G20 Protesters Issue Instruction Manual On How To Counter Police Tactics

By Darryl Mason

One day, probably not too far away, depending on how many are killed or seriously injured in the tabloid predicted, hyped and hoped for riots at the G20 summit in London, this kind of information published by the UK Independent will be illegal to own, or share, or put into print :

One document, called "Guide to Public Order Situations", explains how to breach lines of riot police using a "snow plough" human formation; throw rape alarms to make it hard for the police to give orders; resist baton and horse charges using nets; and "de-arrest" seized protesters.

The document in full is here, and the PDF is here.

It reads reasonable enough. They're not advocating violence, but organised resistance. Still, there seems to be a growing number of 'anarchists' getting plenty of media coverage in England who are demanding urban warfare in the streets of London this week. How many of them are professional agent provocateurs?

The British government and its militiarised police force have a slew of new 'anti-terror' legislation they're getting ready to introduce. A blood-soaked explosion of violence in London will provide the very excuse they need to justify a crackdown not on Islamic terrorists, but 'urban extremists', a descriptor which already appears to include anti-fascists, anti-globalisationists and animal rights activists.

Curiously, those fighting (non-violently for now) to stop global warming do not seem to be causing as much concern for the British government or its police as those who are opposed to global government, the bankrupting of a country and the maniacal propping up of fraudulent bankers and the mega-wealthy.

Scenes from the APEC protests in Sydney, in late 2007 :



Supposed anarchists (on the right) watch as the freshly geared-up 'anti-riot and public order'
police units arrive at the back of the main APEC march.


The riot squad arrived, expecting to find chaos that needed to be contained, but the masked, supposed anarchist group were kept from joining the main body of the march by a human blockade formed by other protesters who suspected they were agent provocateurs. There was no riot, and few arrests (that stuck).

I am proud to say that I was one of those who stepped in to keep the supposed anarchists from getting in amongst the many elderly people and young families marching , and thereby giving the police a reason to wade into the crowd, and test our their brand spanking new water cannon.

The spectacularly tabloid-media hyped 'APEC Riot!' did not become reality, because of non-violent intervention. Bizarrely enough, police came over and demanded I and others get out of the way of the ski-masked anarchist group because "they have a right to march, too". We refused to move out of the way, and mass arrests, property damage and injuries were avoided.

We also took the opportunity to tell the three dozen or so international media reporters and photographers who were hanging around, waiting for the promised riot that day, and the hundreds of tourists and passers-by watching on, that the group we refused to allow to join the march were suspected agent provocateurs, there to cause trouble, and that the police were demanding we allow the ski-masked, expensively dressed 'anarchists' to join the march. Surreal.

The public got very involved and started shouting questions at the police about why they would want ski-masked anarchists to join the peaceful march. Hundreds of people not involved with the march got a quick education in how peaceful marches can turn into horrific riots. When the riot squad turned up, in force, dozens of helmeted, baton-ready, body-padded police, with dogs, and the brand new water cannon, the 'anarchists' quickly packed up their very expensive, professionally printed signs and banners and left the scene. Even though they were still wearing ski-masks, not one police officer out of the many dozen standing around, followed the 'anarchists' to make sure they didn't start trouble elsewhere in the city. Strange, don't you think?

And you'd think at least one of the more than 40 mainstream media journalists there that day, who found the expected riot had been disabled, would find at least a few seconds of a story in such an unusual occurrence - protesters stopping ski-masked, suspiciously well-equipped anarchists from joining a peaceful march and the police demanding the human blockade be broken to let the anarchists through, right? Wrong.

Not one of the newspapers, current affairs shows or news wire agencies there that day even mentioned it.



Anti-anti-globalisation protesters at APEC.

More From The Orstrahyun On The APEC Protests And Police Tactics Here

Thatcher Is Britain's George W. Bush

World Economies Crashing Three Times Faster Than During First Years Of The Great Depression

Australian economist, Alan Koehler :

....world manufacturing is now collapsing at three times the speed in did in the early 1930s -- "the damage that occurred from late 1929 to early 1931 has been packed into six months".

Japan's exports fell 49% in January, and its industrial output has fallen 31%, 24% in Spain, 19% in Germany, 17% in Brazil, 13% in Russia and by 11% in the UK and US. This has all happened since last September, when Lehman Brothers went under.

Everyone who has influence at the G20 summit seems to be betting on a fast fall leading to a fast recovery. It's exactly the same kind of wild betting that began the global financial crisis.

Even before the bitter fighting to restructure the world economy and global trade really gets underway, one thing is most certainly clear : China Wins.

Heads Off, Everywhere



A few months ago, noticing the weird and alarming frequency of decaptitations appearing in the news, I did a Google News Alert for stories that included that word. It was shocking to open Google Mail each morning to find two or three or sometimes seven or twelve stories about humans cutting each other's heads off, all over the world.

I actually started to fear opening Gmail because I knew there would be Google Alerts in that box, and more fresh horrors of than I can handle before a fourth coffee. So I canned that Google Alert, and slept easier. Maybe I should do Google Alerts for "skipping in sunshine beams" and "happy puppies" instead...

But decapitation stories continue to hit the headlines, and few stories are more horrific than this one, from Boston :

A police officer who answered a 911 call to a suburban home in Boston watched on as a 23-year-old man decapitated his own five-year-old sister.

Kerby Revelus, 23, was shot dead after beheading his sister Bianca on her fifth birthday, fatally stabbing his 17-year-old sister Samantha and wounding his nine-year-old sister Sarafina.

Below is the face of a police officer at the scene of this horror. It's a screen grab from a video still. Is this the face of a man who just witnessed the decapitation of a five year old girl, in his own Boston neighbourhood?



