Thursday, December 2, 2010

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HELP YOU MAKE IT TO YOUR FLIGHT - Buck Howdy




PAGE 2:

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:

WHAT IS IT and HOW WILL IT WORK?

Click on the following link and read it for yourself.

www.michnews.com/Tom_DeWeese/tc90909.shtml
It's rather disgusting to see hypocrites spouting about the rule of law call for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Assange before he is even arrested and officially charged.

Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and former adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is such a hypocrite. Flanagan has openly called for the assassination of Assange.



If calling for the assassination of a private citizen is not a crime in and of it self it ought to be. The University of Calgary should fire Flanagan tomorrow.

I encourage you to phone University of Calgary president Elizabeth Cannon at 403-220-5617 and demand the resignation of Professor Tom Flanagan.

Please Email president@ucalgary.ca to speak your mind.

For more on this story please see Professor Tom Flanagan: Glib about Murdering Julian Assange

Sarah Palin Compares Assange to Bin Laden

Tom Flanagan joins media darling Sarah Palin who thinks Assange is like an Al Qaeda terrorist
Sarah Palin has demanded that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is hunted down like Osama bin Laden. In an extraordinary outburst on Facebook, the former Alaska governor attacked the White House for 'incompetent handling of this whole fiasco.'

Assange is not a "journalist," any more than the "editor" of al Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a "journalist."

'He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.

'His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. 'Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?'
Excuse me for asking but since when does exposing corruption and hypocrisy make one an al Qaeda' terrorist? Is the whole world supposed to stand up and salute our illegal wars, our torture of civilians, our holding of prisoners in Cuba with no charges being filed. Are we supposed to salute or simply look away from fraud by our banks and coverups in our Treasury department?

By the way, it took about two days to find Assange. If only we could find Bin Laden so quickly.

Could Sarah Palin Find Spain on a Map?

I seriously doubt Sarah Palin could find Spain on a globe if someone flipped the labels for Spain with France.

She certainly does not know the difference between North and South Korea having spouted to Glenn Beck "Obviously, we gotta stand with our North Korean allies." She had to be corrected by Beck.

Sarah Palin is currently leading the Republican candidates, but of the major candidates she performs worst against President Obama. She may be the one person Obama could beat.

According to the latest ABC Poll 67% say she is not qualified to be president.

Said George Will "After the 2008 campaign she had two things she had to do. She had to go home to Alaska and study. She had to govern Alaska well. Instead she quit halfway through her first term and shows up in the audience of Dancing With The Stars and other distinctly non-presidential venues.

Such stunts will have media fools fawning all over her, but in crunch-time it won't win elections. 2008 is proof enough.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List
Date: November 6, 2010
Time: Evening.

I seen lights that were already posted about on the orange lights over Buffalo on November 6th, 2010. They had the same exact pattern and disappeared. I thought some one might have been having a ceremony or something. I was delivering a pizza at the time. I tried to take a photo, but I couldn't get a good picture.

If you have seen anything like this in the same area please be kind enough to contact Brian Vike at: sighting@telus.net with the details of your sighting. All personal information is kept confidential.

Sightings.com website: http://www.sightings.com/
Remember the Harper Government's new Citizenship Guide? It's working.
Massive failure rates follow new, tougher Canadian citizenship tests

Failure rates for immigrants writing citizenship tests have soared since the spring, when tougher questions and revamped rules made it harder for newcomers to become Canadian.

The new test, introduced March 15, was based on a bulked-up citizenship guide released a year ago to give immigrants a richer picture of Canada’s history, culture, law and politics.

The 63-page guide, Discover Canada, replaced a slimmer volume dating from 1995 that had fewer facts to memorize. The failure rate for the old citizenship test, with questions drawn from the smaller guide, ranged between four and eight per cent.

Failure rates for the new test, however, rocketed to about 30 per cent when it was first introduced — prompting officials to revise the rules to avoid clogging the system with thousands of would-be Canadians who, because they had flunked, often had to plead their cases before busy citizenship judges.

A reworked test introduced Oct. 14 is helping to cut the national failure rate to about 20 per cent, still far higher than historic levels and making the exam-hall experience much more nerve-wracking for newcomers.

