Indiana Jones : Fighter Of Giant Ants And Part Time Teacher


From Empire Magazine


Spoilers Alert

The new Indiana Jones movie is due to hit cinema screens around the world on May 22, but so far there has been no trailer, no leaked footage, no special clip previews on 'Entertainment Tonight' type shows, no major publicity push outside of the cover story for January's Vanity Fair magazine and only a handful of official photos released.

Did producer George Lucas and director Stephen Spielberg decide that a low-key build up to release would be wiser than a full-on, all guns blazing, in your face marketing assault? It sure seems like it.

Compare the relentless publicity and viral marketing campaigns for Cloverfield, which began more than a year before the movie was released. Even the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, has been seen in great detail through trailers and 'leaked' YouTube clips, including the first six or eight minutes of the movie, more than a half a year before it hits cinemas.

Then again, Indiana Jones is a movie 'brand' that doesn't need a whole heap of marketing. There are probably 40 or 50 million people around the world who would cancel their own weddings if it meant they could go and see a new Indy Jones flick if the movie was dumped in cinemas with only a few days notice.

What is far more remarkable than a low-key marketing campaign for the movie, is just how effectively Lucas and Spielberg have been able to keep even the most minor plot details out of the media, and away from bloggers and movie geek websites.



But in the past week, there have been two interesting clumps of plot detail released. One through a description of the trailer, which is set to hit cinemas in two or so weeks, and the other info coming from Gizmodo descriptions of the Lego sets based on the new Indy Jones movie.

Here's what we know of the storyline for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.

The movie is set in 1957 and will open with an extended chase sequence, before Indiana Jones goes back to his university and finds out what his new quest will be.

There's a lengthy car chase through the same secret US government warehouse where the Ark Of The Covenant was stored at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. At least one large crate in the warehouse is labeled Roswell, which would confirm that there will be a plot line involving the legendary 'crash' of a UFO in New Mexico in 1947.

Indiana Jones is reunited with Marion Ravenwood, 20 years after their last meeting in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and learns he has a 19 year old son.

Indy and Marion and the son are captured by Russian agents, who are searching for a mystical crystal skull. In one scene, Indy's son will be seen engaging the Russian agent played by Cate Blanchett in a sword fight.

Indy, meanwhile, will be seen battling.....errr....giant ants.

Indy and Marion escape from the Russians and take off in an amphibious vehicle, while the Russians try to capture them with huge nets, fired from a gun.

Reunited with his son, Indy and Marion then have to escape a massive jungle cutting vehicle the Russians are using to hack through the trees and vines of a Mayan jungle, to uncover the Temple Of The Crystal Skull. Indy makes use of a bazooka to ensure their escape.

Indy and his son eventually enter the lost temple of Akator to retrieve the crystal skull, before the Russian agent can get her hands on it.

The temple is 'activated' and unleashes its ancient defenses to stop the thieves making off with the skull. Indy and his son will be seen fighting to escape from quicksand and trying to run down a flight shifting, disappearing stairs.

In one scene, which apparently shows the kind of humour that Spielberg and Lucas are so excited about (and expect critics to hate), Indiana Jones is punching out a bad guy while his son looks on.

I thought you were a teacher!" the son says, surprised at his father's pummeling abilities.

"Part time!" Indy Jones quips.

Lucas and Spielberg have promised the new movie will have the feel of a 1950s science fiction/action b-movie, instead of the serial-chase adventure style of the first three movies.

Rumours, and the Roswell crate, would suggest that the crystal skull is modeled on an alien and provides the key to extraterrestrial technology that the Russians want to get their hands on so they can win the Cold War.

Spielberg and Lucas have also promised that the movie will not be overloaded with CGI special effects. What we will see on screen, they're promising, will be real stunts filmed on real sets at real locations.

The first trailer from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of The Crystal Skull should be out in two weeks.

Giant ants?


Indiana Jones And The Aliens

How To Train Yourself To Slow Down Time

This report from New Scientist basically boils down this - the more aware you are of the passage of time, the faster that time seems to go by. By reducing your perception of how much time is actually ticking by, and by allowing yourself to slow down, to think, to be more aware of where you are and what you are doing, to even become bored, the more likely you are to feel that time is passing by much more slowly.

Which all seems sort of obvious. But still fascinating :

Mike Hall has taught himself to stretch time. He uses his powers to make him a better squash player. "It's hard to describe, but it's a feeling of stillness, like I'm not trapped in sequential time any more," he says. "The ball still darts around, but it moves around the court at different speeds depending on the circumstances. It's like I've stepped out of linear time."

Hall, a sports coach from Edinburgh, UK, is talking about a state of mind known as "the zone". He puts his abilities down to 12 years of studying the martial art t'ai chi, and now makes a living teaching other sportspeople how to "go faster by going slower".

For most people, getting into "the zone" at work or home isn't a realistic option. But the idea of stretching time - or at least having more control over its frantic pace - is an attractive one. And there may be things we can do. There is a growing understanding of how our brains measure the passage of time, and it turns out we have more conscious control over it than previously thought.

...as everyone knows, time flies when you're absorbed in a task and drags when you're bored. But now researchers are beginning to understand the reasons for these subjective distortions of time. Some even think it will one day be possible to manipulate our perception of time whenever we feel like it.

So how might we alter our experience of time? The first option might be to manipulate brain chemistry, in particular the dopamine system. Patients with disorders of this system, such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's or schizophrenia, also suffer disturbances in their perception of time. It turns out this is because their neurochemistry - specifically their dopamine system - somehow alters the speed of their subjective internal clock. "Schizophrenics have too much dopamine activity in the brain so their clock is so fast that it feels like the whole world is crazy," says Meck. "If you block dopamine receptors with drugs you can bring the speed of their internal clock back to an acceptable level."

Recreational drugs that affect the dopamine system can also alter our perception of time. Stimulants such as cocaine, caffeine and nicotine make time pass faster, while sedatives such as Valium and cannabis slow it down.

So would the dopamine system be a place to start the hunt for designer drugs that alter our perception of time? Perhaps. The pharmacological knowledge is certainly there, says Meck. "I think it would be possible to develop a boutique drug that did the same but without the addictive properties. I'm sure it could be done if the market was there." But while we wait for the arrival of the ultimate "chill pill", what about more natural ways of controlling our internal clock?

When it comes to using the power of the mind to control time perception, one of the most important factors is the attention we pay to the passage of time. According to Meck, although we are rarely conscious of time passing, we keep a subconscious check on our interval-timing system and every now and again consciously access the information. This sporadic attention keeps our perception of the passage of time chugging along nicely.

But if for some reason we disengage attention from the clock, our sense of time can go astray. This accounts for the old adage that "time flies when you're having fun", or more accurately, "time flies when you are focusing on something other than the passage of time". It is equally possible to push the clock in the other direction. At last year's meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC, the Dalai Lama gave a talk to the assembled neuroscientists on how time seems to slow down during meditation, as you focus away from the internal clock. Yet when you surface from meditation, he said, you think more time has passed than actually has. This is uncannily like being in the zone.

Though these effects seem paradoxical, a number of experiments show how the attention we pay - or don't pay - to the passage of time affects our perception of it. As it turns out, the answer depends on whether you are thinking about time "in the moment" or after the event.

You can stretch your perception of time, but only if you're prepared to spend it in the equivalent of a waiting room. Perhaps the best option is to just accept the hectic pace of modern life, but make a serious effort to spend at least some of your time doing nothing much.

That might sound like common sense. But according to social psychologist Robert Levine of California State University in Fresno, it is common sense that's well worth remembering. "Time is our most valuable possession," he says. "Until the biomedical people can make us live forever, the closest thing we have is to stretch the moment."

Go Here To Read The Full Story

"My American Dream Has Turned Into A Nightmare"

The US subprime housing fiasco is already turning once prosperous suburbs into ghost towns :

The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.

This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.

Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.

A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.

Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminum siding.

The police station parking lot is full. The officers, who have seen their numbers triple since 2006, are coming back from their rounds. They speak of installing alarms in some of the homes claimed by squatters.

At 9422 Chagrin Street, a hand-scrawled sign attached to a window indicates someone lives there: "Please Used."

After three rings of the bell, Sarah Evans, 60, opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

She says she is one of the last people left on the street. And she is on the verge of losing this two-bedroom house in which she has lived for more than 30 years because she simply cannot afford her monthly payments.

"When folks buy a home they expect to die in it, I guess," she said as she stood outside in the cold. "I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare."

Her words are echoed by the angry barks of the guard dogs pacing behind a chain link fence two houses away that was installed by the new owner: a bank.

The massive parking lot of the Eagle Fresh supermarket is empty.

Behind her till, Myra Bibldwit lifts her head when a bell signals the entrance of a customer.

"Not many folks come anymore. We're used to it," said the 24-year-old cashier, one of the few in the neighborhood who managed to hold onto her job.

In the five hours since she started working today she has served just 10 customers. "Maybe you will buy something," she says with a smile.

Laura Johnston, 50, says that her street -- about 10 minutes away by car -- was alive two years ago. Today, half the houses are abandoned.

"Folks could not afford their payments. They were asked to pay loans which doubled. They could not afford it, some lost their job. Lenders were greedy. They threw them out of their homes," she told AFP.

"I'm very upset. I missed my friend Helen. She disappeared overnight. She did not even say goodbye."

