Gore Vidal : Media Is Preparing Americans For A War On Iran

In an abrasive interview with the London Times, Gore Vidal cuts loose on Obama, Republicans and dumb Americans (excerpts) :

"(Obama) was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

"(The media) is busy preparing us for an Iranian war.”

"Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

“Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.”

America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is."

“Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

“I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was."

"Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.”

When asked which achievement of his long life and very successful writing career he is most proud of, Vidal cites only the fact that he restrained himself from ever killing anyone.

The Full London Times Interview With Gore Vidal Is Here

The Pro-Iran War Sleepers Awake

By Darryl Mason

The dying mainstream media has begun to beat its drums of war, once more. Iran Must Be Stopped! And how very interesting it is that a new media alleged liberal like Arianna Huffington is doing her bit to promote Iran as "A Grave Threat".



It would not be enough to simply target Huffington Post advertisers with a boycott if the site promotes attacks on the people of Iran, which will kill civilians and destroy infrastructure. A campaign will need to be launched to have everyone opposed to attacks on Iran to immediately remove Huffington Post from their bookmarks. To delete the site from from their digital reality.

Glenn Greenwald, who seems quite stunned at Huffington's echoing of NeoCon warspeak about Iraq, has noticed a storm of Washington Post stories and op-eds echoing the language and deceits of the Washington Post's influential pro-Iraq War cheerleading in 2002 and early 2003.

Greenwald tries to check the insanity, and stunning hypocrisy :

....imagine if Iran had invaded, bombed and then spent the last eight years militarily occupying Canada and Mexico, only for its media elites to keep insisting that it was the U.S. that was the rogue state run by fanatics who threatened world peace....

Those who want to see Iran attacked, to see its people decimated (and some of those who most virulently roared outrage about the dodgy Iran elections do indeed want to see more Muslims killed), know they don't have much time left now to get the new war going.

The US under Obama, Russia, China, most of Europe, will not pursue military strikes or a war on Iran. Sanctions are unlikely to go beyond threats and talking

Iran, despite the Western media propaganda-hysteria about its nuclear energy projects, will only increase trade, diplomatic ties and cultural influence with the world's powers in the next few years. Those who want War On Iran are desperate now to get it started, knowing their time is short, that the era when they could manufacture war-ready reality and silence dissent by pretending it doesn't exist has all but ended. Thankfully. Finally.

I'm working on a few serious pieces for Your New Reality, so this is for my amusement :



Don't worry, the rest of this selection of Roller Coaster Funnies are puke free, and some of them are very funny indeed. Well, they are right now to my frazzled mind anyway.

Glenn Beck, outside of the comfort zone of his show and the safety bubble of Fox News, can't even answer a simple question, supply even the most basic detail to back up a claim he made.



I get the feeling he doesn't write his own material. How can he be so lost for words, for anything at all to say, given the chance by Couric to reach an audience that don't really know that much about him at all. This Liberal Media Are Out To Get Me! bullshit is just a convenient cover story for the fact that without a teleprompter, and someone feeding him lines, coaching him, Glenn Beck is next to useless.

Propagating Myths Through Godwin's Law

With the adding of comments to news stories in the mainstream media, to ramp up that all important hit count, it is becoming harder and harder for journalists to re-circulate decades old propaganda.

The UK Daily Mails runs a story here where a reviewer visits the British Museum for what appears to be an extraordinary collection of beautiful Aztec art. The reviewer doesn't like it, however, because the exhibition includes pieces used in human sacrifice ceremonies.

He goes the Godwin in the headline and second paragraph :

British Museum's Aztec artefacts 'as evil as Nazi lampshades made from human skin'

I don't care whether a Nazi lampshade fashioned from human skin is beautifully made or not. And the same concern blocks out a lot of one's interest in this exhibition.

The reviewer is called out on his myth propagation by dozens of commenters :

"Haven't "Nazi lampshades made from human skin" been proven to be a hoax, as was soap made from human fat. Load of cobblers."

"You will find that the Nazi lampshades made from human skin is a British war propaganda story and they were actually made from goats skin."

"Lampshades from human skin was a blatant lie put about by the allies at the end of the second world war. Research it please"

"Philip Hensher, you are a total fool. The lampshades claimed to have been made from human skin have been scientifically examined and found to be made of goat skin. And I have to wonder at your journalistic integrity that you that you take an article about Aztecs and in the first two paragraphs drag the Nazis into it, using a false allegation on top of it all."

"Nazi lampshades are urban legend actually."

"Why does the writer of this peice refer to 'a Nazi lampshade fashioned from human skin' when that claim was long ago proven false?"

"The so-called Nazi artifacts; lampshades made of human skin, and soap made from human fat were merely fantasies of the propaganda at the time; surely Philip Hensher must know that so why does he lie? To grab the headlines on a story guaranteed to grab attention. How pathetic and how immoral."

99% of the 60+ commenters tear the reviewer to shreds for not only being a liar about lampshades made from human skin, but for being an idiot.

There was some praise, however :

One of the most stunningly ignorant articles I have ever read on this site... bravo!

Oprah's Audience Cheer & Applaud Wildly For Free Swine Flu Vaccine Shot

Americans really will go nuts for free anything :



I wonder if Oprah will do a follow-up show if any of the audience members develop severe side effects from the vaccinations?

