End of Another Year...

End of Another Year...: "You know your country is in trouble when:

1. The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
2. Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
3. The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
4. The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
5. An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country's 'Golden Years'.
6. Your country is purportedly 'selling' 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.
7. For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it's going to cut back on providing that hour.
8. Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is 'sectarian bloodshed' or 'civil war'.
9. People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that's been missing for two weeks.

A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted."

...

"That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible- from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional."

(Via Baghdad Burning.)

ThinkFast

ThinkFast: "'Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth.' Some uninhabited islands have been covered in recent years, but disappearance of Lohachara, an island off the coast of India that was 'once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.'

British and Iraqi soldiers raided a police station in Basra on Monday, uncovering 'appalling' detainee conditions. 'More than 100 men were crowded into a single cell, 30 feet by 40 feet, he said, with two open toilets… A significant number showed signs of torture. Some had crushed hands and feet…, while others had cigarette and electrical burns and a significant number had gunshot wounds to their legs and knees.'"

(Via Think Progress.)

The Sankei Article on Japanese Nukes

The Sankei Article on Japanese Nukes: "Here is the link to the Japanese language Sankei Shimbun story about a Japanese government study on developing nuclear weapons."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)

Flood of Secret Docs Coming

Flood of Secret Docs Coming: "Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret...

And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request...

Gearing up to review aging records to meet the deadline, agencies have declassified more than one billion pages, shedding light on the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the network of Soviet agents in the American government."

(Via a DefenseTech.)

U.S. Blocks Arms, Technology To Israel

U.S. Blocks Arms, Technology To Israel: "The Bush administration has blocked arms and technology transfers to Israel.

Israeli and U.S. sources said the State Department has blocked the transfer of weapons and technology to the Jewish state over the last three months. The sources said the halt reflected deteriorating relations between the two countries since the end of the war in Lebanon in August 2006.

'Nobody will say openly that there is a problem,' a government source said. 'But there is a serious problem that reflects the marginalization of Israel in U.S. strategy.'

The unofficial suspension of U.S. arms deliveries began in late September, the sources said. They said the suspension halted the airlift of air-to-ground and other munitions conducted during and immediately after the Israeli war with Hizbullah."

(Via a DefenseTech.)

America Has Become Incarceration Nation

America Has Become Incarceration Nation: "The United States has now become the world leader in its rate of incarceration, locking up its citizens at 5-8 times the rate of other industrialized nations."

(Via AlterNet.)

Nobel Laureat Attacks Medical Intellectual Property

Nobel Laureat Attacks Medical Intellectual Property: "'Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was fired by the World Bank blasted drug patents in an editorial in the British Medical Journal titled 'Scrooge and intellectual property rights.' 'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.' In medicine, patents cost lives. The US patent for turmeric didn't stimulate research, and restricted access by the Indian poor who actually discovered it hundreds of years ago. 'These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded.' Billions of people, who live on $2-3 a day, could no longer afford the drugs they needed. Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research. A few scientists beat the human genome project and patented breast cancer genes; so now the cost of testing women for breast cancer is 'enormous.''"

(Via /.)

Morning Eye-Opener

Morning Eye-Opener: "UN Security Council sanctions on Iran are a big deal. The groundwork for the action has also demonstrated how far America and Russia are drifting apart."

(Via Martini Republic.)