'The War Is Not Over'

[Dave C]

Spocko wrote:

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planet-wide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. The problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. Is that progress?
We have set in motion an enormous industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands for wealth and power! There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding and overpopulating. They all have collapsed soon after they reached their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_...

Is there only a finite amount of wealth in the world? Prehistoric man must have been filthy rich and living in a paradise. Far better than we have it today-huh?

[Spocko]

Dave C wrote:

<quoted text>
Is there only a finite amount of wealth in the world? Prehistoric man must have been filthy rich and living in a paradise. Far better than we have it today-huh?

A rather self-serving comment don't you think ...:-)

[ABs]

Americans were among the foreigners taken hostage today in an attack on a BP natural gas field in Algeria, US officials have confirmed. An al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist group has claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it retaliation for France's incursion into Mali, Reuters reports. The militants are still occupying the gas field, according to BP, and they say they have up to 41 hostages, including seven Americans. Two foreigners were also killed in the attack.

Hillary Clinton has called Algeria's prime minister to discuss the attack, and Leon Panetta publicly said that the US "will take all necessary and proper steps" to deal with the "terrorist attack," the AP reports. Algeria's interior minister today insisted that his government "will not respond to terrorist demands, and rejects all negotiations," according to CBS.

Now gee, who would have seen that coming in one of the many peaceful loving muslim countries making the world a better place today?

[ABs]

Spocko wrote:

<quoted text>
A rather self-serving comment don't you think ...:-)

What??? I'm with Dave, don't you find it fascinating that over 9 billion people live in less poverty than first man of the caves?

[Spocko]

ABs wrote:

<quoted text>
What??? I'm with Dave, don't you find it fascinating that over 9 billion people live in less poverty than first man of the caves?

Of course you are ... so cavemen lived in poverty eh? I could swear is saw an article the other day that an archeologist unearthed a Porsche in one of the cave dwellings :-)

[ABs]

Spocko wrote:

<quoted text>
Of course you are ... so cavemen lived in poverty eh? I could swear is saw an article the other day that an archeologist unearthed a Porsche in one of the cave dwellings :-)

Based on today's definition of poverty....yes they did. THat is why I don't put a lot of stock in stats and polls...

But I am willing to bet if you had asked Fred Flintstone, he was living the dream until a guvmint official came by and told him he was living in poverty...

[MUQ]

After six years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to pacify the country’s sprawling cities. It then built a biometric database with more than a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans that U.S. patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia.

When President Obama took office and launched his “surge,” escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, that country became a new frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric databases, as well as for full-scale drone war in both that country and the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar already loosed by the Bush administration. This meant accelerating technological developments in drone warfare that had largely been suspended for two decades after the Vietnam War.

Launched as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s “Operation Afghan Eyes.” By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with “persistent hunter killer” capabilities, was heavily armed with missiles and bombs as well as sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development, between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours.

[MUQ]

News you will not see or hear on CNN and FOX News

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/arti...

Beyond Bayonets and Battleships
Space Warfare and the Future of U.S. Global Power

By Alfred W. McCoy
(Contd.)

Computerizing Vietnam

Under the pressures of a never-ending war in Vietnam, those running the U.S. information infrastructure turned to computerized data management, launching a second American information regime. Powered by the most advanced IBM mainframe computers, the U.S. military compiled monthly tabulations of security in all of South Vietnam’s 12,000 villages and filed the three million enemy documents its soldiers captured annually on giant reels of bar-coded film. At the same time, the CIA collated and computerized diverse data on the communist civilian infrastructure as part of its infamous Phoenix Program. This, in turn, became the basis for its systematic tortures and 41,000 “extra-judicial executions”(which, based on disinformation from petty local grudges and communist counterintelligence, killed many but failed to capture more than a handfull of top communist cadres).

Most ambitiously, the U.S. Air Force spent $800 million a year to lace southern Laos with a network of 20,000 acoustic, seismic, thermal, and ammonia-sensitive sensors to pinpoint Hanoi’s truck convoys coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail under a heavy jungle canopy. The information these provided was then gathered on computerized systems for the targeting of incessant bombing runs. After 100,000 North Vietnamese troops passed right through this electronic grid undetected with trucks, tanks, and heavy artillery to launch the Nguyen Hue Offensive in 1972, the U.S. Pacific Air Force pronounced this bold attempt to build an “electronic battlefield” an unqualified failure.

In this pressure cooker of what became history’s largest air war, the Air Force also accelerated the transformation of a new information system that would rise to significance three decades later: the Firebee target drone. By war’s end, it had morphed into an increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would make 3,500 top-secret surveillance sorties over China, North Vietnam, and Laos. By 1972, the SC/TV drone, with a camera in its nose, was capable of flying 2,400 miles while navigating via a low-resolution television image.

On balance, all this computerized data helped foster the illusion that American “pacification” programs in the countryside were winning over the inhabitants of Vietnam’s villages, and the delusion that the air war was successfully destroying North Vietnam’s supply effort. Despite a dismal succession of short-term failures that helped deliver a soul-searing blow to American power, all this computerized data-gathering proved a seminal experiment, even if its advances would not become evident for another 30 years until the U.S. began creating a third -- robotic -- information regime.

