About a hundred pro-Palestinian activists arrived in Egypt on a humanitarian flotilla and made their way to the Gaza Strip through Rafah crossing on Monday.
A law professor being paid $950 an hour with BP's money has declared that the czar of the $20 billion claims fund for Gulf oil spill victims is independent of the oil giant.
Fund administrator Ken Feinberg said Thursday he has agreed to pay NYU professor Stephen Gillers for his advice. Since being hired, Gillers has written a letter stating that Feinberg is neutral and not subject to BP's direction or control.
Webmaster's Commentary: And if you believe that one, I have some of Saddam's 'nookular' bombs to sell you!
In the early 1990s, the biggest names in the mortgage industry hatched a plan for a new electronic clearinghouse that would transform the home loan business - and unlock billions of dollars of new investments and profits. At the time, mortgage documents were moved almost exclusively by hand and mail, a throwback to an era in which people kept stock certificates, too. That made it hard for banks to bundle home loans and sell them to investors. By contrast, a central electronic clearinghouse would allow the companies to transfer thousands of mortgages instantaneously, greasing the wheels of a system in which loans could be bought and sold repeatedly and quickly.
Martha Kunkle has come back to life. She died in 1995. Yet her signature later appeared on thousands of affidavits submitted by one of the nation's largest debt collectors, Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc., in lawsuits filed against borrowers. Some regulators complain that the use of Ms. Kunkle's name reflects an epidemic of mass-produced, sloppy and inaccurate documentation in the debt-collection industry. Lawsuits have surged as more borrowers fall behind on payments and collection firms turn to courts to get what they are owed.
There are no end of websites offering to sell tools to remove this nasty virus, and some of these websites will actually install more malware on your machine while you visit them. Bunch of fucking vultures out there in virus-land, if you ask me.
There are some free resources available and this article points to one.
This is a very nasty virus, hard to detect, hard to remove, and according to Semantic, the reason it can wreck machines trying to remove it is an incompatibility between the Windows API and the Trojan, leaving a batch of bad pointers ready to brick a system.
The good news is that this virus did not get out of the netbook and into the rest of the network, and after purchasing a USB DVD drive I was able to restore the netbook to factory settings. Since this is my travel netbook, intended for TSA to fondle (and hopefully not drop again), there was little of any value lost.
That is not to say that I am still nor furious with hackers for their arrogant assumption that other peoples' computers are their personal playground and profit centers, and wish a painful slow death upon them all.
Nor will I be shy about pointing out that all the fondling at the airports and listening to our phone calls does not obfuscate the government's total impotency in the face of real threats to the nation. Hacking costs the American people billions of dollars every year, and so far, the FBI, CIA, DOJ, DHS and TSA are totally helpless to do anything about it, so they justify their paychecks setting up patsies for phony terror arrests and grabbing our "junk" at the airports. The fact is that for all the money spent for naked scanners and luggage swabs, this nation is wide open to a real terror attack carried out by a simple computer virus like Israel's Stuxnet.
Google 911 and you get about 1,560,000,000 results. That’s right – one billion, five hundred and sixty million results. A search for videos turns up 15,100,000 results. The Search for 9/11 Truth Continues The fact that the 9/11 responders and others effected by 9/11 are going to receive Health Coverage, though long overdue, is great news – even at this late a date.
Indignez vous! (Cry out!), a slim pamphlet by a wartime French resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, is smashing all publishing records in France. The book urges the French, and everyone else, to recapture the wartime spirit of resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the "insolent, selfish" power of money and markets and by defending the social "values of modern democracy".
I previously proposed in this column the idea that Muslim scholars should attempt to differentiate between the prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran and the prophets of the Jews who are mentioned in the Torah, since any history student in any major Western university (but not an Arab university) will learn that Jewish history is only an amalgamation of biblical myths about prophets, kings and kingdoms that never existed.
