2) Marijuana Arrests For Year 2008: 847,864 - “Police arrested 847,864 persons for marijuana violations in 2008, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. The total marks a three percent decrease in marijuana arrests from 2007, when law enforcement arrested a record 872,721 Americans for cannabis-related violations.
“Marijuana arrests now comprised one-half (49.8 percent) of all drug arrests reported in the United States. Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 89 percent, 754,224 Americans were charged with possession only. The remaining 93,640 individuals were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.
“Marijuana arrests were highest in the Midwest and southern regions of the United States, and lowest in the west. The 2008 marijuana arrest total is the second highest annual total ever reported.”
3) Charlie Sheen's Video Message to President Obama
4) 9/11: Our Truth, and Theirs: The "official" 9/11 narrative doesn't make sense - “In spite of all the billions spent on ‘anti-terrorism’ programs during the Clinton years, and the combined efforts of our intelligence community and those of our allies’, Mohammed Atta and his cohorts managed to evade detection until the day they emblazoned their vengeance across the sky and pulled off the biggest terrorist attack in US history. That, at least, is the official story. As to what the real story is – well, we’re not allowed to ask.
“President Obama’s ‘green czar,’ one Van Jones, was recently pressured into resigning. His crime? He had once signed a letter originating with one of the ‘9/11 Truth’ organizations calling for a new investigation of the terrorist attacks. No, he hadn’t declared that 9/11 was an ‘inside job,’ as some of the more flamboyant ‘truthers’ assert: indeed, he hadn’t challenged any one specific aspect of the official story. All he had asked for was a new investigation – and once this got out (thanks to Fox News nut-job Glenn Beck), he was shown the door.
“This is the way our society deals with uncomfortable questions about ‘official’ explanations for the inexplicable – by purging all dissenters, and even anybody who asks a question without necessarily having a ready-made answer. To the stake with them! Burn the heretics! Move along, nothing to see here – and don’t ask questions unless you want to completely marginalize yourself, lose your job, and be subjected to an intensive hate campaign.
“We are asked to believe that 19 men, armed with the most basic weapons, somehow managed to elude the biggest, most expensively-accoutered intelligence apparatus in the world — and the intelligence agencies of our allies, to boot. Utilizing nothing but box-cutters and the knowledge gleaned from a few weeks at flight school, these supermen somehow managed to steer those planes into two of the most visible potential terrorist targets in the US, one of which had been successfully targeted by terrorists before. They did this with no help from any foreign intelligence agency, no nation-state in on the plot, and they did it for less than $100,000. Really?”
6a) Rocket attack destroys 20 Nato tankers at Chaman border - “A number of Nato oil tankers were destroyed in a rocket attack near Custom House and FC Office at Pak-Afghan Border near Chaman. According to Geo News, supplies including 1500 oil tankers which were to be transported for Nato forces came under a rocket attack near Chaman border, triggering a blaze. Twenty oil tankers were completely destroyed in the attack.” … and … 6b) '30 civilians killed' in Afghan NATO strike - “Nearly 100 people, including 30 civilians, were killed in a NATO air strike called in by German troops on two hijacked fuel tankers in northern Afghanistan this month, an Afghan government-appointed official said. The September 4 strike in northern Kunduz province has drawn domestic and international criticism, and has stirred intense debate in Germany over Berlin's strategy in Afghanistan, two weeks before an election.”
7) Afghanistan: the battle for water
8) Water projects' past failures are hurting Afghan farmers - “Poor placement and management of wells and dams over several years by nongovernmental organizations and military reconstruction teams throughout Khost province have drained water tables, drying out land cultivated by thousands of farmers in the mountains.
“As a result, some farmers who grow wheat, corn, rice or fruit didn’t grow enough crops to feed their families. They turned to earning money by logging and goat herding or other means, and bought food at markets.”
“During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.
“But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.
“Judges ‘created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons,’ she said. ‘There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.’”
“Internal emails show that Trafigura, which yesterday suddenly announced an offer to pay compensation to 31,000 west African victims, was fully aware that its waste dumped in Ivory Coast was so toxic that it was banned in Europe.