How can any cop, any person, be prepared to walk into such a terrible reality?

The Killing Of America continues, murder spree after walk-in massacre :

A lone gunman burst into a North Carolina nursing home Sunday morning and started "shooting everything," barging into the rooms of terrified patients, sparing some from his rampage without explanation while killing seven residents....

Freedom Is An Illusion

Tom Toles nails the moment when the War On Terror becomes the War On Us :



More Toles Cartoons And Videos Here

The Ulysses Of DVDs


......the horror.....

By Darryl Mason

Netflix (DVDs mailed to your home) is doing king hell business, mostly because so many Americans are realising they can no longer afford to go to the cinema. Some users, however, would be better of just buying discount DVDs in the first place.

But Netflix, like the bounty of very borrowable books to be found in libraries, also has its downside.

There are certain movies that become like certain books, you have a copy, it sits around in your eye line for months, but you can never muster the enthusiasm to get into it. And there it stays, taunting you, and you soon begin to hate it being there, anywhere in the house, reminding you of the fact that you once actually thought, 'Yeah, I would love to get into this, what a great way to spend a Saturday night at home'.

Disgust and then shame usually follows the initial hatred of that book or DVD you can never bring yourself to read, or watch.

The couple in the following story are in well in tune with those emotions :

“I had ‘English Patient’ for more than six months,” Mr. Marino confessed. “It was an insane amount of time.” He recalled starting the same discussion with his wife, night after night, as they flipped among the five DVDs from their Netflix subscription. “Do you want to watch this? Do you want to watch this? Do you want to watch ‘English Patient?’ ”

“No,” was the response he got.

Soon, Mr. Marino could not even get the full title out of his mouth before it was shot out of the sky like the English Patient himself.

“It was like, ‘Eng — —’ ”

“No.”

“It just sat. My wife thought it would be too depressing. I’m like, ‘When are you going to be in the mood to watch it?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Eventually, it was returned unwatched.

The English Patient is the Ulysses of DVDs.



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The Greater World Depression, And The Inevitable Wars That Will Follow

If James Petras is right, and a global depression leads to hundreds of millions of workers becoming unemployed, what will the major nations do with all those "excess workers"?

Hundreds of millions of workers with nothing to do eventually get busy doing things like starting revolutions, until wars intervene. Well, that's how it used to be.

Unlike World War I & II, they cannot depopulate by sending us in the millions to die in some foreign field. Not this time. The jig is up. From 7 year olds to 70 year olds, we all know too much now about the fake realities of global conflict, and the mostly meaningless reasons why so many of our past generations lost their lives fighting other people who were just as poor as they were.

Now, in this generation of instant world communication and information exchange, finally, some - or at least enough - of the truth has escaped and the old tricks and japes simply do not work like they once (so very reliably) did.

James Petras :

All the idols of capitalism over the past three decades crashed. The assumptions and presumptions, paradigm and prognosis of indefinite progress under liberal free market capitalism have been tested and have failed.

We are living the end of an entire epoch.

Experts everywhere witness the collapse of the US and world financial system, the absence of credit for trade and the lack of financing for investment.

A world depression, in which upward of a quarter of the world’s labor force will be unemployed, is looming.

The biggest decline in trade in recent world history – down 40% year to year – defines the future.

The immanent bankruptcies of the biggest manufacturing companies in the capitalist world haunt Western political leaders.

The ‘market’ as a mechanism for allocating resources and the government of the US as the ‘leader’ of the global economy have been discredited. (Financial Times, March 9, 2009)

All the assumptions about ‘self-stabilizing markets’ are demonstrably false and outmoded. The rejection of public intervention in the market and the advocacy of supply-side economics have been discredited even in the eyes of their practitioners.

You can read the full, vastly comprehensive essay by James Petras here.

Israel : We Killed 189 Children In Gaza



Despite months of carefully focused disinformation, and outright lies, Israel now admits that its official figures for the world-shocking carnage they unleashed in Gaza are almost exactly the same as claims made by Palestinians throughout the three weeks of brutal massacres.

What Israel and Palestine disagree on is how many of the dead were civilians or militants. Basically, if you heard your neighbours getting shot dead by Israeli troops and you rushed out with a gun to defend your own family, then you were a 'guerrilla' or 'militant' :

IDF's survey of the casualties in Gaza found that 1,370 Palestinians were killed in the campaign...,Of these, some 600 were guerrillas and another 320 were unidentified and designated simply as "unaffiliated".

Palestinian estimates for total number of dead are broadly consistent with the IDF's figures. But the two sides differ sharply over the number of civilian casualties, with Palestinian estimates suggesting that more than half of those who died were innocent bystanders.

There is a crucial difference in how the two sides classify casualties. The IDF defines anyone under the age of 15 as a child and admits that 189 were killed. The Palestinian authorities list anyone under the age of 18 as a child.

Another point of contention is over how to identify the 200 Palestinian policemen who were killed in the first day of the fighting during an Israeli air raid on a graduation ceremony in Gaza City. Israel categorises them as Hamas fighters on the grounds that Hamas governs Gaza and controls the police.

The strike on the police graduation ceremony was a purposeful slaughter of potential fighters against the invasion that followed. A pre-emptive strike conducted in the full knowledge of the bloodshed that was to follow.

The slaughter of so many children, some executed at point blank range, makes the whole horrorshow sound like some kind of demonic human sacrifice. Many Palestinians believe this is exactly what it was. How exactly would you go about convincing them otherwise?

Abominable Fear Can Be Catching

An actual outbreak of mass hysteria in Nicaragua. But what does it mean?

