Puppet Masters
The crux of the conflict is China's attempt to assert its sovereignty over the South China Sea, a resource-rich conduit for roughly $5 trillion in annual global trade, of which $1.2 trillion is American, which U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared last year a matter of "national interest."
Beijing's assertive behavior in the South China Sea precipitated calls from Asian allies for the U.S. to deepen its involvement to be a strong counterweight. Those calls led to the formulation of Obama's new Asia strategy, which administration officials admit changes America's "military posture toward China" into something like the former East-West cold war. The first shots of the new war were heard last week.
Many media reports on the alleged deadly repression by the Syrian government fail to mention the sources of their information, which are very often referred to solely as "human rights groups" or "activists":
"Rights groups said Sunday that troops cracking down on pro-democracy protesters killed eight people in northern Idlib province and four more in central areas near Hama. (Syrian Forces Kill 12 as ICRC Head Visits Damascus, Voice of America, September 4, 2011.)
These protests are an unprecedented challenge to President Bashar al-Assad - and his family, which has ruled the country for more than 40 years. The cost has been high: at least 200 dead, according to human rights groups, and many cyber activists have been jailed. (Deborah Amos, Syrian Activist In Hiding Presses Mission From Abroad, NPR, April 22, 2011.)
At least 75 people have been killed today in Syria during mass protests, local human rights activists told Amnesty International [...]
Thirty were killed in the southern town of Izzra', 22 in Damascus, 18 in the Homs area and the rest in other towns and villages, activists said [...] (Scores killed in Syria as 'Great Friday' protests are attacked, Amnesty International, April 22, 2011.)

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, says the ISI uses Afghan insurgents as proxies.
Nato forces in Afghanistan are bracing for possible reprisals from Pakistani-backed insurgents following the coalition air strike along the border that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
Senior officers from the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), were scrambling to resume contacts with their Pakistani counterparts in the hopes of setting up a joint investigation into the incident.
But Pakistani officers severed communications and Islamabad cut Isaf's two supply routes running through Pakistan.
It also gave the US two weeks to vacate the Shamsi airbase in Balochistan, which has been used to launch American drone aircraft.
One Isaf source voiced concern that the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, could go much further and use its suspected influence over insurgent groups in the tribal areas along the Afghan border to launch reprisal attacks on Nato. "This will come back at us, and at a time and a place of their [the ISI's] choosing," the source predicted. In September the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said the ISI was using insurgent groups such as the Haqqani network to wage a "proxy war" in Afghanistan.
The police brutality against peaceful protesters in Berkeley, Davis, Oakland and elsewhere is bad enough.
But next week, Congress will vote on explicitly creating a police state.
The ACLU's Washington legislative office explains:
Do you think that granting corporations the rights of people in the Citizens United case is disturbing? Then contemplate the fact that corporations have been patenting human genes and tissues at alarming rates -- in the last 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone.
As the Occupy movement fights against the unmitigated influence of corporations on our lives, author and medical ethicist Harriet Washington's new book, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, is a timely wakeup call to protect the very essence of human life from the medical-industrial complex.
In a recent phone interview with AlterNet, Washington discussed the dark implications of corporate medical patents, how we find ourselves in this nightmarish scenario and what needs to be done to stop medical research profits from trumping human health. Washington is also the author of Medical Apartheid, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been a fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University and a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Nearly all politicians are scheming, lying parasites that wallow in their cosy, smug little club of elite buddies, nodding, shaking hands, signing bits of paper that will result in the deaths of thousands then turn and smile to cameras telling us plebs that 'it's for the greater good' or 'God told them to' and all sorts of tripe. But Hilary ... AARRGGHH - there is just something soo false and contrived about how she delivers her political spin to the masses that gets my goat up.
As U.S. Secretary of State she has been rather busy of late dictating to the media which of the few remaining sovereign nations on the big blue marble are due for some much needed 'intervention' so that they can come to enjoy some beautiful American-style democracy. The kind of democracy that has turned a once great nation into a dwindling empire on its last legs.
Having 'successfully' brought 'humanitarian aid' to Libya - by destroying its infrastructure, murdering countless civilians and injuring thousands, while lining the pockets of military and defence contractors, I wonder how long it will be before we hear Hillary chuckling with psychopathic glee over the murder of YA'E'L (Yet another 'Evil' Leader') - This time in Syria? Iran? Pakistan? Maybe all three at the same time?
Two separate legal processes in the area of public law that are finally nearing completion will rock Israel's political establishment in January, possibly even to the point of bringing down the government.
The first is State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss versus Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the matter of the Carmel forest fire of last December. The second is Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein versus Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose indictment for money laundering, fraud, breach of trust and harassing a witness, among other charges, is a near certainty.
Netanyahu, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Interior Minister Eli Yishai can be expected to invest great effort over the next few weeks - presumably to no effect - to tone down Lindenstrauss' "white paper," the hefty draft of his damning report on their role in the incident that claimed the lives of 44 Israelis.

Thousands of civilians have been killed in US drone attacks on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya.
Anonymous U.S. officials have announced in The Washington Post that they have effectively defeated what they call "the organization that brought us 9/11″ - Al Qaeda - by rendering it "operationally ineffective."
Specifically, "the leadership ranks of the main al-Qaeda terrorist network have been reduced to just two figures whose demise would mean the group's defeat, U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials said." And: "asked what exists of al-Qaeda's leadership group beyond the top two positions, the official said: 'Not very much'."
You might think this means that the vastly expanded National Security and Surveillance States justified in the name of 9/11, as well as the slew of wars and other aggressive deployments which it spawned, can now be reversed and wound down.
General Wesley Clark revealed in 2007 that the United States had plans for seven countries in five years time to conquer, including Iran. They would start with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally .... Iran.
The annual convention of global warm-mongers gets underway at the resort city of Durban, South Africa.
It's gorgeous down there. There's surfing right in the city. Safari parks aren't too far away. It's full of great hotels and fancy restaurants. It's a bit of a party town. Which is why it was chosen by the world's global warming professionals as their latest winter getaway convention.
This is the annual United Nations get-together to talk about reducing our carbon footprint, which means using less fuel.
Of course the best way to do that is for thousands of very important bureaucrats, diplomats, Greenpeace fundraisers and politicians to jet from all over the world to South Africa. The only place further away by jet would be Antarctica, but that would miss the point - to give their global warmists a free sun vacation in winter.










