We have decided to liberate the country

Of course, no possibility can be discounted as to the identity of the perpetrators of Friday’s attack. But the high-speed issuance of guilty verdicts by politicians should at least be accompanied by a recollection of the ease and expediency of the practice of framing.

As for who stands to benefit from continued instability in Lebanon, it goes without saying that many domestic and international forces have stakes in this business. In his book Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, historian David Hirst writes:

Several states, from inside the region and beyond, have impinged on Lebanon – wooed, bullied or sought to subvert it from within, attacked, invaded, occupied or otherwise maltreated it … But none has done so more strenuously and disruptively than the state of Israel.

Belén Fernández/Jacobin 30.Dec.13

Predator and Reaper:

Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them some questions. I'd start with: "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?" And: "How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Or even more pointedly: "How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs were unable to detect an IED that awaited their convoy?"
Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.

Heather Linebaugh/Guardian 29.Dec.13

Even the garbage is weighed:

Aramark, often contracted to provide food to prisoners at about a dollar a meal, is one of numerous corporations, from phone companies to construction firms, that have found our grotesque system of mass incarceration to be very profitable. The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers. More than 2.2 million men and women are in prisons and jails in the U.S.

Hedges/truthdig 22.Dec.13
via cryptogon

Cast Lead Plus Five:

Israel cast lead indiscriminately hither and thither, aiming to melt not just our bodies, which it did, but also our allegiance and our hope and our memories, which it could not do. Twenty-three days later, the people of Gaza rose to dust themselves off and to start an arduous journey of rebuilding houses and infrastructure, and reconstructing what the missiles had dispersed and scattered. Twenty-three days of nonstop Israeli hate and hostility—and Gaza rose from it like a phoenix.
The people who queued at the morgues and bade farewell to their loved ones days later queued at bakeries that did not raise their prices, and went out to the grocery stores that also did not raise their prices. And they came back home to distribute what little they bought to the people who were unable to buy because they did not have the money. The people of Gaza were never this close before.

Refaat Alareer
Gaza Writes Back, Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine
Helena Cobban

An estimated 15,000 men convicted of the same offence as Alan Turing are still alive.

a single step:

As the first step in rebelling against a broken system and a dysfunctional Congress, the NHRebellion invites you to continue Granny D and Aaron’s work by walking down through New Hampshire. On January 11, 2014—15 years after Granny D began her walk, and beginning on the day Aaron died—we will walk the state from the top to the bottom, recruiting as many citizens in New Hampshire to this cause as we can. Our walk will end on January 24th, the day Granny D was born.

New Hampshire Rebellion march

go granny go:

The #NHRebellion was inspired by the late Doris Haddock, aka, Granny D, a citizen of New Hampshire, and who, at the age of 88, walked across the country with a simple sign on her chest: “campaign finance reform.” Long before I came to the issue, Granny D was recruiting anyone she could to the critically important cause of changing the way campaigns are financed. She believed, as I do, that the current system is a kind of “corruption.” And she believed, as I have come to believe, that unless we find a way to change it, our government will be incapable of addressing sensibly any of the critical issues that it must resolve. Granny D devoted the last part of her life to this fight. The #NHRebellion will continue her work.

Lessig blog, v2  19.Dec.13

cowardice and pure corruption, nothing else:

So you might ask, what's the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC's position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we're talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you're the prosecutor, you've got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?
How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.
Sound harsh? It does, doesn't it? The only problem is, that's exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.

Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone 13.Dec.13

closer:

Projecting power and fighting wars with minimal risk to one's own soldiers, with high accuracy and and potentially less risk to civilians on the other side, is progress of a sort. But law enforcement at all levels, not to mention our adversaries, are also getting access to these tools. I'm deeply uncomfortable imagining Google as an arms dealer, where its unprecedented knowledge of our lives gets added to devices that in the wrong hands are enormous threats. A company that claims "don't be evil" as a slogan can't be a neutral supplier to anyone with enough cash, or with data to trade.

Dan Gillmor/Guardian 19.Dec.13
 -
As with everything else that's happening on the big stage now, there's a vision behind it. Always a vision behind it. Hidden, unarticulated, but shaping every act and utterance.
Whose vision, where it has its origin, and especially what it has as the result of vision translated into act, the opening out from conception to birth to maturity, that's the key. And as always, the doubting, the reluctant, the burned and shy are shoved aside or left standing on the sidewalk while the sleek dark vehicles accelerate silently away.
I see a worm inside a mechanical suit of armor, a cpu of inert organic sentience directing the implacable, with no connection to the gone world but formulaic nutrition, the old forms of biological splendor consumed to feed its mechanical necessities until it's a have-to, no longer just possible, no longer a bad choice, now the only choice.
The worm must live this way because it has no protection without it, no way to feed itself without it, no means without it to any other end but futility.
 Just as the drones make cowardice viable, and the bitterness of cowardice acceptable, indiscriminately powering the weakest with just enough manual strength to pull those virtual triggers, the long run promise is compensatory not elevation, not extension of the good toward the better, not even transcendence from the neutral flatline of everyday humanity, but up from the sunken margins of failure. Revenge against nature.
The coward and the cripple with equal status to anyone who ever lived, handicaps defects incompleteness overcome to become prosthetic superior strength, because of possession of the machine interface as it grows toward symbiosis.
 The worm hungers toward the stars, and it must make human essence its own, replacing the genuine, indefinable human, assuming the center, the reason for collective existence, as long as it requires moral governance to sustain its systemic needs.
Soon enough, in that vision, moral governance will be redundant, and all values will be the worm's survival only.

                                     on the one hand, the other hand isn't there
                                                                 __________

Israel condemns US spying revelations
Officials call on US to stop spying on Israel amid renewed calls for release of Jonathan Pollard, jailed in 1980s for spying
GuardianUK 22.Dec.13
-
NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
 • Secret deal places no legal limits on use of data by Israelis
 • Only official US government communications protected
  GuardianUK 11.Sep.13
___________________

Israel irked by Snowden revelations of spying on its leaders
JERUSALEM — Israel is the latest country to express displeasure with reports of U.S. and British spying on its leaders, although there was not a great deal of surprise over the revelations or suggestions that they would damage relations.
LATimes 22.Dec.13
-
U.S. shares raw intelligence data with Israel, leaked document shows 
The National Security Agency regularly gives Israel intercepts that may include sensitive data about U.S. citizens, a memo leaked by Edward Snowden says.
LATimes 11.Sep.13
 _______________

Israel to U.S.: Stop Spying On Us | TIME.com [22.Dec.13]
 Israeli officials broke their silence over the U.S. surveillance scandal Sunday, angrily demanding an end to spying on Israel.
-
search for Time magazine on raw data to Israel had no result other than above story

Khodorkovsky
-
Khodorkovsky Solzhenitsyn
-
Solzhenitsyn
-
Solzhenitsyn

a reckless disregard:

The commander of Operation Xatruch III, a military-police task force based in the Colón province, which includes Bajo Aguán, publicly accused Bird of destabilizing the area by “questioning the methods of the Honduran justice system” and making false claims about security forces operations. On December 12, 2013, the newspaper La Tribuna quoted Col. German Alfaro Escalante as saying: “We are in the process of investigating a complaint against a supposed American named Annie Bird, who is going around doing destabilizing work here in the Aguán sector, meeting with various campesino leaders.” Alfaro’s comments have been reproduced in national media, accompanied by photos of Bird, a US citizen.

