A Gentleman’s view.

14 signs that the collapse of our modern world has already begun

Posted by: True Activist

(NaturalNews) A lot of people believe the world as we know it is going to end on December 23, 2012. Nonsense, I say. The far more honest answer is that the end of the world as we know it has already begun. And it doesn’t mean the end of the world; it means the closing of one era and the birth of a new one. It is a transition between the ages. This particular transition, however, promises to be the most tumultuous and costly transition humankind has ever seen.

But don’t wait around for December 2012 to look for the signs. Here are 14 signs that the world as we know it is unraveling now. We are living through the end of one era and the birth of a new one. In the future, they’ll look back and call this all one moment in history, but when you’re living through it, it seems to move forward at almost a snail’s pace. But make no mistake: We are living through the opening chapters of the end of the world as we know it, and on the other side of all this will emerge a new world that’s very different from the one we know today.

#1 – Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis – At first it seemed like a fluke; but now it’s a pattern. The weather is becoming increasingly extreme. Over 120 tornadoes recently struck the U.S. Midwest. Texas is on fire and suffering through an extreme drought. And where there aren’t fires and droughts, there are floods. This is only the beginning… watch for more freak weather over the next 18 months.

#2 – The silence of the bees – Colony Collapse Disorder continues to accelerate across North America. We already know it’s being caused in part by chemical pesticides(and possibly worsened by GMOs), but the chemical industry is engaged in a full-on cover-up to deny this truth while the pollinators of our world suffer a devastating population collapse. (http://www.naturalnews.com/028218_pesticides_honeybees.html)

#3 – failure of nuclear science – The Fukushima catastrophe proves one thing: Scientists are dangerously arrogant in their planning of large-scale projects, and they fail to account for the awesome power of Mother Nature. Nuclear science promised us clean, greenenergy– but now it has delivered a silent, invisible poison that infecting our planet.

#4 – The vicious pursuit of Wikileaks – In an age of such rampant deceit, there is no room for the truth. So those who tell the truth (Wikileaks) are viciously pursued as if they were criminals.

#5 – The rise of the medical police state – The armed SWAT raids on Maryanne Godboldo in Detroit are only the beginning (http://www.naturalnews.com/032091_Maryanne_Godboldo_gun_rights.html). The truth is that the medical system uses guns to force its vaccines and chemotherapy onto children and teens across America. The medical system has become so utterly useless, corrupt and dangerous that it must actually invoke guns in peoples’ facesjust to “convince” people to take its medicine. This is a gunpoint-enforced medical monopoly that exists as a threat to our health and our freedoms.

#6 – The increasing frequency of food shortages and crop failures - Notice the spike in food prices? That’s just the beginning: Food prices will continue to skyrocket in the years ahead due to extreme weather, the loss of pollinators and the global contamination of crops by GMOs. Real food is becoming increasingly scarce in our world. You might want to think about starting a home garden…

#7 – The runaway destruction of the world by energy companies – The radioactive fallout from Fukushima isn’t the only way in which energy companies are destroying our world: Don’t forget about the Deep water Horizon and the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — a spill that isn’t over, by the way. They’re still spraying Corexit in the Gulf one year later!

#8 – The continued GMO contamination of our planet – This may be the worst chapter in the coming collapse: The widespread genetic pollution of our planet through GMOs. This is a crime against nature and against humanity. It is a “gene spill” that may never be contained as it spreads its deadly DNA across the world’s foodcrops, leading to crop failures and starvation (http://www.naturalnews.com/032167_gene_spill_GMOs.html). The use of GMOs is the closest thing to “Satanic” that you’ll find in modern agriculture. The agenda behind this is pure evil.

#9 – The tyranny and criminal crackdowns targeting real food  - When you can’t even sell honest farm food to your neighbors without being targeted and arrested by the cops, something is terribly wrong with the world. But this is happening today, all across America. Now the feds are even targeting the Amish! (http://www.naturalnews.com/029322_raw_milk_Amish.html)

#10 – The escalation of the counterfeiting of the money supply – In a failed economic system approaching collapse, the moronic leaders can only think of “solutions” that actually accelerate their own downfall. The runaway counterfeiting of money by the Federal Reserve (with its “quantitative easing” and other counterfeit methods) is a classic sign that the end of our current system is fast approaching. The economic inanities are obvious to anyone who can still do math.

#11 – The plummeting intelligence of the masses - One of the most disturbing signs that we’re already in the collapse is the great dumbing-down of the masses. The drooling, CNN-watching television zombies who dominate our landscape offer absolutely nothing of value to the world. They are the “mindless consumers” who get vaccinated, watch television and eat processed, pasteurized junk food. They’re on psychiatric meds and believe everything the government tells them. Most of these people, of course, won’t make it through the collapse.

#12 – The complete and utter fabrication of the mainstream news – Much of the mainstream news is now utterly and completely fabricated these days: The reporting on Obama’s long-form birth certificate; the news about the war in Libya; the coverage of the economy and the U.S.debt… it’s all so utterly false and unbelievable that an intelligent person watching the news can’t help but explode with laughter. It is a sign of this collapse that the information sources relied upon by the masses are unable to report the truth anymore and must resort to weaving politically expedient fictions on everything from health care and medicine to the fate of the U.S. dollar itself.

#13 – The ongoing pharmaceutical pollution of our world – Beyond the GMO contamination and the radiation contamination of our world, we are also experiencing the mass pharmaceutical contamination of our planet. It’s not just the pharma factories that dump their products into the rivers (http://www.naturalnews.com/025415_water_Big_Pharma_chemicals.html); it’s also the fact that well over half the population is now taking drugs almost daily, and those drugs pass right through their bodies and end up in the watersupply where they contaminate the fish (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933.html). Even beyond that, the drugs end up in the human sewage sludgethat’s packaged and sold as “organic soil!” (http://www.naturalnews.com/029504_organic_biosolids_toxic.html)

#14 – The radioactive contamination of the global food supply – Here’s one that’s really insidious: The global food supply is now contaminated with the radioactive fallout from Fukushima. We’re told the levels are “low,” but we’re not told the truth of how radioactive cesium isotopes persist in the food supply for centuries. How is the human race going to survive its exposure to CT scans, radioactive food, chests X-rays, TSA body scanners and even the secret DHS mobile X-ray vans that can penetrate your body with X-rays as you’re walking into a football stadium? The total radiation burden on the human race is now reaching a point of mass infertility. That may be the whole idea, actually.

