Hunter Killer Robots Now Dropping BIG Bombs On Human Targets



What is trialled and tested in the war zone, usually, eventually, returns to the homeland. It will take something special for most people to accept that heavily armed hunter-killer robots are a necessity in the skies above our cities.

Then again, maybe we won't show any resistance at all, and we won't need to be shocked into accepting a reality where armed killer robots patrol, all night and day long, overhead.

From SpaceWar :

An MQ-9 Reaper dropped a 500-pound bomb against an anti-Iraqi target...

The Reaper began flying combat sorties in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom July 18 and joined the MQ-1 Predator as another UAS patrolling the sky to protect coalition forces.

"This was a great example of the Reaper's unique capabilities," Colonel Morgan said. "We searched for, found, fixed, targeted and destroyed a target with just one aircraft."

Earth, The Villain

It was the greatest mass extinction of plants and animals in the history of the planet. Comparatively little life "The Great Dying", a quarter of a billion years ago.

"An estimated 95% of all marine species and up to 85% of land creatures perished..."

For decades the popular theory was that a comet impact was to blame. But the truth, according to new theories, may have been even more spectacular :

...it was a cascade of events that began with a monstrous outpouring of hot, reeking lava in Siberia. Repeated floods of lava released massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which produced a runaway greenhouse effect, oxygen-starved oceans and a poisoned atmosphere.

Over a period of about a million years, an enormous quantity of lava from deep in the Earth's interior oozed up through giant cracks in Siberia's crust. The molten mass "froze" into step-like slabs of flood basalts, volcanic rocks known as the Siberian Traps.

Enough lava gushed out to cover an area almost as large as the continental U.S.

The lava from the Siberian Traps sent huge quantities of carbon dioxide and methane (natural gas) into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases caused an epic spell of global warming. Toxic acid rain drizzled from the sky, and the ozone shield in the atmosphere thinned, letting deadly ultra-violet radiation pass through.

...the Earth warmed more near the poles than it did at the Equator. The smaller temperature difference slowed the great ocean currents that keep the waters circulating. The oceans stagnated and lost most of their oxygen. Marine plants and animals suffocated.

Some researchers believe that bacteria in the ocean, living on sulfur instead of oxygen, churned out vast quantities of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a lethal gas with a rotten-egg smell. As the hydrogen sulfide gas emerged from the sea, it choked half of all land creatures.

Theories for now. But very interesting ones. Comets are clearly owed an apology.

We really have little idea of the world before "The Great Dying", 250 million years ago. What creatures hopped or crawled across those vast lands consumed by all that lava? We sift through fossils and old rocks and pick up clues, possibilities that spark new ideas which become new theories. We find mostly tiny shards of the past. We lose the history of this planet as fast it it creates itself, covers itself, destroys itself. We try to make sense of events tens of millions of years ago, billions of years ago, but we mostly only have theories.

While scientists may be close to locking down the cause of such a beyond-armageddon event as "The Great Dying", there may be another explanation entirely we haven't even begun to examine, yet alone contemplate.

The truth of our planet's history is mostly dark to us, beyond the dim light of fairly certain knowledge that stretches back a few thousand years, at the most. There are still vivid arguments about what methods exactly were used to construct The Great Pyramids.

It'd be interesting to know how people 500 years on from now look back on our most popular theories today, particularly about the ultra-ancient history of the planet. Do they mock us, as we now roll our eyes at 500 year old scientific theories about dinosaurs and primitive man?

The article, quoted above, ends with the now standard warning, about The Warming :

While the evidence points to natural processes on Earth as the culprits in the P-T mass extinction, scientists warn that humans may now be contributing to a repeat.

"In the late Permian, Earth itself was the villain, but today we've stepped in as the villain," Kump said.

"Earth was the villain." What an utterly bizarre thing to say.

Those pushing these new theories behind "The Great Dying" describe what happened as "natural processes", and yet Earth itself is "the villain" in a mass extinction?

Definitely sounds like a convert to my favoured theory of Vengeful Nature's War On Humans.

Teenagers With Petrol Bombs And Rifles Took On US-Trained Georgian Army In The Streets Of A Devastated Capital





All photos above by Arkady Babchenko. His photo essay is here.

The reality of what happened in South Ossetia in early August has already been memory-holed by the western media. We weren't told soon enough that the Russians are now the New Bay Guys. We weren't prepared in advance with the usual NeoCon propaganda that teaches us that any bunch of civilians who resist invasion by US-backed military are "terrorists" and "insurgents".

When the news of a new war in the Caucasus broke, the natural instinct was to root for those being attacked, and killed. That is, the normal human instinct. But those who were doing the slaughtering were our, apparent, allies. Those being slaughtered by our allies, with American and Israeli equipment training and support, were the South Ossetians.

The actions of the Georgian military, who'd spent the previous few months being trained by US and Israeli forces, in attacking the South Ossetian capital with missile barrages, looked, and was, appalling. The killing was indiscriminate and clearly aimed at the civilian population (a hospital, for example, was repeatedly hit, for hours).

It has been a hard sell for the western media in making the South Ossetians, backed by Russia, look like the inhuman monsters in this war. They've mostly failed in that task.

And most of the western media, by taking the 'Russia Bad!' meme from the NeoCons as headline fact, missed out on some of the best stories. Unlike Spiegel Online, for example, whose coverage of the war has been outstanding, and astounding.

So to the headline - In early August, in the first days of a new war, gangs of South Ossetian teenagers did exactly what you would do, if an invading army rolled tank into your neighbourhood, after bombing the shit out of your city :

When Georgian forces moved into the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7, they underestimated the Ossetians' determination to resist them. Young men opened fire with Kalashnikovs and teenagers hurled petrol bombs at tanks. Now the local Russian-sponsored regime is triumphant.

The invaders who rode into the destroyed town of Tskinvhali on the morning of Aug. 8 in US jeeps wore US-made uniforms and helmets. Many of them were trained by US officers or served in Iraq as brothers-in-arms of the Americans.

They quickly realised that they weren't facing just a "few dozen separatists"....

The attitude of South Ossetia's youth can be summed up by what student Julia Beteyeva of the University of Tskhinvali told SPIEGEL back in June 2004: "One can only take our republic away from us by killing us."

