pay very close attention to the man behind the curtain...,

democracynow |  NBC is facing questions over its decision to pull veteran news correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin out of Gaza just after he personally witnessed the Israeli military’s killing of four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach. Mohyeldin was kicking a soccer ball around with the boys just minutes before they died. He is a longtime reporter in the region. In his coverage, he reports on the Gaza conflict in the context of the Israeli occupation, sparking criticism from some supporters of the Israeli offensive. Back in 2008 and 2009, when he worked for Al Jazeera, Mohyeldin and his colleague Sherine Tadros were the only foreign journalists on the ground in Gaza as Israel killed 1,400 people in what it called "Operation Cast Lead." We speak to Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who has revealed that the decision to pull Mohyeldin from Gaza and remove him from reporting on the situation came from NBC executive David Verdi. Greenwald also comments on the broader picture of the coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict in the U.S. media.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: NBC is facing questions over its decision to pull its veteran news correspondent out of Gaza. Ayman Mohyeldin personally witnessed the Israeli military’s killing of four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach Wednesday. Mohyeldin was kicking a soccer ball around with the boys just minutes before they died. He’s a veteran reporter who has placed the Gaza conflict in the context of the Israeli occupation, sparking criticism from some supporters of the Israeli offensive. Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept has revealed the decision to pull Mohyeldin from Gaza and remove him from reporting on the situation, it came from NBC executive David Verdi.

AMY GOODMAN: NBC executives have reportedly claimed the decision was motivated by "security concerns" ahead of Israel’s ground invasion, but late Wednesday NBC sent correspondent Richard Engel to Gaza. During the 2008-2009 war on Gaza, Ayman Mohyeldin, who then worked for Al Jazeera, was one of the only foreign journalists reporting from Gaza.

NBC News did not respond to Democracy Now!’s repeated requests for comment on its decision.

For more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His piece for The Intercept at First Look Media is "NBC News Pulls Veteran Reporter from Gaza After Witnessing Israeli Attack on Children."

hon.bro.preznit bullseyes bibi's bullshit

guardian |  Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

 • Read the leaked document here

dershowitz says preznit has no rights that the right-wing is bound to acknowledge...,

WSJ |  As a liberal Democrat who twice campaigned for President Barack Obama , I am appalled that some Democratic members of Congress are planning to boycott the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3 to a joint session of Congress. At bottom, this controversy is not mainly about protocol and politics—it is about the constitutional system of checks and balances and the separation of powers. 

Under the Constitution, the executive and legislative branches share responsibility for making and implementing important foreign-policy decisions. Congress has a critical role to play in scrutinizing the decisions of the president when these decisions involve national security, relationships with allies and the threat of nuclear proliferation. 

Congress has every right to invite, even over the president’s strong objection, any world leader or international expert who can assist its members in formulating appropriate responses to the current deal being considered with Iran regarding its nuclear-weapons program. Indeed, it is the responsibility of every member of Congress to listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who probably knows more about this issue than any world leader, because it threatens the very existence of the nation state of the Jewish people. 

Congress has the right to disagree with the prime minister, but the idea that some members of Congress will not give him the courtesy of listening violates protocol and basic decency to a far greater extent than anything Mr. Netanyahu is accused of doing for having accepted an invitation from Congress.

the hon.bro.preznit's rhetoric precise cause he don't love you..,

theatlantic |  Why does this matter? Because the U.S. government has finite resources. If you assume, as conservatives tend to, that the only significant terrorist threat America faces comes from people with names like Mohammed and Ibrahim, then that’s where you’ll devote your time and money. If, on the other hand, you recognize that environmental lunatics and right-wing militia types kill Americans for political reasons too, you’ll spread the money around.

 

We’ve already seen the consequences of a disproportionate focus on jihadist terrorism. After 9/11, the Bush administration so dramatically shifted homeland-security resources toward stopping al-Qaeda that it left FEMA hideously unprepared to deal with an attack from Mother Nature, in the form of Hurricane Katrina. The Obama administration is wise to avoid that kind of overly narrow focus today. Of course it’s important to stop the next Nidal Malik Hasan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But it’s also important to stop the next Timothy McVeigh or Wade Michael Page. And by calling the threat “violent extremism” rather than “radical Islam,” Obama tells the bureaucracy to work on that too. 

Obama, after all, faces two overlapping but distinct challenges. One is an ideology: the totalitarian, even genocidal, vision espoused by ISIS. The second is a tactic: terrorism, which is available to people of all ideological stripes and which grows more dangerous as technology empowers individuals or groups to kill far more people far more quickly than they could have in ages past. 

Instead of assuming that these threats are the same, we should be debating the relative danger of each. By using “violent extremism” rather than “radical Islam,” Obama is staking out a position in that argument. It’s a position with which reasonable people can disagree. But cowardice has nothing to do with it.

so-called existential fears really just the apex of psychological projection

theatlantic |  After the jump I have a reader's note marveling at the way we've agreed to discuss Iran as a bottomless evil, rather than as a state with whom we should look for diplomatic ways to manage conflicts, as we have with China and the old Soviet Union—and as Begin did with Sadat.

---

A reader writes:

This whole thing has become so utterly surreal it's hard to talk about anymore. The entire kerfuffle is premised on an Iranian nuclear weapons program - a program we KNOW with certainty they do not have in operation. NO fissile materials have been diverted, IAEA inspectors routinely tell us that. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his Likudnik colleagues have been telling us since the 1980s that Iran is SIX MONTHS away from having a nuclear weapon.

I understand that Netanyahu is using fear of a nuclear-armed Iran for domestic political purposes - primarily to frighten his citizens into keeping him in office. The use of a ginned-up external existential threat is a time-honored method for cowing and manipulating a domestic constituency, and clearly at some point the fear of the Palestinians had lost its punch.

But why do the US, UK, France, China and other nations go along with this charade? Why do the media always write the stories in such a manner as to indicate that Iran has an active weapons R&D program? Why did we pile sanctions on and make daily threats of offensive war against a signatory of the NPT is good standing, particularly in support of an illegal proliferator? How can we continue this ridiculous sham?

