Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday, 29 May 2014

The European Union Times



Posted: 28 May 2014 10:16 AM PDT

US search engine Google is developing cars which are rendered needless of steering wheels, brakes and gas pedals.
Co-founder Sergey Brin told a Southern California tech conference on Tuesday that the company will make 100 prototype self-driving cars.
The driver-free vehicles are also fitted with start and stop buttons. It is to be made for two occupants and early editions are to run at only 40 kilometers per hour.
Chris Urmson, director of the company’s self-driving project, has said, “We’ll see these vehicles on the road within the year.”
The technology, which uses a combination of sensors and computing power, has already sat its test on actual vehicles. The company has said its self driving cars had covered 700,000 miles on public roads.
“The reason I’m super excited about these prototypes is the ability to change the world and the community around you,” Brin said.
He described the need for these smaller, self-driving vehicles as incredibly important for people underserved by typical transit options, especially those who do not live in densely-packed urban areas.
“We’re really excited about this vehicle – it’s something that will allow us to really push the capabilities of self driving technology, and understand the limitations,” said Urmson.
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Posted: 28 May 2014 10:08 AM PDT


Blaming “white privilege” for mass shootings ignores threat of real enemy, a predatory financial elite.
Over the weekend the usual venues pushing the progressive agenda took the Elliot Rodger shooting to the next level and concluded the root cause for this sort of violence is white privilege and misogyny.
Liberal commentators have devised a new term, “aggrieved entitlement,” to explain what normally would be characterized as psychopathy.
“At the risk of getting too existentialist, I’d like to propose a very simple and elegant explanation for not only school shootings but a host of other barbaric acts in recent years: White men are having a crisis of both aggrievement and entitlement,” writes William Hamby.
As a prime example of this theory, Hamby points to the scripted media sideshow the establishment passes off as political life in America. “One need only look at the 2012 election season to see less brutal but equally mind-numbing examples of white men going mad because they are losing their power,” he writes.
White men, Hamby explains, turn to violence when “they are no longer the kings of their own private castles, rulers of all they survey.” He offers Adam Lanza as an example.
Lanza is a figure sketchy as the blurry and grainy photos of him published by the media following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Lanza, if we can believe the official narrative, suffered from serious mental illness. His alleged shooting spree had nothing to do with a politically charged sense of aggrievement, loss of social status, racism, sexism or misogyny. The Washington Post reported “we still know next to nothing about” Lanza, a young man few if any knew, who might have “been a ghost” who “lived on a screen, in the cloud.” He did not write a manifesto or espouse political beliefs.
As to be expected, we can find even no shortage of ludicrous political theories on mass murder at Daily Kos, a forum created by a known CIA operative.
Chauncey de Vega (not his real name) wrote over the weekend that “white privilege” is in fact a “white pathology” endangering society. “Like Adam Lanza, this would appear to be a case of aggrieved white male entitlement syndrome, one which has led to a murderous and tragic outcome” de Vega explained after the shooting attributed to Elliot Rodger, the son of a Hollywood director.
After Sandy Hook, the anonymous purveyor of the We Are Respectable Negroes blog expanded his racial distillation on violence, which is essentially a modified Marxian theory on class:
Once more the luxury of being white in the United States is the freedom to have your violent deeds be a reflection of a personal failing, as opposed to a cultural or racial one. On a practical level, White privilege is a set of taken for granted and unearned advantages in life. On an abstract level, white privilege also removes certain questions from consideration regarding such matters as social deviancy and crime. As we saw with James Holmes, and now today with Adam Lanza, an unwillingness to ask those hard questions about gun violence, white masculinity, and crime will only continue to hurt all of us across the colorline.
In order to maintain the current level of demagoguery and push a political agenda predicated on race and gender, the left is compelled to exploit isolated instances of societal violence. Connecting mass shooting incidents to mental illness – obvious in the case of Elliot Rodger and, from the small amount of information at our disposal, Adam Lanza – is unacceptable for the left because it undermines its ideological approach to societal issues.
Chauncey de Vega dismisses the mental illness explanation because it is counterproductive to the theory that most social problems are the result of racism and sexism and the illusory claim skin color affords privilege as it did when W. E. B. Du Bois made his argument in 1935. Minus this outdated or similar predicate, the left is unable to call for further government intervention in social affairs and the creation of preferred classes of people who receive transferred wealth through confiscation at gunpoint.
It is unfortunate the left and, conversely, the right do not fully understand the real source of societal violence, violence beyond the reach of mentally ill college students – the predation of an international financial class.
Rodger targeted a handful of students. Wall Street, the City of London and the global financial elite, on the other hand, target entire populations, not strictly with guns but primarily through financial manipulation.
Poverty, misery, disease and death are engineered by banks through debt. The IMF and World Bank, through loan sharking operations designed to prop up corrupt regimes and control and liquidate valuable natural resources have killed millions through so-called structural adjustment programs. Most of the victims are from the third world and the predators primarily from Europe and the United States. Chauncey de Vega and the race and gender left, however, do not seem to be interested in calling out the crimes of the financial class, and for good reason — much of the left is on the payroll.
“More than fifty years ago the [J.P.] Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States,” Carroll Quigley wrote in his book Tragedy and Hope. “This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy… or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could ‘blow off steam,’ and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went ‘radical.’”
The race and gender left is now “blowing off steam” and may eventually succeed in dismantling the Second Amendment and also institute new schemes to shame and confiscate wealth from middle class white males who are perceived to enjoy “privilege” at the expense of others.
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Posted: 28 May 2014 09:44 AM PDT

