Archive for February, 2010
Illuminati Symbolism and 9/11 In Hollywood Movies
Nice little montage of Illuminati/Masonic/911/Conspiracy symbolism culled from popular films. Quite a bit of a stretch in places, but still rather amusing. Possibly even….”illuminating”!
Save Watkins Books!
For anyone interested in esoteric and occult books, one of the very finest shops in the world is London’s Watkins Books. For those of you with deep pockets, please dig deep and buy the business out of bankruptcy/administration. From The Bookseller:
London’s oldest esoteric bookshop and Cecil Court ‘institution’ Watkins Books has gone into administration with 11 members of staff losing their jobs.
The bookshop, which was founded in 1897 and moved to Cecil Court in 1901, closed down yesterday (23rd February), following the appointment of administrator Harris Lipman. A sign displayed on the shop’s window read: “Shop Closed Today”.
Tim Bryars, secretary of the Cecil Court Association, told The Bookseller that it had “taken everybody by surprise”. It is understood that trading had been slower than usual, for a number of reasons including increased online competition and the bad weather. The company was hit by a Capital Gains Tax bill of £500,000,…
A Third Of Texans Say Dinosaurs And Humans Coexisted
Does a third of the population believe that “The Flinstones was a documentary”? In a poll, one out of three Texans say that humans and dinosaurs lived together at one point. Oh, and, the majority say that humanity did not develop from an earlier species. The Texas Tribune reports:
Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.
[Professor David] Prindle recall[s] a line from comedian Lewis Black. “He did a routine a few years back in which he said that a significant proportion of the American people think that the ‘The Flintstones’ is a documentary,” Prindle says. “Turns out he was right.”
Dick Cheney Suffers His Fifth Heart Attack, Is Fine
Amazing: after suffering his fifth heart attack, our former vice president is feeling good and expected to be discharged from the hospital in a day or two. Cheney is definitely going to be around forever; come 2100 his head will be floating in a tank of formaldehyde, barking out orders. From CNN:
Monday’s heart attack was Cheney’s fifth. The first occurred in 1978, when he was 37. He suffered his second in 1984 and his third in 1988 before undergoing quadruple bypass surgery to unblock his arteries. His fourth heart attack occurred in November 2000, after he became vice president. At that time, doctors inserted a stent to open an artery.
Doctors in 2001 implanted a device to track and control his heart rhythm. In 2008, he underwent a procedure to restore his heart to a normal rhythm.
The New Bubble: Superman Comics
From MarketWatch:
Forget gold, Chinese real estate or Greek debt derivatives. A new champion in the asset-bubble wars has emerged: Superman comics.
A sale of the first Action Comics issue, from 1938, drew a winning bid of $1 million, according to an auction site called ComicConnect.com.
That’s three times what a copy of the premiere comic cost just last year. To be fair, last year’s sale was of a slightly lower-quality copy, so the appreciation over the past 12 months may be somewhat less — say, double. Still, compared with a lot of other investments over the past year, that’s not too shabby.
Returns over the longer term are only slightly less dramatic.
For a buy-and-hold purist who put money into the comic 70 years ago, the return works out to an annual compounded rate of 25.8925%.
Put another way, if you’d bothered to buy the first edition when it came out, you could have gotten…
Secret Caves of the Lizard People
So now we know where David Icke got his reptilian conspiracy concept! From the wonderful world of Strange Maps:
This map is an essential ingredient of a story that has ‘Indiana Jones’ written all over it: secret caves, a lost civilisation and above all, a treasure trove of gold in unimaginable quantities. And all this in the ground below the present-day metropolis of Los Angeles.
Below are two extracts from the LA Times of 29 January 1934, in the first of which reporter Jean Bosquet details the incredible story of G. Warren Shufelt, a mining engineer, who had been told of the underground city and its treasures by a wise old Indian, had consequently located it via ‘radio X-ray’ and was currently sinking shafts into the ground to reach it.
The second extract explains the whereabouts of the putative underground city on the map, and provides the legends for a few photos showing…
Glenn Beck: The New Abbie Hoffman?