Over the last couple years, you wrote repeatedly about how the press covered Republican filibusters - and you were right. This is the same thing - we're going through all these massive machinations to address a problem WE KNOW DOES NOT EXIST. If I wrote this in a novel it would be rejected as "utterly implausible"...

situation report on WW-III

World War III (which we are currently in) is being fought with very different tactics than World War I and II. However, in my opinion the mass-motivational strategy is the same: different breeding population males trying to extend the territories on which they are able to impose their respective socio-political systems.  The tactics in WW III involve small groups of (mostly) highly trained and skilled (mostly) men killing primarily civilians in lands yet to be conquered. Because the group of (mostly) men is not concentrated in one country, large nation states with large and powerful traditional armies are rendered rather helpless in trying to defeat them.

None of the prospective combatants are interested in making peace because each of the combatant bands of killer-apes believe themselves in possession of the winning set of tactics to eventually win the war. It is a war that will last for decades or until the socio-economic and political conditions in the enemy combatant nations of the world change.  Only those who are losing wars want to end wars, as cynical as that might sound.

What if all Western nation states with large and powerful traditional armies joined together to send military forces (ground troops) into Syria and Iraq to defeat and capture and/or kill ISIS?  A misguided start as it won't work and will probably make things worse. Western military intervention is merely a guarantee of inflaming and widening the scope of violence and death. Western military intervention would be as effective as stepping on ants in one's house as a way of eliminating the ant problem.

Neither Judeo-Christian extremists or Muslim extremists are interested in making peace.  Each extremist pole is deeply embedded in majority moderate/secular populations and each believes itself in possession of an effective set of tactics to eventually win the war.

If "we" in the West send soldiers to kill ISIS won't that be something of a winning set of tactics?  What is called "ISIS" today is just a drop in the bucket in terms of the number of potential and actual Muslim extremists in the world. If every Muslim extremist who is a part of ISIS is killed in 2015, by 2020 there will be twice as many Muslim extremists in the world, as those watching the unfolding spectacle will be motivated to get even with the western capitalist republics that killed their Muslim brothers in ISIS.

Can the West (and the rest of the world) afford to wait until its own extremist male sub-populations quiet down, are assimilated by the secular moderate majorities in which they're embedded, or until Muslim extremist sub-populations calm down?  No. A better strategy for the west would be to increase the factors that lead to secularization in the Muslim countries: better education, access to information, democratic forms of government, civil rights for women, homosexuals, etc. The western industrial democracies have been secularizing since the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th to mid 17th century. It takes time. Islam is as much a political system as it is a religion.

The United States had a winning strategy to win the Cold War, which was a war between capitalism and communism. We need a similar political strategy to wage war between capitalism and Sharia, the political arm of Islam.  The U.S. has been at war in the middle east since 1991 and things are worse, not better, then when we first went there. A better strategy does not involve sending soldiers to kill individual Muslim extremists or their leaders. One has to be patient. Under the best of circumstances the needed change would take decades. In the global economic contraction we're currently all experiencing, there's no guarantee that the sources of extremism will abate or can be assimilated.

The Arab Spring unfortunately didn't lead to what the protesters wanted and led to violence in many cases. The Arab Spring demonstrated that the Arab masses were tired of the post-colonial dictatorships installed by the west in their respective societies. Most of the Muslim countries of the world were not democracies and are not now democracies. They were, however, national socialist autocracies with Islam as the state religion and Sharia Law influencing national law. The primary dictatorial strategies in Iraq, Libya and Syria were to facilitate secularization. Destruction of the dictatorships brought the western processes - progressively in effect in these countries for decades - to a screeching and catastrophic halt. There has never been a greater policy blunder in the modern era than overthrowing the dictatorships in Iraq and Libya. Continuing this failed policy in Syria has only served to make the already intolerable situation still worse.

Tribalism and extremism under the rubric of cultural Islam have become the prevailing order of the day in the western-created and western destroyed former states of the Middle-East and Northeast Africa.  In order to successfully progress away from this situation, the west must turn to the centralized, hierarchical theocracy of Iran and consolidate power in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard (who are probably quite tired of Mullahs, Mullah nonsense, and Mullah theft and graft). As a good friend of mine is fond of noting, the Shah and his cronies were awful thieves and despots, but you can't steal and pack as much into a uniform or a suit as you can in the bottomless pockets of a Mullah-robe.

Because of neocon stupidity, eggregious cultural miscalculation, and abject military misapplication and failure, we are now faced with the inevitable fact of having to assist with the restoration of Persian empire, actually working with and assisting Iran to become the preeminent power in the entire middle east.

bet not ever put jewish and extremist in the same sentence...,

WaPo |  Like every world leader and, for that matter, nearly everybody else, Netanyahu is fully aware that the fault lines in U.S. politics between Republicans and Democrats have widened to a chasm. Unlike every other world leader, the bumptious Bibi has decided to take a side in America’s internal conflict by addressing a joint meeting of the Republican-controlled Congress (responding to an invitation from House Speaker John Boehner) without even informing President Obama that he was Washington-bound. One of Netanyahu’s goals is to undercut the administration’s efforts to negotiate a pact with Iran that will impede that nation’s nuclear program. His other goal is clearly to stick it to Obama and thus appear to the Israeli electorate — which will go to the polls on March 17 — as one tough dude. If Netanyahu’s talk, the idea for which was at least partly cooked up by Ron Dermer, a former GOP operative who moved to Israel and is now its ambassador to the United States, also has the effect of boosting the Republican Party at the expense of Obama and the Democrats, so much the better. During the 2012 election, Netanyahu did everything he could to make apparent that he preferred Mitt Romney to Obama, with no perceptible effect on the outcome or even on the voting preferences of American Jews, who backed Obama, 69 percent to 30 percent.