A total of 43 people have reportedly fallen ill with what is known locally as grisi siknis ("crazy sickness"). Doctors, anthropologists and sociologists who have studied previous cases of mass hysteria – also known as mass psychogenic illness – have so far failed to come up with any clear explanation for the phenomenon.

Not all mass hysteria is the same :

The first group can be summarised as anxiety symptoms: tremors, shaking, difficulty breathing and feelings of suffocation. The second type is referred to as a dissociative symptom: the person does not recognise where he or she is, seems to be in a trance, looks as if they are in a daze, etc.

Younger individuals, and females, are more likely to be affected.

The kind of mass hysteria that breaks out depends on location :

Dissociative symptoms seem to be more common in less industrialised societies, whereas the pure anxiety symptoms are more common in industrialised ones. The crucial point is that symptoms appear to be contagious. Usually, the sufferers have had a high level of communal stress.

No explanation, no proof of causes, and no known cure.

Now You're Not Allowed To Even Look At The CCTV Cameras

Government posters telling Londoners they must spy on their friends and neighbours, and act pre-emptively by dobbing them into the cops for "suspicious behaviour", have reached insane levels of fear-mongering :

A Bomb Won't Go Off Here Because Weeks Before A Shopper Reported Someone Studying The CCTV Cameras....Don't Rely On Others. If You Suspect It, Report It

Cory Doctorow :

Even worse, though, is the idea that you should report your neighbors to the police for looking at the creepy surveillance technology around them. This is the first step in making it illegal to debate whether the surveillance state is a good or bad thing.

The British authorities are bent on driving fear into the hearts of Britons: fear of terrorists, immigrants, pedophiles, children, knives... And once people are afraid enough, they'll write government a blank check to expand its authority without sense or limit.

The mistake is to assume that a surveillance state actually cares what the public thinks. Debate is something to distract those few who want to express genuine concern about what is happening.

Doctorow asked Boing Boing to remix the poster and its message, and they delivered :

More remixes here

An Inconvenient Fear

Grand thinker, and global warming ideology critic, Freeman Dyson and his wife of six decades sit down to watch Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Again :

There was a print of Einstein above the television. And then there was Al Gore below him, telling of the late Roger Revelle, a Harvard scientist who first alerted the undergraduate Gore to how severe the climate’s problems would become. Gore warned of the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the vanishing glaciers of Peru and “off the charts” carbon levels in the air. “The so-called skeptics” say this “seems perfectly O.K.,” Gore said, and Imme looked at her husband. She is even slighter than he is, a pretty wood sprite in running shoes. “How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?” she asked Dyson.

“When I see clear evidence of harm,” he said.

“Then it’s too late,” she replied. “Shouldn’t we not add to what nature’s doing?”

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large,” Dyson said. “By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese.”

“They’re the biggest polluters,” Imme replied.

“They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”

The film continued with Gore predicting violent hurricanes, typhoons and tornados. “How in God’s name could that happen here?” Gore said, talking about Hurricane Katrina. “Nature’s been going crazy.”

“That is of course just nonsense,” Dyson said calmly. “With Katrina, all the damage was due to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to build adequate dikes. To point to Katrina and make any clear connection to global warming is very misleading.”

Now came Arctic scenes, with Gore telling of disappearing ice, drunken trees and drowning polar bears. “Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice,” Dyson said. “A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it.”

“They were so proud,” Imme agreed. “They could grow their own cabbage.”

The film ended. “I think Gore does a brilliant job,” Dyson said. “For most people I’d think this would be quite effective. But I knew Roger Revelle. He was definitely a skeptic. He’s not alive to defend himself.”

“All my friends say how smart and farsighted Al Gore is,” she said.

“He certainly is a good preacher,” Dyson replied. “Forty years ago it was fashionable to worry about the coming ice age. Better to attack the real problems like the extinction of species and overfishing. There are so many practical measures we could take.”

Forget About A Chip Controlling Your Mind, The Fridge And Toaster Will Soon Be More Likely Suspects

Time magazine recently ran a comprehensive but mostly ignored special on The Future.

The array of writers and tech experts contributing was excellent. One of the many highlights was a piece by author William Gibson, explaining why widespread chipping of the human race will never become a reality :

....the chip is likely to shortly be as quaint an object as the vacuum tube or the slide rule.

From the viewpoint of bioengineering, a silicon chip is a large and rather complex shard of glass. Inserting a silicon chip into the human brain involves a certain irreducible inelegance of scale. It's scarcely more elegant, relatively, than inserting a steam engine into the same tissue. It may be technically possible, but why should we even want to attempt such a thing?

I suspect that mainstream medicine and the military will both find reasons for attempting such a thing, at least in the short run, and that medicine's reasons may at least serve to counter some disability, acquired or inherited. If I were to lose my eyes, I would quite eagerly submit to some sort of surgery that promised a video link to the optic nerves. (And once there, why not insist on full-channel cable and a Web browser?) The military's reasons for chip insertion would probably have something to do with what I suspect is the increasingly archaic job description of "fighter pilot," or with some other aspect of telepresent combat, in which weapons in the field are remotely controlled by distant operators. At least there's still a certain macho frisson to be had in the idea of embedding a tactical shard of glass in your head, and crazier things, really, have been done in the name of king and country.

But if we do it at all, I doubt we'll be doing it for very long, as various models of biological and nanomolecular computing are looming rapidly in view. Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to. Get all the functions and features you want, without that clunky-junky 20th century hardware thing. You really don't need complicated glass to crunch numbers, and computing goo probably won't be all that difficult to build. (The trickier aspect here may be turning data into something brain cells can understand. If you knew how to get brain cells to manage pull-down menus, you'd probably know everything you needed to know about brain cells.)