Human Rights Watch/ScoopNZ 20.Dec.13
-
 Honduras is the most corrupt narco-trafficking country in Central America.

Ugh want recognition:

Dan Dediu, from the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands, published a review article earlier this year suggesting that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a similar capacity for language.
He said that the current study brought more weight to the conclusions that Neanderthals had very similar hyoid bones to us, "not only in form but also in what concerns their mechanical properties".
"The authors themselves are understandably cautious in drawing strong conclusions, but I think that their work clearly supports the contention that speech and language is an old feature of our lineage going back at least to the last common ancestor that we shared with the Neanderthals," Dr Dediu told BBC News.

The Role of Horses in World War I:

Meanwhile heavy plough horses, conscripted against expert advice, proved quite unsuitable for the artillery role for which they were earmarked. The official historians noted: ‘Veterinary officers … foresaw their weakness for military purposes, and anticipated the heavy loss which would ensue if they were indiscriminately employed in war … because of great susceptibility to disease, large food and watering requirements, and inability to stand forced marches.’ Heavy horses perished in thousands in France, partly because of the extreme vulnerability of their feet to wet weather.

Far Outliers  02.Dec.13
via Danny Yee

Up The Rebels:

Dear friends and "fan club members". This will be my one and only comment in twitter regarding the events of pic.twitter.com/nO49W4jI8O
— Stanley Cohen (@StanleyCohenLaw) December 19, 2013

now, with G-d’s great mercy, here in America:

Bolivia on Wednesday accused the United States of helping a New York businessman escape from the South American country where he had spent 18 months in prison and was under house arrest for alleged money laundering.
Interior Minister Carlos Romero said Washington orchestrated a clandestine operation that spirited Jacob Ostreicher, 54, out of Bolivia illegally - further clouding what is known about the entrepreneur's surprise getaway.
...
Ostreicher was arrested for alleged money laundering and connections to drug traffickers related to his purchase of a rice farm in 2008.

Reuters 18.Dec.13
-

Jacob Ostreicher, an Orthodox Jewish American held captive in Bolivia since June 2011 has made his way to the United States, The Algemeiner has confirmed. A source familiar with efforts to have the businessman released confirmed that an “operation” took place Sunday night that resulted in Ostreicher’s return to his family. In an email circulated to friends and supporters, his nephew Moshe confirmed the news as well. “With happiness, we are informing the community of Israel that our dear uncle… has already left the iron curtain in Bolivia, and is now, with G-d’s great mercy, here in America,” Moshe wrote.

algemeiner 16.Dec.13
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No mention in algemeiner of Ostreicher being fingered by Bolivia for drug-money laundering, it's "money laundering and criminal organization".
Contempt for the less-chosen isn't controversial, it's overt, prevalent. The enslavement process as a God-granted gift.
It's still impossible to talk openly in the aboveground about "Kosher Mafia" control of the international drug markets.
There's a line of descent from 19th Century opium trade thru 20th century heroin and cocaine to the present.
The dissonance of the stated aims of the Afghan war, the vertical rise in opium production during that war.
Haiti, lawless, broken, crawling with the desperate and willingly corrupt, as transhipment hub.
The neoliberal opening of Myanmar and now consequent increase in opium production in the Golden Triangle.
Geo-political ugliness, and domestic policies that make no sense on the surface.
The common view, virtual consensus, is some greasy ethnics, not Jews, in the case of cocaine the spics of Latin America, as if South American greaseballs had enough weight to run American drug wholesale operations. Shipment at most.
That shit is internal. Powerful. "American". Likely the same power that has American foreign policy in its grasp.
It's idiotic to assume the illegal drug industry's management is outside the country.
I don't know who the unaware think is supposedly running heroin now, I don't think most people even view it as a business like any other, with hierarchies and concentrations of power. And if they do, probably the Italians.
The disjunct between the people's expressed demand that marijuana be decriminalized and federal refusal to stop the war on weed, the rise of "medical" outlets with the same inflated prices as the underground and the simultaneous fed crackdowns that keep the money big.
There's huge money moving through those systems. Enough money that it makes sense that the drug prohibitions, of the US especially, are being bought and paid for by the wholesalers, while supply continues to meet market demand, with just enough legal impedance to keep the prices artificially jacked.
More on this to come.

that our absolute loyalty lies in the disobedience to power:

The circle narrows. The grandmother of a close friend — she’s as old as you are — pleads with her robbers not to be sexually violated, she even claims to be infected with a communicable disease; the nephew of a fellow writer is shot in the face, killed in his own house by a night intruder whom he mistook for a rat; the son of my eldest brother is stabbed in a parking lot outside a restaurant, the blade pierces a lung, the police never turn up, he is saved because his companion calls her boyfriend all the way in Australia by cell phone and he could summon a nurse he happens to know in Johannesburg. (The woman is on a first visit to the country; she leaves the next day and swears never to return.)

Mandela’s Smile
Notes on South Africa
Breyten Breytenbach/Harper's Dec.08

I wanna go somewhere where it’s quiet:

One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania.

This bodes poorly for the future. 

Andrea Elliott/NYTimes 09.Dec.13

little trembles all the time:

Scientists have known for years that injection wells and other human activities can induce earthquakes by changing pressures underground. That can have the effect of “unclamping” old stressed faults so the rocks can slip past each other and cause the ground to shake.
The weight of water behind a new dam in China, for example, is thought to have induced a 2008 quake in Sichuan Province that killed 80,000 people

HenryFountain/NYT 12.Dec.13

a post-modern film by Jeremy Scahill, about himself, starring himself in many poses:

Economic warfare – strangling nations like Cuba, Iraq and Iran in Medieval fashion – is a type of Dirty Warfare beloved by the Great White Fathers who control the world’s finances. Though no less deadly than atomic bombs, or firebombing Dresden, it is easier to sell to the bourgeoisie.
You’ll hear no mention of this in Scahill’s film, nor will you hear any references to Phil Agee, or the countless others who have explained Dirty War to each generation of Americans since World War Two.
You will not hear about psychological warfare, the essence of Dirty War.