Glenn Beck at CPAC 2010. Photo: Gage Skidmore CC
That’s what Michael Lind claims, in Salon.com:
Street theater. Communes. Manifestoes. Denunciations of “the system.” The counterculture is back. Only this time it’s on the right.
Political factions that are out of power have a choice. They can form a counter-establishment or a counterculture. A counter-establishment (a term that Sidney Blumenthal used to describe the neoconservatives in the 1970s) seeks to return to power by reassuring voters that it is sober and responsible. A counter-establishment publishes policy papers and holds conferences and its members endure their exile in think tanks and universities.
In contrast, a counterculture refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rules of the game that it has lost. Instead of moving toward the center, the counterculture heads for the fringes. Like a cult, it creates its own parallel reality, seceding from a corrupt and wicked society into morally and politically pure enclaves.
In…
Can Open Source Manufacturing Save Humanity?
Open source manufacturing essentially lets you download hardware from the web — free packages of coded instructions to make…well, just about anything.
It leverages collaborative “hackerspace” dens and fab labs, while the Social Engineering-Knowledge Database simplifies searching for free open source hardware designs and creating materials lists by organizing them into packages with things like CAD files, assembly instructions, and a bill of materials…
$10,000 Reward If You Can Watch This Horror Movie
From Reuters:
A Bollywood filmmaker has issued a lucrative challenge to horror movie fans: a $10,000 reward for anyone who can watch his latest supernatural thriller, alone, in a cinema until the closing credits. Ram Gopal Varma’s “Phoonk 2,” a sequel to his 2008 film of the same name, is about an evil spirit that traumatizes a family.
“Anyone who says the movie cannot scare him is going to be put in a theater by himself,” Varma told reporters in Mumbai at an event to promote the movie. Varma said the film fan who steps up to the challenge will be wired up to a heart monitoring machine as well as a camera that ensures they keep their eyes open during the whole movie. Readings from the machines will be shown live on a screen outside the cinema, Varma said, and if the contestant succeeds, they will win 500,000 rupees (approximately $10,850)…
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World Government, Alex Jones and Me
Columnist Gideon Rachman credits 
Alex Jones with his success (sort of), in the Financial Times:
To this day, the most successful article I have ever written was a column called “And now for a world government“. By successful, I don’t mean that it was a particularly good article – this is “success” defined in terms of internet hits.
I noticed the other day that if I type my name into Google, one of the first popular searches suggested is “Gideon Rachman world government” which yields over 40,000 results. Gideon Rachman and new world order produces 844,000 results. Slightly weirdly, another popular search seems to be “Gideon Rachman, Jewish”, which produces over 15,000 hits.
The common thread, I think, is that my world government piece was picked up by the loony right in America as grist for their conspiracy theory that there is a secret plot to create a world government and to deprive…
Ron Paul Wins the CPAC Straw Poll for President, What’s Next?
In his own words, on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show, here is Ron Paul:
The Tattoo Used in Auschwitz Was Originally An IBM Code Number
Here is another (controversial) chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on me, look at The Memory Hole.
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The tattooed numbers on the forearms of people held and killed in Nazi concentration camps have become a chilling symbol of hatred. Victims were stamped with the indelible number in a dehumanizing effort to keep track of them like widgets in the supply chain.
These numbers obviously weren’t chosen at random. They were part of a coded system, with each number tracked as the unlucky person who bore it was moved through the system.
Edwin Black made headlines in 2001 when his painstakingly researched book, IBM and the Holocaust, showed that IBM machines were used to automate the “Final Solution” and the jackbooted takeover of Europe. Worse, he showed that the top levels of the company either knew or willfully turned a blind eye.
A year and a half after that book gave Big Blue…
Toyota’s Consumer Safety Problems Are Dwarfed By Big Pharma’s Deadly Drugs
Mike Adams writes on Natural News:
Even as Toyota now finds itself the target of an increasingly hyped-up inquisition about “public safety,” skeptical consumers are asking the commonsense question: If public safety is so important, then why isn’t Congress asking about the dangers of Big Pharma’s deadly drugs?
