Nice to hear Weezer rocking out, on an 90s classic :

Words More People Should Say

However much it may disgust the mainstream media, 9/11 Trutherism is alive and thriving amongst America's youth, as is a deeply cynical scepticism of the authenticity and purpose of the decade long War On Terror. Musicians are no longer afraid to voice such doubts in their songs, as Lupe Fiasco showed in his recent single Words I Never Said :

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it take to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
So many other cover ups

Words I Never Said was a lead-in single for Fiasco's third album, Lasers, released in early March.

So did rapping about 9/11 Truth on an album released by a music industry giant like Atlantic destroy Lupe Fiasco's chance at chart success?

Lasers debuted at number one in the Billboard Top 100, and in the top five in Australia and Canada, selling more than 250,000 albums in its first weeek of release, along with a few million 'illegal' downloads via torrents.

So the answer is no, not at all.

Expect to see more of this, as some of the children raised in a cloud of doubt about the official story of the 9/11 events and the reasons for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan become teenagers and begin writing novels, making movies and creating music.

Nine galaxies captured by the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. The oldest stars are the most blue :

The Apocalypse Industry

Laugh all you like at the American preacher warning of the Rapture, but helping to prepare the wealthy to survive an alleged incoming 'Apocalypse' is now big business :

Russian Army Colonel Cuts Loose On Weather Wars, Tsunami Weapons

Russian politician, and Russian Army colonel, Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky recently said Russia had "lots of money, resources and new weapons that no-one knows about..."

What kinds of weapons?

“With them we will destroy any part of the planet within 15 minutes.”

But how?

“Not an explosion, not a ray burst, not some kind of laser, not lightning, but a quiet and peaceful weapon....whole continents will be put to sleep forever.”

How very Doctor Strangelove of him :



Weather wars, eh? Really? Weapons that can create tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis?

If the Russians really do have such technology, what then does the United States have? Have there been many successful field tests of these weapons, if they do in fact exist?

On the creation of minor weather fronts, at least, NASA has been able to make its own huge rainclouds for years :

Edison Predicted IKEA, And The Kindle

100 years ago inventor Thomas Edison made the following predictions about the future world of 2011 :

...Mr. Edison tells us, the steam engine is emitting its last gasps. A century hence it will be as remote as antiquity as the lumbering coach of Tudor days... In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world's machinery)...

The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost -- of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair.

Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound.

Not bad. IKEA has popularised the use of steel in furniture for the mass market, electric trains rule the railways of the world and the "nickel book" that contains an entire encyclopedia sounds very much like a Kindle, or an iPad.

Edison also made some weird predictions about making cars and oceans liners out of gold, when the precious metal becomes all but worthless.

Read It All Here

A beautiful collection of images of eccentric, characteristic but now disappearing shopfronts of New York :



The Full Collection Is Here

"But It Was All An Illusion"

In his new BBC documentary series, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis uses what is easily the most dramatic, and revealing, piece of 9/11 footage, showing the collapse of the World Trade Centre's south tower, the explosive pounding as it comes down, the debris jetting out many floors below the tumbling, billowing destruction. How often have you seen this shocking footage in any mainstream documentary?



The above clip also provides a simple explanation, from Adam Curtis, for how the United States managed to get itself into such extraordinary debt, and inflate such apocalyptic bubbles, during the Bush II regime :

"The Asian countries, led by China, had decided never again would they put themselves at the mercy of America and its financial elites.

"So the Chinese Politburo created a system to manage America. They deliberately held their currency's exchange rate at a low level. This meant their exports were cheap, and Chinese goods flooded into America. And to pay for them, American dollars flooded into China.

"But instead of spending the money on the population, the Chinese leaders immediately lent the money back to America by buying government bonds. It was a perfect system of cheap goods and cheap money flowing into America. All controlled by the Chinese Politburo.

"And it was this that created the stability. The Chinese money had led America into a dream world. The reason why so few bankers and politicians questioned it was because of computers."

Curtis' new 3 part series explores, in part, how humanity has enslaved itself to computers, in our search for order and freedom, and the building and maintenance of computer systems.

I regard all Adam Curtis documentaries as essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the western world of the 20th century. But this series looks like it's going to be something very special indeed.

Part 1 of the first episode follows :



More thoughts from Curtis on the themes of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace here :

‘We live in a dynamic and unpredictable world and we need to embrace the chaos,’ he says. ‘But with machines trying to keep everything stable, the world becomes static.’

And here :

"In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. But the idea took root and spread wider – people started to believe there is an underlying order to the entire world, to how society is structured. Everything became part of a system, like a computer; no more hierarchies, freedom for all, no class, no nation states."

"The internet played a key role in guiding revolutions that had no guiding ideology, except a desire for self-determination and freedom. In all those revolutions, that sense of freedom lasted only for a moment. The people were brilliant at overturning the power – but then what? Democracy needs proper politics, but people have given up on saying that they're going to change the world. It's as if these people assembled spontaneously on Twitter and they just want freedom. But what kind of society do they want?"

