Now Official: For the British Ministry of Defence, Afghan Lives Are Cheap by Felicity Arbuthnot

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London, England
September 23, 2013

Image by M Zia Akbari @ Canada in Afghanistan / Canada en Afghanistan via Flickr

The contempt with which “liberated” Afghans are treated by the British Ministry of Defence has been revealed in figures obtained by the (London) Independent (23rd September 2013)

“ ‘Fatality claims’ include the deaths of Afghan civilians in botched air-strikes, crossfire and road accidents involving British forces” – in an invasion into which the British, as ever, trotted obediently after their Washington masters.

Spilling the NSA’s Secrets: Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger on the Inside Story of Snowden Leaks

Dandelion Salad

Image by Joe in DC via Flickr

LeakSourceTV on Sep 23, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org – Three-and-a-half months after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden came public on the the U.S. government’s massive spying operations at home and abroad, we spend the hour with Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, the British newspaper that first reported on Snowden’s leaked documents. The Guardian has continued releasing a series of exposés based on Snowden’s leaks coloring in the details on how the NSA has managed to collect telephone records in bulk and information on nearly everything a user does on the Internet. The articles have ignited widespread debate about security agencies’ covert activities, digital data protection and the nature of investigative journalism. The newspaper has been directly targeted as a result — over the summer the British government forced the paper to destroy computer hard drives containing copies of Snowden’s secret files, and later detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian for nearly two decades, joins us to tell the inside story of The Guardian’s publication of the NSA leaks and the crackdown it’s faced from its own government as a result.

F is for FIRE Sector by Michael Hudson

Image by Jeremy Brooks via Flickr

by Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
September 23, 2013

Part F in the Insider’s Economic Dictionary.

Factoid: A hypothesis, rumor or story so consonant with peoples’ preconceptions that it is accepted as a fact or working assumption, even though it often is made up a priori. Among the most notorious examples are the ideas of diminishing returns, equilibrium, that privatized ownership is inherently more efficient than public management, and that trickle-down economics works. (See Junk Science.)