BUSTED : Murdoch Media Uses Video Game Art For War Propaganda, Claims It Came From Al Qaeda



By Darryl Mason

UPDATE : The Australian newspaper has illustrated a thoroughly discredited story about Al Qaeda and WMDs with a piece of art from an online video game. The Australian newspaper claimed the above was "supplied". But supplied by who? Al Qaeda? News agencies? Corporate American intelligence agencies? Or someone in The Australian's own art department?


Previously : According to Rupert Murdoch's The Australian, the above image turned up on an Al Qaeda website. Or on a website populated by people who claim to be Al Qaeda. Or it was 'supplied' to The Australian newspaper by the corporate American intelligence agency that claims to monitor Al Qaeda websites, and then sells what they find for big dollars to the world's media? It's hard to keep track.

The Australian newspaper is supposed to Murdoch's 'quality broadsheet' down under, but clearly they are more than happy to pump Al Qaeda propaganda as much as the dozens of trash Murdoch tabloids in the US, the UK and Australia.

But don't worry about that massive credibility gap. This imagery (we now know comes from a video game - ed) came with a terrible warning of doom.... or as it's more commonly known, complete and utter bullshit :

Groups that monitor Islamic websites say al-Qaeda will post a new video in the next 24 hours urging jihadists to use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to attack the West, the FBI said.

The FBI warning came as the US-based monitoring group SITE said the video encouraging terrorists to develop and detonate weapons of mass destruction in the US and Europe was posted on an Islamist militant forum.

SITE also released a computer-generated image, showing Washington DC in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, which reportedly appeared on an Islamist forum.

The 39-minute, documentary-style video, titled Nuclear Jihad: The Ultimate Terror, was posted on the al-Ekhlaas forum on May 25, SITE said in a statement.

"The idea of killing lots of people, this idea is available to us, and it must be used under the idea of treating others the same, so I say that terror in their countries must involve human losses and these human losses must be with WMDs," the video says, according to SITE's translation.

Paul Joseph Watson has some very interesting information on American 'intelligence specialists' who have turned the distribution of all but meaningless Al Qaeda propaganda into a very profitable business, and explains why we don't see anymore beheading videos from 'Al Qaeda' :

Nearly four years after Benjamin Vanderford hoodwinked the global media by manufacturing a fake Al-Qaeda beheading tape, America's corporate press whores are once again gearing up to fearmonger about the prospect of mushroom clouds over American cities by instantly ascribing gospel status to a dubious "Al-Qaeda fan" Internet videotape that encourages the use of WMD in a terrorist attack.

Since the dubious series of beheading videos, which coincidentally came to a stop when one of our readers managed to expose the ludicrousness of accepting such propaganda at face value by hoodwinking the world media with a fake beheading tape, "Al-Qaeda" has been resigned to spreading its message through Mossad agents like Adam Pearlman and alleged sketchy Bin Laden audio recordings...

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Darryl Mason's online novel ED Day, about life in Sydney after a bird flu pandemic kills millions, is now completed. Read it here free.

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Now Al Qaeda 'fan made' videos, as this 'documentary' is being described, are getting mass media exposure. The MSM is petrified that if they don't pump any and all AQ propaganda that comes their way, and there is another attack on the US, they will be seen as being guilty of not having informed the public of what they knew might have been coming.

Whatever Al Qaeda is, the American (and Australian) mainstream media is doing their job of spread the threat of terror for them, and making money at the same time utilising dramatic free content supposedly supplied by terrorists.

It doesn't matter how absolutely crap and ridiculous the supposed Al Qaeda videos are, the mainstream media gives them all front page and lead evening news story exposure, almost seven years after the United States was last attacked.

How much longer can this Al Qaeda crapfest be kept up? Not much longer. The bitter cynicism from reader-commenters across the American media spectrum in reaction to this 'documentary' has been almost unanimous, and many are disgusted and furious. Not at Al Qaeda necessarily, but at the MSM for once again doing the terrorists' job of trying to spread fear and unease.

Rupert Murdoch, and the rest of the MSM, should give this shit a fucking rest, Or at the very least start mocking the creators of this propaganda for being absolutely crap at what they do.

All the great enemies of the West were mocked relentlessly during the wars of the 20th century. But for this war we are told, by President Bush in particular, that we must listen closely to and believe every word that Osama Bin Laden, or one of his lackey arseholes, have to say.

The scary truth is that the American war machine has as much interest in prolonging this war as Al Qaeda, or whatever passes for Al Qaeda, has. Neither side wants it to end.

We don't seem to get to have a say in this. No matter who we vote for, the war goes on. And on. And onandonandon.

If you preach hatred, violence and intolerance, you should not expect the mainstream media to do most of your work for you in getting out your vile message.

Enough is enough.

UPDATE : Journalists, or somebody, from the UK Telegraph accessed this blog post and have run a story exposing the truth about the above image. Any credit to this blog, and the reader, NikC, who exposed the truth? Of course not.

And The Australian newspaper has still not corrected its original story. They haven't even bothered to change the headline. IT'S FROM A FUCKING VIDEO GAME YOU MORONS!

"Failure To Comply Will Result In Your Obliteration"



What possible use could there be for a killer robot that can fire a million rounds a minute?

Crowd control, of course!

Friendly To The Environment, Not So To Humans

Innocent people who are blown to pieces by a new generation of "environment friendly" bombs can die happy and secure in the knowledge that the bombs that killed them are not polluting the atmosphere as much as the bombs of previous wars did :

New explosives could be more powerful and safer to handle than TNT and other conventional explosives and would also be more environmentally friendly.

TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks.

To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do.

Sounds like the makers of these bombs might qualify for some carbon credits.

No word yet on how progress is going on the development of "human friendly" bombs.

John McCain + George W. Bush = McBush



Republican presidential nominee John McCain faces an almighty task trying to convince the majority of American voters to give him the tick for POTUS, if only because of his heavy association with President Bush, who can claim the crown now as the most despised, ridiculed and dangerous American president since Richard Nixon.

John McCain has now been forced to close his fundraising dinners and speeches to the media when President Bush is the guest of honour. How bizarre is that? The Republican nominee is afraid of damaging his Republican campaign for the presidency by being seen in public with the leader of the Republican Party.

Ramping up the fact that Bush is now total political poison, anti-Republicans are pumping the claims that McCain is too old and too dim to be a revolutionary president, and that he is little more than a stand-in for a president who can't legally serve a third term. Unless he declares martial law. Vote for McCain, goes a fresh Democratic Party mantra, and you will actually be voting for the continuation of failed, catastrophic and horrifically deadly Bush administration policies.

That John McCain is really a 'McBush' is not a reality that has really caught on in the United States yet. Yet. But you sure are going to be hearing and seeing a hell of a lot more McBush references as the November election draws closer. And for someone who was devastatingly smeared by BushCo. back in 2000, McCain has stupidly allowed himself to be seen hugging, kissing and humbling himself before President Bush on numerous occasions in front of the media. Obviously, the McCain camp doesn't intend on giving the Democrats any fresh imagery of Bush and McCain together, not that it matters now. It's too late. The Democrats already have hours of footage, and thousands of photos to pump the McBush mantra.

When the McBush reality catches fire, it will prove devastating to the McCain campaign for the White House. Imagine thousands of anti-Republican protesters haunting McCain everywhere he goes, all of them holding up the exact same sign, with the above image and that one word : McBush.

Ron Paul still is, of course, waiting in the wings, and he is one Republican wannabe president who has absolutely no history sucking up to BushCo. It's still not impossible that come November, Ron Paul will be the Republican nominee for POTUS. Stranger things have happened in American politics.

"All My Friends Are Getting Married..."

A fairly amusing think piece from a 30-something single male watching in horror as his drinking buddies are rendered extinct by marriage and children.

An excerpt :

...there aren't many of us left. And it's a lonely world out there when you realise that you're closer in age to Homer Simpson than to Jessica Simpson. And that your lifelong fantasy of sleeping with a Yummy Mummy no longer involves an older woman.

It's the double standards where babies are concerned that I find objectionable. If a baby pukes, everyone rushes around like a Kennedy has been shot. But, if I should do likewise after three vodka tonics, a bottle of red and four sambucas, does anyone mop my fevered brow? No, they leave me to make my own way to KFC for a party bucket with mashed potatoes, gravy and onion rings. And when a baby kicks up a fuss, it is rewarded with boob. But if I start crying and demanding boob, I'm simply asked to leave the bus/cinema/restaurant/church.

Read The Whole Story Here

'Peak Oil' Survivalists Prepare For America's Energy Armageddon

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and now the Washington Post appear to be very interested in what is loosely being called 'New Survivalists' or 'Peak Oil Survivalists.' The theme is simple : normal, middle class Americans are terrified of the day that the oil stops flowing and society as we know it breaks down into chaos, rioting and extreme violence. It's a post-Green, beyond Al Gore, mindset. Save the world? Forget that hippie shit, it's too late, or to quote in Aliens, "Game over, man!"

Load up on solar panels and water tanks and non-Monsanto seed, get out of suburbia, bunker down, get a bicycle, get a gun to protect your organic carrots and prepare for life after society's collapse.

From the Washington Post :

Convinced the planet's oil supply is dwindling and the world's economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn't prepare.

These energy survivalists are not leading some sort of green revolution meant to save the planet. Many of them believe it is too late for that, seeing signs in soaring fuel and food prices and a faltering U.S. economy, and are largely focused on saving themselves.

Some are doing it quietly, giving few details of their preparations _ afraid that revealing such information as the location of their supplies will endanger themselves and their loved ones. They envision a future in which the nation's cities will be filled with hungry, desperate refugees forced to go looking for food, shelter and water.

These survivalists believe in "peak oil," the idea that world oil production is set to hit a high point and then decline. Scientists who support idea say the amount of oil produced in the world each year has already or will soon begin a downward slide, even amid increased demand. But many scientists say such a scenario will be avoided as other sources of energy come in to fill the void.

Determined to guard themselves from potentially harsh times ahead, Lynn-Marie and her husband have already planted an orchard of about 40 trees and built a greenhouse on their 7 1/2 acres. They have built their own irrigation system. They've begun to raise chickens and pigs, and they've learned to slaughter them.