Read The Full Story Here

CIA Once Blamed For Failing To Stop 9/11, Praised By Obama For Hunting Down Bin Laden


President Obama's signature on a pamphlet at a meeting with 9/11 families on May 5


In 2002, the FBI and CIA went to war in the media, in an extraordinary slanging match, over which agency was more at fault for the plot of 9/11 not being detected in time :

...unnamed officials blamed the CIA for failing to pass on critical information about two al-Qaida suspects the agency tracked from January 2000, who were later among the hijackers behind the September 11 attacks.

CIA officials, also unidentified, retorted in yesterday's newspapers claiming they had passed along the name and passport number of at least one of the suspects, Khalid al-Midhar, to the FBI in an email message on January 6 2000.

One agency official told the New York Times that the email correspondence proved that "to say we held out information on him is wrong".

However, other administration officials struck back, defending the FBI and claiming the CIA had failed to pass on crucial details, including the fact that al-Midhar and the other suspect under CIA surveillance, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown to the US, and that they were linked to suspects in a previous terrorist attack. Both men helped seize American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon.

President George Bush yesterday dismissed the cycle of recriminations as "typical Washington DC" infighting, and claimed that both the CIA and FBI had acted to correct their failings.

Mr Bush repeated his insistence that he had "seen no evidence" to suggest the attacks could have been prevented. That claim contradicted the admission last week by the FBI director, Robert Mueller, that the plot might have been pre-empted if important clues had not been missed.

The CIA-FBI row broke out just as a congressional intelligence committee began hearings behind closed doors in a soundproof chamber in the roof of the Capitol building, specially insulated against electronic eavesdropping.

And this all but forgotten 9/11 fact :

The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak added to the discomfort of the US intelligence agencies by claiming his government had warned Washington of an imminent attack the week before September 11.

Last week, US President Barack Obama praised the CIA for the death of Osama Bin Laden :

Mr. Obama addressed an audience of nearly 1,000 clandestine operatives, intelligence analysts and senior administration officials packed into the marble lobby at C.I.A. headquarters, thanking them for persevering during the frustrating, years-long hunt for Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.

“I have never been more proud or more confident in you than I am today,” Mr. Obama said.

It was last August when the C.I.A. first located the house where Bin Laden had been hiding for years. C.I.A. agents had tracked his trusted courier to Abbottabad, a middle class hamlet in Pakistan, and during the ensuing months American intelligence agencies watched the compound with high-tech satellites, drone aircraft and human spotters hiding near the sprawling compound.

Even after months of surveillance, American intelligence officials were still not certain that Bin Laden was hiding there when Mr. Obama ordered a group a Navy Seals to cross into Pakistan from a base in Afghanistan and storm the compound on May 2.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Obama travelled to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky and met with a group of the Seals who carried out the raid.

But on Friday, he paid special attention to the “heavy burden” of secret intelligence work, and the spies who he said are the first to be blamed for failure and the “last to get credit” for success.

And Mr. Obama said that the operation to track and kill Bin Laden over the past year was successful for something else, something rare in Washington.

“We kept it a secret,” he said.

So President Obama has the CIA on his side.

Whitby, England, December 2001, the seaside village where Bram Stoker began writing his classic novel, Dracula :











Photographs By Darryl Mason, scanned from negatives

The Most Secure Car In The World Grinds To A Halt

US President Obama's $300,000 limousine, nicknamed 'The Beast' is armour plated and designed to protect the president during bullet, rocket, suicide bomber, missile and biological attack.

But the vehicle's greatest vulnerability has been spectacularly revealed. Kerbs can kick its butt. Yes, kerbs :



The longer view, below, picks up a noise not heard in the first clip.. When 'The Beast' gets stuck, at 0:15, a loud, explosive noise is heard, like some security system of airbags was activated inside the vehicle :



Some more detail of just how secure 'The Beast' is claimed to be :

..it is fitted with military grade armor at least five inches thick, and the wheels are fitted with run flat tires that makes the vehicle drivable for a certain period of time.

The vehicle's fuel tank is leak-proof and is invulnerable to explosions

The car is perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks and has its own oxygen supply and firefighting system built into the trunk

...two holes hidden inside the lower part of the vehicle's front bumper, which are able to emit tear gas.[

The vehicle can also fire a salvo of multi-spectrum infrared smoke grenades as a countermeasure to an Rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) or Anti-tank missile (ATGM) attack and to act as a visual obscurant to operator guided missiles

The limo is equipped with a driver's enhanced video system which allows the driver to operate in an infrared smoke environment. This driver's enhanced video system also contains bumper mounted night vision cameras for operation in pitch black conditions

.

An interesting choice of Photo Of The Day from the official White House website :


I'm guessing the impression the White House wants to give is that President Obama is now playin hardball with Israel's PM Netanyahu.



I'll guess we'll know soon enough whether or not that's true...

