"useful idiots" engineering the gulag for us all?

SovereignIndependent | pro·vo·ca·teur

1. A person who provokes trouble, causes dissension, or the like; agitator.

2. ( italics ) French . agent provocateur.

a·gent pro·vo·ca·teur

A secret agent hired to incite suspected persons to some illegal action, outbreak, etc., that will make them liable to punishment.

And here we have the crux of this article.

The youth involved in this through the incitement of ‘agent provocateurs’ will undoubtedly bring about further Draconian police measures to curb such measures in the future.

This is regardless of the fact that police were ordered to stand back and allow this to happen to such an extent that the outcry would facilitate such Draconian measures being brought to bear, not only on the ‘useful idiots’ who’ve blindly followed establishment provocateurs in carrying out their idiotic rampage, but on us all.

These few hundred or so idiots are going to ensure that water cannon, rubber bullets and real bullets and other sinister weapons, such as sound cannon and other devices designed to immobilise members of the public individually, in the case of tasers, and in groups by other means, are going to be used in the near future. This will of course serve to discourage any legitimate ‘protests’ which can be hijacked by mindless yobs or agent provocateurs.

The army may well now be deployed on the streets of our cities ensuring that our children will now grow up in a similar environment to the children in Nazi Germany prior to and during the Second World War. We will no doubt see the roll out of ID cards and ‘stop and search’ legislation being introduced across the board for all of us who are simply trying to go about our daily business.

The coup de grace of course will be the introduction of conscription as a means of getting the so called ‘disenfranchised’ off our streets. Better they kill innocent Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Iranians or whoever the globalist elite establishment wish to go to war with than have them stealing iPods in London right?

These boys and girls who think they’re so clever at getting away with looting and arson will get a real shock to the system when people in a war zone are firing real bullets at them and might just wonder if that ‘free’ Blackberry phone was really worth it.

Of course they won’t all get conscripted but it might just be that those who either attempt to escape such a draft are simply rounded up and detained in what would be nothing less than concentration camps.

The other aspect of this is of course the mainstream media’s attempt to promote this as ‘race rioting’ but for anyone who’s watched some of the footage from the ‘riots’ it’s very much apparent that despite David Cameron’s tirade on the failures of multiculturalism, it is obvious that the youth in Tottenham and other cities around the country are working together in great harmony to loot and burn down business premises.

We cannot allow the mainstream media to force a racial war onto the streets of Britain. Whether Black, White, Christian, Muslim, Hindu or any other race or religion it is vital that we all stick together to thwart the social engineers despotic plans to start what would amount to civil war within communities which will simply allow the despots to win using their tried and tested ‘divide and rule’ tactics which have worked for centuries.

If the youth of today, regardless of how ‘deprived’ they feel they are, are not brought back into society by whatever means possible without force or compulsion, they will continue to be used by the social engineers to create havoc on our streets and will be nothing less than thug gangs who will be met with real bullets on their streets by soldiers coming back from a war zone who are well used to shooting first and asking questions later, who will be under no civil authority and therefore unanswerable to local community groups

These gangs of youths must realise that their actions have direct consequences on them and their children in the long term and that they are simply facilitating the implementation of the establishment’s goal of bringing about a despotic totalitarian gulag state for us all.

revolution, flashmobs, brainchips: a grim vision of the future

Guardian | Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.

This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".

The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts". It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.

europe's turn to the right

TheNation | Right-wing gunmen are a rarity in postwar Europe. There have, of course, been instances of right-wing violence. In the 1990s, gangs composed mostly of former East German youths, prey to neo-Nazi fantasies, set upon Turks and other clearly identifiable immigrants, beating people up in the streets and torching refugee shelters.

One reason radical right-wing parties were marginalized for a long time in Europe is that they were simply too disreputable. It was worse than uncouth to agitate openly against minorities, let alone to flirt with ideologies that had caused the death of millions. Even to suggest that large-scale immigration could be a problem was considered racist until not so long ago. In such countries as Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and France, mainstream parties have tended to gang up against radical right-wing parties, blocking them behind what the French call a cordon sanitaire. On the whole, voters for the far right hovered between 10 percent and 15 percent—more than is desirable, perhaps, but few people worried that they would ever get much more.

The cordon first began to crack in Austria and Italy, during the ’90s. This was not so much because Austrians were rediscovering their Nazi sympathies. Indeed, by the late ’90s most politicians on the democratic far right in Europe had tried to distance themselves from Nazi or fascist antecedents. The reason for the Freedom Party’s success was that the Social and Christian Democrats had been in government too long. People voted against a sclerotic establishment. Many Italians felt the same way about the Christian Democrats, who had been propped up for decades, with the help of the United States, to keep the left out. But once the Christian Democrats finally lost power, it wasn’t the left that leapt into the vacuum but Berlusconi, backed by neo-Fascist and anti-immigrant parties, such as Fini’s National Alliance and Umberto Bossi’s Northern League.

Governments of the European Union were outraged in 2000, when the Austrian Freedom Party garnered enough votes to form part of a coalition government. Boycotts were threatened. Austrian officials were snubbed. This was a mistake. It only helped to burnish the right’s anti-establishment credentials. After all, the AFP was democratically elected, as were the right-wing Italian parties in 1994.

Perhaps being part of a government had a civilizing effect. In 1995 Fini disavowed his party’s Fascist heritage. But when it comes to immigration and, especially, “the Muslim problem,” Fini and his right-wing allies in Berlusconi’s coalition, as well as the Austrian AFP, are if anything even more ferocious than before. In this, they are not alone.

british youths the most unpleasant and violent in the world?

Video - PM Cameron promises action against protesters

DailyMail | British youths have been branded as 'the most unpleasant and potentially violent young people in the world' by a renowned doctor-writer.

Anthony Daniels, a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist who has worked in some of the hardest-hit areas on the planet, said the British were now in great fear of their own arrogant, knife-wielding children.

The author said Britain's young had a 'sense of entitlement' and were unwilling to change their ways for anyone else - with the only difference between the rich and the poor being that the former had the money to buy what they wanted, whereas the poor had to 'wheedle, cajole, swindle and steal it'.

Writing for the New York Daily News in a comment piece on the riots, he said: 'Of course it is true that not all young Britons are unattractive in appearance and conduct, only a far higher proportion of them than of the young of any other nation.

'It requires but an overnight stay on a Friday or Saturday in any British city to prove it. Even Russians are appalled by what they witness.

'The rioting is only the extreme end of the spectrum of bad behaviour by British youth and young adults.'

Mr Daniels, who often writes for The Spectator under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, said the riots 'did not emerge from a cultural vacuum' but was rather 'the British way of life'.

He claimed many American visitors to the UK were astounded at how quickly Britons became angry over trifling matters.

And he revealed that it was now 'quite literally' difficult to 'distinguish the sound of people enjoying themselves from that of someone being murdered.'

He said: 'Recently in Manchester, I woke at 1 on a Wednesday morning in my hotel to hear drunken screaming and shouting down below on one of the city's main streets, the sound of which continued until 4.30.

