"We Got Nothing Left, Cancel The Rockets' Red Glare"



This is only one of the smaller, most minor examples of how the recent unparalleled theft of Americans' wealth, under the guise of the Global Financial Crisis, is tearing away at the fabric and the traditions of the American people. It should be no big deal for such an event to be cancelled, when towns and states don't have the resources to pay for it, but it still sounds just so terribly, terribly sad :

As the economic crisis has dragged on, city leaders around the country say fireworks are a luxury they can no longer afford. Big and small, urban and rural, the skies will remain dark over at least four dozen communities nationwide come July 4.

"It came down to this: Did we want to spend $150,000 on something that would be over in a few hours?" Cervenik said. "Or did we want to use that money to keep city workers employed?"

The news has sparked outrage and protests among residents who long to preserve an American tradition that dates to 1777. They say that fireworks displays are more than a nod to nostalgia: They allow communities to come together, set aside their woes and build up town pride -- even if only for a few hours.

"Good times, bad times, there's always been fireworks," said Robert Baker, who heads the Fourth of July festival committee in Abington, Mass.

Not this year. Some cities are cancelling the July 4 fireworks so have a bit more money to give to the food banks and charities feeding the rapidly rising ranks of the unemployed :

Some cities would rather feed their residents than entertain them. In the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello, where unemployment hovers at 12%, the City Council unanimously voted to use its $39,000 fireworks budget on donations to local food banks.

"The last food bank line I saw had more than 1,000 people in it," said Mayor Rosemarie Vasquez. "We figured that, instead of burning the money in the air, why not give it to people who need it."

Christmas decorations and town square Christmas trees will join July 4 fireworks for dozens of cities and towns across the United States this year.

Who Killed Michael Jackson?


Michael Jackson before and after he became heavily addicted to pharmaceutical painkillers, and assorted mindfreakers

By Darryl Mason

It seems likely a murder, or at least involuntary manslaughter, investigation into the death of Michael Jackson will be announced within the next few weeks, once toxicology reports are finished. The massive insurance policies connected to Michael Jackson, his business interests and the 50 London concerts he was never going to perform, will demand it.

The pharmaceutical industry that allows one person to run up $100,000 in local drug store debt to pay for even more pills would be my first suspect.

But others may have been involved. Besides being only 58 kilos, and ravaged by two decades of addiction to prescription drugs, Jackson's body apparently bore wounds around the knees and shins and cuts across his back.

Some quotes not getting headlines :

Liza Minnelli - "all hell's going to break loose when the autopsy results come in".

Reverend Jesse Jackson : "It's abnormal. We don't know what happened. Was he injected and with what? All reasonable doubt should be addressed."

Lisa Marie Presley : "Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general...he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my father's death. At some point he paused, he stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, 'I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did'."

Michael Jackson's father, Joe Jackson, thinks something sinister happened to his son :

"Michael was dead before he left the house. I'm suspecting foul play somewhere. He was waving to everybody and telling them he loves them and all the fans at the gate. A few minutes after Michael was out there, he was dead."

What will Americans think, or do, if it turns out the King of Pop was murdered?

Aides claimed the ailing star even believed be would be killed if he pulled out (of the 50 London concerts) on health grounds.

The music industry, where history never stops repeating itself.

Days Before His Death, The UK Sunday Times Asked If Michael Jackson Would Survive His 50 Concerts In London

Darryl Mason is the author of the free online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. Read it here

White Men Can Dance

Michael Jackson in make-up and costume as a fat, gray, balding man from his 1997 movie Ghosts. Funny, and astounding, with the best moonwalk you will ever see :

Michael Jackson was about 38 years old when he performed that dance routine.

Michael Jackson & The Simpsons

Michael Jackson guest-starred in the 'Stark Raving Dad' episode of The Simpsons, playing a psychiatric patient who claimed to be Michael Jackson but clearly was not, being tall and white and bald :

Jackson pitched several story ideas for the episode, including Bart telling everyone in town that Michael Jackson was coming to his house.

He also requested several script changes, including that he wanted to have a scene in which he and Bart wrote a song.

Jackson especially liked Bart and wanted to give him a number one single, so he wrote much of the song "Do the Bartman" although he did not receive credit for it.

Jackson also wrote the song "Happy Birthday Lisa" for the episode....

On May 31, UK Sunday Times Asked If Michael Jackson Will Survive

By Darryl Mason

Michael Jackson recently passed a four hour physical in Los Angeles to comply with insurers demands for his 50 date, $100 million sold out run of shows in London. The biggest of all comebacks from the biggest pop star in history.

How much was Jackson insured for to complete those concerts? $100 million? $200 million?

Michael Jackson was notorious for breaking very expensive business deals, leaving a trail of extremely pissed off and slightly less wealthy entertainment industry players in his wake.

He had some very big debts indeed, and his most prized possessions and collection of strange but valuable antiques were recently auctioned off.

The London concerts for Michael Jackson were not just his Big Comeback. He needed that money to pay off tens of millions in heavy debts, and to fight to keep control of his remaining assets, like the royalties he got every time a Beatles song was played or performed, thanks to the massive music publishing catalogue he co-owned with Sony Music.

On May 31, the London Times prophetically asked :

As his fortune ebbs away, Michael Jackson is relaunching his pop career with a 50-date residency at London’s 02 arena. Thanks to record ticket sales, he could be moonwalking to fiscal salvation. But can the middle-aged comeback kid survive this musical marathon? By Robert Sandall

"....(there is) the sincere belief of some of Jackson’s former business associates that he will bottle it.