Our hardware, I think, is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware. Our hardware is evolving at the speed of light, while we are still the product, for the most part, of unskilled labor.

Gibson continues his argument here against a future where human chipping is either desirable or mandatory. It's a solid enough argument. Chipping is vastly impractical, and the age when we view computers as something separate from our physical bodies - mechanical versus flesh - or even something outside our constant daily reality is quickly coming to an end.

Some of the other articles from the Time magazine special on The Future :

Bill Gates: Will Frankenfood Feed the World?

Bruce Sterling: Will Cybercriminals Run the World?

Will Cybersex Be Better Than Real Sex?

Will I Still Be Addicted To Video Games?

Will My PC Be Smarter Than I Am?

Will Robots Rise Up and Demand Their Rights?

What Will Replace The Internet?

Is Technology Moving Too Fast?

A Sacred Place Of Knowledge, And Silence

The full quotes and writers' names can be read here, but these words are enough to remind you why your local library, as long as it stays open, remains a central and vital part of your community, and continuing education :

"In my school library nobody spoke above a whisper and there was an open fire, can you believe it. I used to sit toasting my toes and resting the back of my head on the collected novels of DH Lawrence. Libraries are sort of semi-sacred places really, I respect the life-giving opportunities that they offer."

"Everything about libraries is perfect in theory: they are a visible embodiment of the importance of books. Many of them look fabulous and loom over their surrounding locations, as if to say, 'This is what really matters.' Inside, they smell terrific, the finest sort of perfume comes off collections of old books, especially on a warm summer's day. They are great places for daydreaming too – you can discover books you didn't even know you needed and waste time under the cover of being productive."

"...the discovery of my local library at eight years old was like opening the portal to a secret garden. I spent most of my summer holidays there – my mum just dropped me off with a packed lunch on the way to work – and being the only brown kid in the area it was also a shelter from the boots and the brickbats."

"I think the idea of a rigidly silent library is dying out, which is a shame. If there is nowhere you can go where silence is imposed, the psychological effect on our generation will be serious. There's something damaging about living in an environment that has constant background noise."

"I grew up in a small Scottish mining town called Cardenden that had a library but no dedicated book shop so as a boy I haunted the place. Aged 12, I couldn't go and see the film of The Godfather but nobody stopped me borrowing the book, so books to me were like forbidden knowledge, stuff that the grown-ups didn't want me to have."

Post-Robot Wars Personal Evolution

Director James Cameron on why you shouldn't get your hopes up for a real-life Humans Vs Robots War, and why he started and then stopped making Terminator movies :

It was....born out of the science fiction movies and literature I grew up with. For the most part, they were warnings—about technology, about science, about the military and the government. You couldn't escape those themes or the fear of nuclear holocaust.

The idea of a hit man from the future trying to change past events was certainly not new. What I thought was cutting-edge was deciding to not have the Terminator be a guy in a robot suit. That's how it was typically done. But a flesh-covered endoskeleton? That was new.

I don't think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now.

The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them. They're about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they've become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely.

I kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I'd evolved beyond it. I don't regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected.

The Text Message Of Brain Hemorrhaging Death

Ways of weaponising YouTube and SMS have probably already been roundtabled and workshopped by those whose job it is is to dream up new ways to kill and disable human beings, and they probably came up with nothing outside of variations of a strobing screen that would only deal with epileptics and former hardcore Ecstasy users.

But the case of the killer mobile phone text message, of brain exploding death, will no doubt inspire weapons makers to all the possibilities of Assassination By SMS.

If only it were possible :

The Egyptian Government has sought to dispel rumours that a mobile phone text message "from unknown foreign quarters" is spreading around the country and killing those who receive it.

The extraordinary move by Egypt's health and interior ministries follows press reports that an SMS containing a special combination of numbers killed a man in the town of Mallawi south of Cairo.

"He died vomiting blood, followed by stroke, shortly after he received a message from an unknown phone number," the Egyptian Gazette reported.

"The number begins with the symbol (+) and ends with (111)," it said.

An "official security source" was quoted by the official MENA news agency as denying that those who receive the SMS "get splitting headaches followed by brain haemorrhage that leads to death."

It's a hoax, apparently. For now at least.

In a national park outside Sydney, cockatoos gather informally to contemplate world domination.

More Photos Here

Better Than Real Life

By Darryl Mason

A games reviewer explains why scoring a "level up" in a fictional reality is better, and more satisfying, than achieving a minor success in the real one (excerpts) :

The reason anyone plays videogames is because they give you crisp, identifiable progress. Games are the only way you can level up....levelling up is a computer's way of saying "I like you - you're all right". It's a warm justification for all your sunken hours, and a winking invitation from the television to bring the duvet downstairs.

Life is slow, in comparison. You can spend seven years of your life studying for a qualification. And even if you get the top grade, there's no immediate benefit - it's not like you can jump higher, or store more ghosts in your vacuum cleaner.

It's not all about having a numbered level. There are other ways to level up: getting a new high score, boosting your car's top speed, inventing Buddhism, or injecting yourself with a red liquid that allows you to fire bees at your enemies - all tried and tested methods of keeping you interested.

And life, well, it just doesn't bother.

...these unthinking advocates of real life are fighting a losing battle.

What happens to reality when reality can no longer compete with beyond realistic games that are wii-ed into our physical bodies for delivering comforting satisfaction, adrenalin rushes and assured feelings of accomplishment?

How much longer can reality compete, and still win?

As long as love cannot be artificially replicated.

American Dollar Goes Toxic

Supposedly one of the primary discussions for the coming G20 conference of world leaders will be the introduction of a world currency. Winding down, eliminating, the US Dollar as the reserve currency for global trading will be the first priority of that process.

