Tsunami Alert Issued For Entire Pacific

The 7th largest earthquake in recorded history has struck off Chile today, magnitude 8.8.

The entire Pacific is now under tsunami alert.

The official warnings being issued tonight (Sydney time) across dozens of countries demand everyone to stay away from coastlines and beaches. No sight-seeing, no surfing.

The tsunami alerts are extremely dramatic, and they may prove to have been too dramatic, but right now they're downright fucking terrifying.

The waves have not struck anywhere yet, but Easter Island is believed to be the first, in about half an hour from now (11.15pm Sydney time)

In Australia, thousands watching The Day After Tomorrow on TV have been jolted by real world tsunami warnings flashing and scrolling onto their screens during the movie.

And there's this stunning map, issued about 9pm Sydney time :



I'm updating on the massive flow of news and eyewitness reports about the Pacific Tsunami over at :

The Orstrahyun

Below is an excerpt from a weather bureau warning explaining how we can tell that the tsunami threat has passed :

"FOR ALL AREAS – WHEN NO MAJOR WAVES ARE OBSERVED FOR TWO HOURS AFTER THE ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL OR DAMAGING WAVES HAVE NOT OCCURRED FOR AT LEAST TWO HOURS THEN LOCAL AUTHORITIES CAN ASSUME THE THREAT IS PASSED. DANGER TO BOATS AND COASTAL STRUCTURES CAN CONTINUE FOR SEVERAL HOURS DUE TO RAPID CURRENTS. "

Most countries and islands of the Pacific will likely get small to slightly damaging waves.

But right now, this feels very, very bad.

From The Desk Of Tesla

The beautiful letterheads of the Nikola Tesla Company at the start of the 20 century :




Letterheady Has More On The Inventions Featured

White House official photographer Pete Souza continues turning out magnificent work :




And a screen grab from a recent White House Photo Of The Day page :



There's an excellent collection of DeSouza photos chronicling the Obama family's first year in the White House here.

An impressively creative collection of billboard art here.

Dude, I'm Seeing Islamic Crescent Moons Everywhere!

And some more fine work by Matt Drudge, whoever he is now, as highlighted by Raw Story.

This is the logo of the US Missile Defence Agency :



Matt Drudge claims this is similar to an "Islamic flag".

No, it's not.

Drudge also claimed : "New Missile Defense Agency Logo Causes Online Commotion..."

But at the time of posting that claim, the only "commotion" the logo had caused was in Matt Drudge's mind. He put the idea out there, first, so he could later report on a controversy that didn't exist until he created it.

Bloggers ask, "Is Drudge high?"

Notorious pro-war NeoCon moron Frank Gaffney appears to be sharing Drudge's Bong of Rampant Paranoia :

The Obama administration’s determined effort to reduce America’s missile defense capabilities initially seemed to be just standard Leftist fare," Gaffney writes, but the new agency logo "suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot."

Does the Dreamworks logo also cause NeoCons and their media hackey-lackeys to shit themselves with fear? Look! A Crescent Moon!



UPDATE : Fox News desperately tries to beat up this nontroversy, by quoting comments posted under fake names online.

But Fox News then allows the admission, from a Missile Defence Agency spokesman, that the logo was in use before Barack Obama became president.

Censorship By Matt Drudge

It's hard to believe that Matt Drudge was once regarded as some sort of take-no-prisoners mainstream media troublemaker.

An example follows of Matt Drudge's reaction, and censorship, when confronted with one of the most explosive media scandal stories in years.

A headline on the Drudge Report website, and the @Drudge_Report Twitter feed :



The actual headline of the Reuters story :



Hmm, a certain name seems to have gone missing...

All The Airline Pilots Are In On It, Too

How many t-shirts, coffee cups and other merchandise could you sell if you officially re-started The Flat Earth Society and started getting big write-ups in the British, and, soon, American media?

Daniel Shenton is about to find out.

Besides believing that the entire planet exists as a flat disc floating in space, in this UK Guardian story we learn that Shenton also believes in evolution, thinks the evidence for man-made global warming is strong, doesn't believe the US government had foreknowledge or were involved in the 9/11 attacks and that the International Space Station is stinky with fakery.

