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

PKD Carbon Credits

I wish I'd written something like this when it occurred to me, but I didn't, and someone beat me to it. They did a better job of explaining it than I would have anyway :

If Philip K. Dick, the man who inspired "Blade Runner," were alive, he would be scribbling dystopian environmental novels in which every newborn child is assigned a lifetime carbon debit card - like wartime ration cards. You only get to use so much plastic, or burn so much wood or eat so much imported food (how much fossil fuel does it take to get that bottle of Euro-water to Santa Monica?) before you use up your carbon points and you're out of the game. Dick's characters wouldn't be stock traders, they'd be carbon traders, blackmailing starving Sudanese villagers online for their carbon points in exchange for rice and water.

So far, green crusading has been sweet persuasion, everyone pointing out - nicely - how you can feel virtuous and conscientious: Please don't buy wood products from rain forest rapists. Be a hero - recycle your plastic and paper. Thank you for not pouring your dreck into the ocean.

Well, nuts to that. A Dickian dystopia is bearing down on us. The government and the greenies are afraid of making you feel guilty. Not me.

Read The Rest Here

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 about all the fun and adventure of physics and quantum whatever.

Millions of copies of the kid's book, George's Secret Key To The Universe, are expected to be sold, with only the first five or six pages to be read before being placed back on the book shelf to be finished "later, when I can concentrate".

Professor Hawking is famous for having written one of the biggest selling, but most unread, books of the modern age : A Brief History Of.....pphhffnoorre.....Of Time.

Sorry. Dozed off there for a sec.

Here's a synopsis of the new book :

...George's parents, who have always been wary of technology, warn him about their new neighbors: Eric is a scientist and his daughter, Annie, seems to be following in his footsteps.

Despite their warnings, George befriends them and Cosmos, their super- computer, and he finds himself on a wildly fun adventure, while learning about physics, time, and the universe.

With Cosmos's help, he can travel to other planets and a black hole, but what would happen if the wrong people got their hands on Cosmos?

George, Annie, and Eric are about to find out, and what ensues is a funny adventure that clearly explains the mysteries of science.

It should hit book stores shelves just in time to distract all those kids weeping themselves into convulsions over the death of Harry Potter.

Whoops. Did I just reveal something I shouldn't have?

Now US 'Intelligence' Claims China Is Arming Terrorists In Afghanistan & Iraq, Via Iran

Just in time to replace all those dire headlines in American newspapers and on the evening news about the US having to arm Sunni insurgents in a desperate attempt to make the troop "surge" strategy work, and to hopefully distract from the latest foul Bush administration scandal, comes the 'leaked intelligence' news that China is helping to arm terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan....via Iran of course.

One Pentagon source spilling their guts to the Washington Times and the Super Terror Trio of Russia, Iran and China becomes a reality, for now :

As the Bush administration loses further ground in Iraq, and it becomes all but impossible to claim that the troop "surge" is working, or needs more time to work, the media voices blaming Iran, Russia and China for America's problems in Iraq and Afghanistan will only get louder.

Such leaked 'intelligence' serves to not only fill news time and column inches that would otherwise be devoted to the horror of Iraq, or the ceaseless bad news about the Bush administration, but it creates a desperate need in the minds of (some) Americans that they must continue to spend jaw-dropping amounts of money on defence - an estimated $530 billion in the next twelve months alone.

That China, as one of the top five weapons and arms manufacturers in the world, is selling military product that eventually winds up in the hands of terrorists and insurgents is barely an issue at all.

The other key arms makers - Russia, France, the UK, Germany, Israel and the US - also sell their weapons of war in open markets across the planet that are constantly infiltrated by middle men who see no problem selling weapons on to genocidal thugs in Africa, jihadist tribes in Afghanistan, or IED-planting insurgents in Iraq, and face little international restrictions when it comes to doing so.

The international sales and export of bombs, missiles and bullets and the means to deliver them into humans is the biggest legal industry in the world, worth more than a trillion dollars a year.

When it comes to filling the world with appallingly vicious weapons of war, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, who also happen to be the five biggest arms manufacturers, are all as guilty as each other.

Go Here To 'The Fourth World War' Blog For The Full Story

United States Has 500,000 American 'Terrorists' On Watch Lists

The FBI's anti-terror 'watch list' has grown beyond merely absurd and become the sort of thing you once read about in the totalitarian societies of science fiction novels :

A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror.

In addition to the NCTC list, the FBI keeps a list of U.S. persons who are believed to be domestic terrorists -- abortion clinic bombers, for example, or firebombing environmental extremists, who have no known tie to an international terrorist group.

Combined, the NCTC and FBI compendia comprise the watch list used by federal security screening personnel on the lookout for terrorists.

"It grows seemingly without control or limitation," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani of the terrorism watch list. Sparapani called the 509,000 figure "stunning."

"If we have 509,000 names on that list, the watch list is virtually useless," he told ABC News. "You'll be capturing innocent individuals with no connection to crime or terror."

U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list.

Reporters who have reviewed versions of the list found it included the names of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, at the time he was alive but in custody in Iraq; imprisoned al Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui; and 14 of the 19 Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers, all of whom perished in the attacks.

In recent months, Americans have been refused access to airplanes and airports, and have been detained and harassed at security desks, merely because they have marched against the Iraq War, listed themselves on public records as 'Quakers', been seen in the company of people who may or may not be terrorist suspects, taken part in animal rights demonstrations or come under suspicion simply because their name is too close to that of someone else already on the anti-terror 'watch list'.

From the earliest days of The Patriot Act, "paranoid" civil libertarians, "crazed" conspiracy theorists and "radical" patriots, warned long and loud that the 'War on Terror' would morph into a war against the freedoms and liberty of all Americans, who could find themselves blacklisted on databases for demanding peace instead of war, fair trials instead of injustice and reality instead of paranoid fantasy.

Such predictions have become every day events now inside the United States.

It is disturbing to repeatedly read stories from Americans, commenting on mainstream media message boards, or in letters to editors, who say they are now afraid to go to the airport, or nervous about handing over personal details, or don't want to cross the borders of Canada and Mexico, in case they are detained for something they haven't done, or said, or even thought.

Likewise, it is unnerving to see just how many Americans are now saying they have been detained, or harassed, or questioned aggressively, because their names show up on 'watch lists'.

If it hasn't yet happened to them, they have a friend or a relative, a son or mother or uncle to whom it has already happened.

