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After 9/11, the excuse for missing clues was too much data -- trying to sip from a fire hose -- but with the priority now excusing NSA spying, the metaphor is for more data -- you can't find a needle in a haystack without a haystack. Twelve years after 9/11, it's time to stop using it to justify illegal and counterproductive policies.
Despite all its claims of independence, the Oslo-based Nobel Committee is enmeshed in Norwegian politics. The global prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has obscured the reality that its selection committee is chosen by leaders of Norway's main political parties -- and, as a member of NATO, Norway is deeply entangled in the military alliance.
The people of the world watch in awe and amazement at what is happening in and to America; they are watching as the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in the history of the world is imploding right before their eyes. They see a country that has lost its vision and its stability, weighed down by a government that is no longer capable of governing.
Glenn Beck was incensed over reports of leaked emails that indicated House Speaker John Boehner coordinated with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to exempt Congress from Obamacare, saying, "This is officially my snapping point. I have had it with John Boehner ... I am for hope and change, I am for transparency," Beck said, as he called for linking arms across party lines. "Enough of this Kabuki theater ... This is a nightmare! ... John Boehner and the GOP: they are nothing but lies."
On September 18, hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas, a.k.a. Killah P, was stabbed outside a bar in Keratsini, Greece.
On Tuesday SCOTUS is to hear arguments in McCutcheon v FEC, a case calling for lifting spending limits by individuals to candidates & political parties during an election cycle. If approved by the Court as was done w/ Citizens United in 2010 where corporate donations savaged the electoral process in its favor it would mean another potential money bonanza to the Republican & Democrat stooges inhabiting the halls of Congress.
How do we make the default pay? We go on offense. Occupy the Default.
This article discusses the interrelations between Obamacare, the shutdown, the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and the need for an emancipatory politics.
By William K. Black, J.D., Ph.D.
Bank Failures are "Inconceivable" under the Latest Neoclassical Fantasy 
Only theoclassical economics constantly recycles variants of its worst ideas that have proven disastrous when they have influenced policy. Other fields advance because they embrace the scientific method. The theoclassical theory is, as always, the creation of "private market discipline" to prevent bank failures. The most catastrophic bank failures are "accounting control frauds."
By David Swanson
Beginning the Ending of War This article is the Introduction to the new book War No More: The Case for Abolition, published in October 2013.
How to meditate and metaphysical information related to our inner microcosm and the outer macrocosm.
Taxpayer Subsidies Helped Tesla Motors, So Why Does Elon Musk Slam Them? Musk is also emblematic of a curious strain of denial that seems to infect Silicon Valley as a whole. His breakaway success is a powerful reminder of how the public sector can turbocharge innovation. It brings to mind the government-backed $500,000 investment in a young startup known as Apple--and the federal grants that funded the prototype for Google. But rather than becoming poster boys for public-private partnership, Musk and other Valley entrepreneurs have gone out of their way to distance themselves from their patron.
By Press Release
How the Rigged Economics of Meat and Dairy Make You Consume Too Much; How to Eat Better, Live Longer, and Spend Smarter 
An Interview with David Robinson Simon author of MEATONOMICS: How the Rigged Economics of Meat and Dairy Make You Consume Too Much; How to Eat Better, Live Longer, and Spend Smarter
After years of sweeping the issue under the rug and hoping no one would notice, the FDA has now finally admitted that chicken meat sold in the USA contains arsenic, a cancer-causing toxic chemical that's fatal in high doses. But the real story is where this arsenic comes from: It's added to the chicken feed on purpose!
How is it that Ted Cruz, a freshman Senator from Texas, is able to call the shots in both houses of congress? Perhaps we are seeing a surface fracture caused by a much deeper rift in power structure behind American politics. Follow the money!
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel tried to take his campaign against the Iranian leadership to Iran's young population last week, saying that if they were truly free, they would be able to wear jeans, listen to Western music and participate in free elections. The problem is that Iranians do wear jeans and manage to listen to whatever music they want to listen to, just like people almost anywhere, except maybe in North Korea.
Israel's real estate bubble never popped. It continues to swell. The Central Bank just lowered interest rates to a record low 1% to try to keep inflating the bubble -- a hopeless endeavor. But the Israel Monetary Change Movement has a simple, gradual solution to fix all this with implications for all Monetary Systems.
At least 51 people have been killed in violence in Egypt as anti-coup protesters take to the streets on the 40th anniversary of an Egyptian attack on Israeli forces. Egypt's Health Ministry announced the number of fatalities and also said that 268 people had been injured in clashes across the country.
NY TImes: A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning
The billionaire Koch brothers have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs,Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce,disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet ad showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman's legs during a gynecological exam.The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable Repub members of Congress with scorecards keeping track of their health care votes; and have distributed scripts for phone calls to Congressional offices, sample letters to editors & Twitter & Facebook.While conservatives believe that the public will back them on defunding, a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 57% disapproves of cutting off funding as a way to stop the law.
Saudi officials have reportedly become deeply upset and anxious over the Iranians' success during President Hassan Rouhani's recent visit to New York and the possible start of rapprochement between Saudi officials have decided to use all their diplomatic and intelligence capabilities and possibilities as well as their lobbies in the US to blockade a rapprochement between Tehran and Washington and Bandar bin Sultan was assigned to study possible ways of stirring tension between Iran and the US.Tehran and Washington, and are seeking a way to sabotage the trend, a source said.
