109 Year Old WWI Veteran : "War Isn't Worth One Life"



Harry Patch has had 90 years to think about the nightmare of horrors he witnessed in the fields of France during World War 1. At 109 years old, Patch is still haunted by the Battle of Passchendaele, where three thousand young Britons were killed or wounded every single day, for almost 100 straight days.

Harry Patch's comments should be etched in the stone of every war memorial :

"Too many died. War isn't worth one life," said Mr Patch.

He said war was the "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".

He has returned to the fields where he fought as a young man, and saw so many of his friends and colleagues killed and torn apart. During the three months of fighting, the heaviest rains in 30 years saw the mud become so thick, men and horses drowned in it.

Mr Patch also paid his respects to the tens of thousands of young Germans who died in the same fields as his friends.

"The Germans suffered the same as we did," he said.

Harry Patch's memories of the Flanders battlefield

The Battle Of Passchendaele

US Army Gets Desperate For New Recruits As They Run Out Of Soldiers

New Deal : $20,000 Bonus, Pick Any Job

Iraq Soccer Captain To US : "Get Out Of Iraq"

The US Army is now so desperate for new recruits they are now offering cash bonuses of $20,000 and the choice of "any job" to young Americans who are willing to sign on and ship out for training in 30 days :

The $20,000 bonus is in addition to previous offers already in place.

The Army has had trouble meeting recruiting goals, especially in southwest Ohio, in the past few months as the Middle East conflicts continue. Soldiers have often complained about the traditionally low pay as well.

...some recruits could tally bonuses up to $40,000 during this period with enlistments of four years or more.

An estimated two million Americans have served in Iraq in some capacity, and the war has gone on for so long that it seems almost everybody in the country knows someone who has served, or knows of a friend of a friend, or a family member, who has been killed, or badly wounded. It's now impossible for the Army to hide the human carnage that the war has wrought on hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether their wounds are physical or emotional.

There is much speculation in the blogstream about President Bush planning to reintroduce a national draft in the wake of an horrific terror attack in the United States. But with such opposition to serving in the Army voluntarily, with bonus packages worth tens of thousands of dollars, the dissent against a draft would be enormous, and all but impossible to legally enforce.

Democrats in Washington claim that the United States will run out of fresh troops for Iraq within eight months. The Pentagon has already lengthened tours of duty to 15 months, but there are rumblings this could rise to 20 months by year's end, to cope with the shortfall crisis.


The win by the Iraqi national football team in the Asia Cup has been widely reported, particularly in the American media, of showing what can be achieved when Kurds, Shia and Sunni Iraqis work together. But the weekend of good news associated with Iraq has now been tainted by some White House rattling quotes by the captain of the championship team, Younis Mahmoud :

Despite a frantic Asian Cup official by his side pleading, "No politics, no politics," the Iraqi captain made clear his distaste for his nation's continuing occupation: "I have only one thing to say: I want America out of Iraq now."

He would like to take the cup on a victory tour of Iraq, but asked: "Who secures my life? In Iraq you do not know who will kill you."

He said he did not fear being among the Iraqi people "but the American and the Government troops? One of my closest friends, the official forces … arrested him for more than one year, and until now neither his family nor me know where he is.

"I don't like the American people to be angry with me but I am very sorry the Americans invade Iraq, and I hope it will be very soon to get rid of the Americans."

Yet another pre-invasion prediction by those who understood what a War On Iraq would actually mean has come horrifically true. One in three Iraqis, or eight million people, are now said to be in dire need of emergency humanitarian help.

Millions of Iraqis have already fled their homeland, and millions more are in the process of leaving, or planning to leave, or have been displaced from their homes. The depopulation of Iraq has led to one of the greatest refugee tides in modern history. For million more who stay, daily life is grim beyond imagining. The deprivation and misery that the sanctions of the 1990s began, the war is now amplifying and multiplying :

15 percent of Iraqis cannot regularly afford to eat, and 70 percent are without adequate water supplies, up from 50 percent in 2003. It also said 28 percent of children are malnourished, compared with 19 percent before the 2003 invasion.

There will be holidays in August and early September for the American president, the US Congress and the Iraqi government. But there will be no holiday for the American troops now serving in Iraq :

The Iraqis bide their time and dream, as ever, sweet dreams of bloody revenge and communal slaughter and laugh at the to-do list of impossible American benchmarks. We talk of Iraqi "national" goals while the Iraqis talk of old, dark tribal and sectarian goals and we pass in the night like so many camel caravans.

The foreign jihadist suicide bombers flow in to take their turns at the wheel of a cargo of plastic explosives, old artillery shells and scrap iron to murder the innocents who've gone to market or the bus station or even to school. The shadowy militias of the Shia — whom we've empowered by visiting the blessings of democracy on a feudal society — kidnap and kill their Sunni neighbors and, for good measure, daily lob mortar shells into the American Green Zone in Baghdad.

Among them all, targets for all, American troops move in a desperate, hopeless attempt to quiet the slaughter and give peace a chance in a place where it has none. Day by day, the toll of those killed and wounded rises like the temperatures in August, and for what?

There aren't enough American troops at their home bases, resting, refitting and re-training after their second or third combat tours, to replace those now in Iraq and Afghanistan come next spring. Not to worry. We can just extend their new 15-month-long tour of duty in Hell to 18 months or maybe even 24 months. After all they're volunteers — the half a percent of Americans who serve and sacrifice while the rest of us obey a President's orders and go shopping and lay about the splendid beaches in August.

Americans are slowly waking up to the fact that the Democrats aren't going to end the war any time soon, either. Ending the Iraq War was recognised as one of the three biggest issues of the 2006 mid-term elections that saw the Democrats oust the Republican majority on the Hill. Now tens of millions of Americans are realising their belief and trust that the Democrats would get them out of Iraq within a year of the election has been thoroughly, purposely, betrayed.


Bush's Unwinnable War Grinds On

General Petraus Claims US Will Have A Big Troop Presence In Iraq Until Mid-2009

US-Led Forces Assault "Al Qaeda" Across Central Iraq

"Corruption Is Evil" - Interview With Iraq's Central Bank Governor

One Day In Iraq - Two American GIs, 66 Iraqis Killed

Female American Solider Committed Suicide After Watching Iraqis Subjected To Horrific "Interrogations"

116 American Troops Have Committed Suicide In Iraq - Toll Back Home In US Could Be In The Thousands

Confessions Of A Fish Murderer

The UK Observer's weekly series of short interviews with 'everyday' Britons, 'This Much I Know', regularly turns up some real gold.

This week's is a profile of a Devon fisherman. A few of the best bits :

Real sushi is catching the freshest mackerel and biting chunks out of its back. It's fantastic. But also, I realise now, quite savage.

I've cooked thousands of lobsters and never heard one scream. It's an old wives' tale. They go red and thrash around a bit, then they're gone.

A defining moment came last summer when, spear-fishing, I saw two beautiful bass lying side by side. I couldn't believe that, for once, I wasn't shooting them straight away. But when my father came up behind and asked why, I said I was out of range. I didn't want to admit my hesitation.

However I look at myself, the bottom line is I am a murderer of fish. But at least I have a passion for its taste, too. Some fishermen just want the fish down the market and head straight to the pub.

Read the whole story here

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Iraq United After Football Success

The national football team of Iraq has won the 2007 Asian Cup. The victory was all the more sweet because they beat the championship team from Saudi Arabia, 1-0.

Celebrating crowds are still filling the streets of Iraq cities, towns and villages, 24 hours after the win. In the midst of the appalling daily death toll from executions and suicide bombings, for a day at least, the people of Iraq stand united.

Good roundup of reports on the win at IraqSlogger.

Prime minister Maliki has announced that $10,000 will go to each player in the Iraqi team.

How far the Iraqi football team has come from the days when Uday Hussein was in charge of the team, and lost games resulted in players being flogged with electrical cables or dunked in raw sewerage.

The Gruesome, Corpse-Soaked Death Of The NeoCons

How many human deaths has the NeoConservatist ideology been responsible for?

If the invasion and destabilisation of Iraq and Afghanistan are viewed as key tenets of the NeoCons grand plan, as outlined in the Project For The New American Century papers of the mid-to-late 1990s, then the death toll is beyond 500,000 already.

Back in the United States, the NeoCons who flooded Washington in the wake of President Bush's 2000 presidential election have ensured that more than $1 trillion extra defence dollars have been spent since 9/11. That hundreds of extra billions of dollars would go to America's defense industries was always one of the key strategies of the NeoCons. People forget that in the flurries of controversies about the Iraq War and the 'War on Terror'.

Brent Budowsky argues, convincingly, that the NeoConservatist political ideology is dead and buried, but the point must also be made that the NeoCons - a collection of long widely reviled and despised politicians, think tank hacks, propagandists disguised as journalists and political rank rats - got much of they wanted. We see immense and tragic failure of an almost unthinkable scale. The NeoCons see great success, and why not? Look at what they've achieved in only a few years.

* The Middle East is beset by growing chaos, war and swamped by tides of refugees.

* Defence spending in the US is back at peak Cold War levels.

* The United States is increasing its funding of Israel's 'security' and no politician can even dream of reaching the White House without first winning the blessing of Washington's deeply powerful and influential Zionist lobby.

* Bush Co. is now firmly cracking down on dissent and dismantling the Bill of Rights and the Constitution to go to war against the growing armies of American civilians opposed to the expansion of American 'empire' throughout the world, via its military bases and military operations.

Here's Budowksy, writing at the Huffington Post :

Our first and last neoconservative President, George W. Bush, is the lead witness for the prosecution in the case whose verdict is the death of neoconservatism.

Never has any philosophy been proven so wrong, so fatal, so disastrous for our country and so deadly for our troops as the views expounded by neoconservative theoreticians.

Their ascent to power meant tragedy, failure and death. Their arrogance and their imperial grandeur has alienated what Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind. Their tactics have been pursued with contempt for alternate views, corruption of our democratic system, and condescension towards those who know far more about military affairs than they do.

In fact, one of the great specialties of the neoconservative movement is that so many who so ostentatiously failed to serve in the military, when their time came, so sneeringly question the patriotism of others, including those awarded medals for valor in combat.

When Ronald Reagan was changing the world with Mikhail Gorbachev, there were the neoconservatives, uttering their sneering contempt for Reagan, comparing his talks with Gorbachev to Pearl Harbor, comparing his diplomacy to Neville Chamberlain.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their fellow neoconservatives know better than Reagan about negotiating with enemies. They know better than Eisenhower about military industrial complexes. They know better than Ford about seeking diplomatic agreements to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction. They know better than Nixon about achieving breakthroughs with our major adversaries.

They are very good about hurling insults to attack their domestic enemies and very bad about supporting wounded troops, disabled veterans and homeless heroes.

Neoconservatives are very special people, in their own eyes. When things go wrong they become the party of perjury and pardons, the party of abuse of power and abuse of executive privilege to cover up their failures and crimes.

Neoconservatives champion the politics of fear, desperately seeking to frighten the people to justify their attacks on freedoms guaranteed by statute and constitution.

Neoconservatives embody the politics of profiteering, masterminding and organizing the most corrupt occupation in world history, staffed by ideological partisans, rewarding their campaign contributors, mismanaging tens of billions of lost and stolen dollars, under the imperial arrogance of a proconsul awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom.

Our neoconservative theoreticians believe that George Washington was wrong and George Bush is right. Even torture is done with the big lie that they are promoting freedom and democracy with their corrupt occupation, their war against the Geneva Convention, and their shadow CIA created in the bowels of Rumsfeld's neoconservative Department of Defense.

...there they are, again, today, on the oped pages of the newspapers, in their discredited think tanks, on their hate ridden right wing radio, before the smirking courtiers of the cable networks, still claiming they are right and their deadly blunders must be escalated again, and again.

Neoconservatism is dumb, discredited, and dead.

While they cover up their dirty laundry, and plan their next wars, and hire their criminal attorneys, and lobby for their pardons, the clock is ticking, the day is coming, when a a grateful nation will celebrate their removal from the high councils of government, once and for all.

Dick Cheney's Song Of America

Where The War On Iraq Really Began : The Project For A New American Century

Bush And The NeoCons Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before 2000 Presidential Election

Mmm, Chunky Bacon ice-cream...Not your favourite flavour? How about raw horse flesh flavour? Or Eel? What about Stilton flavoured ice-cream? Or chicken wing? Or pit viper flavour?

Personally, I can't go past a double cone piled high with squid gut flavoured ice-cream. 101 bizarre ice-cream flavours guaranteed to make you want to reach for a bucket.


America turning into a police state? Shut the hell up you lunatic conspiracy nut. It's perfectly normal for a patriotic American married couple to be arrested for flying the flag upside down and pining notes to it. It's called "desecrating the flag", apparently.

But it's fine for President Bush to use the American flag as a doormat.

Flying the US flag upside down is also a recognised symbol showing the US is in a state of distress. Which doesn't sound far off the mark.


A mysterious Cock And Balls has turned up on an Australian Army recruiting poster. The posters are reportedly about to be recalled. Can you see the 'offensive' image?


When it comes to publicising the cause, beliefs and general threat of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden has really done a pretty half-arsed job. Actually, considering he's probably been dead for two or three years, he's done pretty well. The fact that Al Qaeda had to use a six year old video of Bin Laden in a recent 'Get Some Fear' tape, it's clear they're running low on stock footage.
But by the far the greatest promoter and all round publicist for Al Qaeda is none other than President George W. Bush. In a recent speech, he mentioned the words "Bin Laden" and "Al Qaeda" a mind-numbing 118 times in only 29 minutes.

By the way, Dan Froomkin's White House Watch is the place to go on a regular basis if you want to witness the decline and fall of the Bush administration in all its gruesome glory. Along with The Last Days Of President Bush blog, naturally.


Sage Moonblood, Zola, Pilot Inspektor, Bluebell, Princes Tiammii...Celebrities sure do come up with some crazy names for their children, and here's 45 more of them. Favourite? How can you go past Deizel Ky?


Go here to read Darryl Mason's epic poem, American Sniper, about one young American's short life and untimely death during the Battle Of Fallujah.


Everybody's probably already heard, read or seen the amazing story about Oscar - The Cat Of Impending Death In Old People. But in case you somehow missed, here's a photo and summary of the tale.


As part of the necessary dues in becoming part of a new Asia Pacific Axis with the United States, India and Japan, Australia is now going to sell nuclear fuel to India, who steadfastly refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A Pakistan government minister has warned Australia that "the entire nation is going to be very upset" with Australia over the India nuclear fuel deal.

The Asia Pacific Axis is being formed to contain China in the event of a full scale global war, or just in case they become far too wealthy and powerful. On the other side, Iran, Russia, Pakistan, China and various 'Stans are well on the way to forming their own alliance. The possibility of the Fourth World War breaking out becomes more real by the month.


The United Kingdom continues to use anti-terror laws to curb dissent and crush pro-democracy protest actions. The list of anti-democratic actions taken against civilians by the British government and police under the wide-open-to-interpretation anti-terror laws continues to grow. The good news is the laws are helping police to deal with all those trouble-making 70 year old women and 80 year old men who think they're entitled to publicly state their displeasure over the Iraq War and US military bases on British soil.


UFOS Over England. Last week, more than 100 people gathered in the square of a British town and watched five unidentified flying objects perform spectacular aerobatics for half an hour. The British Ministry of Defence said they remain "very open minded" about the existence of extraterrestrials.


Fancy going on a cruise with a ship full of die-hard NeoCons in their declining years? No?
Well, you can find out the true horrors of such a cruise thanks to a reporter from the UK Independent who went on a recent NeoCon cruise and heard a few Colostomy Conservatives speak their minds on all things Muslim, and French, and Muslim, and Europe, and Muslim and England.

If you replace the word "Muslim" with the word "Jew" in the NeoCon quotes featured in this story, there really is little difference between this ship of aging, pathetic old paranoids and the Nazis in the late 1930s. Well, there is one major difference. The Nazis were better educated.


90 Million Americans are "angry" at President Bush. So what's to blame for this incredible level of public outrage? The Iraq War? Plunging house prices? Deflating stock market? The soft Bush dictatorship? No. Americans have too much access to too much information.

The Washington Post, not wanting to cause any friction, or encourage a nationwide overthrow of the Bush regime, doesn't refer to American voters as being "angry." Instead it says they are "pessimistic." That sounds far less scary.


Bomb attacks killed 50 people in Southern Afghanistan on Thursday and Friday, many of the dead were women and children. It's okay, it wasn't terrorism. That's why it didn't hit the headlines. It was just another massacre courtesy of non-terror military air-strikes. Well, the air strikes were probably exactly like terrorism if you happened to one of the civilians watching women and children being torn apart all around you. Fifty Taliban were also said to have been killed in the fighting. So it wasn't a complete waste of civilian lives.


One of the most entertaining, and very sci-fi, conspiracy theories I've ever read (I'll post a link if I can track it down online) claims that commercial tourist space flight will never be allowed to become a reality because the US military regularly zips around up there, and has deployed entire battalions of off-world astrosoldiers somewhere between the Moon and Mars. Today I wondered how loud the alarm bells would have sounded in that conspiracy theorist's head when he read this story about massive and very deadly explosions surrounding Richard Branson's Space Ship One.


The author of what has become known as the jihadists 'Bible' - The Foundations Of Preparation For Holy War - claims he has now renounced violence. Prison has a way of doing that to people.


When he was alive, Kerry Packer was one of the most powerful media magnates in the world. To pay back politicians and business leaders for special favours and generally doing what he told them to do, Packer filled his own private bordello with some of the finest hookers in the world and then invited his "mates" over for a good time. Australians very much want to know what politicians accepted flesh bribes off Packer. But will any Australian journalist be game enough to out those politicians? Not fucking likely.


