Climate Chronos

Friday, August 24, 2012

NYPD Admits Muslim Spy Program Generated No Leads or Terrorism Investigations -- US has Turned Blind Eye to Far Right-Wing Extremist

NYPD Admits Muslim Spy Program Generated No Leads or Terrorism Investigations -- Only Controversy


Daryl Johnson, a former analyst for the Department of Homeland Security warned that the election of the first African-American president, combined with recession-era economic anxieties, could fuel a rise in far-right violence.


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The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.

During the 1990s, these issues contributed to the growth in the number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups and an increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks, and infrastructure sectors. 

Growth of these groups subsided in reaction to increased government scrutiny as a result of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and disrupted plots, improvements in the economy, and the continued U.S. standing as the preeminent world power.

The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.
                                               
(U)  Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.  It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Politicians, Do No Harm


Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine commented, "In politics . . . you win by scaring people into thinking [about] what the other side will do."  Perhaps each side could take an ethics lesson from the medical profession "to do no harm" As the Te Tao Ching reads (60) . . .



Ruling a big nation is like frying a small fish.
With the presence of Tao beneath heaven,
The evil (spirits) cannot extent their power.
It's not only that the evil (spirits) cannot extent their power,
But its power cannot harm anyone.
It was not even that their power cannot harm anyone,
A ruler also DOES No HARM to anyone.
Since BOTH do no mutual harm to each other,
THEN, THE Virtue of PEACE WAS RETURNED TO THE PEOPLE.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Andrew Bacevich: how war without end became the rule


Andrew Bacevich is the soldier turned writer who’s still unlearning and puncturing the Washington Rules of national security. The rules have turned into doctrines, he’s telling us, of global war forever. He is talking about the scales that have fallen from the eyes of a slow learner, as he calls himself — a dutiful, conformist Army officer who woke up at the end of the Cold War twenty years ago to the thought that the orthodoxy he’d accepted was a sham.
Andrew Bacevich’s military career ran from West Point to Vietnam to the first Gulf War in 1991. The short form of the story he’s been writing for a decade now is: how unexamined failure in Vietnam became by today a sort of repetition compulsion in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington Rules is Andrew Bacevich’s fourth book in a project to unmask American empire, militarism, over-reach and what sustains them.