Headlines from the Wall Street Journal :

Foreign Capital Flees the U.S.

Outflow Hits Record $148.9 Billion as China

Foreigners withdrew funds from U.S. assets in record amounts in January, but China continued to add to its stockpile of U.S. government debt.

Already the largest foreign creditor to the U.S. government, China raised its Treasury holdings another $12.2 billion in January, taking its total holdings to $739.6 billion, according to the latest data from the Treasury Department released Monday. China held $492 billion in Treasurys in January 2008.

Foreigners sold a net $60.9 billion in long-dated U.S. securities in January....

China isn't happy. They don't want to be stuck with almost a trillion in US dollars that are quickly losing value. And they're worried about the safety of their "American assets".

How long before the US Dollar hits runaway inflation? 2010? Or June this year?

Nature Of Capitalism Will Be Altered By Long, Deep World Recession

45% Of World's Wealth Evaporates

Global Manufacturing Hit By Monumental, Rapid Plunge

US Trade Exports Smashed By Staggering 49% Drop

UN Considers Push To Remove US Dollar As World's Reserve Currency

The Urban World War : Military Forces In UK, US, Canada Train To Battle Citizens In City Streets


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What The Hell Is Iran's Problem With The United States Anyway?

US President Obama offers Iran a "new day" of non-aggression, and big table talk sessions, now all the major American intelligence agencies agree that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons :

Invoking art, history and “the common humanity that binds us,” President Obama offered a “new day” in America’s relationship with Iran, using a videotaped message to make an unusual appeal directly to Iranians for a shift away from decades of confrontation.

But Iran is not so ready to say, "Yeah, whatever" to the past. There's a few unsettled grievances they think must be dealt with first :

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a senior official in Tehran, said a new relationship could not be built on “Iran forgetting the previous hostile and aggressive attitude of the United States.”

“The American administration has to recognize its past mistakes and repair them as a way to put away the differences,” news reports quoted Mr. Javanfekr as saying.

The catalog of grievances includes American support for the 1953 coup and the 1988 downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by an American warship in the Persian Gulf. Iran also resents Washington’s support for Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and for the People’s Mujahedeen, a group of dissident Iranian exiles long-based in Iraq that has given the West information about Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Javanfekr was also quoted as taking issue with the United States military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, calling it “the only source of instability in the region.”

He also said America’s support for Israel was “not a friendly gesture” and he took issue with Washington’s support of United Nations sanctions against Iran, which he said were “wrong and need to be reviewed.”

Coups, mass civilian deaths from state acts of terrorism, supporting killcrazy dictators in a war that killed more than a million, causing regional instability, backing sanctions...what the hell is Iran's problem? They're acting like they're the only country the United States has ever unleashed all these things upon.

This Is How Islands Are Born

Murdoch To Campaign For Israel Joining NATO

Rupert Murdoch's public declaration that Israel is essential to the survival of the West, and should be welcomed into NATO, will of course become The Message that will filter out through his worldwide media empire :

In the West, we are used to thinking that Israel cannot survive without the help of Europe and the United States. Tonight I say to you: Maybe we should start wondering whether we in Europe and the United States can survive if we allow the terrorists to succeed in Israel.

In this new century, the "West" is no longer a matter of geography. The West is defined by societies committed to freedom and democracy. That at least is how the terrorists see it. And if we are serious about meeting this challenge, we would expand the only military alliance committed to the defense of the West to include those on the front lines of this war. That means bringing countries such as Israel into NATO.

My friends, I do not pretend to have all the answers to Gaza this evening. But I do know this: The free world makes a terrible mistake if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight.

Is Rupert Murdoch laying some ground work in that last line for an all-out Murdoch media mind-washing campaign to back attacks on Iran?

And then there's this :

"...no sovereign nation can sit by while its civilian population is attacked."

That rule, obviously, doesn't apply when the sovereign nation is Iraq.

Anyway, you'd presume Israel would have to come clean, officially, about its 200 to 400 nukes before NATO would even consider allowing it to join.

Rupert's son James apparently does not agree with his dad about the 'Palestinian Problem' :

When father Murdoch attacks the Palestinians, (his son) James says he’s “Talking fucking nonsense. … They were kicked out of their fucking homes and had nowhere to fucking live.”

No humanitarian awards for James then.

Is Rupert Murdoch still quietly funding illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land? Or was that more of a '90s thing?

The eyes are as dead as the soul.

"I am deeply sorry with all my heart for what I have done, but I cannot go back and change it."

He showed no emotion when he was told he would spend his last days in jail.

Investors Told To Flee Cities Before Civil Unrest Breaks Out

Don't Bet The Farm, Buy One

The message here is more important than the names. Why are these prominent people saying such things to the media? Are these predictions, or wishful thinking?

"The best bet for investors may be to buy a farm and escape from the cities, as a prolonged recession could lead to war, as the Great Depression did. If the global economy doesn’t recover, usually people go to war."

"I expect to see social unrest, civil unrest in the United States...The world's century is moving from the west to the east, to Asia and many people have not figured this out yet."


"...there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots."

Of course, rioting and violent civil disobedience often plays into the hands of those you are trying to defeat, or overcome.

Occupying public space for an extended period, unlike an afternoon march or a morning protest, will prove more effective for American victims of the Global Financial Crisis to make their point, and to remind other poor Americans that they're not alone, that the entire country is filled with people just like them, who wanted to work hard, raise their families in peace and do the right thing. But they still got fucked by the system.

The system that benefits the 1% of Americans that control so much of the country's wealth.

