Last summer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised her citizens a pact which would prohibit U.S. spying on German citizens. But since then, Washington has shown little interest in pursuing such a treaty. Now, officials in Germany fear the deal is dead.
Failed talks? Hardly. The negotiations “are continuing,” says Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). “We are still talking,” says the German government. In other words, nothing has yet been decided. The No-Spy deal is still alive.
But the statements coming out of Berlin and Pullach, where the BND is headquartered, reek of forced optimism. Nobody wants it to look as though efforts have been abandoned toward a deal which would see the U.S. agree to swear off spying operations in Germany.
Yet despite the assertions, most of those involved are slowly coming to the realization that a surveillance deal between Washington and Berlin isn’t likely to become reality. The U.S. government is still digging in its heels.
On Tuesday, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted one source who is familiar with the talks as saying “we won’t get anything.” The paper also reported that the US is refusing to promise that it won’t monitor members of the German government and other politicians in the future.
Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the US president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world.
President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.
Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”
The extraordinary critique by a leading advisor to the United States’ closest military ally comes days after Obama was undermined by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who questioned the President’s foreign policy decisions and claimed he was deeply suspicious of the military.
Strachan, a current member of the Chief of the Defense Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, cited the “crazy” handling of the Syrian crisis as the most egregious example of a fundamental collapse in military planning that began in the aftermath of 9/11. “If anything it’s gone backwards instead of forwards, Obama seems to be almost chronically incapable of doing this. Bush may have had totally fanciful political objectives in terms of trying to fight a global War on Terror, which was inherently astrategic, but at least he had a clear sense of what he wanted to do in the world. Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,” he said.
Strachan’s book The Direction of War, which will be published next month, examines the failure of modern political leaders to use strategy to predict and account for the implications of military action. Oxford University’s Professor of the History of War says the lessons learned at the end of the 20th century proved to be damaging at the start of the next. “Using war did deliver. The wars were pretty short, the Falklands, First Gulf War, Kosovo, so people lulled themselves into an expectation that war was simply a continuation of policy and that it was successful. But it hasn’t been since 9/11,” he said.
Judicial Watch, the organization that investigates and fights government corruption, announced today that it has obtained mission expense records and passenger manifests from the United States Air Force related to the June 21-27, 2011, trip taken by First Lady Michelle Obama, her family and her staff to South Africa and Botswana.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents pursuant to an August 19, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Air Force (No. 11-1496)). Judicial Watch is investigating the purpose and itinerary of the trip as well as a breakdown of the costs to taxpayers.
On June 28, 2011, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request seeking the mission taskings, transportation records, and passenger manifests for Michelle Obama’s Africa trip. Documents were only provided after Judicial Watch filed suit:
According to U.S. Department of Defense’s published hourly rates for the C-32A aircraft used for the trip, Judicial Watch calculated the total cost to American taxpayers was $424,142 for use of the aircraft (34.8 flight hours x $12,188 per hour). (The C-32 is a specially configured military version of the Boeing 757.) Other expenses – meals (off the plane), transportation, security, various services, etc. – have yet to be disclosed.
The passenger manifests confirm the presence of Obama’s daughter’s, Malia and Sasha on the trip. The two girls are listed as “Senior Staff.” The manifests also list Mrs. Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, and niece and nephew, Leslie and Avery Robinson, as well Mrs. Obama’s makeup and hairstylist (Carl Ray and Johnny Wright).
The expense records also show $928.44 was spent for “bulk food” purchases on flight. Overall, during the trip, 192 meals were served for the 21 passengers on board.
The professed purpose of Michelle Obama’s trip to South Africa and Botswana was to encourage young people living in the two growing democracies to become involved in national affairs. Her scheduled stops were in Pretoria and Cape Town, and in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.
The trip also included such tourist events as visits to historical landmarks and museums, plus a nonworking chance to send time with Nelson Mandela, a meeting that Mrs. Obama described as “surreal.”
The trip ended with a private family safari at a South African game reserve before the group returned to Washington on June 27.“This trip was as much an opportunity for the Obama family to go on a safari as it was a trip to conduct government business,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“This junket wasted tax dollars and the resources of our overextended military. No wonder we had to sue to pry loose this information.”
No human hand touched this hamburger. It was made entirely by robots
The San Francisco-based robotics company debuted its burger-preparing machine last year. It can whip up hundreds of burgers an hour, take custom orders, and it uses top-shelf ingredients for its inputs. Now Momentum is proposing a chain of ‘smart restaurants’ that eschew human cooks altogether.
