Brazil has added 30 US military robots to the Israeli drones and ‘Robocop-style’ glasses with face recognition cameras to its arsenal after the country allocated $900 million to make 2014 World Cup “one of the most protected sports events in history.”

A man walks next to a mural depicting “Fuleco”, the mascot of the Brazil 2014 FIFA World Cup

A Brazilian military police officer scans a stadium using facial recognition technology

Hermes 450 drone

Source: http://rt.com/news/brazil2014-us-military-robots-501/

A picture shows a coffee shop that was damaged following a bomb blast in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, on May 17, 2013.

People gather at the site of a bomb attack in Baquba, about 50 km (30 miles) northeast of Baghdad, May 17, 2013.

Iraqis gather around burnt vehicles at the site of a car bombing at a market in Baghdad’s impoverished district of Sadr City on May 16, 2013 as at least eight people were killed in blasts across the country.

An Iraqi man looks at the remains of a vehicle at the scene of a car bomb explosion the previous days in Baghdad’s Sadr City district on May 16, 2013. 

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted “disposition matrix”, a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be “disposed of”: indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this “war” – the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) – should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired’s Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US’s national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

“Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ‘At least 10 to 20 years.’ . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today – atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of  ”endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

In January, former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson delivered a highly-touted speech suggesting that the war on terror will eventually end; he advocated that outcome, arguing:

‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’”

In response, I wrote that the “war on terror” cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of “terrorism”), and (2) the nation’s most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for “at least” another 10-20 years?

The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world’s largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

Then there are the threats to Americans’ security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as “A Nation at War” and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans, as the US government itself claims took place just recently in Boston (and as clearly took place multiple other times over the last several years).

And then there’s the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.

This war will end only once Americans realize the vast and multi-faceted costs they are bearing so that the nation’s political elites can be empowered and its oligarchs can further prosper. But Washington clearly has no fear that such realizations are imminent. They are moving in the other direction: aggressively planning how to further entrench and expand this war.

One might think that if there is to be a debate over the 12-year-old AUMF, it would be about repealing it. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who heroically cast the only vote against it when it was originally enacted by presciently warning of how abused it would be, has been advocating its repeal for some time now in favor of using reasonable security measures to defend against such threats and standard law enforcement measures to punish them (which have proven far more effective than military solutions). But just as happened in 2001, neither she nor her warnings are deemed sufficiently Serious even to consider, let alone embrace.

Instead, the Washington AUMF “debate” recognizes only two positions: (1) Congress should codify expanded powers for the administration to fight a wider war beyond what the 2001 AUMF provides (that’s the argument recently made by the supreme war-cheerleaders-from-a-safe-distance at the Washington Post editorial page and their favorite war-justifying think tank theorists, and the one being made by many Senators from both parties), or (2) the administration does not need any expanded authority because it is already free to wage a global war with very few limits under the warped “interpretation” of the AUMF which both the Bush and Obama DOJs have successfully persuaded courts to accept (that’s the Obama administration’s position). In other words, the shared premise is that the US government must continue to wage unlimited, permanent war, and the only debate is whether that should happen under a new law or the old one.

Just to convey a sense for how degraded is this Washington “debate”: Obama officials at yesterday’s Senate hearing repeatedly insisted that this “war” is already one without geographical limits and without any real conceptual constraints. The AUMF’s war power, they said, “stretches from Boston to the [tribal areas of Pakistan]” and can be used “anywhere around the world, including inside Syria, where the rebel Nusra Front recently allied itself with al-Qaida’s Iraq affiliate, or even what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called ‘boots on the ground in Congo’”. The acting general counsel of the Pentagon said it even ”authorized war against al-Qaida’s associated forces in Mali, Libya and Syria”. Newly elected independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said after listening to how the Obama administration interprets its war powers under the AUMF:

This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.”