While there are still millions of Americans who believe such tightened restrictions on personal freedom and privacy, and the expansion of 'watch lists', are necessary to protect them from terrorist threats, the number of true believers has been dropping steadily in the past two years, as the wide scale impact of such security measures in the homeland have become clearer.


Refuse A Real ID Card And You Will Be Listed As Potentially "Dangerous"

The Police State Is Closer Than You Think

Bush Co. Seizes Control Of 'Shadow Government'

February 2005 : Personal Data On Nearly Every American "Stolen"

Massive New FBI Datamining Plan To Create 6 Billion Records 'Bank' On Americans

Bush The Decider Can Now Become Bush The Dictator, All He Needs Is A "Catastrophic Emergency"

Finally, Massive Amounts Of WMDs Found...

...Dumped In Deep Water Off US Coasts

Of course, this is not a new activity, but it's still stunning to see just how much dangerous crap has been tossed into the oceans over the decades.

Neither in the US alone in this kind of horrendous pollution. The UK, Australia, Iran, Russia, China and dozens of other countries have used the seas and oceans as a dumping ground for dangerous, deadly weapons and chemicals since the end of World War 2.

You just don't see it mentioned that often, or in such detail :

It is no secret that the U.S. military has used the ocean as trashcan for munitions in the past...federal lawmakers were pressing the US Army to reveal everything it knows about a massive international program to dump chemical weapons off homeland and foreign shores.

"The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels."

(Tip o' the hat to Crooks And Liars)

The Etiquette Of Jihad

It may be hard to believe that the ideology of strapping bombs to your torso and detonating yourself in a crowd of innocent people can be enforced by a set of rules, however vague and open to interpretation they may be, but this extremely disturbing, and genuinely f..ked-up story from the New York Times claims otherwise :

With Islamist violence brewing in various parts of the world, the set of rules that seek to guide and justify the killing that militants do is growing more complex.

This jihad etiquette is not written down, and for good reason. It varies as much in interpretation and practice as extremist groups vary in their goals. But the rules have some general themes that underlie actions ranging from the recent rash of suicide bombings in Algeria and Somalia, to the surge in beheadings and bombings by separatist Muslims in Thailand.

Here's the Top Six Rules Of Jihad. The full story from the NYTimes has 'definitions' to go with each rule.

Rule No. 1: You can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt.

Rule No. 2: You can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.

Rule No. 3: Sometimes, you can single out civilians for killing; bankers are an example.

Rule No. 4: You cannot kill in the country where you reside unless you were born there.

Rule No. 5: You can lie or hide your religion if you do this for jihad.

Rule No. 6. You may need to ask your parents for their consent.

But what about all those children in Iraq who have been killed in suicide attacks? How can anyone, even a vengeance crazed jihadi, attempt to justify the slaughter of innocent children?

Two explanations. First the jihadist justification :

...militant Islamists including extremists in Jordan who embrace Al Qaeda’s ideology teach recruits that children receive special consideration in death. They are not held accountable for any sins until puberty, and if they are killed in a jihad operation they will go straight to heaven.

There, they will instantly age to their late 20s, and enjoy the same access to virgins and other benefits as martyrs receive.

And now a reality check, of sorts :

Islamic militants are hardly alone in seeking to rationalize innocent deaths, says John O. Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University. “Whether you are talking about leftist radicals here in the 1960s, or the apologies for civilian collateral damage in Iraq that you get from the Pentagon, the argument is that if the action is just, the collateral damage is justifiable,” he says.

Or you can try the new, refined 2007 Tony Blair/George W. Bush/John Howard Justification For Launching An Illegal War, a pet phrase that sounds disturbingly similar to the rantings of Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s :

"I believed I was doing what was right."

Hey, doesn't everybody?

Vantastic



Perhaps you've seen 'Pimp My Ride'? The American TV show where gangs of car customisers take some dodgy old heap and stuff it full of speakers, TV screens, chrome and accessories?

Well, those Americans are mere upstart amateurs. The kings of radical vehicle customisation are, of course, the Japanese. There is hardcore, and then there is the Japanese extreme edge.

Pink Tentacle has a feast of brain-flexing extreme custom van images

Albanians Love Bush, Steal His Watch

When President Bush visited Albania over the weekend, he was granted a "hero's welcome".

In some of the most remarkable presidential mobbing scenes you will ever see, Bush was patted, kissed, hugged, grabbed, groped and had his watch stolen by some fast-working hands.

And you can see the fast theft of his watch for yourself in a video from an Albanian news channel.

Here's the freeze frames that deny the White House claim that he wasn't robbed.


Bush with watch on left hand



Seconds later, no watch

Go To 'The Last Days Of President Bush' For The Video

Sopranos : The Movie?

Creator Says He'd Do It If He Got The Right Idea

Was The Finale An Extended Tony Soprano Dream?



And so it ends. One of the greatest, most addictive shows in the history of television draws to a close, with a point of view of the world from the Tony Soprano perspective, as his family arrives at an ice-cream parlour one by one.

Is he going to get whacked? What about the dodgy looking geezer he just saw in the bathroom? Is he going to burst out with guns blazing and wipe out the whole family?

Nah. Nothing happened. Tony's wife and kids turned up at the parlour safe and well and sat down for a chat and a feed. Cut to black, five seconds worth, roll credits.

And then the fans invaded the internet, blogs and news comment boards and MySpace devotee sites and HBO's official site. Millions of Americans weighed in with their fury, anger, disappointment. Where was the big finish? Why so many story threads not wrapped up? WTF?

HBO said its Web site crashed shortly after the episode due to the volume of people checking in and posting messages. There were 364,000 page views a second at its peak — "just astronomical," said spokesman Jeff Cuson. It took a half hour to get the Web site up again, and an hour for the bulletin boards.

Not everyone hated it. Many critics claim the Sopranos finale sealed its place as a true work of art, the rarest of things on TV, and the next morning more than a few fans had come round to seeing the final episode in a different light : not that bad at all, considering.

"I was really annoyed watching it," said Marlene Windmiller, a New York attorney and mother. "But now as I think about it, it makes more sense. You know, it was what it was. There really was no more left to say."

Sopranos creator David Chase has given an excellent interview to a local New Jersey newspaper, where he refuses to write off the option of doing a Sopranos based movie. If only he gets the right idea for one :

"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.

"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."

Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."

