Bailing Out A Sinking Ship

As profits climb for companies like Goldman Sachs (who also happened to take government and (tax payer) money to pay for their expensive misjudgements), and Wall Street salaries are returning to former extravagant levels, millions of people are still being sacrificed through job and home loss--and on top of that, the loss of healthcare benefits--as the financial giants recover.

What have these financial firms learned as they plunge ahead on their ship of fools? They have shown no remorse nor have made amends for the damage they have done. Without the majority of people pushing to enforce reform, nothing will change and financial disaster will happen again and again, as history has shown.

Mission Preemptive

During the Bush years, we saw a dwindling of civil liberties that increased disproportinately after 9/11. Preemptive war became preemptive attacks on any country in the name of US security. These attacks are not in keeping with the best interests of all people. Innocent lives are always lost, it seems, and do they ever get their man or woman in the process? Yet the world just sighs and hopes for a better tomorrow.

To put this in perspective, imagine that China has achieved world power and becomes the country all other countries look to for protection. China has decided to incorporate such tactics as preemptive attacks and suspects anti-Chinese radicals in Texas. So China sends a force to Texas, attacks the radicals, and in the process kills a dozen or so civilians, including small children and their parents. And the world doesn't react because China knows what it is doing and lives lost are the cost of security. How would you feel then? And is this country safe from its own preemptive attacks?

I hope that Barack Obama will not keep any current Bush Administration defense leaders who have been involved in strikes that are not in the best interest of innocent human lives.

Associated Press: US conducted secret ops in Pakistan, Syria
Sun Nov 9, 11:04 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The U.S. military has conducted nearly a dozen secret operations against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Syria, Pakistan and other countries since 2004, The New York Times reported Sunday night.

Citing anonymous U.S. officials, the Times story said the operations were authorized by a broad classified order that then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed and President Bush approved in spring 2004. The order gave the military authority to attack al-Qaida anywhere in the world and to conduct operations in countries that were not at war with the U.S.

One such operation was the Oct. 26 raid inside Syria, the Times reported. Washington hasn't formally acknowledged the raid, but U.S. officials have said the target was a top al-Qaida in Iraq figure. Syria has asked for proof and said eight civilians were killed in the attack.

In another mission, in 2006, Navy SEALs raided a suspected terrorist compound in Pakistan's tribal areas.

The raids have typically been conducted by U.S. Special Forces, often in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency, the newspaper said. Even though the process has been streamlined, specific missions have to be approved by the defense secretary or, in the cases of Syria and Pakistan, by the president.

A Defense Department spokesman had no comment Sunday night on the Times report.

Bush Endorses His Mirror Images

McCain is Going to LOSE!

Bush 2000 Saturday Night Live

It came true

The Surge Was a Setup

When President Bush announced he was going to send in a large group of soldiers in a "surge" to stop the violence, it seemed to everyone who had objected that it had indeed worked. However, we who read are often enlightened with the truth which is that the surge was just a ruse to manipulate the American public right before an election. In reality, some people, Iraqis, and/or other groups, had already moved people around right before the military surge arrived and that movement is what silenced the guns for the time being.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor 36 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday.

The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed.
Minority Sunni Arabs were driven out of many neighborhoods by Shi'ite militants enraged by the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. The bombing, blamed on the Sunni militant group al Qaeda, sparked a wave of sectarian violence.

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement.
"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

Some 2 million Iraqis are displaced within Iraq, while 2 million more have sought refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan. Previously religiously mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad became homogenized Sunni or Shi'ite Muslim enclaves.

The study, published in the journal Environment and Planning A, provides more evidence of ethnic conflict in Iraq, which peaked just before U.S. President George W. Bush ordered the deployment of about 30,000 extra U.S. troops.

The extent to which the troop build-up helped halt Iraq's slide into sectarian civil war has been debated, particularly in the United States, with supporters of the surge saying it was the main contributing factor, and others arguing it was simply one of a number of factors.

"Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved," Agnew's team wrote in their report.

Agnew's team used publicly available infrared night imagery from a weather satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force.

"The overall night light signature of Baghdad since the U.S. invasion appears to have increased between 2003 and 2006 and then declined dramatically from 20 March 2006 through 16 December 2007," their report said.

They said the night lights of Shi'ite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as did lights in the Green Zone government and diplomatic compound in central Baghdad. Lights increased in the eastern New Baghdad district, another Shi'ite enclave.

Satellite studies have also been used to help document forced relocations in Myanmar and ethnic cleansing in Uganda.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Ross Colvin)

The Price of Oil

Today the U.S. military targeted four "suspected" insurgents in Iraq, not even proven. They got them, guilty or not, but also killed three innocent Iraqi women and injured at least one person, a child who probably lost his or her mother. The true price of oil is the number of innocent Iraqi lives lost in pursuit of oil, plus the lost lives of the military from America and around the world who were coerced into fighting this senseless war.

US: 7 Iraqis killed in raid north of Baghdad
1 hour, 14 minutes ago
BAGHDAD - The U.S. military says seven Iraqis have been killed in a raid by American troops backed by attack aircraft targeting al-Qaida in Iraq.

A military statement says those killed Friday in the Sunni town of Adwar include four suspected insurgents and three women. It says a child has been pulled from the rubble and is being treated at a nearby U.S. base.
The military says the U.S. troops were targeting a man believed to be the leader of a bombing network in an area north of Baghdad.
It says ground forces killed the main suspect and called in an airstrike that killed three additional suspected insurgents along with three women.
Iraqi officials and neighbors say the family had no connection to the insurgency.

Kudos to Advanced Technology and Knowledge

The Europeans are jumping on technology to advance our knowledge of the world and space while the US argues about morality in the upcoming elections. The Large Hadron Collider is a machine that sends beams of protons at nearly the speed of light. The machine will create a scenario where protons slam into each other and scientists expect that the particles will melt into energy up to 100,000 times hotter than the sun's core — kind of like how the universe is thought to have come into existence. This explains how something with no mass can become particle masses, and so life begins, perhaps.

From a nuclear physicist (my brother), a quote: "the collider: It's purpose is to accelerate subatomic particles to higher velocities than they've ever done before, and to collide them so they can look for other subatomic particles that have never been seen before --certain theoretical atomic entities can only come into existence in the aftermath of extremely high energy collisions. The big thing in the news is that some people say the collisions will create mini black holes that will swallow the Earth. Poppycock. There are a lot of smart scientists that work on accelerators, they love mother Earth as much as anybody, and they would not do something that would destroy the planet. The danger was considered, some calculations were done, and it was determined that is was not possible. But some wackos took off with the idea, and have made a big deal about it."

So there you go, all you doomsdayer freaks who are afraid of change or knowledge--you need therapy.

Meanwhile, in the United States, we are cutting back on research and have been doing so for quite some time, to pour our dollars into a war about oil instead of focusing on new energy options. Promises are made to increase our research budgets, but then fall through the inevitable cracks of politics, and the research dollars never actually surface.

Note: Update - apparently we do have the technology but the military and government have first dibs on it.