ten things you can do

garalperovitz | The richest 400 Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 180 million taken together. The political system is in deadlock. Social and economic pain continue to grow. 

Environmental devastation and global warming present growing challenges. Is there any path toward a more democratic, equal and ecologically sustainable society? What can one person do?

In fact, there is a great deal one person working with others can do. Experiments across the country already focus on concrete actions that point toward a larger vision of long-term systemic change – especially the development of alternative economic institutions. Practical problem-solving activities on Main Streets across the country have begun to lay down the elements and principles of what might one day become the direction of a new system – one centered around building egalitarian wealth, nurturing democracy and community life, avoiding climate catastrophe and fostering liberty through greater economic security and free time.

Margaret Mead famously observed: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Some of the ten steps described below may be too big for one person to take on in isolation, but many are exactly the right size for a small and thoughtful group committed to building a new economy, restoring democracy and displacing corporate power.

As the history of the civil rights movement, women’s movement, and gay-liberation movement ought to remind us, it’s precisely actions of this sort at the local level that have triggered the seismic shifts of progressive change in American history.

david brin says to rock the vote

davidbrin |  Look, I am conservative enough to prefer a budget that's close to balanced, and libertarian enough to think government should be very tightly scrutinized and always need to satisfy a burden of proof, that its services would not be better performed by… us.  I show such trends -- toward a devolution of government activity to tech-empowered citizens -- in EXISTENCE.  Indeed, anyone who shares those desires… along with wanting a scientific, flat-and-open, just and entrepreneurial and future-looking civilization… would have to be crazy to support the current (hijacked) version of the GOP.

One graphic shows clearly how gullible are all the watchers of Fox News, who actually believe the rant that Democrats are the fiscally irresponsible big-spenders.  It starts with the Clinton era surpluses then shows how revenues initially dropped under the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy… without any "supply side" (SS) rebound.  (SS has never predicted correctly, even once.)

Watch the the spectacular (9/11/Iraq/Afghanistan) rise in spending - and in taxation (now pounding the middle class) -  under republican rule, then even steeper, after they torched the economy and revenues plunged in Bush's last two years. Then?  The chart shows federal spending almost perfectly FLAT under Obama, proving the one truth that should make any fiscal conservative vote democratic.  That the 2nd derivative of deficit is always negative under demmies and almost always positive under goppers. Show this.  Remind your crazy uncle that we narrowly avoided a second great depression.

This is not about classic left-right issues.  It is about insanity.

== Wisdom from … Osama bin Laden? ==

Anyone -- including Buckley-Goldwater conservatives -- who believes that the currently constituted Republican Party -- the version owned by Rupert Murdoch -- with its heritage of Bushite calamity -- should ever again be trusted with anything more than a burnt match, should contemplate the following quotation from Osama bin Laden. 

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedin to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. 

"This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahedin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."  

Osama bin Laden

NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

guardian | A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. 

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."

privatization of science is the intellectually strong peoples' plan...,

NYTimes | Last April, President Obama assembled some of the nation’s most august scientific dignitaries in the East Room of the White House. Joking that his grades in physics made him a dubious candidate for “scientist in chief,” he spoke of using technological innovation “to grow our economy” and unveiled “the next great American project”: a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain. 

Along the way, he invoked the government’s leading role in a history of scientific glories, from putting a man on the moon to creating the Internet. The Brain initiative, as he described it, would be a continuation of that grand tradition, an ambitious rebuttal to deep cuts in federal financing for scientific research. 

“We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead,” Mr. Obama said. “We have to seize them. I don’t want the next job-creating discoveries to happen in China or India or Germany. I want them to happen right here.”

Absent from his narrative, though, was the back story, one that underscores a profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and practiced in America. In fact, the government initiative grew out of richly financed private research: A decade before, Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, had set up a brain science institute in Seattle, to which he donated $500 million, and Fred Kavli, a technology and real estate billionaire, had then established brain institutes at Yale, Columbia and the University of California. Scientists from those philanthropies, in turn, had helped devise the Obama administration’s plan. 

American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise. 

In Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research. 

The result is a new calculus of influence and priorities that the scientific community views with a mix of gratitude and trepidation. 