Douglas Valentine/Dissident Voice 07.Jun.13
 -
I bought in to Scahill's shuck from his audio-appearances on DemocracyNow! when I was still feeling a credulous trust and openness to/for Amy Goodman, which is pretty much gone now.
The openness and trust is gone, Goodman's still on the air, but with what appears to be her conscienceless ennabling of Greenwald and Scahill, and other less distinct undercurrents of collaborative and collective self-interest, I just don't have the faith anymore.

The Chávez Administration at 10 Years: The Economy and Social Indicators
venezuelanalysis.com

Glenn “The Gatekeeper” Greenwald at Cryptocomb

losing my reputation, somehow, again:

There was a photo of Obama I think on Xinhua, at Goree, the island where captive Africans were held and then embarked in chains toward their new lives as slaves in the New World.
It's a cool stylish image. He's leaning in a 400 yr old doorway, it looks almost but not quite like an 80's Calvin Klein or someone two-page magazine thing. Rough eroded architecture, broad color fields of natural stuff and sky, but he's too far from the camera to be specifically pimping the casualwear.
So I was looking at that, going "Hmm, well...you know, he's got to be thinking, feeling...or no, I'm supposed to be thinking, feeling..." when drowning virtual Somalis and Haitians came pouring over and around and through it, kind of.
People who are actively intentionally on purpose getting into often very sketchy boats, sometimes paying lots of or even all their last moneys, to go and become practically slaves, because that's promising better than the less than nothing and everything collapsing down back home.
So, there's a simple formula, I think. Permeating so much of what's below most of us, lives that are so completely extra they're hard to see until the not-working parts flare up. Even with Salgado and others showing it for years, and Berger and others telling it, for years.
We're taught and feel inherently some kind of human value for all humans, but the practices of the world we live in have been, and still are, reducing people at the bottom to the status of laboratory animals and worse.
Under people.
Surplus we can use. Or some intermediary we use can. And it's okay. Because look, they're working and feeding themselves and they have at least a place to sleep. And because their lives don't really matter and there's millions and millions of them.

That went into moderation at Crooked Timber then disappeared. A thread about the riots by Indian migrant workers in Singapore.
 Two attempts to alter machine-objectionable possibilities disappeared along with it. Two nonsense comments made it right to the thread. Now I'm off to try it again. Be right back.
Well, the thread's moved on to a girls' school dance of absurdity and bathos, with real gritty reality bits thrown in. Now the comment wouldn't fit even as loosely as it fit right when I sent it.
So this for now.
The Nielsen-Haydens are CIA, they have been from the get.
Somebody is, has to be, the chances of there not being at least a few prominent internet smart-kid bloggers who are company-affiliated, at least to a degree that's indistinguishable from service to those on the other side, are virtual nothing shading to none at all.

If you are not a legal person, then you are considered, legally, a thing:

Courts recognize that a sufficient, though not necessary condition of a fundamental right like bodily liberty is the possession of certain qualities. With over half a century of scientific evidence to support our legal arguments, and affidavits submitted in support of our lawsuit by an international group of the world’s most respected primatologists, our lawsuits set out to establish that chimpanzees possess such complex cognitive abilities as autonomy, self-determination, self-consciousness, awareness of the past, anticipation of the future, and the ability to make choices; that they display complex emotions like empathy; and that they construct diverse cultures. The possession of these characteristics is sufficient to establish personhood and the consequential fundamental right to bodily liberty.
Our arguments establish that extending legal personhood to all the known chimpanzees in New York is strongly supported by law, science and history. In fact New York law does not limit legal personhood to just human beings. Courts have also routinely extended rights to non-human entities such as corporations.
It is important to note that we are not trying to give human rights to chimpanzees. Human rights belong to human beings. We are advocating for chimpanzee rights for chimpanzees, beginning with the fundamental legal right to bodily liberty.

Natalie Prosin/The Nonhuman Rights Project

By 1965, 80 percent of American women had diamond engagement rings:

...it wasn't until the late 19th century, after the discovery of mines in South Africa drove the price of diamonds down, that Americans regularly began to give (or receive) diamond engagement rings. (Before that, some betrothed women got thimbles instead of rings.) Even then, the real blingfest didn't get going until the 1930s, when—dim the lights, strike up the violins, and cue entrance—the De Beers diamond company decided it was time to take action
...
In 1919, De Beers experienced a drop in diamond sales that lasted for two decades. So in the 1930s it turned to the firm N.W. Ayer to devise a national advertising campaign—still relatively rare at the time—to promote its diamonds. Ayer convinced Hollywood actresses to wear diamond rings in public, and, according to Edward Jay Epstein in The Rise and Fall of the Diamond, encouraged fashion designers to discuss the new "trend" toward diamond rings. Between 1938 and 1941, diamond sales went up 55 percent. By 1945 an average bride, one source reported, wore "a brilliant diamond engagement ring and a wedding ring to match in design." The capstone to it all came in 1947, when Frances Gerety—a female copywriter, who, as it happened, never married—wrote the line "A Diamond Is Forever."

Meghan O'Rourke/Slate 
___
Due to advertising campaign, artificially induced fad, parallel to the artificial insertion of cigarette smoking into the cultural flow - thru Hollywood subliminals and massive focused advertising campaigns - by 1947 diamond demand is way up.
 Apartheid begins in South Africa with the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948
_

The Rt Hon Cecil John Rhodes DCL was an English businessman, mining magnate, and politician in South Africa. Rhodes was named the chairman of De Beers at the company's founding in 1888.
...
In October 1871, 18-year-old Rhodes and his brother Herbert left the colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley. Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes succeeded over the next 17 years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area. His monopoly of the world's diamond supply was sealed in 1889 through a strategic partnership with the London-based Diamond Syndicate.

Wikipedia
___

The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems. The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company.

Edward Jay Epstein/Atlantic

even if I have sometimes made restrained remarks:

At a moment when anyone with a claim to a share in the Mandela legacy is proud to make that connection, Israel has a painfully difficult case to make.
 It was a close, if secretive, ally and arms supplier [to]apartheid South Africa and there is a good case to be made that Israeli support helped the all-white regime in Pretoria to last longer than it otherwise might have.
There have been stories - which are difficult to substantiate definitively - that the co-operation extended into Israel sharing nuclear weapons technology.
Mr Mandela observed sharply that when he was finally released from prison he received invitations to visit "from almost every country in the world, except Israel".

