Thursday, June 30, 2016

Big Brother 2016: Beyond Orwell's wildest dreams

Tribute to George Orwell (1984)...

Big Brother 2016: Beyond Orwell's wildest dreams
Sam Gerrans
RT, 8 Jun, 2016

Media is doling out in bite-sized bits what we already knew: we are being tracked and traced, recorded and stored.

The Guardian recently told us that – shock – Google is storing lots of information about us; meanwhile, the wildly different Independent gently awakens us to the fact that Facebook is doing something almost identical. Both articles contain instructions on how to appear to thwart these intrusions.

Oh well, click, click, yawn. Safe again.


An Orwellian present

Most people who read my column will have read Orwell’s 1984. And most who haven’t will have seen the film (the one with John Hurt, I hope). If you haven’t done either, go and do one of them right now.

Orwell’s famous dystopian vision describes a world in which the State knows everything about you. He had entitled his book The Last Man – meaning by that: The last true man left on earth. It was changed – perhaps fortuitously – by the publisher.

The book fed a slew of references into the culture, seemingly understood even by those who had never read it: Big Brother, Doublespeak, Sex Crime, Winston Smith.

The world Winston inhabits is physically viler and more obviously brutal that ours – at least if you live outside the perimeters of the wars the US is waging directly or indirectly. Its architecture and ambiance are, likewise, orders of magnitude darker and more depressing than ours – parts of inner cities excepted.

Orwell’s Doublespeak is more directly relevant to our experience today. With things now routinely called by something other than their proper names – men ‘identifying’ as women, women ‘identifying’ as men, men ‘identifying’ as dogs, and forty-six-year-old fathers ‘identifying’ as six-year-old girls – our world is littered with an increasing number of obvious truths which must be resolutely ignored on the grounds of political necessity.

Doublespeak has hamstrung academia – rendering whole swathes of it inoperative, and much of the rest of it either irrelevant, farcical or pernicious.

In our day-to-day exchanges it has resulted in smile-fronted loneliness and lurking suspicion as necessary features of a life wherein those of us who comment openly upon the Spandex-coated bars of our prison are treated as pariahs and lepers.

As in Orwell’s world, our language is undergoing a thinning process and morphing into a ghettoized Newspeak and Twitteresque literary shorthand. Our grandparents knew what it was to speak and write well because they acknowledged an objective standard. Those who attained it were regarded as exemplars, and those who had not could see what remained to be done. Now, as in so much else, mediocrity and approximation are defended as acceptable standards; simply noticing one’s own shortcomings is elitist – and, therefore, contemptible – while commenting on another’s is an outright sin.

The result is a common language attenuated to the point where being correctly understood is increasingly difficult, and the scope for being wrongfully construed almost unlimited.

But here the overlap in terms of content between our world and Orwell’s thins out in favor of a stark – and for some disarming – stylistic dissonance.

Orwell’s world is bleak. It is dark. The walls are covered – at best – by poorly applied institutional paint and creeping mold. The lights hang by a rat-eaten wire and flicker erratically, serving only – to plunder Milton – to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades. Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face – forever” is congruent in Hollywood terms with the scenery.

But our world is not like that. At least, not yet. Much of it is shiny and manicured – and not only for the technocrats and Inner Party members, but also for the drones of the Outer Party like Winston Smith.

Today, Smith does not wear dungarees and inhabit cold, dark corners creeping with vermin. He wears clothes which look something like what he sees on TV. He makes his car repayments. True, what he buys has the obsolescence of Orwell’s world, but that is due to a design philosophy geared to keep the drones shopping, rather than a simple inability to produce at all.

These seeming contradictions are difficult to process. A system which tortures you and stamps on your face might still be identified by the proles in their current state of conditioning as an enemy. But boot-stamping is not our experience – again, at least not yet.

The Big Brother of our experience has a public relations department and a team of designers with bed-head haircuts working on more palatable and fabulous ways to sell you servitude. Our prison does not simply consist of bars. It consists of hi-tech, ergonomically designed, ambient-adjustable bars. And it is policed by people who want you to call them by their first name; who are trained to seem to agree with you; who sit patiently when you talk, and then tell you to have a nice day.

If this seems unconnected with your current worldview, consider that some of the highest-profile puppets we vote for recently attended the opening of the Gotthard Tunnel, Switzerland – without batting an eyelid.

Online 1984

Our online experience broadly resembles our offline experience.

Sure, if you are deep in the bowels of Badnet – downloading a program you just discovered you really need but don’t want to pay for from a site featuring languages you don’t understand and from which windows with images of scantily dressed females jump out erratically at you – then you expect nasties. It feels dodgy and dangerous – and it is.

But Facebook and Google don’t feel like that. They are shiny, convenient heavens generated by serried ranks of earnest, enthusiastic angels in love with what they do. They love you, too. They don’t love you individually, but they love you mathematically; they love you when enough of you say the same thing to them for it to be incrementally advantageous to do something about your prayers. The world they produce feels professional and safe, something like a cross between a business park, a shopping mall where everything is free, and a children’s nursery.

This does not feel like a place where boots stamp on faces forever.
Collecting data

A common misconception about this ergonomic, customer-service Big Brother decked out in primary colors is that he couldn’t possibly watch everyone at the time.

