Obama Takes On Roomful Of Republicans In Q & A, Carves Them All Up





The Transcript Is Here

From the New Yorker,13 stories by JD Salinger :

“A Perfect Day for Bannanafish” (January 31, 1948)

“Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” (March 20, 1948)

“Just Before the War with the Eskimos” (June 5, 1948)

“The Laughing Man” (March 19, 1949)

“For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” (April 8, 1950)

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” (July 14, 1951)

“Teddy” (January 31, 1953)

“Franny” (January 29, 1955)

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (November 19, 1955)

“Zooey” (May 4, 1957)

“Seymour: An Introduction” (June 6, 1959)

“Hapworth 16, 1924” (June 19, 1965)

There's also a great piece in the New Yorker archive on the rebounding influence of JD Salinger's Catcher In The Rye, from 2001.

Holden Caulfield At Fifty

Osama Bin Laden Jumps The Shark

By Darryl Mason

Bin Laden, or whoever is making those tapes, reinvents himself as anti-capitalist, anti-global warming warrior. Or as it will probably be soon known : Greenhadism.

The War On Terror is dying in a flurry of exposed forgeries and outright frauds. There has to be something next, or governments might stop spending so much money on defence and security.

It's hard not to read a transcript of the latest Bin Laden blatherings and not wonder, seriously, if someone's pulling our chains :

"This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions - whether intentionally or unintentionally - and about the action we must take.

"Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury - the phenomenon is an actual fact."

"All the industrial states (are to blame for global warming), yet the majority of those states have signed the Kyoto Protocol and agreed to curb the emission of harmful gases."

"George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs.

"They are also behind 'globalisation and its tragic implications'. And whenever the perpetrators are found guilty, the heads of state rush to rescue them using public money."

Greenhadism. It's Bin Laden's Big New Thing.

More On All This At The Orstrahyun.

No wonder they hate President Obama so much. He's got a very, very big mouth :

"The Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has looked into 96 major defense projects from the last year, and found cost overruns that totaled $296 billion....indefensible, no-bid contracts that cost taxpayers billions and make contractors rich; special interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and billions over budget; entrenched lobbyists pushing weapons that even our military says it doesn't want and doesn't need -- the impulse in Washington to win political points back home by building things that we don't need at costs we can't afford. This waste would be unacceptable at any time, but at a time when we're fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit, it's inexcusable. It's unconscionable. It's an affront to the American people and to our troops, and it has to stop.

"...no longer will we be spending nearly $2 billion to buy more F-22 fighter jets that the Pentagon says they don't need. This bill also terminates troubled and massively over budget programs such as the Future Combat Systems, the Airborne Lasers, the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter, and a new presidential helicopter that costs nearly as much as Air Force One. I won't be flying on that."

11,000 Haitians are being paid 60 cents an hour by the UN to clear away the rubble of their capital city, and begin rebuilding. The UN plan to employ 90,000 more :

This devastated capital showed increasing signs of stirring back to life on Wednesday as Haitians restarted factory assembly lines, visited their barbers, sought replacement cellphones and even picked up their dry cleaning.

Nothing could be called business as usual. When the big Brasserie Nationale d’Haïti beverage manufacturing plant kicked back into action, it did not start with one of its best-known products, Prestige, the national beer that is a point of pride here. It began with the essential: bottled water.

The Full Story Is Here

The Haiti earthquake death toll is now beyond 150,000.

(via Total Dickhead)

Criticism That Cuts Too Close To The Bone

The Google News links to the original Jerusalem Post story are dead....



.....but it's still cached here for now.

So why has the Jerusalem Post attempted to disappear this story?

The Holocaust only gets media coverage because of affluent Jews' financial backing, military might and lobbying fronts, presenting a skewed version of events to the world, a high-ranking Polish bishop told a Catholic news portal on Monday.

Tadeusz Pieronek, a Polish bishop and professor and a friend of the last pope, John Paul II, claimed that "the Holocaust as such is a Jewish invention" promoted in the press by Jews to gain support for Israel.

Pieronek told the Web site Pontifex.roma that while the Holocaust was not exclusively Jewish, Jews had monopolized it in lieu of encouraging "serious historical debate, free from prejudice and victimization."

Pieronek alleged that Jews today use the Holocaust as "a weapon of propaganda, used to obtain benefits which are often unjustified," citing as an example the unconditional support for Israel by the US.

