Sunday 31 January 2016

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Don’t Go to Starbucks https://t.co/3DZUoQiSTJ https://t.co/WLtcep93Rs

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Don’t Go to Starbucks



You may love your familiar Venti, skinny, soy, extra foam, no whip Caramel Macchiato, but when in Barcelona stay away from the global chain cafes. There are so many wonderful local spots to get your caffeine fix, it would be a coffee-crime to miss out on them. Here’s a list of some of the best places to get a memorable cup of joe in Barcelona neighborhoods like Gracia, el Born and El Raval.

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Tuesday 26 January 2016

US Troops Have Taken Over Airfield In Syria

 US Troops Have Taken Over Airfield In Syria


U.S. special operations troops have reportedly taken over an airfield in northeastern Syria, potentially clearing the way to flow more American military support to friendly militias fighting the Islamic State group.
A small team of U.S. troops is setting up a base camp at Rmeilan Air Base in the Syrian Kurdish region near Syria’s Iraqi and Turkish borders, according to local reports.
American helicopters operated at the base over the past couple of weeks as local workers expanded the runway, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
International Business Times notes:
The US and Russia are working to establish air bases in Northern Syria, within 30 miles of each other, an activist group has claimed. Russian warplanes are expected to begin using the Qamishli International Airport, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
If you assume that the U.S. troops will support pro-democracy forces in Syria, you’d be wrong.
On the other hand, is the U.S. supporting ISIS?

See for yourself… 

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CIA David Petraeus Wants To Remove Leak Against CIA Officer John Kiriakou


When former CIA director David Petraeus requested prosecutors remove reference to a leak case against former CIA officer John Kiriakou from his plea deal, prosecutors astoundingly followed his wishes.
“Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy,” Petraeus declared in a statement to the CIA workforce after Kiriakou pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) in 2013.
This statement shows Petraeus understood the law when he improperly handled and disclosed classified information, including “Black Books” containing the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and notes from his discussions with President Barack Obama. He still provided his biographer, Paula Broadwell, access to these books after she asked to use them as source material.
But, according to the Washington Post, in February 2015, Petraeus’ lawyers requested the statement Petraeus made about Kiriakou’s case not appear in the statement of facts in the plea deal.
“In the statement of facts that would accompany the plea agreement, prosecutors also said they would want to reference a Petraeus message sent to the CIA workforce in 2012 after John Kiriakou, a former agency officer, was convicted of leaking classified information,” the Post reported. A person involved with discussions about the plea deal told the Post the Kiriakou reference was “off the table.”
The issue over the embarrassing Kiriakou reference came up during a meeting with James Melendres, a prosecutor with the Justice Department’s National Security Division. He proposed a deal. Petraeus would plead guilty to lying to FBI agents and mishandling classified information. Petraeus’ lawyer objected to the lying charge and that became a “non-starter.”
The plea deal Petraeus agreed to in March 2015 involved only one charge—the unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. He received a sentence of probation for two years and a $40,000 fine.
“It’s weird on many levels that [prosecutors are] realizing the hypocrisy by admitting they’re going to keep something out of a statement of facts wherein Petraeus acknowledges he realizes leaking classified information is a crime,” Jesselyn Radack, a national security & human rights lawyer for Expose Facts who has represented numerous whistleblower clients, including Kiriakou. “It’s pretty striking that they would deliberately omit that because it makes Petraeus look bad and looks embarrassing.”
The Post report also shows how willing prosecutors were to acquiesce to the demands of Petraeus to remain out of prison and not be charged with any felony that would result in the loss of a pension.
