Tom

Had supper with Tom and Donna tonight. Great food: Cucina in Woodstock. Of course, what makes it so great with them is Tom's perspicacity. He takes my wild-eyed theories about the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies as a matter of course: old news. Peter Van Buren on Edward Snowden:

No, it was conscience. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere along the line Snowden had read the Declaration of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

I never imagined the American people would find it so difficult to realize and discuss the mortifying effect of the Pentagon and intelligence services on our democracy. It's amazing how people want to laugh, shrug, smirk, and turn the other way. There's no talking about jobs or justice when there's a 350 pound gorilla in the room!

March Against Monsanto 5/25/13

How the March Against Monsanto can and will change the world ...This new way of media and activism cannot be controlled by the likes of corporations or governments; these are ideas and they cannot be stopped. This new paradigm shift starts with you, your friends and family, and the way you can connect with people around you; the way information is disseminated makes all the difference in this new paradigm.... Nick Bernabe TheAnti-Media.org

The drone conference in April is finally starting to appear on Peace News. Next Thursday is the raw footage for "Prisoners of the War on Terror."

A thousand protesters showed up at the State of the State last Thursday, but Cuomo didn't mention fracking.

In a letter to the Joint Landowners Coalition of New York last week, DEC chief Joseph Martens sought to assuage fears among the pro-fracking lobby that Cuomo would keep the moratorium in place. Martens said that the governor — who received $150,000 of the roughly $200,000 in campaign contributions that energy firms made in the last gubernatorial election — had personally asked him to reach out to the group. “We’ve just hit walls with a lot of our municipal governments,” said Isaac Silberman-Gorn, an activist with the anti-fracking group Citizen Action in New York’s Southern Tier, a region very much on the gas industry’s radar. “The reason being: They’re bought and paid for.

Fracking is a toxic threat to American communities and the climate. It squanders prodigious quantities of our most precious resource, water. Furthermore, it is likely, although it is hard to gain the fracking industry's cooperation in proving, that over time fracking water and toxic chemicals seep through the earth's substrata, poisoning groundwater and aquifers, and even returning to the surface, where they pollute and permanently befoul--not just surface water--but all the surrounding acreage. This exploitation of the planet and wanton destruction of irreplaceable resources can no longer be tolerated. Now we know. Fracking far exceeds the limits of sustainable practices, even without considering the impact of the methane being extracted for burning. People are responsible for guarding resources for future generations. Fracking is a wanton violation of this principle. Allowing fracked gas exports would dramatically increase the scale of and demand for fracking in the United States by giving the fossil fuel industry access to huge foreign markets. Furthermore, these exports would profit the fracking companies at the expense of everyone else. Fracking for export is unwise, unjust and untenable. Stand up to the fossil fuel industry and deny all applications to export natural gas.

PowellMemorandumPrinted

How did the conservative movement become so well-organized and entrenched, with think tanks, networks, media, deep pockets?

It didn't happen by chance.

Although there was an organized attempt by conservatives to push back against FDR and the New Deal, it wasn't until The Powell Memo that the conservative movement as we know it gained the impetus to the growth and influence we see today.
PowellMemorandumPrinted.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Did somebody say, "Budget Cuts?"

Buried evidence--you don't have to read very closely to gather that this reporter is treading very, very lightly upon material that itself treads very lightly upon military influence in American mass media. Anyone who has read the international news in the papers for the last twenty or thirty years already knows that our intelligence services--especially in the branch services intelligence departments--has worked consistently to manipulate news media in foreign countries where Uncle Sam has a strategic or economic interest. Nothing new, right? What's new since Kosovo is that we're doing it here. But now the major papers won't write about it much, if at all. For the sake of quickly moving public opinion before an armed intervention, the Pentagon used a large cast of retired uniforms to spin the message. Normally, however, mainstream (corporate, commercial) media outlets are already message-managed from the inside by former military officers with ongoing intelligence missions.