Preface: D.C. and the mainstream media are trumpeting the passage of a budget bill as a victory for bipartisanship and the American people. But the truth is very different.
Military Spending Is Destroying Our EconomyWe've repeatedly documented that
military waste and fraud are the core problems with the U.S. economy.
For example, we've noted that we
wouldn't be in a budget crisis in the first place if we hadn't spent so much money on unnecessary wars ... which are
killing our economy.
But it goes far beyond actual
fighting. We could
easily slash the military and security budget without reducing our national security.
For example, homeland security agencies wasted money on seminars like
"Did Jesus Die for Klingons Too?" and training for a "zombie apocalypse" instead of actually focusing on anti-terror efforts.
Republican Senator Tom Coburn notes that the Department of Defense can reduce $67.9 billion over 10 years by eliminating the
non-defense programs that have found their way into the budget for the Department of Defense.
BusinessWeek and Bloomberg point out that we could slash military spending without harming our national security. Indeed, we could
slash boondoggles that even the generals don't want.
Amy Goodman
TruthDigMon, 23 Dec 2013 08:00 UTC
There has been yet another violent attack with mass casualties. This was not the act of a lone gunman, or of an armed student rampaging through a school. It was a group of families en route to a wedding that was killed. The town was called Radda - not in Colorado, not in Connecticut, but in Yemen. The weapon was not an easy-to-obtain semiautomatic weapon, but missiles fired from U.S. drones. On Thursday, Dec. 12, 17 people were killed, mostly civilians. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has consistently tracked U.S. drone attacks, recently releasing a report on the six months following President Barack Obama's major address on drone warfare before the National Defense University (NDU) last May. In that speech, Obama promised that "before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured - the highest standard we can set." The BIJ summarized,
"Six months after President Obama laid out U.S. rules for using armed drones, a Bureau analysis shows that covert drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more people than in the six months before the speech." In a nation that abhors the all-too-routine mass killing in our communities, why does our government consistently kill so many innocents abroad?One significant problem with assessing the U.S. drone-warfare program is its secrecy. U.S. officials rarely comment on the program, less so about any specific attack, especially where civilian deaths occur. As Obama admitted in the speech, "There's a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties and nongovernmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties." The BIJ's estimate of the death toll from U.S. drone strikes during the past 12 years in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia is well over 4,000.
© GuardianFull military-grade autopilot allows the Raptr to be pre-programmed to fly to hundreds of points on a map within a range of 10 miles under its own control.
- Six states will be chosen to host drone test sites
- Oklahoma is one of 24 states in the running
- Oklahoma's drones: the next generation
The Raptr hovers stubbornly at an altitude of about 100 feet despite a lashing Oklahoma wind, its 73-inch rotor blades whirring like a swarm of buzzing bees. Then handler Curtis Sprague disconnects the remote device that he is using to control the mini-helicopter, leaving the pilotless aircraft to move entirely under its own steam - a flying robot let loose in the clear blue sky. The unmanned plane does a pirouette, then flies back to the spot from which it was launched. It lowers itself slowly to the runway, landing with a slight shudder before switching itself off.
Equipped with a military-grade autopilot that can make up to 500 flight corrections per second even as it carries out fully-autonomous surveillance of an area with a 10-mile radius, the Raptr is one of a new generation of drones now poised to burst onto the civilian scene. The helicopter's ability to transmit real-time video and thermal imaging over a wide area has already attracted interest from as far afield as South Africa, where game keepers want to use it to thwart rhino poachers. (Drones are also being eyed as a means of carrying snake antivenom to the Australian outback.)
In the US, a diverse group of interests have their eyes on the technology - fire fighters combatting wild fires, police departments tracking fugitives, farmers on the watch for diseased or parched crops, TV crews filming breaking news.
Comment: Considering the increasing abuse of technology for government/military/police surveillance and targeted killing purposes, how 'comfortable' are you with the idea of a higher number of drones flying U.S. skies? Ask yourself if repetitive assurances originating from various 'interested parties' who stand to gain monetarily and otherwise regarding 'beneficial applications' of this cutting edge technology outweigh the valid concerns and potential risks and dangers posed by pathological individuals and agencies trying to 'normalize' the use of unmanned aerial aircraft and desensitize the public to such use.
Would we ever really know what they're using this technology for?
How would we know?
WNDWed, 25 Dec 2013 00:00 UTC
© WND
Aaron Klein's WABC Radio show experienced what the host called a "tech meltdown" while he was conducting a live, on-air interview with the lawyer who won an injunction against the National Security Agency's collection of phone records.
Software used by the radio station dropped the guest, Larry Klayman, and listeners who had called in to ask Klayman questions were cut off in mid-sentence. Other callers could not be put on the air due to technical difficulties at the radio station.
Audio clips saved on an independent system played at the wrong time.
Klein's headphones had massive feedback that could be heard on the air.
At one point, the WABC call screener said, "We lost control of the software. It's all going nuts."
The technical difficulties started on the show about 10 minutes prior to the Klayman interview. They subsided following the two segments that featured Klayman.
"In my three years of broadcasting at WABC we never had such a technological meltdown as we are having today," Klein told the audience.
He continued: "Calls are dropping. We cant get the guests on. Once the guests are on they are dropping. We've had several meltdowns. Feedback from the microphone. I can barely broadcast. ... However we are going to land this airplane and we're going to have fun doing it."
Get Larry Klayman's fascinating account of his battle with the powers that be: "Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment"During the interview, Klayman called NSA data collection the "worst violation of constitutional rights in American history."