Former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, who testified at the hearing,summarized what was said after it was over: Obama officials argued that “they had domestic authority to use force in Mali, Syria, Libya, and Congo, against Islamist terrorist threats there”; that “they were actively considering emerging threats and stated that it was possible they would need to return to Congress for new authorities against those threats but did not at present need new authorities”; that “the conflict authorized by the AUMF was not nearly over”; and that “several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD’s interpretation of the AUMF.” Conveying the dark irony of America’s war machine, seemingly lifted right out of the Cold War era film Dr. Strangelove, Goldsmith added:

Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

In response to that, the only real movement in Congress is to think about how to enact a new law to expand the authorization even further. But it’s a worthless and illusory debate, affecting nothing other than the pretexts and symbols used to justify what will, in all cases, be a permanent and limitless war. The Washington AUMF debate is about nothing other than whether more fig leafs are needed to make it all pretty and legal.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence – Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class – clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they’re paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Related matters

Although I’m no fan of mindless partisan hackery, one must acknowledge, if one is to be honest, that sometimes it produces high comedy of the type few other afflictions are capable of producing.

On a related note: when Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about the DOJ’s subpoeans for AP’s phone records – purportedly issued in order to find the source for AP’s story about a successfully thwarted terror attack from Yemen - he made this claim about the leak they were investigating: “if not the most serious, it is within the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen.” But yesterday, the Washington Post reported that CIA officials gave the go-ahead to AP to report the story, based in part on the fact that the administration itself planned to make a formal announcement boasting of their success in thwarting the plot. Meanwhile, the invaluable Marcy Wheeler today makes a strong case that the Obama administration engaged in a fear-mongering campaign over this plot that they knew at the time was false – all for the purpose of justifying the president’s newly announced “signature drone strikes” in Yemen.

The key lesson from all of this should have been learned long ago: nothing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe.

Women’s liberation crusade: Off with your breasts!

Worse than merely maiming herself in an act of outright medical quackery, Angelina Jolie has positioned her decision as some sort of women’s liberation crusade, acting and talking as if her “choice” to remove her breasts somehow blazes a new path of female power for all women. (How sick is this, really?)

Oh, what a mess Jolie has made of herself. She has maimed her own body with no medical justification whatsoever, then celebrated this horrible disfiguration through some sort of twisted perception of what womanhood really is. Being an empowered woman doesn’t mean cutting off your breasts and aborting live babies — even though both of these things are often celebrated by delusional women’s groups. Being an empowered woman means protecting your health, your body and your womanhood by honoring and respecting your body, not maiming it.

A vivacious, confident, healthy woman who protects her fertility and nourishes her unborn child is far more heroic and empowering than someone who maims her own body as some sort of sick sacrifice to the cancer industry. Angelina Jolie, as much as she is often viewed as a symbol of female power, seems to have completely lost touch with the core truths of honoring the “temple” of your own female body.

Cancer is never limited to just the breast

Cancer, by the way, is a systemic problem when it emerges, not a local problem limited to just the breasts or other organs. It may be diagnosed in breast tissues, but that’s not the only place it’s growing. The idea that someone can prevent cancer by just removing their breasts is absurd. If the conditions of cancer are present in the body — due to nutritional deficiencies, exposure to chemicals, radiation, etc. — cancer will develop in many different places, not just breast tissues. Removing an organ that might possibly someday be one of the many locations in which cancer is diagnosed is completely irrational and medically abhorrent. Logically, it’s a lot like arguing that you can avoid flat tires on your car by removing all the tires!

If you really want to learn the truth about cancer — and SAVE your breasts! — get our “New Cancer Solutions” CD set. The third CD is absolutely amazing, offering astounding information that can literally help save your life. You can also hear the entire collection for free during our New Cancer Solutions Healing Summit launching next Monday, May 20th.

If Angelina Jolie had heard the information on these CDs, she would have said, “NO!” to the cancer fear mongers and learned that there are far more effective and empowering ways to protect yourself from cancer. Women everywhere need to hear truly empowering, honoring, holistic information about cancer and stop listening to the insanity of the cancer industry and its delusional, victimized spokespeople like Angelina Jolie.

Celebrating the medical abuse of women

The mainstream media is heralding Jolie’s decision to cut off both her perfectly healthy breasts, announcing Jolie is “admired for bravery.” In a NYT op-ed, Jolie wrote, “I hope that other women can benefit from my experience.” (No, I’m not making this up. She literally wants other healthy women to cut off their breasts, too…)

The medical industry, never known to back down from an opportunity to physically abuse women for profit, is jumping on the double mastectomy bandwagon. In a Businessweek article, a genetic counselor named Rebecca Nagy declares, “Having this conversation empowers us all. It’s wonderful what she’s done.”

Wonderful? To cut off parts of your body that have NO disease? With this logic, abortions are cancer prevention, too, because those babies might one day grow up and develop tumors. Better to kill them early and “prevent cancer,” right?