'Lo and behold, when I left the hotel at 8 in the morning, I discovered that a man had been savagely beaten nearly to death at about 2 am and was still in a coma - but the drunken revelling had continued nonetheless, uninterrupted by the police.

'So the sheer viciousness and destructiveness of the riots certainly do not surprise me.'

He ended his piece by saying that the only thing that will stop the 'not well-educated' rioters is 'boredom or exhaustion'.

Mr Daniels' piece, which will be consumed by a worldwide audience, heaps further embarrassment on the UK, which has today again made headline news across the world.

Newspapers from Ireland, Iceland and even Iran have used the sickening images of the looting on their front pages.

In the U.S. the popular Washington Post, New York Daily News and New York Times all dedicated extensive coverage to the events.

Even regional newspapers, such as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which covers Little Rock in Arkansas, led on the riots with the headline 'British add 10,000 police as rioting starts a 4th

The financial daily Handelsblatt said: 'The riots reveal fundamental societal problems that extend far beyond London and England.

'They are too deep for the short-term austerity measures to have had much influence. There wasn't just looting in troubled areas, but also in the affluent district of Notting Hill and among the middle class in trendy Clapham.

'The riots reveal the decay of society at its edges, brought on by deeply cemented inequality, the erosion of social norms, great frustration and a lack of opportunity for the lower class.'

The Financial Times Deutschland added: 'The British elite has systematically compromised itself in recent years. They claimed to be a role model, or at least trustworthy.

'In the economic crisis the financial establishment declared bankruptcy, and British politicians became mired in the expenses scandal of 2009. Then this year the media and politicians have been damaged by the Murdoch scandal.

'When the country's elites don't take the law seriously, why should we? No question is more dangerous for a society.'

Left-leaning Berliner Zeitung said: 'The country has lost faith in every authority: the banks, politicians, the media, the police. The corruption has reached even the smallest unit - the family. There is a generation growing up without values of any kind.'

Finally, the conservative Die Welt commented: 'The unrest in London is a form of hooliganism by losers who are living in a society which no longer has anything left to offer losers. Among the arsonists are people who no longer possess any values.

social class as culture

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ScienceDaily | Social class is more than just how much money you have. It's also the clothes you wear, the music you like, the school you go to -- and has a strong influence on how you interact with others, according to the authors of a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People from lower classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world than people in upper classes -- a fact that should figure into debates on public policy, according to the authors.

"Americans, although this is shifting a bit, kind of think class is irrelevant," says Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley, who cowrote the article with Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Paul K. Piff of UC-Berkeley. "I think our studies are saying the opposite: This is a profound part of who we are."

People who come from a lower-class background have to depend more on other people. "If you don't have resources and education, you really adapt to the environment, which is more threatening, by turning to other people," Keltner says. "People who grow up in lower-class neighborhoods, as I did, will say,' There's always someone there who will take you somewhere, or watch your kid. You've just got to lean on people.'"

Wealthier people don't have to rely on each other as much. This causes differences that show up in psychological studies. People from lower-class backgrounds are better at reading other people's emotions. They're more likely to act altruistically. "They give more and help more. If someone's in need, they'll respond," Keltner says. When poor people see someone else suffering, they have a physiological response that is missing in people with more resources. "What I think is really interesting about that is, it kind of shows there's all this strength to the lower class identity: greater empathy, more altruism, and finer attunement to other people," he says. Of course, there are also costs to being lower-class. Health studies have found that lower-class people have more anxiety and depression and are less physically healthy.

Upper-class people are different, Keltner says. "What wealth and education and prestige and a higher station in life gives you is the freedom to focus on the self." In psychology experiments, wealthier people don't read other people's emotions as well. They hoard resources and are less generous than they could be.

One implication of this, Keltner says, is that's unreasonable to structure a society on the hope that rich people will help those less fortunate. "One clear policy implication is, the idea of nobless oblige or trickle-down economics, certain versions of it, is bull," Keltner says. "Our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back. The 'thousand points of light' -- this rise of compassion in the wealthy to fix all the problems of society -- is improbable, psychologically."

top 5 places not to be when the dollar collapses

DontTreadOnMe | The dollar collapse will be the single largest event in human history. This will be the first event that will touch every single living person in the world. All human activity is controlled by money. Our wealth, our work, our food, our government, even our relationships are affected by money. No money in human history has had as much reach in both breadth and depth as the dollar. It is the de facto world currency. All other currency collapses will pale in comparison to this big one. All other currency crises have been regional and there were other currencies for people to grasp on to. This collapse will be global and it will bring down not only the dollar but all other fiat currencies, as they are fundamentally no different. The collapse of currencies will lead to the collapse of ALL paper assets. The repercussions to this will have incredible results worldwide. (Read the Silver Bullet and the Silver Shield to protect yourself from this collapse.)

Thanks to the globalization and the giant vampire squids of the Anglo-American Empire, the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. It supports the global economy in settling foreign trade, most importantly the Petro Dollar trade. This money is recycled through the City of London (not to be confused with London) and New York. This fuels our corporate vampires that acquires and harvests the wealth of the world. The corporate powers suppress REAL assets like natural resources and labor to provide themselves massive profits. This Fascist, Statist, Collectivist model provides the money into the economy to fund an ever increasing federal government. That government then grows larger and larger enriching its minions with jobs to control their fellow citizens. Finally, to come full circle, the government then controls other nations through the Military Industrial Complex.

This cycle will be cut when the mathematically and inevitable collapse of the dollar occurs. In order for our debt based money to function we MUST increase the debt every year in excess of the debt AND interest accrued the year before or we will enter a deflationary death spiral. When debt is created, money is created. When debt is paid off, money is destroyed. There is never enough to pay off the debt, because there would be not one dollar in existence.

We are at a point where we either default on the debt, willingly or unwillingly, or create more money/debt to keep the cycle moving. The problem is if you understand anything about compounding interest, we are reaching the hockey stick moment where the more debt that is incurred, the less effective it is and this leads us to hyper inflation. There are only two actors needed for this hyper inflation, the Lender of Last Resort, the Fed, and the Spender of Last Resort, the government. These two can, and will, blow up the system. I believe they will wait until the next crisis and the whiff of deflationary depression before they fire up the printing presses. That crisis is coming very soon at the end of this summer or fall. The money and emergency measures are worn out. The fact that NONE of the underlying problems that caused the 2008 crisis have been resolved. The only thing that has happened is that instead of corporate problems, we now have nation problems. In this movie Greece will play the role of Lehman Brothers and the United States will play the role of AIG. The problem is there is nowhere to kick the can down the road and there is no world government to absorb the debt, yet…

ahmadinejad calls for UN intervention in britain

Guardian | Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticised the UN security council for remaining silent over the riots in Britain. Photograph: Vahid Salemi/AP

Having already offered to send an expert team to investigate human rights abuses amid the riots, the Iranian regime has gone one step further and called on the UN security council to intervene over the British government's handling of the unrest rocking the country.

Speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, condemned the British government for its "violent suppression" of the protesters and called for an end to what he described as the "killing and brutal beating" of "the opposition" angry with the government's financial policies.

