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The NSA Is Watching You | Amy Goodman
Apr. 26, 2012 (TruthDig) -- Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained -- sometimes at gunpoint -- and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent. The intell...
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The Descent into Stasis | John Michael Greer
John Michael GreerMay 9, 2012 (Archdruid Report) -- Last weeks’ post attempted, with the help of the ancient Greek philosopher Polybius, to trace out the trajectory that democracies -- and in particular the United States -- tend to follow across time. The pattern that Polybius outlined, and that American politics has cycled through three times so far in the course of its history, begins with most...
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Disinformation On Every Front | Paul Craig Roberts
May 4, 2012 (PaulCraigRoberts) -- Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to Americans. If I may give some...
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Democracy's Arc | John Michael Greer
May 2, 2012 (Archdruid Report) -- The troubling news about methane releases from the Arctic ocean that was the focus of last week’s post on The Archdruid Report belongs, as I mentioned then, to the wider trajectory of industrial society’s decline and fall, not to the more-specific theme I’ve been developing here in recent months. The end of America’s global empire takes place against the backgr...
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Brewing a Conflict with China | Paul Craig Roberts
Apr. 30, 2012 (PaulCraigRoberts) -- Washington has pressured the Philippines, whose government it owns, into conducting joint military exercises in the South China Sea. Washington’s excuse is that China has territorial disputes with the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries concerning island and sea rights in the South China Sea. Washington asserts that China’s territorial disputes with the...
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Illegal Settlements Bonanza | Ramzy Baroud
Israel Plots an Endgame Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust May 2, 2012 -- Israel’s colonization policies are entering an alarming new phase, comparable in historic magnitude to the original plans to colonize Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem following the war of 1967. On Apr. 24, an Israeli ministerial committee approved three settlement outposts -- Bruchin and Rechelim in the northern part ...
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East Africa at the Brink | Ramzy Baroud
Hidden Hands behind Sudan’s Oil War Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust Apr. 27, 2012 -- Once again Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir waved his walking stick in the air. Once again he spoke of splendid victories over his enemies as thousands of jubilant supporters danced and cheered. But this time around the stakes are too high. An all out war against newly independent South Sudan might not be i...
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Seascape With Methane Plumes | John Michael Greer
Methane plume from the sea floor Oct. 25, 2012 (Archdruid Report) -- In the wake of last week’s post, I’d meant to plunge straight into the next part of this sequence of posts and talk about the unraveling of American politics. Still, it’s worth remembering that the twilight of America’s global empire is merely an incident in the greater trajectory of the end of the industrial age, and part of t...
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Trials Without Crimes Or Evidence | Paul Craig Roberts
A fish rots from the head Apr. 25, 2012 (PaulCraigRoberts) -- Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing the facts of the U.S. government’s illegal abuse of “detainees,” against whom no evidence exists. (http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/) In an effort to create evidence, the U.S. government has illegally resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea b...
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America: The Price of Supremacy | John Michael Greer
Apr. 18, 2012 (Archruid Report) -- A complex and self-justifying mythology has grown up around the process by which, during and after the Second World War, the United States made the transition from regional power to global empire. That sort of thing is common enough that it probably belongs on the short list of imperial obsessions. Rome had its imperial myth, as did Spain, Britain, and just abo...
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Unplugging Americans From The Matrix | Paul Craig Roberts
Apr. 19, 2012 (PaulCraigRoberts) -- Americans, the British, and Western Europeans are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the representatives of freedom, democracy, and morality in the world. The West passes judgment on the rest of the world as if the West is God and the rest of the world are barbarians in need of chastisement, invasion, and occupation. As readers know, from time to time I r...
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The Rest is Hasbara: Jenny Tonge’s Victory over the Lobby | Ramzy Baroud
Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust Apr. 18, 2012 -- “My Lords, I was in Gaza six weeks ago,” began Baroness Tonge, when she spoke at the House of Lords in January 2009. “Now, as a result of the impotence of the international community, not just in Gaza, but ... over 40 years of occupation of Palestine by Israel, those institutions that I visited are rubble and many of the children with whom I playe...
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As If Nothing Matters | James Howard Kunstler
M.C. Escher James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust Apr. 23, 2012 -- The world gave the appearance of doing nothing and going nowhere over the past month -- apart from the sensational liaison of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, which, some believe, augurs a dazzling speed-up of the much prayed-for economic recovery, return to full employment, $2.50 gasoline by summer, and the selection of Jesus ...
