Do You Feel Safer Yet?

Soldiers and police in combat gear, armed with mega-powerful M4s, patrol New York City's subway.....because bombs exploded in the Moscow subway yesterday (?) .





The New York Post calls them "armed guards".

Fudge You, You MotherFudger

By Darryl Mason

Okay, it's not Bye Bye Birdie or Hello Dolly!, but why isn't Scarface a good morality play for kids?

Sure he flies high, but Tony Montana pays dearly for his crimes.

The peak of success sees him become a prisoner in his own home, crippled by paranoia, under constant pressure from dirty cops and politicians, hated by his wife, he ends up estranged from his mother, killing his best friend, watching his beloved sister die and then losing his own life.

How is any of that a positive message about drugs and breaking the law?

Besides, this is seriously fudging funny, hypnotically surreal. The kids did an excellent job. They should feel proud.



I suppose the dead silence of the audience registers how shocking it must have been to see, particularly if you did not know what the school play this year was going to be.

The kids did an excellent job. They should feel proud.

Sadly, it will be hard for them to ignore the expected hysterical media reaction, particularly from the likes of Fox News and the Murdoch tabloidia, that will explode all around them.

UPDATE : Moral Panic Cancelled, Not A Real School Play

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Does Hollywood help pre-condition Americans for coming new realities?

I wonder if George Lucas watched Woody Allen's 1973 sci-fi satire Sleeper when he was writing early Stars Wars screenplays? Am I the only one who can see similarities between Allen's android character and C3-PO? Head movements, attitude, shuffling walk? A famililarish robot-dismantling moon in The Empire Strikes Back?



Maybe my coffee's too strong.....or not strong enough.

Incredible. 'Condition 1' weather in Antarctica :

Michael Crichton on the denigration of society by the mainstream media, back in 1993 :

There has been a great decline in civility in this country. We have lost the perception that reasonable persons of good will may hold opposing views. Simultaneously, we have lost the ability to address reasoned arguments - to forsake ad hominem characterization, and instead address a different person's arguments. Which is a tragedy, because debate is interesting. It's a form of exploration. But personal attack is merely unpleasant and intimidating. Paradoxically, this decline in civility and good humor, which the press appear to believe is necessary to "get the story," reduces the intensity of our national discourse. Watching British parliamentary debates, I notice that the tradition of saying "the right honorable gentleman" or "my distinguished friend" before hurling an insult does something interesting to the entire process. A civil tone permits more bluntness.

And where can you find this kind of debate in today's media? Not in television, nor in newspapers or magazines. You find it on the computer networks, a place where traditional media are distinctly absent.

So I hope that this era of polarized, junk-food journalism will soon come to an end.

Is it coming to an end now, 17 years later? Or is it in fact getting worse, and spreading deeper into society, hosing shit all over intelligence?

The Full Michael Crichton Story Is Here

The Future Is Now! But With PayPhones & Faxes

How the future was envisaged in a series of AT&T ads back in 1993. Note cute importance still placed on faxes, the lack of remote controls for TV units, and non-existence of 3G phones with inbuilt movie studio editing and worldwide instant broadcast capabilities :

China Fires Back At US Over Human Rights : "The US Citizens' Freedom To Access & Distribute Information Is Under Strict Supervision"

China has compiled a detailed, well sourced report on human rights' violations in the United States, through 2008-2009. It makes for some very interesting reading, not only for the view China expresses of the United States, but for the vast number of human rights' violations listed, and the massive amount of general criminality it exposes.

Reading all this about the United States from inside China would make the US sound a quite scary, freedom-restricted, dangerous place. Much like the way China is portrayed by some or most of the commercial American media.

An excerpt :

Chaotic management of prisons in the United State also led to wide spread of diseases among the inmates.

A report by the Human Rights Watch released in March 2009 said although the New York State prison registered the highest number of prisoners living with HIV in the country, it did not provide the inmates with adequate access to treatment, and even locked the inmates up separately, refusing to provide them with treatment of any kind. (www.hrw.org, March 24, 2009).

While advocating "freedom of speech," "freedom of the press" and "Internet freedom," the U.S. government unscrupulously monitors and restricts the citizens' rights to freedom when it comes to its own interests and needs.