The couple have gotten rid of their TV and instead have been reading dusty old books published in their grandparents' era, books that explain the simpler lifestyle they are trying to revive. Lynn-Marie has been teaching herself how to make soap. Her husband, concerned about one day being unable to get medications, has been training to become an herbalist.

By 2012, they expect to power their property with solar panels, and produce their own meat, milk and vegetables. When things start to fall apart, they expect their children and grandchildren will come back home and help them work the land. She envisions a day when the family may have to decide whether to turn needy people away from their door.

"People will be unprepared," she said. "And we can imagine marauding hordes."

So how many Americans are we talking about here? Millions? Hundreds of thousands? The fact-checking Washington Post crunches the numbers :

The exact number of people taking such steps is impossible to determine, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the movement has been gaining momentum in the last few years.

Perhaps it's not so important how many 'Peak Oil Survivalists' there actually are. Perhaps the more important mission for the Washington Post, the WSJ and the NYTimes is to further publicise the 'Peak Oil' theory and seed the media ground for the societal breakdown and inner city food rioting that appears to be now so widely, sometimes wildly, anticipated.

Or maybe the Washington Post editors simply know that if they run a story tagged 'survivalism' they will get a few hundred thousand extra readers that day, and in the following days, when blogs and AM radio link and talk it up, just like I've done here.

But is it really necessary for the action of citysiders deciding to get the hell out of CrapTown to pursue a better quality of life to be labeled 'survivalism'? What happened to simply wanting to get back to a simpler and more self-sufficient way of living? Or deciding that there are more satisfying ways to look after and feed the family than the daily warfare of many modern city workplaces?

You don't need to be an Al Gore advocate, or a believer in 'Peak Oil' Armageddon, to understand that the fruit, herbs and vegetables you grow in your backyard, or on your apartment balcony, will always taste better than the old, treated junk you find in most supermarkets.

Expect more mainstream media 'Survivalism' and 'Peak Oil Armageddon' stories.

But there's plenty of positives to flow from a MSM fixation on Americans supposedly preparing to survive in a post-oil and food shortages stricken America. The more who read these stories and decide to grow their own food, or to keep chickens and goats, the less likely that widespread food shortages will become a reality.

It's hard, however, not to view this sudden rush of interest from the mainstream media as part of a conscious and somewhat practical reshaping of society from a heavily consuming culture to one that is far more self-sufficient. At the very least it is a further fermentation of the post-Katrina message from the Bush administration (paraphrased) "When disaster strikes, don't expect the government to come to your rescue. You're on your own."

More and more Americans, apparently, have taken that warning as a herald for a new reality and are getting on with the business of making sure they can largely fend for themselves. Just in case.

Survivalism Goes Mainstream, As The Rich And Middle Class Fear Breakdown Of Society

A 'quake lake' forms over a few days in the mountains of Beichuan County in China.

From China Daily :

Experts have proposed a water diversion channel to drain Tangjiashan Lake, formed by landslides that blocked a river known as the Jianhe after the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province.

Tangjiashan, one of 35 such lakes, is inaccessible by road and can only be reached by foot or air.

The lake currently holds 130 million cubic meters of water, said Liu Ning, Ministry of Water Resources of China chief engineer, who is in Tangjiashan to oversee the diversion. Its water level was 725.3 meters on Monday, only 26 meters below the lowest part of the barrier, he said.

Li Huzhang, an engineer with the armed police force, said three emergency plans had been made to dig out the sluice. He said at least 50,000 cubic meters of debris blockage would have to be removed. Rescuers, however, were aiming to remove 100,000 cubic meters of debris if the weather allowed to minimize the bursting risk.

A Mig-26 helicopter transported a large bulldozer from Leigu, near Tangjiashan. By 7 p.m. on Monday, more than 10 diggers and bulldozers and 40-plus tons of relief materials, including tents, drinking water, food and gasoline, had been airlifted to the site.

Altogether, 35 barrier lakes were formed by landslides after the quake that left 65,080 people dead and 23,150 others missing as of Monday noon, according to the Information Office of the State Council.

Preview Of The Coming 'Water Wars' Seen In Barcelona

Great Cities Of Europe Running Out Of Water


Where there was once a deep reservoir, and a mostly drowned cathedral, there are now only puddles

Rain falls on Barcelona, sometimes, but according to this story, there's not enough rain to quell growing fears that this city could be the first in Europe to run out of water. Fresh water is now being shipped to Barcelona from across the Mediterranean in converted oil tankers :

Its fountains and beach showers are dry, its ornamental lakes and private swimming pools drained and hosepipes banned. Children are now being taught how to save water as part of their school day. This iconic, avant-garde city is in the grip of the worst drought since records began and is bringing the climate crisis that has blighted cities in Australia and throughout the Third World to Europe. A resource that most Europeans have grown up taking for granted now dominates conversation. Nearly half of Catalans say water is the region's main problem, more worrying than terrorism, economic slowdown or even the populists' favourite – immigration.

The political battles now breaking out here could be a foretaste of the water wars that scientists and policymakers have warned us will be commonplace in the coming decades. The emergency water-saving measures Barcelona adopted after winter rains failed for a second year running have not been enough. The city has had to set up a "water bridge" and is shipping in water for the first time in the history of this great maritime city.

A tanker from Marseilles with 36 million litres of drinking water unloaded its first cargo this week, one of a mini-fleet contracted to bring water from the Rhone every few days for at least the next three months. So humbled was Barcelona when prolonged drought forced it to ship in domestic water from Tarragona, 50 miles south along the Catalan coast, 12 days ago, that city hall almost delayed shipment and considered an upbeat publicity campaign to lift morale and international prestige.

The whole country is suffering from its worst drought in 40 years and the shipments from Tarragona prompted an outcry from regions who insist they need it more. For now the clashes are being soothed by intervention from Madrid, and plans to ship water from desalination plants in parched Almeria in Andalusia are shelved until October. But there is little indication of a strategy to deal not just with an immediate emergency but an ongoing crisis. Buying water on an epic scale from France has given the controversy an international aspect as French environmentalists question whether such a scarce natural resource should be sold as a commodity to another country.

What Barcelona authorities are fast discovering is that chronic water shortages are not a problem that money alone can solve.

Its 5.5 million inhabitants need a lot of the stuff: the 20 million litres/20,000 tonnes/five million gallons of water brought from Tarragona on 13 May were enough for barely 180,000 people and were consumed within minutes of being channelled through the city's taps. Wednesday's shipment from Marseilles was bigger, 36 million litres, but similarly short lived.

In reference to the photo at the top of the page :

A striking image of the seriousness of the drought is provided by the emergence of a church from the waters of a drying reservoir. For 40 years, all you could see of the drowned village of Sant Roma was the belltower of its stone church, which peeped from time to time above the surface of the artificial lake in a valley flooded in the 1960s to supply Catalonia with water. This year falling water levels have revealed the 11th-century church in its entirety for the first time, attracting curious onlookers who walk round it on the reservoir's dusty bed.

Jumbo Carrying Diplomatic Cargo Splits In Two On Take Off



The Boeing 747 was loaded with American diplomatic pouches and vehicles when it snapped in to three pieces on take off from a Brussels' airport :

Belgian TV reported that the plane was carrying diplomatic baggage belonging to the US Ambassador to Belgium...The US embassy in Brussels refused to comment.

The five-strong crew were all Americans, and the plane was bound for the Gulf state of Bahrain, according to another airport official, Jan Van der Cruysse.

No obvious cause for the crash was immediately apparent and an inquiry has been opened.

The inquiry will take many months, if not years, and we will never hear about this bizarre incident again.

Suicide Soldier Claimed Ghost Of Iraqi He Killed Followed Him Home, Told Him He Had To Take His Own Life

I've read a fair bit about suicide over the years, for various reasons, and there can sometimes be a morbid fascination in soaking up the details of the often troubled life that led to such self-imposed finality. But the following reads like a horror movie, and is one of the most disturbing suicide accounts I've read. The torment that plagued this soldier, who was sent back to Iraq after a psychiatrist diagnosed massive mental health problems resulting from PTSD, is beyond comprehension :

Until the day he died, Sgt. Brian Rand believed he was being haunted by the ghost of the Iraqi man he killed.

The ghost choked Rand while he slept in his bunk, forcing him to wake up gasping for air and clawing at his throat.

(snip)

As the war dragged on and Rand was sent first to Kuwait, then Iraq, he told family members that he felt torn about the things he saw.

Once while wounded soldiers were being evacuated by helicopter in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, Rand waved at a man he knew. The man turned and Brian saw that half of the man's face was ripped off.

Brian later told his sister he was shocked by how white the bones looked under the flesh.

Then one day, while standing guard near the Green Zone, Rand killed an Iraqi man.

"The spirit of the man that he killed didn't leave him, it kept harassing him," Somdahl said of her brother. "He said this guy is following me around in the mess hall, he's trying to kill me. I told him to leave me alone but he says he wants to take me with him.'"

To help ease his nightly terrors, April would log onto her computer and talk to her brother over the Internet until he fell asleep.

She ended every conversation the same way.

"Sleep well, baby boy. Tomorrow is a new day."

But when he returned from Iraq in 2005, Brian Rand was a different man.

His voice was distant. His jokes were morbid. He moved as if trapped in a nightmare.

Months after he returned to Iraq in November 2005, Rand picked up a fork, stabbed a fellow soldier in the neck in the mess hall, then crawled into the fetal position and sobbed. The soldiers in Rand's unit picked him up and carried him over to a phone, dialed his sister and placed the phone to his ear.

"I asked why did you do that?" Somdahl said. "He said (he) thought (he) was a vampire."

"He wanted to hibernate with me, he started to be more clingy," Dena Rand said. "One day he got upset and he started punching himself and gave himself a black eye. He went to formation with that black eye."

Eventually Rand's thoughts turned to death.

More American soldiers back home are trying to take their own lives than are dying in the war zone. This kind of fallout from Iraq has only really just begun.

Read The Full Story Here

The "Leave Them To Die" List

When the bird flu pandemic comes, and medical centres and hospitals are overloaded with the sick and the dying, not everyone is going to find the help they need.

In fact, there are tens of millions of people in the United States alone who will be denied help simply because they happen to fit into one of the following categories :

• People older than 85.

• Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.

• Severely burned patients older than 60.

• Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer's disease.

• Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

The Centre For Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security were all involved in selecting the categories under which people will be left to die.

The above categories are almost exactly the same as the "Leave Them To Die" health care rationing plans prepared by governments in Australian, South East Asia, the UK and most of Europe.

"If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing," the report states.

To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won't get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival.

If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, "there are some real ethical concerns here."

While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.

Devereaux said compiling the list "was emotionally difficult for everyone."

Particularly for 86 year old car accident victims with mental health problems and limited lung capacity.

Billary's Self-Assassination

Billary won't quit because, hey, who knows? maybe Barack Obama will be assassinated.

We all know that the Bush-Clinton political monarchy demands that Billary at the very least gets the Democratic nomination for POTUS, but Billary is clearly tied of waiting. Barack Obama isn't part of the plan. It was never supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be Billary for two terms, and then Jeb Bush, and then perhaps Chelsea Clinton, or one of the Bush twins. And here's this outsider, a black man, thinking he can take the crown? Seriously, what the fuck is this? A democracy?

Is this the most reckless and stupid thing anyone has ever said in American politics? Judge for yourself :

"We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

Billary is waiting for yet another handy political assassination to clear the way to the White House. And why not? It wouldn't be the first time, as Billary was all too keen to remind us.

And what happens to the United States if Billary is proven accurately, disturbingly, prophetic?

What kind of anarchy will result if rifle fire sounds and half of Barack Obama's head cleaves away in the middle of a speech before tens of thousands of people?

It wouldn't just be the black people rioting, this time.

President Bush, of course, has a martial law plan he can snap into action in the event of the mass civil disobedience and outraged protests that would follow an Obama assassination. The American military has conducted numerous exercises in locking down cities and towns, Blackwater Security is Iraq War-hardened and waiting to do the real dirty work in the streets, the databases of potential trouble makers, and dissenters, is prepared and the detention camps are ready, with room for more than 100,000 Americans.

But who would vote for this Angel Of Death after such horror, even if elections were allowed to go ahead?

Through three decades, the Bush-Clinton aristocracy has ruled the United States and unleashed violence in more than a dozen countries, through direct warfare or war by proxies, resulting in the deaths of millions, and the deprivation of tens of millions more.

But it all ended yesterday when a desperate and frustrated Billary spoke all too clearly of a dark and mortifying reality, long hinted at, long whispered of, and long dismissed as mere conspiracy theories.

It's over.

But will Billary go quietly?

"The Dead Shall Give Way To The Living"

An horrific portrait of a Chinese city as a morgue :

Soldiers and rescue workers were rushing to unload the earthquake victims into a mass burial pit, where the dirt was still loose and sprinkled with white lime powder.

They are unknown people being quickly cremated or buried in unmarked graves, and there are thousands or tens of thousands of them across quake-ravaged Sichuan Province. It may be months or years before family members discover their fate, if they ever do. They are very likely to be among the nearly 25,000 people the Chinese government classifies as missing in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake.

President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have urged rescue workers to save lives “at any cost.” But the scale of the disaster has forced the government to dispose of the dead with little ceremony, closing the door on any opportunity family members have of identifying their kin by sight and upsetting the traditional Chinese reverence for the deceased.

More than 60,000 people have died in China’s greatest natural disaster in three decades, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told The A.P. Officials ordered any bodies found to be burned or buried in mass graves starting May 16, citing the corpses’ state of decay and the threat of epidemics, even though many international health experts say dead bodies do not spread disease.

For many of the dead, no trace remains except photos and names printed on thousands of posters put up by searching family members, like the forests of fliers that sprang up in New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

In this mountainous corner of China, where customs run deep, Chinese of the majority Han ethnicity insist on cremating family members to ensure a smooth passage to the afterlife. Those from the Qiang ethnic group, who are numerous here, want to bury their dead.

As of Tuesday, 80 percent of corpses in Sichuan Province had been buried or cremated...

“Many local people were staying in Beichuan and were reluctant to leave because their family members died there,” she said. “Some continued to stay there because they hadn’t found their missing relatives. But they had to face reality. We have this saying: ‘The dead should give way to the living.’ ”

It is unlikely to be any different in our towns and cities when natural disasters claim death tolls in the tens of thousands.

Unless we all get ID chips, of course, and you can bet that natural disasters like the Chinese earthquakes and the Burma cyclone will be used as part of the marketing to convince us, or guilt trip us, into accepting them, if not for our own sake, then for the sake of friends and relatives.

NYPD Becomes Spy Agency

The Black Helicopters Really Are Flying Over New York City



First comes the unmarked helicopters, then comes the permanent ever-watching surveillance blimps permanently tethered over New York City :

The helicopter's unmarked paint job belies what's inside: an arsenal of sophisticated surveillance and tracking equipment powerful enough to read license plates—or scan pedestrians' faces—from high above the nation's largest metropolis.

Police say the chopper's sweeps of landmarks and other potential targets are invaluable in helping guard against another terrorist attack, providing a see-but-avoid-being-seen advantage against bad guys.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that no other U.S. law enforcement agency "has anything that comes close" to the surveillance chopper...

Not yet, but real soon.

The $10 million helicopter is just part of the department's efforts to adopt cutting-edge technology for its counterterrorism operations.

The NYPD also plans to spend tens of millions of dollars strengthening security in the lower Manhattan business district with a network of closed-circuit television cameras and license-plate readers posted at bridges, tunnels and other entry points.

Kelly even envisions someday using futuristic "stationary airborne devices" similar to blimps to conduct reconnaissance and guard against chemical, biological and radiological threats.

So New York City, the bastion of free markets, capitalism and an emblem of democracy, will soon have surveillance blimps, thousands of networked CCTV cameras and unseen black helicopters scanning peoples' faces as permanent fixtures of a free society.

Police insist that law-abiding New Yorkers have nothing to fear.

Of course not, they never do. Until they are mistakenly accused of associating with terror suspects for telling the wrong person what time it is outside a coffee bar on Wall Street when the helicopters, blimps and CCTV are watching and recording.

"Obviously, we're not looking into apartments," Diaz said during a recent flight.

Well not yet, anyway.

"We don't invade the privacy of individuals. We only want to observe anything that's going on in public."

The helicopter's powers of observation come from a high-powered robotic camera mounted on a turret projecting from its nose like a periscope. The camera has infrared night-vision capabilities and a satellite navigation system that allows police to automatically zoom in on a location by typing in the address on a computer keyboard.

So what happens to all this anti-terrorist security apparatus when the 'War On Terror' is won? It would have to be dismantled, and the mega-million security budgets for cities like New York would have to be wound back. Right?

That's the thing about 'terror' suspects. If you keep widening the definition of what terrorism is, there will always be plenty of suspected terrorists, and terror threats, to blame for having to put the entire city of New York under total, 24 hour surveillance, forever.

(sourced from Frolix 8)

Will War Be Fought Over Mistranslations?



The news agency your newspaper sources its Iran Vs United States (via Israel) from determines what version of comments made by Iranian president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, you end up reading.

Does Ahmadinejad want to "wipe Israel off the map" or is he more interested in Zionist regime change?

It's an important question because war drums are being beaten by the Bush White House, and their NeoCon propagandists, and the "Bomb them now!" chanting will only get louder as President Bush enters the last few months of his soft dictatorship.

Pepe Escobar, of the Asia Times, picks through the mistranslations :

According to Agence France Presse (AFP), quoting the Fars news agency, Ahmadinejad....,said, "They [Israel] must know that the nations of the region hate this counterfeit regime. And if there is the slightest chance, they will uproot this counterfeit regime."

Reuters had a much more bellicose take. According to its translation, "They [Israel] should know that regional nations hate this fake and criminal regime and if the smallest and briefest chance is given to regional nations they will destroy it."

The Associated Press's (AP) version of the quote is even more apocalyptic. It reads: "The criminals assume that by holding celebrations ... they can save the sinister Zionist regime from death and destruction." The AP copy notes, "Ahmadinejad used an Arabic word, ismihlal, than can also be translated as destruction, death and collapse." An Arabic expert contacted by Asia Times Online said ismihlal means basically "to break down in smaller parts". That's not exactly nuclear annihilation.

We are back to the situation of Ahmadinejad's 2005 alleged threat to "wipe Israel off the map". What he actually said then, quoting his personal icon, the leader of the Islamic revolution in 1979, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was that the "regime occupying Jerusalem should vanish from the pages of time". Yes, this means regime change - as much as the Bush administration always wanted regime change in Tehran. It does not mean a call for a nuclear holocaust.

What AFP translates as "the Zionist regime is on the verge of dying ... throwing a birthday party for this regime is like having a birthday party for a dead person", Reuters prefers to package as "the Zionist regime is dying. The criminals imagine that by holding celebrations ... they can save the Zionist regime from death".

But in this case it was up to APTN, the video arm of AP, to provide the meatier translation: "The criminals wrongly suppose that by holding celebrations, coming to the occupied lands of Palestine and supporting these criminals, they can save the resented Zionist regime from death, annihilation and from the claws of Palestinian fighters."

And here's what President Bush has cherry-picked from the fantastical incorrect quotes from Ahmadinejad to make his case for War On Iran :

"...the message to Iran is that your desire to have a nuclear weapon, coupled with your statements about the destruction of our close ally, have made it abundantly clear to everybody that we have got to work together to stop you from having a nuclear weapon. To me the single-biggest threat to peace in the Middle East is the Iranian regime."

And what has been the end result of all the attempts by BushCo. to isolate the Iranians over their nuclear energy programs and anti-Israel baiting?

The Bush administration's campaign to isolate Iran and Syria has backfired as the two Middle East hardliners ended up this week sidelining the United States, analysts said.

Supported by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah bolstered recent military gains in a deal with Lebanon's pro-western government while Syria emerged from the shadows with the announcement of indirect talks with Israel, they contend.

For Brookings Institution analyst Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian scholar and dissident, both events flow from a broader plan orchestrated by "puppet master" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader.

"You end up realizing there is a strategy being worked out between Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, and they have actually managed to make quite strong headway in the last few days," Abdulhamid told AFP.

"The Iranians are running the show right now," he added.

BushCo. and the bumbling NeoCons couldn't have fucked it up more if they tried.

