I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman.
When will I learn? The answer to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV!
I�m a lonely insignificant speck on a has-been planet orbited by a cold, indifferent sun.
...you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?
The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.
....what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.
Dear Lord.. The gods have been good to me. For the first time in my life, everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here's the deal: You freeze everything the way it is, and I won't ask for anything more. If that is OK, please give me absolutely no sign. OK, deal.
I'm in no condition to drive...wait! I shouldn't listen to myself, I'm drunk.
Here's to alcohol. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
I can't live the button-down life like you. I want it all! The terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles..
When I held that gun in my hand, I felt a surge of power ... like God must feel when he's holding a gun.
God bless those pagans.
Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!
Fame was like a drug, but what was even more like a drug were the drugs...
...it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.
Jesus, Allah, Buddha. I love you all!
When will people learn. Democracy doesn't work.
...everything looks bad if you remember it.
There are only so many times I can say sorry and still mean it
I've learned that life is one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead.
1 Buy an untraceable mobile phone
2 Safeguard your email
You do not need an email address of your own. One hacker I spoke to sends emails from cybercafes via The Observer website, using the service which allows anyone to send any article to a friend. He embeds his message into the covering note which goes with the article.
3 Safeguard your computer and your files
There is sophisticated software that deletes all traces of your activities from your computer. Assuming you don't have access to this, it is still worth remembering the data about you contained inside each file.
4 Be invisible to CCTV cameras
Steve is a middle-aged IT consultant who lives in a bungalow on a smart private estate in south west London. He has never committed a criminal act. When he goes to business meetings, he wears a suit and tie, but when he walks around his local high street, he dons a hoodie. He does it on principle.
5 Stay off spam mailing lists
6 Prevent supermarkets knowing your shopping habits
(Ed note : dump your store cards. They may give you ten dollars or so credit for every grand you spend, but that store card supplies them with invaluable information on your shopping habits, as well as logging where you shop and how much you spend)
7 Avoid utility companies' marketing departments
Live off-grid, unplugged from the system with solar panels and rainwater harvesting.
8 Keep your car off the automatic number recognition system
The simplest way is to leave the car at home and use a bicycle. But if you must drive...swap the light above the rear numberplate for an infrared bulb and that will flood the video-camera which operates at near infrared frequency.
9 Safeguard your NHS data
10 Shop outside the system
Another way to avoid buying food is to barter for it. The car park of the pub in the centre of Longframlington village in Northumberland has been a barter centre for decades. On any Friday night between April and October, locals arrive and flip down the backs of their 4x4s laden with the week's produce, whether its chanterelles, venison, pheasant, line-caught salmon or the latest crop of beetroots and lettuces.
Final note from Rosen :
It may seem almost comical to go to these lengths, but the ways companies and the public sector can misuse data isn't a joke. We cannot trust them to safeguard our data or use it ethically, so we must provide our own safeguards.
A U.S. military strike against Iran would have dire consequences in petroleum markets, say a variety of oil industry experts, many of whom think the prospect of pandemonium in those markets makes U.S. military action unlikely despite escalating economic sanctions imposed by the Bush administration.Fair enough. But the same story reveals some remarkable facts about the international oil trade and oil supplies, and just how vulnerable they claim these supplies are.
"It will be chaos. . . . I can't really see it," said Abdulsamad al-Awadi, an oil trading consultant and former executive at Kuwait Petroleum. "Having been in the marketplace for almost 30 years, I can't see a scenario for it, or precautionary measures" that oil companies could take. "There are no precautionary measures.""If war breaks out, anticipate that all hell will break loose in the oil markets," said Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, a District oil consulting firm.
"If it were a botched job with lots of targets and civilians dying and Iranians retaliating . . . it could escalate and the price of oil could shoot up to God knows where."
Saudi Arabia, which accounts for about 8.7 million barrels a day, produces almost all of the world's excess oil and is capable of boosting output by about 2.5 million barrels a day, Drollas said. Iran produces 2.5 million barrels a day."Can the world do without Iranian oil exports at the present time? The answer is: just," said a senior planning executive at a major European oil company who spoke on condition of anonymity because the company has a policy not to publicly discuss oil prices. "There is enough spare capacity to offset Iranian exports, but it would be very tight. If every spigot were open everywhere, including Saudi Arabia, that should just about cover it. But it's not comfortable."
He and others noted that Iran would not need to attack well-guarded facilities in places like Saudi Arabia or harass tankers in the U.S.-patrolled Strait of Hormuz, at the head of the Persian Gulf. It could simply collaborate with Shiite forces in southern Iraq to cut off Iraq's roughly 1.7 million barrels a day of production, further weakening its neighbor while driving up prices for its own exports.
"Certainly when you lose 2.5 million barrels a day of Iranian production, which is the most likely case scenario, that will literally just make the market go berserk," al-Awadi said. Asked whether the companies he worked with had contingency plans, he said, "The oil industry does not have contingency plans."
Most industrialized nations do have contingency plans; they have strategic petroleum reserves that could be tapped during an emergency. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was tapped during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has nearly 700 million barrels, enough to cover about 68 days of U.S. oil imports from all sources.
"It's bullshit, mate. They're all in on it together. All these big oil countries, they argue and threaten each other and the prices go up. They get rich off their bullshit. Look at them. That bloke in Venezuela, the Iranian nutjob, the Saudis, Bush...they're fucking laughing at us. We're this close to going to war, they all yell, and we pay another 10 cents a litre. They're fucking us, and they're fucking laughing at us! They do this over and over again, and it always works. Bush and his oil mates get rich, Iran gets rich, the Saudis get even richer, they're bleeding us fucking dry."Sometimes you have to wonder just how close to the truth this punter actually is.
"These actions will help to protect the international financial system from the illicit activities of the Iranian government," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.
"They will provide a powerful deterrent to every international bank and company that thinks of doing business with the Iranian government."
The sanctions target Iran's elite Quds Force, accused by the US of being a supporter of terrorism, as well as the country's Revolutionary Guards, said to be a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
Some 22 Iranian government agencies, three state-owned banks and individuals are also being blacklisted as the United States steps up a drive to squeeze Iran out of the international banking system.
The bolded final half sentence is the key to the whole story. Forget terror, wiping out Israel and nuclear warheads.
The new US sanctions are all about international banking.Iran has finished the diversification of its assets away from the dollar, reported the Gulf News on Monday. "We have done our best to implement this diversification in both our resources, instruments and forex reserves in order to get maximum out of our assets," said Tahmasb Maaheri, Iran's central bank governor, according to the newspaper's Web site.Maaheri told Washington-based Emerging Market magazine the process of diversification is almost 100 per cent.