Rant Your Head Off

'DwightVanDryver' reads this article in the UK Guardian, which claims "Dust storms like the one that plagued Sydney are blowing bacteria to all corners of the globe, with viruses that will attack the human body" and snaps :

I get up in the morning and turn on the PC to see what's happening in the world. Do I worry about my carbon footprint? Do I f***! When I turn to the Guardian, I am confronted by at least one article trying to indoctrinate me into a guilt trip about how I am destroying the planet. Like the telly, I could switch off, so I don't have to read this stuff; but like the telly if you don't watch the news, you don't know what the buggers will be doing next.

What will they be doing next? Well, it looks like the French are going to be soaked with green taxes if Sarkozy gets his way. The Europeans are going to call for draconian cuts in emissions - already overtures have been made at the G20. Copenhagen? Another jolly for the converted, the results of which are going to hit me in my pocket, whether I like it or not.

I am here on this planet by pure chance. The human species may not have evolved had the dinosaurs not snuffed it. It is only by accident that I happened to be born in a developed nation. I could have been one of the unfortunates in a third world country. If I were, what would I think about all of this green shit? There I am, nearly starving with all sorts of parasites worming their way around my gut, and some twat from the IPCC is telling me that I can't burn anything to heat the few morsels of food that I do have. This affluent guy tells my country that it cannot dig up its own coal and use it in a power station so that I can have a light on at night. Instead, he wants us to import a lot of expensive kit produced by his countries that we can't afford in order for us to be "responsible" by showing that we care. Nobody has cared about me, or my country. It would be different if we had oil or rare minerals, such as uranium ore. But we don't, and the world doesn't give a stuff. This generous world would prefer that we don't procreate and that we die young, so there would be more for them. As I see it, the West has invented this green shit to keep me in poverty.
 

Fortunately, by the merest accident, I'm not in this predicament. 

Even so, I know that the brainwashing will continue relentlessly, that industries must close and jobs lost for the sake of planet. My standard of living will fall, but not for the high priests of the green revolution. Oh no, the likes of Al Gore will make a fortune out of carbon trading and I shall have to pay for it. I shall have to abide by EU rules and regulations or the government will impose a fine on me. For politicians and the state, the green shit is the best thing since sliced bread. It allows them to control me, to get me used to being controlled, to get me to conform and turn me into a malleable plastic man. My spirit and my individuality will be sucked out of my brain cells and I shall become an automaton: a slave to the state.

 

Obi Wan Kenobi : Conspiracy Theorist

Dozens of images created, in only six minutes, echoing classic art, telling stories of Ukranian history, bringing tears to the eyes of those watching, the oldest art form, drawing in sand with fingers and hands :

Acoustic Weapons, Military Abduction, At Pittsburgh G20 Protests

By Darryl Mason

Raw Story confirms the below extraordinary video of government agents in military camos snatch and grabbing a protester at the G20 demonstrations in Pittsburgh, is real :




Acoustic weapons, military weapons, were also deployed against civilians in Pittsburgh :



Consider it a 'live field test.'

Paul Joseph Watson at Prison Planet :

There can be no more debate, America as we knew it is officially dead and buried. The U.S. is more of a police state than Communist China. The only free speech that still exists is on the Internet, in the form of You Tube videos that remind us of what we already knew – the whole country has been hijacked and looted by a criminal gang of globalists who are using their cadre of enforcer thugs to crush any form of opposition to their agenda.

Our only hope is that when the world witnesses scenes like this, it will act as a wake-up call and prevent the planet from sliding once again into tyranny.

The assumption here, perhaps wrong, is that governments of US allies, like the UK, Australia, Canada, are opposed to citizens being treated this way. That they will see this happening today in the United States and react with outrage. But how can they, when such weapons, such police tactics, have already been deployed and used in their own countries?

Here's how the Drudge Report, who seems hell-bent to spark anti-government clashes, or an uprising, covered the incidents, claiming the abduction of the protester was undertaken by the military :

Pittsburgh police now deny the men in camoflauge were military. But their explanation will likely spark even more outrage. Not military, but military members? :

“Military members supporting the G20 Summit work with local law enforcement authorities but do not have the authority to make arrests. The individuals involved in the 9/24/09 arrest which has appeared online are law enforcement officers from a multi-agency tactical response team assigned to the security operations for the G20. It is not unusual for tactical team members to wear camouflaged fatigues. The type of fatigues the officers wear designates their unit affiliation.

"Prior to the arrest, the officers observed this subject vandalizing a local business. Due to the hostile nature of the crowd, officer safety and the safety of the person under arrest, the subject was immediately removed from the area.”

There is a lot of speculation online that the abductee might be an agent provocateur, who was sent in to the protests to smash windows and give police a reason to strike back against the protesters, who mostly appear to be students milling around, videoing each other. It wouldn't be the first time a provocateur has been deployed into a peaceful rally for this reason, and then pulled out by police when his mission is completed.

Armoured Police Seize University Of Pittsburgh Campus, Attack Students

I'll keep the birthday postings to a minimum, but it's hard to go past paying a birthday tribute to the brilliant animator Chuck Jones, not in words, but through his own art. For those under 20 who may never have encountered the art of Chuck Jones, this is one of his most accomplished, hilarious and demented works - Daffy Duck in the 1953 short Duck Amuck.

A compilation of David Fincher (Benjamin Button, Fight Club) directed ads for AT&T, from 1993, on future tech. Remarkably accurate, considering much of what is depicted has only become commonplace in the past couple of years.

Happy Birthday HG Wells



Today is HG Wells' birthday. More than 110 years ago, while still in his 20s, Wells wrote still famous and very readable books about planetary invasion by extraterrestrials (The War Of The Worlds), time travel (The Time Machine) and human cloning and genetic engineering (The Island Of Dr Moreau).

