HOW PROF. BLUWEY BLEW IT

President Dramani Mahama with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

A few days before the arrival, and during the visit of the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to Ghana, Professor Keith Bluwey, a part-time lecturer at the Centre for International Relations and Diplomacy of  the University of Ghana, Legon, sought to provide a few lessons to the Government of Ghana on international relations and politics.

According to information in the media, Professor Bluwey advised the Ghana Government not to allow the Iranian President to visit Ghana because according to him, the visit would offend the  “sensibilities of its Western Partners”.

While cautioning the Ghana Government against the visit, the Professor reminded everyone that as a developing nation with an unstable economy we should not  “throw ourselves around” by playing dangerous games, which include associating with countries as  “Iran and all these people”. 

When the Iranian President finally arrived, the Professor went a step further. He stated that the Ghana Government should not “hobnob” with Iran because that country “is an enemy of the West”. He further explained why Ghana should shun  a country considered by the West as an “enemy” . He was quoted as saying: “You go on hobnobbing with Iran and all these people...Iran that is an avowed enemy of Israel, an enemy of the west and the next day you would turn to America that they should help you with your budget?"

From the standpoint of our semi-detached professor, Ghana should show its loyalty to those who he thinks feed us by classifying as our enemies those that the West consider as their enemies.. Effectively, what the professor is saying that we should tie ourselves to the apron-strings  of the “West” and Israel because (in his view) they feed us.

What the professor did not ask himself is why we should allow ourselves to be “fed” by someone other than ourselves. Perhaps he does not find anything wrong with a sovereign country having to rely on foreign handouts. Neither does he ask himself whether those he considers as our benefactors are really benefactors. In Ghana, the large mining companies and other foreign companies, take our resources, keep 80% of their earnings abroad, give us 3% and pay taxes on the remaining 17%. These are the reasons why we are unable to balance our budgets. If therefore they “donate” about 3% more of the amount they have kept abroad to enable us to balance our budget, which would just keep us alive to enable them to further the exploitation, they are not doing us a favour. They are only giving us a paltry part of what our leaders have sat by for them to take away. We have signed various

 There are foreign companies in Ghana that have been granted huge tax holidays.  If one looks at these companies, they invariably  originate from the Western countries to whom Ghana has surrendered our interests in the form of trade/economic incentives that are one-sidedly favourable to the companies of those countries. These agreements enable companies from those countries that operate in Ghana to enjoy enormous tax holidays (from 0% to 8%), free transferability of capital, profits and dividends  (using our little foreign exchange resources) and exemptions from custom duties, environmental safety requirements which their mother countries would not tolerate. Those countries include: the United Kingdom, USA, Germany, France, Netherland and Switzerland.  Why then would they make so much money out of us such that they could afford to offer us little mercies such as handouts.

In the same way as any household that cannot feed itself without begging for food from outsiders is a failed household, so is a country a complete failure if all that it expects is that every year some other country has to supplement its budget. It becomes even more pathetic when that country does nothing to wean itself off such dependence on handouts.

When one considers the position of Professor Bluwey, one does not detect any wish on his part that Ghana, as a country, should get away from the current dependence on foreign support for our budget. From his utterances, one could translate his views in one simple sentence: “Ghana’s national interest should be sacrificed in favour of the interests of the West”

However, there are enough avenues for generating taxes internally within Ghana, which could eventually wean us off from our current status as a beggar country. However, we live in a country where our leaders and semi-detached  think-thank professors such as Keith Bluwey, out of shear laziness and lethargy, give up  on the need to  collect taxes due to the government, including custom duties at the ports. What they support doing is to tax the relatively poorer sections of the population while leaving the big industries untaxed.

Our semi-detached professor has got himself mixed up and entirely given himself away as complete “coconut”. (In the Caribbean countries, a “coconut” is a black person who thinks he is a white person and therefore thinks in terms of Caucasian interests. He is black on the outside, but white in the inside). It therefore follows that only a “coconut”, an Uncle Tom, or an Uncle Sam, and a mere henchman of the modern-day imperial countries, who can turn his face on his country and paint the charms of those who cheat us  and babble about not to offend “the sensibilities of the West”. This is the person the media calls an international relations expert? May God not come down from the Heavens.

For such people, we must look backwards, not forward; we must not take other alternative measures to secure our ability to sustain ourselves, we must always be appendages of the West. Such an attempt to equate Ghana’s interests to the interests of the West is most certain to lead us into failure.

