January 28, 2006

News -- Januray 28, 2006

Catastrophe Looms - "Americans need desperately to comprehend that if Bush attacks Iran and Syria, as he intends, terrorism will explode, and American civil liberties will disappear into a thirty-year war that will bankrupt the United States. The total lack of rationality and competence in the White House and the inability of half of the US population to acquire and understand information are far larger threats to Americans than terrorism. America has become a rogue nation, flying blind, guided only by ignorance and hubris. A terrible catastrophe awaits."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts144.html

The Truth About the State of our Union - "On Tuesday night President Bush will stand before the Congress and the nation, to deliver his annual State of the Union address. We are sure to hear a rosy tale of an economy on the rebound, a blossoming democracy in Iraq, a terror network on the run, and a Gulf Coast region rebuilding better and stronger than ever before. As is most often the case with this Administration, the rhetoric does not match reality."
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0127-24.htm

Democrats concede Judge Alito victory - "Well before he reached the battlefield, however, Democrats had waved the white flag and agreed that next week's vote to confirm Judge Alito will surely succeed."
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060127-105455-8591r.htm

Chilling dissent - The sordid history of the government spying on its own citizens - "From spying on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil right activists, to the Cointelpro program that targeted the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement and scores of anti-Vietnam War groups in the 1960s and 1970s, to the Reagan Administration's spying on activists opposed to its Central American wars during the 1980s, to police infiltrating groups protesting at the Republican National Convention in 2000, spying on Americans by assorted government agencies is as American as leaky breast implants, cronies getting jobs in the Bush Administration, unsafe coal mines, and Pat Robertson embarrassing himself on television on a near weekly basis."
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m20001&hd=0&size=1&l=e

Germany 'needs a nuclear arsenal of its own' - "A former defence minister has provoked outrage and broken a major taboo by suggesting that Germany should have its own nuclear arsenal." -- If you don't have them, then you're at the mercy of countries that do.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/27/wgermany27.xml&DCMP=EMC-new_27012006

US plans to 'fight the net' revealed - "A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks. ... Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet." -- Interesting read.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm

Manufacturing Reality - "The Bush Administration's recent dog and pony show Why we Spy! doesn't aim to convince anyone of the validity of any of their pretexts for expanding executive power. ... They don't care because the whole show is not about logic, or valid interpretations or even 3rd grade reading proficiency. The aim rather is to create the illusion of controversy. It is a key technique in the propagation of really big lies."
http://secularfront.blogspot.com/2006/01/manufacturing-reality.html

They say POWER corrupts - "Evo Morales proves that it does not. Shortly after winning the Bolivian presidency in a landslide election, Morales reduced his own salary by 57%, to US $1800 per month. Apparently, the age old saying that power corrupts is either not true, or does not apply to Morales. ... I would also argue that the saying is not true. It's a cynical and demoralizing statement that discourages people from expecting more from their leaders. I remain convinced that power may attract corruption, but it does not cause it. Once corrupt, always corrupt. But, if a man is honest, modest, and sincerely cares for people other than himself, no amount of power will corrupt his integrity and his values."
http://wakeupfromyourslumber.blogspot.com/2006/01/they-say-power-corrupts.html

Breathtaking Power Grab - "What emerges with clarity from the weeks since the National Security Agency domestic surveillance program was made public is that this administration is single-mindedly devoted to increasing the power of the government, and more specifically of the executive branch, and has used the 9/11 attack and the subsequent "war on terror" to justify this goal. It is worth remembering that Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and a few others were veterans of the Nixon administration who saw Watergate not as a loathsome abuse of power, but as an unfortunate event that discredited and downgraded the prestige and power of the executive branch and made it more difficult to exercise, in Hamilton's words, "energy in the executive." The terrorist attacks provided a perfect opportunity."
http://www.antiwar.com/bock/?articleid=8452

BYU professor's group accuses U.S. officials of lying about 9/11 - "Last fall, Brigham Young University physics professor Steven E. Jones made headlines when he charged that the World Trade Center collapsed because of "pre-positioned explosives." Now, along with a group that calls itself "Scholars for 9/11 Truth," he's upping the ante. "We believe that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11," the group says in a statement released Friday announcing its formation. "We believe these events may have been orchestrated by the administration in order to manipulate the American people into supporting policies at home and abroad.""
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635179751,00.html

IBM Strives For Superhuman Speech Tech - "IBM unveiled new speech recognition technology on Tuesday that can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it on the fly, and even create on-the-fly subtitles for foreign-language television programs."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1915071,00.asp




Quote of the Day
"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."
~ Sidney Schanberg

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