For county treasurer Jim Rokakis, the greed of the banks is to blame for this man-made disaster.

"All you needed was a pulse to buy a house. Some loans were written with no money down, no proof of buyer's incomes. They did not even check what people were saying. Most of those folks were jobless," he said in an interview.

"Shaker Heights was the perfect storm: poor folks, unemployed and a desire to get a piece of the American Dream."

And it's not going to get any better any time soon.

Record Plunge For Sales Of New American Homes

Home Foreclosures Soared In US In 2007

Very Handy Art

Milan artist Guido Daniele is using human hands as a canvas to create an extraordinary series of animal artworks.





Go Here For The Story And More Images

Go Here To See Videos Of Guido Creating His Hand Art

RoboBoat

Robots are now fighting in wars against human enemies on the land, in the sky...

and now on the water :



Armed robot boats, on patrol.

What if a robot boat decides it doesn't like the look of one of those Hellfire-armed robot planes, now quietly killing humans in Iraq and Afghanistan, returning to an aircraft carrier that it is acting as a water-based sentry for and opens fire?

Or if the drone decides a robot sentry boat is a clear and present danger?

Then we have Robot War I.

It will probably be best to just stand back.

Guiliani Warned Through Official Memo Before 9/11 That Terror Bombing Could Bring Down World Trade Center 7


Aerial view of the wreckage pile of WTC 7

That Rudy Guiliani was warned by any number of police officials, terrorism specialists and secret service agents that placing his emergency command centre in the World Trade Centre 7 building was a really, really bad idea is an important, but fairly exhausted story now. It's not old news, but for anyone following the ups and downs of the 2008 presidential primaries, the details of Guiliani's incompetence have been extensively reported, as has the damage the allegations have caused to Guiliani's campaign for the Republican nomination.

To any sane person, it seems all but unbelievable that Guiliani would okay the locating of his mayoral emergency command centre in a building complex that had already been attacked by terrorists (in 1993), and clearly remained a terrorist target. But that's exactly what he did. Guiliani had been briefed any number of times that terrorists were likely to strike the trade towers again, and knew that US intelligence agencies had intercepted discussions between known Islamic terrorists musing, or confirming, they would hit the trade centre again if they got the chance.

That the New York Times have got their hands on an official memorandum confirming that Guiliani was warned repeatedly not to locate the command centre anywhere even near the WTC site, and preferably off Manhattan Island altogether, is probably worth another NYT story on the subject, but it's the final couple of paragraphs in which the real point of the story may be residing :

The memorandum sets out in detail the reasons why the Police Department concluded that the site was a poor choice for a command center, including its vulnerability to a biological attack and the ease with which a bomber could have damaged the building and crippled the center.

It has nine sections, the longest one headed “Explosives.” It describes a blast analysis conducted by the Police Department’s bomb squad, aided by the Secret Service, which looked at the likely impact of bombs of varying sizes, from one that could be carried in a car or a van to a large truck bomb.

It concluded that the largest of such bombs would have led to the collapse of the building.

The World Trade Centre 7 was damaged by debris from the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 on September 11, 2001, and fires could be seen burning inside the building for most of the day.

The BBC and other news channels reported the collapse of WTC 7 some 20-30 minutes before it came down, and to this day there has been no official US government agency report released confirming the cause of the collapse of the 47 stories tall office building, which had office space leased by the US Defence Department, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

An official government agency report on the collapse of WTC 7 is due later this year, seven years after the event, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) :

NIST’s working hypothesis for the collapse of WTC 7 is that fire and/or debris caused damage to a critical column and triggered a progressive and “disproportionate collapse of the entire structure”—essentially that the wounded building fell in on itself. In its report, NIST will also review hypothetical blast scenarios...

Does the New York Times already know some crucial details of NIST report?

Jack Nicholson : How To Survive Hollywood And Fame

"Do Not Be Afraid"

Jack Nicholson had never met Heath Ledger, but he was nonetheless struck by the waste of a clearly talented 28 year old actor not being able to survive the pitfalls of fame.

Nicholson didn't truly become a star until he was in his early 30s. By then, he'd been around Hollywood for more than a decade, and he'd witnessed actor friends who he started out with hit the heights and then fall back down just as quickly. Nicholson had small acting roles in numerous low-budget films, along with screenwriting gigs, before he broke through with Easy Rider in 1969. So when stardom came calling for Jack, he was ready.

He told Garth Pearce from the London Times the secrets of surviving Hollywood, and fame :

Hollywood, Nicholson said, is like a monster. It is to be ridden, understood and conquered. There are rules of engagement, and those who do not grasp them can be swept aside.

“Let’s go back to when I was first working in Hollywood, nearly 50 years ago....The movie business was star-driven then and it is star-driven now. There were people like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster setting up their own independent movie companies. There was the gossip, the tabloids and the news stories. They had to handle them – as I’ve had to handle them. If you don’t like it, it’s exceptionally tough.”

“There are too many around today who are lonely,” Nicholson said. “Film acting will drive you nuts – if you let it. You can get everything out there if you are young and famous. Any woman. Any drug. But you have to build up your safety zone. You’ve got to build up friendships and keep to them. When I was wild I would tell my friends, ‘We have to develop some social graces’.”

He set out rules early on: “I planned a certain life in leisure. I decided to take up tennis at 28, skiing at 35 and golf at 50. I hit those targets pretty well on the nose. I also made my own rules for publicity. Don’t do television interviews – I never do it. And when I do [print] interviews, I talk. You cannot take too much of what I say too seriously. But this business is about being on show occasionally.

"You’ve got the rewards and you have to take the heat. It’s not an easy business.”

Asked about his own advice for life, the old survivor replied: “Do not lie, do not steal and do not be afraid. Mainly, do not be afraid.”

Calm Down Hitler, And Have A Cigarette

Smokers in Germany are staging a rebellion against the rising tide of anti-smoking laws. And they are using the lingering stain of supreme anti-smoking activist A. Hitler as a weapon against those who they believe can't stop trying to strip away their freedoms.

From the UK Guardian :

The new law has triggered a rebellion and many people have taken drastic and imaginative measures so they can continue smoking.

One campaigner went as far as to issue a T-shirt bearing a yellow star of David along with the word 'smoker', comparing the 'persecution' of smokers to that of Jews under the Nazis. The outrage of Jewish groups led to its withdrawal.

Refusing to face reality, some pub and club owners have even tried to turn their establishments into member-owning smoking clubs, like Hamburg's Association for the Preservation of Smoke Culture and Advancement of Tolerance.

While smoking in bars is technically already illegal, fines of between €5 and €100 for those who continue to light up will not be implemented until July, when orderlies will be sent to inspect establishments.

Indeed, another quirk in the law, allowing smokers into establishments with separate rooms, has led to an explosion of creative solutions, from no-smoker tunnels now being mass-produced out of plaster cast to mobile smoker rooms, complete with DJ and sofas, which are touring the city picking up disgruntled smokers.

The reason for Germans' refusal to take lying down a law that has now become the norm even in European nations that have traditionally taken pride in their subversiveness - such as Italy, Ireland and Scotland - is repeatedly put down to German history.

Campaigners for smokers' rights have been quick to draw on the comparison between the recent clampdown and the little-known nationwide tobacco ban introduced by the Nazis in 1941 as part of their quest for bodily and racial purity.

While few Germans would dare to point it out publicly, for fear of appearing to praise the Nazi era, some of the most advanced research into the links between tobacco consumption and lung cancer was carried out under the Nazis.

Under the supervision of the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, the ban was imposed in every public building and public space, including air-raid shelters, with Hitler even personally intervening in 1944 to ensure it was extended to trains and buses in order to protect young female conductors. It was even pointed out that Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were all non-smokers, while the 'evil enemies' - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin - all enjoyed a tobacco fix.

Some of the 30% or so of Germans who refuse to give up smoking are now leaving the country. Briefly :

Bars on the Polish side of the border are full of Germans coming to enjoy their customary cigarette. In the London Pub in Slubice, across the river from Frankfurt an der Oder, a group of middle-aged Germans are swigging and puffing to their hearts' content. 'It's just like in the old days,' says Dieter Neubauer, who strolled over the border after work.

That would be the old days of East and West Germany, not the "old days" of Nazism. Though with the relentless crusade by those who are trying to stop people from filtering city pollution through cigarette filters, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

A Circle Of Sheep



Even though this unusual 'event' occurred in England's Hertfordshire, where crop circles are common, the most likely explanation is that the farmer laid out the sheep feed in a circle shape.

Excellent photo, though.

Bush's 'War On Terror' A Huge Success...For Bin Laden And The War Industries

More Than $690 Billion Spent So Far, And More To Come

Now Who's Winning The 'War On Terror'?

By Darryl Mason

President Bush came to power backed by a cabal of former diplomats, war industry lobbyists, defence business leaders and NeoCon propaganda specialists. In the late 1990s, this core group of utterly compromised war industry whores, issuing non-democratic declarations under the Project For The New American Century, demanded massive increases to US defence budgets.

The September 11, 2001, attacks provided the "opportunity" for the group to not only get their dream of vastly increased defence budgets, but to ratchet up the spending beyond even that of the Vietnam War years.