On Aug. 8, groups of young Ossetians, some of them just 16 years of age, attacked Georgian tanks with petrol bombs. Young men took Kalashnikov rifles from hidden arsenals and fought the Georgians on their own or in groups. At midday, Alan Ulumbegov, 34, born in the eastern German town of Meiningen as the son of a Soviet officer, saw Georgian troops coming up the road. He got his rifle out of a wardrobe. His mother pleaded with him not to go. "I want to protect our people," he replied and went off to fight.

**********

Babeyev was about to cook his dinner when shells started falling around his apartment block. He fled into the cellar of an adjoining building with nine neighbors. It was a sleepless, frightening night. Hours of artillery bombardment reduced apartment blocks into ruins, wrecked cars and turned gardens into shell holes.

The following morning Georgian warplanes flew bombing runs to complete the destruction. Then tanks arrived to "restore the constitutional order," as Saakashvili put it -- an order that never existed in South Ossetia.

South Ossetians can't understand people who call them "separatists." They say they never broke away from Georgia because they never joined the new country when it was formed after the Soviet Union collapsed. It's impossible to find anyone in this part of the world who can seriously imagine the territory being a part of Georgia in future. What much of the world is labelling as "separatism" is in fact the yearning for autonomy by a small people that was divided against its wishes.

Russia Recognises Rebel Regions - Georgia Begs The West For Help, But Finds Little Interest

Russia To Establish Permanent Military Base In South Ossetia

Russia Warns It Will Respond Militarily To New American Missiles In Europe

Key Events In Georgia Crisis

A Photo Essay On The Georgian Attacks, And Aftermath, In South Ossetia
Seven Days That Plunged Russia And Georgia Into War

An Umbilical Rescue

Some of the poorest people in the world are still struggling to rebuild their lives in Myanmar, four months after a cyclone and tsunami-like tidal surge swept away the lives of more than 138,000 people, and left 800,000 more homeless.

The aid trickles in, mass starvation was avoided, but many of the people of the devastated Irrawaddy Delta are haunted by ghosts, the scale of destruction, the remaining corpses and some of the most remarkable stories of survival you will ever hear :

(The storm surge) leveled most of the fragile thatch homes in its path, uprooted trees, swept away the livestock and fishing boats that provided a livelihood and polluted many rice fields with salt.

For those fields that survived, this year's planting season has now passed, and experts say it may be more than a year before many people see their next decent harvest.

Although some houses are being rebuilt and some fields are being worked, the delta remains a vista of ruin and debris, where human and animal bones and the last decomposing bodies still cluster at the edges of waterways.

Fantastical tales circulate among the survivors, the photographer said, weaving a tapestry of stories from this world and the next.

There is the tale of the boy who survived by clinging to the back of a crocodile, and the story of the boatload of people stranded at low tide who sat waiting on the silt for the water to rise, surrounded by stranded corpses.

There is the story of the mother who was reunited with her baby after it was swept away in a washtub, and the story of the woman who gave birth as the cyclone hit and pulled her baby from the water by its umbilical cord.

And there are the stories of wandering ghosts, whose cries for help can be heard at night in haunted places that no villager dares to enter.

Read the rest of the story here.

This Is Terror

Just another few dozen dead kids in the 'War On Terror'. But don't worry, they weren't our children. They were poor, brown kids with hard to pronounce names, somewhere else. These innocent children had to die as an unfortunate but necessary part of the war to stop all the terrorism that, you know, kills innocent children :

A United Nations human rights team has found “convincing evidence” that some 90 civilians — among them 60 children — were killed in air strikes on a village in western Afghanistan on Thursday night....making it almost certainly the deadliest case of civilian casualties caused by any United States military operation in Afghanistan since 2001.

Mohammad Iqbal Safi, the head of the parliamentary defense committee and a member of the government commission, said the 60 children were between three months old and 16 years old, all killed as they slept. “It was a heart breaking scene,” he said.

The bombing occurred around midnight...

...the villagers were preparing for a ceremony the next morning in memory of a man who had died some time before. Extended families from two tribes were visiting the village and there were lights of fires as the adults were cooking food for the ceremony, he said.

Russia, at odds with the United States and much of the West over its recognition of two breakaway regions in the Central Asian country of Georgia, said it would raise the issue on Tuesday afternoon at the Security Council.

Aerial bombing of Afghanistan villages by American and NATO forces just makes the Taliban's job so much easier. We've killed about the same number of civilians in Afghanistan this year as the Taliban and 'Al Qaeda' have. That is, more than a thousand, and probably closer to 2000.

All bombs are terror.

Bored With Ghost Towns? Why Not Try A 'Ghost City'

A casually depressing photo essay from Forbes dams the following cities to likely apocalyptic destruction and potential 'ghost city' status by 2100 :

Mexico City - The aqaufer on which the entire city is built runs dry, the city sinks into the big hole where all the fresh water used to be.

San Francisco, USA - earthquake.

Detroit, USA - population flight.

Timbuktu, Mali - swallowed up the desert.

Venice, Italy - rising sea levels, rising tides.

Naples, Italy - Mt Vesuvius erupts, again.

If global warming doomology comes true, and coastlines around the world are pounded heavily, regularly, by house eating tides, a flight to inland cities is predicted. San Francisco is cited as a city losing its population at a steady rate, a sign of what is to come for crowded, crime-ridden cities around the world, apparently.

Technology will allow the construction of smaller, more self-sufficient cities, where older cities, like London, like San Francisco, will be cursed with aging infrastructure too expensive to fully replace, or even maintain.

It will be cheaper, more efficient, to build new cities than preserve and update the old and crumbling.

Photos Of No Great Importance



























All images by Darryl Mason

More Photos Of No Great Importance Here

Finally, An Urban Flying Saucer Warfare Reality

They don't even pretend to be making this stuff for foreign wars anymore. We will see fast, darting mini-flying saucers, armed with tasers, chasing down suspects in our cities :

Flying saucers could potentially be used to support troops engaged in urban warfare. The military is to assess whether the alien-like aircraft, Moon buggies and miniature flying robots are capable of detecting roadside bombs and insurgents without putting troops in the line of fire.