Taking the path suggested by Professor Bluwey is tantamount embarking on a the war path against Ghana’s interests. But this is the reasoning of a Ghanaian who repeats the incredibly trite and tired admonishing of the “West” that we should be “careful” of countries who are not exploiting us but would like to be our friend, and probably provide a signpost that may lead us to economic self-sufficiency in the future.

There is no doubt that not all the “interests” of “West” are our interest: and neither would all the “interests” of Iran or other countries described condescendingly by Professor Bluwey as “these people”, be our interest. If Professor Bluwey is unable to think, , he is at least able to read. If he had read the claims of the West, prior to the invasion of Iraq, that they were going to invade Iraq to remove weapons of mass destruction from the country, and their subsequent admission afterwards (when they had devastated the country and taken over their economy) that there were, indeed no such weapons after all, he would have realized that we do not have to make a country our enemy just because that country is considered an enemy of the “West”.  But when professors take the road of putting the interests of foreign countries above those of their own country, one never knows what to wonder at most—their ignorance opportunism, or their unscrupulousness.

The Western countries have put forward a claim that the fight against “terrorism” is a fight to which all descent countries should be committed. This is entirely acceptable. However, they have arrogated unto themselves, the exclusive right of determining who is a “terrorist”. If a country wishes to stand on its own feet, they say it supports “terrorism”. They say that Al-Qaeda is a “terrorist” organization. It appears that Al-Qaeda is a “terrorist” organization only when it fights against the west. However, when Al-Qaeda fights against the Libyan or Syrian governments, the West considers the same Al-Qaeda as a liberation force. They cannot have it both ways, my dear professor Keith.  Does Professor Keith Bluwey, our expert in international relations, know that the West (UK and USA) considered Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” and the ANC a “terrorist organization”?

According to the logic of professors such as Keith Bluwey, Syria should be our enemy, Venezuela should be our enemy,  Sudan should be our enemy, Iran should be our enemy, Zimbabwe should be our enemy, Cuba should be our enemy, Serbia should be our enemy, and probably, China and Russia should be our enemies.   When will the list end?

Puzzled Ghanaians may begin to ask, how could a learned professor like Bluwey have forgotten the rudiments of international relations and still be considered as an expert on the subject? The real fact is that among the hordes of professors in this world, there are several of them who sell truth to serve the interests of foreign countries that they consider omnipotent. . As a result they utter the most fatuous drivel, the most unscrupulous hogwash against their own country. The “West” will admire such professors as long as they go on subordinating the interests of their own country to those of the West.

Editorial

STOP THE CONCERT PARTY

One of Dr. Bawumia’s favorite catchphrases at the Supreme Court, whenever he is asked a question about what happened at a polling station is “You and I were not there”. 

We do not know how Dr. Bawumia understands the meaning of “representation”. When the elections took place in December 2012, the NPP appointed people from the party to represent their flag bearer and the party at each polling station.  When one appoints another person to represent them, that representative is as good as the person who appointed him/her.

When the 2012 elections took place, a party’s polling station representative is a substitute or proxy of the appointing authority. The effect of such an agent of the NPP is that he or she has the “power of attorney” to be the eyes of Dr. Bawumia and Nana Akufo Addo. So what does Dr. Bawumia mean by “You and I were not there”. Someone should remind him that he was there.  

If Dr. Bawumia were the President of Ghana and asked his Ambassador to represent him on an issue abroad, he cannot turn round later and say “I was not there” What type of President is that?

No wonder he was warned to stop the theatrics and concentrate on the essential ingredients of his case.

Nicolas Maduro did not Steal the Venezuelan Elections

Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela

By Greg Palast

The guy in the cheap brown windbreaker walking up the dirty tenement steps to my New York office looked like a bus driver.

Nicolas Maduro, elected President of Venezuela , did indeed drive a bus, then led the drivers’ union, then drove Chávez’s laws through the National Assembly as Venezuela’s National Assembly chief.

And this week, the US State Department is refusing to accept the result, suggesting Maduro hijacked the vote count. But did he?

Maduro came to me that day in 2004 on a quiet mission, sent by President Hugo Chávez to give me information I needed for my investigation for Rolling Stone – and to get information from me that might save Chávez’s life.