Of all the reasons that American Jews remain firmly Democratic, and liberal as well, the most fundamental is their commitment, both particular and universal, to minority rights. For Jews in a majority-Christian country, the enshrinement of minority rights and its institutional guarantees — nondiscrimination in hiring and voting, say, or a judiciary independent of the elected branches of government — has always been paramount. It’s why American Jews have embraced not only the battles for their own liberties but those of every other minority group.

the limits of the islamic label

NYTimes |  President Obama stands accused of political correctness for his unwillingness to accuse groups such as the Islamic State of “Islamic extremism,” choosing a more generic term, “violent extremism.” His critics say that you cannot fight an enemy you will not name. Even his supporters feel that his approach is too “professorial.” 

But far from being a scholar concerned with describing the phenomenon accurately, the president is deliberately choosing not to emphasize the Islamic State’s religious dimension for political and strategic reasons. After all, what would be the practical consequence of describing the group, also known as ISIS, as Islamic? Would the West drop more bombs on it? Send in more soldiers to fight it? No, but it would make many Muslims feel that their religion had been unfairly maligned. And it would dishearten Muslim leaders who have continually denounced the Islamic State as a group that does not represent Islam.

But “the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” Graeme Wood writes in a much-discussed cover essay for the Atlantic this month.Wood is much taken by the Princeton academic Bernard Haykel, who says that people want to turn a blind eye to the Islamic State’s ideology for political reasons. “People want to absolve Islam,” he quotes Haykel as saying. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do.” Right. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and perhaps 30,000 members of the Islamic State. And yet Haykel feels that it is what the 0.0019 percent of Muslims do that defines the religion. Who is being political, I wonder?

cousin-humping, draft-dodging, serial wife-abusing son of a mafia hitman doesn't love me...,

NYTimes |  Mr. Giuliani has plainly not mellowed in his prosperity. Representative Peter T. King, a Long Island Republican who has known him for decades, said the former mayor was “very personally angry” in his remarks, on and off the stage at the fund-raising event on Wednesday evening.

“This is as emotional as I’ve seen him. He was in some ways more emotional than he was after 9/11,” said Mr. King, who spoke alongside Mr. Giuliani at a private “super PAC” fund-raising event at the Women’s National Republican Club in Manhattan.

John A. Catsimatidis, the billionaire grocery store magnate, attended the same fund-raiser and, on a whim, invited Mr. Giuliani to join him at a meet-and-greet for Mr. Walker with members of the New York financial elite. Mr. Catsimatidis, a frequent Republican donor, lamented that Mr. Giuliani’s unplanned speech became an enveloping spectacle.

“The focus of the event should not have been that,” Mr. Catsimatidis said, adding: “Look, Rudy is Rudy. He’s not going to run for anything himself. Maybe he wanted to get it off his chest.”

To some in Republican politics, Mr. Giuliani’s public eruption looks like the product of slack political instincts, the shoot-from-the-lip behavior of a former champion who has lost self-awareness with each year removed from office. The former mayor’s political career has sloped precipitously downward since his ill-fated 2008 campaign; while he remains an occasional fund-raising attraction, his time as a national Republican leader is past.

For all the criticism Mr. Giuliani’s comments attracted from Democrats and members of the Republican establishment, there are quarters of the right where his remarks struck a chord. The talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh crowed about “getting texts praising Rudy to the rooftops.”

Joe M. Allbaugh, a former Giuliani adviser who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the World Trade Center attacks, said he applauded Mr. Giuliani’s candor.

“He represents a lot of Americans who are scratching their heads wondering why our president — the president of the United States — doesn’t defend our culture the way he defends everybody else’s culture,” Mr. Allbaugh said.

no idea giuliani was such low-life trifling trash...,

nydailynews |  Rudy Giuliani knows a lot about love.

Ask Regina Peruggi, the second cousin he grew up with and married, who was "offended" when Rudy later engineered an annulment from the priest who was his best man on the grounds, strangely enough, that she was his cousin. Or ask Donna Hanover, the mother of his two children, who found out he wanted a separation when he left Gracie Mansion one morning and announced it at a televised press conference.

Or ask Judi Nathan, his third wife, whom he started dating while still married to Hanover and New York mayor. In two SUVs, he and an entourage of six or seven cops traveled 11 times to Judi's Hamptons getaway at a taxpayer cost of $3,000 a trip. That's love.

Rudy knows so much about love that he declared the other day that President Obama "doesn't love you" and "doesn't love me" at a private party of GOP fat cats.

The onetime presidential candidate also revealed at the party that Obama "doesn't love America," an echo of a speech he'd delivered to delirious cheers in Arizona a week earlier when he declared: "I would go anywhere, any place, anytime, and I wouldn't give a damn what the President of the United States said, to defend my country. That's a patriot. That's a man who loves his people. That's a man who fights for his people. Unlike our President."

Rudy may have forgotten the half-dozen deferments he won ducking the Vietnam War, even getting the federal judge he was clerking for to write a letter creating a special exemption for him. And remember Bernie Kerik? He's the Giulaini police commissioner, business partner and sidekick whose nomination as homeland security secretary narrowly preceded indictments. He then did his national service in prison.

Giuliani went so far as to rebuke the President for not being "brought up the way you were and the way I was brought up through love of this country," a bow no doubt to the parenting prowess of Harold Giuliani, who did time in Sing Sing for holding up a Harlem milkman and was the bat-wielding enforcer for the loan-sharking operation run out of a Brooklyn bar owned by Rudy's uncle.

Though Rudy cited Harold throughout his public life as his model (without revealing any of his history), he and five Rudy uncles found ways to avoid service in World War II. Harold, whose robbery conviction was in the name of an alias, made sure the draft board knew he was a felon. On the other hand, Obama's grandfather and uncle served. His uncle helped liberate Buchenwald, which apparently affected him so deeply he stayed in the family attic for six months when he returned home.

biology is technology, time is precious, and stupid only gets in the way...,

H+ |  DARPA, the Defense Research Projects Agency, is perhaps best known for its role as progenitors of the computer networking and the Internet. Formed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, DARPA’s objective was to ensure that the United States would avoid technological surprises in the future. This role was later expanded to causing technological surprises as well.