Within one year of taking control of the White House, President Bush was already paying back those NeoCons and war industry whores who had helped him into power by sending troops into Afghanistan, ramping up Army recruitment and training, kickstarting new weapons production facilities across the American heartland (where steel mills and car makers once ruled) and fermenting the propaganda campaign that would lead to the illegal War On Iraq.

If you, like Dick Cheney, are a major shareholder of American corporations who are profiting obscenely from the 'War On Terror', Bush is not a failure, he's one of the most successful American presidents of all time. For funneling almost unlimited billions in cash into the war industries.

No wonder Bush and Dick Cheney, and the owners of the world's biggest war-related corporations, most based in the US, have had so much to smile about lately.

Sure, nearly 4000 Americans, tens of thousands of Afghans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the 'War on Terror' so far, with millions more wounded, but you're focusing too much on the negative.

These are salad days for America's war industries. They've never made so much money, and Bush and Cheney are doing everything they can to make sure the cash spigot is not turned off any time before the Bush White House fades into blood-soaked history.

Before you consider the numbers below, remember that President Bush has now also been granted a new US defence budget of almost $700 billion in recent days :

War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Congress has written checks for $691 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and such related activities as Iraq reconstruction, the CBO said.

...$440 billion had been spent on fighting in Iraq launched with the goal of ousting President Saddam Hussein from power and securing weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

All of the Iraq and Afghanistan war money -- about $11 billion a month -- is effectively being put on a government credit card at a time when U.S. government debt has skyrocketed to more than $9 trillion, up from around $5.6 trillion when Bush took office in January 2001.

President Bush has increased the US national debt by almost $4 TRILLION dollars. Well done!

...nearly every penny spent gets added to the U.S. debt...the interest payments on the debt would total $234 billion this year, more than the likely $250 billion budget deficit for the year.

Interest payments on the debt will total an estimated $2.7 trillion over the next decade...

So, in the end, by 2020 say, the NeoCon/Bush 'War On Terror' will have cost Americans almost $3 TRILLION.

Two of Osama Bin Laden's reported strategies in attacking the US on 9/11 was to get oil prices up from about $30 per barrel to somewhere closer to $100 a barrel and to draw Americans into a long and extremely costly international conflict, which would, Bin Laden hoped, eventually bankrupt the country.

So who do you think is winning the 'War On Terror' so far? Bush? Bin Laden? Or the American and international war industries?

If you stop believing the tripe pumped out by much of the mainstream media, you will quickly realize that all three entities are winning. No great surprise then to lean that Bush now believes he will be unlikely to 'catch' Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.

The American public, and the American children not yet born who will have to pay off the War On Terror credit card bill, are the real losers in this absurd fiasco.

$3 trillion spent by 2020 on the 'War On Terror' represents the greatest robbery in history, and the stumbling destruction of the world's biggest economy will be the end result.

Bin Laden wins. And Bush wins. And Cheney wins. And the war pigs win.

But you lose.

Key NeoCon Admits US Intelligence Agencies Staged A "Quasi-Coup" Against Bush And NeoCons Over Iran

If John Bolton, the former wannabe US ambassador, and full-time pro-Iran War promoter, had his way, the United States would have already bombed Iran. Now it's clear that Bush is extremely reluctant to take military action against Iran, with the support of the US State Department, John Bolton is now telling Israel it has to act alone.

But going to Israel to flog a book and telling Israel it has to go to war against Iran, particularly following the disastrous Lebanon War II, has made John Bolton a suddenly very unpopular man amongst international NeoCons, who know Israel will get hammered if it hits even one Iranian nuclear energy installation and that Russia views attacks on Iran as attacks against its "international interests".

Bolton's job was to get the United States to attack Iran, and he failed to do his 'duty'. Telling Israelis they have to sacrifice their own lives, instead of more American lives, to deal with the still unproven Iranian nuclear weapons threat, should pretty much put an end to Bolton's so-called career for the moment.

In this very interesting story from the Jerusalem Post, Bolton admits that US intelligence staged a coup, of sorts, against the NeoCons and the White House when they released NIE reports saying that Iran poses no immediate nuclear threat to Israel, or to the world :

The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, as well as the skewed reporting around it, is a sign of the "illegitimate politicization" of the American intelligence establishment, according to former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

"I know the people who wrote this intelligence estimate," Bolton continued. "They are not from our intelligence community. They're from our State Department. It was a highly politicized document written by people who had a very clear policy objective."

"Generating intelligence should be separated from policy-makers, but it should also be separated from intelligence analysts who impose their own policy views on the intelligence they generate," insisted Bolton..

Bolton calls the NIE "a quasi-coup by the intelligence services," which was "intended to have a political and policy effect."

He's saying that like it's a bad thing. Yes, the NIE had a political and policy effect, as reported
here in December, 2007. A very impressive one. It killed any momentum the war-crazed NeoCons had built up for the US to attack Iran. Bolton didn't like that one bit.

Bolton is just another fading NeoCon trying to flog a sad little book full of lies, distortions and propaganda. He was wrong on Iraq, wrong on Iran and wrong on just about everything to do with the 'War On Terror'. Which is why he can always rely on a 'special analyst' paycheck from Fox News.

Pathetic.

BushCo. Abandons Bolton Over Iranian Nuclear Weapons Propaganda

October 2007 : Bolton Gushes, Fantasises About The Days When The US Overthrew Democratically Elected Governments Around The World

September 2007 : Bolton Says US Has No Choice Left But To Attack Iran Immediately, Overthrow Regime

December 20006 : US Intelligence Agencies Strike Back At NeoCon Propaganda War On Nuclear Iran

June 2006 : Bolton Says United Nations Is An "Effective Tool" Of US

'Mossad Agent' Found With Bombs, Explosives, Charged With Jewish Hate Crimes In New York City

It sounds like someone was planning terror attacks against Jewish institutions and synagogues in New York City. Bizarrely, the man now being held for perpetuating hate crimes against Jewish targets there, is a Jew himself, and this report from the New York Times quotes him telling a judge he had been "trained by Mossad".

Had the terror attacks gone ahead, you can guess who they would have been blamed on :

It all happened in less than three hours on a cool September night — a prolific spurt of anti-Jewish vandalism at more than a dozen locations in the heart of Brooklyn Heights.

On Monday, the police caught a break, arresting a man who they said had a trove of weapons inside a stately apartment building in the neighborhood. The man, Ivaylo Ivanov, admitted under videotaped questioning that he was behind the spree, which had mystified investigators for months, the police said.

And later Monday evening, after Mr. Ivanov’s arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court, his lawyer surprised reporters with his own announcement: Mr. Ivanov is himself Jewish.

The revelation was the latest twist in a bizarre story that features a man who, police said, shot his own finger; a sizable weapons collection, including pipe bombs and a sawed-off shotgun, found in an apartment in one of Brooklyn’s most exclusive neighborhoods...

So he was heavily armed and cashed up. Wonder who was funding his 'operations'?

The hate crimes had unsettled local residents, many of whom awoke on the morning of Sept. 25 to find swastikas and other slurs scratched, scrawled and spray-painted on cars, playgrounds, synagogues and building facades. Crude fliers reading “Kill All Jews” were strewn about.

Upon hearing that Mr. Ivanov was said to be Jewish, Aaron L. Raskin, the rabbi of Congregation B’Nai Avraham, one of the desecrated synagogues, was skeptical.

“Is his mother Jewish or is his father Jewish?” the rabbi asked, adding that to be “biblically Jewish,” Mr. Ivanov would have to have a Jewish mother.

I think this is called 'parsing'.

In court, his lawyer said that Mr. Ivanov is a linguist. The authorities are not sure of his age, saying he is either 37 or 31 years old. Mr. Ivanov told the police that he was born in Sicily and raised in Bulgaria, and that he had been trained by Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

(Ivanov's) arsenal included seven pipe bombs and two pounds of what the police called a “low-explosive powder”; a sawed-off shotgun and a crossbow with arrows; another pipe bomb, hidden in a foam football; and other rifles, including pellet guns.

According to a law enforcement official, detectives are exploring the possibility that Mr. Ivanov had planned to use the pipe bombs against synagogues.

The official said that Mr. Ivanov told investigators he intended to use the bombs for fishing; but, given his admission that he painted swastikas on synagogues, investigators became concerned he was planning violence.

You can expect this story to disappear very, very quickly into the memory hole.

How's The Air Up There?

It looks like a blown-up image of someone, a woman perhaps, climbing down a rocky hill.



And going further back, it most definitely looks like someone, almost certainly a woman, climbing down a rock hill, or sitting and resting on her way down.



But here's the problem. This is a photo from the surface of Mars.



The images come from a Mars rover that has been tooling around the surface of the planet for four years. The rover's original mission was to have only lasted a few months, but every time it bogs down, or its solar panels get coated with dust, the rover finds a way to keep on exploring.

So what is that a photo of? A rock formation? Foreground or background objects pulled together by the camera lense?

As an occasional Mars addict, I can't say I've seen photos of any other rock formation that even come close to mimicking the human form.

It's certainly the most jaw-dropping image we've seen from Mars in a few years. And it gets the mind wondering : so what exactly would it take for the majority of humans to accept that there is life on Mars? Would the alien need to look more human, or less? Would it need to perform great feats beyond the capacity of humans, or would it have to deliver a competent and convincing interview on Oprah?

The more I look at the photos, the more I can see how the shadow of the not so strange rock formation give the illusion of a human form. And it's the 'shape' of what initially appears to be an extended arm that really sets off the illusion. A longer, closer look reveals that the arm shape is actually made up of rock colours and shapes from the distant background.