Kevin Connolly/BBC 06.Dec.13

Mandela was an enabler of anti-Semitic terrorism:

Nelson Mandela has already been mourned by many Jews around the world. And for good reasons.When Mandela was released from prison by de Klerk, he showed statesmanship and reconciliation rather than revenge.
But his biography reveals that he was an enemy of the Israeli people.
A post-apartheid Pretoria that joins in boycotting Jerusalem is one of the more powerful victories for the boycott and divestment campaign. And it’s Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

Giulio Meotti/Arutz Sheva

Informed consent should never be abrogated for any research involving human subjects, under any circumstances, in any country, regardless of local standards and regardless of the type of research.

When the people make dark the light within them
the world darkens

Wendell Berry

The Guarani have one of the highest murder rates in the world and land theft is at the heart of all the violence. In spite of this, the land demarcation process is stalling – the authorities are doing far too little to challenge ranchers who have taken the tribe’s ancestral land. How many more gruesome killings must the Guarani suffer before their territory is mapped out and protected?

Survival's Stephen Corry
 on the murder of Ambrósio Vilhalva
_

If it were up to me, you’d be under the ground.

José Teixeira
Brazilian rancher supplying sugarcane to a joint venture partner of energy giant Shell,
who is also a state deputy

Guardian Editor on #Snowden cache "There's stuff in there about Iraq and Afg and we're not even going to look at it" http://t.co/MysiHVx10z
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 4, 2013

English men have funny haircuts, generally. The placement of attractive women behind but in camera line. Part of the intentional decor.
And as Wikileaks points out, nothing about the real shit. Not even going to look at it.
 What Chelsea Manning did, what Jeremy Hammond did, is reveal the lying serpentine evil and its direct connections to real harm - the violent oppression, the spilled blood and ruined lives, the destruction of communities and futures.
 What Snowden and the Guardian/Post/Times and Greenwald have accomplished, so far, is the astonishing revelation that powerful secret government agencies are staring at everyone.

I already never read the Daily Kos:

A big part of me thinks, wow what is wrong with you that you see a gorilla there?

Ted Rall/progressive.org 03.Dec.13

It goes without saying that at a time when 
the scourge of global anti-semitism is on the rise:

"...as we work to end anti-Israel bias in the UN system..." 

John Kerry/ScoopNZ 02.Dec.13
_
Just kind of writes itself, doesn't it?

silly boys all over the place:

In a 2005 piece David Aaronovitch criticized Atzmon for writing in his essay "On Anti-Semitism" that "We must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously." and "American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forged irrelevant. American Jews do control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least"; Aaronovitch said Atzmon was "a silly boy advancing slightly dangerous arguments".

from the Wikipedia entry on Gilad Atzmon, who Max Blumenthal, among evidently quite a few others, has "repeatedly denounced as an anti-Semite".
   Since calling someone an anti-Semite energizes most nice people's radar to a degree that rational open-mindedness toward the accused becomes nearly impossible for them, and is then only achievable with conscious active effort, effort which is counter-productive to the receptive open-minded state, it's a very serious charge to make. It's also nigh impossible, once so accused, to avoid consequent antagonism.
   People who level that charge don't really have much awareness of its consequences. Being slimed on and info-groped by assholes like the dishonorable thugs who deploy from groups like the ADL and its many subsidiary orgs is a repellent and polarizing experience all by itself. The accusation can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
   There's one of those tipping points in there, where whatever the original conditions were, the fear and defensive reactions of Jews to accusations of devious and covert activity - ancient irrational hatred! - practically necessitate a world-controlling response, to neutralize the real and increasing threats - from people who are seriously mad at you because they think you're controlling the world, and fucking up their lives. Even if you weren't doing that, even if it only looked like you were, or if only some of you were.
  This is likely to account for at least some of the motives behind the NSA surround-snoop full-system info-suck. But to get to that assertion you have to get to Semitic manipulation of the US governmental apparatus to a degree that would make that doable. Which is conspiracy-thought, and targets the speaker of that thought for ridicule and contempt.
   The total absence of discussion and analysis of the NSA's driving impetus, who's been ordering it to do all that, and especially why, would obviously point to something seriously powerful and covert in addition to the acts of surveillance. The discussion either goes underground from there, and onto the glass slides of infinite regress surveillance, or it gets exposed, isolated, and dealt with.
The so-called Southern Poverty Law Center, in its role as monitor of "hate groups", which superficially seems to be valiantly protecting struggling black folks from them dumb-ass cornpone racists and Gestapo re-enactors, functions now primarily as early-warning radar for....
whoever it is that creates the social conditions and cultural ambience in which Atzmon's reputation eats shit in much of polite society and Sheldon Adelson gets to vet the Republican nominee for President.
What Atzmon said above, is what Alterman said below.

Wait,..what?

“If a Jew-hater somewhere, inspired perhaps by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sought to invent an individual who symbolizes almost all the anti-Semitic clichés that have dogged the Jewish people throughout history, he could hardly come up with a character more perfect than Sheldon Adelson.”

Eric Alterman > Max Blumenthal > Mondoweiss
-
This quote is from a piece by Alterman in the Nation, quoted in a piece by Blumenthal at Mondoweiss, around the idea that Alterman's smearing Blumenthal because Alterman says David Duke likes what Blumenthal's doing in his, Blumenthal's, book Goliath. 
And since everybody knows Duke's a registered anti-semite, or anti-Semite, or Anti-Semite, or all three, Duke's praise and Alterman's alluding to it, is a smear.
One of the ways you can tell people like Duke are irrationally prejudiced toward Jews is they think people like Adelson, as Alterman describes him, and as both Blumenthal and Mondoweiss evidently concur he does, do exist, and they, anti-Semites, talk about them, people like Adelson, existing, as individuals, and as a type within the collective, Jews.
Alterman seems to be saying that the existence of Sheldon Adelson, and his activities as Sheldon Adelson, are a bad thing for the collective, Jews, because they give fuel to the fire of bigotry, an irrational dangerous bigotry that believes things that aren't true about the collective, Jews.
For instance that people like Sheldon Adelson, a Jewish Republican kingmaker featured prominently in the news during the last US Presidential race, exist and do the things they do.
And it's socially and often legally prohibited, because of the Holocaust, to speak about them as if they do exist, because they don't and it's unfair, because of the Holocaust, to all the decent non-Adelson Jews to say they do. But Alterman is speaking about him.
It's as though Alterman thinks that if it were true that Adelson is who he is and if it were true that he does what he does, it would be bad for the Jews, because it's a negative stereotype right out of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion, and because racists like Duke would then think they were right about Jews.
But wait. Sheldon Adelson really is who he is, and he really does do what he does. And so is, and does, Mel Sembler.
   On a less surreal note, both Blumenthal and Phil Weiss and likely other liberal progressive Jews as well, say one main fallacy in the paranoid Zionist mind-set - that festering bigotry against Jews still exists in the US - is refuted by the prosperity and comfort and security and professional and social status currently enjoyed by their peers and relatives. No need for a refuge in Zion.
Something I wish they'd address when they do that is the steep decline in prosperity and well-being of the US middle class and especially the hopelessness-inducing and steadily deteriorating economic conditions in the American underclass. Because that Jewish prosperity they point to would appear to have occurred in near parallel to that precipitous decline for their fellow citizens.
 Saying things are great because your people are headed into the 1% in unprecedented numbers, however true, isn't what I'd call a sensible statement at this time.