"The real opposition are the people who are beaten up and killed on the streets of London, those whose voices are not heard by anyone," Iran's Irna state news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

The foreign ministry, went so far as to issue a statement advising against any unnecessary travel to the UK.

On Tuesday night, conservative websites sympathetic to the Islamic regime called on the Iranian government to offer refuge in its embassy in London to "UK protesters in need of protection".

In the aftermath of Iran's disputed presidential election in 2009, some European embassies in Tehran opened their doors to opposition protesters.

Iranian officials infuriated by the UK's condemnation of Iran's human rights violations in recent years, have found a unique opportunity with recent events to get back at the British government by criticising the police force for "exercising violence".

The Iranian opposition, on the other hand, has accused the regime of hypocrisy and opportunism in "deliberately portraying rioting and looting as political protests".

Ahmadinejad criticised the UN security council for remaining silent over the riots in Britain. "What else should happen for the security council to react and condemn one of its own members?"

He accused the UK authorities of portraying its opposition as a group of "looters, rioters and drug dealers", adding: "Does Britain have this extent of drug dealers? If this is the case, they should be tried and UN should build walls surrounding their country."

Ahmadinejad said the protests were the result of London's imperialist policies of the past three centuries and of ignoring the poor. "Time is up for few capitalist families with different titles to loot other nations and governments and making them slaves," he said.

"Instead of giving up their wealth to control their deficit, the burden has been put on masses. There are pressures in crisis and it's evident that people would protest in such a situation," he said.

Ahmadinejad said British officials should stop meddling in other people's affairs and instead worry about their own. "Instead of interfering in others' affairs in Afghanistan, Iraq and attacking Libya, they should deal with their own people."

He asked Britain to listen to the demands of its people and criticised human rights organisations for remaining silent over the violence used against British protesters.

where will growth come from?

NYTimes | Never has the world economy depended so much on the success of developing nations. A misguided focus on budget cutting has plunged the European Union and the United States down paths that will prolong their economic stagnation and perhaps tip them into another recession. The International Monetary Fund was forecasting 2 percent growth in the euro zone before the financial crisis spread to Italy. The Japanese economy is shrinking. Some top economists put the odds of a double-dip recession in the United States at 1 in 2.

These dire prospects, along with the realization that economic policy is blocked by political gridlock in the United States and complacency in Europe, have sent spasms through financial markets, which could further sap growth. Fortunately, developing countries, which account for almost half the globe’s economic output, are growing faster than the industrialized world: in June the I.M.F. forecast that they would grow some 6.5 percent this year and next. Their growth spares the world utter economic stagnation.

Yet developing countries are not robust enough to keep the global economy from sinking in a morass for long. Their economies remain vulnerable to financial turbulence and economic weakness in wealthy nations.

Even a flood of money moving to developing nations, as investors react to the lack of growth in the industrial world, would create new challenges. It would stoke inflation and asset bubbles in developing economies: annual inflation in Brazil is running at 6.85 percent. And it would push up the value of their currencies, hindering exports.

China, the biggest developing economy, is still more a caboose than a growth engine, dependent on rich countries to buy more than 40 percent of its exports. In 2009, China led efforts to help the global recovery, investing heavily in infrastructure and boosting consumer spending, but today it is taking the opposite tack and trying to combat inflation, which is running at 6.4 percent.

british in denial about their "arab" spring

Video - Pink Floyd Money

GlobeandMail | This isn't the Arab Spring. But the riots in London and beyond do pose a challenge to one of the world's most stable democracies. As Home Secretary Theresa May put it, Britain relies on the consent of communities, not on water cannons, to keep social order. And when thousands of people are hell-bent on destroying order, even if for no other purpose than the cruel joy of it, it does tend to raise the question of what happened to the consent.

But that is a question that can be dealt with down the road, when the streets are calm again. One doesn't ask a young man with a Molotov cocktail in his hand why he wishes to burn the city down. One calls in the police.

Riots involving thousands of hooded people rolling from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and city to city are not, however, easy to beat back. David Green, the director of Civitas, a British think tank, verges on panic when he writes that “being reluctant to use force can be admirable. But when events have got out of control, the fullest use of police powers is justified.” He implies that anything goes. But how many deaths would be justified? Democratic societies need to protect public order and property, but not at any cost to life.

What is happening is sickening to watch – the mob mind unable to conceive of anything beyond the twisted pleasures of destruction. The fires raging in London and, Tuesday night, in Manchester, show humankind reduced to its most elemental drives. There is no reason to think that these nihilistic riots are anything but a way to fill the boredom of summer. They are not a protest against tuition increases, or social-service cuts, or the fatal police shooting of a black man in Tottenham. That shooting was no more the cause of these riots than the Vancouver Canucks' disappointing loss in the Stanley Cup finals in June caused thousands to engage in an orgy of looting and fighting and burning cars. It was an excuse for those people who feel most alive when rioting.

lack of awareness...,

Video - Malcolm X you are afraid to bleed...,

aljazeera | On Twitter late last night, following the main bulk of the riots, I was astonished at the incomprehension generally expressed as to why they had occurred. There seemed to be an extraordinary lack of awareness that working class youth in Britain are being punished for the financial excesses of the banking collapse.

The public spending cuts this year meant many of the youth summer schemes in London did not run. These riots suggest boredom - and inarticulate rage. The youth are smashing and grabbing the things society tells them to want.

The coalition government's austerity measures have hit this generation hard. There will be no higher education for those who cannot take on burdensome debt. The chance of ever being able to afford to buy a home in London seems remote - except for those whose wealthier parents can provide the deposit for a home loan.

A generation of young people have been left behind by this coalition's policies and the policies of previous governments. How can these young people see that they have anything invested in British society that will enable them to become fulfilled and successful adults?

The comments on Twitter and Facebook, following Monday's riots in London, starkly reflect the class divides within Britain today.

Hitting the streets

After spending much of the day deliberating over whether I should go and see what was happening, on Monday I set off on my bike with a stills camera. I cycled from my apartment in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets across Victoria Park toward the Borough of Hackney, to check out the scene. Would this just be a copycat riot that the police would quickly put down, or was it going to explode into something bigger?

Knowing that the local kids would not appreciate my taking the pictures mid-riot, I planned to get the aftermath shots: upturned, burned-out bins; trashed vehicles; local people wandering through the broken glass...

As I turned onto the main road I saw a red-faced man with a Union Jack flag tattooed on his forehead walking along with two women, drinking cans of beer. One said: "There were loads of masked up Asians swarming outside the Tube station, ready to riot." This man and women were drunk, seemed furious, spoke racist and walked scared.

police there to be against them rather than to protect them...,

Video - Malcolm X We are living in a police state.

CNN | Officers from Operation Trident -- the Metropolitan Police unit that deals with gun crime in London's black communities -- stopped the cab in the working-class, predominantly Afro-Caribbean district of Tottenham during an attempted arrest, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said. Soon after, shots were fired and Duggan, a father of four, was killed. Shooting deaths are rare in England.

The IPCC said Tuesday an illegal firearm had been found at the scene, with a "bulleted cartridge" in the magazine, but there was "no evidence" it was fired during the incident.

