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Open our eyes

While catching up with one another over the challenges facing ordinary Afghans and Egyptians, Sherif Sameer and I talked about how ‘opening our eyes’ could go a long way to building a better world. We decided to co-write this piece, from Ismailia, Egypt and Kabul, Afghanistan.



Open Our Eyes in Egypt

The truth is there, clear and burning like a sun. We only need to open our eyes and take a look. ‘Our eyes’ means ‘our minds’. The mind is that big thing on top of our necks inside of our heads, and it has a function called ‘thinking’. Just last year, I was taken from my village in Egypt to spend some time in Spain, because I wrote a short story and won a prize. There, I noticed that I was walking around with a belief in the cleanliness and accuracy of everything. I was drinking tap water believing it was so pure and clean, eating food as if it was coming from heaven, even after I got diarrhoea and had to take medicine. I believed that the medicine will cure me like magic. I had faith in absolutes and that meant that my mind was dysfunctional.

And so the fracking cover up begins

A headline in the Saturday, November 30 Columbus Dispatch screamed: “Family’s well not tainted by driller.” The lead asserts that, “Natural gas that caught fire after it bubbled from a faucet in a Portage County house did not come from a nearby shale well, state officials have concluded.” The question is, can we trust these state officials?

The investigation conducted by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) needs to be closely examined. The ODNR is at best a “captured agency” which has been accused repeatedly of promoting the oil and gas industry and specifically fracking, the practice of horizontal drilling.

The freepress.org reported earlier this year that formal complaints were filed against ODNR employees for falsifying “production records on wells.” Reports were also made to the FBI that the ODNR was covering up 1200 gas wells that were on record without tax ID numbers in southern Ohio. By leaving out ID numbers, the wells’ ownership can often be hidden so public doesn’t know who is responsible for the pollution.

Mansfield Council votes in support of fracking waste ban in Ohio

City officials and citizens of Mansfield Ohio continue to move forward in protecting communities against the inundation of hydraulic fracturing waste disposal. In a unanimous vote, Mansfield City Council passed resolution 13-343 which strongly supports the passage of Ohio House Bill 148. HB 148 proposes prohibiting the disposal of brine by deep well injection and land application in the state of Ohio.

Ohio is targeted as a toxic dumping ground by the oil and gas industry and Ohio residents are seeing an increasing amount of waste flowing into their communities. As local municipalities fight to prevent the influx of toxic waste, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources continues to permit Class II injection wells and welcome millions of gallons of hazardous waste from inside and outside the state. In 2012 almost six hundred million gallons of toxic fracking waste was dumped on Ohio communities via injection and almost sixty percent of that came from out of state.

Thailand protesters demand appointed regime to replace "Bad Politicians"

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The authoritarian leader of an increasingly violent anti-government protest met Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Sunday (Dec. 1) and told her to resign so a dictatorial provisional regime could run Thailand and stop voters electing "bad politicians".

Hours earlier, the government advised Bangkok residents on Sunday (Dec. 1) to stay indoors overnight after three people died and police battled protesters, while mobs swarmed government ministries, TV stations and police headquarters, escalating their week-long clashes to topple the prime minister.

Protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban "told the prime minister that dissolution of parliament, and her resignation paving the way for new election, could not resolve the underlying deep-rooted problem because bad politicians" could return to power, Thai Public Broadcasting Service (ThaiPBS) reported.

"He said the problem could be resolved only when she returned the power to 'the people' to form the 'people's council' [which could] appoint a 'people's government' to rule the country," the report said.

Suthep announced his ultimatum in a live TV broadcast at 10 p.m.

The National-Security State’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy

For 50 years defenders of the Warren Report have claimed that JFK conspiracy theorists simply cannot accept that a little man killed a great man.

Really?

Let’s see now. John Lennon was a great man. Oh sure, he was monitored and spied on by the U.S. national-security state but that was only because national-security state officials were convinced that anyone who opposed what the national-security state was doing during the Cold War was a communist or communist sympathizer and part of the world-wide communist conspiracy to take over the United States, not to mention, of course, a grave threat to “national security.”

Yet, despite how the national-security state viewed Lennon, most everyone would agree, I think, that Lennon was great man and that his assassin, a man named Mark David Chapman, was a little man.

Yet, I don’t see a huge number of people saying that Lennon was the victim of the U.S. national-security state and that Chapman was nothing more than a “patsy” for the assassination. In fact, I don’t see many assassination researchers saying that about the assassination attempts against Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.

Give thanks now, shop later

Thanksgiving Day — a day of family gatherings to give thanks for our many blessings — has evolved into a day of turkey and football, as the NFL’s Thanksgiving Day rivalries fill the TV. Now, it threatens to be taken over by a shopping spree. This year, Wal-Mart has announced it will open its stores at 6 p.m. on Thursday to begin its “Black Friday” sales. Macy’s, Target, Kmart and others are all moving up their opening times on Thursday. Suddenly, Thanksgiving dinner itself is at risk.

This lust for stuff is a stark contradiction to the origins of Thanksgiving. Days of thanksgiving were celebrated in England from the 1500s as part of the Protestant Reformation. This country traces a thanksgiving feast back most famously to 1621, when the Puritans in Plymouth Colony gave thanks for a bountiful harvest. In 1789, President George Washington issued the first national proclamation declaring a day of “thanksgiving and prayer.”

Trivializing Peace

What goes around comes around . . . and around, and around.

Last month, the day after I left Santa Rosa, Calif., a 13-year-old boy carrying a toy replica of an AK-47 was shot and killed on the outskirts of that town by a Sonoma County deputy sheriff with a reputation for being trigger-happy. The officer had ordered the boy to drop the “gun,” then in a matter of two or three seconds opened fire, giving him no chance to comply.

This is not an isolated incident, which is why it’s yet one more tragedy I can’t get out of my mind — one more logical consequence of the simplistic militarism and mission creep that’s eating us alive. This is gun culture running unchecked from boyhood to manhood, permeating national policy both geopolitically and domestically. This is the trivialization of peace. It results in the ongoing murder of the innocent, both at home and abroad, at the hands of government as well as criminals and terrorists.

Overplaying Its Hand, Israel Still Holds Plenty of U.S. Cards

More than ever, Israel is isolated from world opinion and the squishy entity known as “the international community.” The Israeli government keeps condemning the Iran nuclear deal, by any rational standard a positive step away from the threat of catastrophic war.

In the short run, the belligerent responses from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bound to play badly in most of the U.S. media. But Netanyahu and the forces he represents have only begun to fight. They want war on Iran, and they are determined to exercise their political muscle that has long extended through most of the Washington establishment.

While it’s unlikely that such muscle can undo the initial six-month nuclear deal reached with Iran last weekend, efforts are already underway to damage and destroy the negotiations down the road. On Capitol Hill the attacks are most intense from Republicans, and some leading Democrats have also sniped at the agreement reached in Geneva.

Fukushima getting worse

Hello Everyone,
We have yet to get a response from the UN on our petitions. We'll continue gathering signatures until we do. Our request that Tepco be replaced by a global team is more urgent than ever.

Why? Because news from Fukushima & the Pacific continues to worsen. Please look at the on-going coverage as linked at Nuke Free.

Tepco has brought down some unused fuel rods from Unit 4. Next come those that were exposed. Remember that Units Three, Two & One may have even worse problems.

The whole world is trying to watch....so Tepco has complained that the media is actually photographing their operations! With a state secrets act on its way, we anticipate a formal crackdown. Tepco wants to open four other reactors in Japan and pursues overseas investments while toying with the fate of the Earth at Fukushima.

Healthcare Dot Gov HQ

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