And although DARPA is and has been the leading source of funding for artificial intelligence and a number of other transhumanist projects, they’ve been missing in action for a while. Nothing DARPA has worked on since seems to have had the societal impact of the invention of the Internet. But that is about to change.

The current director of DARPA is Dr. Arati Prabhakar. She is the second female director of the organization, following the previous and controversial director Regina Dugan who left the government to work at Google. The return to big visions and big adventures was apparent and in stark contrast to Dugan’s leadership of the organization.

Quoted in WIRED, Dugan had, for example, stated that “There is a time and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at DARPA,” and she told a congressional panel in March 2011, “Darpa is not the place of dreamlike musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and hopes. DARPA is a place of doing.”

Those days are gone. DARPA’s new vision is simply to revolutionize the human situation and it is fully transhumanist in its approach.

The Biological Technologies Office or BTO was announced with little fanfare in the spring of 2014. This announcement didn’t get that much attention, perhaps because the press release announcing the BTO was published on April Fool’s Day.

But DARPA is determined to turn that around, and to help make that happen, they held a two day event in the SIlicon Valley area to facilitate and communicate about radical changes ahead in the area of biotechnologies. Invitees included some of the top biotechnology scientists in the world. And the audience was a mixed group of scientists, engineers, inventors, investors, futurists, along with a handful of government contractors and military personnel.

when the unintelligent are in charge...,

WaPo |  There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview — and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol” — to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.

Ripper: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”

Mandrake: “Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.”

Ripper: “Well, do you know what it is?”

Mandrake: “No. No, I don’t know what it is, no.”

Ripper: “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?” 

The movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established and anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. Yet half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013, citizens in Portland, Ore., one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking-water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay — a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brushers or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing anti-fluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.

sock-puppets don't need no edumackation...,

WaPo |  Walker had decided to challenge Gwen Moore (D), an African American woman who represented a partly white and deeply Democratic state assembly district that surrounded Marquette, Hiller said.

Republican leaders welcomed Walker’s bid. He wouldn’t win, but he would still force Moore to spend money and time defending the seat. (Walker later moved to suburban Wauwatosa, and it was there that he won his seat in 1993.)

In 1990, the 22-year-old Walker spent days knocking on doors in the district, preaching a get-tough message. He wanted 200 more cops on the street and stronger mandatory sentences for drug dealers.

“The number one fear is crime,” he wrote in a letter to Marquette students, asking them, again, to vote for him. “For too long, we have ignored this issue and now it is time to do something about it.”

Moore, who is now a member of Congress, said: “His campaign was one big dog whistle.” She believed that Walker’s anti-crime message was a way to speak to white voters’ fears of blacks without saying them aloud. “He had sort of insinuated sort of the worst stereotypes about black people [and] innate criminality.”

Hiller, Walker’s campaign treasurer, said that Moore was entirely wrong about Walker’s message. “There was no racial angle,” he said. “It never crossed our minds.”

On election night, Walker’s chances looked so terrible that Walker and Hiller left the district and the city of Milwaukee behind. They started driving to Madison, the state capital, to attend parties for other Republicans who had a chance.

Then, for a minute, something strange happened.

“We’re listening to election returns on the radio, and the guy comes on: ‘In a surprise in the [7th District], Scott Walker is ahead of Gwen Moore,’ ” Hiller said. “Literally, I pulled off the road.”

The two young men sat there on the shoulder, blindsided by the idea that Walker — a politician who hadn’t won anything he really wanted — might be about to win.  Fist tap Vic.

why don't we profile, stop, and frisk right-wing extremists?

mintpressnews |  “We’re currently in one of the hottest periods of extremist activity in the United States that I’ve seen in my 20-year career. This blows what we saw pre-Oklahoma City out of the water and makes it look like a kindergarten picnic,” Daryl Johnson, a domestic terrorism expert and founder of DT Analytics, a private consulting firm for law enforcement and Homeland Security professionals, says during an interview for the recent Vice News documentary. Johnson was also the main author of the intelligence assessment issued by DHS in 2009.

Yet, rather than acting on the information gathered in the assessment, the government cancelled all of its domestic terrorism reporting and law enforcement training after the report was leaked and politicized by conservative media outlets and politicians.

One such publication described “the piece of crap report” as “a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”  It continues, “In Obama land, there are no coincidences. It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party-bashing left-wing blogs … and demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party.”

Conservative news organizations interpreted the publication of the report as a political power play by Obama to demonize the right, rather than an impartial analysis of domestic terrorism that could help law enforcement.

In 2011, two years after the report was released, Johnson said he was deeply disheartened by how the report was characterized. Johnson told Joe Hamilton at the Muskegon Chronicle that he was “a former intelligence analyst and counterterrorism expert for the U.S. Army, an Eagle Scout, Mormon, one-time church missionary, an anti-abortion gun owner, and third-generation lifetime registered Republican.” In short, he said he is a conservative. Johnson added that the report could not have been a political move on the part of Obama, since he was hired in 2004 by the George W. Bush administration.

Following Hamilton’s opinion piece, Johnson penned his own article for Salon, “Daryl Johnson: I tried to warn them.” In it, he makes a damning indictment of the DHS decision not to follow through on recommendations made in his report.

splcenter |  At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a 7,000-pound truck bomb, constructed of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane racing fuel and packed into 13 plastic barrels, ripped through the heart of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion wrecked much of downtown Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, including 19 children in a day-care center. Another 500 were injured. Although many Americans initially suspected an attack by Middle Eastern radicals, it quickly became clear that the mass murder had actually been carried out by domestic, right-wing terrorists.

The slaughter engineered by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, men steeped in the conspiracy theories and white-hot fury of the American radical right, marked the opening shot in a new kind of domestic political extremism — a revolutionary ideology whose practitioners do not hesitate to carry out attacks directed at entirely innocent victims, people selected essentially at random to make a political point. After Oklahoma, it was no longer sufficient for many American right-wing terrorists to strike at a target of political significance — instead, they reached for higher and higher body counts, reasoning that they had to eclipse McVeigh's attack to win attention.