Google pays homage :



Almost everything HG Wells wrote during his extremely prolific lifetime is now available to read online for free. As it should be. While Wells is mostly know today for his science fiction (or as it was wonderfully known in his day, 'scientific romance'), he was also an extremely important essayist, and polemicist, and a remarkable historian.

HG Wells, writing in 1940 :

The world before 1900 seemed to be drifting steadily towards a tacit but practical unification. One could travel without a passport over the larger part of Europe; the Postal Union delivered one’s letters uncensored and safely from Chile to China; money, based essentially on gold, fluctuated only very slightly; and the sprawling British Empire still maintained a tradition of free trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to all comers round and about the planet. In the United States you could go for days and never see a military uniform. Compared with to-day that was, upon the surface at any rate, an age of easy-going safety and good humour. Particularly for the North Americans and the Europeans.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

...the minds of our comfortable and influential ruling-class people refuse to accept the plain intimation that their time is over, that the Balance of Power and uncontrolled business methods cannot continue....

.....we are living in the end of a definite period of history, the period of the sovereign states. As we used to say in the eighties with ever-increasing truth: "We are in an age of transition". Now we get some measure of the acuteness of the transition. It is a phase of human life which may lead, as I am trying to show, either to a new way of living for our species or else to a longer or briefer dégringolade of violence, misery, destruction, death and the extinction of mankind.

These are not rhetorical phrases I am using here; I mean exactly what I say, the disastrous extinction of mankind. That is the issue before us.

As I write, in the moment, thousands of people are being killed, wounded, hunted, tormented, ill-treated, delivered up to the most intolerable and hopeless anxiety and destroyed morally and mentally, and there is nothing in sight at present to arrest this spreading process and prevent its reaching you and yours. It is coming for you and yours now at a great pace.

Plainly in so far as we are rational foreseeing creatures there is nothing for any of us now but to make this world peace problem the ruling interest and direction of our lives. If we run away from it it will pursue and get us. We have to face it. We have to solve it or be destroyed by it.

HG Wells' The New World Order

HG Wells' The Time Machine

HG Wells' The Island Of Dr Moreau

HG Wells' The War Of The Worlds

The War Of The Cable News Networks

The Old Media continues to eat itself, like a snake gulping down its own tail.

How far will the CNN Vs Fox News war go? Will they attempt to sabotage each other? Will there be violence?

From Reddit :

When millions of Americans protested the Iraq war, the media ignored it. 70,000 lunatics protest healthcare, they got hours of commentary. When a couple went to a Bush rally wearing anti-Bush t-shirts, they got arrested. Guys at Obama rallies openly carry guns and get interviews.

Politics And Religion Are Obsolete, The Time Has Come For Science And Spirituality

Carl Sagan : "I think the essence of the scientific method is the willingness to admit your wrong, the willingness to abandon ideas that don't work. And the essence of religion is not to change anything. the supposed truths are handed down by some revered figure, and then no-one is supposed to make any progress beyond that, because all the truth is thought to be in hand.

"My sense is that the scientific way of thinking, questioning, some delicate mix of creative encouragement of new ideas, and the most rigorous and sceptical scrutiny of new and old ideas, I think that is the path to the future, not just for science but for all human institutions.

"We have to be willing to challenge, because we are in desperate need of change."

This Is What The Universe Is Made Of (Some Of It Anyway)

It may not look like much, but it's an image of incredible scientific, historical, reality-defining importance. The tip of an atom.



Derek Lowe explains :

...(this shows) the electron density around one nucleus. Behold the s and p orbitals. Generations of students have learned these as abstractions, diagrams on a page. I never thought I'd see them, and I never thought I'd see the day when when it was even possible.

More Here

Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great"

By Darryl Mason

It's not just smirking bloggers and feisty independent New Media snarking over the Death Of Newspapers. Now Rupert Murdoch, who convinced a generation of British fathers in the 1970s and 1980s that they should be proud to see their 18 year old daughter's tits on Page 3 of The Sun, is joining in the newsprint grave dancing :

"I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.

“Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great.”

But the monopoly of distribution and political influence he once enjoyed, and exploited, with newspapers is gone forever. Now Murdoch's news has to compete in the ultimate free market, as he tries to force readers to pay for news that they will (soon after it breaks) also be able to find elsewhere on the internet for free.

Murdoch has also announced plans to increase prices for the cable sports programming he controls. He believes News Corp. has been “undercharging". Australian subscribers to premium Fox Sports channels will be surprised to hear that.

The first example of how Murdoch's YouWillPay! system will work, as far as news and opinion content is concerned, comes with the announcement that :

The Wall Street Journal...will start charging non-subscribers $2 a week to access content on mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, he said. Current subscribers will be charged $1.

So even if you already pay a few hundred dollars a year, or more, to access The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's going to hit you up for another $52 a years minimum to read it all on your hand screen.

The headline on this Financial Times story reads :

Murdoch Hails E-Readers

Like he has a choice now.

Suicide Or Suicided?

Four prominent, fairly young, heavily connected American financiers die from what appears to be suicide in just six days.

Danny Pang :

...died early Saturday at a local hospital, according to the Orange County coroner’s office.

The 42-year-old Pang has been accused by the government of operating a Ponzi scheme and of taking at least $83 million in inflated fees, salary and loans from his investment firm before it was seized by federal regulators in April. He had denied wrongdoing.

Police are investigating the death of the former chief fundraiser for ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich as a "death-suicide," an Illinois mayor said Sunday.

