criminalwisdom:

“Operation Northwoods was a plan circulated in the U.S. government in 1962 to stage false flag terrorist attacks inside the U.S. and abroad to provoke “military intervention in Cuba”. The plan called for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other operatives to commit genuine acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro. One part of the Operation Northwoods plan was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.”

And ever since Florida has become the USA hub for some very dirty deals and false flag operators. See The Deep History of the Venice Municipal Airport and The Ultimate Hedge if you think you have the stomach for it.

Desert Dust Storm Roars Through China, Blankets Korea

• Imagine having neighbors whose yard — once lush and beautiful, filled with grass and trees — became a wasteland. Every time the wind blew hard, dust rose from their torn up plot of earth and wafted into your yard, into your house. It got on your clothes, in your kitchen, in your lungs.
• You’d be pretty annoyed at your neighbors, wouldn’t you? Well, South Koreans must be fairly ticked off just now, because their entire country is suffering from the worst dust storm the Korean Peninsula has ever seen.
• It’s basically China’s fault. The storm started when strong winds powered through the Gobi Desert in western China and Mongolia before turning day into night in Beijing, and then moving on to sprinkle over Japan and slam into Korea. China’s dust problems are well-documented, and largely thought to be the result of deforestation and poor land use management on farms near the arid fringes of the Gobi.
• Now, dust storms whipping up from deserts and arid regions all over the world are perfectly natural, if destructive. But this storm is part of a growing trend of increasingly frequent and severe dust events in the region.
• The NASA image gives you an idea of just how monstrously big this thing is…

• A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same. 
• In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.
• “Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”

• Portugal’s credit rating has been downgraded from AA to AA- by leading credit rating agency Fitch over concerns about its high levels of debt.
• Earlier this month, Portugal passed an austerity budget aimed at cutting its budget deficit.
• The downgrade heightened concerns about the health of some of Europe’s heavily indebted economies, forcing the euro lower against the dollar and the pound.

If spain takes a hit next…yowza.

• Madoff, 71, suffered a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face after he was reportedly attacked last December by a prisoner who believed Madoff owed him money.
• After pleading guilty last year to running an enormous Ponzi scheme which tricked investors out of billions of dollars, Madoff is serving a 150-year-jail sentence at Butner federal prison in North Carolina.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, Madoff’s assailant was a “beefy” body builder with a drug conviction and a black belt in judo.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy…but I wonder if the assailant’s description was made to sound ‘extra-tough’ to generate sympathy for Madoff.

pieto:

Insurgency is the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify or challenge political control of a region. As such, it is primarily a political struggle, in which both sides use armed force to create space for their political, economic and influence activities to be effective.

U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide

download document here

Rajasthani folk music- Nagara-Satara 

A nice little ditty after a long day.

• The images were shocking - and strange. On Tuesday, thousands of Thai protesters splattered buckets of their own blood outside the Prime Minister’s office in Bangkok as a Brahmin priest in flowing white robes lit incense, chanted spells and cast a curse upon the government.
• As theater, it was both effective and mysterious: clips of the blood curse led international news broadcasts, with viewers and analysts bewildered as to what the protesters were trying to achieve. But in Thailand, it was anything but an aberration. Curses, dark rituals and black magic have long been part of the political culture of the country and some of its neighbors. And to some Thai analysts, the strange rite was a rare public revelation of a more covert aspect of the ongoing conflict between the country’s political movements - a war of the supernatural.
• The protesters, known as the Red Shirts for the color they wear, were supporters of fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup and has fled the country rather than serve a prison term on a corruption conviction. His opponents include the current Democrat-led government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, the military, a rival group of protesters known as the Yellow Shirts and, according to some, Thailand’s monarchy. Thaksin’s followers are comprised largely of the rural poor, and so it was easy to dismiss, as many commentators did, the bloody curse as a desperate act by uneducated farmers. But in Thailand, despite modern commuter Skytrains, gleaming new international airports, and a populace with a passion for the latest IT gadgets, members of all classes regularly pay deference to the supernatural. From hit men getting tattoos they believe will repel bullets, to aristocratic ladies trading stocks on the advice of astrologers, and ministers who pay tens of thousands of dollars for amulets they believe will ward off evil, the unseen is a serious, and potentially lucrative, business.
• Thailand is a nation that prides itself on its Theravada Buddhist heritage. But Buddhism in Thailand is blended with a brew of Hindu, animist, Khmer, pagan and other beliefs. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the country’s 82-year-old constitutional monarch, spent time as a Buddhist monk but also retains astrologers and Brahmin priests at court, as is tradition. So it’s no wonder that coup plotters, Prime Ministers and lawmakers have frequently consulted fortune-tellers before making important decisions. Performing dark rites to increase one’s power and defeat your adversaries is as pervasive among the political class as bribery and vote buying. Even Thaksin, who became a billionaire from satellite services, computers and telecommunications, once declined to answer a reporter’s question because “Mercury [was] not in the right house.”
• In fact, according to Wassana Namnuan, a Bangkok Post reporter, Thaksin and his opponents have been deeply engaged in black magic battles for dominance of the country for several years. “Both sides have been casting curses and spells upon each other,” says Wassana who has written a book on the subject in Thai called Secrets, Trickery and Camouflage: The Improbable Phenomena. According to Wassana, Thaksin believes he is the reincarnation of a Burmese king who killed many Thais, and so has engaged in elaborate cleansing rituals to wash away the sins of his past lives. While in power, Wassana says Thaksin performed several saiyasat, or black magic rituals, that he hoped would prolong his rule for life. While visiting Burma he sought counsel from a deformed astrologer nicknamed “ET” who is favored by the generals that have kept the country in their iron grip for more than half a century.