But a movie is almost a redundant idea in the age of online TV. If Chase wanted to, and despite the expected howls of outrage that would pre-empt such a move, he could turn out another ten episodes and sell them online, TV on demand, direct to millions of Sopranos fans around the world. An audience that will only grow as the DVD box sets and re-runs spread throughout the world. How many people would pay two or three dollars for each new episode?

Ten million people?

50 million?

If Chase wanted to do nothing but make a staggering pot of money, easily more than a billion dollars, he could always choose this option, and he could do so any time in the next three to five years and still find a huge audience.

Unlikely? "I never say never."

The best interpretation of the final episode I've read so far comes from the man who interviewed Chase, Alan Sepinwall :

Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

A big final shootout gun battle would have been stupid, and out of character. The Sopranos rarely went for the easy and neat wrap-ups, that's one of the reasons why you wanted to keep watching the show. It was satisfying, funny and shocking, and messy and frustrating.

(I must confess to having watched a bootleg copy of the final episode online, the quality was bad, and I'll probably kick myself that I didn't wait until I'd viewed the other 40 or so episodes I haven't got through yet on DVD, which has become a fantastic experience of marathon TV viewing, five to eight hours worth of episodes per week).

The Sopranos had to end without the big gunfight, and because it didn't end in such a cliched way, fans are free to imagine what happens from now on in the lives of these characters.

And if Tony had gone into witness protection, it would have been a direct rip-off of Scorsese's Goodfellas, something that would have been utterly unforgivable for such an original, groundbreaking TV show like The Sopranos.

It ended as it should have. As it ultimately had to.

Unless there's a movie, of course.

Or another eight or ten TV-on-demand episodes online.

Or The Sopranos Family Christmas Special.


UPDATE : A very perceptive interpretation of the Sopranos finale has popped up in the comments after the David Chase interview mentioned above :

"Tony falls asleep (in the second to last episode) in a barren room. No sheets on bed, no alrms clock, nothing. When he apparently wakes up, there are sheets on bed, a mirror, an alarm clock with music going off. None of that was in the end of last week's show. Tony dreams the whole last episode. A.J getting settled, Phil going down and agent harris cheering for him, Meadow becoming a lawyer and getting married. In the end, he sees himself sitting at the table. He is dreaming of having dinner with his family. Its ends when tony wakes up from his great dream. When A.J. says during the episode, "you are all living in a dream", that is a clue. sheets on bed, A.J's comment, and tony seeing himself at the end are all clues that the show really ended last week. This weeks episode was all a dream."

Most of this theory makes perfect sense. It fits the second to last and final episodes, it fits with Tony's extensive dream library through the previous 85 episodes and explains the semi-surreal feel of the finale.

It'd be interesting to know what David Chase thinks of this theory, but he's refusing to confirm or deny any speculations about what the finale really means.

As well he should.

Sopranos Extras Thrown Into TV History

Fade To Black Has Sopranos Fans Seeing Black

Sopranos Leave Mark On Jersey

The Ending That Was Admired, And Hated

Finding Salvation By Not Driving SUVs




Author Michael Crichton explains why he sees vast danger in the transformation of responsible environmentalism into an irresponsible new world religion of the kind that Al Gore is regularly accused of pumping like an evangelist.

Crichton's comparisons, from an anthropological point of view, between the key world religions and fundamentalist environmentalism, as a cure for global warming induced rapid climate change, are powerful, challenging and poignant.

Will These Two Apocalyptic Madmen Get Their War?



It sure sounds like it :

Predicting that Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon within three years and claiming to have a strike plan in place, senior American military officers have told The Jerusalem Post they support President George W. Bush's stance to do everything necessary to stop the Islamic Republic's race for nuclear power.

A high-ranking American military officer told the Post that senior officers in the US armed forces had thrown their support behind Bush and believed that additional steps needed to be taken to stop Iran.

According to a high-ranking American military officer, the US Navy and Air Force would play the primary roles in any military action taken against Iran. One idea under consideration is a naval blockade designed to cut off Iran's oil exports.

The officer said that if the US government or the UN Security Council decided on this course of action, the US Navy would most probably not block the Strait of Hormuz - a step that would definitely draw an Iranian military response - but would patrol farther out and turn away tankers on their way to load oil.

While it is not uncommon for an Israeli government media propaganda portal like the Jerusalem Post to announce War On Iran is imminent, and that US military plans are ready to go, the talk of an international oil blockade is something you don't see often mentioned, and for good reason.

A planned, purposeful international oil blockade, with or without strikes on Iran's nuclear plants, will uncork the fury of China, who already relies on Iranian energy exports to fuel its stunning growth, and has recently cut deals worth more than $100 billion to guarantee Iranian energy supplies through the coming decade.

The US, under BushCo and the NeoCons, with Israel barracking from the stands, are ready and willing to launch a War On Iran, and the Iranian president is all but saying "Bring It On".

But where is the international support for such military action against Iran? Most Americans don't view Iran as a threat, and most nations of the European Union have already voiced their displeasure at any action that might be taken by the US, or Israel, that would clearly further destabilise the Middle East and lead to even greater hostilities and international stock market and trade losses.

If US-Israel joint strikes on Iran go ahead, it will be impossible for China and Russia not to get involved.

It's hard to believe that the Fourth World War has not already begun. We are just yet to see it's total breakout.

Don't Put Your Carbon Footprints On The Furniture

Bored with simply complaining to your wife or husband about their inability to hang wet towels correctly? Or clean a coffee machine? Or take care of the yard? Or clean the kitchen floor right up to the corners?

Just don't get a kick anymore out of complaining about their personal habits, sleeping habits, eating habits? The clothes they wear? The haircut they have? The books they read and the DVDs they want to watch?

Well, that's no reason to break up, or file for divorce. All you need to do is find some fun new ways to taunt, tease and annoy your loved one.

And the threats of global warming and subsequent climate change provides an endless panorama of Eco-Harassment opportunities.

I've seen probably a dozen letters like the one below, in 'Help Me' advice columns in American, French, Australian and German newspapers. Thought it might be a passing phase, or something rare and unusual. Nuh. Eco-harassment is here to stay.

Witness the horrors that can be inflicted on a passive partner by a raging new Eco-Evangelist :

My wife has become an eco-evangelist, and it's affecting our previously blissful relationship. A supermarket boycott, recycling and wormeries I can deal with, but a ban on foreign holidays has been hard to bear - the lack of mini-breaks is taking its toll on our sex life. Now I'm fighting to save my hard-earned car from extinction. I think it's unfair of her to impose her views in this way, but she says the rainforests are dying. I'm seething about it. Sometimes when she's out I feel like leaving the lights on, repeatedly flushing the toilet and gorging myself on baby vegetables flown in from Kenya just to annoy her. It's just not funny any more. How can I persuade her that this crusade is damaging our marriage?