The Very Thing That Makes You Rich
 Has Made Me Poor

It's hard to balance accessibility and security, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it:

While Syme might only introduce a few additional speed bumps to state surveillance, it looks great compared to Facebook, where the only good thing about Facebook is that a lot of people are on it. Every other aspect of Facebook is rat poison.

cryptogon  29.Nov.13

ScoopNZ 

Weekly Report On Israeli Violations in Palestine: 21- 27 Nov 

Friday, 29 November 2013, 3:34 pm
Column: Palestinian Human Rights Campaign

Israeli forces continue systematic attacks against Palestinian civilians and property
in the occupied Palestinian territory

Israeli forces killed 3 Palestinian civilians in Yatta, south of Hebron.
A Palestinian child was wounded in Qarawet Bani Zaid village, northwest of Ramallah.
Israeli forces have continued to open fire at the border areas in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces have continued to use excessive force against peaceful protesters in the West Bank.
Israeli forces conducted 64 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
  • At least 46 Palestinians, including 10 children, were arrested in the West Bank.
  • 3 children were arrested in the Gaza Strip, but released after being interrogated.
Israel has continued to impose a total closure on the oPt and has isolated the Gaza Strip from the outside world.

Israeli navy forces have continued targeting Palestinian fishermen in the sea.
Israeli forces have continued to support settlement activities in the West Bank and Israeli settlers have continued to attack Palestinian civilians and property.

Summary
Israeli violations of international law and international humanitarian law in the oPt continued during the reporting period (21 – 27 November 2013).
The full report is available here.
-
also:
‏@Irene_Nasser  
 Palestinian,writing from Palestine
Considering the above week's menu, a valiant soul

They are as natural to men and women as breathing

Black

The United States has long championed these rights domestically and internationally,
 and as we have said before:

The United States remains firmly committed to working with all States to promote freedom of expression and privacy online. And we applaud this resolution’s recognition that full respect for the right to freedom of expression requires respect for the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information.

Mr. Chairman, human rights defenders, civil society activists, and ordinary citizens the world over are using the Internet and online resources in new and innovative ways, to protect human dignity, fight against repression, and hold governments – including mine – accountable. It is imperative that they can use these tools freely without inappropriate censorship and fear of reprisals, to continue their vital work to protect and promote human rights worldwide. Thank you.

United States Mission to the United Nations
Ambassador Elizabeth Cousens
ScoopNZ 26.Nov.13
-
Yeah well. The US is not now if it ever was a monolithic single-consciousness. The disjunct between the common people's ideas and wants - when they can be heard at all through the noise of artificial thought - and the ideas and wants of an elite that's surrounded by chromatically sliding degrees of the partial elite, out to the voiceless and mostly powerless mass, that's the US.
So the people believe in and champion freedom of expression, sort of, in theory, while the real power sets aside "free speech zones" and limits the dominant voice, the media, which is still, in spite of the atomization of the net, the big sound, to a self-censoring bank of sycophantic chancers with career-driven values that have little or nothing at all to do with truth or justice.
But okay, freedom of speech - with some dweeb just sitting there reading your free speech, monitoring your free speech, cataloging it, archiving it, but not actually doing anything directly to stifle it. Just watching.
Disney-fascism, cartoon tyranny, pastel-colored jackboots that don't break down your door, because they're already inside, just sitting there.

...from the October 7th [2011] New York Times, 
"For some Occupy Wall Street is Occupy Main Street" (slightly retitled online)...spoke of the put upon neighbors. There were a few items of concern, but behold:

Heather Amato, 35, a psychologist who lives near the protest area, said she felt disturbed by some of the conduct of the protesters. She said she had to shield her toddler from the sight of women at the park dancing topless. “It’s been three weeks now,” Ms. Amato said. “Enough is enough.”

Nigel Parry 14.Oct.11
-
Women used to get arrested for breast-feeding, which is starkly insane. But insanity is not failure, clearly. Crazy people are still running the world.
It's not  failure in the short run.
School teaches us that crazy people fail. Can't pass the test if you're cuckoo.
 But school's full of shit about quite a few things.
The source of what is, what has to be, core anti-life irrationality is the sex-pathology we inherit from...uh...from...crazy-people-back-there-somewhere.
Everyone knows that boobs are evil dirty nasty. That's not crazy.
Right.
Then the next level of insanity in is, "Well they're not evil - but sex is dirty, and boobs are sexy."
We're talking about the main food source for babies, the most innocent of all humans, and that's according to the crazy people that used to arrest hippie women for feeding their babies in public. Like in restaurants where people complained of nausea, because hippie mom was exposing her tit so little Cranberry Vishnu could get at the milk delivery
Making people feel guilty and ashamed about natural things is a great way to dominate them.
It's also evil. Really really evil..

our hearts are leading this

They called the company:

At the time of the Stratfor hack I was working for Wired covering Anonymous — notably the antics of Antisec anons much of the time. I had missed the Lulzsec period, which I spent under federal investigation myself. From February to July of that year I stayed away from the hacker world, unsure if my computer would be seized and unwilling to draw my sources into a possible fishing expedition

Quinn Norton/Medium

Language is a strategy, but it does not eclipse the totality of who we are and what we do. The words that have gained global currency — LGBTQ — are used with great caution in our grassroots movements. Simply because such words emerged from a particular context and political moment does not mean they carry that same political content when deployed in our context. The language that we use is always revisited and expanded through our work. Language catalyzes discussions and pushes us to think more critically, but no word whether in English or Arabic can do the work. Only a movement can.

Eight questions Palestinian queers are tired of hearing
Ghaith Hilal
  The Electronic Intifada 27 Nov. 13

Physicists have long known that plants and bacteria convert light into chemical energy in a way that is hugely efficient. But only in recent years have they discovered that the molecular machines behind this process rely on quantum mechanics to do the job.
TechnologyReview
via

pinks and blues:

The result of harsh gender policing isn't upstanding masculine sons and submissive feminine daughters. It's kids who are hurt, confused and alienated from their parents.