But it doesn’t work like that. Mostly, he doesn’t care what you are doing on a day-to-day basis.

When databases were created in the 1970s, storing stuff was very expensive. That’s why they used the relational data model: it could cram more stuff into less space.

Now storing stuff costs nothing. I bought a 16 GB USB memory stick for the price of two cups of coffee last week. So they are not watching you. They are storing what you do.

Firstly, in case they need it. As morals, mores and norms are re-engineered and hemorrhage and coalesce in new configurations and are downloaded as normative updates by a population unable to concentrate or remember, everyone eventually will be a criminal – at least retrospectively. There is no future-proofing compliance with this new system of control. No matter how quickly you take the upgrades in Newthink, proof of your Oldthink will be accessible and visible to those who care to use it against you.

Secondly, they are building profiles. They want to know who the troublemakers are.

Those at the helm couldn’t care less what you think currently. If you are intelligent and happen to have spent your time online researching rather than looking at compilations of top goal-scoring moments, pornography, or highly pixelated editions of the Simpsons’ back catalog, that is likely to have rendered you a social outcast sheltering under the bridge of your own Cassandra complex yelling at random passing cars. So they don’t care about you – at least, not yet.

What they are on the lookout for in the current phase is a rogue idea. They are afraid that some bright individual will find the solar plexus of the psychological control grid and start jumping up and down on it. And they are also making sure existing powerful entities don’t go off the reservation of what is agreed by the guiding think tanks and conclaves of the mighty.
What to do?

We incline toward fight or flight. Many feel their security lies in keeping their heads down, by conforming. While I understand the feeling, my opinion is that no amount of conformity will be enough to placate what is coming. This system does not simply want conformity – although it does require it – it will not rest until it has your homage. For myself, my mind is made up: I will not bow to the new idol.

Armchair heroism is easy, it is true. But I know one thing: Room 101 will hold much less terror for me if I ever have to enter it, if I know then that I stood up now and spoke out while I could, leveraging what intelligence God saw fit to give me.

And that is something no boot can stamp out of existence.

@SamGerrans


Sam Gerrans is an English writer, translator, support counselor and activist. He also has professional backgrounds in media, strategic communications and technology. He is driven by commitment to ultimate meaning, and focused on authentic approaches to revelation and realpolitik. He is the founder of Quranite.com – where the Qur’an is explored on the basis of reason rather than tradition – and offers both individual language training and personal support and counseling online at SkypeTalking.com.

Selected Readers Comments:

# Who are they? The 1% off shore shell company crowd who pay no taxes,  who follow no law except maybe their own. Who want  total control over every living soul.

# It is about time People realize that Google & FB are part and parcel of the MIC (Military Industrial Complex).

# An excellent article.
"Sure, if you are deep in the bowels of Badnet – downloading a program you just discovered you really need but don’t want to pay for from a site featuring languages you don’t understand and from which windows with images of scantily dressed females jump out erratically at you – then you expect nasties. It feels dodgy and dangerous – and it is."
So, you have been there too. It's not so bad if one takes precautions: an Internet condom consisting of TOR (preferably WHONIX), a configurable ad-blocker (e.g. uBlock origin), a script blocker (i.e. NoScript) and a base operating system not associated with Microsoft or Apple. Trophy software thus gathered should be tested in a sandbox e.g. a virtual machine. Also, with experience one gets to know the trade marks of reputable 'purveyors'.
The question is who lies behind the façade of the Big Brother in waiting? In the UK it is clear that the Prime Minister and his coterie of ministers are merely placemen for those owning Conservative Party plc. Indeed none is bright enough to sustain a power conspiracy: the Oxford PPE which several ministers hold cuts no ice in the real world where said general degree is regarded as equivalent to Domestic Science with Crochet as subsidiary subject at the University of Hertfordshire.
When the likes of Cameron, May and the twerp ex-minister Hague opine on matters of security and the need for surveillance, for limiting encryption, and so forth it is clear they speak from deep ignorance. Yet, behind them are some truly malignant forces pulling their strings.

Blurring lines & shifting strategies in Syria

Playing terror game is in the bone marrow of US military-industrial complex...

Blurring lines & shifting strategies in Syria (Who said terror was not the end game?)
RT, 26 Jun, 2016

In the words of Sun Tzu, ‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.’ Looking at Syria, it is evident the US failed to heed such words of wisdom. To soothe its pride Washington now wants all-out war.

Maybe not the whole of Washington, but enough of Washington to signal that a deep political rift now exists within the corridors of the US State Department. Not even Britain’s decision to leave the European Union could silence Washington’s ongoing political frenzy over Syria. As markets have crashed, and the Old Continent has faltered under the weight of its own political irrelevance, it is war, and more wars America’s true blue neocons argue still – as if an answer, and a justification to their collective sense of exceptionalism.

America wants to go to war - again! And here I was thinking that Washington was already at war with Damascus – or was it counter-terrorism? I can’t really tell those days. I’m not even sure America knows the difference anymore either. At war against terror, at war against sovereign nations … all in a day’s work for the United States.
Of course you might want to argue that terror is really a matter of political perspective, and that as far as Washington is concerned, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stands as the greatest terrorist of them all.
Read more
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden speaks after winning a Father of the Year award in New York, U.S., June 14, 2016. © Lucas Jackson ‘Freudian slip’: VP Biden says he wants Syrian president named ‘Saddam’ to go
Mirror, mirror on the wall...