The advice columnist's reply plays all sides of the issues at the same time :

I'm on your side and hers. But there is something a trifle irritating about evangelists who start banging the drum before they have a clue what they're supposed to be playing.

Your wife's intentions are sound and her initiatives very admirable. But we're never going to return to nomadic farming, so educated and informed responses rather than knitting your own home are what's required to ensure the planet's future.

The global warming Headlines Of Horror, Reality, Incredulity And Doubt continue to flow :

Global Sunshades, Massive Mirrors, Chemtrails - Why These Fantastical Solutions To Global Warming Are No Solutions

The Melting Arctic : Is Dirty Snow Worse Than Greenhouse Gases

Claim : Global Warming Is Happening At Three Times The Speed Of Worst Previous Estimates

Tibet's Glaciers Melt, China's Fresh Water Supply Under Threat

Global Warming : Speculation As Dogma

The Unprecedented Melting Of West Antarctica

US Experiences Invasion By Feral Cats - Blame Global Warming

300 Antartican Glaciers Head Into The Ocean

Huge Divisions Still Remain Between World Leaders Over Global Warming And How To Control Climate Change

Alien Neighbours "Almost Certainly" Exist, And Close By

Yawn-o, Brainiac, Where Do They Shop?



Some day soon, probably no more than a decade away, a group of scientists are going to huddle nervously before a packed press conference to announce that they are "almost 100% sure" that they have confirmed the existence of intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy.

No doubt, there will be a number of mocked-up images of what our alien neighbours may possibly look like, and lots of speculation about what they eat, breathe, think and what they know about us.

But what sort of impact would such an announcement have? Even if Paris Hilton was quiet that day and the news about our 'Alien Neighbours' got the full media attention? Would people panic, or rejoice? Roll out the red carpet, or fill a few more bullet clips?

Probably none of the above, or at least, there would be no great frenzy of any reaction, other than "Yeah, so what?" from most people.

The big excitement will come when one of these aliens turns up on Letterman, or decides to go shopping in Walmart. Or starts dating Paris Hilton. Until such events occur, or short of a full Independence Day-scale invasion and scouring, most people won't give a damn about our alien neighbours until they provide amusement, intrigue or a threat.

But in the meantime, the preparatory work on shaping world opinion towards the "Alien Neighbours" announcement continues, steadily, regularly, and positively. If they come, they will come in peace, we will be told, so we do not need to send them home in pieces :

Intelligent extra-terrestrials almost certainly exist on distant planets beyond our solar system, leading British astronomers told the government yesterday.

The scientists expect that the first evidence of primitive alien life, such as microbes and vegetation, will emerge within 10 years, with more substantial finds following future space missions.

The experts, from high-ranking UK universities and research institutes, were gathered in London by the science minister, Malcolm Wicks, to describe the latest advances in the search for distant, habitable planets capable of harbouring life.

A recent revolution in technology means astronomers can now spot Earth-like planets orbiting faraway stars, raising the chances of alien life being found. By analysing reflected light, it is becoming possible to find any that may host vegetation and breathable atmospheres.

"Twenty years ago we only had one solar system to study and that's the one we live in. But since then, there's been an explosion in the number of planets outside our solar system that we've been able to detect," said Professor Keith Mason...

Some 200 planets have been detected orbiting stars other than the sun.

Scientists this year announced the discovery of a warm, rocky "second Earth" circling a distant star called Gliese 581, about 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra. Crucial measurements of the planet's surface temperature range revealed it was able to hold liquid water, believed to be a prerequisite for life.

Our own existence may already have come to the attention of any aliens who are peering in our direction across the depths of space. Since the advent of radio waves, stray signals have leaked from Earth and travelled as far as 80 light years into space, far beyond the closest stars.

"If there's intelligent life out there, they sure as hell know we're here," said Michael Perryman, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency.

When Bush Co. Politics Meets Terror In The Homeland

60% Of Americans Don't Trust Bush Co. To Tell The Truth About Terror Threats

JFK Airport Terror Plot Was Fantasy, Not Threat

Remarkable Washington Post/ABC News poll results, as summarised by WHW :

* An all-time high of 55 percent think U.S. military forces should be decreased.

* An all-time high of 53 percent don't think the war with Iraq has contributed to the long-term security of the United States.

* And a staggering 60 percent of American feel they cannot trust the Bush administration to honestly and accurately report intelligence about security threats facing the United States.

Why do 6 out of 10 Americans feel they cannot trust Bush Co. to tell the truth about terror threats?

Why are more than 180 million Americans so suspicious about how the president deals with the terror threat facing the United States, even after the devastation of 9/11, and a seemingly endless stream of terror-related busts and investigations in the homeland?

Keith Olbermann, of NBC, has a remarkable and extremely troubling pair of reports on what he calls "The Nexus Between Politics And Terror". The reports take a close look at some 12 'terror alerts' issued by the Bush Administration since 9/11, and almost every one of these major terror alerts were made public one to four days after a very embarrassing news event that impacted negatively on the Bush White House.

Or as Crooks And Liars puts it :

...the Bush Administration has strategically used terrorism and fear to counter bad publicity, starting in 2002 all the way up to the most recent terrorist plot to blow up JFK airport.

A couple of the connections Oldermann makes in his timeline are weak, but the vast majority are very strong, and disturbing in the extreme. It would seem that the Bush administration has no problem pumping the media with terror threats, alerts and leaks, whenever they want the headlines to be drawn away from their own failings and embarrassments.

Unfortunately, the Olbermann reports add weight to the occasionally raised argument that the 'War on Terror' is a fraud, and the Bush administration regularly tries to capitalise on criminal plots and threats in the United States to justify the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You can decide for yourself. The video reports can be found here.

From a transcript of an earlier Keith Olbermann report on the "Nexus Between Politics And Terror" :

Are these coincidences signs that the government‘s approach has worked because none of the announced threats have ever materialized? Are they signs that the government has not yet mastered how and when to inform the public? Is there, in addition to the fog of war, a simple, rather benign fog of intelligence?