The saucers, which are less than a metre (3ft) across, have optical and infra-red cameras and can fly over enemy positions without the need for a remote-control operator.

The unusual devices are among the entrants in a Ministry of Defence competition aimed at encouraging the development of urban warfare equipment.

Military analysts believe that street fighting will become an increasing part of armed conflict in the future and want to make sure that British troops have the edge.

Hence, the excitement over manmade mini-flying saucers.

The Stella system operates as a robotic team, with one unmanned aircraft mapping an enemy stronghold, and the second aircraft working with the ground vehicle to provide close inspections.

The devices, like others in the competition, are fitted with thermal and normal lens cameras linked to intelligent software that can interpret pictures to identify potential threats.

Readers of the London Times (in comments) appear to know that these robotic hunter (and eventually killer) flying surveillance systems will eventually be deployed in the skies and in the streets of London.

Just in time for the Olympics, in 2012.

"Winter Will Be Catastrophic For Millions"

The next president of the United States is going to have one hell of a hard time selling the carbon tax to Americans, as a way to stop global warming, when they're enduring winters like this :

"Numb's the word," says the 192-year-old (Farmer's Almanac) publication, which claims an accuracy rate of 80 to 85 percent for its forecasts that are prepared two years in advance.

...two-thirds of the country can expect colder than average temperatures....

"This is going to be catastrophic for millions of people," said almanac editor Peter Geiger, noting that the frigid forecast combined with high prices for heating fuel is sure to compound problems households will face in keeping warm.

Eat or keep warm will be the choice for tens of millions of Americans in such a scenario.

The forecasts...are prepared by the almanac's reclusive prognosticator Caleb Weatherbee, who uses a secret formula based on sunspots, the position of the planets and the tidal action of the moon.

The almanac's winter forecast is at odds with that of the National Weather Service, whose trends-based outlook calls for warmer than normal temperatures over much of the country, including Alaska, said Ed O'Lenic, chief of the operations branch at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.

Blame Global Warming? Okay : Record Flooding Swamps Ireland

Blame Global Warming? Okay : Transfusion Blood At Risk

Blame Global Warming? Okay : Welcome To Your New Submersible Pod Home In The Depths Of A Polar Ocean

Blame Global Warming? Okay : New York's Bridges And Tunnels Could Turn To Wreckage

World Climate Change Providing Fresh Challenges For Farmers

China Declares Victory: Olympics Are Over, We Won, We Beat The USA



According to this story, China's newspapers have already declared China the winner of the most gold medals in the 2008 Olympics. With 43 gold medals already bagged, Chinese media declares, the United States has been defeated.

Confused? China's Dongguan Times is not. Headline : "China Is Not Confused."

I'd have written more about the onslaught of totalitarian-tech that has been on display during the Beijing Olympics - the ultra-surveillance, the constant body scanning, the crushing of free protest in the streets and free speech online, the massive databases that suck up every online detail of everyone who enters the country and generates multiple profiles, the military vehicles roaming public events laden with yet more cameras and yet more scanners - if this was not the way cities in Australia, across the UK, the US, Europe, even New Zealand were already heading.

Surveillance, luggage and body scanning and profiling technology developed in Australia and the US, and elsewhere in the west, was marketed to China for the Beijing Olympics years ago. They brought at least a billion dollars worth of totalitarian-tech tested in the streets of cities like Sydney, London, Melbourne, New York, LA, specifically for the Games.

What worked here, was sold there. And what is perfected there, while our media shouts "Look! Look how unfree they are!", will be sold back to our governments, and added to the arsenal of anti-privacy measures available to those we bless with control over us.

We may not be right there with China on the re-education camps, the many executions, the farming of organs from political prisoners, but the same attitude, the same unwarranted distrust of your own people, the same disturbing desire to digitally lock away their secrets while stealing yours, is there. Here.

For today at least, you will still be captured on surveillance cameras more times walking through the streets of London then you would were you in Beijing, attending the Olympics.

The next big marketing mecca for normalising the daily, often deeply personal intrusion of totalitarian-tech will be, of course, the London Olympics in 2012.

"My Mind Is More Important Than My Possessions"



A selection of Philip K Dick quotes from the Paul Williams book Only Apparently Real :

The police informally said, "We don't want a crusader here in Marin County. You better move away or you'll get a bullet in your back some night. Or worse." I was shucked by deadly people playing a deadly game.

I'm sure within my circle there was at least one agent provocateur.

...your consciousness is built up on introjected moral values that authority figures have deliberately laid on you.

The unconscious relates to the entire world, the whole panoply of the universe. It learns from birds, it learns from ads it sees, it learns from television commercials, it learns from everything at once, not just from a few narrow authority figures...

I could never mock my characters, for screwing up, especially. See, these people are no longer freaks to me, I mean in the sense of being incompetent and fucking up their lives. Because I had completely fucked up my life, I was completely incompetent, and I loved my characters for their incompetence, you see? I could never write down to my characters. Also it made me need my characters more, as compatriots, friends, cohorts…

…my novels are my make-believe world, and they're full of my friends. …

...it makes me wonder, you know, are these characters really real? Do I think I invent them, but in actual fact I am merely picking them up from somewhere?

You know, the greatest incentive to write is that you can't figure out the universe. And you keep trying to do it by writing about it. You can coerce it into making sense by writing a book that makes sense, but what happens is, your books don't make any sense either.

My mind is more important than my possessions.

When things got really bad, miserable and wretched, you know, or I got really frightened, I began to blank out, retrospectively.

You've got three possibilities. (The Universe) is either malicious; or it is completely uninterested and cold, in the sense of it doesn't care, you get ground up in the machinery and it doesn’t notice you; or that it actually has a certain concern for you, and will do - make efforts, if you will only notice its proferring of help, but you must notice its proferring of help.

I didn't really groove with the universe. Now, I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it. My only suspicion about it was that it would find out the truth about me, and its reaction would be perfectly normal: It would get me.

There are no private lives. …one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private.

Let Us Create A New War Reality For You

From 'The Fourth World War' blog :

The US Vs Russia, Via Georgia War has seen an avalanche of faked news, and purposeful manipulation of dramatic footage, being released from all sides of the conflict, but the truth manages to cut through most of the reality tinkering.