Of course I never believed for a second that those images really showed a human form, or a statue crafted by Martians to honour their Earth-based relatives.

Honest!

Or maybe it is simply one of these :

Prince Charles Is Not All There



The above image is being promoted as a hologram of Prince Charles, delivering a pre-recorded speech :

....delegates were treated to a full-size, walking, talking, fiddling hologram of his royal highness, who made a brief speech then vanished back into thin air.

His appearance was the talk of the 2500 delegates at the World Future Energy Summit.

I suppose it was a solar-powered hologram then?

More importantly, exactly when did the quality of holograms get that good? If that's really a photograph of a Prince Charles hologram, it's a stunning piece of work. It's almost HD quality.

So are holograms of this quality and definition already being used to flush out insurgents and roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan?

'Australians Now Support Big Brother Surveillance Society'

From The Orstrahyun :

Why did Australians fall so easily and with so little dissent into the clutches of a surveillance society?

We used to cherish our privacy and gag at the thought that our every movement outside the home could be captured on video and stored away somewhere. Or that our personal details, our opinions, our beliefs and our favourite food choices could be databased and monitored for the rest of our lives.

Did you even stop to think about how all that personal information about yourself that you so freely typed into MySpace questionnaires and quizzes and into Facebook profiles will be used? Do you even know that all that info will never disappear, and that those personal details are already being traded and circulated and analysed and used to build profiles of you, your emotions and your thought patterns?

And if you think that using fake names or profiles on MySpace or Facebook will keep you safely anonymous, think again. That little bout of Googling your own name a few months ago IDed you to your computer's IP address.

Why make it any easier for them to know so much about you? They already know enough.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

Increasingly Australians are being bar-coded and scoped. Their whereabouts are checked, along with the company they keep. How they make money, how they spend it - all is monitored in the name of progress, profit and private and national security.

Australians had been sceptical about the surveillance industry and associated identity checks. But the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, and subsequent terrorist outrages changed much of that. And while law enforcement agencies' activities have expanded considerably to fit new laws and demands, other surveillance industries and programs have enthusiastically jumped on the "new world order" band wagon and grown exponentially.

Traditionally Australians have been wary of such "Big Brother" developments but opinion polls show that - like Americans and the English - Australians now tend to support more rather than less surveillance.

Go Here For The Full Story

Plants That Eat Rats Discovered In Australia

Believe it!

Hope For True Democracy In United States : No Clear Presidential Front Runner Has Emerged For Democrats Or Republicans

This is probably one of the more important stories in the history of US democracy. I can't think of anything else to say but "Brilliant!"

There is nothing more disturbing for true believers in democracy than to see corporate media nodding in agreement as they claim that this or that candidate is a definite shoe-in to win the nomination of their party, and then to win the presidency of the United States.

A year ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN were smugly asserting that Hillary Clinton would likely be president in 2009. If not Hillary, then at least Barack Obama. And if not either of them, then surely John McCain for the Republicans.

But that was a year ago. 11 months out from the vote for POTUS and CNN is now admitting that the presidential race is in a state of complete chaos and neither party is presenting a leading candidate who will surely win their party's nomination.

Of course, CNN, along with the rest of the American corporate media is only now starting to report this story because they have no choice. Clinton was going to be the surefire candidate for the Dems and Rudy Guiliani was definitely going to be the Republican nominee.

But shock, horror, the American people are no longer believing nor swallowing what the mainstream media is telling them to think, or how to vote :

CNN : No Clear Party Front-Runners Emerge

I'll make an absurd and completely unlikely prediction for the Democrat and Republican presidential contenders come November, 2008 : John Edwards (D) and Ron Paul (R).

It won't happen. Those opposed to everything that Edwards and Paul stand for would probably bomb the Capitol before they let those two compete for the big desk in the West Wing, but a presidential campaign between Edwards and Paul would certainly be the most interesting, the most educational, and the most enlightening, for the American people.

A few more predictions : Fred Thompson will be gone from the race by the end of the month. Hillary Clinton will continue to stumble and fall as the American people wake up to the fact that she has already been crowned Next President by the corporate and media elite of the US, and they won't like it one bit. And Rudy Guiliani will bail by early March, as his psychotic linking of 9/11 with everything he says and does continues to creep out just about everyone who hears him speak.

Of course, if a full-scale nuclear-tipped Fourth World War breaks out in 2008, there won't be a presidential election, and Dick Cheney will seize control of the White House shortly after George W. Bush appears drunk in public and vomits on the podium as he tries to explain why they just had to bomb Iran.

Or something like that.

"America For Sale, At Discount Prices"

The once all powerful US Dollar is turning into worthless paper, the American economy is crumbling, US stock markets are losing billions every day and the average American owes more money than they could ever hope to save in two or three lifetimes.

What's happening in the US right now is a major historical event, for Americans and for the world, as the fallout from a solid decade of outrageous lending practices and insane levels of credit begins to impact across the globe.

From the Sudan to India, to Iran to Russia, and now China, people don't trust the value of the US Dollar anymore. And why should they? The US owes the world, and its own people, as much as $50 to $70 trillion. This level of incomprehensible debt will never be paid back in full, with or without interest, to international lenders and they know it, which is why so many are now, as queitly as possible, trying to sell their off American debts.

But at the same time, hundreds of billions of foreign money is pouring into the American economy.

But they're not extending Americans more near unlimited levels of credit, they're buying up America instead :

With credit tight, unemployment growing and worries mounting about a potential recession, American business and government leaders are courting foreign money to keep the economy growing. Foreign investors are buying aggressively, taking advantage of American duress and a weak dollar to snap up what many see as bargains, while making inroads to the world’s largest market.

Last year, foreign investors poured a record $414 billion into securing stakes in American companies, factories and other properties through private deals and purchases of publicly traded stock, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm. That was up 90 percent from the previous year and more than double the average for the last decade. It amounted to more than one-fourth of all announced deals for the year, Thomson said.

If a recession now unfolds and the dollar drops further, the pace could accelerate, economists say.

The most conspicuous beneficiaries are Wall Street banks like Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, which have sold stakes to government-controlled funds in Asia and the Middle East to compensate for calamitous losses on mortgage markets. Beneath the headlines, a more profound shift is under way: Foreign entities last year captured stakes in American companies in businesses as diverse as real estate, steel-making, energy and baby food.

The weak dollar has made American companies and properties cheaper in global terms, particularly for European and Canadian buyers. Even as Americans confront the prospect of a recession, economic growth remains strong worldwide, endowing oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia and export powers like China and Germany with abundant cash.

Some labor unions see the acceleration of foreign takeovers as the latest indignity wrought by globalization.

“It’s the culmination of a series of fool’s errands,” said Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers. “We’ve hollowed out our industrial base and run up this massive trade deficit, and now the countries that have built the deficits are coming back to buy up our assets. It’s like spitting in your face.”

Perhaps emblematic of national ambivalence, in an appearance on CNBC last week, the voluble market analyst Jim Cramer spoke in menacing terms about the growing role of state investment funds from the Middle East and China.

“Do we want the communists to own the banks, or the terrorists?” Mr. Cramer asked. “I’ll take any of it, I guess, because we’re so desperate.”

“They’re buying financial assets at well under book value,” said Gary C. Hufbauer, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Trade experts assume tensions will rise as developing countries — which tend to have more state companies — continue to expand their share of investment in the United States.

....even if political tension increases, so will the flow of foreign money, some analysts say, for the simple reason that businesses need it.

“The forces sucking in this capital are much bigger than the political forces,” said Mr. Garten, the Yale trade expert. “If there is a big controversy, it will be between Washington on the one hand and corporate America on the other. In that contest, the financiers and the businessmen are going to win, as they always do.”

"The financiers and the businessmen are going to win, as they always do." There's a quote to keep in mind as the US, and many other countries, plunge into recession in 2008.

The biggest lie of all is that the sub-prime fiasco and the crashing value of the American dollar is all some big accident that the major players didn't see coming. Of course they saw it coming, they engineered it.

Purposely fuck the world's largest economy and then move in and snap up the bargains.

Read The Full Story Here

Save The Whales, Save The Pandas....Now Save The Insects?

Whales, dolphins, pandas, koalas, brown bears, polar bears...it's not too hard to get a cute photo of any of those creatures and whip up some sympathy and support to 'save' them from extinction, or to 'protect' their natural environments.

But how challenging will it be to whip up mass public support to save the honey bee?


More honey bee photos here

We would miss dolphins and whales if they all died out tomorrow, and there would be some major environmental impacts from the loss of these creatures. Underwater.

But the mass dying off bee populations in the US, Europe and England is truly catastrophic.

Colony Collapse Disorder, where entire colonies of bees die off spells disaster for societies who rely on bees to pollinate the flowering trees and crops that form the basis of our diets.

The news coming out of England is almost beyond belief.

In London alone, more than four thousand hives - some two-thirds of all the hives in London - died off last year. Experts are now warning that within ten years honey bees could face
extinction :

The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said that if the crisis continued, honeybees would disappear completely from Britain by 2018, causing "calamitous" economic and environmental problems.

Tim Lovett, the association's president, said: "The situation has become insupportable and the Government is unwilling to take steps to avoid disaster.

