The Rise of ISIS

Excellent documentary about ISIS and the motivation to form the group...certainly key in understanding the quagmire we are stepping into...


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/rise-of-isis/

Reza Aslan Schools CNN and Fox News

Awesome! Way to go Reza!

CNN Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ibKWVTFSak

Fox News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt1cOnNrY5s

Piers Morgan Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYluVdT50Ro

Dear North America, You're Not as Great as You Think
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/angelina-chapin/reza-aslan-bill-maher_b_5941718.html

The Antidote to Apathy

Great talk...share it!

Local politics — schools, zoning, council elections — hit us where we live. So why don't more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy

The Gift of American Power

Often I'm inundated with left-wing liberal media, so it's refreshing to get a different point a view even if I don't entirely agree with it....great article by Robert D. Kaplan

The United States is not a traditional empire because it has no colonies, but its military -- and the diplomatic power that accompanies it -- is deployed in an imperial-like fashion worldwide. The U.S. Navy calls itself a global force for good. That claim would pass the most stringent editorial fact-checking process. Without that very naked American ambition, which allows the Navy and the Air Force to patrol the global commons, the world is reduced to the sum of its parts: a Japan and China, and a China and India, dangerously at odds and on the brink of war; a Middle East in far wider war and chaos; a Europe neutralized and emasculated by Russian Revanchism; and an Africa in even greater disarray. It is not that regional powers cannot act rationally on their own; it is only that without a global hegemon of sorts, local balance-of-power interactions become more fraught with risk and are, therefore, more dangerous.

READ MORE HERE....
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2014/05/15/the_gift_of_american_power.html

Chinese experts 'in discussions' over building high-speed Beijing-US railway

Hey...they built the Great Wall.......nevertheless, this would be a major engineering feat...not to mention---life-changing...

'China-Russia-Canada-America line' would run for 13,000km across Siberia and pass under Bering Strait through 200km tunnel

Read more here...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/chinese-experts-discussions-high-speed-beijing-american-railway

Also...

China poised to overtake US as world's largest economy, research shows

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/apr/30/china-overtake-us-worlds-largest-economy

UK, US spies hacked into webcam feeds of millions of Yahoo users

• Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
• Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'
• Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo


This invasion of privacy is also happening in the US as well....the Washington Post writes last year...

 Powerful FBI surveillance software can covertly download files, photographs and stored e-mails, or even gather real-time images by activating cameras connected to computers, say court documents and people familiar with this technology.
Read More here....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/2013/12/06/352ba174-5397-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html 

Time Magazine writes...

The NSA Is Spying on Your Webcam Sex

And some interesting comments...
Top comments...

"Who cares if GCHQ have been reading my emails. Meta data is no big deal. I have nothing to hide. It's not like they're peering into my home when I'm naked or anything."

"Oh."
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 If people don't even care about this, then that really is it. There is nothing we will not allow the security services to do. There is no limit we will give them. Abhorrent, and genuinely disgusting.
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So much for the advantages of liberal democracy and the open society. Forget the Stasi - this is a level of state intrusion that is beyond hyberbole.
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Are you reading this on your phone or tablet or laptop? See that little lens near the top of your screen? Say cheese!
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I 'm feeling more revolutionary by the day...
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"Speechless"

Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?

Good read...

Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures? Many of the shifts there are occurring in other advanced nations, too. Across urban Asia, Europe and America, people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise and, in countries where economic recession is worst, young people are living at home....

Japan's 20-somethings are the age group to watch. Most are still too young to have concrete future plans, but projections for them are already laid out. According to the government's population institute, women in their early 20s today have a one-in-four chance of never marrying. Their chances of remaining childless are even higher: almost 40%.

READ MORE HERE...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex

Global Threats

 

Various countries are surveyed to find out what they believe is the biggest Global Threat..;.

http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/24/climate-change-and-financial-instability-seen-as-top-global-threats/

Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism
• Outlook.com encryption unlocked even before official launch
• Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls
• Company says it is legally compelled to comply

READ MORE HERE:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a spy – but do our leaders care?

"...a member of the House intelligence committee, wrote that Snowden "has provided intelligence to America's adversaries".
Pompeo correctly notes in his op-ed that "facts are important". Yet when asked for the evidence justifying the claim that Snowden gave intelligence to American adversaries, his spokesman, JP Freire, cited Snowden's leak of NSA documents. Those documents, however, were provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post, not al-Qaeda or North Korea."

Read more here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/05/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-spy

Takin' It to the Streets

 

The world is getting angrier and with the prevalence of smartphones, Twitter and FB...Cities will continue to be the battleground between citizens and governments and corporations.  Interesting read.

 
Excerpt:
 
"thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Facebook and blogging, angry individuals now have much more power to engage in, and require their leaders to engage in, two-way conversations — and they have much greater ability to link up with others who share their views to hold flash protests. 

As Leon Aron, the Russian historian at the American Enterprise Institute, put it, “the turnaround time” between sense of grievance and action in today’s world is lightning fast and getting faster. 

The net result is this: Autocracy is less sustainable than ever. Democracies are more prevalent than ever — but they will also be more volatile than ever. Look for more people in the streets more often over more issues with more independent means to tell their stories at ever-louder decibels." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/takin-it-to-the-streets.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

When do they install barcodes on our foreheads?

Excerpt:

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Read more here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

The Growing Importance of the Arctic Council

 

See full Size Image Here.

