Signs Of The Times - SOTT.NET

Associated Content Takes Down SOTT Server

2009-06-22T12:00:00.004+01:00

SOTT has been shut down due to a legal demand by a gang called "Associated Content". It was sent to the hotmail account of one of the editors on June 20, which obviously we didn't get since sott email is received at sott(at)sott.net. Anyway, this morning we received the following from our server people:

Due to the below email, their is an abuse issue with your server. You have 24hrs to respond on how you will correct this issue before we null route the ip. Further complaints, without action may result in deactivation of your server.

Thanks for your cooperation.

To Whom It May Concern:

We would like to report the following violation of your Terms of Service outlined on your web site for "sott.net/", a web site that your company hosts. Please view our DMCA complaint below regarding http://www.sott.net/articles/show/186797-Feminist-Perspectives-on-Natural-Childbirth.

Please respond to the undersigned with your decision.

DMCA: 1. The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on _http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1375139/feminist_perspectives_on_natural_childbirth.html?cat=7

2. It appears on http://www.sott.net/articles/show/186797-Feminist-Perspectives-on-Natural-Childbirth

3. Please contact us at designated_agent@associatedcontent.com

We are: Associated Content, Inc. 88 Steele St. Suite 400 Denver, CO 80209 F: 720-214-0293

4. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

5. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

6. Tori Hyman, On behalf of Designated Agent, Associated Content

--

Tori E. Hyman 88 Steele Street, Suite 400 Denver, Colorado 80206 P: 720-214-1000 | F: 720-214-0293 associatedcontent.com

The question is, of course, what is "Associated Content"? I decided to do a little investigating. According to their site:

Associated Content is an Open Content Network. AC's platform enables anyone to participate in the new content economy by publishing content on any topic, in any format (text, video, audio and images), and connects that content to consumers, partners and advertisers.

* Sources benefit in three major ways beyond the opportunity to publish: fair payment compensation, online discoverability and distribution through our partner sites. Anyone can become a Source. Click here to learn more and sign up.

* Associated Content publishes authentic, useful and informative content on nearly every conceivable topic, produced by real people sharing real-world expertise from diverse perspectives. Search our library to see what we have, or create an RSS feed of content that interests you.

* The depth and breadth of our library is the perfect match for our partners who desire authentic content for their own websites or to advertise against at AssociatedContent.com. If we don't have the content you need, our Sources can quickly and affordably generate credible, engaging content on any topic. Click here to learn more about what we offer our partners.

Corporate History

Associated Content was founded by Luke Beatty in Denver, Colorado, in 2005. Luke, who developed search advertising and taxonomy solutions at WAND, Inc. before founding AC, envisioned a business that would open the content economy to the world by allowing anybody to publish content in any form. Today, with its vast library of unique multimedia content, diverse community of Sources and scalable platform, Associated Content provides consumers, brands, and publishers with a wide range of quality content.

Obviously, the sott editor who selected this article should have checked out this site a bit better and, having done so, would have determined that it is not a reliable source for information. (Do some research into "WAND, Inc." too, just for fun. Their legal disclaimer page is a gas!)

But, even more curious is that this "take down" notice came as it did, without warning. I have never been able to get a server to take down my own material that has been pirated with such a letter... so it is curious that others are able to do so so easily, without even demonstrating that they have taken the necessary steps to notify the object of their nefarious intentions. One wonders about the "connections" that Associated Content may have?

Looking a bit further, it seems that this person - Juniper M Russo Tarascio, the author of the article in question - is rather militant about his/her "rights" in the financial sense. See this Link and this one.

I think that what SOTT.net will do from here on out is to remove the text (and link) of any article we have received a complaint about, and replace it with the take-down notice so that our readers can know which sites to visit and which to avoid. With SOTT's growing readership, that should make some waves. But then, maybe it is SOTT's growing readership that is worrying somebody? Or am I being too conspiratorial?

It is, indeed, a "sign of the times."

UPDATE!SOTT.net has received an email from Juniper as follows:

Subject: DMCA Nazis and Other Stuff Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:05:46 -0500 From: Juniper **** To: sott(at)sott.net
Hi There,

I'm a SOTT reader and the author of the article "Feminist Perspectives on Natural Childbirth" that caused the recent brouhaha. I wanted to write to you guys and let you know that I was actually very happy when I saw that SOTT had published one of my articles. I was a little embarrassed since it wasn't one of my best (it was written at 2:00 am with a teething baby in my lap) but I actually had no problem whatsoever with SOTT reprinting the material.