About 4 solid minutes pass with no movement from Obama at all, except for eye blinks, as he listens to Netanyahu shit all over his Middle East plans :

Director Lars Von Trier blames the below bizarre rant at Cannes 2011 on not drinking :

\

Astronaut UFO Photos Posted On NASA Website


A grab from a 1998 photo by a space shuttle astronaut, from a NASA website

By Darryl Mason

A set of images quickly becoming known as 'Actual UFO Photos Taken By An Astronaut' are circulating online today, and dropping jaws across the online UFO community.

We may not have got The Rapture today, but we did get NASA UFO photos.



A photo stream hosted on an official NASA site highlights exceptional photography by astronauts. Many beautiful photos of our planet from space, like this :



But a photo set from the 1998 Space Shuttle Endeavour mission to the International Space Station has revealed there's something more going on up there than a lot of sunlight making clouds look real pretty.

Now, if I convince you that the images here are actually just photos of routine space trash, that is, abandoned broken satellites, chunks of old solar panel arrays, shattered rocket casings, the detritus of seven decades of humans in space, the high orbit equivalent of taking your rubbish for a drive and dumping it out the window at high speed...if I tell you all that then these pics are going to look like exactly what I said. And that's no fun. At all.

So forget all that.



These are clearly alien fucking spacecraft, and a whole lot of different ones, too, all captured in one photo sequence. Are you getting this? An astronaut shot these photos, he caught numerous non-terrestrial spacecraft, and the photos are hosted on an official NASA/US government website. This is it. This is The Disclosure.

It's a fucking ET parking lot up there :



Okay, maybe this one actually does look something from Space Shuttle bin night :



Now this one is a bit scary. Prepare :



So there you have it. Official NASA photos of UFOs shot by NASA astronauts on a NASA mission, released onto a public NASA website.

They want you to know the truth. The Truth the US government will not officially disclose.

The War In Space is real. Alien forces are gathering in orbit around Earth.

Now, if you're not prepared to believe all that, then you will have to face the much more depressing reality that humans are now leaving their rubbish and shit somewhere else other than all over just one planet.

One day the field of space trash orbiting Planet Earth will be so thick, so dangerous, mining expeditions and tourist ships to The Moon and Mars will have to blast their way off the planet equipped with laser defences to blow a clear path out, dodging thousands of ship-shreddingly big chunks of spinning out of control crap.

.

Tin Tin : The Real Magic Will Be in The Eyes



By Darryl Mason

At first glance, director Steven Speilberg and producer Peter Jackson seem to have stepped right around the uncanny valley of animation with the visuals created by WETA Digital for the new Tin Tin 3D franchise.

The glimpses of human characters in this first Tin Tin teaser may leave you trying to guess which are real human actors and which are fully animated characters. Or all they animated?

These two dozen seconds of teaser trailer look extraordinary. For old fans of Tin Tin, and special effects geeks, this trailer has been a long time. 3D CGI storytelling is about to get a whole lot more real, or perhaps something beyond :



For the first time in CGI movies, the eyes of human characters are realistic enough to not freak the viewer out, a little or a lot. They seem just right. Or at least, right enough. Getting CGI eyes correct on human characters has been a holy grail for digital animation. CGI movies that don't get that one part right have crashed and burned at cinemas.

A grab of the CGI eyes of a character from The Adventures Of Tin Tin :



A grab of the eyes of Tin Tin himself :



Image above from this Tin Tin story by Garth Franklin at Dark Horizons.

A fascinating story from NPR on why humans react so hard against almost-real CGI animation, creepy animated eyes and too real robots :

There are a number of theories as to why we're afraid when we gaze at nearly real faces. One suggestion is that it's existential because we see the potential for being replaced by nearly-perfect computers. Theologians argue that we're seeing human imitators that lack a soul. But the most convincing explanation for the fear may be evolutionary. We see in uncanny faces something unhealthy or unappealing and our instinct is to recoil. Maybe they're contagious. Maybe they're not suitable mates.

WETA Digital Reverse Engineers The Human Face

US Surveillance Blimp Crashes In Arizona

In the coming years, if the US government uses surveillance blimp technology tested in Iraq & Afghanistan warzones to spy on Americans in towns and cities across the country, in a land with so many guns and people who are fearful of their own government, the scenes below may become a common sight.

Find Nemo. Then Kill Him

Disney Trademarks Assassination Squad




FishbowlNY breaks some mindboggling news :

Disney’s trademark applications for “Seal Team 6″ cover clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and “entertainment and education services,” among other things.

Disney no doubt has big plans for Seal Team 6, the US Navy SEALs who are claimed to have killed Osama Bin Laden, no matter how much Walt Disney rolls around in his ground.

Disney didn't mess around. The trademark claim was registered less than 48 hours after the name of the military unit was made public.





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

.

From a purely research point of view, of course, I was lucky enough to experience real, uncut, untainted Ecstasy in the late 1980s. Still, I think completely natural magic mushrooms do the job better, with less short & long term after effects. But this is still very interesting :

It's The Taliban...On Twitter

The UK Guardian claims this is the official Twitter account of the Afghanistan Taliban :



The first person the Taliban followed on Twitter? A US Air Force logistics officer, working as a combat advisor in Afghanistan, who last tweeted six months on leaving the war zone.



