Showing posts with label end of the USA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label end of the USA. Show all posts

Thursday, 15 May 2014

UN: Is America "the land of the free"?

Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Kevin Uhrich (pasadenaweekly.com, 4-8-14)

The Mirror Turns: UN Human Rights Committee says...
This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow)
Despite our government’s many military entanglements and abuses of authority at home, most Americans still maintain a pretty high opinion of our country and the way our government treats its citizens and others around the world. 
  
The thing is, the unquestioning zeal regularly expressed for “our way of life” by cheerleading mainstream media personalities and politicians isn’t something that’s universally shared, according to a recent report issued by the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

What's America really like? This map shows some snapshot traits (koalogist.tumblr.com)
 
Whereas it is usually the United States that stands in judgment of other countries, and has traditionally used the UN to justify the wars it’s waged since the Korean Conflict, the script has been flipped in this case, with America now being portrayed as a bully and a villain, not only abroad, but at home as well. 

Uncle Sam (Big Brother) is watching
“The committee’s recommendations highlight the gaps between US human rights obligations and current laws and practices,” said ACLU Human Rights Program Director Jamil Dakwar in a statement issued last week by the organization’s national office. “The Human Rights Committee rightly called out the United States for setting dangerous examples from counterterrorism operations to an unfair criminal justice system to inhumane treatment of migrants.”

Local reactions to the report released on March 27 were no less critical of the United States, as well as the American media, few of which gave much play to the committee’s findings.

Heads or Tails, Lesser Evil vs. Greater Evil...
“It is shocking that media in Los Angeles [capital of the world] -- print, broadcast, and social -- have nearly entirely ignored what can only be called a factual but nevertheless horrifying, detailed indictment of violations of human rights in our country,” said local civil rights activist Marvin Schachter. Schachter is a longtime member of the ACLU, both its Southern California and Pasadena Foothills chapters. He is also a member of the Pasadena United Nations Association. More

Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Saying no to our U.S. "War Criminals" (video)

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow.org)

In yer face, killer, war criminal! (Code Pink)
Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- a war criminal and unindicted co-conspirator along with Dick Cheney, Karl "the Architect" Rove, both George Bush(es), Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft -- was forced to withdraw as commencement speaker at Rutgers University following protests by faculty and students over her role in the 2003 American (U.S.)-led invasion of Iraq and our torture of captives.
 
Abughraibphoto
Seeking justice with a torture lawsuit
Rutgers faculty circulated a petition decrying the role Rice played in "efforts to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." 
 
G.W. Bush, Condi Rice on way to jail (CP)
Last week, Rutgers students occupied a campus building in a call for the invitation (and its $35,000 stipend) to be withdrawn. In a statement this weekend, Rice said her appearance "has become a distraction."

The "No Rice Campaign" at Rutgers is discussed by student protester Carmelo Cintrón Vivas and Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. More
 
PEACE ON EARTH! WOMEN FOR JUSTICE, CODE PINK FOR PEACE (codepink.org)
Cecilymcmillancase
Occupy Wall Street on Trial: Cecily McMillan convicted of assaulting cop, faces seven years

New York’s new Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced the city will drop its appeal of a ruling by a U.S. district court that found the NYPD’s controversial "stop-and-frisk" program unconstitutional and settle an ongoing lawsuit.
 
Guantanamo-1Saying he would close Guantánamo years after it opened, Pres. Obama has signed the National Defense Authorization Act, barring the use of federal funds to transfer detainees from the notorious American torture prison in Cuba to U.S. soil. Of the 166 prisoners remaining, 86 have been cleared for release...

Thursday, 16 January 2014

Fukushima exploded; State says never mind


"Radiation Raining Death" in the US (Hagmann & Hagmann Report)
 
California's last big disaster
Dr. Len Horowitz and Jim Lee discuss the public relations side of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear meltdown in long form radio interview (or see longer video). Judging by the plume at the time of the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown disaster, there was an nuclear explosion. What are the implications of the massive contamination of Japan with radioactive caesium? What about ten years of Fukushima radiation crossing the Pacific Ocean? What are the 10 Most Radioactive Places on Earth? The best way to find out about nuclear reactor leaks around the world is by live radiation monitoring.