A bullet that lodged in a radio carried by an officer was police issue, the IPCC said.

"A post-mortem examination concluded that Mr. Duggan was killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest. He also received a second gunshot wound to his right bicep," the IPCC said, without saying who fired the bullets nor why police had stopped the cab.
Violence and looting across London

The man's family and friends, who blamed police for the death, had gathered peacefully Saturday outside the Tottenham police station to protest.

The protest soon devolved into violence as demonstrators -- whose numbers included whites and blacks -- tossed petrol bombs, looted stores and burned police cars.

Violence continued in isolated pockets on Sunday, spread Monday to other parts of the nation and continued Tuesday.

Metropolitan Police and Duggan's family have appealed for calm. Police said they were stretched thin as they tried to respond to emergency calls -- which were up nearly 400% Tuesday.

British Prime Minister David Cameron's vow of action to quell rioting in Britain's cities was backed up by an increased police presence -- about 16,000 officers were set to be on London's streets Tuesday night -- twice the number on Monday night.

"People should be in no doubt that we will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain's streets and make them safe for the law-abiding," said Cameron, who called the events "criminality, pure and simple."

The trouble -- described by police as "'copycat criminal activity" -- takes place against a backdrop of austerity measures and budget cuts that have led to high rates of unemployment, particularly among the nation's youth.

Some 685 people have been arrested in London since the violence began, police said late Tuesday. With Metropolitan Police detention cells full, authorities were taking those they arrested to facilities belonging to surrounding police forces.

when did gary busey become the mayor of london?

Video - Mayor of London gets heckled after riots.

forget london, this commercial set y'all back 150 years or more...,

Video - Trojan Twister "blow her hair back" commercial.

jesus loves nukes...,

Telegraph | For 20 years the course on “Christian Just War Theory” was taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to those who would turn the key should World War III break out.

The training, which used passages from the Bible and religious imagery to demonstrate the moral justification for atomic warfare, has now been suspended.

The Air Force acted after receiving an inquiry from Truthout, a news website which first broke the story.

A PowerPoint presentation which was part of the course had consisted of 43 slides which included references to Biblical figures like Abraham and John the Baptist, and paintings of the Visigoths attacking Rome in AD410.

Instructors quoted St Augustine’s just cause for war, telling them it was right “to avenge or to avert evil, to protect the innocent and restore moral and social order.”

They also recounted how, in the Book of Genesis, Abraham had organised an army to rescue Lot, and how there were “Old Testament believers who engaged in war in a righteous way.” Officers were also told that in Judges, God is “motivating judges to fight and deliver Israel from foreign oppressors,” and that there was “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”

In the New Testament, they were told, Jesus used the Roman centurion as a “positive illustration of faith.” One slide read: “Revelation 19:11 Jesus Christ is the mighty warrior.”

The course literature also quoted Werner von Braun, the leading German rocket scientist who went on to work for the United States after the Second World War, saying that it was a “moral decision” to surrender his technology to the US.

Von Braun said: “We felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”

Before the the course was stopped 31 nuclear missile launch officers, including Protestants and Roman Catholics, had complained to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group that campaigns for the separation of church and state.

Its founder Mikey Weinstein said the officers were being told that “under fundamentalist Christian doctrine, war is a good thing”.

He said the officers found that “disgusting.” Mr Weinstein said: “The United States Air Force was promoting a particular brand of right wing fundamentalist Christianity.

“The main essence was that war is a natural part of the human experience and it’s something that is favoured by this particular perspective of the New Testament.”

David Smith, spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, said ethics courses were “especially important” for nuclear missile launch officers.

But he added: “Our commander here reviewed the course and decided immediately that it was not appropriate for what we want to do.

“The use of Bible passages and other elements was just inappropriate. The military is made up of people from all walks of life, all faiths.” However, critics accused the Air Force of bowing to political correctness.

Commander Daniel McKay, a retired US Navy chaplain, said: “Why is it inappropriate to give our people guidelines that have withstood the test of time, to give us moral guidance?

“History will prove that if you stay true to God’s wisdom, it will serve us well and it has served us well.”

NEETS: not in employment, education, or training...,

Video - Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK.

GlobeandMail | These are not race riots: Though they began, on Saturday afternoon, with a small protest in Tottenham, north London, over the shooting of a dark-skinned man by police under suspicious circumstances, they quickly became a much wider and less purposeful explosion of youth criminality.

Tottenham was the site of the terrible Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, which also began with a protest over a police shooting – but that was another London, deeply divided along racial lines, with a furious and socially excluded Caribbean community battling an all-white and explicitly racist police force. This week, by contrast, both the rioters and the police are multicoloured.

Nor are these explicitly political riots: There is no message, no motive, no cause, no slogan. Efforts by some opposition politicians to link these events to Prime Minister David Cameron’s spending cuts have been met with incredulity in the affected neighbourhoods, where those cuts have not yet had any municipal effect.

But this is clearly an event with far deeper causes than simple random hooliganism. A night of protesting and looting in one neighbourhood is not an unusual phenomenon in London, where a certain sort of mass drink-fuelled petty crime and low-level rioting never lies far beneath the surface. But three nights, spread across a dozen large neighbourhoods covering the entire expanse of this city of 10 million with scores of buildings set alight – this is an event of a much different magnitude.

There are some things uniting the London rioters. Almost all are under 20. Police reported that the youngest arrested over the weekend was 11 years old, and that almost all were born in the 1990s.

And most, according to their own accounts in interviews and Facebook postings, come from the same neighbourhoods they are looting and burning: Mostly poor neighbourhoods, thick with public-housing towers and short on employment opportunities.

“I think that there was disillusionment among some segments of the rioters,” said Heidi Alexander, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham, south London, where huge fires and large-scale rioting erupted Monday night. “There are high levels of youth unemployment in my district, they have trouble staying on in work or getting education, and they get caught up in this.”

Whether the thousands of rioters actually did express disillusionment – some did say they were angry at police or the world, but many appeared gleeful or greedy – it is clear that most had nothing else to do with themselves, and no reason to fear or feel responsible for the consequences of their actions.

This is a chronic problem in Britain, which has a “lost generation” of young high-school dropouts far larger than most other Western countries.

One European Union study this year found that 17 per cent of Britain’s youth are classified as “NEETs” – for Not in Employment, Education or Training, in other words high-school dropouts with no prospects of employment – the fourth-highest percentage in the European Union. There are 600,000 people under 25 in Britain who have never had a day of work.

Why these disenfranchised youth so explosively made their presence known in such a devastatingly violent way, and how this will all end, is not yet understood. But it puts a dark punctuation mark on what had, until this weekend, been London’s brightest modern era.

streets littered with the remnants of cash register tills...,

Video - The Clash London Calling

SydneyMorningHerald | British Home Secretary Theresa May described the rioting as "sheer criminality", vowing that those responsible would be brought to justice.

Asked if the army would be brought in to restore order, Ms May said an end to the riots could be brought with policing, the use of intelligence and the help of local communities.

"The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon," she told Sky News.