The more they try to hide the truth, the more those interested will try to seek it out, sensing they are being fed crap and wanting to find out for themselves what is going on.

Here's how the war began. Broadcast two days before Georgia attack the capital of South Ossetia, killing hundreds, if not thousands of civilians.



It's hard to have confidence in a president who picks a fight with Russia, and then eats his tie on the BBC :



Censorship is rarely this blatant, and clumsy. Or creepy :



"There are grsy areas in war."

It's even creepier the second time around.

Now Russia can rightly accuse the US, and Murdoch, of faking a news reality for this war. They did it just as well with video as Pravda ever did with newspapers.



We in the West mostly got the Fox News version of how this new war began from the mainstream media.

And this 'accident' of using footage of a city laid to waste by Georgia with missiles fired into civilian populations and trying to pass it off as a Georgian city smashed by Russia was all over Australian TV news, and news channels, as well. It was everywhere, around the world.

Majority Of Australians Want Limits On Free Speech, Would Allow Homes To Be Searched Without A Warrant

The battering ram of fear mongering and rampant propaganda really does smash through :

A clear majority of voters believe freedom of speech should not extend to groups that are sympathetic to terrorists (56.8 per cent agreed with this proposition and only 23.2 per cent disagreed).

A smaller majority also said police should be allowed to search the houses of these people without a court order (50.5 per cent in favour versus 33.2 per cent opposed).

"It Tastes Bitter...Like Abandonment"

"Ha! If Russia invades, I will eat my tie! On the BBC! You forget we have America and Israel backing us..."

The president of Georgia loses the bet, and does the only honourable thing :

"You're Either With Them Or Against Them...Sometimes You're Both!"



Okay, it turns out I was wrong yesterday when I said I was wrong about us all living in a Philip K. Dick reality :

A War On Terror board game designed in Cambridge has been seized by police who claim the balaclava in the set could be used in a criminal act.

The board game was deemed to be a "criminal item."

"Surely no member of the public is going to believe that a board game could be used as a weapon?"

War on Terror, similar to games like Risk, revolves around creating empires that compete and wage war.

Each player starts as an empire filled with good intentions and a determination to liberate the world from terrorists and from each other.

Then the reality of world politics kicks and terrorist states emerge.

Andrew said: "The terrorists can win and quite often do and it's global anarchy. It sums up the randomness of geo-politics pretty well."

All High Street retailers declined to stock the controversial game. But more than 12,000 copies have been sold online or through independent stockists.

12,000 non-mainstream sales for an independent board game is excellent work.

More here.

Here are the rules for the War On Terror board game :

The game is for two to six players.

All players begin with fledgling empires on a world map which they expand through the acquisition of land, oil and cities.

At any time players can abandon the "pursuit of liberty and oil" in favour of becoming a terror state - or they are designated a terror state by a random "Axis of Evil" spinner.

Empires can also train their own terrorists to target rival empires, although these groups often turn on you later in the game.

What's the problem here? This is the exact same kind of scenario-exploring, role-playing games that the world's militaries have been using intensely in the past decade.

So they can play war games with toys and we can't?

(via BoingBoing and the Cambridge News)

More on the game from the official website :

Everyone starts with the best intentions. Then things start to get cramped. Then you notice your neighbour has more oil than you. Before long, war is waged, nukes are dropped, revolutions are fought and terrorists are doing your dirty work...

So how do you 'liberate' the world these days? Is it OK to fund terrorism to defeat a greater evil? Do weapons of mass destruction exist? And what's with that balaclava?

A selection of game play cards from the War On Terror board game :






A reality based board game explaining the methodology, ideologies, and exploring the desires, that link state warfare and terrorist violence.

Just like the real world.

Too close to reality.

"You're Either With Them Or Against Them...Sometimes You're Both!" from the 'WoT' board game.

Gamers Have Fought This War Before

I thought we were living in a Philip K Dick reality. I was wrong.



We're actually living in a Tom Clancy videogame :

Recent news coverage of the worrying ground war between Russia and Georgia could well leave gamers with a sense of deja vu.

The South Ossetia war, which began on August 7, bears a close resemblance to events portrayed in the 2001 Xbox and Playstation 2 game "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon," the first level of which takes place against the backdrop of a struggle between Georgian rebel forces and the legitimate Georgian government in the South Ossetian region.

Ghost Recon's plot follows these skirmishes with a full-scale Russian invasion of the region, a subsequent evacuation of US forces, and ultimately the fall of the Georgian government.

The creators of Ghost Recon had their Georgia-Russia war beginning in April, 2008. The build up to the real war had certainly begun by then, with Russian special forces and psychological warfare experts working away in South Ossetia, helping to build up resistance to the increasingly US-controlled Georgian government, aiming to keep the territory for larger Russia. At the same time, American and Israeli 'military trainers' were flying into Georgia to prepare the locals who would do the actual fighting for the coming conflict.

How did Tom Clancy see the Georgia Vs Russia war playing out?

...we can expect the South Ossetia conflict to culminate in a dramatic assault on Red Square and the Kremlin by NATO troops..."

Okay, now we know it was all just fiction.

Tarantino Versus Hitler

American Jews Go On Nazi-Killing, Skull Smashing, Terror Spreading, Swastika-On-Forehead Carving Massacre

In a few weeks, Quentin Tarantino will begin shooting his long-awaited World War 2 revenge fantasy, 'Inglorious Bastards', starring Brad Pitt, Simon Pegg and Adam Sandler.

What's it about? The short version is this : In 1941, a gang of American Jewish hillbillies are dropped into Nazi-occupied France on a simple, secret mission - kill as many Jew-hating Nazis as they can, and collect their scalps as mementos. The Jewish soldiers are vengeful, giggling terrorists, who mutilate the wounded and the dead, beating people to death with baseball bats and carving swastikas on foreheads.

For the 'Basterds', this a suicide mission, with little connection to historical fact.

If you want to see Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds' (to use Tarantino's spelling from the hand-written title of what is purported to be the last draft of the script) in mid-2009 knowing nothing more than the above, then stop reading right now. In fact, don't visit this site in the next few weeks, because we'll be coming back to look at more from the massive July, 2008 Tarantino script.