Israeli activists protesting the killing of Bil’in’s Jawaher Abu Rahmah 'returned’ spent tear gas canisters to the residence of the American ambassador to Israel late Saturday evening. Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, was evacuated to the Ramallah hospital on Friday after inhaling massive amounts of tear-gas during the weekly protest in Bil’in, and died of poisoning Saturday morning. The tear gas used by the Israeli forces in Bil’in is manufactured by Combined Systems Inc.; a United States company based in Jamestown, Pennsylvania. This is the first protest where empty tear gas canisters have been returned to an ambassador’s home.
Webmaster's Commentary: As reported today, 3 January, 2011 at:
"Some of the tear gas canisters used by the Israeli military are manufactured by the American company Combined Systems Inc., which is based in Jamestown, Pennsylvania. The company manufactures a variety of grenades, aerosols, impact munitions, and arms launchers.
"While Combined Systems Inc. and the Israeli military maintain that the canisters being used are non-lethal, on its product notes Combined Systems recommends the use of a full face respirator with organic filter cartridge, or self contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) for those deploying the canisters. A SCBA is a device worn by rescue workers, firefighters, and others to provide breathable air in an Immediate Danger to Life and Health Atmosphere. Combined Systems further recommends ventilation, local exhaust, protective gloves, eye protection, protective clothing to prevent skin contact, and washing thoroughly after handling.
"The tear gas being used by the Israeli military is commonly known as CS gas. Following the 1993 American FBI raid on a compound in Waco, Texas, in which large amounts of CS gas was used and dozens died, an investigation was conducted into the possible lethal effects of CS tear gas."
"Because there are no scientific tests studying the effects of CS gas on humans, the report explores the toxicity of the gas on animals and then lends that information to an understanding of how CS might, and in past instances has, affected humans.
“In inhalation experiments, only delayed deaths were observed after exposure to high concentrations of CS. This response indicates a different mechanism of action of CS depending on the type of exposure. After inhalation exposure, the toxic response focuses primarily on the lung, with direct effects on the mucous membrane and the epithelial cells,” noted the report, following experiment with different animal groups.
“In addition to strong irritation at higher concentrations, inflammation and damage to the alveolar capillary membrane also occur followed by the development of edema, emphysema, hemorrhages, and atelectasis due to reduced synthesis and/or destruction of the surface active material (surfactant) in the lung. These effects lead to compromised oxygen transfer from the lung to the blood capillaries and eventually, after some time, to death from suffocation.”
Bank of America Corp. is settling some buyback claims on bad home loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as it attempts to separate itself further from one of the of the housing downturn's biggest headaches. Webmaster's Commentary:
This is an admission of what I have been saying all along. The financial institutions that sold fraudulent mortgage-backed securities are being forced to buy them back. In order to keep the losses from the forced repurchases from driving the banks into insolvency, the banks needed new assets on their balance sheets, in this case the homes of Americans. That is the reason for the orgy of foreclosures, many against homeowners not actually delinquent in their payments, and some without even having a mortgage at all. This is wealth confiscation from the people to prop up the bankers, done in a covert way to trick Americans into thinking it is their own fault they lost their homes.
I can say that Isabel Kershner's comment in the New York Times, that these demonstrations "inevitably end in clashes, with young Palestinians hurling stones and the Israeli security forces firing tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets" completely reverses the course of events. The IOF commenced firing tear gas long before any demonstrators neared them. There was little stone throwing during the demonstration and it did not commence until long after the tear gas.
Webmaster's Commentary: Sycophantic defenders of everything Israel does can no longer get away with lying; the truth is out there, documented, and sent across the world faster than a heartbeat.
Israel on Sunday extended for six months a ban preventing Palestinians married to Israelis immigrating to the state, the premier's office said in a statement.
"The ministerial committee for security affairs decided tonight [Sunday] to extend for six months a text on family unification, which expired December 31," said a statement from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That extension until June 30 denies Palestinians the right to acquire Israeli citizenship or resident status through marriage.
Webmaster's Commentary: "The only 'democracy' in the Middle East", my astrolabe! The Israeli government has shown its completely racist face to the world yet again.