The article is worthwhile, however, for this wonderful illustration from 1922 :

British PM's Violence As Seen By Hundreds Of Millions Of Chinese

Chinese TV has almost eliminated the need for actual video camera footage of a big news story. In this case, they provide dramatic video where none exists of the alleged violent behaviour of British prime minister Gordon Brown (wait for the action at 0:36) :

1993's Falling Down has suddenly begun to catch fire on torrent sharing sites, and rental copies will fly out of video stores across the United States.

Any reason for the resurgence of interest in this old movie?

Good Luck With That Whole Anti-Cannabis Christian Movement

Raw Story publishes the results of a "Well, Duh!" study into inhaled cannabis and the conclusions reached that it is likely as good as or better than most of the pharmaceuticals prescribed for a variety of ailments.

But there it is in the comments. Again. A jarring screed with plenty of CAPITALISED words. Comments very similiar to the one below - in subject matter, thrust and word choice - are dumping into comment streams across the independent and so-called 'conspiracy' American digital media.

It's not an opinion, and it's not from a deeply religious person. It's like an auto-comment, designed to annoy just about every reader who comes across it, making them reluctant to bother with making or reading comments, at all, anywhere :

"Here we go with the liberal hippy proaganda! This is a drug! A harmful drug! A drug that has harmed countless American lives and continues to destroy the very fabric of God's America. As a Christian woman, I will not stand idly by as another MENACE is bestowed upon my America in the guise of medicine. ALCOHOL IS BAD ENOUGH! This is an instrument of the devil, and the ragged degenerate god hating Americans who support this crap are going to be a) incarcerated in the coming years, b) shunned from his HOLY word. Have no doubt that this crap was put on our earth to weed out the truthsayers from the sinners. THIS IS AN INSTRUMENT OPF THE DEVIL....AND THOSE USING IT WILL REEP WHAT HE HAS SOWN!!!!!!!!!!!! THE COMING GOD REVOLUTION IS NOT GOING TO ALLOW THE USE OF THIS INSTRUMENT OF SATAN. Allhe who washes their hands in the blood of the LAMB before the SABBATH of HIS WORD will BE SENT INTO THE FIRE! YOU SICK BASTARDS MAKE ME glad knowing that the revolution is UPON US. AND THAT HIS HOLY WORD WILL SHINE AGAIN ON THIS, OUR GREAT NATION."

God is anti-medicinal cannabis, apparently.

Now you know.

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New York Times Publishes Column By War Machine Employee Demanding US Stop Thinking About All The Innocent Afghans Killed And Ramp The Fuck Up The Bombing

Glenn Greenwald of Salon uncovers a brutal mindfuck of gruesome pro-civilian bombing positive influence in the pages of the New York Times. A defence corporation employee demands the US blow more money terror bombing the civilian populace of Afghanistan.

New York Times column excerpt :

So in a modern refashioning of the obvious -- that war is harmful to civilian populations -- the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim. . . .

[A]n overemphasis on civilian protection is now putting American troops on the defensive in what is intended to be a major offensive. . . .

Of course, all this is not to say that the United States and NATO should be oblivious to civilian deaths, or wage "total" war in Afghanistan. Clearly, however, the pendulum has swung too far in favor of avoiding the death of innocents at all cost.

General McChrystal’s directive was well intentioned, but the lofty ideal at its heart is a lie, and an immoral one at that, because it pretends that war can be fair or humane. . . .

Wars are always ugly, and always monstrous, and best avoided.

Once begun, however, the goal of even a "long war" should be victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.

She means unleash the Flying Killer Robot drones, the ones with very expensive bomb payloads.

Greenwald :

Does anyone need it explained to them why causing large civilian deaths through air attacks in Afghanistan is not only morally grotesque but also completely counter-productive to our stated goals?

No.

But those bombs and missiles have to be dumped somewhere, so the warehouses and new orders can be filled and re-filled, over and over again.

Stephen Walt At Foreign Policy Responds


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The most bizarre collection of old photos you will see this year.