The irrationality of Jolie’s decision is truly sickening. Even worse is that idea that she may inspire other women to have their healthy bodies maimed, too. If Jolie cut off both legs and called it a “choice” to prevent leg cancer, I have little doubt many women would follow her lead and cut off their legs, too. Jolie herself says she may have her ovaries cut out in the future because they, too, might someday get cancer.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see where this medical insanity ultimately leads. Got a risk of kidney cancer? Remove your kidneys. Risk of colon cancer? Take out your colon. Lung cancer, perhaps? Remove your lungs, just in case! That’s the logic of Angelina Jolie who has been completely deceived by the cancer industry into maiming her own body based on nothing for medical fear mongering and cancer quackery.

Never doubt the fact that fear can be an effective marketing tool when it comes to breast cancer, by the way. The cancer industry rakes in billions of dollars a year based on irrational fears spread by misinformed women.

Medical maiming going viral across the population of sheeple

There’s nothing quite as exciting and heroic as having your body parts chopped off by surgeons and then declaring yourself to be a “pre-vivor” of cancer. Yep, that’s the new term. You’re not really a “survivor” of cancer, since you never had it. You’re a “pre-vivor” because you preempted the cancer.

Or, just as likely, you got suckered into the most delusional decision of your life and had a bunch of quacks slice off pieces of your body that were perfectly healthy to begin with. This is medical insanity at its worst… especially given that a woman’s risk of breast cancer can be reduced by 78% using nothing but vitamin D. Yeah, take some vitamin D and keep your breasts! What a deal, eh?

Why aren’t male cancer doctors cutting off their own testicles?

You’ll note, by the way, that men never have their testicles removed to lower the risk of testicular cancer. Not even the male cancer doctors, oncologists and surgeons who are slicing off women’s breasts all day long. Sure, they think cutting off breasts is a great idea, but ask one of them to part with their own testicles to “prevent” cancer, and they’ll look at you like you’ve gone, well, nuts.

Because cutting off your testicles to prevent testicular cancer that you don’t even have would be stupid, of course. Pure quackery. Suggest it to a man you know and you’ll either be laughed at or punched in the mouth. No ethical doctor would ever remove a perfectly healthy set of testicles from a man who has no symptoms of testicular cancer. The very idea is absurd and possibly even risking a medical malpractice lawsuit.

So why is it somehow acceptable to cut off the breasts of “empowered women” who think they are making some sort of social statement by maiming their own perfectly healthy bodies?

How cancer doctors lie with statistics and use fear to scare women into high-profit procedures

The very idea that breast cancer is a “percent risk” is a complete lie. In reality, everyone has cancer micro-tumors in their bodies, including myself. Cancer is not a disease you just “get” like being randomly struck by lightning. It’s something you must “manage” or “prevent” day by day, meal by meal, through a lifestyle choice that involves vitamin D supplementation, nutrition, superfoods, vegetable juices and avoidance of cancer-causing chemicals and radiation.

So when a doctor says you have a “chance” of getting cancer, what he’s implying is that you have no control over cancer, and that’s an outright lie. Cancer quackery, in other words.

Even Jolie with her BRCA1 gene that’s linked to breast cancer can quite easily follow a dietary and lifestyle plan that suppresses BRCA1 gene expression. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even difficult. It can be done with simple foods that cost a few dollars a day. Those foods include raw citrus, resveratrol (red grapes or red wine), raw cruciferous vegetables, omega-3 oils and much more. Those same foods also help prevent heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other chronic diseases.

Indole-3-carbinol (I3C), by the way, a natural chemical found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage, offers powerful prevention against BRCA1 gene expression. But you don’t hear cancer doctors telling women to “eat more cabbage” because that doesn’t make the cancer industry any money. You can buy I3C as a potent nutritional supplement from a variety of sources. It’s literally cancer prevention in a capsule.

So the whole “chance” argument is pure quackery. There is no chance involved in whether you get cancer. It’s all cause and effect. You are either living a pro-cancer lifestyle and therefore growing cancer, or you’re living an anti-cancer lifestyle and keeping cancer in check so that it never becomes a problem. Cause and effect is what results in either the growth of cancer tumors or the prevention of cancer tumors. There is no “luck” involved.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that medical doctors don’t believe in luck or voodoo on any topic other than cancer. But when it comes to cancer, they want all women to be suckered into the victim mentality that cancer is purely a matter of “luck” and therefore women have no control over their own health outcomes. How dis-empowering! How sick! How incredibly exploitive of women!