"This promotes a certain arrogance that I find unbearable," he said, explaining that Israel was using its position of power and exploiting historical tragedies to treat the Palestinians "like animals."

The bishop said that American support for the Jews had not always been so readily given. "What did the Jewish-American and allied forces do in [World War II] to avoid these tragedies? Little or nothing," he said.

"The Holocaust as such is a Jewish invention ... a day of remembrance must also be set for the many victims of Communism, persecuted Catholics and Christians and so on."

"The anti-Semitic history of Poland is an invention. A joke ... offensive to our people."

Although most of the victims of the Holocaust were indeed Jews, many Poles, Italians and Catholics also died at the Nazi concentration camps, he said.

It doesn't sound like there will be an apology, or a statement from the Pope this time.

There seems to be an increasing number of Catholic bishops saying such things about the exploitation of the WW2 Holocaust. Presumably it is in part to correct the historical record, but probably more so to fire back at campaigning against the sainting of the so-called 'Nazi Pope.'

Paul Joseph Watson :

Global warming is heading to the same dustbin of history as Y2K, SARS and swine flu – another manufactured scare peddled primarily to make vast profits for corrupt elitists at the expense of the general public. The entire fraud is collapsing under the weight of its own lies as new revelations of IPCC deception and bias emerge on an almost daily basis thanks to the sterling work of climate skeptics who have had their convictions vindicated.

If history does actually record that Global Warming Was A Fraud, it was the bloggers who busted it wide open, with most of the mainstream media slow indeed to chase down the story for themselves, or to even outwardly express suspicion at the expanse of enviro-apocalypse scenarios laid out by both deeply concerned scientists and outright scammers. In the end, it became almost impossible to tell the two apart.


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Barack Obama's face moments before he went to take the oath of office.



This is a detail from a larger image, which reveals Obama is actually looking at himself, in a mirror.



As I've said here before, regardless of the intent, the official White House photography of the Obama administration has been excellent, sometimes intimate. occasionally surreal and often surprisingly revealing.

Here are a bunch of detail grabs from larger official White House photos :














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An incredibly indepth ("why did your mother and father commit suicide?") and long interview with screenwriter Lem Dobbs (Dark City, The Limey) :

If only the Jews still controlled Hollywood. In the late 60s/early 70s you could get a movie made starring Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, James Caan, Elliott Gould, George Segal, George Burns, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Walter Matthau, Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, Richard Dreyfuss, Dustin Hoffman, Mel Brooks, Barbara Hershey, Henry Winkler, Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Robby Benson, Alan Arkin, Dyan Cannon, Barry Newman, Jerry Lewis, Peter Falk, Harvey Keitel, Laurence Harvey, Charles Grodin, Gene Wilder, Elaine May, Jill Clayburgh, Ali MacGraw, Joan Collins, Anthony Newley, Goldie Hawn, Marty Feldman -- and Topol.

Today? Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Sasha Baron Cohen, Shia LaBeouf, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Connelly, Sean Penn -- and at least three of them are the progeny of older Hollywood. Notice the slight drop-off in quantity and quality? Screenwriters and directors and composers and studio executives -- same story.

On a one-week visit to New York in the early 70s when my father had an exhibition there, I went to see The Exorcist (Friedkin), Serpico (Lumet), Papillon (Schaffner), with Dustin Hoffman, Mean Streets, with Harvey Keitel, The Getaway, a Foster-Brower production, Westworld, with Brynner and Benjamin, and Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

Wanna see what’s playing in New York this week?

Here's what's playing in New York this week : Avatar, Up In The Air, The Lovely Bones, Sherlock Holmes and....errr....The Tooth Fairy.

They'll Get Their 'People' To Call Your People

You can watch a movie shot by chimpanzees here, (don't worry, they're not making porn. Yet) and it's not bad, though the plot seems a bit disjointed (2 out of 5 stars).

But in the 'relevant stories' sidebar from the BBC archive at this link, there is a jarring list of headlines from recent years about our hairier relatives, and just how intelligent we're learning they actually are.

Chimps use cleavers to chop food

Chimps born to appreciate music

Chimps mentally map fruit trees

Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex

'Armed' chimp gets honey reward

Zoo chimp 'planned' stone attacks

Chimpanzees 'hunt using spears'

Remember, one day they will learn to learn to communicate over the internet, and then they will hit the archives, so we should be careful what we say about them.