The central topic was the “Invisible Ring”. Venezuelan intelligence had secretly taped US Embassy contractors in Caracas talking in spook-speak: “That which took shape here is a disguised kind of intelligence… which is annexed to the third security ring, which is the invisible ring.”

(“Invisible Ring”? Someone at the State Department has read too many Alan Furst novels.)
On the grainy film, they worried that “Mr Corey” (a code name we easily cracked) would blow his cover and begin barking, “I am from the CIA! I am from the CIA!”


“Mr Corey” was certainly not from the CIA, an agency holding on to one last fig-leaf of discretion. This crew was far more dangerous, from a spy-for-hire corporation, Wackenhut Inc. I’d been tracking Wackenhut for years, ever since their spies – more Austin Powers than James Bond – were arrested while on a black-bag job for British Petroleum. They’d attempted to illegally tape a US Congressman by running a toy truck with a microphone through the ceiling vents over the lawmaker’s head.

But even clowns, when heavily armed, can be deadly. In 2002, Chávez was kidnapped with the blessing of the US Ambassador right out of the presidential palace and flown by helicopter over the Caribbean where, Chávez later told me, the President assumed he’d be invited for a swim from 2,000 feet. Instead, just 48 hours later, Chávez was back at his desk.
But Washington wouldn’t quit the coup business. New documents revealed several interlocked methods (“rings”) for overthrowing Venezuela’s elected government.

First, US operatives would monkey with voter registrations – and if that didn’t steal the election from Chávez’s party, the next step was to provoke riots against Chávez’s elections “theft”. The riots would lead to deaths – the deaths would be the excuse for the US to back another coup d’etat to “restore order” and “democracy” in Venezuela – and restore Venezuela’s oil to Exxon. (Chávez had seized majority control of the oil fields and Exxon was furious.)

Maduro had already figured the US operatives wanted to use, “The collection of [voters’] signatures… to [occur] amidst a climate of violence and uncertainty, national and international uncertainty…To cause deaths the day of the collection of signatures.”


 Would this be to justify another coup?

“Yes: The justification to tell the world Chávez is a murderer, Chávez is a dictator, Chávez is a terrorist and the OAS [Organisation of American States] should intervene and Chávez should be ousted.”

This week, the warlords of the rings are back in Caracas as, per the original script, the US State Department is backing opposition claims (no details provided) that Maduro’s win is in question. And per the old playbook, the losers are taking to the streets, seven voters are dead (mostly Chávistas, but not all) and Caracas waits for the coup’s next boot to drop.

President Maduro (R) and the late Commandante Chavez (L)

 Is a manoeuvre to remove Maduro far-fetched? George W Bush promoted the botched kidnapping of 2002. But it was the progressive Barack Obama who, newly elected President, blessed the overthrow of the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.

Still, it’s fair to ask if Maduro and the Chávistas stole last week’s presidential election?

Answer: They didn’t have to. Even the Wall Street Journal accepts that, “for a majority of Venezuelans, Mr Chávez was a messiah,” and Maduro, the successor Chávez chose from his deathbed, had too big a lead to lose.

Still, the election was nearly stolen – by the US-backed anti-Chávistas.
How? That’s what Chávez wanted Maduro to find out from me: how could US operatives jerk with Venezuela’s voter rolls? It wasn’t a mere policy question: they knew Chávez wouldn’t be allowed to survive through another coup.

My answer: They could steal the vote the same way Bush did it in Florida – in fact, using the very same contractor. Take a look at these documents… from the pile I reviewed with Maduro:

FBI memo detailing the shoplifting venezuela's voter rolls

According to this once-secret FBI memo, ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract – had shoplifted Venezuela’s voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

I did ask myself how our national security apparatchiks could say that filching these voter rolls made our nation more secure? What were they for?

I had little doubt. In November 2000, working for the Observer and BBC Newsnight, I discovered that a subsidiary of ChoicePoint had, for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, obtained his state’s voter rolls and “purged” more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, illegally denying them their vote. And that was how Jeb’s brother, George W, won the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

And now ChoicePoint had the data to allow Homeland Security to do a Florida on Venezuela – and Honduras and the others. (In 2006, the candidate of the left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won the election but lost the presidency through gross ballot-box finagling.)
Chávez himself read my findings on potential elections theft – to his nation on his TV show – and then he moved swiftly, establishing an election system that Jimmy Carter, who has headed vote observer teams in 92 nations, called, “an election process that is the best in the world”.