"We're increasingly unable to cope with threats as they arise. No bees means a huge cost to agriculture, without touching on the ecological and environmental issues. We're facing calamitous results."

The decline in honeybees is risking the sustainability of home-grown food. They pollinate more than 90 of the flowering crops we rely on for food.

Save The Bee!

Claim : 500,000 Assaults Stopped By Violent Movies

Do violent movies stop violent crime? The answer we've been trained to give is, "Christ, no! They only encourage more violence." But is that the truth?

Two researchers, using the fascinating stat-analysis techniques of 'freakonomics', are claiming that violent movies keep potentially violent people mostly sober and busy, at the times they are most likely to inflict violence on others.

From the New York Times :

A paper presented by two researchers over the weekend to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association here challenges the conventional wisdom, concluding that violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs.

Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.

“You’re taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters,” said the lead author of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.”

Professor Dahl and the paper’s other author, Stefano DellaVigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, attach precise numbers to their argument: Over the last decade, they say, the showing of violent films in the United States has decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend, or 52,000 a year.

Crime is not merely delayed until after the credits run, they say. On the Monday and Tuesday after packed weekend showings of violent films, no spike in violent crime emerges to compensate for the peaceful hours at the movies. Even a few weeks later, there is no evidence of a compensating resurgence, they say.

Young men are the most likely to commit violent crimes. In opting to see a movie — even one featuring, say, gang rape or chain-saw amputation — they forgo activities that have a greater tendency to encourage mayhem, like drinking and drug use.

“Economics is about choice,” Professor Dahl said. “What would these people have done if they had not chosen to go and see a movie? Whatever they would have done would have had a greater tendency to involve alcohol. If you can incapacitate a large group of potentially violent people, that’s a good thing.”

From 6 p.m. to midnight on weekends — when the largest numbers of people are in theaters — violent crimes decreased 1.3 percent for every million people watching a strongly violent movie, the study found. Violent crimes dropped 1.1 percent for every million seeing a mildly violent film.

In the hours after theaters close — from midnight to 6 a.m. the next day — violent crimes dropped 1.9 percent for every million people at a strongly violent movie, and by 2.1 percent for every million at mildly violent film. Strikingly, the data shows that crimes also drop, though not by as much, when large audiences see nonviolent films that young men find appealing.

Fascinating stuff.

Mutanty

It's kind of hard to see just what that dog has given birth to in this first photo. Yeah, there's some puppies, but what is that thing?



A mutant puppy that kind of, disturbingly, resembles something human.



The photos are from Pravda, so....

Spinal Tap Wrong On Limit Of Blackness

The legendary guitarist, Nigel Tufnel, of Spinal Tap, once asked "how much more black could this be? And the answer is none...none more black."

But science has now proved Tufnel wrong. The truth is there is a whole lot more black to black now, with the carbon-derived 'invention' of a new black that absorbs 99.9% of all light that reaches its surface :

US researchers say they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 per cent of light.

Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.

And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colours of light and reflect none.

"All the light that goes in is basically absorbed," said Pulickel Ajayan, who led the research team at Rice University in Houston.

"It is almost pushing the limit of how much light can be absorbed into one material."

It can't just be called 'black', because it clearly rises above all the other measures of black in the rankings of colours, hues and shades. What else can it be called but 'Tufnel Black'?

And just in case you are not familiar with the wisdom of Nigel Tufnel, here's the clip where the guitarist ponders the utter blackness of his band's latest album cover :



Real rock bands wish they could be this brilliant.

Update : Hell, the trouble with Nigel is that one clip is never enough. Here is Nigel painfully explaining the torture of having to endure "backstage arrangements" that simply do not measure up to his standards of taste, foldability and professionalism :

Attention Workers, You Are No Better Than Machines

Okay, excuse the language, but this definitely falls into the You've Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me category.

The London Times is claiming it has seen patent applications filed by Microsoft for plug-in worker software and hardware that will literally turn hundreds of millions of office workers into attachments of computer mainframes.

The software will monitor your respiration, eye dilation, heart rate and even detect dissent, or as it's more commonly known - worker dissatisfaction.

With all technology there is a point where people really have to say "This has gone far enough." We've accepted urine testing and being under surveillance from the moment we leave our homes in the morning and until we return in the evening and being told that if haven't done anything wrong then we have nothing to hide. People have been extremely flexible and have given up a shocking amount of privacy and rights mostly for the benefit of governments and corporations. But this is the tipping point, the event horizon.

Enough is enough. You are not a machine, and you should not be plugged in like one. The day your boss tells you to plug into Microsoft 'Spy' is the day you finally say "Fuck you, I won't do it" or you walk. Either is better than letting yourself become a part of this thing :

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly."

Welcome, welcome to the machine.

Valium, Cancer Drugs Found In London Tap Water

Londoners are consuming an amazing cocktail of drugs when they drink tap water, according to this story :

Britain's tap water should be monitored for powerful medicines after traces of cancer and psychiatric drugs were detected in samples, a report has warned.

Trace levels of bleomycin, a cancer chemotherapy drug, and diazepam, a sedative, have been found during tests on drinking water, the report reveals.

"Drinking water treatment works use a wider and technically more advanced range of processes, but again these are not specifically designed to remove pharmaceuticals and several compounds have been reported in drinking water."

The report comes as a separate study by environmental scientists has warned that toxic chemotherapy drugs used to treat cancer patients are being washed into Britain's rivers. They, too, have called for testing of tap water to ensure there is no risk to people.

The level of drugs found in tap water are extremely low, but may still be strong enough to cause harm to developing foetuses.

How To Fall 500 Feet And Survive

Basically, you need something to ride on the way down :

It's a modern-day miracle. An Ecuadoran native who fell 500 feet from the upper reaches of a New York City skyscraper--and survived. By the time Alcides Moreno hit the alley behind the black-glass luxury apartment building, he was traveling upward of 124mph. Only about half of the people who fall off a four-story building make it. So how is it possible that Moreno is alive?

The answer has a lot to do with physics, luck and a 16-foot plank.

Moreno and his brother Edgar, 30, both worked for City Wide Cleaners. They were getting ready to wash windows on Dec. 7, 2007, when the cables for the scaffolding snapped. Neither wore a safety harness. Edgar died instantly when he fell off the platform and a fence severed his body. But Moreno managed to grab ahold of the 16-foot scaffolding platform--which proved crucial to his fate.

Following the training provided by his company, Moreno held fast to the platform--which increased the air drag on his falling body. And when Moreno hit the ground, the 1,250-pound scaffolding absorbed some of the shock of the 5.5-second fall...

The rest of the explanation, here, is fascinating, and manages to cite a Spider-Man episode to fill out the details. Apparently landing on the balls of your feet after a huge fall ups your chances of surviving, if you don't happen to be riding a plank on your way down.

And then there's this shocking stat on American work-place deaths :

Of 5,703 work-related deaths in 2006, 1,329 happened on highways, 809 resulted from falls, and 583 involved workers being struck by objects.

That's a lot of hammers being dropped on unhelmeted heads.

Alcides Moreno joins an exclusive, extraordinary club of those who have survived falls from extreme heights. Here's a few others :

Three airmen in World War II fell 20,000 to 30,000 feet and survived.

A Yugoslavian flight attendant named Vesna Vulovi survived a 33,316-foot plunge when a Czech flight exploded in midair (the Guinness Book of Records recognizes her for surviving the greatest fall without a parachute).

How To Survive A Long Fall

Water Wars Begin Small

Wars over access to, and supply of, fresh water is one of the more likely scenarios for major future conflict between bordering countries. But what about between states within the same nation? Or districts within the same state?

North and central Florida aren't feeling very neighborly at the moment as they battle over water from the St. Johns and Ocklawaha rivers to meet central Florida's exploding population demands.

Central Florida plans to take millions of gallons of water a day out of the rivers, angering north Florida residents and officials who say that could cause grave environmental damage, particularly to the north-flowing St. Johns.

"It is madness. We do not believe there is surplus water in the river," said Neil Armingeon, a St. Johns riverkeeper. The position is a privately funded advocate for the river. "We are not going to stand by and let the St. Johns and Ocklawaha rivers be degraded."

North Florida cities such as Jacksonville, St. Johns County and a river advocacy group all say the plan would destroy the delicate balance of saltwater and freshwater needed to preserve critical biological habitat and submerged vegetation.

The district developed the proposal after determining that areas of central Florida could reach their groundwater limits within five years, and that by 2025 it will need 200 million gallons of water a day from alternative sources.

Partly because of the fast growth of central Florida, half a billion gallons of water are being pumped out of the deep underground Floridan aquifer each day.

The seven counties of central Florida had a population of about 3 million in 2000; it's about 3.6 million today. It is expected to hit 5 million in 2030 and 7 million by 2050, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

There's a lot of well-watered lawns and gardens in Florida. For now.

Israel Assassinates 152 Palestinian Children In Two Years

The Israel security agency, Shin Bet, has revealed the scope of its assassination, car bombing and air strike campaign against Palestinians, claiming it has killed "1000 terrorists in the Gaza Strip over the last two years" :

Because 20,000 terrorists were known to have been at large in the Strip, Public Affairs Minister Avi Dichter said that the number only reflected five percent of the total number of terrorists.

"The implication is that five percent of terrorists in the Strip have been killed," said the minister.