Toyota’s problems with throttle controls and brakes haven’t actually killed anyone as far as we know. Even if deaths have occurred, their number would be extremely small compared to the number of deaths caused by Big Pharma’s products. FDA-approved pharmaceuticals kill nearly 270 people each day in the United States alone, and that’s according to conservative calculations published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That’s equivalent to a jumbo jet airliner falling out of the sky and crashing in a giant ball of flame every single day in the U.S.
If you’re concerned about public safety in the United States, there’s no industry…
Court Documents Reveal Palin’s Grandson Uses Socialized Medicine
From The Raw Story:
For someone who once generated a national hysteria by claiming socialized medicine would bring about government-run “death panels” that would kill the elderly and children with mental defects, Sarah Palin seems remarkably calm, what with her grandson now facing the very same allegedly tyrannical construct, that is.Yes, that’s right: Sarah Palin, Alaska’s former governor and a millionaire thanks to sales of her book, has a grandson whose health care is paid for by the federal government, according to newly released court documents.
The revelation was made in court documents filed Feb. 16, relating to the child support battle between Bristol Palin and Levi Jonson, available here [PDF link] courtesy of E! Online.
“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment…
Marijuana Use by Seniors Goes Up as Boomers Age
From Yahoo News:
In her 88 years, Florence Siegel has learned how to relax: A glass of red wine. A crisp copy of The New York Times, if she can wrest it from her husband. Some classical music, preferably Bach. And every night like clockwork, she lifts a pipe to her lips and smokes marijuana.
Long a fixture among young people, use of the country’s most popular illicit drug is now growing among the AARP set, as the massive generation of baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s grows older.
The number of people aged 50 and older reporting marijuana use in the prior year went up from 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent from 2002 to 2008, according to surveys from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The rise was most dramatic among 55- to 59-year-olds, whose reported marijuana use more than tripled from 1.6 percent in 2002…
Cheney Confesses to Serious Crimes — Torture Is Just the Beginning
From Alternet:
Dick Cheney’s statutory crimes are notable for their severity, their number, and his public confessions to them. Torture is the least of it.
We can start with the crimes found in the three articles of impeachment contained in H Res 333 in the 110th Congress:
1. “Cheney has purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests, to wit:” (H Res 333 goes on to list evidence).
2. “Cheney purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner…
The Rise of the Economic Elite
From Dissident Voice:
The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.
As a record number of US citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening; how did we get to this point?
The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on US workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970-2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEOs, this pay ratio…
A History of American Tax Revolts (Photos)
Newsweek presents:
Nobody likes taxes. But some people really don’t like taxes. Joseph Stack, a software engineer in a long-running feud with the Internal Revenue Service, crashed his small airplane into an Austin, Texas, office building that housed nearly 200 IRS workers on Feb. 18, 2010. Stack and a man believed to be an IRS employee were killed in the crash. The Austin attack is just the latest in a long history of protests against the government’s power to tax. Before the United States even existed, patriots staged the Boston Tea Party in protest of the British crown’s taxation of the Colonies.
See the photos and read the stories of the history of tax revolt in America on Newsweek
Grant Morrison, Paul McGuigan And Stephen Fry Team Up For TV Series
Grant Morrison, ComiCon 2006. Photo: pinguino, CC
Despite his unbelieveable success as a writer, Grant Morrison has yet to have one of his comics translated onto the screen. Now he’s going to be writing for TV and personally, I can’t wait! Via MTV News:
Comic book scribe Grant Morrison is teaming up with “Push” director Paul McGuigan for a currently untitled television series to be filmed in Scotland, according to McGuigan himself.
In an interview with Live For Films, McGuigan revealed that he’s developing a seven episode television thriller alongside Morrison and actor Stephen Fry, who comic book fans will remember as talk show host Gordon Deitrich in “V for Vendetta.”
“It takes place over seven days around an event that happens in Scotland,” said the “Push” filmmaker. “It’s a modern take on an old fable or fairy story. If you know [Grant's] work you might have an idea of what it will be…
