Hurricane Irene : Apocalypse Fail

From the front page of the New York Times print edition, Sunday, August 28 :



The aftermath, via an AP headline that sounds like the title of an unwritten RadioHead song. Little Damage Seen In Many Places :



From AP :

From North Carolina to Pennsylvania, Hurricane Irene appeared to have fallen short of the doomsday predictions. But with rivers still rising, and roads impassable because of high water and fallen trees, it could be days before the full extent of the damage is known.

People used to be happy when terrifying doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong. Now they feel, somehow, as though they've been robbed.

UPDATE : This video completely sums up the way millions of Americans felt about the cable news, in particular, coverage of Hurricane Irene. The tension of a brave reporter's dramatic hurricane report is destroyed by young people, having fun :



And this video, because the Fox reporter is covered in sea foam, containing raw sewage, but he doesn't know it ."It smells like ocean...it's got a sandy consistency....it doesn't taste great" :



"I will retreat if it gets anymore dangerous."

And yet he remains, to be almost washed away by frothy, foamy waves of gritty human waste. A graphic metaphor for the American cable news media in 2011.

The story must go on, always breaking new news, even if when stripped bare of hype, it's not really much news at all, until reporters are literally sinking in shit.

UPDATE : The Sydney Morning Herald used the beautiful image below of a still, empty Times Square for its coverage :



That Story Is Here

"How beautiful is New York without the traffic?" was a common tweet from New Yorkers during 24 hours of Hurricane Irene scaring away cars, trucks and buses.

The trailers of Hollywood movies have shown us what New York City looks like under attack from Mother Nature. But the reality wasn't rivers of water rushing down Fifth Avenue, it was a near utterly still Times Square, still alive with lights and video screens, but staggeringly, breath-takingly, empty.

Hurricane Irene Might Not Be Fake, But It's Most Popular Photo Is

As Hurricane Irene comes ashore in New Jersey, with New York City in its sights, the most retweeted photo of Irene over North Carolina is a flat-out fake. But an impressive one :



That this photo is a fak is irrevelant to many who tweet, send and circulate it on, they just want to blow their friends' minds. But why are so many American and international news shows and websites promoting it as real? So far, Hurricane Irene has delivered no truly jaw-dropping photos, outside of satellite images of the storm, the news companies need an image like the above, and to many of them, too, the fact it's a fake matters not. It's spectacular, it's popular on Twitter, so it's real.

Or real enough.

But it's actually a shelf cloud. Hurricanes simply don't look like that. They're big windy, rainy storms, that look in photos like big windy, rainy storms.

If you want to photoshop a shelf cloud over your town or coastfront, there are dozens here to choose from.

At least 12 people appear to have been killed as a result of Hurricane Irene sweeping up the east coast of the United States. The first victim was a man who fell off a ladder trying to board up his windows.

Hurricane Irene, from its birth more than a week ago to its first landfall on the US East Coat today :



New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg tells New Yorkers if they are told to evacuate and they don't leave, "they will be on their own."



Sunday afternoon might prove to be one of the more interesting days in the history of New York City.

Hurricane Irene Prepares To Devour US East Coast

How Do You Evacuate Atlantic City? How Do You Evacuate New York City?


NASA satellite image

From the Weather Channel :



This is the most serious hurricane threat to the east coast of the United States in more than five decades :

- Irene is a hurricane that poses an extraordinary threat and is one that no one has yet experienced in North Carolina to the mid-Atlantic to the Northeast and New England.

- We can now narrow the projected path corridor. Confidence is growing that locations from eastern North Carolina and the eastern Mid-Atlantic states to Long Island to southern New England are all in the potential path of Hurricane Irene.

- It is becoming clear that Irene's future track will NOT be a Hurricane Earl (2010) scenario where a hurricane barely brushes the Outer Banks of North Carolina then stays well offshore.