But let me ask you this then, whose reflection will the mirror offer back? Whose terror does Syria suffer under? And more importantly whose terror is Syria fighting to defeat? That of ISIL, and its sisters in radicalism, or that of those who chose to empower the likes of ISIL in order to score immediate political gains?

Those questions of course hardly make it to prime-time debates… such questions would equate in America to political apostasy.

For five years America has worked to depose Syria’s seat of power. For five years Syria has pushed, clawed and fought to reclaim both its territorial and political sovereignty. For five years US officials have argued more weapons, more proxies, more, more and more hiding behind Terror to justify their stance. What a convenient smokescreen has Terror been! What a convenient companion indeed!

Interestingly enough, it is as Terror stands to be obliterated under the Syrian Army’s boots that Washington has cried war the loudest. Frustrated and angry to see its assets slip away, America’s neo-conservative complex wants its day under the sun; it wants to overtly enter the fray - a re-enactment of the Iraqi takeover.

Not even US Vice-President Joe Biden could contain that genie in its proverbial bottle. Speaking on Syria to CBS Charlie Rose, the US VP said: “At the same time, we’re continuing to work the international community to reach a negotiated settlement that gets Saddam out of power, have him leave.”
Read more
An image grab taken from a propaganda video uploaded on June 11, 2014 by jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) allegedly shows ISIL militants gathering at an undisclosed location in Iraq's Nineveh province. (AFP Photo) Lost: 7 US Geo-gaffes that should worry us all

But why should President al-Assad leave? Why do Western powers so desperately want to see one democratically elected head of state ousted, when reason would dictate that Terror remains the absolute priority? Which Terror - it needs to be asked - has lost ground under the impetus of the Syrian Arab Army backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah?

Military advances against Raqqa, ISIL's de facto capital, are testament that cooperation between foreign powers continue to be not only relevant within the framework of international law, but effective in defeating terrorism altogether.

The argument that President al-Assad is a tyrant onto his people does not hold. Not when he still entertains such obvious popularity among his people, not when Western powers have comfortably backed odious regimes and vindictive powers across the globe. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria come to mind. Too many of America’s allies have proven to be serial human rights offenders for political righteousness to hold. Too many Western-made weapons have been fired at civilians for any Western capitals to claim the moral high ground here.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s departure remains relevant today in that it would usher a very American political takeover, and turn Syria into another US military client state/asset – the fate of Syria holds not a candle to America’s hegemonic hunger.

But Syria has proven a tough nut to crack! So tough indeed that it has led to a political fracture in the inner sanctum of America’s powerhouse.
This June, Washington has spoken dissent against its Commander in Chief. Frustrated, and angry neocons have called for direct military confrontation against Damascus, oblivious to the repercussions such a move would have across not the region, but the world.
Read more
Army General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Armed Forces Staff and First Deputy Defense Minister © Sergey Guneev 'Never mind the US, Russia’s the one losing patience over Syria ceasefire chaos' - Chief of Staff

America wants war – or at least its officials do. On June 17, The New York Times wrote: “In a draft version of a dissent memo filed with the State Department's senior leadership, dozens of diplomats and other mid-level officials called for military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.”

“A more military posture under US leadership would underpin and propel a new and reinvigorated diplomatic initiative,” the so-called dissenters demanded.

Here is how Jeremy Lott from The Spectator summarized America’s political psychotic break: “The Obama administration’s foreign policy in Syria has been a failure by any non-sociopathic measure, a policy quite literally at war with itself. And yet, some high ranking State Department officials want not less but more of this.”

Beautifully written, indeed.

So what now? What now for Syria, and what now for Terror? Even if President Barack Obama is unlikely to change his position on Syria so close to the exit door, his successor might not feel the same way. With six months left on the clock, Damascus and its anti-terror alliance will need to hit full throttle against ISIL.

With this in mind, take a second look at this ongoing race for Raqqa, and recognize America’s exit strategy.

According to Semyon Bagdasarov, Director of the Moscow-based Center for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, the US-backed SDF, comprising mostly Kurdish militants, is pursuing its own geostrategic goals in the region. The offensive on Manbij is part of a plan aimed at eventual division of Syria, the expert told Russia's Svobodnaya Pressa media outlet.

Like I said, Syria has become a political cesspit of covert dealings, and hidden agendas.

With ISIL gone, and Terror decimated, peace negotiations would take on a very different tone. Actually, it could well be by then that the world would finally be forced to pay attention to what the Syrian people want.

Remember them?

Has anyone bothered to ask Syrians how they envision their future? How about we start with that question and work our way back to sanity?