If you've ever been interrogated by a bunch of angry, righteously spiteful apes, you already know how unpleasant it can be.

Go Chimps!


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An impressive series of ads promoting Russia Today, banned in American airports, but turning heads in the UK :







More Of The Ads Can Be Seen Here

Mass Graves For The Victims Of Nature's Fury



The above photo, by Olivier Laban Mattei, is from 'Haiti : Six Days Later' at The Boston Globe's The Big Picture.

Do you really think it would be any different in your city if 200,000 people died an earthquake? They'd be digging mass graves in New York's Central Park and Sydney's Botanical Gardens if those cities suffered a similar fate as Port-Au-Prince.

But would American newspapers show graphic photos of the dead, if they were in the majority dead Americans?

A New York Times photo editor insists that they would, and did during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath :

....the contention that such pictures would not appear in the paper if the victims were somewhere in the United States. If such pictures existed, she said, she would run them. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, The Times did publish a front-page picture of a body floating near a bridge where a woman was feeding her dog. But despite Katrina’s toll, there were relatively few such images in the paper. Irby said that authorities in the United States are generally quick to cordon off disaster scenes.

This stunning image from the 2004 tsunami is also cited as an example that Haiti is not the first time the New York Times has run graphic photos of natural disaster dead on its front page :



And yet, they are so reluctant to run images of the human carnage left behind in America's wars.

Demi Moore, the same photo shoot, before and after the digital retouching :



I don't get it. She clearly is far more beautiful in the 'before' shot. Who are the advertisers trying to appeal to with such a plastic-face makeover? Robots?

More Here

Four Lions Director Chris Morris On 9/11

Philip K Dick :

"Perhaps we have not truly had a legal government since that day in Dallas, and those dreadful forces of murder and tyranny took over, cloaked in gray fog, to rule over us in the form of secret police, a true police state but masked by the outer garments of legality."

Just A Coincidence, Surely?

January 19 : Tony Blair To Testify At Iraq War Inquiry Over Pre-War Lies

January 22 : Britain Raises Terror Alert Level, Attack "Highly Likely"

Robots drink vodka?

Library Porn :





If those two pics got you warmed up, there's Plenty More Here

We'll like robots even more when they empathise with us :

A detail from Mathew McDermott's extraordinary photograph of a child set free from the rubble of the Haitian earthquake, having survived eight days with no food or water :



The Full Photo Is Here

Paywalls Will Dry Out The News Junkies

By Darryl Mason

Here are 16 stories I've now got open in various windows and tabs. I intend to read them all, but there doesn't seem to be enough time to soak it all up, so much fresh news and information flooding in, constantly, sometimes feel stressed when I see how many unread stories I've bookmarked or left hopefully on the desktop, piling up, too many to read, but all too interesting, and seemingly important, vital even, to x-click and disappear, but which one to read first then, or to read all the way through without almost unconsciously clicking to another window, another story, another buffet of information, interrupted by a quick check of what new news is online, a pang of guilt for not having read a story that's been hovering around in a window for five days, neglected, forgotten....

This is Digital Option Anxiety.

I think some of us might need some kind of Information Addicts Anonymous soon.

So to the stories (of which I probably could have read half in the time it took me to fumble over that intro) :

UK Independent : Dignity For The Dead Scarce In Haiti

Nikola Tesla Is A Man For The 21st Century, And Why Not? He Invented It

Wall Street Journal : The Publishing Slush Pile, Where Unknown Writers Without Agents Could Once Be Discovered, Is Dead

Washington Post : Haiti's Elite Spared Much Of The Devastation

New York Times : The Coming Revolution In Independent Movie Distribution

In 2009, More US Military Killed Themselves Than Died By Enemy Action In Iraq And Afghanistan

Pope Benedict Squares Off Against Jewish Critics Who Want To Stop The Sainting Of The 'Nazi Pope'

Death Of Two Teenagers In Harsh Outback Changed Reality Of Isolated Station Life

The Swine Flu Pandemic : A Multi-Billion Dollar Pharmaceutical Industry Conspiracy?

