Huge London Car Bomb "Could Have Killed 1700"

Londoners React : "So What?"



Yesterday in Central London, a Mercedes Benz was discovered packed with explosives, gas canisters and nails in a street near Piccadilly Circus. Police bomb squads and anti-terror units moved fast, locking down local streets and defusing the bomb. Newspaper headlines blared the bomb was so big it could have taken the lives of some 1700 Londoners. The incident comes almost a week before the second anniversary of the July 7 attacks, and only hours before the new Gordon Brown government began running the country.

Time to panic?

Certainly not :

“It’s something you get used to, living in London...”

“...given the stance our government made on the war in Iraq and elsewhere, I think we are just getting used to being a target...”

"To be honest, it didn’t worry me..."

“I feel surprisingly all right about it...”

“I sort of think, ‘So what?’”

"There are risks living in any city."

“If you’re near the bomb when it explodes, well, that’s really unlucky...”

"...nobody looks too frightened..."

“I’m already late around two hours for my work..."

When a close call with a huge car bomb fails to incite fear and panic even in people who were within range of the potential blast, the act of trying to unleash a terror attack has already lost most of its visceral power.

Learn from the Londoners. This is how you fight a 'War on Terror'.

Not by doing nothing, but by getting out of the way, letting the authorities deal with the problem, and not cowering in fear, panicking in the streets, or trying to frighten the stuffing out of everyone about how they could be blown to smithereens at any moment.

Perhaps whoever built and left this car bomb was intending to make sure Prime Minister Brown didn't do anything silly, like pull back from fighting the 'War On Terror' with the same fervour and energy that former prime minister Tony Blair did.

Successful terror strikes in the West rarely coincide with key dates or events. But dire threats, very public official warnings and intercepted attacks always seem to happen at politically important times.

Here's an eyewitness report of the car bomb in motion :

...the car was seen being driven " erratically" before it collided with some bins or bin bags on the pavement. The driver ran off, apparently uninjured. The lights of the car were left on.

Police said the vehicle would have been captured on hundreds of different surveillance cameras as it entered London.

"London Shall Be Bombed" - Revenge Attack For Rushdie Knighthood?

So Far, No Links To Any Terror Networks

US Says : Pay Attention, Terror Looms

Police Have "Crystal Clear" Image Of Mercedes Driver

Second Car Containing Explosives Found In London

BBC : Two Mercedes, Two Explosive Devices

First You Must Learn How To Smile As You Kill





John Lennon has found a new audience with the YouTube generation, and his songs, some done over with new edit videos, provoke plenty of comment and debate.

But out of all Lennon's Beatles and solo songs, it is the one above that appears to hit the youth of America and the UK the hardest, if the hundreds of comments beneath the clip on the YouTube page are anything to go by.

And no wonder. Lennon's lyrics are still scathing, and biting :

"They keep you doped with religion, sex and TV, and you think you're so clever and classless and free...but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

"There's room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill...if you want to be like the folks on the hill."

A working class hero is something to be.

The Green Day version of the song, played live to tens of millions of young Americans on an American Idol finale broadcast is almost as good as Lennon's original. Almost.

There are SuperGroups. And then there is THE SuperGroup, Dirty Mac, 1968 - John Lennon, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell (drums) from the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They should have been called 'The Functional Junkies'.



The song is Lennon's Yer Blues, and the vid is from the Rock N' Roll Circus. One of the most spectacular, weird, awesome, psychedelic, and rocking musical variety shows ever made.

Rock 'n Roll Heaven, personified.

Desert World : Our Tattooine Future

Poor Nigerian Farmers Show The World How To Hold Back The Deserts

If you've got any doom-laden ideas or theories on what is going to happen to the world in the next five to 100 years, now is a pretty good time to make a whole bunch of ultra-heavy, pessimistic predictions. You don't even need to be an expert in any field. Read a couple of old JG Ballard books about environmental armageddon and start churning out the books and news features.

Today's entry for 'Oh Fuck, What's Next?' collection is this story from the New York Times, or the New Dooms Tome as an American friend calls it. After the excerpt, about how our world will soon turn mostly to desert and send hundreds of millions of people rampaging across the planet in search of soil and water, with uprooted tomato plants in hand, there's a good story about how Nigerians are taking practical measures to stop the creeping desertification of their farming lands.

Here's the first excerpts :

Enough fertile land could turn into desert within the next generation to create an “environmental crisis of global proportions,” large-scale migrations and political instability in parts of Africa and Central Asia unless current trends are quickly stemmed, a new United Nations report concludes.

“The costs of desertification are large,” said Zafar Adeel of the United Nations University, who is based in Canada and is an author of the report, to be released Thursday.

“Already at the moment there are tens of millions of people on the move,” Dr. Adeel said in an interview. “There’s internal displacement. There’s international migration. There are a number of causes. But by and large, in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia this movement is triggered by degradation of land.”

The report’s authors say individual nations and international groups must collaborate to solve what has so far been an underrecognized crisis in the making, caused mainly byclimate change . Water resources are overexploited because the poor have no other options, and climate change has exacerbated the cycle. Governments and wealthier countries must aid these populations to develop more sustainable livelihoods or suffer the consequences, the report says.

“Today, those migrants who are escaping dry lands are mostly moving around far from the developed world,” Janos Bogardi of the United Nations University in Bonn, Germany, a technical adviser on the report, said in an interview. “Those who end up on boats to Europe are the tip of an iceberg.”

The United Nations report estimates that 50 million people are at risk of displacement in the next 10 years if desertification is not checked.