But if merely a reasonable case could be made that any of these juxtapositions of events are more than just coincidences, it underscores the need for questions to be asked in this country. Questions about what is prudence and what is fear mongering? Questions about which is the threat of death by terror and which is the terror of threat?

UPDATE : Arianna Huffington deconstructs the so-called 'JFK Pipeline Terror Plot' that swamped the American media last weekend, just in time for another Republican presidential wannabe debate. Huffington further explores the argument that more and more Americans don't trust Bush Co. on the threat of terrorism because of the exploitation and manipulation that comes with every new 'terror plot' revelation :

The JFK pipeline plot appears to be the work of yet another gang that couldn't jihad straight.

There was no set plan. There was no financing. They didn't have any explosives -- and yet government officials were quoted calling the amorphous plot "one of the most chilling plots imaginable" that almost "resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction." And people wonder why the public has become cynical about how the war on terror is being used for political purposes.

What's more, the wave of red alert press coverage turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding of how jet fuel pipelines work. "Such an attack would have crippled America's economy," wailed AP's Adam Goldman. And people wonder why the public has become cynical about how the media uses the war on terror to boost their ratings and circulation.

These things always seem to follow a pattern: Start with a big media splash: "We got the bad guys! We saved the country!" Then it slowly comes out that the terrorists might not have been so terrifying. Indeed, they are boobs that go to Circuit City to get their jihadist recruitment video burned onto DVD, or they are low-level criminals with delusions of grandeur, goaded into grander fantasies and bigger targets by informants who are getting paid or getting their sentences reduced by the FBI if they deliver.

Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani's replacement as mayor of New York, took a rightly dismissive approach to the JFK plot hype: "You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life. You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist."

Amen to that.

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

Cashing In On Terror : Disgraced Bush Cronies Get Rich Off Philip K Dickian Security And Defence Companies And Contracts

Republican Chairman Calls For More Terror Attacks In The United States

Recent Stories From Darryl Mason's Blog Network

Most Americans No Longer Believe Bush Co. Will Tell Them The Truth About Terror Threats
Mutiny Looms? The Growing Dissent Inside The US Army
The Most Dangerous Game : US Plays Chicken With Russia Over Missile Shield
Sydney To Get A Police State Preview During World Leaders Summit : Locals Told To "Leave Town" When Bush Comes To Visit
Parties, Loud Music To Become Illegal In Sydney After 10pm
Putting The Boot Into Bush : Now Republicans Are Doing It, Too
The 'War On Terror' Is "An Undeniable Fraud"
--------------------------------

Reporter Arrested At Republican Bash For Asking Questions

Police Arrest CNN Affiliated Reporter On Orders Of Guiliani Aide

Reporter To Seek Criminal Indictments Against Guiliani Staffers, Police For Assault And Abuse Of First Ammendment Rights


Amazing footage of a reporter for an independent news site asking a member of Rudy Guiliani's staff valid questions about the presidential candidate, during a Republican media function last night, and then being removed and arrested by police, on the direct orders of a Guiliani aide.





(Go here if you have any problems viewing the video above)

The reporter, Matt Lepacek, was an accredited journalist, with CNN, so he had a legitimate reason to be at the media function. He was escorted from the venue by police, in the midst of a media swarm, and later released on $400 bail :

Though CNN staff members tried to persuade police not to arrest the accredited reporter-- in violation of the First Amendment, Lepacek was taken to jail...

...Lepacek was scared because he had been told he may be transferred to a secret detention facility because state police were also considering charges of espionage against him-- due to a webcam Lepacek was using to broadcast live at the event. State police considered it to be a hidden camera, which led to discussion of "espionage."

Wearing a webcam at a press event is not an act of espionage. Alex Jones, who was watching the live feed, witnessed Lepacek announce that he was wearing a camera connected to a laptop that was transmitting the press conference live at approximately 9:20 EST. When Lepacek announced that he was broadcasting live, Giuliani staff members responded by getting upset at his questions and ordering his arrest.

Lepacek is being tagged "a conspiracy theorist", but as the video above clearly shows, he was only asking the Guiliani aide why the presidential candidate had changed his story about key events of the 9/11 attacks, based on quotes from Guiliani mainstream media interviews over the past six years.

The story, and video, is now going viral across the internet, and should be popping up in the mainstream media in the next day or two days.

Lepacek had previously questioned Guiliani about 9/11, in the company of New York City firefighters and family members of 9/11 victims.

The crux of Lepacek's questions to Guiliani concerned comments made by the candidate and widely reported on American cable news and mainstream news channels, and centred on why Guiliani said in one interview that he knew the Twin Towers were probably going to collapse on the morning of 9/11, and then later denied he had said any such thing.

Clearly, these are question Guiliani, and his staff, don't want to answer, but is that any reason to order police to not only remove an accredited journalist from a Republican function, but to also have him arrested?

Of course not.

The plot thickens, as anyone wanting to ask the New Hampshire police why the reporter was arrested are apparently told to contact the Secret Service.


UPDATE : The arrested reporter, Matt Lepacek, claims he was assaulted by police and a person believed to be a secret service agent during his arrest. He is now planning to pursue criminal indictments against Rudy Guiliani staffers, the police and possibly the Secret Service.

Lepacek is now entering into a legal fight, based on his constitutional rights, that will follow him for the rest of his days. But he is right to do so. It is a clear case of wrongful arrest and an attempt to oppress legitimate media. He posed no threat to Guiliani's staff, or other reporters in the room, many of whom were asking why he was being ejected and arrested :

Matt Lepacek, the reporter who was kicked out of the CNN press room and arrested after asking Rudy Giuliani's staff a question, has now been released on bail. Criminal indictments are now being pursued against the police involved as well as Giuliani's staffers for their flagrant abuse of the First Amendment, assault and wrongful arrest.

Another eyewitness said that the entire arrest was clearly being directed by Secret Service, who were ordering the police to threaten anyone who asked questions about the incident with arrest.

MORE TO COME....

Republican Chairman Calls For More Terror Attacks In America

Not enough Americans are behind President Bush when it comes to the 'War on Terror' apparently. But Arkansas Republican Party chairman thinks he knows a good way to get Americans on side :

“At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001 ], and the naysayers will come around very quickly..."

What a loon. From my reading of America's anti-terror laws, Milligan should already be on his way to Guantanamo Bay for advocating the use of terrorism to advance political causes.

Expect a storm of outrage from American conservatives about this man all but demanding terrorists pull another 9/11, if only to prove President Bush right.

