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.
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) |
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 |
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 |
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.
Such a wonderful piece from the old Professor, Professor Bluwey my International Relations Lecturer, Jayee University College.
ReplyDeleteHarold Akesseh.