Experts say climate shifts are one of several converging stresses creating the raised vulnerability in dry areas. Others include population growth, diversion of rivers for irrigation and a lack of ability to store water from flooding rains to use when dry times come.

How many people will be forced from their homes and lands due to climate change? Recent estimates suggest 80 million, 100 million and 150 million. But the Christian Aid charity has topped them all with its predictions :

A recent study by Christian Aid, a charity based in Britain, found that 155 million people are currently displaced by conflicts, natural disasters and development. By 2050, an additional billion people may be forced to leave their homes because of climate change, said John Davison, the author of that report.

But the Nigerians aren't waiting to see whether or not Christian Aid predictions turn out to be true, or just more charity-inducing projections.

Not only are Nigerians moving to hold back encroach deserts from their valuable farmlands by planting more trees to help hold topsoil in place, they're showing the world how to transform dead, lifeless land into future farming fields, by planting trees and cultivating new grasslands :

In this dust-choked region, long seen as an increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple methods cost little or nothing at all.

Better conservation and improved rainfall have led to at least 7.4 million newly tree-covered acres in Niger, researchers have found, achieved largely without relying on the large-scale planting of trees or other expensive methods often advocated by African politicians and aid groups for halting desertification, the process by which soil loses its fertility.

Recent studies of vegetation patterns, based on detailed satellite images and on-the-ground inventories of trees, have found that Niger, a place of persistent hunger and deprivation, has recently added millions of new trees and is now far greener than it was 30 years ago.

These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land degradation, scientists studying Niger say.

“The general picture of the Sahel is much less bleak than we tend to assume,” said Chris P. Reij, a soil conservationist...“Niger was for us an enormous surprise.”

About 20 years ago, farmers like Ibrahim Danjimo realized something terrible was happening to their fields.

“We look around, all the trees were far from the village,” said Mr. Danjimo, a farmer in his 40s who has been working the rocky, sandy soil of this tiny village since he was a child. “Suddenly, the trees were all gone.”

Fierce winds were carrying off the topsoil of their once-productive land. Sand dunes threatened to swallow huts. Wells ran dry. Across the Sahel, a semiarid belt that spans Africa just below the Sahara and is home to some of the poorest people on earth, a cataclysm was unfolding.

Severe drought in the 1970s and ’80s, coupled with a population explosion and destructive farming and livestock practices, was denuding vast swaths of land. The desert seemed determined to swallow everything. So Mr. Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but radical step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead they would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing around them when sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans.

Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity.

“The benefits are so many it is really astonishing,” Dr. Larwanou said. “The farmers can sell the branches for money. They can feed the pods as fodder to their animals. They can sell or eat the leaves. They can sell and eat the fruits. Trees are so valuable to farmers, so they protect them.”

They also have extraordinary ecological benefits. Their roots fix the soil in place, preventing it from being carried off with the fierce Sahelian winds and preserving arable land. The roots also help hold water in the ground, rather than letting it run off across rocky, barren fields into gullies where it floods villages and destroys crops.

Lessons for the whole world to learn and follow, but particularly Australia and the American mid-west, where massive land clearing for farming and grazing transformed millions of hectares of once rich grasslands into drought-blown deserts-in-the-making.

God Tells Man : Teach Americans How To Beat Their Children, With Love

It should be a hoax, one of those websites created with the sole aim of scoring a few million hits off taking an outrageous stand, on controversial subject matter, and then pocketing the ad cash and pulling the plug.

But this guy appears to be serious.

Pennsylvanian corporal punishment enthusiast, Joey Salvati, claims he had not one but four conversations with God, while he was showering, and God told him to go into business constructing wooden paddles that parents can use to beat their children senseless. Or to show their love.

Joey claims because this is a mission from God, he is giving the paddles away for free, but there is a fee for packaging and mailing. So far, he's shipped 1400 of the thick, plank-like paddles, which come with an owner's manual :

"If you have to do something with your child, if you do it this way, you are at least getting their attention, but you are not harming them," said Salvati.

The manual touches on everything from how many swats to apply to an appointment card for scheduling the spanking.

But according to his Web site, the paddles are to be used lovingly and never in anger.

Of course not.

Joey wants all parents who feel the need to spank their children, to act responsibly. This is why on his website, Spare Rods, he supplies tips.

First he warns you should 'calibrate' your paddle :

Before applying paddle to a child you should determine the force of your swing.

Beat yourself with the paddle first, he suggests, to find out how much it hurts.

The child to be punished, Joey says, should have to tell the parent why they are being punished. And what happens if they refuse?

• Parent should wait one minute between each swat.

• Apply no more than 5 swats per day.

• Spank only on the rump.

• Child must be wearing clothes.

• Use force sufficient only to get the child's attention.

And don't forget, Joey says, to give your child a hug after the beating is over, and tell them that you still love them. The beating, of course, was for their own good.

Spare Rods : God-Approved Wooden Planks For Beating Your Child

Fighting VD In World War 2, Through Poster Art



The brilliantly surreal, and hallucinogenic, Spanish artist Salvador Dali created the above painting in the early 1940s to warn soldiers of World War 2 against the dangers of venereal disease. It didn't work. Venereal disease spread like wildfire through the ranks of the world's military during WW2.

Perhaps the soldiers who saw this painting noticed the prostitutes more than the skull.

The United States Army went with something more straightforward. Donald Duck, dressed in the uniform of an Australian soldier, for some reason. The 'Pro' in the poster being the slang term, at the time, for prophylactics :



During WW2, the US Military distributed 50 million free condoms to its soldiers, each month :

After D-Day, the U.S. Army created two mobile VD treatment centers on trucks to follow the troops as they marched across western Europe.