By earl ofari hutchinson
Was Race a Factor in the Slaying of Miriam Carey? Miriam Carey's sisters screamed loudly that their sister did not have to die in the hail of gunfire from D.C. police. They did not say or even hint that race had anything to do with the young black woman's slaying in her alleged attack on the White House. The blizzard of oft times conflicting reports on how and why she was killed has left plenty of room for much speculation and serious doubt over whether Carey really was a dan
By Andrew Schmookler
Obama Should Say, "My Oath of Office Tells Me, No Concessions to Blackmailers" A brief speech that casts the Republican tactic as an assault on the American constitutional order, and hence the refusal to negotiate with the hostage-takers as part of the presidential oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
By Tom Engelhardt
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Age of Inhuman Scale It was the stuff of fantasy, of repeated failed expeditions and dreams that wouldn't die. I'm talking about the Northwest Passage, that fabled route through Arctic waters around North America. Now, it's reality.
By Sherwood Ross
UK's Liberal Guardian Bids To Become First Global Daily UK's liberal Guardian, an investigative newspaper "on fire," on a path to become the world's first truly global news daily. Latest Articles
This is lunacy. The economy is sputtering along at sub-2 percent, millions of people can't find work, public confidence in the government is down the plughole, and Bernanke's playing circle-jerk with the money supply. This is the recovery we're expected to believe in? Just look at the problems the banks are having.
There is an insidious method to the madness of government shutdowns. In general, the dividing line between what gets shut down and what doesn't is a similar dividing line between what America's political culture typically venerates as The State and what that culture lambasts as The Government.
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The federal government is shut down, we're about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen? Many people seem perplexed by the transformation of the G.O.P. into the political equivalent of the Keystone Kops -- the Boehner Bunglers? Republican elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party's radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.
Speaker John A. Boehner stood his ground on Sunday alongside the most conservative Republicans in Congress, insisting that the House would not vote to finance and reopen the government or raise the nation's borrowing limit without concessions from President Obama on his health care law. Most of the government remains shuttered with no end in sight, and markets and businesses were growing increasingly fretful over the chaos that could result from the first government default on its debt.
The world is watching Washington's showdown over the federal budget and debt ceiling with the same feelings of horror, disbelief and ghoulish fascination that a slow-motion car crash produces. The Republican-led House of Representatives is on a collision course with the Democratic White House. Both sides know the damage that would be inflicted on the country if the Treasury runs out of money later this month, risking an unprecedented debt default. So one of them is sure to blink and swerve away. Aren't they?
A bomb killed four US soldiers in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, American and Afghan officials said. They were the latest casualties in a 12-year conflict that shows no signs of slowing down despite a drawdown in foreign forces. The US-led international military coalition says four of its service members were killed in the south, and a military official
Mohammad Saleh Jokar, a ranking member of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, condemned the recent fabrication of the Iranian President's remarks by CNN, and called for an immediate ban on the American news network. He said CNN has adopted contradictory policies towards Iran in recent years, but all in all it has always tried to serve the goal of the Zionists who seek to portray Iran as an enemy state geared towards developing an atomic bomb.
The partial government shutdown headed into its second week with no sign of resolution to the bitter stalemate as key Republicans in Congress on Sunday linked the current budget impasse to the looming confrontation over a potential default on the nation's debt. House Republicans made dismantling or delaying the health care law a condition of passing a temporary spending bill -- a position rejected by Obama and Senate Democrats.
International disarmament experts on Sunday began dismantling and destroying Syria's chemical weapons arsenal and the equipment used to produce it, taking the first concrete step in their colossal task of eliminating the country's chemical stockpile by mid-2014, an official said
SAN FRANCISCO -- Hunkered down in a converted shipping container stationed in a San Francisco parking lot, three young entrepreneurs are tinkering with the DNA of ordinary plants in the hopes of being able to mass produce a variety that glows in the dark. If all goes well, their start-up company will begin mailing out the first batch of seeds next spring to the 8,000 donors across the country who helped them raise nearly $500,000 in a phenomenally successful online fundraising campaign through Kickstarter. The distribution of an estimated 600,000 seeds would be, by far, the largest release of a synthetically engineered organism to the general public. The recipients will be able to plant the seeds in any standard flower pot and, with enough light and water, grow a glowing version of a small winter annual with oval-shaped leaves that is related to mustard.
The past, as Faulkner famously observed, is not even past. We live in this year of white rage and white derangement, the year of George Zimmerman and Paula Deen and a government shutdown engineered entirely by a small group of congressmen who represent a lily-white, neo-Confederate nation within a nation. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove and the other so-called Beltway pragmatists of the Republican Party have relied on angry white people for political victories for decades.
A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning - NYTimes.com
The stand by conservatives that led to the current crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort, waged by a galaxy of well-funded groups, to undo President Obama's health care law.
hen it comes to the movement to end domestic violence, women have remained at the forefront of the struggle. That's one of the reasons that inspired a new campaign called #31forMarissa. The campaign calls on men nationwide to write in support of Marissa Alexander, a Florida woman who was sentenced to 20 years in jail after firing a warning shot at a wall near her abusive husband. On September 25, a judge ordered a new trial for Alexander. Each day, #31forMarissa will post a different letter written by a man about his story of violence experienced by women in his circle—his mom, sisters, daughters or friends. (Read the first letter below.) The letters will run on a blog called theSWAGspot, dedicated to starting conversations by men, throughout the month of October, which is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Hard copies of the letters will be sent to Marissa Alexander.
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