Australian authorities have been forced to drop extraordinarily weak 'terror' related charges against an Indian doctor who worked in a Brisbane hospital. He was charged with giving "reckless" support to a British terrorist. But the British terrorist group, as far as Scotland Yard is concerned, for now, doesn't actually exist. The Australian government and its media lackeys went to town trying to smear Dr Haneef as some kind of Doctor Terror. He is still being held in house detention because the immigration minister decided the doctor was of "bad character". Dr Haneef was held without charge for 12 days, enduring interrogation sessions that lasted for twelve hours at a time. Neither the Australian Federal Police, the prosecutor or the government ministers responsible for beating up the charges are willing to apologise to Dr Haneef. A shocking, despicable international embarrassment.


Godzilla has launched an unprecedented assault on Chicago. According to the news feed on this screen capture from a news channel covering this shocking event, President Bush is blaming Iran.


Five days on from our story on the sudden death of controversial blogger Theresa Duncan, the comment section continues to fill with arguments for and against a conspiracy surrounding her sudden demise. Toxicology reports are still over a week away. Theresa Duncan claimed she was being harassed, followed and surveilled by the FBI and Scientology nutbags in the months before her death.

The 'Flying Wing' Aircraft That Didn't Exist, Now Does


Wonder how many UFO sightings this weird looking aircraft has been responsible for over the years?

The Boeing X-48B is one of those prototype aircraft that, for years, didn't officially exist, even after it had been spotted on desert runways, and glimpsed on test flights. In 2006, an Airfix-style model kit of the aircraft was released to hobby stores, and even enthusiasts presumed that would be the last they saw of the mysterious flying wing.

Strange. Two days ago we were recalling how we witnessed a 'flying triangle' experimental aircraft taking test flights over moors in England in the late 1990s. And today, comes news of Boeing's successful test flight, via remote control, of its 'flying triangle' experimental aircraft :

The X-48B, which looks like a flying wing that blends into a wide, flat and tail-less fuselage, took flight on July 20 and climbed to an altitude of 2,285m before landing about a half-hour later.

The 227kg, three-engine jet with a 6.4m wingspan was engineered by Boeing's Phantom Works in cooperation with NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

'Flying wing' aircraft have been airborne, with various degrees of success, since the 1930s. German flying wing gliders took flight during World War 2, but the war ended before the Nazis could work out the kinks with their jet-powered version.

Iranian-Backed Godzilla Attack On Chicago Sees Bush Declare Martial Law



David Dees is probably the best photoshopping illustrator-artist on the internet today. His work gets better, and more cutting, every month.

His political satire imagery (mostly involving President Bush) can be found here.

His Kids World gallery artwork can be viewed here.

And his Game Art is just spectacular.

Brilliant stuff.

90 Million Americans "Angry" Over What Bush Co. Is Doing To Their Country

America's Supra-Elite Shocked That Internet Allows Free Flow Of Damaging Information

America's political elite are absolutely mystified why so many Americans hold President Bush, and the Bush administration, in such utter contempt. The Iraq War is bad, they say, but Vietnam was worse. The American economy is tanking, but it could be worse. How is this possible? Why are so many Americans feeling so absolutely hostile towards Bush Co.?

Answer?

Too much information, too readily available.

Cursed internet and blogs telling Americans what is going on, without government-approved spin softening up the harsh edges of all that bad news :

"It's astonishing," said Pat Caddell, who was President Jimmy Carter's pollster. "It's hard to look at the situation today and say the country is absolutely 15 miles down in the hole. The economy's not that bad -- for some people it is, but not overall. Iraq is terribly handled, but it's not Vietnam; we're not losing 250 people a week. . . . We don't have that immediate crisis, yet the anxiety about the future is palpable. And the feeling about him is he's irrelevant to that. I think they've basically given up on him."

That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell's boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization.

"A lot of the commentary that comes out of the Internet world is very harsh," said Frank J. Donatelli, White House political director for Ronald Reagan. "That has a tendency to reinforce people's opinions and harden people's opinions."

What they're really saying is that the internet, and blogs, are cutting through the brain fog so faithfully delivered up by the once dominant American evening network news.

Not only are Americans getting more information, they are discovering, online, that they are not alone in their anger and dismay at what Bush Co. are doing to their country. They are finding allies in their anger, and their suspicions about the true intent of the Bush Co. cabal are being reinforced by the like-minded, online.

Naturally, the absolutely shocking news that a recent poll revealed that 90 million Americans (or 28%) are feeling "angry" about Bush Co. is buried way down in this Washington Post story.

More on all this at The Last Days Of President Bush

How To Make Americans Very, Very Angry

Witness : "It Was The Most Extraordinary Thing I've Ever Seen"

British Ministry Of Defence : "...To The Question Of The Existence Of Extra Terrestrial Life Forms...We Remain Totally Open-Minded"




In Britain's Stratford-Upon-Avon on Saturday night, more than one hundred people ran from pubs, climbed out of their cars and gathered in the town square to watch a half hour long "extraordinary" light show. Five objects, brightly lit, darted, hovered, and whipped back and forth across the night sky :

Although Air Traffic Control reported no unusual activity, some witnesses were convinced they were witnessing an extra-terrestrial spectacle

The strange episode started just after 10.30pm, when the lights were seen hovering slowly over the town before three of them formed a triangular shape with one positioned just to the right.

A few minutes later a fifth came into view travelling towards the others at breakneck speed before slowing down and stopping a short distance away.

Tom, 30, said: "We walked outside and there was at that time a growing crowd of about 60 people looking up at something in the sky.

"I saw this light appear, then three others. They came over our heads in formation but then manouvered into different positions.

"Three had formed a triangular shape and one was to the right. Then another one came hurtling towards the rest at what looked like a very fast speed. But as it neared them it suddenly slowed and stopped altogether.

"It was the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen and the way in which everyone gathered in the street to watch them reminded me of a scene from Independence Day."

Chef Kern Griffiths, 26, said: "I saw five lights, we all thought they were hot air balloons at first because the glowing spheres looked like a burst of flames. But I couldn't see any outline of the balloon itself and they were travelling far too fast.

"Suddenly someone shouted 'look' and there were these bright dots fizzing across the sky.

"It was weird, they way they moved did look alien."

Hillary Potter from The British Earth Aerial Mystery Society (BEAMS) said they were being inundated with similar calls from across the country but said it was rare for such phenomena to be witnessed by so many people.

She said: "Such incidents have been on the increase recently...We've had many reports of people seeing quite large unidentified objects in the skies. It's not going away, It seems these incidents are becoming more bold...We take the reports very seriously."

A Mod Spokesman said: "The MoD does not have any expertise or role in respect of UFOs or flying saucer matters or to the question of the existence of extra terrestrial life forms, about which we remain totally open minded.

"Unless there is evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom from an external military source, and to date no UFO report has revealed such evidence, we do not attempt to identify the precise nature of each sighting reported to us.

Frankie Spray, from Wellesbourne Airfield, just outside Stratford, added: "The lights were nothing to do with us. None of our aircraft fly at night at this time of year.

"It's very bizarre but I've got no explanation as to what the lights were."

It's plain as day what's going on here. People from the 22nd Century are enjoying 'Back In Time' tour groups, checking out the sights of today, and in particular, the Great England Floods Of 2007. One of the most popular parts of any tour back to 2007 is to 'buzz' crowds at night, and to watch them gather and point.

Pity this event wasn't during the day. The people on the ground might have seen a Virgin InterTime Galactic logo on one of the ships.

But seriously, living in Somerset, UK, in the late 1990s, I witnessed a huge, black, triangle-shaped craft floating over the moors one night. It hummed, and it scared the living piss out of me. Locals told me such sightings were anything but unusual and if I had a torch the next time I saw it, I should flash a bit of Morse code at it. The unusual craft, I was told, would often respond with light flashes of its own. I never got the chance to try it out. A number of locals had witnessed the same humming black triangle over the moors and were fairly unexcited about the whole thing. As a topic of conversation in the village pub, it was no big deal.

A few years later I found a photo online of the supposed new generation of 'stealth' aircraft which were said to have been tested at British air force based in the late 1990s, as well as at sites in the United States. The test aircraft and the black triangle I saw were a pretty well perfect match.

'Black Triangle' sightings were quite common through the late 1990s and early 200s. That mystery, at least, was solved.

A local football club in Stratford-Upon-Avon said the Saturday night lights might have been 'floating lanterns' that had escaped from their moorings. This is the only, presumably, credible suggestion offered up, so far, as to what the lights were. The weird movement and 'flight' may be explained by the lanterns being caught up in wind and slip streams. For now, who knows?

But this sighting is only one of the dozens of mass sightings of bizarre, fast moving light formations witness all over the world in the past two years. Websites that catalogue UFO sightings seem to be in agreement that sightings have been escalating since 2004.

Hopefully there'll be a thorough explanation for Stratford-Upon-Avon sighting in the coming days.

As for visitors from other planets, or package tour time travelers, in the words of Carl Sagan : "Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence".

Outside of eyewitness accounts from those hundred people in Stratford-Upon-Avon on Saturday night, and tens of thousands of eyewitness accounts from the past six decades of UFO sightings, "extraordinary evidence" is still pretty damn hard to find.

White House : We Need A "Surge Of Facts"

Or How To ReBrand Iraq War Propaganda

Crooks And Liars first spotted the emergence of a new Bush Co. mantra to try and backbone the homeland rebranding of the 'War On Iraq' as a 'War On 9/11 Al Qaeda Folks'.

"You're either with us or against us" worked for a while, but started sounding scary to international allies.

"Stay the course," was also popular with Bush Co. and even the Australian allies, but it died a slow and tragic death when it became clear that "staying the course" was one of the chief reasons why the War On Iraq was failing.

"We'll stand down as they stand up," was used for years, but lost favour when it became impossible to ignore the fact that Iraq's Army was taking a long time to "stand up", partly due to hundreds of Iraqi soldiers being far too busy with executing Sunnis in their part-time death squad gigs.

"Fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them at home" has had a good run, but doesn't fit with new US intelligence reports that say the Iraq War has made Al Qaeda more likely than ever to hit American soil in the worst way.

A new mantra, clearly, has been long overdue. And now Bush Co, appears to have workshopped a new one.

The new Bush Co. mantra is (drum roll) : The "Surge Of Facts".

Or 'SoF' for our purposes.

Disclaimer : Bush Co. and its affiliated brands and derivatives take no responsibility for the American people confusing the word "facts" with the actual dictionary-defined meaning of the word "facts".

The 'SoF' mantra got a little airing today in a New York Times story about President Bush still trying to portray Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (Iraq) as the New Nazis, worthy of half trillion dollar a year defence budgets and the lives and limbs and mental stability of thousands of American soldiers :

Kevin Sullivan, the White House communications director, said the speech was devised as a “surge of facts” meant to rebut critics who say Mr. Bush is trying to rebuild support for the war by linking the Iraq group and the one led by Mr. bin Laden.

As Crooks & Liars reported on July 13, it was White House press secretary Tony Snow who first unveiled 'SoF'. Quoting Snow :

“The interim report is the beginning of a new kind of surge and it’s a surge of facts, because what’s happened with a lot of the war in Iraq, as you know, Rush, is that people get pictures of dead bodies, but they don’t get any sense of what’s actually going on on the ground,” Tony Snow told Rush Limbaugh yesterday, adding, “[W]e need a surge in facts.”

Snow then hosted a conference call with conservative bloggers.

“We need a surge of facts. That’s one of the things we’re going to be working on. I’m going to be doing it from the podium. […]

From whose mouth will "Surge of Facts" make its next appearance? Will it be Bush? Will it be Condoleezza Rice? The new UK prime minister Gordon Brown doesn't buy into the Bush Co. mantras, he won't even use the term 'War on Terror' anymore, so don't expect to hear him saying it any time soon. So that leaves Australia. Who'll say it first? Will be prime minister John Howard, or faithful Bush Co. apologist and foreign minister Alexander Downer?

We'll keep a Google Alert out for the next appearance of 'SoF'.

Bush Co. will have to keep using 'SoF' to make the term and its wishful credibility-cementing definition stick in the public's mind. As President Bush himself said :

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

It's always refreshing to hear President Bush tell the truth.

'Suicide' Of Controversial Arts Blogger Theresa Duncan

"Vital Part Of The Story Missing"


Blogger Theresa Duncan interviews Frank Morales six weeks before her death

UPDATE : Ron Rosenbaum claims that, contrary to the New York Times story excerpted below, his checking the facts of Theresa Duncan's death with the New York City Police Department and the City Medical Examiner’s Office reveals that her death has "not yet been officially ruled a suicide" :

To my knowledge no evidence has come to light suggesting murder or accidental death. But the authorities aren’t commenting, awaiting, for one thing, toxicology reports on Duncan they say may not be available for at least two weeks.

A verdict “on the cause and manner of her death” is still “pending investigation” is all a spokesman for the Medical Examiner said she was authorized to say.

Meanwhile the body of Theresa Duncan’s boyfriend, Jeremy Blake—who reportedly committed suicide in the waters off Rockaway Beach because he was “despondent” over Theresa’s death—has still not been found.

But in the meantime, 'Anonymous' commenters are filling up blog sites with claims that both Theresa and partner Jeremy Blake were mentally ill and "deeply troubled", which we examine in more detail below. Interesting then that the many 'Anonymous' comments we've read so far, from a close look at the writing styles and syntax, seem to have been written by the same one or two people.

From the New York Times :

In a case that is reverberating in the art world, the New York Police Department said yesterday that a video-game designer and budding filmmaker committed suicide last week and that her companion, a rising art star, has been missing since Tuesday.

The filmmaker, Theresa Duncan, 40, who has also drawn attention for her writings on cultural topics, committed suicide in their East Village apartment on July 10, the police said. Her companion, Jeremy Blake, 35, a well-regarded artist known for digital animation that blurs the line between abstract painting and film, has been missing since his clothes were found on a beach in the Rockaways on Tuesday evening, they added.

Found with the clothes was a note that made reference to Ms. Duncan, the police said.

Theresa Duncan also ran an arts and literary blog we visited occasionally called 'Wit Of The Staircase'.

In a post on her blog the day she died, July 10, Theresa quoted novelist Reynolds Price :

"Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

The night before she killed herself, she headed a short post 'Goodnight, Children, We're In The Arms Of The Great Lover'. The Great Lover being sleep.

On July 8 she wrote she was working on a new political essay, under the title 'The Devil And Dick Cheney'.

On July 5, she wrote :

So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades, as if all the Cold War missile paranoia was just a smoke screen for all the body snatchers the Pentagon was beginning to hatch.

Mind control and psychological warfare are the primary weapons that led to our current Monarch Moment. Cults like Scientology and mind control-manufactured Monarch girlies and Operation Mockingbird are the fungus among us that has been eating away at the foundations of democracy for decades....

And then linked to this video, a strange and troubling documentary on the history of American intelligence and military run mind control experimentation :




The New York Times story claimed her partner Jeremy Blake found her body :

Mr. Kinz said that Mr. Blake told him he had discovered Ms. Duncan’s body after she committed suicide. He said he had spoken with Mr. Blake after her death and that, while devastated and grieving, “he seemed to be very much in control and to be coping with it.”

News of her death spread fast amongst her friends, and in the New York art circles. Her blog averaged 800-900 visits a day while she alive. There was an increase of a few hundred extra visitors a day in the week after she died, perhaps friends and family members who had never visited her blog much before, but went there in search of learning something about why she did what she did.

On the day this story about her death appeared in the New York Times, the visits to her site shot up to more than 10,000 :


There are a growing number of blogs, FaceBook and MySpace pages belonging to people who've died. Often families and friends don't take down the pages, leaving them online as a personal memorial, with farewell messages from loved ones filling the comments. I've been told there are at least 200 or so MySpace pages from Americans, Brits and Iraqis who've died in the Iraq War still online. Permanent portraits of the lives and minds of the dead. As permanent as the internet remains anyway.

Sometimes you find the personal blogs and web sites of the dead are just as the creator left them the day they died. There is nothing on Theresa's site, at the moment, to say she died, or how she died. There is just the blog she created and filled with images and quotes from books and poetry that meant something to her, that she wanted to share with the world.

Many artists dream of some kind of immortality. Her blog renders her immortal in at least one sense : you can learn something of her life, her interests, her passions and her sadness from moving through the few months of archives.

It would be a shame indeed if her site, 'The Wit Of The Staircase' was taken down now she's gone. It is filled with sometimes beautiful, sometimes stark paintings, photography and artwork, and enough interesting and thought-provoking quotes and excerpts of novelists and poets to point any visitor towards searching out and reading something new they might never have come across had Theresa not created and filled this site.

UPDATE : Marshall Sponder, of Art In NYC, isn't convinced the full story of Theresa Duncan's death, and the disappearance of Jeremy Blake, has been told :

"there's some vital part of the story that's missing here..."

Theresa Duncan claimed back in May on her blog that she and Blake were being harassed, threatened, smeared and stalked by Scientologists, and a prominent Republican donor connected to the Heritage Foundation :

Much of the harassment of me and Mr. Wit was also conducted by the Church Of Scientology in L. A., who Cownie also no doubt also "does business with." U.S. Intelligence "black ops" and "psy ops" have long relied on (or just outright invented) religious cults (including the Manson Family--Charles Manson received 150 hours of in-prison Scientology "auditing"), biker gangs, and the like in Federal Counterintelligence prorgrams in order to disrupt the counterculture since the 1960s. Read more about the CIA and cults here and couch jumping, Katie kidnapping mind controlled movie star Tom Crusie's meeting with Scooter Libby and State Department head Richard Armitage here.

While this ongoing illegal harassment of Wit using Federal employees (or their "cut-out" counterparts) and Federal funding (your Homeland Security tax dollars at work!) is meant to deprive us of work and our livelihoods and even sanity, the harassment also has a curious sexual focus on Wit that mirrors this J. Edgar Hoover campaign against Black Panther organizer and actress Jean Seberg.

On June 1, Theresa engaged in something of a slanging match in the comments of Charm School, after the blog posted on her then recent interview with Episcopal priest Frank Morales. In the comments, she sounded like she had important information she wanted to share with as many people as possible. Charm School described the interview as an "elevated" discourse on :

Gov't conspiracies, dissent in art, Scientology, Christianity as subversion and Jesus as Insurrectionist, some meaning of Time, Lennon, P.K. Dick, Disney, St. Paul, the truth about 911, how the artist must take risks...