Catherine Shakdam is a political analyst, writer and commentator for the Middle East with a special focus on radical movements and Yemen. A regular pundit on RT and other networks her work has appeared in major publications: MintPress, the Foreign Policy Journal, Mehr News and many others.Director of Programs at the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, Catherine is also the co-founder of Veritas Consulting. She is the author of Arabia’s Rising - Under The Banner Of The First Imam

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Afghan fury as Iran, Turkey claim Sufi poet Rumi

Everyone trying to pretend who is more Sufi / Saint (or Sane)?

on June 30, 2016

Kabul (AFP) - Who can lay claim to Rumi, the Sufi mystic who is one of the world's most beloved poets? A bid by Iran and Turkey to do so has exasperated Afghanistan, country of his birth eight centuries ago.
Tehran and Ankara asked to list the work of Jalal ud-Din Muhammad Rumi as their joint heritage on the UN's "Memory of the World" register in May.
The register, falling under the UN's cultural organisation UNESCO, was formed in 1997 to protect the world's documentary heritage -- archives, correspondence and writing -- especially in troubled or conflict-ridden areas.
But the Afghan government has denounced the bid, which mainly concerns the 25,600 verses of "Masnavi-i-Ma'navi", one of the most influential works in Persian literature.
He is one of the best-selling poets in the US, and his works have been translated into more than 23 languages. Hollywood is planning a Rumi biopic -- also mired in controversy after rumoured plans for Leonardo DiCaprio to play him were met with accusations of "whitewashing".
The poet and philosopher "was born in Balkh in Afghanistan and made us proud," the Ministry of Information and Culture insisted.
UNESCO "never asked us" about the proposal, Harron Haklimi, the ministry's spokesman, said, acknowledging that Kabul had been beaten to the punch but hoping they can yet convince the organisation that Afghanistan has the better claim to the poet.
- Son of Balkh -
For Afghans, who learn his poems in primary school, Rumi is "Maulana Jalaludin Balkh", or "Maulana" (literally "our master"), or simply "Balkhi".
Most researchers agree he was born in Balkh, Afghanistan in 1207 -- though this too has been the subject of debate: a few argue he was born just across the border, in what is modern day Tajikistan, in a region also known as Balkh.
Today, the Afghan town of Balkh is a small provincial settlement, but back then it was an ancient religious capital and centre for Buddhist and Persian literature. It was sacked by Genghis Khan and his Mongal hordes in 1221.
The young Rumi and his family fled to Turkey, where he spent most of his life -- he died in the city of Konya in 1273. It was there that his son founded the Order of the Whirling Dervishes to perpetuate his father's teachings.
But for Afghans, he remains a child of their country and it is still possible to visit the house in which they believe he was born.
The powerful governor of Balkh province, former warlord General Ata Mohammad Noor called on Afghanistan's representative to the United Nations to protest.
"By limiting Maulana to only two countries, we do not do justice to a global personality who is truly cherished and admired across the world," he said.
"He is considered an important part of the culture and identity of Afghanistan," writer and poet Sadiq Usyan, professor at the Balkh university in nearby provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif, told AFP.
Separating the two is considered an "insult" and even a "threat" to Afghanistan, he said.
A UNESCO representative in Kabul argued there had been some "confusion".
"Any country, delegation or even individual can submit a request to be considered under this program," said spokesman Ricardo Grassi.
He noted the backlash, adding: "But this request has still to be considered."
To accede to it without mentioning Afghanistan would be unacceptable, said the director of Balkh's provincial cultural department, Salih Mohammad Khaleeq.
"Maulana belongs to Afghanistan."
- #RumiWasntWhite -
Khaleeq has big plans for Balkh -- especially since Oscar-winning star DiCaprio was tipped to play Rumi in the new Hollywood film.
The unconfirmed rumour spread rapidly on social media with accusations of film industry "whitewashing", with the hashtag #RumiWasntWhite swiftly trending.
"So easy for Hollywood to find Muslims to play terrorists, but they can't cast a Muslim as Rumi?" read one typical tweet.
Another said: "remember when idris elba wasn't 'english enough' to play james bond, but it's chill if leo dicaprio plays rumi."
For Khaleeq, however, the film is an opportunity.
"We want this place to become a tourist site where tourists can come and visit," he said.
A large portrait of Rumi already greets visitors arriving in Balkh. However, his childhood home has been ravaged by time, badly weathered with its ochre-coloured mud walls collapsed, the interior open to the wind.
The controversy has warmed spirits in the region, with an online petition collecting nearly 6,000 signatures.
President Ashraf Ghani, who in mid-June hosted Turkey's foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, has been carefully diplomatic, with a statement saying Rumi is "a shared pride of the two countries".
It added he was ready to register Rumi's works "as a shared heritage of Turkey and Afghanistan".
He made no mention of Iran.
Clues to what Rumi himself might have made of the dispute may lay in his writings.
In 2007, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey came together with UNESCO to mark the 800th anniversary of his birth.
Then, the cultural organisation issued a medal in his honour while citing one of his famous couplets: "I do not distinguish between the relative and the stranger".

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Can Brexit verdict usher breakup of EU & NATO & avoid WW III ?

Kudos to far-sightedness of Dr Paul Craig Roberts...
A wishful but appropriate thinking by erudite scholar Dr Roberts... At least a partial dismemberment of EU and NATO is required to stop the evil adventures of EU and NATO...