Even before the reports that Jackson may be suffering from the early stages of skin cancer and the news that the first four dates of the tour are to be postponed, scepticism was rife.

One top British manager who spent time in 2007 attending meetings called by Jackson, then cancelled at the last minute, says: “Let’s see how many concerts he turns up for.”

“He’s a serial betrayer of business deals. He’ll probably play a couple of shows, then get a doctor’s sick note. Jackson’s not a well man. To do 50 concerts you need real strength, mentally and physically. He couldn’t even read the teleprompter at the press conference.”

The story goes on to speculate that Michael Jackson could have used a lookalike at the press conference to announce the London shows, and that he was rehearsing lookalikes to fill in for him during the more rigorous dance routines.

Here's concert promoter CEO, Randy Phillips on Michael Jackson and the London gigs :

“Michael is a magnet for weird stories like that! He’s in fine shape. Very sharp, asks succinct questions. When we first started talking he was a little thin maybe. Today he feels much healthier.”

“It isn’t about the money, it’s all about the money!”

The insurance worries :

But there have been dark mutterings in the business pages about the difficulty of insuring the O2 concerts with a notorious no-show like Jackson. Marcel Avram, a German concert promoter, won a multi-million-dollar judgment against the singer at a 2005 civil trial in California for damages arising out of Jackson’s no-show for some millennium concerts. As usual, Phillips is sanguine. “Michael is totally focused now, and the insurance wasn’t a problem, it was just expensive.”

He reveals a phased three-year touring plan that will take Jackson to Europe, then the Far East, winding up in the Americas in 2011. He estimates that Jackson will make $50m-$100m from the London dates, and that this could rise to $500m if the world tour materialises.

A half billion dollar tour just went up in smoke.

Jackson was on the brink of losing the rights to his treasured collection of Beatles songs, and about 400,000 other songs. Sony owned half of the Beatles catalogue with Jackson, and were on the brink of seizing it all from Jackson, riddled as he was with small nation sized bad debts.

But here was Michael Jackson, a very astute business man, back in 1993 :

He had recently signed a new contract with his label Sony that was reputedly worth $100m, making it the richest record deal in history. He had outbid Paul McCartney for the publishing rights to the Beatles songs — which meant every time one of their tunes was played or performed in public, he received half the royalty. He had acquired a 2,700-acre ranch with a funfair and zoo attached, which was later valued at $100m and which he named Neverland after the fictional nirvana of Peter Pan.

Jackson's Dangerous tour of 1993 grossed $200 million, and by then he'd already sold more than 100 million albums and singles.

Jackson was an extremely big spender :

One source who had access to Jackson’s accounts reckons that over the previous 20 years he had burnt through $1 billion: $650m in earnings and the rest borrowed.

The promoter of the London shows, Randy Phillips :

“When I asked him why he was doing this tour now, he said it was because his kids are old enough to appreciate it and he still felt young enough to do it. He’s told me that whatever profit he makes from these shows will go into a trust fund for his children.”

Profits, however, are still some way off. AEG expects to see no return on its investment of at least £20m until Jackson has played one-third of the O2 shows. The start-up costs for This Is It have been huge, covering the biggest stage set built for an indoor arena show and a number of what Phillips calls “grand illusions”.

His hope, along with that of the 800,000-odd fans who have bought tickets, must be that their trust in pop’s most charismatic but accident-prone Peter Pan doesn’t turn out to be the grandest illusion of all.

There will be many grande illusions quickly stitched up in the media about just how fit and ready Michael Jackson was for the London shows, and the inevitable world tour that would have followed. Jackson had to keep performing live to get the money to hang onto all those Beatles songs, a catalogue which will be worth at least a couple of billion dollars in the next few years as digital exploitation of those rights continues.


Kurt Cobain earned more than a billion dollars after he killed himself.

Elvis Presley earned dozens of times more after death than alive.

Michael Jackson, now he has Dead Legend Status, will likewise become an extremely profitable enterprise now for the music industry.

Now Jackson cannot destroy that heavily promoted Legend by failing to perform those 50 London shows, or by simply failing to perform anymore.

Dance The Night Away

One of the greatest, if not the greatest, pop stars of our days is dead.



This performance by Michael Jackson at the 25th anniversary of Motown Records sealed his fate as a legendary performer, and set a standard of dance and showcraft impossible to maintain into his 40s and 50s :



But this is the clip that I think showed him at his best. Great song.

Rock With You

So many great songs.

Jackson was facing 50 sold-out concerts in London, new tickets were still being sold yesterday, where this 50 year old man would be expected to perform, if not as good as he did in his 20s and 30s, then still magnificently.

Big call.

Michael Jackson died a week and a half before the first London concert. When he held his press conference in March, he expected, or hoped, to sell out ten shows in London. He woke the morning after the press conference to learn that 50 concerts had been announced and mostly sold out. Jackson had planned to take his new show around the world, to Africa, Australia, Asia, and back home. But imagine being 50 years old and heading out on a world tour, of stadiums, of huge arenas, after completing 50 shows in one city.

But few who brought tickets for the London shows will demand a refund. A ticket to those London concerts will quickly triple in value, and so the $100 million or so those 50 London dates would have brought in will not have to be refunded.

