One of the most awe inspiring photographs ever taken was by a machine, not a person. The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ is the name of the photograph. It is an image of the Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager spacecraft, some six billion kilometers away from our planet as the craft was about to leave the Solar System. The Earth appears as a miniscule dot, almost lost in the vastness of space. The ‘Blue Marble’ is another image from space that also shows the Earth. It was taken by the US Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972. The entire planet is a vivid, enchanting swirl of deep blue oceans, scattered white clouds and solid green land masses set in stark contrast against the apparent emptiness of space. To see the magnificent fragility of Earth hanging in a mind boggling expanse of blackness is as wondrous as it is humbling.
Category: Head Stories
Last summer the Pentagon announced its plans to create an advanced missile defense system in the Asian-Pacific region. In the next few years a chain of modern missile defense radars can be deployed from the North of Japan through its Southern islands to the Philippines. Together with the missile systems and the ships the radars will form a joint system that allows intercepting ballistic missiles. “Without acknowledging it, the system is targeted against China. And practically nobody doubts that…[T]he USA is not prepared to acknowledge China as an equal partner and not ready to have a mutual nuclear deterrence or strategic partnership with China…” Leon Panetta, the head of the Pentagon, announced that Japan and the US signed an agreement to deploy the second element of the American missile defense system on Japanese territory. Washington and Tokyo assured China that the missile defense system was not targeted against it. However, experts are convinced that Beijing will view with caution these steps towards deploying a new missile defense element.
Protests are erupting across the Middle East as demonstrators throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at police who retaliate with tear gas canisters being shot into the crowds. The US Embassy in Cario has become a new target. On the 11th anniversary of September 11th, a US-sponsored false flag attack occurred wherein the US Embassy in Libya was bombed. The US Ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens was suffocated to death and his dead body dragged through the streets amid a mob of fake revolutionaries supported by the CIA-funded al-Qaeda. Obama, using this manufactured Islamic extremist threat to his advantage, admonished Egypt saying “they’re not taking responsibilities, as all other countries do where we have embassies, I think that’s going to be a real big problem.” In Yemen, mobs have formed and stormed the US Embassy in Sanaa, Egypt. This latest protest is being tied to the Islamic film that sparked the violence in Libya. One has been reported killed while 13 Egyptian protesters are wounded after security guard fortified the compound and began firing on the protesters. It is estimated by mainstream media that 5,000 protesters over-ran the US embassy.
Once upon a time, there was a Kingdom of Justice and Light. The kings served there in periods of four years and insisted on being called “Mr. President.” That was true until the year 2000, when the son of a former king was chosen to office by the voice of a single Justice who had been appointed by his father. From that moment onwards, it had become pretty close to a formal kingdom. Yet, they didn’t define themselves as such; they claimed that they were the world’s most powerful country, and prided themselves on their democracy. They weren’t exactly a democracy of the people […]. They were a democracy of corporations. These organizations were recognized by the kingdom as judicial persons, and were those guiding and funding the government’s behavior. Many of these soulless persons were rather innocent, busying themselves in the science of preparation of greasy hamburgers and similarly useless tasks. However, the largest and most powerful among them made money out of war.
An armada of US and British naval power is massing in the Persian Gulf in the belief that Israel is considering a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s covert nuclear weapons programme. Battleships, aircraft carriers, minesweepers and submarines from 25 nations are converging on the strategically important Strait of Hormuz in an unprecedented show of force as Israel and Iran move towards the brink of war. Western leaders are convinced that Iran will retaliate to any attack by attempting to mine or blockade the shipping lane through which passes around 18 million barrels of oil every day, approximately 35 per cent of the world’s petroleum traded by sea. A blockade would have a catastrophic effect on the fragile economies of Britain, Europe the United States and Japan, all of which rely heavily on oil and gas supplies from the Gulf.
Angelina Jolie, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations has arrived in Syria to survey the destruction caused by the proxy war created by the US and Israel; as well as confirm that there is a need for the continued supply and support of the CIA-sponsored Free Syrian Army (FSA). Jolie, after spending time with the estimated 253,000 Syrian refugees, recounts horrific events. She is part of the UN peace keeping envoy. Because Jolie has travelled across the globe on behalf of the UN before, she has been deployed to “help the Syrian people.” It is expected that Jolie’s envoy will meet with Assad. Lakhdar Brahimi, UN diplomat travelling with Jolie, has replaced Kofi Annan and expects this mission to be “very difficult”. In the manufactured war concocted in Syria, al-Qaeda has become a US asset . Using advanced tactics in terrorism and suicide bombers, as well as recruiting young and impressionable men to fight with the FSA. Mainstream media is declaring that the Syrian government is weakening because they are preparing heavy artillery such as military aircraft, helicopters and tanks.
While Ben Bernanke’s announcement that the Federal Reserve will embark on an open ended scheme to purchase $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities each month has been touted by the establishment media as the beginning of “QE3″ it is in fact nothing less than another banker bailout in disguise. While many have rightly attacked the Fed’s policy of printing money as a band aid that does little to solve the economy in the long term, this new move isn’t even about that. The policy announced yesterday will merely see the Fed use taxpayer money to purchase more bad debt in the form of junk mortgage-backed derivative based securities that have been sold over and over again. This has nothing to do with getting the economy going again and will only serve as yet another huge wealth transfer from the middle class to the elite. While the fed claims the move will facilitate more lending it will do nothing of the sort. As the China Securities Journal reports today, “QE3 is not likely to result in more loans.”
“I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not Al-Qaeda. To the contrary: They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation. We should help them do it.” Senator John McCain in Benghazi, Libya April 22, 2011. McCain’s “Libyan patriots” have now murdered US Ambassador John Christopher Stevens in the very city McCain spoke these words. An assault on the American consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, the epicenter of not only last year’s violent subversion and destruction of sovereign Libya, but a decade’s old epicenter of global terrorism, left Ambassador Stevens dead along with two of his aides. The violence, Western media claims, stems from an anti-Islamic film produced in the US. In reality, the coordinated nature of the attacks on both the US Embassy in Libya, as well as its embassy in Cairo, Egypt, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, are most likely using the Neo-Conservative Clarion Fund-esque propaganda film as a false pretense for violence long-planned. The Clarion Fund regularly produces anti-Muslim propaganda, like “Iranium,” specifically to maintain a strategy of tension using fear and anger to drive a wedge between Western civilization and Islam to promote perpetual global wars of profit.
The mainstream media in the United States is almost totally ignoring one of the most important trends in global economics. This trend is going to cause the value of the U.S. dollar to fall dramatically and it is going to cause the cost of living in the United States to go way up. Right now, the U.S. dollar is the primary reserve currency of the world. Even though that status has been chipped away at in recent years, U.S. dollars still make up more than 60 percent of all foreign currency reserves in the world. Most international trade (including the buying and selling of oil) is conducted in U.S. dollars, and this gives the United States a tremendous economic advantage. Since so much trade is done in dollars, there is a constant demand for more dollars all over the globe from countries that need them for trading purposes.
The Central Intelligence Agency cobbled together the forerunner of the present Muslim jihadist terrorist network in the late 1970s to battle Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Throughout the next three decades, the CIA continued to maintain links with the jihadist groups, using them as allies for certain operations and attacking them when America’s «commitment» to the «war on terrorism» required an propaganda boost in the world’s media. An example of the CIA ‘s flip-flopping between using its mujaheddin and jihadist allies and then declaring them «terrorists» and putting a price on their heads is the recent declaration by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Haqqani network based in North Waziristan, Pakistan is a «foreignterrorist organization». The Haqqani network, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, was cobbled together by the CIA and the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1980s.