It’s accelerating, too

December, 2012 may be a useful date as some sort of mid-point in the crisis, or perhaps as a trigger date for some further acceleration of society’s rapid unraveling. But make no mistake: We are already living in the collapse of our modern world.And you have a front-row seat!(Exciting, huh?)

Think about what’s happening around you these days. These are the signs of the last, desperate clutches of civilization built on utterly unsustainable practices that don’t value life on our world. These are the End Times of the corporate oligarchy; the monopolistic for-profit corporation machine that destroyed everything in our world in exchange for a slightly higher quarterly earnings report.

In the quest for more money, humanity has sacrificed its food supply, its pollinators, it’s oceans, forests and soils. Greed-driven humans have used other humans as medical experiments and cannon fodder. We have created wars to sell more bombs, and we’ve invented disease to sell psychiatric chemicals.

These are the practices of a failed civilization… and one whose days are numbered. Watching it all crumble is far more interesting than watching it continue its destructive ways, of course, because those of us paying attention realize a future civilization must rise in the place of this one after the collapse.

Say goodbye to the false power of institutions

It would be nice if our future leaders remembered the importance of liberty and personal responsibility, of course. The answer to all the world’s problems, it turns out, isfreedom– freedom in medicine, freedom in economics and freedom from government tyranny.

Because, let’s face it: The root cause of most these problems that are bringing down our world now is bad government. It is bad government (Big Government) that approved the GMOs. Bad government enforced the medical monopoly and allowed the pesticides to kill the honey bees. Bad government drove us into inescapable debt and costly foreign wars. Bad government outlawed health freedom and protected the monopolistic practices of the food companies,drug companies and chemical companies.

The downfall of modern human civilization is, as you probably guessed, also the downfall of the very idea that Big Government creates a better society. Because if there’s one idea that needs to stay dead after the collapse, it’s the idea that We the People somehow need another group of people (government workers) to live off our hard work while hounding us with their false authority, directing every little detail of our lives.

What we need in our world isn’t more government, but more freedom. If we had freedom, integrity and personal responsibility, we wouldn’t even be facing the global collapse that has already begun. But alas, the human race is an infant species and it must learn some lessons the hard way, it seems.

This lesson should be long remembered: If you let the corporations, the banks and the governments run your economies, your farms and your lives, they will enslave you and steal your future while you sleep; they will inject silent poisons into the very world around you until you awaken one day to find that all you created has been destroyed. They will promise you paradise but deliver only death.Beware of any entity that is not a living person– no government, no institution, no corporation has a soul, nor a heart, nor a conscience. They are forces of organized destruction that decimate those things we hold dear while delivering to us things that will only enslave us or harm us.

Beware the corporation; the government; the non-profit institution working as a front group for industry. Never allow yourself to be ruled over by any institution which exists only as a fictional construct organized from the projection of human greed.

And be ready for the acceleration of the collapse. Because if you are reading this,you are the future of the human race. You have a duty to stay alive, keep your genes intact, and be around to help create the Next Society after this one crumbles into history.

Armchair Warriors: Why Are Conservatives the Biggest Warmongers?

The following is Part 2 of an excerpt from Corey Robin’s book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.” You can find Part 1 here. 

What is it about being a great power that renders the imagining of its own demise so potent? Why, despite all the strictures about the prudent and rational use of force, are those powers so quick to resort to it?

Perhaps it is because there is something deeply appealing about the idea of disaster, about manfully confronting and mastering catastrophe. For disaster and catastrophe can summon a nation, at least in theory, to plumb its deepest moral and political reserves, to have its mettle tested, on and off the battlefield. However much leaders and theorists may style themselves the cool adepts of realpolitik, war remains the great romance of the age, the proving ground of self and nation.

Exactly why the strenuous life should be so attractive is anyone’s guess, but one reason may be that it counters what conservatives since the French Revolution have believed to be the corrosions of liberal democratic culture: the softened mores and weakened will, the subordination of passion to rationality, of fervor to rules. As an antidote to the deadening effects of contemporary life—reason, bureaucracy, routine, anomie, ennui—war is modernity’s great answer to itself. “War is inescapable,” Yitzhak Shamir declared, not because it ensures security but “because without this, the life of the individual has no purpose.” Though this sensibility seeps across the political spectrum, it is essentially an ideal of the conservative counter-Enlightenment, which found its greatest fulfillment during the years of Fascist triumph (“war is to men,” Mussolini said, “as maternity is to women”)—and is once again, it seems, prospering in our own time as well.

Nowhere in recent memory has this romanticism been more apparent than in the neoconservative arguments during the Bush years about prewar intelligence, how to prosecute the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and whether or not to use torture. Listening to the neocon complaints about U.S. intelligence during the run-up to the war, one could hear distant echoes of Carlyle’s assault on the “Mechanical Age” (“all is by rule and calculated contrivance”) and Chateaubriand’s despair that “certain eminent faculties of genius” will “be lost, and imagination, poetry and the arts perish.” Richard Perle was not alone in his impatience with whatSeymour Hersh calls the intelligence community’s “susceptibility to social science notions of proof.” Before he became secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld criticized the refusal of intelligence analysts to use their imaginations, “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” Once in office, he mocked analysts’ desire to have “all the dots connected for us with a ribbon wrapped around it.” His staffers derided the military quest for “actionable intelligence,” for information solid enough to warrant assassinations and other preemptive acts of violence. Outside the government, David Brooksblasted the CIA’s “bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians” and praised those analysts who make “novelistic judgments” informed by “history, literature, philosophy and theology.”