Charm School pays tribute to Theresa here, and points out that the New York Times, the New York Post and other media stories that reported on her death :

are whitewashed of any mention of the harassment Wit claims she and her longtime lover suffered.

Theresa seemed to identify with the actress Jean Seberg, of whom she wrote :

The declassified "Cointelpro" FBI document requesting permission to smear the actress and Black Panther activist Jean Seberg. J. Edgar Hoover sent letters to the Los Angeles press claiming that Seberg's pregnancy was the result of an affair with a Black Panther. Seberg, who was married to playwright Romain Gary, subsequently miscarried due to the stress of the scandal. She and Gary buried their child in a glass coffin to prove that the dead child was Gary's, and to show the public that they had been lied to. Seberg suffered mental health problems for years afterward, and eventually succeeded in commiting suicide after many attempts. Seberg was gorgeous, one of kind. She can be seen in "Breathless" "Bonjour Tristesse" and Otto Preminger's "Joan of Arc.

The method of suicide Theresa Duncan allegedly chose was pills and alcohol, but an official verdict on the cause of death has not yet been made public, contrary to the "It's over" style of reporting in the New York Times, which claimed a police source had confirmed suicide.


UPDATE : The interview Theresa Duncan conducted with Father Frank Morales in late May also includes her partner Jeremy Blake commenting on how the punk music scene had changed in New York since the 9/11 attacks. Very interesting.

The general tone of the interview, while discussing government and military programs against the American people, certainly doesn't sound like a person who was either suicidal or mentally ill.

Theresa sounds like somebody who was soaking up new information and sharing her knowledge and thirsting for more. She also supplies some of the best insights into Philip K Dick's infamous 'epiphany' that you'll read online.

One further note, many of the documents and government and military programs Frank Morales discusses in this interview are declassified and available online. So it's best not to dismiss the entire conversation as wacko conspiracy talk. If you pay attention, and follow up with some critical Googling, you might learn some very interesting things.


UPDATE : The smearing of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Duncan by 'Anonymous' commenters has well and truly begun.


The Wit Is Dead : Requiem For A Blogger

A Video By Theresa Duncan

An Interview With Theresa Duncan On Living In LA

'Wit' Talks Art, War And Religion With Episcopal Priest Frank Morales

Claim : Climate Change To Blame For England Floods

Worst Floods In Living Memory : 500,000 Told Not To Drink To Tap Water

Nature - 'Human Activity' Changes Patterns Of Rainfall Around The World


Dozens of towns and villages in middle England are filling up with water, as rivers burst and overflow their banks and Victorian-era sewers block and fail. Yesterday morning the England floods were being called the worst floods in 30 years, by afternoon that had changed to "the worst floods in 60 years." Today, they're "the worst floods in living memory."

Some 500,000 people are reportedly being told not to drink tap water as water supplies become polluted by river water and sewerage. Stores are running low on bottled water and food supplies as panic-buying empties shelves. The Iraq War-depleted British Military is being deployed to deal with multiplying emergencies and evacuations. 55 major flood warnings are now in place.

More rain, perhaps even worse levels of rainfall, are coming. A widely reported stat claimed that two months of rain fell over England in one day. In some districts, the stat claimed two months of rain fell in only minutes.

The claim that the England floods are a direct result of global warming induced climate change are now circulating, and are hitting the headlines of British newspapers.

This story from the UK Independent is pretty weak on proof, or even fine detail, of why the great floods in England of the past week can be directly linked to global warming. The proof, the story claims, will come in a study published in Nature later this week.

In the meantime, here's something of a preview of that study from the Independent :

It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.

More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established for the first time ­ an effect which has long been predicted but never before proved.

The study's findings will be all the more dramatic for being disclosed as Britain struggles to recover from the phenomenal drenching of the past few days, during which more than a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours in some places, and floods forced thousands from their homes.

The Great Flood of July is all the more remarkable for following right on from the Great Flood of June, which caused similar havoc in northern towns such as Doncaster and Hull, after a similar series of astonishingly torrential downpours on 24 June.

The study is being published in the journal Nature on Wednesday...

One source familiar with the study's conclusions said: "What this does is establish for the first time that there is a distinct 'human fingerprint' in the changes in precipitation patterns ­ the increases in rainfall ­ observed in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, which includes Britain.

"That means, it is not just the climate's natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause ­ climate change, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall. So this is very significant.

The conclusions of the new rainfall study are regarded as all the more robust as they are the joint work of several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, with each using its own supercomputer climate model.

Global warming is likely to lead to higher rainfall because a warming atmosphere contains more water vapour and more energy. Since climate prediction began 20 years ago, heavier rainfall over Britain has been a consistent theme.

We'll have more on this in the coming days, and we'll also take a look back at a key report from 2004 that detailed predictions of how the world should be affected by climate change today. Some of the predictions made already seem laughable. Some...not so funny.

UPDATE : Nature has just published its own preview of the report here. Some of the detail :

Human activity has made the weather wetter in a large slice of the Northern Hemisphere, say researchers. It has also made the regions just south of the Equator wetter, and those just north of it drier.

Agriculture and human health have already been affected...

To show human influence, the researchers compared observed changes in rainfall during the twentieth century with those predicted by 14 climate models, divided into three groups. One group contained estimates of human greenhouse-gas emissions, one included only natural factors such as volcanic aerosols, and a third contained both.

The models including both human and natural influences gave the best fit to the observed trends. In the zone between 40 and 70 °N, which includes much of North America and most of Europe, rainfall increased by 62 millimetres per century between 1925 and 1999. The researchers estimate that between 50 and 85% of this increase can be attributed to human activity.

Similarly, most of the wetter weather between 0 and 30 °S is down to human activity. Previous studies had not detected a human influence because the amount of global rainfall was analysed, which meant increases in some areas were masked by decreases in others...

Sky News is reporting that more heavy rains are expected, and London is likely to be the next city to experience widespread flooding. Damage from the June and July floods are already expected to top more than $US5 billion.


Power Out, Costs Soar As Britain Floods

Chaos As Towns Cut Off By Flood Waters

500,000 Surrounded, Cut Off By Flood Waters Told Not To Drink Tap Water

Race To Rescue Flood Victims Running Out Of Food And Water

Army Called In As 10,000 Are Trapped On Motorway By Floodwaters

Face Up To Climate Change Flooding, Don't Flee To The Sun

How's The Weather?

Wild, Apocalyptic, Dangerous, Deadly

It's a good thing all those dire predictions about a massive global increase of extreme weather events have not turned out to be true, otherwise we'd be living in a world awash with torrential rain storms, widespread flash flooding, record heat waves and millions of people being forced from their homes.

China

82 Killed In One Week Of Record Breaking Storms

Horrific 16 Hour Long Thunderstorm Kills 37, Injures 126, Dumps 10 Inches Of Rain, Massive Flooding

In Recent Weeks, Heavy Floods, Landslides, Have Killed More Than 360, Destroyed Or Damaged 200,000 Homes, Forced Millions To Evacuate, Racked Up More Than $US5 Billion In Damages


United States

"Weird" July Cold Front Expected To Spark Severe Weather, Storms In Florida

Dangerous Wildfires Erupt, Spread Rapidly Across Utah, Thousands Evacuated

Torrential Rains Hit Texas, Widespread Flooding, Evacuations

70 Counties In Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas Still Disaster Zones After Torrential Rains, Flooding In Recent Weeks

Severe Weather Lashes Iowa, Softball Sized Hail Reported

Heat Wave Boils East Coast, New York City Opens "Cooling Centres"


Mexico

Town Buried By Freak Hail Storm


Canada

Manitoba Hit By Heat Wave

Heat Wave Sends Power Prices Skyrocketing


United Kingdom

One Day - 85mm Of Rain, "Apocalyptic Skies", "Tropical" Downpour Floods London Tube Stations, "Everyone In The Country" Facing Potential Flood Risk In Coming Days, 15 More Days Of Cold & Heavy Rain Predicted

Many Parts Of England, Wales Under Several Feet Of Water


Europe

Central, Southern Europe Swept By Devastating Heat Wave, 13 Die In One Week, Widespread Crop Damage, Hundreds Of Fires Break Out

Temperature Hits 50 Degrees Centigrade In Romania


Russia

Huge Rainfalls In South East Put Dam At Risk Of Detruction, More Than 30,000 Face Evacuations



New Zealand

Downpours And Widespread Flooding Expected, $50 Million In Damages From Recent Floods


Thailand

Heavy Rains, Flash Flooding, Fresh Water Shortages


Pakistan

100 Killed In Flash Floods, Hundreds Of Thousands Forced From Homes

2.5 Million Affected By Flash Floods In June, 300,000 Children Under Five In Dire Need Of Help

15 More Dead Bodies Found After Cyclone



Communities Around The World Battle Worst Floods In Living Memory

President Bush Steps Down, Cheney Seizes Control Of America

Just typing that headline made the blood run cold.

But it's true.

President Bush will, today, hand over executive control of the United States, and all its military forces, to Vice President Dick Cheney.

For a few hours.

How To Make Americans Very, Very Angry

What Happens When Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld And Wolfowitz Are Confronted For Their War-Making Lies And Deceptions




Supporters of Bush Co. and the appalling horror that is the War On Iraq, continue to claim that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not lie about weapons of mass destruction, and the non-existent links between the Saddam Hussein regime and Al Qaeda, and claim that they never said there were connections between the attacks of 9/11 and Iraq.

But they did say all these things, and more, of course they did, and then they lied about saying it. Repeatedly. But they told the lies, and then denied lying, on television, and it's all recorded.

The above video proves it all, utterly, and comprehensively.

The calls for impeachment of the key 'war criminals' involved may be optimistic, but there is no mistaken the shocking anger and fury of the people near the end of the video who break through the walls of silence and directly confront Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and war architect and slithering NeoCon Paul Wolfowitz for the lies they told and the destruction and misery they have brought to the people of Iraq and the people of the United States.

As Democrat and Republican senators fight in Capitol Hill to bring an end to the Iraq War, and the Bush Co. regime spit in the faces of more than 200 million Americans and say they will do whatever the fuck they want, there grows a real sense that something terrible is going to happen there soon. Not necessarily another terror attack, but a violent and savage uprising amongst the people.

The mainstream media do all the can to pretend nothing is happening, that all is well, but the word, the truth, is getting out. The fever of outrage grows hotter by the week and the dissent passes amongst the people like a virus.

Videos like the one above are but a sample of the very real anger and frustration of America today. Anger and frustration that is now spreading rapidly through military families and amongst the soldiers actually fighting the war in Iraq. Some of whom are now being told they must return for a fifth time. But now they are saying no. No more. And the people of America, more often than not, will support them when they say, "Hell no, we won't go."

Which is why President Bush is now passing into law legal avenues which will allow him to make illegal any form of anti-war protest that he deems to be "destabilising" of the continuance of the War On Iraq.

Life After Harry Potter : Rowling Wont Rule Out More Tales From Hogwarts

JK Rowling And The Queen Shared The Same 'Satanic' Adviser'

'Harry Potter Police' Try To Seize Early Copy Of Hallows From Family

UPDATE : An interesting story on what happened to one family who received copies of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows in the mail, a few days early :

El-kaim ordered two books on-line, and when they arrived earlier this week, a label on the outside read "do not open until July 21st", which is the official release date.

The mother of 5 says she OK'd the opening telling WBBM, her reaction the "do not open" label was "Are you kidding? Open it. what do think is going to happen, the Harry potter police will come down the chimney, or we'll go to Azkaban?"

The police didn't visit, but the postman did, twice, asking them to return the books because he feared he'd lose his job for delivering them before the official release date.

El-Kaim did turn them over, but not before one of her kids finished the book.

UPDATE : JK Rowling speaks a little more about life after Harry Potter (she finished the Deathly Hallows in late 2006) and why she won't rule out a return to Hogwarts :

...after finishing the last book, "I felt terrible for a week."

"The first two days in particular, it was like a bereavement, even though I was pleased with the book. And then after a week that cloud lifted and I felt quite lighthearted, quite liberated," she says.

"Finishing is emotional because the books have been so wrapped up with my life. It's almost impossible not to finish and look back to where I was when I started."

"Harry's story comes to a definite end in book seven..."

What sounds ominous. So have we really seen the last of the staff and students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

"Because the world is so big, there would be room to do other stuff," Rowling says carefully. "I am not planning to do that, but I'm not going to say I'm never going to do it."

Right. So after she publishes a couple of 'straight' novels, she'll be heading back to Hogwarts? Former students of the school for wizards have a habit of going back there to teach, decades later.

UPDATE : This CBS News blog story hints at the possibility that the New York Times might have faked its vague, at best, review of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. It's an interesting idea. There's nothing in the NYT review that the writer couldn't have picked up from comments on numerous blogs, including this one.

Let's call it.

The NYT saw the chance to grab headlines around the world, hundreds of them, and dashed off a 'review' based on a quick scan of the online pages and filled out with blog spoiler comments - the exact same info in the review can be found in this story from this blog and the comments below - puffed up by a general overview of the Harry Potter series.

The NYT reviewer claimed they picked up the book from a New York City bookstore, yet no-one can find the store responsible. Regardless, who can read a 750+ page book in less than 24 hours thoroughly enough to write a review of it?

Nobody.

Buy the book, read the whole thing, write a review, get it through the New York Times fact-checking copy editors and sub editors and online all in 24 hours or less?

The spoilers in the New York Times review are true (see below), but the reviewer didn't read the whole book. They just read enough pages (probably online) and then got the rest of the info they needed from blogs so they could fake their way through.


UPDATE : The first copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows has gone up on eBay and sold for $US250. Mugglenet's extremist Potter nerds, realising they will become all but irrelevant after Sunday, have turned into hysterical stoolies and are forwarding personal details of Deathly Hallows leakers to the American publisher's lawyers. The Mugglenet Potter experts are more often wrong than right in their predictions for what happens in the final book.

We'll be linking to the more interesting reviews of Deathly Hallows, and 'It's All Over For Harry' type stories at the bottom of this post over the next few days.


I cheated with the online bootleg and skipped to the last chapters of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows first to write about it here on Tuesday, a few hours after the pages first appeared online.

But reading the rest of it on a laptop screen is an eye-stinging affair. Got through more than half of it in one five hour squinting session, but I'll wait now for the weekend to get through the whole book, but in paper and cardboard form.

There's comments popping up in MySpace saying the photographed pages of Deathly Hallows that showed up online on Tuesday have already been printed up in book form and are on sale in Chinese street markets. That's fast.

Seeing as (by my rough estimate) a few hundred thousand people have already accessed the bootleg online version, and a few thousand have already read, or are reading, the copies mailed out a few days early in the United States, it should come as no surprise that the New York Times has broken the embargo and published the first mainstream newspaper review of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows :

...true to its roots, it ends not with modernist, Soprano-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: a big screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people’s fates.

With this final volume, the reader realizes that small incidents and asides in earlier installments (hidden among a huge number of red herrings) create a breadcrumb trail of clues to the plot, that Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor. Objects and spells from earlier books — like the invisibility cloak, Polyjuice Potion, Dumbledore’s Pensieve and Sirius’ flying motorcycle — will play important roles in this volume, and characters encountered before like the house elf Dobby and Mr. Ollivander the wandmaker will resurface, too.

The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvelous, the ordinary and the surreal co-exist. It’s a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people’s innermost desires. It’s also a place utterly recognizable to readers, a place where death and the catastrophes of daily life are inevitable, and people’s lives are defined by love and loss and hope — the same way they are in our own mortal world.

The review confirms the ending spoilers we've already published on this blog as fact. So much for JK Rowling and her publishers' claims that the online bootleg was "misinformation".

It'll seen pretty well pointless to publish my own review of the book here after the weekend. There will be thousands of reviews online by Sunday night. Why add to the onslaught? I had my chance on Tuesday and missed it, too busy doing an interview for this story on 'The Orstrahyun' blog.

But I will say this of what I've read of Hallows - the '19 Years Later' epilogue may sound like a cheesy and somewhat daggy way to end this seven volume tale, but it gives you all the closure you could possibly want.

You won't be left wondering what happened to the key characters of the Harry Potter books after Deathly Hallows becomes blank pages. If you don't read about them being killed or tortured in the earlier chapters, the epilogue tells you where they are and what they're doing almost two decades after Harry Potter's final showdown with Lord Voldemort.

The 'Battle Of Hogwarts' chapter is probably one of the best chunks of fantasy writing I've ever read. It absolutely carves, the action pulses.

story continues....
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Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's 'American Sniper'

Go Here To Learn How To Make Americans Very, Very Angry

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story continues....

JK Rowling's achievement in keeping the Harry Potter tale going for seven volumes, and ending it so spectacularly, and bravely - she does a lot of killing, and some of it is ugly as hell - is an historical achievement in the history of literature. And it is literature. Don't believe the wankers who try and claim this is just a children's book, or 'genre fiction'.

It is classic literature of the wizards and wands and capes variety, up there with Lord Of The Rings for scope and sheer storytelling skill, but undercut with extremely undervalued (for now at least) fictionalised interpretations of current events.

In two or three decades, the Harry Potter books will be 'rediscovered' and written about as being veiled commentary and pointed critique of the values and events of our days at the dawn of the 21st century, when rumours of magic and mysticism, and all too real horror and violence coalesced into outpourings of panic, paranoia and Dark Ages-style religion-soaked fear.

JK Rowling's echoistic writings about American evangelical end-times dogma, terrorism, Al Qaeda, Islamic extremism, the Bush-era war-mongering NeoCons rise to power and subsequent fall, the Iraq War and the Iraqi resistance, all most notably in books five and six and although altogether in a disguised form, will no doubt be hailed in decades to come as powerfully iconic of our age, and she will likely be regarded as a fearless writer who possessed a rare mastery of her medium.

