Month: April 2010
START Denying the Nuclear Holocaust
(picture from this source) Yesterday in Prague, the U.S. President Barack Obama and the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, signed START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 each. Sounds great, unless you realize what the figure of 1,550 actually means. Our ignorance of the meaning of numbers of deployed strategic nuclear warheads allows politicians to get away with making worthy speeches and nice fluffy agreements without actually changing anything. Although no-one could criticize both sides for sitting down together with some flowers on the table, wagging those chins and shaking those hands and reducing the amount of deployed strategic nuclear warheads from about 2,126 American and 2,600 Russian to 1,550 each over the next seven years, this is far from being a 'giant step', or even a 'step'. A nuclear doomsday scenario, wiping out all advanced life on...
Wikileaks: Surveillance, Suspicion and a Mysterious Video
(Photo of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and its logo: http://edu.npo.eu/news/) What will be on the video that will be shown in Washington D.C. today? The website Wikileaks.org is a non-profit organization that publishes countless classified documents, typically 'from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN' and it gets away with it by being based in more than one jurisdiction. So the last few years they have been publishing globally, made possible because each country on this planet has different laws about what one can and can't publish. This is a truly unique situation. It has proven impossible for governments to clamp down on WikiLeaks. It seems, then, certain governments are thinking of using other methods to prevent material getting onto that site. Surveillance '...the increase in surveillance activities this last month.. excessive,' says a WikiLeaks press release of 26 March (reproduced in full here), 'some...