They Fell Hard For Obama, Now The Doubts Are Setting In

The Medical Crisis In Haiti Was Already "Overwhelming" Three Days Ago

The Grubby World Of Mainstream Media Taking Free Op-Eds From Politicians Pushing Agendas That Benefit Their Financial Interests

Haiti CorpsePorn : Would The Media Be Showing All Those Bodies If They Were Dead Middle Class White People?

Late Cold War Era Paper On Effects Of Global Thermonuclear War After Detonation Of More Than 57,000 Nuclear Weapons. Australia And New Zealand Amongst The Winners

And, without irony, a Reddit thread on Being Addicted To Information

This will be the year that most of the newspapers I've linked to above - The UK Guardian, The UK Independent, The New York Times, The Washington Post - will begin to disappear behind pay walls.

I'm really going to miss the days of The Free.

Paywalls will mean much less instant access to news and information. But that may turn out to be a good thing. Cutting off the supply of infodrugs.

The withdrawals, however, will be reality altering.

Tony Blair looks to be going down for his involvement in the war of lies that preceded the War On Iraq, but it will take a few years. His public shaming begins soon, and hopefully will be followed by a stiff sentence fit for a war criminal.

In the meantime, a long procession of former Blairians take to the media with their tales of Tony. Obviously, they're not good ones :

"The low point was a ‘Make Poverty History’ rally at the Old Vic theatre. It was a ‘celebration’ of our achievements in alleviating Third World poverty, something we were rightly proud of.

Unfortunately the event, with a live satellite link-up to poor people in Africa and President Clinton in the United States, cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to stage.

It was the ultimate vanity exercise which attracted virtually no media coverage, and I was ashamed."

Few of his old associates have good reason now to maintain their loyalty to Blair, and so they won't. The worst stories about Blair will fetch the highest media and publishing prices.

Haiti : A Nightmare Beyond Comprehension

Appalling scenes, as bodies are piled in the street and moved by diggers and bulldozers into trucks for transportation to mass graves.



Hundreds of thousands homeless in a city with no water, no food, nowhere to go :


A two day wait at hospitals, few working toilets or showers. Now the mass cremations have begun.

New York Times photographer Damon Winter (here for his photo gallery) :

"People are out on the street at night...all night you could hear them singing prayers. It’s pretty amazing the ways that people are dealing with this tragedy. It says a lot about the Haitian character. They are an amazing people."

The death toll looks likely to rise beyond 50,000.

The War On Terror : Sell The Fear, However Misplaced

A poignant, reality-shattering piece from Gary Younge that didn't get anything like the attention and Redditing and Digging that it should have (excerpts) :

"Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," explains Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. During the Bush years that terror was routinely leveraged for the purposes of social control, military mobilisation and electoral advantage. Meanwhile, the administrative processes that might prevent the next attack were tragically lacking. In short, Bush's anti-terror strategy was not about protecting people but about scaring them.

To galvanise the nation for war abroad and sedate it for repression at home, the previous administration constructed a terror threat that was ubiquitous in character, apocalyptic in scale and imminent in nature. Only then could they counterpose human rights against security as though they were not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.

Al-Qaida was only too happy to oblige. In such a state of perpetual crisis both terrorists and reactionaries thrive. Terrorists successfully create a climate of fear; governments successfully exploit that fear to extend their own powers.

"I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it," said former vice-president Dick Cheney.

....in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the US government undertook the "preventative detention" of about 5,000 men on the basis of their birthplace and later sought a further 19,000 "voluntary interviews". Over the next year, more than 170,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea were fingerprinted and interviewed in a programme of "special registration". None of these produced a single terrorism conviction.

This set the pattern for the years to come: wiretapping, rendition, torture, secrecy. Those who otherwise rail against the inefficiency of government argued for more extensive, intrusive state power even as it produced little in the way of results. When confronted with this lamentable record, their only defence was the threat of the next attack. "The next time, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud" said Condoleezza Rice, adding. "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time." Over the last week even once in a while would have looked good.

Al-Qaida is now more likely to be found in Pakistan, an American ally, than in Afghanistan and the latest threat came via Yemen. Terrorism is a strategy, not a place – attempts to carpet-bomb it or occupy it or conquer it will inevitably fail.

Thanks to war and torture it has swelled the number of people who might want to do it harm.

Read The Full Story Here

It's not every day you see a gunman in a wheelchair surrendering to a police robot :





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Haiti. The earthquake :



The aftermath :



The prime minister of Haiti worries that "hundreds of thousands may have been killed."