News footage in Britain has shown brazen aggressors in broad daylight using street bins to smash business windows.

In one piece of footage, women can be seen and heard directing men to steal particular pieces of jewellery from a retailer while alarms scream.

Streets have been littered with the remnants of cash register tills and in at least one instance a cash machine was dragged from a business onto the street and forced open.

With many of the perpetrators identified as youths - some as young as 10 years old - authorities have appealed to parents to keep their children at home.

London's everyday operations have been impacted by the violence, with public transport routes modified and cancelled, and some suburbs put in lockdown.

British Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his holiday in Italy and flew back to Britain early Tuesday to chair a meeting of the government's emergency committee amid fears there will be a fourth night of violence.

london riots spread...,

VoiceofAmerica | Violence has broken out in two more British cities, while London endures its third straight night of rioting.

Police in Birmingham and in Liverpool report fires and looting. A Liverpool police spokesman says police are taking swift and robust action to what he calls "isolated outbreaks of disorder."

British Prime Minister David Cameron cut short a vacation in Italy and rushed back to London to deal with some of the city's worst rioting in years.

Buildings, cars and bus stops burned and police fought with young people for a third straight night Monday in several London neighborhoods. Stores and restaurants were looted and police were pelted with gasoline bombs.

u.s. widens role in battle against mexican drug cartels

NYTimes | The United States is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.

In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where, for the first time, security officials from both countries work side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations. Officials are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit.

Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced American surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption.

“A sea change has occurred over the past years in how effective Mexico and U.S. intelligence exchanges have become,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. “It is underpinned by the understanding that transnational organized crime can only be successfully confronted by working hand in hand, and that the outcome is as simple as it is compelling: we will together succeed or together fail.”

The latest steps come three years after the United States began increasing its security assistance to Mexico with the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative and tens of millions of dollars from the Defense Department. They also come a year before elections in both countries, when President Obama may confront questions about the threat of violence spilling over the border, and President Felipe Calderón’s political party faces a Mexican electorate that is almost certainly going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly 45,000 people dead.

“The pressure is going to be especially strong in Mexico, where I expect there will be a lot more raids, a lot more arrests and a lot more parading drug traffickers in front of cameras,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution. “But I would also expect a lot of questioning of Merida, and some people asking about the way the money is spent, or demanding that the government send it back to the gringos.”

Mexico has become ground zero in the American counternarcotics fight since its cartels have cornered the market and are responsible for more than 80 percent of the drugs that enter the United States. American counternarcotics assistance there has grown faster in recent years than to Afghanistan and Colombia. And in the last three years, officials said, exchanges of intelligence between the United States and Mexico have helped security forces there capture or kill some 30 mid- to high-level drug traffickers, compared with just two such arrests in the previous five years.

The United States has trained nearly 4,500 new federal police agents and assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects. The Pentagon has provided sophisticated equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters, and in recent months it has begun flying unarmed surveillance drones over Mexican soil to track drug kingpins.

Still, it is hard to say much real progress has been made in crippling the brutal cartels or stemming the flow of drugs and guns across the border. Mexico’s justice system remains so weakened by corruption that even the most notorious criminals have not been successfully prosecuted.

“The government has argued that the number of deaths in Mexico is proof positive that the strategy is working and that the cartels are being weakened,” said Nik Steinberg, a specialist on Mexico at Human Rights Watch. “But the data is indisputable — the violence is increasing, human rights abuses have skyrocketed and accountability both for officials who commit abuses and alleged criminals is at rock bottom.”

Mexican and American officials involved in the fight against organized crime do not see it that way. They say the efforts begun under President Obama are only a few years old, and that it is too soon for final judgments. Dan Restrepo, Mr. Obama’s senior Latin American adviser, refused to talk about operational changes in the security relationship, but said, “I think we are in a fundamentally different place than we were three years ago.”

A senior Mexican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed. “This is the game-changer in degrading transnational organized crime,” he said, adding: “It can’t be a two-, three-, four-, five- or six-year policy. For this policy investment to work, it has to be sustained long-term.”

Several Mexican and American security analysts compared the challenges of helping Mexico rebuild its security forces and civil institutions — crippled by more than seven decades under authoritarian rule — to similar tests in Afghanistan. They see the United States fighting alongside a partner it needs but does not completely trust.

a secret war in 120 countries

TomDispatch | Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you’re done... for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight. It was atypical. While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently. This global presence -- in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

The Rise of the Military’s Secret Military
Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987. Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate. Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions. Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal “kill/capture” campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."

This assassination program has been carried out by commando units like the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force as well as via drone strikes as part of covert wars in which the CIA is also involved in countries like Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. In addition, the command operates a network of secret prisons, perhaps as many as 20 black sites in Afghanistan alone, used for interrogating high-value targets.

Growth Industry
From a force of about 37,000 in the early 1990s, Special Operations Command personnel have grown to almost 60,000, about a third of whom are career members of SOCOM; the rest have other military occupational specialties, but periodically cycle through the command. Growth has been exponential since September 11, 2001, as SOCOM’s baseline budget almost tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion. If you add in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8 billion in these years. Not surprisingly, the number of its personnel deployed abroad has also jumped four-fold. Further increases, and expanded operations, are on the horizon.

wikileaks haiti: the aristide files

The Nation | US officials led a far-reaching international campaign aimed at keeping former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide exiled in South Africa, rendering him a virtual prisoner there for the last seven years, according to secret US State Department cables.

The cables show that high-level US and UN officials even discussed a politically motivated prosecution of Aristide to prevent him from “gaining more traction with the Haitian population and returning to Haiti.”

The secret cables, made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by WikiLeaks, show how the political defeat of Aristide and his Lavalas movement has been the central pillar of US policy toward the Caribbean nation over the last two US administrations, even though—or perhaps because—US officials understood that he was the most popular political figure in Haiti.

They also reveal how US officials and their diplomatic counterparts from France, Canada, the UN and the Vatican tried to vilify and ostracize the Haitian political leader.

For the Vatican, Aristide was an “active proponent of voodoo.” For Washington, he was “dangerous to Haiti’s democratic consolidation,” according to the secret US cables.

Aristide was overthrown in a bloody February 2004 coup supported by Washington and fomented by right-wing paramilitary forces and the Haitian elite. In the aftermath of the coup, more than 3,000 people were killed and thousands of supporters of Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas political party were jailed.

The United States maintained publicly that Aristide resigned in the face of a ragtag force of former Haitian army soldiers rampaging in Haiti’s north. But Aristide called his escort by a US Navy SEAL team on his flight into exile “a modern-day kidnapping.”

Two months later, the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) was established, a 9,000-strong UN occupation force that still oversees Latin America’s first independent nation.

Aristide has spoken forcefully against the UN occupation, particularly in his 2010 year-end letter to the Haitian people. “We cannot forget the $5 billion which has already been spent for MINUSTAH over these past six years,” he wrote. “Anybody can see how many houses, hospitals, and schools that wasted money could have built for the victims” of the January 12, 2010, earthquake that destroyed much of Port-au-Prince and surrounding regions.