People who are Canadian by accident of birth are required to do nothing but obey the law and pay taxes. Those who choose to become Canadian - people who uproot their lives and families, spend many thousands of dollars, often forced to start their educations and careers completely over, all for the privilege of living in Canada - are made to jump through hoops meant prove knowledge and loyalty.

Yet Canada cannot survive without immigrants. The country's non-immigrant population growth is less than zero. And once people are here, it should be as easy as possible to become citizens. Don't we want to encourage immigrants to have a full stake in the country? To put down roots, to build a future, to vote?

The idiots commenting on the news stories about this - themselves likely the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants - crow about Canada finally getting a grip, cracking down. About people "milking the system", the horror of hyphenated identity. Most sound like they can only dream of having the skills, resiliency and tenacity to emigrate to another country. Or for that matter, to brush their own teeth.
The blazing stupidity of some of the ridiculous schemes hatched by US diplomats is staggering.

Take a look at Wikileaks Docs Reveal Secret Scheme To Wean China Off Of Iranian Oil Supply by Joe Weisenthal at the Business Insider, and I will show you exactly what I mean.
Very interesting nugget from the WikiLeaks dump showing how the world of economics, security, and energy collide.

Specifically, the documents reveal a plan, hatched by the US, whereby Saudi Arabia would guarantee China ongoing supply of oil in exchange for China weaning itself off Iran.
A Selection From the Cache of Diplomatic Dispatches

Weisenthal points to A Selection From the Cache of Diplomatic Dispatches and uncovers this gem.
FM SAUD: CHINA NEEDS TO MORE ACTIVELY COUNTER IRANIAN NUKES

9. (C) Deputy Foreign Minister Dr. Prince Torki told visiting NEA A/S Feltman on January 26 (ref C) that FM Saud had pressed the Chinese Foreign Minister hard on the need to be more active in working with the rest of the international community and the UN Security Council to counter the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon. FM Saud told FM Yang that Saudi Arabia was convinced Iran intended to develop anuclear weapon, despite its assurances, and that only concerted international action could stop that.

While no explicit bargain was discussed, Dep FM Torki explained that Saudi Arabia understood China was concerned about having access to energy supplies, which could be cut off by Iran, and wanted to attract more trade and investment. Saudi Arabia was willing to provide assurances on those scores to China, but only in exchange for tangible Chinese actions to restrain Iran's drive for nuclear weapons.

COMMENT:
...try and leverage their economic relationship with China for political gain with respect to sensitive regional issues, such as Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are significant and growing. After patiently focusing on building the economic relationship since 2006, FM Saud's public and private prodding of FM Yang indicates the Saudis are ready to try and cash in some political chips. End comment.
SMITH
Global Economic Illiteracy

Because oil is fungible, the entire conversation is an exercise in blatant stupidity. It does not matter one bit if Iranian oil goes to China or not, as long as it goes somewhere. Oil that does not go to China may go to Europe or Japan and any price changes would quickly go away as supplies were re-routed.

Of course if Iranian oil was shutoff altogether, you have a different situation, one in which the only guarantee would be enormously higher prices for everyone, not a guaranteed supply to China.

Negative Effects of Mountains of Stupidity

That such conversations occur at all is a testament to global economic illiteracy. Did anyone in the US or Saudi Arabia benefit from this stupidity?

The answer of course is no. In fact, there is negative benefit from accumulating mountains of stupidity in that someone might look at it, think it's important, and try and act on it.

For example, I can easily imagine diplomatic idiots starting to worry about oil going to China because of "guarantees" arising from those comments. This in turn would necessitate a need to work out our own "guarantees" that allegedly would supersede any Saudi "guarantees" to China.

In fact, I would be shocked if such conversations did not occur, even though the idea that any "guarantees" would be honored in the face of a real crisis with oil supplies is more than a bit foolish.

The solution is to fire every one of these secret deal-makers because they are doing more harm than good. Indeed the best way to prevent leaks is to not have moronic conversations in the first place.

Meltdown in US Foreign Policy

Inquiring minds are reading Spiegel Online's commentary A Superpower's View of the World
251,000 State Department documents, many of them secret embassy reports from around the world, show how the US seeks to safeguard its influence around the world. It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.