The U.S. citizens' freedom to access and distribute information is under strict supervision. According to media reports, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) started installing specialized eavesdropping equipment around the country to wiretap calls, faxes, and emails and collect domestic communications as early as 2001. The wiretapping programs was originally targeted at Arab-Americans, but soon grew to include other Americans. The NSA installed over 25 eavesdropping facilities in San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago among other cities. The NSA also announced recently it was building a huge one million square feet data warehouse at a cost of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars at Camp Williams in Utah, as well as another massive data warehouse in San Antonio, as part of the NSA's new Cyber Command responsibilities. The report said a man named Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in prison after he refused to participate in NSA's surveillance program (http://www.onelinejournal.com, November 23, 2009).

After the September 11 attack, the U.S. government, in the name of anti-terrorism, authorized its intelligence authorities to hack into its citizens' mail communications, and to monitor and erase any information that might threaten the U.S. national interests on the Internet through technical means. The country's Patriot Act allowed law enforcement agencies to search telephone, email communications, medical, financial and other records, and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting foreign persons suspected of terrorism-related acts. The Act expanded the definition of terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which law enforcement powers could be applied. On July 9, 2008, the U.S. Senate passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008, granting legal immunity to telecommunication companies that take part in wiretapping programs and authorizing the government to wiretap international communications between the United States and people overseas for anti-terrorism purposes without court approval (The New York Times, July 10, 2008). Statistic showed that from 2002 to 2006, the FBI collected thousands of phones records of U.S. citizens through mails, notes and phone calls. In September 2009, the country set up an Internet security supervision body, further worrying U.S. citizens that the U.S. government might use Internet security as an excuse to monitor and interfere with personal systems. A U.S. government official told the New York Times in an interview in April 2009 that NSA had intercepted private email messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by U.S. Congress the year before. In addition, the NSA was also eavesdropping on phones of foreign political figures, officials of international organizations and renowned journalists (The New York Times, April, 15, 2009). The U.S. military also participated in the eavesdropping programs. According to CNN reports, a Virginia-based U.S. military Internet risk evaluation organization was in charge of monitoring official and unofficial private blogs, official documents, personal contact information, photos of weapons, entrances of military camps, as well as other websites that "might threaten its national security."

The so-called "freedom of the press" of the United States was in fact completely subordinate to its national interests, and was manipulated by the U.S. government. According to media reports, the U.S. government and the Pentagon had recruited a number of former military officers to become TV and radio news commentators to give "positive comments" and analysis as "military experts" for the U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to guide public opinions, glorify the wars, and gain public support of its anti-terrorism ideology (The New York Times, April 20, 2009). At yearend 2009, the U.S. Congress passed a bill which imposed sanctions on several Arab satellite channels for broadcasting contents hostile to the U.S. and instigating violence (http://blogs.rnw.nl). In September 2009, protesters using the social-networking site Twitter and text messages to coordinate demonstrations clashed with the police several times in Pittsburgh, where the Group of 20 summit was held. Elliot Madison, 41, was later charged with hindering apprehension of the protesters through the Internet. The police also searched his home (http://www.nytimes.com, October 5, 2009). Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.

The Full Report Is Here

How The US Intends To Stop The Next Financial Crisis : 'We Will Ask People To Stop Cheating'

And so it is up left up to the 'funny coz it's true' alternative news like The Daily Show to expose just how vulnerable the US economy and financial institutions was to theft, fraud and apocalyptic greed, and how vulnerable they remain still :

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
In Dodd We Trust
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

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Sarah Palin Won't Settle For Just Any Old Private Jet

Really, Sarah Palin is just like you, and me.....If you and me were 1990s high-flying rock stars, on a massive ego trip, looking to cash in at every opportunity :

Palin’s contract, according to Shreeve, who had a look at it, called for her to be paid $100,000 for the event. It also included $18,000 for private jet travel for her and her entourage. Shreeve told me Palin's contract — standard among political stars who make the speaking-circuit rounds — specified what type of private jet she requested for the trip to Nashville. “It was like, she had to have this or that size plane,” Shreeve recalls. “It was like when a rock star comes to town, the contract was that detailed.”

Whatever the Tea Party is now, it was not meant to be anything to do with all that.