Such positions are major reasons Washington fought to get and keep Aristide out of Haiti, the cables make clear. “A premature departure of MINUSTAH would leave the [Haitian] government...vulnerable to...resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces—reversing gains of the last two years,” wrote US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in an October 1, 2008, cable. MINUSTAH “is an indispensable tool in realizing core USG [US government] policy interests in Haiti.”

At a high-level meeting five years ago, top US and UN officials discussed how the “Aristide Movement Must Be Stopped,” according to an August 2, 2006, cable. It described how former Guatemalan diplomat Edmond Mulet, then chief of MINUSTAH, “urged US legal action against Aristide to prevent the former president from gaining more traction with the Haitian population and returning to Haiti.”

At Mulet’s request, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki “to ensure that Aristide remained in South Africa.”

President Obama and Kofi Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-moon, also intervened to urge Pretoria to keep Aristide in South Africa. The secret cables report that Aristide’s return to Haiti would be a “disaster,” according to the Vatican, and “catastrophic,” according to the French.

the lil'sick men of europe commence to clowning...,

Video - Greek racism, fascism, nazism.
CTV | They descended by the hundreds -- black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down dark-skinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece's far-right extremists.

In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a right-wing rise -- and the Norway massacre on Monday drove authorities to beef up security.

The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The U.N.'s refugee agency warns that some Athens neighborhoods have become zones where "fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime."

Greek police on Monday said they have increased security checks at Muslim prayer houses and other immigrant sites in response to the Norway shooting rampage that claimed 77 lives.

"There has been an increase in monitoring at these sites since the events occurred in Norway," said police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis.

Greece's fears are shared across Europe. Last week, EU counterterror officials held an emergency meeting in Brussels on ways to combat right-wing violence and rising Islamophobia, warning of a "major risk" of Norway copycats. The massacre by Anders Behring Breivik prompted continent-wide soul-searching about whether authorities have neglected the threat of right-wing extremists as they focus on jihadist terror.

Greece, however, may be particularly worrisome because of the intersection of extreme economic distress and rampant illegal immigration, which can create fertile ground for the rise of rightist movements. Immigrant scapegoating has been rife here as unemployment balloons amid economic catastrophe.

Even as Greece founders under mountains of debt, illegal immigrants have been streaming into the country across the Turkish border — turning Greece into the migrant world's gateway to Europe. Last year, Greece accounted for 90 percent of the bloc's detected illegal border crossings, compared to 75 percent in 2009.

The UNHCR and Muslim groups say hate crimes have risen sharply, although police do not have hard numbers.

The xenophobic rage exploded in May, when youths rampaged through a heavily immigrant neighborhood in broad daylight, knifing and beating foreigners. The attacks left at least 25 people hospitalized with stab wounds or severe beatings. Athens has since suffered a spate of hate attacks by far-rightists.

houston chronicle doesn't mince words about london...,

HoustonChronicle | The riot that tore through parts of north London's deprived Tottenham neighborhood has cast a pall over Britain's capital, echoing an earlier era of racial unrest, while spreading malaise through a city preparing to host the Olympic Games.

Eight officers were hospitalized after a peaceful protest against the shooting death of a young man degenerated into a Saturday night rampage, with rioters torching a double-decker bus, destroying patrol cars and trashing a shopping mall.

Looters descended on the area around midnight, setting buildings alight, and piling stolen goods into cars and shopping carts. Sirens could be heard across the capital as authorities rushed reinforcements to the scene.

"This is just a glimpse into the abyss," former Metropolitan Police Commander John O'Connor told Sky News television Sunday. "Someone's pulled the clock back and you can look and see what's beneath the surface. And what with the Olympic Games coming up, this doesn't bode very well for London."

As residents of Tottenham and nearby Wood Green picked through the wreckage Sunday, O'Connor said the disturbance had echoes of Tottenham's 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, a deadly disturbance that led to the savage stabbing of a police officer and the wounding of nearly 60 others — brutally underscoring tensions between London's police and the capital's black community.

That riot was among one of the most violent in the country's history. It too was sparked by the death of a local resident after an encounter with the police.

Journalist and Tottenham resident Rizwana Hamid, who covered the 1985 riots, said Saturday night's violence was reminiscent of the earlier eruption in Tottenham, an ethnically mixed area which is home to one of London's largest black communities.

"The climate has changed, but very little of the issues have gone away," she told the BBC. She cited desperation, poverty and what she said was a lack of communication from police about the circumstances under which the man — 29-year-old Mark Duggan — was gunned down.

British media said that an officer involved in the shooting had a bullet lodged in his radio, suggesting a gunfight, but other details were scarce. Britain's police watchdog is investigating.

The Metropolitan Police, colloquially known as Scotland Yard, has struggled for years to cope with a 1999 inquiry into the death of a black British teenager that concluded that the force was "institutionally racist." In 2003, the Black Police Association even went as far as to call on ethnic minorities not to join Scotland Yard, saying discrimination was rife.

Although the force has made strides in its relationships with black communities, tensions linger.

the truth about global demand for food

Guardian | As it happens, FAO food balance sheets show that both direct and indirect demand for grain in China and India barely increased between 2000 and 2007, and cereal imports were actually lower. Why this has been happening, and why the economic growth has not translated into more aggregate demand for grain, is obviously a fascinating question on its own and one that deserves more study. It is likely that the worsening income distribution in both countries may have had something to do with it, so that increased demand from high-income groups is counterbalanced by reduced demand from poorer sections. But this needs to be explored further.

The relevant point is that it is not increased demand from China and India that is driving up grain prices. This does not mean that there are no other demand forces at work, however. Financial speculation in commodity markets is clearly significant, but it is also true that even such speculation must be based on some assessments of changing global balances. What could that be based on?

The report from the FAO has a convincing response to that as well: it notes that the biofuel boom has had a major impact on the evolution of world food demand for cereals and vegetable oils. According to page 32 of the report "there is a real acceleration of non-feed uses boosted by biofuel development. Excluding use for biofuel, the growth rate for non-feed use is stable compared with the 1990s and markedly inferior to its historical performance. Without biofuel, the growth rate of world cereal consumption is equal to 1.3% compared with 1.8% for biofuel".

This massively increased demand from biofuel is largely determined by the very large subsidies provided in many western countries, which have, ironically, been increasing their subsidisation of biofuel at the same time that they have reduced subsidies on food cultivation. Aside from a few producers, such as Brazil and Cuba, biofuel production in most locations would be completely unviable without these large subsidies.

The impact of these on diverting production and affecting price has been even more significant in the case of edible oils. The report shows that "the use of vegetable oils for food slowed down between the 1990s and the 2000s (from 4.4% a year to 3.3%), but industrial use of vegetable oil soared, pushed by the booming European biofuel industry. As a result, the share of industrial use in world consumption of vegetable oils jumped from 11% to 24% between 2000 and 2010".