Or expect no outrage at all. If anyone who still listens to Cat Stevens, and spends Friday afternoon praying to Allah, said America needed another 9/11 to get its priorities straight, the American right wing would convulse until they were puking blood.

Unless that person happened to be a Republican, of course.


Paul Joseph Watson has an interesting take on the recent 'terror plot' to allegedly blow JFK airport, and half of Queens, into the stratosphere.

Watson predicts that like so many other big headline-grabbing, terror-related busts in the US in the past few years, the credibility of this one will crumble long before the alleged terror plotters even reach trial, if it hasn't already :

Once again we learn that "the plot was only in a preliminary phase and the conspirators had yet to lay out detailed plans or obtain financing or explosives," and yet the event is reported by a jingoistic and frothing media as if an imminent attack on the scale of 9/11 has been averted.

But as always, the devil is in the details, because even if the group had managed to acquire the financing and explosives to enact the plot, it would have been unsuccessful, due to "safety shut-off valves would almost assuredly have prevented an exploding airport fuel tank from igniting all or even part of the network."

The sum of the group's planning for the alleged attack amounts to nothing more than visiting Google Maps and printing off photographs.

The war on terror is the most politically exploited concept since the cold war. The propaganda boon from hoodwinking Americans into thinking they are constantly under threat from terrorists is unsurpassed.

On the hyping of the terror threat, Watson is dead right. On the rest, we'll see.

US Soldiers In Iraq : What Are We Doing Here? When Can We Go Home?

Powerful Veteran Group Tells US Military To Stop Pursuing Anti-War Vets, As Dissent Spreads At Home, And In Iraq

As we've pointed out previously on this blog, the Vietnam War began to end for the United States, in 1970-71, not when anti-war protesters massed in their hundreds of thousands across the country, but when American soldiers on the ground in Vietnam decided they would fight no more, and refused orders from their senior officers to engage the enemy.

The stories coming back from Iraq about the massive loss of morale amongst the troops, the mental health problems, the spreading dissent, are rumours no more. The sense of pointlessness, and the increasing feelings of futility at seeing more American dead and wounded, is clearly spreading through the troops.

Soldiers who've returned from the war are now protesting White House and Pentagon plans to continue the war beyond 2008. One of the more prominent of these uniformed Iraq veteran protesters has been threatened with dishonourable discharge by the military. An important veterans organisation has told the military to back off :

"Trying to hush up and punish fellow Americans for exercising the same democratic right we're trying to instill in Iraq is not what we're all about," said Gary Kurpius, national commander of the 2.4 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars.

"Someone in the Marine Corps needs to exercise a little common sense and put an end to this matter before it turns into a circus," Kurpius said.

While there are no signs yet of a military-wide rebellion, and there are still many American soldiers who believe in finishing "the mission", the Pentagon faces an almost impossible task in both stemming the spread of dissent, and raising the morale of troops crushed by the horrific losses, the boredom, the extended deployments and separation from family and friends and the mind-numbing, energy-draining routine of the war.

Perhaps recent stories like this one from McClatchy Newspapers will one day be viewed as important historical documents, noting as they do the emotions of soldiers tiring of the war, and questioning why they should still fight on, when it all seems so pointless :

Spc. David Williams, 22, of Boston, Mass., had two note cards in his pocket Wednesday afternoon as he waited for Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Williams serves in the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., the first of the five "surge" brigades to arrive in Iraq, and he was chosen to join the Independent from Connecticut for lunch at a U.S. field base in Baghdad.

The night before, 30 other soldiers crowded around him with questions for the senator.

He wrote them all down. At the top of his note card was the question he got from nearly every one of his fellow soldiers:

"When are we going to get out of here?"

The rest was a laundry list. When would they have upgraded Humvees that could withstand the armor-penetrating weapons that U.S. officials claim are from Iran? When could they have body armor that was better in hot weather?

Next to him, Spc. Will Hedin, 21, of Chester, Conn., thought about what he was going to say.

"We're not making any progress," Hedin said, as he recalled a comrade who was shot by a sniper last week. "It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at."

In the past two months, the unit has lost two men. In May alone, at least 120 U.S. troops died in Iraq, the bloodiest month in 2007 and the highest number since the battles of Fallujah in 2004.

Spc. Kevin Krasco, 20, of Medford, Mass., and Spc. Kevin Adams, 20, of Moosup, Conn., chimed in with their dismay before turning the conversation to baseball.

"It's like everything else in this war," Adams said, referring to Baghdad. "It hasn't changed."

Earlier, Lieberman had met briefly with Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi police at a Joint Security Station; there are 31 throughout the city now. The senator, who's steadfastly supported the Iraq war along with the current surge of more than 28,000 additional American troops, said things were better.

"I think it's important we don't lose our will," he said. "To pull out would be a disaster."

As Lieberman walked out, he said that congressionally mandated withdrawal would be a "victory for al-Qaida and a victory for Iran."

It isn't clear whether Williams mentioned the last line on his note card, the one that had a star next to it.

"We don't feel like we're making any progress," it said.

Low Morale, Mental Health Problems Plague American Troops In Iraq

US Begins Negotiating Ceasefire Agreements With Iraqi Militants

Don't Punish Iraq Veterans Who Protest The War, Key Veterans Group Warns Military

American AntiWar Sentiment Rises At Grassroots Level

US Planning To Hand Over Control Of Security In Northern Iraq To Kurds

US Troops In Iraq Fight Insurgents, Fear And Boredom

Training Soldiers For The All Important Media Battlefield

Sunni Insurgency Militants Fighting Al Qaeda - With US Backing?

Insurgent Attacks On American Troops Grow More Numerous, And Deadly

Russia Claims To Have Uncovered Western BioWeapon Plot To Depopulate Country Or Render Russians Sterile

The idea that a biological weapon could be created that can hone in on the specific genetic markers of a race of people, and render them sterile, or kill them off altogether, is nothing new.

The Nazis were claimed to have been working on such weapons to wipe out Jews, while Israel has been alleged to be working on such weapons to wipe out Arabs.

The threat of bioweapons of this kind actually becoming a reality has also been pumped as a bioterrorism threat in recent 'War on Terror' related hysteria.

But what is rare to find allegations of a bioweapons plot raised by such senior members of a government, as this story from the UK Telegraph claims :

Russia has banned the export of medical specimens after the country's spy agency allegedly uncovered a Western plot to manufacture a biological weapon that would make Russians sterile.