The Brexit Vote. What Does it Mean? Hopefully, a Breakup of the EU and NATO, the Avoidance of World War III


The EU and NATO are evil institutions.  These two institutions are mechanisms created by Washington in order to destroy the sovereignty of European peoples.  These two institutions give Washington control over the Western world and serve both as cover and enabler of Washington’s aggression.  Without the EU and NATO, Washington could not force Europe and the UK into conflict with Russia, and Washington could not have destroyed seven Muslim countries in 15 years without being isolated as a hated war criminal government, no member of whom could have travelled abroad without being arrested and put on trial.
Clearly, the presstitute media lied about the polls in order to discourage the leave vote.  But it did not work.
The British people have always been the font of liberty.  It was the the historic achievements of the British that transformed law into a shield of the people from a weapon in the hands of the state and gave accountable government to the world.
The British, or a majority of them, understood that the EU is a dictatorial governing mechanism in which power is in the hands of unaccountable people and in which law can easily be used as a weapon in the hands of unaccountable government.
Washington, in an effort to save its power over Europe, launched a campaign, willingly joined by presstitutes and the brainwashed left-wing, who flocked to the One Percent’s banner, that presented the effort to preserve British liberty and sovereignty as racism.  This dishonest campaign shows beyond all doubt that Washington and its media whores have no regard whatsoever for liberty and the sovereignty of peoples.
Washington regards every assertion of democratic rule as a barrier to its hegemony and demonizes every democratic impulse.  Reformist leaders in Latin America are constantly overthrown by Washington, and Washington asserts that only Washington and its terrorist allies have the right to choose the government of Syria, just as Washington chose the government of Ukraine.
The British people, or a majority of them, gave Washington the bird. But the fight is not over.  Perhaps it hasn’t really yet begun.  Here is what the British can likely expect:  The  Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, and George Soros will conspire to attack the British pound, driving it down and terrorizing the British economy.  We will see who is the strongest: the will of the British people or the will of the CIA, the One Percent, and the EU and neocon nazis.
The coming attack on the British economy is the reason that leave supporters such as Boris Johnson are mistaken in their belief that there is “no need for haste” in exiting the EU.  The longer it takes for the British to escape from the authoritarian EU, the longer Washington and the EU can inflict punishment on the British people for voting to leave and the more time the presstitutes will have to convince the British people that their vote was a mistake.  As the vote is nonbinding, a cowardly and cowed Parliament could reject the vote.
Cameron should step down immediately, not months from now in October.  The new British government should tell the EU that the British people’s decision is implemented now, not in two years and that all political and legal relationships terminated as of the vote.  Otherwise, in two years the British will be so beat down by punishments and propaganda that their vote will be overturned.
The British government should immediately announce the termination of its participation in Washington’s sanctions on Russia and hook its economy to the rising nations of Russia, China, India, and Iran.  With this support, the British can survive the Washington led attack on their economy.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

US calls Russia ‘aggressive’ as NATO creeps eastward

Pot calling the kettle black...