“I’ve represented national security and intelligence officials who revealed wrongdoing and faced the rest of their lives in jail. The fact that the government indulged Petraeus’ wish to remain out of jail and receive his pension is unconscionable,” Radack added.
In an interview last year, Kiriakou stated, “David Petraeus said some very nasty things about me on the day that I took my guilty plea, that oaths mean something to us and that it was a great day for the intelligence community. I think he owes me an apology frankly because he did the exact same thing that I did.”
The report from the Post clearly demonstrates Petraeus was aware of the consequences he faced for his actions. He wielded his status in the power elite to strong-arm prosecutors into avoiding a high-profile trial for actions arguably worse than what Kiriakou pled guilty to doing.
Kiriakou pled guilty to confirming the name of a covert agent to a reporter, who already had the name, and the name was never published. For that, he received a sentence of 30 months in prison. He initially was to be sent to a minimum security work camp at a federal facility in Loretto, Pennsylvania, but the Bureau of Prisons violated an agreement and he served his sentence in the low security facility at Loretto.
Radack further commented on the fact that former Attorney General Eric Holder said a felony conviction for Petraeus would have been “very, very, problematic.” She suggested this is “less an explanation about Petraeus and more an explanation about the lack of prosecutions—or even investigations—for most senior administration officials who leak classified information to the press on a daily basis. If Petraeus was convicted of felony, what about everybody else?”
Prosecutors are fond of insisting, as then-U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride did, that a prison sentence is required to remind “those who are entrusted with classified information that damage done by leaks is not speculative or hypothetical—it is actual and substantial, and the Justice Department will hold them accountable.”
In a filing supporting a 30-month sentence for Kiriakou, MacBride and other attorneys maintained Kiriakou had signed “multiple non-disclosure agreements acknowledging that unauthorized disclosures of classified information could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation.” They also made the unfounded allegation that Kiriakou was “engaged in a concerted campaign to raise his media profile, principally to advance his private pecuniary interests through, among other things, consulting engagements, publication of editorials, more remunerative and secure employment, and sales of his forthcoming book.”
If it were true that Kiriakou was using unauthorized disclosures to build up his profile, this is no different from what Petraeus did when he cozied up to his biographer and provided her access to materials. Any official who had chosen to reveal such information to challenge U.S. war policies would have been aggressively prosecuted for similar disclosures to journalists.
On one hand, the actions of prosecutors make it abundantly transparent that there is a double standard for leaks when it comes to government officials. Prosecutors may strive for consistency, yet it is ultimately futile. The Justice Department will submit to the power of someone with the stature of Petraeus and abandon full-blooded efforts to hold such a high-ranking official accountable.
But what unfolded also makes it apparent that prosecutors can come to some agreement with a person guilty of unauthorized disclosures, especially when there was no damage done to national security. Prosecutors and the accused’s lawyers can come to an agreement that holds the person responsible without being overzealous.
“Petraeus’ case shows that you can hold somebody responsible for revealing classified information without sending them to jail, without forfeiting their pension, and without ruining their life and career,” Radack declared.
This is what makes what the Obama administration did so outrageous. There is such an unequal application of the law when prosecuting officials for leaks of classified information. In fact, Petraeus’ own lawyers planned to use this as part of his defense.
Petraeus’ lawyers “brought up an array of classified material that had appeared in other books and articles, including those written by cabinet members, and had not led to any prosecutions. That showed, they said, that some of the material Broadwell had obtained from Petraeus was already in the public domain,” according to the Post.