The minister did not explain what beliefs. behaviour or criminal actions rank a Palestinian as a 'terrorist' worthy of being killed. With more than 95% of the agency's claimed Gaza 'terrorists' still running free, they'll have plenty of work and big budgets to spend in the coming years.

In response to Diskin's comments, 'Betselem' claimed the total number of Palestinians killed between 2006 and 2007 was 816, a figure that includes 152 minors and of that number, 48 who were under the age of 14.

Due to this alleged fact, the organization said that it was impossible for all the Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip to be terrorists.

Some of those 48 under-14s killed include children who were shot dead for walking too close to the 'security fence' and for wearing the wrong kind of backpack to school, or for simply being Palestinian.

Israel's medieval-like siege against the people of Gaza appears to be working, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families now suffering from food shortages.

Projectile-Vomiting Virus Infects 3 Million Brits

Millions of Britons infected with a virus that results in diarrohea and projectile vomiting have been told to stay away from work and school and to isolate themselves. Almost 1 in 8 British workers are now infected with norovirus and more than 200 hospital wards have been forced to close because they can't take any more patients. Now people struck by norovirus are also coming down with seasonal flu :

The winter vomiting bug norovirus has struck 2.8million people, with health professionals braced for another rise as people return to schools and offices.

The virus - which causes projectile vomiting, diarrhoea, mild fevers and headaches - is striking down more than 200,000 a week, according to official estimates.

Three hospitals have been placed on red alert, while hundreds of wards up and down the country have been closed to new patients as the number of beds being taken up by bug victims reaches critical levels.

Schools have even begun sending warning letters to parents explaining the symptoms while employers are calling on staff to stay away from work 48 hours after they have recovered to stem the spread of the virus.

Norovirus can prove deadly for vulnerable people, such as children and the elderly. The impact of the bug has been exacerbated by a new outbreak of flu with those most at risk now being given antiviral drugs by their doctors.

Curiously, no British news site, including the BBC, have reported even one single death related to this near-epidemic viral outbreak.

More than 28,000 Brits, on average, die from flu, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses every year. Are norovirus deaths being covered up as flu and pneumonia deaths?

It seems remarkable that a virus that can cause such intense levels of dehydration (through all that vomiting and time on the toilet) has officially killed nobody in the past two months.

Obviously, given the incredible rate of infection, there would be at the very least a few dozen frail, elderly people who have been killed by norovirus, so why aren't these deaths being reported?

As regular readers here already know, I'd be more than happy if the entire world's giraffe population died out tomorrow.

The above giraffe, with a neck kink that made it even more hideous than the supposedly 'normal' ones already are, has finally checked out after 20 years of auditioning for the nightmares of Santa Barbara zoo visitors.

Ninten-ories

A reader e-mailed me this story without saying where it was from :

Half Of 26 Year Old's Memories Are Nintendo-Related

It was only three quarters through the story the ball dropped. The Onion, of course. But like all the best satire, this is firmly grounded in a fair bit of truth :

Nearly 50 percent of 26-year-old paralegal Philip Jenkins' encoded long-term memories involve button combinations, game-playing experiences, and spatial-cognitive maps of various levels and worlds from Nintendo's line of video-game consoles, a team of neuroscientists reported Tuesday.

The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the Charlotte Hornets 82-81 in NBA Jam: Tournament Edition.

I've spent a few days with young nephews visiting, who have trouble recalling details of what they did in the real world on Friday, but can rattle off deep and involved details about the AdventureQuest session a week ago where they managed to complete, for the first time, all the 'quests' doled out by some princess in an enchanted forest.

What happens when the memories of virtual world adventures take priority over possibly far less exciting real world activities and routines?

It'll be interesting to see how children today who spend more time playing video games than watching television turn out as adults. One thing's for sure, they'll all have excellent hand-eye coordination, and competent dragon-slaying skills.

"Make It End"

The latest chapter of my free online novel ED Day is now up :

If this was bird flu, I hadn't seen anything this extreme before. I coughed up plenty of blood and pus when I was ill at the detention camp. I felt like I was going to die, the throbbing agony in my bones and joints and the struggle to breathe through all that fluid, the endless vomiting and stomach muscle spasms, all of it made me want to die. But I didn't begin to decompose when I was still alive, like Maggie.

Is this the next mutation? Is this how bird flu is going to really finish off humanity? By mutating into an evil more horrific virus and delivering a immune-system apocalypse that means no-one can survive once they got sick because decomposition begins before you even die?

Be warned, though, this chapter gets gruesome as it vividly describes the last hours of an elderly bird flu victim.

If you haven't been reading ED Day, you can start here at Chapter One.

If you're a regular reader, here's a link to Chapter Fifteen.

Australia really does have some of the most awesome animals in the world.

More photos here.

All Bombs Are Terror

Thank goodness the Bush troop 'surge' in Iraq was so successful. Otherwise, US jets and B-1 bombers would be dropping 40,000 pounds of bombs on Baghdad in only ten minutes.

Oh, wait...

Six more months, anyone? Anyone?

Iraqi Major General Claims 'Al Qaeda In Iraq' Internet-Only Fiction Created To Get Money From Americans

US Soldier Admits To Randomly Shooting Iraqi Civilians With Stolen AK-47

Say Goodbye To 'Iraq Benchmarks' Of Progress And Success, Say Hello To 'Iraq Solutions'

"We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists" : US Now Arming, Training Supposedly 'Former' Al Qaeda In Iraq

Supposedly US-Loyal Iraqi Soldier Hailed A Hero For Killing American Troops

Marking The Beast

You don't have to be religious to know that 666 is supposedly the number, or mark, of the satanically biblical Beast. You only have to be a fan of Iron Maiden.

The British House Of Lords has just experienced a wickedly coincidental Number Of The Beast incident :

A motion calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England appeared on the House of Commons order paper today - bizarrely numbered 666, the number associated with the Antichrist.

Bob Russell, Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester, one of the signatories, said: "It is is incredible that a motion like this should have, by chance, acquired this significant number.

"This number is supposed to be the mark of the Devil. It looks as though God or the Devil have been moving in mysterious ways.

"What is even stranger is that this motion was tabled last night when MPs were debating blasphemy."

Maybe God was trying to tell them something?

'Bush Derangement Syndrome' Breaks Out In Israel

Bush Protected By Robots During Israel Tour



Arrests have been made in Israel over the distribution of the above poster :

Jerusalem police arrested six extreme right-wing activists on Tuesday for putting up incendiary posters depicting US President George W. Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli President Shimon Peres wearing a kaffiyah...

The six activists are members of the right-wing group the Jewish National Front (JNF). Jerusalem police arrested the activists, some of them minors...

Extreme rightist Itamar Ben-Gavir commented on the activists’ arrest, telling Ynet that “the ad in question was a legal ad, which is part and parcel of their freedom of expression.”

Part of President Bush's security detail while he's visiting Israel and Palestine will include robots.

More On That Here


Israel Tries To Hide Truth On Illegal Settlements Before Bush Visit

Bush Security To Cost $25,000 An Hour

Most Israelis Not So Excited About Bush Visit - Bush Viewed As The Least Involved 'Peace Settlement' President

For The Paranoid Billionaire Who Has Everything Else - A Bullet Proof Mansion

Israel's richest man has bailed on Tel Aviv and is taking up residence in London, in a bullet proof mansion worth more than $US68 million :

Lev Leviev, who until a week ago was classified as the richest man in Israel, has joined the growing list of Israeli billionaires who have made their homes in London, where wealthy foreigners are not asked to pay tax on income earned overseas.

This month, Mr Leviev officially moved into a bullet-proof house in Hampstead, which he bought for £35m. His near neighbours include several other mega-rich Israeli tycoons who prefer UK tax rates. In Israel, they are liable for tax on all their income, no matter where it is from.

News of his departure has shocked the Israeli business community and created a political headache for its government, because of the drain of wealth from Tel Aviv to London. Among those who have made their homes in London are Zvi Meitar, the founder of one of Israel's biggest law firms; Benny Steinmitz, a diamond dealer and property tycoon; Yigal Zilka, head of Queenco Leisure International; and the real estate developer, Sammy Shimon.

Mr Leviev's departure knocked 11 per cent off the stock market value of his company...

So he saves on tax, but loses on his shares.

Leviev made his money off diamonds.

Is the journo who wrote up this story having a bit of a laugh? Witness the closing paragraphs :

Soon after reaching Israel, Mr Leviev left school to become a diamond cutter, and upheld a family tradition by circumcising his sons, and the sons of work colleagues.

Ouch.

Official Truth : The 'Incident' That Ignited The American War On Vietnam Never Happened

North Vietnamese Faked Calls Leading Americans To Bomb Their Own Troops

The truth seems to take an awfully long time to become offical fact, particularly when it involves war.

That the Gulf Of Tonkin 'incident' never actually happened, and that Americans were plunged into the horror of the Vietnam War based on incredible lies, is rarely debated anymore.

Now declassified documents from US signals intelligence files confirms what most Americans, and nearly every Vietnam veteran, already knows :

...the "most historically significant feature" of the declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to president Lyndon Johnson's sharp escalation of American forces in Vietnam.

The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable,' but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack happened that night,'" FAS said in a statement.

"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record..."

The newly declassified intelligence files do, however, turn up a stunning secret that never got far beyond the paper shredders. The North Vietnamese forces managed to crack American communications and led them to call in airstrikes on their own forces. Incredible :

North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war.