Jill Filipovic/theguardian.com

deliver us from evil.

and I don’t say that lightly:

CS: Why do you feel that you need to break the news to the American public?

MB: The horrors that I expose in my book, which could have filled up 10 more volumes, are never conveyed to the American public or rarely conveyed. And if they are, they’re whitewashed or suppressed. There was a full-scale race riot in the heart of Tel Aviv on May 23, 2012 and it was buried in The New York Times. The interior minister of Israel said, "Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man."

And that quote, which was just a shocking quote and distilled the entire mentality or sensibility of the government-lead campaign of incitement against non-Jewish Africans, was buried deep in the article by Isabel Kershner. So there’s clearly a fear of exposing the real Israel, that Israelis experience, and an attempt to present it back to Americans in a soft-peddled way so that they — mainstream journalists — never get accused of being insensitive to the Israelis.

In the case of Africans, there couldn’t be a more clear vision of the racist foundation of the state and its ethnocracy because the 60,000 non-Jewish Africans pose no security threat to the state of Israel, and have never been accused of doing so. They simply pose a demographic threat. This is never challenged.

Christian Stark iv Max Blumenthal/PolicyMic - 22.Nov.13

an opportunity to reflect on the evil that man can do:

Eighty years ago, the Ukrainian people were subjected to unimaginable suffering as a result of the deliberate policies of the regime of Joseph Stalin

White House on Holodomor Remembrance Day
Office of the Press Secretary
 November 21, 2013
-
A significant, though relatively obscure in the West's media-history, member of that regime, an evil treacherous man indeed, had a role in a few of its other "deliberate policies", such as the Katyn Massacre; and plausibly killed Joseph Stalin, by poisoning him.

The Long March for the Baloch missing persons has entered its 27th day after completing 690 KMs AHRC/ScoopNZ 21.Nov.13

David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation TigerTime

The Energy Department now says it hopes to have a repository by 2048.

Poisoning with polonium alone does not prove it was Israel that did it. But it certainly makes it the prime suspect. Polonium is lethal doses is expensive to produce artificially, and only a small handful of states have the nuclear facilities to do so. Israel is certainly one of them. The others had no interest in killing him.

"If we were to eliminate the possibility of a simultaneous accidental heavy metals exposure to the sample donor then the only logical explanation would be an exposure to these metals (toxins) administered by a third party perpetrator with likely criminal intent."

Vigilantism is dangerous because it feeds on visceral rage and because it comes with few safeguards. Rage is a powerful tool for activism, but not a very good one for justice. Group rage, in particular, heats quickly and perpetuates itself; and it's difficult to cool. It's also difficult to control, especially when there are a great many anonymous actors in play who are only loosely accountable to each other and certainly aren't answering to anyone else.

Unchecked authority is a dangerous thing, and we should always be wary of powerful actors whose actions are largely unfettered by oversight or accountability...

Jill Filipovic/Guardian 18/Nov/13

bringing opiates to Afghanistan

But the Tamils who live there tell another story. They speak of continuing misery, of military occupation, of a climate of fear. A place where thousands remain homeless while army land-grabs continue unabated. Where thousands are still missing – and many women who remain are subject to the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of repression.
 Of course, the way for journalists to get to the truth is to go there and see for themselves.

William A. Doyle’s syndicated advice column, “The Daily Investor,” on August 14, 1961:

Q.  I bought some shares of Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Voting Trust a couple of years ago. This stock was listed on the American Stock Exchange but I never see it quoted there any more. What’s the trouble?

A.  The trouble is spelled C-a-s-t-r-o. When that bearded dictator took over the government in Cuba, he started kicking American investors smack in the pocketbook. The Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Voting Trust story is somewhat involved.

The Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) was established by Presidential Directive of April 4, 1951, "to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations."
-
The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants..."

life in prison for his poetry

PEN Center Day of The Imprisoned Writer
 Well, the way things are going that's going to be all of us pretty quick here.
  Danny Martin hit it back in the days of ink and unbroken skies
George Jackson wrote from prison in 1970

Besides Byrd’s far-right politics, his founding role in the Civil Air Patrol, and his ties to de Mohrenschildt, he evidently rejoiced in Kennedy’s assassination – as suggested by the macabre fact that he arranged for the window from which Oswald purportedly fired the fatal shots to be removed and set up at his home.

Renisha McBride wasn't shot in the back of the head as reported here previously.
 She was shot in the face.
 -
 And in other police blottery news:

“Unless, like many people, you consider trying to create a deadly weapon out of thin air as foul play, but it’s not the Austin Police Department’s role to make those kinds of decisions.”

Above that is a spokesvoice for Solid Concepts, the innovators:

“However, anybody who has ever dealt with a printer jam knows that frustration can take over and lead to poor choices. A 3D printer jam is no different, except that the results can be deadly. When something goes wrong, it’s more than just ink stains and torn paper.”

And above that, the lede:

A Texas manufacturing company’s technological innovation turned tragic on Tuesday when a 3D printer jammed while printing a metal pistol, killing two technicians and injuring an intern.

The story is presented as the gun was magically appearing in the 3D printer fully loaded.
Then blam blam!
 Dudes are dead of gunshot, dudes were printing handgun on printer, ergo printing handguns will kill you. Case closed.
An attempt to "create a deadly weapon out of thin air" killed two and injured one, because the printer jammed.
Multiple gunshot wounds.
Headline is factually accurate, I guess, but the story is insanely whack.
Contempt is the key invisible here.
Contempt in law enforcement, contempt in government, contempt in the upper ranks of business, contempt in media.
 Contempt for the people.

non-satirical non-ironic Mission Accomplished:

Afghan opium cultivation has reached a record level, with more than 200,000 hectares planted with the poppy for the first time, the United Nations says.
The UNODC report said the harvest was 36% up on last year, and if fully realised would outstrip global demand.
Most of the rise was in Helmand province, where British troops are preparing to withdraw.
One of the main reasons the UK sent troops to Helmand was to cut opium production.

BBC  13.Nov.13
-
Most regular folks are dubious to disbelieving of the claim NATO is still in Afghanistan, years after any rational justification viz. terror-hotbed, to lock up the world opium supply.
 But all you need to tie it together is the concurrent claim that world heroin traffic is in the same corporate portfolio as behind-the-scenes direction of contemporary American foreign policy and domestic criminalization prohibition yadda-yadda crap.
 A tough case to make, but we slog on.
Because American soldiers and Afghani children are dying for this evil horseshit.

what the kids are doing
according to grownups whose jobs are talking about what the kids are doing:

Snapchat!

