"Robert Johnson" - New Cyber Attacks Will Target Power Grids And Major Public Works

Commander of the new U.S. Cyber Command General Keith Alexander said Tuesday that he's most concerned about attacks targeting America's electrical grid, and destroying large public machinery.

Gen. Alexander says cyber-attacks over the Internet are shifting from data theft to physical assaults.

First, he pointed to the 2003 Northeast power outage started by a downed tree branch. Following the initial accident at the pole, the utility company's computer entered "pause" mode, cutting power to people in several states and illustrating the effect an intruder could have on any power grid.

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"Joshua Holland" - Has American-Style Conservatism Become a Religion?

As the American right lurches from traditional conservatism – a go-slow approach to governing that stresses the importance of continuity and social stability – to a far more reactionary brand typified by acolytes of Ayn Rand and Tea Party extremists waving misspelled signs decrying Democrats' "socialism," the time has come to ask whether modern “backlash” conservatism has become a religious faith rather than a pedestrian political ideology.

Ideology is grounded in the real world. It offers us a philosophical lens through which we can efficiently process what's happening in the world around us. Religion is different. It's a fixed belief system, based on faith, and it is immune to – or at least highly resistant to – challenges mounted by objective reality. Which better describes the belief system of a typical Rush Limbaugh fan or Tea Party activist?

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"Daniel Denvir" - A Political Casualty of 9/11 -- The Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement

Nine-eleven's ten-year anniversary is sparking retrospectives ranging from lives lost to a War on Terror launched. But media accounts have omitted an important political casualty: the short-lived "anti-globalization" movement, perhaps the largest American social movement since the civil rights and Vietnam War era.

I watched the massive November 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) from my computer, a high school student with a budding interest in social justice eagerly clicking "refresh" on the brand new Indymedia web site: Teamsters and Turtles, steelworkers and socialists shutting down streets and anarchists smashing Starbucks' windows. The police conducted mass arrests and unleashed tear gas, but a shocked elite was forced to hunker down in hotel rooms: the summit failed and the march of global capitalism stumbled.

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"Mark Karlin" - Uninsured by Ron Paul, His 2008 Campaign Manager Died Owing $400,000 for Medical Care

Ron Paul knows something about uninsured men dying without health insurance. Kent Snyder, who was Paul's 2008 presidential campaign manager, died on June 26 of that year without any medical coverage. His hospital bills had accumulated to $400,000 at the time of his passing.

The Washington Post noted in an obituary for Snyder, 49 [4]:

Mr. Snyder had been associated with Paul, a Texas Republican with Libertarian leanings, for more than 20 years. He worked as a top aide for Paul in 1988, when the congressman sought the presidency on the Libertarian ticket.

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"EU Obersavation" -Poland warns of war 'in 10 years' as EU leaders scramble to contain panic

Germany, France and the European Commission are scrambling to contain panic and "quash rumours" about a eurozone break-up amid repeated off-piste messages from other senior EU politicians.

But even amid their desperate efforts, the finance minister of Poland, the country that currently represents the EU to the world as holder of the bloc’s rotating presidency, warned of war on the continent within 10 years if the eurozone collapses.

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"Inter Press Service" -Record Arctic Ice Melt Threatens Global Security

All the analysis and commentary about safety and security on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 ignored by far the biggest ongoing threat to global security: climate change.

Just days before Sunday's commemoration of the attacks, German scientists pointed to yet another smoking gun of climate change: the Arctic sea ice reached a new historic minimum ice extent.

The rapidity with which the planet is losing its northern ice cap continues to astonish experts. The defrosting northern pole is one of the prime drivers of Earth's climate system and is changing global weather patterns in unpredictable ways.

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"Smithsonian Magazine"-Could The Sun Set Off The Next Big Natural Disaster?

It can take a long time to clean up from natural disasters. New Orleans still had remnants of Katrina damage years after the storm barreled through. Hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless in Haiti, more than a year and a half after its earthquake. Areas of Japan may be off limits for years due to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

But as bad as these events might be, they are at least limited geographically. But that probably won’t be true when it comes to a severe solar storm, say scientists in a new study in Space Weather. Before I go into that, though, let’s first review what I mean by solar storms. These are explosions on the Sun that send energized particles out into space. If Earth is in the way of a mild outburst, we get pretty auroras at the poles. But more violent events can have bigger impacts, as Robert Irion noted earlier this year in his Smithsonian story “Something New Under the Sun“:

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"Mike Adams" - Documents proving FDA abducted an American citizen in illegal war against herbal cancer cures

(NaturalNews) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration masterminded an illegal international abduction of an American citizen as part of its illegal war against natural cancer treatment products, NaturalNews can now reveal. (This is an exclusive NaturalNews story, so please credit NaturalNews as the source.) Gregory Caton, an herbal product formulator living in Ecuador, was kidnapped at gunpoint in 2009, forced onto an American Airlines commercial jet in Guayaquil, and flown to Miami as part of an "extraordinary rendition" operation which involved U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials knowingly providing false information to Interpol (among other crimes) and recruiting what appear to be FBI agents who illegally operated on the ground in Ecuador.

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"Sarah Jaffe" - Are Jobs on Their Way to Becoming Obsolete? And Is That a Good Thing?

http://www.alternet.org/story/152383/are_jobs_on_their_way_to_becoming_obsolete_and_is_that_a_good_thing/

AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe

Do we have it backward when we call for job creation? Could we instead radically rethink our economy to benefit everyone?

September 12, 2011 |

 

Are jobs obsolete?

 

Media theorist and author of Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back Douglas Rushkoff ruffled some feathers this week when he dared, at CNN.com of all places, to ask that question. It seemed, perhaps, gloriously insensitive to the plight of unemployed workers, of union workers at the U.S. Postal Service, who are struggling like so many others to stay afloat in an uncertain economy while they're demonized in the press as greedy for wanting a decent job.

Yet Rushkoff also raises points worth considering, particularly for those of us trying to articulate, in the wake of massive failures of the economic system we've lived our whole lives with, some sort of alternative to the cycle of boom, bust, bailout.

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"Abby Zimet" - Going Rogue

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2011/09/14-1

09.14.11 - 10:56 AM

by Abby Zimet

It seems Joe McGinniss "leaked" his new, as-yet-unpublished Sarah Palin biography to Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, who promptly "leaked" it to his Fox News "reporter" Roland Hedley, who is struggling to find something good to say about it using actual excerpts from the book. The Chicago Tribune is unhappy about this and has declined to run it. Fans of Doonesbury and the First Amendment, in turn, are unhappy with the Tribune. Despite all this unhappiness, it's pretty juicy, funny stuff.

"This week's Doonesbury does not meet our standards of fairness. Please enjoy this substitute strip." - note from Tribune.