Political tensions with the U.S. and the weakness of the dollar in the past two years "could be cited as two fundamental reasons behind Iran's move to diversify its assets away from the dollar."
But Iran is not alone in shoving the US Dollar overboard :
Asian investors are now selling wads of US Treasury bonds, that is US debt, valued in the tens of billions of dollars. In August alone, investors from China, Taiwan and Japan got rid of $US52 billion.The Dubai newspaper also pointed out to recent statistics from the U.S. Treasury Department illustrating the position of other Middle Eastern countries in diversifying their reserves.
"The latest data … showed outflows of $163 billion from all forms of U.S. investments in August," reported the paper.
“It must be said from the start that Harry Potter is deeply political and that the books speak of today's England,” Jean-Claude Milner told the left-wing newspaper Liberation today.
“Reading it, one can see that JK Rowling - like many cultured English people - believes there was a real Thatcherite revolution, that it was a disaster, and that culture's only chance is to survive as an occult science.”
According to Milner, Harry's world of magic - and especially the elite public school setting of the Hogwarts school of wizardry - offer a means of resistance against a triumphant middle-class represented by the non-magic Muggles.
“Harry's uncle and aunt - Muggles par excellence - live like heroes of Margaret Thatcher's world, in a neat little estate where all the houses are identical,” he said.
“One can equally say that modern England is a world where the Muggles have indeed taken power, first with Margaret Thatcher and then with Tony Blair - a world where the omnipotence of the middle class is given free rein,” he said.
For Milner, Hogwarts provides a refuge for the minority who wish to preserve civilisation from the dangers of globalisation."...Harry Potter is a war-machine against Thatchero-Blairism and the 'American way of life'.
As for the evil Voldemort, he is the “super-spin doctor”.
A wizard himself, he is proof that culture alone is not enough to save the world, Milner says.
Power-mad, he differs from good wizards because he lacks “nobility of soul”.“So we have on one side the Muggles, where oppression means power over things; and on the other hand Hogwarts, where knowledge enables one to resist the materialism of the Muggles - but also opens the way to power over people.
“This terrible power, which Voldemort seeks and which we call tyranny, is one of the themes of Harry Potter - and indeed one of the themes of English literature since Dickens and Orwell,” he said.
The guy was screaming into the phone. He said he could see waves of fire, balls of fires, ripping through house after house. He said "it's like a movie...it's like watching scenes from the Apocalypse".The LA Times has an excellent breaking news blog of up to the minute news from reporters on the scene of numerous fires, with plenty of local 'colour' stories, like the one detailing how evacuated home owners who can't get through to authorities to see if their homes have been destroyed, are instead phoning home to see if the answering machines click on.
Is this how the pandemic begins? With a small story that barely grabs headlines finally confirming that the H5N1 virus has 'learned' how to spread from one human to another?
We have mentioned before that the WHO was moving towards confirmation that "clusters" of bird flu victims in Indonesia could prove human to human transmission was taking place, but this is the first time we've seen the claims confirmed by the World Health Organization as fact.
Prominent secular and atheist commentators have argued lately that religion "poisons" human life and causes endless violence and suffering. But the poison isn't religion; it's monotheism. The polytheistic Greeks didn't advocate killing those who worshiped different gods, and they did not pretend that their religion provided the right answers. Their religion made the ancient Greeks aware of their ignorance and weakness, letting them recognize multiple points of view.
Openness to discussion and inquiry is a distinguishing feature of Greek theology. It suggests that collective decisions often lead to a better outcome. Respect for a diversity of viewpoints informs the cooperative system of government the Athenians called democracy.
Unlike the monotheistic traditions, Greco-Roman polytheism was multicultural. The Greeks and Romans did not share the narrow view of the ancient Hebrews that a divinity could only be masculine. Like many other ancient peoples in the eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks recognized female divinities, and they attributed to goddesses almost all of the powers held by the male gods.
The existence of many different gods also offers a more plausible account than monotheism of the presence of evil and confusion in the world.
....in the monotheistic traditions, in which God is omnipresent and always good, mortals must take the blame for whatever goes wrong, even though God permits evil to exist in the world he created.
...as the Greeks saw it, the gods made life hard for humans, didn't seek to improve the human condition and allowed people to suffer and die. As a palliative, the gods could offer only to see that great achievement was memorialized. There was no hope of redemption, no promise of a happy life or rewards after death. If things did go wrong, as they inevitably did, humans had to seek comfort not from the gods but from other humans.
... the main advantage of ancient Greek religion lies in this ability to recognize and accept human fallibility. Mortals cannot suppose that they have all the answers.
Ancient Greek religion gives an account of the world that in many respects is more plausible than that offered by the monotheistic traditions. Greek theology openly discourages blind confidence based on unrealistic hopes that everything will work out in the end. Such healthy skepticism about human intelligence and achievements has never been needed more than it is today.
How old is the world?
Most people would say: "Nobody knows."
Actually, most people would say a few billion years old, at the minimum. But anyway...
...the author of the book frequently described as the greatest history book ever written, said the world was created Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. – making it exactly 6,010 today.
In the 1650s, an Anglican bishop named James Ussher published his Annals of the World.
The book, now published in English for the first time, is a favorite of homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously.
Ancient history that doesn't extend back more than 4000 or so years.
In the words of one soldier: 'The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That's when I enjoy it. It's like a drug. If I don't go into Rafah, and if there isn't some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.'
Another explained: 'The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides... As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.'
The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. 'We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn't throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,' he said.
The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. 'With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with any more.'
The soldiers described how the violence was encouraged by some commanders. One soldier recalled: 'After two months in Rafah, a [new] commanding officer arrived... So we do a first patrol with him. It's 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn't so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers.
'He grabbed the boy. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock...
'The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing."
The Regional Geology Director for INGEMMET, Hernando Núñez del Prado stated, "I've been told that foreigners, with Russian nationalities, have been manipulating the people, telling them that if they don't extract the probable fragments that are in the deep (crater), they will turn to ash and disappear."Who knew flogging rocks from space on E Bay could cause such a ruckus?
In addition, Núñez del Prado revealed that municipal authorities from Desaguadero and Chucuito would begin digging for the meteorite using heavy machinery. In the specialist's opinion this would cause an uproar among the townspeople.
"If municipal authorities come in with backhoes and find fragments in the deep (crater), people will throw themselves on (the fragments) because they know the value of the meteorite, there could be accidents, even a slaughter," warned Peru's Regional Geology Director.