Dave Devries sensational and occasionally downright disturbing artistic reworkings of children's drawings make you wonder whether four year old kids really see the monsters in their imaginations, that they try to get down on paper, as vividly horrific as these :




They really are the creatures of nightmares.

More Of Dave Devries Work Here

The Next Generation Of Astronauts Will Be Inspired By Homer Simpson, Not Neil Armstrong

Every now and then it's good to pause and really take in the mind-blowing Future Now! wonder of what the internet brings to us. The part of me that is still a wide-eyed 8 year old all-things-space-&-NASA-total- junkie was absolutely thrilled to discover that real live astronauts are on Twitter and posting photos they took on a space station orbiting this planet.

We take the space missions for granted now, but it is absolutely unbelievably fucking cool that we have an actual space station orbiting above us, visited by a (soon to be phased out) reusable space plane. Space tourism and permanent settlements on The Moon, and Mars, are not an if, but a When. And that When is within only another couple of decades.

There are 8 year old kids around today who, if they don't become astronauts themselves, will be able to take a Trip Of A Lifetime to The Moon, before they hit their 70s, and they won't have to be multi-millionaires in order to afford it.

If you'd told me at 8 years old that the above was a coming soon new reality, and that in a few decades I also wouldn't have to constantly, diligently, scan newspapers and magazines one or two grainy new photos every few months taken in space, via human or robot, because they would be freely available, by the tens of thousands, whenever I wanted to go and look at them online, I probably would have pissed my pants with delight.

But that is this reality now.

That was probably a way too long intro for this photo, but fuckit, I haven't ranted anywhere near enough on here lately.

Clayton C. Anderson was an astronaut on Expedition 15 to the International Space Station. Here's a beautiful photo he took over the 'World Resort', United Arab Emirates :





More Of Clayton C. Anderson's Photos Here

It's also very cool to learn that the Homer Simpson in space episode, Deep Space Homer, is in the DVD library on the international space shuttle.

George Lucas has been a good sport in not demanding YouTube take down the massive number of Star Wars re-edit clips. Some are instant classics :







(via Reddit)

Drugs : "A Brief Holiday From Society's Unrelenting Bullshit"

Charlton Brooker warns of a dangerous, powerful, legal drug :

It's perhaps the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeing, yet it's freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this "awareness" is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they've even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it's called "a newspaper"...

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.

(headline quote is taken from Charlton Brooker's story)

Christopher Nolan's brilliant reality-redefining movie Memento, in six minutes :

A wondrous, beautiful ride on a Market Street, San Francisco, tram in the early 1900s. Utterly hypnotic :



It's widely claimed the film was made shortly, a matter of days, before a massive earthquake struck San Francisco in 1906, killing some 3000 people. It's easy to assume that some of those who died are also the same people you see walking, dodging cars and trams and waving to the camera.

The same film again, but if you go to about 4:10, you will see the unknown cameraman returned Market Street after the quake and the firestorm that followed, and filmed from the tram the same view towards the clock tower :



Much of the city was all but leveled by the earthquakes and fires.

More views of Market Street, in the aftermath :







Soldiers patrolling in the devastation :



And soldiers looting :



And Market Street from a tram, again, but this time in 1941 :



It's as close to time-travel as we're going to get, at least this century.

Stories I've Reading Reading Instead Of Posting Stories Here :

Murdoch Journalists Hacked "The Police, The Military, The Royals, Government Ministers...On A Near Industrial Scale"

Australian Official : "Israel Has Got Us By The Balls"

The 'Mirror Man' - One Of The Strangest Mental Disorders Ever Recorded

Washington Times : A Lingering Technical Question About The September 11, 2001 Attacks....How Did 200,000 Tons Of Steel Disintegrate And Drop In 11 Seconds?

Australian Federal Police Join Multinational Unit To Hunt Down Israeli Hit Squad Who Frauded Passports The New York Times Pegs A Nose-Ringed Actress As Founder Of Tea Party Movement

Incredible, Absolutely Riveting Story Of Cop Who Shot A Crazed Face-Shredding Chimp He'd Known For 15 Years, It Used To Wave At Him

Adam Curtis, The Writer/Director Of 'The Power Of Nightmares', Has The Best History/Reality Check Blog In The World

Mammals That Live In The Trees Live Twice As Long As Ground-Dwellers

Hurricane Katrina : Police Shot Ten 10 In Aftermath, Attempted To Cover Up Killings, Former Detective Pleads Guilty

Organ Donors Can Pass On Memories, Likes And Dislikes To Those Whose Lives They Saved...Or Is It Just The Drugs?