I'm a freelance writer and I write for a number of "credible" sources, but I use AC for Op/Ed pieces, newsy bloggy stuff, and topics that are too political for other sources to publish. Writing for Associated Content is a labor of love-- I get paid all of about $3 per article on average. I really don't care if other sites want to republish my work, especially when they're sites that I support, like SOTT.

I have only had ONE article removed in over a year working as a freelance writer. SOTT links to Ning's removal notification, and to a forum where the members of the site defame me (without having the slightest clue who I am or how much money I don't make). Though SOTT cites that as evidence that I'm "militant" about copyright law, I'm actually not. I had the swine flu article removed from Ning only because it was a very hot topic and the reprint had surpassed my original copy on Google-- costing me about 10,000 pageviews. I get paid by pageviews, not by article, and I'm raising a family of three at well below the poverty line. I only bothered to have that ONE article removed because it was affecting my ability to earn a living.

SOTT's republication of my Natural Childbirth article didn't cost me a dime, because it was never a particularly popular article to begin with -- and because I never expected to make any "real" money on an op/ed piece like that. I really didn't care that it was republished, so please don't make me out to be a DCMA Nazi.

I'm really upset about the fact that SOTT- a website that I visit daily-- would be defaming me just because AC was bullying you guys with copyright law. For the record, I'm actually a fan and frequent reader of SOTT, and I was personally very happy to see that I was republished there.

This has been a lot of mess over an article that I was never even particularly fond of.

Before you defame or attack a writer, please make sure you ACTUALLY know who's looking at the other monitor. It hurts a lot to see a site that I respect call me "militant" about my financial rights, when I am neither militant nor financially well-off. I'm also cringing at the fact that anyone took the people at Ning seriously when they accused me of "profiting enormously" and being a money-grubber because I wasn't happy about losing pay to plagiarism. I've got rent to pay and a family to feed, but I'm by no means militant about DCMA.
You're welcome to republish this email, if you want. I don't want any other SOTT readers to think that I'm opposed to the SOTT's cause.

Cheers, Juniper Russo Tarascio

This information puts additional light on the situation and SOTT sincerely apologizes for any upset we may have caused Ms. Tarascio. What is important to note is the fact that Ms. Tarascio has informed us of the following curious fact:

SOTT's republication of my Natural Childbirth article didn't cost me a dime, because it was never a particularly popular article to begin with

In other words, it was Associated Content's sole decision to take this action in consideration of an article that was not even popular and had been receiving exposure on SOTT since January of 2009. How curious is that?

US: At least 245 cases of taser deaths between June 2001 and June 2007, but don't talk about it!

2008-05-12T18:18:00.001Z

SOTT Editors
12 May 2008

Well, it looks like something fishy is going on with a topic that has been in the news for quite awhile now: deaths due to Tasers.

We begin our little story with an article from NorthCountryGazette.org:

Pinellas County Taser Deaths - Excusable Or Not?

June Maxam
North Country Gazette
7 May 2008

Between June 2001 and June 2007, there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers. Of these cases, in seven cases, medical examiners said tasers were a cause or a contributing factor or could not be ruled out as a cause of death.

In 16 cases, coroners and other officials stated that a taser was a secondary or contributory factor of death.

In dozens of cases, coroners cited excited delirium as cause of death. Excited delirium has been questioned as a medical diagnosis.

Several deaths occurred as a result of injuries sustained in struggles. In a few of these cases, head injury due to falling after being shocked contributed to later death.

In 2005, a medical examiner ruled for the first time that a taser was the primary factor in a death. [...]

Fabulous. So what's the big deal? The day after we posted this article under our Fair Use Policy, we received an e-mail as follows:

From: Sasha (at) acegm2.com
Date: 11-May-08

As a first time reader at SOT [sic], I found a story about my county in the headlines.

I was appalled. Your headline: Florida, US: At least 245 cases of tase deaths in Pinellas County

Then I went and looked at the original story from the North Country Gazette which states:

"Between June 2001 and June 2007, nationwide there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers. Of these cases, in seven cases, medical examiners said Tasers were a cause or a contributing factor or could not be ruled out as a cause of death." [emphasis ours]

which is a FAR CRY from there being 245 cases of taser deaths in Pinellas County.