“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.”

climate change is god's plan...,

newsvandal |  Secretary of State John Kerry declared climate change “a threat to national security” and likened it to a “weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

His declaration during a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia came on the heels of President Obama’s visit to drought-stricken California to deliver both aid and pointed remarks on the need to make climate change a political priority.

At least one senator—Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)—thinks Congress is getting closer to taking some action on carbon-limiting fees and regulations. But his is a “contrarian view” stoked by pending EPA regulations on coal-fired plants and, perhaps, the demonstrable link in other nations between the increasingly bad weather that people experience and their growing trepidation about a changing climate they may not fully understand.

Could droughts, heatwaves, superstorms and, for good measure, a polar vortex or two finally force a real change in U.S. policy?

Not if God’s Plan gets in the way.

That’s the dirty little secret sustaining the Holy Trinity of big oil, natural gas and “clean” coal. They preserve their grip on both U.S. policymaking and those swollen wads of taxpayer-amplified profits by greasing the palms of political roundheels who, more often than not, are elected by a political base built on the Evangelicals and various mega-churchgoers who dominate gerrymandered districts, act as gatekeepers in primary elections and protest loudly over Biblically-bereft school curricula.

The “protest loudly” part is important because Big Carbon and their coterie of concubines cannot endure without some reliable public acquiescence or, even more alarming, the mechanical recalcitrance of their political base, even in the face mounting evidence. That sort of recalcitrance in the face of evidence is contrary to the practice of science, but almost requisite for adherence to creationism, climate denialism or the idea that our destinies are made manifest by the will of the Almighty.

According to a 2011 Baylor University study, seventy-three percent of Americans believe that God has a plan for everyone. And the more strongly they believe in God’s Plan, the more likely they are to see government overreach in the affairs of Americans. As Christianity Today pointed out, this distaste for government’s role in human affairs “…diminishes as belief in God’s plan wanes.”

It’s a simple juxtaposition—God’s preset course for history trumps any scheme concocted by humans. And any human-centered efforts that deny the Almighty’s heavy hand in the writing of history are, at best, apocryphal and, at worst, heretical.

In the case of the environment and climate change, human impact on something as big as the whole of God’s creation is, in and of itself, a dubious proposition. This makes human-centered explanations of climate change or the sixth mass extinction not only incidental, but even self-aggrandizing. It also fosters a willingness to accept the otherwise unacceptable, and this willingness is predicated on one simple turn of phrase—it’s all part of God’s plan.

Climate is part of God’s Plan.

does the u.s. and its puppets want to start a war with russia?

voiceofrussia | Greetings citizens of the world. We are Anonymous Ukraine Operation Independence Ukraine continues.

Western hirelings and fascists are attempting to start a war with Russia in Ukraine.

Much of Ukraine is now under the control of the Bandera nazis but all is not lost. We are winning. We continue to uncover and expose to the world the evil plans the United States, NATO, the European Union, the NSA, the CIA, the IMF and their corporate banker masters have for Ukraine. We will not let this stand. We will expose every detail of their plan. We will never forgive them for what they have done to Ukraine and they will pay the cost.

Ukraine has no government. Those in the Verhovnaya Rada are self-appointed Nazi killers and do not represent the Ukrainian people.

We repeat. Anonymous Ukraine continues to support peace and the right of the people of Ukraine and the Crimea to self determination. The Bandera Nazis and fascist thugs that are pretending to be the voice of the people will be stopped. The US/NATO invasion of Ukraine will be stopped. Their puppets will be exposed and brought to justice.

Murderers and fascist thugs who kill police and members of the security services of Ukraine do not represent the will or the wishes of the people of Ukraine. Nazis who deny the Nuremberg Trials at the United Nations do not represent the will of the people.

Anonymous Ukraine supports the Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Tartars, Jews and others that the Bandera nazis want to kill. They are also Anonymous.

We have hacked the e-mail correspondence of the US Army and the Nazi Trident in Ukraine including the US Army Attaché’s Assistant in Kiev Jason Gresh and yet another high ranking Bandera Nazi from the Ukrainian General Staff Igor Protsyk.

The western hirelings and traitors are planning to conduct a series of attacks on Ukrainian military bases in order to destabilize the situation in Ukraine. The want to stop the referendum in Crimea. They want war with Russia.