Food Beast points us to the Momentum’s official release, where the company says:
“Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices. Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant. It does everything employees can do except better.”
And what might this robotic burger cook of the future do better than the slow, inefficient, wage-sucking line cooks of yore?
It slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles only immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order? No problem.
It’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.
Furthermore, the “labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.”
Hear that? Without all those cumbersome human workers, your hamburger will be twice as good. For the same cost. – Food Beast
After the Omaha Police Officers’ Association highlighted a shock video of a black toddler being encouraged by his family to spout obscenities as a warning against the “cycle of violence and thuggery,” subsequent outrage was not directed against the family but against the police association for being racist.
The clip shows a black toddler in a nappy being encouraged by his foul-mouthed relatives to curse after knocking over a chair.
After the adults reference a local street gang and call the toddler a “bitch nigger,” an “asshole” while repeatedly stating, “fuck you,” and urging him to say “suck my dick,” the toddler responds with a gang sign before remarking, “You a ho, bitch,” “Shut up, bitch,” along with several other abusive insults.
“Say I need some pussy today, I’m throwing a fit right now,” the toddler’s uncle encourages him to say. The clip ends with the toddler uttering more foul-mouthed abuse as the adults laugh.
After the boy’s uncle uploaded the clip to Facebook because he found it “funny”, the Omaha Police Officers’ Association posted it on their own website as a public service to the community to, “educate the law abiding public about the terrible cycle of violence and thuggery that some young innocent children find themselves helplessly trapped in.”
Shortly after the issue began to attract wider attention, the ACLU, a community activist group, as well as pundits on CNN all insinuated that the police union was racist simply for drawing attention to the video.
“For them to take a video out of context — a 2-year-old who doesn’t have the brain capacity to know what’s going on — and to say that this child, because two adults acted inappropriately, is going to end up in a life of crime is totally inappropriate,” said Willie Hamilton, president of the community activist group Black Men United, adding that the police association had “crossed a line.”
ACLU of Nebraska Executive Director Becki Brenner said the union’s use of “racially charged language” was “very disconcerting,” adding that posting the video would erode trust amongst Omaha’s ethnic minorities, which make up around a quarter of the population.
However, the union didn’t use any racially charged language whatsoever, unlike the obscene family members in the video.
Media talking heads soon jumped on the controversy, with political commentator Marc Lamont Hill telling CNN that the clip, “sends the wrong message about young black boys.” – prisonplanet.com
Accelerated aging and a greater likelihood of suffering from an age-related illness at a younger age are two consequences being linked to African-American men who have experienced high-levels of racism throughout their lives.
A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine finds that African-American men who reported high levels of racial discrimination, or who have internalized anti-black attitudes themselves, have an increased risk of premature death and chronic disease than white people.
Previous research has documented African-Americans’ shorter life expectancy and greater risk of chronic diseases, but this new study is the first to link racism-related experiences to accelerated aging at the biological, cellular level.
“We examined a biomarker of systemic aging, known as leukocyte telomere length,” Dr. David H. Chae, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and the study’s lead investigator, said in a statement.
Chae continued: “Shorter telomere length is associated with increased risk of premature death and chronic disease such as diabetes, dementia, stroke and heart disease. We found that the African American men who experienced greater racial discrimination and who displayed a stronger bias against their own racial group had the shortest telomeres of those studied.”
The “telomeres” measured in the 92 African-American men were lost at a length equivalent to 1.4 and 2.8 years of life faster. The men also had an average of 140 base pairs shorter than the average of 50-100 lost each year.
The men surveyed were asked about their experiences with racial discrimination from the police, at work, and in daily scenarios in stores and restaurants. The men were also tested using “implicit association” exams that measure their own attitudes toward various racial groups.
“Our findings suggest that racism literally makes people old,” Chae said, citing the “social toxins” African American men experience as a result of stereotyping, police harassment, and disrespect in the workplace and society. ”Stop-and-frisk policies and other forms of criminal profiling such as ‘driving or shopping while Black’ are inherently stressful and have a real impact on the health of African Americans.”
Although Chae notes that further research is needed on the correlation, he indicates that there is a growing research field for how the stress of racism on African-Americans can be harmful to health. – washington.cbslocal.com
The Obama administration is urging schools to abandon policies that civil rights advocates say “lead to a school-to-prison pipeline that discriminates against black students”.