So now I doubt the integrity of your entire site...

Sasha

The problem here is that the word "nationwide" (bolded red text above) was not in the original article. So, was the article changed after we posted it, and then changed again to remove the word "nationwide"?

No. As it turns out, there are TWO articles. The first one is Death In Pinellas County - Excited Delirium Or Murder? This article, does, indeed, say:

Between June 2001 and June 2007, nationwide there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers. Of these cases, in seven cases, medical examiners said Tasers were a cause or a contributing factor or could not be ruled out as a cause of death.

The second article, entitled Pinellas County Taser Deaths - Excusable Or Not? nowhere includes the word "nationwide." (We have taken a screenshot of it just in case it morphs!)

A bit of digging reveals that, according to Amnesty International, the 245 taser deaths were for the entire US, not just Pinellas County, Florida.

However, SOTT.net did not catch this error until after it was brought to our attention by Sasha. After all, the article we used was copy/pasted in toto, as it was and we were relying on the journalist who wrote it to at least have checked out the basic facts! In this case, not only did she not check out the basic facts, she did not even quote the article she was commenting on accurately! So, we must thank Sasha for bringing this to our attention. The end result was, of course, that the title of the article on the North Country Gazette site which is "Pinellas County Taser Deaths - Excusable Or Not?", and the content certainly does make it seem like the 245 deaths occurred in Pinellas County only.

After responding to Sasha and pointing out that the word "nationwide" is no longer (or perhaps never was) in the article text, we received another e-mail:

From: news(at)northcountrygazette.org
Date: 12-May-08

Please remove my copyrighted work from your website. You do not have permission to reprint my entire original work.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/155956-
Florida-US-At-least-245-cases-of-tase-deaths-
in-Pinellas-County

June Maxam, Publisher
North Country Gazette

Obviously, it seems highly likely that June Maxam didn't even bother to go to our web site to check out the placement and context or even the Fair Use notice (that sott.net is a research database). How do we know? Well, she included the SOTT link with the old title. After having the error pointed out to us by Sasha, we had changed the title to "US: At least 245 cases of taser deaths between June 2001 and June 2007". This suggests to us that someone alerted her to the fact that her work was being quoted, that it was wrong, and Ms. Maxam decided to do damage control.

Normally, we would simply point correspondents such as Ms. Maxam to our Fair Use Policy. In this case, however, we now think it's pretty safe to say that the article on the North Country Gazette is really not up to SOTT.net standards anyway, so we are happy to remove it. Again, we have to thank Sasha for that, though Sasha does not seem to be a happy camper. She wrote again today as follows:

Subject:Re: Not very happy with your site - MAJOR ERROR
IN YOUR HEADLINES
Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 09:22:26 -0400
From: sasha2
To: SOTT.NET

First of all, ANY "articles" from the North Country Gazette seem to be "commentaries" which means no one is reporting the facts. YOUR headline read that 245 deaths from tasers were in PINELLAS COUNTY - the other article says there are 245 deaths NATIONWIDE. LINK- who or what are they "commenting" on?

Since we have already dealt with this above, noting that there are TWO articles on the North Country Gazette website, Sasha is beating a dead horse here. But, she continues:

So who's irresponsible here? If you are "reporting the news" you need to report the news - not just quote some commentary or change the original content.

Again, we note that there are two articles as indicated above, so Sasha's charge that we changed the content is in error. She has not investigated very thoroughly before charging SOTT with malfeasance. She continues:

There is an article in the SP Times in August 2005 that reported ONE death IN PINELLAS and NO deaths in HILLSBOROUGH at that time from tasers. That article I consider to be accurate. So would that then mean that those 245 deaths occurred between 2005 and June 2007 (which I seriously doubt)? There would be an UPROAR in the SP Times had this been occurring. LINK

****Here is an Amnesty International article dated March 28, 2006 stating that there had been only 152 taser deaths IN THE UNITED STATES from June 2001 through Feb 2006. LINK

It seems that they are the agency diligently tracking these deaths. In fact, they report 290 deaths in the UNITED STATES as of late 2007. LINK

What I am saying here is that on a first visit to your site, I have found a "sensational" headline that would cause any sane, logical person to question the credibility of ANY of the content in your site(s). All COMMENTARIES from North Country are suspect and need to be investigated unless they take one to an original report done by a credible entity.

