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The obsession of ISIS with killing Shias flows directly from the top.

http://agonist.org/how-saudi-a...

These liberal blogs that I am following have been very critical of Obama:

http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/
http://www.americablog.com/
http://agonist.org/
http://crooksandliars.com/
http://www.juancole.com/

Dailykos mission is too elect Democrats. They are more partisan than the progressive blogoshpere at large.

Glad to see somebody brought this up. This issued sparked a controversial discussion on my political blog of choice. In my opinion wikileaks really jumped the gun by not blanking out the names of Afghan and other low level civilians. Many will lose their lives because of this.

Relax, I was joking. The issues you are raising are not black and white.

I typically refrain from discussing these issues at /. Not my venue of choice. Rather do this at my favorit political blog hang-out.

For a discussion on the minaret issue in Switzerland I refer you to the thread that developed after my first comment to this article on Turkey

Relax, I was joking. The issues you are raising are not black and white.

I typically refrain from discussing these issues at /. Not my venue of choice. Rather do this at my favorit political blog hang-out.

For a discussion on the minaret issue in Switzerland I refer you to the thread that developed after my first comment to this article on Turkey

How about from here?

Q: Why was this PDB prepared?

DCI Tenet has already described the genesis of this PDB item in a letter to the 9-11 Commission dated March 26, 2004. This PDB item was prepared in response to questions President Bush asked his PDB briefer. The President had seen previous intelligence reports about possible al-Qa'ida threats to U.S. targets outside the United States. The President had asked whether any of the information pointed to a possible attack inside the United States. When this PDB item was presented to the President on August 6, 2001, his PDB briefer told him that it was prepared in response to the President's previous questions.

Q: What information does this PDB item contain?

The article advised the President of what was publicly well-known: that Bin Ladin had a desire to attack inside the United States. Bin Ladin had stated publicly in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would try to "bring the fighting to America." Most of the information in the article was an analysis of previous terrorist attacks by al-Qaida and a summary and discussion of general threat reporting from the late 1990s. The draft was prepared by CIA after consultation with an FBI analyst.

Q: Did the PDB item include any warning of the 9-11 attack?

No. The only recent information concerning possible current activities in the PDB related to two incidents. There is no information that either incident was related to the 9-11 attacks. The first incident involved suspected "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." This information was based on a report that two Yemeni men had been seen taking photographs of buildings at Federal Plaza in New York. The FBI later interviewed the men and determined that their conduct was consistent with tourist activity and the FBI's investigation identified no link to terrorism. The second incident involved a call made on May 15, 2001 by an unidentified individual to the U.S. Embassy in the UAE "saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives." The caller did not say where or when the attacks might occur. o On May 17, 2001, the NSC's counterterrorism staff convened the Counterterrorism Security Group, whose members include State, DoD, JCS, DoJ, FBI, and CIA, and reviewed the information provided by the caller. o The information was also shared with Customs, INS, and FAA. o The PDB article advised the President that CIA and FBI were investigating the information. o We had no information, either before or after 9/11, that connects the caller's information with the 9/11 attacks.

Lots of stores in the news about US guns in Mexico... the problem is, those are very tortured statistics. Sure, most of the guns that can be traced do get traced back to the US. But for the overall total of guns sourced from the US, nobody knows for sure.

Who's to say only the "American people" got fucked over? It's usually the rest of us.

When some greedy corporation in the US gets the urge to over-reach common sense in the name of profit, people die. Hello Halliburton, Blackwater - sorry, "Xe" - Merck, Chevron, Shell, Union Carbide, Monsanto - This is going on all around you, every day. It's just the kind of business y'all have been trained to tolerate, encourage and sponsor. And let's be frank, the absurd US military budget is largely what it is so that they can keep doing it with impunity. Nice little system.

If a corporation is legally a person, then let them be shut down and incarcerated like the murderers and thieves they are.

Perhaps it directly corresponds to this; (http://agonist.org/20081012/american_culture_derails_girl_math_whizzes_study_finds) in conjunction with filter courses and other prerequisites of those particular degrees.

