By nymole, on July 21st, 2014 You remember, the UN, created to respond to international crises, before the holder of the office of the Secretary General had to be hand-picked by the US (Goodbye, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, for sure), and the misuse of the veto by East and West and..and… 
Even the near-appearance of a UN session, such as Colin Powell’s charts and pointers. is gone.
Now we have:
MH17: UN resolution on ensuring crash site access set for Monday
Russia will support final version in security council vote if no one is blamed, according to reports in Australian newspaper
Continue reading Where is the UN in all of this mayhem?
By Raja, on July 20th, 2014 Militant jihadist group kills dozens of Syrian troops and workers in its largest attack yet on the regime
Reuters, July 19
Jihadists have killed 270 Syrian regime fighters, civilian security guards and employees since seizing a gas field in Homs province, a monitoring group said Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described Thursday’s takeover of the Shaar field as “the biggest” anti-regime operation by the Islamic State (IS) since it emerged in the Syrian conflict last year.
The watchdog, updating an earlier toll of 115, said it had documented “the death of 270 people killed in the fighting or executed” since Thursday.
“A large majority of the men killed were executed at gunpoint after being taken prisoner following the takeover of the camp,” said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.
By William Boardman, on July 19th, 2014 Reader Supported News
Hobart & William Smith Colleges does a Steubenville
Two weeks after the fall term started, an unknown number of male students, apparently including members of the undefeated football team at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Hobart), raped an 18-tear-old freshman girl who’d had too much to drink. Hobart’s response was to re-rape the child bureaucratically by ignoring evidence and finding the alleged rapists not guilty. It was a sham of an administrative adjudication that failed to meet even a shadow of fairness, competence, or even intellectual plausibility. Hobart stands by its dishonest decision. Case closed.
Continue reading Rape at College, Then Rape by College
By Raja, on July 19th, 2014 The Intercept, By Glenn Greenwald, July 17
Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday’s killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately. According to an NBC source upset at his treatment, the executives claimed the decision was motivated by “security concerns” as Israel prepares a ground invasion, a claim repeated to me by an NBC executive. But late yesterday, NBC sent another correspondent, Richard Engel, along with an American producer who has never been to Gaza and speaks no Arabic, into Gaza to cover the ongoing Israeli assault (both Mohyeldin and Engel speak Arabic).
Mohyeldin is an Egyptian-American with extensive experience reporting on that region. He has covered dozens of major Middle East events in the last decade for CNN, NBC and Al Jazeera English, where his reporting on the 2008 Israeli assault on Gaza made him a star of the network. NBC aggressively pursued him to leave Al Jazeera, paying him far more than the standard salary for its on-air correspondents.
[The New York Times’ television reporter just reported on Twitter that NBC has “reversed its decision” and is now sending Mohyeldin back to Gaza as soon as possible].
Democracy Now: Glenn Greenwald: Why Did NBC Pull Veteran Reporter After He Witnessed Israeli Killing of Gaza Kids?
By steeleweed, on July 18th, 2014 Just to get it out of the way…
Word Crimes – Weird Al
Also funny
…Alien Music
…rather spooky
By Raja, on July 18th, 2014
By nymole, on July 18th, 2014 NYT – On Friday, Open Source continues to follow the aftermath of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in rebel-held eastern Ukraine to supplement the latest coverage of New York Times reporters on the ground.
Updates below mix breaking news reports with new information on the investigation into the disaster and the reaction to the tragedy gleaned from social networks.
NYT crowd sourcing or the ultimate blog- whatever. Continuous updates also from the BBC.
The rush to judgment is on…
By nymole, on July 18th, 2014 NYT- U.S. DOWNS IRAN AIRLINER MISTAKEN FOR F-14; 290 REPORTED DEAD; A TRAGEDY, REAGAN SAYS; ACTION IS DEFENDED - July 4, 1988-
United States Navy warship in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger plane today that the Navy said it mistook for a jet fighter, and Iran said all 290 people on board were killed. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., said the missile cruiser Vincennes, while seeking to protect itself from what was thought on the basis of radar readings to be a hostile F-14 jet fighter, downed the plane with a surface-to-air missile.
Continue reading Lest we forget we are part of the glass house…The downing of Flight 655
By Raja, on July 17th, 2014 The Intercept, By Glenn Greenwald, July 14
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.