The Amazing Multi-Billion Dollar Boneyard Of America's 20th Century War Machine

The Oath Keepers Recruit Patriot American Soldiers And Get The Mother Jones Treatment

A Pre-Iraq War Story On Tribalism That Warned Of Bloody Insurgency And Civil War Tensions Rise Between Australia & Israel Over Passport Fakery, Foreign Minister Says This Is Not "What Friends Do"

From "Bloody Civil Wars To Rag Tag Insurgencies" - Photo Essay On 33 Conflicts From Across The World

Detail of an avalanche on Mars :



The Full Image Is Here

They Call It Dominating "The High Frontier"

NASA/US Air Force's Global Hawk, with a wingspan greater than a 737 -800, is now surveilling the planet from an official height of 19 kilometres :



Imagine if, or when, the "robotic plane" is armed? Would NASA oppose it being loaded with heavy weaponry for a special mission or two? Eventually it will have a near endless fuel source, batteries and solar presumably, and will be able to stay in the air for weeks or months at a time.

When that becomes reality, then Space War has begun. (Or at least the Upper Atmosphere War, but that sounds stupid, and the media will adopt 'Space War', if only because it's so much catchier).

More on the Global Hawk :

The Global Hawk is a unique robotic plane that can fly for more than 30 hours at a time, soaring as high as 65,000 feet and as far as 11,000 nautical miles (12,659 miles). It can carry up to 1,500 lbs. of instruments.

Or a half dozen Hellfire missiles.

The logo for the coming series of five missions for the Global Hawk over the Pacific and Arctic.



How many UFO sightings were a decade of test flights of the Global Hawk responsible for? A few hundred? A few thousand?

As I looked through these Rare Star Wars photos, I found myself thinking, 'Wow, these are of great historical importance. This is history.' But they're only behind the scenes pics from the 1976 set of Star Wars. I had to remind myself, this was not a real historical event, it did not happen a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It was, after all, only a movie. And Chewbacca was only a costumed giant. Sadly.



The Full Set Is Here, Starting With Darth Kenny



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Without The Mo, He Kind Of Looks British

Would you do business with this man?



Some of America's biggest corporations of the 1930s and 1940s did.

Redditers find other examples of Hitler after a makeover, including Emo Hitler.

UPDATE : Now he's ready to run for the Republicans. Or the Democrats.

The CIA Really Did Poison People With LSD In Search Of Mind Control Weapons

This story once fell into the point-and-laugh realm of ridiculous "conspiracies theories". Not anymore :

In 1951 a quiet village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were committed to asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now an even more extraordinary explanation has emerged, with evidence suggesting the CIA peppered food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind-control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (''The Cursed Bread'') still haunts Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, south-east France. On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants suddenly suffered frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted, ''I am a plane'', before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 45 metres. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the asylum in straitjackets.

Time magazine wrote at the time: ''Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.''

However, H.P. Albarelli jnr, an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US army's top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The scientists who produced both the theories of accidental poisoning, he writes, worked for the Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying the US army and CIA with LSD.

....Albarelli spoke to former colleagues of Olson, two of whom told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind-control experiment run by the CIA and US army.

Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated ''local food products''.

In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Albarelli says, the army also drugged more than 5700 unwitting US servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

The Full Story Is Here

So how many other people were sprayed by the CIA with doses of milder LSD, a variant not so likely to cause mass, violent hallucinations, in the years after Pont-Saint-Esprit? Did they ever go forward with plans to dose the water supplies of their enemies with hallucinogens?

What bizarre extremes has hallucinogenic drug experimentation on unknowing victims by military contractors, pharmaceutical corporations and intelligence agencies reached in the decades since?

UPDATE : The story, seen on alternative news sites weeks ago, is popping up on the UK Telegraph, The Sun, across Murdoch's Australian media. How extensive will the American corporate news media reporting of this story be? It's a slow news day. They can't avoid reporting this mind-boggling (literally) horror story about the CIA. Can they?

