Archive for March, 2010
Sarah Palin Admits To Sneaking Into Canada For Health Care
Speaking before a sold-out crowd in Calgary this month, Sarah Palin reveals how her family got medical care when she was growing up: by sneaking into Canada. And, yes, she sees the irony, the Globe and Mail reports:
The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.
“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn’t that ironic?”
Why Punish Iran for What Israel Has Already Done?
From Truthout:
As the Western powers continue to criticize Iran for its nuclear enrichment program, and while they try to pressure Russia and China to impose stiffer economic sanctions, maybe it would be an opportune time to remember that for decades Israel has developed nuclear weapons and has tried to keep its program a secret. In fact, Israel has produced more than 200 nuclear warheads, a number of which can be deployed on nuclear submarines, long-range aircraft and missiles.(1)
Starting in the 1950’s, Israel begin producing uranium for its nuclear missiles program. It is one of the few nations that has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it has never declared its nuclear weapons program publicly.(2) From the Dimona reactor in the Negev Desert to the complex nuclear facilities at Nahal Soreq, Rehovat and Yodefat – which is near the Syrian border – Israel has constructed a number of large-scale nuclear facilities,…
Coca-Cola Intimidates Student Group Over Film Screening
Maybe I’ll have a Pepsi instead. Via Art Threat:
What can make a giant tremble? When a penniless student group gets a threat from New York lawyers — in this case, Coca-Cola’s lawyers — on account the students want to show a film condemning human rights abuses, the optics suggest that the giant has something to hide. ‘Screening truth to power’, it seems, has its consequences.
Earlier this month, Coke threatened legal action to prevent the screening of a new documentary film The Coca-Cola Case. The $141 billion company (with annual revenues of $28 billion) threatened a small non-profit media-arts group called Cinema Politica which shows documentary films for free at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and through a network of independent locals across Canada, in the United States, and in Europe and Latin America.
Remembering Mac Tonnies
Art by Isoban
Via Technoccult:
Mac Tonnies was a ufologist, the author of After the Martian Apocalypse and The Cryptoterrestrials, and the blogger behind Posthuman Blues. He died on October 19th, 2009 due to heart complications.
The Cryptoterrestrials was released posthumously on March 15th, 2010. Fortunately, Mac gave numerous interviews on the subject of his book prior to his death, including this one with the Ballardian and an interview on Coast to Coast AM.
Since his death, a dedicated community of friends and readers has been working to preserve his legacy. Blazingbetta (aka Sarah Multiverse) has started a Mac Tonnies tribute site, and Capn Marrrk has been hard at work archiving Posthuman Blues. I talked to both of them via instant message.
Now You Have Two Ways To Go Blind … Lazer Tits!
According to the movers & shakers of the internets, this is the new trend sweeping the web …
You are forewarned, I am not responsible for blindness resulting from viewing of these (many NSFW) pics. LazerTits says:
For centuries the female bosom has been wrongfully held in the prison of maternal duty and manboy motor-boating … It’s time to get ZAPPED!!!!
What will YOU say when your kids ask where you were during the revolution? Don’t burn your bra, BLAST IT!!!
Lady Gaga: Puppet of Illuminati Mind Control?
Disinformation World News first “uncovered” this Illuminati plot back in August of last year. Here’s more analysis from Max Fisher of Vigilant Citizen’s The Hidden Meaning of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” on the Atlantic Wire. Check out the video below and make up your own mind…
ALLEGATION: Lady Gaga is a pawn of the Illuminati and a peddler of the occult. Her music video “Telephone” is a brazen attempt at recruiting teenagers into mind control programs.
LADY GAGA IS: “A mind-controlled drone who kills people”
“TELEPHONE” VIDEO IS ABOUT: “Ritual murder of average Americans in a diner by mind-controlled slaves” and “mind control, a covert practice used by the military, the CIA, religious cults and the Illuminati elite. It is used to program human beings to become mental slaves and to execute specific tasks.”
LYRICAL EVIDENCE: “By ‘kinda busy’, Gaga means she has dissociated from reality. Real life is calling her brain but she ‘has no service’, she’s not there. Gaga is not thinking or talking for herself anymore, her head and her heart have been dissociated from her core personality due to [Illuminati/CIA] Monarch programming.”
