It was a disgrace, a most shameful chapter in Egyptian history. The police - some wearing black hoods - shot down into the crowds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters from the roof of Cairo's Ramses Street police station and surrounding streets.

They even fired at traffic on the airport highway. And to see their terrible work, you had only to climb the pink marble steps of the Al-Fath Mosque - sticky with fresh blood yesterday evening - and see the acre of wounded lying on deep-woven carpets and, in a remote corner, 25 shrouded corpses. Dr Ibrahim Yamani gently lifted the bandages from their bodies: shot in the face, shot in the head, shot in the chest.

Few military projects are more notorious than the V-22 Osprey. The name has become synonymous with flawed government contracting and planning. Originally conceived in 1980 in the wake of the botched Iranian Hostage Crisis rescue mission, the Osprey was supposed to represent a new type of aircraft that could land and takeoff vertically but also carry plane sized equipment and personnel. So ends the theory.

What followed was an amazing waste of money. The Osprey was first budgeted at $2.5 billion in 1986, by 2008 $27 billion had been spent, with another $27.2 billion needed to complete production. Yes $2.5 billion to an estimated $54.2 billion. And yes, in that time period other aircraft were developed to successfully fulfill US combat needs. And yes, no other country is even within striking distance of America's air capacity. Of course, other countries aren't interested in competing with America for developing anything like the Osprey, because the damn thing doesn't work.

In 2001 numerous officers were relieved of duty due to their falsifying records to try to make the Osprey seem like it worked. In 2007 the Pentagon deployed the aircraft leading to condemnation from many that the Osprey was too unsafe for combat use.

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I ask you to please show this list to as many people as possible - and especially, to please show it to as many Obama supporters as possible. Sunshine really is the best disinfectant. I can't stop Obama from doing any of these horrible things, but I can tell people about what he is doing. So please share this list with others on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thank you. The short link for this can be found here.

Every President, every politician, and every human being tells lies and engages in acts of hypocrisy. But Barack Obama does these things to a far greater degree than anyone else that I have ever known of. His campaign promises were so much better sounding than anyone else's - no lobbyists in his administration, waiting five days before signing all non-emergency bills so people would have time to read them, putting health care negotiations on C-SPAN, reading every bill line by line to make sure money isn't being wasted, prosecution of Wall St. criminals, ending raids against medical marijuana in states where it's legal, high levels of transparency.

Obama's promises of these wonderful things sounded inspiring and sincere. They sounded so much better than the promises of any other President. So when Obama broke these promises, it felt so much worse than when other Presidents broke their promises.

Fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden was not interrogated by special services after his arrival to Russia, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on Friday.

In an interview with Fairfax Media, the founder of the anti-secrecy organization has confirmed that WikiLeaks personnel have continuously accompanied Snowden since he left Hong Kong for Moscow on June 23.

"Since Hong Kong we have had someone physically by his side the entire time," Assange said. "We have had someone with him for 54 days."

The statement comes amid media speculations that Snowden has fallen into the hands of the Russian state security services.

After months of in-fighting, the beleaguered Oregon Republican Party elected a new chairman last weekend. His name is Art Robinson, and he wants to sprinkle radioactive waste from airplanes to build up our resistance to degenerative illnesses. Robinson, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress against progressive Rep. Peter DeFazio in 2010 and 2012, took over after the previous chair resigned in advance of a recall campaign over her alleged financial mismanagement.

Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has marketed himself for the last three decades as an expert on everything from nuclear fallout to AIDS to climate science in the pages of a monthly newsletter, Access to Technology, which he published from his compound in the small town of Cave Junction. A quick glance at his writings, which were publicized during his ill-fated challenges to DeFazio, suggest that whatever the failings of the previous party leadership - Democrats now hold all statewide elected offices and control both houses of the state Legislature - Robinson brings with him a new set of challenges entirely.

On nuclear waste: "All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean - or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases." And: "If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law."

United States defense equipment is selling like hotcakes in the Middle East, and Israel is concerned. In light of its neighbors' growing military arsenals, the country is imploring the U.S., their premier benefactor, to raise their rations so they can be sure to maintain military dominance in the region.

U.S. and Israeli officials are in initial negotiations over a new 10-year military aid package.

As Defense News reports Thursday, the package, which would extend through 2027, is focusing on a "full spectrum of Israeli concerns, including military modernization needs, new threats from regional instability and the erosion of Israel's so-called qualitative military edge (QME) due to U.S. arms sales in the Mideast."