The Global War on Terror

As it found itself at the edge of defeat in the attempted pacification of two complex societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare -- all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before.

[ABs]

Spocko wrote:

<quoted text>
Of course you are ... so cavemen lived in poverty eh? I could swear is saw an article the other day that an archeologist unearthed a Porsche in one of the cave dwellings :-)

Thanks for the funnytime, my serve...

Subject: "You have 2 cows" - an update

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other and then throws the milk
away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of
credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity
swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back,
with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a
Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells
the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one
more.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want
three cows.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5,000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
Nobody believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your
country.
You still have no cows but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

A GREEK CORPORATION
You have two cows borrowed from French and German banks.
You eat both of them.
The banks call to collect their milk, but you cannot deliver so you call the
IMF.
The IMF loans you two cows.
You eat both of them.
The banks and the IMF call to collect their cows/milk.
You are out getting a haircut

[ABs]

MUQ wrote:

After six years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to pacify the country’s sprawling cities. It then built a biometric database with more than a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans that U.S. patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia.
When President Obama took office and launched his “surge,” escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, that country became a new frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric databases, as well as for full-scale drone war in both that country and the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar already loosed by the Bush administration. This meant accelerating technological developments in drone warfare that had largely been suspended for two decades after the Vietnam War.
Launched as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s “Operation Afghan Eyes.” By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with “persistent hunter killer” capabilities, was heavily armed with missiles and bombs as well as sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development, between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours.

Thanks for sharing, comrade MUQ...muslims and jews have been at it for so long that with this new great technology I can see the day when jews and muslims can fight and kill each other from the comforts of their computer at home...how about you?

For the sake of mankind I sure hope islamic nations and israel learn to co-exist...the time is rapidly approaching where the inevitable will be upon you both...

[ABs]

67 years later!

What happened to the radiation that lasts thousands of years?

HIROSHIMA 1945 - totally devastated, desolute, depressing...

We all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 after the explosion of atomic bombs.
However, we know little about the progress made by the people of that land during the past 67 years.

HIROSHIMA - 67 YEARS LATER is a vibrant modern thriving metropolis...

DETROIT- 67 years ago a thriving vibrant metropolis...

DETROIT 67 YEARS AFTER HIROSHIMA-- totally devastated, desolute, depressing...

What has caused more long term destruction - the A-bomb, or Government welfare programs created to
buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?

Japan does not have a welfare system.

Work for it or do without.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences
you'll ever read and all applicable to this
experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into
prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of
prosperity.

2. What one person receives without
working for, another person must work for
without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody
anything that the government does not first
take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that
they do not have to work because the other
half is going to take care of them, and when
the other half gets the idea that it does no
good to work because somebody else is
going to get what they work for, that is the
beginning of the end of any nation.

Can you think of a reason for not sharing this? Neither could I.

[John_Schuylkill County_Pa]

ABs wrote:

67 years later!
What happened to the radiation that lasts thousands of years?
HIROSHIMA 1945 - totally devastated, desolute, depressing...
We all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 after the explosion of atomic bombs.
However, we know little about the progress made by the people of that land during the past 67 years.
HIROSHIMA - 67 YEARS LATER is a vibrant modern thriving metropolis...
DETROIT- 67 years ago a thriving vibrant metropolis...
DETROIT 67 YEARS AFTER HIROSHIMA-- totally devastated, desolute, depressing...
What has caused more long term destruction - the A-bomb, or Government welfare programs created to
buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?
Japan does not have a welfare system.
Work for it or do without.
These are possibly the 5 best sentences
you'll ever read and all applicable to this
experiment:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into
prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of
prosperity.
2. What one person receives without
working for, another person must work for
without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody
anything that the government does not first
take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that
they do not have to work because the other
half is going to take care of them, and when
the other half gets the idea that it does no
good to work because somebody else is
going to get what they work for, that is the
beginning of the end of any nation.
Can you think of a reason for not sharing this? Neither could I.

Thanks for sharing. Obama brags about saving jobs with the auto bailouts. only 4 years later Jeep is building a plant in China.

[Spocko]

John_Schuylkill County_Pa wrote:

<quoted text>Thanks for sharing. Obama brags about saving jobs with the auto bailouts. only 4 years later Jeep is building a plant in China.

That's Forrest -- for the Chinese market!!!

[Spocko]

Isn’t the NRA forgetting something?“Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people!!

[John_Pa]

Spocko wrote:

Isn’t the NRA forgetting something?“Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people!!

head cases kill people

[ABs]

Spocko wrote:

Isn’t the NRA forgetting something?“Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people!!

People kill people, period...have been before guns and will continue to long after they ban them and pry them from our cold dead hands...here's a buck, buy a clue old boy...

[ABs]

In March 2006, then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., found the notion of raising the debt ceiling quite distasteful.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” he said.“It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.… Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

He did. It passed narrowly – by a vote of 52-48.

In January, I asked then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about those comments and that vote, given the president’s belief that the debt ceiling needs to be raised in May.