What does the United States really think of German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Is she a reliable ally? Did she really make an effort to patch up relations with Washington that had been so damaged by her predecessor? At most, it was a half-hearted one.

The tone of trans-Atlantic relations may have improved, former US Ambassador to Germany William Timken wrote in a cable to the State Department at the end of 2006, but the chancellor "has not taken bold steps yet to improve the substantive content of the relationship." That is not exactly high praise.

And the verdict on German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle? His thoughts "were short on substance," wrote the current US ambassador in Berlin, Philip Murphy, in a cable. The reason, Murphy suggested, was that "Westerwelle's command of complex foreign and security policy issues still requires deepening."

Such comments are hardly friendly. But in the eyes of the American diplomatic corps, every actor is quickly categorized as a friend or foe. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? A friend: Abdullah can't stand his neighbors in Iran and, expressing his disdain for the mullah regime, said, "there is no doubt something unstable about them." And his ally, Sheikh bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi? Also a friend. He believes "a near term conventional war with Iran is clearly preferable to the long term consequences of a nuclear armed Iran."

A Political Meltdown

Such surprises from the annals of US diplomacy will dominate the headlines in the coming days when the New York Times, London's Guardian, Paris' Le Monde, Madrid's El Pais and SPIEGEL begin shedding light on the treasure trove of secret documents from the State Department. Included are 243,270 diplomatic cables filed by US embassies to the State Department and 8,017 directives that the State Department sent to its diplomatic outposts around the world.
There is much more in the Spiegel article including a nice interactive map showing a time lapse of 251,287 documents, where the majority of the cables originated from, and where they had the highest level of classification.

That interactive map will take a while to load. Speigel also discusses specifics about Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Germany.

Hillary Clinton said there would be minimal damage from this. It would be amusing to hear her private explanations of that on WikiLeaks.

US a Pawn for Oil Producers

Speigel concludes with an interesting suggestion that the US is nothing but a pawn for the oil producing countries, not the other way around.
On the whole, the cables from the Middle East expose the superpower's weaknesses. Washington has always viewed it as vital to its survival to secure its share of energy reserves, but the world power is often quickly reduced to becoming a plaything of diverse interests. And it is drawn into the animosities between Arabs and Israelis, Shiites and Sunnis, between Islamists and secularists, between despots and kings. Often enough, the lesson of the documents that have now been obtained, is that the Arab leaders use their friends in Washington to expand their own positions of power.
US embassy cables: browse the database

The Guardian also has an Interactive Map of 250,000 US Embassy Cables that inquiring minds may wish to peruse.

Joe Weisenthal at the Business Insider points out these tidbits.
  • Iran has fortified its weapons cache with the help of Russian-designed missiles and North Korea.
  • Saudi King Abdullah can't stand Iran. In fact, the entire Middle East is basically uncomfortable with Iran right now.
  • The US has been involved in a dangerous standoff with Pakistan regarding nuclear fuel since 2007 (not surprising at all)
  • Under Hillary Clinton, us diplomats have been urged to help spy on the UN.
  • Afghanistan is seen as corrupt (shocking!)
  • US officials have been wargaming a North Korea collapse (again, not surprising).
  • Vladimir Putin and Sylvio Burlesconi have an unusually close friendship (amusing).

  • The Moral Standards of WikiLeaks Critics

    New York Times writer Joe Klein writes "If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in 'freedom' stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail."

    Glenn Greewald smashes the blazing hypocrisy of Joe Klein right out of the ballpark with his rebuttal The Moral Standards of WikiLeaks Critics.

    Do you have that principle down? If "a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail" because of the WikiLeaks disclosure -- even a "single one" -- then the entire WikiLeaks enterprise is proven to be a "disaster" and "Assange is a criminal" who "should be in jail." That's quite a rigorous moral standard. So let's apply it elsewhere:

    What about the most destructive "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" the planet has known for at least a generation: the "human disaster" known as the attack on Iraq, which Klein supported? That didn't result in the imprisonment of "a single foreign national," but rather the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the destruction of a country of 26 million people. Are those who supported that "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" -- or at least those responsible for its execution -- also "criminals who should be in jail"?

