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Best of the Web: Spain could indicate the direction America is taking

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© Eleonore Weil"The Economy"
Suddenly, Spain and Greece are being racked by strikes and huge demonstrations. The public in these countries is, in effect, saying that it has reached its limit: With unemployment at Great Depression levels and with erstwhile middle-class workers reduced to picking through garbage in search of food, austerity has already gone too far. Paul Krugman - New York Times

What began as an economic storm has blown into a full-scale political crisis. Amid popular discontent and separatist protests, Spain has stumbled towards a crossroads: without decisive action by the government, the post-Franco democratic settlement is at risk. Financial Times

It is said that every historical phase carries within it the embryo of the next phase to be born in the future. If this is so, then someday we may come to consider the mountain of debt that threatens to crush our present system as an explanatory, broken condom.

One of the paradoxes here is that the enormous robustness of the United States, its size, population, its natural resources, military power and perhaps most of all, its ability to create money out of thin air to pay its debts, probably means that it would not see the total systemic crisis arriving until it was too late to really do anything about it.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Amazing meteor boomerangs around earth

For the first time ever, a meteor has grazed in and out of Earth's atmosphere, slowing enough to become a temporary satellite that lasted a full orbit.
O'Briens Tower
© Damien Stenson PhotographyLucky skygazer Damien Stenson was photographing O'Briens Tower at Ireland's Cliffs of Moher when a brilliant, fragmenting bolide passed behind. Stenson used LEDs to illuminate the tower in this 30-second exposure. Click on the image for a larger version.
By evening on September 21st, an earlier storm had moved eastward and left skies over the British Isles beautifully clear.

Martin Goff, an officer with the Greater Manchester [England] Police, was making his rounds when he spotted a dazzling meteor at 22:55 p.m. (21:55 Universal Time). "I immediately pulled the van over to better see the fireball," he recounts. "Although not an experienced astronomical observer I was able to log relevant information such as altitude and azimuth relative to the straight road I was on and to trees and streetlights nearby." He estimates it was about as bright as a full moon and remained visible for 35 to 40 seconds, fragmenting for at least the last half of that. "I was just flabbergasted to have seen it!"

He was hardly alone in his amazement. Friday-night crowds were out and about when the bolide appeared, delighting and amazing untold thousands as it broke into dozens of pieces as it glided east to east across the sky. Dirk Ross, who tracks bright meteors and meteorite finds worldwide, logged 564 eyewitness reports from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Norway.

A few hours later, Ross received another burst of 126 sightings. But these weren't from Europe - instead, a fireball had appeared over southeastern Canada and the U.S. Northeast. What at first seemed the unlikely arrival of two dramatic bolides in a single night is now known to be something much more historic and scientifically profound.

Attention

Best of the Web: Precursor to social unrest? High food prices forecast more global riots ahead, researchers say

When French peasants stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, they weren't just revolting against the monarchy's policies. They were also hungry. From the French Revolution to the Arab Spring, high food prices have been cited as a factor behind mass protest movements. But can food prices actually help predict when social unrest is likely break out? Yes, say a group of researchers who use mathematical modeling to describe how food prices behave. Earlier this summer, their model had predicted that the U.S. drought would push corn and wheat prices high enough to spark social unrest in other parts of the world.

"Now, of course, we do see this happening," says Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Science Institute in Cambridge, Mass. And unless those food prices come down, the researchers warned last week, more waves of riots are coming.

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© Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty ImagesA Tunisian protester holds a baguette while taking to riot police in January 2011

Comment: Is the food shortage before us? Will we be buying bacon and pork sausages next year?


Hourglass

Best of the Web: Distress of Nations: Signs of the Times in September 2012

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Note: this video does not imply the world is going to end in 2012.

Extreme weather and global unrest in September 2012. Earthquakes, sinkholes, volcanic eruptions, steam plumes, riots, floods, UFOs, meteors, fireballs... major Earth changes are underway.


Star of David

Best of the Web: Netanyahu's crazy UN speech: Medievalist poses as champion of "modernity"

bibi's bomb, Netanyahu
© Lucas Jackson/ReutersNetanyahu: "Here, see? Iran has nuclear bombs to wipe us all out!"
It's no wonder the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially held back from releasing a transcript of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the UN General Assembly: Bibi's wackiness doesn't bear close scrutiny. Perhaps "wacky" isn't quite the right word for his 40-minute peroration, during which he pulled out a bomb "diagram" and a red marker to illustrate where he would draw a "red line" defining the outer limits of Iran's nuclear program. Cartoonish is more like it. The cartoonish quality of the bomb drawing underscored the content and tone of the speech, which was the jeremiad of a radical ideologue rather than anything one would expect from a statesman:
"Today a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval. Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the right of all our citizens, men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, all are equal before the law."
Israel, which privileges its priestly caste, has a state religion, and bases its national mythology on a "promise" from G-d, is as medieval as any of its neighbors. Aside from being a lie, however, this statement is interesting because it evokes the very same supremacist spirit that animates the controversial pro-Israel public relations campaign launched by the Jewish state's extremist American supporters. Posters in the public transport system, from New York to San Francisco, proclaim:
"In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad."
No wonder the Israeli consulates in New York and San Francisco won't disavow those vile subway posters: Pamela Geller is the new public face of Israel.

Yes, Israel protects the rights of all citizens - unless they're Palestinians who happen to own property coveted by the "settlers," in which case it doesn't. And the key word here is citizens: of course, the Palestinians in the occupied territories are not citizens, but helots, with no rights, and no protection from fanatical Jewish fundamentalists who have launched hundreds of attacks on their homes, and sought to displace them at every opportunity, with the active complicity of the Israeli government.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Electric Comet: The Elephant in NASA's Living Room?