The US Army writes to Igor Protsyk that it’s time to implement a plan that implies causing problems to the transport hubs in the south-east of Ukraine in order to frame-up the neighbor. It will create favorable conditions for Pentagon to act.

Russia is Ukraine’s friend. We Anonymous, have witnessed the support for the people of Ukraine by Russia. Russia has kept order in Crimea while the Bandera nazis have destroyed much of what the people cherish. The Bandera nazis want blood and war for Ukraine. Then they will sell Ukraine to NATO and the United States and take their money to another country like Julia Timoshenko whose accounts we have also hacked and which we can empty at will.

The United States and its puppets in Ukraine in Ukraine want to start a war with Russia.

will valodya invade ukraine?

20committee | As I write, Russian forces, reportedly close to 100,000 troops, are massing on the eastern borders of Ukraine for a possible invasion. The Kremlin is either about to start a major war, or wants the world to think it is: there is no third choice now. Given the scheduled referendum in the Crimea this Sunday, smart money has it that Putin, if he really launches an all-out push for Ukraine – which, as I’ve already explained, could be a disastrous move on his part – it will come early next week. Needless to add, this scenario brings chills to me and to anyone who understands the stakes in what would immediately be the biggest European war since 1945.

Yet that invasion, with its terrible consequences, is what many in Ukraine now expect. That mood of resignation, and what a Russian invasion might look like, are elaborated well in a new piece in Novoye Vremya (The New Times), a Moscow newsmagazine that is a rare outlet for anti-Kremlin views in Russia. The article by Maksim Shveyts, titled “Kyiv: Expecting War,” follows in toto, with my analysis following.

don giovanni may have gotten ghadafi, but he won't get assad...,

WaPo |  Three years into the revolt against his rule, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in a stronger position than ever before to quell the rebellion against his rule by Syrians who rose up to challenge his hold on power, first with peaceful protests and later with arms.

Aided by the steadfast support of his allies and the deepening disarray of his foes, Assad is pressing ahead with plans to be reelected to a third seven-year term this summer while sustaining intense military pressure intended to crush his opponents.

The strategy is not new, but in recent months it has started to yield tangible progress in the form of slow but steady gains on several key fronts on the battlefield that call into question long-held perceptions of a stalemate.

Most notably, the government has pushed the rebels back or squeezed them into isolated pockets in large swathes of the territory surrounding Damascus, diminishing prospects that the opposition will soon be in a position to seriously threaten the capital or topple the regime.

For those who joined the effort to unseat Assad three years ago, flush with the fervor of the Arab Spring protests sweeping the region, the realization that the rebellion is faltering is “deeply depressing,” said Abu Emad, a student activist who has watched as the government has steadily crushed the armed rebellion in his hometown of Homs, once regarded as the epicenter of the revolt.

Saturday marks the third anniversary of the initially tentative anti-government demonstrations that spiraled into civil war, and many Syrians are wondering whether the 140,000 deaths and the displacement of millions of people were worth the price, he said.

“More than ever there is no hope. Not on the ground and not politically,” Abu Emad said, using a pseudonym to protect his identity. “For the rebels to win, it will take a miracle.”

the neocons are anything but finished...,

commondreams |  Rather than being ostracized and marginalized – as they surely deserved for the Iraq War fiasco – key neocons were still held in the highest regard. According to his memoir Duty, Gates let neocon military theorist Frederick Kagan persuade him to support a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. soldiers into the Afghan War in 2009.

Gates wrote that “an important way station in my ‘pilgrim’s progress’ from skepticism to support of more troops [in Afghanistan] was an essay by the historian Fred Kagan, who sent me a prepublication draft.”

Defense Secretary Gates then collaborated with holdovers from Bush’s high command, including neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus, and Secretary of State Clinton to maneuver Obama into a political corner from which he felt he had no choice but to accede to their recommendation for the “surge.”

Obama reportedly regretted the decision almost immediately after he made it. The Afghan “surge,” like the earlier neocon-driven Iraq War “surge,” cost another 1,000 or so dead U.S. soldiers but ultimately didn’t change the war’s strategic direction.

At Clinton’s State Department, other neocons were given influential posts. Frederick Kagan’s brother Robert, a neocon from the Reagan administration and co-founder of the neocon Project for the New American Century, was named to an advisory position on the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Secretary Clinton also elevated Robert Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, to be State Department spokesperson.