I promise.

Dispatch Palmer Eldritch, He'll Know What To Do

Author William Gibson reads this story about Philip K Dick and then rips into him, on Twitter :



I think Philip K Dick would be highly amused to see so many taking so much of what he said so damn seriously.

I had to reply :

I Want You To Punch Me As Hard As You Can

The latest in "Hey! Look At Me! I'm A Fucking Arsehole With A Real Short Memory" t-shirts :


The Bush "Miss Me Yet?" image and tag line is quickly becoming iconic, and congratz to whoever came up with it and is now selling a shitload of merchandise at CafePress.

You can't blame people for wanting to make a buck, however they can, in what's left of Bush's America.

A beautiful collection of 20th century Russian theatrical posters, by Nikolay Palvovich Akimov :



See The Rest Of The Collection Here

How Can Demanding Truth Be More Dangerous Than Demanding War?



By Darryl Mason

A good question, not asked often enough :

I have one simple question though for anyone free-thinking enough not to immediately follow whatever the voice on the radio tells them. What “conspiracy theorists” are more dangerous and deserve to be shunned by public opinion?

The ones trumpeted by people like Alex Jones whose goal is to have the 9/11 attack investigations to be reopened?

Or the ones feverishly hawked by the likes of Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh that call for the American military to begin attacking Iran?

I don't believe, or subscribe, to everything I read or hear on alleged 'conspiracy sites' like the ones run by Alex Jones or Mike Rivero's WhatReallyHappened.com, nor does anyone there demand I do so.

I don't see columnists or commenters, anyone in fact, at those sites demanding my country go to war against people on the other side of the planet who have never done me or my family harm, based on the flimsiest of evidence, or flat-out fearmongery.

But when I go to The Washington Post, or the New York Times, I see columnists demanding Iran be bombed, now. Again and again. It's no coincidence of course that is it usually the exact same people who in 2002 filled column after column in those newspapers demanding Iraq be bombed, then invaded.

I often think of the extremely brave men I met and spent time talking to in bars and coffee shops around Ground Zero, back in December 2001. While I went back to my hotel room, or to do more sight-seeing, they went back into the ruins of the World Trade Centre to keep digging for the bits and pieces of their missing friends and former colleagues in the police and fire departments they hoped were still there, so they could give them a proper burial and help their families move on.

Those rescue workers I met, who were near the Twin Towers on 9/11, and were still working at Ground Zero months later, didn't talk about grand plots or conspiracy theories. They didn't blame Bush or Cheney or Israelis or Haliburton or the Project For The New American Century.
They just wanted to know why they saw those buildings exploding before, and as, they fell down.

They just wanted to know the truth about what they saw that day, and why their friends died, and why the only pieces of flesh and bone they usually found could fit into a coffee cup. Or a matchbox.

Soon it will be a decade on from 9/11, and those rescue workers (the ones who haven't died from the effects of 9/11 dust) still don't know the answers to the questions they asked all those years ago.

The truth. That's all.

They just want to know the truth.

And that, according to Fox News, makes them "dangerous people"?

The truth, then, must be a whole lot more spectacular and shocking than the Bush administration official story would have us believe.

What other explanation can be there for such hatred and venom directed at those who seek answers to their questions?




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67 Year Old "Epic Beard Man" Promises To Kick Ass, And Does

By Darryl Mason

Now everyone has a camera, the one-on-one confrontations of everyday life on public transport that once went unreported now become world news.

How can fake TV drama compete with this?

The Ass-Kicking :



The Aftermath :



If these videos become explosively popular, here's how the news media narrative will likely unfold.

You will see this footage over and over again until you want to snap.

Reporters will track down the EBM and the man he fought, interview them separately and then attempt a meeting and reconciliation.

The Epic Beard Man will become famous as expressing the fears and anxieties of Baby Boomers who now feel they are vulnerable members of society, and much discussion and soul-searching will unfold as 24 hour news channels sacrifice small animals in thanks for this story landing free in their laps, providing days of panel discussion race-related fodder.