Hey Now, Don't Go Forgetting Who Made All Those Pretty Trees....

The Vatican reviews Avatar, with some hard-to-hide nervousness about how religiously influential the movie, and its sequels and prequels and vidgames and TV series and books, its eco-theology, will become, or what they might inspire :

"(Avatar) gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature."

"...it cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium."

"So much stupefying, enchanting technology, but few genuine emotions...."

"Everything is reduced to an overly simple anti-imperialistic and anti-militaristic parable."

"Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship."

The Vatican is afraid of the competition.

It's crystal clear already that eco-worship, what I and many others have described as 'Green Jesus', will become the most popular, and most powerful, religious movement in the second half of the 21st century.



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Tarantino :

'In general cinema, violence is the biggest attraction. I'm a big fan of action and violence in cinema. That's why Thomas Edison created the motion picture camera — because violence is so good."

This is somebody who has seen little real-life violence.

2009 : The Your New Reality Year In Review

Here's a roundup of the more unusual and/or less known stories I've written about or linked to on this blog through 2009, with a couple of essays thrown in.

The 'Best Of' January/February 2009 (in no particular order) :

"I'm A Missile, I'm Here To Kill You, But I Can Wait"

It's Not War, It's Just Another 'War On Terror' Massacre

Why Obama Might Run America Like Brando's Godfather

Red Cross : House After House In Gaza Filled With Corpses, Children Lying Next To Dead Mothers

Suddenly The Media Are Seriously Interested In UFOs

Life On Mars : We Are Not So Alone Anymore

World To Israel : Nobody Believes Your Lies

(Essay) The War On Truth About War

No, Really, God Told Me To Kill All Those Women And Children

Life Lessons From Philip K Dick

A Photograph Is Not A Mirror

"Drug Money Is The Only Liquid Investment Capital"

Israel Told Its Gaza Soldiers, Kill Yourselves And Each Other To Avoid Capture
Obamamamamamamamama

Did I Really Say Those Words? Yes, You Did, Mr President

UFOs Love Obama, Too

"They Bomb Us Because They Don't Want Us To Well-Educated"


More to come.....

Afghanistan : "International Forces" Handcuffed Then Executed Children

An extraordinary series of claims leveled at western military forces in Afghanistan that have received a suspiciously thin amount of mainstream media coverage.

News of the massacre was no doubt overshadowed by the priority of covering the deaths of 8 CIA officers by a suicide bomber at their Afghanistan base, from where the drone attacks were launched that killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pakistan in 2009.

TimesOnline :

American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

President Karzai sent a team of investigators to Narang district, in eastern Kunar province, after reports of a massacre first surfaced on Monday.

“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” a statement on President Karzai’s website said.

Another account :

“At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village.

“The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire.”

"I spoke to the local headmaster. It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent"

The headmaster of the school : “First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

Eight of the victims were aged 11 to 17.

In Kabul, outraged protesters chanted “Death to Obama”. One of their signs read "Stop Killing Us."

Contact :







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So Many Holocausts....

George Monbiot has a read of David Stannard's American Holocaust :

(the book) ­documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced. In 1492, some 100 million native people lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease, but the mass extinction was also engineered.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different to their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peaceable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives' extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the ­amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them destroying everything and everyone they encountered.

The butchery began with ­Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of ­Hispaniola (now Haiti and the ­Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on ­living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. ­Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a ­certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native ­population of Hispaniola had fallen from eight ­million to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly due to murder, overwork and starvation.

The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women's breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted them with dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work the native Americans to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, about 95% of the population of South and Central America were dead.

In California during the 18th century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junípero Serra set up a series of "missions": in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junípero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint.

While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation's wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe "is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi". During the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed ­people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their ­victims' genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. ­Theodore Roosevelt called this event "as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier".

In comments, Leofwine of the UK replies :

Hey, I'm still extremely angry about the Norman Conquest. The Norman French invaded our country. Our king, Harold Godwinson, his brother Leofwine, and most of the defenders of our kingdom were hacked to death and their corpses mutilated. There followed an absolute reign of terror as the French-speaking Norman barbarians swept across the land, slaughtering, desecrating our sacred sites, raping, and pillaging. To this day the French have never acknowledged their culpability in that atrocity, nor have they offered so much as a brass farthing in reparations. As long as we are to confess our sins with regard to the Americas, let's also drag a mea culpa out of the French for similarly atrocious behavior inflicted upon our Saxon ancestors. (Reparations would be nice too.)