"Mike Farmer is a imbecil. He still doesn't realize that this meteorite is buried tens of meters in the cold mud. His primitive mind can't understand..."Farmer :
"Randall Gregory is as nutty as a fruitcake...I have exposed you for the psycho you are....The only reason you are mad is that I messed up your plans to get rich on this meteorite fall...Cant you see the bullshit your fucking actions are causing?"Gregory :
"I offered to end this war and you failed to respond to me. I gave you the chance for us to work together on this, yet you chose to go it alone. You took my invitation as a threat. A gun in your face in Columbia. Get the picture? Leave South America to me..."Farmer :
"Randall, just what do you really think you can sue me for? Calling you a nutjob, a moron, a piece of crap?...bring it on...Randall....is the needy freak who when you speak one word to him, latches on like a leech for dear life. My god, what a freak of nature."Gregory :
"I am suing you for public slander."Because of e-mails like this that Gregory claims Farmer sent to him :
"I am sure Peru will love to see gringo in their own country selling their national treasures. What a fucking moron, I am shocked a nut like you could find a woman to spread her legs, must have been a cheap whore. How is that asshole? Is the mother of your children a whore? How much was she..."Gregory in reply :
"Mr. Farmer and I did engage in name calling at some points....I called Mr. Farmer a sissy, stupid, fat, out of touch with reality, greedy, without morals. I never resorted to profanity. I don't believe in it. The ONLY referenced I made to Mr. Farmer's wife was a question. I asked Mike if his wife had traded up yet. I believe most women would."
Gog and Magog are the names of the two opposing warriors, unions or alliances of nations in the ancient Hebrew bible. and also appear in the New Testament book of Revelation, which prophecies a great world war, where Jerusalem is the centre of the Apocalypse and the Holy Land in general is where the war begins and is primarily fought.
From Revelation :On two Israeli TV channels, maps laid out for viewers which nations would make up Gog and Magog in a third world war :
One side were Israel, the United States, Britain, France and Germany.
On the other were Iran, Russia, China, Syria and North Korea.
They should have added Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and most of the 'stans to the 'other' side, and included Australia with the Israel, United States alliance.
An ancient prophecy is not going to come true because this is what God, or a God, wants. A new world war pitting the United States and Israel against Russia, Iran and China will only happen because some very powerful people want it to become reality.US President Bush said Wednesday during a press conference that Iran attaining nuclear weapons raises the risk of "World War III."
"If Iran had a nuclear weapon, it'd be a dangerous threat to world peace," Bush said. "So I told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested [in preventing a nuclear Iran]…I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Iran Tuesday and slammed the US’s refusal to rule out the use of force against Iran’s nuclear project. "Not only should we reject the use of force, but also the mention of force as a possibility," he said.
The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI agree that the homemade explosive devices that have wreaked havoc in Iraq pose a rising threat to the United States. But lawmakers and first responders say the Bush administration has been slow to devise a strategy for countering the weapons and has not provided adequate money and training for a concerted national effort.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who told the Senate last month that such bombs are terrorists' "weapon of choice," said yesterday at a local meeting that President Bush will soon issue a blueprint for countering the threat of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs..
"Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons," Plame told 60 Minutes. Plame also indicated that her outing in 2003 had caused grave damage to CIA operations, saying, "All the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases" to see where she had gone and who she had met with.
RAW STORY first revealed Plame's Iran mission and the damage done to CIA operations by her outing in a February 13, 2006 story by Raw investigative editor Larisa Alexandrovna, titled "Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say." In that article, Alexandrovna wrote:
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program. ...
Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.CBS states further that Plame "was involved in one highly classified mission to deliver fake nuclear weapons blueprints to Tehran. It was called Operation Merlin, and it was first revealed in a book by investigative reporter James Risen."
"There are no esoteric clues in (the final episode). No Da Vinci Code. Everything that pertains to that episode was in that episode. And it was in the episode before that and the one before that and seasons before this one and so on. There had been indications of what the end is like.
"There was so much more to say than could have been conveyed by an image of Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head. Or, on the other side, taking over the New York mob.
"The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people's alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ''justice.'' They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly. But these people have always wanted blood. Maybe they would have been happy if Tony had killed twelve other people. Or twenty-five people. Or, who knows, if he had blown up Penn Station. The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years."
Neither Turkey nor the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) owns any oil.
But the PKK's stepped up attacks on Turkey and Turkey's threat to unilaterally strike back at their bases across the border in Iraq could shut a key pipeline that runs from the giant landlocked Kirkuk oil field in Kurdish northern Iraq to the port of Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast.
Given the extensive sabotage and vandalism unleashed on Iraq's oil industry following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the pipeline is one of the few corridors through which Iraq can access the world market to raise badly-needed cash to rebuild its economy. This makes it a frequent target in a region already rife with violence and warring factions.
The 600-mile pipeline's vulnerability is well known. Few barrels of crude have trickled through it over the past four years.
Iraq has lined up contracts to supply about 300,000 barrels of oil per day to tankers calling at Ceyhan, a move that would lift Iraqi oil exports by about 15% from its current 2 million barrels per day. Currently, most of that oil flows to market through the predominantly Shiite port of Basra in southern Iraq.The Ankara government has long viewed efforts by the Kurds to establish an independent homeland as a serious threat to regional stability.It's a precarious situation for the United States as well, since most supplies for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan enter the region through airbases in NATO-ally Turkey, and the U.S. can ill-afford further destabilization in the region.
All of this translates into heightened tensions and an even higher risk premium in oil prices.
U.S. ally Turkey and U.S. arch-enemy Iran have formed a military alliance to drive opposition Kurds from bases in northern Iraq they have used since 2004 to launch guerrilla operations inside Iran...
Both Iran and Turkey have vowed to send troops into northern Iraq, but until now evidence of active military cooperation between them has remained a closely-held secret.
"Iran and Turkey attacked jointly on August 16 against our forces inside Iran and against Turkish self-defense forces in northern Iraq..."
Iran has been offering Turkey an economic agreement with Iran in July to build a strategic pipeline that will bring Iranian natural gas to Europe, in defiance of a U.S. led effort to increase the economic squeeze on Iran.
Australia's classification regime has now decided that the forthcoming shooter title, Solider Of Fortune : Pay Back, is too gory and violent for the millions of adult Australians who play video games every evening, instead of tuning into Dancing With The Australia Idols.
The game was refused classification by the Office Of Film and Literature Classification.
Yet the Australian Defence Force now uses very realistic video games to help recruit teenagers into a militaristic way of thinking. The games are specifically designed to begin training teenagers for war, long before they are old enough to sign up for the real thing. Those games, naturally, are not banned. They are, in fact, free.
So is the problem here that Soldier Of Fortune : Pay Back actually shows the kind of injuries, decapitations, amputations and spouting head wounds that are part of every day life in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan where Australia has deployed thousands of troops?