- History tells us that no category 4 hurricane has made landfall north of the South Carolina/North Carolina border. That said, some computer guidance indicates a category 4 landfall over eastern North Carolina and this solution can NOT be ruled out.

- There is historical precedence for a hurricane impacting the major metropolitan areas of the

- ...with a population explosion along coastal areas of the Northeast during the past several decades, there is little to no precedence for a hurricane of this potential magnitude making landfall over highly populated metropolitan areas such as New York City.

- Regardless of track and intensity, confidence is growing that Hurricane Irene will cause extensive tree and power line damage. Electricity infrastructure will be greatly compromised for millions if not tens of millions of Americans.

A warning from 2008 blasts unimaginable, beyond nightmare scenarios of destruction (excerpts) :

...big storms have hit the New York area in living memory and will undoubtedly strike again, experts say, with the potential for immense damage.

The dense development of towns on eastern Long Island in the decades since the 1938 storm could mean tremendous losses in a future storm. “Property values make it very vulnerable” to large-scale losses...more than $1.9 trillion worth of insured coastal property in the path of a storm and the risk to the population.

Loss of life can be minimized in a storm if people evacuate — and know how dangerous it is to try to ride out a storm.

Even if people on Long Island had a storm on the way and got the message, an orderly evacuation might be difficult if not impossible. People may think they will evacuate upon notice of a hurricane, but “that’s not going to work,” Dr. Leatherman said. “You can’t get people out of there on a Sunday night in the summer.”

...hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico tend to travel at 10 to 15 m.p.h., but a storm coming up the Eastern Seaboard might hit 60 m.p.h. because of interactions with fronts that occur in the middle and higher latitudes.

The storms move so quickly that “we’d have maybe eight hours by the time it leaves North Carolina to the time it hits the Long Island shore”...

“Even if you did know it was coming, how the heck are you going to evacuate Atlantic City?” he said. And as a storm neared and its surge rose, the waters would cover some of the low-lying evacuation routes in the hour or so before it hit.

“New York City is often on the list of ‘hot spots’ for hurricane catastrophes because the shorelines of Long Island and New Jersey could funnel a large surge into Manhattan if impacted by a major hurricane.

Even storms that do not strike directly can bring rains that cause extensive interior flooding...

...a storm that travels up through New England may hammer Cape Cod and Rhode Island, but a second wave of damage will come with rainwater swelling the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers, among others.

And then there's the storm surge projections :




MORE TO COME

UPDATE : Actually, no more to come. Hurricane Irene thankfully turned out to be a bit a of non-event, at least in the mega-destruction stakes set by Hurricane Katrina.

A remarkable, hard to find documentary by Orson Welles on the nature of fakery in what we perceive to be reality :

A long lost Leonardo DaVinci portrait of Jesus as a white man.

Perry And Bachmann Show What They're Capable Of Fitting In Their Mouths

According to the corporate American mainstream media, these two, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, are "frontrunners" for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 ;



I'm not quite sure who they're trying to impress by showing what they can stuff in their mouths without gagging.

Never Give An Ape A Gun, Never, Ever

This series of viral vids for the Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes movie are nicely done, straight to the point and very entertaining. I was surprised by just how affecting I found the movie, and those cinema and TV trailers don't do the movie justice. It's far better than what you've been led to believe, and sets up a series of sequels beautifully.









This one is flat-out hilarious :

Agree or disagree with Ron Paul's beliefs and politics, but it is impossible to deny this is one of the best campaign ads ever made :

The Black Night Highway Of Ancient Human History Gets A Little More Light

By Darryl Mason

The oldest tools used by human-like creatures every found are maybe 700,000 years old. The most ancient cave and rock carvings ever found are perhaps 40,000 years old. The oldest, still-existing cave paintings are rarely older than that. No writing or cuneiform older than 10,000 years have ever been found. And carbon dating, at best, can only tell us if some ancient curiosity or remains are up to 50,000 years old, and no older. At least not yet.