(Hat tip for the Dali image to the always excellent Boing Boing)

Salvador Dali In Quotes :

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."

"God invented man, and man invented the metric system."

"Have no fear of perfection -- you'll never reach it."

"I believe that the moment is near when, by a procedure of active paranoic thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality."

I don't take drugs: I am drugs."

1000 Salvador Dali Paintings

80 Year Old WW2 Vet Recalls "My Sex Life In The Army"

Australia, World War 2, Venereal Disease And "Moral Corruption"

Two US Army Posters Warning Of VD

Genetically Tailoring Your Diet To Ensure Longer Life

And A Longer Life For Diet Industries

If only one of these Food Technologists would tell me that my genetically perfect diet, to ensure long life, was dark chocolate and Guinness. I'd go for one of these genetic screenings tomorrow if my churning gut instinct didn't already tell me that my genetically perfect diet would be something like baked broccoli with anchovy sauce.

You'd have to bet that living off a diet that revolved around dark chocolate and Guinness would surely make most people happy enough that their immune systems would be super-boosted and ready to take on all comers, be they flu viruses or cancer.

The idea of the Genetically Tailored Diet is that babies could one day be genetically screened (as insurance companies will one day demand all babies be screened), and the resulting genetic profile could supply the information from which a diet could be tailored that would ensure a longer, healthier life.

Sounds suspiciously like the beginnings of a new food-tech diet industry, and about 50 best-selling books.

Why not just teach children how to eat healthy, and enjoy fresh fruit and vegetables and practice restraint when it comes to the junk and the fat-ladens?

Naaah. That'd be too easy, and there's not enough money in it. We are, after all, talking about a new DIET here :

"As we learn more and more about the genetics of human beings, all the evidence suggests we ultimately will reach a point where just by doing a genetic profile on a newly-born child, we would then be able to interpret that into the most desirable diet for that particular individual..."

"An individual diet then becomes one that will provide the longest lifespan and the highest quality of life for that particular individual.''

Dr Heldman said genetics was already known to determine whether someone was predisposed to high cholesterol and he speculated that other examples, such as cancer, would follow.

"We will make adjustments in the diets that help prolong the onset of certain kinds of diseases,'' he said.

Of course, none of this will ever guarantee that someone, full of booze and a broken heart, won't stop off at McDonalds at 2am on a Saturday morning and work their through the entire burger and thickshake menu.

But the Genetically Tailored Diet will surely spawn a new multi-billion industry of books, DVDs, magazine articles, lectures, screenings, testing and lecture tours.

Followed by the multi-billion dollar debunking of the Genetically Tailored Diet that will surely, inevitably, follow.

Anyway, what about the predictions of decades past that we'd all be eating pill-sized meals by now?

I want my T-Bone steak with mushroom sauce pill now, dammit. I don't have the time to chew. It's so 20th century.

Freedom's Hookers

Tens of thousands of Iraqi girls and women are exercising their new found freedom and liberty by selling their bodies. Not just in Iraq, but in Syria, where they were forced to flee when they became part of the reported 3 million strong tide of Iraq war refugees.

Of course, women in Iraq have also turned to prostitution, now tens of thousands of their husbands, fathers, brothers and uncles have been killed in the occupation and war. There is no set estimate of how many women in Iraq are now prostitutes, but the total is believed to be beyond the number now working in Syria.

In Syria, 'liberated' Iraqi women and teenage girls, many underage, sell themselves to wealthy Syrians and international businessmen. In Iraq, women and girls sell themselves to Coalition of the Willing soldiers, diplomats, security workers and international businessmen.

Congratulations ladies, you have been liberated.

All these Iraqi females, who were once forbidden by the Saddam Hussein regime to sell their bodies, are now free to do so, and to enjoy all the 'benefits' that prostitution can bring : sexual diseases, trauma, PTSD, shame, drug addiction, alcoholism, rape and suicidal depression.

Liberty, freedom and democracy in action. This is the way of war, of course. And it has always been this way. Women being forced into prostitution has happened in the course of every major war, stretching back centuries, and every time the invading powers, the liberators, fail to do anything to stop the situations developing where women are forced into such brutal degradation.

Thanks to the invasion of their country, no longer are Iraqi women denied the freedom of choice to sell their bodies and souls for a pittance to feed their children and family.

They have been liberated.

That this is all the direct result of an invasion and spectacularly flawed occupation launched by three proud Christian family men - President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and Australian Prime Minister Howard - makes the horror of it all just that little bit more appalling :

There are more than a million Iraqi refugees in Syria, many are women whose husbands or fathers have been killed. Banned from working legally, they have few options outside the sex trade. No one knows how many end up as prostitutes, but Hana Ibrahim, founder of the Iraqi women's group Women's Will, puts the figure at 50,000.

I met Fatima in a block of flats operating informally as a brothel in Saida Zainab, a run-down area with a large Iraqi population. Millions of Shias go there every year, because of the shrine of the prophet Mohamed's granddaughter. "I came to Syria after my husband was killed, leaving me with two children," Fatima tells me. "My aunt asked me to join her here, and my brothers pressured me to go." She didn't realise the work her aunt did, and she would be forced to take up, until she arrived.

Fatima is in her mid-20s, but campaigners say the number of Iraqi children working as prostitutes is high. Bassam al-Kadi of Syrian Women Observatory says: "Some have been sexually abused in Iraq, but others are being prostituted by fathers and uncles who bring them here under the pretext of protecting them. They are virgins, and they are brought here like an investment and exploited in a very ugly way."