“Thousands of west Africans besieged local hospitals in 2006, and a number died, after the dumping of hundreds of tonnes of highly toxic oil waste around the country's capital, Abidjan. Official local autopsy reports on 12 alleged victims appeared to show fatal levels of the poisonous gas hydrogen sulphide, one of the waste's lethal byproducts.”
“American officials on Monday provided few details but confirmed that Special Operations forces commandos, operating from a nearby American warship, participated in the helicopter raid… The helicopters, either with sniper bullets or air-to-surface missiles, quickly disabled the trucks, according to villagers in the area, and several of the Shabab fighters tried to fire back. Shabab leaders said that six foreign fighters, including Nabhan, were quickly killed, along with three Somali Shabab.
“‘We are very upset, very upset,’ said a Shabab official from the town of Merka, near where the raid happened. ‘This is a big loss for us.’ Ahmed Gaabow, a resident of the area, said that the helicopters then landed and retrieved the bodies, apparently for identification purposes.”
I wonder what the consequences would have been if some of the American soldiers involved with this operation were actually killed or captured when they got out of their helicopters - Black Hawk Down anyone?
The True Story Of Black Hawk Down
It’s also important to keep in mind that even though “many in the media touted Nabhan as a ‘top al-Qaeda leader,’ his affiliation with the group isn’t readily apparent, and the FBI’s wanted poster simply lists him as ‘wanted for questioning’ in connection with a 2002 attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya.”
In 2006 “the CIA propagated that Al-Qaeda had made its base in Somalia where three senior leaders were residing. CIA then encouraged Ethiopia to invade Somalia in support of weak TFG forces (Transitional Federal Government) against UIC fighters (Union of Islamic Courts) and promised to provide intelligence and air cover. Ethiopian troops backed by USA invaded Somalia on 28 December 2006. The UIC was quickly defeated in a sweeping offensive and the six-month peace period was shattered. It was believed that the UIC leadership fled into Kenya or to Yemen and the hard-line fighters cached their arms and melded back into their clans leaving the mostly untrained, new recruits to face the Ethiopian troops. Soon after the UIC rout, two US air strikes targeted alleged Al-Qaeda bases in southern Somalia on 13 January 2007 but only innocent civilians got killed.”
“‘My four-year-old boy was killed in the strike,’ Mohamed Mahmud Burale said. ‘The plane was firing at other areas in Ras Kamboni. We could see smoke from the area. We also heard 14 massive explosions.’
“The air strikes came 16 days after Ethiopian forces entered Somalia to back pro-government troops driving out an Islamist movement that had taken control of much of the country from the weak transitional administration.”
In 2008 “the Islamist fighters attacked the pirates in Hobyo, 450 kilometres (270 miles) north of the capital Mogadishu … just after they had released a Jordanian-flagged cargo ship seized nearly a week earlier. ‘Two Islamists and several pirates died in the fighting which lasted more than an hour,’ one of the elders, Abdinasir Diriye, told AFP by telephone. An Islamist leader said four pirates and two Islamists had been killed in the shoot-out, adding that they had also arrested several of the pirates… Local elders had said Islamist fighters had threatened to attack the pirates if they did not release the ship.”
“Due to the tribal organization of Somalia and the lack of a central government, combined with Somalia's location at the Horn of Africa, conditions were ripe for the growth of piracy in the early 1990s. Since the collapse of the state, boats illegally fishing in Somali waters were a common sight. Pirates at first were interested in securing the waters before businessmen and militias became involved. Acts of piracy temporarily subsided following the rise of the Islamic Courts Union in 2006. However, pirate activity began to increase after Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006.”
It’s important to point out that “the radical Islamists in Somalia never had much following until the Somali people became aware that an outside power was supporting the corrupt and thuggish military chieftains. The popularity of the Islamist movement then surged, allowing the Islamists to take over much of the country. In sum, where no problem with radical Islamists previously existed, the U.S. government helped create one.”