If you really want to be informed about breast cancer and the corrupt, dishonest cancer industry, read my related article 10 Facts about the Breast Cancer Industry You’re Not Supposed to Know. Or listen to our upcoming FREE Cancer Solutions Summit broadcasting this coming Monday, May 20th.

Why doesn’t the cancer industry empower women with a sense of control over their own health?

I find it astonishing that the cancer industry doesn’t believe in cause and effect. They would rather scare women with “risk” statistics that imply people have no control over cancer. Empowering women with a sense of control over their own health is the last thing the cancer industry wants to do, because that would cause them to lose customers and lose money.

It’s far more profitable to scare all women into a state of such irrational panic that they agree to the most insane things imaginable such as chopping off both their healthy breasts even though they have no cancer. Such women are then convinced they’ve literally saved their own lives by agreeing to be mutilated by cancer surgeons.

“My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent,” says Jolie. “I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”

Will she also tell her children they should mutilate themselves, too, as a form of medical disease prevention? And what happens if she learns she has a risk of brain cancer? Does she chop off her head and call it a cure?

The scam of making women believe there is only ONE way to reduce your “risk” of breast cancer

The other enormous scam in all this is the idea that there’s only one way to reduce your “risk” of breast cancer. Even if you believe the fictitious number of “87% risk,” why does everyone automatically assume there is one and only one way to lower that risk?

“For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options,” writes Jolie in the NYT. Yet she utterly fails to offer women any options other than the one she took: check in to a cancer center and let them play “cut-poison-burn” on your body. Jolie’s op-ed piece, which reads as if it were written by the public relations department of the Pink Lotus Breast Center, offers nothing in the way of nutrition advice, lifestyle choices, holistic therapies, wellness, alternative medicine… nothing! What an incredible disservice to all the women of America…

In the world of health, nutrition and cancer, there are thousands of ways to prevent cancer and suppress the expression of BRCA1 genes. But Jolie and the cancer industry seem to imply no options exist other than chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery. Three options only. Nothing else exists in their world, not nutritional prevention, not vitamin D therapy, not vitamin C potentiated micro-chemotherapy, not ozone therapy, sauna treatments, acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, stress reduction or anything else. You are supposed to believe that none of these things exist!

And why? Because the cancer industry wants to funnel women like cattle into their slash-poison-burn system of quack treatments. And Angelina Jolie is their new cheerleader. Scarred and no doubt experiencing the chest and armpit numbness that almost always accompanies mastectomy surgery, she now seeks to “inspire” other women to exercise their own sick “choice” and have their breasts removed, too!

It is the sickest invocation of women’s power that I’ve ever witnessed. This is not empowering women, it’s marching them into self-mutilation. And the “risk” is a complete fraud. In truth, Angelina Jolie had a higher risk of dying on the operating table than dying from breast cancer if she simply followed an anti-cancer lifestyle.

Don’t be tricked into self-mutilation by cancer industry quacks

In summary:

• The claim that you have a “percent risk” of breast cancer is a big lie which implies you have no control over cancer.

• BRCA1 genes can be kept quiet (suppressed) through proper foods and lifestyle choices. A gene is not a death sentence.

• The implication that there is only ONE way to reduce breast cancer risk is a complete lie. There are thousands of options and strategies for preventing cancer. Never be cornered into surgery by a group of surgeons pushing irrational fear.

• Cancer micro-tumors exist in everyone. Cancer must be “managed” in everyone to keep it in check and avoid the growth of tumors.

• The cancer industry tricks women using unethical fear tactics to scare women with false statistics into high-profit cancer procedures that only cause them harm.

• The claim that cutting off healthy breasts somehow “empowers” women is sick and demented. Women are far more empowered by honest information on nutrition and healthy living that allows them to keep their bodies intact rather than being sliced up by dishonest cancer surgeons.

Listen to our FREE cancer solutions seminar on May 20th, as we launch our New Cancer Solutions Healing Summit featuring incredibly valuable lectures by holistic / alternative cancer doctors who know what they’re talking about. It’s FREE and all women need to be empowered by this truthful information.