Billionaire Jeff Greene, who made his fortune as a real estate developer and from 
fraudulent mortgage securities, told a reporter at this week’s Davos, Switzerland, economic summit that “America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence.”
Take that, you Millennials who want to earn enough for rent and food!!!
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(Full text after amendment on March 14, 2004)
(Adopted at the Fifth Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress and promulgated for implementation by the Announcement of the National People’s Congress on December 4, 1982
Amended in accordance with the Amendments to the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China adopted respectively at the First Session of the Seventh National People’s Congress on April 12, 1988, the First Session of the Eighth National People’s Congress on March 29, 1993, the Second Session of the Ninth National People’s Congress on March 15, 1999 and the Second Session of the Tenth National People’s Congress on March 14, 2004)
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100,000 years of more older then the expansion that seems to tie the earliest complex language ..as indicated by symbolic marks, rapid tool development, and linguistic studies to when complex speech first appeared.Tomgram: Rory Fanning, Unpacking the War on Terror
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s post features Rory Fanning, author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America, and is introduced by Nick Turse, whose book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam was a New York Times bestseller. For a contribution of $100 (or more), you can still get a personalized, signed copy of either book at our donation page. Check it out. Tom]
About a year ago, I hit the road for a couple of months. I went to Albany and Albuquerque, Berkeley and Boston, Chapel Hill and Chicago, Seattle and Schenectady. I wasn’t reporting. I wasn’t writing. I sure wasn’t vacationing. No, I was out on a book tour in support of the paperback edition of my book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. I went to colleges and universities, bookstores and radio stations, churches, a writer’s institute, and even a senior center. I spoke in classrooms and hotel conference centers, auditoriums and theaters, before students and retirees, to veterans and life-long civilians.
After offering a brief overview of my decade-plus journey into the subject of American war crimes in Vietnam, I would open the floor to questions, and that generally lasted as long as the powers that be allowed. Once, it went on for almost two hours. People would ask about my discovery of long-secret U.S. investigations into atrocities in Vietnam, or what it was like tracking down survivors there, or what Vietnamese thought of Americans all these years later, or how American boys could do such horrendous things. I’d often answer that last one by talking about command policies — free-fire zones, lax rules of engagement, the body count — that made it inevitable that large numbers of innocent Vietnamese would be killed.
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January 21, 2015
from Lars Syll
When applying deductivist thinking to economics, neoclassical economists usually set up “as if” models based on a set of tight axiomatic assumptions from which consistent and precise inferences are made. The beauty of this procedure is of course that if the axiomatic premises are true, the conclusions necessarily follow. The snag is that if the models are to be relevant, we also have to argue that their precision and rigour still holds when they are applied to real-world situations. They often don’t. When addressing real economies, the idealizations and abstractions necessary for the deductivist machinery to work simply don’t hold.
If the real world is fuzzy, vague and indeterminate, then why should our models build upon a desire to describe it as precise and predictable? The logic of idealization is a marvellous tool in mathematics and axiomatic-deductivist systems, but a poor guide for action in real-world systems, in which concepts and entities are without clear boundaries and continually interact and overlap.
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Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Shadow War in 150 Countries
From the point of view of the U.S. military and the national security state, the period from September 12, 2001, to late last night could be summed up in a single word: more. What Washington funded with your tax dollars was a bacchanalia of expansion intended, as is endlessly reiterated, to keep America “safe.” But here’s the odd thing: as the structure of what’s always called “security” is built out ever further into our world and our lives, that world only seems to become less secure. Odder yet, that “more” is rarely a focus of media coverage, though its reality is glaringly obvious. The details may get coverage but the larger reality — the thing being created in Washington — seems of remarkably little interest.
That’s why websites like TomDispatch matter. They offer the larger picture of a world that’s being built right before our eyes but is somehow seldom actually seen — that is, taken in meaningfully. America’s Special Operations forces are a striking example of this phenomenon. The commando is, by now, a national culture hero, the guy who stands between Hell and us. But what special ops forces really do all — and I mean all — over the planet, doesn’t seem of any particular interest to Americans in general or the mainstream media in particular. The way those “elite” forces have parlayed their popularity into a staggering growth rate and just what that growth and the actions that go with it actually mean in terms of, say, blowback… well, that’s something you’re simply not going to read much about, other than at a website like this one.
In fact, we’ve focused on the spectacular growth of this country’s special forces outfits, what that has meant globally, and the ethos of the organization for years now. Nick Turse, in particular, has in the past and again today done the kind of reporting on and assessment of special forces operations that should be the coin of the realm, but couldn’t be rarer in our world. If you want to know, for instance, just how many countries special forces operatives have set foot in from 2011-2014 (150 on a planet with only 196 nations), this is the place to come, not the giant media outfits that straddle the consciousness of the planet. Tom
The Golden Age of Black Ops
Special Ops Missions Already in 105 Countries in 2015
By Nick Turse
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Perpetual War
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
[This epilogue to Scahill’s bestselling book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is posted with the kind permission of its publisher, Nation Books.]
On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he had promised when he began his first campaign for president six years earlier, he pledged again to turn the page on history and take U.S. foreign policy in a different direction. “A decade of war is now ending,” Obama declared. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
Much of the media focus that day was on the new hairstyle of First Lady Michelle Obama, who appeared on the dais sporting freshly trimmed bangs, and on the celebrities in attendance, including hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and his wife, Beyoncé, who performed the national anthem. But the day Obama was sworn in, a U.S. drone strike hit Yemen. It was the third such attack in that country in as many days. Despite the rhetoric from the president on the Capitol steps, there was abundant evidence that he would continue to preside over a country that is in a state of perpetual war.
In the year leading up to the inauguration, more people had been killed in U.S. drone strikes across the globe than were imprisoned at Guantánamo. As Obama was sworn in for his second term, his counterterrorism team was finishing up the task of systematizing the kill list, including developing rules for when U.S. citizens could be targeted. Admiral William McRaven had been promoted to the commander of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and his Special Ops forces were operating in more than 100 countries across the globe. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-scahill/dirty-wars-epilogue_b_4173513.html
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