A survey conducted by the Swedish TV station, ‘Sifo‘ shows that an increasing number of Swedes think that Sweden accepts too many immigrants.
According to the survey, 44% of Swedes think Sweden has too many immigrants, which rose from a survey last year, that found 37% agreed there were too many immigrants.
This year’s survey found that 36% did not feel strongly about immigration, and only 10% wanted more immigration.
So why is it that a democratic country does not get what it wants? Simple, there is an ongoing program of genocide afoot, which is intended to outright destroy Swedish people, or at least turn us into a minority. There can be no voting for that now, can there?
Did you know that around 2015, there will be a new law in Sweden that makes it a crime to criticize immigration? When you are in power, you don’t have to debate your opponents; you can just criminalize their words.
If they are not allowed to talk about certain things, they cannot represent people’s views, therefore can be no true democracy. Freedom of speech is a required in order to have a democracy.
        
Posted: 28 May 2014 05:03 AM PDT

Britain’s military involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost UK taxpayers almost £30 billion, a think tank says.
In a book published on Tuesday, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said that the UK’s contribution to the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was £19.59 and £9.56 billion respectively.
The think tank described the invasions as “strategic failures” despite their high costs, which do not even include the money needed for the UK troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014.
The figures, released in the book, which is titled “Wars in Peace,” translate into £1,000 in losses for every taxpayer in Britain.
Referring to the British intervention in Afghanistan’s southern provinces, the think tank also argued, “[opium] cultivation in Helmand is higher today than it was before the British arrived.”
Britain joined the United States in an invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of combating terrorism. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but Afghanistan remains insecure despite the presence of tens of thousands of US-led forces there.
UK forces also participated in the US-led invasion of Iraq in a blatant violation of international law in 2003 under the pretext that the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.
The UK participated in the controversial wars under former Prime Minister Tony Blair. He currently faces accusations of impeding the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war. He denies the accusation.
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Posted: 28 May 2014 04:24 AM PDT

Edward Snowden was trained as a professional spy and actually worked undercover abroad for America’s biggest intelligence agencies, developing their IT security architecture, the whistleblower revealed in an exclusive interview to NBC News.
“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden told Brian Williams, anchor on NBC’s on Nightly Newsю
“So when they say I’m a low-level systems administrator, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d say it’s somewhat misleading,” he said.
The NBC News pointed out that once Edward Snowden started to leak sensitive information about the methods and scale of NSA global surveillance, the Obama administration tended to speak about him as small fry, a thievish hacker that happened to be a system administrator at the NSA quite by chance.
“No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” President Barack Obama said, shrugging Snowden off last June.
Edward Snowden specifically stressed that he did not “work with people,” being busy securing IT data for the US intelligence.
“I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert,” Snowden told NBC. “I don’t work with people. I don’t recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I’ve done that at all levels, from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top,” he said.
Snowden specified that he was not only involved in undercover work for the CIA and the NSA, but actually taught others the specific skills he knew.
“What they are trying to do is that they are trying to use one position to distract from the totality of my experience, which is: I’ve worked for the Central Intelligence Agency – undercover, overseas, I’ve worked for the National Security Agency – undercover, overseas, and I’ve worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the joint counter-intelligence training,” Snowden revealed.
The agency confirmed to NBC that Snowden delivered at least three lectures at DIA conferences. Two unspecified sources also confirmed to NBC that Snowden really used to be a CIA IT and communications specialist working overseas.
“I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world,” Snowden claimed.
The CIA refused to give an official comment.
US intelligence has been trying to hunt Snowden down ever since he flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong. In late July 2013, he was granted temporarily asylum in Russia, as the US government had charged him with espionage, revoking his passport so he couldn’t move onto Latin America as he had planned.
NBC News spent ‘months’ preparing the interview in an atmosphere of total secrecy, while putting to use some of the documents leaked by Snowden and preparing three exclusive digital reports this year alone. They also put together a special Nightly News report on British cyber spies monitoring YouTube and other social media services.
According to the New York Times report, NBC’s Brian Williams conducted a four-hour interview with Edward Snowden at the Kempinski Hotel in Moscow last week, after “months of negotiations” with Snowden’s intermediaries.
It is believed that Snowden, now 30, used to work for the CIA, but then opted to leave the government to become a freelance intelligence contractor working for various NSA branches, in Japan, Hawaii and other locations. At his last place of work he made a copy of up to 1.7 million secret US intelligence documents revealing the unprecedented scale of internet surveillance and other communications worldwide.
Snowden’s revelations exposed the NSA as the world’s largest collector of phone and internet metadata, capable of intercepting diplomatic and personal communications from everywhere, including undersea fiber-optic cables and tapping the mobile phones of foreign leaders.
NBC News will air the full version of the Edward Snowden interview on Wednesday night at 10 PM EST. This will be the first interview the former NSA contractor has given to the US television news organization since he found himself at the center of the “most staggering theft of American intelligence secrets in the modern era,” NBC News claims.
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