In the age of all-but-irresistible video games, iPhones, vidcams, 400 hundred channel digital TV, YouTube, MySpace and all the distractions of the internet, JK Rowling created a story that made tens of millions of kids read thousands of pages of fiction. Not only read all those books, but make those same kids utterly desperate to read the next book and the next.

For that accomplishment alone, JK Rowling should be hailed.


Two quick bits before we leave Harry Potter alone :

* JK Rowling is friends with Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin guitarist, and avowed devourer of books on witchcraft and Satanism. Page has acted as an advisor to Rowling for most of the Potter books, making sure she gets the spells, incantations and herbs just right. Jimmy Page, weirdly enough, supposedly introduced Rowling to the Queen Elizabeth II. Jimmy Page being an old friend of The Family. Don't think about that for too long. It may melt your mind.

* In early 1997 I was in England chasing down a publishing deal. A subscription only magazine called Writer's News was an essential tool, providing publishing news, info on what kinds of books editors were looking for (interest was still high for novels about football and love and love for football, 30 year old single women drinking and shagging too much and novels that would glorify 'Cool Britannia') and the mag also supplied lots of details of who were the best agents to contact with unsolicited manuscripts and why you had to learn to be patient.

In the January 1997 issue (I think) of Writer's News there was a small story sending out a congratulations to one of the magazine's subscribers and long hopeful novelists. It was worded something like this : "Great news for one of our friends in Scotland. After a long struggle, and a long rewrite, this single mother has just signed a book deal for her children's novel. Congratulations to Jo Rowling from the editors of Writer's News. We all look forward to reading the adventures of 'Harry Potter' later this year. Her initial success gives hope, as always, to all our readers that they too will have their dream come true."

The London agent, Christopher Little, who took on Harry Potter couldn't find a publisher, for months. Twelve of the largest and supposedly most reputable book publishers, based in London, turned down Little and Harry Potter. When I was meeting with book publishers and editors in 1998 and 1999, I took great delight in always asking "So were you one of the people who said no to Harry Potter?" The visible wince always told me that they were. They would never admit it.

While JK Rowling has earned close to $1 billion from Harry Potter books, movies and merchandise, the worldwide publishers' take (how much they get back from bookshops, and after the writer's 10 to 15% royalty has been subtracted) has been estimated to be worth more than $5 billion.

I still can't remember where I left that first edition hardcover of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone. Somewhere in an airport, probably, in late 1997. I'd like to think that I gave it some kid as a gift, but I probably just forgot it and left it on a chair once I finished reading it. I still like the idea of leaving books I've finished reading in a public place for someone else to find.

Of course, that was back when the hardcover edition of Philosopher's Stone could still be found in some London bookstores with the price marked down. Most of those first editions went to libraries and were stolen or worn out by constant reading.

It took a little while for Harry Potter to catch on.

The Baltimore Sun Breaks The Embargo With A Review

Harry Potter 'Leaks' Spread To China - Peoples Literature Press To Do Translation, Official Release Delayed To October 21

Plans To Sell Harry Potter On The Sabbath In Israel Faces Legal Threats, Challenges

I Wish Harry Potter Would Just Disappear

Internet Vs The Bookshelf : Harry Potter And The Great Web Leak

Harry Potter Spoilers : The Literary Terrorists Have Won

Hmmm - Church Of England To Publish A Guide For Young Missionaries On How To Sell Jesus Myths By Way Of Harry Potter

Harry Potter And The Ignored Embargo - Did The New York Times Fake Its Review From Blog Spoiler Comments?

JK Rowling's Anger At The New York Times Embargo-Breaking Review

NYC Building "Explodes" "Destroyed" "Collapses"

Or Not



UPDATE : Reader Little Blue PD provides a remarkable eyewitness account. Thanks a large one, PD :

It happened on the East side of 41st and Lexington Ave. I was like a block away in the office. At first I thought it was thunder, but it just kept going for like over 20 minutes it seemed, and it was very very loud.

Very scary, the NYPD says it was not terrorism. They say it was a steam explosion. Smoke and steam went up over the 45th floor. There was no black smoke like a fire though. People were running down Lexington. It was pretty scary, I was positive while in the area that it was terrorism.

Read the rest of PD's mini-report in the comments section of this story.


PREVIOUSLY : The first breaking news report on Channel Nine in Sydney, at 8.30am, and on radio a few minutes earlier, claimed that a building in New York City had "exploded" and then "collapsed".

But it looks like it was just a gas or steam main erupting. Six to twenty people as of this posting are in hospital, and the windows of a school bus were blown out by the explosion, sending a stream of New Yorkers running in terror. Most of the US would have heard, only the day before, news stories about the National Intelligence Estimate, which claimed it was likely pissed-off Iraqis would try to get into the US and wreak some terror of their own.

The headlines on the NYC Building Explodes, Collapses story were changed pretty quickly on the Google News lists, when it became clear that the first reports were utterly wrong :

Blast destroys NY building
Advertiser Adelaide, Australia - 1 hour ago
AN explosion in New York has caused a building to collapse in midtown Manhattan this morning - but officials say the blast is not terrorist related. ...

Another headline captured before it was changed :

Explosion destroys Manhattan building

Were the news wires who reported that an entire building had blown up and then collapsed getting their reports from the White House or something?

A hastily rewritten wire report once it was realised the original eyewitness was FOS :

A explosion in New York has rocked a building in midtown Manhattan sending people fleeing from as debris falls, reports say.

The Associated Press (AP) said the suspected steam pipe explosion occurred at the corner of 43rd Street and Lexington Avenue, near Grand Central Station.

Sky News is reporting that six people have been injured.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) said a steam pipe exploded, and had no immediate detail on possible injuries, AP reported.

Reuters is reporting that an electricity transformer has exploded.

The NYPD said it does not appear to be terrorism-related.

A witness reported that a building had collapsed, but New York City police said the building had not fallen, but was "shaky."

"There is debris falling, get back," a fireman told onlookers. People were being kept a block away.

The explosion occurred just before 6 pm (10pm GMT) and sent crowds of people heading north from the area, some of them running.

An extremely dramatic eyewitness report follows. This person should write for Hollywood :

"There was a thundering noise like a hundred freight trains going by and a plume of what looks like steam as high as 10 stories," a witness said.

"All Is Well"

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Leaked Online


A scan from The Deathly Hallows, or a brilliant piece of fan art?


UPDATE : It appears a few hundred, or a few thousand, people who pre-ordered copies of Deathly Hallows, by mail, have got their copies a few days early. Whoops. Makes all that security around bookstores and armed guards at warehouses stuff look more than a little pointless. The American publisher Scholastic urged those who got an early copy of Deathly Hallows to hold off reading the book until after the official release date, July 21. Now that's funny.

JK Rowling has issued a statement about the leaked copies and leaked ending :

As launch night looms, let's all, please, ignore the misinformation popping up on the web and in the press on the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

It's not misinformation when the details are true. But it's misinformation to claim the truth is misinformation. Or something.

Now we know why those scanned pages look so real. They are real. As is the image above.


UPDATE : A century ago, thousands of people would crowd the docks in American ports, waiting for ships to unload the latest serial installments of Charles Dickens novels from England.

Today, entire copies of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows have been digitalised and distributed around the world via file-sharing sites, four days out from the official release.

As a commenter posted below, information wants to be free. It sure does. The book publishing industry has been slow to adapt to the world of instant global distribution via the internet, and generally resist the digitisation of current works. Why? It doesn't make sense. If people want to read a book, they should be able to read it. It's up to the publishing industry to work out a way to make money off it. The music industry has done it, the film industry has done, or is well along the way to doing it, but the publishing industry resists.

One hundred years after those Dickens fans waited in the rain for a boat to appear on the horizon with the latest booklet of the story they were consumed by, kids are waiting outside bookstores for days to find out how the adventures of Harry Potter come to an end.

All the hype, all the security, all those people waiting in line, night and day, it all seems so pointless now. The information is out there, you don't have to read it online if you don't want to, but you can if you can't wait.

This will be the last time book publishers will be able to try and keep such secrets, and generate such hype from such security measures trying to keep a book under wraps.

UPDATE : So it is real. The entire book has been scanned at least five times, in different parts of the world, and is now burning up the net. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows has been leaked to the world four days out from the official release, violating one of the biggest, and most absurd, international security operations of the year.

Armed guards for pallets of books? Yes, armed guards for pallets of books. And more :

...secret warehouses, round-the-clock security and, according to Britain's The Sunday Telegraph, satellite tracking systems attached to trucks transporting the books to ensure they did not stray from assigned routes. The book's US publisher, Scholastic, appears to be furiously trying to suppress the leak.

Harry Potter publishers around the world are trying to run a bit of interference, saying the copies out there might be frauds, but most of them are keeping low key, probably trying not to encourage the distribution of the copies already out there. There have been takedown orders issued to file sharing sites to get the copies offline, but the entire files of photographed pages have now been compiled and are going viral over email.


PREVIOUSLY : Are they real? Is it fan fiction? Brilliant photoshopping? Magnificent fraud?

Millions of copies of Harry Potter's seventh and final book have already arrived in bookstores, large and small, across the world.

Shop owners and distributors were made to sign confidentiality agreements, and there is a detailed step-by-step guide to how they should be displayed, when they can be put on shelves, etc.

But that doesn't mean thousands of people haven't already torn off the plastic wrapping and dived into the final pages to see how the Harry Potter saga ends.

Of course they have. There are hundreds of comments already up from people who claim to work in bookshops who are reading the book right now, or have already finished it. But have any of these people been brave enough to risk prosecution and scan or photograph those pages? You'd have to imagine the temptation, for some, would be all but irresistable.

The pages on this site look real enough, and what is purported to be the final chapter 'Epilogue : Nineteen Years Later' reveals an ending to the saga that appears to fit with all that has gone before.

If it's a fraud, then it's up there with the Hitler Diaries.

So Don't Read Anymore If You Don't Want To Know How It Ends.

Just In Case.

According to the scanned pages, the final word of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is not 'Scar', as JK Rowling once, infamously, said it would be.

It's "well". As in "All is well", but 'scar' is in the second to last line :

"The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen yeas. All is well."

Here's the rundown of how The Deathly Hallows supposedly ends, from the scanned pages. Remember, it's all probably fake, or...

Harry gets married, to Ginny. They have three children - James, Lily, Albus.

Ron marries Hermoine, couple of children, Huge and Rose.

Draco Malfoy gets married, too, the child spawn is named Scorpius.

It's now Professor Neville LongBottom.

And the new headmaster of Hogwart's is Snape.

Harry dies, but it appears it's only Harry the wizard who departs the earthly realms. Harry the mortal survives, and breeds and gets a very happy ending. The scar he received from his first encounter with his arch-nemesis, Voldemort, pains him no more once Harry 'killed' he who killed his parents.

So Harry Potter doesn't die. Apparently.


story continues below...
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story continues....


Did fans of the series really want to see Harry get killed off?

Of course not.

JK Rowling has become the world's most famous, and successful, writer because she knows how to tell a good story very well indeed.

She can hardly be expected to destroy the entire tale with a tragic end for Harry. An ending that many of her friends made clear to her, long ago, in person and in letters, that they didn't want. JK Rowling wrote the story for them, why spit in their faces, and betray their loyalty, with an ending that is beyond redemption?

Ten years, seven books, 350 million copies sold. And now JK Rowling moves onto fiction for adults. Or least, adult fiction for the kids who started reading Harry Potter at eight or twelve and are now eighteen or twenty two years old.

It'll be fascinating to see how the hardcore fans react to the book they will absolutely devour this weekend.

And it'll be fascinating to see the headlines when JK Rowling releases her next, non-Harry Potter book :

'New Rowling Novel Not A Harry Sized Hit - Only Seven Million Copies Sold'.





Harry Potter Books Under Armed Guard In US Warehouse

Rowling Receives Pleas From Families Of Terminally Ill Relatives - Tell Us How It Ends, They Won't Live Till The Weekend!

Rowling Says Goodbye To Harry Potter For The Last Time

One Fifth Of London Kids Will Flip To The Last Page To See How It Ends

Bets Pouring In That Harry Potter Commits Suicide In Final Book

NeoCons Defined : Too Much?

Propagandist-In-Chief for the NeoCons, William "The Bloody" Kristol managed to get an op-ed piece called 'Why Bush Will Be A Winner' published in the Washington Post. In the piece, Kristol musters all his powers of spin to try and backbone his diabolically bizarre argument that President Bush is not the humongous failure that the vast majority of Americans now believe him to be.

Not only that, Kristol lays out a scenario for how the Republicans can retain the White House in 2009, by using the record of President Bush to win over voters.

Come on, stop laughing. Kristol is serious.

Strange then that none of the Republican candidates so far have even talked about President Bush's achievements in the White House during the televised debates. They distance themselves from the president at every opportunity, and would rather be photographed trimming Osama Bin Laden's beard than standing side by side with the leader of their own party.

You can read the key chunks of Klassic Kristol Krapulance here, with a bit of analysis, and comment.

When the Washington Post published the Kristol piece online, they opened up the page to comments, and at the time of this posting an astounding 248 pages of comments have racked up there, more than 2500 in total, and still counting.

The response has been close to record breaking for online reaction at a Western mainstream online media site. All but a handful of the 2500 comments from readers tears shred off Kristol and utterly demolish each and every point of his argument. Not only that, the entire history of Kristol's involvement in pushing for the War On Iraq to become a reality, starting back in the mid-1990s, when he helped to found The Project For A New American Century (along with Cheney, Jeb Bush, 'Scooter' Libby and Donald Rumsfeld), is laid out and his near ceaseless support for more war, on Iraq, on Iran and now Pakistan, is hammered with passionate and informed reaction from the readers.

It takes hours to get through most of the comments, but doing so provides a spectacular insight into the American mindset today. There is something close to palpable horror and hysteria in many of the comments. The readers understand that Kristol was a key architect in lying America into a costly and extremely deadly war, and they don't hold back from giving him all barrels, right in the face.

Kristol is abused, threatened and demonised, and any number of the comments would have been X-ed out of existence on sites like the New York Times Lede blog, or the UK Guardian's usually open-borders Comment Is Free blogstream.

But the Washington Post lets its readers go hard, and hardcore, many times in clear violation of its own policy for online comments.

But that's not the point of this piece, that's just for the history of the internet, when we will look back on the days when commenting was allowed to cross boundaries of public discussion never allowed by talkback radio and letters to the editor.

The point of all this is to draw your attention to one comment in particular, where reader Kelletim unfurls probably the most amazing, truthful and comprehensive rant we've read on a comments page in many, many months. It's over-the-top as hell, but not too far gone on the facts when it comes to the various ranks of the NeoCon fraternity. Enjoy the most harsh definition of the NeoCons you will ever read :

Neocons are all imbecilic, aging, wheezing syphilitic pathological creeps, dirty old men that smoke Cuban cigars and go on child sex slave vacations in third world nations while on oxycontin between snorting viagra and having secret affairs with gay sex workers.

When they're not spouting homophobic bullshit or writing breathlessly idiotic, fact free columns in major newspapers, clinking crystal tumblers brimming with $38,000 a bottle bourbon with the Skull and Bones / AEI classmates at grand elite socials, getting drunk and shooting people in the face, brazenly granting trillion dollar contracts to their former companies, raping teenaged boys in Texas Prisons, chronically sexually harrassing their female employees, they're out doing what they do best: ravaging the life savings of thousands of people and committing genocide.

All this while being ardently fawned over by the liberal media.

These revolting sub-human colostomatic shitbags of filth and perversion should all be in GITMO right now receiving sex changes from Cuban doctors, only to spend the rest of their lives as a drag show touring East African nations.

In the interests of accuracy, one glaring distortion in the above needs to be corrected :

"...brazenly granting trillion dollar contracts to their former companies..."

This is not true. Yes, Vice President Dick Cheney, has helped guide a ream of government and Pentagon contracts the way of Haliburton, the company he once headed.

But these contracts were not worth 'trillions'. Only $US50 to $US100 billion of America's war fighting dollars has been shepherded into Haliburton's vaults so far, resulting in the worth of Cheney's Haliburton stock increasing from a few hundred grand to more than $8 million.

So far.

As far for the rest of it Kelletim's rant? We must strongly disagree.

East African nations should not have William "The Bloody" Kristol and 'Scooter' Libby in drag forced on them. Even after undergoing sex changes at the hands of Cuban doctors.

The East Africans have suffered enough.


William "The Bloody" Kristol : Bush Ain't So Bad

Bush Comes Clean On The Propaganda War

"We Started It"


We are winning the war on Iraq, we are winning the war on Iraq, we are winning the war on Iraq

President Bush has been remarkably frank on how his government and its agencies use propaganda to shape public opinion, to crush dissent and, primarily, to rally support for the War On Terror and the War On Iraq.

The Pentagon, under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was busted buying positive news stories in Iraqi media, and is known to spends billions each year fighting the online propaganda war. Rumsfeld himself admitted they were losing the fight against the far less resourced Al Qaeda, the Taliban and various Iraqi insurgency groups. Those groups could use spectacular videos of military vehicles being IEDed. The Pentagon had to make do with horrific images of sexual torture, degradation and brutality from Abu Ghraib.

What the Nazis turned into an artform, Bush Co. has attempted to refine and strip clean of identifying watermarks. But President Bush keeps forgetting he's not supposed to come out and admit to the use of propaganda, particularly in the homeland. The best propaganda is, of course, the stuff you don't notice.

In 2005, Bush spilled his guts on his use of propaganda, and the methods he uses to try and make it stick in the mind, but it went all but unreported in the mainstream media :

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)

But a far more remarkable admission came from Bush only last month. This time it escaped the attention of the mainstream media completely :

"...we're not doing a very good job with the propaganda battle around the world. We created it, and we're losing. And that's one thing we've got to spend a lot of time on..."

"We created it...." What does that mean?

An explanation can be found at The Last Days Of President Bush.