What follows is a detailed listing of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the American radical right in the years since Oklahoma City. These have included plans to bomb government buildings, banks, refineries, utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives and biological and chemical weapons. [Each of these plots aimed to make changes in America through the use of political violence.] Most contemplated the deaths of large numbers of people — in one case, as many as 30,000, or 10 times the number murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.

Here are the stories of plots, conspiracies and racist rampages since 1995 — plots and violence waged against a democratic America.

giuliani crying the hon.bro.preznit don't love right-wing extremists..,

politico |  Rudy Giuliani went straight for the jugular Wednesday night during a private group dinner here featuring Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker by openly questioning whether President Barack Obama “loves America.”

The former New York mayor, speaking in front of the 2016 Republican presidential contender and about 60 right-leaning business executives and conservative media types, directly challenged Obama’s patriotism, discussing what he called weak foreign policy decisions and questionable public remarks when confronting terrorists.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

With Walker sitting just a few seats away, Giuliani continued by saying that “with all our flaws we’re the most exceptional country in the world. I’m looking for a presidential candidate who can express that, do that and carry it out.”

goo-gol crying about the FBI's push for more intelligent law enforcement...,

nationaljournal |   Google is warning that the government's quiet plan to expand the FBI's authority to remotely access computer files amounts to a "monumental" constitutional concern. The search giant submitted public comments earlier this week opposing a Justice Department proposal that would grant judges more leeway in how they can approve search warrants for electronic data.

The push to change an arcane federal rule "raises a number of monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal, and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide," wrote Richard Salgado, Google's director for law enforcement and information security.

The provision, known as Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure, generally permits judges to grant search warrants only within the bounds of their judicial district. Last year, the Justice Department petitioned a judicial advisory committee to amend the rule to allow judges to approve warrants outside their jurisdictions in cases where authorities are unsure where a computer is located.

Google, in its comments, blasted the desired rule change as overly vague, saying the proposal could authorize remote searches on the data of millions of Americans simultaneously—particularly those who share a network or router—and cautioned it rested on shaky legal footing.

 

"The serious and complex constitutional concerns implicated by the proposed amendment are numerous and, because of the nature of Fourth Amendment case law development, are unlikely to be addressed by courts in a timely fashion," Salgado wrote.

The Justice Department has countered that the rule change amounts to a small-scale tweak of protocol, one that is necessary to align search-warrant procedures with the realities of modern technology. In its own comments, the Justice Department accused some opponents of the rule change of "misreading the text of the proposal or misunderstanding current law."

"The proposal would not authorize the government to undertake any search or seizure or use any remote search technique not already permitted under current law," Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Bitkower said in a memorandum written late last year and made public Tuesday. He added that investigators are "careful to avoid collateral damage when executing remote searches, just as [they are] careful to avoid injury to persons or damage to property in the far more common scenario of executing physical warrants."

the epitome of incompetent governance and illegitimate social control...,

telegraph |  Hong Kong’s unpopular chief executive has infuriated pro-democracy campaigners by using a Chinese New Year message to urge the former colony's citizens to act more "like sheep". 

In a brief video address commemorating the start of Year of the Sheep, CY Leung said sheep-like behavior was required in the wake of the turbulence caused by last year’s street protests.

“Last year was no easy ride for Hong Kong. Our society was rife with differences and conflicts,” the chief executive of the former British colony said.

“In the coming year, I hope that all people in Hong Kong will take inspiration from the sheep's character and pull together in an accommodating manner to work for Hong Kong's future.”

In case his message had been missed, Mr Leung noted that the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac had 12 individual "character types". "Sheep are widely seen to be mild and gentle animals living peacefully in groups," he said.

procedural fairness the cornerstone of legitimate social control

proceduralfairness |  The theory behind procedural fairness, or procedural justice as it is sometimes called, has developed over a period of more than 25 years. Tom Tyler, one of the key figures in the field of procedural fairness, provides a concise overview for members of the court community in his article "Procedural Justice and the Courts."

In a recent lecture, Professor Tyler further explores and highlights the implications of procedural fairness on several aspects of the justice system.

Judges Kevin Burke and Steve Leben authored an extensive white paper on procedural fairness entitled, "Procedural Fairness: A Key Ingredient in Public Satisfaction." The paper examines core research in the area and recommends various changes to "improve" the daily work of the courts and their judges. Click here to access the spanish version of the paper. 

In a December 2011 presentation to the Conference of State Court Administrators, Judge Kevin Burke presented an overview of procedural fairness and its practical applications. A copy of the powerpoint from his presentation can be found here.

Other scholars have explored the connection between procedural fairness and other areas of research. The article Fair Procedures, Yes. But We Dare Not Lose Sight of Fair Outcomes by Brian Bornstein and Hannah Dietrich discusses procedural justice and its interrelation with distributive justice. Similarly, Jonathan Jackson discusses procedural justice as an important aspect of criminology's definition of legitimate authority in his chapter, On the Dual Motivational Force of Legitimate Authority.

An Argument for Procedural Fairness

 Professor Tom Tyler's presentation to a 2007 Harvard Law School Conference focuses on how legitimacy, which is rooted in procedural justice, is important in decisions to adhere to social rules. The presentation is broken into three parts below:

why pookie holding his breath for a whiteright-wing epiphany?

WaPo |  Over the holiday weekend, I waited for something that never came. Given FBI Director James Comey’s powerful and direct speech on law enforcement and race at Georgetown University on Thursday, I thought for sure hellfire would rain down upon him from the right. After all, in tone and word, he echoed the sentiments expressed by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder on the same topic. Yet instead of being accused of having blood on his hands or labeled a race-baiter, Comey and his “hard truths” have been met with silence.

The four “hard truths” articulated by Comey were tough on police. “Much of our history is not pretty,” he said as he acknowledged law enforcement’s role in maintaining the status quo against “disfavored groups.” He talked about the unconscious bias that grips many in law enforcement. He discussed the “different flavors of cynicism” that cops “work hard to resist.” And he talked about the staggering problems facing many young men and boys of color that become part of officers’ “life experience.” In addition, Comey called on police to “better understand the people we serve and protect — by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and encountering law enforcement.”

