Despite recent establishment efforts to sanitise it, World War One was not a glorious war. It was an immoral global conflict that led to an unparalleled level of death and destruction.

Very few benefited from the killing. It did, however, line the pockets of arms companies and their shareholders.

As the Arming All Sides project, supported by Campaign Against Arms Trade and On the Record, makes clear, they were certainly not dispassionate bystanders. In fact, the appalling conduct of these companies was instrumental in both fuelling the drive to war and shaping the conflict.

The scale of international tensions created new business opportunities for arms companies. Of course they were only happy to maximise these by purposely exaggerating, and in some cases fabricating, war scares with the aim of exacerbating and profiting from the arms race.

One example of this is Herbert Mulliner, the Director of Coventry Ordnance Works, who in 1908, with the support of journalists at the Daily Mail, worked to persuade the British government that Germany was secretly accelerating its naval programme. The scare worked; stimulating massive naval expenditure in the process and helping to create an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, making war more likely. Even Winston Churchill would later accept that the claims were entirely false.

The arms dealers interests were protected in no small part by the intimate relationship the companies enjoyed with politicians. In 1914 one Labour MP, Philip Snowden, told the House of Commons that with so many MPs being shareholders of arms companies, 'it is not possible to throw a stone at the benches opposite without hitting one.'

The report “Working for the Few,” contains some startling statistics on what it calls the “growing tide of inequality.”

The report states:

• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.
• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.
• The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.
• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

An Italian invention, WoW - Wonderful Water, is a unique water treatment technology turns any kind of water into drinkable water. There is no need for filters, chemicals or other consumables. WoW can treat any source of polluted or dirty water and turn it into clean and drinkable water.

WoW - Wonderful Water may even deal with water which is radioactively polluted and reduce the volume of the polluted water by a factor in excess of 5,000. Thus it would be well suited to deal with the water contamination issues at the crippled Fukshima nuclear power plant in Japan.

By Susan Nevens - Appeared in OpEdNews on 10/19/2014

Some musings........

Often musing is necessary to keep one's sanity, the hope is that someone reads one's thoughts, interjects their own and either tell you that you are NOT insane or that you are off your rockers, both of which I consider a solace.

We learned on Friday (10/3/14), that Sweden's newly elected Social Democrat prime minister Stefan Loefven announced that his country will recognize a Palestinian state, becoming the first EU member in Western Europe to do so.

The British Parliament quickly followed suit.

It must be noted that 7 EU members in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, namely; Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta, Poland and Romania have already recognized the Palestinian state.

Among the non-EU members, Iceland is the only other western European nation to have done so. So Sweden's significance in joining the 130 other countries around the world in recognition of Palestine is due to it being the first Western European country.

Social activism is erratic, non cohesive, everything is dissected, argued and debated to death. It lack greatness of purpose and it's simply because it can't even agree on the fundamentals: Every protest is a movement for accountability. Every peaceful protests is pursuing "peace" and peace was grossly mislabeled and mismanaged by thousands of false prophets.

Peace.. the most aspired of human ideals. The invisible force that stands like an overarching umbrella as a state of “blue sky” when justice is present, when freedom reigns, when access to education or affordable healthcare make people live with peace of mind.

Forget about that delusional and unproductive idea of peace you’ve been dreaming of for 50 years now, imagined, erratically, waving flowers or offering slices of free pizzas to the militarized forces ready to strike them, beat them with sticks in the knees and their shin bones. You can’t be that naive and not have realized that war has evolved! You’re all enemies now. Even raising both hands in surrender to the militarized forces can get you shot. Have you at least made up your mind whether when you think of peace, you refer to non violent dissent, personal serenity and universal love and compassion, inclusion and tolerance, or the active pursuit of a world free of armed weapons, nuclear weapons and major national quarrels?

Don't want to hear it from me? Well then, look at Yoko Ono and see how she has expanded her imagine into "holding accountable" the government for creating new wars. See how she advocates for freedom of epxression and dissent.

One of the most fascinating aspects of popular interpretation of American History, especially among the Christian nation believers, is the assumption that everything started fresh, that American history started when we got here and is not connected to anything that happened before. This leads to a dangerously simplistic and naive perspective that ignores and denies previous social reality.

Like many, I was taught that the Puritans left England, then Holland, because they were persecuted for their religion. Actually, while they were suppressed in England, that could hardly be called "persecution"; and they left Holland because they saw their children acculturating and did not like that. And the settlers who made Virginia a success - not the original incompetents - were refugees from the English Civil War,  in other words, the losers in that conflict.

We did not start fresh.

Albion's Seed demonstrates convincingly that we brought our cultural traditions and perspectives with us, mostly from 4 specific regions in England: The Puritans into New England, the Quakers into Pennsylvania, the Cavaliers into Virginia and further South, and Borderlanders (mostly from the border between England and Scotland) through Pennsylvania into the Appalachians, Kentucky and Tennessee. While each of these four cultures adapted, the survival of cultural traditions remained strong and pervasive.

Opposition to the pipeline has galvanized a national movement that unites environmentalists, indigenous groups, farmers, ranchers, and landowners; since 2008, more than 2,000 activists have gotten arrested in tar sands protests and over 50,000 have rallied against the proposal in Washington, D.C.

Close to two million metric tons of carbon pollution has been left underground as a result of the anti-pipeline mobilization, according to a release sent out by a coalition that includes350.org, Bold Nebraska, the Center for Biological Diversity, Oil Change International, and the Energy Action Coalition.

"For six years family farmers and ranchers have stood up to TransCanada, a foreign oil corporation, as they tried to bully and swindle us for our land," Bold Nebraska director Jane Kleeb told Common Dreams. "Every day the pipe is not in our water is a victory for our livelihoods."

It may sound like a harsh statement, but our out of control, corrupted system of institutions was allowed to get to this point because activists, or organizations on their behalf, allowed it. Is there a lack of organizations, of movements, of unions or associations of alternative media in the U.S.? Is there a lack of agreements on the part of organizations on the issue of resetting NetNeutrality or "Money Out Of Politics"? Look at the images. If we can't agree on anything, is our own fault. We're just as corrupted as the government, just in a different way. We're corrupted by self interests, by the spread of self serving ego driven personalities, the "1% inside activism", and plain fear driven competition.

When we look at society's problems we tend to focus on the system of governance and point out its flaws. We speak of "us vs.the Establishment, the corrupted CEOs, the Government" and we speak as "activists". But activism is by far not a cohesive system. Activism is a system that is trying to create an impact on what is not working: the system of governance. The form in which we're trying to create order inside activism is not creating order and unity, quite the opposite. We're as divided as ever. There are more, not less petition sites, more organizations trying to do the same, not less, more communities, pages, movements on Facebook not less.

Carne Ross says that "order can be recreated from the ground up. This is a fascinating characteristics of complex systems. The characteristics of individual agents don't necessarily manifest as characteristics of entire system. Water molecules are not wet, a brain neuron has no consciousness. When you put them together they create consciousness. When you put water molecules together they become "wet", they are "water" and only then, they are able to extinguish a fire. The bigger the fire, the more they have to be.