Archive for June, 2010
“The Official 9/11 Story … Accept Without Question”
Nathan Janes writes at PUPAGANDA.com:
In the United States today, true investigative journalism is rare. Much of the news circulated by mainstream media is only a presentation of information handed down from the government. Major media functions as a gatekeeper of information, creating consensus among Americans on an array of topics including the popularly held beliefs about September 11, 2001.
An atmosphere has been created where questioning the official explanation or asking for a reinvestigation is seen as blasphemy. Individuals who do so are labeled anarchist, conspiracy theorist, domestic terrorist, and anti-government. Politicians and other public figures who have voiced concerns about the 9/11 Commission Report have been invited on national news programs only to be pressured to renounce previous statements about 9/11 and publicly reject any affiliation to the group 9/11 Truth. While a critical analysis of the 9/11 Commission Report is absent from mainstream media, a number of questions go unanswered…
Democracy Needs Reform — The Cruelty Of Poll-Driven Politics In Australia
Kevin Rudd
After a series of sudden and drastic moves initiated by a handful of people within some factions of the Australia Labor Party on Wednesday evening, Australians woke up the next morning (24 June 2010) watching their elected Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd) cry in front of the TV screen after he was told by the dozens of his colleagues he was finished as prime minister. (Herald Sun, 25 June 2010)
The cause of his down fall was mainly due to the fact that his popularity has plunged dramatically over the last 6 months. This in part was the direct result of the mining companies’ $100 million advertising campaign against his government intention to imposed a Super Mining Tax in 2012 to give the average Australian a fairer share of the profit from the resources digging out from Australian soil and seabed. The opposition has sided with the miners over the Super…
Buzz Aldrin Forging New Frontiers In Space, Again
Buzz Aldrin in 2009. Photo: Phil Konstantin
Not content with resting on the his laurels as the second man on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin has been shaking things up in the Space realm of late, what with his appeal to President Obama to push Space Solar as the leading alternative energy platform. Now he wants to go to Mars, per this profile in Vanity Fair:
President Obama gave a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April, promising to increase NASA’s funding by six billion and send astronauts to Mars in the next two decades. Do you believe him?
I do. But what he’s describing is a very leisurely way. He’s talked about getting a bunch of things in the orbit of Mars by… what year did he say again?The mid-2030s.
Well that’s all well and good. But I want to land on the damn place! And I want to minimize the expense. I want…
Treating America’s Psychopathy
When it comes to bioenergetic defense structures, the United States is first and foremost a “psychopath.” How do we treat this condition in the land of “God, guns, and country” and can these destructive energies be transmuted to help manifest a global shift in consciousness?
Going beyond talk therapy, bioenergetics is an intuitive science that combines psychoanalysis and hands on energy healing. It considers our entire emotional history to be crystallized in the body and that our blocks and difficulties in accessing our own power (and a deeper connection in our lives) are the results of “unfinished business” from early childhood. While growing up, we develop defense systems to prevent us from being overwhelmed by difficult experiences. The only problem is that we don’t release the fear and resistance afterwards, which leads to tension, constriction, illness, and a skewed worldview. We, to some degree, perceive our reality through the lens of a…
World’s First Bionic Cat (Video)
One of our cats recently fell from our 4th floor NYC apartment and sad to say, the ASPCA told us it should not be saved, even though the local animal hospital wanted $14,000 to try. But they didn’t say they could give it bionic limbs … maybe if we lived in the UK, per this story from ABC News:
Colorado Man’s Rambo-Style Mission To Kill Osama Fails
A middle-aged-dad-type from Colorado was arrested in the mountains of Pakistan, where, armed with a sword, pistol and night-vision goggles, he was on a solo go-for-broke mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden. Amazingly, he made it pretty far, reaching the isolated region where Osama is rumored to be hiding. Las Vegas Sun reports:
“A lot of kids grow up and say, `I want to be Rambo,’ you know? Well, he is,” said Gary Faulkner’s brother, Scott, 43.
“He’s as normal as you and I,” Scott Faulkner said. “He’s just very passionate, and, as a Christian, he felt, when Osama mocked this country after 9/11, and it didn’t feel like the military was doing enough, it became his passion, his mission, to track down Osama, and kill him, or bring him back alive.”