    How about the multiple journalists and other human beings whom the U.S. Government imprisoned (and continues to imprison) for years without charges -- and tortured -- including many whom the Government knew were completely innocent, while Klein assured the world that wasn't happening? How about those responsible for the war in Afghanistan (which Klein supports) with its checkpoint shootings of an "amazing number" of innocent Afghans and civilian slaughtering air strikes, or the use of cluster bombs in Yemen, or the civilian killing drones in Pakistan? Are those responsible for the sky-high corpses of innocent people from these actions also "criminals who should be in jail"?

    I'm not singling out Klein here; his commentary is merely illustrative of what I'm finding truly stunning about the increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session aimed at Julian Assange, also known as the new Osama bin Laden. The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of -- and in some cases directly responsible for -- the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade. And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them.
    Secret Police Tactics

    My only problem with Glenn Greenwald's article is that I want to excerpt the whole thing. Since I won't do that, and since there is much more to see in his excellent article, please click on the link and read the whole thing.

    Hopefully it will leave you with a different perspective about the crazies and their secret police Tactics.

    Finally I want to share an email from reader "SB" in response to my article Amazon Drops WikiLeaks on Request of Sen. Lieberman; Lie of the Day from Hillary Clinton; How NOT to Stop Leaks; Why we have Leaks.

    "SB" Writes...
    Hello Mish

    Thanks for your post. I am 100% in agreement. I'm 65, and as a youngster worried almost daily about being called up for the draft for Vietnam.

    Imagine what might have happened to the Vietnam war effort if the whole mess had been made public from the start.

    I was supportive of the war, and would have gone if called, but the revelations about it over the past 50 years have definitely called that into question. It sure would have been nice to know what folks in the Federal Government were hiding.

    Those who are in favor of prosecuting Mr. Assange need to remember the words, "Secret Police," and contemplate how close we are coming to that concept in our nation, and in our actions throughout the world.

    We need someone like this to shine the light of day on what passes for proper behavior now.
    Mike "Mish" Shedlock
    http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
    Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List
    Date: July 17, 1978
    Time: Approx: 11:00 p.m.

    I was 19 years old at the time. The stars were bright and the sky clear. I was sitting in an automobile in the evening around 11:00 p.m. in a parking lot of a Westborough, Massachusetts, USA in a school parking lot with my boyfriend. I was talking with him and gazing at the stars above.

    The sky was clear and the stars visible. I had an intuitive feeling and looked above to look at the stars. Above in the stars was a very bright light in the distance and 8 smaller lights (crafts) moving up and down, sideways and erratically.

    Gradually all of the 8 smaller bright lights dove into the larger bright light (at various times within a 30 minute period of time). I know this was not of this earth as the patterns of the smaller bright lights were so erratic moving north-south-east west randomly that it was not of this world.

    About 1 hour later I was still chatting/kissing with my boyfriend in the dark in the same location. Something tried to open the doors of the automobile (door were locked thank God) My boyfriend reacted quickly and speeded out of the parking lot. By the time I got home (I live 5 minutes away) 1 hour was missing that we could not account for.

    I did not report this until now in 2010, as it was so surreal that I put it out of my mind. However, I am bringing this information forth now with truth, but to much in fear of ridicule and finally brave enough to report it.

    If you have seen anything like this in the same area please be kind enough to contact Brian Vike at: sighting@telus.net with the details of your sighting. All personal information is kept confidential.

    Sightings.com website: http://www.sightings.com/
    Date: November 12, 2010
    Time: 11:25 p.m.

    I saw something that sounds very similar to what you saw. I was driving home from a friend’s house, when I looked out and saw a huge semi-circular object in the sky. It was so large, I thought it was the moon.

    It was a burnt orange color. I stopped my car and got out to look at it. It then seemed to change shape/get smaller until it just disappeared. I Googled Orange ball of light and came up with your page. Any ideas on what it is? Have you heard anybody seeing anything similar?

    If you have seen anything like this in the same area please be kind enough to contact Brian Vike at: sighting@telus.net with the details of your sighting. All personal information is kept confidential.

    Sightings.com website: http://www.sightings.com/