The wide-ranging series of guidelines issued Wednesday in essence tells schools that they must back down or face strong action if they don’t. The American Civil Liberties Union called the recommendations “ground-breaking.”
“A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” Attorney General Eric Holder said.
Holder said the problem often stems from well intentioned “zero-tolerance” policies that too often inject the criminal justice system into the resolution of problems. Zero tolerance policies, a tool that became popular in the 1990s, often spell out uniform and swift punishment for offenses such as truancy, smoking or carrying a weapon. Violators can lose classroom time or become saddled with a criminal record.
Source: breitbart.com
Police have become a more common presence in American schools since the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.
In American schools, black students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as whites to be expelled or suspended, according to government civil rights data collection from 2011-2012. Although black students made up 15 percent of students in the data collection, they made up more than a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled.
More than half of students involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement were Hispanic or black, according to the data.
The recommendations encourage schools to ensure that all school personnel are trained in classroom management, conflict resolution and approaches to de-escalate classroom disruptions.
Among the other recommendations:
_Ensure that school personnel understand that they are responsible for administering routine student discipline instead of security or police officers.
_Draw clear distinctions about the responsibilities of school security personnel.
_Provide opportunities for school security officers to develop relationships with students and parents.
The government advises schools to establish procedures on how to distinguish between disciplinary infractions appropriately handled by school officials compared with major threats to school safety. And, it encourages schools to collect and monitor data that security or police officers take to ensure nondiscrimination.
The recommendations are nonbinding.
Already, in March of last year, the Justice Department spearheaded a settlement with the Meridian, Miss., school district to end discriminatory disciplinary practices. The black students in the district were facing harsher punishment than whites for similar misbehavior.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has acknowledged the challenge is finding the balancing act to keep school safe and orderly. But, he said that, “we need to keep students in class where they can learn.”
Research suggests the racial disparities in how students are disciplined are not explained by more frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color, according to a letter sent to schools with the recommendations by the departments.
“For example, in our investigations, we have found cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students,” the letter said. “In short, racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.”
The Council on Foreign Relations has released its estimates on the year’s covert targeted killings in Yemen and Pakistan, carried out primarily by drones. The numbers are based on reports from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Long War Journal, and The New America Foundation. Each source provides slightly different numbers, but the Long War Journal figures estimate a total of 54 strikes and 253 casualties, of whom 31 were civilians. The Council estimates a total of 3,520 casualties since the drone strike program began in 2004, of whom 457 have been civilians.
The numbers are only estimates, as data on civilian casualties is notoriously unreliable, but CFR is straightforward about its goals in releasing the report. “The current trajectory of US drone strike policies is unsustainable,” author Micah Zenko wrote in his initial report last year, to which these new numbers are an update. “Without reform from within, drones risk becoming an unregulated, unaccountable vehicle for states to deploy lethal force with impunity.”
A new scientific discovery that takes algae and turns it into crude oil in minutes rather than millions of years could be the end of constant worries over “peak oil.”
Engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) announced that they have created a process that takes an enriched stew of algae and turns it into crude oil which, in turn, can be made into a usable bio-fuel. The development was announced in a recent issue of the journal Algal Research.
Genifuel Corp., a biofuels company from Utah, has licensed the technology and is attempting to utilize the process on a larger, industrial scale.
In a press release, PNNL described, “In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.”
The press release also noted that “conventional refining” is then capable of taking the man-made crude oil and turning it into usable biofuels. PNNL notes that the man-made crude can be made into “aviation fuel, gasoline, or diesel fuel.”
PNNL also feels that its process has eliminated the high cost of other algae-based biofuels processes.
“Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel,” said Douglas Elliott, leader of the PNNL research team. “We believe that the process we’ve created will help make algae biofuels much more economical.”
The biggest cost-saving aspect of the new process is that the PNNL team figured out how to use wet algae, whereas most other formulas require the algae to be in a dry form.
“Not having to dry the algae is a big win in this process; that cuts the cost a great deal. Then there are bonuses, like being able to extract usable gas from the water and then recycle the remaining water and nutrients to help grow more algae, which further reduces costs,” Elliot said.
Another exciting development in this new process is that the system works continuously. Other attempts created biofuels in single batches, but this new process works more like an assembly line in a continuously moving and producing system.
The new process also dispenses with the use of toxic chemicals and solvents to separate the energy-rich oils from the algae. The process uses high heat and pressure instead.