From the UK Guardian :

The Taliban's embrace of social media is just one part of an impressive public relations capability that runs rings around the efforts of Nato to communicate with Afghans. The movement puts out a constant stream of information through text messages and email. Edited video clips of fights against coalition forces, "martyrdom operations" and Taliban songs are circulated through Bluetooth-enabled smartphones.

Important statements by the movement are often translated into several different languages, including flawless English, with two spokesmen usually on hand to give quotes to journalists.

The Taliban are apparently pissed off so few of their text & video releases make it into the Western media. They know why :

"global colonialist junta under the leadership of America … trying its utmost to maintain its monopoly over the media".

The Taliban on Twitter only have a few hundred followers, as of this posting. They're going to have to start tweet-linking to fresh LOLcats or vids of Taliban fighters dancing Thriller if they want to be taken seriously on Twitter.

Credibility Of 'Osama Watches Obama' Vid Blows Apart, BBC Now Adds "Apparently" When Referencing It

Was 'Osama Watches Obama' Shot By A CIA Surveillance Camera?

Bin Laden Family Doesn't Believe CIA Killed Osama In Abbottabad Raid, Without Proof



By Darryl Mason

I thought it would take a few years for the 'Osama Watches Obama' video to be totally discredited, by the mainstream media in particular, but it's taken less than two weeks for the BBC to begin backing away from its earlier no-questions-asked endorsement of the credibility of the clip :

"...an image the White House wants the world to see. Apparently a dishevelled and much diminished Osama Bin Laden watching himself on TV. The footage was edited by the Pentagon and released without sound."

A local claims not only is the video not of Osama Bin Laden, but that he knows the old man. He names him and adds he was the landlord of the Abbottabad house :



When you view the 'Osama Watches Obama' a few times, you begin to notice there's something strange about the camera movements, the slow panning across the room, as though searching for something, the zooming in and out....like it wasn't shot by a human hand.



The Abbottabad house was under surveillance by American intelligence agencies for months (if not years). Is this a video taken from a surveillance device discretely placed inside the house? Or is it a complete digital fabrication?

BTW, if you pause the above video at exactly 2:20, you get a pretty good look at the old man the White House and Pentagon claims is Osama Bin Laden.

If he doesn't know already, you can imagine President Obama is going to be plenty fucking pissed when he learns he has been out there pumping Pentagon and/or CIA fabrications.

At least, you'd hope Obama would be pissed off.

Meanwhile, the Bin Laden family have released an interesting statement :

I Omar Ossama Binladin and my brothers the lawful children and heirs of the Ossama Binladin (OBL) have noted wide coverage of the news of the death of our father, but we are not convinced on the available evidence in the absence of dead body, photographs, and video evidence that our natural father is dead. Therefore, with this press statement, we seek such conclusive evidence to believe the stories published in relation to 2 May 2011 operation Geronimo as declared by the President of United States Barrack Hussein Obama in his speech that he authorized the said operation and killing of OBL and later confirmed his death.

If OBL has been killed in that operation as President of United States has claimed then we are just in questioning as per media reports that why an unarmed man was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world. If he has been summarily executed then, we question the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated but USA has set a very different example whereby right to have a fair trial, and presumption of innocence until proven guilty by a court of law has been sacrificed on which western society is built and is standing when a trial of OBL was possible for any wrongdoing as that of Iraqi President Sadam Hussein and Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic'. We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems and crime's adjudication as Justice must be seen to be done.

It is also unworthy of the special forces to shoot unarmed female family members of Binladen killing a female and that of one of his son.

Most importantly, when it is a common knowledge that OBL's family is residing at one place outside KSA, why they were not contacted to receive his dead body. His sudden and un witnessed burial at sea has deprived the family of performing religious rights of a Muslim man.

Finally, now that the operation is concluded we wish the Government of Pakistan to release and hand over all minors of the family and all the family members are reunited at one place and are repatriated to their country of origin, especially female members of the family to avoid further oppression and we seek international support to that effect.

Without agreeing to the ways of OBL as to how he professed, believed and operated, We Omar Ossama Binladin, and my brothers, the lawful children of the Ossama Binladin (OBL) herewith demand an inquiry under UNO to reach to the accuracy of the facts as stated by United States into the fundamental question as to why our father was not arrested and tried but summarily executed without a court of law. We are putting these questions to the United Nations, OIC, President of United States that a necessary evidence is presented to the family in private and or public to make us believe what they claim, and all the remaining family members are repatriated and united after necessary initial investigation.

In making this statement, we want to remind the world that Omar Ossam Binladin, the fourth-born son of our father, always disagreed with our father regarding any violence and always sent messages to our father, that he must change his ways and that no civilians should be attacked under any circumstances. Despite the difficulty of publicly disagreeing with our father, he never hesitated to condemn any violent attacks made by anyone, and expressed sorrow for the victims of any and all attacks. As he condemned our father, we now condemn the president of the United States for ordering the execution of unarmed men and women.