Sources And More Here

"I haven't a clue what the saucers are. I've never really believed in all that But it's a big old place out there and I think the picture speaks for itself."

The Drugs Don't Work....Like They Used To

British satirist Chris Morris perfected the art of the fake-but-real hard news interview. Few did it better before, or after, him :

Why Drugs Will Make You Watch Terrible Music Videos

US Financial Destruction = "Stuff Happens"

Cheney Uses Rumsfeld's Iraq Excuse For The Looting Of The American Treasury

Former Vice President, Dick Cheney, a few days ago :

"...the economic circumstances that [Obama] inherited are difficult ones....(but) I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances."

"The notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration -- that's interesting rhetoric, but I don't think anybody really cares about that."

Yeah, nobody cares Dick. Well, nobody you know.

"Eight months after we arrived we had 9/11. We had three thousand Americans killed one morning. ... We immediately had to go into wartime mode. ... We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina. ... All of these things required us to spend money."

"Stuff happens," Cheney summarized....

Cheney's old buddy, former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld also found those words to be a handy, dismiss-all" when looting broke out across Baghdad after invasion of Iraq :

The Necessary Global Crisis

By Darryl Mason

There is opportunity in disaster, there is hope in utter despair. From disaster comes rebirth, from the end comes a new beginning, a fresh start. This is what we were told all through the 9/11 aftermath and the Iraq War. It's not a new mantra, by any means. Our grand-and-great grandparents heard much the same thing during and after World War I and II.

And this is exactly what US Secretary Of State, Hillary Clinton, said to the European Parliament over the weekend :

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today told an audience "never waste a good crisis", as she highlighted the opportunity of rebuilding economies in a greener, less energy intensive model.

Clinton told young Europeans at the European Parliament global economic turmoil provided a fresh opening: "Never waste a good crisis ... Don't waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security."

"This is a propitious time ... we can actually begin to demonstrate our willingness to confront this.

politicians argue that the economic crisis, energy security issues and climate change can all be dealt with in a "New Green Deal", replacing high-carbon infrastructure with green alternatives and simultaneously creating millions of jobs.

"There is no doubt in my mind the energy security and climate change crises, which I view as being together, not separate, must be dealt with," Clinton added.

I suppose we should consider ourselves somewhat fortunate that another world war was not started in order to re-order global wealth and trade and shift the global energy economy, this time from oil (and coal) to Green.

Still, there's going to be one hundred million or two surplus workers by the time the global economic takedown and re-ordering is finished. And this time, those millions will not proudly march off to die uselessly in some foreign field.

So what happens now to all those 'extra' people that a global conflict like World War I and II once so quickly and ruthlessly removed during the birth pains of a new world order?

Bird flu?

This Is For You, Thanks For All The Fish

Dolphins blow underwater rings, and seemed pretty damn happy about what they've created. And they did create them, on purpose. For play, and to impress :



Impressed!

The creators of this robot, set to strut its stuff on Japanese fashion catwalks, said they purposely had to make it look less human, otherwise the resemblance to human was "uncanny."

I think they mean "disturbing."

US Financial Destruction = "Stuff Happens"

Cheney Uses Rumsfeld's Iraq Excuse For The Looting Of The American Treasury

Former Vice President, Dick Cheney, a few days ago :

"...the economic circumstances that [Obama] inherited are difficult ones....(but) I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances."

"The notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration -- that's interesting rhetoric, but I don't think anybody really cares about that."

Yeah, nobody cares Dick. Well, nobody you know.

"Eight months after we arrived we had 9/11. We had three thousand Americans killed one morning. ... We immediately had to go into wartime mode. ... We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina. ... All of these things required us to spend money."

"Stuff happens," Cheney summarized....

Cheney's old buddy, former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld also found those words to be a handy, dismiss-all" when looting broke out across Baghdad after invasion of Iraq :

Fox News Prepares The Ground For Civil War II

The principles of patriot movement that the mainstream media, and in particular the Rupert Murdoch media, so relentlessly demonised in the 1990s is now a most powerful marketing tool.




Fox News host Glenn Beck :

“It seems like the voices of our leaders, and 'special interests', the media, they're surrounding us. It sounds intimidating. But you know what? Pull away the curtain. You'll realize...that there isn't anybody there! It's just a few people that are just pressing the buttons and that their voices are actually really weak. The truth is, they don't surround us. We surround them....”

You are the media you ridiculous fuckhead.

Why, you may ask, after watching Fox News host Glenn Beck so cynically, appallingly, fake tears of patriotism in the above video, is Rupert Murdoch's media suddenly so interested in the Constitution? But do you really need to ask?

It's always important for the gatekeepers of American society, like Fox News, to get in early on a new movement taking hold of the American people. Not only to exploit it, but to help control it, focus it, contain it, and strip it of its power, before too much "Change" really takes place.

Interfere. DeInspire. Divide. Dismantle. Conquered.


UPDATE : Here are the 9. 12. of Glenn Beck's 'peoples' movement. Remember, this is the same network that has until recently blanket-vilified, harassed and attacked critics of the Iraq War, right to privacy advocates and 9/11 Skeptics.

The comments at 9. 12. are thick with suspicious, clunky praise, and demands to unite behind "this message" :

Molon Labe (not verified)

at 20:14 on March 13th, 2009

We need to pull behind Glenn Beck and email Foxnews and tell them how we need His voice to be heard more and more and at PRIMETIME. He would gain so much more popularity for FOX and his show.

We need to unite behind this message.