The report was released by the National Security Agency, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work, in response to a "mandatory declassification" request, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Monday.

From the first intercepted cable -- a 1945 message from Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh to his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin -- to the final evacuation of US spies from Saigon, the 500-page report retold Vietnam War history from the perspective of "signals intelligence," the group said in a statement.

During the war, North Vietnamese intelligence units sometimes succeeded in penetrating US communications systems, and they could monitor American message traffic from within, according to the report "Spartans in Darkness."

On several occasions "the communists were able, by communicating on Allied radio nets, to call in Allied artillery or air strikes on American units," it said.

"That's something I have never heard before," Steven Aftergood, director of the FAS project on government secrecy, told AFP.

No doubt, in thirty or forty years, declassified files will officialise the truth about the disgusting lies that led the US into the War On Iraq, and reveal plenty of disturbing truths about the secret history of the 9/11 attacks.

As with the Gulf Of Tonkin 'incident', the truth about 9/11 and Iraqi WMDs will for now likely remain in the domain of the so-called 'conspiracy theorists', who seem to have a disturbing habit of uncovering terrible truths decades before the revealing files are declassified. Part of the reason why, of course, so much time and energy is spent mocking and discrediting those who seek to uncover the truth about the great historical events of our age, when such revelations still carry much importance, and those responsible are still alive and can face the music for their crimes against humanity, and their own people.

What's Happened To America?

The New York Times editorial board hammers hard in its final op-ed of 2007. What's happened to the America of pre-911? is the main theme. Look what the Iraq War has done to this country and to the United States international image and reputation is another key theme.

Naturally, the New York Times editorial board forgets to mention just how much of a key role it played in creating the reality of Americans fighting in Iraq.

How many times did Bush and Cheney and Tony Blair and Australia's then prime minister, John Howard, directly quote or source articles and opinions in the New York Times to make their case for War On Iraq? Dozens of times, for most of 2002.

The NYTimes myth-making about Saddam's WMDs and nuclear capability influenced media across the planet and actively tried to rally the world to America's point of view and desire for war.

The NYTimes allowed itself to be used as a clearing house for anti-Iraq propaganda and misinformation as it helped to prepare the American public for the reality of an unprovoked attack on a mostly defenseless sovereign nation. Misinformation managers would leak utter fictions to NYTimes journalists, and then Dick Cheney would quote from the front page stories to back up and give credence to the fictions that flowed from his offices.

While most of the observations in this piece are relevant and important, the 'Who? Us?' of it reeks of hypocrisy and buck-passing :

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

"There is much more" - is there? Well, why isn't the New York Times telling us what all these other "shocking abuses" are? Clearly they know. So why aren't they running the details on the front page?

Well, they will of course. In 2010, or 2015, when it no longer matters as much.

In the meantime, like much of the rest of the corporate mainstream media, the New York Times will do what it can to make sure the American public do not learn the truth about all these "shocking abuses".

At least, not while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are still in power.

The New York Times isn't there to tell Americans what is really going on in Washington, or the White House. It is there to help keep the public dosed with just enough good news, and bad news, to maintain the balance and harmony, to keep the established order in power and to hold the public back from lynching their nation's leaders.


The New York Times Brainstorms How Terrorists Can Attack The US

"Who's Curveball?" The New York Times Pretends The Iraq War Had Nothing To Do With Them

On Death

By Darryl Mason

In the end when death came, there was no final dramatic moment. It wasn't a movie scene. There was no raging struggle to keep breathing, to fight on. She just slept on. She just died.

We saw her shortly before she died. She was sleeping, as she had been sleeping for weeks. The cancer she had was not the most painful kind, it just gradually drained her of energy. A winding down after a long, busy life in which no illness had ever slowed her before.

In July she had been as she had always been, almost bursting with energy and passion. The kind of energy that made you jealous, because you knew you if you had it, you would feel as though you could fly to the stars and back again.

Her mind as sharp as a razor then, her wit hilarious, incisive, absolutely cutting, brilliant.

Within weeks, the switches were turning off. Less than three months ago she was lying in casualty of the RPA hospital in Sydney, listening to a doctor explain that if she were to have a heart attack, or stroke, that they would not try to revive her, that they would let her go, that her cancer had spread too far, throughout her. She nodded, she understood, but as soon as the doctor left us, she was telling us, me and her daughter, how terrible it was that the "poor woman" lying in a bed across the room had cancer "and they can't do anything for her. The poor dear." Did she know that was her, too? That she was the same as this woman she was talking about? Of course she did. But she was more concerned for a sick stranger than she was for herself.

We went to see her the day she died. If she was in pain in those last hours of her life, in those final hours of the 700,000 hours she had lived in her lifetime, it did not disturb her from her sleep. She only woke we came in to see her and touched her arm. Her flesh was cold, as though her death was growing over the hours, with her blood cooling long before she took her last breath.

She cried out only once as her daughter moved the pillows and her utterly frail, thin body to make her more comfortable. She was asleep again within seconds. The kind of sleep only known by those just born and at the other end of life. We watched her breathing, the normal rhythm of breathing out of sync, the loop of regular inhalation and exhalation broken, bent. Not long to go now. Soon it would be over.

The window was open, a dazzling sun razoring through the tree branches and casting glowing anti-shadows on the grounds of the park outside. Next to her, a cup of water she could barely swallow. She could take in nothing but air and drops of water now. Flowers, a wall of cards from all over the country, from around the world, some pills, the bowl of mints she had only stopped eating a few days before, photos of family, friends, neighbours, neighbours who had become like family in that small Sydney street where she had lived with her husband for decades. The sort of neighbour most only ever get to know in fiction, who welcomed all and judged nobody.

The curtains flowed in slow motion, touched by a breeze, the cries of children in the park down below echoed softly into the room. No life support equipment, nothing to monitor her heart beats, no machines that go ping, just an old woman who had lived a long time and was near the end. She wasn't letting go of life, she was just going.

We said goodbye, a last goodbye, because we knew it would be tonight. Sometime tonight. Her husband knew this, the nurses there knew this, she knew it, too. There was no final fight. It was time.

You can feel the phone call coming, before the phone rings. You're not supposed to know when someone you love dies, this is paranormal or at the very least not normal, or so we are told. But you do know. Of course you do. If you listen, not with your ears but with everything that you are, you can hear the lives of the people you love, and when one of them dies, something is then missing from the comforting thrum of that thing that connects you all, that is not supposed to exist, but is still there. It's always been there.

The nurse doesn't ask her daughter if she wants to see her mother, now she is gone, she issues a soft order, "Take as much time as you need and then come and see me up the hall." The nurse knows the daughter must do this, even if she would say no if given a choice.

The nursing home is mostly dark, it's late at night now, and in every other room is an elderly man or woman who will die in the weeks or months or years to come. Not many years. This is a place where you come to die. It never struck me as an utterly depressing place. Some days when we visited, it was like a departure lounge. Old people sitting in chairs, waiting, some patient, some frustrated and impatient. Lots of chatter and noise. The Waiting. Most ready for what comes next, whether they believe there is something next or not.

This night there is not a sound to be heard from the other rooms, where there is usually, always, some babbling, some soft crying if you care to listen closely enough, or the occasional groan of "Nuuurrssse...." and calm mutterings in dreams of youthful times ten thousand days ago, or whispers to those already gone, promising to "be with you soon."

But tonight there is not a sound. Perhaps they all know, not because they have been told, they haven't been, but they seem to know, their silence is respectful, because one of them has gone where they're all going, too, soon. Silence. Not a chilling silence, just stillness.

She is lying on her back. Her mouth is slightly open, her eyes almost closed. She is dead, she took her last breath less than half an hour before. But who she was, the person inside that body, is already gone. There's not a trace left of her. Just her body, a little more deflated, as though something really has left her.

Her forehead is warm, damp with sweat, but her cheek is already cool, and will soon be as cold as her arm was a few hours before.

The window is still open, there is no breeze, and no-one is in the park now. Finding a strength I cannot even comprehend, her daughter pulls back the sheet and lifts her mother's arm off her chest. She removes the wedding ring that has been on her mother's finger for more than sixty years and slides it onto her own finger. We sit there with her but she's not there. Without religion, there are no chants or prayers or noise or activity. Stillness, calm and quiet. It's just memories for now, and grief, but the grief has been there for months, so the shock is not so great. The inevitable is now real, but the reality is not terrible. There is sadness, but not horror.

Her daughter goes to the nurse and thanks her for everything she did to help this elderly woman in her last hours, her last weeks. The nursing home has a funeral director they recommend, but her daughter wants to choose another. She is given a phone book.

We go downstairs and to the table outside, and sit at the edge of the circle of light from the wall lamp to go through the pages of that section of the phone book you always knew was there, but never really looked before. When you're young and people you knew and loved died, there were always others who did these things, made these arrangements. Now it is the daughter who must take care of this duty.

It's still hot outside, even as midnight approaches. The branches and leaves are as still as photographs.

And then a breeze comes, from nowhere, or somewhere. Cool, but not cold, it doesn't pass us, it moves through us. The breeze doesn't touch the leaves only a few feet away, it doesn't disturb the rising blue straight line of cigarette smoke, it doesn't disturb the pages of the phone book, or even shift one hair of the daughter as she leans forward, but the breeze is real enough, because you can feel it on your skin, inside your skin, everywhere.