Christopher Kelly :

...was former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's chief fundraiser.

Financier Christopher Kelly told police shortly before he died Saturday that he took an "overdose of drugs," said Dwight Welch, mayor of Country Club Hills, Illinois.

Country Club Hills police found several drugs in Kelly's black 2007 Cadillac Escalade, but they were not sure yet whether they were prescribed, Welch said.

Finn H.W. Casperson :

....(the) ex-CEO of Beneficial Corp. was found dead in an apparent suicide behind an office building in Westerly, Rhode Island.

Casperson, 67, was discovered dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound on September 7th, after police were asked to “check on” him. Casperson came from a wealthy family and moved with powerful people, and he was known for his political influence, fundraising and philanthropy.

James McDonald :

...chief executive officer of investment management firm Rockefeller & Co, committed suicide on Sunday in Massachusetts, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

According to the paper, Barclay McFadden, who identified himself as a friend of McDonald's family, said James McDonald "took his own life." McDonald was also a board member of NYSE Euronext.

No one at Rockefeller & Co was immediately available for comment.

Dead men tell no tales. Usually.

My Goatie Isn't Stupid

CollegeHumour gathers some more 'Awkward Facebook Moments' :



Go Here For The Rest

Michael Moore : The Newspapers Slit Their Own Throats

I don't particularly care where Michael Moore comes from, how rich he is, how fat he is, or even how obnoxious he is. I want to know if he speaks the truth. And unfortunately for the American newspaper empires, Michael Moore is speaking a whole load of truth :



Local newspapers will survive, even if the New York Times falls. They'll simply have to start serving their readers and covering local news, instead of running wire stories about Kayne West.

If you've got a lot of dedicated readers, advertisers will always pay attention.
.

Wait, Who Are We Supposed To Be Hating Now?

At a rally against mosques in Birmingham, England, the English Defence League (or agent provocateurs) successfully infuriate Muslims who've turned out in an "anti-fascists" counter-protest. Rioting, violence and mass arrests follow :



Wasn't the media only recently telling us British skinheads hated Jews, as well as Muslims? It's so hard to keep up.

Clashes between "far right groups" and "anti-fascists" Muslims over the locations of new mosques and ridiculous arguments and 'debate' about the clothes people choose to wear should provide plenty of distraction capacity for the British government in the lead-up to the next election. They're going to need it.


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"It's So Bad, I Miss Bill Clinton"

Americans speak out. Well, fat white Glenn Beck mind-bombed, Fox News mantra-spouting Americans anyway :



Signs and mantras heard in Washington DC on September 12, 2009 :

Bury ObamaCare With Kennedy

Abortion Is A Greater Evil Than Taxes

Stop Spending Or Learn Chinese

Boycott Hollywood, Get Rid Of The Commies

Keep Pushing Us....Find Out What Happens

Glenn Beck For President, Constitution Party 2012

It's So Bad I Miss Bill Clinton

Obama AntiChrist

Hitler Gave Good Speeches Too

What's A Czar? R We In Russia?

Hannity Palin 2012

I'd Like To See A Christian In The White House

Re-Elect Nobody


It's good to see Fox News, who helped organise and publicise the Washington DC rallies, finally embracing protests against an American president, particularly during War time.

Beckicans used to think that was about as unpatriotic as you could get.


.

Are They Trying To Tell Us Something?

Google continues to have fun with flying saucer-themed reinventions of its search engine logo :



The flying saucer logo from a few weeks back :




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"He Was Really Into Dirty Dancing"

The Trailer Park Boys on Patrick Swayze (who died today) :



The Rumble Scene from Patrick Swayze's best movie, The Outsiders :

It's remarkable how small they managed to make the September 12, 2009 protests in Washington DC look on the evening news in Australia. The crowd was described as "in the thousands", while the footage shown of those gathered on lawns around the Capitol was shot from about grass height, giving the impression of maybe a few hundred only gathered there :



An interesting amount of activity on the rooftop to the left.

UPDATE : The above video, representing a fake reality pumped by Fox News and Michelle Malkin, appears to be another, far more popular Washington rally.

Apparently, the Australian TV coverage of 9/12/09, or Glenn Beck Day as it should be known, was more accurate than Fox News and Michelle Malkin, and ten thousand propagandic conservative Twitter feeds. Which is partially reassuring :


(click to enlarge)

Eight Years After 9/11, The United States Remains In A State of National Emergency

From President Barack Hussein Obama :

I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2009. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency the former President declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

The war is not over.

On 9/11 Anniversary, Twitter Strips Away Media Filters For Those Who Still Mourn


(New York City from the ISS on September 11, 2001 - NASA)

By Darryl Mason

Something remarkable is happening on Twitter right now. Thousands of people are paying tribute to the people they lost on September 11, 2001 through hashtags like #Sept11 and #WTC. The messages are short, and many link to pages honouring the office workers, police, paramedics and firefighters who lost their lives eight years ago today.

What is happening on Twitter on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 is not what they used to call a TV Event, it's not a radio event, it's people talking, communicating, all across the world, throughout the United States, from one suburb of New York City to the next, an online outpouring of grief, memories and occasionally jet black humour.

There is no need for a news media filter.You don't need a journalist, or a blogger, to interpret any of this for you. There are no talk radio hosts or on-the-scene reporters getting inbetween what those who still mourn have to say and those who want to share their memories, and pay their respects. Thousands of people directly or indirectly affected by the 9/11 attacks are/will see the Twitter names of people they remember from that day, or that week, from those days, and with one click they can open a message box and say hello, or I miss you.