World Exclusive : First Review From New Harry Potter Novel

In a world exclusive we present the first review of the new Harry Potter novel, The Deathly Hallows.

Well, it's not a review of the entire book, or even a complete chapter. It's a review of the first couple of paragraphs of the most eagerly awaited book in the world.

Here's an excerpt from page one of an early draft of the new Harry Potter novel :

'Chapter One. The Dark Lord Ascending.

The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. For a second they stood quite still, wands pointing at each other's chests: then, recognising each other, they stowed their wands beneath their cloaks and set off, side by side, in the same direction.

"News?", asked the taller of the two.

"The best," replied Snape.'

And here's our world exclusive review :

Interesting, but Deathly Hallows gets off to a slow start. Early appearance of wand pointing bodes badly for those who are sick of all the wand pointing in Harry Potter novels. More cloak wearing. More 'stowing' of wands inside cloaks.

Do these opening paragraphs point towards the ultimate death of Harry Potter in the final chapter?

Of course.

Iraq PM Maliki Says US Troops Can Go Home, Iraqis Will Deal With Security

WarPig Bill O'Reilly Declares US Defeat In Iraq : "You Can't Win..."

Iraq's prime minister Maliki has announced that American forces can leave his war-ravaged country any time they want, though he would prefer that they stay and keep training Iraqi police and military :

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that the Iraqi army and police are capable of keeping security in the country...

The embattled prime minister sought to show confidence at a time when congressional pressure is growing for a withdrawal and the Bush administration reported little progress had been made on the most vital of a series of political benchmarks it wants al-Maliki to carry out.

Al-Maliki said difficulty in enacting the measures was "natural" given Iraq's turmoil.

'Lawrence Of Arabia' successfully predicted the strengths of the Iraq insurgency, and the reasons why the United States cannot destroy 'guerrilla' fighters in the region more than 78 years ago. Did Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the NeoCons read TE Lawrence? Probably. Did they learn anything? Of course not.

Go To The Fourth World War Blog For The Full Story On Maliki And Lawrence


You don't get many more psychopathically single-minded supporters of the War On Iraq than Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. But even he's now joined the ranks of those who "give aid and comfort" to the enemy by declaring America cannot win the War On Iraq.

No double-talk, no word twisting. O'Reilly came right out and said it, during an interview with White House press secretary, Tony Snow : "You can't win..."

Notice O'Reilly uses "you" when talking about American defeat in Iraq. When he was insulting American servicepeople, to their faces, and declaring that anyone who said the War On Iraq could not work was a treacherous fucking traitor, and when he railed about impending victory, he always said : "We".

Defeat : "You". Victory : "We."

It doesn't make any difference. O'Reilly refused to face the reality of what American soldiers were experiencing on the ground in Iraq for four years. He lied to the American people on behalf of Bush. Co, to rally support for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2002, and he ceaselessly urged young Americans to place their lives and limbs on the line and go and fight the War On Iraq for all of 2003, 2004 and 2005, while abusing, literally, hundreds of experts, researchers, journalists, war veterans, generals and intelligence analysts who knew what they were talking about.

But O'Reilly couldn't stop lying, and refused to square with the American people.

It matters not at all that he chooses to do so now, and for reasons only that he claim in 2008 that he was calling for American troops to leave Iraq, "last year".

Story and video of O'Reilly's declaration of defeat, and pre-emptive arse-covering, now up at Raw Story.

"Freedom Fighters", Less Shakespeare For Little Brits, Rumsfeld Let Al Qaeda Escape Justice, Tony Blair Doesn't Like Traffic Lights, Robodocs Free Up More Time On The Links


Iraq : They used to be Sunni insurgents, but now the American military calls them "freedom fighters" and sends them out on patrols with US soldiers.

If you cast your minds back to the 1980s, when Afghan mujahadeen were fighting the Russians, then President Ronald Reagan called those shoulder-mounted missile touting Islamists "freedom fighters". Then vice-president George HW Bush called those anti Russian Islamists "heroes".

Of course, many of those "freedom fighters" ended up becoming the original core of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and went on to bomb the shit out of tourists in Bali in 2002.

Iraq : Sunni insurgents become freedom fighters.

Aghanistan : Freedom fighters become Taliban & international Al Qaeda.

Desperate to stop the failure of one war, you engage and train those who were your enemy and in the process possibly create more future enemies and threats. It's one way to keep the war industries alive through the next few decades.


The world's most expensive toilet? $19 million. It comes complete with foot straps. Just read the story.


When Tony Blair is confronted by red traffic lights, he is left "confused". Why? Because when TB was the British prime minister, he didn't have to worry about such everyday annoyances as stopping for red traffic lights. As PM, he was whisked through all traffic lights, which were changed to green in advance of his passage through the streets of London. The UK Guardian described Blair's red traffic light trauma as part of his "struggle to adjust to normal life." We weep for his "struggle". Tony Blair's new neighbours, meanwhile, are less than impressed with all the hardcore security measures that come with living next door to an ex-PM.


A major Australian newspaper has declared war on Aussie political bloggers for exposing too much of its bullshit and feckless pandering and butt-kissing of the conservative government. Bloggers ask : are we worthy?


Teaching British school children, aged 11 to 14, about Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler will no longer be compulsory. School curriculums are undergoing a controversial, and some would claim extremely radical, transformation.

Out goes the study of maps, in comes the study of climate change. No more Henry VIII, but lots more on the United Nations and the European Union. Through 'citizenship education' little Brits will now learn more about 'British values' and national identity. Out goes the Battle Of The Nile, in comes an increased learning focus on how to manage a mortgage, though, presumably, 13 year old children will not be encouraged to take one out.

There are some extremely positive changes - 11 to 13 year olds will only be forced to study one play by William Shakespeare.


This may come as a surprise to you, but it shouldn't : Dolphins don't like watching the mega-wealthy having sex through the viewing portals of their private luxury submarines.


The body count of the military assault on Pakistan's Red Mosque is becoming more clear. At least 70 of those inside the complex were killed, 19 of whom are believed to have been children or teenagers. 11 Pakistan military commanders also died during the 36 hour assault. Pakistan's President Musharraf has now vowed to "crush" Islamist militants across the country, no doubt feeling plenty of pressure from Bush Co. who are said to have warned him his time is short, and that they can no longer support his military dictatorship, if they're not taking care of business. The business being the killing of Muslims who want to change the political and social staus quo of the country.


When the world's tallest man meets the world's shortest man. 7.9ft vs 2.4ft. Contrast.


The Communist Party Of China is the world's biggest political party, with more than 72 million members. And it's getting bigger. Another 2.6 million joined the Party in 2006. Communism is still growing in China? What happened to their embrace of capitalism? Chinese know the best way to get ahead in business, to develop contacts and strong networks for future business ventures, is to join the Communist Party. Do these facts discredit Communism, or capitalism?


The privatisation of America's intelligence operations has grown at a mind-fogging rate since 9/11. The private spy industry has achieved what the KGB never could in the Cold War era. Private spying companies have utterly penetrated the CIA, and all but taken over its key operations, pulling more than $42 billion a year. Private firms, who are also key weapons contractors for Bush Co. now recruit private spies and run major intelligence operations. A comprehensive new book on the grand failures of the CIA over the decades confirms the story that the recruiting and training of mujahadeen in Afghanistan during its war with Russia in the 1980s gave birth to Al Qaeda.


A robot with videoconferencing capabilities is now standing in for doctors at patients bedsides in a Baltimore hospital. "They love it," claims one doctor. Yeah, sure they do. No word yet on whether the videoconferencing robots, or 'Robodocs', will fill in for the flesh doctors on Baltimore golf courses.


Go Here For The Latest News From 'The Fourth World War' Blog


In 2005, US special forces and intelligence operatives were only hours away from launching an operation inside Pakistan's borders to capture, or kill, key leaders of Al Qaeda. As usual, when the military got too close to genuine success in the 'War on Terror', then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld got involved and pulled the plug on the entire operation. Not surprisingly, the US military, the intelligence agencies and its special forces were furious at Rumsfeld's interference, and since 2005, Al Qaeda in that part of the world has grown and expanded its strength, influence and scope of operations. Why did Rumsfeld pull the plug? Because for the 'War on Terror' to continue for decades to come, and to keep annual US defence budgets above $400 billion, you need to have a somewhat viable enemy to be at war against.


Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's epic poem on the battle for Fallujah - 'American Sniper'


Top Cop warns that we must be prepared to fight a robot crime wave. Well, a half-robot, half-cloned human crime wave, specifically.


50 suicide attempts? The preferred method is drowning for this British woman, but how many times can you throw yourself into the sea, as part of your 'cry for help' before rescuers say enough is enough? About 50 it seems. She's now been banned from entering the sea along the entire coastline of Britain. Reminds us of a dark comedy sketch from Jam where a man, unsure about whether or not he really wants to die, decides to jump 20 times from a first floor balcony, instead of jumping once off a 20th floor balcony, just in case he changes his mind halfway through and decides he wants to live.


"Right now, I could kill President Bush." Please form one orderly queue.


A tornado all but wiped the town of Greensburg, Kansas, from the face of the earth on May 4. Now it is being rebuilt as the United States' first complete 'eco-town'. Leo DiCaprio is making a series about the rebuilding project for the Discovery Channel. Greensburg was, and will be again, home to more than 1500 residents. LeoVille promises to become "sustainable model of eco-living and one that will save it from future environmental catastrophe."


Bob Woodward is working on a new book, which will probably be called 'Washington At War'. It will focus on the 2006 period in Washington when support for Bush Co.'s War On Iraq dissolved and led to the Democrats taking control of Congress in stunning mid-term election victories. 2006 was the year the long fight began on Capitol Hill to end the War On Iraq, which meant the Democrats, and a growing number of Republican senators had to, in turn, go to war against Bush Co.

The insurgency within the Republican Party will also be a key focus of Woodward's new book. He provides a preview of 'Washington At War' in this story about briefings given to President Bush back in November 2006, when Bush was told by the CIA director that Iraq's Maliki government could not function, and was unsustainable. The language used by CIA director Hayden was blunt and based in the kind of reality that Bush Co. have long ignored when it comes to true - verifiable truth.


People often complain that church ministers spend too much time declaring that people who don't believe in God, and do not behave according to God's laws, will end up going to Hell. So what happens when a minister decides to drop the whole "You Will Go To Hell!" fear gear from his sermons? He loses his congregation.


Two American brothers have been gored in the Pamplona bull run, at the same time. See? Stupidity can be found in the genes. A bull broke from the pack and caught one brother on each of its horns. Instead of being rewarded for its attempt to promote active Darwinism, the bull was later slaughtered.


The Iraqi Parliament has decided to take all of August off, even though the American troop "surge" is now peaking, and the Maliki government has but eight weeks to prove to the Americans that it can reign in the violence and chaos of its new democracy before the supposed September deadline. Does Bush Co. actually understand that the Iraqis are just waiting for the Americans to give up and leave? And that another 100 dead Americans won't make any difference, except to the families of all those dead Americans?


An 11 year old kid wins a teddy bear on one of those 'claw' vending machines. The bear is found to be wearing a t-shirt with a huge 'Viagra' logo on it. The family complains. Warnings of "inappropriate" teddy bears in child's vending machines are issued.


Saddam Hussein blew his peoples' money building new palaces. Australia's prime minister, John Howard, blows his peoples money on surrounding himself with "life's luxuries." The latest outrageous Howard spending spree was a $100,00 "makeover" of his prime ministerial jet. Is $9000 too much for a roll of silk wallpaper for the jet's interior?


One Glass Of Water : $55. Priceless urine results.

When Saddam Was A "Visionary"

Pro-War On Iraq Journalist Christopher Hitchens didn't always think Saddam Hussein was the scum of all scum.

In fact, Hitchens once believed that Saddam was the saviour of Iraq, and a "visionary".

Don't be fooled by claims that the 1970s-era Saddam was a very different model to the Saddam of the 1990s. He wasn't. Saddam was a brutal fucker from his childhood on.

In 1976, Christopher Hitchens acknowledged his murderous, torturing ways, but he could hardly find fault with the tyrant. Hitchens wrote a number of influential stories all but praising the already then notorious butcher of Baghdad.

In 1976, Saddam Hussein was just as brutal, just as savage, as the man who President Bush called "evil" in 2002. And in 1976, Saddam had the exact same plans for Iraq that he was still trying to solidify when Bush Co. and the NeoCons decided he had to go.

The very prominent praise and support given to Saddam by journalists like Hitchens back in the mid-to-late 1970s, helped Saddam to consolidate power with the support of the UK and the United States. Hitchenswrote back in 1976 how Saddam would revolutionise oil production in Iraq, and get the barrels per day production up from 2 million to 4 million. Today, Iraq produces just over two million barrels per day, but Bush Co. thinks they could soon turn out 4 million, and maybe in a decade, 10 million barrels per day.

Back in 1976, Hitchens thought it was absolutely brilliant that Saddam was a socialist and wanted to nationalise the oil industry, much the same as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez wants to do today.

Of course, when socialism lost favour with the West in the 1980s, Hitchens transformed himself into a NeoCon media operative and cheerleaded the illegal War On Iraq, and praised the skies when Saddam was deposed. Hitchens acknowledgements of his previous praise and support for Saddam were thin, and hard to find.

So why did this booze-bloated leopard change his spots so radically?

Christopher Hitchens worships power, and the powerful, and will write what the market demands, particularly when the prime marketplace for where his work will be seen as influential and power-broking is mostly war-mongering NeoCon journals and newspapers. The man is a power whore of the most hypocritical kind.

US Veterans : The Iraq War Is Dark And Depraved

Shooting Civilians : "Just Another Dead Iraqi"

Just what do the supporters of an endless war in Iraq really think is going on over there? Do they read the words of American veterans of the war, like those quoted below or do they block them from their field of vision so they don't have to face the awful reality? Or they just simply shrug and say "Well, that's war..."

It's true of course. The slaughter of civilians by invading armies are a part of every war. But so far, it has been the least well known aspect of the War On Iraq.

Now the dissent, the sheer disgust, at what is happening in Iraq is so widespread, so ingrained, inside the American military, the truth about what is being done to the civilians of Iraq is becoming clear. American veterans of the Iraq War are telling their stories and voicing their horror at what they've seen, and what they've been a part of.

This is war. And this is the War On Iraq. The secret war that defenders of this horror cannot allow themselves to acknowledge as fact, even when veterans of the war do so, in their own words :

Through a combination of gung-ho recklessness and criminal behaviour born of panic, a narrative emerges of an army that frequently commits acts of cold-blooded violence. A number of interviewees revealed that the military will attempt to frame innocent bystanders as insurgents, often after panicked American troops have fired into groups of unarmed Iraqis. The veterans said the troops involved would round up any survivors and accuse them of being in the resistance while planting Kalashnikov AK47 rifles beside corpses to make it appear that they had died in combat.

"It would always be an AK because they have so many of these lying around," said Joe Hatcher, 26, a scout with the 4th Calvary Regiment.

Sgt Kelly Dougherty of the Colorado National Guard described a hit-and-run in which a military convoy ran over a 10-year-old boy and his three donkeys, killing them all. "Judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down. But, I mean... your order is that you never stop."

Sgt Dougherty described her squad leader shooting an Iraqi civilian in the back in 2003. "The mentality of my squad leader was like, 'Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in Colorado'," she said. "He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a potential terrorist."

More quotes from veterans of the War On Iraq :

"We were approaching this one house... and we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it... So I see this dog - I'm a huge animal lover... this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, what the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words."

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned... [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little two-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs and she has a bullet through her leg... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me... like asking me why. You know, 'Why do I have a bullet in my leg?'... I was just like, 'This is, this is it. This is ridiculous'."

"Here's some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK47, decides he's going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds..."

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'... [Only when we got home] in... meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."

"[The photo] was very graphic... They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got a spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and smiling."

"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population..."

"I just remember thinking, 'I just brought terror to someone under the American flag'."

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."

Full Story : US Veterans Of Iraq Bear Witness To A Dark, Depraved War

Bushspeak : Iraqi Insurgents Are 9/11 Hijackers (?)

Pentagon Admits US Troops Shot 429 Iraqi Civilians At Checkpoints, In 12 Months

Opposition To Iraq War Grows In US Senate, But Nothing Will Change Any Time Soon

Bush : Iraq War Needs More Time, More Money, More Dead Americans

What The 'War On Terror' Really Needs Is More Terror

US On Non-Specific, Increased Risk, Non-Elevated Threat, "Gut Feeling" Terror Warning

Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, has a "gut feeling" that the United States is entering a fresh period of increased risk of terror attacks.

A "gut feeling"?

The United States government spends more than $40 billion a year on intelligence gathering, it has now wired itself into the very bedrock of all private and public communications systems, and has dispatched literally thousands of agents around the world to monitor jihad and terrorist activity, and finds no credible evidence of coming terror attacks worthy of an official alert. But Michael Chertoff has a "gut feeling" something is coming :

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune that he had a "gut feeling" about a new period of increased risk.

He based his assessment on earlier patterns of terrorists in Europe and intelligence he would not disclose.

"Summertime seems to be appealing to them," Chertoff said in his discussion with the newspaper about terrorists.

Well, of course. Everybody loves getting out and about in the summertime. Even suicidal jihadists.

The Bush administration, and its various branches of government and agencies, or Bush Co. as it's more commonly, collectively, known, has developed a very disturbing habit of ramping up the official, or presumed, threat of new terror attacks - in this case Chertoff's "gut feeling" - more often than not when there is serious Capitol Hill pressure and widespread public disgust on their handling of the Iraq War, and the 'War on Terror' in general.

Of course, it has to be nothing more than sheer coincidence.

Bush Co. spends a lot of time explaining to the American people that they are all involved in the 'War on Terror' and that America is a key target of Al Qaeda. But the sixth anniversary of 9/11 is close, and while there have been plenty of planned terror plots broken and busted through the past six years, Americans haven't seen anything like the attacks in London, Bali, India, Spain, Morocco or Iraq.