Obviously it is proving extremely popular on blogs. Particularly so-called "conspiracy sites". Of course it is. It confirms other nightmarish tales about the CIA.

The story ran on the news.com.au front page in Australia, and drew about 60 comments as of this posting. Quite a few commenters celebrate the idea of getting free LSD in their food, or in the water supply, but there are next to no debunkers.

This comment, however, is a standard attack on the messenger, and a half-hearted denial of what millions are reading and hearing and seeing as fact in the mainstream media :

Conspiracy Pays of adelaide Posted at 10:00 AM Today

The author Mr Albarelli Jr is a sensationalist author who lives in Tampa Florida whose writngs and films are almost all based on information more than 50 years old. A graduate of the Antioch Law School Mr Albarelli found sensationalist novels were more palatable to the public than his questionable legal skills. Although he jumped on the bandwagon following the 911 Tradgedy ,he keeps to the past where all the people in his books are dead and gone.Hunter White{ an intelligence officer] was in fact a fictional account]once again in the 1950 s .His '' 80 greatest conspiracies of all time''was the same old pulp fiction. He sensationalised the Death of Dr Frank Olson an army Biochemist who accidentaly died in service. The trouble is many people like to read his sensationalist fiction that he often sells as fact. The most recent ramblings appeal to that same customer. It is however interesting to note that LSD was discovered after a Dr Hoffman found a growth ergot of rye ,while researching chemicals in plants; once again back in the 30 s,it is not beyond reasonable doubt that a village baker could have spores of this type in a small bakery and find their way into bread

Having read about the 'ergot mass poisoning' of the French town as a kid, and being horrified as any kid would be (the whole village goes nuts for no apparent reason?) and then having read in the 1980s stories theorising the CIA's involvement, along with plenty of denials, it is remarkable indeed now, all these years later, to see this story hitting news media the world over as fact, no longer fiction.

Wonder how the French are going to take it?

Eiffel Tower Not So Impressive Anymore

Ants don't need architects :

"The structure covers 50 square metres, and goes 8 metres into the earth.

"In it's construction, the colony moved 40 tonnes of soil. Billions of ant loads of soil were brought to the surface, each load weighed four times as much as the worker. And in human terms, was carried a kilometre to the surface.

"It is truly a wonder of the world."

It most definitely is.



An interesting couple of comments from YouTube :

"Pretty dick move by us humans."

"Why couldn't we have just sent tiny robotic sensors that traveled all around it and just map it out. Why the hell did they have to destroy probably the equivalent of NYC just to figure out how much there was to it. That's like exterminating everyone in a city just to look at the buildings."

Fascinating how many people now look at the actions of humans filling a massive ant colony with concrete for reasons of science (and a cool documentary) as being a somewhat fucked thing to do.

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A stunning, brutal collection of anti-American propaganda posters from North Korea.

Some examples :






The Full Collection Of North Korean Propaganda Art Is Here

Imagine what North Korean artists could do with these appalling details of waterboarding torture conducted by Americans, exposed by Salon.

"Different Scares Go In And Out Of Fashion"

The glossy corporate news media creates a shiny product, loaded with shock tactics, emotional manipulation and fearmongering. Nothing new there. But every new generation has to learn what they are seeing, and being told to believe, really is.

Charlie Brooker shows how to filter the bullshit :




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Another Lost Boy :

ABC News Disappointed To Find No Ranting Violent Wackos At 9/11 Truth Convention

By Darryl Mason

The ABC News story turns out be more balanced than many were expecting, though it seems primarily focused on trying to find Truthers who spout violent, ant-government rhetoric, so as to forge a neat link with the Pentagon shooter.

If that was ABC News' mission, they failed.

The message that Truthers are not violent, and represent a wide cross-section of the American public (some of whom are also running growingly popular mini-industries) is instead clearly presented and stated by many interviewed, and in the end Truthers are dismissed as Mostly Harmless, like JFK assassination obsessives.



But ABC News will be doing stories on 9/11 Truth again.

They will see a noticeable increase in traffic to their website and a surge of comments from running the above story. ABC News will learn, if they don't already know, that 9/11 Truth stories are pure clickbait. 100,000 extra visitors, half a million, linked up on hundreds of blogs and independent news sites.