The man whose ass was thoroughly kicked, and should have known better than to wind up a pretty fit looking old guy wearing a "I Am A Motherfucker" t-shirt, regardless of his bushranger beard, will slink away from his infamy, but will be mocked by friends, relatives and strangers on the street for years to come.

Epic Beard Man, meanwhile, may become something of a national hero if Fox News goes heavy with it, he will probably meet Sarah Palin, be hailed for standing up to arseholes on public transport and end up scoring a few hundred grand doing ads for some downright American product, and could probably one day demand a suitcase of cash from a razor blade company to get rid of the beard for a TV ad.

Meanwhile, plenty of real news will go unreported.


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Newsweek Forgot The Conspiracy They Were An Active Part Of : To Lie America Into The Iraq War

In a fairly weak piece of clickbait (and the mainstream media knows 'conspiracy theories' are click magnets), Newsweek lists the following as "hip, trendy, least likely fringe beliefs" :

* Obama Is A Secret Muslim, With No American Birth Certificate

* FEMA Is Establishing Detention Camps For American Gitizens

* BushCo. Knew The 9/11 Attacks Were Coming

* Media Corporations Want Internet Licenses For All Users, IndieMedia & Bloggers

* AGW Is A Hoax

* Goldman Sachs Purposely Created Fragile Investment Bubbles And Then Bet On Them Failing

Incredibly, Newsweek uses this story to claim that business links tying the Bush and Bin Laden families together are just more "fringe" conspiracy theories.

And they wonder why their media is dying.


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American Soldiers In Iraq Use Slayer To Engage A "Predator Mindset"

The UK Guardian on the soundtrack of war for Generation Y soldiers in Iraq :

A musicologist, Pieslak discusses why these songs triggered a "mental transformation". He analyses Slayer's guitar-drum barrage, and the pre­fabricated nihilism of gangster rap lyrics. His interviews raise an old ­question: how does violent music ­affect the ­listener's behaviour?

It's a debate that was long ago drowned out by indignation, finally disappearing under a heap of "parental advisory" stickers. But the conclusion of Sound ^­Targets is that, in some contexts, violent songs can ­encourage violent behaviour.

Two of the most popular MP3s for American soldiers pumping themselves up to go out and - Eminem's Go To Sleep :



And Slayer's song about Auschwitz, Angel Of Death :

100 Years Of Visual Effects In Five Minutes. Cinemafastique!




(Via The Drum)

9/11 Dust : What Was In It?

This story details the incredibly toxic contents of 9/11 Dust :

• Over 400 tons of asbestos, which inhaled in any quantity, cannot be expelled by the lungs.
  
  
• 90,000 liters of jet fuel containing benzene, a carcinogen that suppresses the immune system and causes leukemia.
  
  
• Mercury from over 500,000 fluorescent lights that is toxic to the nervous system, and damaging especially to the kidneys.
  
  
• 200,000 pounds of lead and cadmium from personal computers toxic to the respiratory tract, especially damaging to kidneys.
  
  
• Polycystic aromatic hydrocarbons that cause lung, laryngeal and throat cancers.
  
  
• 130,000 gallons of transformer oil, which contains PCBs ad causes serious skin rashes and liver damage.
  
  
• Crystalline Silica from 420,000 tons of concrete, sheetrock and glass (tiny particulates that lodge in the heart, causing ischemic heart disease).

By 2030, the 9/11 dust, that the Environmental Protection Agency declared was not toxic and safe for New Yorkers to breathe, will have killed more Americans than died in the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

This Story About The Flying Killer Robots Vs Terrorists War Has Been Endorsed By The White House

By Darryl Mason

The White House on Twitter has about 1.7 million followers. White House postings on Twitter are often 'retweeted' by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of followers. If the White House wants to get information out to Americans, unfiltered or tainted by the mainstream news media, Twitter is better than sending a few million people out to knock on doors.

So it's of reasonable internet historical importance to note that the White House on Twitter is now linking to stories the White House clearly approves of.

War On Terror success stories.