Raised terror threat levels appear to have little impact on most Americans now, so perhaps this is why Chertoff chose to go with the "gut feeling" approach, rather than ramping up the official meter to critical. Homeland Security won't then be accused of crying wolf if another summer passes by without an horrific attack becoming reality.

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Go Here To Read 'American Sniper' - An Epic Poem About The Battle For
Fallujah

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There's an interesting story in the Toronto Star on 'conflict studies' and how wars or interventions that focus on regime change and gaining the support of the invaded locals, as opposed to totally annihilating everything and everyone who gets in the way, fail more than 80% of the time. A large portion of the reasons for failure, this story claims, is due to a loss of will on the part of the war-maker's people, who lose faith and interest when their own towns and cities are not being invaded or attacked.

But the story also includes this key paradigm, one that no doubt plays on the minds of President Bush and Chertoff :

The challenge for the government is maintaining support for a conflict when people don't perceive a threat...

It may well be that the key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago, he says.

"If nothing happens, it will be harder still to say this is necessary."

More than 220,000 Americans have been killed in car accidents since 9/11, and more than 80,000 have been killed or wounded in gun-related crimes, but no American has died on an exploding airliner or from car bombings.

The longer the time between attacks in the homeland, the less likely Americans are to feel threatened by terrorism and the more likely they are to question the reality, and cost, of fighting a 'War on Terror'.

The success the US has had in stopping terror attacks in the homeland has, in fact, undermined the case for the public continuing to support the 'War on Terror', the Iraq War in particular.

Chertoff holds back from saying out loud that a successful terror attack in the United States is key to rallying the nation back behind President Bush, and rallying support for the 'War on Terror' in general. But other Republicans have not been so coy.

In June, 2007, Arkansas Republican Dennis Milligan said :

"....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 to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country."

* It's not a new realisation for the Republicans by any measure. There's this from November, 2005 :

A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.”

The latest, and the most disturbing example, of Republicans appearing to be anticipating, even desiring, a successful terror attack in the homeland, to get the public support back behind Bush and the war, came from Rick Santorum, on July 7 :

"...between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public’s going to have a very different view..."

Santorum is likely to be proved wrong, even if the Republicans 'best-worse case' scenario does come true. A successful terror attack in the United States between now and the 2008 presidential elections will uncork an avalanche of genuine public paranoia and fear, but not all of that will be directed towards foreign terrorists.

Should America be hit by terror attacks, during the 2008 elections, Republicans like Santorum will find their comments and memos, like those quoted above, shoved back in their faces. There will be many who will claim Republicans wanted, and needed, a terror attack to prove the 'War on Terror' is worth fighting, and it will be hard for them to deny it. This will make for extremely ugly scenes and a shattered American morale during a time of all-too-real national emergency.

Plus, the idea that the Iraq War has increased the threat of terror attacks on American soil is alive and finding firm grip amongst the American people. CIA studies, international intelligence agencies and Army War College reports repeatedly state that invading Iraq has not only increased the threat of terror in the US, but it has led to a massive increase in the number of terrorists who might try and carry out such an attack.

Republican senators, and conservative media hosts, can claim this is not true all they like. But most Americans don't believe them when they say the 'War on Terror' and the Iraq War is helping to keep them safe from terror. The more conservative radio, newspapers, websites and blogs try to deny the very concrete Catch-22 of the 'War on Terror', the more they see huge falls in their audiences and readership.

Should a terror attack happen in the US, as Santorum says that it will, Bush's claim that "we are fighting them over there (Iraq), so we don't have to fight them at home" will be proven, horrifically, woefully, false.

The Republican Party is facing a shattering defeat in 2008. No successful terror attacks in the homeland will lead to further disbelief that America faces a threat so hostile and real that it needs to devote thousands more lives, and hundreds more billions of dollars, to fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But a successful terror attack in the homeland will bring a tide of accusations that the Republicans stand to benefit the most from all the death and devastation. After all, some of them were waiting for such an attack to see a rise in the polls and support for the war.

The majority of Americans now believe the 'War on Terror' and the Iraq War are not worth fighting, and nothing will change their mind on that fact.

But President Bush, and bubble-brained Republicans like Rick Santorum, don't seem to understand this, or at least, they don't want to accept it for the reality that it is.

Homeland Security Chair Asks Chertoff : What Colour Code Is Your Gut?

Dolphins Don't Like Watching The SuperRich Having Sex In Luxury Submarines

So, you've cashed in your Google shares, you've got $150 million squid in the bank, and you think it's time to lash out and buy yourself a supertoy.

A $50 million dollar yacht with indoor swimming pool, snooker table and helicopter pad?

Ugh. How very 1998.

An $32 million round trip ticket to the international space station?

Please. That's so 2006.

If you want to be taken seriously in the world of the super-rich, what you really need is your very own luxury submarine :

The ocean floor is the final spending frontier for the world's richest people.

Luxury-submarine makers and salesmen from the Pacific Ocean to the Persian Gulf say fantasy and secrecy are the foundations of this nautical niche industry built on madcap multibillionaires.

"Everyone down there is a wealthy eccentric,'' says Jean- Claude Carme, vice president of marketing for U.S. Submarines Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based bespoke submarine builder.

"They're all intensely secretive.'' Who owns the estimated 100 luxury subs carousing the Seven Seas mostly remains a mystery.

The major points from the story :

* Submarine builders sign confidentiality clauses to keep secret the identity of the undersea elite.


* $80 million for an underwater boat is not seen as excessive when luxury yachts are costing $150 million.

* The Pheonix 1000 model is 65 metres long and four stories tall.

* The Seattle 1000 will set you back $25 million. It can range 3000 nautical miles. It's got three stories tall, it has five bathrooms, five staterooms, a wine cellar, gym and two kitchens. But unlike military subs, the owners want to watch the fish swim by, through observation portals, so the Seattle includes one that is 10 metres long.

* Luxury submarines can remain submerged for a week at a time.

* There are a few dangers down below. Like military submarines that you don't bother to alert to your presence, and the possibility you might run into old mines or depth charges.

* You don't have to be super-rich to own a sub. You can sell the house and pick up a "sport luxury model" that will seat three people for a mere $350,000.

* Tahiti is hoping to become a docking station for the world's private submarine owners, and are developing a "luxury submarine market."

* Dolphins can sense when people are getting into it underwater, and apparently like to come up to the observation windows of subs to get a closer look. The dolphins are "easily excited" and "get jealous". They show their displeasure by banging their noses on the windows.

* If the dolphins don't interrupt your underwater love, the depth charges just might.

* Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen now owns a luxury submarine. At $12 million it's a bit of a cheapie, and apparently regarded by the sub-class as rather tacky.

Being yellow.

Don't make us sing the song for you....

Infected And On The Run

A news story straight out of the early chapters of Stephen King's 'The Stand' :

A man kept in isolation after he was diagnosed with contagious tuberculosis broke a hospital window and fled from his room at a Little Rock hospital.

Franklin Greenwood, 50, was placed in isolation on June 29 after he was seen coughing up blood outside of the city's traffic court and was released by a judge to the state Health Department's custody. He left the hospital on July 1.

A state health official said Greenwood has a form of tuberculosis that would respond to treatment but that it is still important to find him because he is contagious.

State tuberculosis control officer Dr. Iram Bakhtawar wrote in a draft affidavit that Greenwood is believed to have "an active case of tuberculosis in an active state and in a communicable form." The affidavit said Greenwood had previously been treated for the lung disease but did not complete treatment. The document shows that recent chest X-rays indicated Greenwood's tuberculosis was getting worse.

Tuberculosis is transmitted by air in nearly all cases. Active TB patients normally cough, dispersing particles that can float in the air for hours.

He's infected with TB, it's 'active', it could be highly communicable, the virus can live outside the body, in the air, for hours, and he's been on the run for ten days.

Australia's Top Cop Says Prepare To Fight Robot Crime Wave

Plans To Hunt Down Criminal Clones, Go Undercover In Second Life

Australians can rest a little easier today. While the media and public fret about terror and drug gangs, the Australian Federal Police are getting in early on the supercrimes we will be facing when robots and clones, and cloned-robots, and robot-humans start raising hell in the underground crime worlds.

The Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, sounds like he's been reading a bit of Philip K Dick recently. Which is never a bad thing. Either that, or the AFP are working secretly to interrupt a Bladerunner/Terminator-like rise of machine men that we haven't even begun to seriously entertain.

Wherever Keelty is getting his information, this is not the sort of Cyborg War talk you usually hear at a parliamentary inquiry :

Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.

Mr Keelty said the police force would have to use experts from the private sector to fight tech-savvy organised criminals, because it lacked the necessary skills.

Technology-enabled crime was "a new area that's growing exponentially", he warned yesterday.

(Keelty) identified the use of robotics and cloning as future challenges.

"Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot," he said.

"You could (also) have technology acting at the direction of a human being, but the human being being distanced considerably from the actual crime scene."

No wonder we need to tighten our immigration laws and visa standards. We've got to keep an eye out for "cloned part-person, part-robots". Will we need to introduce empathy tests at airports to determine who is synthetic and who is uniquely human?

The Australian Federal Police are also turning their attention to the world of Second Life. A world that Keelty appears to believe will become a criminal playground, and paedophile wonderland. But Keelty is also concerned that crimes committed in virtual worlds may eventually seep over into our reality :

Mr Keelty said scams had sprung up in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, where people can spend real money via credit cards to buy products such as virtual real estate and gifts.

"Policing that is going to be quite difficult," he said.

Australian and UK police had also noticed a trend of internet pedophiles crossing into real life pedophilia, and were planning a joint operation in developing countries, he said.

"We are watching people in the virtual world convert what they are doing in the virtual world..."

"So this convergence from the virtual to the real world is a new phenomenon and makes evidence-gathering quite difficult. It will be a problem for us into the future."

Keelty just admitted that the AFP have got undercover agents wandering around in Second Life, didn't he? Weird.

As far as robot crime waves go, why should all this cause us so much concern? Just get the robopolice to go after the robot criminals. In the US, there's a taser-touting robot that looks set to hit the streets soon :

A move to arm police robots with stun guns has been condemned by weapons researchers.

On 28 June, Taser International of Arizona announced plans to equip robots with stun guns. The US military already uses PackBot, made by iRobot of Massachusetts, to carry lethal weapons, but the new stun-capable robots could be used against civilians.

"The victim would have to receive shocks for longer, or repeatedly, to give police time to reach the scene and restrain them, which carries greater risk to their health," warns non-lethal weapons researcher Neil Davison, of the University of Bradford, UK.

"If someone is severely punished by an autonomous robot, who are you going to take to a tribunal?" asks Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.

Ahhh, isn't that the idea? This is why former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so keen to get robots armed with automatic weapons into the battlezones of Iraq.

Let the robots run wild, and then stand back and laugh as the lawyers and judiciaries try to determine whether a robot can be charged with murder.

But if we let robopolice go after the robocriminals, aren't we drifting into dangerous territory?

What if they find common ground, in the dark alleys of a night city and, you know, team up?

Against us?

And is Keelty actually hinting at a day when we might find ourselves having to deal with cloned humans, stripped of their emotions and brains, stuffed with nanotech, being sent into crowded places to then detonate by remote control?

Or will half-robot-half-humans be jihad-programmed to explosively suicide?

1950s and 1960s science fiction, particularly the work of Philip K Dick, has had a nasty habit of turning into reality, our reality, of late. It looks like we are going to get even more in the not so distant future.

Here’s a smattering of decades old Philip K Dick realities that have become, or are quickly becoming our new reality :

Criminals being tracked by satellites, remote control robot sentries and machine-gunners, synthetic and cloned pets, swipe cards to enter buildings and malls, laptop computers, reality television, hacker anarchists, mega-global corporations that rule entire continents, android babysitters, a military controlled United States divided into police-state zones (post-Hurricane Katrina, this was New Orleans), whole towns as nostalgia amusement parks, a technology-interconnected global humanity and a president who bankrupts his country and creates fictional wars to distract his people from their dark reality.

Philip K Dick's 1980 Top Ten Predictions For The Future That Have (Mostly) Come True

Russian RoboCop Hits The Streets - But Shorts Out In The Rain

Robots Are Now Being Given Emotions

Why We're All Living In A Philip K Dick Novel

Robots Don't Cry - US Has Big Plans For Its Robot Army

Accidents In BioWeapons Labs Deemed Greater Threat Than BioTerrorism

20,000 Americans Now Work On BioWeapons

"Dangerous, unreported infections" recently forced the Centre For Disease Control to shut down a biodefence research facility in Texas.

The United States now has the world's biggest concentration of bioweapons labs, with more than 20,000 workers at hundreds of sites.

The watchdog group, the Sunshine Project, claims the Texas incident is but the public face of an increasingly dangerous brew of research and accidents across the United States.

The Sunshine Project claims that researchers are coming into contact with pathogens more dangerous, more infectious, than most of the American public could even comprehend.

While the threat of bioterrorism remains a reality for most countries of the world, public health experts fear that accidents in biodefence facilities pose a far greater threat.

In recent years, lab workers have been, accidentally, exposed to or jabbed with needles containing TB, anthrax, plague and "undisclosed, genetically engineered microbe."

Since 9/11, the United States has spent more than $40 billion on defence against bioweapons, and research into developing their own. Spending in the next fiscal year is set to push that total to almost $50 billion.

From New Scientist :

Deadly germs may be more likely to be spread due to a biodefence lab accident than a biological attack by terrorists.

Plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever - these are among the bioweapons some experts fear could be used in a germ warfare attack against the US. But the public has had near-misses with those diseases and others over the past five years, ironically because of accidents in labs that were working to defend against bioterrorists. Even worse, they may be only the tip of an iceberg.

The revelations come from Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a biosafety pressure group based in Austin, Texas, US, who after persistent requests got the minutes of university biosafety committees using the US Freedom of Information Act. The minutes are accessible to the public by law.

Bioweapons Advisor To Bush 41 Convinced US Government Responsible For October 2001 "Superweapons Grade" Anthrax 'Attacks' - Senators Opposed To Patriot Act Were Targeted

Centre For Disease Control Closes Bioweapons Research Labs In Texas After Discovery Of Unreported Accidental "Exposures"

UK : Bioweapons Labs Put On Guard Over Fears That 'Terrorists' Will Try And Steal Deadly Viruses

Creation Of Synthetic Life Leads To Fears Of New Generations Of Powerful Bioweapons

Selling The Threat Of BioTerror - Spread The Fear, Shape US Policy, Make A Few Bucks

The World Guide To Bioweapons

Iraq : Time To Go

The New York Times Says So

Don't Mention "Curveball"

The New York Times editorialises today that it's time for the United States to leave Iraq.

It's that simple, apparently.

The New York Times, who devoted so many of its front pages through 2002, and early 2003, to preparing the American people for the War On Iraq, by devoting numerous front pages to Judith Miller penned "exclusives" from "senior military sources" and "Bush administration sources" and "CIA sources" and "intelligence sources" scaring ten kinds of shit out of people about WMDs, that didn't exist, now tells the American people that 'The Road Home' awaits.

Is that the road littered with more than six thousand IED-shredded Humvees? Yes.

Is that the road drenched in the blood of hundreds of young Americans who will never grow old enough to legally buy beer, get drunk and tell their dad to get fucked? Yes.

Is that the road along which Chinese and Russian senior military officials now stand shaking their heads in disbelief at their extreme good fortune, smirking and saying, "See you sooooon."

Yes.

Of course, more than four years on from the start of the War On Iraq we know now that the New York Times was perhaps the most guilty of all the world's media for perpetuating the myths of the existence of a ready-to-annihilate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program. More guilty of perpetuating this myth than even the Murdoch media. Now that's really saying something.

Sure, Fox News might have once claimed that Saddam Hussein had traveled back in time with Osama Bin Laden to kidnap twenty five T-Rex dinosaurs which they were going to fit with lasers and let loose in the streets of Buttstink, Omaha, or something, but you didn't see lizard-eyed NeoCons slurking onto CNN saying, "As they said on Fox News this morning..."

No, all those who wanted to go to War On Iraq always quoted the 'Saddam Has WMDs, Wants Nukes' type stories on the front page of the New York Times, before they enthusiastically preached the good word from the Project For The New American Century song sheet.

Ahh, how we remember the days when the New York Times acted as the Bush administration's crack dealer, selling the shit on the street that would help addict most of the nation to the idea that they just had to sacrifice thousands of American lives, and in turn decimate the human ranks of the American Army, and empty most of the Treasury, on modern history's greatest clusterfuck.

Who can forget the alcoholic, cash-soaked, fuck-brained rantings of the legendary New York Times source "Curveball", who acted as Miller's very own 'Deep Throat'? The New York Times treated him so seriously, his word was gospel, but key intelligence agencies around the world were shouting, "Who the fuck is this idiot? And why are the York Times printing his bullshit as fact?"

Lookit, Saddam's bioweapons program! Lookit! Missiles that can hit London in 45 minutes! Lookit! Saddam's got stuff and things that go boom! Lookit! Saddam went on e-Bay looking for nuclear weapons!

Yes, "Curveball", the New York Times source that no journalist ever met, whose claims were passed on to the 'Newspaper Of Record' by the Vice President's office, must have fully checked out, or otherwise they wouldn't have used his fantasies to demand the United States act decisively against Saddam in early 2003.

For what it's worth, the New York Times is now doing its 'bit' to end the war it so thoroughly helped begin. If the media are not complicit in preparing a nation, and the world, for a war, then why should so many low-ranked politicians and first year intelligence agency clockpunchers have to cop so much shit for echoing what they read in the New York Times as "fact"?

But the rule of the American Elite is clear : Never Blame The Institutions. Blame the shitkickers instead. And the New York Times is as much an American institution of global power and influence as the Pentagon is. Sometimes even more so.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld loved the New York Times back in 2002 and early 2003. They quoted NYT editorials and front page "exclusives" endlessly during press conferences and media appearances. Because all Americans knew, well, enough anyway, that if it made the front page of the New York Times then it had to be true.