Failure to answer these questions will force us to go to International forum for justice such as International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice and UN must take notice of the violation of international law and assist us to have answers for which we are lawful in seeking them. A panel of eminent British and international lawyers is being constituted and a necessary action may be taken if no answers are furnished within 30 days of this statement.

So the Osama Bin Laden Is Dead story isn't dead yet.

At least, not as dead as the Pentagon would like it to be.

The most extraordinary insect :



Not quite sure where HungryBeast got the figure of 40,000 years for how long humans have been roaming the planet. Within a decade, discoveries will be made to prove humans have been around for at least 600,000 years.

Look! Up In The Sky! It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A.....KABOOM!

Flying Killer Robots, aka missile-armed drones, are the new 'black helicopters' for the paranoid :

"There are three drones which hover above my village 24 hours a day… it's the Americans, I'm sure of it. They've killed Bin Laden and now they're after my son."

Osama Watches Obama, Can We Get It On A Commemorative Plate?

The Daily Mail takes a US Department of Defense released still from the alleged Osama Home Videos, and via a bit of photoshopping, creates this 'historic image' of a man the Pentagon claims is Osama Bin Laden watching the man who is going to have him assassinated, US President Barack Obama, on TV :



I'd be very surprised if the 'Old Man Osama' video goes down in history as authentic.

The True Origins Of Mother's Day

How many know Mother's Day began as an anti-war protest?

...most Americans do not realize that Mother's Day began as an activist's response to war. Though the holiday has become a warm family tradition it began not as a feel-good national event but as an urgent call for women and mothers worldwide to unite against war.

"Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?" Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war and just a few years after the Civil War ended.

Shortly after, she published her Mother's Day Proclamation, which was a call for peace and disarmament, and staked out a day to organize around. Howe's vision of a peace movement led by mothers gained support and the first Mothers' Peace Day festival was held in Boston on June 2, 1873.

Mother's Day for Peace was celebrated in at least 18 U.S. cities that first year and the tradition continued in Boston for the next 10 years.

Four decades later, the idea of a day for mothers was revived by Anna Jarvis, whose own mother had previously tried to establish Mother's Friendship Days as a way to heal the divisions caused by the Civil War.

...in 1914 Mother's Day was proclaimed a national holiday by President Wilson.

Julia Ward Howe's Mother Day Proclamation in full :

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Philip K Dick : How To Survive A Totalitarian Society

A 1973 speech excerpt from Philip K Dick :

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.

I wonder if the CIA will outsource the Watching Over The Homeland operations?

One of the many official Iraqi police armoured Humvees. Unlike the 'tin-can' Humvees in which hundreds of American soldiers were torn to shreds, year after year, during the IED attacks of the War On Iraq, Iraqi police Humvees actually have substantial armour plating protecting those inside :

Enter Stage Left, 'The New Bin Laden'

Get used to hearing the name 'Anwar al-Awlaki'. He's just made his official New York Times front page debut :



He's already got plenty to be vengeful about. He's American born, but President Obama tried to take him out with Flying Killer Robots in Yemen. The FKRs missed.

Bloody hell, somebody, or some many somebodies, have put a hell of a lot of time and work into Anwar al-Awlaki's Wikipedia entry. It's longer and more detailed than Wikipedia entries for some American presidents.

I'm guessing Fox News will be the first to shorten his name to something catchier, like 'Triple A', but the rest of the news media will soon follow Fox News' lead.

And also get used to hearing this tag line, like something off a movie poster, perfect for 'War on Terror' marketing purposes :

"The Osama Bin Laden Of The Internet."

No scratchy audio tapes for al-Awlaki. He's got clips and sermons all over YouTube and a Facebook page.

No Twitter?

Pffft. How can you take any Muslim fundamentalist who is supposedly waging jihad against The West seriously if he doesn't tweet?

Get with the times, Triple-A.

Damn, I went and did that before Fox News.

UPDATE : Less than 24 hours after the above al-Awlaki New York Times story, guardian.co.uk ran this :



Tipped by whom? Unnamed "officials".

If you're reading this in 2017 and are surprised by the cynicism, we just lived through the Pentagon PR 3-Ring Bullshit Circus that followed the White House claimed official death of Osama Bin Laden. Anyone would be cynical about 'War on Terror' industry attempts to hype a new Bin Laden.

And most are.

Finally.

Gandalf Bin Laden At Home



By Darryl Mason

The Pentagon claims this man is Osama Bin Laden, old, hunched and grey-bearded, watching news reports of himself on Al Jazeera :



Is it authentic?

Are the Osama Home Movies, allegedly seized from the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad following his assassination by US Navy SEALs, real clips of Bin Laden with his beard dyed doing takes for his jihad videos?

Does it matter?