The Big Plan - US Hoping That "Someone Else Shows Up" Sometime To Lead Iran
President Bush confirmed today that he will not be happy with just one appallingly deadly and horrifically failed war as part of his presidential legacy. Now he's thinking about another war, a bigger war, a World War III kind of war.
Bush said that if world leaders are interested in "avoiding World War III" they would have to crack down on Iran's nuclear weapons program.NeoCons began claiming in 2005 that Saddam Hussein was pursuing "weapons of mass destruction programs." He wasn't building them, he was thinking about building them, therefore reducing cities in Iraq to rubble was the right thing to do.
So in Iran, there are no nukes, no sign of nukes being built, but Bush says World War III looms if China And Russia don't stop Iran from gaining the knowledge which they may or may not use to build nuclear weapons, one day. Maybe.
Here's the key Bush quotes from the press conference :
"I think Tehran -- until they suspend and/or, you know, make it clear that they -- that -- that their -- that their statements are real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so.
"I told (world leaders) that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. And I take this very -- I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously."
As does China and Russia, no doubt.
The difference is that China and Russia know that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons and isn't building any. Both China and Russia, and a host of nations under their new umbrella of trade and economic alliances, are opposed to increased sanctions on Iran and have vowed "consequences" for any nation that attacks Iran.
China and Russia, along with India and Pakistan, have signed energy deals with Iran in the past two years worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and regard these deals as being part of their "national interest"."...my intent is to continue to rally the world" said Bush, "to send a focused signal to the Iranian government that we will continue to work to isolate you in the hopes that at some point in time somebody else shows up and says it's not worth the isolation."Hoping that somebody else shows up, sometime.
"Threatening someone, in this case the Iranian leadership and Iranian people, will lead nowhere," Putin said Monday during his trip to Germany. "They are not afraid, believe me."
Or a bunch of guns or missiles to dispatch whatever enemy the unmanned UAV is hunting down.
The flying saucer is flown by human operators for now, via radio signals. But the developers see a much more autonomous future for the craft, planning for the day its flight control systems will be guided by GPS :
"You would input coordinates via a laptop or PDA...and the craft would navigate itself."
If the craft works as well as its developers claim, expect to see a fleet of these hovering over your hometown in the decade to come. They'll cost "much less than a Hummer or Range Rover".
The UAV/flying saucer's development was partly funded by the US Army's International Technology Center-Atlantic's European Research Office, based in London.
From Raw Story :
A major mainstream online media site tried to censor the truth about Paul's popularity, again, but this time they got busted and the act of censorship became a news story.Harwood explained that when CNBC did an online poll of who won the last GOP presidential debate on October 9, "Ron Paul dominated the debate, and some of my colleagues at CNBC thought that there was something wrong with that and they took the poll down. I want to tell you, my email box, thousands and thousands and thousands of email...."
Two days after the debate, CNBC Managing Editor Allen Wastler posted "An Open Letter to the Ron Paul Faithful" at the CNBC website, in which he accused them of having hacked the poll. Wastler wrote, "You guys are good. Real good. You are truly a force on World Wide Web and I tip my hat to you. ... You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can't help but admire that. But you also ruined the purpose of the poll."
However, the very next day, Harwood himself posted "My Open Letter To Ron Paul Supporters," in which he apologetically stated, "I agree with the complaints. I do not believe our poll was 'hacked.' Nor do I agree with my colleagues' decision to take it down, though I know they were acting in good faith. ... I have no reason to believe anything corrupt occurred with respect to our poll. To the contrary, I believe the results we measured showing an impressive 75% naming Paul reflect the organization and motivation of Paul's adherents. This is precisely what unscientific surveys of this kind are created to measure."
(Ed : Harwood had to go online and tell the truth because to not do so would be to admit that CNBC's own poll was not secure, and therefore, completely lacking in credibility. Not a good look for CNBC, who have now learned that the Ron Paul support base is very real, and very active)
...Ron Paul has widespread appeal, with signs all over college campuses and traditional conservatives, libertarians, and even people on the far left responding positively to his positions on the war and on civil liberties. He added, though, that in the House of Representatives, "Everybody's thought that he's been crazy for a while, as far as too conservative, too libertarian. ... He's a very independent guy. He doesn't play by the rules."
He then seemed to think better of his earlier remark about Paul's colleagues considering him crazy, concluding, "He's an extremely impressive man, he's brilliant ... and everybody's excited about this guy."
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Monday that the United States will risk God's wrath if it forces Israel to surrender part of Jerusalem to the Palestinians."He that touches Jerusalem touches the apple of God's eye," Robertson said on "The 700 Club," the daily religious news-and-talk television program he hosts from his Christian Broadcasting Network.
The "apple in God's eye" quote comes from the Book of Zachariah.
Robertson was once regarded as something of a seer by the Bush Dynasty. Well, something of a vote recruiting force anyway. Now the political power of the Christian conservative movement is fading rapidly, the Bushes don't spend much time in the company of Robertson. Not publicly anyway.
Robertson made headlines around the world when heo called for the assassination of Venezuela's democratically elected leader, Hugo Chavez, in 2005.
Many Israelis, like many Palestinians, believe peace and a two state solution to their problems are years overdue. The last thing Israelis need is loudmouth loons like Robertson rallying his millions of followers to pressure Israel, via Robertson-loyal American senators, to interfere in a final and lasting peace.
"...if we decide we're going to wrest East Jerusalem away from the Jews and give it over to the Palestinians, we're risking the wrath of God on this nation, and I think it's very dangerous," Robertson said.
With vast stretches of their country regularly lashed by hellish storms, endless droughts and a growing economic apocalypse amongst the nation's poor, and large slices of the middle class, many Americans probably already believe they are feeling God's wraith.
Robertson unfurled his awesome stupidity after hearing that US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice had met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and declared that the creation of a Palestinian state was "a top US interest".
Rice's announcement followed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's approach that Israel is ready to share control of Jerusalem, ceding authority to some of the outlying Arab neighbourhoods to Palestinian control.
That Robertson can view the removal of IDF troops from a few suburbs on the other side of the world as reason enough for God to uncork some fury on Americans shows the true depravity of Robertson's fear-mongering.
Israelis vented their disgust at Robertson in early 2006 when he declared that then Israeli PM Ariel Sharon only had a stroke because God was punishing him for withdrawing Israel troops and settlers from Gaza.
During a town hall meeting in Exeter, a young questioner asked the former New York mayor about his plan to protect Earth.
"If (there's) something living on another planet and it's bad and it comes over here, what would you do?" the boy asked.
"Of all the things that can happen in this world, we'll be prepared for that, yes we will. We'll be prepared for anything that happens."
