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- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman | TV Channel ^

BBc World Service Live ^

MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann ^

- America's #1 Populist Jim Hightower On Air ^

- Mark Fiore Animated Political Cartoons ^

- Documentary - Bilderberg and the Obama Deception ^

Jewish TV Channel ^

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Editor's Note - News items Will not be categorized while technical work proceeds on the site.

Leading Story | WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Australian) breaks cover but will avoid America ^
US desperate to ask hacker what he knows of classified messages about Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Alternet - By Ian Traynor in Brussels - Monday, June 21, 2010

Are We Going Down Like the Soviets? ^
Alternet - June 21, 2010

The Soviets made a devastating miscalculation: they mistook military power for power on this planet. Sound familiar? Mark it on your calendar. It seems we’ve finally entered the Soviet era in America.

You remember the Soviet Union, now almost 20 years in its grave. But who gives it a second thought today? Even in its glory years that “evil empire” was sometimes referred to as “the second superpower.” In 1991, after seven decades, it suddenly disintegrated and disappeared, leaving the United States -- the “sole superpower,” even the “hyperpower,” on planet Earth -- surprised but triumphant.

The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that official Washington had a clue. At the moment it happened, Soviet “experts” like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (then director of the CIA) still expected the Cold War to go on and on. In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military, which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring, indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare payments were eating into what funds remained. Not even a vigorous, reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could staunch the rot, especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell drastically.

Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military -- and its military adventure in Afghanistan -- when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation. They mistook military power for power on this planet. Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.

In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration whose national security advisor was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a “Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a weak communist government in Kabul. When resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.

Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t. (And if you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the U.S., you should.)

Continued. RTA - AER - Read this article. Absolutely essential reading. Don't pass this up. ^

Opinion 4444444| Why America Is One Step Away From Becoming An Abomination - The Long Journey To Nowhere Brings Us Back To Ourselves ^
atlantic Free ress - June 20, 2010

Are U.S. Warships Gearing Up for a Confrontation With an Iranian Aid Flotilla to Gaza? ^
A U.S. Navy fleet is moving through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, probably aiming to head off the Iranian flotilla headed toward Gaza.
Alternet - June 20, 2010

Supreme Court ruling makes ‘it a crime to work for peace and human rights’ ^
Supreme Court ruling makes ‘it a crime to work for peace and human rights’:
Raw Story - Monday, June 21, 2010

How Conservative Politiciaans Make Life Harder for Working Moms ^
Alllternet - June 20, 2010

Conservative women politicians are profiting from the feminist movement while promoting policies that make the lives of everyday women much harder.

First, let's swallow hard and be fair. There is something to cheer in the so-called Year of the Woman. You don't have to credit the Republican Party, which did next to nothing to bring on the wave that swept Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Sharron Angle and Nikki Haley to victory in June's primary elections. Indeed, before the RNC began heralding its Mama Grizzlies, in Sarah Palin's typically catchy but grating phrase, it was brushing off complaints about how its roster of 104 rising "Young Guns," lavished with party attention and resources, included only seven women. Fiorina and Whitman bought their gleaming California wins with their own money, while Angle charged to victory in Nevada on sheer Tea Party adrenaline. There's certainly nothing progressive about these women, but their brash, unapologetic and largely unsolicited emergence in Republican politics—in American politics—does represent progress, of a sort.

Life After Oil: Cuba Can Teach Us How to Live Without Our Dirty Fossil Fuel Addiction ^
Alternet - By Jill Andeson - June 18, 20010

The crisis in the Gulf is only the most recent reminder that we have to begin imagining a post-carbon future.

As oil pours into the Gulf of Mexico, providing a painful reminder of the cost society pays beyond the gas station pump for fossil fuel energy, it's hard to even begin to imagine what a post-carbon future would look like. If you can't picture it, try looking about 90 miles south of Florida.

Cuba, which enjoyed plentiful oil during much of the latter half of the 20th century, entered a crisis when the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc disintegrated. In late 1989, Cuba saw its access to oil, food imports and chemicals used in industrial agriculture whisked away practically overnight. A few years later, in 1992, scarcity increased further when the U.S. tightened its blockade of Cuba. After 20 years of painful transition, Cuba is now a living example of how a society can flourish while treating oil like the scarce, filthy and increasingly risky-to-procure energy source it is.

The United States can learn two lessons from Cuba: first, what might happen if we do not transition to clean, renewable forms of energy before our oil runs out; and second, how we might successfully thrive in an era when oil is no longer a cheap form of energy we take for granted. Where Cuba's model can offer the most to the U.S. is in lessons learned about agriculture. Few Americans may be aware of how fossil fuel-dependent our food system really is. Oil powers tractors and fuels food processing plants, refrigerators and freezers that store our food. Oil powers the trucks and trains that ship our food to us and we also use oil to make pesticides. As for fertilizer? That comes from natural gas.

Cuba is living proof that an abrupt shift is painful. No Cuban who was alive at the time can forget the first years of the so-called "Special Period." Sara Daisy, who lives in Havana, describes waiting upwards of five hours for a bus to take her to work. Fernando, a middle-aged Cuban with a bit of a belly, says he lost 25 pounds in those first years, sucking in his tummy to show how he used to look. The societal upheaval caused by the lack of oil permeated every aspect of Cuban life. When Cubans were able to find transportation to their jobs, often they would arrive to find the power was out and they could not work anyway. The commute home was no easier, with another long wait for the bus.

Cuba, a nation with nearly 100 percent literacy and a highly educated population, simply didn't have enough oil to transport students to and from the island's major universities. And, perhaps most fundamentally, Cubans had simultaneously lost food and the inputs needed to grow their own food using industrialized agriculture. With only an average of 60 percent of their caloric needs met, Cubans began to starve.

The country needed to restructure in order to survive. Some of its adaptations are ones we in America might consider sub-optimal (like the widespread and encouraged use of hitchhiking as a means of transportation). But, keeping in mind that we can and should be selective in what we replicate, Cuba does provide a model for running a modern society on little oil. Nowhere is this truer than in agriculture. Cuba is perhaps the only country on earth with a national policy promoting food sovereignty via agroecology (that is, being able to feed their own population by growing food organically and ecologically).
Continued > ^

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Archive of Miscellany

- Dance Video | MICA | "Blame It On The Girls ^

- Musical Group Video | Neville Brothers - Yellow Moon ^

- Out of the Hills | Jesus Is Coming Soon -The Oak Ridge Boys ^

- Musicians mix Coldplay and Taylor Swift together - Enjoy ^

- Music Video | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA" - Leonard Cohen ^

- usic Video | Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin ^

- Music Video | Jordan Page - "Listen" | What If This Happened On Your Street? ^

- Music Video | Jordan Page - "Pendulum ^

- Music video - Neville Brothers performing "Fearless ^

- Video - The Arts of Peace vs Violence ^

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