The corporate news media will pump the videos as real, and a clear indication of how vain, weak and pathetic Bin Laden was, into his last days. The alternative media will analyse every frame of Osama's Home Movies to point out how fake and ridiculous they are.

The rumble will continue until the next Pentagon Osama Home Movies release, which will presumably be much clearer footage of Bin Laden as an old, sick man, shuffling around his compound.

And so the Osama Is Dead Show enters its second week.

UPDATE : How weird is this? During the Pentagon briefing to reporters on Osama Home Movies :

...reporters were not allowed to record the briefing. They were permitted to take notes, she said, while an Obama administration official took photographs of the reporters.

Wife Claims Osama Bin Laden Visited Los Angeles For "A Week Of Meetings"

May, 2011 : FBI Website Only Announces Bin Laden Was Wanted For 9/11 Attacks After He Was Assassinated

'Fuck You Osama, We Won't Stop Until We Kill You, Signed The United States'

Osama Bin Laden Jumps The Shark

September 2006 : Pakistan Announces Bin Laden Can Live Free In Pakisan Without Being Prosecuted If He "Lives As A Peaceful Citizen"

FBI Admits It Has "No Hard Evidence" Linking Osama Bin Laden To 9/11 Attacks

December, 2009 : Defense Secretary Gates Prepares Ground For Future Obama Announcement Of Death Of Osama

Bush's War On Terror A Huge Success For Osama Bin Laden And The American War Industry

Osama Bin Laden's Plan To Bankrupt America Becomes Reality

Osama Bin Laden : Now Deader Than Ever

'Fuck You Osama. We Won't Stop Until We Kill You. Signed The United States Of America'

Ground Zero, New York City, December 2001


A shot of the Twin Towers from my April-May 2001 visit to New York City

By Darryl Mason

The official War On Terror death of Osama Bin Laden, and President Obama's visit to New York City today, reminded me of the days I spent in and around Ground Zero in October and December, 2001

It was a surreal place to be, both times, mourners were gathering every night at the fences, to cry, to pray, to talk to others who wanted to listen, there was a lot of listening to be done. In October, the deadly 9/11 dust was still swirling in the streets, the smell of burnt death and toxic smoke was thick, sickening, overwhelming. Incredibly, I could smell smoke from still smouldering fires deep inside the World Trade Center ruins when I returned in December.

I took a lot of photos during my early October visit, the nine rolls of colour and slide film were stolen before I even got a chance to get them developed. On those rolls were photos of firemen and other first responders I talked to, who often gathered in bars around Ground Zero after their shifts ended to try and blast away their agony with alcohol, their clothes still coated with the dust that ended up killing so many of them. Smoke, drink heavily, cough your guts out. That was the routine most nights.

Anyway, it was the messages written by hand on sheets hung on fences around Ground Zero that jumped into my mind when President Obama announced Osama Bin Laden's execution. It's hard to read a lot of them from my photos, digital cameras weren't exactly common back then, but my notebook tells me a few dozen amongst the thousands of handwritten messages were directed specifically to Osama Bin Laden, including the following :

'Fuck You Osama. We Won't Stop Until We Kill You. Signed The United States Of America'

'One Day Soon Bin Ladin We'll Cheer Your Death Like You Cheered The Deaths Of My Friends'

I wonder if those who wrote messages like that are still alive today, and if they did cheer? Or if their time at Ground Zero, mourning their dead, adding messages to the tribute sheets, breathing that fucking terrible insanely toxic, asbestos-ridden dust, killed them like it has killed, and is still killing, so many other tens of thousands of New Yorkers.








(click to enlarge any of the above)

All Photos By Darryl Mason

In case you're wondering, this is Psalm 91 (qouted above) :

Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.”

Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare
and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.
You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.

A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.
You will only observe with your eyes
and see the punishment of the wicked.

If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways;
they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the cobra;
you will trample the great lion and the serpent.

“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him;
I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.
He will call on me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble,
I will deliver him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him
and show him my salvation.”

A wallet-sized copy of Psalm 91 was given to hundreds of thousands of Americans who went to fight the War On Afghanistan and the War On Iraq.

I met three young Americans, aged between 18 and 22, at those tribute sheets in early December, 2001. They left Ground Zero that afternoon and walked all the way up to the US Army recruiting office in Times Square to sign on for The War Against Terror, as it was then known. The line was out the door.

Two of those young men didn't come home, and the one who survived his two tours of Iraq wishes he'd died there, with his war friends, in that IED-shredded Humvee.

He left his laminated copy of Psalm 91 in Iraq, it had his friends' blood on it, he'd tried to read it while he was waiting to be rescued.

WTC Cough - The 9/11 Lie Killing Thousands Of New Yorkers

What Was In The 9/11 Dust? Why Was It So Deadly?

The Numbers & Stats Of 9/11

Nun Dying From 'WTC Cough' Wants An Autopsy To Help Get At The Truth Of What Is Killing Her And Thousands Of Other New Yorkers

FBI Site Only Says Osama Bin Laden Was Responsible For 9/11 Attacks After He Was Announced As Officially Deceased

By Darryl Mason

How the FBI's 'Most Wanted' Page For Osama Bin Laden used to describe him :

Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.