Human existence, and that of our clearly intelligent predecessors, is a black hole of ancient history beyond 50,000 years past. We can only make vaguely-educated guesses as to what went on all those years ago. Technologies may have been lost and discovered numerous times over hundreds of thousands of years. Civilisations may have existed that are now buried under ice, or rock or oceans, or have simply been wiped clean from the surface of this world.

The simple fact is we don't know much, really, about anything that happened in ancient human history beyond 50,000 years ago.

But every now and then we find mindblowing clues that ancient humans, and the varieties of human-like creatures that have wandered this planet for at least one or two million years, were capable of feats of adventure and exploration and had access to technologies and sciences that until only recently were widely claimed to have not existed beyond 10,000 years ago.

Like this remarkable, exciting story reveals :

Early manlike creatures may have been smarter than we think. Recent archaeological finds from the Mediterranean show that human ancestors traveled the high seas.

A team of researchers that included an North Carolina State University geologist found evidence that our ancestors were crossing open water at least 130,000 years ago. That's more than 100,000 years earlier than scientists had previously thought.

Their evidence is based on stone tools from the island of Crete. Because Crete has been an island for eons, any prehistoric people who left tools behind would have had to cross open water to get there.

The tools the team found are so old that they predate the human species, said Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist from Providence College who led the team. Instead of being made by our species, Homo sapiens, the tools were made by our ancestors, Homo erectus.

"The thing to me that really makes this unique and exciting is ... these other sister species maybe weren't entirely stupid like we portray them," Wegmann said. "They were capable of really complex things."

And we're only now just learning, in these first decades of the 21st century, how intelligent, complex and capable our 'sister species' actually was. We have so much more to learn, and to discover. Not only of what they knew, but what we have lost.

Hacking The Human Brain

Mike Wehner at Y Tech :

Of all the storage mediums you use to keep information that is most important to you, your brain is by far the most complex. Because of the immense amount of data that the human brain can hold, scientists have been attempting to crack our internal hard drives for quite some time. The scary part? They're actually getting close.

By building complex models of other brains in the animal kingdom — such as those of mice, cats, and primates — and then moving on to humans, researchers have begun to translate the trillions of impulses that go on in our heads into readable data. In fact, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a $4.9 million program to reverse-engineer the human brain in an effort to mine its computational abilities.

Some scientists, including Ray Kurzweil of Kurzweil Technologies, see a future where microscopic robots will be injected into a person's blood stream, head straight for the brain, and monitor activity. Of course, with the vulnerabilities of other medical implants already well documented, we'd hate to know the consequences of someone taking control of our brain's bots.

Cars, Pacemakers, Baby Monitors And Garage Doors Can Also Be Hacked

Now everyone has a camera, every accident and tragedy has a high-definition clip online within minutes.

The stage collapses at the Indiana State Fair yesterday, in 100kmh winds, killing at least seven people and injuring dozens :



The aftermath :

Tea Party hijacker, and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is getting some sympathy, even from the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, for Newsweek magazine purposely choosing a bad photo of her for this recent cover :



Redditers, however, think she got off lightly with Newsweek choosing the above photo. They found one that is much, much worse :


Bizarrely, the above image is not photoshopped. Bachmann actually devoured that monster in front of dozens of media cameras.

Maybe she knows more about winning male Republican votes than her critics do.

UPDATE :

US Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann has won a key pre-election campaign poll in the state of Iowa.

The Iowa straw poll held in Ames attracted about 17,000 voters and is considered the first big test of the 2012 presidential race.

Mrs Bachmann, an Iowa-born social conservative, narrowly beat her rival Ron Paul in the non-binding contest.

Police in the UK are now free to brutally beat teenagers on the night streets of a city like Manchester, and they are cheered for doing so :



The UK police state, it only gets worse, and more brutal, from here on in.