“It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,” Elliott said. “In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.”
Perhaps it won’t be long before humanity manufacturing its own oil eliminates the question of whether to drill the earth for it. – breitbart.com
The American Studies Association (ASA) announced Monday that its nearly 5,000 members voted in favor of the boycott by a 2-to-1 margin on Sunday night. A total of 1,252 members voted on the issue, with 66 percent voting ‘yes’ and 30 percent voting ‘no.’ Three percent abstained from voting altogether.
The boycott calls on US schools and academic research groups to end all work with Israeli groups. It does allow individual Israeli scholars to still attend conferences and speak at American universities, as long as they do not do so in any official capacity of the government.
“The resolution is in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom, and it aspires to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians,” the statement declares. It goes on to mention “Israel’s violations of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights,” among other points.
In April, the Association for Asian American Studies voted to enact a similar boycott, although the American Association of University Professors has voiced its opposition to such a measure.
The seeds for this month’s vote were laid last month at the ASA’s annual conference in Washington, where the 20-member national council unanimously agreed on a boycott.
“The National Council engaged and addressed questions and concerns of the membership throughout the process,” the statement explained.
“During the open discussion at the recent convention, members asked us to draft a resolution that was relevant to the ASAS in particular and so the Council final draft resolution acknowledged that the US plays a significant role in enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
Monday’s announcement is the latest in a line of boycotts that may have Israeli leaders worried. Vitens, a Dutch water company, said last week that it would cut business ties with Israel’s national water company. Considerations of a more widespread boycott have also been discussed throughout Europe, where Israel has strong economic ties.
The ASA’s statement has already been called the first step toward more boycotts from American institutions, with the Modern Language Association saying its meeting next month will include a discussion on academic boycotts.
The movement to single out Israel’s academic institutions has not come without critics. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), released a statement Monday condemning the ASA. Foxman deemed the act a “shameful, morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest attack on academic freedom.”
“Targeting Israeli institutions solely because they are in Israel – the only democratic country in the Middle East where scholarship and debate are encouraged and flourish – is based on a myopic and fundamentally distorted perspective of Israel and the conflict and is manifestly unjust,” he said. “We commend those members of the ASA who boldly spoke out and voted against this shameful resolution.” – RT
A key Hawaii official in the dispute over Barack Obama’s birth certificate – who lifted state restrictions to allow the White House to present the document to the public – has died in a plane crash.
Loretta Fuddy, the state health department director, was the only fatality among nine people aboard a Cessna Grand Caravan that went down at about 3:15 p.m. on Wednesday while heading to Honolulu.
WND reported Mike Zullo, the lead investigator for Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse in Arizona, has contributed evidence to a court case pending before the Alabama Supreme Court and has testified that the White House computer image of Obama’s birth certificate contains anomalies that are unexplainable unless the document had been fabricated piecemeal by human intervention, rather than being copied from a genuine paper document.
WND has reported since before the 2008 election on the dispute over Obama’s birth documentation.
Fuddy was appointed health director by Gov. Neil Abercrombie. Recently she had been working on the state’s Obamacare website.
When he took office in 2010, Abercrombie, who claimed to have had a relationship with Obama’s parents in Hawaii as a fellow student, vowed to settle the birth certificate dispute once and for all. He finally gave up, however, insisting he didn’t have the necessary legal authority.
Abercrombie told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser regarding Obama’s birth documentation: “It actually exists in the archives, written down.” The London Daily Mail reported, however, Abercrombie “suggested that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health.”
Later, Obama asked for copies of the document, and under Fuddy, the state instantly waived a long-claimed ban on reproducing long-form birth certificates. On Fuddy’s instructions, copies were produced and delivered to Judith Corley, a private attorney for Obama.
But Zullo explained: “Mr. Obama has in fact not offered any verifiable authoritative document of any legal significance or possessing any evidentiary value as to the origins of his purported birth narrative or location of the birth event,” he explained. “One of our most serious concerns is that the White House document appears to have been fabricated piecemeal on a computer, constructed by drawing together digitized data from several unknown sources.”
Zullo also has noted that the governor of Hawaii was unable to produce an original birth document for Obama, and it should have been easy to find.
More recently, Grace Vuoto of the World Tribune reported that among the experts challenging the birth certificate is certified document analyst Reed Hayes, who has served as an expert for Perkins Coie, the law firm that has been defending Obama in eligibility cases.