Thousands of messages and tributes are pouring through Twitter, simple messages stating the names of those lost, bursts of grief, but the real messages will be taken over by the adbots, spambots, as any subject will once it hits the Trending Topics of Twitter, until it is only the bots spamming each other as interest drifts away from the subject, and everyone moves on.

For an hour reading the #Sept11 and #WTC and #911 streams on Twitter was like reading through a remembrance book, as each new entry was being written in.

A girl comes running down the hall as shes trying to reach her mother who's in the WTC

Flight 11 - 92 souls Flight 77 - 64 souls Flight 93 - 45 souls Flight 175 - 56 souls Pentagon 125 souls WTC 2595 souls

Lt. Joseph Gullickson David Halderman Jr. Lt. Vincent Gerard Halloran Robert Hamilton Sean Hanley Thomas Hannafin #NYFD #WTC #911

Still can clearly remember looking up and seeing that gaping hole in the WTC 8 years later...I was lucky enough to get out

The paper flying out of the windows of the WTC just made me think how irrelevant our work is. Life is the only important thing

I don't think I can ever forget the sound of that jet screaming over my head and the view of it crashing into WTC on 9/11.

I was at work, 3 blocks from the Capitol - wife had been at WTC 36 hrs before but was safe. I wandered DC streets, listening to F15s above.

Dana Hannon Daniel Harlin Lt. Harvey L. Harrell Lt. Stephen Gary Harrell Capt. Thomas Theodore Haskell Jr. #NYFD #WTC #911

Timothy A. Roy 36 Massapequa Park NY NYPD

In loving memory to 911 victims and their families. Robert A. Vicario 40 Weehawken NJ WTC

8 yrs ago #WTC Marriott told guests to stay in rooms. Then tower fell on hotel. My dear friend & roommate never came out. #911

UPDATE : After about an hour, the #WTC and #Sept11 Twitter streams were so infested by people and twitbots using those hashtags to sell everything from craft to cars it became all but unreadable.

It's hard to feel disgust at a robot marketeer using a popular online 9/11 memorial to flog something, after living through the years when an American president used the events of 9/11 to sell a war, and then himself for a second term.

And a nasty link began to be spammed under #neverforget, by a prankster or someone who wanted to seriously shock people, for cruel or more odious reasons :

Who would think that it's ok to spam my whole team with a slide show of people jumping from the WTC 8 yrs ago. I get it, nvr forget but yuck

The New York Times front page from the afternoon of September 11, 2001, a front page from a disaster movie, still so surreal, all these years later :





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The New York Post front page on the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC :



Other American newspaper front pages for September 11, 2009 here.

Stop Rover, Stop The Slaughter

This is on YouTube so it must be true - the Mars Rover is RIGHT NOW, killing TINY HUMANS as it rolls relentlessly over TINY TOWNS and FARMS. Nobody knows how many are DEAD, it could be MILLIONS :

9/11 : "The Darkest Jigsaw Puzzle Of The Young 21st Century"

Journalist Pepe Escobar, in the influential and widely read Asia Times, has
'50 unanswered questions about 9/11' . The attacks that he calls "the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century."

A sample :

How come dead or not dead Osama bin Laden has not been formally indicted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as responsible for 9/11? Is it because the US government - as acknowledged by the FBI itself - has not produced a single conclusive piece of evidence?

How could all the alleged 19 razor-blade box cutter-equipped Muslim perpetrators have been identified in less than 72 hours - without even a crime scene investigation?

Why did George W Bush continue to recite "My Pet Goat" in his Florida school and was not instantly absconded by the secret service?

Why did combat jet fighters of the 305th Air Wing, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey not intercept the second hijacked plane hitting the WTC, when they could have done it within seven minutes?

How come a substantial number of witnesses did swear seeing and hearing multiple explosions in both towers of the WTC?

Why did Mayor Rudolph Giuliani instantly authorized the shipment of WTC rubble to China and India for recycling?

How come former Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Niak said in mid-July 2001 that the US had already decided to strike against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban by October?

Considering the very intimate relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the ISI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is Bin Laden alive, dead or still a valuable asset of the ISI, the CIA or both?

Why did George W Bush dissolve the Bin Laden Task Force nine months before 9/11?

Did Washington know in advance that an "al-Qaeda" connection would kill Afghan nationalist commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, aka "The Lion of the Panjshir", only two days before 9/11? Massoud was fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda - helped by Russia and Iran. According to the Northern Alliance, Massoud was killed by an ISI-Taliban-al Qaeda axis. If still alive, he would never have allowed the US to rig a loya jirga (grand council) in Afghanistan and install a puppet, former CIA asset Hamid Karzai, as leader of the country.

Were the Taliban aware of the warning by a Bush administration official as early as February 2001 - "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs?"

Including dead soldiers of the US and UK invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the dead civilians of attacks in those countries, the events of 9/11 led directly to the deaths of more than 5000 American and British soldiers and more than 100,000 men, women and children in some of the poorest towns and villages in the world; more than 100,000 coalition were soldiers seriously wounded or disabled, more than 500,000 civilians, mostly children or young people, were left wounded or disabled.

Bin Laden, or whoever pulled off the 9/11 attacks, was estimated to have spent a few hundred thousand dollars preparing and carrying it out. But the War on Terror has succeeded in diverting more than $2 trillion dollars through the 'defence' departments of coalition countries.

And we don't even know for sure, yet, who did 9/11.

