Anthony Gregory

This December, leaders of the industrialized world will gather in Copenhagen to frame an international strategy against "climate change" to take the place of Kyoto.

Many in the mainstream media would have you believe that someone must be crazy to voice skepticism toward the idea that human carbon emissions cause significant and disastrous global warming.

They don't usually call it "global warming" anymore. The lingo for a few years has been "climate change," since it provides a much more rhetorically strong ground from which to deride skeptics. Lambasting those who "deny climate change" is more compelling than to scoff, "how could you deny the earth is warming?" Especially now that we know it has been cooling for a decade.

So it's cooling now, but the real problem, we are told, is climate change -- as caused by human emissions of carbon -- particularly with an alleged long-term trend toward warming. Real and alleged cataclysms of nature -- everything from Katrina to spiders getting bigger -- has been blamed on our greenhouse gases.

Merely to express doubt of this theory has been called "treason against the planet" by Paul Krugman, who probably speaks for a large segment of left-liberals. It is seen as unseemly, unpatriotic and hysterical to wonder if humans are causing the earth to warm in unsustainable and disastrous ways. Another Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore, even said a year ago that businesses (conveniently ones that compete with his own favored industrial interests) should be censored for voicing doubt on climate change:

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by Gary G. Kohls, MD

71 years ago this week, on 11/9/38, the horrifying event that the Nazi Party called Krystallnacht occurred. It could be said, that the events of 11/9/38 was the official start of Adolf Hitler’s overt and “endless war” against the Jews, but the methods used to justify that war were not an aberration. Rather, the Night of the Shattering Glass, which saw many synagogues destroyed, all the plate glass windows of a thousand Jewish businesses in Germany shattered and the first 26,000 Jewish men, of many millions more to come, sent off to concentration camps, was simply another example of an all-too-common historical reality that has been going on ever since the first tyrant orchestrated the first false flag operation, allowing him to “innocently” and patriotically declare the first “retaliatory” war. And then, by repeatedly using cunning propaganda techniques, that tyrant could plausibly deny responsibility for the coming violence because the enemy was, after all, the one who drew “first blood”.

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Ayman T. Quader

Gaza City, November 15, 2009, (Pal Telegraph) The ongoing Israeli siege has been gravely suffocating the life of people of the Gaza Strip. The fuel companies in the Gaza Strip have been warning of the imminent humanitarian crises that the cooking gas is about to get depletion after 25 days of cutting access to the Gaza fuel sanitation.

It is warily reported by Mahammed Al Shawwa, the head of the union of fuel companies in the Gaza Strip, that the gas sanitations in the Gaza Strip has stopped supplying people of their needs of the cooking gas.

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Glenn Greenwald

The criminal conviction of 22 CIA agents (and 2 Italian intelligence officers) by an Italian court yesterday -- for the 2003 kidnapping of an Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, off the street in Italy and his "rendition" to Egypt to be tortured -- highlights several vital points:

First, illustrating how these matters are typically distorted by the U.S. establishment media, note that CNN -- in the very first paragraph of its story -- claims that the CIA agents were convicted "for their role in the seizing of a suspected terrorist in Italy in 2003." What did Nasr allegedly do that warrants that "terrorist" label? Did he participate in the 9/11 attacks, or plan attacks on "the American homeland" or U.S. civilians? No. According to CNN, this is what makes him a "suspected terrorist":

He was suspected of recruiting men to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Re-reported, edited with brief comment by Carolyn Bennett

Nice holiday speeches but Washington politicians are at heart unconcerned about America's health.

"I feel a little bit like we're debating whether to give aspirin or Tylenol to a patient with breast cancer," Dr Steffie Woolhandler said about health care proposals moving pushed through Congress. "The patient needs surgery," she told interviewer Amy Goodman. "What's being debated in Washington is really Tylenol or aspirin...

"There are so many bad planks. This bill needs to be scratched and we need to start over."

The Democracy Now interview was pegged to a study by Harvard Medical School researchers that found an estimated "2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care." This figure amounts to -

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Mickey Z.

A friend of mine recently brought to my attention a former vegan who has now re-invented himself as the "Ethical Butcher" (a title right up there with Peacekeeper missiles, limited autonomy, and military intelligence). The butcher writes: "After 14 years as a vegetarian, a few of those as a quite 'militant' vegan, I became a butcher. The factors that went into me taking the position are many, but the result was maybe quite predictable. Within a month I was a full-fledged meat eater. What has not changed is my passion for the welfare of animals. Through my work as a butcher and chef, I now see a more direct way to influence and work for change in the meat industry and to improve the quality of life for all of the animals we rely on for food."

Such backlash in the face of compassionate evolution is not uncommon. For example, just as more and more women begin to challenge gender roles, the patriarchal culture countered with Howard Stern, Maxim, and Spike TV. But I digress…

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Salim Nazzal

Abbas announcement last week that he would not run for another term in an election scheduled for January has created many debates among Palestinians at home and worldwide. Most of the inter Palestinian debate was focused on what Palestinians do next, become the major speculated question.

From Abbas speech it is possible to conclude three things,

1- that Israel is not interested in peace no matter what Palestinians do, and the second is that the Us will support Israel no matter what Israel does the third that the whole process which began in Oslo in 1993 has ended in failure.

Among the several Palestinian reaction is a Palestinian think that group made of Prominent political, economic, academic and other legal persons, which called for crystallizing a new Palestinian strategy, and the mobilization of the elements of power among the Palestinian people, which enable it to achieve its goals in ending the Israeli occupation and establish their independent state on all the occupied territories in June 1967, and its capital Jerusalem. Yet the challenge remains how could Palestinian overcome their divisions and set plans for the next period. In the view of a Palestinian intellectual the sad thing about Abbas decision is that it is addressed to the American and not to his nation. In the speech Abbas accused the USA of favoring the Israeli side which is not a new thing.

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Paul Craig Roberts

U.S. Marines in Helmand province, Afghanistan (Xinhua / Reuters)

It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft that ended the Vietnam war. According to this explanation, cowardly college students subject to the draft and their unpatriotic families forced an end to the war. This is Karl Marx’s explanation. Material interests, not empty morality, are said to have brought the war to an end.

The fact that in those days the US still had an independent media of sorts that sometimes framed the war in moral terms is ignored. Are we sure, for example, that the film of the naked little girl running in terror down the road burning with napalm was ineffectual in arousing moral opposition to the war? Are we certain that it wasn’t an aroused moral conscience that brought about the end of the war but was college students’ fears for their lives and limbs?

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by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

If the 'President' is elected to represent the people of the United states, then he/she should be elected directly by the people. The Electoral College, in which electors represent states --not people --must be abolished and the 'office' of President elected directly. The voice of the people needs no proxy. The voice of the people must be be heard directly, loudly and often.

Fears that the 'college' might elect a minority President are not merely speculative should the nation be so deeply divided that three or more candidates split the electoral votes among them --no one getting a necessary majority. Precisely that happened in 1824, attempted in 1948 and again in 1968.

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Mary Shaw

On Friday the 13th, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators will be tried in federal court in New York. This is a vast improvement over the military kangaroo courts of the Bush administration, and will help to restore America's image in the world with regard to human rights and the rule of law.

And this is no mere bleeding-heart perspective. In practical terms, the U.S. federal court system has a proven track record of effectively prosecuting complex terrorism cases. On the other hand, says Joanne Mariner, Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program Director for Human Rights Watch, "The military commissions at Guantanamo are simply not up to the task."

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