Go Here To Read David Stannard's American Holocaust.

For those who enjoyed 2008's blurry, dodgy-camera, light-trailing New Year's Eve fireworks photos, here's some from NYE 2009 :













Photos by Darryl Mason

Google Suggest self-censors "Islam is....".

But look what comes up for "Christianity is..." :

FaceBook Commits Suicide?

Founder Declares Privacy Is History

Facebook undergoes a radical shift in its views on how much privacy its hundreds of millions of users are entitled to. Sign them up with the impression that what they decide to share with friends and family through Facebook will be private forever, and then open the doors for some mega-datamining.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg :

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Marshall Fiztpatrick unloads :

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing.

Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable.

Read The Full Story

Like I said, datamining. Consumption profiles on hundreds of millions of people must be worth billions to marketers and other manipulators of society.

Then again, Zuckerberg is party right. Most people don't seem to be concerned about their privacy, and willingly share the most intimate details of their lives, even once they understand that on the internet nothing is ultimately private.

In the 1980s, when the total surveillance society was a cultural cling-on from early 1970s paranoid fiction, and the fodder of short-wave conspiracy theory radio, the expected reaction from the masses at incredible violations of privacy would be disgust, outrage and uprising. But a surveillance society is no longer science fiction, or conspiracy theory. It's here, and yet most seem relatively unbothered by the thought of others knowing so much about them. Curiously, they seem more than willing to go into extreme detail of their likes and dislikes, and enthusiastically recall their personal moments, even to relative strangers online.

Anyway, here's the old Facebook privacy policy, that the vast majority of users never bothered to read :

"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States."

Selling user data to intelligence agencies and marketing corporations appears to have been the intention from the start.

Which adds an interesting perspective to the Facebook CIA Conspiracy.

Wow, Glenn Beck finds some subliminal image-laden propaganda he, wow, really likes. Wow :

"WOW! I don't know who produced this but again WOW! MUST SEE."

The United States, where major national elections every two years means the re-election campaigns never end.

Assassinator Robot Wasp No Longer Drug-Induced Hallucination

The future is now....that super-weird science fiction future where flying killer robot insects can undertake missions that humans with a steady hand and a sniper rifle once had to take care of :

The Air Force Research Laboratory set out in 2008 to build the ultimate assassination robot : a tiny, armed drone for U.S. special forces to employ in terminating “high-value targets.” The military won’t say exactly what happened to this Project Anubis, named after a jackal-headed god of the dead in Egyptian mythology. But military budget documents note that Air Force engineers were successful in “develop[ing] a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.”

It might seem limited compared to larger craft, but the Wasp excels at close-in reconnaissance. Its quiet electric motor means it can get near to targets without their ever being aware of its presence.

The Air Force’s 2008 budget plans described the planned Project Anubis as “a small UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that carries sensors, data links, and a munitions payload to engage time-sensitive fleeting targets in complex environments.” It noted that after it was developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Anubis would be used by Air Force Special Operations Command. The total cost was to be just over half a million dollars.

According to the budget, $1.75 million was spent to reach the goal.

The Full Story Is Here

Anubis, an Egyptian god of the dead, who dealt with mummification and getting the dead through to the afterlife :

Don't Get Them Started On '33% Off''

If this seems to you a sad and depressing thing to see in a Walmart store, December, 2009 :



Wait till You See The Whole Sign.

(via Reddit)

Preparing Americans for the reality of war in the homeland :

“We cannot rely on money and the banking system and government to come up with all the answers.

People years ago were more self-reliant and were more able to take hold of the reins and do things themselves. I think we need to get back some of those basics.”

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The Reading List

This is not so much a story as a list of the blog posts, news stories and features I've got open in other windows but haven't yet got around to reading properly. This seems an easier, handier way of reminding myself of what stories had caught my interest at this time than bookmarking alone.