England is now using digital billboards to broadcast surveillance images of people wanted for minor crimes.


screengrab from ABC News Australia

None of the British bankers and financial experts who played their part in the looting that caused the global financial crisis have had their faces displayed on police public billboards. Not one.

The Installation Of The British Police State Is Now Being Televised

First the UK riots, then MPs get a free run to pass almost every law they want to licence social networking and internet use, to arm most police with plastic bullets and to install regimes of lockdowns and curfews for "troubled" communities, all before the kick off of the 2012 Olympics.

Here's what the government, police and military can unleash with the laws they have right now :

Curfews, bans on travel, assembly and "other specified activities", confiscation of property, with or without compensation, and most drastically, the deployment of armed forces on the streets to quell disorder are among options that can be introduced by ministers under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Although ministers have appeared to rule out the use of troops, the sweeping powers in their locker can include "any provision which the person making the regulations is satisfied is appropriate" to protect human life, health and safety and protect or restore property and supplies of money, food, water, energy or fuel.

Threats to transport and other forms of communication, to banks and other financial institutions, to land, water or air through contamination, to the the running of parliaments in Westminster and Edinburgh and assemblies in Belfast and Cardiff and to other "public functions" are all covered by the legislation.

And an interesting insight into the first night of the London Riots, and decisions made by the top ranks of London's Metropolitan Police :

"The officers on the streets wanted to do nothing more than go in and arrest people as they were in the act of breaking into property, looting and robbing. But they had been told not to and it was just not acceptable," said a source.

Anyway, here's lots more riot porn.







If only all rioters were so dim :



Londoners are so shocked by the rioting and looting, they haven't even begun to ask whether or not there were agent provocauters involved.

The 'London Riots' : What The Fuck Is Really Going On?

The Twitter Police In Action

By Darryl Mason

A young mother of two, somewhere in the UK, who had filled her Twitter feed up until late July with details of her beauty course, her love for her sons, her reality TV show interests, and the occasional retweet of a 'Why Be A Hater When You Can Be A Creator' type motivational quotes, suddenly explodes into calls for more rioting in London earlier today :



But the hashtag and message on the next tweet caught the attention of Hampshire Police, who are trying to dispel continuous rumours of outbreaks of looting and rioting in their area :



Hampshire Police on Twitter responded :



Then a more general warning :



If police intend to doorknock every single person in England who has published a message encouraging violence, or encouraging more rioting, they'll be busy for the next five decades. And how to tell between those who were seriously calling for rioting, or trying to organise it, and those who were just being dickheads and fuckwits, having a laugh, trying to be ironic, or teenagers attempting to appear tough and all "Fuck The Police man, innit" in front of their friends?

Impossible, of course.

Blogger for The UK Independent, Jody McIntyre, hasn't had a visit from police, yet, but he did lose his job for this outburst :



There has been plenty of newspaper stories, radio talkback, online articles blaming Twitter for the London Riots, full stop. We will see a wave of politicians and probably police as well talking up the day, coming soon, when Twitter and other social networking will require users to be licensed in order to use them, anonymity made illegal and demands for imposition of censorship over social media, minor to draconian.

There's a growing number of tweets showing up where Londoners try to explain what bothers them most about the London Riots (at least those who haven't been affected by the violence and looting). They have trouble explaining what they're feeling, but need to say that something "smells funny about this", it "doesn't seem real", "how can kids do all these things they say?" and more generally, "what the fuck is going on? Who's doing this to us?"

Who indeed. For now, if you watch BBC and Sky News, it's poor, mostly black and immigrant youth, from some of London's more deprived suburbs.

But are these "scumbags",as they're so commonly called today online and all over talkback radio, really responsible for all the fires, for the high-end looting, for the loads of obviously professional criminals swarming the city in fast cars, always one or two steps ahead of the police, burning and looting wherever they please?

Clearly not.