Here’s how it works: every Venezuelan voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic, the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorises, then places in a locked ballot-box. An astounding 54 percent of the boxes are chosen at random to open and check against the computer tally. It’s as close to a bulletproof count as you can get.
Still, the loser bitched and – his bluff called – was allowed to pick all the precincts he wanted – 12,000 – to add to the audit.

And that’s why the US State Department then has to turn to the threat of bullets and “Third Ring” mayhem in the streets – to undermine the legitimacy of the new Maduro government and signal the US willingness to support a new coup.


It won’t succeed this time, either. The populist socialist governments that the US couldn’t remove have now replaced the juntas and stooges that once gave the US control of the Organisation of American States. And Venezuelans themselves won’t let it happen.

What impressed me about Maduro and his boss Chávez was their reaction to the Third Ring and the attempted Florida-tion of their election. Instead of ordering mass arrests, their response was to strengthen democracy with a no-tricks voting system.

The revolution will continue

 I should note that ChoicePoint, once exposed, apologised to Mexico’s government, agreed to destroy its ill-gotten voter rolls and, soon thereafter, sold itself to a credit-rating company. Wackenhut fired its goof-ball spooks and sold itself off in pieces. Both deny knowingly breaking laws of any nation. And in Bush’s US State Department, all hell broke loose, as UN Ambassador John Negroponte, sources verified, fumed over what he deemed a renegade neo-con escapade endangering remaining US oil interests. (In fact, Chevron ended up paying what I call a “coup tax”.)

The vote was still close, mainly because Maduro – a sincere, competent administrator – is no singing-dancing-camera-perfect Sinatra of politics like Chávez was.

Secretary of State Kerry’s challenge to Maduro’s 270,000-vote victory margin struck me as particularly poignant. Because in 2004, besides Chávez, I gave another presidential candidate evidence of the Bush gang’s ballot banditry: Senator John Kerry. Kerry lost to Bush by a slim 119,000 in Ohio, blatantly stolen, but Kerry refused to call for a recount. It took him two years to publicly acknowledge our findings – when he introduced, with Senator Ted Kennedy, legislation to fix America’s corrupted voting system, then let the proposed law die of neglect.

Chávez knew, and Kerry will never learn, that democracy requires more than a complete count – it requires complete courage.

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, “confidential”.

Israel injecting dangerous viruses into Palestinian prisoners

By Lisa Karpova

Israeli Prime Minister Nyetanyahu

A Palestinian released from Israeli jails, Rania Saqa, has brought to light that the Israeli regime injected detainees that are out of prisons with dangerous viruses.

Noting that Palestinian prisoners suffer from serious and chronic diseases such as bladder cancer and liver disorders, Rania has revealed that the Tel Aviv regime injects prisoners with dangerous viruses before releasing them.

The released prisoner  has asked the many institutions and the international community to examine them carefully.

Most former inmates die after being released from Israeli jails.

Saqa Rania criticized the neglect of the Palestinian state to the situation in which the prisoners and their families find themselves and added that "the prisoners are subjected to the most cruel tortures."

A suspiciously large number of Palestinian prisoners are suffering from incurable diseases or permanent disabilities as a result of the critical situation in prisons that they suffer at the hands of Israeli regime.

Recently, the International Solidarity for Human Rights Institute warned that the Israeli regime uses and abuses Palestinian prisoners to test their new drugs, and this contradicts international medical and moral principles.

Currently, about 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, including women and children, are crowded in the jails of the regime in Tel Aviv. Most have not been tried and some have no formal charge against them, a strategy that the Israeli regime called "administrative detention."

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, voicing deep concern over what he called the "rapidly deteriorating condition" of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody who are on hunger strike, urged a solution to the matter be reached without delay.

"International human rights obligations towards all Palestinian detainees and prisoners under Israeli custody must be fully respected," Mr. Ban's spokesperson said in a statement that also underlined the importance of full adherence by all sides to previous agreement on the issue, including the implementation of prisoners' family visitation rights.

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

A palestinian in Israeli gaol

The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights came in into force 23 March 1976. Article 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides that any person deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and dignity.  The article imposes a requirement of separation of prisoners in pre-trial detention from those already convicted of crimes, as well as a specific obligation to separate accused juvenile prisoners from adults and bring them before trial speedily.  