It would appear, at this time, that Michael Jackson either died from an accidental drug overdose, or a very purposeful overdose, self-administered or otherwise.

The evening news across the US were preparing to lead with the death of Farrah Fawcett. The news of Michael Jackson's death quickly shunted aside that story.

This is for Jack. Only some robots want to kill us, others want to show off their 1980s-style breakdancing moves :

The Greatest Worst Movie Review Ever

A selection of possible movie promotion tag lines composed by Roger Ebert after exposing himself to Transformers 2 :

....a horrible experience of unbearable length...

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The plot is incomprehensible.

The dialogue....is meaningless word flap.

(The Transformers) appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock.

The battle scenes are bewildering.

....an incomprehensible confusion.

....dumber than a box of staples.

Modern technology allows Ebert to immediately compare his review to some of those in the British online media :

"Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian)

"Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail);

"A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror).

The kids will love it. Transformers 2 will make a solid billion around the world before it hits the discount DVD bin.

So How Many People Have American Flying Killer Robots Killed In Afghanistan And Pakistan?

The Flying Killer Robot body count must be getting close to 1000 dead civilians, including dozens if not hundreds of children in some of the poorest regions on the planet. And this is before the flying killer robots become truly autonomous, when there is no longer 22 year old working what is basically computer game controls in a military base back in Nevada, when real robots are flying and killing and nobody will ever be held responsible for all the men, women and children they kill.

Another 60 Slaughtered By Flying Killer Robots

"Three missiles were fired by drones as people were dispersing after offering funeral prayers for Niaz Wali," one intelligence official said, referring to a Taliban commander who was one of six militants killed in an earlier drone attack.

The army had no information on the attack on the funeral in the remote area under the control of Baitullah Mehsud, the country's enemy number one, a military official said.

One local security official, who could not be identified as he was not authorised to speak to media, said that more than 60 had died of whom "half are civilians". Funerals of Taliban are attended by local villagers, not just militants.

The most modern methods of killing come from the skies and rain slaughter in Waziristan, where some of the most ancient methods of killing remain popular.

Women Assaulted By British Police For Daring To Ask For Officers' Names And Badge Numbers

A shocking piece of video that shows what British police are willing to do members of the public who wish to hold them to account :

Britain Already Has A Police State Iranian Theocracy Would Be Proud Of

The women arrested did not resist, they were choked, assaulted and restrained and then jailed for three days before charges against them were dropped.

This is not Iran, this is the UK, supposedly one of the countries that the uprising youth of Iran are hoping their country will one day emulate. A lot may have to change in Iran before it becomes a beacon of myth-soaked Western Democracy, but the police in both countries are already using plenty of the same techniques, weapons and tactics of violence to break the spirit of those who will not submit, who refuse to be intimidated.

Obama : Don't Blame The Fed, You're Responsible, Too

Oh Really?

The Nation's William Grieder takes President Obama apart over his justifications for the financial reforms that will make the Federal Reserve more powerful than ever before :

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama's call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame. "A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street," Obama explained. "And a regulatory system basically crafted in the wake of a 20th century economic crisis--the Great Depression--was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy."

is not what happened, to put it charitably. Unlike some other presidents, Obama is much too intelligent not to know this. The regulatory system was not overwhelmed by historic forces. It was systematically gutted and dismantled by the government in Washington at the behest of the banking interests.

And so far, at least, the 'banking interests' have won.

The Full Story Is Here

History In Colour Doesn't Seem So Old

Photography of our world 100 years ago is just about all black and white. And while there are many, many beautiful century old photographs, the fact that they were B & W, or sepia-tone, puts us at a vast distance, not only in time, from the reality captured in those images.

Which is why these extraordinary colour images by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky from the first decades of the last century feel so jolting. They don't look 100 years old, they look like work of someone who has just stepped out of a time machine with a digital camera and uploaded the files to Flickr.

Here, for instance, is the only colour portrait of the brilliant Russian writer Leo Tolstoy :











I won't further spoil the surprises waiting for you if you haven't already seen these images.

Iraq PM Declares Victory Over United States

Either Rueters fucked up the quote, or the context, or the Iraqi PM just declared "victory" over the United States as an occupying force in his country, and it didn't even make the headline, or opening paragraphs of this story :

Maliki, a Shi'ite, said the start of the U.S. withdrawal was a "great victory" for Iraq over foreign occupation.

"I, and you, are sure that many don't want us to succeed and celebrate this victory," he said. "They are getting themselves ready to move in the dark to destabilize the situation, but we will be ready for them, God willing."

Naturally, these were the last two paragraphs of a story about a truck bombing in Iraq, killing dozens. Burying the lead, indeed.

The War On Iraq really is over....well, kind of :

Almost all U.S. soldiers will leave urban centers by June 30 under a security pact signed by Baghdad and Washington last year, and the whole force that invaded the country in 2003 must be gone by 2012.

Obama Easily Survives Assassination Attempt By Killer Robot Fly

The Insect Rights movement will be appalled by this smirking barbarity.



UPDATE : I didn't actually know there was anybody standing up for Insect Rights, but apparently there is.

Iran : A New Reality Dawning Fast And Hard

By Darryl Mason

Will it last? That seems to be the biggest question of all right now. How long can the many millions filling the streets of Iran over the past few days maintain their rolling protests against what they believe to be a stolen election?