That’s strong stuff. And yet, those easily irritated folks on the right who slammed Obama and Holder for saying similar things over the past six months have been rendered mute. No doubt it is because the new messenger is a white, 54-year-old Republican son of Irish immigrants and grandson of a police chief. What’s disturbing is that they willingly ignore Comey’s entreaties while trivializing the same from the president and the attorney general.

trying to counter extremism at home

WaPo |  Abdisalam Adam is a public school teacher and imam from St. Paul, Minn., and a model for how the White House and U.S. law enforcement hope to avoid an American version of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. By working within local communities and with civic leaders, they aim to prevent the radicalization and recruitment of young people into extremist organizations.

But even Adam — whose work in this area will be highlighted during this week’s White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) — has to fight deep suspicions among his fellow Somalis that the government efforts are just a guise for intelligence gathering.

“Is the government sincere about this?” Adam said. “That’s a big question. The trust is not completely there.” But he added that communities such as his have little choice. “Personally, I think if it’s done right and the government’s sincere, it’s the right thing to do.” 

The three-day gathering, which has been in the works since the fall but has attracted significant attention in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere, will launch a new U.S. framework aimed at preventing potential extremists from launching strikes in the United States or joining the fight overseas. Expanding beyond the work already underway, the White House’s approach aims to enlist the help of social-service providers and religious leaders to avert future conversions to radicalism.

Senior administration officials, speaking to reporters Monday, said that while the initiative would not end terrorist acts like those undertaken in Copenhagen and Libya in the past few days, they are part of the broader answer to such threats.

“I think we need to be realistic that this is a long-term investment,” said one official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the event in advance. “And so, ultimately, we hope to get to a place where we just have much greater resilience and greater action across communities. But that is not something we’re going to see tomorrow.”

***************

One of the senior administration officials said Monday that “there’s no profile that we can point to to say this person is from this community, is going to be radicalized to violence,” adding, “I think that we make a mistake as a government if we focus on stereotypes.” 

Nicholas J. Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified this month before the House Homeland Security Committee that these initiatives should not be “perceived as intimidating” and that several communities have responded positively to the government’s overtures.

what is the islamic state?

theatlantic |  Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohammad Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.

military-backed criminal superhacking, or, three stacks for uncle sugar, one stack for me?

NYTimes |  In a report to be published on Monday, and provided in advance to The New York Times, Kaspersky Lab says that the scope of this attack on more than 100 banks and other financial institutions in 30 nations could make it one of the largest bank thefts ever — and one conducted without the usual signs of robbery.

The Moscow-based firm says that because of nondisclosure agreements with the banks that were hit, it cannot name them. Officials at the White House and the F.B.I. have been briefed on the findings, but say that it will take time to confirm them and assess the losses.

Kaspersky Lab says it has seen evidence of $300 million in theft through clients, and believes the total could be triple that. But that projection is impossible to verify because the thefts were limited to $10 million a transaction, though some banks were hit several times. In many cases the hauls were more modest, presumably to avoid setting off alarms.

The majority of the targets were in Russia, but many were in Japan, the United States and Europe.

No bank has come forward acknowledging the theft, a common problem that President Obama alluded to on Friday when he attended the first White House summit meeting on cybersecurity and consumer protection at Stanford University. He urged passage of a law that would require public disclosure of any breach that compromised personal or financial information.

But the industry consortium that alerts banks to malicious activity, the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said in a statement that “our members are aware of this activity. We have disseminated intelligence on this attack to the members,” and that “some briefings were also provided by law enforcement entities.”

i've used kaspersky endpoint security for years and so should you...,

arstechnica |  A long list of almost superhuman technical feats illustrate Equation Group's extraordinary skill, painstaking work, and unlimited resources. They include:

• The use of virtual file systems, a feature also found in the highly sophisticated Regin malware. Recently published documents provided by Ed Snowden indicate that the NSA used Regin to infect the partly state-owned Belgian firm Belgacom.
• The stashing of malicious files in multiple branches of an infected computer's registry. By encrypting all malicious files and storing them in multiple branches of a computer's Windows registry, the infection was impossible to detect using antivirus software.
• Redirects that sent iPhone users to unique exploit Web pages. In addition, infected machines reporting to Equation Group command servers identified themselves as Macs, an indication that the group successfully compromised both iOS and OS X devices.
• The use of more than 300 Internet domains and 100 servers to host a sprawling command and control infrastructure.
• USB stick-based reconnaissance malware to map air-gapped networks, which are so sensitive that they aren't connected to the Internet. Both Stuxnet and the related Flame malware platform also had the ability to bridge airgaps.
• An unusual if not truly novel way of bypassing code-signing restrictions in modern versions of Windows, which require that all third-party software interfacing with the operating system kernel be digitally signed by a recognized certificate authority. To circumvent this restriction, Equation Group malware exploited a known vulnerability in an already signed driver for CloneCD to achieve kernel-level code execution.

Taken together, the accomplishments led Kaspersky researchers to conclude that Equation Group is probably the most sophisticated computer attack group in the world, with technical skill and resources that rival the groups that developed Stuxnet and the Flame espionage malware.

"It seems to me Equation Group are the ones with the coolest toys," Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab's global research and analysis team, told Ars. "Every now and then they share them with the Stuxnet group and the Flame group, but they are originally available only to the Equation Group people. Equation Group are definitely the masters, and they are giving the others, maybe, bread crumbs. From time to time they are giving them some goodies to integrate into Stuxnet and Flame."

In an exhaustive report published Monday at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit here, researchers stopped short of saying Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA—but they provided detailed evidence that strongly implicates the US spy agency.

say it ain't so, joe...