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Left: Specimen produced in the laboratory of CJ Ransom.
Right: Comet Hartley.

For thousands of years, the appearance of a comet in the terrestrial skies has provoked deep anxiety and even collective hysteria in humans the world over. The reasons for this response are not entirely clear. Working with historical testimony, David Talbott and his colleagues have concluded that comet fears originated in a global experience of catastrophe and terror. Behind all of the regional traditions and stories is the memory of the "Great Comet," the mother of all comets. The memory traces to the origins of world mythology, according to Talbott, and is particularly vivid in the story of a cosmic serpent or dragon threatening to destroy the world. The most common ancient ideas attached to a comet were the death of kings, the fall of kingdoms, cosmic upheaval, and the end of the world.


It is well worth asking why this collective anxiety can be provoked with the first appearance of a mere wisp of gas in the heavens. The question is especially appropriate today because of the approach of the Comet Elenin, which is predicted to pass within about 0.233 AU of the Earth in October of this year. Speculations about Elenin range from a theoretical NASA coverup of an "extinction level event," to theories that the comet is actually the ever-elusive planet "Nibiru" of author Zecharia Sitchin's lore. (For a thoughtful meditation on the credibility of some of these theories, see the Subversify.com piece, "Is Google Censoring Nibiru?"). It should be noted here that the leading proponent of the electric universe, Wal Thornhill, has refrained from predicting specific behaviors of Elenin due to the number of unknowns. These unknowns (discussed below) include the Sun's activity, and the constituent material of the comet itself.

USA

Best of the Web: Outrage at CIA's deadly 'double tap' drone attacks

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American freedom fighters at work on an unmanned, child-killing drone
Report claims just one in fifty victims of 'surgical' US strikes in Pakistan are known militants. Jerome Taylor reports on a deadly new strategy

Late in the evening on 6 June this year an unmanned drone was flying high above the Pakistani village of Datta Khel in north Waziristan.

The buzz emitted by America's fleet of Predators and Reapers are a familiar sound for the inhabitants of the dusty hamlet, which lies next to a riverbed close to Pakistan's border with Afghanistan and is a stronghold for the Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur.

As the drone circled it let off the first of its Hellfire missiles, slamming into a small house and reducing it to rubble. When residents rushed to the scene of the attack to see if they could help they were struck again.

According to reports at the time, three local rescuers were killed by a second missile whilst a further strike killed another three people five minutes later. In all, somewhere between 17 and 24 people are thought to have been killed in the attack.

The Datta Khel assault was just one of the more than 345 strikes that have hit Pakistan's tribal areas in the past eight years but it reveals an increasingly common tactic now being used in America's covert drone wars - the "double-tap" strike.

More and more, while the overall frequency of strikes has fallen since a Nato attack in 2011 killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and strained US-Pakistan relations, initial strikes are now followed up by further missiles in a tactic which lawyers and campaigners say is killing an even greater number of civilians.

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Mitt Romney Helped Monsanto's Toxic Takeover of the World

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© Romney: Chris Devers/WikiMedia Commons; Corn: Africa Studio/Shutterstock
Today, Monsanto looms over the global ag landscape like a colossus. It is the globe's largest seed purveyor - and its dominant vendor of genetically modified traits. How dominant? Here's NPR on the company's mastery over the US GMO market: "More than 9 out of 10 soybean seeds carry [Monsanto's] Roundup Ready trait. It's about the same for cotton and just a little lower for corn." It also sells nearly $1 billion worth of herbicides every three months.

But for all its clout, Monsanto is a relatively new player in the Big Ag game. While fellow ag giants like ADM, Cargill, Bunge, and BASF have been in the game for a century or more, as recently as the late 1970s Monsanto was known mostly as a chemical company; herbicides were a relatively small sideline, and genetically modified seeds were just the gleam in the eye of a few scientists in the R&D department. And its flagship chemical business had plunged into crisis. In 1976, Congress banned the highly toxic industrial coolant PCB - the US production of which Monsanto had enjoyed what the Washington Post called a "lucrative four-decade monopoly." According to the Post, Monsanto had been actively covering up the dangers of PCB exposure for years before the ban, opening the company to a thicket of lawsuits. To make matters worse, the company had also been heavily invested in the toxic pesticide DDT (banned in 1972) and the infamous Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange - both of which carried their own legal and public-relations liabilities.

How did Monsanto pivot from teetering, scandal-ridden chemical giant to mighty high-tech (though still quite controversial) agribiz firm? As the veteran investigative reporter (and Mother Jones contributor) Wayne Barrett shows in a new Nation article, a young consultant called Mitt Romney helped push the firm on its highly lucrative new path.

Magnify

Best of the Web: Meet Monsanto's Number One Lobbyist: Barack Obama

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During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama transmitted signals that he understood the GMO issue. Several key anti-GMO activists were impressed. They thought Obama, once in the White House, would listen to their concerns and act on them.

These activists weren't just reading tea leaves. On the campaign trail, Obama said:
"Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they're buying."
Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand.

Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in promising that, if elected, his administration wouldn't do business in "the old way." He would be "responsive to people's needs."

Then came the reality.

Stormtrooper

Best of the Web: Coming to a city near you soon: Madrid police fire rubber bullets as thousands surround Spain's parliament


Madrid riot police have cleared Plaza de Neptune of protesters, with about 200 officers securing the surrounding blocks. At least 60 people have been injured and 26 arrested as police used batons and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd.

­Local emergency services have confirmed that at least 60 people, including eight policemen, were injured in clashes between police and protesters, El Pais reports. One of the wounded is believed to be in critical condition, while one of the injured policemen suffered a severe concussion.