Rumsfeld’s war on the rule-bound culture and risk aversion of the military revealed a deep antipathy to law and order—not something stereotypically associated with conservatives but familiar enough to any historian of twentieth-century Europe (and, indeed, any historian of conservative thought more generally). Issuing a secret directive that terrorists should be captured or killed, Rumsfeld went out of his way to remind his generals that the goal was “not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” Aides urged him to support operations by U.S. Special Forces, who could conduct lightning strikes without approval from generals. Otherwise, they warned, “the result will be decision by committee.” One of Rumsfeld’s advisers complained that the military had been “Clintonized,” which could have meant anything from becoming too legalistic to being too effeminate. (Throughout the Bush years, there was an ongoing struggle within the security establishment over the protocols of machismo.) Geoffrey Miller, the man who made “Gitmo-ize” a household word, relieved a general at Guantanamo for being too “soft—too worried about the prisoners’ well-being.”

By now it seems self-evident that the neocons were drawn into Iraq for the sake of a grand idea: not the democratization of the Middle East, though that undoubtedly had some appeal, or even the creation of an American empire, but rather an idea of themselves as a brave and undaunted army of transgression. The gaze of the neocons, like that of America’s perennially autistic ruling classes, does not look outward nearly as much as it looks inward: at their restless need to prove themselves, to demonstrate that neither their imagination nor their actions will be constrained by anyone or anything—not even by the rules and norms they believe are their country’s gift to the world.

If Torture, Sanford Levinson’s edited collection of essays, is any indication of contemporary sensibilities, neocons in the Bush White House are not the only ones in thrall to romantic notions of danger and catastrophe. Academics are too. Every scholarly discussion of torture, and the essays collected in Torture are no exception, begins with the ticking-time-bomb scenario. The story goes something like this: a bomb is set to go off in a densely populated area in the immediate future; the government doesn’t know exactly where or when, but it knows that many people will be killed; it has in captivity the person who planted the bomb, or someone who knows where it is planted; torture will yield the needed information; indeed, it is the only way to get the information in time to avert the catastrophe. What to do?

It’s an interesting question. But given that it is so often posed in the name of realism, we might consider a few facts before we rush to answer it. First, as far as we know, no one at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or any of the other prisons in America’s international archipelago has been tortured in order to defuse a ticking time bomb. Second, at the height of the war in Iraq, anywhere between 60 and 90 percent of American-held prisoners there either were in jail by mistake or posed no threat at all to society. Third, many U.S. intelligence officials opted out of torture sessions precisely because they believed torture did not produce accurate information.

These are the facts, and yet they seldom, if ever, make an appearance in these academic exercises in moral realism. The essays in Torture pose one other difficulty for those interested in reality: none of the writers who endorse the use of torture by the United States ever discusses the specific kinds of torture actually used by the United States. The closest we get is an essay by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in which she writes:

Is a shouted insult a form of torture? A slap in the face? Sleep deprivation? A beating to within an inch of one’s life? Electric prods on the male genitals, inside a woman’s vagina, or in a person’s anus? Pulling out fingernails? Cutting off an ear or a breast? All of us, surely, would place every violation on this list beginning with the beating and ending with severing a body part as forms of torture and thus forbidden. No argument there. But let’s turn to sleep deprivation and a slap in the face. Do these belong in the same torture category as bodily amputations and sexual assaults? There are even those who would add the shouted insult to the category of torture. But, surely, this makes mincemeat of the category.

Distinguishing the awful from the acceptable, Elshtain never mentions the details of Abu Ghraib or the Taguba Report, making her list of do’s and don’ts as unreal as the ticking time bomb itself. Even her list of taboos is stylized, omitting actually committed crimes for the sake of repudiating hypothetical ones. Elshtain rejects stuffing electric cattle prods up someone’s ass. What about a banana [pdf]? She rejects cutting off ears and breasts. What about “breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees”? She condemns sexual assault. What about forcing men to masturbate or wear women’s underwear on their heads? She endorses “solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.” What about the “bitch in the box,” where prisoners are stuffed in a car trunk and driven around Baghdad in 120° heat? She supports “psychological pressure,” quoting from an article that “the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself.” What about threatening prisoners with rape? When it comes to the Islamists, Elshtain cites the beheading of Daniel Pearl. When it comes to the Americans, she muses on Laurence Olivier’s dentistry in Marathon Man. Small wonder there’s “no argument there”: there is no there there.

The unreality of Elshtain’s analysis is not incidental or peculiar to her. Even writers who endorse torture but remain squeamish about it can’t escape such abstractions. The more squeamish they are, in fact, the more abstractions they indulge in. Sanford Levinson, for example, tentatively discusses Alan Dershowitz’s proposal that government officials should be forced to seekwarrants from judges in order to torture terrorist suspects. Hoping to make the reality of torture, and the pain of its victims, visible and concrete, Levinson insists that “the person the state proposes to torture should be in the courtroom, so that the judge can take no refuge in abstraction.” But then Levinson asks us to consider “the possibility that anyone against whom a torture warrant is issued receives a significant payment as ‘just compensation’ for the denial of his or her right not to be tortured.” Having just counseled against abstraction, Levinson resorts to the greatest abstraction of all—money—as payback for the greatest denial of rights imaginable.

If the unreality of these discussions sounds familiar, it is because they are watered by the same streams of conservative romanticism that coursed in and out of the White House during the Bush years. Notwithstanding Dershowitz’s warrants and Levinson’s addenda, the essays endorsing torture are filled with hostility to what Elshtain variously calls “moralistic code fetishism” and “rule-mania” and what we might simply call “the rule of law.” But where the Bush White House sought to be entirely free of rules and laws—and here the theoreticians depart from the practitioners—the contemplators of torture seek to make the torturers true believers in the rules.

There are two reasons. One reason, which Michael Walzer presents at great length in a famous essay from 1973, reprinted in Torture, is that the absolute ban on torture makes possible—or forces us to acknowledge the problem of “dirty hands.” Like the supreme emergency, the ticking time bomb forces a leader to choose between two evils, to wrestle with the devil of torture and the devil of innocents dying. Where other moralists would affirm the ban on torture and allow innocents to die, or adopt a utilitarian calculus and order torture to proceed, Walzer believes the absolutist and the utilitarian wash their hands too quickly; their consciences come too clean. He wishes instead “to refuse ‘absolutism’ without denying the reality of the moral dilemma,” to admit the simultaneous necessity for—and evil of torture.