Though Obama’s original “team of rivals” eventually left the scene (Gates in mid-2011, Petraeus in a sex scandal in late 2012, and Clinton in early 2013), those three provided the neocons a crucial respite, time to regroup and reorganize. So, when Sen. John Kerry replaced Clinton as Secretary of State (with the considerable help of his neocon friend John McCain), the State Department’s neocons were poised for a powerful comeback.

Nuland was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs and took personal aim at the elected government of Ukraine, which had become a choice neocon target because it maintained close ties to Russia, whose President Putin was undercutting the neocons’ “regime change” strategies in their most valued area, the Middle East. Most egregiously, Putin was helping Obama avert wars in Syria and Iran.

So, as neocon NED president Carl Gershman wrote in the Washington Post in September 2013, Ukraine became “the biggest prize,” but he added that the even juicier target beyond Ukraine was Putin, who, Gershman added, “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In other words, the ultimate goal of the Ukraine gambit is not just “regime change” in Kiev but “regime change” in Moscow. By eliminating the independent-minded and strong-willed Putin, the neocons presumably fantasize about slipping one of their ciphers (perhaps a Russian version of Ahmed Chalabi) into the Kremlin.

Then, the neocons could press ahead, unencumbered, toward their original “regime change” scheme in the Middle East, with wars against Syria and Iran.

As dangerous – and even crazy – as this neocon vision is (raising the specter of a possible nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia), the neocons clearly appear back in control of U.S. foreign policy. And, they almost can’t lose in terms of their own self-interest, whichever way the Ukraine crisis breaks.

insatiable...,

RT | As I took in the opening night of Vancouver Opera’s Don Giovanni on the weekend, I realized there was something vaguely familiar about the libertine protagonist.

The unrepentant sociopath whose conquests number in the thousands and who remains indifferent to the pain and suffering he’s caused, didn’t just remind me of my ex boyfriend. 

No, there was something more in his smug hubris, his unabated appetites, something that recalled dramas happening outside the theatre, in the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe. And then it dawned on me: Don Giovanni’s predatory technique of seduction and abandonment is nothing less than the modus operandum of US Foreign Policy. 

As jilted politicos – from Noriega to the Shah of Iran to Saddam Hussein – can attest, the only thing worse than being an enemy of the US is being a former ally. 

And yet the amazing thing is, just as with the seductive Don, people keep falling for the same tired old lines. “I think you’re really special, and I want to liberate you. Of course I’m not only interested in your oil fields. Your people deserve an autonomous state.” And let’s not forget the classic: “I’m here to bring you freedom and democracy honey.”

 

Why is it that so many folks – from the Free Syrian Army to the Ukrainian ‘rebels’ – are happy to sing Là ci darem la mano with their handsome suitor and head off to his gleaming palace, damning precedents notwithstanding? 

While Don Giovanni’s conquests, as Leporello tells his spurned lover Dona Elvira in the famous ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’ (‘My dear lady, this is the catalogue’) include ‘640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, but in Spain, 1,003’, he still keeps on truckin’, preying on women of all shapes, sizes and nationalities. 

To date, as professor Zoltan Grossman notes, in his ‘History of US Military Interventions since 1890’, from Wounded Knee to Chile to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the US has lots of ‘splainin to do.

They sure broke a lot of hearts in 1956 Budapest, 1968 Prague and 1991 in Southern Iraq to name only a few. And yet, just as the decidedly un-self-aware Don Giovanni, the US continues to sell itself as the apparently amnesiac romantic rescuer of the world’s unloved.

black to the future: american proxy warmaking in africa

tomdispatch | Lion Forward Teams? Echo Casemate? Juniper Micron?

You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to you.  It isn’t.  It’s the language of the U.S. military’s simmering African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions carried out in countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a map; the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions.     

Since 9/11, the U.S. military has been making inroads in Africa, building alliances, facilities, and a sophisticated logistics network.  Despite repeated assurances by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that military activities on the continent were minuscule, a 2013 investigation by TomDispatch exposed surprisingly large and expanding U.S. operations -- including recent military involvement with no fewer than 49 of 54 nations on the continent.  Washington’s goal continues to be building these nations into stable partners with robust, capable militaries, as well as creating regional bulwarks favorable to its strategic interests in Africa.  Yet over the last years, the results have often confounded the planning -- with American operations serving as a catalyst for blowback (to use a term of CIA tradecraft). 