I remember when another student on the bus loaned me "Fahrenheit 451,"

WHOA. Hold it right there buddy, a student loaned you Ray Bradbury's intellectual property, and you read it without paying the man?! Ray's going to drag his octogenarian ass to your house and give you a good solid SF-writer-caliber whoopin, I tell you what. Look at all the ruckus he caused just because someone borrowed his title; how do you think he's going to feel when he finds out you borrowed the whole book!

Good point, but you're missing the fact that we are the only species on earth to create technology. Perhaps a tenet of intelligence requires a similar bodily structure? We don't know because we only have ourselves as a model on which to base assumptions, which is admittedly not broad enough.

You, sir, are forgetting about Cow Tools.

Victoria Clarke was the Pentagon flack that organized this, so as punishment, I shall link to a picture of her - check out the sweater.

First and oldy but a goody
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/about/history/speeches/19 330131.html

The Black Belt of Central Texas: This region, whose fame as a cotton-producing area is known to the ends of the world, once was a real black belt of highly productive black clay, rich in lime, humus and plant nutrients. Vast changes have come over the region since it was broken out of the prairie sod some 30 to 50 years ago. It is no longer an unbroken black belt, but a mixed black and white belt with countless areas scoured off to the underlying white chalk or marl.

Erosion in the Red Plains Region: A large part of the 36 million acres of predominantly red sandy lands extending from western Oklahoma far down into Texas has undergone terrific erosion during the past generation,

Effects in the Corn Belt: A tremendous amount of land has been severely impoverished in the rolling counties of northern Missouri, southern Iowa, eastern Kansas and southeastern Nebraska, and many farms have been abandoned as the result.

These are from 1933.
Do you think it we have reclaimed any of that lost land?

More recently
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/cu rrent/lectures/land_deg/land_deg.html
The world's croplands are in decline due to the pressure of human activities. The figure shows the regional and global trends in the total available area of the world's croplands. ...
Worldwide the amount of cropland per capita has declined due to population growth. North America and the former USSR have substantially more cropland per capita than the rest of the world. ...
  The total loss of arable land can be summarized in the following figure. Of the total available (1500 million hectares, signifant components have been lost due to the combined effects of desertification, salinization, erosion, and development activities. ...
  Summary
# Degradation of land includes soil erosion, salinization, nutrient depletion, and desertification. The rate of degradation has increased dramatically with growth in human populations and technology.
# Severe land damage accompanies large scale agriculture. Restoration is very problematical.
# Continued loss of arable land will jeopardize our ability to feed the world population.
# Land degradation is worldwide - both developed and developing countries.

On the oceans...
http://agonist.org/20060803/the_dying_oceans
First global map reveals rapidly shrinking hotspots for tuna, marlin, swordfish - Diversity has declined by up to 50% over 50 years due to fishing

http://www.net.org/marine/fish.vtml
What's left behind is a dead zone, like a forest after being clearcut, except that it takes centuries rather than decades to grow back.

---
I'm not so pessimistic as these folks are. I think it could recover in a generation if we would stop killing everything. But as the human population increases- there are not any more real fish out there.

So what's more likely-- 9 billion or 3 billion? I'm thinking 9 billion and my investments in scarce resources and global luxury property (fidelity has a nice new fund just for this which I'm not in yet) are doing nicely.

I agree with you on the waste. We deal with it inefficiently because it's cheap. But again the root problem is too many people. If the world population was 50% lower, the trash would be less and there would be a lot more places to put it.

It's bad.
It's going to get worse.
And we can't or won't do anything about the fundamental problem-- too many people. Every exit scenario I see is very bad. I'm hoping I get to die comfortably before that point.

Good video of Charlie Gonzalez dissembling in committe hearings.

Here, it is The ocean does not have 70% less sharks than at some time in the past. The fact that sharks don't and cant live in the deep ocean, probably due to energy metabolism, is not new and their distribution in ocean waters is not new, its just that we don't have to guess any longer about where they do live.

Do the people think that the first thing on any President's mind after something like the 9/11 attacks would be, "hmmm... how can I screw the American system for personal advancement in this time of crisis?"

Sadly... the first thought was probably "damn, how long is it going to take for them to tell me what to do. This kid is boring me silly!"

Followed by: "gotta remember to make that presidential brief disappear"

Followed by: "damn... I'm doin' a hellava job!"