Why? To make space for a moral leader, as Walzer puts it in Arguing about War, “who knows that he can’t do what he has to do—and finally does” it. It is the familiar tragedy of two evils, or two competing goods, that is at stake here, a reminder that we must “get our hands dirty by doing what we ought to do,” that “the dilemma of dirty hands is a central feature of political life.” The dilemma, rather than the solution, is what Walzer wishes to draw attention to. Should torturers be free of all rules save utility, or constrained by rights-based absolutism, there would be no dilemma, no dirty hands, no moral agon. Torturers must be denied their Kant and Bentham—and leave us to contend with the brooding spirit of the counter-Enlightenment, which insists that there could never be one moral code, one set of “eternal principles,” as Isaiah Berlin put it, “by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous and free.”

But there is another reason some writers insist on a ban on torture they believe must also be violated. How else to maintain the frisson of transgression, the thrill of Promethean criminality? As Elshtain writes in her critique of Dershowitz’s proposal for torture warrants, leaders “should not seek to legalize” torture. “They should not aim to normalize it. And they should not write elaborate justifications of it . . . . The tabooed and forbidden, the extreme nature of this mode of physical coercion must be preserved so that it never becomes routinized as just the way we do things around here.” What Elshtain objects to in Dershowitz’s proposal is not the routinizing of torture; it is the routinizing of torture, the possibility of reverting to the “same moralistic-legalism” she hoped violations of the torture taboo would shatter. This argument too is redolent of the conservative counter-Enlightenment, which always suspected, again quoting Berlin, that “freedom involves breaking rules, perhaps even committing crimes.”

But if the ban on torture must be maintained, what is a nation to do with the torturers who have violated it, who have, after all, broken the law? Naturally the nation must put them on trial; “the interrogator,” in Elshtain’s words, “must, if called on, be prepared to defend what he or she has done and, depending on context, pay the penalty.” In what may be the most fantastic move of an already fantastic discussion, several of writers on torture—even Henry Shue, an otherwise steadfast voice against the practice—imagine the public trial of the torturer as similar to that of the civil disobedient, who breaks the law in the name of a higher good, and throws himself on the mercy or judgment of the court. For only through a public legal proceeding, Levinson writes, will we “reinforce the paradoxical notion that one must condemn the act even if one comes to the conclusion that it is indeed justified in a particular situation,” a notion, he acknowledges, that is little different from the comment of Admiral Mayorga, one of Argentina’s dirtiest warriors: “The day we stop condemning torture (although we tortured), the day we become insensitive to mothers who lose their guerrilla sons (although they are guerrillas) is the day we stop being human beings.”

By now it should be clear why we use the word “theater” to denote the settings of both stagecraft and statecraft. Like the theater, national security is a house of illusions. Like stage actors, political actors are prone to a diva-like obsession, gazing in the mirror, wondering what the next day’s—or century’s—reviews will bring. It might seem difficult to imagine Liza Minnelli playing Henry Kissinger, but I’m not sure the part would be such a stretch. And what of the intellectuals who advise these leaders or the philosophers who analyze their dilemmas? Are they playwrights or critics, directors or audiences? I’m not entirely sure, but the words of their greatest spiritual predecessor might give us a clue. “I love my native city more than my own soul,” cried Machiavelli, quintessential teacher of the hard ways of state. Change “native city” to “child,” replace “my own soul” with “myself,” and we have the justification of every felonious stage mother throughout history, from the Old Testament’s rule-breaking Rebecca to Gypsy’s ball-busting Rose.

Veterans and Brain Disease By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

He was a 27-year-old former Marine, struggling to adjust to civilian life after two tours in Iraq. Once an A student, he now found himself unable to remember conversations, dates and routine bits of daily life. He became irritable, snapped at his children and withdrew from his family. He and his wife began divorce proceedings.

How America Went Rogue: What We All Need to Know About Our Government’s Shadow Wars

Reagan’s shadow government was a disaster, but it was a pygmy compared with Obama’s.

Covert operations are nothing new in American history, but it could be argued that during the past decade they have moved from being a relatively minor arrow in the national security quiver to being the cutting edge of American power. Drone strikes, electronic surveillance and stealth engagements by military units such as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), as well as dependence on private corporations, mercenary armies and terrorist groups, are now arguably more common as tools of US foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy. But these tools lend themselves to rogue operations that create peril for the United States when they blow back on us. And they often make the United States deeply unpopular.

Shadow power has even become an issue in the presidential campaign. Newt Gingrich advocates ramped-up “covert operations” inside Iran. President Obama replied to Mitt Romney’s charge that he is an “appeaser” by suggesting that his critics “ask bin Laden” about that.

Obama often speaks of the “tide of war receding,” but that phrase refers only to conventional war. In Afghanistan, where the administration hopes to roll up conventional fighting by the end of 2013, it is making plans for long-term operations by special forces through units such as JSOC. It is unclear what legal framework will be constructed for their activities, other than a wink and a nod from President Hamid Karzai.

Although the Iraqis managed to compel the withdrawal of US troops by the end of last year, Washington is nevertheless seeking to remain influential through shadow power. The US embassy in Baghdad has 16,000 employees, most of them civilian contractors. They include 2,000 diplomats and several hundred intelligence operatives. By contrast, the entire US Foreign Service corps comprises fewer than 14,000. The Obama administration has decided to slash the number of contractors, planning for an embassy force of “only” 8,000. This monument to shadow power clearly is not intended merely to represent US interests in Iraq but rather to shape that country and to serve as a command center for the eastern reaches of the greater Middle East. The US shadow warriors will, for instance, attempt to block “the influence of Iran,” according to the Washington Post. Since Iraq’s Shiite political parties, which dominate Parliament and the cabinet, are often close to Iran, that charge would inescapably involve meddling in internal Iraqi politics.

Nor can we be sure that the CIA will engage only in espionage or influence-peddling in Iraq. The American shadow government routinely kidnaps people it considers dangerous and has sent them to black sites for torture, often by third-party governments to keep American hands clean. As usual with the shadow government, private corporations have been enlisted to help in these “rendition” programs, which are pursued outside the framework of national and international law and in defiance of the sensibilities of our allies. How the United States might behave in Iraq can be extrapolated from its recent behavior in other allied countries. In November 2009 an Italian court convicted in absentia twenty-three people, most of them CIA field officers who had kidnapped an alleged Al Qaeda recruiter, Abu Omar, on a Milan street in the middle of the day and sent him to Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt for “interrogation.” Obama has explicitly continued this practice as a “counterterrorism tool,” though he says torture has been halted. Iraq is likely to continue to be an arena of such veiled struggles.