Iran might have been expecting attacks from Israel, they've certainly been planning for it for years, but it seems obvious the ruling religious leader did not expect anything like the dissent and scenes of anarchy that now fill the streets of Iran's capital.

In many ways, what is now happening in Iran is even worse than an all-out aerial assault by Israel. That would have only lasted 48 hours or less, and united most of Iran behind its leaders.

But what is happening in Iran now could last for weeks, months, could end up hauling the brutal theocracy into the 21st century whether they like it or not.

You just don't see these kinds of scenes on the streets of Iran's capital city.



An extraordinary series of images from the aftermath of the Iran elections, as rioting, violence and dissent fills the streets of Tehran, can be viewed here.

Pepe Escobar, one of the finest, most honest journalists writing about the Middle East today (which is why he's not published in your city's newspapers) explains why, in dealing with what they perceive to be a stolen election, Iranians are not like Americans (excerpts) :

It is 1979 in Tehran all over again. From Saturday to Sunday, the deafening sound deep in the night across Tehran's rooftops was a roaring, ubiquitous "Allah-u Akbar" (God is great). Then, in 1979, to hail the Islamic revolution; now, in 2009, to signify what appears to be the hijacking of the Islamic revolution. Then, the revolution was not televised; it was via (Ruhollah Khomeini) radio. Now, it is being broadcast all across the world.

Let's cut to the chase: what Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi qualified as "this dangerous charade" and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "the sweetness of the election", or better yet, a "divine assessment", has all the non-divine markings of intervention by the Iranian Republican Guards Corps (IRGC). This follows President Mahmud Ahmadinejad officially gaining 64% of the vote in defeating Mousavi in what in parts of working-class south Tehran, but not even "divine assessment" could be expected to give him more than 30% in the capital.

Ahmadinejad blamed the whole Iranian turmoil on foreign media - which not by accident are now being virtually persecuted by the security apparatus. The crackdown is assuming ultra-hardcore proportions. Yet the revolution continues to be broadcast to the whole world in English and Farsi, although the indispensable Tehran Bureau website was been taken down by the thought police. Riot police have fought students inside the dorms of the University of Tehran.

This has nothing to do with the US-supported color-coded revolutions in Eurasia. This is about Iran. An election was stolen in the United States in 2000 and Americans didn't do a thing about it. Iranians are willing to die to have their votes counted. There is now an opening for a true Iranian people-power movement not specifically to the benefit of Mousavi, but with Mousavi as the catalyst in a wider struggle for real democratic legitimacy. The die is cast; now it's people power against "divine assessment".

Change always comes to those who fight it the hardest, and even if the protests die away, or the rulers military forces kill thousands once the foreign media is expelled, real change in Iran has been set in motion.

Those who have feasted on the exhilarating joy of true defiance in these past few days, as the centre of Iran has filled with hundreds of thousands of people, and nine kilometre long protest marches, will not forget that feeling of being a part of something historic. Revolutionary.

At the same time, it will not be impossible for outsiders to now seed the scenes for something close to a civil war. The city-dwelling middle classes versus Ahmadinejad's rural poor.

That kind of horrific reality will be immediately preceded by the ever reliable car bombs and urban terror attacks that no-one ever seems to claim responsibility for. They just seem to happen, don't they?

"There Are A Lot Of People Who Lie, And Get Away With It"

By Darryl Mason

Never forget....because it's not over, yet :



The short section where George W. Bush is laughing it up with his elite pals over the WMD lies, with the photos that show the tragic realities of those lies for Americans, is still one of the most powerful and shocking pieces of video I've seen in all these long, strange years of the 2000s.

If you feel fucking outraged watching that clip, all those lies, imagine how it feels to be an American soldier who signed up when the NeoCon cheerleading for War On Iraq was at its loudest, who did their two or three tours, saw friends die, came home to see more friends die in drunken car accidents and suicide-by-cops, who came home to see so many families shattered by loss, the ruins and ongoing aftershocks of all those terrible fucking lies, small communities forever scarred, imagine how it must feel to watch the above video now, to hear Bush laughing like that, while their colleagues and friends were being blown to pieces.

If you claim to Support The Troops, then you now have no excuse not to support the many hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and miliary family members who want BushCo. to be held to account for their lies and deceptions before and during the War On Iraq, and the War On Afghanistan.

You know why these people keep making these wars in our reality? Why they keep sending so many Americans to die for little more than the sake of maintaining and expanding their war industries and presidencies and energy empires? You know why they do it generation after generation?

Because while American teenagers die miserable deaths screaming for their mothers in a foreign land, they get to laugh it up back home with their pals about how, once again, they got away with it.

How they always get away with it.

How To Kill Bloggers : Take Away Their Anonymity

By Darryl Mason

In the UK at least, this is the day that marks the beginning of the end of the age of anonymous blogging :

Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled today

In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of a blog called NightJack.

The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.

In April Mr Horton was awarded an Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were not aware that he was revealing confidential details about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.

His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues, including matters of “public controversy,” the judge said.

Think about it. A Rupert Murdoch newspaper helped shut down a blogger who was reporting the kind of news and opinion that they cannot. And he was pulling the kind of readership that many Murdoch online newspapers would kill half a dozen sub-editors to get.

It wasn't the police who put this anonymous blogger out of business, and forced this wildly popular blog to be removed from the internet, it was a Rupert Murdoch newspaper.

This is called Killing The Competition With Your Lawyers.