I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him

• “I started getting emails saying ‘have you heard of Benjamin Creme?’ and ‘are you the world teacher?’” he said. “Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’”
• Their reasoning? Patel’s background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or “the world teacher”…
• There are many elements of his life that tick the prophetic checklist of his worshippers: a flight from India to the UK as a child, growing up in London, a slight stutter, and appearances on TV. But it is his work that puts him most directly in the frame and causes him the most anguish – the very things the followers of Share believe will indicate that their new messiah has arrived…
• While his goal appears to match Share’s vision of worldwide harmony, he says the underlying assumptions it makes are wrong – and possibly even dangerous.
• “What I’m arguing in the book is precisely the opposite of the Maitreya: what we need is various kinds of rebellion and transformations about how private property works,” he said.
• “I don’t think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good launching point for the kinds of politics I’m talking about – for someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly deep contradictions in it.”

• UK patents are being declared state secrets more than three times as often as those filed in the US, according to information released to New Scientist.
• An average of nine secrecy orders were imposed for every 10,000 patents filed in the UK since 2003, compared with less than three per 10,000 filed in the US, figures released for the first time by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) reveal.
• The difference is surprising because the US government spends far more of its overall R&D budget on military research than does the UK. In 2009, the Pentagon spent $80 billion (0.16 per cent of GDP), or 57 per cent of the US public research budget, on defence R&D - against the Ministry of Defence’s $3.4 billion (0.56 per cent of GDP), or 9 per cent of overall UK R&D funding.
• A secrecy order is applied to a patent if patent office staff and their military advisers think the idea could be used to threaten national security. A patent cannot then be published until the technology is no longer considered to be a threat.
• Inventions related to cryptography, uranium enrichment and biological and chemical weapons are often made secret. Governments won’t confirm it, but seemingly benign inventions can also be made secret if they could be “dual-use”, for example, an airborne crop duster that might be used to spread bioweapons.

• Full patent data released by UK IPO (online spreadsheet)

  Data on R&D spending from OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009

Making the USA into one state…

• Most intelligent people recognize that suburban sprawl is a blight. A lot of people also realize that walkable cities and well-planned communities would be a huge improvement on ghost malls, suburban slums and other hideous after-effects of developer greed and stupidity. Livable cities are the hallmark of a true civilization.
• That being said, there are a lot of radical ideas out there that have the strong whiff of elite social engineering. This may or may not be one of them, but fitting the entire population of the US into a territory the size of New Hampshire seems a bit extreme, don’t you think? But we’re living in a time when plans are being drawn up to bulldoze any number of Rust Belt ghost towns back into farmlands. All bets are off.
• We’re also living at a time when it seems that the country is being goaded into disintegration, mainly through media shills rejiggering our political symbols and myths into social weapons. It could turn out that certain parts of the US could be radically transformed into sci-fi habitats surrounded by forest and farmland. Keep an eye out for signs of this in the days to come.

My favorite line from the infographic: “we’d all be neighbors!”

• David Miliband said today that there was “compelling evidence” that Israel was responsible for misuse of British passports as part of a plot to kill a prominent member of Hamas.
• The foreign secretary confirmed that Britain had demanded the withdrawal of an Israeli diplomat following the “intolerable” use of 12 forged British passports by a hit squad that killed the founder of Hamas’s military wing in Dubai.
• Miliband attacked the “profound disregard” for UK sovereignty and said the apparent involvement of a friendly nation “added insult to injury”.
• Israel’s ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, said he was “disappointed by the decision of the British government”, but pledged that the two countries would retain close ties. “The relationship between Israel and the United Kingdom is of mutual importance,” he said.
• Miliband’s statement will be seen around the world as the first definitive allegation from a western government of Israeli responsibility for the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel in January.

• By early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.
• Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled the online forum. Although some Saudi officials had been informed in advance about the Pentagon’s plan, several key princes were “absolutely furious” at the loss of an intelligence-gathering tool, according to another former U.S. official.
• Four former senior U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrate the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar. The use of computers to gather intelligence or to disrupt the enemy presents complex questions: When is a cyberattack outside the theater of war allowed? Is taking out an extremist Web site a covert operation or a traditional military activity? Should Congress be informed?
• “The point of the story is it hasn’t been sorted out yet in a way that all the persons involved in cyber-operations have a clear understanding of doctrine, legal authorities and policy, and a clear understanding of the distinction between what is considered intelligence activity and wartime [Defense Department] authority,” said one former senior national security official.
• CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “It’s sheer lunacy to suggest that any part of our government would do anything to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters to Iraq.”
• The Pentagon, the Justice Department and the National Security Agency, whose director oversaw the operation to take down the site, declined to comment for this story, as did officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.