There is also a requirement that the focus of prisons should be reform and rehabilitation, not punishment. These provisions apply to those in prisons, hospitals (particularly psychiatric hospitals), detention facilities, correction facilities or any other facility in which a person is deprived of their liberty. 

The article compliments article 7 of the Covenant, which bans torture or other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, by guaranteeing those deprived of the their liberty with the same conditions as that set for free persons.

Source of translation

http://globedia.com/rania-saqa-israel-inyecta-virus-peligrosos-presos-palestinos

Quoting HISPAN TV as source

Translated from the Spanish version by:

Russian space industry recovers from hibernation

By Yuri Skidanov

In the past year, the Russian space program and related industries seem to have gotten out of the state of economic hibernation. It appears that the industry's stagnation is over, and distant and near prospects have been identified in a recent large-scale meeting near the new cosmodrome in the Far East.

The world is entering the stage of post-industrial informational development. Primitive market "buy-sell" relationships will be replaced by the demand for high-tech products and services, among which the space industry products will be one of the most sought after. Today, the market amounts to $300-400 billion, and by 2030 it could reach $1.5 trillion. Space development can be much more profitable than increasing the exports of energy resources.

Obviously, these considerations were taken into account by the Russian leadership that allocated 181 billion rubles to fund space programs in Russia. This is three times more than in 2008. This allowed getting ahead of the leading space powers by nearly five times in terms of average annual growth in federal funding. Approximately one trillion six hundred million rubles will be allocated for space activities from 2013 to 2020.

Where would this money go? First, the orbital parameters should be restored to the size of those supported by the leading space powers, including the United States and China. This will be done at existing Plesetsk and Baikonur cosmodromes, where infrastructure for launching rockets of middle class "Soyuz-2", "Proton-M", "Zenith" and "Rockot" will be developed.

The next task is to create and launch a space rocket complex of heavy class "Angara" and rebuild new facilities at cosmodrome Vostochny.

We are talking about a radical modernization and renovation of the space technology and the means of delivery. Where would the new missiles fly? First of all, to the near-earth orbit. They will deliver a multi-laboratory module and autonomous free-flying modules to the International Space Station.

In parallel, robotic tools for the study of the moon will be developed, and the moon landing runway complex and inter-orbital tug for manned spacecraft will be created. As emphasized by the Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, this will be done to deploy and begin to operate a permanent scientific base on the Moon, and further implement a manned mission to Mars. For these purposes, heavy rockets with carrying capacity of over 50 tons are required. A mission to Mars will require a launch vehicle capable of moving approximately 180 tons in a vacuum, which is equivalent to three fully loaded railroad cars.

The program of deep space studies, nearly forgotten in the last 15 years, will be revived. Today, there are two spacecraft "Spektr-R" that allow observing the core of galaxies at a distance of 5 to 7 billion light-years. Next year another such machine will be launched into space that will further expand the range of visibility, allowing studies of the so-called black holes.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia

 Another sensation is a breakthrough project to develop transport and energy module based on the nuclear power unit. A nuclear spacecraft was started by Soviet designers and engineers, and their designs are still seven to ten years ahead of similar ones produced by Western scientists. According to the head of Roscosmos Vladimir Popovkin, a nuclear missile will provide a very different capacity and travel speed, which would have revolutionary implications in space science.

Of course, the specific terrestrial tasks of the space industry will not be forgotten. Satellite group "Glonass" is in great demand by transporters, industrialists, and signalers. "Glonass" is inferior to its Western competitors in terms of accuracy, which necessitated the task to raise this indicator to one - three centimeters. The success of the national system will capture a significant segment of the operator services market, estimated at $200 billion.

Another direction is creating bandwidth in the Arctic zone, including the Northern Sea Route and the transpolar route for aircraft.

The period of anarchy in the management of the space industry has come to end. The anarchy was caused by the fact that powerful governmental scientific and production associations that solved world-class problem split into dozens of obscure firms with big names, striving for economic independence. A decision was made to preserve and enhance the role of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) as a federal executive authority. 

The rocket and space industry will be consolidated into a few large specialized scientific and industrial holdings with one hundred percent government participation. These structures will be controlled by Roscosmos. In fact, the Soviet space control scheme is being reconstituted with two competing basic space holdings in Moscow and Krasnoyarsk.

Will the Russian space program reach the high level of development it enjoyed during the Soviet times? According to the stated objectives, it is feasible. 