Health Care Insurer Assurant, Targeted HIV Patients to Drop Coverage
Talk about a terrible name regarding these circumstances … “Assurant” Health? Why purchase health insurance in the first place if this can happen? Murray Waas writes on Reuters:
WASHINGTON — In May 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance.
Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis, revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that.
So he hired an attorney — not because he wanted to sue anyone; on the contrary, the shy African-American teenager expected his insurance was canceled by mistake and would be reinstated once he set the company straight.
But Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, ignored his attorney’s letters, as they had earlier inquiries from a case worker at a local clinic who was helping him. So Mitchell sued.
Tiger Woods, Sex Addiction & South Park
Tiger gets South Parked … When the successful men of the world suddenly want to have sex with tons of women, the top scientists in the country are brought together to put a stop to it. Once the testing gets underway, it turns out some of the fourth grade boys of South Park are sex addicts. (Full episode here)
Did Aliens From Friendship Island Warn Of The Chile Earthquake?
In January I visited Chile, luckily for me before the earthquakes. While there I was told a story about Friendship Island, a mythical island inhabited by strange beings off the southern coast of Chile (learn more here). Although famous amongst Chilean conspiracy buffs and ufologists, it is seldom discussed outside the region. I would have left it as an amusing piece of local lore, but recently the leading Chilean TV conspiracy theorist, Salfate, went on air in December 2009 claiming that beings from Friendship Island had told him there would be many earthquakes and tsunamis in 2010…
OK, it’s totally nutty stuff, but the natural disasters are hitting as predicted. What does anyone know about Salfate – is he credible or a crank?
Into The Lions’ Den: Barack Obama Visits Fox News Channel
Well you can’t say Barack Obama isn’t willing to face his critics! The president sits down with Fox News Channels’s Bret Baier to discuss the health care reform bill:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Newly Released FBI Documents Support Sibel Edmonds’ Allegations
Thanks to a FOIA request, new evidence has emerged from the FBI’s own internal communications that appear to support many of the claims made by Sibel Edmonds regarding (largely though not exclusively) GOP collusion in the spying activities of the Turkish government.
This is no small matter, as it involves blackmail and bribery of high-level officials like former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, PNAC signatory Richard Perle, Congressman Roy Blunt, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, Turkish Ambassador Marc Grossman, Congressman Stephen Solarz, Asst. Sec. Def. Douglas Feith, Congressman Dan Burton and others to “look the other way” from those engaged in spying activities with a foreign government against the United States.
Per the report from the Boiling Frogs website:
Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI…
The Lies of Karl Rove
By Melvin A. Goodman for TruthOut:
Joseph Goebbels, the leading propagandist of the Third Reich, believed in the power of the lie; the greater the lie, the greater the power. Goebbels would have loved Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, a pastiche of lies, fabrications and distortions designed to rehabilitate the record of the Bush-Cheney years. There are too many lies to treat in this one column, but his greatest lie is that the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq if it had known there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. Its corollary is that the administration did not lie about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In fact, the Bush administration mounted an intense six-month campaign to make sure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) produced “evidence” of WMD, and then made sure that such players as National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell parroted the administration’s big lie to the American public and to the international community…
Ponerology 101: The Psychopath’s Mask of Sanity
Harrison Koehli writes on Signs of The Times:
A Wall Street Psychopath?
In 1960 Bernie Madoff founded his Wall Street firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. As chairman of its Board of Directors until his arrest in December of 2008, Madoff saw his firm (and himself) rise to prominence on Wall Street, developing the technology that became NASDAQ, the first and largest electronic stock exchange in America, in the process.
A multimillionaire with over $800-million in shared assets with his wife and high school sweetheart, Ruth Alpern, Madoff was well-regarded as a financial mastermind and prolific philanthropist. He exuded an aura of wealth, confidence, and connections, and many trusted him as a pillar of the community. Sounds like a great guy, huh?