In a decree that appeared to reflect the Russian state's growing suspicion of all things Western, the Federal Customs Service forbade the shipment of all human blood, hair, DNA and bone marrow out of the country.

While officials gave no formal explanation for the ban, Russia's most respected broadsheet suggested that the customs service had been ordered to act after the Federal Security Service, the KGB's successor, handed an alarming report to President Vladimir Putin earlier this month.

Quoting unidentified sources, Kommersant said that foreign health institutions were using human specimens to create a "genetically engineered biological weapon" capable of rendering the Russian population sterile or even of killing it off altogether.

Among those purportedly involved in the conspiracy are the Harvard School of Public Health and the U.S. Department of Justice. The FSB declined to comment on the allegations.

The newspaper said the ban had been authorized by deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov, a hardliner many believe could succeed Mr Putin next year.

American Children Locked Up By Suburban "Fortress Mentality"

This story about American parents cocooning their children inside their yards and homes is by no means a reality unique to America.

There are numerous suburbs in Sydney, Australia, where you can drive through at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon and see not one single child out in the front yard or riding a bike along the footpath, let alone kicking a ball around with friends in the local park.

Compared to the child-filled streets of the 1970s and 1980s, it can get pretty creepy seeing entire suburbs devoid of kids running amok on a weekend, the dead air silence broken only by the occasional lawnmower or barking dog.

From the CSM :

...we don't let our children play in the front yard, because a sex offender lives two doors down. Instead, like other families in this neighborhood, we've built private playgrounds in the back.

The kids on our street don't play unsupervised on common ground. They have play dates now, arranged by protective parents.

The unsupervised outings of my 1970s childhood are over. When Mom told us, "Be back before dark," we'd check in sooner only if our stomachs insisted.

My family lived in a subdivision full of cul-de-sacs with small ramblers and split-level homes. I wandered freely. My sister and I traipsed past construction sites to undeveloped land beyond. We'd romp in waist-high grasses, trampling down areas we'd pretend were houses. We wandered in the woods.

We explored the creek, trying to keep the mud from sucking our sneakers right off our feet. I used to ride my banana-seat bike (without a helmet) down the busy road to buy candy at the gas station.

That would never happen today. Two-thirds of Americans say it's likely that a convicted child molester lives in their neighborhood, according to a 2005 Gallup Poll. Yet the constant supervising seems to be taking its toll.

Is it any wonder children don't get enough exercise? They aren't allowed to walk far enough to raise their pulses. My kids can ride their bikes only if I'm supervising.

I wonder if homes have grown bigger because our outer world is shrinking. According to the US Census Bureau, households today have fewer people, yet houses have expanded from an average of 1,645 square feet in 1975 to an average of 2,434 square feet in 2005. Families used to occupy smaller indoor spaces, but inhabit larger outdoor spaces. Today, I walk along desolate suburban streets.

That's because children don't play where passersby can see – or snatch – them. They're hidden away in backyards, climbing on pricey, customized play structures, jumping on trampolines, or swimming in pools. They shuffle from soccer to judo to piano lessons. But you don't find them out and about.

I wish I didn't have to barricade my family behind an invisible barbed-wire fence. I wish our kids could explore the world alone. But we just can't take the chance. All we need is a moat, and our fortress will be complete.

Read The Full 'Fortress Mentality Suburbia' Story Here

UK Parents Face Massive Fines If They Let Their Children Play In Streets

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

Mainstream Newspaper Editor Writes Controversial Story Questioning The 'War On Terror', Gets Fired

Considering that fighting the 'War On Terror' has chewed up thousands of lives, tens of thousands of pieces of military equipment and hundreds of billions of dollars - primarily from the US, the UK, Canada and Australia - it is remarkable to realise just how rarely a journalist in the mainstream media of any of those countries actually dares to question the validity of the entire venture.

On April 16, John Gleeson, the editor of the Winnipeg Sun, normally a fairly conservative newspaper, published the following story titled 'The War On Terror Looks Like A Fraud'.

The story was reprinted in at least two other newspapers in the Canadian newspaper chain, and has since been widely reprinted across the internet.

John Gleeson was reportedly sacked from the Winnipeg Sun.

Here's Gleeson's story in full :

Contrary to the “patriots” who try to use the deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan to stifle debate on Canada’s involvement in the War on Terror, I would say that as new evidence presents itself, we would indeed be cowards to ignore it simply because we’ve lost troops in the field and are therefore blindly committed to the mission.

And new evidence is piling up around us, arguably strong enough to declare the whole War on Terror an undeniable fraud.

Virtually ignored by mainstream media, the Americans showed their hand this year with the new Iraqi oil law, now making its way through Iraq’s parliament.

The law — which tens of thousands of Iraqis marched peacefully against on Monday when they called for the immediate expulsion of U.S. forces — would transfer control of one of the largest oil reserves on the planet from Baghdad to Big Oil, delivering “the prize” at last that Vice-President Dick Cheney famously talked about in 1999 when he was CEO of Halliburton.

“The key point of the law,” wrote Mother Jones’ Washington correspondent James Ridgeway on March 1, “is that Iraq’s immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy ‘Federal Oil and Gas Council’ boasting ‘a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq.’ That is, nothing less than predominantly U.S. Big Oil executives.

“The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq’s oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements, which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically U.S.) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq’s roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit.”

While the U.S. argues that the oil deal will give Iraqis their shot at “freedom and stability,” the International Committee of the Red Cross reported this week that millions of Iraqis are in a “disastrous” situation that continues to deteriorate, with “mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies littering the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school.”

Four years after the invasion, it’s becoming pretty clear that Iraq has been “pacified” solely for the purpose of economic aggression. Humanitarian considerations are moot. The awful plight of Iraq’s one million Christians, who have no place in the new Iraq, underscores this ugly truth.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, has given the U.S. a strategic military beachhead in Central Asia (which “American primacy” advocates called for in the ’90s) and it was quietly reported in November that plans are being accelerated for a $3.3-billion natural gas pipeline “to help Afghanistan become an energy bridge in the region.”

With many Americans (including academics and former top U.S. government officials) now questioning even the physical facts of 9/11 and seriously disputing the “militant Islam” spin, with the media more brain-dead than it’s been in our lifetimes, now is not the time for jingoism and blind faith in the likes of Cheney, George W. Bush and Robert Gates.

Our young men are worth more than that...

