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Thursday September 25, 2014
News Articles

A Look Inside The Secret Deal With Saudi Arabia That Unleashed The Syrian Bombing
ZeroHedge | author | 09/25/14

For those to whom the recent US campaign against Syria seems a deja vu of last summer's "near-war" attempt to ouster its president Bashar al-Assad, which was stopped in the last minute due to some very forceful Russian intervention and the near breakout of war in the Mediterranean between US and Russian navies, it is because they are. And as a reminder, just like last year, the biggest wildcard in this, and that, direct intervention into sovereign Syrian territory, or as some would call it invasion or even war, was not the US but Saudi Arabia - recall from August of 2013 - "Meet Saudi Arabia's Bandar bin Sultan: The Puppetmaster Behind The Syrian War." Bin Sultan was officially let go shortly after the 2013 campaign to replace Syria's leadership with a more "amenable" regime failed if not unofficially (see below), but Saudi ambitions over Syria remained. That much is revealed by the WSJ today in a piece exposing the backdoor dealings that the US conducted with Saudi Arabia to get the "green light" to launch its airstrikes against ISIS, or rather, parts of Iraq and Syria."The process gave the Saudis leverage to extract a fresh U.S. commitment to beef up training for rebels fighting Mr. Assad, whose demise the Saudis still see as a top priority." Read more

The Right's Newest Obama Conspiracy: He Made Up a "New" Terrorist Group to Defeat
MotherJones | Jenna McLaughlin | 09/25/14

... "From what I understand, the [Obama] regime has given this group a new name in order for Obama to be able to continue to say he wiped Al Qaeda out," Rush Limbaugh said on Wednesday. "So you come up with a new name for Al Qaeda, the Kardashians, or Khorasans, or whatever they are, and either way it's defeating…So this new group is essentially just Al Qaeda renamed."

Glenn Beck came to a similar conclusion: "What is Khorasan? [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper mentioned Khorasan for the first time last week. What is it? It's an Al Qaeda splinter group. Notice they're not saying 'Al Qaeda Khorasan.' They're just calling it Khorasan. Why? The Pentagon claimed they have been watching Khorasan for a very long time, but it wasn't too long ago that this administration said Al Qaeda was decimated and on the run. But now they're an imminent threat? It doesn't add up, does it?"... Read more

FBI: U.S. mass shootings more than doubled in past five years

486 people were killed in 160 shootings in the past 14 years

$26 Billion in US Aid Later, the Iraqi Military Is a Total Disaster
MotherJones | Alex Park | 09/25/14

As US bombs rain down on ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria, analysts agree that this war will ultimately be won on the ground. Too bad the Iraqi defense forces are a shambles. The New York Times reports that the United States still has to train the country's 26 "intact and loyal" brigades. And the Iraqi government has yet to recruit and set up national guard units. "It is not going to be soon," says a State Department official.

Here's where that money went:
  1. Training the Iraqi military: $1.32 billion. SIGIR says: "As with the police force, the number of troops reporting for duty continually fell below desired levels, with AWOL rates exceeding 3% per month."
  2. Providing military, logistical, and maintenance support for the Iraqi military: $2.6 billion
  3. Renovating and building Iraqi military bases: $4.1 billion
  4. Supplying the Iraqi military with aircraft, boats, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other gear: $3.4 billion
  5. Developing an elite counterterrorism force: $237 million* . Maybe: Since the US government did not keep track of this specific expenditure, SIGIR says "the total costs of the program remained unknown."
  6. Training, staffing, and supplying Iraqi police: $9.4 billion
  7. Developing the "Sons of Iraq" program to train to provide jobs for about 100,000 mostly Sunni insurgents: $370 million. SIGIR says: "Financial controls were weak, program managers could not tell whether SOI members received their US-funded salaries, and [the Pentagon] was unable to provide evaluations of the program's outcomes."
  8. Developing other infrastructure security programs: $300 million
  9. Shoring-up Iraq's courts: $681 million. SIGIR says: "The court system contends with human rights issues, including reported acts of torture and retaliatory prosecutions by police and military authorities."
  10. Building prisons, including the never-completed Khan Bani S'ad prison: $165 million
Total cost of rebuilding, training, supplying the Iraqi military, police, and justice system: Around $26 billion
Read more

Obama Expands Pacific Ocean Preserve, Making It Largest In The World
AP & HP | Josh Lederman | 09/24/14

President Barack Obama is carving out a wide swath the Pacific Ocean for an expanded marine preserve, putting the waters off-limits to drilling and most fishing in a bid to protect fragile underwater life.

The revamped expanded Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument will cover 490,000 square miles - an area roughly three times the size of California - and will become the largest marine preserve in the world. Millions of seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals live in the bio-rich expanse included by the new monument, which will also add new protections for more than 130 "seamounts" - underwater mountains where rare or undiscovered species are frequently found. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, September 25 [6:42]
DN | Exclusive: Freed After Hunger Strike, Egyptian Journalist in U.S. to Campaign for Jailed Colleagues (09/25/14) [16:43]
*DN | Listen to the People, Not the Polluters: Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace on the Global Climate Uprising (09/25/14) [11:54]
How Honest Are Our News Agencies?
Viggo Mortensen Calls Fox News "A Brazen Form Of Lying" (09/18/14) [2:59]
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart | Jon Stewart asks: Is Wall Street's favorite new company, Alibaba, just Craigslist with better graphics? (09/24/14) [4:15]
How ISIS | ISIL | IS Is Organized
How IS Is Organized (09/11/14) [3:19] *TRNN | Turkish-Syrian Border "A Great Hole" in Obama's UN Speech (09/25/14) [15:11]
TRNN | US Bombs Syria without Congressional Approval (09/25/14) [8:01]
*TYT | Hidden Camera Reveals Chilling Life Under ISIS Control (09/24/14) [8:17]
*TYT | Students Bravely Fight Back Against 1984-Loving Conservative School Board (09/24/14) [6:26]
"Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.
TYT | Obama Salutes With Coffee Cup - Cue Conservative Freak Out (09/24/14) [9:15]
TYT | Obama Pitches ISIS War To The UN - Will The World Say Yes? (09/24/14) [11:39]
TYT | Permanent War In Middle East? Hell Yes Says GOP Hot Shot (09/24/14) [6:20]
???
The militant Islamic State group has released a new video in which a man identifying himself as a British journalist, John Cantlie, says that he will "show you the truth" about ISIS and how western media is manipulating the public. (09/18/14) [2:59]
The militant Islamic State group has released a new video in which a man identifying himself as a British journalist says that he will "show you the truth" about ISIS and how western media is manipulating the public. The chilling video shows a man who says he is John Cantlie. Cantlie, a former reporter for the Sunday Times, the Sun and the Sunday Telegraph, went missing in Syria in 2012, but was later freed by the Free Syrian Army. Cantlie reportedly then returned to Syria in 2012, along with US journalist James Foley. Foley was beheaded by ISIS in August, a horrific killing that was also recorded and released on video.

09.25.2014. 11:00



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Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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