The Obama administration’s severe unilateral sanctions on Iran and attempts to cut that country off from the world banking system have a shadow power aspect. Aimed at crippling Iran’s oil exports, they are making it difficult for Iran to import staples like wheat. Although Washington denies carrying out covert operations in Iran, the US government and allies like Israel are suspected of doing just that. According to anonymous US intelligence officials and military sources interviewed by The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, the United States has trained members of the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Jihadis), based in Iraq at Camp Ashraf, to spy on Iran and carry out covert operations there, just as Saddam Hussein had done, though any American support for the organization would directly contradict the State Department listing of it as a terrorist organization. The MEK is suspected of carrying out a string of assassinations against Iranian nuclear scientists, but US intelligence leaks say Israel’s Mossad, not the CIA, is the accomplice. Indeed, the difficulty of disentangling Washington’s shadow power from that of its junior partners can be seen in the leak by US intelligence complaining that Mossad agents had impersonated CIA field officers in recruiting members of the Jundullah terrorist group in Iranian Baluchistan for covert operations against Iran. Jundullah, a Sunni group, has repeatedly bombed Shiite mosques in Zahedan and elsewhere in the country’s southeast. Needless to say, the kind of overt and covert pressure Obama is putting on Iran could easily, even if inadvertently, spark a war.

The recent release of more than 5 million e-mails hacked from the server of the private intelligence firm Stratfor shows that it did more than analysis. It engaged in surveillance and intelligence activities on behalf of corporate sponsors. Dow Chemical, for example, hired Stratfor to monitor a protest group agitating on the issue of the catastrophic 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India, which killed at least 3,500. WikiLeaks maintains that Stratfor exemplifies the “revolving door” between private intelligence firms and the US government agencies that share information with them.

The increasingly frequent use of civilian “security contractors” — essentially mercenaries — should be a sore point for Americans. The tens of thousands of mercenaries deployed in Iraq were crucial to the US occupation of that country, but they also demonstrate the severe drawbacks of using shadow warriors. Ignorance about local attitudes, arrogance and lack of coordination with the US military and with local police and military led to fiascoes such as the 2007 shootings at Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where Blackwater employees killed seventeen Iraqis. The Iraqi government ultimately expelled Blackwater, even before it did the same with the US military, which had brought the contractors into their country.

* * *

The bad feelings toward the United States generated by hired guns can also be seen in the infamous Raymond Davis incident in Lahore, Pakistan. On January 27, 2011, Davis, a CIA contractor, was waiting at a traffic light when two Pakistanis pulled up next to him on a motorcycle. Davis, who later alleged that one of them had a gun, became alarmed and shot the men. The driver survived the initial volley and tried to run away, but Davis shot him twice in the back. Instead of fleeing the scene, he spent time searching and then photographing the bodies and calling the US consulate for an extraction team. Undercover CIA field officers raced toward the site of the shooting in a consulate SUV, hoping to keep Davis out of the hands of Pakistani authorities, who were approaching, sirens blaring. In its haste, the extraction team killed a motorcyclist and failed in its mission. Davis was taken into custody. His cellphone yielded the identities of some forty-five members of his covert network in Pakistan, who were also arrested.

The incident provoked rolling street demonstrations and enraged Pakistanis, who are convinced that the country is crawling with such agents. Davis was jailed and charged with double homicide, and only released months later, when a Persian Gulf oil monarchy allegedly paid millions on behalf of the United States to the families (in Islamic law, families of a murder victim may pardon the murderer on payment of a satisfactory sum). It was a public relations debacle for Washington, of course, but the salient fact is that a US public servant shot two Pakistanis (likely not terrorists) in cold blood, one of them in the back.

American drone strikes on individuals and groups in the tribal belt of northwestern Pakistan, as well as in Yemen, also typify Washington’s global shadow wars. The United States has 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles, which it has deployed in strikes in six countries. Both the CIA and the US military operate the drones. Rather than being adjuncts to conventional war, drone strikes are mostly carried out in places where no war has been declared and no Status of Forces Agreement has been signed. They operate outside the framework of the Constitution, with no due process or habeas corpus, recalling premodern practices of the English monarchy, such as declaring people outlaws, issuing bills of attainder against individuals who offend the crown and trying them in secret Star Chamber proceedings.

Despite President Obama’s denials, the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that not only are civilians routinely killed by US drone strikes in northern Pakistan; often people rushing to the scene of a strike to help the wounded are killed by a second launch. The BIJ estimates that the United States has killed on the order of 3,000 people in 319 drone strikes, some 600 of them civilian bystanders and 174 of those, children. Some 84 percent of all such strikes were launched after Obama came to office.

Moreover, the drone operations are classified. When asked about strikes, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refuses to confirm or deny that they have occurred. The drones cannot be openly debated in Congress or covered in any detail by the US media. Therefore, they cannot be the subject of a national political debate, except in the abstract. The Congressional intelligence committees are briefed on the program, but it is unlikely that any serious checks and balances can operate in so secret and murky a realm, and the committees’ leaders have complained about the inadequacy of the information they are given. No hearing could be called about them, since the drone strikes cannot be publicly confirmed. Classified operations create gods, above the law.

* * *

The WikiLeaks State Department cables reveal that Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh secretly authorized US drone strikes, pledging to take the blame from their angry publics. But a private conversation with a single leader, repeatedly denied thereafter in public, is hardly a treaty. The only international legal doctrine (recognized in the United Nations charter) invoked to justify drone strikes is the right of the United States to defend itself from attack. But it cannot be demonstrated that any drone strike victims had attacked, or were in a position to attack, the United States. Other proposed legal justifications also falter.

The doctrine of “hot pursuit” does not apply in Yemen or Somalia, and often does not apply in Pakistan, either. The only due process afforded those killed from the air is an intelligence assessment, possibly based on dubious sources and not reviewed by a judge. Those targeted are typically alleged to belong to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or some kindred group, and apparently thought to fall under the mandate of the September 14, 2001, Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force by the president against those behind the September 11 attacks and those who harbored them. The AUMF could probably legitimately be applied to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Al Qaeda faction, which still plots against the United States. But a new generation of Muslim militants has arisen, far too young to be implicated in 9/11 and who may have rethought that disastrous strategy.