For whistleblowers who allege wrongdoing, there is no discretion from prosecutors but only overzealousness. On the other hand, when faced with esteemed military or intelligence officials, all standards of prosecution go by the wayside and it is the prosecutors who have to beg the accused criminal to allow them to hold them responsible in a manner that may cause them a small amount of embarrassment. 

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SOURCE: SHADOW PROOF

Monday 25 January 2016

Numb And Terror Weary Citizens Welcomed The Show Of Force


French police commandos with a bullet-hole riddled riot shield used during the assault at the Bataclan theatre in Paris during the November 13, 2015 terror attacks
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The French Human Rights League (LDH), one of many bodies now questioning the efficacy of the harsher measures, said recently that only four legal procedures relating to terrorism had emerged from the spate of police operations.
"The political trap of a state of emergency is closing on the government (because) there will always be a good reason to keep" it in place, said LDH lawyer Patrice Spinozi.
And Jean-Jacques Urvoas, the president of the parliamentary commission of laws argued that the "element of surprise" against potential terrorist networks has been "largely reduced".
The Council of Europe's human rights commissioner Nils Muiznieks warned earlier this month that the state of emergency could constitute a "threat" to democracy.
He raised concerns about ethnic profiling of suspects facing police searches.
And a panel of UN human rights experts said last week the measures placed what they saw as "excessive and disproportionate" restrictions on key rights.
- One and indivisible -
The current three-month state of emergency expires on February 26 and an extension will give government time to adopt reforms to enshrine new security measures into the constitution.
None has been more divisive than a reform proposed by the Socialist president to strip French citizenship from people convicted of terrorist offences, if they have another nationality.
Rights activists, intellectuals as well as those within the Socialist party have criticised a measure they see as a betrayal of France's founding principles, in which the republic is "one and indivisible".
France's National Human Rights Commission (CNCDH) said the loss of nationality was "of no use in the prevention of terrorist acts."
The commission said it would establish "different treatment" between French people holding dual citizenship and those who are only French, a move "radically opposed to all republican values."
A group of 70 non governmental organisations have called for a protest on January 30 against the measure.
"For us it is definitely non!" they wrote in a declaration.
On Saturday the National Council of Bars, which represents French lawyers, said it was concerned to see the construction of "a judicial and social model which breaks with republican values".
Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the BBC on Friday that France would "use all means" at its disposal to combat terrorism "until we can get rid of Daesh," an acronym for Islamic State.
However, a source close to Valls told AFP "it is not envisaged in any way to extend it indefinitely."
When asked about the government's intentions regarding the state of emergency, the source said simply that France was at "war", hence "we shall see if we are going to extend it (for) as long as necessary."
The state of emergency boosts police powers, allowing house arrests, raids both day and night and the banning of public gatherings, without permission from a judge.
The lives of the majority of French people have not been affected by the state of emergency, and a recent poll showed 70 percent of people wanted it kept in place.
But there have been cases of violence during police raids, mistaken identity and people losing their jobs because they were placed under house arrest.
For the first time on Friday the Conseil d'Etat -- the highest administrative court -- stopped a house arrest and fined the State as the person in question had not been proved to belong to an Islamist grouping.
The Conseil d'Etat will on Tuesday examine a request from the LDH to end the state of emergency.