Specialist firearms officers were armed with bullets used by US air marshals that "immediately incapacitate" their victims, the court was told.
The officer, who was an acting superintendent at the time of the incident, said he had opted for hollow-point 124-grain bullets, which do not penetrate right through the body.The standard, more powerful 9mm jacketed soft-point ammunition would hit the target and pass out the other side, he said.
He told the court: "The bullet flattens on impact and immediately incapacitates the target. This is a more effective bullet in the context of dealing with a suicide bomber as there is more chance of incapacitating a subject with a single shot.
"A direct to brain stem shot is the only way to incapacitate a subject. You need a bullet that dumps all its energy into the subject."
13% boasted they would sit back, say "whatever" and crack the champagne.
9% said sex would be the main priority, but the poll didn't specify whether that was sex with a partner, something else warm, or themselves.
Surprisingly, only a mere 3% said they would be on their knees praying to God. Or to all the Gods, just in case. It's clearly no time to be hedging your bets.
2% would be stuffing their faces with bacon-wrapped blocks of butter.
But here's the weirdest slice of all : 2% said they would spend the last hour of their lives looting.
Looting what exactly? Looting NASA for a spaceship off the soon to be smoking rock? New runners? That big screen HD TV they've always had their eye on in the local shops?
Looting!
Space-based solar power would use kilometre-sized solar panel arrays to gather sunlight in orbit. It would then beam power down to Earth in the form of microwaves or a laser, which would be collected in antennas on the ground and then converted to electricity. Unlike solar panels based on the ground, solar power satellites placed in geostationary orbit above the Earth could operate at night and during cloudy conditions.
...the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.
Spokesmen for the Justice Department, the NSA, the White House and the director of national intelligence declined to comment...
I submitted a fake news story about Ron Paul and his online campaign. I used one of the free news release services and it just got published. Ha Ha!
It's only in an australian newspaper but im sure the us media will pick it up soon.
What do you think of my fake name? I'm Professor De Bots. Get it .. de bots..
Here's the paper it was published in:
http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story...005940,00.html
I can't believe an editor was stupid enough to publish it. I'm very proud of myself.
Investigators have catalogued the abuse of thousands of teenagers and the deaths of at least 10 minors at American boot camps.In another trial, seven guards and a nurse from a Florida boot camp are facing manslaughter charges for allegedly beating a 14 year old boy and then suffocating him, until he was dead.The report was published as a court in Florida began a manslaughter trial into the death of a 14-year-old boy who was filmed being beaten by camp guards minutes before he died.
The Government Accountability Office, the US Congress's investigative arm, identified 1619 incidents of child abuse in 33 states in 2005.
"Examples of abuse include youth being forced to eat their own vomit, denied adequate food, being forced to lie in urine or faeces, being kicked, beaten and thrown to the ground," investigator Gregory Kutz told a congressional education committee.Bob Bacon, speaking in front of photographs taken of his emaciated son Aaron an hour before his death, told how the boy had been starved, his weight falling from 59kg to 49kg in three weeks.
He and his wife had sent Aaron to the Northstar Expeditions in Escalante, Utah, to get him away from the drugs he had started dabbling in at school.
Aaron's "bloody and battered journal" contained "an unbelievable account of torture, abuse and neglect", Mr Bacon said.He had been beaten "from the top of his head to the tip of his toes" during his month at the camp, Mr Bacon said.
"His mother and I will never escape our decision to send our gifted 16-year-old son to his death."
Up to 20,000 children attend the US camps every year.
Some charge up to $US450 ($500) a day.
At least 15 Iraqi civilians, including nine children, were killed last night in American air strikes against suspected al-Qaida militants north of Baghdad, the US military said yesterday.
The operations, which inflicted one of the heaviest tolls on Iraqi civilians for months, comes only days after the Iraqi authorities accused private security firms of firing indiscriminately on civilians.
The US military said last night it regretted the deaths of the civilians - six women and nine children - in the strikes near lake Tharthar, 75 miles north of the capital.
"We regret that civilians are hurt or killed while coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism," Major Brad Leighton, a military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters.
The US military claims it ordered the air strikes after receiving information that senior al-Qaida leaders had gathered for a meeting in the area north of Baghdad.
Four suspected militants were killed in the initial air assault. Fifteen others died in further air and ground raids on a building where the al-Qaida suspects were believed to be meeting, the spokesman said.
Tell Us Everything You Know
From ED Day :
“I want to know, right now, what you know about what’s going on outside of here,” Kat said, her voice quavering a little, clearly nervous, and maybe a bit scared.
“Where are all the other people? How come we don’t seen any boats coming into the harbour? Has anyone here seen even one plane or helicopter fly over? It’s been six weeks! Where are all the other survivors?”
Go Here For More
A candidate for the US presidency is being buoyed by a massive online campaign that may be a fake grassroots movement organised by party staff.It gets worse, and far more dubious :
YouTube footage of Texan Republican Congressman Ron Paul, whose candidacy has been overshadowed in the media by competitors Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John McCain, has been viewed by tens of thousands of people in the last week.What the hell is this guy talking about? Can anyone make sense of this nonsense? The RonPaul2008 channel is an election channel, which every presidential wannabe who is seriously pursuing an online audience also has, including Billary, Giuliani and Barack Obama.
As of 11am (AEST) today, a compilation of different clips of Dr Paul was the “Top Rated” video of the past 24 hours.
The clip had been viewed nearly 60,000 times since it was uploaded yesterday.But it was not the only clip of the Congressman receiving kudos from Youtube users, with another 10 videos appearing in today’s list of the site’s 100 "Top Rated" recordings.
Of the 11 featured clips of Dr Paul, only one user uploaded more than one of them in the last 24 hours.Just one of the 11 clips in the list was actually featured in today's top 100 "Most Viewed" videos.
Those figures were only based on clips uploaded by one user, RonPaul2008dotcom, who didn’t have any clips in today’s 100 Top Rated list.
Head of Flinders University’s Department of American Studies Don De Bats told NEWS.com.au that it “sounded like” an astroturfing campaign.
Astroturfing is the term used to describe a fake grassroots campaign, where members of an organisation create the illusion that “ordinary people” are behind the movement.
Professor De Bats said that for a relatively unknown candidate like Dr Paul to have so much prominence online was suspicious.
“I would not put any credibility on those results,” Prof De Bats said.
“I find it terrifically surprising and unlikely (that Dr Paul would attract that level of response).”
Earlier this week, the Republican's campaign team issued a press release that said: “Dr Paul's video channel has been viewed 4.5 million times by supporters who embrace his message of freedom and limited government, making him one of the most-watched presidential candidates in internet history.”