The 12 Values Fox News Is Trying To Tell Americans They Must Embrace. Or Else :

Honesty
Reverence
Hope
Thrift
Humility
Charity
Sincerity
Moderation
Hard Work
Courage
Personal
Responsibility
Gratitude

These are the 9 principles Glenn Beck is trying to tell Americans, between his dry-eyed weeping, they must live by. Or else :

1. America is good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

(Where exactly have Fox News been on this valuable principle for eight years? Look how they dealt with critics of the Iraq War, or 9/11 skeptics - DM)

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

And what if Americans don't want to live by those principles and values? Or at least do not wish to live by all 9 and 12 of them?

Fox News has a simple, direct message for dissenters :

Civil War II : No Longer Just A Bad 1980s Movie Plot

Obamarama

Obama gets the fried chicken fingers treatment in Germany :



A page from the Spiderman comic, in January :



A US reader, Nancy, e-mailed a few days ago to say that when she was fired last week, the announcement went something like this :

"It's like Obama says, Nancy. It's time for Change."

Bolivian President : A Plant Is Not A Narcotic



Coca leaves have to be classed as an illegal narcotic in most parts of the world because otherwise billions might use them to suppress hunger, increase alertness and fight nausea, instead of buying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of pharmaceuticals. Juice from coca leaves also makes for a nutritious sweet alternative to sugar.

You can't just have everybody going around plucking medicinal leaves off trees, vines and bushes to make themselves feel better. The world pharmaceuticals industry, the second biggest after weapons, would be decimated.

Evo Morales, president of Bolivia explains why coca leaves are not the same as cocaine :

This week in Vienna, a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs took place that will help shape international antidrug efforts for the next 10 years. I attended the meeting to reaffirm Bolivia’s commitment to this struggle but also to call for the reversal of a mistake made 48 years ago.

In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine — thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic — and ordered that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.” Bolivia signed the convention in 1976, during the brutal dictatorship of Col. Hugo Banzer, and the 25-year deadline expired in 2001.

So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples.

Many plants have small quantities of various chemical compounds called alkaloids. One common alkaloid is caffeine, which is found in more than 50 varieties of plants, from coffee to cacao, and even in the flowers of orange and lemon trees. Excessive use of caffeine can cause nervousness, elevated pulse, insomnia and other unwanted effects.

Another common alkaloid is nicotine, found in the tobacco plant. Its consumption can lead to addiction, high blood pressure and cancer; smoking causes one in five deaths in the United States. Some alkaloids have important medicinal qualities. Quinine, for example, the first known treatment for malaria, was discovered by the Quechua Indians of Peru in the bark of the cinchona tree.

The coca leaf also has alkaloids; the one that concerns antidrug officials is the cocaine alkaloid, which amounts to less than one-tenth of a percent of the leaf. But as the above examples show, that a plant, leaf or flower contains a minimal amount of alkaloids does not make it a narcotic. To be made into a narcotic, alkaloids must typically be extracted, concentrated and in many cases processed chemically. What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic. The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not.

Why is Bolivia so concerned with the coca leaf? Because it is an important symbol of the history and identity of the indigenous cultures of the Andes.

The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness. Unlike nicotine or caffeine, it causes no harm to human health nor addiction or altered state, and it is effective in the struggle against obesity, a major problem in many modern societies.

Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.

Mistakes are an unavoidable part of human history, but sometimes we have the opportunity to correct them. It is time for the international community to reverse its misguided policy toward the coca leaf.

From the New York Times

Civil War II : No Longer Just A Bad 1980s Movie Plot

By Darryl Mason

If you're going to try and round up serving members of the American armed forces for a homeland constitutional army of true patriots to fight in the, presumably, eventual insurgency against Washington DC (as Civil War II breaks out and Texas secedes), you need to start with a good YouTube trailer. This one, for the Oath Keepers, is not bad.



Who are the Oath Keepers?

...a non-partisan association of currently serving military, reserves, National Guard, peace officers, and veterans who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic … and meant it.

This is the Oath Keepers declaration :

1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects — such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.

3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as "unlawful enemy combatants" or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a "state of emergency" on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state's legislature and governor.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to "keep the peace" or to "maintain control" during any emergency, or under any other pretext. We will consider such use of foreign troops against our people to be an invasion and an act of war.

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever.

10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

The hundreds of comments from readers at the Oath Keepers can be inspiring, educational and terrifying, depending I suppose on just how fucked up you think the United States has become, and how likely you think a war in the homeland is of breaking out sometime soon.

What is most extraordinary about what is happening in the US today is that the once only video-game, science fictional, idea of Civil War II doesn't seem so much like fiction anymore.

The United States has the potential to get very, very fucking ugly indeed in the next few years, and with tens of millions of unemployed men, and no world war to send them off to die in, the Obama White House will need to tread very cautiously indeed as they attempt to calm and reassure a desperate, panicking nation, and get the economy back in some kind of order, and the jobs, housing and food supplies secured.

And there are plenty of indications that most of what Obama has tried so far is not working.

Americans are nervous. Armed, and nervous.

In Australia, we are seeing the following images and stories on our news programs, a few times a week now, a narrative is being built for us of a nation crawling into its death throes : tent cities are sprouting up outside of major cities; American soldiers and National Guard rehearsing for anti-insurgency operations in American cities; hundreds queue in bitter cold all night to receive free dental/medical care in massive sheds; thousands are turning up, and sometimes rioting, for a few dozen jobs; the Dream is crumbling down, faster and faster; panic is setting in. And nobody, not even the President, appears to know what is going to happen next.

To outsiders, or those who have never experienced a chaotic dismantling of comfortable reality in their own countries, it all sounds like a movie. Or the lead-in for an urban warfare video game. This is not supposed to happen to the United States.