Sunday 24 January 2016

Truth And The Media


The world is interconnected like never before, and the overwhelming growth of accessible information on the internet has made figuring out the truth both easier and more difficult.
In this visualization, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green). Image credit: SCNARC/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. - See more at: http://news.rpi.edu/luwakkey/2902?destination=node/38887#sthash.fB5wqy5p.dpuf
In this visualization, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green).
Image credit: SCNARC/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
It is very important to note that 100 years ago, we had more than 100 times as many different interests contributing to the official news media. There were more locally owned news sources which were not fronts for larger mega-corporations. There was no television, so the people relied on the newspapers and the people they met in the world for information. While it was harder to find reliable information about what was happening around the world, it was easier to figure out what was happening where you lived.
Today, only a handful of corporations control the vast majority of mainstream news sources. Corporations like News Corp, Bertelsmann, and Time Warner collectively control huge parts of the market, with actual numbers and percents obscured by shell-corporations owning each other.
This media centralization assures that if we do not take the time to educate ourselves, to inform ourselves from sources other than the TV, we are allowing not only our viewpoint, but also the very basis of our view; the information we base our view on, to be spoon fed to us by highly impersonalized forces with the primary objective of maximizing profit.
A disparaging view of the major British broadcasters war coverage, A1one takes aim at the notion of truth as presented by the media. The fat traditional-looking Englishman looks complacent and uninterested in what he broadcasts and sees. Tehran 2006. Source: Flickr
Source: Flickr
What exactly does this mean?  This means the interests of those who decide what goes on the air, in the newspaper, decide what is investigated, what is published, what information is ignored or emphasized, do not feel connected to the people who are consuming the news. They do not feel connected or identify with us.
The people making these decisions are connected to the people who are paying them, and to other businesses and interests (sometimes government, but since corporations mostly control government, it is hard to tell the difference). This makes them answer far more to existing power structures than to us: their primary interest is not in giving us news, but keeping us glued to the screen, keeping us from thinking about important issues, and maintaining their funding.
While every one of us in the “civilized” world has heard every possible viewpoint in relation to abortion, how many of you know about ocean acidification, biosphere or ecological collapse and its costs, or about hidden viral genes discovered by regulators in Monsanto GMOs? How many are talking about the ubiquitous threat presented by endocrine disruptors in our water or by many common types of EMF.
Gezi Part protest: June 1st 2013 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Gezi Part protest: June 1st 2013
Source: Wikimedia Commons
As Noam Chomsky said “any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media.” But, unfortunately, it is not just a US problem, as we saw no reporting about the protest/blockade in Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul, in the Turkish media, despite sister-protests in at least 67 Turkish cities. The Western media then began talking about Istanbul, but as always is largely ignoring the underlying reasons for the protests: namely democracy and a right to decide what happens where you live.
Since the dawn of mass media, the political center has been continually and slowly moved to the right to the point that Ronald Reagan’s policies would be criticized as overly liberal by today’s center, and Franklin D. Roosevelt would be characterized as a socialist and likely impeached. This has been deliberately done to benefit the existing financial interests: to make different shades of their opinion the only acceptable opinion, to make corporate fascism look reasonable.
Debate is routinely railroaded into topics of little systemic importance while the available parties actually all hold basically the same economic, environmental, and civil rights stance. This stance can and has been called neo-liberalism, which can be summed up as no regulation, and no government aid, except in the protection of existing power structures, as we see in the bank bailouts and “austerity measures”. It represents a merger of government and big business.
Because debate is kept within this limited spectrum, people are often left with the impression that the view being presented is the only view and that alternatives do not exist. People are also distracted by superfluous or unimportant debates and allow themselves to overlook important issues, and sometimes even end up opposing things which would benefit them, for instance environmental regulation.
Fortunately, we have access to the internet, and this can allow us to bypass these media bottlenecks and exchange information with each other and access independent news sources. Sites like Exposing The Truth, among others, strive to connect with real people, do real research, and speak honestly about important topics. These 21st century sources try to present varied viewpoints and dig for the truth, instead of settling for viewpoints which all basically agree.
Unfortunately, current power interests have noticed this migration to the internet and governments and corporations have been actively purchasing and using software for influencing social media. This includes personality-management-software, which enables a single individual to control 70+ online personalities (for instance on Facebook) simultaneously to shift the tone of debates and make certain positions seem more popular than they really are.
Noam Chomsky Source: Wikimedia Commons
Noam Chomsky
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The internet has brought with it as many risks and dangers as it has possibilities. The average person has access to more information than ever before, yet people, according to Noam Chomsky, are less informed than they were 70 years ago, and according to historian Howard Zinn, also less involved in their own communities than they ever were in the past. Censorship efforts also threaten to limit the effectiveness of the internet, and its centralised nature -with only about a dozen main servers in the whole world- means there likely exists one or more digital dosiers about every one of us, our interests, and our online behavior.
As Chomsky so artfully states: “all over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and consume.” Despite the conditioning, many of us know we are not helpless. As I discuss in Be The Change, we can directly effect the people around us, and when 10% of people become aware of something, convinced of it, it quickly spreads to everyone (Syzmanski, 2011).
And as Niklas Luhmann explains, a system –for instance civilization or society- can endanger its own survival and not notice it until the environment is no longer able to fulfill its needs. The system can only notice problems in its environment through overlap with its needs –at which point it may be too late- , or through sub-systems (like ecologists and international scientific bodies) who investigate these questions. But, the facts about both the ecological and social pieces of the puzzle do not effect the system unless other subsystems translate these facts into resonance –or vibrations- within the system, unless other parts of the system ring the warning bells so hard that the system itself recognizes the situation.
This is where social media comes in. Social media has the capacity to produce resonance, to “awaken” society, without the participation of the mainstream media. As long as we have an open and free internet, we can work to assure people wake up, that problems start to be solved instead of only symptoms treated, and that decision making is returned to the people.
Source: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/anonymous9000/4280254856" target="_blank">Flickr</a>
Source: Flickr
Of course, we will need to do more in terms of organizing and solving this dilemma, the current monopoly of power in the hands of irresponsible people, than inform others and trade information. It is a necessary first step, and in the coming months I will write other texts to better highlight our position, strategy, and a few ideas about how we can change the status quo. But, none of that can be successful if people do not realize what is going on, if we collectively are not aware of what is going on. People do not help in an emergency unless they are aware there is one, and it is our first job to let people know there are in fact many emergencies, and they require our attention.
Sources:
1) Chomsky, Noam. 2002. Media Control.
2) Zinn, Howard. 1999. A Peoples´History of the United States.
3) Luhmann, Niklas. 1986. Ökologische Kommunikation.


Free Speech Is Not For The Faint Of Heart


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8 Conspiracy Theories You might Have Missed