This is going to be a brutally violent, and extremely wordy movie. Nothing new there for Tarantino. QT addicts love his lengthy dialogue-rich scenes, and blood-splattering savagery.

But 'Inglourious Basterds' is easily going to be the most controversial Tarantino movie, so far, and not solely because of the violence this time.

Basically, 'Inglourious Basterds' is a very modern fantasy about how American Jews helped kill Adolph Hitler and thereby won World War 2, all before Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December, 1941.

This is how Brad Pitt's character, Lt. Aldo Raine, lays out the Nazi-killing mission for his new recruits (all typos from the script are Tarantino's) :

LT ALDO
I'm putting together a special team. And I need me eight soldiers. Eight-Jewish-American-soldiers. Now y'all might of heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we'll be leaving a little earlier. We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwackin, guerilla army, we're gonna be doin one thing, and one thing only, Killin Nazi's.
The members of the National Socialist Party, have conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation, and terror. And that's exactly what we're gonna do to them. Now I don't know bout y'all? But I sure as hell, didn't come down from the goddamn Smoky mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my through half of Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi's lessons in humanity. There the foot soldiers of a Jew hatin, mass murderin manic, and they need to be destroyed.
That's why any and every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin a Nazi uniform, there gonna die.
We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disembodied, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives.

Lt. Aldo then lays out the challenge.

LT. ALDO
...I got a word of warning to all would-be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And y'all will git me, one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazi's.....or you will die trying.

This won't be a subtle movie. Adolph Hitler (Joe Pesci? We wish!), channeled through Tarantino, is the living embodiment of every cliched mad-ranting Hitler of 1940s American cinema. Historians will gag in horror when they see 'Inglorious Bastards', but then Tarantino's not doing this to cement the historical record on a foundation of facts. This is his World War 2 revenge fantasy and, presumably, it's supposed to be fun, funny and mostly fact-free.

Here's some Tarantino dialogue for one of the table-pounding Hitler scenes from the July, 2008 screenplay :

HITLER
How much more of these Jew swine must I endure? They butcher my men like they were fish bait! This pack of filthy degenerates, are doing what the Russian army didn't, and Patton's army couldn't. Turning soldiers of The Third Reich, into superstitious old women!

Hitler pounds furiously on the desk with his fist.

HITLER
No, no, no, no, no! I have heard the rumors myself! Soldiers of the Third Reich, who have brought the world to there knee's, now pecking and clucking like chickens. Do you know the latest rumor they've conjured up, in their fear induced delirium? The one that beats my boys with a bat. The one they call "The Bear Jew"....is a Golem. A avenging Jew angel, conjured up by a vengeful rabbi, to smite the Aryans!

Some more of Tarantino's Hitler.

HITLER
You want to prove their flesh and blood? Then BRING THEM TO ME! I will hang them naked, by their heels, from the eiffel tower! And then throw their bodies in the sewers, for the rats of Paris to feast!

I'm not convinced that this really is the 'Final Draft' of the script as Tarantino claims on its front page. A timed reading shows the movie, based on this script, will run more than four hours, most of it action-free dialogue, with one of the dumbest finales seen in any major movie in recent years. If the ending is filmed as the July 2008 script reads, cinemas will be pulsing with laughter. But the ending is not supposed to be funny.

And he wants to debut this at Cannes next June?

It's hard to imagine actors of Brad Pitt's calibre will do Tarantino's dialogue exactly as it reads in this 'Final Draft' screenplay. A script doctor has probably been brought in for a bit of a polish, which may be why the rest of the cast (Adam Sandler, Simon Pegg) have not yet been 100% confirmed.

More Next Week....

Blogspeak Now Infiltrates Mainstream Headlines

Wow. A totally bloggy headline from a very straight Associated Press Olympics-related news
story :

Phelps becomes winningest Olympic athlete ever

No irony, no humour. Just a very bloggy made up word hitting the mainstream media headlines.

Winningest!

Awesome!

How Many Secret Service Agents Does It Take To Help One American President Stand Up?

The question should not be was George W. Bush drunk on at least one day during his visit to Beijing Olympics. The question should be : How completely fucking hammered was he?

Russia Vs Georgia : Medvedev Declares Mission Accomplished

According to this report, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev has announced the end of military operations against Georgia.

"I have taken the decision to end the operation to force Georgian authorities into peace," Medvedev was quoted as saying at a meeting with defence officials.

"The purpose of the operation has been achieved.... The security of our peacekeeping forces and the civilian population has been restored."

The announcement comes after a day of heaving bombing throughout Georgia.

Georgia's other separatist region of Abkhazia has also launched a military offensive to force Georgian troops out of the upper part of a disputed gorge, Abkhazia's self-styled foreign minister said.

"Our goal is to free the Kodori Gorge of Georgian troops," Abkhazia's Sergei Shamba said by telephone from Abkhazia's Black Sea capital Sukhumi.

Abkhaz officials insisted that Russia, which has boosted its peacekeeping force in the province to 9,000 in recent days, was not involved in Tuesday's military operation.

Like Georgia's other separatist region South Ossetia, Abkhazia is populated by an ethnically distinct group and wants nothing less than full independence from Georgia.

So is that really it? How disappointed the NeoCons will be. They were getting so excited comparing the Russian military, defending its citizens in South Ossetia, to the Nazis.

It's clear the action taken by Georgia, as the Olympics began, was not taken without the permission and approval of the United States.

Israel and the United States have had more than 1500 military 'trainers', between them, in Georgia for months gearing up for this clash. But you have to wonder how much of a surprise all this was to President Bush. He looked seriously pissed off when he made his demands yesterday for Russia to pull back to its borders. But was Bush pissed at Putin, his great friend (or so Bush once claimed), or was he pissed at Dick Cheney's office?

We'll probably never know.

UPDATE : President Bush held a short, sharp press conference a few hours after he returned from ogling bikini-clad beach volleyball players at the Beijing Olympics. He said :

"Russia's actions this week have raised serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region. These actions have substantially damaged Russia's standing in the world. And these actions jeopardize Russia's relations with the United States and Europe."

Vladimir Putin's response :

"The very scale of this cynicism is astonishing -- the attempt to turn white into black, black into white and to adeptly portray victims of aggression as aggressors...