The caravan began in India and passed through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and finally Egypt. In Syria, materials were loaded onto the boat "Salam" (peace in Arabic) and waited at the port of Latakia for final permission to enter the Egyptian port of Al-Arish. According to organizers, the boat carried $1 million worth of medicine, foodstuffs and toys, as well as four buses and 10 power generators for hospitals. The convoy included activists from more than 15 countries, including, Iran, India, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, New Zealand and Kuwait. The Egyptian government gave permits to 120 activists to pass through into Gaza with the goods, but denied entry to participants from Jordan and Iran.
Webmaster's Commentary: All the convoys to follow this with aid to Gaza must continue until the Israeli siege of Gaza is broken irreparably, once and for all.
Air strikes, drone and cruise missile attacks, special forces operations, helicopter gunship raids, counterinsurgency campaigns, multinational armed interventions, cluster bomb and depleted uranium weapons use, and the entire panoply of military actions associated with the Afghanistan-Pakistan war are already being conducted in Africa and will only be increased.
Webmaster's Commentary: In terms of unexploited resources, Africa is essentially the "new Middle East", which is why these military interventions will continue until there is "US/NATO-friendly" leadership installed in all of these countries.
Evidence is now clear. Wikipedia, the vast online encyclopedia used as a reference source by amateur and professional scholars, journalists and researchers of all kinds is now proven to be subject to a massive assault by the government of Israel. Hundreds of Wikipedia editors are being recruited and trained each week, tasked by the Israeli government with instilling open “Zionist” bias in even the most innocent areas, not just news, but personal biographies and, especially history.
Webmaster's Commentary:
Such a deal! The US Government gives Israel billions of your tax dollars so that Israel can then buy up and control all the media both traditional and online.
We have often stated that the Gaza Strip is the world’s largest open air concentration camp. Recent developments in the West Bank have turned that besieged area into the largest open air gas chamber. Apologists for zionism are constantly arguing against our comparisons of what is going on in Palestine today with the holocaust of Eastern Europe. Their biggest comeback is “where are the gas chambers?” Perhaps if they read the following report their tune will change …. needless to say, all made possible by gifts from the United States Government….
From the chorus of an obviously drug induced song…. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, now now.
The writer obviously never visited Palestine or any other area where Freedom is nothing but a dream…. a very expensive one at that.
The real US unemployment rate is not 9.8% but between 25% and 30%. That is a depression level of job losses - so why doesn't it look like a depression for many people? How can so large of a statistical discrepancy exist, and how is it that holiday shopping malls are so crowded in a depression?
The true devastation is hidden by essentially placing the job losses inside three different "boxes": the official unemployment box, the true full unemployment box, and most importantly, the staggering and persistent private sector job loss box that has been temporarily covered over by a fantastic level of governmental deficit spending. The "recovering and out of the recession" cover story is only plausible when nobody connects the dots and adds all the boxes together.
Webmaster's Commentary:
What this government could do to ease, or in fact, end this depression is threefold:
1. Cut taxes. 2. Stop funding these illegal and immoral wars without end. 3. Incentivize companies to keep jobs in the US.
Of course, all these would be logical; unfortunately, the relationship between logic and Federal government is tenuous at best.
Creating artificial "free money" on a massive scale that artificially boosts short-term employment is how you segment depression level unemployment into the separate boxes and hide what is really happening. It is this radical strategy that most distinguishes the current downturn from the 1970s and 1930s. The ultimate source of most of the current "free money" that hides the depression is the government risking the impoverishment of US savers and investors for potentially decades to come, with the worst of the damage concentrated on retirees and Boomers.
The medical establishment doesn't want to treat sick people anymore; they complain and sue too much. So the new business model is to sell medicines to people who aren't sick at all! Even if nothing happens, the customers thinks they got value for money.