Fukushima update: January 2014
Nuclear energy experts Scott Portzline, Arnie Gundersen, and Kevin Kamps (C2C, 1-6-14)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are Japanese cities. US war crimes extended to dropping nuclear bombs over noncombatant civilian populations for the first time in history (kootation.com).
  
Three experts discussed the status of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, the cover-ups of scientific data, and general issues about nuclear waste and power. 
 
How much fallout is too much? (CR)
Last week there was a spate of reports about Fukushima's Unit 3 having new radiation plumes. The reports of steam emissions and people living on the West Coast of the US needing prepare for evacuation were false, according to Scott Portzline. It was a hoax, but the climate of uncertainty is very real. It has been created by the lack of truth from TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), the US government, and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), he explained. "In my opinion, Fukushima is a Level 8 on the international nuclear event scale; the levels normally only go up to 7," Portzline emphasized. He continued: There are multiple sources of radiation, and the situation requires international assistance and monitoring.
"Yes we scan!" Obama to help NSA (dw.de)
Arnie Gundersen concurs. Fukushima is a dire situation -- in contrast to Chernobyl (USSR) and Three Mile Island (USA). The "spigot" isn't turned off yet, and radiation continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean. Fish are picking up extraordinarily high levels of radioactive materials. Gundersen claims he will not eat any fish that comes from the West Coast. In Japan, "the epidemiological data that will develop over the next 30 years [will show that] somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million new cancers will develop as a result of this." But the nuclear industry can hide behind the fact that a high percentage of people get cancer anyway, he points out. Stressing the importance of stopping the groundwater contamination with radioactive waste, Gunderson suggests building a trench of zeolite to absorb the radiation surrounding the plant.

Kami in Shinto (mondojapan.net)
Kevin Kamps points out that 72,000 gallons of contaminated water a day is flowing into the ocean. That radioactivity adds up over nearly three years since the accident. Making matters worse, Kamps explains, Unit 4 may be on the brink of collapse. Some countries, such as Germany, are wisely phasing out dangerous  and expensive nuclear power entirely after the lessons of Fukushima and Chernobyl, Kamps explains. As an alternative, wind power is being tapped as having a great deal potential. And the first offshore floating wind turbines were just installed in the Gulf of Maine, which could provide as much electricity as five atomic reactors, Kamps asserts.

Zen Buddhism will live on. But this may be the end of Japan as a country. Inhabitants will die off or emigrate off the island nation and leave it to the kami (the pre-Buddhist shapeshifting mountain monsters of Shinto Japanese lore).
 
 
Living in a Police State
Part 4: Chase Madar (pasadenaweekly.com), edited Wisdom Quarterly
David Brooks smoked illegal cannabis (Tom Tomorrow/thismodernworld.com)

Snowden: fake controlled-disclosure for NSA?
There is digital over-policing. For a time the Internet was new territory, free of overly aggressive law enforcement. Not anymore. The late Aaron Swartz, a young Internet genius and activist affiliated with Harvard University, was caught downloading publicly subsidized scholarly articles from an open network on the nearby campus of MIT. Swartz was federally prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for violating a “terms and services agreement.” It was a transgression that anyone who has ever disabled a cookie on a laptop has also committed, technically. Swartz committed suicide earlier in 2013 while facing a possible 50-year sentence and up to $1 million in fines.
 
The NSA has a message for the world.
(Why? That is how the corporations wanted it; it sends a message). Recently, thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we have learned a great deal about the way our country's NSA “stops and frisks” us. It apparently does the same to other citizens -- stealing copies of all digital communications (encrypted or not), 200 million texts a day, emails, telephone calls, meta-data, every and anything electronic in nature. The security benefits of such indiscriminate policing are zero, despite the government’s pretense that that is why our spies are allowed to violate laws and international agreements. What comes into sharper focus with every volley of new revelations is the emerging digital infrastructure of what can only be called a police state.  More
CODE PINK FOR PEACE