Increasingly, moreover, “Al Qaeda” is a vague term somewhat arbitrarily applied by Washington to regional groups involved in local fundamentalist politics, as with the Partisans of Sharia, the Yemeni militants who have taken over the city of Zinjibar, or expatriate Arab supporters in Pakistan of the Haqqani network of Pashtun fighters — former allies of the United States in their struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. How long will the AUMF be deployed in the Muslim world to authorize cowboy tactics from the skies? There is no consistency, no application of the rule of law. Guilt by association and absence of due process are the hallmarks of shadow government. In September the Obama administration used a drone to kill a US citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki. But since the Supreme Court had already ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), that the AUMF could not authorize military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees that sidestepped civil due process — and since the subsequent Military Commissions Act of 2006 allows such tribunals only for aliens — it is hard to see how Awlaki’s right to a trial could be summarily abrogated. Two weeks after he was killed, his 16-year-old son, also a US citizen and less obviously a menace to the superpower, was also killed by a drone.

By contrast, the United States and its allies are sanguine about a figure like the Libyan Abdel Hakim Belhadj, now in charge of security in Tripoli, who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and was later held in US black sites. Released, he emerged as a rebel leader in Libya last year. The circumstantial case against him would easily allow a US drone strike on him even now under the current rules, but he was rehabilitated because of his enmity toward Muammar el-Qaddafi.

* * *

Among the greatest dangers to American citizens from Washington’s shadow power is “blowback,” the common term for a covert operation that boomerangs on its initiator. Arguably, the Reagan administration marked a turning point in the history of US infatuation with shadow power. Reagan strong-armed King Fahd of Saudi Arabia into providing funds to the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua, and the president developed his own resources for the Contras by illegally selling weapons to Iran (despite its being on the terrorist watch list and ineligible for such sales). Washington also joined Fahd in giving billions of dollars of arms and aid to the fundamentalist mujahedeen in Afghanistan (“freedom fighters,” Reagan called them, “the equivalent of America’s founding fathers”), where Arab volunteers ultimately coalesced into Al Qaeda. They later used the tradecraft they had absorbed from CIA-trained Afghan colleagues to stage operations in the Middle East against US allies and to carry out the 9/11 attacks. Two allied groups that received massive aid from the Reagan administration became among the deadliest US enemies in Afghanistan after 2002: the Haqqani network and the Hizb-i-Islami. Blowback goes hand in hand with covert operations.

The use of mercenaries and black units by the US government undermines discipline, lawfulness and a strong and consistent chain of command. Regular armies can be deployed and then demobilized, but Al Qaeda-like networks, once created, cannot be rolled up so easily, and they often turn against former allies. Black intelligence and military operations with virtually no public oversight can easily go rogue.

Reagan’s shadow government was a disaster, but it was a pygmy compared with Obama’s. Americans will have to be prepared for much more blowback to come if we go on like this — not to mention further erosion of civil liberties at home, as the shadow government reaches back toward us from abroad. (Electronic surveillance without a warrant and the militarization of our police forces are cases in point.) Moreover, the practices associated with the shadow government, because of the rage they provoke, deepen mistrust of Washington and reduce the international cooperation that the United States, like all countries, needs. The shadow government masquerades as a way to keep the United States strong, but if it is not rolled back, it could fatally weaken American diplomacy.
Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is available in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website.

Is the Six-Million-Dollar Man possible? By James Gallagher

Steve Austin was the “world’s first bionic man” in the 1970s TV series

Can we give ourselves super vision, super strength and super speed?

Science fiction is littered with the theme of upgrading the human body with machinery.

In the 1970s classic TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, the main character – astronaut Steve Austin – is horrendously injured in a test flight accident. He was a man “barely alive” but, as the title sequence explained, science could come to his rescue.

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”

His array of upgrades included an eye with zoom and infrared vision. Bionic legs which could give a car a good race and an arm with the strength of a bulldozer.

Meanwhile, as we have been discovering in the Bionic Bodies series, bionics are having a transformative role in the real world. Artificial hearts implanted into the chest can keep patients alive until a transplant becomes available. Cochlear implants have restored hearing to people who were once deaf. Bionic eyes are giving sight to the blind and a range of hands, arms and legs are restoring lost movement.

But the focus is on keeping people alive or restoring lost function. What about the potential to expand capabilities, what is known as human augmentation? Could a six-million-dollar man ever be built?

Enhancement

“Well, first of all, it’s going to cost a lot more than six million dollars,” says Richard Yonck, foresight analyst with Intelligent Future in Seattle, “but there’s an awful lot of technologies under way that will come very close to achieving that.”

The modular prosthetic limb, in development at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, is one of the most advanced bionic arms

He said: “I see strength, certainly, and I would say the equivalent to the bionic arm he had – that kind of strength – is certainly feasible with time.

“He had bionic vision; the contact lens is one approach and there are developments in retinal implants which are currently working to restore sight. That type of technology will lead to further capabilities, I’m sure, with time.”

However, what about running at speeds of 60mph (100km/h)?

“In physical terms, it’s definitely feasible; in practical terms, I’d really question that, given the difficulties.

“Bipedalism was not really designed for that kind of running. There’s considerably more efficient ways of moving at 60mph. I don’t know if there’s enough benefit to overcome the difficulties of 60mph running speed.

“I totally believe that very seriously enhanced and augmented abilities are going to be available to human beings both in the general public and certainly at the military level.

“In terms of strength, in terms of endurance, in terms of sensory capabilities – all of these are most definitely going to be, in the coming decades, seeing some significant progress.”

One of the challenges with human augmentation is that the human body is still going to be quite weak. It is remarkably easy to damage the body in everyday life, from preparing dinner to playing football.

It might be possible to attach a bionic arm with enough strength to lift a car. However, actually doing so could cripple the rest of the body. Falling over while running at 60mph could be equally damaging.

Timescales

Current bionic body part replacements can imitate human function, but considerable technological developments will be necessary before entering an era of enhancement.

