Archive for March, 2009
AboveTopSecret.com’s Top Ten Conspiracy Theories
Over the past several years, the Internet has become fertile ground for the discussion, creation, and evolution of various “alternative points of view,” more popularly known as “conspiracy theories.” The combination of near-zero cost-of-entry required to build an opinionated website with the high availability of collaborative discussion forums have created what some call a renaissance for conspiracy theorists. Ranging from ludicrous and uninformed flights of fancy to thought-provoking essays of brilliant research, the sheer volume of online conspiracy “chatter” is a testament to the incredible number of people who are dissatisfied with the “official” answers to provocative questions.
With over three-million visits a month from those dissatisfied answer-seekers, AboveTopSecret.com has emerged as the largest and most popular web site where conspiracy theories of all kinds are created, examined, debunked, filtered, and matured. We turned to our members and visitors to review all of history’s conspiracies, compared with contemporary conspiracies, and created…
Severe Space Weather Threatens Earth
It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by…
Matt Taibbi: The Big Takeover
The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people’s money would make his dick bigger.
Matt Tiabbi – The Big Takeover
The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people’s money would make his dick bigger.
No Clear Evidence of a Maya 2012 Doomsday Prophecy
Do the Maya elders predict doomsday?
The modern Maya peoples have an elected council of elders currently headed by Don Alejandro. In recent interviews he has been very clear in stating that the Maya do not believe there is a doomsday tied to the end of the 13 Bak’tun cycle.
In fact Maya elders have only ever ventured as far as suggesting that times of change at the end of such eras may include serious natural upheavals, much as we see our climate changing now.
No Maya elder is stating a complete global devastation ahead. I find that most of their talks carry a very positive air to them, they explain the benefits of the changes they see post 2012.
Is a doomsday within the written prophecies?
The Big Takeover
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone: While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments).
No one knows who’s getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America’s credit rating.
By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to…
Breast Implants Bust Woman for ID Theft
A California woman turned herself in to Huntington Beach police yesterday after being wanted for using a fake ID to get liposuction and trade in her breasts implants for new ones.
The Big Takeover
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone: People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a…
Dead Teen Gets Attendance Warning From School
The British parents of a teenage girl who died recently received a letter from their daughter’s school demanding that she improve her attendance.
AIG Changes Name to AIU (Sounds Like IOU to Me…)
Just like Blackwater’s change to Xe, and MCI’s change to WorldCom before them…
Reuters: Workmen rolled up their sleeves at American International Group Inc. this weekend to take down the most prominent sign at the downtown Manhattan offices of the embattled insurer that has become the scorn of America.
A spokesman said the company had decided to replace the large AIG sign — outside the entrance to its property-casualty offices — as part of its plan to change that operation’s name to AIU Holdings Ltd.
The move is designed to “distinguish these well-capitalized businesses from AIG,” said a second spokesman.
An old tactic that Stringer Bell makes use of on The Wire to deal with an inferior drug supply, AIG is doing the same thing:
FDIC Didn’t Collect From Banks For A Decade, Now Out Of Money
The FDIC, the federal agency that insures bank deposits up to $250,000, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.
Apparently, for years the FDIC tried to get congressional authority to collect the premiums in case of a looming crisis. But a Republican Congress deemed bank failures an artifact of the past and decided that there was no need to collect the premiums, says the Boston Globe. (Wouldn’t it be nice if your auto or health insurance company decided to insure you for billions of dollars for free?)
Now with 25 banks having failed last year, 17 so far this year, and many more expected in the coming months, the FDIC has proposed large new premiums for banks at the very time when many can least afford to pay–banks say it will force them to further curtail lending…
Japanese Monster Mummies
Lurking the halls of Buddhist temples and museums across Japan are a host of monster mummies — the preserved skeletal remnants of demons, mermaids, winged beings, and river imps. Until about a century ago, remains such as these were held as heirlooms of influential families or shown off at carnivals, and popular legend implied that they could cause or cure misfortune. Some of these are obviously hoaxes, the work of artists who altered and combined existing skeletons, while others…are more questionable.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner Encourages Chinese Call For Global Currency
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Wednesday said he is “quite open” to China’s suggestion of moving toward a currency system linked to the International Monetary Fund’s Strategic Drawing Rights.
Zhou Xiaochuan, China’s central bank governor, earlier this month said the world should consider the SDR, a basket of dollars, euros, sterling and yen, as a super-sovereign reserve currency.
Geithner, responding to a question, said he hadn’t read Zhou’s proposal but added, “as I understand it, it’s a proposal designed to increase the use of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights. I am actually quite open to that suggestion.”
Barry Cooper’s Back!
When you’re at a party and the police show up, what’s usually the end result?
Party over, at the very least. Right?
Well … Not if you’re hanging out with Barry Cooper. Disinfo ed’s note: Cooper’s DVD Never Get Busted Again was released by Disinformation.
Raw Story readers may well remember Cooper. Late last year, he pulled a first-of-its-kind stunt to debut his ‘coming soon’ reality show ‘KopBusters,’ a ‘To Catch A Predator’-style program targeting allegedly crooked officers. Our initial report on his exploits with a phony marijuana grow house in Odessa, Texas is still one of the most well-read writeups carried by Raw Story.
After all, it isn’t every day a former narcotics officer becomes a celebrity anti-prohibitionist.
A couple days after I filed the initial Raw report on ‘KopBusters,’ I reached out to Cooper and co. to get some more material. As it just so happened, they live not more than 15 minutes from…
The Quiverfull Movement
Quiverfull movement shuns birth control, common sense, in order to defeat their “Adversary.”
The Quiverfull Movement
Quiverfull movement shuns birth control, common sense, in order to defeat their “Adversary.”
The Quiverfull Movement
Quiverfull movement shuns birth control and common sense in order to defeat their “Adversary.”
Reports: Bilderberg To Meet in Athens
Reports circling in the Greek media have suggested that the location of this year’s secretive Bilderberg meeting will be Athens, Greece.
GR Reporter, a Greek based website that gathers information from different print and electronic media in Greece, reports that the Elefterios Tipos newspaper recently announced the location and date of the meeting as Athens between 14th and 16th of May.
A second report in another Greek newspaper, Tovima, has also suggested that the confab will be held in Athens in the same area that hosted the 1993 conference.
According to the reports, invited guests include the Queen of Netherlands Beatrix, the Spanish Queen Sophia, Lawrence Summers, head of the National Economic Council and James Jones, head of the US National Security Council.
UK Government May Monitor Facebook, MySpace, Bebo
The Home Office is considering plans to force such sites to hold data about their users’ movements to thwart criminals who use them to communicate.
The information would then be stored on a central database as part of the government’s proposed Intercept Modernisation Programme.
The proposal follows plans to retain information about all telephone calls, emails, and internet visits made by everyone in Britain through a multi-billion pound system.
A European Union statutory order, called the Data Retention Directive, already proposes that internet service providers in member states store communications and traffic data for one year.
However, Vernon Coaker, Minister of State for policing, crime and security, has told MPs that it does not go far enough.
Mr Coaker told a Commons Committee: “Social-networking sites, such as MySpace or Bebo, are not covered by the directive.
“That is one reason why the government are looking at what we should do about the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP),…