Scott Faulkner said his brother sold all his tools to finance his trip and was prepared to die in Pakistan.…
Scientist: Human Race May Die Out Within 100 Years
Scary stuff, reported in New Scientist:
To say Frank Fenner is no fool is without doubt an understatement. He is an accomplished scientist, and that rarity in modern science, a polymath. As a virologist he helped lead the eradication of smallpox, while as a human ecologist he set up the respected Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University.
So how worried should we be that Fenner told an Australian newspaper that humanity will be extinct within a century because of our failure to deal with global warming?
All is not necessarily lost, at least according to Stephen Boyden, Fenner’s colleague at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU, who told the same paper there is still time to prevent our extinction. The problem, he says, is to do it we will need to pull off “revolutionary changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability”. Still hardly an optimistic view.
And it’s not just Fenner and…
Orson Wells On Police, Passports, And The Erosion Of Rights
The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman than the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal.
On his 1955 BBC television show The Orson Welles Sketchbook, Welles gives a prescient talk on the dangers of police and authority.
For Hire In China: Fake White Businessmen
Jakob Boeskov's fake ID Sniper Rifle
This story totally reminds me of an essay we included in Russ Kick’s classic anthology Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide To Media Mirages And Establishment Lies, “How I Crashed A Chinese Arms Bazaar With A Rifle That Doesn’t Exist,” by Jakob S. Boeskov. For some reason, white guys in China seem to be cloaked in Yes Men-like levels of suspended belief as to their (highly unlikely) cover stories. By Mitch Moxley for the Atlantic:
Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.
“I call…
Police State Lockdown In Toronto For G20 Summit
Photo: Sherurcij
Here we go again, another suspension of civil liberties as the elite nations of the world gather in Toronto. Why do we put up with it, and if Canada, usually a bastion of human rights, allows it, who’s going to call a foul? Report from the Globe & Mail:
At City Hall, employees arrived at work to find a burly security guard demanding their access pass before they entered the normally unlocked doors. At a downtown law firm, lawyers were told to leave their suits and high heels at home and dress casual-like to avoid being set upon by anti-capitalist rioters. At one provincial government office, bureaucrats were told in late afternoon that the building was going under “lockdown” because protesters were in the neighbourhood. Many scooted for exits to avoid being trapped in the closed-up building.
All of a sudden on Monday, our calm, mild, pacific city took on…
The Morning Challenge Campaign
The Japanese government has proposed the Morning Challenge campaign, put out by the Environment Ministry, to decrease carbon footprints in the home. The campaign suggests that people go to bed one hour earlier in order to reduce the amount of energy being used at night.
Danielle Demetriou of The Daily Telegraph states:
A typical family can reduce its carbon dioxide footprint by 85kg a year if everyone goes to bed and gets up one hour earlier, according to the campaign.
The amount of carbon dioxide emissions potentially saved from going to bed an hour early was the equivalent of 20 per cent of annual emissions from household lights, “Many Japanese people waste electric power at night time, for example by watching TV until very late,” a ministry spokesperson told The Daily Telegraph.
“But going to bed early and getting up early can avoid wasting electrical power which causes carbon dioxide emissions. If people change their…
No Yellow Cards Here: Wall Street Banksters Lead In The World Cup of Phony Reform
charade | sh əˈrād| (noun)
an absurd pretense intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance: talk of unity was nothing more than a charade.
The plan was to get the financial reform bill “done” by this weekend so that President Obama could pull it out of the his back pocket at the G20 meeting in Canada to demonstrate American “leadership” on an issue the whole world is legitimately worried about: the real prospect of an even more serious global economic collapse.
The Congress has been working on this deal for months. The Senate passed its version after the House adopted a different measure. It was then up to the Conference process to “reconcile” the two bills, and come up with a law all could live with before taking the summer off to prepare for killer elections in the fall.
No one reminded these alleged public servants of that axiom about the best laid plans…
“I Met Lee Harvey Oswald” on The Black Fridays
The Black Fridays Bonus Episode 3 — “I Met Lee Harvey Oswald”
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
“Peggy” joins us to talk about her meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. A chance meeting shortly before he changed history . We find this interesting that he was looking for work, as well as, he was listing his aunt’s telephone number on job applications even though she hadn’t seen him in weeks.