The FBI doesn't know.

The last guy who claimed he plotted 9/11 appears to have only confessed after American agents tortured him, tried to break his mind and threatened to rape his children in front of him.

The Full List Of 50 9/11 Questions Is Here

Obama : Protect Your Digital Privacy

Every leader in the world should be telling the children of their nations and countries what President Obama told American children yesterday :

"Well, let me give you some very practical tips. (Laughter.) First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook — (laughter) — because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search and — so that’s some practical political advice for you right there."

MySpace, on behalf and for the future profit of the Rupert Murdoch media, archives photos with names and other info for later retrieval and exploitation by Murdoch media should the kid vomiting on his mate and laughing end up becoming a reality TV star or actor, singer, politician. Facebook likely does something very similar, or at least other archivists do who can access any and all photos posted, even for a few minutes.

Basically, we have no idea how information, videos, blog comments, Facebook photos, will be stored and data-mined at a later date.

The rule is simple : Nothing Disappears On The Internet.

Wait A Sec, What Happened To The North American Union?

Maybe the NAU was more of a Bush II-era thing.



Pravda, of course :

The map of the collapse of the United States in 2010, made by Russian scientist of politics Igor Panarin, has received millions of views in the United States over one day only. The Wall Street Journal published the map on its front page at the end of 2008. Alaska is pictured on the map as a part of Russia. Hawaii were shown as a territory of Japan, whereas four new states were pictured on the territory of the USA: the Californian Republic, the Central North American Republic, the Texas Republic and the Atlantic America, which included the traditional states.

That's probably more of a wish ("Alaska on the map as part of Russia") than a coming reality. Though 'The Four State Solution' does a bit of a ring to it.

Closer, Closer, Closer....

An electron microscope zooms in on a leaf, until you can in the insides of cells. Beautiful, incredible. Galileo would have wet himself with delight, I almost did :

Zoom into a Leaf
by Weird_Weird_Science

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If You Want Us To Move To Earth, You're Going To Have To Do Something About All Those Damn Dinosaurs



A story in the UK Telegraph about why Google featured a flying saucer as part of its logo for brief period resulted in some interesting comments, as you would expect. This one is very entertaining :

Humans once lived on Mars over 16 million years ago. Scientist predicted a catastrophic disaster approaching Mars and they need a place to go. Earth was the closest and safest planet. The only problem was earth had 100ft giant dinosaurs populating the land. Humans nuked Earth or some form of mass destruction and abounded Mars. Humans did not evolved from apes. How can humans evolved from apes when ape are still here. They say lizards evolved from dinosaurs, cats evolved from saber tooth, and elephants evolved from mammoth. You don't see any dinosaurs, saber tooth, or mammoth still around so why would you still see ape?

How can you argue with logic like that?

Anyway, everyone knows humans first appeared on Earth, on the current timeline anyway, after a time machine from 2096 crashed in Georgia a few million years ago. That doesn't mean we didn't evolve from apes, however.

I think....

Listen Up, Kid, This Advice May Save Your Life, And Get You Laid

A 16 year old asks Reddit : "What can you tell me that you wish someone had told you?"

There's almost a thousand responses here. Some of the best, and more interesting, advice :

"Kiss her, you fool!"

"Live your life as if you know the future."

"The girl you are dating now will (most likely) NOT be the girl you will marry. Life will not end when she breaks up with you. The same goes for the next one too."

"Not one person in your life now or in the future really has any idea WTF is going on."

"Learn to lie with a confident smile, honest eyes, and a slight nod, and people will be grateful to believe everything you tell them."

"Pretty much EVERYONE is making it up as they go. So don't feel bad when you do it."

"you're an idiot, but so is everyone else"

"Learn how to cook. You'll eat a lot healthier, and it will really impress women."

"Don't talk to cops. Don't open your mouth, even if you think you're being helpful, even if you have nothing to hide and are being honest and truthful, even if you think it's the right thing to do, don't even say one word to them other than to tell them you're not talking. Remember to be polite and respectful. But also firm and direct. Just remember: the police work for the prosecution, not the defense."

"Even if right now it seems as if you might die a virgin, or without ever having a gf or bf, or without ever being kissed, etc, you'll realize soon enough that enough people find you desirable that these worries are baseless."

"Spend a year in the real world, at a real job, before college. You'll learn the value of both work and a dollar in a way an allowance can never provide."

"High school romances are there for you to learn. They aren't and won't be the end of the world."

"Try lots of new things so that you can discover your passion."

"Don't get in stupid fights with your parents. There's no need, and you'll get more out of cooperation."

"Be nice to old people. They have a lot to teach and can be great friends."

"Take your ego out back and shoot it in the head."

"Everything you do at 16 is absurd. As long as you come to realise that, you'll be fine."

"Hug your mum."

"never turn down the opportunity to travel."

"Learn to take care of yourself so you don't have to rely on someone else."

"Sex really isn't that big of a deal."

"Figure out what you really love to do, then figure out how you can get paid to do it."

"Don't masturbate on public transport."

"Stay away from credit cards. Stay out of debt. It will eat away at you to point of misery."

"There is no god, we are only responsible for and to each other. Act accordingly."

Read The Rest Here

Note : some of the comments above from Reddit were slightly edited.

Legal Opiate Market In UK Worth More Than £500 Million A Year

As the smarter illegal opiate junkies know, you don't have to hang around the streets suffering through withdrawals, waiting frantically for your next fix. If you know what you're looking for you can get your fix, or a temporary fix, over-the-counter at your local pharmacy. At least, you can in Australia and England.