Deadly irony: US calls Russia ‘aggressive’ as NATO creeps eastward

RT, 17 Jun, 2016


With US military bases breeding faster than McDonald’s franchises, and 28-member NATO smashing up against Russia’s border, antagonizing Moscow with war games, the West continues selling the pulp fiction of ‘Russian aggression’ to an increasingly suspect audience.
In the latest serving of steaming rhetoric designed to make Westerners tremble and quake at the very mention of the name ‘Vladimir Putin’, a Newsweek article proclaims in its apocalyptic headline, “How and Why Russia is Moving to a War Footing”.
Russia has been found guilty – by the non-jury court of NATO opinion - of carrying out the very same task that every nation performs if it hopes to maintain its sovereignty: spending money on modernizing its forces.
The author of the hit-piece, Andrew Monaghan, nervously describes the funds the Kremlin has set aside for military expenditures as “impressive figures.”
In 2010, Russia “committed $610 billion to a decade-long transformation process… ensuring that at least 70 percent of military equipment is modern, including the procurement of thousands of pieces of high performance and heavy equipment, such as tanks, artillery, military aircraft and naval vessels,” Monaghan wails, as if Russia had just invented the concept of national armies.
The author fails to mention, however, that the US Pentagon spends about that much every month feeding the voracious appetite of its vast military empire. And since global conflagrations have been erupting in direct proportion to how far NATO forces wander abroad, many countries do not perceive this US-engineered monster as a remotely positive thing. Indeed, they see it as a direct threat to their national survival.
Russia, which finds itself on the front line of the encroachment, wasted no time modernizing its military after coming to the realization that Washington’s pledge of cooperation with Moscow against terror, not to mention the US-built missile defense system in Eastern Europe was an elaborate fraud, designed to lull Russia into a false sense of bilateral security with the global superpower.
Washington’s “anti-Russian policies have convinced the Russian leadership that making concessions or negotiating with the West is futile. It has become apparent that the West will always support any individual, movement or government that is anti-Russian, be it tax-cheating oligarchs, convicted Ukrainian war criminals, Saudi-supported Wahhabi terrorists in Chechnya or cathedral-desecrating punks in Moscow,” wrote Dr. Evgenia Gurevich, Dr. Victor Katsap, Dmitry Orlov and A. Raevsky.
At the same time, Western media and think tanks regularly accuse Russia of harboring evil designs towards neighboring states, and despite the fact that Russia has not given the slightest indication of threatening behavior.
Consider this opening line of a recent article in Foreign Policy, citing a Rand Corp. study, that certainly sent shudders across the tiny Baltic States: “If Russian tanks and troops rolled into the Baltics tomorrow, outgunned and outnumbered NATO forces would be overrun in under three days.”
The article was published on the same day US Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced a $3.4 billion plan to add more heavy weapons and armored vehicles in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. In other words, a very nice payday for numerous American defense contractors, who now want debt-riddled Eastern European countries to crack open their wallets and donate or go it alone against the invisible menace of ‘Russian aggression.’
“And our estimates for 2016 indicate a further increase of 1.5 percent in real terms this year. This is progress. But I will call on allies to keep up the momentum, and to do more,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a press conference this week.
Personally, I hear faint echoes of blackmail in that comment.
Time for a quick reality check: If Moscow was really as aggressive as NATO leaders want us to believe it is, the map around Russia would look radically different right now. Ukraine would be torn apart and Balkanized between no fewer than two autonomous republics, while Georgia, which launched a brazen crack-of-dawn attack on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia on August 7, 2008, would be fortunate if it had escaped with nothing less than the lengthy occupation of its territory.
But as things stand, Russia never launched a military invasion of Ukraine, as so many Western experts had predicted it would, and Georgia (free of former President Mikhail Saakashvili, who ordered the attack on Russian positions) remains a free and independent state with steadily improving relations with Russia.
Does that sound remotely like the actions of a country hell bent on restoring empire?
On a side note, I am personally convinced that the West was not only anticipating but desperately hoping that Russia would have jumped at the opportunity of invading Ukraine as the capital Kiev succumbed to Western-backed neo-fascist forces. An invasion by Russian forces would have bogged Moscow down in a protracted conflict that would only have succeeded in destroying Russia’s relations with European countries for a very long time, possibly forever. At the same time, it would have given US-led NATO forces a free hand in deciding Syria’s fate, a fate that the United States has already unilaterally determined - without even a hint of democratic due process - has no place for President Bashar Assad.
The other purported excuse for NATO forces massing on Russia’s Western border is due to Crimea voting to leave Ukraine at the height of the Kiev’s political crisis. Although it is rarely admitted in Western media - many journalists who should know better still describe the annexation as due to an invasion - Russia never employed military force against the peninsula. Today the people of Crimea – in poll after poll – have only positive things to say about their new national status.
President Putin on Friday had strong words regarding NATO's advance on Russia's borders under the false pretext of Russian aggression.
"After the 'Arab Spring' they have already moved closer to our borders. Why did they need to support the coup in Ukraine", Putin said at a plenary session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
The Russian leader believes such actions were taken to justify the existence of the North Atlantic Alliance. "They need an external enemy, an external opponent - or why else would this organization be needed?" he explained.
Monaghan, meanwhile, has taken the position that Russia’s militarization and modernization are “not so much responses to what NATO is currently doing but rather reflections of what would have taken place anyway.” In other words, nothing NATO is doing in Russia’s backyard can explain the Russian military’s actions of late; Russia is militarizing because, well, it’s Russia. This explanation is either willful self-deception or a flat-out lie. Moscow has been warning for years that unless US-led NATO demonstrates that it wants a real partnership, and not just a bunch of hollow statements, the option is nothing less than another arms race to the bottom.
All things considered, Russia made the right move on the global chessboard. Even before Washington showed its hand at the geopolitical poker table, revealing that its calls for cooperation with Russia were nothing but a bad bluff, Moscow had already understood Uncle Sam had cards up his sleeve.
Today, the US military leviathan has grown to such monstrous proportions that it is nearly impossible to say with any certainty how many military bases the United States operates abroad. Journalist Nick Turse reported in 2011 that there’s "one number no American knows and that is the number of overseas US military bases".
“Today, according to the Pentagon’s published figures, the American flag flies over 750 U.S. military sites in foreign nations and U.S. territories abroad,” Turse wrote. “This figure does not include small foreign sites of less than 10 acres or those that the U.S. military values at less than $10 million.”
Indeed, the Pentagon – which funds through US taxpayer money about 75 percent of NATO expenditures - has become so large and cumbersome that it lost track of $2.3 trillion dollars, former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters on September 10, 2001.
It appears that not only has US-led NATO become a threat to hundreds of sovereign states around the world with its extreme imperial overreach, the very same malignancy that the Roman Empire succumbed to, it has managed to become a threat even to itself.
Today, Russia is not taken any chances with the unpredictable global hegemon, whose list of nations it has destroyed grows annually. Indeed, the Russian military is engaged in a “transformation process” at the very same time NATO is pounding on the front door. But instead of throwing open the gates to the Western juggernaut, Russia has hedged its bets on long-term strategy, investing in strong national defense.
And that is an “act of aggression” US-led NATO simply can’t tolerate.

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Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist based in Moscow, Russia. His articles have been featured in many publications, including Russia in Global Affairs, The Moscow Times, Russia Insider and Global Research. Bridge is the author of the book on corporate power, “Midnight in the American Empire”, which was released in 2013.
@Robert_Bridge

Monday, June 13, 2016

Moonsighting for Ramadan on 1437H

According to science, neither "astronomical new moon" nor "hilal moon" could not have been sighted from Australasia on the evening of 5th June.
http://www.crescentwatch.org

There were no reports from moonsighting (hilal) from any African countries either on that date. However, Indonesia claimed to sight moon. So did the Saudis. As such,  Ramadan was started in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Mideastern countries from the 6th June.