Dr Anders Sandberg, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, told the BBC: “I do think it is possible to reconstruct a body quite easily and get into a six-million-dollar man situation.”

For the next 10 years, he thinks the field will be at the level of “pretty nice prosthetics”, but would then start to be “significantly better” than the real thing.

He said: “I think mid-century, I would be rather surprised if there wasn’t a lot of implants and enhancements around.”

I think it is quite likely that humanity will fight back. I don’t want to be enhanced at all.”

Prof Noel Sharkey, University of Sheffield

Options could include “sensory augmentation; ways of extending our senses such as infra-red sight or ultra-violet; or extending hearing.”

He says one day blind people who are fitted with artificial retinas will not only be given sight, but, rather like a smartphone, a range of apps will emerge that would allow recording, zooming and augmented reality.

“Eventually you reach the point where you can start doing things that normal people can’t do,” he said.

Anybody interested?

“It is quite possible that while we’re kind of anxious about the end product that seems to come from science fiction, we’ll be quietly accepting versions of it,” argues Emily Sargent who is preparing the Wellcome Collection’s exhibit, Superhuman.

She cites the example of the introduction of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) which made people “incredibly nervous” and then “very quickly we became accustomed to it”.

Prof Noel Sharkey, from the University of Sheffield, is not convinced that augmentation will ever catch on: “You’ve got perfectly good legs and arms; I’m not sure people will want other things attached.

“I think it is quite likely that humanity will fight back. I don’t want to be enhanced at all. I’m a human, I love being a human.”

Brain-controlled Cyberdyne’s Hal suit allows disabled patients to walk again

However, he can see enhancements coming from “exoskeletons” – basically robotic suits.

It already conjures up the idea of the people flying round like the Marvel Comics superhero Iron Man, but some suits are already being made.

The Japanese company Cyberdyne has already developed a suit called Hal. It can help people who are no longer able to walk to regain their mobility by picking up electrical signals from the nerves which used to tell limbs to move and converting them into instructions for the suit.

The other option for Prof Sharkey is devices which can be controlled by thought, but which are not part of the human body.

He said: “If I want a really really strong arm, rather than having it attached to my body, it would be much better if it was just alongside me and just moved when I moved and did whatever I wanted. I think you might see that.

“So I can imagine a building site for the future, for instance, where there are builders wearing these exoskeleton suits and being accompanied by tools that do whatever they want without having to press buttons and things.”

So does he think there will be a six-million-dollar man?

“No Steve Austins, I think, but put it this way – I couldn’t rule it out.”

HERE’S a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.

Failed Rocket Spurs Questions

North Korea’s Rare Admission Raises Worries in the U.S. That a Nuclear Test Would Come Next By EVAN RAMSTAD

North Korea launched a multistage rocket Friday morning, again defying countries that want it to stop pursuing advanced weapons, but it apparently blew up less than two minutes into flight. Evan Ramstad has details on The News Hub. Photo: AP.

SEOUL—North Korea’s latest attempt to fire off a long-range rocket followed the same pattern as previous efforts except for one potentially significant difference: this time it admitted failure.

Nearly a month after announcing its intentions, North Korea early Friday launched a newly designed, three-stage rocket, which it said was destined for space but other countries feared was a intercontinental missile in disguise. Less than two minutes after launch, the rocket crashed off the west coast of South Korea, whose navy Saturday deployed about 10 warships in search of debris, a Defense Ministry official said, according to the Associated Press.

Leader Kim Jong Eun (above, right) takes part in celebrations in Pyongyang Friday for the centennial of his grandfather’s birth. The missile launch was timed for the events.

The news of the failed launch was quickly relayed by South Korean and U.S. officials, whose militaries monitored the flight. About four hours later, North Korea itself announced the launch had failed.

Among North Korea observers, that acknowledgment became almost as significant as the launch itself and fed into speculation about what its authoritarian regime will do next and how far the admission of failure had weakened its grip on power.

Nuclear Ambitions

“If you look back to their statements through history, they never say anything like this,” Choi Jong-kun, a political scientist at Yonsei University in Seoul.

The launch embarrassment also raises the probability that North Korea’s leadership will test a nuclear device in the near future, as it did after previous long-range missile tests in 2006 and 2009, many analysts said after the crash.

“The regime may be politically tempted to conduct nuclear tests to save face, but that would directly irritate China, which North Korea is economically dependent on,” Lee Jong-won, professor at Waseda University, said in Tokyo. “This poses a dilemma.”

U.S. officials said its military and intelligence agencies are working to determine what caused the North Korean missile launch to fail. President Barack Obama said the U.S. will work to try to further isolate North Korea in the wake of its failed missile launch. “We will continue to keep the pressure on them and they’ll continue to isolate themselves until they take a different path,” he said in an interview with the Spanish-language network Telemundo en route to to a summit in Latin America.

North Korea’s Failed Launch

A soldier stands guard in front of the Unha-3 (Milky Way 3) rocket sitting on a launch pad at the West Sea Satellite Launch Site, during a guided media tour by North Korean authorities in Pyongyang on April 8.

He added that the North Korean nuclear program is an area of “deep concern,” but added, “They’ve been trying to launch missiles like this for over a decade now and they don’t seem to be real good at it.”

Ben Rhodes, a deputy U.S. national security adviser, said he expected consultations would begin at the United Nations Security Council about an international response to North Korea’s actions and possible “additional steps” if there are further provocative actions. The U.S. canceled plans to provide food aid to North Korea after the launch attempt.

U.S. intelligence agencies have long held that North Korea could have a missile capable of reaching the United States as early as 2015 or 2016, and Pentagon officials cautioned against assuming the latest failure meant Pyongyang’s advancement toward an intercontinental ballistic missile has slowed.

“Their recent track record is not good,” Mr. Little said. “This is, in our estimation, their third failed attempt.…They obviously have a ways to go with their capabilities.”

But Mr. Little added: “We’re not ready to say that somehow the brakes are on North Korean military advancements.”

Still, North Korea’s acknowledgment of the failure may be a sign that the ability of the regime to control information, which has been important to its maintenance of power, is eroding, some analysts said.

“They’re losing their grip on the flow of information in and out of the country,” said Peter Beck, director of the Korea office of the Asia Foundation.