Rupert Murdoch journalists in Australia are trying to do the very same thing with anonymous blogs who ritually smash the credibility of some of Murdoch's highest paid Australian journalists and opinion writers. It has been made very clear indeed to a small circle of anoymous bloggers in Australia that Rupert Murdoch's lawyers want to have their true identities exposed in court. And not because they are revealing police or even government secrets, but because they are too criticial of the Murdoch media in Australia.

Around the world, there are plenty of hardcore political blogs published under writers' real names that will carry on as usual, but there are also tens of thousands of other blogs, on subjects as vast and varied as sex, finance, police brutality, anarchy, the questioning of history, tech, the movie industry, the music industry (what's left of it) that will now either disappear, or will tone themselves down in fear of the day the writers real indentities are exposed in a court.

We will see a steady, concerted push by politicians, media companies and authorities across Western nations to make it mandatory for blogs to be published under the writers' real names, and then similar laws will be pushed to do away with anonymous commenting completely.

No doubt, plans are already being discussed to create mandatory online IDs for all internet users, be they readers or writers, creators, publishers or just commenters, game players too. This will of course cost a fee, per year. If you don't pay for your online ID renewal, you will eventually find it more difficult to get online. These new laws might not get pushed through yet, or in the next few years, but they are most definitely in the pipeline.

That yearly online ID subscription fee for a billion internet users around the world is simply too much money not being collected to never become reality.

When all bloggers must post under their real names, and all commenters must log in with their mandatory online ID numbers, the wild and crazy and absurd and shocking and jaw-dropingly funny and controversial and information-soaked online realities will become far more subdued, restricted, monotone, and sad indeed it is to say, a whole lot less exciting.

Of course there will be plenty of mainstream media companies who will be damned happy to know that bloggers will soon no longer be able to get away with doing what their journalists can never do, so very, very unrestrained - writing brutally honest reality-changing opinion and 'Truth' detonating news, and not giving a fuck for the consequences.

These kinds of compilations always miss a few personal favourites, but this collection of 100 Classic Movie Lines In 200 Seconds is fantastically comprehensive, and tight as a drum :

This Is Venus

I thought I was a total space-nerd during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I seemed to have missed the part where Russians sent probes and landers to Venus and took extraordinary images of the surface. Like this one, :



Here's a screen capture of those distant hills :




The Russian 'Venera' missions reached the surface of Venus at least 10 times, before 1985.

For someone who stared for a few hundreds of hours at the colour front page of a newspaper showing the surface of Mars, stuck to my bedroom wall, I'm stunned I knew so little about the Russians on Venus.

Obviously I was reading the wrong books. Back then.

Nothing To See Here....

You'd think the busting of an international smuggling and probable counterfeiting operation involving more than $134 billion in US bonds would be big news.

You'd be wrong, at least according to thousands of mainstream news services you can search through Google News :



That's a search from today, at 11pm Saturday night, almost four days after the story first appeared on the front pages of Italian newspapers.

Only 36 related articles, and that includes the financial media. The independent online media and bloggers have given this story far more attention than the mainstream media.

I mean seriously, how is this not extremely huge fucking news?

Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each.

Italian authorities have not yet determined whether they are real or fake, but if they are real the attempt to take them into Switzerland would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history; if they are fake, the matter would be even more mind-boggling because the quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are undistinguishable from the real ones.

What caught the policemen’s attention were the billion dollar securities. Such a large denomination is not available in regular financial and banking markets. Only states handle such amounts of money.

The question now is who could or would counterfeit or smuggle these non-negotiable bonds.

In order to stop money laundering Italian law sets a ceiling of 10,000 euros per person for importing or exporting money without declaring it. The penalty for violating the law is 40 per cent of the money seized.

If the certificates were real, for Italy it would be like hitting the jackpot. The fine alone would amount to US$ 38 billion, five times the estimated cost of rebuilding quake-devastated Abruzzi region. It would help Italy’s eliminate its public deficit.

As soon as the seizure was made the US Embassy in Rome was informed. Italian and US secret services were called in to assist the Italian financial police.

As this story points out, the international media, the Western media, is all but silent.

This is either going to be the biggest financial smuggling bust in history, or the biggest counterfeiting bust in history.

Or both.

But you can probably tick this story for a very quick disappearance from the handful of mainstream media outfits that have bothered to cover it so far.

Apparently there is already a fair bit of talk in the Germany and Italian financial media about American "funny money" being detected in circulation.

This massive bust and those rumours are not going to help the standing of the broken American dollar in world markets, and China will be increasingly nervy about the true value of the trillion plus in US bonds they've found themselves stuck with.

.

Richard Nixon On Drugs

A great piece by on drug prohibition through the ages, and how the pissed-away-billions US War On Drugs that still sends dope smokers to jail today began in the Richard Nixon White House.

From the essay, here is Richard Nixon explaining his thinking on why he brought into reality this multi-trillion dollar farce of criminality, corruption. violence and death :

"You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

"Why the hell are those Communists so hard on drugs? Well why they're so hard on drugs is because, uh, they love to booze. I mean, the Russians, they drink pretty good."

"People use marijuana to get high. People use alcohol to have fun."

"Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish."

"These uh, more radical demonstrators that were here the last, oh, two weeks ago. They're all on drugs. Oh yeah, horrible..."

"Now, this is one thing I want. I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana. Can I get that out of this sonofabitching, uh, Domestic Council?"

"I mean (a War on Drugs) on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them."

