Mal Wedd

● The IPCC’s "certainty" about its certainty is a fraud, and latest report makes that clear. In order to fully appreciate its legerdemain, we need a reminder of how real scientists deal with uncertainty.

Let us start with the concept of time, which can now be measured in intervals hundreds of trillions of times smaller than a second, thanks to clocks made from ytterbium, which have the potential to be 100,000 times more precise than the current gold standard – the caesium atomic clock. All you need to do is cool ytterbium atoms to within ten-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, and use a laser to stimulate transitions between two of the atoms' energy levels. Such clocks would gain or lose less than a thousandth of a second in around 100 million years. I find this stuff absolutely awesome -- not as in “your new hairdo is awesome”, but as in truly awe-inspiring.

Precise time-keeping is just what we need to Usain Bolt reduce any uncertainty associated with his world records. If the International Olympic Committee (IOC) engaged physicists to improve timing techniques, atomic clocks would probably not be recommended (despite their incredible performance). Instead, the physicists would methodically go through all the uncertainties involved and improve them, starting with the most significant ones.

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Wayne Madsen

Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis were fond of saying, "Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!" (“Today Germany, tomorrow the world!”), when describing the Nazi Party’s goals for global domination.

Many of Israel’s dominant political parties espouse the same goals for Zionism, which many observers believe take a page from the Nazi playbook when it comes to expansion not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but beyond to the Golan Heights of Syria, southern Lebanon, Sinai, eastern Libya, northern Iraq, and even further afield.

The top polling Israeli political parties heading into the January 22 election all advocate varying degrees of expansion. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud alliance with former Foreign Minister illegal settler-based Yisrael Beitenu is staking their election bid on building thousands of new housing units in occupied east Jerusalem, starting in the Gilo area. There are also plans to build thousands of more illegal housing units in occupied West Bank towns, including Ariel, Hebron, and the north Dead Sea and Jordan River Valley.

As expansionistic as the Likud-Beitenu bloc is, the rising star of Naftali Bennett, a dual U.S.-Israeli national who leads the new Home Party is even more nationalistic, with its platform centered on annexing 60 percent of the West Bank, referred to as “Area C” in the now all-but-dead Oslo Peace Accords.

Palestinians would exercise nominal control in a Palestine fully dependent on Israel that would resemble the “bantustans” created for blacks by the apartheid government of South Africa: non-contiguous reservations that would be at the mercy of further encroachment by a militarily-dominant Israel.

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The BRussells Tribunal

There's nothing "humanitarian" about a new US/NATO war of aggression.

The Syrian Civilian population has been the major victim of all kinds of violence and they definitely don't need anymore bombing and destruction from the US and NATO.

Every U.S. war claims to “punish” a bad act. After the Tonkin Gulf incident and the Vietnam war, the incubator baby massacre in Kuwait and the first Gulf war, the Racak massacre and the Kosovo war, the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the second Gulf war, the threat of massacre in Benghazi and the Libyan war, the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syrian Government Forces is the latest pretext invoked to justify an imminent war.

All the previous pretexts were fabricated or dubious.

What we know is that 12 members of the Syrian rebel forces were arrested in May in Turkey. The rebels possessed 4.5 pounds of Sarin, the neurotoxin gas that allegedly has been used in the recent attack. What we also know is that United Nations Human Rights investigator Carla Del Ponte declared in May: “according to what we have established so far, it is at the moment opponents of the regime who are using sarin gas”.

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