No mainstream media can afford to dismiss pure clickbait as a story not worth focusing on.

And perhaps ABC News knows that if a new investigation into the 9/11 attacks does go ahead - a public investigation with weeks of testimony from Bush administration officials and firefighters and family members and architects and engineers and terrorism experts - then this event will produce hours of popular news content. That is, inexpensive TV, with a pre-attached audience in the millions, plus hundreds of easy stories to fill their website for months to come.

There's some kind of bizarre idea that Americans don't want to hear about 9/11 anymore, or that it is still too soon to revisit those events and criticise those who failed to protect the United States from terror attacks.

This is simply not true. The reason why cottage industries are flourishing around the 9/11 Truth movement is because Americans have not heard enough about 9/11, and have an appetite to learn more, to find out if there really are great secrets still hidden from them on what happened that day.

The mainstream media, by sheer audience demand alone, will come round to the idea that a series of televised public hearings into the 9/11 attacks, how the WTC towers collapsed and the failure of Bush administration officials and intelligence agencies to prevent the attacks, is a very good idea indeed.

It will certainly bring a few million Americans back to their TVs.


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9/11 Truthers Are Dangerous

Former members of the US Air Force, the Marines, senior officials of the CIA, the FBI, firefighters, police officers, pilots, engineers, architects, Republican and Democrat congressmen and former members of the 9/11 Commission have all expressed doubts about the Bush administration's explanation for the events of September 11, 2001, amongst rising calls across the United States for a new, criminal investigation.

Fox News is right. These are dangerous people.

Go Here For The Full List

Do Schools Kill Creativity?



Ken Robinson :

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. They're not frightened of being wrong.

I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.

....if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.

They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way. We stigmatise mistakes. And we're now running education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make.

The result is we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso once said, "All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up."

I believe this passionately, we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it.

Or rather we get educated out of it.

(Via @MoreOJ)


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2012 London Olympics Will See Deployment Of 'Copyright Cops'

By Darryl Mason

The police paid for by the people of London will be deployed during the 2012 Olympics to stop punters carrying "non-sponsor items" into venues.

Moves to safeguard company trademarks and stamp out ambush marketing, to preserve the monopoly of official advertisers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) logo, are raising concerns among civil liberty groups.

Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events.

The people of London should tell The Advertising Olympics to go fuck themselves, and immediately start making 'illegal' poster art featuring the 2012 London Olympics logo, violating as many copyrights as they please, and hand them out for free on the streets. Or just hang them in their front windows.

It's not copyright violation if it's free original art.

Right?

Here's the official logo to get you started :



(via Reddit)


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Stunning video from a freak weather event in Melbourne a few hours ago :



Chinaapek details on the above incredible vid of flash flooding in Melbourne :

I was there having coffee, the sky turned grey within seconds. Withinsecond, hail storm. Within 3 minutes, the street has gone chaos. It was a wave pool and flying branches and bins.

More Here

Philip K Dick : How To Survive A Totalitarian Society

Philip K Dick, a 1973 speech excerpt :

If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improvised electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.

And this, also from the early 1970s :

World war three hasn’t started yet. Just feints emanating out of Hamilton air force base. Mind-disorienting drugs, systemic toxins, psychological warfare techniques, plus combat operations: seize and search. Hit, destroy, and carry off. Special operators in the field, whose real purpose, as the magazine Earth says about the CIA, is to ‘peddle dope and off people’.

So nothing's changed much then, except for the fact the CIA now uses Flying Killer Robots to perform civilian-slaying 'targeted' assassinations. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

The deployment of Flying Killer Robots to the skies above the United States seems, now, inevitable.



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"Copying The Past....How's That Rock N' Roll?"

Yes, John Lennon is being used to sell cars, but what a fantastic message to get out to a new generation who don't really know what he was about :



Hopefully when teenagers see the ad and curiously google John Lennon, they'll come across this song :

Lord Of The Lies

Tony Blair has a memoir on the way, and you can smell the wretched stink of its bullshit even before the plastic wrap is peeled off the first copies.

Look at this what this enormous lying cock has to say about the book he was paid, incredibly, as much as £5 million to write :

"I have tried to write a book which describes the human as much as the political dimensions of life as prime minister.