"We are going to hit the marijuana thing, and I want to hit it right square in the puss, I want to find a way of putting more on that."

"I want to hit it, against legalizing and all that sort of thing."

"We need, and I use the word 'all out war', on all fronts... We have to attack on all fronts."

"America's Public Enemy Number One is drug abuse."

"...present efforts to control drug abuse are not sufficient... The problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency. I intend to take every step necessary to deal with this emergency."

"Drug traffic is public enemy number one domestically in the United States today and we must wage a total offensive, worldwide, nationwide, government-wide, and, if I might say so, media-wide."

Many decades earlier, Abraham Lincoln well understood what Richard Nixon did not, or simply did not want to :

"Prohibition... makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... and strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."

So according to Lincoln, drug prohibition is anti-democratic? Hell, Lincoln makes prohibition sound downright anti-American.


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A Robot With "Predictive Powers" Will Be Able To Anticipate A Human's Reaction To Just About Anything

Robots eventually won't just be smarter than humans, they will know us better than we know ourselves :

European scientists have created a robot that can predict the intentions of humans, a development that could pave the way to make interactions between human and robot more natural.

The EU-funded JAST project aimed to see whether human and robot could "coordinate their work" and move on with its task without being told what to do next.

"In our experiments the robot is not observing to learn a task," explains Wolfram Erlhagen, one of the project consortium's research partners.

"The JAST robots already know the task, but they observe behaviour, map it against the task, and quickly learn to anticipate [partner actions] or spot errors when the partner does not follow the correct or expected procedure," stressed Erlhagen, from the University of Minho in Protugal.

The robot, by observing how its human partner grasped a tool or model part, was able to predict how he intended to use it.

So you will never be able to sneak up on your annoyingly smart robot companion with a soldering iron.

It'll know exactly how you're planning to rewire it, and anticipate exactly when you're thinking of putting your plan into action.

How did HAL put it in 2001?

"What are you doing, Dave?"

There'll be some terribly depressing lessons for humanity to learn when it collectively comes to understand, thanks to the intelligent robots it creates, just how predictable and routine-based we all are.

Won't that then mean, in turn, that we'll have a bit of a hard time trying to predict how intelligent robots will act? They'll be able to read us like a big print children's book, while we'll be struggling through 1000 page manuals.

Believe The Defibrillator Story If You Like, But We Know Zombies Have Been Playing Professional Sports For Years

A Belgium football player has a heart attack in the middle of a game, and hits the ground, as good as dead.

At 14 seconds in, you can see this football player's legs jolt as his implanted defibrillator gives him a zap. Almost instantly he sits up.



The reporter doesn't make clear if the player was then hungry for fresh brains.

(found on Reddit.com)

I Had To Call, He Was Sitting At The Back Of The Bus Eating Guinea Pigs Whole

A promotion for the very interesting sounding aliens-among-us movie District 9 asks the public to refocus its suspicious eyes :

Last week the studio introduced an unusual outdoor advertising campaign for the film, papering bus-stop benches and billboards with messages encouraging people to report nonhumans.

The studio has already logged nearly 12,000 calls....

No doubt a fat chunk of these were prank calls or people just ringing to see what the strange posters were all about, but what of all the other calls to the hotline?

How many walk the streets of our cities and gaze into the eyes of passers-by and think 'Yep, definitely non-human.'

The District 9 trailer :

Arrestable Rant Of The Day :

"We are 94 million miles from the sun, and are in-between the sun and moon, and the eagle that flies between them and it's a giant step for mankind. ... I have traveled thousands of miles to be here and know things that are going to happen. ... the banking system will fail and people will die. ... there will be chaos in the world," Murray said, according to the complaint.

He then made his threat against the president...

The Full Story Is Here

M-O-O-N Spells Incredible

This is The Moon from a high-definition camera mounted on Japan's Kaguya probe. The probe is expected to crash into the Moon's surface on June 10.

An American President Manages To Make An Entire Speech In The Middle East Without Using The Words 'Terror" Or "Terrorists"

"Extremists", However, Sure Did Get A Workout



By Darryl Mason

A simply remarkable speech for an American president, well worth reading in full.

It was an historic event in Cairo, of major important for a young American president, and the full consequences of what will now unfold in the Middle East will take years to manifest. What happens in the next few weeks will likely be either suprisingly calm, or stunningly violent.

If President Obama is a man of his word, and a president of honour and intregrity, the Middle East will never be the same again. It would be a remarkable first year legacy if Obama can pull off what so many other presidents before him failed to achieve.

Here's the Obama mentions of "extremists" and "extremism" from his Cairo speech :

"Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims."

".... the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile..."

"When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountains, people are endangered across an ocean."

"The first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms."

"We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security."

"We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan...."

"Indeed, none of us should tolerate these extremists. They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths – more than any other, they have killed Muslims."

"Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace."

"And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter our principles."

"But we have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek – a world where extremists no longer threaten our people...."

Using "Extremist" instead of "Terrorist" is not just an Obama presidency word change. In his last two years in the White House, President Bush began to favour "extremist" over "terrorist".

The question is why is Obama referring only now to "Extremists" when he describes acts of terrorism?

It certainly doesn't sound as bad as "Terrorist", though it seems a little further down the line towards the day when an animal rights campaigner is classed, legally, alongside those who blow up buses and run into cafes wearing bombs.