"They of course had to hang Saddam Hussein for destroying several Shiite villages. But the current Georgian rulers, who in one hour simply wiped 10 Ossetian villages from the face of the earth, … are players that have to be protected."

No more fishing trips together at the Bush family estate then.

How To Turn $1.7 Million Into $200 Million In Less Than A Week

The Great American Financial crisis was a controlled demolition of the American economy, and just like 9/11, it appears a few people knew exactly what was coming, and when :

In a gambit with such low odds of success that traders question its legitimacy, someone wagered $1.7 million that Bear Stearns shares would suffer an unprecedented decline within days. Options specialists are convinced that the buyer, or buyers, made a concerted effort to drive the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm out of business and, in the process, reap a profit of more than $270 million.

Whoever placed the bet used so-called put options that gave purchasers the right to sell 5.7 million Bear Stearns shares for $30 each and 165,000 shares for $25 apiece just nine days later, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That was less than half the $62.97 closing price in New York Stock Exchange composite trading on March 11. The buyers were confident the stock would crash.

"Even if I were the most bearish man on Earth, I can't imagine buying puts 50 percent below the price with just over a week to expiration,'' said Thomas Haugh, general partner of Chicago-based options trading firm PTI Securities & Futures LP. ``It's not even on the page of rational behavior, unless you know something.''

During the next four days, New York-based Bear Stearns unraveled in the swiftest investment-banking failure in Wall Street history. Speculation about a cash shortage proved self- fulfilling, causing customers and lenders to demand their money back. Bear Stearns's stock sank 47 percent to $30 on Friday, March 14. That's when the Fed moved to stave off a panic by helping the U.S. Treasury arrange JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s purchase of the company for $2 a share, a price unimaginable to the firm's 14,000 employees.

In the aftermath, Bear Stearns Chief Executive Officer Alan Schwartz told Congress that the firm was toppled by rumor- mongering and abusive trading. Regulators have begun peeling back trading records, hunting for suspects.

NeoCons Begin The New Chant : Send Americans To Die In Georgia

'It's Raining Nazis In Russia!'

NeoCon William Kristol is one of the great liars of the 21st century. Few have done more than Kristol to deceive Americans and Brits into sending their children to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now he wants the shattered army of the United States to fight the Russians over Georgia. And like all good NeoCons, Kristol refuses to acknowledge that the true act of aggression in the Caucasus last week, as the Olympics began, was from Georgia, backed by US and Israeli 'military trainers', and not Russia. The Georgian/US/Israel collective attacked the capital of South Ossetia, killing hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians.

The new NeoCon chant is that Russia wants to overthrow the US backed government of Georgia, and that all the aggression is coming from the Russians. Kristol lays out the new NeoCon mainstream media chant in the pages of the New York Times, of course :

....Russia has sent troops and tanks across an international border, and now seems to be widening its war against Georgia more than its original — and in any case illegitimate — casus belli would justify.

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

But Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.

For that matter, consider the implications of our turning away from Georgia for other aspiring pro-Western governments in the neighborhood, like Ukraine’s. Shouldn’t we therefore now insist that normal relations with Russia are impossible as long as the aggression continues, strongly reiterate our commitment to the territorial integrity of Georgia and Ukraine, and offer emergency military aid to Georgia?

Incidentally, has Russia really been helping much on Iran? It has gone along with — while delaying — three United Nations Security Council resolutions that have imposed mild sanctions on Iran. But it has also supplied material for Iran’s nuclear program, and is now selling Iran antiaircraft systems to protect military and nuclear installations.

It’s striking that dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes — whatever their differences — seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies. So Russia helps Iran. Iran and North Korea help Syria. Russia and China block Security Council sanctions against Zimbabwe. China props up the regimes in Burma and North Korea.

The United States, of course, is not without resources and allies to deal with these problems and threats. But at times we seem oddly timid and uncertain.

Pick up a gun, Kristol, round up your NeoCon buddies, and go lead the charge. What are you waiting for?

UPDATE : Joe Klein has already declared War On NeoCons, and they're proving him right with their spectacularly dangerous demands for the Pentagon to hit back at Russia. Klein calls the NeoCon rabble-babble already clogging up newsprint and airwaves "Naziphilia" :

"...it is important, yet again, to call out the endless neoconservative search for new enemies, mini-Hitlers.

"It is the product of an abstract over-intellectualizing of the world, the classic defect of ideologues. It is, as we have seen the last eight years, a dangerous way to behave internationally. And it has severely damaged our moral authority in the world... I mean, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after Abu Ghraib, after our blithe rubbishing of the Geneva Accords, why should anyone listen to us when we criticize the Russians for their aggression in the Caucasus?"

Raw Story rounds up the nutbags, who refuse to acknowledge that US/Israel ally Georgia kicked off the bloodshed with a missile storm on the civilian population of South Ossetia's capital. Here's Robert Kagan setting out the meme :

"Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

"The mood is reminiscent of Germany after World War I, when Germans complained about the 'shameful Versailles diktat' imposed on a prostrate Germany by the victorious powers and about the corrupt politicians who stabbed the nation in the back."

There's no point quoting the rest of the NeoCon rabble-babble. It's all the same ridiculous rhetoric.

Here's an idea for all the NeoCons who want the United States to go to War On Russia : Send in Israel troops first, and see how that goes down. Israel already has some 800 military 'trainers' in Georgia. Let them have the first crack.

No? Didn't think so.

The expansion of war between Russia and Georgia, and with all the mysterious terrorist bombings on civilians in Russia and elsewhere that will follow (no doubt to be claimed by terror groups never heard of before, with ski-masked ranting videos supplied by the always helpful IntelCenter) will probably guarantee John McCain wins the White House in November. Now surely that's just a coincidence...

Spellun Fings Rite Knot Sew Importint AniMor

There is something more annoying than bad spellers on blogs and in blog comments. And that's the spelling and punctuation police. Are these people trying to help, or do they get off slamming others for easy and not generally important errors? Basically, if you can correct another's bad spelling, then you know what word they were attempting to use. So why bother?