A U.S.-backed uprising in Libya, for instance, helped spawn hundreds of militias that have increasingly caused chaos in that country, leading to repeated attacks on Western interests and the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Tunisia has become ever more destabilized, according to a top U.S. commander in the region. Kenya and Algeria were hit by spectacular, large-scale terrorist attacks that left Americans dead or wounded.  South Sudan, a fledgling nation Washington recently midwifed into being that has been slipping into civil war, now has more than 870,000 displaced persons, is facing an imminent hunger crisis, and has recently been the site of mass atrocities, including rapes and killings. Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed military of Mali was repeatedly defeated by insurgent forces after managing to overthrow the elected government, and the U.S.-supported forces of the Central African Republic (CAR) failed to stop a ragtag rebel group from ousting the president.  

In an effort to staunch the bleeding in those two countries, the U.S. has been developing a back-to-the-future military policy in Africa -- making common cause with one of the continent’s former European colonial powers in a set of wars that seem to be spreading, not staunching violence and instability in the region.

this beezy again...,

washingtonexaminer |  Secretary of State John Kerry warned of serious repercussions for Russia on Monday if last-ditch talks over the weekend to resolve the crisis in Ukraine failed to persuade Moscow to soften its stance.

Kerry will travel to London for a Friday meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ahead of a Sunday referendum vote in the Crimea region to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation

U.S. and European officials argue that Moscow is orchestrating the referendum and waging an intimidation campaign with thousands of Russian troops controlling the region. If Russian-backed lawmakers in Crimea go through with the Sunday referendum, Kerry said the U.S. and its European allies will not recognize it as legitimate under international law.

The U.S. and Europe on Monday would then unite to impose sanctions on Russia, Kerry told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Thursday during a hearing on the State Department's budget.
“There will be a response of some kind to the referendum itself,” Kerry said. “If there is no sign [from Russia] of any capacity to respond to this issue ... there will be a very serious series of steps on Monday.”

“Our hope is to have Russia join in respecting international law. ... There is no justification, no legality to this referendum that is taking place,” he said. “The hope is that reason will prevail but there is no guarantee of that.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a top critic of President Obama's foreign policy, asked what the administration would do if Russian forces advance farther into the eastern area of Ukraine, and the new government in Kiev asks the U.S. for weapons to fight the Russians.
Kerry responded carefully, saying “we have contingencies – we are talking through various options that may or may not be available.”

why ukraine matters to many other nations

bloomberg | Ukraine doesn’t seem like the kind of place that world powers would want to tussle over. It’s as poor as Paraguay and as corrupt as Iran. During the 20th century it was home to a deadly famine under Stalin (the Holomodor, 1933), a historic massacre of Jews (Babi Yar, 1941), and one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters (Chernobyl, 1986). Now, with former President Viktor Yanukovych in hiding, it’s struggling to form a government, its credit rating is down to CCC, a recession looms, and foreign reserves are running low. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, head of the opposition party affiliated with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said on Feb. 24 in Parliament, “Ukraine has never faced such a terrible financial catastrophe in all its years of independence.”

But Ukraine is also a breadbasket, a natural gas chokepoint, and a nation of 45 million people in a pivotal spot north of the Black Sea. Ukraine matters—to Russia, Europe, the U.S., and even China.

President Obama denied on Feb. 19 that it’s a piece on “some Cold War chessboard.” But the best hope for Ukraine is that it will get special treatment precisely because it is a valued pawn in a new version of the Great Game, the 19th century struggle for influence between Russia and Britain.

Russia, which straddles Europe and Asia, has sought a role in the rest of Europe since the reign of Peter the Great in the early 18th century. An alliance with Ukraine preserves that. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire,” the American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1998. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to join his Eurasian Union trade bloc, not the European Union. Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet is headquartered in Sevastopol, a formerly Russian city that now belongs to Ukraine. Last year Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom (OGZPY) sold about 160 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Europe—a quarter of European demand—and half of that traveled through a maze of Ukrainian pipelines. Those pipelines also supply Ukrainian factories that produce steel, petrochemicals, and other industrial goods for sale to Mother Russia. “Ukraine is probably more integrated than any other former Soviet republic with the Russian economy,” says Edward Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

yawning is a form of jaw dropping too?

rsn |  Today, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein released an astonishing statement on her committee's investigation into torture by the CIA – and the intelligence agency's shocking, and possibly illegal, activities to spy on the committee itself.