“We have obtained an affidavit from a certified document analyzer, Reed Hayes, that states the document is a 100 percent forgery, no doubt about it,” Zullo told the World Tribune.
“Mr. Obama’s operatives cannot discredit [Hayes],” the investigator told the news outlet. “Mr. Hayes has been used as the firm’s reliable expert. The very firm the president is using to defend him on the birth certificate case has used Mr. Hayes in their cases.”
The Tribune reported Hayes agreed to take a look at the documentation and called almost immediately.
“There is something wrong with this,” Hayes said.
Hayes produced a 40-page report in which he says “based on my observations and findings, it is clear that the Certificate of Live Birth I examined is not a scan of an original paper birth certificate, but a digitally manufactured document created by utilizing material from various sources.”
“In over 20 years of examining documentation of various types, I have never seen a document that is so seriously questionable in so many respects. In my opinion, the birth certificate is entirely fabricated,” he says in the report.
Leonard Peltier is serving a life sentence in the US Penitentiary in Coleman, Florida. He was accused of the 1975 murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He was convicted in 1977.
Peltier is considered to be a political prisoner of war by many American Indians throughout the United States and others worldwide. Through the years, Peltier’s supporters have included the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Bishop Desmond Tutu, among other prominent names.
The following is Mr. Peltier’s statement:
Greetings my relatives, friends and supporters,
I am communicating to you today to address some of the concerns about the changes that have taken place within the organization that leads the efforts to bring about my freedom. I am referencing the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee (LPDOC) as you well know, those of you who are familiar with the organization, there have been changes every two or three years. Sometimes people feel this is too much and some feel it is too little and this is why I am having this comment sent out.
First of all I want you all to know that I deeply, deeply, appreciate all the people who have given parts of their lives to help bring about my freedom and enhance the lives of my people all over the world. I know it has been difficult for many, in fact for most because it is a drain on ones resources, ones time, and often times takes away from a person’s family and personal life to be involved in movement activities. I appreciate that. I don’t know how to impart to you how deeply I appreciate that. There is no one who has come through the doors of the LPDOC that has all the answers or could possibly make all the right decisions, all we can really do is do our level best to do what is right, and try to right what is wrong. This kind of work wears on people and I do not expect any person to devote their lives to me.
This isn’t all about me.
This is about the constitutional violations toward Americans that put me here. This is about the violations that keep me here. This is about the human rights violations that put and keep me here. This is about the human rights that indigenous people all over the world deserve to have honored. This is about the treaty rights that the indigenous people of America have with the United States that are being violated feloniously today.
This is about the legal procedures that were violated in my case that stand as possible precedents in the cases of others to come. Of all these things I mentioned, I am legally adjudicated evidence of those violations. I am not the only person who is evidence of these violations however, because of your struggles and those before you, and those who struggle now I am probably more visible than most of the others. As I said before people coming to the defense committee are not expected to devote their whole lives to me and I fully realize they have families and children. The older members of AIM and the struggle have grandchildren they are taking care of now. I guess what I am trying to say to you is that it is not unusual, nor inappropriate for there to be changes within the Peltier Defense Committee.
As Native people, and as movement people, we represent in most cases the poorest of the poor in America and we are dealing with the most powerful, politically strong, well financed organization in the world today. So it’s not so difficult to see how we can be stressed from time to time and have changes from time to time for we are in fact the most vulnerable all the time.
We don’t have enough money to always fund the most needed lawyers and legal workers or secretaries or web managers or whatever. We rely mostly on the good hearts of people who volunteer and we have never had enough money to pay these good people what their efforts are worth so it is easy to see why people at some point might choose to travel a different path in due time because they all have families and their own lives to live. People come into this organization with various skills and skill levels and most times they further those skills and skill levels and it enhances the strength of all of us whether they stay within this committee or not because of their involvement in their community using those skills.
In the near future you will see some changes in our website, and our level of activities, and our promotion, even more so of all our concerns for our mother earth, and our children’s future. I have personally, grand children and great grandchildren at this time and I know that you would understand my concerns for their future and my concerns for the future of all of our children.
If it were not for our indigenous cultures which are totally linked to the natural environment the creator gave us than I would have had no reason to be at Oglala that day, nor would the other Native people on Pine Ridge have a reason to remain where they live today. That area is still the poorest of the poor. The suicide rates there among children are epidemic and among adults it’s the same.