Tensions are on the rise again in the Gaza Strip after Israeli attacks on two refugee camps left at least two civilians wounded. Israel insisted the attacks were “retaliation” for rocket fire from the strip. Israel insisted the attacks on the refugee camps were aimed at targeting Hamas and that they blame Hamas for the rocket fire, even though officials have repeatedly conceded that Hamas is not the ones firing the rockets and are indeed struggling to prevent such fire by their rivals
Webmaster's Commentary: So let me get this straight: Israel is indiscriminately bombing a refugee camp and wounding civilians in alleged "retaliation" for alleged rocket fire Israeli officials concede Hamas didn't start?!?
MUTANT canola crops genetically engineered to survive repeated sprayings of herbicide have been approved for planting. This is despite the furore over GM contamination of an organic farm. The West Australian Minister for Agriculture and Food, Terry Redman, has called on the organic industry to bend its rules to permit some GM material, declaring purity to be "unrealistic".
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday following the deadly church bombing in Alexandria, saying that they must stand as a united front in the war on terror.
"All nations which support freedom stand as a united front in the the war on terror," Netanyahu told Mubarak regarding Saturday's bombing which killed 21 people and wounded at least 97.
Webmaster's Commentary:
"Except if the terror is against Palestinians!!!"- official Tel Aviv Souse.
Francesca Esposito, 29 and exquisitely educated, helped win millions of euros in false disability and other lawsuits for her employer, a major Italian state agency. But one day last fall she quit, fed up with how surreal and ultimately sad it is to be young in Italy today.
Actually the deep snow above at Mammoth Mountain is nothing compared to the snow at one Vancouver Island ski resort, which was practically completely snowed-in. Mount Washington has been pummeled with three meters of fresh snow over a recent three-day period, burying lodges, cars, and even ski lifts.
“If you thought it was especially cold in December, it’s not just your imagination. The facts prove it, according to the National Weather Service, which announced Saturday that December 2010 set a record as the coldest December ever in Ft. Lauderdale. Miami, and Key West,” writes CBS News. It is also confirmed now that that Dec 2010 in Britain and probably West Europe, was indeed the coldest for at least a 100 years...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed US President Barack Obama for cancelling a package of incentives in exchange for a three-month settlement freeze.
Webmaster's Commentary:
My recollection is that Netenyahu canceled the freeze, then demanded the F-35s anyway.
Home foreclosure sales slowed down at the end of 2010 for two reasons: the regular holiday foreclosure freezes, and the remnants of the so-called robo-signing scandal. In the fall, many lenders put evictions on hold while they reviewed their foreclosure procedures. Rick Sharga of RealtyTrac says that's behind us now — and the pace of foreclosure is about to pick up.
"I'd be really, really surprised if we didn't see a probably record quarter in the first quarter of this year," he says. Sharga expects banks to repossess close to 100,000 homes in January alone.
Webmaster's Commentary: One cannot use the phrase "economic recovery" with a straight face, looking at potential numbers like this.
Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, said if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling, the “impact on the economy would be catastrophic.”
“I don’t see why anybody’s playing chicken with the debt ceiling,” Goolsbee said today on ABC’s “This Week” program. “If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”
The government is slated to hit the legal limit on borrowing, $14.3 trillion, early this year. Congress must agree to raise that ceiling or the U.S. could be forced to default on its obligations.
Webmaster's Commentary: Not raising the debt ceiling would be "catastrophic"?!? Catastrophic for whom, I have to wonder. If We the People have to live within our means, why can't the US Congress?!?
Just in time for the new deficit-conscious Republican Congress, Sen. Lindsey Graham is calling for the American military to be in Afghanistan permanently. His call for permanent U.S. bases in Afghanistan is not particularly novel -- his close Senate buddy John McCain has been saying the same thing since at least 2005. But Graham's formulation, that an American military presence is something to be "earned" by a foreign population, is a striking reflection of his neo-imperialist worldview. As he said on Meet the Press Sunday:
Webmaster's Commentary: Forgive me, but has Senator Graham gone absolutely barking mad to make this recommendation? Does he not, in fact, recognize that the US already well and truly "dug in" in Afghanistan?!?