A bit of important background: The investigation into the CIA's "enhanced techniques" of interrogation – doublespeak for torture – began late last decade, after it was revealed that video tapes of the CIA's torture sessions had been destroyed, over the objection of George W. Bush's White House Counsel and the Director of National Intelligence.

In lieu of the destroyed video evidence, the CIA began by providing its Senate overseers with "CIA operational cables describing the detention conditions and the day-to-day CIA interrogations."

Here the 11 most jaw dropping disclosures and accusations from Feinstein's statement:

double-0 knew the sissy pit was bout to get hit and didn't give a sh**....,

kcstar | The CIA's director and its top lawyer told White House attorneys in advance about their plans to file an official criminal complaint accusing Senate Intelligence Committee aides of improperly obtaining secret agency documents, the White House confirmed Wednesday.

Lawyers in the White House counsel's office did not approve the CIA's move to refer its complaint to the Justice Department or provide any advice to the agency, presidential spokesman Jay Carney said.

"There was no comment, there was no weighing in, there was no judgment," Carney said, citing protocol not to interfere in the ongoing inquiries into the matter by the FBI and the CIA's inspector general.

The public controversy erupted on Wednesday when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, head of the intelligence panel, accused the CIA of snooping in a computer network it had set up for committee aides conducting an investigation, possibly violating the Constitution as well as federal law.

She also disclosed that a top CIA lawyer had filed papers with the Justice Department saying committee personnel may have violated the law by possessing certain agency documents.

Carney made his comments at the White House as the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee avoided taking sides in the dispute between Feinstein, D-Calif., and the spy agency.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said in a brief speech on the Senate floor he does not know all the facts, and a special investigator may be needed to find out what happened. He said pointedly that GOP staff aides were not involved in the activities at the heart of the dispute.

Carney did not say whether President Barack Obama was directly aware of the decision. "The president has been aware in general about the protocols and the discussions and occasional disputes involved," he said.

Obama avoided commenting on his involvement in the dispute at the end of a meeting Wednesday with female Democratic lawmakers on women's economic issues. He added that "with respect to the issues that are going back and forth between the Senate committee and the CIA, (CIA Director) John Brennan has referred them to the appropriate authorities. And they are looking into it. And that's not something that is an appropriate role for me and the White House to weigh into at this point."

Carney's confirmation of the White House's awareness of the CIA's decision deepens the complicated chronology that led the committee head to denounce the CIA and top officials Tuesday for allegedly trying to intimidate and monitor congressional overseers.

Feinstein's committee has been investigating the CIA's now-shuttered "black site" overseas prison system and harsh interrogation of prisoners. The committee's long-overdue report has been stymied by its inability to fully review a classified CIA report on the George W. Bush-era secret interrogations, while CIA officials have questioned whether Senate investigators breached a classified computer system in their efforts to press for the material.

Carney said Brennan and the acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger, informed White House officials about the decision to make a referral to the Justice Department. Carney would not say when the notification occurred.

A spokesman for James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Wednesday that Clapper has been "fully aware of the circumstances related to this matter and is in regular contact with Director Brennan." The DNI spokesman, Shawn Turner, did not say whether Clapper was told in advance of the CIA's plans to file its complaint to Justice or whether he approved of the decision.

"Commenting on this issue while it is under review by the Justice Department would be inappropriate for someone in his position," Turner said.

Feinstein castigated Eatinger, though not by name, and characterized the move as "a potential effort to intimidate this staff, and I am not taking it lightly."

She contends CIA officials monitored Senate aides as they worked on their report, raising concerns of a clash between the legislative and executive branch.

Brennan said the CIA was "not in any way, shape or form trying to thwart this report's progression."

Obama said he was "absolutely committed" to declassifying the Senate Intelligence Committee's report. "I would urge them to go ahead and complete the report, send it to us," Obama said. "We will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward."

nsa's industrial-scale botnet strategery..,

firstlook | Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.”