NHTSA |
Background and Introduction 
While the extent of use of alcohol by drivers and the risks posed by alcohol use have been well known for many decades, relatively little has been known about the use of other drugs by drivers and the associated risks. However, drug-impaired driving has recently become an issue of increasing public and governmental concern in the United States and in many other countries (Compton et al., 2009; Asbridge et al., 2012; ICADTS, 2007). While it is readily apparent that driving-related skills can be impaired by a wide variety of illegal substances and medications, the nature and scope of the drug-impaired driving problem has been difficult to define (Jones et al., 2003; DuPont et al., 2012; Houwing, 2013). In the United States, recent State actions to legalize the use of marijuana for medical and recreational use have further exacerbated concern over potential risks of driving impaired by marijuana.

Marijuana is the most frequently detected drug (other than alcohol) in crash-involved drivers as well as the general driving population (Terhune, 1982; Terhune et al., 1992; Lacey et al., 2009; Walsh et al., 2005). There is evidence that marijuana use impairs psychomotor skills, divided attention, lane tracking, and cognitive functions (Robbe et al., 1993; Moskowitz, 1995; Hartman and Huestis, 2013). However, its role in contributing to the occurrence of crashes remains less clear. Many studies, using a variety of methods have attempted to estimate the risk of driving after use of marijuana (Li et al., 2012; Asbridge et al., 2012). The methods have included experimental studies, observational studies, and epidemiological studies. While useful in identifying how marijuana affects the performance of driving tasks, experimental and observational studies do not lend themselves to predicting real world crash risk.

Epidemiological Studies
Epidemiological studies differ in how they estimate risk. Culpability studies compare the rate at which crash-involved, drug-positive drivers and drug-negative drivers are deemed to be at fault for their crashes. Case-control studies compare drug use by crash-involved drivers to drug use by non-crash involved drivers. In general, the case-control method is preferable since it can eliminate more sources of potential bias in estimating crash risk resulting from drug use (e.g., alcohol use is much higher at night and on weekends than during the day or on weekdays). The existing epidemiological research (both culpability and case-control studies) have produced contradictory estimates of risk for marijuana use. Some of these studies have suggested that marijuana use has minimal or no effect on the likelihood of crash involvement, while others have estimated a small increase in the risk of crash involvement.

Two recent population-based case control studies have estimated the crash risk of drug use by drivers by using NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) 2007 data for the crash-involved driver population and the 2007 National Roadside Survey of Alcohol and Drug Use by Drivers for the control drivers (Lia, Bradya, & Chen, 2013; Romano, Torres-Saavedra, Voas, & Lacey, 2014). The Li study estimated the increased risk of crash involvement for drivers using marijuana at 1.83 times that of drug-free drivers, while the Romano study found no increased risk of crash involvement for those drivers testing positive for THC (the main psychoactive substance in marijuana). However, current limitations in the FARS dataset do not allow calculation of unbiased, reliable and valid estimates of the risk of crash involvement that results from drug use.

rule of law and academic political correctness are fin d'siecle american orthodoxy

thefourthway |  Q. Does school stand for self-initiation?
A. What does self-initiation mean? It is all words. What would it mean?

Q. If schools are so important, why do they not have more influence in the world?
A. Schools can only act through people who are interested in them. They can do nothing if they are surrounded by people who are indifferent. The possibility of schools influencing life is conditioned by the general attitude to schools. In order to have influence, schools must have people who are interested and who would obey. But this must come from below, it cannot be produced by schools. Schools can throw B influences into the world, but if people are not interested in them, they can do nothing. They cannot use violence.

Q. Can a school lose by giving away its knowledge?
A. A school can lose in many different ways. We shall come to this question later on. It depends whom it gives to. If it gives just in general and does not receive anything, certainly it will lose. If one has money and begins to give it to everybody, whether they deserve it or not, certainly one will lose one's money.

Q. You said that if we want a school we must take part in building it. How can we do that?
A. You must remember that the level of a school depends on the level of being of the people who constitute it. If there are not enough people with magnetic centre, there can be no school. But it is not simply coming to lectures and accepting what one hears that shows the presence of a
magnetic centre.

Q. Would the spreading of school ideas and school language among other people be of any help from the point of view of the school?
A. Ideas cannot be spread in the right form—it is important to understand that. It would be very good if it could be done, but it cannot. Words would remain, but the ideas themselves would be different. If it were enough to spread them, why are schools necessary? The language will spread itself, maybe even in our lifetime, but the ideas will enter into the general currency in a wrong form. For instance, there would be no distinction between 'doing' and 'happening'.

Q. We talk of schools and different levels. Is it not rather confusing? What do higher levels mean?
A. Why do you find the idea of higher levels confusing? For instance, we can take this idea of levels quite simply in relation to ourselves: using all our mental capacities we can think only up to a certain level, but if we could use higher centres, for instance higher emotional centre which already needs more or less complete self-remembering, then certainly on the same subject we could think quite differently and find many more connections in things which we do not notice now. That shows different levels of thinking, and sometimes we actually have glimpses of a higher level of thinking, so we may have some material for observation, because even now we can think differently on the same subject.

And as regards different levels of people, we meet with results of work of people obviously belonging to higher planes; we cannot say that our experience of ordinary life is limited to results of work of people like ourselves. Take the New Testament, and there are also works of art, esoteric writings, Christian literature and so on which obviously cannot belong to ordinary people. The existence of people of higher development is not imagination, not a hypothesis, but an actual fact. So I do not understand in what way it is confusing; I do not see how one can think without recognizing this fact. It is a definite fact that people live not only on the level on which we are but can exist on different levels.

From this point of view humanity can be regarded as divided into four concentric circles. The three inner circles are called Esoteric, Mesoteric and Exoteric. The fourth is the outer circle where men 1, 2 and 3 live. Schools act as gates through which man No. 4, who is between the outer and the Exoteric circle, can pass. Man No. 5 belongs to the Exoteric circle, man No. 6 to the Mesoteric and man No. 7 to the Esoteric or the innermost circle. The outer circle is also called the circle of the confusion of tongues, for in this circle people cannot understand one another. Understanding is possible only in the inner circles.

All this means there are degrees.