China : Victims Fighting For Food, Mass Graves For The Dead

The epic scale of the destruction in China is hard to comprehend. The suffering of the millions left homeless will be less easy to understand because we won't hear about it, or if we do, it will be through the positive new reality vision of China's state media.

The relocation of some 12 million homeless Chinese into government camps has begun.

Fighting amongst aid volunteers and desperate quake victims for food and water in Mianyang :




For the tens of thousands who died, including many thousands of young children, there were no funerals. In the rush to remove the dead, to stop the spread of disease, many were quickly fed into crematoriums. For the rest, there were only mass graves :

Mrs Hu, the first lady of China, travels with a spare set of legs.

Unfortunately, the real explanation for this photo is far less interesting.

"There's Something Inside Me, You Can't See It, It's Too Small, But It's Making Me Sick"

A cancer-fear story involving microscopic machinery that most people don't even know already exists, even though they may have already been exposed to its potential adverse health effects :

Scientists have warned that carbon nanotubes could pose a cancer risk similar to that of asbestos, saying the government should restrict the use of the materials to protect human health.

Carbon nanotubes were developed in 1991 and have proved extremely useful, conferring great strength while being very light. They are superb conductors of heat and electricity and have been touted as wonder materials that could form the basis of a new generation of electronics.

Scientists will have to show that exposure from products is safe, said Andrew Maynard, of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, in Washington. "What happens as you demolish products or throw them away in landfill sites? Is there a chance of carbon nanotubes coming out then and exposure occurring? We simply don't know the answer to that and that needs to be addressed."

"This is a reason for concern," Anthony Seaton, an expert in asbestos-related diseases, at the Institute of Occupational Medicine, in Edinburgh, said. "Asbestos started in the same way - people used it experimentally."

The highest potential risk was to workers involved in the manufacture of carbon nanotubes, he said.

Just like asbestos. Of course, mass producers of asbestos products were hiding studies showing how dangerous the fibres were from the 1930s on. Are producers of nanotubes sitting on similar toxic health reports?

If millions find their lungs affected by the presence of nanotubes, just like asbestos, we will be sold on the idea of using nanobots to go into the lungs and clean away the damage. Nanotechnology clearing away the potential wreckage of nanotechnology.

If you polled a thousand people and asked them if they though they had already been exposed to nanotubes, how many would answer : "What the hell is a nanotube?"

Elevator Blues

Not many people can handle enclosed spaces for more than an hour or two. Confinement does strange things to the human mind, as the brain washers of high-security and military prisons around the world well understand. So what's it like to be trapped inside an elevator for more than 40 hours?

Here's the security camera video :





And here's the detail on how Nicholas White spent his time in that elevator, from an utterly fascinating story in the New Yorker, that also details the evolution of elevators, without which we would never have built beyond 10 or 15 floors :

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee.

After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.

At a certain point, he decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black. It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down. (Such a shaft is known as a blind hoistway.) He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft.

He started to call out. “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.

....White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby. He considered lighting matches and dropping them down the shaft, to attract notice, but still had the presence of mind to suspect that this might not be wise. The alarm bell kept ringing. He paced and waved at the overhead camera. He couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. To pass the time, he opened his wallet and compared an old twenty-dollar bill with a new one, and read the fine print on the back of a pair of tickets to a Jets game on Sunday afternoon, which he would never get to use. He imagined himself as Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” throwing the baseball against the wall. Eventually, he lay down on the floor, intent on sleep. The carpet was like coarse AstroTurf, and was lousy with nail trimmings and other detritus. It was amazing to him how much people could shed in such a short trip. He used his shoes for a pillow and laid his wallet, unfolded, over his eyes to keep out the light. It wasn’t hot, yet he was sweating. His wallet was damp. Maybe a day had passed. He drifted in and out of sleep, awakening each time to the grim recognition that his elevator confinement had not been a dream. His thirst was overpowering. The alarm was playing more aural tricks on him, so he decided to turn it off. Then he tried doing some Morse code with it. He yelled some more. He tried to pick away at the cinder-block wall.

At a certain point, he decided to go for the escape hatch in the ceiling. He thought of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” climbing up and down the shaft. He knew it was a dangerous and desperate thing to do, but he didn’t care. He had to get out of the elevator. The height of the handrail in the car made it hard for him to get a leg up. It took him a while to figure out and then execute the maneuver that would allow him to spring up to the escape hatch. Finally, he swung himself up. The hatch was locked.

At a certain point, Nicholas White ran out of ideas. Anger and vindictiveness took root. He began to think, They, whoever they were, shouldn’t be able to get away with this, that he deserved some compensation for the ordeal. He cast about for blame. He wondered where his colleague was, why she hadn’t been alarmed enough by his failure to return, jacketless, from smoking a cigarette to call security. Whose fault is this? he wondered. Who’s going to pay? He decided that there was no way he was going to work the following week.

And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor.

A voice woke him up: “Is there someone in there?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing in there?”

White tried to explain; the voice in the intercom seemed to assume that he was an intruder. “Get me the fuck out of here!” White shrieked. Duly persuaded, the guard asked him if he wanted anything. White, who had been planning to join a few friends at a bar on Friday evening, asked for a beer.

Before long, an elevator-maintenance team arrived and, over the intercom, coached him through a set of maneuvers with the buttons. White asked what day it was, and, when they told him it was Sunday at 4 P.M., he was shocked. He had been trapped for forty-one hours.

The experience changed White's life, for the worst. He never went back to his old job.

Boo Nitrogen

Don't reserve all your Al Gore-inflamed loathing for just carbon dioxide. Hell, everybody hates CO2 now, and they're starting to get bored.

So hello, Nitrogen!

"The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world's peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge," University of Virginia environmental sciences professor James Galloway said in a statement.

While nitrogen alone is inert and harmless, reactive nitrogen compounds — such as ammonia — have been released by its use in nitrogen-based fertilizers and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels.

The researchers propose ways to reduce nitrogen use, ranging from encouraging its uptake by plants to recovering and reusing nitrogen from manure and sewage and decreasing nitrogen emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

I've already tried to encourage my food garden to uptake more nitrogen, but those plants just won't listen.

When Boulders Rain Down Into City Streets



photo from the Daily Mail

Two Bricks Of The Yellow, No Questions Asked

Japan is living a Homer Simpson nightmare. Supermarket shelves have run out of butter. And butter shortages are impacting on the burgeoning new Japanese quiche and croissant market :

The rich yellow stuff has all but vanished from grocery stores across Japan, with the world's second-biggest economy, where fine foods are prized and aisles otherwise groan with abundance. Some stores have tried to ration the few bricks that occasionally arrive by limiting customers to a pack or two, but in most places merchants have been reduced to posting signs apologizing for having none.

Nor does anyone know when butter will be back. Japanese milk production has dropped over the last two years, leaving less available to be churned into butter.

Even bakeries that buy in bulk are finding it hard to get enough, which crimps their ability to turn out the croissants, cakes and quiches that have shouldered their way into the Japanese diet.

As global food shortages and ballooning prices are rocking the desperately poor from Africa to Southeast Asia, Japan's pastry problems qualify as barely more than an inconvenience. No one expects the famously controlled Japanese to riot in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets.

But the case of the disappearing butter has unnerved people here, delivering a psychological blow to shoppers utterly unaccustomed to dealing with shortages.

Weirdly, butter shortages follow an overabundance of milk two years ago that led to a bizarre brewing experiment :

A Hokkaido beer company tried to use some of the excess by brewing a low-malt beer that was one-third milk. Called "bilk" and described as having a sweet taste, the concoction didn't catch on.

Sweet milk beer? Can't imagine why that wouldn't be popular.

What Real Archaeologists Think Of Indiana Jones

Great idea for a story. Indiana Jones is a serial grave defiler and a tomb smasher, but he's also helped make archeology one of the most apparently exciting profession in the world. So what do realarchaeologists think of Dr Jones' methodology? Not much :

Real experts in antiquities acknowledge that the movies are pure fiction that present archaeology as blockbuster adventure, yet they cannot help but cringe at the way Indy manhandles the ancient world.

"There are codes of ethics in archaeology, and I don't think he would be a member. Not in good standing, anyway," said Mark Rose, online editorial director for the Archaeological Institute of America.

In a career spanning 27 years and three previous films, Indy has been both a blessing and curse for the musty world of archaeology, fanning interest in the field beyond academic circles but doing a Hollywood number on how the job actually works.

The reality of archaeological field work is not a lone hero dashing into hidden chambers with a bullwhip and a pistol and coming away with a priceless relic. It's large groups of academics and students painstakingly sifting through grids to retrieve artifacts as mundane as pottery fragments.

"It is rather adventurous in a way, because for the most part, you're going to some exotic country and delving into their past. But it's not an adventure with a whip and chasing bad guys and looking for treasure," said Bryant Wood, an archaeologist with Associates for Biblical Research.

"You're working at one site tediously, probably for many, many years and spending more time processing the finds and writing reports than you do actually digging at the site."

And no fighting Nazis either.

"To be honest, it's a lot of drudge work. You can end up producing a 600-page Ph.D dissertation, and it's important and useful and it's good that someone has done it. But it's not going to be made into a major motion picture anytime soon."

But it's not all drudgery and sifting sand for pottery shards. Archaeologists sure know how to have a good time. Particularly the younger ones :

On a dig in Iraq, one student dressed like Indy, minus the whip, and whenever the team made a notable find, they would play the "Indiana Jones" fanfare...

Wild times.

For Afghan Farmers, Wheat Is More Valuable Than Heroin

Russia Wants China, India To Form 'Belt Of Security' To Stop Afghan Drug Smuggling

NATO forces haven't had much impact on the volume of heroin flowing out of Afghanistan in the past six years of occupation. There's more Afghan brown heroin on the streets of Indonesian, Australian and American cities than at any other time in history. But while the 'War On Terror' has, by effect of its fighting and chaos, led to a massive increase in the amount of smack coming out of Afghanistan, in the end many farmers may drop the once profitable opium poppy crops because wheat is now worth so much more :

Afghan farmers hope to capitalise on soaring food costs by growing wheat instead of poppy crops, with the fall in heroin prices further fuelling the switch.