Today :


So what does the story say? Excerpts :

It was not the first (unmanned armed drone) airstrike on Obama's watch, but it marked the first major victory in his war on terrorism, a campaign the administration believes can be waged even more aggressively than its predecessor's. Long before he went on the defensive in Washington for his handling of the failed Christmas Day airline bombing, Obama had widened the list of U.S. targets abroad and stepped up the pace of airstrikes.

Obama's national security team believed that the president's campaign promise to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq would have a side benefit: freeing up manpower and resources to hunt terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Intelligence officials, lawmakers and analysts say that approach is showing signs of success.

Intelligence officials and analysts say the drawdown of troops in an increasingly stable Iraq is part of the reason for the increase in drone strikes. The military once relied on drones for around-the-clock surveillance to flush out insurgents, support troops in battle and help avoid roadside bombs.

With fewer of those missions required, the U.S. has moved many of those planes to Afghanistan, roughly doubling the size of the military and CIA fleet that can patrol the lawless border with Pakistan, officials said.

Talk about getting the message out. The AP story also includes this photo released by the US Air Force of a fully armed unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drone.

Or as they're known around here : A Flying Killer Robot (FKR).



Since that photo was taken in August, 2007, FKRs have killed primary Taliban leaders and Al Qaidaists in what should more accurately now be called The Flying Killer Robot Vs Terrorists War.

Look at it again.

They've also killed at least 1000 innocent men, women and children in wrong target horror airstrikes in Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pakistan.

But it doesn't matter. They do not feel sorrow, or pity, or empathy.

Yet.

They do not cry. They cannot be prosecuted for killing civilians.

The FKRs.

Now the White House, through Twitter and the Associated Press, wants you know the 'Robot Vs Terrorists War' is ramping up.

What is tested and hailed a success in the warzones, always returns to the homelands.

And you were worried about black helicopters.

The Future, it's always so much fucking weirder than you ever expected.

What is that strange buzzing sound outside?


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Time Magazine ran this story on the United States' Snowpocalypse :



The story was left open for comments. After a few hours of relentless mockery from commenters, someone at Time Magazine decided another headline might be necessary :



More Here

IOC Move Fast To Censor Video Of Luger's Death Crash

Why is the IOC demanding the Nodar Crash Video be censored on YouTube and elsewhere online? This is the sometimes deadly reality of an extremely fast Winter Olympics event like the luge, and what happens when the IOC sign off on having great huge unpadded poles right next a track corner where lugers exit travelling at 90 mph.


Watch CBS News Videos Online

Goodbye Testicles

I've changed my mind. I will pay to read Rupert Murdoch newspapers online, but only if they consistently come up with stories of such a high quality as this one :

From The Sun :

The lad hallucinated for 18 hours and mutilated himself because he believed centipedes were crawling over his body and biting him.

Durham Police are warning that its use can result in severe nose bleeds, nose burns, hallucinations, blood circulation problems, rashes, anxiety and paranoia, fits, delusions and can lead to a heart attack.

But a police report - some of which was based on online forums about the drug - revealed a lad in Durham had tried to rip off his testicles after taking it.

Let me guess. The bit about a user getting so fucked up he wrenched off his own nuts came from an anonymous person on an online forum.

There's a bunch of kids in the UK high-fiving each other right now that the cops and The Sun are reporting this incident of testicle sack mutilation as fact.

The drug may well be causing a terrible amount of damage to users, but it's hard not to reminded of another British drug hysteria outbreak.

The drug purportedly affected an area of the brain called "Shatner's Bassoon" (altering your perception of time), can give you a bloated neck due to "massive water retention"....and..."…you can puke yourself to death on this stuff — one girl threw up her own pelvis-bone"

The Pre-Iraq War Lies Conspiracy-Conspiracy : Nice Try, Tony

By Darryl Mason

Tony Blair has discovered that nobody, but nobody, believes his bullshit anymore, and the possibility of far more hostile attention to come, from signing his country up for the illegal War On Iraq back in 2002, is dampening his trousers and dementing his mind. He's now ranting like a fucking loon :

Tony Blair yesterday launched an extraordinary attack on the Iraq inquiry - as the chairman warned that he and others could be recalled over 'gaps' in their evidence.