"In fiscal year 2009, for example, the civilian U.S. Agency for International Development awarded $20 million in contracts for work in Afghanistan, while the U.S. Army alone awarded $2.2 billion -- $834 million of it for construction projects. In fact, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, the Pentagon has spent "roughly $2.7 billion on construction over the past three fiscal years" in that country and, "if its request is approved as part of the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill, it would spend another $1.3 billion on more than 100 projects at 40 sites across the country, according to a Senate report on the legislation."
Bogged Down at Bagram
Nowhere has the building boom been more apparent than Bagram Air Base, a key military site used by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. In its American incarnation, the base has significantly expanded from its old Soviet days and, in just the last two years, the population of the more than 5,000 acre compound has doubled to 20,000 troops, in addition to thousands of coalition forces and civilian contractors. To keep up with its exponential growth rate, more than $200 million in construction projects are planned or in-progress at this moment on just the Air Force section of the base."
The US and NATO are in Afghanistan for two reasons, and two reasons only: the installation of the TAP pipeline, through which natural gas from Turkmenistan will be pumped through Afghanistan into Pakistan, and the profits from the drug trade. A short memo to Senator Graham: we are already in Afghanistan permanently.
Wiki bills The Real Housewives of etcetera as they “follow the lives of relatively affluent, bourgeois housewives and professional women (not to mention self-described ‘alpha women’) in the suburban or urban areas of several American cities. . . .” Oh but it’s so much more, and less . . . Could they really be real? Are they the real class of super-rich locusts that sit atop America, their hubbies its top 2 percent of earners, getting all those Bush tax cuts, the doctors, hedge funders, football stars, lotharios, while their women cut each other up, wondering whose husband or boyfriend is sleeping with whom?
Webmaster's Commentary:
My wife and I say part-way through one of these, and the two thoughts I had were that I wouldn't want these women as friends, and second, that these shows are giving the rest if the world a very negative image of Americans.
The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the second largest party in the ruling coalition, said Sunday it would join the opposition, leaving Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani's government short of majority support in parliament. The political crisis could distract the government from its alliance with the U.S. against Islamist militants in neighboring Afghanistan, though security is largely the purview of the powerful military. But the turmoil also all but guarantees lawmakers will make no progress anytime soon on solving the critical economic problems that have forced the country to rely on $11 billion in loans from the International Monetary Fund.
Webmaster's Commentary: This situation leaves Pakistan ripe for a military coup, a process which has happened several times before in Pakistan's history.
Experts fear the missing emails - on computer hard disk drives that have reportedly vanished - could have major implications for the multiple investigations into claims the newspaper was involved in widespread hacking into the phone messages of targets from the worlds of politics, royalty and entertainment.
The effects of the disaster that poured millions and millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico last spring will have global ramifications, a Gulf Coast activist recently warned.
"What's been done in the Gulf is going to eventually affect every single American citizen," Kindra Arnesen told Project Gulf Impact in a recent interview. She continued, "This is still going to go global because as the economy and the United States goes under the sledgehammer... the rest of the world is going to feel it."
Webmaster's Commentary: This administration will continue to cover up and deny because BP was one of the largest campaign donor to the Obama campaign. Therefore, the people in the Gulf who have been massively effected will get no substantive assistance, medical or financial, because that would be an admission of guilt that BP had, in fact, played fast and loose with safe drilling practices, causing this disaster.
When CFR Director, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most feared power brokers in Washington or anywhere else, openly attacked Wikileaks as an intelligence operation, siding with Jeff Gates, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, William Engdahl, Lila Rajiva, Gordon Duff and so many others of the independent alternative media, Wikileak’s days were numbered. The failed UFO scare, whatever it was supposed to do, has backfired, putting a bullet in the heart of Wikileaks. After a “bang up” start, the Iraq helicopter video, Wikileaks spent its credibility supporting Israel and attacking, not only the Islamic world but the United States as well, in a clearly biased and “ham-handed” manner.
No comments:
Post a Comment