The surprising conclusion from all this is that, leaving out the impact of the biofuel boom of the 2000s, global consumption of both cereals and edible oils is actually slowing down. All the more tragic, then, that speculative forces are still allowed to run amok in global commodity markets and global food prices are kept so high as to increase the deprivation of the millions of hungry people in the world.

twitter caused tottenham riot....,

themediablog | The Daily Mail this morning has suggested Twitter may be to blame for violent riots in Tottenham, North London, last night. I'll not link to the story - as they're no doubt hoping to drive traffic with such nonsense.

Predictably we're not told whose "fears" these are. I suspect it's a case of 'journalistic licence'. And presumably The Mail considers its own images of burning vehicles and those broadcast on rolling news channels to millions through the night to be less controversial than those posted and retweeted "more than 100 times" on Twitter.

Further down the article any doubts that Twitter's was a mere bit-part in the violence have vanished altogether as it is a declared a bull blown "Twitter riot" in one of the image captions

hood rioting over hood policing in london...,

Telegraph | 26 police officers were injured in the unrest and 42 people were arrested for offences including violent disorder, burglary and theft following overnight clashes.

Mr Lammy today said the area had had its "heart ripped out" by the rioting and said there may even be fatalities in the burned out buildings, he said.

He said: "A community that was already hurting has now had its heart ripped out.

"The post office, shops, news agents, mobile phone shops, council building that deal with customer complaints, smashed to pieces by mindless, mindless people last night - many of whom are not from Tottenham and had come from afar into this community intent on causing violence.

"What happened here raised huge questions and we need answers, but the response to that is not to loot, to rob.

i love how the arab spring sprung in israel...,

Reuters | Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scrambled on Sunday to try to quell escalating demonstrations for lower living costs after a quarter-million people marched in the biggest economy-related protests in Israel's history.

While Netanyahu's governing coalition faced no immediate threat, a summer of discontent in Israel has underscored the potential electoral impact of a burdened middle class rallying under a banner of "social justice" and rewriting a political agenda long dominated by security issues.

On the morning after Saturday's demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial capital, and other cities, Netanyahu -- a champion of free market reform -- announced at the weekly cabinet meeting the appointment of a committee of experts to propose social-economic reform.

"Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed a public protest that expresses real hardship," he said.

Holding out the prospect of "major change" -- while cautioning he would "not be able to satisfy everyone" -- Netanyahu said the committee, headed by Harvard-educated Israeli economist Manuel Trajtenberg, would hold "a broad dialogue with various sectors in the community."

In under a month, the popular protest movement has swollen from a cluster of student tent-squatters into a diffuse, countrywide mobilization of Israel's middle class.

Itzik Shmuli, a protest leader, welcomed Netanyahu's round-table initiative. But, he told Israel Radio: "I want to be sure ... we will not be given the runaround for three months, at the end of which we will not emerge with real solutions."

GROWTH

Israel projects growth of 4.8 percent this year at a time of economic stagnation in many Western countries, and has relatively low unemployment at 5.7 percent.

But business cartels and widening wage gaps have kept many citizens from feeling the benefit.

The conservative coalition government has vowed to free up more state-owned land for development, build more low-cost housing and improve public transport. It also wants to lower dairy prices with more imports and boost medical staff numbers to address demands by striking doctors.

Demands submitted by the National Union of Israeli Students go much further, calling for an expansion of free education and bigger government housing budgets.

The demonstrations have upstaged Netanyahu's standoff with the Palestinians ahead of their bid to lobby for U.N. recognition of statehood next month.

Protests also deflated his celebration of Israel's stability as popular uprisings rock surrounding Arab states across the Middle East and North Africa.

Social media also played a role in the Israeli protests, which began with a call on Facebook for a boycott of cottage cheese after the price of the Israeli staple hit a new high.

On one main Tel Aviv thoroughfare a throng of demonstrators stretched as far as the eye could see against a backdrop of soaring skyscrapers.

"A new country," read one banner newspaper headline, amid commentary cautioning Netanyahu that he could not afford to ignore the shifting focus in Israeli society.

Protests on such a scale in the country of 7.7 million have usually been over issues of war and peace.

Several rightist commentators have voiced fear the demonstrations signal the resurgence of Israel's left-wing after its voice was muted by Israeli-Palestinian violence over the past decade and flagging peace prospects.

"There has been nothing like this for decades -- all these people coming together, taking to the streets, demanding change. It's a revolution," said Baruch Oren, a 33-year-old protest leader.

interesting account of the exchange stabilization fund

Video - First of five videos discussing the exchange stabilization fund.

Marketskeptics | The video series about the ESF’s history is finally finished! I especially recommend watching the first (explains the basics about the ESF), fourth, and fifth videos (Part 4 and 5 really deal with the material that I have been “afraid to blog about”.)

interesting comment about fukushima fallout...,

Lethal Levels of Radiation at Fukushima: What Are the Implications? from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

energynews | Japan has been discovering radiation all over the Island and yesterday TEPCO announced that the worse is yet to come – just as Arnie says in the above video. Most likely, in just a year from now, we will start seeing a cancer epidemic open up in Northeast Japan. Later on the epidemic will start appearing in several other places as well.

Below is an email I received from an America friend of mine currently working and living in Tokyo. He said that some of this email may just be rumors but some of it may actually be true as well. I don’t believe all of it but remember this come from a high-level, completely bilingual economic analyst working in a US finance firm that analyzes and reports all that is happening within the Japanese finance industry and several other industries on a daily basis:

“International firms are closing left and right as CEOs and leaders leave the country. Kan and other high-level government officials are rumored to have already left and they only make visits back to Japan when they have to. The electric power grid is quite stressed and workers who are willing to stay and live in this disastrous environment are becoming hard to find.”

“Japan makes 90% of America’s quality and proprietary IC chips, resistors, ceramic capacitors, electrolytic capacitors, transformers, transistors, and diodes. Every TV, PC, cell phone, radio, car made in America is loaded with these items. They hold the patents, and no nation wants them coming in to build new factories in this economy. The long of it, they wont be producing much more for much longer.

“The major USA companies cannot survive without these components. Ford, GM, Chrysler, Dell, Microsoft, Logitec, Apple, Motorola, Philips, GA, 3M,… ALL of them depend on Japanese products. For the US firms to tool up, infringe on Japanese patents, build factories, train people, just to pay them with minimum wages and food will never happen. The corrupt may be able to manipulate the markets, but they cannot when America’s largest producing companies WILL NOT HAVE A PRODUCT LINE FOR 2012.

“Once the masses learn of these there will be three major runs:

Stocks

Banks

Food

“…and the elite know this. They need to pull their investments and make it spendable as quickly as they can without anyone knowing about it. But that will never happen. They will try to drop gold and silver prices as they try to buy up as much as they can with what dollars they have left, but it will be short lived. $1000 silver and $10k gold are expected by many economic experts including myself.”

“Below a list of companies about to close down and leave Japan once and for all. Many were already planing to abandon Japan even before the disasters hit. Just think about all the American companies who are completely reliant on their products for production AND retail sales.”