This is a bonus show which will lay some ground work for Episode 25. As will be obvious, “Peggy” was very nervous and so decided to read her story rather than re-telling it from memory.
Supreme Court Aids Corporate Fraudsters
Is this really the time to give a “get-out-of-jail-free” card to corporate chiefs who can’t resist fraudulently dipping into the honey pot of riches that they have access to? I mean we’re still unraveling (and paying for) the massive frauds perpetrated by the banksters at AIG, Goldman Sachs and their Wall Street cronies and shills in Washington. I suppose it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the Supreme Court is in on it too, but the timing shows a particularly callous disregard for public sentiment. Report from the Los Angeles Times:
A Supreme Court ruling Thursday dealt a severe blow to legislation meant to fight public corruption and also could affect the recent convictions of former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling and former newspaper magnate Conrad Black.
In ruling on “honest-services fraud,” the justices said Skilling and Black were wrongly convicted on that charge. All nine justices agreed that such fraud…
The Crime of the Century: A Review of “Plunder”
"Plunder" Filmmaker Danny Schechter
From Nick Pell at Red Star Times:
In a just world Michael Moore’s Capitalism would have been released on DVD for a niche crowd of professional weirdos and malcontents while Plunder would have made millions and garnered Academy Awards. Unlike the former which relied on the pulling of emotional heartstrings, sucking up to Barack Obama and Mr. Moore’s usual shenanigans, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time revolves around hard analysis. Plunder provides a detailed summary of the Rube Goldberg machine that collapsed the American economy.
Indeed, the investors who robbed America blind are only one part of the equation. They received a great deal of assistance from the regulatory agency tasked with defending Americans from just such a swindle. Plunder falls short on exploring just how such malfeasance at the highest levels of power is allowed to happen, though it does an admirable job of laying bare the function of such agencies. Similarly, the film…
Northern China Hosts Robot Olympics
Walking, running and even dancing robots have been competing at the International Robot Olympic Games in China:
Colonel Sanders Exposes the NWO, and Other Revelations From Glenn Beck’s Fancy New Novel
Greer Mansfield reviews The Overton Window by Glenn Beck in classic fashion, at Wonkette:
It is summertime, is it not, fellow Wonketeers? And summertime means summer reading: a mystery on the beach, occasional dips into the new Ecco Anthology of International Poetry while you’re on a bus or train to somewhere interesting, or perhaps The Charterhouse of Parma in the shade of a poplar tree. Then again, books and travel are both perilously expensive these days, and neither is particularly American. Not to mention the beach is now smothered by oil-waves and strewn with the inky corpses of pelicans and sea turtles. Maybe it’s better to read something from the Discount stack, something that suits the atmosphere of a foreclosed meth-stained bathtub at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. The debut novel from promising young wordsmith Glenn Beck is just the thing!
As you can see from that terrifying literary trailer, Beck’s first novel is titled The Overton Window…
South Carolina’s Going Greene
If someone meets the U.S. Senate candidate requirements (at least 30 years of age, a U.S. citizen for nine or more years, and having residency in the state where campaigning) are they equipped to run for election? South Carolina seems to think so.
Alvin Greene, a 32 year-old unemployed veteran, won 60% of votes at the Democratic primary. His inexperience in politics and minimal campaigning strategy gave rise to many questions and conspiracy theories. Given Greene’s simplistic interviewing responses, the question of why he won is still unanswered. Did Greene win because his name was first on the ballot? Was he planted by the Republican party? How does an unemployed man, living with his father after being discharged from the Air Force fund a $10,440 filing fee with little to no fund-raising? What are the details to his felony obscenity charge from his arrest last year? Keith Olbermann addresses these questions in an interview on MSNBC:
The Rolling Stone Story That Got McChrystal Fired
President Barack Obama meets with Army Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, in the Oval Office at the White House, May 19, 2009.
The U.S. General who was in charge of the war in Afghanistan was fired yesterday by President Obama as a result of a Rolling Stone magazine article in which the General slagged off Obama, his VP Joe Biden and most of the people he works for in Washington. In case you’re curious, here’s a link to the Rolling Stone article in question, and below a little taste of what got the civilians so upset:
The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech…