Well, mostly true...well, pretty well mostly...okay, some truth...alright, a little tru...fuckit, it was all bullshit, okay? We know that now. That is a fact.

And these are facts, as well : Half a million Iraqis are dead, 3600 American soldiers were slaughtered, 180,000 military personnel are filing for disability, more than $500 billion was pissed up against a brain-and-skull flecked wall in a back alley of the miserable shithole called Sadr City, and a shockingly high percentage of the world's population thinks that most Americans are a bunch of killkrazy deathfreaks.

Mission accomplished? Mission Accomplished.

Here's the New York Times licking war-weary America's balls. Hey, they're trying to do the right thing :

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong.

The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

One of Mr. Bush’s arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening.

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq’s political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.

The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.

Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences. To put it baldly, terrorism and oil make it impossible to ignore.

One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors — America’s friends as well as its adversaries.

For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq’s borders.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war.

Well, isn't that ironic? Because the New York Times used Demagoguery And Fear to build support within a populace mostly opposed to wars of aggression to give Bush Co. the base from which to build its thin Coalition Of The Willing against the opposition of most of the rest of the world.

Everyone who wanted the war quoted the New York Times. Every newspaper in the world ran stories quoting the New York Times in late 2002 and early 2003, even those newspapers who were virulently opposed to the invasion. Just the fact that the New York Times continually claimed, based on information from Dick Cheney's office, that Iraq had an extremely dangerous, very active WMD program, and Saddam intended to use those weapons, and soon, intimidated thousands of other media voices into silence.

Throughout the war, the New York Times sat on information that would have made a difference. They had facts of the Iraqi resistance from the very first car bombings, only a few weeks after the war began, and they didn't give them to the American people. Three years ago, it killed stories that would have alerted Americans to the truth of the insurgency's strength and the reality of the IED, Mad Max style war underway, and they buried this information until 10,000 outraged blog posts in 100 countries forced it to admit the truth.

But now? Now, at all but the last moment before millions of Americans are ready to rise up and storm Capitol Hill in grief-fuelled fury, now the New York Times says : "It's Time To Go Home."

Funny, through all its couple of thousand words of editorial today, the New York Times completely forgets to mention the involvement of Judith Miller, or her 'sources' in Dick Cheney's office (who turned out to be the NeoCon, and probable under cover Mossad, agent, 'Scooter' Libby) and they forget to mention"Curveball" or any of the newspaper's own complicity in helping to create the reality that is the War On Iraq.

For all the many months that the vast majority of Americans, and the vast majority of world citizens have cried out, "For Chrissakes, please! End this war now!" the New York Times hedged, doing what the American elite wanted it to do, playing down the facts on the ground, and continued to say "just a little longer, just a little longer, just a little longer."

If there truly is any justice in this world, the fallout from the Iraq War should destroy the New York Times Company as soundly, as thoroughly, as it has destroyed the Bush Administration.

Burn In Hell, you bastards.

Not So Surprising Statistic

Is anyone shocked to learn that new research shows :

Eating At The Wheel Doubles Accident Rates

Talking on the phone while driving is dangerous, watching DVDs while driving is dangerous, closing your eyes to enjoy a particular good Slash solo during an old Guns N' Roses song while driving is dangerous, applying make-up while driving is dangerous, checking spreadsheets for the morning's meeting on your laptop while driving is dangerous, masturbating while driving is dangerous, watching DVDs and masturbating while driving is dangerous, making cocktails while driving is dangerous, punching bucket bongs while driving is dangerous, playing video games on your laptop while listening to Guns N' Roses and masturbating and applying make up all at the same time, while driving, is particularly dangerous.

Basically, doing anything else while driving, except for driving, is dangerous.

But new research has proven it's dangerous to eat while driving, so now you know.

"Armageddon Isn't What It Used To Be..."

The 2012 Mayan Calendar Cult Makes Its Mainstream Debut

When Nostradamus Meets The Da Vinci Code



The idea that the Mayan calendar somehow predicts the End Of The World, come December, 2012, when the calendar's unique method of marking time ends, is a relatively new concept. There is no history of Mayans, millions of who still live in South American, citing 2012 as the End Times, or even that much scholarly work examining such a prediction.

Like the widely believed idea of The Rapture - that when Jesus Christ returns he will suck up the living bodies of all the believers and the innocent (even unborn foetuses) and leave the unbelievers to burn in a living hell on Earth - the growing cult of 2012 is a modern day creation, making use of old writings to capitalise on very modern fears and anxieties, and consumer guilt.

Let's face it. An entire genre of very popular movies and books and video games, and the mind-boggling success of the American Evangelical movement (70 million strong and reportedly still growing), proves that many Westerners secretly love the idea that we're all about to cop it in the neck, in a mega-apocalyptic sense.

If not next year, then 2012. If not then, maybe 2032, when yet another comet is set to slam into the Earth and end all life as we knew it.

The Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult is perhaps more of a cult by hype than any kind of growing or widespread set of beliefs. Like Al Qaeda in Iraq, there was no such thing as a cult of true believes in the 2012 calendar until the media began reporting that there was, and then it grew. Or least, the claims of its existence and popularity and credibility grew after all the media reports.

There's a surge of new books and websites pumping the myth that the end of the Mayan calendar marks the demise of our time, and there are plenty of academics willing to get down and have a bit of a brawl over the fascinating history of the Maya and their once incredibly advanced society and historically unique concepts of time and cosmology. But the academics are mostly getting involved to smack down the myth-makers and to argue through their own knowledge. Many academics treat myth-busting the 2012 Armageddon Cult as intellectual wrestling, followed out by a sleeper hold.

But one thing the growing surge of interest in the Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult does show is that the media always loves a good apocalypse story. Almost as much as it loves to do stories on people who have belief systems seemingly dipped in Wacky which they then help to let loose upon the world.

To prove that point, here's a few excerpts from a long feature published in New York Times Magazine recently. It's worth a read in full, if you've got the time. And according to the Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult you don't have much of that left :

Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon — with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities — environmental change, for example — that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of age.

Light and darkness — heavenly forces and a corrupted earth — are the twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but can’t yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe — and we are always wrong. Gnostics predicted the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom as early as the first century; Christians in Europe attacked pagan territories in the north to prepare for the end of the world at the first millennium; the Shakers believed the world would end in 1792; there was a “Great Disappointment” among followers of the Baptist preacher William Miller when Jesus did not return to upstate New York on Oct. 22, 1844. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been especially prodigious with prophetic end dates: 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. Any religious movement with an end-time prophecy is certain to attract followers, no matter how maniacal or fringy (witness the Branch Davidians).

For those who want to go online and get the latest tally of bad news, there is a nuclear Doomsday Clock and the Rapture Index. If you remember living through Y2K, that was another millenarian moment — except our computer systems were redeemed by the same code writers who corrupted them in the first place.

Who dreams of the apocalypse? Why do they dream of it? Polls indicate that up to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is a true, prophetic document, meaning they fully expect the predictions of “Rapture,” “Tribulation” and “Armageddon” to be fulfilled. There is a paradox built into end-time theologies in that imminent catastrophe often brings comfort; according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select group — all of whom share secret knowledge — and a world redeemed and delivered from evil. “The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western tradition,” Boyer told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of righteousness to dawn.” This is as true in the New Age as much as in any other one. Rumors of global crisis, the distrust of institutional authority, the ready availability of esoteric lore, the existence of individuals drawn to abstruse numerical schemes, the urge to assuage anxieties with dreams of social transformation — wherever these elements exist, apocalyptic thinking is likely to flourish.

If the Mayan calendar seems like an unlikely timing device for our salvation — whether it arrives through global catastrophe or telepathic rainbow around the earth — its animating role in the 2012 phenomenon is entirely consistent with popular notions of the “mysterious” Maya that have persisted for over a century. The Maya were just one of the peoples to thrive in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest of the 16th century, but the civilization’s florescence — spanning the period called the Maya Classic, between 300 and 900 A.D. — was especially bright and spectacular. After growing into a loose confederation of rival city-states that spread across the Yucatan peninsula and extended as far as Chiapas in the west and Honduras in the east, the Mayan civilization fell into a rolling decline that ended with the almost complete abandonment of their cities. The so-called Mayan collapse is a continued source of speculation and a major reason why the Maya have captured the imagination of 19th-century travelers, 20th-century archaeologists and generations of popular fantasists who have connected the Maya to everything from intergalactic colonies to the lost island of Atlantis to Teutonic gods from fire-breathing spaceships. The Mayan sites attract small armies of New Age pilgrims every year, hoping to plug into a stone socket of timeless indigenous wisdom; tens of thousands gather for the spring equinox at Chichén Itzá alone to watch the shadow of a snake slither down the steps of the Temple of Kukulcin.

The Maya calendar keepers are known to have charted the cycles of the moon, the sun, Mars and Venus with an accuracy that wouldn’t be duplicated until the modern era. Like most premodern societies, the Maya conceived of history not as the linear passage of time but as a series of cycles — they called them “world age cycles” — that would repeat over and over. To capture these cycles, the Maya employed what scholars call the long-count calendar, a five-unit computational system extending forward and backward from their mythical creation day, which is calculated to have fallen on either Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. or Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. All the current hoopla is due to the mathematical fact that the current world-age cycle on the long count, which began in Aug. 3114 B.C., is about to reach its end, 5,126 years later, on a date given in scholarly notation as 13.0.0.0.0 — which falls, not quite exactly, on Dec. 21, 2012. Enter the apocalypse.

It is a splendid, human-size dream, that an ancient people revered for unearthly wisdom could climb aboard a calendar ship and redeem us from our troubled world and the confines of our vexing natures. Dec. 21, 2012, is already here — long before the date arrives — and perhaps it has always been. End dates are not the stuff of fantasy, after all; each and every one of us has a terminal appointment inscribed in our calendars. And the end might just arrive sooner. Perhaps that is why we need to imagine a supernatural force with one eye on a ticking clock, waiting to make everything new again.

Personally, I dread the 2015. Mostly because I had a long series of dreams when I was nine years old that 2015 is the year a full blown nuclear war breaks out between the United States and Russia. The dreams continued for nearly three weeks, almost every night, unrolling like a 15 or 16 part long TV miniseries, each dream picking up from where the last one ended, packed full of people I didn't know, living in towns I'd never visited, talking of life experiences I'd never had.

After the first week, I came to kind of enjoy these mini-mind movies. Some nights I couldn't wait to go to sleep to see what was going to happen next. Of course, the more I wanted to get into those dreams, the longer it took me to fall asleep and get there.

When I was nine and ten years, 2015 seemed an impossibly long time away. Here in 2007, well, it's just around the corner.

If you're interest is piqued by the Mayan 2012 calendar 'controversy', you will find your time far better spent if you pick up a couple of good books on the history of the Maya and their remarkable culture. A book on Mayan sculpture and art is usually a thing of beauty, and will blow away any idea you've ever had that 'advanced society' is something unique to our times.

The books on the 2012 calender guff I've flicked through don't provide much more info than what you'll find in the full article I've excerpted from above. If you read the full article, you'll know as much about the supposed 2012 Mayan Armageddon as any of the dozens of books that are going to be published in the next four years will offer. In that I mean that there is only so much historical info on all this, and most of it is mentioned in the New York Times Magazine article.

Expect the Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult to get an absurd amount of media coverage in the next few years. There will be more books, documentaries, no doubt a feature film, or five, lecture tours and lots of pontificating twits chewing up TV news magazine time.

Now if the Mayans had actually written down some detailed predictions of what we can expect to happen come 2012, then it would be very interesting indeed to see what they get right, and wrong, if you're into that sort of Nostradamusing. But the Mayans didn't do that. They created an advanced system for cataloguing the passage, the history, of time and the calendar cycles they created expire in the year 2012. That's about it.

The Mayan 2012 Armageddon is a creation of the past three decades, and nothing more.

Consider yourself fully warned. And enjoy the remarkable sculpture and art of the Mayans if you ever see such a book on a shelf somewhere.

It is for their fantastic art, sculpture, culture and cosmology the Mayans should be respected and remembered and honoured. Not because a bunch of publishers decided that the 2012 Mayan Armageddon was going to be the new Da Vinci Code Meets Nostradamus publishing phenomenon.

How To Survive Global Warming

Wear More Sweaters, Live In A Box, Say Hello To The Cashless Society (?)


Live Earth has its own survival handbook, naturally, with a nifty idea to help the drowning polar bears. Give them their own inner tubes. Brilliant!

You know, perhaps there wouldn't be so much rampant conspiracy theorizing going on in this world if we didn't keep finding out information like this.

As the Live Earth concerts were held last weekend, we discovered that a booklet was widely distributed to gig goers all over the world, and is for sale on Amazon.

The booklet is called, of course, 'The Global Warming Survival Handbook' (GWSH) and it is written by one of the incredibly privileged sons of the Rothschild mega-banking clan.

So what does David de Rothschild suggest you do to help fight global warming?

Give up paper money of course, and learn to 'enjoy' the soon to be mandatory cashless society :


Oh, and he's supplied a few other 'skills', too, 77 of them, just so the cashless society stuff doesn't look too, well, suspicious.

Skill Number Five - Learn how to live in a box with windows, drive a box on wheels and watch a TV smaller than the one your grandparents had :



story continues below....
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Recent stories from Darryl Mason's blog network

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New York Times : Burn In Hell, You Bastards

The Last (Online) Stand Of Piers Akerman

The Day The Murdoch Media Told The Truth About The Iraq War

"Armageddon Isn't What It Used To Be"

Al Qaeda : The Reality Check
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story continues.....



Skill Number 20 & 21 - Learn how to put on a sweater. Yes, really, the booklet even instructs you how to put one on. Weird. Oh, and we should all work from home. Like David. Unless of course, you work in a factory, or a shop, or an office, like 80% of the population :



And you can also learn how to...let cows eat off the kitchen table? Who the freak knows what this image is supposed to mean :



And don't forget - Learn how to make your car a death trap for ten or more people :



Rothschild, funny guy that he is, calls this 'carpooling'. Ho, ho, ho.

Brendan O'Neill from Spiked has given the GWSH a good going over, and he doesn't much like what he sees :

The book is unbearably middle class. It’s packed with weblinks for companies that make eco-jewellery and eco-clothing, or organise eco-weddings and advise you on how to ‘green your home’. Skill No.21 advises us to ‘work at home’. Apparently if one million of us did that, we’d eliminate three million tonnes of CO2 a year. Okay, but what about the millions of people who work in schools, hospitals, offices and factories, and whose jobs involve, you know, human interaction? Not everyone runs virtual online stores that sell overpriced hemp-based garments to the guilt-ridden daughters of the aristocracy. Most of us have proper jobs.

I found Skill No.18 the most grating. It advises us to say no to packaging by unpacking everything we buy in store and leaving all the cardboard and plastic with the store manager. ‘This sends a message to retailers to downsize their waste.’ Grrr! When I spent my eighteenth summer working in Argos, a regular customer used to do precisely that. ‘I won’t be needing this, thank you very much’ she’d say, after unwrapping her teamaker-cum-alarm clock and dumping the box and its polystyrene insides with me or some other unfortunate stroppy teenager on duty. The only ‘message’ it sent to us was: ‘What a BITCH.’ When the Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is not encouraging you to fantasise about future doom, it’s giving you a licence to behave antisocially in shops.

You read through propaganda like GWSH for a while, and suddenly it dawns on you just what is going on here.

The extremely privileged classes of society are trying to Redefine The American Dream for the other 99.8% of the population. And they're trying to sell another dream altogether to those countries now just rising up out of the industrial age.

And remember, if you don't follow Rothschild's instructions and fight global warming, so his winter alpine ski retreats don't melt away into slush, then you're a nature-hating bastard.

We're all for cleaner air and conserving energy, and the fact that every home in every town in every city in the world isn't kitted out with solar panels and a rainwater tank is something that needs to corrected, and soon, but we'll be fucked if we're going to have some corporate elite hippie twat like David de Rothschild tell us how to put on a sweater, or to buy a smaller TV.

We just picked up a second hand copy of the Lord Of The Rings DVD box set for chrissakes. We're supposed to watch that on a screen the size of a dinner plate? No thanks.

Enjoy the ski fields, Mr Rothschild...while they last.

(hat tip to the Jones Report)


UPDATE : David de Rothschild made an appearance on an American radio talk show last week, and shows the depth of his knowledge of the known solar system :

ALEX JONES: "The polar icecaps of Mars are receding at several miles a year, much faster than ours and that the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are melting, in fact several of their moons were ice and are now liquid seas - how are SUV's causing that David Rothschild?

ROTHSCHILD: "Because those planets are closer to the sun, my friend."

ALEX JONES: "No, Jupiter and Saturn are not closer to the sun and neither is Mars."

Rothschild then quickly changes the subject and when the point is raised again later in the show, he makes no effort to correct himself.

Eep. It's going to be hard for people like Rothschild to actively discredit the possible effects of solar cycles on the heating of our planet when he doesn't even know the order of the nine planets in our solar system.


Don't Put Your Carbon Footprints On The Furniture

Climate Change : It's Not All Bad News

Global Warming : The EcoTerrorist Menace

Snow Free Antarctica & Why Our GrandChildren May Call The Arctic "Home"

Climate Change : It's Official, We're All Well And Truly F..ked - The Headlines Of Impending Doom

Corporate American Media Educates Terrorists On How To Build Car Bombs That Work

Are these people out of their minds? What possible reason could an American corporate media giant like ABC News have for running this story? Hopefully by the time you read this, the story will have been pulled. Unless they have another agenda for supplying such information to the public.

Not only does the ABC News story detail why the London car bombings failed to ignite, but consequently educates wannabe terrorists on how to build a 'fuel air bomb' that will ignite and potentially kill innocent bystanders.

To no sane person's surprise, the comments following the story are filled with outrage and disgust from dozens of Americans. Here's a few examples :

Why is ABC reporting this? Are you trying to aid the enemy by telling them about their mistakes?

