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Tuesday November 25, 2014
News Articles

How Obama Pushed Hagel Out of the Pentagon
Bloomberg | Jonathan Allen | 11/25/14

"The White House has really wanted to minimize the influence of the Pentagon on policy," said Rosa Brooks, who was counselor to then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy during Obama's first term.

Like his immediate predecessors at the Pentagon, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Hagel chafed at the way a small cadre of Obama loyalists centralized power in the White House. When Obama backed off a threat to bomb Syria last year, he made the decision on a walk with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough. Hagel was informed of the decision later.

Tension between Hagel and White House aides got so bad, the defense official said, that Hagel would often phone Obama after the meetings to make sure his voice was heard. ... Read more

Wall Street Pension-Raiders Scored Big Wins in 2014 Midterms
BillMoyers | author | 11/21/14

Last fall, journalists David Sirota and Matt Taibbi dug into a well-funded Wall Street campaign to loot public pension funds. A number of states had, or were in the process of turning billions of dollars in public employees' retirement funds over to various financial firms that in turn skimmed exorbitant fees off the top. ... Read more

Looting the Pension Funds
RollingStones | Matt Taibbi | 09/26/14

In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo -- an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist -- the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.

Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford -- she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about." ... Read more

WALL STREET IS TAKING OVER AMERICA'S PENSION PLANS
TheIntercept | Murtaza Hussain |

Coverage of the midterm elections has, understandably, focused on the shift in political power from Democrats toward Republicans. But behind the scenes, another major story has been playing out. Wall Street spent upwards of $300M to influence the election results. And a key part of its agenda has been a plan to move more and more of the $3 trillion dollars in unguarded government pension funds into privately managed, high-fee investments -- a shift that may well constitute the biggest financial story of our generation that you've never heard of. .... Read more

Here Comes France: Right-Wing Leader Marine Le Pen Demands Central Bank Repatriate French Gold
ZeroHedge | author | 11/25/14

First Germany, then the Netherlands, perhaps Switzerland this weekend, and now the French right-wing Front National, which shockingly came first in May's European parliament elections, and whose leader Marine Le Pen is currently polling in first place in a hypothetical presidential election (in both a first and run off round), ahead of president Hollande, has sent a letter to the governor of the French Central Bank, the Banque de France, demanding that France join the list of nations which have repatriated, or at least tried to, their gold. ... Read more

Apple Market Cap Tops $700 Billion, Netflix Goes Red In 2014
ZeroHedge | author | 11/25/14

Apple tops $700 billion market cap and is up over 50% year-to-date...
Meanwhile Netflix has once again given up all its year-to-date gains...

Read more
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Tar Sands - Click to zoom
Tar Sands is a messy job
A Thanksgiving Snowstorm Could Make America's Busiest Travel Day A Living Hell
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Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, November 25 [10:36]
DN | Black Lives Matter: Ferguson Erupts After Grand Jury Clears Officer in Michael Brown Killing (11/25/14) [20:02]
DN | Riot as the Language of the Unheard: Ferguson Protests Set to Continue In Fight For Racial Justice (11/25/14) [15:14]
*Matt Taibbi on How Wall Street Hedge Funds Are Looting the Pension Funds of Public Workers (older) [7:04]
TRNN | IPS fellow Phyllis Bennis and Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman discuss Hagel's actions on Afghanistan, ISIS, and the Pentagon budget (11/25/14) [13:05]
TYT | 12-Year-Old With BB Gun Killed By Police On Playground (11/24/14) [8:40]
TYT | Pentagon Boss Chuck Hagel Fired - Why And What Now? (11/24/14) [12:14]
TYT | Forget Ferguson, Blacks Are The Real Threat To Blacks, Says Giuliani (11/24/14) [10:54]
TYT | Conspiracy-Debunking Benghazi Report Whips Lindsey Graham Into A Tizzy (11/24/14) [8:31]
Thom Hartmann
*Thom Hartmann | EXPOSED: 90 Pipeline Spills in 4 Months... (11/24/14) [9:11]
*Keystone PipeLIES Exposed from Center for Media and Democracy (05/24/14) [23:07]
www.pipeliesexposed.org website
Ring of Fire
Ring of Fire (11/23/14) [57:00]
  1. 00:45 - "The Most Selfish Congress In History." Rant about upcoming Congress's plans for America. Congress, climate change, environment, jobs, economy, wages. #SelfishRepublicans
  2. 07:06 - David Haynes will tell us how corporate greed and negligence have made our roadways a very hazardous place. Airbag, Guard Rail, Corporation, Road, Danger, Lawsuit. #CorporateGreed
  3. 17:24 - "The Net Neutrality Battle Rages On." Timothy Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press in New Jersey, will give us the latest on the ongoing battle for net neutrality. Net Neutrality, Telecom, Company, Internet, NSA, Spying. #NetNeutrality
  4. 26:16 - "Financial Divide Threatens American Security." Attorney Howard Nations explains how the growing gap between the haves and have nots is threatening our democracy. Income Gap, Money, Finance, Economy. #WealthGap
  5. 37:08 - "Fast Track To Disaster." Attorney David Hersh will tell us how the TPP could get fast tracked from the new GOP congress. Trade, Deal, TPP, Negotiation, Jobs, Wages. #NoFastTrack
  6. 46:48 - "SEC Delays Wrecking Our Economy." Peter Mougey will explain why the Securities and Exchange Commission is delaying rules and regulations that could help curb Wall Street crime. Banks, Wall Street, SEC, Dodd Frank. #JusticeDelayed

11.25.2014. 11:29



Special Interest Important stuff
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Newer Documentaries You Might Not Have Seen

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Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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