A man who lives in the outer circle is under the law of accident, or, if he has a strongly expressed essence, his life is more governed by the laws of his type or the laws of fate. But when a man begins to work towards consciousness, he already has direction. This means a change, perhaps not perceptible, but nevertheless cosmically a change. Only individual effort can help man to pass from the outer circle into the Exoteric circle. What refers to a man in the outer circle does not refer to a man who begins to work. He is under different laws, or rather, different laws begin to touch a man who begins to work. Each circle is under different laws.

"treat it like a virus of the mind"...,

speaking of singing and dancing about killing...,

RT |  A German rapper who joined the Islamic State in Syria is overseeing the extremist group’s effort to recruit Britons. Denis Cuspert, from Berlin, has become the jihadist group’s main propagandist, managing its sophisticated media operation.

Cuspert is reportedly responsible for recruiting Britons by using English-speaking jihadists as poster children, the Daily Mail reports.

 

He is said to be the mastermind of a campaign to attract foreigners, including German Salafists and other impressionable, radicalized youths. 

Cuspert is now fighting under the name Abu Talha al-Almani. The former rapper is also reportedly the leader of a combat unit of German-speaking Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) jihadists called the German Brigade of Millatu Ibrahim. 

The 39-year-old was born in Berlin to a German mother and a Ghanaian father. He became a rapper under the artist name Deso Dogg. 

The would-be propagandist converted to Islam in 2007 following nine years imprisonment for manslaughter. 

He is thought to have travelled to Syria in early 2013, swearing his allegiance to the self-proclaimed IS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. 

Last week, Cuspert appeared in a video alongside other fighters, in which at least three opponents were executed. 

“That's why they've received the death sentence,” Cuspert says in German in the video, while another fighter explains in Arabic that the victims belonged to the Syrian Al Sheitaat tribe. 

Although Cuspert is not shown killing any of the men, the German jihadist poses with the severed head of one of the victims. The video contradicts earlier reports that Cuspert was killed in Syria.

According to the German security agency Verfassungsschutz, Cuspert is part of a “terrorist establishment” and is said to have become a member of the IS inner circle. The jihadist was reportedly seen beating a corpse with a stone in a video from July, filmed near Homs in Syria.

welcome to the world inside

aeon |  I stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor, hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise, honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above ground: the craftsman cottages with their well-tended lawns, the emerald green golf courses, the sun-washed aquamarine swimming pools and the multimillion-dollar mansions that hug the sweeping sands from Malibu to Palos Verdes. These images evoke feelings of deep nostalgia for a Los Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore, back in the halcyon days before my great-grandparents were born, when procreation wasn’t strictly regulated and billions of people roamed freely on Earth.

There are only about 500 million of us left, after the convulsive transformations caused by climate change severely diminished the planet’s carrying capacity, which is the maximum population size that the environment can sustain. Most of us now live in what the British scientist James Lovelock has called ‘lifeboats’ at the far reaches of the northern hemisphere, in places that were once Canada, China, Russia and the Scandinavian countries, shoehorned into cities created virtually overnight to accommodate the millions of desperate refugees where the climate remains marginally tolerable.

Despite all this, history offers a game plan for our species to survive. In analysing his copious research, Parker came to a startling conclusion: the deprivations of the 17th century laid the basis for the welfare state that became the ‘hallmark of all economically advanced states’ by the 19th century. ‘In the 21st century, as in the 17th, coping with catastrophes on this scale requires resources that only central governments command,’ he notes in his book. ‘Despite the many differences between the 17th and the 21st centuries, governments during the Little Ice Age faced the same dilemma. . . [they ultimately realised] that, in the long run, it was economically cheaper and more efficient (as well as more humane) to support those who became old, widowed, ill, disabled or unemployed, thus creating the first “welfare state” in the world.’

Likewise, we are too technologically advanced – and, one hopes, too socially sophisticated – for the doomsday scenarios some foresee. Instead of fighting it out in barbaric, Mad Max-style, dystopian colonies reminiscent of the American West, humanity’s 500 million remaining souls, fed by artificially concocted edibles or even a 23rd century version of Soylent Green, will no doubt be crammed into towering high rises in dense urban areas creating their culture anew atop the world.

folks stay missing what the hon.bro.preznit is really about...,

salon |  Had religion not existed, had it waned by our time, all this violence would just not have happened. If some of these people would have found other reasons to fight, the religious aspect of the conflicts renders them intractable, even insoluble.

Conservatives were vexed by what Obama said next: “lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. . . . So this is not unique to one group or one religion.”

Straightaway, remember that both the Old Testament and the New sanction and even sanctify slavery, as well as proffer helpful advice to slave masters. The Catholic Church embarked on the Holy Inquisition not to do inexplicable violence “in the name of Christ,” but to rid its “flock” of unclean “sheep” – most notably “secret Muslims” and Jews, heretics and witches. Skull crushers and the auto-da-fé, breast rippers and thumbscrews (and much, much more, including Spanish Donkeys and Judas Cradles) all formed part of the godly torturers’ ghastly repertoire, which aimed to prompt innocents to “confess” their “crimes.” Which without religion would not have been crimes at all.

Obama went on to blame all this on “a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.” But slaughter and mutilation occur as natural, almost inevitable phenomena among those believers – and they have been no trifling minority – who take literally their canon’s commands to conduct themselves savagely. After all, if, as a wannabe martyr, you think you’re carrying out the demands of “the Almighty,” with everlasting hellfire or the threescore and twelve virgins of paradise as the stakes, what will you not do?

We should not ascribe vile behavior to misreadings of the canon. It does not help us to suppose that its all-too-human authors penned words like “behead” and “enslave” expecting that they would be metaphorically interpreted. (You can perhaps imagine the absurdity of one of the benighted scribes, resurrected before a Religion 101 class, declaring, “By ‘smite off the infidels’ heads’ I really meant ‘give the unbelievers a stiff talking-to.’”)  After all, they were writing in barbarous ages. The inevitable conclusion: Most folk of the faiths in question behave decently only to the extent that they “pervert and distort” – that is, ignore – the more macabre dictates of their sacred credos.