No clear, direct mention of involvement, or even suspicion of involvement, in the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC.

In the FBI 'Most Wanted' Page that has now been updated to include the word 'Deceased', this has been added to explain why Osama Bin Laden was, once, 'Most Wanted' :

Murder of U.S. Nationals Outside the United States; Conspiracy to Murder U.S. Nationals Outside the United States; Attack on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death

The page as it appears online May 4, 2011 :



Why didn't the FBI feel comfortable listing 9/11 as one of the terror attacks they were pursuing Bin Laden for?

On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.

Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.”

While the official FBI 'Most Wanted'/Deceased Listing for Osama Bin Laden still doesn't name him directly for involvement in the 9/11 attacks, even after his death, this story posted on the FBI's news page does :

The mastermind of the attacks on September 11, 2001 that killed thousands of innocent men, women, and children has been killed.

President Barack Obama made the announcement late Sunday evening, May 1, in a televised address to the world. He said he had been briefed by the intelligence community last August that bin Laden was in hiding “within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.” Over the intervening months, intelligence agencies worked to confirm the intelligence. Then last week, President Obama determined there was enough intelligence to take action.

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan,” the President said from the East Room of the White House. “A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Well before the events of 9/11, bin Laden had openly declared war on the U.S. and was committed to killing innocents. His al Qaeda group was responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks killed over 200 people. Bin Laden was indicted for his role in planning the attacks and added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1999.

Intelligence agencies quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by bin Laden’s terrorist organization, and in October 2001, his name was added to the U.S. Department of State’s Most Wanted Terrorists List.

"Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome,” President Obama said. “The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.”

The '9/11 Confession' video, supposedly recorded in October, 2001, has never been authenticated or officially examined by the FBI, and the FBI never regarded it as "hard evidence" of Osama Bin Laden's involvement in the 9/11 attacks :



In an interview with a Pakistan journalist two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden claimed he was not involved :

"I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.

"Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle.

"Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed...

The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive..."

One fact certainly isn't in doubt. Osama Bin Laden and his followers, like the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia, France, Israel, Australia and numerous other countries, used the 9/11 attacks for their own propaganda purposes.


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

.

Top Secret US Stealth Helicopter Left Behind In Ruins Of 'Osama Hideout'

Wreckage in the Osama Bin Laden 'Death Raid' compound reveals a previously unknown American stealth helicopter :




As this Reuters pic shows, the aircraft was too small to take a human pilot.

So the mystery aircraft appears to be a stealth drone helicopter.

UPDATE :

What is being called a 'Stealth Blackhawk' also crashed. A photo of the rotor baffles that locals claimed meant the helicopter could only be heard when it was overhead :



This US ABC News claims one of two Blackhawk helicopters that allegedly delivered US Navy SEALs to Osama Bin Laden's Pakistan hideout "grazed one of the compound's walls and was forced to make a hard landing."

The Navy SEALs blew up the crashed helicopter before they allegedly retreated with Osama Bin Laden's corpse, after a summary execution.

...photos of what survived the explosion -- the tail section of the craft with curious modifications -- has sent military analysts buzzing about a stealth helicopter program that was only rumored to exist. From a modified tail boom to a noise reducing covering on the rear rotors and a special high-tech material similar to that used in stealth fighters, former Department of Defense official and vice president of the Lexington Institute Dan Goure said the bird is like nothing he's ever seen before.

"This is a first," he said. "You wouldn't know that it was coming right at you. And that's what's important, because these are coming in fast and low, and if they aren't sounding like they're coming right at you, you might not even react until it's too late... That was clearly part of the success."

In addition to the noise-reducing modifications, a former special operations aviator told The Army Times the general shape of what was left of the craft -- the harsh angles and flat surfaces more common to stealth jets -- was further evidence it was a modified variant of the Blackhawk.

So the story appears to be that the above two photos are of the same aircraft.

The more likely scenario is they are two seperate stealth aircraft. One a modified Blackhawk helicopter (that carried Navy SEALs) and the second an unmanned stealth drone helicopter (to send back live streaming video to the White House Situation Room).

UPDATE : It looks like there was only helicopter down, a modified Blackhawk. The first photo above appears to show the tail of the crashed Blackhawk hanging over one side of a wall of the alleged Osama Bin Laden compound, while the rest of the mostly destroyed wreckage fell on on the other side of the wall.

Sorry about any confusion.

