Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1372292 Comments:2390
Another hulking character who identified himself as a member of Unit 51 from the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade paratrooper corps barked at the activists, “The only thing you are is a bunch of traitors. Every day people here are fighting… This is unbelievable. You are traitors and if we had the chance we would shoot you one by one. One by one we would shoot you…”
The demonstration concluded with police violently arresting three participants including one man for the crime of reading aloud the names of destroyed Palestinian villages.
Lia Tarachansky of the Real News Network filmed the melee. Her footage is below:"
And he would. Sharon's buddies would shoot them....;}
The repression of Zochrot’s educational action was the street level manifestation of the campaign the Israeli government has waged to mute discussion of the Nakba and punish those who violate the code of silence.
Israel’s Education Minister, declared that merely allowing students to learn about the mass expulsion of Palestinians during 1947 and 1948 would encourage them to work against the Jewish state.
“If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm,” the book read, “then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society.”
Quantcast EPA Grossly Misrepresents The Toxicity Of Corexit Used In Gulf Of Mexico EPA Grossly Misrepresents The Toxicity Of Corexit Used In Gulf Of Mexico thumbnail
Quite incredibly, the EPA issued a positive report on May 1, 2012 regarding the safety and toxicity of various dispersants use in the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Included in this assessment was the use of Corexit.
This report “indicated that all eight dispersants had roughly the same toxicity, and all fell into the “practically non-toxic” or “slightly toxic” category. Scientists found that none of the eight dispersants displayed endocrine-disrupting activity of “biological significance.” The same report went on to say that “dispersant-oil mixtures were generally no more toxic to the aquatic test species than oil alone.”
Hidden Crisis in the GULF. Barbara Wiseman, TEO President, has been an ardent advocate for safer oil remediation measures since the very beginning of this oil spill. She has said that:
“At the beginning of the disaster, TEO investigated to find effective, non-toxic technologies currently available in adequate supply to clean up an oil spill of this size. Once we isolated the best solutions, we then investigated to find what the barriers to getting them implemented were. The barriers have all come down to specific people in the EPA. They are, in effect, holding the Gulf hostage and, for some unexplained reason, won’t let it be cleaned up.”
A 2nd Anniversary Report on the BP Gulf Oil Spill as follows:
“The toxic dispersants add absolutely nothing to EFFECTIVE RESPONSE. There is no scientific basis for it, and their use violates The Clean Water Act, EPA’s charter and common sense.”
“Corexit’s label clearly states it can cause kidney failure and death and the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) specifically warns, “Do not contaminate surface water” with it. Additionally, toxicity testing in regards to marine species shows little tolerance by all forms of sea life; thus, applying it on spills as a preferred response method increases the toxicity of the spilled oil on which it is used.”
Print Afghan police kill two British soldiers in Helmand Province Sun May 13, 2012 8:50AM GMT Latest reports indicate that members of the Afghan national police force have shot dead at least two British soldiers in the troubled Helmand Province of Afghanistan.
4 US-led soldiers killed in Afghanistan Sat May 12, 2012 3:9PM GMT At least four US-led troops have been killed in separate incidents in Afghanistan in the past 24 hours, as attacks against the United States and its Western allies have increased in the war-wracked country.
Brave Afghan shoots 12 US-NATO invaders in Kunar Zabihullah Mujahid E-mail Print PDF Friday, 19 Jamadil Akhir 1433 Friday, 11 May 2012 12:59
KUNAR, May 11 – A brave Afghan, apparently working as soldier of puppet forces turned his gun on the US-NATO terrorist troops in the invaders’ army base located in Agam, Ghazi Abad district of Kunar province on Friday, killing as many as 12 US-Nato cowardly troops and wounded a dozen more, a Mujahideen’s official said Friday, adding that the said spirited Afghan had been enlisted in the puppets’ army for the very purpose and after accomplishing his heroic mission joined Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate safe and sound with his machine gun and an American heavy machine gun.
Enemy sustain severe losses in Kabul Zabihullah Mujahid E-mail Print PDF Sunday, 21 Jamadil Akhir 1433 Sunday, 13 May 2012 07:01
KABUL, May 13 – Later on Saturday, Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate confronted a great number of the puppets in Sarubi, Kabul, triggering a one-hour fight in which a number of the enemy soldiers got killed and wounded.