The international trade and trafficking of children and girls to be sold into prostitution has actually been boosted by the horror, death, savagery and displacement of the Iraq War.

Prostitution, and the trafficking of girls and women, is also taking root in Afghanistan.

No doubt, millions of women and girls in Iran are now looking forward to being liberated, just like their Iraqi sisters.


US Offers Cash To Iraqi Tribes To Turn Against 'Al Qaeda'

Suicide Bomber Kills At Least 4 Sunni Sheiks Who Pledged To Help US Forces

How Iraq Insurgency Musters Its Forces Online

The PTSD Generation : Iraqi Children Will Bear Lasting Scars From Seeing The Horrors Of War Close-Up

US Generals Campaigning Against The War

Taking Baquba, Block By Block, Piece By Piece

A Closer Look At The Media Of The Iraq Insurgency

Writer Attacked By His Own 'Characters'

Certainly one of the strangest literary stories we've come across in many months.

UK Observer senior editor Jason Burke went deep into the French countryside to investigate the very strange case of a writer who turned the bizarre true-life tales of the locals in the village where he summered with his family into a novel that has now, literally, come to life and turned on him.

The sleepy French village is called Lussaud. There are barely 40 people living there. They are rural peasants, stunted by poverty and bare education. Their village is isolated from almost all other French society and lifestyles. Many of them featured in the novel, and many didn't like it. Interesting to note that it took the locals a whole year to find out they were characters in a novel, written by a semi-local.

From the UK Observer (excerpts) :

...last week, Lussaud stumbled blinking and dressed in its shabby Sunday best into a very 21st-century media spotlight. On Thursday five villagers will hear a court's verdict deciding if they will receive prison sentences for assaulting an author who, after years living on and off in the village, wrote a slimly disguised book about them and their ancestors.

The episode is a dramatic final chapter in a long story, described by Le Monde as 'terrible and sad,' which has pitted urban intellectuals against the rural back country, set the liberty of the creative artist against the privacy of an isolated community, revealed the vicious reality of rural poverty and questioned the romanticised vision that many French citizens still have of their own countryside.

'The people of Lussaud do not live,' said Michel Masson, vice-president of France's biggest farming union, 'they survive. Now perhaps townspeople will understand that better.'

The writer in question is Pierre Jourde, a controversial and critically acclaimed 52-year-old novelist and university academic whose family is from Lussaud. Though not a full-time resident, Jourde, with his family's tombs in the village cemetery and the months he has spent every year in Lussaud, was an honorary villager.

The 'terrible and sad' story started with the death of a 12-year-old girl of leukaemia in the village nine years ago. One of the guests at the traditional wake, held in the house of the bereaved family with the body of the child still in her deathbed, was Pierre Jourde. The episode inspired him to write The Lost Country, a spare, dark and grotesquely comic description of a land where the local gods are 'Alcohol, Winter, Shit and Solitude', where old ladies sleep beside the decaying corpses of their dead dogs, where children are raised with a bottle of sweet cassis liqueur to the lips and where men don't leave home without a flagon of cheap wine. One passage relates the story of how an unacknowledged adulterous liaison resulted in the marriage of a brother and sister. His book was meant to be, Jourde explained last week, 'a description of the brutally hard reality of life in Lussaud ... a memorial to a generation that is disappearing.'

...in July 2005, when Jourde, whose previous works include unflinching and controversial portrayals of the worlds of literature and academic scholarship, arrived with his family for a summer break, six villagers appeared outside his house shouting insults. Blows were exchanged and stones thrown. A car window was smashed. Jourde's 15-month-old baby was slightly hurt and his mixed-race sons were called 'dirty Arabs'. The writer and his family locked themselves in their car and fled. They have not returned to the blue-shuttered farmhouse with its black cat and pebbled yard since.

In the village itself, Jourde still has at least some supporters. One family that bears no grudge are the Liandiers, whose daughter's death nearly a decade ago, lies at the origin of the whole story.

'Some here might think differently but we are very happy with what he wrote,' Marie-Jose Liandier told The Observer yesterday.

'He just told some stories which are surely true."

The truth, however, can sometimes be too ugly to handle. Or control.

Schuuuulllltz!



Watch as Daffy Duck takes on the Nazis in this, supposedly, banned Merry Melodies cartoon from the early 1940s. Watch as Duffy Duck sings an Australian wartime ditty, complete with a rough-as Aussie accent. Watch as Daffy Duck meets Hitler face to face, and beans him with a mallet.

"Hoo hoo! Hoo Hoo!"

They don't make propaganda like they used to.


Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd & Bugs Bunny Flog US War Bonds

The Flintstones Selling Winston Cigarettes

1943 Cartoon Portraying Japanese Military As Funny, Harmless

(thanks to reader Marcus Q. for the heads up)

7 Out of 10 Americans Say US Is Losing 'War On Terror'

Most Americans Don't Believe Iraq Is Part Of 'WoT'

In the worst poll results about the American public mood towards the 'War on Terror', since the 9/11 attacks, only 29% of Americans believe the United States is effectively fighting, and winning, the war.

The Gallup Poll also revealed that the majority of Americans believe the Afghanistan war is a part of the 'WoT'. However, more than half do not believe the Bush Co. propaganda that claims Iraq is "the central front in the War on Terror" :

29% of Americans say the United States is winning, while 20% say the terrorists are winning and 50% say neither side. Independents and Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to doubt U.S. progress, but even so only 53% of Republicans feel we have the upper hand.