Something else is going on here, above and below the layer of the socially deprived who adopted a "gangsta" lifestyle from British crime TV shows and Hollywood movies and decided to go smash up their high street and chuck rubbish at cops.

There are highly experienced professional criminals involved in all this, and none of them have to have even come from London.

One of the most disturbing things I saw online about these riots were claims that London's emergency services have received, literally, thousands of calls in the past few days and nights where callers have screamed for help, claiming their areas were being looted, burned, destroyed. When police were dispatched, they found nothing amiss, while in another part of the city, 100 to 300 mostly masked, gloved and hooded people swarmed and looted shops and homes.

Thousands of fake phone calls, to send police and ambulance and firefighters on wild goose chases.

So who organises something of that scope?

A bunch of Kayne West wannabe 15 year olds from South London with Blackberries?

Very, very fucking unlikely.

For now, tonight, London's normal night-time on duty force will increase almost ten-fold to 15,000, there will be armoured vehicles, and police have been given the okay to use gas and rubber bullets.

London Streets Ruled By Riot Kids


A Google Map of confirmed rioting and looting outbreaks in London, August 8, 11pm.

The UK Guardian, Sept 15, 2010 :

The home secretary, Theresa May, has dismissed fears that deep spending cuts could undermine the ability of the police to tackle possible civil unrest, and insisted the British did not respond to austerity by rioting on the streets.

The UK Telegraph today :

As disturbances entered a third day, the scale of civil disobedience reached unprecedented levels, with incidents in all corners of the capital.

The violence, which began in Tottenham, north London on Saturday spread south and east to Brixton, Streatham, Walthamstow, Edmonton, Enfield, Oxford Circus and Islington on Sunday.

By last night further outbreaks of disorder involving hundreds of hooded yobs had taken place in Hackney, Clapton, East Ham, Lewisham and Clapham Junction. Property and shops were set on fire in Peckham and Croydon.

There are 1400 police on the streets of London for the third night of rioting and looting. There were 5000 on duty for the recent Royal Wedding. Protect the rich and fuck the rest.

These are the kinds of headlines and newspaper front pages predicted for years by blogs and independent news sites - as poor people in Wesern cities were stripped of jobs, dignity, pensions and local services - and now they've become horrifying reality in the 2012 Olympic city :









UK front pages via Nick Sutton





An extroardinary piece of cell phone reporting from the streets of Clapham, London, now controlled by kids, of all colours and backgrounds :



Riot porn, with an acoustic soundtrack :

The 2012 Olympic City Explodes

First the rocks and looting, the batons, shields and police dogs. Then the shootings and the bombings, the water cannons, tear gas, live fire and the Army.

Nobody knows how to turn this off, or stop it spreading :



The police are outnumbered. They know it, they've admitted it.



And those who want to continue looting know it, too.

The mega-billion pound London Westfields prepares itself for tonight, with ultra-tall anti-riot fencing. The Londoners who spend more than $US3 million a day there will have squeeze through the little gates :



Photo from YFrog

The rioting and looting began in the North London area of Tottenham. The fires burned through the night and well into the next morning :

The extreme virulence and high mortality capacity of the Bird Flu Virus will be back in news by late August, just in time for the release of this big-budget, Hollywood star-soaked ad for not touching your face so much :

US Loses 10% Of Its Elite CIA-Navy SEALs In One Day

Did Key Members The 'Neptune Spear' Team Who Killed Osama Bin Laden Just Get Taken Out?

UPDATE : YES



By Darryl Mason

Unofficially, at least, the United States today lost more Navy SEALs in one helicopter crash than they have in the entire decade of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Presumably the cause of the Chinook helicopter crash that killed 25 Navy SEALs in Afghanistan will, like nearly all NATO and American helicopter crashes there, be blamed on malfunctions, or the weather.