Continue reading Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
By actor212, on July 17th, 2014  Actual engraving…the chisel adds ten pounds I like to keep that as my private stash, but this, this was too good not to share:
It’s not just that TBOTP [ed. note: Tiger Beat On The Potomac also known as Politico.com] invited the Manson Family of American geopolitics to come together for an exercise in ensemble prevarication. It’s not just that the account of said exercise is written in the kind of cacophonous cutesy-poo necessary to drown out the screams of the innocent dead, and to distract the assembled crowd from the blood that has dripped from the wallet of the celebrity war-criminal leading the public display. And it’s not as though this was a mere interview—a “get” that could help you “win the morning (!).” In that, it might have been marginally excusable. No, this was one of Mike Allen’s little grift-o-rama special events—a “Playbook lunch,” sponsored by that noted mortgage fraud concern Bank Of America. There’s an upcoming TBOTP “event” in L.A. that is sponsored by J.P. Morgan. I know what Mike Allen is, but I am so goddamn tired of haggling about the price. Here’s how TBOTP‘s own account of the event begins.
If I could write like that, I could put away my shitty little blog and become world-famous, and have women dripping off me like rainwater in a monsoon.
By actor212, on July 16th, 2014 
…I would have laughed in your face. But it did:
Why abandon K-Street, and acknowledge, then reject, the Big Business perception of the GOP? They’ve had the Republican Party’s back for some time, right? In the past, the largest companies favored one party over the other because they understood a pro-capitalist, low-regulation government benefits them.
However, in recent years, especially since the 2007-2008 recession, many have turned to viewing government as a revenue source, a competition crusher, an error-eraser, and a partner in padding their bottom line. Their interest in cheap labor, bailouts, and selectively-favorable legislation has led to a flood of dollars into the Democrat Party, or into political action committees (PACs) that attempt to move Republican congressional votes away from their bases’ expectations, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s push for amnesty. Meanwhile, a mix of bad deals and worse legislation left taxpayers and shareholders on the hook for trillions, millions lost their homes and jobs, and the senators and corporate heads responsible are laughing all the way to the bailed-out bank.
Continue reading If You Had Told Me This Appeared on The Federalist Website….
By Raja, on July 15th, 2014 A speech by an ex-MI6 boss hints at a plan going back over a decade.
The Unz Review, By Patrick Cockburn, July 13
How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”
The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shia, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria. Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit.
Continue reading How Saudi Arabia Helped Isis Take Over the North of Iraq
By William Boardman, on July 15th, 2014 – Reader Supported News –
Children at the Border, Another U.S. Foreign Policy Debacle – Seeing through the tear-jerking to the guilty U.S. Government
The pictures of thousands of children huddled in shelters are upsetting, and the tales some tell are horrifying, and that is all a real but sentimental distraction from the entrenched American power that created these conditions. American power uses these children and their families and their countries for its own ends. American power is not likely to make any meaningful changes to solve what is essentially a permanent crisis. Whatever official alleviation there is will be just enough to get those heart-rending images off the front pages so, that the profitable stream of human exploitation can be managed more “effectively.” American power insists that these are “illegal immigrants,” rather than face the reality that they are refugees from the exercise of American power.
So it’s no wonder President Obama doesn’t want to have his picture taken amid the terrible results of American policy to which he has been as much a guilty party as every other president at least since Polk.
By his actions over the years, the President appears committed to the U.S. imperial role in the world, especially in “our backyard.” There is little serious debate among the governing classes, who seem to feel their mandate is expressed by racist rioting against brown children. But there seems to be another, better America as well, perhaps a majority, out of power and out of the media, but stepping up to care for these refugees, humanely, where they are.
Continue reading American Cruelty
By Raja, on July 14th, 2014 OilPrice.com, By Andy Tully, July 13
According to BP, drivers whose vehicles rely on burning oil have a little more than a half-century to find alternate sources of energy. Or walk.
BP’s annual report on proved global oil reserves says that as of the end of 2013, Earth has nearly 1.688 trillion barrels of crude, which will last 53.3 years at current rates of extraction. This figure is 1.1 percent higher than that of the previous year. In fact, during the past 10 years proven reserves have risen by 27 percent, or more than 350 billion barrels.
The increased amount of oil in the report include 900 million barrels detected in Russia and 800 million barrels in Venezuela. OPEC nations continue to lead the world by having a large majority of the planet’s reserves, or 71.9 percent.
As for the United States, which lately has been ramping up oil extraction through horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, BP says its proven oil reserves are 44.2 billion barrels, 26 percent higher than in BP’s previous report. This is more than reported most recently by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which had raised its own estimate by 15 percent to 33.4 billion barrels.
Continue reading BP’s Latest Estimate Says World’s Oil Will Last 53.3 Years
By nymole, on July 14th, 2014 NYT – A Nobelist With 3 Banned Apartheid Novels
Bengt Oberger/Wikimedia Commons
Ms. Gordimer found themes in the injustices and cruelties of South Africa’s policies of racial division, and she left no quarter of the society unexplored. She died Sunday at 90.
Nadine Gordimer in the New Yorker here
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