Maybe that really is just being too paranoid. Then again, laws in the UK, the US and Australia already class acts of what would have once been regarded as "extremism" as being all but the same as acts of "terrorism".

It's hard to believe all of that is an accident, or coincidence.

The disappearance of the word 'terrorism' from the president's dialogue is some kind of Change, and one that many in the Middle East will welcome. It was hard to take President Bush seriously when he gave speeches where he used the word 'terrorist' almost as often as he used the word 'and'.

In August, 2006, I wrote about how The War On Extremism began.

By September, 2006, however, Bush was regularly mixing 'extremists' into his key Fear Words list for his 'War on Terror' speeches, as were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

This September, 2006 speech by Bush stands in somewhat stunning contrast to what Obama delivered in Cairo yesterday.

While Obama spoke clearly and precisely of his "New Beginnings" vision, Bush ranted, and filled a big chunk of his You Should Be More Scared, All Of You speech with direct quotes from the propaganda of Osama Bin Laden. Not once, or twice, but over and over again. Bin Laden's words flowed from Bush's lips, for minutes.

Osama Bin Laden wasn't mentioned once in all of Obama's 6000 word speech in Cairo.

Looking back at that Bush speech, and reading Obama's Cairo speech, makes it seem like a decade or two has passed by, not just a few months.

Obama promised Change. The Cairo speech certainly qualifies as Change. A vision for it, at least, and it's a start. The Obama effigy-burning count today is low in Muslim countries. Not everyone in the Middle East liked what Obama had to say, but it seems like most felt it was necessary.

Now, of course, Obama has to deliver, and make sure no new wars break out in the Middle East just as it appears the region is on the brink, yet again, of a more lasting peace.

You get the feeling the weeks ahead in the Middle East will be either suprisingly peaceful, or shockingly violent.

The more days that pass now without a new war breaking out over there, the more likely it is fresh war will not break out. Or certainly not break out as easily, as quickly, as wars in the Middle East have begun in recent years.

August, 2006 : The War On Extremism Begins

A Very Good Question Posed At Reddit :

Is it morally correct for a Government to ask a society knowingly deceived into debt and war to adjust to a lesser lifestyle while the elites who caused it got bailed out with the people's money?

Fuck no, it's not morally correct. But it's still a reality.

Killing Machine Hitler Still Getting More Media Coverage Than Any Of The Truly Great, Courageous Leaders Of The 20th Century

More than 60 years on, Adolf Hitler, somehow, remains a reliable staple of the mainstream media, who think his memory deserves particularly lavish photo essays.

Christmas With Hitler, 1944 :



15 Pages Of HitlerHitlerHitlerHitlerHitler At Life Magazine

Toxic Extremism That Doesn't Grab Newspaper Headlines

This is not the real quote, but it fits snugly into the War on Terror narrative :

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Islamic way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)...."

“I don’t believe in Western morality. Living by the values of the Qur'an will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.”

This is the real quote :

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle),” Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its “Ask the Rabbis” feature.

Friedman argued that if Israel followed this wisdom, there would be “no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.”

“I don’t believe in Western morality,” he wrote. “Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.”

These anti-humanity beliefs are also taught to many of Israel's soldiers, most of whom are only teenagers when they are first indoctrinated.

All religious extremism used to justify murder is fucking ugly.

"America Can Live In Peace With The Muslim World"

"No, You Can't"


An Israeli Anti-American propaganda poster

President Obama has made it clear that the United States will not back or protect Israel if it decides to launch an incomprehensibly destructive war on Iran, that Israel must stop its settlers from violently stealing Palestinian land, and that the Bush-era status quo has changed. Probably forever.

And so, hundreds of Israelis gathered outside the American Consulate in Tel Aviv to protest the United States' new plans to stop further bloodshed in the Middle East and to declare that they are, still, victims :

Over the coming days, activists plan to hang posters throughout the country of Obama wearing a keffiyeh, flanked by the words, "Anti-Semite," and "Jew-hater," written in red in both English and Hebrew. Another poster published by the campaign shows Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against a background of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

The Jewish National Front, which is backing the protests, said in a statement: "We decided to launch a campaign against the president of the United States and to say that Barack Hussein Obama is bad for the Jews."

"From the moment that he entered the White House, we have been feeling anti-Semitism and hatred toward Israel," the statement continued.

I'm sure bombing the shit out of thousands of people and hospitals and schools in Gaza had nothing to do with this new "hatred toward Israel."

"We have a number of plans, among which are demonstrations in the US and protests in front of the consulate and homes of the ambassadors."

Hopefully, they will stop well short of the Israeli Right's old tactic of blowing up those from the West they oppose.

Obama's 6000 Words To The Muslim World That Could, And Should, Change History

Obama Speaks In Cairo, Calls For New Beginning Between Americans And Muslims

Israel Claims Bush Gave An Unwritten Promise To Allow West Banks Settlements To Expand

Slowly, Obama's Muslims Roots Emerge In The Mainstream Media

Israel Foreign Minister : We're Not Going To Bomb Iran....Well, Not Now

Netanyahu Needs Billions In 'Defence Funding' From Obama, So He Claims He Will Do As Obama Says

Goodbye, Grasshopper...

Actor David Carradine has been found dead, at 71, in a hotel room in Thailand. It may be suicide.

Along with about 100 roles in the movies, and hundreds more on TV, Carradine played Bill, in Tarantino's Kill Bill. Here's Bill's death scene, and one of Carradine's finest cinema moments :



Beautiful.