"Though necessarily retrospective, it is an attempt to inform and shape current and future thinking as much as an historical account of the past. Most of all I want readers to have as much pleasure reading it as I had writing it."

Unlikely. He was paid to write it, while readers will pay to read it.

Here's the cover of the book :



When you see it on your local bookshop shelf, don't forget to take out a fat black pen and write "Fucking Liar Scum!" and "Lord Of The Lies!" on as many pages as you can before you are ejected, or arrested.

Somebody has to do it.


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A New Jersey family created something beautiful from the snow :



And a policeman came and told them (reluctantly) that they had to cover it up, after someone complained.

About the nudity.

The Full Story Is Here

When She Stops Writing On Her Hand, You'll Know They've Wheeled Out The Robot Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin tells the people what they want to hear and gets the expected reaction. She all but admits she made sure the notes she wrote on her hand would become a media freakout, and important talking point for interviews.

But in the video below she also discusses the Tea Party, without any of the mockery the movement as a subject usually draws on late night talk shows. Palin admits the Tea Party is a threat to the Republicans. No doubt the Republicans are hearing her message loud and clear.



The Tea Party, as it popularly known now, only started a year ago, and if not already, then soon enough millions of Americans will proudly claim to be Tea Partiers.

A third major political party in the United States, as the country heads into the chaos of years of mass unemployment and the loss of the 'easy credit' tens of millions of Americans had been using for years to pay for groceries, fuel, heat, could become a reality.

If so, presumably the Democrats and Republicans will quietly team up to smash the Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party's best bet would be to mostly agree on a set of principles and policies, debated publicly, and run as independents everywhere. It will be harder for Republicans and Democrats to absorb or destroy them that way, they will need to picked off one by one, instead of a full frontal assault.

Elections later this year are going to be very interesting.

By the time 2012 rolls around.....

Like Scenes From The Game 'Earthquake Wars', If It Existed

A massive earthquake strikes Chile, leaving monumental scenes of death and destruction. The Boston Globe's always excellent The Big Picture rounds up images from three days later. Broken brick stone masonry everywhere, fishing boats dumped in a city street, a statue of Chile's national hero smashed to pieces, a church missing a chunk of roof and wall like a giant hand snatched it away, huge cargo containers tossed around and piled up like scattered matchboxes, the side of a massive mausoleum stripped away revealing shelves of caskets, so much grief.

Two massive earthquakes in two months. Will it be three in three months?

Go Here For The Big Picture

When We Say "Independent" We Mean Independent Of Morals And Ethics

By Darryl Mason

They don't care anymore. They used to do everything they could to avoid word getting out in the media about what they're doing.

But sometimes people find out, the news of what they're up to hits the paper, or a paper, there's a bit of outrage, a few letters, some gnashy tweets and blog comments, but nothing really happens, nothing really changes. They don't have to hide anymore. They can do whatever they like, as they've always done of course, but they don't care that you know. Yes, they might not always get away with it, but they're always trying. The odds are in their favour.

You see, when you learn to live without shame, without remorse, then the world is yours for the taking. You simply have to no longer give a fuck what anybody, even your own mother, thinks of you and how you make your millions.

From USA Today :

More than half of the panel members appointed to review the Pentagon's latest four-year strategy blueprint have financial ties to defense contractors with a stake in the planning process, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Congress created the 20-member panel in 2006 to analyze the Defense Department's four-year plan, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. Lawmakers called for the committee to provide an independent "alternate view" of the Pentagon's plan, which shapes future military policy and spending on weapons and other needs.

Eleven work for defense contractors as employees, consultants or board directors, records show.

This extraordinary US Today story reveals that former National Security advisor Stephen Hadley sits on the board of Raytheon, a defence contractor "which won more than $15.8 billion" in business with the US government in 2009.

But forget about all that. Look over there! A celebrity fucked someone! Wow!


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Is it true that a few years into the 'War on Terror', President George W. Bush turned to his senior staff and declared : "Get me Lt Frank Drebin!"

For the 3rd time since 2004, live fish fell from the sky over a town in the Northern Territory of Australia. The town sits hundreds of kilometres from lakes, and the coast. No tornadoes or any other weather incidents of note that might have been responsible were on weather charts.

A local was quoted as saying : "Thank God it didn't rain crocodiles."

More Here