As mentioned in our previous blog post, Snaps are deleted from our servers after they are opened by their recipients. So what happens to them before they are opened? Most of Snapchat’s infrastructure is hosted on Google’s cloud computing service, App Engine.        Most of our data, including unopened Snaps, are kept in App Engine’s datastore until they are deleted.

Twerky sends vagi-snap selfie to Berky, thinking:
Twerky > Snapchat somethingware > iCloud server > Berky!

But really:
Twerky >NSA > Snapchat > NSA > iCloud > NSA > Berky

NSA in this graph standing in for any Frankensuck groupclot with access to...
Everything.

ShelterBox after Typhoon Haiyan

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.

Iran's deputy minister of industry, mines and commerce _ Assassinations of officials are not unheard of in Iran

Survivors 'walk like zombies' Ahem, and you know what I mean

Love in its anatomical connections:

o, the seat of love, in the female head
from Artwork Archival Objects list
at EugenicsArchive 
 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement
_
Francis Galton's right hand print
__
Wild men within commuting distance
__
Carrie and Emma Buck at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, taken by A.H. Estabrook the day before the Buck v. Bell trial in Virginia 1924
(Buck v. Bell was the occasion for Oliver Wendell Holmes' infamous "three generations of imbeciles are enough")
_

 

paranoia

_

Reading "Against Their Will" by Hornblum, Newman, and Dober
( firedoglake book salon with authors/brief review at Philly.com)
One of the more unsettling, and personally interesting, facts presented in the first couple chapters is that while the Nuremberg Doctor Trials were happening, while they were happening, American doctors were conducting human experiments on a large scale, invisibly, using the institutionalized populations of prisons, mental asylums, and orphanages. Orphanages.
 The German doctors had mixed fates, seven acquitted, seven executed, and nine got ten to life in prison. Joseph Mengele, the most heinous, escaped, twice.
The American doctors made bank and professional status, and kept on with their research and experimentation.
The confluence of the behaviorist data garnered by the inhuman science of the Nazis, transferred in bulk to the US and its Allies post WW2, with the eugenic philosophy that was seemingly unfettered by personal or collective conscience, and evidently rampant in the 50's and 60's US medical research community - "Think of the lives we're saving!" - is most interesting to those of us who grew up during that time.

 “Who the fuck does he think he is, who’s the fucking superpower here?”

Renisha McBride:
The wound was to the back of the head, leading investigators to believe she was leaving the porch when the shot was fired.

“You want to tell God he doesn't know what he's talking about?"

what we’re seeing now is America’s Jewish community trying to save a weak and incompetent executive from himself.
_
“Publicly funded institutions do not have the right to spew hatred without permitting an equal response,”
_
"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
_

Yup. Though techinically, not quite so blasphemously, it's more that your idea about what God knows and where and when God is speaking, and if God is speaking, is pure self-interested bunk.
Also I can't figure out how to get to Ben White's twitter feed for May 26 2012 to see the Jacobson tweet in context

Yucky update: the hospital is billing him

Yucky days in law enforcement:

1. Eckert's abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
4. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
5. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
6. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert's anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

KOB4 05.Nov.13
via cryptogon
_
Even not having drugs is bad for you, that's how bad drugs are.

the largest detention center in the world

_

thanks to Anonymous, which responded to the verdict by "doxing" Preska, releasing personal information on her as well as her husband, Thomas J. Kavaler, a partner at the Manhattan law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. According to the leaked material, Kavaler, through his firm, was a client of the intelligence firm Stratfor and a victim of the Anonymous attack, all of which raises significant questions about Preska's objectivity

lengthy background on Hammond in Rolling Stone
_
Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild which is putting support behind Hammond’s defense, said, “The conflict of interest here is clear cut … Judge Preska is required to avoid the appearance of bias so that, even if she owned one share of Stratfor stock, she would be obligated to recuse herself. How can she be impartial when the case directly affects the man she wakes up to every morning?"
  Natasha Lennard/Slate

“If Jeremy Hammond would have been found guilty of the crimes he is alleged to have committed in Iceland, his actions would have been considered an act of bravery. His maximum sentence would have been counted in months, not decades.” Birgitta JonsDottir Icelandic Member of Parliament
_
 “Jeremy’s treatment by the government, unfortunately, is in line with that of other political prisoners where guilt, innocence, proportionality, and the constitution itself are disregarded in the pursuit of politicized convictions. Heidi Boghosian Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild
_
 “Hammond knowingly took a risk for a political cause he passionately embraced and has taken responsibility for his actions. If justice is to be served the courts must distinguish between principled activity and nefarious, criminal acts. He has already spent enough time behind bars; time-served is sufficient punishment.” Gabriella Coleman Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, McGill University
  Free Jeremy Hammond

more you asked for it:

Policy makers throughout the industrialized world generally assume that humankind can solve serious global problems by adopting better technologies and regulations—without questioning the viability of consumer-capitalist societies. This faith is mistaken. The big problems, particularly climate change, are so serious that they cannot be solved without unprecedented and extremely radical change, including abandoning the obsession with economic growth, market systems, and high living standards.
The fundamental cause of the global problems threatening humanity is a grossly unsustainable level of over-consumption. The per-capita rates at which people living in rich countries are using up resources are far beyond levels that can be kept up for long or that could be extended to all the world’s nations. Yet most people fail to grasp the magnitude of the overshoot or its significance. The reductions required are so big that they cannot possibly be achieved within a consumer-capitalist society. Among the factors that policy makers are ignoring are standards of living, available land, carbon emissions, and economic growth.

Ted Trainer/Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 04.Nov.13
_
James Hansen et al. meet Ted Trainer et al.

In March, Medellín received the title of the world's most innovative city in the City of the Year competition organized by The Wall Street Journal and Citigroup, beating out Tel Aviv and New York:

... there is a complete circle where children and adolescents are involved, not only because they are exploited but because they are part of this micro-trafficking chain. They are the ones that supply the sexual abuser with drugs plus they also consume them, whether it is to take part in the [sexual] activity or to gain access to the drug
/.../
Most of these children have to earn money to support themselves and their families, says the study. According to the Medellín mayor’s Grow with Dignity program, some 274 children have been identified in La Candelaria district, which is located in the center of the city, as being sex workers.

ELIZABETH REYES/EL PAÍS 01.Nov.13
 _
fined five times and dead from suicide:

Adriana's pimp was her own husband, whom she married at the age of 16 and with whom she had a child, now aged four. She was part of a group of 200 women who were being abused by the same clan of procurers. Last week, a police operation busted this ring, and Adriana's husband was arrested. But it was too late for her — she had already jumped off the bridge...