No wonder they want to shut him up, and shut him down."Why don't we just open up the Constitution and read it? You're not allowed to go to war without a declaration of war. Now, as far as fleeting enemies goes, yes-- if there's an imminent attack on us. We've never had that happen to us in 220 years. The idea that Iran could pose an imminent attack on the United States is preposterous. There's no way."
"This is just war propaganda preparing this nation to go to war and spread this war not only into Iraq but into Iran unconstitutionally. It is a road to disaster for us as a nation. It is the road to our financial disaster if we don't read the Constitution once in a while."
Few seem to grasp the reality that the destruction and mass murder now depopulating Iraq, and further crippling its infrastructure, is exactly what Cheney, Rumsfeld and other Project For The New American Century neocon alumni hoped would happen.Cheney said despite Rumsfeld's controversial handling of the war in Iraq, the secretary of defense (had managed) the war successfully.
...the vice president said he "thought that in terms of the way forward, Don was the right guy to continue to lead the Department of Defense."
Scientists and scholars have long speculated that religious feeling can be tied to a specific place in the brain. In 1892 textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy.
Nearly a century later, in 1975, neurologist Norman Geschwind of the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital first clinically described a form of epilepsy in which seizures originate as electrical misfirings within the temporal lobes, large sections of the brain that sit over the ears. Epileptics who have this form of the disorder often report intense religious experiences, leading Geschwind and others, such as neuropsychiatrist David Bear of Vanderbilt University, to speculate that localized electrical storms in the brain’s temporal lobe might sometimes underlie an obsession with religious or moral issues.
Such efforts to reveal the neural correlates of the divine—a new discipline with the warring titles “neurotheology” and “spiritual neuroscience”—not only might reconcile religion and science but also might help point to ways of eliciting pleasurable otherworldly feelings in people who do not have them or who cannot summon them at will.
Because of the positive effect of such experiences on those who have them, some researchers speculate that the ability to induce them artificially could transform people’s lives by making them happier, healthier and better able to concentrate.
Over 7.5% of the Indian population is facing some sort of mental problem, of which over 1.75% (16 million) needs institutional intervention.
The country is also facing an acute shortage of psychiatrists. Of the 3,300 trained psychiatrists, 3,000 are in the four metros. India actually needs 32,000 psychiatrists.
According to health ministry figures, over 900,000 women females in India need treatment for mental illness. Of these, nearly 280,000 fall in the age group of 10-29 and nearly 250,000 in the age group of 30-50. Though women attempt to commit suicide more, men usually become successful more often in their attempts.
A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.
It is alleged he had a copy of the "Anarchists' Cookbook", containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives. The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000. The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year. The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.
Like possessing a Rambo DVD? Or a copy of Fight Club? Or V For Vendetta? Does owning a copy of the classic film The Battle Of Algiers mean you possess information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism? What about a book on the Irgun, the Jewish terrorists who massacred hundreds in Palestine in the late 1930s and 1940s? What about Henry's Lawson's short story The Loaded Dog - a story which explains in great detail how to make a bomb powerful enough to kill dozens of people?
The UK law under which the 17 year old has been charged doesn't even specify explosives, books or manuals. It is aimed at 'information'.
Possession of information with which you could prepare for, but not necessarily plan, an act of terrorism is a crime in the UK. That may well mean you don't even need to have the information in book or paper or DVD form. You can possess information simply by storing it in the memory banks inside your skull.
But who determines what information is safe and that which is far too dangerous to possess? Does the public get a say in the setting of parameters for what constitutes 'dangerous' information?
The weapons deliver an electric shock that incapacitates a person, are widely used by US law enforcement. They are also used by police in Australia.
Advocates argue these weapons allow police to subdue criminal suspects without resorting to more dangerous types of force, reducing injuries to officers and suspects.
Critics say they are used too routinely and often against unarmed people who pose no threat, causing needless injuries and deaths.
One thing is clear : tasers were supposed to replace the use of firearms to subdue violent and/or armed criminals. Better to electrocute the dangerous criminal than to blow his head off.
...men mutate into diseased flies, women give birth to giant slugs, car crashes are eroticised, lovers penetrate vulva-like scars, game-players plug umbilical cords into their spines and syphilitic parasites go on the rampage...It's all the more remarkable then that not only has Cronenberg found a large international audience for his films, but that he continues to make them, by his own rules, fusing into the core of each his desire to drag the darkness of humanity kicking and screaming into the daylight.
"I can't imagine how people are not amazed by life and what it is and how it works," he says. "How does an insect work? Does it have a brain, and how can it be so small, and how can they do such amazing things? I find that fascinating. It always amuses me that people fantasise about alien life forms on other planets, and meanwhile we have the most alien life forms you could imagine right on this planet. Weird people are people who don't want to explore and dissect and hypothesise 'what-if' questions."
"It was apparent to me (as a child) that religion was an invented thing," he says, "a wish-fulfilment thing, a fantasy thing. It was much more real, dangerous, to accept that mortality was the end for you as an individual. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, so if you're thinking of murder, if your subject is murder, then that's a physical act of absolute destruction because you're ending something, a body, that is unique. That person never existed before, will never exist again, will not be karmically recycled, will not go to heaven, therefore I take it seriously."
"...I think there's violence involved in all sexuality and I think there is sexuality involved in all violence."
"You watch a beheading by several priests all shouting and it looks absolutely like a gay gang rite. I think there's a huge homoerotic element - not necessarily homoerotic, when you're stoning a woman to death, there's a heteroerotic element, too - in that that's very disturbing. I think those people doing that would be shocked that you would suggest such a thing, but to me it's obvious. And I think it needs to be addressed. I don't think you can cover it up with religiosity and self-righteousness because you're actually beheading this person whose arms are tied behind his back and he's on the floor, and you're sitting on top of him. What is that? It's very perversely sexual."
But along with the 'depravity' of Cronenberg's more bizarre and freakish films, he has also turned out at least one genuine classic : The Dead Zone. Still one of the best American movies ever made, with probably the best performance Christopher Walken has ever delivered. It's a film about precognition and the psychotic lust for political power above the needs of humanity.
It's a film that holds some frightening parallels with our reality today, asking as it does a powerful and haunting question : if you knew the future as a total certainty, and you knew the man who was soon to become president was going to launch a nuclear war, would you kill him? And would it be wrong for you to do so?
Cronenberg's latest movie to DVD, A History Of Violence, shows humans as monsters, without the special effects and goo and extra alien organs. But it's probably the most frightening movie he has ever made.
Q...in the Islamic world they think that President Bush is an enemy of Islam --THE PRESIDENT: Sure.