The Dying "Faith Based" American Dollar

Kuwait has decided to cut its dinar free from the US dollar. Across world currency markets, the value of the US dollar is falling. Iran and Russia are moving toward pricing all of their oil and gas in Euros, instead US dollars. Saddam Hussein was ready to price all Iraqi oil in Euros only weeks before the American invasion of Iraq began.

The US Dollar is quickly losing its place as the world's favourite currency. The descent, so far, is measured, gradual, controlled. But when the panic sets in, and the mass sell-offs of US dollar stockpiles begin, it's going to get ugly.

If that day comes. Through its massive stockpiles of American dollars and American debt, China controls the dollar's perceived value on world markets. China literally has its finger on the trigger, with the US dollar in its sights. If China begins dump the dollar, the rest of world is likely to follow. And fast.

From the Financial Times :

...the more the dollar's value sagged, the more dollars the members of the Gulf Co-operation Council have had to absorb just to maintain the desired exchange rates. Naturally, the central banks of the participating countries did not acquire their dollars with nothing. They printed the local currencies with which to buy them and the more they printed, the more that inflation welled up. Now Kuwait has chosen to go its own way, leaving Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to ponder their tolerance for open-ended dollar-buying. Little Kuwait just might be the herald of big change, both in the dollar's fortunes and the world's monetary organisation.

Hard-working Asians (and oil-blessed Arabs) consume much less than they produce. Americans, on the other hand, produce much less than they consume.

...a greenback has no intrinsic value. It is faith-based.

That the paper dollar finds favour the world over must be counted as one of the greatest achievements in the annals of money. To be sure, the central banks of the Middle East and Asia have had their own reasons for stockpiling the greenback and US securities.

....we are up to a point of saturation, a point that Kuwait seems to have finally reached. Its neighbours, too, appear to be on the edge of dollar surfeit. Broad money growth in the Gulf region is running at 20 per cent, in no small part a consequence of rampant dollar absorption.

By upsetting the integrity of prices, it can disturb the architecture of production. In most of the dollar-buying states, monetary growth is fast enough to upset the eternal rest of Milton Friedman. In all cases, a slower pace of dollar absorption is an integral part of a monetary cure. It will be said that only some members of the dollar-buying bloc want to be cured. The rest - notably, China - are happy to keep on cranking the monetary presses. But the upward track of US interest rates and the downward path of the dollar exchange rate tell a different story.

United Nations Warns US Debt Could Trigger Collapse Of Dollar

America's Spectacular $60 Trillion Debt, Every Family Liable For More Than $500,000

Just As In The Dying Days Of Ancient Rome, Gold Once Again Vanishes Into Private Hoards

Kissinger Still Pumping His Vietnam War Fables

War Pig Wants More War In Iraq

Henry Kissinger says the Iraq War is nothing like the Vietnam War. But it is exactly the same for this reason alone : the American public are sick of it and want it to be over, dissent is spreading amongst the troops on the ground, and Henry Kissinger is in the media calling for the war to continue, while shaking the last few billion dollars out the money tree for the benefit of arms manufacturers before the whole thing completely falls apart.

Why this demonic mass murderer has not been charged with war crimes, over the destruction of multiple countries and the deaths of millions of people through the past four decades, and then hung on live TV, is one of the great mysteries of our age. Along with why the LA Times gives him space to spread his disinformation about the Iraq War, considering that Kissinger has been in President Bush's ear since late 2003, telling him to keep his forces in Iraq and that everything would work out for the best, if only he didn't give in to the will of the American people. No surprise, then, to see Kissinger is still at it today :

A strategic design cannot be achieved on a fixed, arbitrary deadline; it must reflect conditions on the ground. But it also must not test the endurance of the American public to a point where the outcome can no longer be sustained by our political process. In Iraq, rapid, unilateral withdrawal would be disastrous.

Kissinger uses the column to pump one of his favourite fables : that America's involvement in Vietnam came to an end because of the peace movement and the defeatism of Washington in the early 1970s. Absolute crap. The Vietnam War began to end for America in 1970-1971 when thousands of soldiers on the ground decided they would fight and kill no more. When soldiers refuse to fight, to engage the enemy, to kill, then the war comes to an end. A very similar situation is now said to be unfolding in Iraq.

The Secrets Of Iron Mountain

"Charred Evidence" From United Flight 93 Held Under Heavy Guard In One Of The Most Secure Places On Earth

An extremely interesting news report from an American news show that takes you deep inside Iron Mountain, the former mine 220 feet beneath meadows in North Pennsylvania that holds the US government's "national secrets" and some "dark secrets" as well, as the reporter says in reference to the "charred evidences" of United Flight 93.

Why is the US government storing the wreckage from Flight 93, brought down on 9/11, under "heavy guard", in one of the most secure places of Earth?

The reporter doesn't explain.

The story on Iron Mountain is fascinating. Three miles long, and two miles wide, the huge complex of vaults hold files for branches of the government the journalist has never heard of before ("US Investigation Services) along with the original masters of more than 700,000 musical recordings, from Elvis to Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson.

Bill Gates has a vault in Iron Mountain, but not just anyone can buy storage room there.

As the reporter explains : "I asked...if money can buy a vault. But even Elizabeth Taylor herself wouldn't be able to get a vault for her jewellery collection if she wanted. The value of all of her diamonds don't even come close to the value of the information that's stored in Iron Mountain. Because if it isn't vital, it just doesn't get a vault."




The journalist points out the area around Iron Mountain has "zero earthquakes", which is apparently essential to Iron Mountain's security and long life as a storage facility.

As well as vaults and rooms filled with government files and master tapes of Elvis recordings, "Iron Mountain is also a relocation centre for many major companies in case of an emergency..."

The chief emergency in this scenario is nuclear attack. But Iron Mountain was also used extensively during the 9/11 crisis.

"95% of their customers demand complete secrecy, and guarding the information is Iron Mountain's greatest strength..."

Iron Mountain has gone global. It now has "information management" and "data protection and storage" branches in the UK and Australia, along with many other countries.

You go to Iron Mountain when you want to pay top dollar to hide the "dark secrets" you want to keep safe from prying eyes. Or, like Bill Gates, to safely store, in a refrigerated, vault a massive and historically important photographic archive.

But again, why does the US government find it necessary to store the "charred remains" from United Flight 93 in such a facility, and under "heavy guard"?


Two Iron Mountain Storage Facilities Hit By Huge Fires Within 48 Hours