In a top-secret presentation, dated August 2009, the NSA describes a pre-programmed part of the covert infrastructure called the “Expert System,” which is designed to operate “like the brain.” The system manages the applications and functions of the implants and “decides” what tools they need to best extract data from infected machines.

AI poses extinction risk to humanity?

HuffPo | Artificial intelligence poses an "extinction risk" to human civilisation, an Oxford University professor has said.

Almost everything about the development of genuine AI is uncertain, Stuart Armstrong at the Future of Humanity Institute said in an interview with The Next Web.

That includes when we might develop it, how such a thing could come about and what it means for human society.

But without more research and careful study, it's possible that we could be opening a Pandora's box. Which is exactly the sort of thing that the Future of Humanity Institute, a multidisciplinary research hub tasked with asking the "big questions" about the future, is concerned with.

"One of the things that makes AI risk scary is that it’s one of the few that is genuinely an extinction risk if it were to go bad. With a lot of other risks, it’s actually surprisingly hard to get to an extinction risk," Armstrong told The Next Web.

a glow in the dark

shalereporter | Here’s a problematic fracking by-product that never occurred to me: radioactive socks.

When I first read the phrase I thought of of weary drillers trudging out of fracking fields late at night, invisible but for a glowing green inch of material between their shoes and trouser hems. But then I kept reading and discovered the socks in question were actually filter socks, which look like tube socks designed for an elephant.

When chemical-laced water is injected into the ground during a hydraulic fracturing operation, some of it returns to the surface and must be collected. The flowback contains water, chemicals, salts, metals  and organic compounds; it all passes through filter socks, which capture the solid particles. The liquid is disposed of in various ways, and filter socks are disposed of at municipal and residual waste landfills.

Unless they happen to be radioactive.

This is quite a problem in North Dakota, where naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) is common in certain parts of the Bakken shale. North Dakota landfills will not accept waste with radioactive levels higher than 5 picocuries per gram, and the average filter sock’s level ranges from five to eighty, although one did clock in at 374.

A year ago, after landfill Geiger counters began clicking incessantly, the government helpfully distributed pamphlets listing businesses that would accept radioactive waste. Since the nearest ones were in South Dakota, Colorado and Utah, this has led to a spate of radioactive sock dumping.

Thirty were found during a cleanup day at the Fort Berthold Reservation. A hundred were found in a Williston city garbage can. 250 were dropped into a container box near New Town and picked up by an unsuspecting trucker. Last spring, after the snow melted in Tioga, a “large sack of them” were found along a highway. “They appeared to have fallen off a truck,” reported a local paper, just like the radioactive rod that fell off a truck in Texas, and the radioactive gauge that fell off a truck in West Virginia.

“There are only a few places that have facilities designed to take radioactive materials, and North Dakota is not one of them,” says Kurt Rhea, the CEO of the Colorado-based radioactive waste removal company Next Generation Solutions. Rhea’s company has contracts with certain companies fracking the Bakken shale; picking up a container of waste, trucking it out of state, and disposing with it properly costs about $8,000. He guesses that approximately 20% of North Dakota's radioactive waste is being disposed of properly. What about the rest?

“Good question,” he responds.

 Noonan mayor angry over situation with radioactive filter socks

Tribe warns that children might play with illegally dumped filter socks

vis-a-vis ukraine: tribalizing and digesting formerly multiethnic sovereign states is our standard operating procedure

alternet | On the campaign trail, the Clinton camp has held up Kosovo as a successful model for how to conduct US foreign policy and Clinton criticized Bush for taking "so long for us to reach this historic juncture."

Perhaps a little of that history is in order. If Kosovo is her idea of solid US foreign policy, it speaks volumes to what kind of president she would be. The reality is that there are striking similarities between the Clinton approach to Kosovo and the Bush approach to Iraq.

On March 24, 1999, President Bill Clinton began an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Like Bush with Iraq, Clinton had no UN mandate (he used NATO) and his so-called "diplomacy" to avert the possibility of bombing leading up to the attacks was insincere and a set-up from the jump. Just like Bush with Iraq.