Q -- that he wants to destroy their religion, what they believe in. Is that in any way true, Mr. President?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it's not. I've heard that, and it just shows [sic] to show a couple of things: One, that the radicals have done a good job of propagandizing. In other words, they've spread the word that this really isn't peaceful people versus radical people or terrorists, this is really about the America not liking Islam.
*************
"....I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God. That's what I believe. I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace. And I believe people who murder the innocent to achieve political objectives aren't religious people, whether they be a Christian who does that -- we had a person blow up our -- blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City who professed to be a Christian, but that's not a Christian act to kill innocent people.
"...the war is not a struggle against Muslims, the Muslim religion, it is a struggle of honorable, peaceful people throughout the world against the few who want to impose their vision.
************
"...I believe there is a universal God. I believe the God that the Muslim prays to is the same God that I pray to. After all, we all came from Abraham. I believe in that universality."
***********
"I strongly believe in the freedom movement. It's ingrained in my soul. It comes from my belief that freedom is universal. And I believe freedom is ingrained in everybody's soul and if just given a chance, they'll reach for it.And so security is really a step, an important step, in the freedom movement. You can't make the decisions if you're worried about getting blown up.
Not every freedom movement requires military action. But freedom movement does require U.S. commitment to helping reformers and just the average citizen realize the blessings of a free society.
And so the freedom movement is the front and center of our foreign policy, because I understand that the peace that we want -- listen, we all want peace....peace will succeed, as more and more people become free."
*************"I believe murderers murder, and it doesn't matter whether you're a Shia murderer or a Sunni murderer or a Christian murderer, you're a murderer. And the role of a state is to protect the innocent people from those murderers."
*************
"Our country is a loving country. It's hard for me to believe that people can't look at America and say, wow, what a compassionate group of people -- because we are. And yet I understand the images of my country have been distorted...my country is a country of peace."
If BushCo. and the NeoCons try to launch nuclear strikes on Iran, would the dissenting retired and serving generals of the US military intervene? Could it really be true that there is a movement within the US military to stop the War On Iran that BushCo. and the NeoCons seem so intent on starting?And this short summary on the 'race to war' from Seamus Milne :
The idea that there is a growing mutiny against the Bush administration within the American military has been kicking around the message boards of both conspiracy and alternate news sites for more than two years. A lot of this speculation has come from the very real 'Revolt Of The Generals' - a grouping of multi-star retired generals who began speaking out against the War On Iraq in 2004.
But what was once the domain of conspiracy sites is now hitting the mainstream media. And it would appear the speculation may have not been all that far from the truth.
Blogger Glenn Greenwald points out that the very credible Dana Priest, of the Washington Post, recently had this to say during an online Q & A :West Chester, Pa.: History seems to be repeating it self as the drumbeat for war with Iran, based on accusations not backed up by any facts, intensifies. Do you think the Bush administration will launch a war (perhaps sending only the bombers) against Iran and if they do what are the likely consequences for the Middle East?
Dana Priest: Frankly, I think the military would revolt and there would be no pilots to fly those missions. This is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. Casey, the Army chief, said yesterday. That the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Beside, it's not the "war" or "bombing" part that's difficult; it's the morning after and all the days after that. Haven't we learned that (again) from Iraq?
Greenwald says there has been a number of "extraordinary reports" on what he calls the "virtual refusal of senior military officials to permit a war on Iran." He's playing it safe. There is nothing virtual about it. The revolt within the US military against BushCo. and the NeoCons going to War On Iran is clearly a very real event, and all but unprecedented in more than a century of American history.
Why the news that an anti-NeoCon, counter 'Bomb Iran' movement within the most senior ranks of the US military is acting to stop a new war breaking out has not yet hit the mainstream media headlines is remarkable indeed. Or, depending on your cynicism towards the MSM, not so remarkable at all.
It seems almost incredible after the catastrophe of the Iraq war, but the signs are growing that the Bush administration wants to do it all over again - this time to Iran. Just as in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, the Washington air is thick with unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction; demonisation of the country's president has reached bizarre proportions; intelligence leaks about links with al-Qaida and attacks on US and British targets are now routine; demands for war from the administration's neoconservative outriders are becoming increasingly strident; the pronouncements of George Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, are turning ever more belligerent - and administration sources claim that the British government is privately ready to play ball.
Peru's Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute (INGEMMET) announced today that the crater left by the meteorite that landed in a small town in Puno, Peru would disappear in two or three months.So, locals hoping for the site to become a tourist attraction have had their hopes dashed. The site is now off-limits to locals and visitors, scientists are working to retrieve the meteorite, but they expect coming rains will destroy the crater itself in the coming months, leaving little or no trace of what happened outside of the little town of Puno.
Experts estimated that the crater would be gone within this time because of the accumulation of dirt and water in the hole itself. They stated that the accumulation would be due to the rainy season this region of Peru is experiencing.
"There will be no evidence that a meteorite had landed there," said Nuñez del Prado. The specialist said he was sorry because he knew that locals wanted the crater to be a tourist attraction.
Nuñez del Prado requested that no unauthorized person get close to the area where the meteorite had landed. He explained that the next two months should be dedicated to a serious investigation and a scientific study of the area.
After these studies are done, the specialist stated that scientists would search for and retrieve the meteorite which is several meters below the earth.
Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.
“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”
Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.
Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.
“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”
Since Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the overall American commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent American military operation here offered a window into how efforts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.The aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade tribesmen to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.
Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new American military approach but were cautious about predicting long-term success. Many of the economic and political problems fueling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts.
Deploying small groups of soldiers into remote areas, Colonel Schweitzer’s paratroopers organized jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades. Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls “armed social work.”
The process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.
Ms. McFate helped develop a database in 2005 that provided officers with detailed information on the local population. The next year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.
Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”
"…with paranoids establishing the ideology, the dominant emotional theme would be hate. Actually hate going in two directions; the leadership would hate everyone outside its enclave and also would take for granted that everyone hated it in return. Therefore their entire so-called foreign policy would be to establish mechanisms by which this supposed hatred directed at them could be fought. And this would involve the entire society in an illusory struggle, a battle against foes that didn't exist for a victory over nothing."That quote is from the PKD novel Clans Of The Alphane Moon. More quotes from that novel can be found here.
The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.
Crick...later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD, then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy, to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.
***************
"Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.
"It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration."
I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge. He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: "Print a word of it and I'll sue."
Crick died in 2005, but LSD-influenced discovery with change the future evolution of humanity in ways we still haven't begun to grasp.
Former CIA case officer turned psychiatrist Marc Sageman told the Safeguarding Australia Summit in Canberra yesterday the typical profile of a terrorist had changed since the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq invasion.
Dr Sageman said al-Qaeda's leaders had been all but cut off from the current crop of jihadists and comprised no more than two dozen people.