The Taliban, however, are claiming a major victory in taking out so many highly-ranked American military personnel in one attack, soldiers who were responsible for so many of the night raids that have killed thousands of Taliban recruits and hazily-linked fighters along with hundreds of civilians, including a long list of women and children, in the War On Afghanistan, now in its 10th year.

Details on whether or not the Chinook death toll includes members of SEAL Team 6, credited with killing Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, haven't been made public. And probably never will be.

But a gut feeling tells me we will learn soon that at least some of the 23 Navy SEALs in the Kill Bin Laden team died in this helicopter crash, which means they will never get to tell their story of what they did in Abbottabad.

It would be a very neat conclusion to the War On Terror, if true. The US announces it is pulling troops out of Afghanistan, the alleged main target in the War On Terror is killed, and then those who assassinated him wind up dead only three months later.

The Navy SEAL Team 6 were recently profiled in a celebratory New Yorker profile written by Nicolas Schmidle, son of Marine Corps Lieutenant-General Robert Schmidle, now serving as the deputy commander of the US Cyber Command.

Nicolas Schmidle said of his story that while he spoke to none of the 23 SEALs involved in the Bin Laden raid, he interviewed two dozen military insiders, including some who were listening to Navy SEALs radios and communications in the lead-up and aftermath of the assassination raid.

Some interesting details about Navy SEAL Team 6, and the Abbottabad raid, from the New Yorker story, which may prove even more interesting should it turn out to be true that many who helped kill Bin Laden are now also dead :

Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator...and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard.

During the ninety-minute helicopter flight, James and his teammates rehearsed the operation in their heads. Since the autumn of 2001, they had rotated through Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, at a brutal pace.

The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU’s maiden venture into Pakistan, either. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid. Most of those missions were forays into North and South Waziristan, where many military and intelligence analysts had thought that bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. (Only one such operation—the September, 2008, raid of Angoor Ada, a village in South Waziristan—has been widely reported.) Abbottabad was, by far, the farthest that DEVGRU had ventured into Pakistani territory.

If there are some 300 Navy SEALs in DEVGRU in total, the Chinook crash in Afghanistan has killed almost 1 in 10 of their numbers :

Red Squadron is one of four squadrons in DEVGRU, which has about three hundred operators in all.

The Navy SEALs are working for the CIA :

The bin Laden mission—plotted at C.I.A. headquarters and authorized under C.I.A. legal statutes but conducted by Navy DEVGRU operators—brought the coöperation between the agency and the Pentagon to an even higher level. John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the C.I.A., said that the Abbottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC into a C.I.A. operation.”

Despite JSOC’s lead role in Neptune’s Spear, the mission officially remained a C.I.A. covert operation. The covert approach allowed the White House to hide its involvement, if necessary.

The stunning number of raids undertaken by Navy SEAL teams in Afghanistan :

This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.” He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.” On the night of May 1st alone, special-operations forces based in Afghanistan conducted twelve other missions; according to the official, those operations captured or killed between fifteen and twenty targets.

The crashed helicopter in Abbottabad was supposed to quieten those who questioned the veracity of the official story, heavily leaked to the media :

Black soot from the detonated Black Hawk charred the wall of the animal pen. Part of the tail hung over the wall. It was clear that a military raid had taken place there. “I’m glad no one was hurt in the crash, but, on the other hand, I’m sort of glad we left the helicopter there,” the special-operations officer said. “It quiets the conspiracy mongers out there and instantly lends credibility. You believe everything else instantly, because there’s a helicopter sitting there.”

An interesting warning of the capability proven by Navy SEALs on the Pakistan raid :

The special-operations officer spoke more boldly. He believes that a precedent has been set for more unilateral raids in the future. “Folks now realize we can weather it,” he said. The senior adviser to the President said that “penetrating other countries’ sovereign airspace covertly is something that’s always available for the right mission and the right gain.” Brennan told me, “The confidence we have in the capabilities of the U.S. military is, without a doubt, even stronger after this operation.”