The price of a tonne of wheat in Afghanistan has almost trebled this year, causing acute food shortages. A changeover of crops has begun in key agricultural regions, said Tekeste Tekie, country representative for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

He said a significant increase in wheat crops is expected from next year's harvest. "The high price of commodities has encouraged farmers to switch from poppy cultivation to wheat. In fact, we are already seeing evidence of this happening, for instance in the Bamian region, where some farmers have planted half wheat and half poppy crops," Tekie said.

The growing season runs from November to June in Afghanistan. If wheat prices stay near their current level, supported by regional subsidies, an Afghan farmer can make up to a third more on wheat than poppy by next year's harvest, according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture.

Russia now proposes that China and Iran join in establishing a 'belt of security' to stop the heroin from leaving the continent :

Tightening security at Afghan borders would dilute "the drugs and terrorist threat," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (said).

It was not immediately clear what Lavrov had in mind. Neither Russia nor India has a border with Afghanistan; and China's border is only 76 kilometers (45 miles). Afghanistan's other neighbors are Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

In Today's News...Well, Nothing Really Happened

You turn on the TV to catch up with the latest BBC World News, but there is no news, nothing happened worth reporting. So the news readers just sit there, and look back at you.

Watch The Video Here : Weird, Funny, A Little Bit Creepy

Washington Post Exposes Billary Creating Fake Realities For Media



Billary isn't preparing to quit. It's waiting for something to happen to save it's campaign for Democratic presidential nominee. But what? And when?

So frustrated is the American media establishment with Billary's refusal to get out of Obama's way, the Washington Post is now running multimedia packages on Billary's continuing campaign called 'The Death Watch Continues'.

But the Post also broke through a glass ceiling of sorts today in thoroughly exposing the other reality of political campaigning where politicians turn on the charm, the smile, the excitement, even when no crowd other than the media is present. Most of the time the establishment media is happy to play along in the crafting and distribution of a presidential candidate's fake reality, because it is a reality they help create simply by covering the campaign, but their bosses have already decided Billary is toast, so the old rules are now history :

A steep descent brings Clinton's plane to Charleston's hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane's wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

It's certainly not the first time the Post, or other newspapers, have reported on how political candidates craft a media reality for the punters, and then exploit it, but the timing of this piece from high profile reporter Dana Milbank is crucial. Billary won't go so it's time to humiliate it into quitting, by exposing just how pathetic, how pitiful, Billary's campaign has become.

The establishment media granted Billary a chance to bow out, as gracefully as possible, but Billary keeps going. Why?

Another $11 million in personal loans to keep the campaign afloat, tens of millions from Billary coffers already lost to the campaign, and a promise of more money to come. Why?

The media says it's over, Billary says "No, not yet." Why?

What does Billary know that the establishment media does not?

We will find out, within a few weeks.

Series Of Bizarre Natural Events Preceded Massive Earthquakes In China

How To Turn A Deadly Disaster Into A Public Relations Triumph

This story from the Times Online pings the word 'conspiracy' to these stories of weirdness before the 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit China a few days ago, but such stories are not rare. In fact, animals acting strangely before earthquakes hit is fairly common.

From the London Times :

One blogger from Shandong province, in eastern China, wrote that more than a month ago, he went to his local earthquake resesarch centre several times to report that his animals had been disturbed and restless.

But, he wrote: "They not only ridiculed me, they accused me of making up stories."

The Chutian Metropolis Daily reported that on April 26, 80,000 tonnes of water suddenly drained from a large pond in Enshi, Hubei province. The province shares a border with Chongqing Municipality, which was devastated by the earthquake on Monday.

On May 10, a Sichuan-based newspaper, the West China Metropolis Daily, reported that hundreds of migrating toads descended upon the streets of Mianyang, the second largest city in the province which neighbours Wenchuan County, the epicentre of the earthquake.

In the city of Mianzhu, 60 miles from the epicentre, bloggers pointed to reports just weeks before the earthquake of a mass migration of more than one million butterflies.

On May 10, a Sichuan-based newspaper, the West China Metropolis Daily, reported that hundreds of migrating toads (below) descended upon the streets of Mianyang, the second largest city in the province which neighbours Wenchuan County, the epicentre of the earthquake.

The China quakes have killed more than 15,000 people, more than 25,000 remain trapped under collapsed buildings, schools and apartment blocks as this is written, and 30,000 to 60,000 are missing. More than 1 million people are believed to have lost their homes.

The scale of the disaster and loss is staggering :

"The losses have been severe," said Wang Yi, who heads an armed police unit sent into the epicentre zone. "Some towns basically have no houses left. They have all been razed."

At least 7700 people died in the small town of Yingxiu alone. Only 2300 survived there.

Across Sichuan, countless thousands more people are missing or buried under the rubble of homes, schools and factories.

The Premier, Wen Jiabao, said 100,000 military personnel and police had been mobilised. "Time is life," he told rescuers.

Hundreds of survivors were pulled from rubble in Beichuan county yesterday, including five kindergarten children who were carried up the mountain road towards the city of Mianyang.

The road into Beichuan is blocked by boulders the size of houses and it takes would-be rescuers one hour to walk three kilometres.

Hardly a building remains untouched, and many have been buried beneath avalanches from the towering mountains on either side.

Remarkably, the Chinese government has managed to turn an appalling natural disaster into an international PR coup, by ramming almost the entire force of its rescue services and military into emergency service and allowing state media to run hours of footage of people being dug out of collapsed buildings and apartment blocks.

As this New York Times report explains, international criticism of China over its anti-free speech Olympics agenda and its brutalisation of Tibetans has disappeared from most media in the past 48 hours, replaced by stories of the Chinese government responding swiftly to the disaster :

Mothers wailing over the bodies of their children. Emergency workers scrambling across pancaked buildings. And a grim-faced political leader comforting the stricken and reassuring an anguished nation.

While such scenes are a staple of catastrophes in much of the world, the rescue effort playing nonstop on Chinese television is remarkable for a country that has a history of concealing the scope of natural calamities and then bungling its response.

...China’s Communist Party leaders are keenly aware that their approach to the earthquake will be closely watched at home and abroad. And after two bruising months of criticism from the West over its handling of Tibetan unrest, the government can ill afford another round of criticism as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in August.

...if China manages to handle a big natural disaster better than the United States handled Hurricane Katrina, the achievement may underscore Beijing’s contention that its largely nonideological brand of authoritarianism can deliver good government as well as fast growth.

Dali Yang, the director of the East Asian Institute in Singapore, said the government might have come to the realization that openness and accountability could bolster its legitimacy and counter growing anger over corruption, rising inflation and the disparity between the urban rich and the rural poor.

“I think their response to this disaster shows they can act, and they can care,” he said. “They seem to be aware that a disaster like this can pull the country together and bring them support.”

The videos of rescue workers clambering over wreckage, hauling out the living and the dead, and racing the injured out of the disaster zones, along with footage of officials helping out and consoling the devastated, were filmed, packaged and distributed around the world by China's state propaganda services. The videos ran on every major TV news channel or program across the EU, the UK, the US and Australia, and the message from the Chinese government was
clear : "This is how you run rescue and recovery missions."

The contrast with the Bush White House's 'whatever' attitude to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is stunning.

Bush's Personal Sacrifice



Psychotic Bush haters will scream that President Bush has sealed himself off from the realities of the wars he has launched and that he makes no great sacrifices or endures the kind of suffering that millions of Americans with loved ones in the war zones have to live with everyday.

Well, they couldn't be more wrong.

President Bush explains just what he has sacrificed during this time of war :

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Bush shows solidarity with the mothers and fathers of the dead and wounded by...giving up golf.

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization's high commissioner for human rights.

"I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life," he said. "I was playing golf -- I think I was in central Texas -- and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, 'It's just not worth it anymore to do.'"

Such selfless sacrifice has won me over. This great president has suffered, too.

You would be foolish to deny it.

UPDATE : No great surprise, turns out Bush lied about when he supposedly gave up golf. He wanted to show 'solidarity with military families', but not for a few months more.

Einstein On God : What Is He Good For? Absolutely Nothing

From a recently unearthed Albert Einstein letter, written in 1954 :

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

From an excellent short article by Gary Suttle, Einstein further explains his 'religious' beliefs :

" My religion...is really the universe--in other words, nature, which is our reflection of the universe."

When asked if he believed in God, Einstein answered "I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists." Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), the renowned philosopher of pantheism, held that God and Nature are one in the same.

A deep sense of mystery pervades Einstein’s outlook. "The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion.... He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness....one cannot help but be in awe when (one) contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure.

In a beautifully touching stage show in the mid-1980s, comedian Robin Williams summed up Einstein's words with this bit of paraphrasing : "My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe".

ED Day Update





I've posted some thoughts on finishing the ED Day : Dead Sydney online novel over at the ED Day blog.

Go Here For That

The short version is that I'm rewriting Dead Sydney to include more of the plot elements that turned up when I was writing the last chapters and to more fully detail post-pandemic Sydney a bit more.

I've also decided to do an online book of short stories of how characters who turn up in Dead Sydney managed to survive the first waves of the bird flu pandemic that kills millions across the city. This book of short stories would then act as a prequel to Dead Sydney.

I've also started work on the first few chapters of the sequel to Dead Sydney, which follows the narrator, Paul, on his journey into the Blue Mountains after escaping the 'invisible' wall that surrounds the city centre, trapping pandemic survivors inside a few city blocks. I think it's going to be great fun writing about city office workers and mountains locals joining together to fight, and survive.

Like Dead Sydney, the prequel and sequel will be free to read online.

I hope to have copies of the Dead Sydney for sale through this blog in a month or so. I'm toying with the idea of printing Dead Sydney with four or more different covers, for a bit of variety, and because not everyone will want to read a book in public that has a cover showing Sydney landmarks strewn with bodies. Some, however, won't mind.

I'll update here when the first short stories go online. The first chapters of the sequel are a few weeks away.

Full Core Psycho

Fox News star nutter, Bill O'Reilly, has had a nasty blast from the past run wild online. It's an old clip of O'Reilly completely freaking out and hurling abuse over some minor technical hitch while he's trying to record some fake spontaneity.

This is something that really has to be seen to be believed :

Watch Bill O'Reilly Go Psycho

And note the calm, though tense, voice of the producer, counting the Rage King in. Obviously he's dealt with prissy, temperamental and obviously disturbed 'talent' like Bill O'Reilly before.