ABC is the real terrorist here for posting a shameful story like this ,NEVER AGAIN will i come to this site

ABC used to stand for American Broadcasting Company. After this story, it's obvious that it has become Al Quida Broadcasting Company. Shame on you for explaining to how to make these bombs and how to fix the problems that these ones had.

ABC, why are you describing what went wrong with the bombs??? What value does this add to the public?

I hope that the terrorists will not use your 'after action" report on a device directed against some poor innocent Americans going about their own business. Please explain to this poor ignorant reader, the news value of telling terrorists what went wrong with their bomb?

Are you so stupid that you want to earn a few dollars and help train terrorists on how to avoid their mistakes next time? What a lousy company you are. Why dont you move out of the US if you dont care about US and just are a greedy money crazy company interested to sell anything for a buck

From the ABC News story on why the car bombs failed :

The London bomb plot allegedly planned by a cell of doctors failed early last Friday morning because a medical syringe used as part of the firing mechanism caused a malfunction, ABC News has learned.

According to nonclassified documents reviewed by ABC News, and confirmed by multiple sources, both mobile telephones initiated firing mechanisms rigged inside a Mercedes E 300 parked several yards from the front door of Tiger Tiger nightclub failed despite multiple calls to the cell phones designed to remotely trigger the devices

Whether or not the information published under Brian Ross' byline on the ABC News website comes from "non classified documents" is not the point. There are plenty of places online, or in old books, for wannabe terrorists to source information on how to create car bombs and explosives.

In Australia, bizarrely enough, they even advertise one combination of easily sourced materials on posters and in television ads aimed at encouraging the public to dob in suspicious behaviour that may be related to terrorism.

Why give anyone with the slightest intention of building a bomb to commit a terrorist act the slightest built of help the way ABC News did yesterday?

Al Jazeera may have been guilty in the past of airing news reports that have inflamed anti-American tensions in the Middle East, and in Arab countries, but have they ever run a story on how to knock some of the flaws out of your 'fuel air' car bomb? No. If they did, you sure would have heard about it.

Thomas Green, writing at The Register has a few ideas why the scale of media coverage is so vast :

Police and securocrats know that there aren't enough real terrorists in the world, which is why they have to keep manufacturing them. This is because citizens tire of being watched by cameras, frisked and x-rayed, having their belongings searched, giving fingerprints to so-called friendly nations on entry, contemplating the myriad government databases where their details and activities are preserved, and wondering if some dour little bureaucrat is reading their email or listening to them on the phone.

Citizens tire also of reading the rolls of the war dead fraudulently sacrificed in the name of counterterrorist "victory", and of seeing hundreds of billions spent on surveillance and private security, ridiculous wars, and security-related gimmicks and gizmos, when it could be so much better spent on, oh, needs like housing, medicine and pensions, and mitigating actual mass threats to life via such non-sexy routes as traffic safety, fire safety, vaccinations, buildings and infrastructure inspection, water treatment, and food safety.

We are entering a dangerous phase of the 'War on Terror' where the media, and those who stand to benefit most from outrageously restrictive security measures, are crying wolf far too often.

Former NATO commander, General Wesley Clark estimates there may be as few as 50,000 Islamists in the world today (based on the contact he still has with intelligence agencies) and not all of them are likely to try and attack civilians as part of their jihad.

The key success in the failed London bomb attacks was to provide yet another platform for those with an anti-Muslim agenda to shout their vile message from the rooftops.

Do planned attacks, like those in London and Glasgow, really scare people in the West all that much anymore? Is the media hype still giving us The Fear, or have they worn out this kind of 'If It Almost Bleeds It Now Leads' media frenzy?

Americans seemed genuinely surprised at how calm many Londoners interviewed within hours of the failed car bombings were about what had almost happened. One Londoner infamously said "So what?" when asked what he thought of the day's events.

The entire sprawl of corporate media coverage of the failed bomb attempts in London, and the flaming car attack in Glasgow, also raises questions about why such acts of terrorism that claimed no lives are being given such prominence and publicity.

The headlines blasted from newspaper front pages and days worth of lead stories on the evening news have been incredible. The reason why the British media refused to give extensive coverage to terror attacks by the IRA in the 1970s was because they understood, and intelligence agencies like MI5 understood, that part of the war the terrorists were fighting was a media one. They wanted to scare the shit out of the British, and having the BBC blast every single failed or attempted terror attack, would have succeeded in completing half of the IRA's mission.

People understand there is a war, and that the threat of terrorism is a real one, and we have been educated to report suspicious activity or to take care when we see a lone bag at an airport, or to not ignore people sweating on buses in heavy jackets on hot summer days. You can only have the "They Want To Kill Us All" message blasted into your brain for so long before you learn to ignore it.

Those who feel sympathy towards the aims of Islamist terrorists, and the next wave of terrorists themselves, would have taken great comfort watching the coverage of the London and Glasgow failed attacks.

Surely there is nothing more than that scale of hysterical, overblown coverage to teach all Islamists that if they choose to attack civilians, they will be made incredibly famous by the media.

Website Bomb Making Instructions To Be Outlawed Across Europe

Shoppers Step Over, Photograph, Stabbed, Dying Woman

Beyond sad. When members of a society don't stop to help one of their own, when they need help the most, that society is dying :

Shoppers in a US convenience store stepped over a woman dying from stab wounds with one stopping only to take a picture on a mobile phone.

The incident captured on surveillance video in a Kansas convenience store on June 23 of this year shows 27-year-old LaShanda Calloway lying bleeding after being stabbed in a robbery that she was innocently caught up in...

It took about two minutes for someone to call police to report the crime, police said.

After finally being attended to Ms Calloway died at a hospital from her injuries.

Police at this stage have refused to release the video, saying it is part of their investigation.

"It was tragic to watch," police spokesman Gordon Bassham said.

"The fact that people were more interested in taking a picture with a cell phone and shopping for snacks rather than helping this innocent young woman is, frankly, revolting."

"The lack of concern for humanity over this young woman's life is deeply troubling," Mr Bassham said.

Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams told US paper, The Wichita Eagle, which highlighted the incident after it had gained little media coverage, that the callousness on display from the shoppers was "appalling"

"I could continue shopping and not render aid and then take time out to take a picture? That's crazy. What happened to our respect for life?"

Perhaps LaShanda won't have died in vain. Perhaps there will be so much outrage and shame in the media over this despicable incident, that Americans will take a closer look at who've they become.

Or not.

Plants To Humans : Stop Using All Our Sunlight

Sometimes you read an article, and you can't believe what you've just read. So you need to read it again. Then again. And then you just have to go and have a good lie down, because what you read made your brain hurt, but not in a good, interesting way, but a WTF-is-this-fresh-BS kind of way.

Try it for yourself :

Humans are just one of the millions of species on Earth, but we use up almost a quarter of the sun's energy captured by plants - the most of any species.

The human dominance of this natural resource is affecting other species, reducing the amount of energy available to them by almost 10 per cent, scientists report.

Researchers said the findings showed humans were using "a remarkable share" of the earth's plant productivity "to meet the needs and wants of one species".

"Here we are, just one species on the earth, and we're grabbing a quarter of the renewable resources … we're probably being a bit greedy."

If the plants want more sunlight, they should grow bigger leaves.

Arctic Plants Have Learned How To Cope With Climate Change

New Orchard Species 'Evolved' To Imitate Female Wasps

Ancient Plant Has Strong Potential As Source Of BioFuel

NASA : Plants On Other Planets Might Be Yellow, Or Red - What Plants?

Al Qaeda : The Reality Check

Unlike the hyperventilating NeoCon Grand War Council of Washington, four star General Wesley Clark (ret) has actually been to war. And unlike the NeoCon warpigs now all but screaming for an attack on Iran to be launched tomorrow morning, Clark actually understands how to read and process intelligence reports on the scale of the threat posed to the United States by Islamist regimes and the agents of Al Qaeda.

The following quotes from Clark are from an interview in the New York Times Magazine :

"...we are having a leadership crisis. We have an administration that has lost all sense of strategic purpose in the Mideast. I am very concerned that we have lost the foundation of America’s worldwide power and influence. It has been squandered."

"The most important element of power is not the military. After World War II and through the end of the 20th century, we had a legitimacy that magnified our military strength and economic strength. We weren’t like other powers. We weren’t after an empire. We didn’t torture. What we’ve lost is our legitimacy."

"Al Qaeda is not an existential threat to the United States the way the Soviet Union was. You have to understand that the Soviet Union was a country of more than 200 million people. Al Qaeda is maybe 50,000 angry and destructive individuals."

"Al Qaeda is unpredictable and dangerous and has an unknown number of sympathizers. But the Soviets had thousands of nuclear warheads, nuclear bombs, biological and chemical warheads and specially trained assassination teams aimed at us, and all of it was on a hair-trigger status that could have been set off by accident or miscalculation."

"Thus far, we don’t have an opposing superpower against us, no matter how much the neoconservatives long for this. Perhaps the neoconservatives believe that we can only be defined by having an enemy."

The NeoCons need to have an enemy they can claim poses a far greater threat than real world intelligence says that it does because otherwise they would need to propose ideas about how to improve the health, education and wealth of all Americans to make their think tanks and policy boards relevant and viable.

Instead of proposing positive and meaningful ways to better American, the NeoCons use Al Qaeda to threaten, intimidate and ostracise their opponents and funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into defence industries.

Well, smacking down opponents and dissenters with the Al Qaeda threat used to work.

Unfortunately for the NeoCons, most Americans are waking up the reality of their lies and distortions and fear-and-war-mongering.

Next up in the reality horrors for the NeoCons is the beginning of the very likely debate about who has caused the greatest damage to the United States' morale, finances, military, international reputation and general self-respect : Al Qaeda or The NeoCons?

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500 Terror Attacks Across Europe In 2006

But Only One Was The Work Of An Islamist

Der Speigel reports there were 500 individual terror attacks across EU nations during 2006, but only one attack was the work of an Islamist :

Almost all the terrorist attacks in the European Union in 2006 were unrelated to Islamist terror, a new report reveals -- but the potential impact of an attack aimed at mass casualties made Islamist terrorism a top priority for European investigators nonetheless.

That may sound confusing, or even an example of misplaced priorities. Why go after Islamists so hardcore when separatists and anarchists are responsible for almost 499 more terror attacks?

But the reasoning behind it is that the 'War on Terror' dictate decrees that all Islamist terrorism aims to kill as many civilians as possible, whereas all the EU other terror attacks, mostly by French and Spanish separatist groups, "resulted in material damage and were not intended to kill."

...Islamist attacks such as the German plot and the foiled airplane mass bomb attacks in the United Kingdom were aimed at mass casualities, the report points out. As a result, "investigations into Islamist terrorism are clearly a priority for member states' law enforcement," the report writes.

Half of the 706 terrorism-related arrests made in 2006 were related to Islamist terrorism, with France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands having the highest number of arrests of Islamist terrorist suspects. A small number of attacks by left-wing and anarchist terror groups were also carried out in Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain. The report concluded that France, Spain and the UK are the EU member states "most severely affected" by terrorism.

What's interesting then about the near universally similar anti-terror laws across the EU, UK, US, Australia and Canada is that as a Spanish separatist or Euro anarchist aiming only to cause some chaos and make a political point, you can be prosecuted and sentenced the same as an Islamist aiming for mass civilian casualties.

The War On Terror rule is clear, to paraphrase Forrest Gump : A Terrorist Is As A Terrorist Does.

And the War On Terror knows no subtlety in definitions. Not anymore.

The War On Terror spawned anti-terror laws can now be used, if a leader so wished, to successfully prevent any uprisings or rebellions against the state, no matter how tyrannical the state may be regarded internationally. All a dictator or democracy-challenged leader needs to do is to tag someone, or a group, as "terrorists" and the EU, the UK and the US will nod their heads in sympathy. For now at least.

The Solidarity movement (so beloved of Margaret Thatcher, amongst numerous world leaders) in Poland in the 1980s, and the French insurgency against the state in 1968 would be easily classed as 'terrorist' movements under the current laws, and those responsible, even before they committed acts of 'terrorism', could be prosecuted and sentenced to jail for decades, or sent elsewhere to be tortured until they cough up the names of their friends and associates.

The War On Terror is not just against Islamists, or jihadists.

It's a war against anyone, or any group, that a state or regime can somewhat convincingly charge and portray to be terrorists. If they find you in possession of explosives, or even the kitchen cabinet cleaning products that can be turned into explosives, all the better for making the charges of 'terrorism' stick.

Today, you can be legally classed as a terrorist whether or not you attempt to kill anyone.

Even US intelligence reports, and those in the know, estimate there are perhaps 50,000 Islamists around the world who actively seek to harm or to kill, or to overthrow Western powers and or their own authoritarian governments or royal families.

But in the United States today, there would easily be millions are edging towards anarchist or revolutionary thinking, or are dreaming of outright rebellion against Bush Co. When the time is right, any or all of those Americans opposed to the pseudo-dictatorial regime of President Bush can be tagged 'terrorists', as some very insignificant peace groups and anti-war groups, including movements of Iraq war veterans, are now being surveilled, wiretapped and harassed via new laws passed down in the Patriot Act.

Interfering with the smooth running of a government, state, corporation or society in general is now enough to be classified as a terrorist in countries across the EU, the UK, Canada, the US and Australia, amongst the many, if authorities chose to do so.

For now, charges of terrorism are mostly being laid against individuals or non-state entities who act, or intend to act, or even talk of acting, to bomb, kill or main civilians.

For now.


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What The World Is, And Will Be, Watching On TV

According to media-hyped polls, anti-Americanism is huge across the world right now. If that is true, why do so many people from nearly every nation on the planet spend so much time watching American TV shows, filled with American actors, telling mostly American stories?

The UK is supposed to be one of the most anti-American countries outside of the Middle East. But American TV shows have never been more popular than they are right now in England. Can you really hate America, but love its television? Lost, The Sopranos, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty and a fest of supernatural-themed dramas clog British TV and cable channels. Just as they do here in Australia. And across the EU, and, weirdly, Russia and the Middle East.

Anyway, that's all a semi-related intro for the following.

We may all be watching less TV than we did a decade ago, but making, buying and selling TV programs, through syndication, is still a mega-billion dollar industry.

There is little argument to be found to deny that the United States turns out most of the best TV shows on the planet, and many of the most popular, and every year an event known as the 'LA screenings' is held in Hollywood to showcase what are hoped to be the next year's biggest TV success stories. For every smash hit show, like Desperate Housewives or Lost, there are another two dozen that never get beyond a handful of episodes, or the pilot.

The UK Observer has a good piece on what the major studios in LA are trying to flog to TV buyers from around the world, which provides an excellent preview of new shows on the way, and a few fascinating facts about what the world is watching, right now.

The biggest foreign TV show in China is Prison Break.

Russians love Lost.

House is huge in Germany.

The Czech Republic can't get enough of Desperate Housewives.

Apparently CSI could claim to be one of, if not the, most widely watched TV show in the world today, with an estimated 75 million global viewers.

The French are digging Lost and, bizarrely enough, 24.

Desperate Housewives is also huge in...Saudi Arabia? Yes, Saudi Arabia. They cut some of the sex, but not much.

From the UK Observer :

No other country in the world can compete with the economic power of the American networks, with their budgets and high-gloss finish. Every year, studios produce more than a hundred pilots and this is money down the drain. They cost around $7m apiece and if the networks don't pick them up, nobody ever gets to see them.

The Wire - This year, they say, the supernatural is big: undead people, time-travelling people, moving-objects-with-your-mind kinds of people - although there are also two fairly blatant rip-offs of Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia...and two shows that purport to be the new Dallas: Dirty Sexy Money and Cane - a sort of Cuban King Lear with Jimmy Smits.

The following are the US TV shows already hyped to be 2008's biggest hits :

Back to You: the new Frasier. Kelsey Grammer as a washed-up anchorman back in his hometown to work with ex-colleague Patricia Keaton.

Big Bang Theory: two theoretical physicists who live next to a hottie. Geek comedy, vaguely Will & Grace.

Reaper: Ghost Busters for teens. Two slackers turn clean-up men for the devil, Twin Peaks' star Ray Wise.

Dirty Sexy Money: an everyday tale of ordinary rich folk starring Peter Krause - Nate from Six Feet Under.

Pushing Daisies: quirky, supernatural drama about a man who can bring people back to life. With Anna Friel.

The Bionic Woman: Jaime Sommers returns in the unlikely guise of Zoe Slater off EastEnders (Michelle Ryan).

Cane: another everyday tale of ordinary rich, murderous folk. This one is set amid a Cuban-American rum family, stars LA Law's Jimmy Smits.

Swingtown: Kitschy wife-swapping drama set in Seventies smalltown America starring Jack Davenport from This Life.

Californication: David Duchovny as a washed-up writer who's sold his soul to the Hollywood devil. Rude, funny, it's on that most un-Hollywood quality: failure.

Damages: a twisting legal thriller starring Glenn Close as an ice-cold litigator.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles: a Terminator spin-off starring British actress Lena Headey. To air on new Freeview channel

Californication, is already getting some great write-ups, before it's even started to roll out. Nobody does cynical, hilarious hitjobs on Hollywood better than....Hollywood.

There's fairly interesting trailer for Duchovny's new show up on YouTube.

Here's a preview from the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

And a trailer for Dirty Sexy Money.

It's A Zorse!



More From 'Planet Of Strange Things'

Burning SUV Crashes Into Airport Terminal

UK Wave Of Attempted Car Bombings Continues...



For the third time in only 24 hours, a vehicle has been used in what was suspected to be an attempted terror attack in the UK. This time, a burning SUV crashed into the main terminal at Glasgow Airport.

Eyewitnesses reported that the two male occupants jumped out of the vehicle and smashed what were believed to be molotov cocktails to make the SUV "go up in a big way."

A passerby knocked down one of the men, and police quickly arrested both. A number of people rushed towards the crashed vehicle, not to help one of the men who was on fire, but to make sure they didn't get away from the police.

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