Considering how often Americans are pumped with the message that Iraq is not only a part of the 'War on Terror', but "the central front", it is clear the majority of Americans no longer trust their government, or many of the mainstream American media outlets, to tell the truth about Iraq or the 'War on Terror'.

Finally, only 3 out of 10 Americans are "somewhat" worried that they, or a friend or relative, will be a victim of terrorism. Another exceptionally low figure.

Are Americans losing their fear of terrorism because so many years have passed since 9/11? Or are these all signs of a more deeply ingrained sense that the 'War on Terror' is not what it appears to be?

The 'War On Terror' Is "An Undeniable Fraud"

'War On Terror' Created "A Culture Of Fear" In The United States

US Growing Complacent On Terrorism, Says Homeland Security Chief

The 'War On Terror' - Powerful Orwellian Newspeak

BushBushBushBushBushBush

A bunch of story updates from our 'Last Days Of President Bush' blog follow :

It's seems like just about everyone in the United States is a Bush Hater now. Even conservative bloggers, the last bastion of grassroots Bushiastra left, have turned on their president over his plans to allow more than 12 million illegal immigrants to eventually, legally, call the United States their home. Interesting, President Bush shows an admirable level of tolerance, and even more people hate his guts than ever before.

The White House wanted to clarify something last week, and here it is : President Bush does not bind peoples' hands behind their back and throw them off rooftops. In case you were thinking he did. Sometimes...

During eight years in the White House, a president can expect to go through periods of popularity and unpopularity. It goes with the job. President Bush has known both the giddy heights and the sickening lows of popular opinion during his time in the West Wing. But now his personal approval ratings have entered a terrifying new zone of raw horror : Less Popular Than Jimmy Carter.

Did you know President Bush has been deployed to Iraq in a major combat role? No? Well, it's true, according to White House spokesman Tony Snow.

According to Snow, not only is President Bush "in the war" every day, he's "on the front lines".

So who's back at the White House meeting with world leaders? His replicant?


Did the American President and the Israeli Prime Minister finalise their plans to attack Iran during a White House pow wow last week?


Did a fast-fingered local really steal the Presidential Watch during Bush's recent visit to Albania? Maybe. Maybe not. The video says yes, the White House says no.

But the legend of 'Albanian Steals Bush Watch' will go down as one of those "It's True, Even If It Isn't" anecdotes that will never be completely demolished. Like Bush and the Plastic Thanksgiving Turkey he supposedly tried to serve up to American troops during a visit to Iraq. The myth has been utterly debunked, but it's still widely believed to be true.

Surprisingly, the 2006 edition of Alex Boese's book of hoax-busting, 'Hippo Eats Dwarf' includes the Plastic Turkey story as a fact. One of the world's most famous hoaxbusters believes Bush really was photographed holding a plastic turkey. Amazing stuff.

Perhaps the UK Observer was really onto something, back in January, 2001, when they said "Do Not Trust This Man As President".

Lots of Republican politicians don't want to be photograph with President Bush. They don't want to be seen with him in public, they don't want to talk about him during interviews and speeches, and if you're a Republican presidential candidate, you sure as hell don't start praising him during televised debates. But Bush loathing has spread so deeply into the Republican Party that GOPers are now actively snubbing their president. It's that ugly.

New Tom Cruise Movie "Sure To Be Crap"

Valkyrie hasn't been released yet, hell, it hasn't even started shooting, but the son of the subject of the new Tom Cruise movie, to be directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) believes he knows how it will all turn out.

“It is sure to be crap...I could be wrong - I would like to be.”

Of course he would. The movie is about his dad, who carved his name into the history books by trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944.

From The Australian :

The son of Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg said in an interview in today's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that he objected to the actor's involvement with the Church of Scientology, adding that Cruise “should keep his hands off my father”.

“I hoped for a while that it was all just a publicity stunt by Mr Cruise,” said Berthold von Stauffenberg, 72...“It is sure to be crap. Of course, I could be wrong - I would like to be.”

Stauffenberg led a group of Nazi officers who planted a bomb under a table in Hitler's eastern headquarters in East Prussia on July 20, 1944.

But the Nazi leader escaped with slight injuries because an officer had moved the briefcase containing the explosives behind a sturdy leg of the oak table.

“I am not saying that Cruise is a bad actor - I cannot judge that. But, in any case, I fear that it could turn into horrible kitsch....He should keep his hands off my father. He should climb a mountain or go surfing in the Caribbean."

Too late. Tom Cruise is locked in for the role. Will Cruise play the lead role with a German accent? Unlikely. It would be too easy for it to be hilariously bad. So Cruise will most likely play the role with an American accent, which will probably be even funnier.

Of course, Valkyrie could turn out to be a great movie. It could.

Expect the son to be offered a "consultant" gig on the new movie, and to radically change his tune a few weeks before the movie's cinematic release. This is the way such dissent is usually dealt with in Hollywood.

John Travolta Agrees With Tom Cruise On "Dangers" Of Psychiatric Drugs

Loser Loses 'Emotional Damage' Court Case Claim For Being A Loser

She didn't enter the lottery draw, but her neighbours did. They won. And then they rubbed it in by flaunting their new found wealth. Just hearing the word "lottery" could reduce her to tears. She decided to go to court to try and claim "emotional damages" for not winning a competition she didn't enter.

It comes as no great surprise to learn she lost her damages claim as well :

Amsterdam District Court judges Wednesday rejected the claim of Helene de Gier, who said she was traumatized by not winning the country's National Postcode Lottery...

De Gier lived on a street in the small southern town of Heusden where seven entrants won €13.9 million (US$18.6 million) each on Jan 1, 2006.