Some background from Raw Story :

The bombastic Fox News host is known for taking the left to task for its bad language. In February, he played a montage of mostly-liberal celebrities cursing on television and complained, "If someone does that on my program? Believe me, they'd get scolded." He added, "They’d never dare do it here. You know why? Because they’d be called on it. And they’d be humiliated in front of millions of people."

In the newly revealed clip from Inside Edition, where he was a host before joining Fox News in 1995, O'Reilly runs into a problem with his teleprompter. "I can't read it, there's no words on it," he complains. "I don't know what that means, 'to play us out.'"

After twice blowing the rehearsal of his closing line, O'Reilly finally erupts, screaming, "We'll do it live. Fuck it! ... Fucking thing sucks!"

What else can you say after viewing that clip?

What a total arsehole.

No wonder, then, Rupert Murdoch loves him so much.

Claim : Giant Space Vegetables To Cure World Hunger

This is just so bizarre, it either has to be a fabrication or...true. Either way, it makes for great reading and imagination fuel :

...the seeds from which these monster vegetables were grown spent two weeks orbiting the earth.

On their return they were cultivated in giant Chinese hothouses....

Scientist hope the pumpkins, as well as two-foot long (06.m) cucumbers, 14lb (6.3kg) aubergines, and chilli plants which resemble small trees, could provide an answer to the world’s food crisis.

It is thought the near zero gravity conditions in space result in super-sized fruit and vegetables with a higher vitamin content.

Crucially, the plants are said to produce harvests which are ten to 20 per cent higher than normal - offering a rich source of food for the country’s 1.3 billion people.

Researchers fired off a batch of 2,000 seeds into space in 2006 on the Shijian 8 satellite.

After germination the best specimens were selected for further breeding.

And now for the much awaited explanation for why sending seeds into space for a few weeks can result in monster fruit and veg :

...it is thought cosmic radiation, micro-gravity and magnetic fields may play a part.

Oh. Okay.

So what happens when a child is 'germinated' in orbit?

Giant Space Children to unleash havoc on Earth?

"Sorry? You Play Video Games For A Living?"

Being paid to review video games would, for most guys under 40, be a dream job. But what's it actually like to be a professional video game reviewer?

According to Charles Brooker, it was a pretty sweet gig. Until he told people what he did for a living :

As jobs go, it was a curate's egg. On the one hand, I could legitimately sit around playing games until three in the morning without feeling guilty - even if I wasn't specifically reviewing whatever I was currently playing, it all provided useful background knowledge. It never felt like work.

But on the other hand, whenever I told people what I did, they pulled pained, sympathetic expressions and automatically began treating me like some kind of adult baby, as though I'd suddenly started wheeling myself around the room on an undersized tricycle, gurgling and suckling on a dummy. Because games are for kids, right? So I was essentially a grown man reviewing Mr Men books, yeah?

And when I wasn't viewed as a child, I was viewed as a nerd. How sad my little interests were. How dorky. It was bad enough enjoying the damn things but, being a games journalist, I took things one stage further by developing some understanding of how they were actually constructed. I might look at a new release and be impressed by the polygon count or the draw distance. Apparently this made me a tedious loser, because society decrees anyone who knows anything whatsoever about computers to be a boring idiot, while those possessing a similar level of nerd-knowledge of football or cinema or food are well-informed and sophisticated and sexually attractive and cool.

Exactly. Brooker's thoughts on Grand Theft Auto IV are worth a read.

Save The Planet : Eat Squirrels And Bugs



In the UK, Brits are supposedly "going mad" for a squirrel dinner. Not because squirrel is particularly nutritious, but for ethical and green reasons :

It's low in fat, low in food miles and completely free range. In fact, some claim that Sciurus carolinensis - the grey squirrel - is about as ethical a dish as it is possible to serve on a dinner plate.

The grey squirrel, the American cousin of Britain's endangered red variety, is flying off the shelves faster than hunters can shoot them, with game butchers struggling to keep up with demand.

...its new-found popularity is partly due to its green credentials.

'People like the fact it is wild meat, low in fat and local - so no food miles,' says Simpson.

Ridley reckons that patriotism also plays a part: 'Eat a grey and save a red. That's the message.'

Don't worry if you're repulsed by the idea of nibbling on all those tiny squirrel bones. Perhaps insect flesh is more to your fancy :

David Gracer lifts a giant water bug, places his thumbs in a pre-sliced slit in its underside, and flips off its head. “Smell the meat,” he says, sniffing the decapitated creature, and the people gathered around the table willingly oblige. Members of the New York Gastronauts, a club for adventurous eaters, they murmur appreciatively as they scoop out and swallow the grayish, slightly greasy insect flesh.

“Perfumey, tastes like salty apples,” one says. “Like a scented candle blended with an artichoke,” another adds.

The giant water bug, or Lethocerus indicus, a three-inch-long South Asian insect that looks uncannily like a local cockroach, is just one of the items on the menu of this bug-eating bacchanal.

Gracer, a self-described “geeky poet/nature boy” who teaches composition at a community college in Providence, Rhode Island, has made it his duty to persuade ordinary Americans to eat insects.

Gracer wants people to move away from getting their protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative impact on the environment...,

“Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.”

It takes 869 gallons of water to produce a third of a pound of beef, about enough for a large hamburger. By contrast, to supply water to a quarter pound of crickets, Gracer simply places­ a moist paper towel at the bottom of their tank and refreshes it weekly.

Insects, he says, also need less food and space than vertebrate sources of protein and therefore could replace or supplement food resources that may become scarce in the future, such as fish stocks, which a recent study indicates may collapse by 2048.

Double-fist sized hamburgers dripping with cheese and lashed with bacon versus ground beetle dip. Dave Gracer has one hell of a sales mission on his hands.

Foreclosed Americans See Their Possessions Auctioned For A Few Dollars

In the fallout from the fantastical conjob that convinced poor people to buy homes they simply could not afford, when prices were peaking, first you lose your house, then you lose everything in it :

The foreclosure crisis is hitting yet another American locale: the self-storage center.

As they lose their homes, people are turning to these humble cinderblock and sheet-metal boxes to store their stuff. But some people cannot keep up with their storage bills any better than they could handle their mortgage payments, and storage companies are auctioning off their property for a pittance.

A cottage industry has developed to profit from these lost and abandoned items.

In three brisk days, Mr. Snyder held auctions at 23 U-Store-It facilities. At the first site, in Gurnee north of the city, he raised the door on an indoor unit, revealing what was essentially a one-room apartment...The contents sold for $675.

The next warehouse, in Waukegan, brought a unit full of — depending on how you look at it — cherished household possessions or somebody’s trash. Boyd bought the bulging plastic bags for all of $6.

For some units, $6 is too much. “A dollar bill, first dollar bill takes it,” Mr. Snyder implored in front of one unit. “Come on, this is everything they own!” To no avail.

What's left of the dream - the dream they crammed into minds through political speeches, through ceaseless advertising, through dozens of 'lifestyle' shows telling you you're nothing if you don't own your own home, through all the newspaper and evening news shows hyping the 'property boom', and how you had to get in quick or miss out forever - are tatters almost worthless.

Well, maybe worth one dollar.

Science, Not Wishful Thinking : Cannabis Kills Pain

Millions of sane and happy people across the West use cannabis infrequently for pain relief, often because the pharmaceuticals available can't do the same job, with so few side effects. As the scientific data mounts in favor of medicinal cannabis, surely the days can only be numbered when doing so remains a crime.

Some of the latest research results here :

Cannabis significantly reduces neuropathic pain compared to placebo and is well tolerated by patients with chronic pain conditions, according to clinical trial data to be published in The Journal of Pain.

Investigators at the University of California at Davis, in conjunction with the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis Research (CMCR), assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis on pain intensity among 38 patients with central and/or peripheral neuropathic pain in a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial.

Researchers reported that smoking low-grade (3.5 percent THC) and mid-grade (7 percent THC) equally reduced patients’ perception of spontaneous pain.

“[A] significant … reduction in [a 100-point visual analog scale of] pain intensity per minute was noted from both 3.5 percent and 7 percent cannabis compared to placebo,” authors wrote. “Separate appraisals using the patient global score and multidimensional [eleven-point neuropathic pain scale also] revealed that both active agents alleviated pain compared with placebo.”

“In the present experiment, cannabis reduced pain intensity and unpleasantness equally. Thus, as with opioids, cannabis does not rely on a relaxing or tranquilizing effect, but rather reduces both the core component of nociception (nerve pain) and the emotional aspect of the pain experience to an equal degree.”

Prince Philip Still Hoping For Mass Death

What an absolutely curious thing for Prince Philip to say :

Rising world food prices are due to overpopulation, Prince Philip says in a rare documentary on the Queen's husband of 60 years.

"The food prices are going up - everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food, but it's really that demand is too great, too many people,'' said the outspoken royal, 86, according to a British newspaper.

"It's a little embarrassing for everybody, no one quite knows how to handle it.''

Absolute twaddle. The main reason why food prices are soaring is from blood-sucking 'food speculators', who've discovered they can inflict as much damage and pain falsely inflating the prices of wheat, corn and rice as they did doing the same to oil.

Here's how Philip managed to get religious leaders like the Pope to step into line with globalist environmentalism :

"It seemed to me that most religions attributed the world to some special creation and I said, 'Well look, if you believe God created the world you ought to take an interest in its well-being'."

Or at least take an interest in the establishment of a global tax, on carbon for starters.

Here's some previous thoughts from Prince Philip on what he'd like to do about the "too many people" problem :

"In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."

Feel the humanity.

Eat Like A Caveman, Your Heart Will Thank You

They may not have had much need for wheels, or shaving, or most forms of communication, but our neanderthal relatives sure knew how to eat healthy, when they weren't poisoning themselves learning what not to eat :

Our early ancestors lived on a diet lacking in cereals, dairy products and refined sugar for centuries before farming developed and some scientists believe that the human body is still best suited to this kind of food.

Volunteers in the trial, run by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, were allowed to eat only foods from a prescribed list, which included fresh or frozen fruit, berries or vegetables, lean meat, unsalted fish, canned tomatoes, lemon or lime juice, spices and coffee or tea without milk or sugar, for three weeks.