Gibbs said it was OK for then-Senator Obama to have cast that vote, since the outcome was guaranteed.

“Based on the outcome of that vote…the full faith and credit was not in doubt,” Gibbs said. Then-Sen. Obama used the vote “to make a point about needing to get serious about fiscal discipline….His vote was not necessarily needed on that.”

On Sunday, senior White House adviser David Plouffe revised that explanation.

“He believes that vote was a mistake,” Plouffe told Fox News Sunday.

And today White House press secretary Jay Carney said that “the president, as David Plouffe said yesterday, regrets that vote and thinks it was a mistake. He realizes now that raising the debt ceiling is so

important to the health of this economy and the global economy that it is not a vote that, even when you are protesting an administration's policies, you can play around with, and you need to take very seriously the need to raise the debt limit so that the full faith and credit of the United States government is maintained around the globe.”

[ABs]

John_Schuylkill County_Pa wrote:

<quoted text>Thanks for sharing. Obama brags about saving jobs with the auto bailouts. only 4 years later Jeep is building a plant in China.

My pleasure...good luck this weekend in thongwearer nation...hope Ray brings home the bacon...will be in HOTlanta again this weekend and if its close I will NOT leave early this time :(

[ABs]

News you will not hear on IRNA or any other muslim news source...why is your cell phone so rigid???
Such thin, tiny or just downright unusual shapes could be created if there were batteries slim, flexible and also powerful enough to run the gadgets. The batteries, it turns out, are the main barrier to modern electronics design.

But in a small, brightly lit lab in an office park behind the Oakland Airport in Alameda, Calif., a young startup called Imprint Energy, is using research created at the University of California, Berkeley to develop just such a battery that could free gadget makers from the constraints of the standard lithium ion battery. Well, that’s the plan, anyway.

Using zinc instead of lithium, along with screen-printing technology, Imprint Energy is already churning out low volumes of its ultra-thin, energy-dense, flexible, low-cost, rechargeable batteries for pilot customers.

It’s hard to make standard lithium ion batteries thin and flexible, explains Imprint Energy Chief Executive Officer Devin MacKenzie in an interview in the startup’s lab. There’s a “lot of packaging” required to seal off the highly reactive lithium in the battery from the environment, says MacKenzie. If you’ve ever seen YouTube (GOOG) videos of lithium batteries that catch fire in the air or water, you know why those barriers are needed.

But this architecture also makes lithium ion batteries rigid and potentially bulky. Even the slimmest laptops such as the Macbook Air (AAPL), or tablets like the iPad, face design limitations posed by the size and weight of the batteries. The Nike FuelBand uses a curved (called conformal in battery terms) lithium polymer battery, but if you look closely at the shape of the band, the battery is the only part of the bracelet that isn’t pliable.

Imprint Energy’s battery tackles the problem of rigidity and bulkiness by throwing out the lithium. The company, which has a staff of 8, was founded in 2010 by Berkeley PhD students Christine Ho and Brooks Kincaid, who recently raised seed funding from Dow Chemical (DOW) and CIA fund In-Q-Tel.
The company uses zinc for the anode part of the battery, combining it with a solid polymer electrolyte and a cathode made of a metal oxide. A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. In Imprint’s case, zinc ions travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte, creating a chemical reaction that allows electrons to be harvested along the way.

MacKenzie tells me that while zinc has been used for years in batteries, it’s been difficult to make zinc batteries rechargeable. That’s because when zinc is combined with a liquid electrolyte, it creates something called dendrites—tiny fibers that grow and get in the way of the charging reaction. Imprint Energy solved this hurdle by using an electrolyte made of a solid polymer combined with the zinc.

Using zinc means Imprint’s batteries can have far less “packaging” because zinc isn’t highly reactive with the environment. In other words, the batteries can be made much more thinly. They can also be made as tiny as a few hundred microns thick (the width of a couple of human hairs). Batteries that small could power tiny digital smart labels, like freshness-detector stickers on food.

Zinc also makes Imprint’s batteries safer and less toxic than lithium-based batteries are. The team at Imprint can work on zinc batteries in the open air. And zinc batteries are a safer option for creating devices that sit on—or even in—the body. Imagine a lithium battery powering a heart device inside a person’s chest cavity—and the battery leaks lithium into the person’s body. Yikes.

[Spocko]

Wake up America!
Aside from the terrible loss of life and a barrage of nonsense put out by the NRA, the most insulting assault on public sensibility may be the shameless attempts by the right-wingers to suggest irrational alternatives to sensible gun laws. They seem incapable of grasping the gravity of what happened in Newtown or, like Rush Limbaugh, have the temerity to make light of it with ill-chosen attempts at humor, seem to have lost the capacity to think and feel like descent human beings. It is almost impossible to underestimate the depravity of those in our society who are beyond the reach of decency, having given themselves over to the lowest impulses on the planet in their perverted salute to money lenders and political savages on the far right. The fact that Limbaugh and others like him have grown rich spewing their hate-filled vitriol across the airwaves is a frightening indictment of the kind of behavior we have come to accept.