Together with her husband, she filed a suit, arguing that the lottery was an invasion of privacy because she could not escape the media attention surrounding the town's selection. Afterward, neighbors allegedly rubbed in their victory, including one who ostentatiously displayed a new Porsche in front of his house.

De Gier said she eventually become obsessed with the loss. She said she was constantly confronted with it when writing her postal address.

The thought of the next lottery draw felt "like a noose around my neck being tightened," she told television program Nova, wiping away tears.

De Gier denied a charge that has repeatedly been leveled at her since she launched her legal action.

"I'm not a sore loser. Absolutely not," she told Nova.

Nice try, though.

Michael Moore : 9/11 Truther?

9/11 Widows Demand Release Of Key CIA Report That Reveals Failure To Address Terror Threat

During a promotional tour for his new documnetary, 'Sicko', controversial film-maker Michael Moore was approached by a video reporters for an independent media group called We Are Change.

They asked him his thoughts about the 9/11 terror attacks, almost six years on, and what he had learned from the 9/11 rescue workers he had taken to Cuba for free medical care as part of his Sicko documentary. More than 1500 9/11 firefighters and rescue workers are now sick, or dying, from respiratory illneses due the extremely toxic dust they inhaled while working at Ground Zero. The site continued to burn and expel toxic smoke and fumes for almost three months after the attacks.

Moore told reporters :

"I've had a number of firefighters tell me over the years and since Fahrenheit 9/11 that they heard these explosions-- that they believe there's much more to the story than we've been told. I don't think the official investigations have told us the complete truth-- they haven't even told us half the truth."

On the morning of 9/11, bomb blasts and exploding carswere reported on CNN, BBC and local New York City media, in streets around the World Trade Centre site before the twin towers collapsed. Reports in a special issue of Time Magazine released days after the attack included numerous quotes from witnesses who claimed they saw or heard bombs exploding before the Twin Towers came down.

Michael Moore brought up the blackout of video at the site of the alleged Pentagon plane crash...

"I've filmed there before down at the Pentagon-- before 9/11-- there's got to be at least 100 cameras, ringing that building, in the trees, everywhere. They've got that plane coming in with 100 angles. How come with haven't seen the straight-- I'm not talking about stop-action photos, I'm talking about the video. I want to see the video; I want to see 100 videos that exist of this..."

Moore also expressed doubts about the believability of hijackers, with no former experience controlling large aircraft, being able to expertly manouvre the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 :

"Why don't they want us to see that plane coming into the building? Because, if you know anything about flying a plane, when you're going 500 miles per hour, if you're off by that much, you're in the river. So, they hit a building that's only 5 stories high...that expertly. I believe that there will be answers in that video tape and we should demand that that tape is released."

Moore also publicly joined the calls by widows of 9/11 victims, former members of the Bush administration, professional pilots, former intelligence agents and hundreds of New York firefighters, police and Port Authority workers for a new, and more thorough investigation, into the 9/11 attacks.

A new, independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks was needed, Moore said, "... to find out the whole truth."

In other 9/11 news, a group of widows of 9/11 victims are now demanding the release of a key CIA report they believe may hold secrets about how the United States came to be so unprepared for the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Centre and killed more than 2300 people :

From Raw Story :

"The report, prepared by the CIA's inspector general, is the only major 9/11 government review that has still not been made publicly available," Michael Isikoff reported in January. "When it was completed in August 2005, Newsweek and other publications reported that it contained sharp criticisms of former CIA director George Tenet and other top agency officials for failing to address the threat posed by Al Qaeda, as well as other mistakes that might have prevented the attacks."

In a statement obtained by RAW STORY, September 11th Advocates Patty Casazza, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg, and Lorie Van Auken write, "Almost six years have passed since the attacks of September 11, 2001, yet critical information continues to be withheld from the American public regarding the attacks.

"In 2002, after reviewing the evidence produced by the Joint Inquiry of Congress into the 9/11 Attacks, both Republican and Democratic Congressmen agreed that a CIA Inspector General review into individual responsibility was necessary," the statement continues. "Faced with the facts, these Congressmen understood that accountability in the Intelligence Community was crucial."

The 9/11 widows add, "Their intent was that a final declassified CIA/IG report be released to the public and where deemed appropriate by the report, for personnel at all levels to be held accountable for any omission, commission, or failure to meet professional standards in regard to the events of September 11, 2001. To date, despite enormous efforts from the Senate Intelligence Committee, nothing has happened."

World Trade Centre Cough - The Toxic Dust That Infected New York City

9/11's Lingering Cloud - Sick Ground Zero Workers Face Grim Future

5000 New York City Fire Department Workers Recieving Medical Treatment For Illness And Injuries Related To World Trade Centre Attacks

'Ground Zero' Toxic Fumes Were Covered Up From Day One - More Than 70,000 New Yorkers Under Medical Surveillance

Eyewitnesses Report Massive Explosions In Basement Of Twin Towers

YouTube Removes Dozens Of Videos Showing NYC Firefighters Discussing Explosions And Bombs At WTC Before Twin Towers Collapsed

Instant Justice : Texas Style

Mass insanity gets deadly, fast :

A crowd attacked and killed a passenger in a vehicle that had struck and injured a child, police said Wednesday.

Police believe 2,000 to 3,000 people were in the area for a Juneteenth celebration when the attack occurred Tuesday night. The man who was killed had been trying to stop the group from attacking the vehicle's driver when the crowd turned on him, authorities said.

The driver was able to get away is cooperating with investigators, police said.

The child hit by the car went to hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Unlike the passenger.

Juneteenth is a celebration connected with the emancipation of American slaves.