A month before the bombing began, the Clinton administration issued an ultimatum to President Slobodan Milosevic, which he had to either accept unconditionally or face bombing. Known as the Rambouillet accord, it was a document that no sovereign country would have accepted. It contained a provision that would have guaranteed US and NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout" all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. It also sought to immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]," as well as grant the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without payment." Additionally, Milosevic was told he would have to "grant all telecommunications services, including broadcast services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years later, Rambouillet mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free market principles."

What Milosevic was actually asked to sign is never discussed. That it would have effectively meant the end of the sovereignty of the nation was a non-story. The dominant narrative for the past nine years, repeated this week by William Cohen, Clinton's defense secretary at the time of the bombing, is this: "We tried to achieve a peaceful resolution of what was taking place in Kosovo. And Slobodan Milosevic refused." Refused peace? More like he unwisely refused one of Don Corleone's famous offers. Washington knew he would reject it, but had to give the appearance of diplomacy for international "legitimacy."

So the humanitarian bombs rained down on Serbia. Among the missions: the bombing of the studios of Radio Television Serbia where an airstrike killed 16 media workers; the cluster bombing of a Nis marketplace, shredding human beings into meat; the deliberate targeting of a civilian passenger train; the use of depleted uranium munitions; and the targeting of petrochemical plants, causing toxic chemical waste to pour into the Danube River. Also, the bombing of Albanian refugees, ostensibly the people being protected by the U.S.

Similar to Bush's allegations about Iraqi WMDs in the lead up to the US invasion, in 1999 Clinton administration officials also delivered stunning allegations about the level of brutality present in Kosovo as part of the propaganda campaign. "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing ....They may have been murdered," Cohen said five weeks into the bombing. He said that up to 4,600 Kosovo men had been executed, adding, "I suspect it's far higher than that." Those numbers were flat out false. Eventually the estimates were scaled back dramatically, as Justin Raimondo pointed out recently in his column on Antiwar.com, from 100,000 to 50,000 to 10,000 and "at that point the War Party stopped talking numbers altogether and just celebrated the glorious victory of 'humanitarian intervention.'" As it turned out "there was no 'genocide' -- the International Tribunal itself reported that just over 2,000 bodies were recovered from postwar Kosovo, including Serbs, Roma, and Kosovars, all victims of the vicious civil war in which we intervened on the side of the latter. The whole fantastic story of another 'holocaust' in the middle of Europe was a fraud," according to Raimondo.

Following the NATO invasion of Kosovo in June of 1999, the US and its allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs of criminals and paramilitaries spread out across the province and systematically cleansed Kosovo of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and other ethnic minorities. They burned down houses, businesses and churches and implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly expel non-Albanians from the province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with the Kosovo Liberation Army and backed the rise of war criminals to the highest levels of power in Kosovo. Today, Kosovo has become a hub for human trafficking, organized crime and narcosmuggling. In short, it is a mafia state. Is this the "democracy" Hillary Clinton speaks of "promoting" in "the heart" of Europe?

sissy pit pretends a hissy fit, but who is calling the tune?

firstlook | Two top Senate leaders declared Tuesday that the CIA’s recent conduct has undermined the separation of powers as set out in the Constitution, setting the stage for a major battle to reassert the proper balance between the two branches.

Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), in a floor speech (transcript; video) that Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) immediately called the most important he had heard in his career, said the CIA had searched through computers belonging to staff members investigating the agency’s role in torturing detainees, and had then leveled false charges against her staff in an attempt to intimidate them.

“I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause,” she said. “It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.”

She concluded: “The recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community. How Congress responds and how this is resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee. I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.”

She also accused the CIA of obstructing her committee’s torture inquiry in general, and of disputing findings that its own internal inquiry had substantiated.

The document at the heart of this confrontation is an internal review conducted by the CIA of the materials it had turned over to Feinstein’s committee during the course of the four-year congressional investigation into the Bush-era torture practices.

Feinstein said the document, which has become known as the Panetta Review after then-director of the CIA Leon Panetta, was first discovered by committee staff using CIA-provided search tools in 2010. It became particularly relevant later, after the committee completed a scathing 6,300-page report in December 2012, and the CIA sent its official response in June 2013.

The committee’s detailed report is still classified, but it is known to be highly critical of both the CIA’s role in the torture regime and its campaign to deceive Congress about it. The CIA vehemently took issue with those conclusions.