Followed by: "heh... maybe I should take an early nap today"

P.S. No, I don't think he actually remembered the brief

P.P.S. I also don't think there was anything special about 9/11 in regards to screwing the American people... that is business as usual for these guys. 9/11 wasn't special in that regard.

Very evil people were about and the average joe needed some measure of hope that good would triumph.

Not much has changed

There are evil people about and the general population feels powerless.

You're 100% right!

On the other hand, there might be a funnier outcome to the current fall of the dollar value : just imagine that the OPEC countries decide to use the Euro instead of the dollar as a reference currency... Now *that* would be fun :-)

There is a well-thought-out "what-if" on just that scenario at by Richard Clarke (update) with the horror story further expanded at at this Canadian site.

A "real fun" scenario is, if the OPEC nations follow Iran and begin demanding Euros vs. dollars for oil, then there is a real possibility for US==banana republic (which it is beginning to resemble quite closely) economically, once the Saudis and Japanese and Chinese cash in all their dolloars for Euros. See a rather detailed analysis of how we got into this mess from Morgan/Stanley.

The World is now more peaceful than ever. Both the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Project Ploughshares report that the number of conflicts and the total bloodshed declined to new lows in 2003. Bush has ended the 25 years of war in Afghanistan. The Administration has also negotiated a cease-fire in southern Sudan, ending a civil war that killed over two million people, and the Administration has kept Darfur from turning into a Rwanda. Bloodshed has also decreased in most of Africa, Kashmir has cooled significantly, and the disengagement policy in Israel/Palestine has reduced terrorist violence significantly. Iraq will soon become democratic and free, which will create peace.

While Clinton was busy negotiating "peace" with Arafat, 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda, 1 million died in war in Sudan, hundreds of thousands died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world did not seem to care. With Bush as president, the rest of the world actually seems to care about innocent bloodshed. The more that war leads the news, the faster peace breaks out.

The World is now more peaceful than ever. Both the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Project Ploughshares report that the number of conflicts and the total bloodshed declined to new lows in 2003. Bush has ended the 25 years of war in Afghanistan. The Administration has also negotiated a cease-fire in southern Sudan, ending a civil war that killed over two million people, and the Administration has kept Darfur from turning into another Rwanda. Bloodshed has also decreased in Palestine, Kashmir, and Africa. Now Iraq is about to become an model of peace, democracy, and freedom.

While Clinton was busy negotiating "peace" with Arafat, 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda, 1 million died in war in Sudan, hundreds of thousands died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world did not seem to care. With Bush as president, the rest of the world actually seems to care about innocent bloodshed. The more that war leads the news, the faster peace breaks out.

Civil liberties? The best way to protect civil liberties is to have law enforcement use the best technology and tools, including the Patriot act, to enforce the law with the fewest number of police. Bush has been criticized for not having enough police, Kerry is both for the Patriot act and for hiring more police. Computers, don't infringe civil liberties, people do. So why are libertarians not in favor of using the Patriot act and other technology to cut both the budget and the size of the police force?

Smaller government? Bush has limited the growth of regulation and is for much less spending than Kerry. His tax cut is actually too small according to the Economics Nobel Prize winner.

War? The world is now more peaceful than ever. Coverage of war and bloodshed on the news may be at an recent high but the actual number of conflicts and amount of bloodshed has declined to an all time low under Bush. Bloodshed in Iraq is less than under Saddam. The long war in Afghanistan is over, and the Administration has negotiated a cease-fire in southern Sudan, ending a civil war that killed over two million people, and the Administration has kept Darfur from turning into a Rwanda. Bloodshed has also decreased in Palestine, Kashmir, and Africa.

Coming from Europe I can feel Jon Stewart's pain. What passes as news here is unbelievable.

Jon Stewart is my personal hero for exposing this sham.

BTW a transcript and links to clips (in the comments) can be found here.

Don't forget The Agonist.

My favorite is definitely The Agonist, who live up to their tagline of "thoughtful, global, timely". Excellent source of worldwide news that the American media just don't cover...

For a leftist bent: agonist and
for a nutty kind of libertarian bent : Arts and Letters Daily.

Here are some related links:
US ready to seize Gulf oil in 1973

Was America preparing a war for the Gulf oil in 1973?