Mr. Beck said the risk to the regime stemmed not from immediate reports, but the prospect that word of the failure would get back to North Koreans through people who travel outside the country, or via DVDs and other materials that are illegal but increasingly available.

“They decided it would be better to get out in front it rather than having the failure spread through word of month,” he said. Some noted that, after enduring a month of international criticism for the launch and inviting foreign reporters to see the rocket earlier this week, the government had no other choice but to break with past claims of successful launches, despite their failure.

As part of an effort to persuade other countries that its rocket was heading to space and was not a missile, North Korea this week invited about 50 reporters from other countries to visit the launch site, as well as its space-command center near Pyongyang. Though the reporters weren’t allowed to watch the launch, their presence may have pressured the government to acknowledge the failure.

“It was impossible for North Korea to assert the rocket launch was successful.” said Baek Seung-joo of the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis.

North Korea’s government has long generated support for its dictators by creating mythological stories about them and keeping its 24 million people largely cut off from outside information. Its officials hoped the rocket launch would become another chapter in the mythology and said it was timed to commemorate the anniversary of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder and first leader, Kim Il Sung.

North Korea took another step in building up the image of the current leader Kim Jong Eun later on Friday when its Supreme People’s Assembly gave him the final title that his father and grandfather had before him—chairman of the National Defense Commission, considered the most powerful organ in the state.

Among those mythmaking efforts in years past, North Korea claimed that two previous rockets, which other countries also tracked until they crashed, successfully sent satellites into space. Some observers expected North Korea to pretend Friday’s crash didn’t happen.

Instead, its main TV network broke into programming early Friday afternoon for an anchorwoman to deliver a three-sentence announcement that concluded, “Scientists, technicians and experts are now looking into the cause of the failure.”

North Korean authorities gave no further explanation, but military officials in South Korea and the U.S. said the rocket apparently failed around the time its first stage was complete and second stage was taking over.

South Korea’s military said the rocket crashed in two parts. The first part split into 10 pieces that fell in waters west and slightly south of Seoul. The second part flew a bit farther south, then broke in three pieces into waters west of Gunsan.

The White House said the “provocative action threatens regional security, violates international law and contravenes its recent commitments.”

Asked Friday why the U.S. canceled plans to provide food aid to North Korean people because of their government’s actions, Mr. Rhodes said the lack of trust on security issues had implications for other programs.

“We cannot trust the government to provide that assistance to the people who need it. It is the North Korean government who is holding its own people hostage,” Mr. Rhodes said.

He also denied the launch meant that President Obama’s effort to engage the North Korea was a failure.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “What this administration has done has broken the cycle of rewarding provocative actions by the North Koreans that we’ve seen in the past. Under the previous administration, for instance, there was a substantial amount of assistance provided to North Korea. North Korea was removed from the terrorism list, even as they continued to engage in provocative actions. Under our administration we have not provided any assistance to North Korea.”

He said the administration made it clear that talks with Pyongyang about possibly giving food aid in exchange for a freeze in North Korea’s enrichment activities and a move toward denuclearization could not advance if the leadership didn’t keep its commitments. “And their efforts to launch a missile clearly demonstrates that they could not be trusted to keep their commitments, therefore we’re not going forward with an agreement to provide them with any assistance,” Mr. Rhodes added.

War…This is for REAL. The Democrats versus the Republicans. If the Republicans win we’re back to SLAVERY esp for WOMEN ” PREPARE TO FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE “………Harvey Edwards

REPORTING THE FACTS……

It took Bush, Cheney and the Republicans eight years to destroy our country let alone the world and you expect President Obama to correct years of destruction they have caused to be reversed in three years. That is simply and truly IMPOSSIBLE.

I am living in the realistic present. If you ride a horse to work today I will listen to you otherwise these are the facts: The Republican party has changed and has moved to the far right and has become a party for the rich and powerful leaving the poor hopeless with no chance to succeed in life. Their only option, which I stand behind, is to fight whenever wherever the Republicans and the conservative right wing are.

We have lost hope in America because of the REPUBLICANS. AMERICA IS NOT GOD BUT THE REPUBLICANS THINK THEY ARE. I am 64 years old and all that I invested in is gone, and I AM POOR so is my country. What happened, well you can start by blaming  Bush and Cheney and the REPUBLICANS for an illegal war that KILLED many of our great Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent women, children and men. It also drained trillions of dollars and nobody has ever brought them to justice and nobody will.

The death of THE AMERICAN DREAM due to the banks, the war, deregulation, the rich, big business, basic healthcare for all and the list goes on and on all under the watch of BUSH, CHENEY and the REPUBLICANS. The rich control the country and somehow we must revolt and give every WOMAN, MAN and CHILD the opportunity to have a life. Remember you must take charge of your own fate for if you don’t it then is taken out of your hands and you will certainly regret that. Women in this country must have the right to make decisions about their own lives and the government esp the REPUBLICANS, WHO DO NOT CARE IF YOU LIVE OR DIE must stay out. This is a must…..

We only go around once in life, don’t make your life theirs to control. Write, call, protest in front of their office, home or when you see them but to do nothing will only bring injustice in your life. We must bring back hope for at this point in time we have lost it..When President Clinton left office we had money in the bank , now are broke with no hope in sight. I can’t believe the Republicans on so many levels. Now the REPUBLICANS want to control WOMEN’S RIGHTS and KILL HEALTHCARE and THE LIST GOES ON….

Now is the time to go after them in any way you feel justified. The Democrats say yes and, without even reading a plan, the Republicans will say no. I believe if this does not stop we will have a revolution and maybe we need one to change. I know some of those who read this will say ridiculous but please look around and tell me things are good. There is so much fake spin out there you get dizzy. How can anyone be proud of this country right now? If you are well off you want it to stay the same. Forget about the children going to bed hungry, those homeless, no jobs, can’t meet your basic needs, those that are dying since they have no health insurance and can’t afford it, taking care of our brave vets, making sure our existence in our country is taken care of first. I see no hope for the future. We were once a great nation and now we are becoming a third world nation. And then you see a Hummer drive by, do they care? I don’t think so. We must take care of our family first and this country is our family. Who is Harvey Edwards ?