UPDATE : Police now say there were less than 20 people present when the man was beaten to death. No guns or knives were involved. They are now trying to find witnesses, but are getting no help from locals.

Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's 'American Sniper'

Virtual Life To Replace Physical Relationships?

"Sex With A Real Human? Ugh!"

Second Life Dying A Slow Death As Growth Falls Dramatically

Why do scientists and psychologists fret so much about such an incredibly disappointing online experience as 'Second Life'?

The UK Telegraph has yet another story propagating the myth that Second Life has seven million, or more, 'residents' and that is going to change the world, as it sucks half the planet into a virtual reality existence. Or something.

But more and more people who have invested heavily in trying to build a business in Second Life are asking : where are all the people?

It's a question worth asking, particularly if you spent big to establish your presence in this fake reality.

Has anyone who uses Second Life ever seen a crowd bigger than a couple of dozen people? Anywhere in there?

From the UK Telegraph :

The internet-based virtual world Second Life may have a serious impact on people's real life relationships, one of Britain's best-known scientists warned yesterday.

Baroness Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, said she feared users of the popular simulation could abandon the messy intimacy of "real-life" human relations for two-dimensional liaisons in the virtual world.

"People who dismiss it as a game will be in for a rude awakening," she said. "This will have a huge impact on society.

"Offering people the chance to have a permanent soap opera going on, in which they can participate, will be even more pervasive than reality TV such as Big Brother.

"This is the ultimate in that you can be involved, you can interact, but still you are hiding behind an avatar."

Baroness Greenfield wondered whether people who inhabited virtual worlds would come to regard real-life sexual relationships with some queasiness.

"Could it be that in the future they will say, 'A real relationship! Urgh, how horrible,' " she said. "The messiness and squalor of the real world, and the real-time element, might be offset by the more sanitised, two-dimensional reality of Second Life.

"It scares me in one way, and fascinates me in another, in wondering where it will take people. What impact does having a false identity have on your real identity?"

About as much impact as pretending you're the detective in your favourite crime book series?

The Baroness obviously hasn't tried having any kind of fun in Second Life. It may, or may not, have a bright future, but for the hundreds of millions of people who go online every day, all over the world, Second Life is little more than than an interesting diversion, an entertainment of short duration, a trendy tourist stop on the netpacker world trail.

Second Life is an online phenomena still trying to live up to its enormous publicity hype and mega-hyped reputation. How many corporations have blown tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, building an online presence in Second Life, because they believed all the guff that the Baroness has been suckered in by? That Second Life was somehow going to replace real life experiences for tens or hundreds of millions of people?

People are quite clearly making money flogging their products and services in Second Life, but there is a growing fear amongst the retailers that the traffic stats they hear about are not all they appear to be.

The current "population" of Second Life is just over 5 million people, but daily "active" users can be as low as 30 or 40 thousand people. And users only need only log in for about an hour a month to be counted as "active". In May, only 1.2 million users registered as "active'.

In fact, the economic growth of Second Life is has slowed dramatically :

The numbers show that growth in unique Second Life users has been steadily slowing since a peak of nearly 50 percent per month in October, 2006.

Slowing growth in the online world is not good business. In fact, it makes people feel panicky, as some of the retailers are clearly expressing on the official Second Life blog.

There may be more than 5 million members, but how many are actually in the Second Life universe at any one time, actively engaging in talk, activities, relationships or spending money? There are endless locations in Second Life that have cost big name clients extraordinary amounts of money to establish their "presence", but now look like city streets in the movie 28 Days Later. Empty. Lifeless. Devoid of activity.

And as for the Baroness' panic-attack on Second Life sucking up real life, there's anecdotal evidence gathering cred that the sprawl of entertainment options available to the internet generation is seeing them actually spending less collective time in front of the computer monitors, not more.

With the net, iPods, video phones, a multitude of gaming options, books and real world sports, the average kid in the US, or the UK, the all important cashed-up youth will probably soon be spending less time online then they were four or five years ago, and definitely less time zoked out in front of the television, which requires absolutely no interaction at all, just staring.

Second Life appears to be going the way of one of those glitzy supermalls that spring up in the middle of nowhere, and do well for a few months, and then slowly, quietly go out of business as the customers stop coming. The stores begin to close, the ones who invested the most hang on as long as possible, but a rot, a nefarious reality sets in, that becomes self-perpetuating.

And there are many, many nervous Second Life retailers and business people wondering how a new mandatory proof-of-age restriction is going to affect their business activities.

Online, the harder you make it for new users to get into something that has caught their interest, the less likely you are to find all those new customers you need to grow exponentially.


Second Life Has More Bugs Than A Cheap Las Vegas Motel Mattress

In Second Life, Women Outnumbered 3 To 1

The Death Of The American Newspaper Meets The Rise Of The Digital News Junkie

Check Green, veteran Colorado journalist of many decades, is not a lone voice in the American media landscape, crying out for the glory days of newspapers.

Sales of newspapers in the US are plunging. Dozens of local newspapers in Texas have been swallowed up and may cease to exist at the same moment that the New York Times and the Washington Post are suffering stunning circulation drops.

But Green, like many of his generation, thinks newspaper sales decreases automatically means that the 20-somethings are not getting their full dose of news and views, and are far more occupied with their iPods and Playstations.

Green couldn't be more wrong. There has never been an American generation consuming as much current affairs and news as the American generation that now fights the war in Iraq, and the war against Bush Co. in the homeland.