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


Ground Zero, NYC, December 2001 : 'Fuck You Osama, We Won't Stop Until We Kill You, Signed The United States Of America

Enter Stage Left, 'The New Bin Laden'

Wife Claims Osama Bin Laden Visited Los Angeles For "A Week Of Meetings"

Osama Bin Laden Jumps The Shark

The Benjamin Button Effect & Osama Bin Laden Photos - 2004 Vs 2007

Benazir Bhutto Claimed Osama Bin Laden Dead Eight Weeks Before Her Assassination

July 2006 : CIA Closes Unit Devoted To Capture Of Osama Bin Laden

September 2006 : Pakistan Announces Bin Laden Will Be Set Free If Captured, As Long As "He Lives As A Peaceful Citizen"

September 2006 : French Paper Claims Osama Bin Laden Dead Of Typhoid

FBI Admits It Has "No Hard Evidence" Linking Osama Bin Laden To 9/11 Attacks

December, 2009 : Defense Secretary Gates Prepares Ground For Future Announcement Of Death Of Osama Bin Laden

Bush's War On Terror A Huge Success For Osama Bin Laden And The American War Industry

Osama Bin Laden's Plan To Bankrupt America Becomes Reality

Hope Then Is High, Regardless Of What The Headlines Tell You

By Darryl Mason

An extract from a ramble-babble I wrote in August 2006. Hadn't re-read this in a long time, but it made me smile to remember how bizarre and uminaginable it seemed in 2006 that a worldwide youth movement, driven by internet information sharing, could revolutionise the Middle East and change the face of modern global politics. And it's only begun.

August 23, 2006

Bizarre, broken, swarming with change and chaos, magic and miracles, madness and joy.

This is our world today.

But for all the cries of 'Terror!' and 'Hatred!', the divisions amongst the youth of all nations are few and far between. There has probably never been a time before in the history of our races that so few young people view war as the way to remake the world for the better.

There is another way, a hundred other ways to make it better and a few million info-rich youth-fresh brains are chewing over those ideas into the early hours while you sleep. Before you wake, they will have discussed their ideas online in front of audiences in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The ideas will spread, the good ones will stick, the brilliant ones will change minds and lives and the future, subtle brick by brick, before you even finish breakfast.

Hope then is high, regardless of what the headlines may tell you.

The war pigs of the boomer-plus generations don't seem to understand that the world they knew is drawing to a close. They want bigger armies, they want wider wars, but how do they get such things when the majority of the world's youth simply do not want to fight? When the majority of the world's people are repeatedly asking, "Sorry? You want another hundred billion to buy more weapons? What exactly will that achieve?"

The will to fight isn't gone from the youth. But the drive to fight pointless, blood-soaked wars that solve little, change nothing, destroy everything, that drive is not only gone, but it seems it will now be impossible to motivate it, or reinstate it.

The youth of our world want to fight. They want to fight for their future, but they don't want to fight each other.

At least, they don't want to fight outside of the online world. There are a million battles underway tonight in the gaming worlds of another reality, but the bodies from those wars are not piling up in the streets of our real world, and most of the hatred is short-lived and is disguised admiration for the skill of their online enemies.

This weird and wonderful, strange and beautiful world.

Historic Photos Mark The End Of The War On Terror (Photos Supplied)

By Darryl Mason

White House photographer Pete Souza's candid shots from inside the White House Situation Room are supplying visual detail for news stories in place of actual footage from the alleged death raid on Osama Bin Laden's Pakistan family home. Particulary now the Osama Death Photo has been thoroughly exposed as a fake, after being passed off as real to hundreds of millions of evening news viewers across the world by a news media who didn't care whether it was real or not.

Every photo from inside the Situation Room shown on TV, in newspapers and collected in online news slideshows were supplied to the news media by the White House, though most fail to disclose where they came from.

All the photos released by the White House are supposed to have been snapped during the Osama Death Raid, or in the hours following, when President Obama phoned former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and prepared for his speech.

Let's take a closer look :





This is a grab of what appears to be satelite photos laid out on Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's laptop :







This grab is from a photo claimed by the White House to have been taken during the actual Osama Death Raid, leading journalists and readers to assume it was taken during the moment they watched, via Navy Seals headcams, the killing of Osama Bin Laden.



Will this go down in history as an image of President Obama watching Osama Bin Laden being killed?

Or how about this one for Hilary Clinton?




The Best Of Bin Laden From Your New Reality :

Wife Claims Osama Bin Laden Visited Los Angeles For "A Week Of Meetings"

Osama Bin Laden Jumps The Shark

The Benjamin Button Effect & Osama Bin Laden Photos - 2004 Vs 2007

Benazir Bhutto Claimed Osama Bin Laden Dead Eight Weeks Before Her Assassination

July 2006 : CIA Closes Unit Devoted To Capture Of Osama Bin Laden

September 2006 : Pakistan Announces Bin Laden Will Be Set Free If Captured, As Long As "He Lives As A Peaceful Citizen"

September 2006 : French Paper Claims Osama Bin Laden Dead Of Typhoid

FBI Admits It Has "No Hard Evidence" Linking Osama Bin Laden To 9/11 Attacks

December, 2009 : Defense Secretary Gates Prepares Ground For Future Announcement Of Death Of Osama Bin Laden

Bush's War On Terror A Huge Success For Osama Bin Laden And The American War Industry

Osama Bin Laden's Plan To Bankrupt America Becomes Reality