“To keep the invasion and Africa's worst humanitarian catastrophe going, heavy and modern weapons, including airplanes were used. One was a United States Air Force AC-130 gunship that attacked and killed Somali villagers and countless livestock in the hunt for three foreign men suspected for the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Africa, who yet remain at large.”
The shear madness of firing artillery from navy destroyers and gunships to try and kill two or three people in a town occupied by thousands of civilians, is only surpassed by the indifference displayed by the US military, the US media, and the US citizenry as to the number of innocent civilians being killed and displaced. How many civilians did the United States kill in these bombardments?
“Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil, extracting it hadn't seemed worth the effort and risk until recently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude skyrocketing, and advancing technology making reserves easier to tap, the region has become the scene of a competition between major powers that recalls the 19th-century scramble for colonization. Already, the United States imports more of its oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia, and China, too, looks to the continent for its energy security.”
Even though “Africa is united in rejecting US requests for a military headquarters” inside Africa, there are reports that “from oil rich northern Angola up to Nigeria, from the Gulf of Guinea to Morocco and Algeria, from the Horn of Africa down to Kenya and Uganda, and over the pipeline routes from Chad to Cameroon in the west, and from Sudan to the Red Sea in the east, US admirals and generals have been landing and taking off, meeting with local officials. They've conducted feasibility studies, concluded secret agreements, and spent billions from their secret budgets.” This is the future that awaits Africa with AFRICOM and the agenda to control the “oil, and the diamonds, and the uranium, and the coltan.”
If you find the idea that Africa can become bloodier than it is inaccessible, then consider this: Contrary to popular belief, the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa is not Darfur, it’s Somalia, and it all started in 2006, when the United States and Ethiopia started a war with Somalia, ending six months of the only peaceful period Somalis had known for years. The end result has been the same as all other wars that the United States has started this century. Not only is Somalia devastated but the war is spreading.
Turing is widely considered to be the father of modern computing, however, he is best known among the general populace for his “cryptanalysis work at Bletchly Park in the UK. He contributed several ideas that helped the British Government translate Enigma machine messages sent by German naval intelligence. His work with Tommy Flowers resulted in Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer.”
“Bletchly Park projects probably shortened the war by several years, but Turing’s work remained secret until the 1970s. Although he was awarded the OBE for his services during the war, the UK Government ordered the destruction of all computing equipment and research notes.
“Turing was homosexual and lived at a time when it was illegal and considered to be a mental illness. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to a choice of jail or chemical castration. He chose the latter and, two years later, died of cyanide poisoning. The coroner’s official verdict was suicide, but there is speculation regarding the possibility of assassination owing to Turing’s sexuality being perceived as a security risk.”
My first introduction to Turing was last year when I came across a BBC documentary entitled “Dangerous Knowledge”. It featured Alan Turing along with three other great visionaries from our civilization.
In the introduction the producer and presenter, David Malone states the following:
“…this is my homage to four great thinkers, who without most of us even having heard of them, have profoundly influenced the nature of our age, and who’s stories have, I think, an important message for us today.”
I really didn’t understand what David Malone meant until I watched segments of this work multiple times trying to understand connecting phrases, which presented brilliant thoughts on how we interact with the known and the unknown.
It presents some of the perspectives from those who are considered to have been the most literate among us in their abilities in communicating in the language of mathematics. This is an excellent documentary on our past and future, insanity, life, time, human nature, infinity, entropy, artificial intelligence, institutional stupidity, change, incompleteness, uncomputability, chaos, suicide, murder, love, human rights, secrete governments, god and God.
It is an extraordinary documentary, a good portion of which is dedicated to Turing. If you would like to know more about this amazing man then I highly recommend watching ‘Dangerous Knowledge’, which is embedded below. You will not regret it.
The word from The White House’s Briefing Room is that Obama is going to continue the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001 by the Bush administration.
The full briefing is available below, but before reading it, it might be worth while reading the following quote from George Orwell's 1984, it should help put things into perspective.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release - September 10, 2009
NOTICE CONTINUATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY WITH RESPECT
TO CERTAIN TERRORIST ATTACKS
Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.
Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2009. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency the former President declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.
This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.
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