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A Kid With Skittles | James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust Apr. 16, 2012 -- In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers "An Activist for Our Times") and in the course of things (12:18 in the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about race." In point of fact, ...
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The Logic of Unintended Consequences: The ‘Mess in Mali’ | Ramzy Baroud
Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust Apr. 11, 2012 -- The intentional misreading of UN security council resolution 1973 resulted in Nato's predictably violent Operation Odyssey in Libya last year. Not only did the action cost many thousands of lives and untold destruction, it also paved the way for perpetual conflict -- not only in Libya but throughout north Africa. Mali was the first major vi...
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Washington Leads World Into Lawlessness | Paul Craig Roberts
Apr. 12, 2012 (PaulCraigRoberts) -- The U.S. government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed. U.S. government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel se...
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What Is ObamaCare? | Paul Craig Roberts
Apr. 10, 2012 (PaulCraigRoberts) -- Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The U.S government can assassinate any U.S citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the U.S government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without prese...
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The Top Short-Term Threat to Humanity: The Fuel Pools of Fukushima | WashingtonsBlog
Nuclear love. Ben Heine The Greatest Single Threat to Humanity: Fuel Pool Number 4 Apr. 7, 2012 (Washington's Blog) -- We noted days after the Japanese earthquake that the biggest threat was from the spent fuel rods in the fuel pool at Fukushima unit number 4, and not from the reactors themselves. See this and this. We noted in February: Scientists say that there is a 70 percent chance of...
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The 'Specter' Of Al Qaeda In Africa: A Cover For Western Reconquest Of The Continent | Finian Cunningham
Global Research, April 5, 2012 A British foreign policy think tank has this week released a study claiming that the terror group Al Qaeda is regrouping in Africa creating “an arc of instability” from the Western Sahel to the Eastern Horn. The Royal United Services Institute, based in Whitehall, London, and closely aligned to official British foreign policy, cites “disturbing new trends” across t...
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From the Cold War to NATO's 'Humanitarian Wars' -- The Complicity of the United Nations | Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, April 4, 2012 Humanitarian wars, especially under the guise of the “Responsibility to Protect (R2P),” are a modern form of imperialism. The standard pattern that the United States and its allies use to execute them is one where genocide and ethnic cleansing are vociferously alleged by a coalition of governments, media organizations, and non-governmental front organizations. The a...
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The F-35 Stealth Fighter Program: How the War Economy Contributes to Exacerbating the Social Crisis | Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, April 4, 2012 There is mounting controversy regarding the purchase of the F-35 stealth fighter jet from U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin. The Pentagon has commissioned the purchase of 2,443 aircraft "to provide the bulk of its tactical airpower for the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy over the coming decades." This massive procurement of advanced weapons systems ...
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Treacherous Treaties: American Imperialism, World Government and the Bilderbergers | Prof. John Kozy
Apr. 2, 2012 -- Global Research "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" --George Washington, 1796 Is American imperialism a Bilderberger plot? Are the American bankers, diplomats, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations all traitors, having turned America into merely an instrument to carry out their Bilderberger maniacal aims? Does America as...
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America: The Eagle and the Lion | John Michael Greer
Apr. 4, 2012 (Archdruid Report) -- I’ve commented more than once in these essays on the way that so many people on the leftward end of today’s American politics act as though America’s current empire is unique in the history of the world, either in scale, malevolence, or some combination of the two. In any form, this notion is impressively absurd, and it presupposes an equally impressive ignoranc...
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Numbing Numbers Explain US Frog Revolution | Joel S. Hirschhorn
Joel S. Hirschhorn -- World News Trust Apr. 6, 2012 -- Believing in the classic American Dream that hard work will deliver prosperity is like believing that buying super lottery tickets is a smart way to become wealthy. Both are delusional beliefs because both are bets on incredible long shots that will disappoint nearly everyone who believes this garbage. The American Dream has been destroyed ...
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US-Israel War on Iran: The Myth of Limited Warfare | Prof. James Petras
Global Research, April 5, 2012 The mounting threat of a U.S.-Israeli military attack against Iran is based on several factors including: (1) the recent military history of both countries in the region, (2) public pronouncements by U.S. and Israeli political leaders, (3) recent and on-going attacks on Lebanon and Syria, prominent allies of Iran, (4) armed attacks and assassinations of Iranian scie...
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