Over the counter opiates are so strong, a UK government watchdog has warned in an extraordinary claim, that the non-addicted can pick up a habit "within just three days" :

New restrictions will now be applied to medicines containing codeine, including Nurofen Plus and Solpadeine, that are sold over the counter and are routinely used to ease headaches, back problems and period pain.

Official figures show that more than 30,000 consumers have become addicted to the drugs, many accidentally, with women most at risk of developing an addiction.

In Australia and the UK, Nurofen Plus sells in boxes of more than 70 tablets, each tablet containing at least 8-10 milligrams of codeine. Those who know how to do it can easily extract almost 3/4 of a gram of codeine from one big box for an outlay of perhaps twenty dollars. The opiate sold over the counter of thousands of pharmacies is vastly cheaper than the street smack, and, for the most part, a lot cleaner.

The fact that those beset with intense pain can easily access, for low cost, a drug to deal with it would seem acceptable and reasonable to most people. This is why so many people support the legalisation of medicinal cannabis.

But the pharmaceutical companies didn't stop their advertising 'outreach' when they cornered the market on those with a taste or need for legal opiates, they instead turned to the broadest possible customer base available. The sniffly :

New advertising will no longer state that the drugs are remedies for coughs and colds and it will be targeted towards acute and moderate pain.

If you're hooked on codeine and you don't know it, the first noticeable symptoms of withdrawal will seem to the unaware like another bout of "the coughs and colds", so more legal opiates will be brought. Insidious.

A recent report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Misuse warned the 32,000 addicted were just the 'tip of the iceberg'.

Some people were taking up to 70 pills a day, putting themselves at risk of serious complications such as bleeding stomach, liver problems, gallstones and depression.

Serious complications which, of course, will increase the likelihood of more pain and discomfort and so more need for more over the counter opiates.

Around 27 million over-the-counter pills containing codeine are sold every year in a (UK) painkiller market worth £500 million.

Stunning.

Wheelchair Confiscated From Severely Disabled Patient Because He Dared To Take A Drug The Chinese And Koreans Have Been Using For Thousands Of Years

This is what prohibition of a fucking plant leads to. If you're in a position to help make this story into a Very Big Deal, then go hard :

Taking The Shit Tornado Right Back To Oz

Hmmm

"For many, The Wire is simply the best television show ever made."

Really?

Maybe to those who've never been exposed to the Trailer Park Boys :



The Trailer Park Boys have a new movie, Countdown To Liquor Day, coming in late September to Canadian cinemas and a torrent sharing site near you (and if you do 'steal' this movie, and you like it, remember you have to buy at least Trailer Park Boys DVD in return) :



The Full Trailer Park Boys Christmas Special Is Here

Magnificent Mars

Back in 1976, when an Earth-originated vehicle named Viking reached the surface of Mars, this was the kind of exciting photo we got back :

Of course, we know now that Mars is not a 'Red Planet' after all, but bursting with colour, and every month more high altitude images of the stunningly beautiful textures of Martian landscape find their way online. Too many to keep up. But these are particularly special, and come from NASA's HiRise : High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment :













Hundreds More HiRise Photos Here

Sunset On Mars

The Ice In The Crater

A Martian Mountain Range

Well, She Was A Palestinian





'Suicide Madonnas'. It sounds like the name of a potentially great all-girl punk rock band, but it's not.

It's the name being thrown at works in a Tel Aviv art exhibition featuring the faces of Palestinian mothers, who acted as suicide bombers, pasted onto recognisably classic images of Jesus and his mum.

One of the artists responsible explains what the exhibition is supposed to be about :

"I don't understand how this turned into an insult to bereaved families. We came actually to emphasize the exact opposite. The baby in Madonna's hands is in danger. This really needs to disturb people. It isn't just an Israeli problem, but a global one. Therefore, we chose Madonna, who is a symbol of Christianity.

"We are trying to ask how a woman, who is meant to love and give birth, became a source of hatred and murder."

There are a lot of people, not just in Israel, who don't want to hear the answer to that question, unless the answer is, simply, "Islam."

More Here

World War I Was Okay, But The Sequel Was Better

By Darryl Mason

This is the first year of World War 2-related anniversaries that I've noticed a huge number of opinion pieces in the Western mainstream media taking Australia, the UK and the US to task for what happened all those many decades ago, in the first half of the last century.

Many have not been particularly venomous, but they have been highly critical of what was done, when and why. World War 2 looks only more grim and pointless the further we move away from it through history.

There is, too, an obvious clanging of futility in much of the media about continually trawling back over 70 year old events in search of new, or even relevant, story angles.

The Sunday night TV shattering documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s, the 'It Was Fun!' adventure books and comics of multiple childhoods, the buzzing glue highs of Airfix models of Soviet tanks and American cruisers and British bombers, even for Generation Xers, Word War 2 somehow remained the dominant narrative of the West, and the 20th century.

But how much World War 2 memorabilium is enough?

The 'Yeah Churchill! We Won!' narrative of World War 2 drummed, crammed, forced into our childhood minds and imaginations is rapidly changing, all but unspooling, as those born decades after the war ended take over the media and publishing and movie-making and don't see a national duty to filter the truth as their grandparents often did. The story of glorious war, of spectacular victory, for Britain in particular, is fast disappearing.