Britain Warned of U.S. Plans After War

U.S. Mulled Seizing Oil Fields In '73 British Memo Cites Notion of Sending Airborne to Mideast

And this news item found originally on Reuters ties up nicely to the above:
U.S. OIL (Operation Iraqi Liberation) Imports Set Record in 2003, Trend Seen Up

Aside from the fact that China doesn't give a fuck about economic concerns, there isn't much chance of a war happening.

As unlikely as more people looking to China than the U.S. for hopes for a better future.

Drupal offers a good solution because it can require logons for comments etc... Other solutions are trying to integrate BBS systems like YABBSE with Blogs - they are giving that a try at the agonist and it works quite well and helps to build a community.

... to news blogs like the Agonist made me very aware of how late the established news media picks up stories - if they pick them up at all.

Internet is the way to go if you want to stay well informed.

I am now looking to buy that french deck of cards

Why give the French all the credit? A US blogger came up with the same idea back in April

Indeed, as a Canadian, you might have heard the spot on CBC's "Here and Now" a few months ago where a maker of such a deck was banned from selling it on e-bay. According to The Agonist, "He owns the domain name, "thebushadministration.com" where he's posted the images for sale."

So you can spend locally and protest globally. Or something like that.

Then should we attack Israel and every other country that breaks a UN resolution? Iraq has been by no stretch of the imagination any threat to the US or even to its neighbors since 1991. They could barely contain the Kurds. I don't pretend to whitewash Saddam's murderous regime, but we pick and choose which thugs to go after. And Saddam was no threat to us. If we were enforcing the UN resolutions why the hell wasn't the UN on board? Because the UN inspectors made it clear that they didnt need an invasion to do so. Look up "Hans Blix" on google if you want more information, but you should know this since you claim to read the news.

The fact that Saddam was uncooperative with U.N. weapons inspectors was worrisome regardless of what was known. You'd think he'd want to prove he was clean so sanctions would be lifted and Iraq could get on with normal life.

I can't account for Saddam's twisted thinking but as I said it is not our job to enforce UN resolutions, and the UN wasn't pressing for our assistance here.

Me: our intelligence agencies knew their WMD were nonexistent from the beginning and there was no threat to US national security.

You: Wow, you must have access to information that no-one else has access to.

Yeah, I do, really obscure sources like the New York Times. Even Fox news was reporting on this. I guess you missed it. The CIA (prior to the recent fuss about "yellow cake") was telling the Bushies they couldn't find an al Qaeda link and that they thought most of the evidence for WMD was weak. The Bush Administration wound up creating a separate intelligence agency in the Pentagon whose sole purpose seems to have been to produce a different intelligence estimate than the CIA. Here's an article about some of this from the Washington Post. I don't feel like doing more of your research for you; suffice to say that if you don't believe any of my claims you're free to look them up. Some links might be easy to find on the warblog I was keeping on the war for a while, if you care to look (though a lot of the links have probably expired). Also I would recommend The Agonist; he does a really good job of culling a lot of this information from mainstream news sources. I'm not in the habit of making stuff up or believing everything I read on the internet.

So it's not terrorism, it's guerilla warfare.

Talk about self serving definitions -- you define Saddam's attacks on his own people as terrorism but suicide bombers attacking the UN building and American soldiers as guerrilla warfare. I don't particularly care what you want to call it; my point is that our involvement in Iraq has increased the threat and power of Islamist fundamentalist organizations who wish to do harm to the US and who wish to institute theocratic goverments in the Middle East. Call it what you will, but I see that as a much greater threat to US national security than Saddam gassing his own people twenty years ago (as horrible as the latter admittedly is).

So how is the U.N. supposed to know if any particular dictator is just being a pain in the ass or really has something to hide? Saddam *HAD* WMDs, that's common knowledge and accepted.

If you define chemical weapons as WMD, fine, but those kind of WMD are hardly a threat to anyone (except someone who invades Iraq), and they have been an accepted part of conventional warfare since WWI. But the UN inspector Hans Blix made it clear that he was confident of the inspectors' ability to keep Iraq's WMD t

Government censorship is certainly dangerous, but I think the self censorship practiced by the media (including the U.S. media) is more insidious.

Consider the story that the BBC ran in early 2001 about the theft of the U.S. presidential election. The BBC is not some indie rag, but the story was not picked up by ANY of the U.S. media until almost a year later (too late to do any good).