All dairy products were banned as well as beans, salt, peanuts, pasta or rice, sausages, alcohol, sugar and fruit juice.

After three weeks, the 14 volunteers who completed the study had lost an average of five pounds...

Scientists found that volunteers who ate the stone age fare for just three weeks had lowered blood pressure and a reduced risk of clots.

It'd be interesting to know what health professionals in the future make of our age of highly processed, sugar and salt rich foods. We'll probably come up trumps with some of the worst and most physically destructive eating habits in the entire history of man.

They won't understand in the future, of course. We will be mocked. But they'll have no idea, no comprehension, of how utterly fantastic so much of the food we're told is bad actually tastes.

Hiss, Crackle, Gone, Flush


Photo from the LA Times

"We have come together today to say goodbye to an old friend, and beloved relative to so many gathered here. We will all miss him, and remember him fondly. Now let us begin the dissolving of his body...." :

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest -- dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers.

Entrepreneurs are racking their brains to think up a way to make this an acceptable part of the modern American green-friendly funeral. Claiming that dissolving your loved one in lye and then tipping the syrup down the drain is far more eco-friendly than carbon-belching crematoriums is part of that initial green push for acceptance, and approval.

Not surprisingly, many people find this process an appalling way to deal with the dead.

It's going to be a tough sell.

Men In Bright, Tight Clothing Work Covertly For The United Nations


The Robert Downey Iron Man movie certainly isn't the first piece of American entertainment where a fictional superhero steps in to do what the military and politicians cannot.

From the UK Guardian :

Since they were born on the eve of the second world war, America's superheroes have been enlisted for all sorts of undercover propaganda duties, from promoting patriotism, war bonds and recycling (even of comics themselves) to warning about health, drugs and landmines.

So it's nothing new that Iron Man, the latest in Marvel's pop-icon pantheon to hit the big screen, is coming to the rescue of the United Nations. In a specially customised comic book, Ol' Shellhead and his costumed cohorts will battle that most terrible of supervillains, a tarnished public image, by demonstrating the UN's positive, proactive roles. Will it work? It's debatable: over the years these earnest, message-laden stories have not always been too effective as weapons of mass persuasion.

When it comes to propaganda, superheroes were probably at their most convincing in the early 40s, when they and their frequently Jewish creators and publishers, were tackling Hitler himself long before America entered the fray after Pearl Harbor. Seventy years ago this year, two young bespectacled Cleveland Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, saw their nerdish fantasies published on four-colour newsprint as Superman burst off the pages of the first Action Comics and sparked a battalion of imitators. Their Man Of Steel started out as a champion against corrupt employers and other scoundrels but he and other superheroes would soon find the perfect bad guys in the Nazis and the Japanese.

For the February 27 1940 issue of Look weekly, Siegel and Shuster were commissioned to create a two-page expose showing How Superman Would End The War. After he pummels Germany's fortifications on the Siegfried Line, Superman grabs Hitler and Stalin and flies them to Geneva where they are found guilty of "unprovoked aggression against defenceless countries" by the League Of Nations, forerunner of the UN. This condemnation of the Nazis seems to have worked as propaganda. It reportedly infuriated Joseph Goebbels, himself a master propagandist, so much that he angrily proclaimed "Superman is Jewish!" in a meeting.

In his Look strip, Superman was restrained from giving the captive Fuhrer "a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw". A year later, another Jewish partnership, New Yorkers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, unleashed their super-patriot Captain America, garbed in the stars and stripes flag, who finally gave Hitler that threatened punch on their first issue's front cover. This was too much for some American Nazi sympathisers and opponents of their country entering the war. Simon and Kirby's studio became the target of hate mail, obscene phone calls and sinister types lurking outside, until mayor Fiorello LaGuardia himself rang Simon to assure him of round-the-clock police protection, saying, "You boys over there are doing a good job. The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you." Once the war was won, however, Captain America hung up his shield. Somehow his comeback as a 50s "commie basher" in the Cold War and Korea never caught on.

As for the UN, superheroes have come to its rescue before. In November 1967, The Justice League Of America featured the UN symbol on the cover of issue 57, in a very right-on plea for racial harmony called "Man, The Name is - Brother!" The UN even had their very own team of superheroes devised by Wally Wood for Tower Comics in the 60s. Called the THUNDER Agents (The Higher United Nations Defence Enforcement Reserves), they were led by Dynamo, dressed in the UN's blue and white colours. Rather than relying on Marvel's characters, the UN could have resurrected this team, but THUNDER Agents vanished after only 20 issues and only aging comic collectors remember them now.

"Get A Little Octopus"

A surreal video of Richard Pryor playing the barman of a gay star bar, that is, a gay bar populated by the aliens of the Star Wars cantina. The Star Wars cantina costumes were hauled out of storage, cleaned up and further detailed for the Richard Pryor Show in 1977 :

Billary Can't Quit, Won't Quit

The best anti-Billary heckle so far, from a thinly attended rally yesterday in West Virginia :

"Down with the monarchy."

Ouch. That's gotta sting.

Dana Milbank profiles Billary in its last days of last shots at the nomination. Unless Billary knows something the rest of the Democrats do not.

UPDATE : In the significantly more racially divided America of 1977, Richard Pryor provided his take on the first black President of the United States :

Starvation = Assassinations

Former Forbes business correspondent Benjamin Fulford thinks he knows what is really going on in the world today :

"...you will notice that Asian countries have stopped buying US government bonds. The US secret government has retaliated by artificially raising food and oil prices.

We are in the middle of World War 3. The US and Israel have been taken over by Nazis and the rest of the world is trying to take them down.

The reason the society has not started assassinations yet is that the Nazis in the Bush/Clinton administration want any excuse to start all out world war. However, if starvation begins in earnest, there will be assassinations."

Fresh Banksy

Romanwyg has rounded up a huge gallery of the graffiti and stencil art on display at the Cans Festival in London. Here are some fresh Banksy artworks :











Go Here For The Full Gallery

More Banksy Art At His Website

White House : Whoops, We Lost All Those Iraq War Emails



It's the equivalent of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration filling brick ovens with filing cabinets full of Vietnam War memos and letters and vaporising it all. Digital letters and memos are so much easier to disappear.

There may well be international criminal charges and war crimes trials for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, once they're gone from the White House, but their faithful and faithfully compromised lackeys don't intend to make it easy. Too many have far too much to hide :

The Bush administration has not found disaster recovery files for White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, raising the possibility that messages sent before and after the invasion of Iraq may never be recovered.

The White House chief information officer, Theresa Payton, said in a sworn declaration that the White House has identified more than 400 computer backup tapes from March through September of 2003 but that the earliest recorded file was dated May 23 of that year.

That period was one of the most crucial of the Bush presidency. The United States launched the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1.

Two federal statutes require presidential communications, including e-mails involving senior White House aides, to be preserved for the nation's historical record. The White House's electronic archiving system has come under scrutiny from Democrats who allege that nearly 500 days' worth of White House e-mails from 2003 to 2005 may be missing.

A question worth asking is whether the storage systems for Bush White House digital records were ever intended to preserve the true record of communications between senior officials during the launching of the War On Iraq. Why would they want records kept of what they knew was an illegal invasion and occupation?

If all digital traces of a period of communication between, say, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, has now been disappeared, then it never happened.

Obama Will Fight McCain For US Presidency

It's over for Billary. If they fight on, they will only sink further into debt and public ridicule. The story will not be how brave Billary is being for refusing to quit, but how crazed Billary is for believing the White House in 2009 is something owed to them, even if the public doesn't want it.

Barack Obama will face off against John McCain. The vast majority of Democrats back Obama, and once Billary quits the backing will become almost unanimous. McCain, meanwhile, is losing voters to Obama already. Americans really don't care about the Reverand Wright beat ups, but they want to get the hell out of Iraq. If Obama fully commits to ending the War On Iraq, there's no reason why he cannot win the White House.

Busted Tech : Billions Spent On Surveillance Society Fails To Cut Crime


Altered art by Banksy

In the UK, some 4.5 million CCTV cameras, and billions spent installing and maintaining them, has proven to be a complete waste of money.

CCTV cameras don't stop crime, they just move it on, and increase the work load for police and investigators. As Philip K Dick pointed out back in the early 1970s, authorities can have all the surveillance cameras and audio recorders they want, but someone still has to sit down and sift the data, and that's the cruncher.

Note in the story below how the alleged failure of CCTV cameras to radically cut crime is used as an argument to now ramp up the monitoring and surveillance of innocent people to extraordinary new levels.

From the UK Guardian :

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:

· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

"We are [beginning] to collate images from across London...The images are from thefts, robberies and more serious crimes. Possibly the [database] could be national in future."

Cheshire deputy chief constable Graham Gerrard, who chairs the CCTV working group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Guardian, that it made no sense to have a national DNA and fingerprint database, but to have to approach 43 separate forces for images of suspects and offenders.

...there were discussions with biometric companies "on a regular basis" about developing the technology to search digitised databases and match suspects' images with known offenders.

The end aim is a national grid of cameras linked to a central database (which will live on police and Scotland Yard servers), with the video flooding in constantly 'searched' by face, body and gait recognition technology to build up a virtual CCTV life of those deemed worthy of surveillance.

That's after they release your image to the net because you are suspected of being involved in a crime.

It's Never Too Soon To Conduct Experiments On Babies' Brains



Attaching lots of wires to an infant's head has resulted in some fascinating discoveries about the minds of the very young :

...from the moment we first open our eyes, we possess the essential mental equipment to make sense of the confusion around us.

We are natural-born mathematicians - for example, six-month-olds can distinguish the quantities eight from 16, and 16 from 32. Babies will infer that a rolling ball will keep moving. They also know that when that ball rolls behind a screen it should pop out the other side. And although they can only babble, babies tell us that the germ of our instincts about age, gender and race are laid down in the cradle.

Hopefully we will never learn what babies really think about all those people looming into view pulling stupid faces and talking in weird, high-pitched voices.

Git More Gitmo

The next time you're taking a holiday and enjoying the snorkelling in the refreshing Cuban waters off Guantanamo Bay, don't forget to pick up a few souvenirs before you head back to your non-cage home :

Reznor Gives Us The Slip

No ads, no teasers, no hype, no waiting. A few days ago a message on the Nine Inch Nails website told fans that something was coming May 5.