Due to lapse of time, moonsighting was possible from Texas and some Latin American countries on the 5th June. So, Ramadan was started in those countries from the 6th June which is correct.


Astronomical New Moon (Qamar Jadeed) is not the same as Crescent Moon (Hilal) which is what Allah asked us to sight to determine lunar calendar.



At the start of the New Moon, it is all pitch dark (since no sunlight is reflected off the moon's surface). Crescent is visible about 12+ hours after the advent of New Moon according to astronomers at observatories.

Hukm (injunctions) for pilgrims are not applicable to non-pilgrims. Wukoof (staying) on the plains of Arafah does not determine the date for Eid-al-Adha. Remember, pilgrims don't offer Eid prayer!

Cold hard truth of modern time...

Prof Michel spells out the current world scenario in dot points...

What is a Conspiracy Theory? What is the Truth?
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, June 12, 2016

Obama is on a hot war footing. Western civilization is allegedly “threatened by the Islamic State”. 

The “Global War on Terrorism” is  heralded as a humanitarian endeavor.

We have a “Responsibility to Protect”. Humanitarian warfare is the solution.

Evil folks are lurking. ‘Take ‘em out”, said George W. Bush.

The Western media is beating the drums of war. Obama’s military agenda is supported by a vast propaganda apparatus.

One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to “fabricate an enemy”. As the political legitimacy of the Obama Administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this “outside enemy”, namely Al Qaeda and its network of (CIA sponsored) affiliates  must be dispelled.

The purpose is to tacitly instil, through repeated media reports, ad nauseam, within people’s inner consciousness, the notion that Muslims constitute a threat to the security of the Western World. 

Humanitarian warfare is waged on several fronts: Russia,  China and the Middle East are currently the main targets.

Xenophobia and the Military Agenda

The wave of xenophobia directed against Muslims which has swept across Western Europe is tied into geopolitics. It is part of a military agenda. It consists in demonizing the enemy.

Muslim countries possess more than 60 percent of total oil reserves.  In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves. Iraq has five times more oil than the United States. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The “Demonization” of Muslims and the Battle for Oil, Global Research, Jannuary 4, 2007).

A large share of the World’s oil lies in Muslim lands. The objective of the US led war is to steal and appropriate those oil reserves. And to achieve this objective, these countries  are targeted: war, covert ops, economic destabilization, regime change.

The American Inquisition

A consensus building process to wage war is similar to the Spanish inquisition. It requires social subordination, the political consensus cannot be questioned. In its contemporary version, the inquisition requires and demands submission to the notion that war is a means to spreading Western values and democracy.

A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. We must go after the bad guys.

War is peace.

The ‘big lie’ has now becomes the truth … and the truth has become a ‘conspiracy theory’.

Those who are committed to the Truth are categorized as “Terrorists”.

According to Paul Craig Roberts (2011), the conspiracy theory concept “has undergone Orwellian redefinition”…

A “conspiracy theory” no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy.  Instead, it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the government’s explanation and that of its media pimps….

In other words, as truth becomes uncomfortable for government and its Ministry of Propaganda, truth is redefined as conspiracy theory, by which is meant an absurd and laughable explanation that we should ignore.

Fiction becomes fact.

Investigative journalism has been scrapped.

Factual analysis of social, political and economic issues is a conspiracy theory because it challenges a consensus which is based on a lie.

What is the Truth

The real threat to global security emanates from the US-NATO-Israel alliance, yet realities in an inquisitorial environment are turned upside down: the warmongers are committed to peace, the victims of war are presented as the protagonists of war.

The homeland is threatened.

The media, intellectuals, scientists and the politicians, in chorus, obfuscate the unspoken truth, namely that the US-NATO led war destroys humanity.

When the lie becomes the truth there is no turning backwards.

When war is upheld as a humanitarian endeavor, Justice and the entire international legal system are turned upside down: pacifism and the antiwar movement are criminalized. Opposing the war becomes a criminal act. Meanwhile, the war criminals in high office have ordered a witch hunt against those who challenge their authority.

The Big Lie must be exposed for what it is and what it does.

It sanctions the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.

It destroys families and people. It destroys the commitment of people towards their fellow human beings.

It prevents people from expressing their solidarity for those who suffer. It upholds war and the police state as the sole avenue.

It destroys both nationalism and internationalism.

Breaking the lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force.

This profit driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

Let us reverse the tide.

Challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

Break the American inquisition.

Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade.

Close down the weapons factories and the military bases.

Bring home the troops.

Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal war.

Thursday, June 2, 2016

US stabs Saudi ‘ally’ in the back – again

Big Brother plays old 'blame game' once again...