We’re Fighting in a War We Lost Before the War Began by Phyllis Bennis, May 12, 2012 Print This | Share This
It shouldn’t surprise anyone, but support for the longest U.S. war is dropping further and faster than ever. The latest national U.S. poll, released on May 9, shows 66 percent of Americans are against the war in Afghanistan – with 40 percent "strongly opposed."
We can expect to hear the usual spin, claims that it’s a hard slog but Afghans are still better off and we have to finish what we started.
With all due respect to Phyllis, no one will hear Any spin because none is necessary.
No one is reporting anything about the Afghans. Refute silence? ;}
If that money ($571 billion according to the National Priorities Project) had not been wasted on the war in Afghanistan since 2001, it could instead have paid for ten years of health care for 12 million low-income people, or hired 840,000 elementary school teachers for ten years, or paid for converting 246 million households to all solar energy for a year."
us spends more in 5 hours on defense than in 5 years on healthcare
The Combat-Application-Tourniquet is the 1st choice of the U.S. Army and is deployed with our troops around the world. If you are looking for a light weight, ...
A scaling law, or power law, is a simple polynomial functional relationship, i.e., f(x) depends on a power of x. Two properties of such laws can easily be shown:
* a logarithmic mapping yields a linear relationship, * scaling the function’s argument x preserves the shape of the function f(x), called scale invariance.
See (Sornette, 2006).
Scaling-Law Distributions Scaling-law distributions have been observed in an extraordinary wide range of natural phenomena: from physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science and demography to the social sciences; see (Newman, 2004). It is truly amazing, that such diverse topics as
* the size of earthquakes, moon craters, solar flares, computer files, sand particle, wars and price moves in financial markets,
* the number of scientific papers written, citations received by publications, hits on webpages and species in biological taxa,
* the sales of music, books and other commodities,
* the population of cities,
* the income of people,
* the frequency of words used in human languages and of occurrences of personal names,
* the areas burnt in forest fires,
are all described by scaling-law distributions. First used to describe the observed income distribution of households by the economist Pareto in 1897, the recent advancements in the study of complex systems have helped uncover some of the possible mechanisms behind this universal law. However, there is as of yet no real understanding of the physical processes driving these systems.
AND
For how long have we known about the fat tails?
"Heavy tails: the (unconditional) distribution of returns seems to display a power-law or Pareto-like tail, with a tail index which is finite, higher than two and less than five for most data sets studied.
In particular this excludes stable laws with infinite variance and the normal distribution. However the precise form of the tails is difficult to determine."
Cont (2001) # MANTEGNA, R.N. and H.E. STANLEY, 1999. Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance. books.google.com. "The degree of leptokurtosis is much larger for high-frequency data (Fig. 8.2)." Mantegna and Stanley (2000)
What JP Morgan's MANY theoreticians are desperately trying to wrap their heads around at this very moment:
"However the precise form of the tails is difficult to determine."
"The main concepts that are needed to understand stock markets are imitation, herding, self-organized cooperativity and positive feedbacks, leading to the development of endogenous instabilities. According to this theory, local effects such as interest raises, new tax laws, new regulations and so on, invoked as the cause of the burst of a given bubble leading to a crash, are only one of the triggering factors but not the fundamental cause of the bubble collapse. We propose that the true origin of a bubble and of its collapse lies in the unsustainable pace of stock market price growth based on self-reinforcing over-optimistic anticipation. As a speculative bubble develops, it becomes more and more unstable and very susceptible to any disturbance."
Jamie Dimon, the king of controlled risk, just now hearing about any of this
"statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you.
In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system)."
Clearly, with current International Monetary Fund estimates of the costs of the 2007-2008 subprime crisis, the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banks ever earned taking risks.
But it was easy to see from the past that the pilot did not have the qualifications to fly the plane and was using the wrong navigation tools:
The same happened in 1983 with money center banks losing cumulatively every penny ever made, and in 1991-1992 when the Savings and Loans industry became history.
After 1998, when a “Nobel-crowned” collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management,
a hedge fund, because the “scientific” methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited.
Yet the Fed helped their bailoutand exposure to rare events (and model error) patently increased exponentially (as we can see from banks’ swelling portfolios of derivatives that we do not understand).