© Unknown
The United States is sending Iraq dozens of missiles and surveillance drones to help it combat a recent surge in Al-Qaeda-backed violence, the
New York Times reported on Thursday.
The weapons include a shipment of 75 Hellfire missiles purchased by Iraq, which Washington delivered to the country last week, the Times reported.
The daily wrote that 10 ScanEagle reconnaissance drones - smaller versions of the larger Predator drones that once were frequently flown over Iraq - are expected to be sent by March.
Administration sources told the
Times that the delivery comes as the Iraqis had virtually run out of Hellfire missiles.
The shipments are being sent as Baghdad confronts the worst wave of Islamic militant violence in half a decade.
© OftheHighest.wordpress.com
So you've signed up for health care on the ObamaCare exchanges. Think you're covered? Not quite.
As with any insurance plan, new enrollees still have to pay their first month's premium to lock in coverage. But the deadlines for that task are different all over the country, adding to the confusion over an already-perplexing sign-up process.
"It makes an already kind of chaotic situation even more chaotic,"
Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers said.
The deadlines in the ObamaCare enrollment process have been a moving target. For those seeking coverage for the start of the new year, the deadline to sign up was originally Dec. 15. Then it was moved to Dec. 23, and then again to Dec. 24. Even after that deadline passed Tuesday night, the administration announced that those who ran into technical problems on HealthCare.gov could still seek an exemption and get covered by Jan. 1.
Divide and conquer, works everytime... The Egyptian Revolution has been completely neutralized and its revolutionary energy funnelled back towards tight control of the masses by the small US-backed Egyptian elite.
Egypt's military-backed interim government has declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, criminalising all its activities, its financing and even membership to the group from which the country's ousted president hails.
The announcement on Wednesday is a dramatic escalation of the fight between the government and the Brotherhood, which has waged near-daily protests since the 3 July popularly backed military coup that toppled President Mohamed Morsi. An Egyptian court had
banned the group in September.
Hossam Eissa, the minister of higher education, read out the cabinet statement after a long meeting, saying: "The cabinet has declared the Muslim Brotherhood group and its organisation as a terrorist organisation."
Anyone caught smoking on high-speed trains will be fined up to 2,000 yuan ($330) as of Jan 1, according to a railway safety regulation issued by the State Council.
The penalty aims to ensure normal operation of the railway system and passenger safety as China's railway system readies for the annual challenge of coping with an expected 258 million passenger journeys during the 40-day Spring Festival travel season.
Passengers intercepting trains, walking on railway lines, jumping off running trains or throwing garbage from trains will also face a fine of up to 2,000 yuan, the safety regulation said.
According to an official from the Beijing Railway Bureau who spoke on condition of anonymity, the fine is expected to considerably reduce the number of smoking passengers and ensure travel safety.
We don't need no 'education'... we don't need no thought control...
About one-third of Maryland colleges and universities have decided to follow a recent national trend to ban smoking on college campuses.
The majority of institutions clearing the air are community colleges and the 10 campuses within the University System of Maryland, which adopted a system-wide smoke-free policy last year. Only two private schools in the state, both with religious affiliations, have enacted smoking bans.
Across the country, colleges and universities are rapidly adopting smoke-free policies. Since 2010, the number of smoke-free campuses has more than doubled, and 1,127 institutions now prohibit puffing on their premises, according to the American Nonsmokers Rights Foundation, which collects national data on smoke-free initiatives.
"We're seeing activity in all corners of the country and by all kinds of campuses," said Liz Williams, a project manager for the American Nonsmokers Rights Foundation. "In the last four years, we've seen a massive uptake [of smoke-free policies]."
RTTue, 24 Dec 2013 09:15 UTC
© AFP photoIraqi security forces inspect the site of a blast in Bartala in the Nineveh province, north of Baghdad, on January 16, 2012.
Iraq has too many competing interests, internal and external, and there is too much struggle for power on many sides, so it's unlikely that the parties behind the violence will let it get better, Lily Hamourtziadou at Iraq Body Count, told RT.
RT: You've been researching the victims of terrorism in Iraq for a long time. Where do you get the information and how credible is it?
Lily Hamourtziadou: Our research is daily and what we do is we check many media sources, any media source that is available to us in English or in Arabic. We collect any information we have on civilian casualties on a particular day. We have a very large database that contains names, ages, places where attacks have taken place, as well as who the perpetrators were if they are identified. And that enables us to monitor the violence, to provide some statistics and to see whether it is increasing or decreasing, who is doing the killing, who the targets are.
Comment: Invade a country using a lame, baseless, BS excuse like 9/11 and the 'war on terror', bomb said country to kingdom come, 'shock and awe' it to death, topple its government, install a central bank, destroy its economy, erase everything familiar to its people, murder a significant percentage of the civilian population, traumatize and scar the ones who survive the bombs, install a puppet government,steal, seize and control their natural resources, pretend you're going after 'terrorists', reduce the lives of civilians to a bleak, precarious, unstable, hopeless existence, profit off of stolen treasures and plundered resources, and then sit back and watch havoc play out in the streets, or what's left of the streets.
Just in case anybody still seriously believes the lie that the U.S.actually invaded Iraq to fight any 'war on terror', or that Iraq had anything remotely to do with the U.S. government's official lies regarding 'terror attacks' in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001.
Comment: For further reference see: 'Bride and Boom!' Wedding parties obliterated by U.S. air strikes