US stabs Saudi ‘ally’ in the back – again – with terror scapegoating

Finian Cunningham
RT, 2 Jun, 2016


For months now, US-Saudi relations have become increasingly strained. The latest American aggravation is blaming its Arab ally for turning Kosovo into an “extremist breeding ground”.
In an article by the New York Times’ editorial board last week, entitled 'The World Reaps What the Saudis Sow', the leading US publication castigated the Saudi rulers for “promoting Wahhabism, the radical form of Sunni Islam that inspired the 9/11 hijackers and that now inflames the Islamic State.”
It was an astounding broadside of condemnation, articulated with palpable contempt towards the Saudi rulers. “Saudi Arabia has frustrated American policy makers for years,” the editorial bitterly lamented.
In particular, the august US “newspaper of record”, which can be taken as a barometer of official Washington thinking, accused Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchies of turning the Balkan country of Kosovo into a failed state.
This was because the Saudis have sponsored “extremist clerics” who are “fostering violent jihad”, thereby making it a “fertile ground for recruitment to radical ideology”.
That Kosovo has become a hotbed of Islamic radicalism and a source of young militants going to Syria and Iraq to join the ranks of the Islamic State and other terrorist groups is not in dispute.
Nor is it in dispute that the Saudis and other Gulf Arab states have pumped millions of dollars into the Balkan territory to promote their version of Islamic fundamentalism – Wahhabism – which is correlated with extremist groups.
All that is true. But it’s a bit rich for elite US opinion to lump all the blame for Kosovo’s tribulations at the feet of Arab allies.
After all, it was Washington that created the failed state of Kosovo in the first place when it agitated for its secession from Serbia in 2008. Russia and several other governments, including some members of the European Union, have never recognized the self-proclaimed Kosovo republic, arguing that the mainly Muslim Albanian province’s secession from Serbia was not based on a democratic mandate.
Illogically, Washington and the EU claim that the secession of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 – though based on a popular referendum – is not legal under international law, even though these powers applied much less criteria to recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state.
In any case, the failed status of Kosovo was sadly predictable from the outset owing to the fact that “liberation” movement comprising the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was a creation of the US and NATO as a proxy with which to dismember Serbia. Under President Bill Clinton, the US and NATO launched an illegal bombing campaign on Serbia in 1999 under the pretext of “preventing oppression” of Kosovo by Belgrade.
The real agenda was that Washington wanted to carve out a pro-American state in the strategically important Balkans, right on Russia’s doorstep. It achieved that with the breakaway of Kosovo in 2008 and the setting up on the territory Camp Bondsteel, the biggest American military base in the Balkans.
However, the artificial province-cum-state was inherently unstable. The KLA, lionized by Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, is notorious for links to terrorism and organized crime, from drug smuggling to arms dealing. Its former leader, Hashim Thaci, who is now the territory’s president, is accused of being a warlord and overseeing such criminal activities as organ trafficking. Kosovo has since gained the ignominious moniker of “Mafia State”.
Funneling jihadi money from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states into Kosovo has certainly spawned extremism in Kosovo over the past decade. But for Washington to cast all the blame for Kosovo’s chaos and criminality on to the Saudis and others is an audacious whitewashing of American culpability.
This is especially so because several jihadists from Kosovo who are active in Syria and Iraq are known to have passed through the US army’s Camp Bondsteel. One such figure is Lavdrim Muhaxheri who came to notoriety as an IS leader in Iraq after a video showed him beheading a victim.
Dishing the dirt on the Saudis over Kosovo is but one aspect of a larger emerging narrative in Washington. One which seeks to offload responsibility for international terrorism, instability and conflict on to America’s Arab allies.
US President Barack Obama riled the already-irked Saudi rulers when he referred to them as “free riders” in a high-profile interview published in April, suggesting that the oil-rich kingdom was overly reliant on American military power. In the same interview, Obama also blamed Saudi Arabia for destabilizing Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
The Saudis reacted furiously to Obama’s claims. The White House then tried to back-pedal on the president’s criticisms, but it was noticeable that when Obama flew to Saudi Arabia for a summit with Persian Gulf leaders later that month, he received a chilly reception.
Since then, relations have only become even more frigid. The passage of a bill through Congress which would permit American citizens to sue the Saudi state over alleged terrorism damages from the 9/11 events has provoked the Saudi rulers to warn that they will retaliate by selling off US Treasury holdings.
Then there are strident calls by US politicians and media pundits for the declassification of 28 pages in a 2002 congressional report into 9/11, which reputedly indicate Saudi state involvement in financially supporting the alleged hijackers of the civilian airliners that crashed into public buildings in September 2001.
President Obama has said that he will veto the controversial legislation and publication of classified information. Nevertheless, the Saudi rulers are incensed by the moves, which they see as treacherous backstabbing by their American ally. An alliance that stretches back seven decades, stemming from FDR and the first Saudi king Ibn Saud.
As American writer Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, the latest twists in the 9/11 controversy appear to be efforts by the US “deep state” to make the Saudis a convenient fall guy.
The same goes for Obama accusing Saudi Arabia for destabilizing Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Yes, sure, the Saudis are involved in fomenting violence and sectarianism in these countries and elsewhere. But, again, the bigger culprit is Washington for authoring the overarching agenda of regime change in the Middle East.
As for claims that the Saudis and other Persian Gulf states are sponsoring Islamic extremism, this conveniently obscures US covert policy since the 1970s and 80s in Afghanistan, when American planners like Zbigniew Brzezinski conceived of al Qaeda terrorist proxies to fight against the Soviet Union.
Blaming the Saudis over the failed state of Kosovo is but the latest in a long list of scapegoating by Washington. No wonder the Saudis are livid at this American maneuver to dish the dirt. Washington is setting the Saudi rulers up to take the rap for a myriad of evils that arguably it has much more responsibility for.
The question is: how much can the strategic alliance between the US and its Saudi partner bear – before a straw breaks the camel’s back?


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Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.