Hopefully you will find stories here you missed :

CIA Loses Some Of Its Most Experienced Middle East Operatives In Pakistan Border Base Attack

Former UK PM John Major Slams Tony Blair As Reality Of Iraq War Crimes Trials Draw Closer

Ten Science Stories From 2009 That Will Fuck With Your Mind

New York Times : Why Twitter Will Endure

Americans Appear To Be Waking From Their Decades Of Frenzied, Mind-Controlled Spending And Consumption To Discover The Stuff That Matters Can Be Cheap, Or Even Free

The TwentyTeens : Why It Will Be The Out Of Control Decade

Bono On How To Make The New Decade Better : Make Eco-Cars Look Better, Fight Retovirus, More Non-Violent Revolutions, Enjoy World Cup South Africa.

The Simplest Solution To Killing SuperBugs Found In Norway : Stop Taking So Many Drugs

Why Too Much Positive Thinking And Optimism Is Bad For You

"Twitter Can Be Overwhelming, But Think Of It As A River Of Data Rushing Past That You Can Dip Your Cup Into Every Once In A While"

An Amazing Collection Of The Best Movie Posters Of The 1990s

2009 : The Year In Cannabis Stories

The Pyramid Of People Power

Bono :

A lot of us have seen or lived the organizational chart of the last century, in which power and influence (whether possessed by church, state or corporation) are concentrated in the uppermost point of the pyramid and pressure is exerted downward. But in this new century, and especially in some parts of the developing world, the pyramid is being inverted. Much has been written about the profits to be made at the bottom of the pyramid; less has been said about the political power there. Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.

Hold The Presses! We Haven't Mentioned The Nazis Today!

Rupert Murdoch's The Sun scrapes the absolute bottom of the 'Nazi Outrage!' barrel with this story of some idiotic British tourist seeing swastikas in a pane of glass in a German hotel, and kicking up a shitstorm over it.

The pane of glass :



This is nothing more than cheap media exploitation of the horrific memories of those who suffered and lost friends and entire families under Nazi Party rule, invasion and occupation.

There's something really sick and sadistic and, dare I say it, Nazi-like in the way the British and American tabloid media, in particular, refuse to allow the youth of Germany to move beyond the outrages committed by their grandparents, and great-grandparents.

The Nazis misappropriated an ancient symbol of peace when they imprinted their hatred upon the swastika symbol. It's beyond time to free this symbol of its recent dark past, and the best way to start is by not freaking out every time a swastika appears.

Even in Germany.

2010, According To The BBC

A summary of the stories BBC World correspondents believe will be the big headline grabbers of 2010 :

* World Cup, South Africa.

* Iran, and the fall of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

* Israel's reluctance to make peace with Palestinians, Syria, and what they will do about Iran.

* The comeback of Imelda Marcos.

* Sarah Palin's ongoing campaign to....do something.

* How the US/NATO strategy in Afghanistan unfolds.

* UK defence chiefs fighting funding cutbacks as the British economy continues to tank.

* The arrival of a "long overdue black swan - an unpredicted, unexpected game changer.

* Whether or not President Barack Obama can live up to (fading) hopes and expectations.

* "The global economy coming out of recession."

* Whether or not China will replace the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

* The beginning of "real nuclear disarmament by the United States and Russia."

* Iceland-style economic meltdown in one or more EU member states.

* The electoral destruction, or ressurection, in the UK of New Labour. The possibility of a coalition New Labour/conservative government.

* Elections in Burma.

* "The success or failure of the Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy."

* "Can the world's top military leaders and diplomats really turn the tide against the Taliban?"

Read The Full Story Here

I'll drop a note to myself to take a look back at this list of predictions at the end of the year, see how they turned out.

It's funny because it's true :

Film critic Roger Ebert has a fantastic collection of the Best Movie Posters Of The Decade. I can't go past this one from 2002 :





The Rest Are Here

In Louisiana, a mother and son went to jail for growing this :



More at The Boston Daily Enterprise.

That's all. That pathetic little plant.

How could the arresting police officers feel anything but humiliation that they are ordered to arrest people for such a 'crime'? Perhaps they enjoy their work. Perhaps they sleep more soundly knowing the world has one less little cannabis plant in it.

Keeping America safe. From a non-toxic plant grows naturally in at least a dozen American states.

The people of the 22nd century are going to look back and shake their heads in disbelief that such pettiness existed in our days; that adherence to outdated, ridiculous laws ruined the lives of otherwise non-criminal people.

What a fucking joke.

What a con.

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