The Cathedral, the Temple of their way of life, the Black Hills of South Dakota has the faces of those who led the destruction of their lives carved upon them. The Black Hills of South Dakota was forcibly leased from the Lakota people, that lease has been up for over 40 years and yet America does not return it. The Lakota people have not accepted money for it and yet this injustice continues while all the while people of America turn a blind eye to this violation of religious freedom. This is only one example that I mention because of the size and how blatant it stands out and how most Americans are not aware of this.
We truly want changes in America. We want changes in the Americas from the far north to the extreme far south. We want a turnaround in the destruction of our natural environment. On the dollar bill it says in “God we trust.” It should say something to the effect in God’s handy-work we MUST trust.
I could go on and on but I feel like I am getting to preachy. Forgive me if I have rambled, if you can imagine sitting in a building that you don’t like, for ONE day imagine how it would be to sit in there for approximately 13,688 days plus and think about these things and try to work on these things. So I would like to sincerely encourage you to try and mend your differences and join with me to make this a better place for the future of our children and all natural life. And if you so decide to be involved with some other group I totally respect that, but I encourage you—deeply encourage you—to always be doing something to make a difference in our world. A difference for the better.
Forgive me if this seems a bit lengthy but the future of my involvement is very important to me and when you get to be 69 years old, one day could be a lifetime. If you have any doubts about this statement, just ask one of your grandparents. In saying this I want you to understand why we are gearing up to do everything as soon as possible. I don’t know what else I can say to get you to better understand this situation at the moment but again I want to say I appreciate all your efforts, all the things you have done, and for the indigenous people of the United States I want to echo the words that they say over and over again in their own way
WE ARE STILL HERE.
This is our home, this is our past, this is our present, and this is our future.
May the Great Spirit bless you with the things you need and enough to share with others who have needs also.
In the spirit of Crazy Horse and all our people of the past who have given unselfishly that we might exist today and have values that are worth living for.
Your friend always, in all ways,
Mitakuye oyasin
Doksha
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Sunday he was “very surprised” at people who were critical of his decision to praise Nelson Mandela this week, standing by his admiration for Mandela’s “very long, deep commitment to freedom.”
On Thursday, upon hearing of the former South African president’s death, Gingrich put up a post on Facebook, expressing his condolences.
“President Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime,” he wrote. “When he visited the Congress I was deeply impressed with the charisma and the calmness with which he could dominate a room. It was as if the rest of us grew smaller and he grew stronger and more dominant the longer the meeting continued.”
Gingrich’s statement, however, was met with backlash from many of his followers.
“Newt, I was rooting for you to win the primaries and become the next president; please tell me your joking!! Mandela was a commie murderer!!” read one comment that was popular with other users.
“You’re forgetting Mandela’s extreme racism! There are YouTubes of Mandela singing songs about murdering the white man. I spit on his grave….,” read another.
When asked about the criticism in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Gingrich replied, “I was very surprised by it. [My wife] Callista posted my statement on her Facebook page and was amazed at some of the intensity — some of whom came back three, four and five times repeating how angry they were.”
In response, on Saturday, Gingrich put out a new statement and video to his supporters, challenging critics to put themselves in Mandela’s shoes.
“I was surprised by the hostility and vehemence of some of the people who reacted to me saying a kind word about a unique historic figure,” he said. “So let me say to those conservatives who don’t want to honor Nelson Mandela, what would you have done?”
Responding to conservatives who dismiss Mandela as a communist, Gingrich added, “Actually Mandela was raised in a Methodist school, was a devout Christian, turned to communism in desperation only after South Africa was taken over by an extraordinarily racist government determined to eliminate all rights for blacks.”
As Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic pointed out, Gingrich’s support for Mandela is not new or an attempt to rewrite history.
“Newt Gingrich was among a cadre of conservatives who opposed the mainstream conservative stance on Apartheid and ultimately helped override Reagan’s unconscionable veto of sanctions,” he wrote, adding, “When Gingrich compliments Mandela on his presidency he doesn’t do so within the context of alleged African pathologies, but within the context of countries throughout the world. It’s a textbook lessons in ‘How not to be racist,’ which is to say it is a textbook lesson in how to talk about Nelson Mandela as though he were a human being.” – excerpted from Huffington Post
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Last summer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised her citizens a pact which would prohibit U.S. spying on German citizens. But since then, Washington has shown little interest in pursuing such a treaty. Now, officials in Germany fear the deal is dead.