Not a chill breeze, it's warm but cool, strange but comforting. There's a shiver from the breeze, but not of fear, it's of something familiar, recognition, of something inside you that is not flesh or heart or mind, but is you, recognising the breeze for what it is, and being glad for knowing, not pretending it is otherwise, knowing it is going from this to that, from here to there, knowing that it is not a bad or terrible thing. Feeling that it is, in the end, good. That this is the end.

A beautiful moment. A final goodbye.

Oil Hits $100 : One Trader Responsible For Record Price

He Did It For 'Bragging Rights'

According to the BBC, the price of a barrel of oil reached $100 yesterday mostly due to the actions of one New York trader, who wanted to be able to boast to his grandchildren that he was the first trader in history who brought oil at $100 a barrel :

Stephen Schork, a former floor trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange and the editor of an oil market newsletter, said one floor trader bought 1,000 barrels, the smallest amount permitted, and sold it immediately for $99.40 at a $600 loss.

"They absolutely overpaid," he told Radio Four's Today Programme.

"He paid $600 for the right to tell his grandchildren that he was the first in the world to buy $100 oil."

Most trading in energy futures has shifted away from the trading floor and takes place on electronic platforms.

The NYMEX, along with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is one of the last bastions of "open outcry", where traders use frantic hand signals to trade securities.

Bragging rights? He should be dragged by his teeth down Wall Street.

Because of this egotistical dipshit's actions, people all over the world will have to pay more to fill their fuel tanks tomorrow, and oil companies will find yet another margin to squeeze even more profit from hundreds of millions of workers already having trouble meeting their mortgages and paying for food.

It's not just about 'bragging rights' of course. Now the headlines have screamed "Oil At $100!" the public have been mentally prepared for oil to now sail past that historic marker. And it will.

What a monumentally screwed up global financial system it is when just one person can do something like this that has such a massive worldwide impact.

It is not peak oil, or Nigerian pipeline explosions, or political assassinations in Pakistan alone that are ramping up the price of oil. It is the greed, egos and stupidity of oil speculators. This isn't capitalism, it's a con job, gutter-level thievery, and financial terrorism.

"Hey Rupert Murdoch! What Happened To All Those Post-Saddam $20 Barrels Of Oil?"

'Oil At $200 Barrel Within The Decade'

OPEC : Oil At $100 A Barrel "Not Our Fault"

Oil Price Spikes Boost Latin American Leftist Leaders Agenda Of Nationalising Oil Companies

Indiana Jones And The Aliens

Secrets Of The New Indiana Jones Movie



By Darryl Mason

So what do we know about the storyline of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull?

Crystal Skull is set in 1957, and both director Stephen Spielberg and producer George Lucas were intent on capturing the atmosphere and feel of a 1950s B-movie, rather than the serial-chase adventure style of of the first three Indiana Jones movies.

Like the previous three Indiana Jones movies, this one will take Indy on a quest to recover a supernatural object. The object being, obviously, a crystal skull, and he will go up against Russian agents also trying to get their hands on the skull because, it would appear, the skull is the key to extraterrestrial technology that would help the Russians win the Cold War.

The B-movie theme now promoted by Spielberg and Lucas in interviews appears to be their way of preparing audiences for what may be a brilliant-or-stupid storyline twist : that the crystal skull Indiana is trying to find was made by ancient Mayans using extraterrestrial technology.

Here's George Lucas :

“What it is that made it perfect was the fact that the MacGuffin (the crystal skull) I wanted to use and the idea that Harrison would be 20 years older would fit,...So that put it in the mid-50s, and the (crystal skull)....was perfect for the mid-50s. I looked around and I said, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t do a 30s serial, because now we’re in the 50s. What is the same kind of cheesy-entertainment action movie, what was the secret B movie, of the 50s?’ So instead of doing a 30s Republic serial, we’re doing a B science-fiction movie from the 50s. The ones I’m talking about are, like, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Thing. So by putting it in that context, it gave me a way of approaching the whole thing.”

What Lucas says—and he won’t say more—seems to support earlier Internet speculation that the scenes filmed in New Mexico may be set at Area 51, the Nevada military base which, according to conspiracy buffs and the creators of The X-Files, has been the site of U.F.O. and alien research.

The crystal skull of the title, at least from it's appearance in the first poster for the new movie, will apparently be that of an alien.

Crystal Skull will start with an extended action sequence, then Indiana will go back to his university and learn what his new adventure is going to be.

There's an extended river chase sequence, most likely the first action scene we'll see in the movie. There's also a chase sequence set at the university where Indiana teaches archeology, and a long jungle/temple set piece, which will involve a huge piece of machinery used by the Russians to cut a path through the Peruvian jungle.

Karen Allen returns as Marion Ravenwood, and George Lucas says that Crystal Skull is a continuation of their relationship, some 20 years on from Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Marion Ravenwood reappears in Indiana's life and the rumour goes that she reveals she fell pregnant to him the last time they were together, two decades ago. Jones then supposedly meets, for the first time, his 19 year old son, who joins his father on the new adventure in the jungles of Peru as they try to recover the crystal skull of the storyline.

George Lucas is expecting movie critics to hate Crystal Skull, and he expects die-hard Indiana Jones fans to hate it as well. He says he didn't make the movie for fans or critics, but "for fun."

Lucas insists Crystal Skull is "very funny" and will feature running gags about Indiana's age.

In an interview for Vanity Fair, Stephen Spielberg details his formula for telling stories through movies and supplies his own preview of the Crystal Skull storyline :

If a movie is going to be a reflection of any kind of a real-life situation, it has to have all the sine waves of real stories, meaning there’s absurdity, there’s comedy, there’s tragic loss, there’s huge impenetrable forces chasing you down, and then there’s redemption at the end. Every movie is really just a distillation of a moment in time, a moment in someone’s life, but filmmakers and writers love to shove every possible option into those moments, so the audience gets to experience an entire life in a couple of hours

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull will be released worldwide in May.




Q & A With George Lucas

Q & A With Stephen Spielberg

The Official Indiana Jones Site

Christian Optimism And Prophet Of Doom Profiteering

Pat Robertson, the Bush family friend and 'advisor', and one of the few Christian leaders in the world who promotes political assassination, has a new message for his followers.

God is going to deliver China :

"What I'm praying about is China. I'm asking for 250 million in China. We haven't had that breakthrough yet but I think we're going to get it. God's going to give us China. And China will be the largest Christian nation on the face of the earth. They're going to come to Jesus."

Apparently, Pat Robertson goes off "alone with the Lord" at the start of each year and is given a preview of the year head. Maybe God is yanking Robertson's chain, because, like most prophets, Robertson has a history of failed predictions, real big ones, including the prediction that he himself would become president of the United States.

Here's some others :

In 1980, he predicted that the USSR would invade the Middle East. In 1981, he predicted a global economic collapse. He predicted that the USSR would invade Israel. In 2004, he predicted that George W. Bush would “easily” win the election in a “blowout.”

Bush, of course, barely scrapped home in one of the narrowest election victories since the Woodrow Wilson era.

Finally, here's some of Robertson's other 'predictions' for 2008 :

"The Lord was saying that there’s going to be violence and chaos in the world..."

He also predicted that there will be a recession, oil will reach $150 a barrel and the U.S. dollar will continue to fall. He added that there will be a major stock-market crash in 2009 or 2010.

Robertson isn't hearing the voice of God, he's just been reading the lead editorials in the financial media.

Hammered

An interesting clip of Bush back in the days when alcohol was the cause and answer to many of his problems. Bush says he hasn't had a blast of alcohol in more than 20 years, so presumably this video is pre-1987. Presumably :

Flashback : Israel Intelligence Kicked Off "Iraq Did 9/11" Propaganda Only Days After Attacks

This story, citing Israeli intelligence sources, appeared in the influential Jane's publication only eight days after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York City and Washington D.C., and, as the story reveals, six weeks after Israel warned the US that massive terror attacks were coming.

The key passages :

Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.

The Iraqis, who for several years paid smaller groups to do their dirty work, were quick to discover the advantages of Al-Qaeda.

"We’ve only got scraps of information, not the full picture," admits one intelligence source, "but it was good enough for us to send a warning six weeks ago to our allies that an unprecedented massive terror attack was expected."

Our sources believe that it will be very difficult to get to the bottom of this unprecedented terror operation. However, they believe the chief of the Iraqi SSO is Qusai Hussein, the dictator’s son, and his organisation is the most likely to have been involved.

How to counter this kind of terrorism? "To fight these bastards you don’t need a military attack," said an experienced Israeli commando officer. "You only need to adopt Israel’s assassination policy."

In August, 2006, and a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis later, President Bush was forced to finally admit the truth about 9/11 and Iraq during a fiery press conference :

BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

Here's the video of Bush destroying the 'Iraq Did 9/11' myth that began with the Israel intelligence source quoted in Jane's on September 19, 2001 :







48 Hours After 9/11, Thomas L. Friedman Hypes The 'War On Terror' : "We Have To Fight The Terrorists As If There Are No Rules"

CIA Withheld Important Al Qaeda Information From 9/11 Commission - What Exactly Was On Those Interrogation Videos That Were Destroyed?

Pretty Colours










More New Year's Eve Sydney fireworks surreality over at The Orstrahyun.