Speaking on Fox News he said critics of the war were obsessed with conspiracy theories, and refused to accept that his motives were 'genuine'.

'There's got to be some conspiracy behind it. Some great, you know, deceit that's gone on, and people just find it hard to understand that it's possible for people to have different points of view and hold them reasonably for genuine reasons.'

The claims of a conspiracy are in themselves a conspiracy....right.

Everybody knows where the deceit truly lies. That's why so many Brits, including many, many family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, would like to see him dragged through the streets of London to the Tower.

Blair's been abandoned by just about everybody who served with him, and it's clear there is a '"If I'm going down you're fucking coming with me" attitude developing amongst former staffers and fellow New Labour MPs.

Tony Blair on Fox News :



An idiot grin, so no surprise there. But let's take a closer look at his eyes :



Yep, he's shitting himself.

Good.

A taste of what's to come in the ongoing Iraq War inquiry was served up to one of Blair's henchmen and former ally in the 2002 campaign to lie the UK into an illegal war :

Justice Secretary Jack Straw yesterday looked taken aback when he was asked detailed questions about official notes of conversations which apparently showed the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had told him the U.S. would invade Iraq 'come what may'.

Mr Straw initially said he could not 'recollect' such a conversation but later agreed to consult his records after members of the inquiry made it clear they knew the conversations had taken place.

Let's have a look at Jack Straw's eyes on his way into the inquiry :



He's shitting himself, too.

Even better.

It's a shame Robin Cook isn't still here to see all this.


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Unfathomably UnFailable

From a speech by Bill Duddley at the low-key world bankers gathering now underway in
Sydney :

It is critical that we ensure that no firm is too big to fail. This is about both fairness and having proper incentives in the financial system. Having some firms that are too big to fail creates moral hazard. These firms are able to obtain funding on more attractive terms because debt holders expect that the government will intervene rather than allow failure. In addition, too big to fail creates perverse incentives. In a too-big-to-fail regime, firms have an incentive to get large, not because it facilitates greater efficiency, but instead because the implicit government backstop enables the too-big-to-fail firm to achieve lower funding costs.

So there's a revealing explanation of what "Too Big To Fail" really meant. The biggest banks, insurance and investment firms knew, from well in advance of the global financial crisis, that they could do whatever the fuck they wanted, and did, because the government would not let them crash into a heap. They'd already been assured of that. A long understood arrangement.

Where was the incentive to not act like greed-crazed reprobates?

They knew they could not die, and so acted as thought they thought themselves immortal.

What a scam.

Perhaps they really do dose the water in the US with psychoactive drugs, as Philip K Dick wrote back in the late 1960s. What other explanation can there be for the fact that most of those ultimately responsible for tens of millions of Americans eventually losing their homes not only escaped any kind of punishment at all, but are still getting bonuses?

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Fuck No!



More At NPR

Ever Wonder Why The United States Is Such A Violent Nation?

If half or most of the 100 million Americans who watched Superbowl 2010 sat through the ads, they would have been exposed to the following acts of violence :

Yet Another War On Terror Myth Bites The Dust

Stunning. It doesn't matter what kind of bullshit you try and spin when it comes to the War On/Of Terror, the American mainstream media will line up to let you create a new reality that goes against the law, humanity and downright commonsense.

From ABC News :

John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

"It works, is the bottom line," conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou's ABC interview. "Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works."

A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling -- to this day -- the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times.

Kiriakou did his job. He got the Torture Works! idea into the mainstream media.

Now he's got a book out, he's oh so sorry he lied, and so successfully seeded disinformation not only through US media, but international media as well.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

....Kiriakou....didn't have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn't. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: "In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own."

Right. That's why he gave literally dozens of interviews, repeating the claim that waterboarding suspects works to stop terrorism.

I don't believe him. Let's waterboard him and see what he has to say then.


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30 Movies Where The 'Bad Guy' Wins In The End

So many great movies end with the 'bad guy' triumphing, escaping, surviving.