Green remembers the days when all good Americans read one or two newspapers a day. But millions of young Americans are scanning three or four or eight or twelve newspapers a day online, and not just the local or next big city papers. Thousands of newspapers from all over the world are available online now, and tools like Google Alerts keep these young American news junkies filled to the brim with news and opinions on their topics of interest from across the globe, not just from the local newspaper or state capital broadsheet.

That said, Chuck Green's opinion piece, excerpted below, is an interesting exercise in nostalgia, but the unbiased, independent city newspapers he fondly remembers are long gone now.

But I'd be of the opinion that Americans are now in a far better media/news landscape than ever before, thanks to the internet and digital newspapers. For it is far better to have access to the variety, colour and scope of the world's opinion, and the global interpretation of the big news stories of the day, then just the filter-themes of one local big city newspaper editor :

I've worked for newspapers for 46 years, beginning as a kid riding a bicycle to the job as a printer's apprentice after school, and now winding down as a retired journalist writing two columns a week for several Colorado newspapers. Between those bookends, I worked for 34 years at The Denver Post, from copy boy to club reporter to city editor to vice president of news.

But the dream came true, and now it has vanished. There are no jobs anymore for kids on bicycles, and the entry-level job of newsroom errand boy no longer exists.

Newspapers are experiencing financial trouble these days, and there are signs that it is no temporary decline. The economy is good, but the newspaper business is turning bad.

Within the past two months, employees have been cut - either through buyouts or layoffs - at four Colorado newspapers (The Post, the Rocky Mountain News, the Fort Collins Coloradan and the Colorado Springs Gazette), conforming to a nationwide trend that has reduced the workforce at large and small newspapers from Boston to Los Angeles.

Those that haven't tossed employees out of jobs are not hiring new ones to fill vacancies created by the normal retirements or resignations in the ebb and flow of normal business. They are desperately cutting expenses by reducing travel, trying to consume less newsprint, and even pulling back on charitable contributions.

There is a limit to how much revenue they can raise by increasing advertising and subscriptions rates, and for many companies they have reached that limit.

The mighty New York Times Co. last week announced an 8.5 percent decline in advertising revenue for the month of May 2007 compared to the same period last year.

That, my friends, is a huge number - hundreds of millions of dollars. It not only reflects a decline at The Times itself, but its other properties including the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe and several community newspapers in New England and all the way down the East Coast to Florida.

The dilemma isn't a simple one to grasp.

Two generations of devoted newspaper readers (customers) are dying off, and two generations of non-readers (not customers) are replacing them.

Grandpa used to read a newspaper or two every day, as regularly as taking a morning shower and showing up for the job. Grandson hasn't picked up a newspaper in months or years.

Younger people, who now are in their twenties, thirties and forties, are more interested in iPod music than news reports on what the City Council or the School Board or the Pentagon is doing.

This might be just the muttering of an old man, wallowing in nostalgia, but I can't help but think that the decline in newspapers reflects a decline in our society. It has been said that newspapers are the glue that holds a town together, and news is the first draft of history.

The decline of newspapers, a great American institution and founding pillar of our nation, might just reflect the crumbling of a democracy's foundation. A government of the people can't last long if the people lose interest.

It's a reasonable argument to counter Green with that young Americans have never been more interested in what the Pentagon or the White House is up to, and they are contributing to the national debate, through blog comments and catching the news clips they missed on You Tube, in a far more active and influential way than just writing the occasional letter to the editor, as was the way it was once done. Back in Green's day.

More young Americans might be getting their nightly news from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, than the 6pm NBC News, but that doesn't mean they are any less informed, or aware of what is happening to their country.

In fact, considering that The Daily Show actually tears apart and deciphers the propaganda of the White House and the Pentagon, the youth of America are even more informed and aware than their parents and grandparents, still getting their news fix from the local city paper and their news round-up from the talking heads on the evening news.

The Impossible 'Corner' Of The Universe



The above image, from NASA, is a computer simulation based on observations made by many of the world's leading astronomers. It shows a remote, and therefore, early part of the Universe, at an era astronomers estimate to be about 1/5th of its presumed age - 10.8 billion years. This vast 'string' of galaxies is about 300 million light years long.

But the 'string' of galaxies poses some troubling questions for the standing theories of not only how the Universe has evolved through billions of years, but it how it originally came into existence.

In short, the 'string' of galaxies is a seeming impossibility. It's too many galaxies for such a young Universe. Too youthful to be so evolved :

This new structure defies current models of how the Universe evolved, which can't explain how a string this big could have formed so early.

The string lies 10,800 million light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Grus (the Crane).

"We are seeing this string as it was when the Universe was only a fifth of its present age...That is, we are looking back four-fifths of the way to the beginning of the Universe as a result of the Big Bang."

You can also find a pretty damn stunning MPEG mini-movie of the formation of the 'string' at the NASA site, here.

You can see a much larger image of the 'string' of galaxies here.

American Sniper - A Poem

An excerpt :

I bled from my ears as I slept
and dreamed of home
dreamed I was home again
but I woke up here
it's still night
but almost dawn now
I need water
my throat is on fire
I need bullets
I need food
I need to see that helo
coming in through the dust storm
that fills the distant sky
I hold my knife, ready
I can hear them coming up
to get me
now they've cleared the bodies
and wounded from where the stairs
used to be
I can hear them coming
I can't stop them but
I can secure my zone of defence
they come onto the rooftop
my rooftop in Fallujah
there's so many of them


Go Here To Read The Whole Poem

Stephen Hawking Will Now Bore Children, Along WIth Their Parents, To Distraction With Physics Based 'Adventure' Book

Professor Stephen Hawking has written, in collaboration with his daughter, a book for kids</