The story of borshch

Delightful, long article in the Guardian Online, spotted by A Fistful of Euros.

On the afternoon of March 31 2000, Boris Pasternak, editor-in-chief of the Moscow publishing house Polifakt, drove to the suburb of Podolsk to look up one of his authors, the food writer and historian Vilyam Pokhlebkin. Pokhlebkin was late delivering the final manuscript of his new book, A Century Of Cooking, and had failed either to turn up for a scheduled meeting or to respond to telegrams. The writer had no phone. He had no fridge or TV, either, although he did have 50,000 books crammed into his apartment...

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

Congress in 1978 established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a special court and authorized the Chief Justice of the United States to designate seven federal district court judges to review applications for warrants related to national security investigations. Judges serve for staggered, non-renewable terms of no more than seven years, and must be from different judicial circuits. The provisions for the court were part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (92 Stat. 1783), which required the government, before it commenced certain kinds of intelligence gathering operations within the United States, to obtain a judicial warrant similar to that required in criminal investigations. The legislation was a response to a report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the “Church Committee”), which detailed allegations of executive branch abuses of its authority to conduct domestic electronic surveillance in the interest of national security. Congress also was responding to the Supreme Court's suggestion in a 1972 case that under the Fourth Amendment some kind of judicial warrant might be required to conduct national security related investigations.

Warrant applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are drafted by attorneys in the General Counsel's Office at the National Security Agency at the request of an officer of one of the federal intelligence agencies. Each application must contain the Attorney General's certification that the target of the proposed surveillance is either a “foreign power” or “the agent of a foreign power” and, in the case of a U.S. citizen or resident alien, that the target may be involved in the commission of a crime.

The judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court travel to Washington, D.C., to hear warrant applications on a rotating basis. To ensure that the court can convene on short notice, at least one of the judges is required to be a member of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The act of 1978 also established a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, presided over by three district or appeals court judges designated by the Chief Justice, to review, at the government's request, the decisions the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Because of the almost perfect record of the Department of Justice in obtaining the surveillance warrants and other powers it requested from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the review court had no occasion to meet until 2002. The USA Patriot Act of 2001 (115 Stat. 272) expanded the time periods for which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can authorize surveillance and increased the number of judges serving the court from seven to eleven.

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The Illusion of Democracy

From Democracy is an Illusion :

Quiqley, a Professor of History at the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University was a trusted insider who had access to their private archives. He felt the plot, which he supported, was too important to be kept hidden. However, shortly after publication, his book was taken off the market.

Cleon Skoussen was an FBI agent for 16 years and the Police Chief of Salt Lake City for four years. His "The Naked Capitalist" distills the most shocking evidence from Quigley's daunting 1300-page book.

At just 122 pages, "The Naked Capitalist" (1970) is a concise, lucid and absolutely convincing account of the international banker conspiracy. Historians have betrayed the public trust by largely ignoring this material.

OUR PREDICAMENT

Quigley confirms that a network of banking dynasties has, in Skousen's words, "acquired a choke-hold on the affairs of practically the entire human race." According to Quigley, they include "Baring, Lazard, Erlanger, Warburg, Schroder, Selingman, the Speyers, Mirabaud, Malet, and above all Rothschild and Morgan." (Citations are from Tragedy and Hope, 51-52)

Quigley confirms that, starting with the Bank of England in 1694, these dynasties organized themselves in a system of central banks that charge their respective nations billions of dollars in interest for the privilege of using currency backed by the nations' own credit. In other words, they have carried off a swindle of monstrous proportions.

From Democracy and Illusion :

I diagnosed the problem as follows. American democracy has a single point of failure. If the people's ability to vote candidates in and out of office has no meaningful influence on the decisions they make while in office, then democracy does not exist, because the will of the people has no influence on policy. Money has broken that link. Once the people admit a candidate in the gate, they have no further say in what he does, because his exclusive constituency becomes the people who give him the dollars for his next campaign. Though the voters have the authority to remove the politician from office on the next go round, two, four or six years later, this authority is easily defeated by a game involving media-disseminated disinformation, public complacency and short memory, and a byzantine legislative system which shields legislators from being held accountable for the choices they make.

Conceding truth to the adage: 'We have found the enemy and he is us' - The Illusion of Democracy – If We Can Keep It :
By: Peter Chamberlin

In the name of patriotism, we have participated in a planned deception to create a state of permanent war. In the name of profit, America has been sacrificed on the altar of the god of war, to create a global empire based on the mass-marketing of death.

“We are opposed...by a ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the [war] with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match...” –JFK, 1961 http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/S...

The official version of this speech, is that Kennedy was describing an international communist conspiracy in this address, but then, the official version of the conspiracy that later killed him was that it was the work of a “lone assassin,” firing magic bullets. The alternative view is that Kennedy was giving us a hidden warning of the secret “power behind the throne,” otherwise known as the “military/industrial complex.”

Over the many decades since President Kennedy uttered this warning, “the conspiracy” has undermined American society. In the process it corrupted three major religions and killed millions worldwide, in order to bring us to the precipice of permanent perpetual war. The next war will take us over that threshold. As citizens in the last remaining bastion of democracy on the face of the earth, we have a responsibility to prevent that final war from beginning. All we have to do now is figure out how to do it.
Kennedy always knew that this dreadful day would come, that one day Americans would have to choose between freedom and the illusion of security. He had heard his predecessor President Dwight D. Eisenhower, prophetically warn of the inevitable future danger that would arise from the military/industrial complex and “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

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The “war on terrorism” is a euphemism for a war on democracy. The purpose of the entire production is to use democracy, to eliminate democracy. Whether it be here in America, or in England, or in any other country where we have relations, American foreign policy is to use democracy as a tool for burying freedom. The war was created by us (manipulating many foreign players to do our will), to propel a fascist vision of perpetual world war, which will forever justify the militarization of our society and every democracy within reach.

Argentina, Brazil to drop U.S. dollar in bilateral commercial transactions

Argentina and Brazil are to scrap bilateral commercial transactions in U.S. dollars and start using their own currencies from August, an official in charge of currency settlement at the Argentine Central Bank said here Saturday.

The new payment system is aimed at reducing costs in commercial transactions and would benefit small and medium-sized enterprises, the official said.

Under the new system, there will be a unified exchange rate between the real and peso, the so-called reference rate, which will be applied by Brazilian and Argentine central banks at the end of each day.

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Science studies the 'Ouzo Effect'

From Science Daily :

Scientists studying the cloudy emulsions produced by anise-flavored liquors such as Ouzo have discovered new molecular insights into their formation, findings that could lead to the design of better commercial emulsions used in making pharmaceuticals, food products, cosmetics and other materials.

The original study may be found here.