His humanitarian image was supported by his work for various nonprofit groups like the American Jewish Congress and Yeshiva University in New York, the various commissions and boards on which he…
Secret Document Calls Wikileaks ‘Threat’ to U.S. Army
David Kravets writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
Wikileaks presents a “threat to the U.S. Army” and publishes “potentially actionable information” for targeting military personnel, according to a classified intelligence report posted on the whistleblowing site.
The 32-page report entitled Wikileaks.org — An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? indicates the government’s concern that “current employees or moles” within the Defense Department or the U.S. government “are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.” To stop this, the 2008 report had suggested a campaign to expose and punish those who leak to the site, which was founded in 2007 by Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians.
“Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the website that they will remain anonymous,” according to the report. “The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal…
Experts Say the U.S. Pays Too Much to Fight Cancer
Ellen Gibson writes on Bloomberg News via the Columbus Dispatch:
The rising cost of cancer research and care, which helped reduce death rates by 16 percent over 40 years, is straining the U.S. health system and needs to be restrained, commentators said in a special edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Cancer research has cost the U.S. government $100 billion since 1971 and the price of care, accounting for inflation, has more than doubled to $90 billion since 1990, according to six journal reports that raise key questions about the past and future success of the U.S. “War on Cancer,” announced by then-President Richard Nixon in 1971.
The reduced death rates result from anti-smoking campaigns, early disease detection and new drugs, which can cost individual patients as much as $100,000 a year. The price of the drugs, and the care tied to their use, can be lowered by shifting to…
Lehman Brothers Was More Dangerous Than Enron
Here’s an excellent explanation from The Dylan Ratigan Show of an arcane “accounting gimmick”, employed by Lehman Brothers as the firm failed in 2007 and 2008.
According to the 2,200-page court examiner’s report this practice, known as “Repo 105″ (“Repo”? Really, why not call it “Steal 105″?), was like “a drug” propelling the bank to conceal the true nature of its financial health.
The collapse of “venerable” Wall Street investment house Lehman Brothers was the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Here’s Dylan Ratigan and Eliot Spitzer making sense of what is clearly a crime against the economic health of the United States:
Texting From Beyond the Grave, On Your Headstone
Leave a message for your descendants 3,200 years from now?!? I guess you can assuming we don’t blow it all to hell, and our ape overloads are ruling the planet. This company has the same name as those language DVDs, but they are definitely thinking “long-term” … James Williams writes on Discovery News:
Generally a headstone conveys two very basic facts about the person interred below it — their name plus the two most important dates of their life. Thanks to some new technology, headstones can now convey much more that: a photo and note written by the deceased, delivered right to your phone.
The product is called RosettaStone and comes from a company called Objecs. If you were to purchase a RosettaStone, you’d receive what looks like a granite iPod with a few symbols visible on the outside and a microchip embedded on the inside. That device is then secured into your headstone…
Bush Officials Warned 9/11 Commission Against Probing Too Deeply
Some people ask, “Why do conspiracy theories get such traction in people’s minds?”
Perhaps because the arguments against them are not entirely dissuasive, but I have to say, if nothing else, it’s largely because of stories like this one, that actually lend credence to people’s suspicions by providing them with objective proof of the government’s attempt to obfuscate and withhold vital information.
Whether it is done in order to prevent embarrassment, or to protect themselves from prosecution, the fact remains, Bush officials in Washington were more concerned with covering their own butts, than publicly revealing an inconvenient truth. Even if it meant that national security might be improved and a similar event avoided.
As of today, it has been revealed via a FOIA request made by the ACLU, that Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet sent a letter dated January 16, 2004 to the members of the 9/11 Commission that there was an investigatory line it was “not allowed to cross.”
The line was in questioning the terrorist suspects that the Bush Administration was busy torturing, in violation of both U.S. and international law. In other words, the Commission was not allowed to question the accused.
Hardly a high point for American jurisprudence.
First Commercially Available Jetpacks For Sale For $86,000
It’s time to live the dream: jetpacks from Martin Jetpacks are now on sale. If you’re able to plunk down $86,000, one could be yours in twelve months. The Martin Jetpack gives you 30 minutes of flight time, tops out at 60 miles per hour, and has mechanisms designed to correct for operator flight error, supposedly reducing the chance of fatal mistakes in the air. No license is needed to fly this in the United States, as of now.