Whatever you think about Noam Chomsky, his theory on media self censorship is worth hearing: The media doesn't make money by selling news to audiences. It makes money by selling audiences to advertisers. In other words, advertisers must be kept happy at all times. The media chooses which stories will be reported on, but more subtly, it chooses how issues will be framed. The choice between the "right" and "left" viewpoints on issues that we are given in our media is often a false dichotomy. Whole ranges of opinions outside the liberal/conservative framework are ignored.

So pay attention. Don't rely on the news media to filter things for you. Get your news from multiple sources, including sources outside the U.S. Try out The Agonist and TerrorWatch and some other samizdat news sites. Don't always believe what you hear about Arab news networks. It is your responsibility to educate yourself.

• http://warblogging.com/
• http://agonist.org/
• http://www.alternet.org/
• http://www.stratfor.com/corporate/static_index.neo

I would think that after a while, there would also be a system that would separate the wheat from the chaff for you, based on a system whose preferences you yourself set. (Kinda like meta-moderations!)

Many blogging sites already tell you which have been updated recently, but more importantly, which are the most popular. They also will break them down based on content and/or channels. Google just bought blogger.com, and with their ranking system, it will only accelerate the trend.

Furthermore, there is also word of mouth. When the second Gulf War started, it didn't take long before someone pointed me to The Agnonist, and I got a lot of good news from that site. All without even looking - I merely heard about it.

But to the main point: "the reviewer has greater incentive to give a good review". sure, but, whith an affiliate program, we're not dealing with professional reviewers....

If I (as an amateur) like a book, and give it a good review, and make a few cents from that, I don't see much harm.

All well and good so long as there was a pretty clear distinction between "amateur" and "professional".

A professional is someone who gets paid for his work, and an amateur is, literally, someone who does the work out of a love for it (Latin, amare, to love, being the root of "amateur"). Affiliate programs quite literally turn an amateur into a (low paid) professional; that's the point of these programs.

But this conversion to professional status doesn't come with the traditional professional "baggage": codes of conducts, oaths, test, certifications, guild membership, peer review. A lawyer's conflict of interest is (supposedly) checked by the Bar Association and by statute law; a journalist's by his editor and his profession's code of conduct and his peers' review.

No such check exists (or should, in any statute law sense!) for Joe Blogger or Jane Usenet Poster, or Jeff Amazon Reviewer.

You may accuse me of exploiting the etymology of the word "amateur" to create a problem that isn't real. But the problem is even deeper than that: the distinction betweem amateur and professional has begun to disappear.

In the "Blogosphere", it's not entirely clear who is an amateur and who's a professional. With MoveableType, anyone with the money to get a site hosted can put up a professional (that word again!) looking web site. Anyone can pontificate. And everyone has an opinion.

How can the causual reader tell who is knowledgable and honest, and who is looking to cash in on a favorable review? During the recent war in Iraq, I got much of my news of the war from www.theagonist.org, a blog with the most current breaking news -- aand the most current breaking unsubstantiated rumors. Is Andrew Sullivan a professional pundit, a professional journalist, or an amateur blogger? Can I trust Amazon.com user reviews? Can Snopes serve as a reference in a paper on Urban Legends?

What web site can I go to to tell me who is professional, who is amateur, who is honest, who is out to make a quick buck as an affiliate?

And can I trust the web site that purports to make those distictions?

So I fall back on the easy distinction: if you stand to make a buck as an affiliate, your review may be tainted -- whether you realize it or not -- by your self interest. You are perhaps no longer objective, as you're a (poorly compensated) contractor to the company you're affiliated with.

When the newspapers were reporting mortality rates of 2-3%, I was reading the regular SARS updates on The Agonist that made a convincing case for mortality rates of greater than 10%. Sure enough, a week later than the papers were also quoting 10%

Other than typical news sites...

-- Debka (Middle East News)
-- Official Iraqi News
-- Where is Read? - Iraqi Blog
-- Kuwait Blog
-- Back to Iraq Blog
-- Iraq today
-- Warblogs.cc
-- Kevin Sites
-- Sky.com
-- BCC News Live Feed
-- Agonist

CBSnews also has a beautiful high detail webcam without all the crap on the bottom of the screen.
God bless our soldiers.

Davak