All the Neptune's Spear SEALs met Obama, and got their photos taken with their president :

Afterward, Obama....presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation and said, “Our intelligence professionals did some amazing work. I had fifty-fifty confidence that bin Laden was there, but I had one-hundred-per-cent confidence in you guys. You are, literally, the finest small-fighting force that has ever existed in the world.” The raiding team then presented the President with an American flag that had been on board the rescue Chinook. Measuring three feet by five, the flag had been stretched, ironed, and framed. The SEALs and the pilots had signed it on the back; an inscription on the front read, “From the Joint Task Force Operation Neptune’s Spear, 01 May 2011: ‘For God and country. Geronimo.’ ” Obama promised to put the gift “somewhere private and meaningful to me.” Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.

Will the deaths of 25 Navy SEALs in Afghanistan act as a surprise ending to the American folly of invading Afghanistan? Or will stir up the masses for a greater, expanded war? And just how will it be blamed on Iran?

The event certainly adds a sense of futile tragedy to the greater tragedy unfolding in the United States right now, as the Great Depression II, or Greater Depression as some call it, seems only an inevitability, if not already a reality.

A stockmarket near-crash, the global humiliation of a financial downgrading and the killing of 10% of its CIA-Navy SEALs elite fighting force, all in 36 hours.

What horror next for the United States?

UPDATE :




The Associated Press updates with a denial from a PentaBot, but clearly the AP believes their original headline and sources are correct, as they should :

U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that they believe that none of the Navy SEALs who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although they were from the same unit that carried out the bin Laden mission.

Sources say that more than 20 Navy SEALs were among those lost in the crash in Afghanistan.

Dead special ops soldiers, helicopters shot down, Afghan children killed by drones or raids, the first move by the US military is always to Deny, Deny, Deny.

The Associated Press isn't buying their bullshit, this time.

Even if Banksy does turn out to be an advertising executive from London, he is without doubt one of the more important and influential artists of Generation X :

That the centre of our galaxy is a 'star nursery', and appears to our telescopes as holding the shape of an infinity symbol, is a beautiful moment in astronomy and cosmology's history. It may not, in decades to come, turn out to be true, but right now it's a still stunning, awe-worthy idea.



From Space.com :

A twisted ring of gas, one that stretches more than 600 light-years across the heart of the Milky Way galaxy....which gives birth to new stars...

Scientists don't yet understand why the newly observed infinity symbol is twisted and kinked, and little is known about how gas rings, and even rings within larger rings, form in spiral galaxies in the first place.

More Here

Even At The Brink Of A US Economic Apocalypse, The 1 Percenters Still Want More

It seems like only yesterday the United States was trying to bomb Al Jazeera out of the news business. Now the news station growing quickly towards a global audience of one billion people is fastidiously documenting the downfall of the 20th century's greatest world power.

From The Wooster Collective, a London artist resets a Metropolitan Police ad on the Tube :



One of the most succint summaries of the Murdoch Hacking And Spying And Bribery And Corruption And Surveillance Scandal I've seen yet :

....journalists on a British tabloid hack into and delete the voice mail messages of a missing (murdered, it turns out) teenage girl. Their activities are exposed by a rival outfit, to widespread public outrage. The paper in question is shut down by its owner, despite having a circulation of millions. Senior policemen, who hired former journalists from the paper as press officers, resign. Evidence emerges of illegal payments from the paper to corrupt police in exchange for information about celebrities, politicians and crime victims. Several journalists are arrested, including two former editors of the paper, one of whom had worked for the prime minister. A whistle-blower is found dead (though police say it isn’t suspicious). The paper’s owner, mogul of an international media empire, is summoned to testify before Parliament. And the allegations of wrongdoing just keep coming.

The rest of that story from New York Times books is here

United States Marine Corps officer, General James N. Mattis :

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people."

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

"I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all."

General Mathis is now Commander of US Central Command.

Sources for qoutes are here.