The threat was now coming from home-grown young men in their early 20s who recruited mostly on the internet.
Dr Sageman said there were "potentially thousands" of these "new" terrorists, although they were incapable of replacing older terror networks because of their self-organising, independent structure. Many were petty criminals or gang members who eventually drifted back to their Islamic roots.
Their actions were inspired by a sense of "moral outrage" at perceived grievances against Muslims, usually focusing on Iraq, reinforced by personal experiences of alienation in their host countries.
According to Sageman, and a host of other realistic experts and threat assessors, there is no worldwide network of Al Qaeda terrorists and 'terror cells' lying in wait to nuke cities.
The jury at the inquests into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed will explore 10 key elements supporting the conspiracy theory that the couple were murdered on the express orders of the Royal Family.
Lord Justice Scott Baker, the coroner presiding over the six-month-long inquiry into the fatal car crash in a Paris underpass 10 years ago, said yesterday that it was important that the court "got to the truth".
This, said the judge, would mean that the six women and five men jurors must consider not just Mohammed al Fayed's allegations that Diana and his son were killed because the establishment did not want them to marry, but other conspiracies that might come before the court.
Addressing the jury, the coroner said: "You may think that all the evidence largely points to the collision being a tragic accident... and that the cause was driver error." But he said that, from the night of the crash, Mr Fayed had "not accepted" that explanation and had not wavered from that conclusion.
The judge said that Mr Fayed was not alone in his suspicions. "There are many members of the public who are concerned that something sinister may lie behind circumstances surrounding the events of that night. What we are going to get to is the truth... so we will look at some allegations which have publicly been advanced in support of various conspiracy theories, even if they are not supported by Mr Fayed."
The coroner has isolated what he described as 10 key issues for the jury to consider relating to the alleged Fayed conspiracy. These include that the driver of the Mercedes, Henri Paul, was an informant working for MI6 and the French security services and that "there was a determination to wrongly portray him as a drunk driver". Other central issues include the suggestion that the crash was caused by stun guns fired by MI6 agents in the underpass. The jury will also investigate Mr Fayed's contention that Diana was pregnant when she died and that this fact was concealed by the embalming process.
The whole point of Gaff was — the guy who makes origami and leaves little matchstick figures around, right? The whole point of Gaff, the whole point in that direction at the very end, if Gaff is an operator for the department, then Gaff is also probably an exterminator. Gaff, at the end, doesn't like Deckard, and we don't really know why. And if you take for granted for a moment that, let's say, Deckard is Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human. Gaff, just at the very end, leaves a piece of origami, which is a piece of silver paper you might find in a cigarette packet. And it's of a unicorn, right? So, the unicorn that's used in Deckard's daydream tells me that Deckard wouldn't normally talk about such a thing to anyone. If Gaff knew about that, it's Gaff's message to say, "I've basically read your file, mate." Right? So, that file relates to Deckard's first speech to Rachael when he says, "That isn't your imagination, that's Tyrell's niece's daydreams. And he describes a little spider on a bush outside the kitchen door....the spider is an implanted piece of imagination. And therefore Deckard has imagination and even history implanted in his head. He even has memories of his mother and father in his head, maybe a brother or sister in his head. So if you want to make a Nexus that really believes they're human, then you're going to have to think about their past, and you're going to have to put that in their mind.
Why is (Rick Deckard) nodding when he looks at this silver unicorn? It's actually echoing in his head when he has that drunken daydream at the piano, he's staring at the pictures that Roy Batty had in his drawer. And he can't fathom why Roy Batty's got all these pictures about. Why? Family, background, that's history. Roy Batty's got no history, so he's fascinated by the past. And he has no future. All those things are in there to tap into if you want it...Deckard's look on his face, look at it again now that I've told you what it was about. Deckard, again, it's like he had a suspicion that doing the job he does, reading the files he reads on other replicants, because — remember — he's, as they call them, a blade runner. He's a replicant moderator or even exterminator. And if he's done so many now — and who are the biggest hypochondriacs? Doctors. So, if he's a killer of replicants, he may have wondered at one point, can they fiddle with me? Am I human, or am I a replicant? That's in his innermost thoughts. I'm just giving the fully flushed-out possibility to justify that gleaming look at the end where he kind of glints and kind of looks angry, but it's like, to me, an affirmation. That look confirms something. And he nods, he agrees. "Ah hah, Gaff was here." And he goes for the elevator door. And he is a replicant getting into an elevator with another replicant.
It's worth noting that while Ridley Scott now praises BladeRunner to the skies, on the eve of its 25th anniversary re-release, that has not always been the case.
She pondered. "Androids can't bear children," she said, then. "Is that a loss? I don't really know. I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We're not born, we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like like ants...that's what we are...reflex-machines who aren't really alive...I'm not alive. You're not going to bed with a woman. Don't be disappointed, okay? Have you ever made love to an android before?"
"I've seen things you humans wouldn't believe...and all those moments will be lost...in time...like tears in the rain...time to die."
And here's another :A television journalist was charged yesterday with abetting suicide after he allegedly persuaded a depressed businessman to kill himself and his family live on camera.
Officers in the northern state of Punjab intervened in time to stop Tilak Raj and his three daughters drinking poison on Sunday.
The journalist, identified only as Vipin, had convinced the man that a choreographed suicide attempt was the best way to highlight his troubles after he lost a land dispute in court.
Last week a TV reporter in Delhi was charged with inciting riots after his exposé of a prostitution racket supposedly run by a mathematics teacher turned out to be a set-up.
Would the use of nuclear weapons to prevent a war be an action you could justify?A variation of this question was asked of Israelis in a recent poll, according to this story in the Jerusalem Post. 37% of respondents said the use of nuclear weapons to stop a war could be justified, and some 35% said nuclear weapons could be "justifiably used during a war."
Of all the countries surveyed, Israelis support for the use of nuclear weapons before or during a war was the highest.
Also disturbing was the extraordinarily high number, 55%, of Israelis who were said to be in favour of Israel using its "power and influence in a way that serves its own interests" instead of trying to co-ordinate efforts with other nations in the best interests of the world "as a whole".
More from JPost :
Nearly 72% also agreed that "nuclear weapons place Israel in a unique position, so it is not in our interest to participate in treaties that would reduce or eliminate our purported nuclear arsenal."
About three-quarters of Israelis also said they would feel safer if they knew for certain that Israel had nuclear weapons. Israel has thus far maintained its policy of nuclear ambiguity.
The organizers of the study suggested that Israel accorded greater importance to the nuclear form of defense due to the Iranian threat, Army Radio reported.
"The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."
John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country."...life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities."
He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the "source of the problem", Mr Ahmadinejad.
"If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change..."