According to the United States' National Snow and Ice Data Center, the amount of Arctic ice (usually at a minimum during September) was 3.61 million square kilometers (1.39 million square miles) in September 2012 -- close to 49 percent lower than the average amount of ice seen between 1979 and 2000. The melting of the ice facilitates natural resource exploration in the high north. U.S. Geological Survey estimates from 2008 suggest that 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas reserves are located in the Arctic Circle.

Moreover, the retreating and thinning of the ice opens up new trade routes. In 2012, 46 ships transporting a total of 1.3 million tons reportedly used the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the northern coast of Russia; this represents a considerable increase from 2011, when 34 ships transported approximately 820,000 tons.

Read more: The Growing Importance of the Arctic Council | Stratfor

http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/growing-importance-arctic-council

French Oil Company Warns Against Drilling in the Arctic...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/09/26/total-arctic-drilling.html

10 Tribes That Avoided Modern Civilization

There are said to be as many as one hundred “uncontacted tribes” still living in some of the most isolated regions of the world. 

The members of these tribes, who have maintained traditions long left behind by the rest of the world, provide a wealth of information for anthropologists seeking to understand the way cultures have developed over the centuries.

http://listverse.com/2013/01/24/10-tribes-that-avoided-modern-civilization/

Stone Age Tribe Kills Fisherman Who Strayed on to Desert Island

One of the world's last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.
READ MORE HERE...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/1509987/Stone-Age-tribe-kills-fishermen-who-strayed-on-to-island.html

Amazon Vs Amazon

When you see the word "Amazon", what's the first thing that springs to mind – the world's biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet retailer – and which do you consider most important?

These questions have risen to the fore in an arcane, but hugely important, debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have lodged objections to a bid made by the US e-commerce giant for a prime new piece of cyberspace: ".amazon".

The Seattle-based company has applied for its brand to be a top-level domain name (currently .com), but the South American governments argue this would prevent the use of this internet address for environmental protection, the promotion of indigenous rights and other public interest uses.

Along with dozens of other disputed claims to names including ".patagonia" and ".shangrila", the issue cuts to the heart of debates about the purpose and governance of the internet.

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/25/amazon-domain-name-battle-brazil

Will the Middle Class Shake China?

Cultivating and satisfying the middle class was now an explicit part of the Party’s recipe for holding onto power.

A decade later, Chinese politics have not achieved that goal. The Chinese middle class— defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as those with the means to make spending decisions beyond just subsistence—is almost certainly growing: it is now about ten per cent of China’s population, and on pace to be forty per cent by 2020. But when it comes to politics, the Chinese government risks losing the support of the middle class...

This year, Bloomberg News reports a sharp increase in what we might call the Oligarch Index: the number of legislators who are on the list of China’s richest people grew seventeen per cent, from seventy-five to ninety—each with an average fortune of $1.1 billion.

The U.S. Congress has its own plutocracy problem, but in this case any equivalence is false. The House, Senate, and upper levels of the U.S. federal government do not boast a single billionaire (the Chinese government has scores of them)...

Read more here...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/03/will-the-middle-class-shake-china.html

Man outsources his own job to China, watches cat videos

By all accounts, Bob was a model employee, a software developer who consistently wrote clean code for his company and never missed deadlines. Then investigators found out it wasn't Bob who was doing his job.

Turns out Bob had outsourced his work to China, paying a lowly overseas surrogate a fraction of his six-figure salary to do his 9-to-5 job. All the while, Bob sat at his desk, pretending to be busy while actually surfing the Internet, updating his Facebook page and watching cat videos.

READ MORE HERE...
http://news.msn.com/science-technology/man-outsources-his-own-job-to-china-watches-cat-videos?ocid=ansnews11

Monks Lose Relevance as Thailand Grows Richer

Excerpt:

 

“Consumerism is now the Thai religion,” said Phra Paisan Visalo, one of the country’s most respected monks. “In the past, people went to temple on every holy day. Now, they go to shopping malls.”

The meditative lifestyle of the monkhood offers little allure to the iPhone generation. The number of monks and novices relative to the population has fallen by more than half over the last three decades. There are five monks and novices for every 1,000 people today, compared with 11 in 1980, when governments began keeping nationwide records. 

Although it is still relatively rare for temples to close, many districts are so short on monks that abbots here in northern Thailand recruit across the border from impoverished Myanmar, where monasteries are overflowing with novices. 

READ MORE HERE...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/world/asia/thai-buddhist-monks-struggle-to-stay-relevant.html

Facebook's Craziest Stories

A documentary that revolves around some of the craziest stories associated with Facebook...Enjoy!

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Shows/Shows/Doc+Zone/ID/2161490436/

The World is Safer Now. But Who Cares?

The world is safer now, but no one in Washington can talk about it...

Excerpt:

Obama says terrorist networks remain the greatest threat to the United States. “We have to remain vigilant,” he warned recently. But global terrorism has barely touched most Americans in the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, with 238 U.S. citizens killed in terrorist attacks, mostly in war zones, according to the National Counterterrorism Center’s annual reports. By comparison, the Consumer Product Safety Commission found that 293Americans were crushed during the same stretch by falling furniture or televisions.

Beyond the United States, global statistics point undeniably toward progress in achieving greater peace and stability.
READ MORE HERE... 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-world-is-safer-but-no-one-in-washington-can-talk-about-it/2012/11/02/2e59cfea-2442-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_story.html