Obviously this is spoilertown, so be warned. Via Reddit :

Halloween

The Empire Strikes Back

No Country For Old Men

Saw

Se7en

12 Monkeys

The Silence Of The Lambs

The Usual Suspects

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The Omega Man

Arlington Road

Brazil

Lord Of War

Breaker Morant

1984

Braveheart

The Thing

Angel Heart

Fallen

The Taylor Of Panama

Easy Rider

Friday The 13th

Gladiator

Nightmare On Elm Street

Rosemary's Baby

Dawn On The Dead

The Mist

Cool Hand Luke

Memento

The Prestige

The Unforgiven

Chinatown

Oliver Stone's W.

Your body is like a video game on the inside. A white blood cell pursues bacterium, but turn off the sound and imagine PacMan music :

War On Terror Reality Seeded 30 Years Ago In Nostradamus Documentary

By Darryl Mason

In 1980, a documentary on Nostradamus, screened all over the west to hundreds of millions of people, and repeated for years after, laid out the rise of political Islam through the 80s and 90s, leading to a terrorist attack on New York City (a nuclear attack was predicted).


I vividly remember watching this when I was about 10. It was the stuff of nightmares. It wasn't a horror movie, it was our new reality to come. And, it's probably worthy of a 6/10 for prophetic accuracy. While it might seem a bit cheesy now, watch the montages with the sound off. Repeated imagery of nuclear detonations, New York skyscrapers collapsing, dead people lying in the streets of America. What stunningly haunting images to pump into homes across half the world, claiming it was all going to come true. How many tens of millions of other children saw this and thought, 'Holy Fuck!' and were riven by nightmares? It's a visual assault.

And it was Orson Welles telling us that our future held terror wars and mega-death natural disaster chaos. How could we not believe it?



How could some not resist making it come true?


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The majestically beautiful apex of a total solar eclipse



The Full Image Is Here

(via Reddit)

We Had To Borrow The Costume, So Go Easy On It

It's called The Worst Fight Scene ever. And yes, that may be so. But consider this, it's a clip from a 40 year old, very low budget TV series, that has been watched almost 7 million times in just over 700 days at YouTube, let alone the hundreds of other places it can be seen online. I wonder if they ever contemplated how much simple pleasure, and laughter, this would bring to so many people in the 21st century?



It should be called The Best Worst Fight Scene Ever. I love how Shatner has to be so careful 'fighting' the alien so that the costume doesn't fall apart. You just don't get that kind of realism with CGI.

An appallingly sad murder-suicide, announced via Facebook



What a tragedy.

Whoops, Iraqolypse!

Here's how BushCo. hoped, and prayed, the War On Iraq would unfold back in 2001 :

Just a few years ago, an overconfident George W Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating US presence in the Middle East.

These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of vice president Dick Cheney's secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq's monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves - more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran - including the quadrupling of Iraq's capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

The dream in those distant days was to strip the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) - the cartel consisting of the main petroleum exporters - of the power to control the oil supply and its price on the world market. As a reward for vastly expanding Iraqi production and freeing its distribution from OPEC's control, key figures in the Bush administration imagined that the US could skim off a small proportion of that increased oil production to offset the projected $40 billion cost of the invasion and occupation of the country.

All in a year or two.

Michael Schwarz at Asia Times goes on to compare the reality, to the dream.

NASA : "What The Fuck Is That?!"

Okay, Hubble scientists have no idea what they've caught on camera here, only guesses for now.



Primarily, it''s not behaving like a comet. So it's open slather for theories.

I'm sticking with a Klingon 'Bird of Prey' until I see a better explanation.

You think that's a bit nutty? Well, compare :





Chilling, isn't it?

On safari in Kenya, photographer Michel Denis-Huot snapped a series of incredible images which reveal when the pressure of hunger is sated, the hunter and the hunted can just hang out for a while.

A preview :



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If only there was a 24 hour news channel made up of stories like this :

Fox News Poll : Obama's Leadership Puts Him At The Top Of The Class

Fox News polls its audience on how President Barack Obama performed during his first year in the White House. More than 473,000 had voted when I did this screen capture :



I saw it on Fox News. It must be true.

This result will unlikely be reflected in how Fox News covers the second year of Obama's presidency.



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