Today, a new album, The Slip, arrives and it's free to download again.

Nin.com will be chockers, so hit The Pirate Bay to get The Slip.

There'll be a review of the new album up here in the next day or so.

Trent Reznor makes releasing albums that will be scooped up and appreciated by millions look easy. The major record labels are watching his soaring new wave of success closely, and nervously, for good reason. Nine Inch Nails is now selling hundreds of thousands of CDs, DVDs, books and downloads direct to fans, using free albums as a promotional tool for the live shows.

It's a business model for bands both huge and just starting out which makes major record companies irrelevant.

Free Rules : Give Music Away, Make $1.6 Million In A Week

Trent Reznor Shows Why 'Feeconomics' Works

Skyvertising



1912 : The sky is brilliant blue, clumped with clusters of fluffy clouds. "I see," a child begins, "a doggy! A..a...horsey! And...oh, that one looks my Floaty my goldfish."

2012 : The sky is brilliant blue, small clouds made of soap bubbles and shaped like corporate brands dash and turn on the wind currents. "I see," a child begins, "a Disney! A...a...Nike! And that one looks like Hillary Clinton in profile!"

Skyvertising, according to 'flying logos' creators Flogos, will soon be polluting blue skies above our cities. You can see their video pitch here.

From Dark Roasted Blend :

(Flogos will) shape your logotype into a "cloudy" mixture of soap-based foam and helium - and send it off to drift for miles, as high as 6 kilometers up...

Any form can be made (of any color) and almost any specified location covered. The company seems to maintain that "flogo" shapes are environmentally friendly (they just evaporate after a while, and airplanes will fly through them like through any cloud).

More Cloud Weirdness Here

Mmm, Doublethink...

As all true totalitarians know, the best way to get the message across is through a good poster.

Bizarrely, North Korean propaganda posters are now being displayed as art in a London gallery. Then again, some of the paintings are beautiful, in a paint-by-numbers kid of way, like the peace doves one below :

The exhibition features 400 hand-painted posters dating from the peak of the Dear Leader Kim Sung Il's power in the 1950s to the present regime led by his son, Kim Jong Il.

There are posters penetrating every aspect of North Korean life, with slogans explaining how it should be lived: “Let's create a social impetus for enjoying wearing our national dress”.

Colour scenes of the workers' paradise encourage farmers to boost production in a nation beset by famine and corruption. The Korean War — or the Great Fatherland Liberation War, as it is known in the North — is also a common theme: “Let's not forget the blood-drenched hatred!”

No enemy is hated as much as America. Clenched fists smash US soldiers. The slogans scream: “Let's take revenge a thousand times on the US imperialist wolves!”

The poster slogans are almost as cheesy, and funny, as some of the paintings :

“Let's breed more high-yielding fish.”

“In all institutions and workplaces, let's popularise basketball,”

"Nobody in the world can defeat us!"

"Let's expand goat rearing and create more grassland in accordance with the party!"

"Let's be invincible in every fight."

"Let's achieve even more supremacy"

The translations below the posters are from the London Times.


"Peace Has To Be Defended"



"Let's smash them in a single blow!"


"Let's all become perfect swimmers"


"He who provokes us shall be punished!"

And when you're making a nice cup of tea after a hard day's work done fighting all that Western wolf-like imperialism, don't forget to stop the leaks!


"In families let's save even a single drop of water!"

ED Day Ends

The last chapter of my online novel about life in Sydney after a virus pandemic kills millions is now online. I'll update soon about what I'm going to do with the novel now it's finished (short of a few changes), and why I chose to publish it free online.

Here's an excerpt from the last chapter of ED Day : Dead Sydney :

"This depopulation thing was always going to happen eventually, Paul,” Bossbloke said. “You know that, don't you? The world was already running out of food, water, energy, everything. We had to find 18 million football fields worth of land every year just to keep up with all the hungry mouths being born, while established farmland across the world was turning to fucking desert, or covering over with ice. This had to happen. They would have eaten the whole world.”

“The planet couldn’t sustain so many useless eaters,” I said, I knew what he wanted to hear.

Bossbloke grinned and clapped his hands, once. Crack, like a rifle shot. “Exactly!"

"If selective depopulation didn't happen, billions would have starved to death," I said.

Bossbloke nodded. "Exactly. What was the choice? Depopulation by virus, which means quick deaths, or depopulation by starving people to death? There is no choice. In the end, it really was an act of mercy."

Go Here To Read The Final Chapter In Full

Go Here To Read ED Day : Dead Sydney From The Beginning

The Universe Is Scheduled For Self-Destruction In 100 Trillion Years



It's the kind of news that makes you wonder why you should even bother getting out of bed. What's the point? After all, the Universe will eventually dissolve away to nothing in about 100 trillion years, according to this entertainingly morbid piece of ultimate doom speculation :

Over the course of the next few billion years, evolution will seem to go reverse. The largest organisms and least heat tolerant animals will die out, leaving hardy insects and bacteria. Finally, it'll be so hot on the surface of the Earth that the oceans will boil away. There'll be no place to hide from the terrible temperatures. Only the organisms that live deep underground will survive, as they have already for billions of years.

And the end. The End of all ends ending endingly :

When the last black hole evaporates, all that will remain in the Universe are photons of radiation, and elementary particles that escaped capture by black holes. The temperature of the entire Universe will reach a final temperature just above absolute zero.

Perhaps...this bleak future of a cold, dead Universe is all that awaits us.

Only 100 trillion years to go, make the most of it.

This piece also contains the standard prediction that humans have got about 10,000 years left before we manage to do ourselves in as a species, or that vengeful bitch Mother Nature decides to smite us verily, permanently.

Rubbish. Humans aren't going anywhere. We'll continue to rule this rock. Above ground or under ground. We'll grow new bodies, store our brains online, learn to feed ourselves from sunlight and populate the solar system. We're smarter than cockroaches and more vicious than a starving crocodile gobbling down its own offspring. This planet has never seen anything like us.

Pet Depopulation

It's not exactly a great way to market your animal rescue charity, which is why PETA doesn't make too much of this startling statistic :

Since 1998 PETA has killed more than 17,000 animals, nearly 85 percent of all those it has rescued.

PETA and the Humane Society kill more than 4 million pets and stray animals each year. It's dog and cat genocide, and most who hand over hundreds of dollars in donations every year to PETA, to help save unwanted pets, have no idea this is what they're doing.

A new movement in dealing with unwanted pets emerges, "no-kill" shelter and community outreach adoption programs. They claim they don't take in animals just to kill them, but to get them into homes in local neighbourhoods.

PETA, which chews through $30 million a year, and the Humane Society are depicted as all but pure corporate evil by the "no-kill" movement :

"With the resources at their disposal, PETA and the Humane Society of the U.S. could become no-kill in no time...Instead they have become leading killers of cats and dogs, and the animal-loving public unwittingly foots the bill through taxes and donations."

And all that good meat going to waste.

Millions more pets are likely to hit the PETA gas chambers, as the luxury of pet food, and pet products and pet healthcare bills, becomes an unreality for more and more American families.

Death, The Ultimate Trip

Albert Hofmann, dead at 102, discovered LSD. Or more specifically, he accidentally stumbled across it. Here he details some of his hallucinatory experiments :

He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped onto his finger...

"I had to leave work for home because I was suddenly hit by a sudden feeling of unease and mild dizziness," he wrote in a memo to company bosses.

"Everything I saw was distorted as in a warped mirror," he said, describing his bicycle ride home. "I had the impression I was rooted to the spot. But my assistant told me we were actually going very fast."

Three days later, Hofmann experimented with a larger dose. The result was a horror trip.

"The substance which I wanted to experiment with took over me. I was filled with an overwhelming fear that I would go crazy. I was transported to a different world, a different time," Hofmann wrote.

The LSD eventually created by the Sandoz pharmaceutical firm, where Hofmann worked, also known as LSD-25, was supposedly so powerful one gram could induce hallucinations in 10,000-20,000 people. That an entire population could be dosed with LSD through the water supply became a powerful idea in the mid-1960s. Author Philip K Dick had a couple of extra pages added to his FBI file after he published the short story, Faith Of Our Fathers, in 1967, where a totalitarian regime fed powerful hallucinogens to the populace through the water and food supply to hide their true, hideous identities and to keep the people subdued.

While some details of CIA programs to drug unsuspecting civilians with LSD-25 in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the MK-ULTRA program, have been declassified, the full scope of how LSD-25 was tested on the public, and used as a weapon, remains classified.

Hofmann went to his grave believing that LSD should never have been made illegal, and was a powerful tool for psychological repair, while he also acknowledged its dangers, referring to the drug as 'My Problem Child' in a book title in the mid-1970s.

"LSD can help open your eyes," he once said. "But there are other ways: meditation, dance, music, fasting."

What Hofmann discovered in 1938 had already blackened the history of the Middle Ages, hundreds of years before. LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, was synthesised from ergot, a fungus that grows on wheat and barley. Ergot itself is quite capable of inducing severe hallucinations, and there's strong evidence to back up the theory that much of the witch and religion-related history and violence across Europe in the 16th and 17th century came as a result of entire bread supplies for villages being 'spiked' by the presence of ergot fungus in the grains used. Climatic changes saw mature crops being infected by the black fungus, but many villages were too poor to discard of an entire grain crop and the infected crops were turned into bread for the villages and fed to livestock.

World Wide Web Creator : It Only Worked Because It Was Free

Sir Tim Berners-Lee looks at the online world he helped to create and sees a future of more intense, international and creative collaboration amongst more and more people. It's still early days for the web :

Making the web free to use had a vital role in spreading its use worldwide.

"The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating across the globe has just been a fantastic experience," he said.

"The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit that really we have only started to explore the possibilities of [the web], that continues."

The ubiquity of the web gives the impression that its success was inevitable but that was not always the case, said Robert Cailliau, who worked alongside Sir Tim.

Mr Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web and later helped convince the directors at Cern to "give the web away".

"The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was going to be," he said.

"We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore Cern couldn't hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away."

He said competing technologies, such as Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota, were also offering a method of using hyperlinks to connect documents across computers on the internet.

"If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now."