I get e-mails from American readers asking why I haven't been doing more on these events. The only excuse I have is this : it all seems so unreal, because I'm not there, living it, and because it all goes against the version of America that has been drummed into foreigners' minds for decades through its media.

What is happening there all seems like an impossible fiction. A fictional reality that belongs more to all but forgotten, bottom video store shelf, movies from the 1980s, or the militia 'fiction' that was briefly popular in the mid-1990s, until the Oklahoma City bombings.

Where does the United States go from here? Will it ever again be, to billions of outsiders at least, a land of dreams and opportunity? Will we actually see a full-blown civil war? (Some of) The American military raiding thousands of homes for weapons? Check-points outside of major American cities? Militias claiming cities of their own across the mid-west and Texas, New Mexico, parts of California?

Personally, if I was an American, or a Brit for that matter, I wouldn't be adding my name or personal details to any dissenter lists or databases, unless I trusted with my life the people I was giving that information to. Because if hell erupts, my life would be trusted to those people.

How To Manipulate The Stock Market

Jim Cramer explains, back in 2006, why you'd have to be a fucking idiot to put all your money into the stock market, at any time, unless you're one of those doing the manipulating.



What a scam. But then, we all know that now, don't we?

In ten years, a new generation will be sufficiently hyped to also bet their financial futures on the whims, cons and bets of people they've never met. It appears the scam can only be run every 10 to 15 years, but when you can then suck tens of trillions in wealth from entire nations, and ruin the retirements (HA!) of hundreds of millions of people, pulling it off twice every 30 years or so is enough.

Here's Jim Cramer, in late 2007, explaining why the Federal Reserve was destroying the American economy. Interesting to look back at his rant now.

Licky

Louis Armstrong's version of this song is not as good as Joey Ramone's, but it's still pretty good :

"Take Your Stinking Hands Off Me You Damned Dirty Killbot!"

By Darryl Mason

Robots with guns make old people, particularly scientists and philosophers, very, very nervous. Doesn't seem to bother the young so much. Maybe the youth already understand that robots fighting robots in foreign lands will make the news far more exciting to watch than their robots fighting robots video games.

In this short essay for New Scientist, robophobic JC Grayling makes the most nerdicly impossible-to-forgive mistake when he confuses robots with remotely operated machinery, and he did it in New Scientist(!). And that's before he starts to whip up The Fear about the Armed Robot Uprising that realists know will never happen, because there will actually be a Armed Monkey & Robot Uprising first :

In this age of super-rapid technological advance, we do well to obey the Boy Scout injunction: "Be prepared". That requires nimbleness of mind, given that the ever accelerating power of computers is being applied across such a wide range of applications, making it hard to keep track of everything that is happening. The danger is that we only wake up to the need for forethought when in the midst of a storm created by innovations that have already overtaken us.

We are on the brink, and perhaps to some degree already over the edge, in one hugely important area: robotics. Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians. Police forces are looking to acquire miniature Taser-firing robot helicopters. In South Korea and Japan the development of robots for feeding and bathing the elderly and children is already advanced. Even in a robot-backward country like the UK, some vacuum cleaners sense their autonomous way around furniture. A driverless car has already negotiated its way through Los Angeles traffic.

In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?

Media stories about Predator drones mounting missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan are now commonplace, and there are at least another dozen military robot projects in development. What are the rules governing their deployment? How reliable are they? One sees their advantages: they keep friendly troops out of harm's way, and can often fight more effectively than human combatants. But what are the limits, especially when these machines become autonomous?

The civil liberties implications of robot devices capable of surveillance involving listening and photographing, conducting searches, entering premises through chimneys or pipes, and overpowering suspects are obvious. Such devices are already on the way. Even more frighteningly obvious is the threat posed by military or police-type robots in the hands of criminals and terrorists.

Anyway, in other more exciting news related to the coming Armed Robots & Monkeys Vs Humans War, apes are learning to stockpile weapons, showing the kind of future-planning once thought to only belong to humans, and monkeys are learning they can deal with their tormentors once and for all if they only fight back, with a good aim :

The animal – named Brother Kwan – found (collecting coconuts) tedious and strenuous but Mr Janchoom refused to let him rest, dishing out beatings if he refused to climb trees.

It is believed that the monkey eventually snapped, and targeted his owner from a high branch with one of the hard-skinned fruits.

Mr Janchoom, from the province of Nakorn Sri Thammarat in Thailand, died on the spot after being struck by the coconut....

Did it occur to monkey Kwan days or weeks earlier that the coconuts he collected could also provide an escape from his tortures? Did Kwan "snap" or did he plan his murder in advance?

And if Kwan can, like apes, make plans for the future, what else has been ticking along through that not-so-little-anymore monkey mind?

How many cute apes and monkeys we see in zoos are actually thinking "Oh, when we get out of here, you guys are so gonna get it!"

Snopes Editor Admits To Making Up Stories And Staging His Own Hoaxes

He smashes entertaining, fun, sometimes scary, urban myths and legends to pieces for a living, but even he can't resist trying to fill the void left behind with more WTF stories :

David, the resident expert on Coca-Cola, the Beatles, Disney, and sports, occasionally tries to make up a rumor, like the one he attempted to spread that Mr. Ed was actually a zebra.

"You'd be surprised how hard it is to get traction with one of these," he says.

"The things that take off have to hit a nerve we're all thinking about."

Just Another American City, Rotting Away



French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have captured the "beautiful, tragic decline" of Detroit in this photo essay of startling urban decay. They said of their imagery :

"Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes...the volatile result of the change of eras and the fall of empires. This fragility leads us to watch them one very last time: to be dismayed, or to admire, it makes us wonder about the permanence of things."

The website, and more photography, of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre is here