God knows I've unleashed my fair share of horrific spelling, and even worse punctuation and grammar (or should that be "worse, even : grammar?") on this blog. Spell check is fantastic, but I'm an Australian writing a blog for a majority audience almost even split between Australian and American readers. So when I write the word 'colour', do I use the Australian-British spelling - c-o-l-o-u-r - or do I go with the American variant - c-o-l-o-r? Most times, I go with the spelling that looks right in the sentence, if that makes any sense.

As the internet (e-mail, blogs, social networking, comments) becomes the main form of written communication for at least one third of the world in the next five to ten years, we are going to have to learn to be far less hung up about spelling, and punctuation, in general.

I love the way uncapitalised and un-punctuated comments look. So clean and free. I might start blogging like this soon, but my brain and fingers automatically insert commas and full stops without my knowledge. It's hard to shake off the training of English and journalism teachers.

I think there is some wonderful creative spelling going on today, and I think we can do away with a lot of vowels, when, for example, the letters 'clr' are obviously meant to mean the word 'colour' (or 'color) in the sentence. We are already seeing the influence of text messaging and blog comment word shortening slipping into every day usage, and this will only increase as more kids brought up on digital communication move into the workforce, and expand their influence across the new internet media.

I probably spend more time reading blog comments from sites around the world than I do reading actual stories or original blog posts, and the more I'm exposed to what English teachers would have once called "woeful spelling", the less wrong it looks to me. I now love to see the English language changing, evolving, unshackling before my eyes.

It feels like the English language is being set free from the brain-numbing rules and restrictions once imposed by the educated classes, which was also a handy way for the educated, upper classes to find out just how far down the social scale from another someone was. Do World War I letters from the trenches have less emotional power because so many were written by teenagers with little grasp of The Queen's English? I believe, in fact, the complete opposite.

Okay, another long-winded introduction out of the way. Here's the gist of the news story under discussion :

...a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity", why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

"Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."

To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor", "occured", "thier", "truely", "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").

To that I would add these variants : "fuku", "upyors", "tradishonul", "yor", "wanka"...

Akshuly, this is kinda fun.

My Year 7 high school English teacher, however, would be horifyed.

UPDATE : In an excellent story, a New York Times journo wonders how exactly she is supposed to excerpt, or quote, blog comments and message board missives with creative spelling and anarchic grammar. Does she leave the words and sentences as the commenter posted them, or should she make the corrections her journo training screams at her that she must?

I am stumped how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs.

Take a passage signed by zipthwung, an astute online commenter: “pornography if for the ruling classes and their violent vulgar all consuming appetites. Or their slaves.”

Interesting. But so as not to distract you with the typos, should I have repunctuated it, adding commas and plunking a hyphen into “all-consuming”? Should I have turned that “if” to “is”?

Zipthwung — I can testify, as a longtime fan — is a poet and a mystic. Maybe he means “if.”

Week after week, these questions dog me. Sometimes I opt to copy words and paste them into the text of a column — to quote verbatim. I treat message-board words as if they had been written in books, articles, brochures or press releases. Is that what zipthwung wants? Should I care?

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

The Sanhedrins of style at newspapers are not so amused by the merry game of signification. Most of them seem to believe in standardizing spoken English — to a point. At The New York Times, using nonstandard spelling to reflect dialect — “he wuz a good friend” — is seen as a sketchy business, since no two writers do it the same way and since it can reflect bias. But rhetorical eccentricities ought to be preserved. “I’m friends with him 20 years,” for example, does not have to become, “I have been friends with him for 20 years.”

Some architects of Times style have proposed that communication on a message board should be treated like the text of a novel. As novels of sorts, message boards ought to be excerpted using the same protocols that newspaper critics use to quote from fiction. That is, we should go light on the academic sics, addition brackets and omission ellipses, which in a paper can come across as sneering, cluttered, pretentious or all three.

I’ll go on treating message boards like novels until I am persuaded otherwise.

Reports Claim 1600 Civilians Slaughtered By US Ally Georgia On Russia's Border

Proxy War Breaks Out Between US/Israel And Russia

Georgia Declares State Of War With Russia



UPDATE : From the BBC, Georgia declares state of war with Russia. Russian jets destroy Georgian oil port facilities. US President Bush demands Russia respect Georgian souvereign territory. Cities across Georgian being hit by Russian jets, reports CNN.

UPDATE : A quick summary of news from the Interfax news agency, 8pm Sydney time :

* 1600 are now believed to have been killed in the South Ossetia capital under a missile barrage by Georgia, purposely targeting civilians.

* 50 Georgian soldiers have been killed in South Ossetia, more than 400 wounded.

* Georgian soldiers are now surrendering in the SO capital Tskhinvali

* Martial law is expected to be enacted in Georgia.

* Russia claims it is not waging war on Georgia, but a "peacekeeping mission."

* South Ossetia forces claim to have shot down two Georgian jet fighters.

* Georgia claims it has shot down 10 Russian jets, and is interrogating a captured pilot.

* 15 Russian peacekeeping troops are believed to have been killed in the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali.


PREVIOUSLY....

If you're a dictatorship backed by the US and Israel, there's no time like the Olympics to pick a fight with Russia.

Before we are lost in an ocean of anti-Russian propaganda from the mainstream Western media, as a new war in the Caucuses erupts, it's important to remember that Georgia hit South Ossetia first, smashing its capital and reportedly killing more than 1400 civilians and a dozen Russian peacekeepers.

The attack by Georgia followed weeks of rising tensions between the Georgian dictatorship and the breakaway South Ossetia region, including the killing of Russian soldiers inside South Ossetia and the mortaring of villages by Georgia across the border.

Georgia has been building up a massive arsenal of weapons, helicopters, tanks and jets in the past two to three years, most of which were supplied by the Ukraine and the West. In recent months, American and Israeli troops have been on the ground in Georgia, training its military. Israel and the United States still have troops in Georgia, and are believed to have been involved in more than an 'advisory capacity' in the attacks on South Ossetia.

Energy pipelines flowing through South Ossetia are, once again, the focus of the war behind the war, as Israel and the US sets their sights on wrestling control of the key pipelines away from Russia and its allies.