REBECA CARRANCO/EL PAÍS 01.Nov.13

you asked for it:

      Top US climate scientists support development of safe nuclear power
Open letter to environmentalists and world leaders says wind and solar power are not enough...
The letter signers are James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Environmentalists agree that global warming is a threat to ecosystems and humans, but many oppose nuclear power and believe that new forms of renewable energy will be able to power the world within the next few decades.
That isn't realistic, the letter said."Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, and "with the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology" that has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases.

AP/Guardian 03.Nov.13
-
 Elephant in the room?
Pachyderm in the patio?
 Mammoth in the den?
 Jumbo in the kitchen?
A sudden drop in human population numbers, great enough, lowers every danger signal currently on the table. Not all danger. Just the immediate, weirdly numerical, intangible turmoil of thermal disruption of a balance in the sky we didn't even know was there. Until it began to go out of whack.
"We" being the particular segment of the human presence on earth that at the same time didn't know and did the disrupting. Whatever you want to call that. It wasn't the Guarani or the Bushmen of the Kalahari. No reasonably intelligent logical mind can look at the facts as presented and not consider that lessening carbon footprint could be more easily achieved by shrinking the foot itself, the size of it being the numbers of consumers of things that create the carbon release. But it's the taboo of taboos. Leading directly to eugenic solutions that have hideous precedent and no clear examples of how-to that are morally as well as strategically successful. So it can't be talked about. So what can be talked about is the "harnessing" of contained nuclear fire. By the same clueless technocratic fools that got us into the mess, Stewart Brand is on it, Hansen, lots of lesser lights as well. No one, that I'm hearing, anywhere, is pushing the controlled reduction of human population numbers, even though it's as rational as reduction of consumption and alterations of technologies away from unlimited carbon release. Lots of folks in the aghast community are nervous about conspiratiod elites with eugenic plans and schemes. For good cause. And as long as the discussion is hidden, taboo, it takes place only in the toxic fermentation tanks of private discourse, or in marginal uncritical hysteria-covens.
The thesis is that the disregard for well-being in so many areas of the contemporary news landscape proceeds directly from the confidence of hard-minded clear-sighted recognition of that numerical inevitability.
Not to say there's a weakness in the visible speakers, Brand, Hansen et al. It's responsible engagement. They can't talk about massive scaleback in human numbers publicly. No one can, without great personal risk.
And something has to be said about the immediate problem.
So let's nuke up! Because, because, because we have to!
"...cheap and reliable power the world needs..." to continue in the hell-bound blindness that got us to the bring of this awful verge to begin with.
Because the alternative is Death Panels, and Vonnegut's Monkey House, and the social acceptance of genocide, and the way things are set up that means the least responsible for the disaster members of the present company eat shit first. And people who have benefited most from the wrong-way power-thrust of how we got in the climate mess will then emerge from the chaos of pop-drop with a happy future intact.
Thus the intense meta-systemic grab for total info, social network map and diagram, the metastisizing technology of control. Ominous gathering of potential ability with no clear statement of intent.
The knee-jerk immediacy of "The NSA's doing it to preserve their(invisible masters') status quo", a common assumption of motive about that, versus they're doing it to get ready for the big elimination frenzy.
Wouldn't you want to start the population diet from the bad and unnecessary, then move up? Instead of random non-Darwinian selection?
Kesey said it eloquently and wittily and compassionately in '74. If you agitate for pop-drop, the first casualties will be us, the gadflies, the rebels, the non-consensus refusers and critics and weirdos, and a whole lot of voiceless-in-this-wilderness folks.
 The immune system of centralized greed is powerfully ready for that, and discussion of pop-drop feeds that readiness, So it's understandable, and good, that it remains off-camera. But it's there, and in its absence placing nukes center-stage is disturbing as hell.
Reducing the human population from 7 billion clueless and governed by a few hundred thousand greedhead assholes, to a half-billion clueless governed by a few hundred thousand greedhead assholes won't fix things.
 But enabling the present set-up with nukeshine replacing petropuke won't fix it either.
Solutions, solutions.
Change your attitude about life.

USGS 1 day Magnitude 2.5+ worldwide

"That we forbid cosmetic genital surgeries for newborns, that is our first demand," 

Newborn babies can remember melodies played to them while they were in the womb
_

Myth:  Everyone is circumcised.
Reality check:  Actually, world-wide, only 30% of men are circumcised, and most of these men are Muslim (WHO 2007).   Most modern, Westernized countries have rates well below 20%.  In the United States about 25 years ago, around 85% of babies were circumcised. The rates have dropped substantially to 32% in 2009, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control (El Becheraoui 2010).

Myth:  Circumcision is an important tradition that has been going on forever.

Reality check:  In the United States, circumcision wasn't popularized until Victorian times, when a few doctors began to recommend it to prevent children from masturbating.  Dr. Kellogg (of Corn Flakes fame) advocated circumcision for pubescent boys and girls to stop masturbation:  "A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision, especially when there is any degree of phimosis. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anæsthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment... In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement" (Kellogg 1877).  Circumcision caught on among the sex-negative Victorians, but only wealthy parents could afford it.  In 1932, only 31% of men were circumcised; this peaked around 85% in 1980, and has been dropping ever since (Laumann 1997, Wallerstein 1980).  Far from an ancient tradition, it was only popular in post-war America; think of it as "your parent's body mod."

-Darcia Narvaez/PsychToday

signaling its superiority:

RT: But if these strikes are targeting Hezbollah - which Israel considers a terrorist organization - isn't that a justification?

JP: I think this is ridiculous. Hezbollah did not invade Israel, Israel invaded southern Lebanon. Israel violates the skies over Lebanon. They violate the borders of Lebanon, and not vice versa. Everything points to an aggressive Israel. Normally, these kinds of acts of war by Israel would receive sanctions and strong criticism.

RT: If it is proven that Israel has attacked another sovereign state without provocation, would that constitute a war crime?

JP: Exactly right, and the only way Israel can act with impunity is because in the United States, the Israeli Fifth Column is so influential on Capitol Hill and, in particular, it is influential within the Obama regime. There is hardly an appointment that goes on in the Obama regime which doesn’t result in a pro-Israeli official. Look at Commerce, look at Treasury, look at Trade. All the appointments - [US Trade Representative Michael] Froman, [Dept. of Treasury Secretary Jack] Lew, [Dept. of Commerce Secretary Penny] Pritzker - are all pro-Israel zealots. I think this is one of the problems. The US does not act in accordance with international law when it comes to Israeli war crimes.

Petras/rt  01.Nov.13