There are a lot of completely unfounded essentially fantasy conspiracy theories. That said there are of course real conspiracies, especially in the dimensions of personal interest.
This article proposes 8 interesting conspiracy theories. Some may hold little kernels of truth, and others are simply interesting ideas. You, the reader, are responsible from telling fact from fiction, and there’s still more truth than fiction in this text. Links are embedded to help, in certain instances, because after all: I don’t want to spread misinformation.
1. Wild conspiracy theories are designed and distributed by companies and governments to distract from real issues
Deep within the walls of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and in the cubicles of many multinational companies like BP, Exxonmobil, Dow chemical, and Newscorp (and others) sit men and women who are responsible for generating misinformation. The fact that uninformed and sometimes dangerously wrong information is listed at the top of Google searches (who are currently considering a change to a fact-based ranking system) is because keywords have been bought by vested interests intent to shift the debate to nonsense issues.
One of the most debunked images on the internet, yet this theory distracts from real environmental and social problems
2. The pharmaceutical industry promotes anti-vaccine misinformation to increase infection rates so they can raise vaccine and treatment prices as demand increases
The fact that vaccines have been so effective at stopping many human diseases has decreased demand and led to price competition between competing pharmaceutical companies. To increase profits across the board, misinformation was propagated via mass media and internet to synthetically polarize people into not vaccinating, allowing otherwise extinguished pathogens to reemerge, leading to an increased demand and funds to create a new vaccine.
3. The fact a child with a weak immune system can potentially get the contagion from a vaccine is deliberate (when using weakened, but still living versions of the pathogen), and the newest technology being ignored
Vaccines which use weakened forms of the actual pathogen have been deliberately kept in use to make more unvaccinated people sick, to help increase demand (as in theory 2). The newest technology, used only by a few labs (like one who created a multi-strain (multivalent) Ebola vaccine) are using it.
The newest technology, which uses characteristic surface proteins from target pathogens and puts them onto the surface of a harmless but “awakening” vector, leads to acquired immunity against threats the body did not even have to directly counter. It may also be possible to simply use synthetic cells (without DNA) using the same idea. To protect adjuvant makers and current production, this is being ignored.
4. The debate about GMOs is deliberately kept in center stage to protect current seed producers, who produce mutagenic seeds for organic and conventional agriculture.
This one is actually pretty much true. Both convention and organics share the same type of seeds: species created through cross-breeding and chemical or radiological mutation. What differentiates organic from conventional is simply how you grow them, but not where the seeds come from. Keeping the debate about GMOs prevents people from focusing the real problems in agriculture, like land and chemical use (if you didn’t know: organics are also allowed to use certain pesticides).
The anti-GMO films you have probably watched on YouTube were largely financed by these guys. They have a financial interest in preventing the discussion from actually going into detail about where conventional and organic seeds come from.
5. Real environmental issues are being ignored deliberately, focus is being put on social topics to distract from real issues.
Is it that people simply like discussions about popular cultural topics and famous people, or is it that this is being deliberately pushed to take time away from legitimate topics? Is it that people at the top know about impending biosphere collapse, and have decided to save only themselves while milking everyone around for everything they’ve got? How can 67-85 people control more money than half of the world’s population, and there exist no real list?
Aralship2

Aral sea due to water diversion
6. God was overthrown by the devil thousands of years ago, and our current understanding of God and lucifer is actually God banished from his own kingdom.
Not a big believer in this kind of stuff myself, but check out the story.
Having created the universe and the forces of nature and physics spanning over distances greater than the human mind can perceive, God became involved in the more cognitive aspects of existence, birthing 7th dimension planes of ideas accessible to every conscious life under the right conditions.
godanddevil
luciferThe forces of evil noticed that certain rules about psychic creatures allowed them to be turned into a belief or direction at will, with especially great odds of success when the belief played into the being’s fantasy . This “first fantasy force” held more power than later attempts to inform on the subject. God, knowing the infinite nature of reality and perception, was keen to allow conscious life to inform itself, to build theories to test and explore their surroundings. But the forces of evil wanted to gain as much control as possible and exploited this weakness, gaining more philosophical ground than God among the higher echelons of life capable of abstract thinking.
God was banished from the light, following the overthrow of harmony by misinformed militant arrogance. Those believing themselves to be following God fled from the light, and lived into the night. To this day, God remains the patron of the scientist, the truth-seeker, and the light-bearer, holding itself the name Lucifer (bringer of light).
7. Lobbyists pretend to be experts, while simply parroting corporate positions for money. They, and their supporters, control the outcome of political decisions.
Giving reports, advice, and gifts to politicians, as well as influencing policy and the interpretation or representation of facts, allows lobbyists to have a significant effect of US political decisions. Using the same tricks mentions in the God was switched theory (6), lobbyists manipulate representatives, regulators, and the public to push their agenda. This primarily entails support related to industrial growth and opposition to laws increasing environmental protection and regulation.
Lobbying_Data
8. The FDA and EPA regulators are paid off to ignore and remain silent about serious problems.
It’s recently come out that the FDA remains silent about methodological and data based problems they find during audits or test sites. Records are kept, but only heavily redacted versions are accessible to the public or even congressional committees supposed to regulate these drugs.
Final Words
So, are you a good enough researcher to differentiate potential, fantasy, and fact within this text? In real life, you should treat every text as if it may have disinfo in it, and look up/into any facts you plan on citing.  Definitely read and look into every article you share. After all, none of us want to help propagate false information (here’s an article about 52 common myths).


SOURCE