This conflict has been building for years, and the apparent sudden outbreak of fighting is anything but sudden. Clearly, the timing of Gerogia's attacks on South Ossetia were meant to coincide with the Olympics, when much of the world is distracted by televised sports. US and Israeli military trainers and advisors have been preparing the Georgian military for this new conflict for many months.

This is likely to get extremely ugly, and far more deadly.

More details and sources at The Fourth World War blog.

Check His Head For The 666

The new John McCain election strategy? Seed gullible minds with the idea that Barack Obama just might be the biblical AntiChrist.

Watch the ad, then read the explanation below :



From Time Magazine :

(The McCain ads) first caught the attention of Democrats familiar with the Left Behind series, a fictionalized account of the end time that debuted in the 1990s and has sold nearly 70 million books worldwide.

"The language in there is so similar to the language in the Left Behind books," says Tony Campolo, a leading progressive evangelical speaker and author.

As the ad begins, the words "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One" flash across the screen. The Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia who founds The One World religion (slogan: "We are God") and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of several Obama clips in the ad features the senator saying, "A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for."

The visual images in the ad, which Davis says has been viewed even more than the McCain's "Celeb" ad linking Obama to the likes of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, also seem to evoke the cover art of several Left Behind books.

...the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.

Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign's red-white-and-blue "O" logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.

The cataloguing of similarities Obama shares with the Antichrist began nearly two years ago.

It's not hard to see how some Obama-haters might be tempted to make the comparison. In the Left Behind books, Carpathia is a junior senator who speaks several languages, is beloved by people around the world and fawned over by a press corps that cannot see his evil nature, and rises to absurd prominence after delivering just one major speech. Hmmh.

The speculation reached a fever pitch after Obama's European trip and the Berlin speech in which he called for global unity. Conservative Christian author Hal Lindsey declared in an essay on World Net Daily, "Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him-a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib...The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance."

A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain's candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote. That's what worries Campolo, who also sits on the Democratic party's platform committee.

"Those books have created a subliminal language and I think judgments will be made unconsciously about Barack Obama," he says. "It scares the daylights out of me."

And Armageddon doesn't?

Claims that George W. Bush was the AntiChrist in 2000 and 2004 were also extremely popular online. Didn't stop him from winning the White House. Twice.

Anyway, what's the problem with Obama being the big AC? According to the biblical mythology, first we get the AntiChrist, then Jesus makes his long awaited return tour of Earth. Isn't that a good thing? Aren't we supposed to be fully keen for The Second Coming so we can get off this sin-drenched rock?

Of course, there's a thousand odd year battle between AC and JC to survive first, but then it's all Good News.

For Christians anyway.

UPDATE : My mistake, according to End Times 'scholars', John McCain is actually the AntiChrist :

"What started us looking at this issue is the fact that Senator McCain has declared his intention to maintain US forces in Iraq for a hundred years," said David Jenkins, a leading Biblical scholar. "That means that McCain wants to control Babylon for at least a century." According to many scholars of the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist will try to rebuild the ancient city of Babylon in order to use it as a springboard for an international effort at world domination. Ultimately, the Antichrist will marshal forces from Babylon to spark a showdown with Christian and Jewish-led forces in the battle of Armageddon.

"We believe that the End Times is near, based on the pattern of wars, earthquakes. and other strange phenomena we've been witnessing since the start of the New Millennium," said Jenkins. "Given that it may be imminent, the person who controls Babylon must be the Antichrist."

Until 2003, many Christians believed that Saddam Hussein might be the Antichrist, since he started excavations to restore Babylon in the mid 1970s. But Hussein's death meant that the Antichrist is someone else. Since Obama wants to get out of Iraq, he can't be the AntiChrist.

Does all this nuttery qualify as Extremist Christianism?

Dance Of Light



The challenge is to only watch it once!

Hey NeoCons, Up Yours

Joe Klein finally snaps, in Time Magazine online, and has his "I'm As Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going To Take This Anymore" moment :

There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003. Their motivations involve a confused conflation of what they think are Israel's best interests with those of the United States. They are now leading the charge for war with Iran.

In early 2003, during my first weeks as a Time Magazine columnist, I wrote a handful of skeptical columns about the coming war in Iraq, including this one about Israel's security as a hidden casus belli.

We have lost more than 4000 Americans, tens of thousands have come home grievously injured, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and wounded, and we are weaker, palpably and morally, as a result.

I am not going to make the same mistake twice. I don't think a war with Iran is coming, thank God, but this time I am not going to pull any punches. My voice isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, but I'm going to do my job--and that means letting you know exactly where I stand and what I believe. I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous.

They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them.

The rest of Klein's extraordinary declaration of War On NeoCons Who Want War On Iran is here.

UPDATE : Justin Rainmando knows exactly where Joe Klein is coming from :

On September 11, 2001, the neocons were in place, ready to take advantage of the worst terrorist attack in our history. Willing and able to implement their preconceived war plans, deciding to attack Iraq rather than al-Qaeda's Afghan stronghold "because it was doable," as Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual eminence grise of the administration's Israel-firsters, bluntly put it.

For a long time there has been a reaction building among Jewish progressives – a phrase that seems oddly redundant – against the domination of pro-Israel and Jewish organizations by right-wing extremists who represent nothing but their own prejudices, and certainly do not represent the American Jewish community.

...Klein's outspokenness – which, I think, underestimates the power of Christian neoconservatives, and not only evangelicals – is part of this new frankness about the ethnic factor in American politics, which is coming to the fore in this era of Obamamania, and that's all to the good.

In his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Klein goes on at length about this thesis that a group of individuals with key ties to the far right wing of Israeli politics achieved prominent positions within the administration's foreign policy circles and deliberately plotted a course that was detrimental to the United States in order to further Israel's interests.

....Enough is enough. Let (the NeoCons) join with the overwhelming majority of the American people who want to take back our foreign policy from a small but influential minority of Israeli-centric ideologues, and start putting American interests first, in the Middle East and everywhere.

Official : Fart Jokes Have Been Funny For At Least 4000 Years

From ABC News :

The world's oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humour was as popular with the ancients as it is today, British academics say.

The joke is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq, and goes:

"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."

It heads the world's Oldest Top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton.

A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second. "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish."

The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th century and reveals the bawdy face of the Anglo-Saxons. "What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? A key."