This from Mark Mazower, in The Guardian's Comment Is Free (of course!) is but one example of what I mean :

...the British war against nazism looks less like a moral crusade and more like defence of the global status quo. A war for liberty and self-determination? Not in the colonies, if Churchill had any say in the matter. Nor even in the Middle East, where Churchill did make a critical and often overlooked strategic contribution. Had the Germans got sympathetic regimes to stay in place there to secure their oil supply, the war might have gone differently. British intervention in Syria, Egypt and Iraq prevented that and did much more – it laid the foundations for a new, short-lived empire of client states stretching from Libya to Iran. After the war, once India and Pakistan became independent, and the Australians and New Zealanders looked increasingly to Washington for protection from Asia, it was the Middle East where the British made their last imperial stand.

The global perspective is not one we should ignore. Viewed from India or Japan, the war was a matter of rival imperialisms, the culmination of more than a century of Europeans fighting over how to carve up the world. The irony is both Britain and Germany were too weak to defeat the other unaided. If Britain had stronger allies than Germany, this was as much the fault of the Nazis – stabbing Stalin in the back, contemptuous of the Spanish and French, the Hungarians and Italians – as it was a reflection of Whitehall's superior charms. The Germans lost their empire in Europe, the British lost theirs outside it.

However, in some other newspapers, it is still remarkable to see how utterly obsessed white, middle-class Britons, or at least those running the media, are with the events of World War 2, still hopelessly trying to sell the myth that it was a "good war", even a "great war".

The generation now coming out of schools across the West seem about as interested in World War 2 as they are in the Boer War. Which is, fuck all.

It's time to start acknowledging that this lack of interest is a good thing, not a bad thing. The wars of the 20th century should be left back there, not forever resurrected to shape or justify the decisions being made today in the halls of political, and corporate, power.

9/11 X 100

Eight years later, 9/11 remains sacred. Almost nobody has dared to use historically famous imagery associated with the attacks of September 11, 2001 in advertising campaigns, TV shows or even movies. Well, outside of President George W. Bush re-election campaigns that is.

This image, and a video, of a proposed advertising campaign, has provoked plenty of outrage, or so it would appear :



It is a dramatic piece of advertising art, designed to provoke a reaction. So it succeeded.

Raw Story Has More

Obama "Strongly Recommends" Voluntary ManBirdPig Flu Vaccinations For Millions Of Americans

Pandemic Declared "National Security Threat"

By Darryl Mason

The US Government Department of Health invites you, yes you, to vote for your favourite 'Stop Swine Flu' video. And you could win $2500. It's a strange new way of running a public health information campaign. Cash prizes for voting for your favourite flu vid?

Here's one of the dozens of vids the DoH are using to try and convince Americans that washing your hands, keeping healthy and not actually catching swine flu yourself is not good enough, you need to be vaccinated to stop yourself from acting as a carrier and infecting others. At least, I think that's what they're trying to say....



A chainsaw. Okay.

And if that's too adult for you, here's Elmo :



Using Miss Piggy instead of Elmo probably wouldn't have worked.

Washing your hands regularly is always a good message to get out, even if it may seem nanny-state obvious to you. But why give anyone the idea of rubbing someone else's toothbrush on places likely to be buzzing with flu viruses?



The creators of this 'awareness campaign' obviously think using humour is the best way to get the message(s) across :



Note the changing colours of the purposely hypnotic background image used in this ad, to burn the outlines of the Four Steps on the retina of your memory :



There's also a H1N1 Rap, by Dr Clarke, if you can bring yourself to watch it.

Even before the rollout of all these ads, there has been vast resistance to the planned national vaccination program proposed by President Obama, to allegedly protect tens of millions of Americans from HumanBirdPig Flu (H1N1) infection.

I'm not sure any of those ads are going to convince the many that a fast-tracked, barely tested H1N1 vaccine is safe, or even a necessity.

They may, however, get people to wash their hands and not sneeze in the faces of strangers on the morning bus, which in itself will slow down the spread of the ManBirdPig Flu.

President Obama is still insisting that the coming H1N1 vaccinations will be "voluntary, but strongly recommended". One million New York schoolchildren will be offered free vaccinations in October, but may recieve their doses through "a nasal mist" instead of injections.

During this speech, Preisdent Obama declared the pandemic a "national security threat" :

As I said when we saw the first cases of this virus back in the spring, I don't want anybody to be alarmed but I do want everybody to be prepared. We know that we usually get a second, larger wave of these flu viruses in the fall. And so response plans have been put in place across all levels of government. Our plans and decisions are based on the best scientific information available and as the situation changes, we will continue to update the public.

We're also making steady progress on developing a safe and effective flu vaccine and we expect a flu shot program will begin soon. This program will be completely voluntary but it will be strongly recommended.

For all that we do in the federal government however, everybody has a roll in responding to this virus. We need state and local governments on the front line to make antivirals available and be ready to take whatever steps are necessary to support the health-care system.

We need hospitals and health-care providers to continue preparing for an increased patient load and to take steps to protect health-care workers. We need families and businesses to insure that they have plans in place if a family member, a child or a co-worker contracts the flu and needs to stay home

And most importantly, we need everyone to get informed about individual risk factors and we need everyone to take the common sense steps we know can make a difference. Stay home if you're sick, wash your hands frequently, cover your sneezes with your sleeve, not your hands. And take all the necessary precautions to stay healthy. I know it sounds simple but it's important and it works.

No word yet on when President Obama and his family will hold a press conference and take one of the first shots, to prove it's safe, of a fast-tracked vaccination program that could see more than 100 million Americans being dosed with a vaccine that insurers are worried may have side effects that make people partcularly litiguous.