There is another important factor: a program has been established that is worthy of a great power and scale and innovation potential. The space construction that involves hundreds of thousands of citizens in a large scale project may significantly improve the public perception of the world, give a sense of optimism and prospects to the country oppressed by the ideology of consumerism and social Darwinism.

CIA and Google sponsor prophets

 By Sergei Vasilenkov

Who would not want to see the future? Millions of people around the world spend a great deal of money paying for services of prophets and magicians. Whether the predictions come true is another matter, but there is certainly a steady demand. The official science is also not standing still and is trying all sorts of ways to look into events that await us in the years to come. Will the humanity learn to predict the future?

According to British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Iranian Center for Strategic Innovations patented the invention "The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine". According to the scientist Ali Razeghi, this machine does not transfer an individual into the future, but only predicts it for the next five to eight years based on her fingerprint. This invention is no larger than a standard PC and uses sophisticated algorithms.

The scientist has been working on the machine for the last ten years. According to him, this invention will enable the Iranian authorities to predict the possibility of a military conflict or fluctuations in currency exchange rates or oil prices. "The government capable of looking 5 years into the future will be able to prepare for a potentially hazardous situation," said the scientist. Razeghi Ali claims that his know-how can predict the future of any individual with 98-percent accuracy.

It is not reported how exactly the scientist was able to verify the accuracy of the predictions of his invention. 

The details of the algorithm also remain confidential, as well as the format of the results. Razeghi is afraid to mass produce his invention because he believes that the idea may be stolen by the Chinese who would make millions of copies of it. It is difficult to check the truthfulness of this information. Every year, there are numerous statements from different scientists about the alleged invention of a time machine, but so far no one has managed to get in the past or the future, or change it.

Scientists of the Israel Institute of Technology along with experts from Microsoft stated that they have developed an interesting computer program able to see into the future and even predict what will occur tomorrow. The program analyzes different sources of information to determine which events, when and why happened in the past. The machine then displays a definite pattern, and based on this information can accurately predict 70-90 percent of a civil unrest and outbreak of epidemics. At this time scientists are not considering commercialization of the program. Now the software is still running in a test mode. In addition, scientists are striving to improve the accuracy of its predictions by increasing the number of data sources for analysis.

British scientists have developed an algorithm that can predict where the owner of a smartphone would go with high probability. The studies were conducted in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. They showed that it is possible to guess the future location of the user by analyzing her previous moves, details of incoming and outgoing calls, used applications and information left in social networks. All this, of course, is the information from public sources.

In addition, virtually each mobile device has a GPS receiver. If not, then the location of the phone owner can be calculated based on geo-location data for cellular antennas. The information about people's possible plans will be useful for marketers and advertisers. They will be able to improve the accuracy of targeting, recommending specific stores in the area where a potential customer would presumably go. Also, these data can help law enforcement agencies to predict potential crime scenes.  

Not only ordinary citizens and scientists are interested in looking into the future. Intelligence agencies cannot remain on the sidelines when it comes to predictions. Google and the CIA have invested in the company engaged in prediction of future events based on the monitoring of the World Wide Web.

The company Recorded Future scans tens of thousands of websites, blogs and twitters, trying to find hidden connections between people, organizations, past and future events and actions. The company's management says that they have created an analytical engine capable of detecting "invisible links" between organizations, documents and events.

The idea is to find out which blog entries and twits preceded past events, and then, on the basis of these data, predict future events. Of course, the development of Recorded Future has a great potential for prevention of undesirable trends and developments. Google and In-Q-Tel (CIA investment company) invested in this company back in 2009. The exact amount of the transaction has not been released. Both Google and In-Q-Tel have a seat on the board of directors of Recorded Future. It should be noted that this is not the first time when Google is doing business with the CIA. Watching as the search giant is actively working with the U.S. intelligence, many are beginning to worry that their information may fall into the hands of enemies.

While some scientists are trying to come up with innovative ways of predicting the future, others claim that anyone can predict it. This, in particular, was stated by U.S. scientists. Employees of the University of Washington have even discovered the area of ​​the brain responsible for visionary skills.

The scientists based their conclusions on the fact that every person predicts certain events in life, for example, when their bus will come, or who is at the door. The researchers decided to study the brain activity of volunteers using magnetic resonance imaging. The subjects were shown a video of normal events: a housewife doing laundry, a child assembling Lego, a man washing his car, etc. At some point, the recording was stopped, and the researchers asked volunteers to predict what would happen next. In 80-90 percent of cases, the volunteers answered correctly.