Toyota
Mazda
Nissan
Subaru
Honda
Isuzu
Suzuki
Kawasaki
Yamaha
Mitsubishi
Mitsumi
Kia
Hitachi
Sony
Fuji
Fujitsu
NEC
Panasonic
TEAC
RICHO
NIPPON
Sanyo
Cannon
Sega
Nintendo
Matsushita
Toshiba
Nippon
Toyo
Sharp
Bridgestone

“And hundreds and hundreds more. The Japanese government and other distinguished company execs will continue to play it all down, censor, deny reality and keep saying that everything is OK. Meanwhile working in collusion they will all short their own companies stocks and then head for the hills. This all may sound somewhat over the top, but believe me, this truth will soon come to be.”

japan drawing flies...,

Video - Soundgarden Drawing Flies

DailyYomiuri | Hordes of flies continue to plague areas devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake, some of them threatening survivors with serious disease.

Flies have thrived on the ample rotten fish and sludge that riddles the disaster-hit areas. Municipal and private exterminators kill them, only to see more emerge, and residents constantly in need of bug sprays and swatters are becoming increasingly irritated.

In mid-July, extermination companies nationwide were dispatched to an industrial complex in Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture. The workers, who wear protective suits and masks, used about two tons of bug spray in the morning alone.

"This is an abnormal situation," one of the exterminators, Hideaki Yamanaka, 63, from Osaka Prefecture, said. "It's the first time in decades that I've used such a large amount of spray."

Flies are hatching from rotten fish carried out of destroyed processing facilities by the tsunami, and also sludge-filled drains. Local governments have been taking measures such as burying rotten fish underground and abandoning them at sea.

According to experts, flies are also residing in the styrofoam containers the fish were kept in. These containers have stayed afloat at sea, spreading the fly outbreak even further.

An Ofunato city government official said, "Even in commercial and residential areas without fisheries companies, we have received numerous requests to exterminate flies."

One problem is that flies are hatching from areas previously cleared by exterminators. Since April, the Tokyo-based Japan Pest Control Association, which includes harmful insect-exterminating companies and other entities, has dispatched a total of 4,000 workers to 14 municipalities, including Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, and Rikuzen-Takata, Iwate Prefecture.

Motokazu Hirao, 73, deputy head of the association, said, "Removal of debris has progressed and the peak of the [fly outbreak] has passed."

But he added, "Flies hatch every 10 to 20 days. We need to persistently exterminate them."

The Self-Defense Forces have taken the fly outbreak seriously, dispatching 10 teams of 15 members each for "epidemic prevention assistance" since mid-July. They have even deployed spraying vehicles and portable sprayers normally used to defend against biological and chemical weapons.

Duquesne? - betcha yingling is a tea partisan....,

CNN | Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré first gained national attention commanding the military's response to Hurricane Katrina. He's back in the spotlight again, arguing that members of the U.S. Congress lack a sense of "shared purpose." His solution is to send them to internment camps.

Here are some quotes from his CNN.com opinion piece: "It's time to get draconian ... time to load our elected officials on troop planes and send them to Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

"Put them in tents with no air conditioning, have Army drill sergeants teach them teamwork and physical sacrifice. When they recognize their responsibility to the people of America, they can return to D.C., their upscale restaurants, and military plane trips, as though they were royalty."

Taken at face value, Gen. Honoré is advocating a coup d'etat. Neither the president nor the Army has the authority to intern people based on their political beliefs or behaviors, let alone members of Congress.

Honoré's "draconian" measures violate every conceivable constitutional principle, from due process to the separation of powers. While using the innocuous term "boot camp," Honoré is actually advocating interning members of Congress for the purpose of political re-education. "Boot camp," or basic training, has a distinct military purpose: to transform civilian volunteers into effective service members responsive to the lawful orders of a chain of command.

Honoré's re-education facility at Camp Shelby has no such military purpose. Instead, its purpose is to change the political beliefs and behaviors of popularly elected civilian officials. Honoré would release members of Congress from internment only when they "recognized their responsibility to America." Honoré does not specify who will make this judgment, but it certainly cannot be the voters. Perhaps Honoré expects the president to make this judgment, or perhaps it will be left to military officers. In either case, the moment that the U.S. military starts teaching Congress about "teamwork and physical sacrifice," the rule of law in America will have come to an end.

A more plausible explanation is that the general didn't mean what he said. Relying on the colorful bombast that made him a media darling during the Katrina debacle, Honoré may be speaking apocryphally. He doesn't really intend to force members of Congress to live in tents in Camp Shelby. Instead, he's lamenting the partisan rancor in Washington when compared with the discipline of America's military forces.

Still, it's clear that Honoré misunderstands the ideas that underpin the U.S. Constitution. James Madison, rightly called "Father of the U.S. Constitution," did not expect members of Congress to embrace Honoré's "shared purpose." Instead, he expected vigorous debate on the very topics under discussion in Washington today.

Madison and the other founders knew that Americans held different views on the proper size, scope and purposes of government. They anticipated the formation of factions organized around these views and developed mechanisms to cope with the resulting disagreements.

operation shady RAT

NYTimes | An American cybersecurity company issued a report on Wednesday saying that it had identified a single perpetrator of cyberattacks that lasted up to five years on a wide range of governments, American corporations and even United Nations groups, and that the pattern of targets suggested the attacker was a “state actor.”

However, as with a number of other alarming recent reports on computer spying, the study offered few details that would allow independent verification, and it was difficult to immediately assess the damage done. It did not identify the location of the attacking computer system, say what kinds of documents or information were stolen, or offer any direct evidence of a state’s involvement.

The company, McAfee, said it had identified 72 targets — 49 of them American, including 14 federal, state and county agencies and 11 defense contractors — and also informed law enforcement agencies, which it said were investigating.

The White House referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security. At a news conference on other matters, that department’s secretary, Janet Napolitano, said: “We became aware of the McAfee report, I think, today, which is when it was released to the press, as well. We obviously will evaluate it, look at it and pursue what needs to be pursued in terms of its contents.”

One of the few named organizations, the World Anti-Doping Agency, cast doubt on the report’s assertion that the agency had been subject to a 14-month attack that began in August 2009. In a statement, the director general, David Howman, acknowledged that the agency had experienced an e-mail breach in February 2008, but that “at this stage, W.A.D.A. has no evidence from its security experts of the intrusions as listed by McAfee and the agency has yet to be convinced that they took place.”

McAfee, which was recently acquired by Intel, said it released the report to coincide with the start on Wednesday of the annual Black Hat technical security conference in Las Vegas. Briefings were scheduled to be delivered at the conference. Details of the study were first published on the Web site of Vanity Fair.

Asked why McAfee decided not to identify most of the corporations that were targets in the attacks, the company said that the corporations were worried about being identified and alarming shareholders or customers.

Cybersecurity is now a major international concern, with hackers gaining access to sensitive corporate and military secrets, including intellectual property. The report comes after high-profile computer network attacks aimed at the International Monetary Fund, Sony and the Lockheed Martin Corporation, America’s largest military contractor.

Concern over attacks being carried out by nation-states is rising sharply, particularly after Google said last year that Chinese hackers stole some of the company’s source code. Many security experts say the Chinese government has built up a sophisticated cyberwarfare unit and that the government might be partnering with professional hackers. But the list of entities, government or private, suspected of hacking campaigns, is a long one.