Under the existing $30 billion aid agreement, signed in 2007, the need for Israel to maintain an "edge" over their regional adversaries was not directly accounted for. The updated, more "holistic" approach - according to Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the U.S. - will ensure the relative superiority of Israel's arsenal will become codified in the agreement.

Humans, and perhaps their prehuman ancestors, have engaged in murder and mayhem, as individuals and in groups, for hundreds of thousands of years. And, at least since the advent of recorded history, violence and politics have been intimately related. Nation-states use violence against internal and external foes. Dissidents engage in violence against states. Competing political forces inflict violence on one another. Writing in 1924, Winston Churchill declared - with good reason - that "the story of the human race is war."

Some writers see violence as an instrument of politics. Thomas Hobbes regarded violence as a rational means to achieve such political goals as territory, safety, and glory. Carl von Clausewitz famously referred to war as the continuation of politics by other means. A second group of writers view violence as a result of political failure and miscalculation. The title of an influential paper on the origins of the American Civil War by the historian James Randall, "The Blundering Generation," expresses that idea. A third group, most recently exemplified by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, regards violence as a pathological behavior that is diminishing in frequency with the onward march of civilization. Some proponents of that perspective have even declared that violence is essentially a public-health problem. Whatever their differences, each of these perspectives assigns violence a subordinate role in political life.

But there is an alternative view, one that assigns violence a primary role in politics. This outlook is implied by Mao Zedong's well-known aphorism that political power "grows out of the barrel of a gun." Violence, in other words, is the driving force of politics, while peaceful forms of political engagement fill in the details or, perhaps, merely offer post-hoc justifications for the outcomes of violent struggles. Mao corrected Clausewitz by characterizing politics as a sequel to or even an epiphenomenon of violence - a continuation of violence by other means.

Newly declassified CIA documents reveal the history of Nevada's Area 51. The area was never home to aliens or UFOs, but was instead a super secret site for testing spy planes such as the U-2.

The document, "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: the U-2 and Oxcart Programs," was released recently in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request made by George Washington University in 2005.

Area 51, a desert tract near Groom Lake, about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was first chosen by officials searching for a place to test planes and train pilots flying the U-2 in 1955. The airstrip by a salt flat was used for the U-2 plane, as well as its successors, the Lockheed A-12 Oxcart, the D-21 Tagboard and the F-117 Stealth Fighter. The document doesn't reveal what's been done at the base since 1974.

Area 51 buffs are unlikely to be surprised by the new disclosure: Many of these facts had been suspected for years and government officials have even mentioned the area offhandedly on occasion. However, this is the first time Area 51 is explicitly mentioned in a publicly available government document.

A video released Thursday of an alleged FSA (Free Syrian Army) arms cache captured by Assad forces appears to show two pieces of highly-regulated U.S.-made military equipment worth more than $4,500.

One is a Trijicon ACOG (Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight) which is issued to US Special Forces and the other is a set of PVS-7 night vision goggles.

Both of these items fall under ITAR, or the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. As such, their ownership outside of the continental United States is highly regulated.

The description on Trijicon's website of the ACOG (MSRP $1,192) reads: 'The concept is simple: a durable scope with a reticle that illuminates in low light situations. And the best part is that it doesn't require batteries. Over 25 years later, the original ACOG stands the test of time and remains one of our most popular items. ACOG 4×32 Scope with Full Line Red Illumination features black crosshairs during daytime and tritium illuminates reticle at night. The reticle ranges out to 800 meters for 5.56 (.223 cal)."

This marks a tragic turning point, from which it will take Egypt years to recover

The Egyptian crucible has broken. The "unity" of Egypt - that all-embracing, patriotic, essential glue that has bound the nation together since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and the rule of Nasser - has melted amid the massacres, gun battles and fury of yesterday's suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. A hundred dead - 200, 300 "martyrs" - makes no difference to the outcome: for millions of Egyptians, the path of democracy has been torn up amid live fire and brutality. What Muslim seeking a state based on his or her religion will ever trust the ballot box again?

This is the real story of today's bloodbath. Who can be surprised that some Muslim Brotherhood supporters were wielding Kalashnikovs on the streets of Cairo? Or that supporters of the army and its "interim government" - in middle-class areas of the capital, no less - have seized their weapons or produced their own and started shooting back. This is not Brotherhood vs army, though that is how our Western statesmen will mendaciously try to portray this tragedy. Today's violence has created a cruel division within Egyptian society that will take years to heal; between leftists and secularists and Christian Copts and Sunni Muslim villagers, between people and police, between Brotherhood and army. That is why Mohamed el-Baradei resigned tonight. The burning of churches was an inevitable corollary of this terrible business.