According to the head of the study Professor Jeffrey Zax, predicting the future is essential for human survival and is a key component in learning and perception of speech. He said that while it was good to escape from a lion's attack, it is much better to predict which road the lion would take to avoid the predator altogether. 

In the course of this experiment, the structure in the midbrain called substantia nigra was particularly active. The black substance is responsible for making vital decisions that help a person to survive or adapt to the environment.

Not that long ago, Russian scientists-parapsychologists said that the phenomenon of anticipation was inherent in every person. Instead of looking into the future using planets, beans, maps, computers and coffee grounds, it is better to explore our own mind. According to their theory, predicting the future is the innate ability of the human brain.

The gist of the Russian parapsychologists' information theory is that the human brain is a matrix filled with a variety of information codes. Living in a three-dimensional time stream, a person constantly sends and receives information. The radiated information recedes into the past, and the incoming comes from the future. Information is the link between the physical and the mental body of the person, and the person receives and transmits it. The person is at the same time in the past and in the future. People are sending information signals from the past to the future, and vice versa. A person can independently simulate the future, because it is multivariate. Simply put, anyone is a prophet.

Can drones murder?

Hussein Obama, the drone loving US President

By David Swanson

Last Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee hearing on drones was not your usual droning and yammering. Well, mostly it was, but not entirely. Of course, the White House refused to send any witnesses. Of course, most of the witnesses were your usual professorial fare. 

But there was also a witness with something to say. Farea Al-Muslimi came from Yemen. His village had just been hit by a drone strike last week. He described the effects -- all bad for the people of the village, for the people of Yemen, and for the United States and its mission to eliminate all the bad people in the world without turning any of the good people against it. 

The usual droning and yammering that preceded and followed this testimony seemed more offensive than usual. One witness summarized the general position of pointless witnesses who accept all common wisdom and have no information or insights to contribute:

If the drone strikes are part of war, that's fine, she said. But if they're not part of war, then they're murder. But since the memos that "legalize" the drone strikes are secret, we don't know whether they're perfectly fine or murder. 

That's the common view of things. But to say it in front of someone who knows something about the killing from the perspective of the victims seems particularly tasteless. 

The basic facts are barely in dispute. A single individual, President Barack Obama, is choosing to send missiles from drones into particular houses and buildings. Most of the people being killed are innocent and not targeted. Some of those targeted are not even identified. Most of the others are identified as run-of-the-mill resisters to hostile foreign occupations of their or neighboring countries. A handful are alleged to be imminent (meaning eventual theoretical) threats to the United States. Many could easily have been arrested and put on trial, but were instead killed along with whoever was too close to them.

If this is not part of a war, apparently, then it's murder. 

But if it's part of a war, supposedly, it's fine. 

It's funny that murder is the only crime war erases. Believers in civilized warfare maintain that, even in war, you cannot kidnap or rape or torture or steal or lie under oath or cheat on your taxes. But if you want to murder, that'll be just fine. 

Believers in uncivilized war find this hard to grasp. If you can murder, which is the worst thing possible, then why in the world -- they ask -- can you not torture a little bit too? 

What is the substantive difference between being at war and not being at war, such that in one case an action is honorable and in the other it is murder? By definition, there is nothing substantive about it. If a secret memo can legalize drone kills by explaining that they are part of a war, then the difference is not substantive or observable. We cannot see it here in the heart of the empire, and Al-Muslimi cannot see it in his drone-struck village in Yemen. The difference is something that can be contained in a secret memo. 

This is apparently the case no matter whom a drone strike kills and no matter where it kills them. The world is the battlefield, and the enemies are Muslims. Young men in predominantly Muslim countries are posthumously declared enemies once a drone has killed them. They must be enemies. After all, they're dead. 

I wonder how this sounds to a young Muslim man who's taken to heart the lesson that violence is righteous and that war is everywhere at all times. 

Do people who blow up bombs at public sporting events think all together differently from people who blow up peaceful villages in Yemen? 

Don't tell me we can't know because their memos are secret too. Those who engage in murder believe that murder is justified. The reasons they have (secret or known) are unacceptable. Murder is not made into something else by declaring it to be part of a war.

War is, rather, made criminal by our recognition of it as mass murder.