It's bizarre sometimes the clips that show up in YouTube's 'Featured Videos' list. Here's one from today :





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The Bloody Finales We Never Got To See





Despite the curious gruesomeness of these pieces of art by James Caughty, the images merely show us what Sylvester and Tom were always trying to do, kill Tweetie and destroy Jerry.

These are the end scenes of the cartoons that soaked up so much childhood that we were never allowed to see, but could always imagine.

More of James Caughty's Blood Splattered Cartoon Art At The Chive

You might like to save the images you like while you can, they may disappear if Warner Bros. takes offence.

"B Was Ready To Begin His True Work"

A short story from writer JG Ballard, published after his death in the New Yorker :

In the following week, B made several expeditions to London. He returned to the houses and flats of his friends, but found them empty. He broke into Scotland Yard and the newspaper offices in Fleet Street, in the hope of finding some explanation for the disappearance of an entire population. Lastly, he entered the Houses of Parliament, and stood in the silent debating chamber of the Commons, breathing the stale air. However, there was not the least explanation anywhere of what had taken place. In the streets of the city, he saw not a single cat or dog.

The Full Short Story Is Here

The excellent animated intro to the The Beatles' Rock Band video game :

New Clouds Appear In Our Skies

Strange, majestic clouds like none officially recorded before are appearing in the skies above New Zealand, England, Scotland. They appear to be rain clouds, but rain doesn't fall.

These two extraordinarily beautiful, and somewhat menacing, images from New Zealand are by Ken Prior, sourced from the Cloud Appreciation Society website.





I imagine these spectacular images will be seized upon and marketed as a stark, extremely visual demonstration of how global warming can supposedly change our skies right before our eyes.

A campaign has begun to have the cloud type officially recognised :

Experts at the Royal Meteorological Society are now attempting to make it official by naming it 'Asperatus' after the Latin word for 'rough'.

If they are successful, it would be the first variety of cloud formation to be given a new label in over half a century.

In cloud appreciation circles, this is Big, Big News.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society :

'We try to identify and classify all of the images of clouds we get in, but there were some that just didn't seem to fit in any of the other categories, so I began to think it might be a unique type of cloud.'

It's not easy getting a new cloud type recognised, and named :

Officials will then apply to the UN's World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva to have the new cloud type considered for addition into the International Cloud Atlas, the system used by meteorologists across the globe.

Why are these clouds here, and what do they want from us?

Professor Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the RMS :

'There would probably need to be quite a lot of heat around to produce the energy needed to generate such dramatic cloud formations.

'They are quite dark structures so there must be a lot of water vapour condensing in the cloud.'

Is this what happens to clouds when you dump a whole load of sulphur into the sky from the back of an aircraft in an attempt to halt global warming?

Michael Moore : Cars Are Like "A Million Daggers Into The Heart Of Mother Nature"

The financial ruin of General Motors was accurately predicted by Michael Moore two decades ago in his first film, Roger & Me.

On the day it becomes official, Moore writes :

100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine.

Moore proposes a World War 2-style revolution in American vehicle production, with former GM factories completely retooled and turning out hybrids and electric cars, bullet trains, light rail carriages, buses for the towns and villages that the rails will not reach.

General Motors purposely built cars that would fall apart, and considering Moore's brief history of the greed and corruption that overtook GM, it's a wonder this financial ruin didn't come sooner :

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one — has now made itself obsolete.

It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh — and that wouldn’t start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the “inferior” Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to “improve” the short-term bottom line of the corporation.

Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans.

The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars?

Americans now own 80% of General Motors, which has announced its bankruptcy with a declaration that it owes a staggering $172 billion.

Bill O'Reilly Spent Years Goading Potential Assassins : "This Man Is Executing Babies....He Has Blood On His Hands....Stop This Man"

For more than three years, Bill O'Reilly used his Fox News show to demand someone in his audience of three million do something about "baby killer" Dr Tiller :



And now someone has.

Bill O'Reilly will not personally pay a price for what he said, or the campaign he led, but "Christian terrorism" will now enter the American lexicon with gusto, and the murder of Dr Tiller and the gleeful reaction of so many supposed Christians online will be used to further wind back freedom of speech.

An opportunity to increase the focus of Homeland Security on "urban terrorism" and "extremism" is never missed.

An example from Newsweek of Making The Most Of This Opportunity-type comments popping up all over the online mainstream media by the thousands :

Accept Jesus into your heart, and become a cold blooded murderer. The Department of Homeland Security must start investigating right wing religious groups as possible terrorist organizations!

Posted by: thomasmc1957 | June 1, 2009 10:20 AM

They already are investigating right wing religious groups, along with pro-peace activists, patriot movements and animal rights activists.

The alleged assassin is apparently very well known in 'pro-life' circles, so you would presume that the DoHS and the FBI already knew who he was, to some extent. It will be interesting to learn how extensive the surveillance and pre-murder investigations into the alleged assassin were, and how recently such surveillance and investigations were still running.

Clandestine LSD experiments in mind control and memory-clearing figure heavily in the below summary of Cold War events :

The CIA, with a little help from the Nazis, accidentally helped invent hippies while they were trying to figure out how to brainwash communists.

Robert Wright :

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the new atheists really got traction in the years after 9/11. The rise of fundamentalism in Islam, but also in Christianity in America, has so highlighted the dark side of religion that people denouncing religion as a whole have a receptive audience.