There is certainly enough bad crap going on the world without you having to make it appear to be worse.

Sasha

Sasha is certainly entitled to her opinion about SOTT, however, as we have noted above, there is a quite simple explanation for the problem: there are two items on the referenced website, Sasha was reading one, and we had included the other on SOTT. And, for the record, as our regular readers already note, we do not just report news, we also carry a great deal of commentary.

In the end, what we can say with a high degree of certainty is that taser deaths are a serious problem in our pathocratic world, and we'll continue to bring you any news and commentary we find on the topic.

For all our readers concerned with any potential decrease in accuracy here on SOTT.net, rest assured that the editor who posted this article has agreed to exile in Siberia.

For the time being, just type "taser" in the Search box above, and you'll get plenty of food for thought! SOTT doesn't need to try to make things appear to be worse than they really are. We might also mention that it is knee-jerk reactions like Sasha's that create many of those problems. Sorry SOTT.net doesn't suit you - don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Also see: Man Files Patent For Taser-Proof Clothing

Via Golden Nuggets - Sexing Up An Iranian War

A Thousand Words

2008-05-10T19:26:00.001Z

A couple of pictures via Dave Neiwert's Orcinus blog:

©Unknown

Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth?

2008-04-19T00:29:00.001Z

Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Somehow, I think it is highly probable that we have a new event to add to our list of Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls Have a look at the excerpts from the following two news items from this past week and see if something doesn't seem off about the glib and facile "explanations" for a series of extremely bizarre events. Every element of the stories is explainable in the terms presented by Clube and Napier, Mike Baillie and John S. Lewis and which have been the topic of the present series of articles on Comet hazards. At the same time, the explanations given by the "official sources" simply do not sound plausible.

Read and judge for yourself.

2008 - 15, 16, 18 April - Illinois - Maybe we had a comet fragment impact or two or three over a period of several nights? Perhaps a couple of overhead explosions and then, later, a ground impact. Read the following stories and judge for yourself:

That would explain booms and earthquake and lights in the sky spread out over three days. Damage Control: Mysterious booms, lights over Indiana were just F-16s

A sonic boom and fireballs and flaming debris that Kokomo-area residents reported seeing in the sky Wednesday night prompted Howard County's police agencies to conduct a two-hour search for what many residents thought was a crashed aircraft.

As it turned out, the fireballs were flares fired by F-16s that are part of the 122nd Fighter Wing, an Indiana Air National Guard unit based at Fort Wayne International Airport. ...

Staff Sgt. Jeff Lowry with Indiana National Guard's headquarters in Indianapolis said the jets taking part in the training are not supposed to exceed the speed of sound, which is about 760 mph, because supersonic speeds produce sonic booms.

He said the 122nd's commander, Col. Jeff Soldner, will investigate why at least one jet reached supersonic speeds Wednesday night over Howard and Tipton counties, and also on Tuesday night over the Logansport area, shaking the ground below. ...

He said F-16 training often involves the aircraft dropping flares from more than 10,000 feet above the ground, a technique that can allow the jets to evade heat-seeking missiles in combat. ...

Logansport Police Chief A.J. Rozzi said he heard a loud sonic boom on Tuesday night, and then heard the sound of a jet high overheard. He said residents also reported seeing fire streaks in the sky.

He said it is common for the 122nd to conduct missions in the area and believes F-16 training almost certainly explains the sights and sounds.

"They've been doing that training for quite a while. I don't know what maneuvers they're actually doing, but they do shoot out streaks of light," he said.

5.4 earthquake rocks Illinois; felt 350 miles away

A 5.4 earthquake that appeared to rival the strongest recorded in the region rocked people awake up to 350 miles away early Friday, surprising residents unaccustomed to such a powerful Midwest temblor.

The quake just before 4:37 a.m. was centered 6 miles from West Salem, Ill., and 66 miles from Evansville, Ind. It was felt in such distant cities as Chicago, Cincinnati and Milwaukee, 350 miles north of the epicenter, but there were no early reports of injuries or significant damage. ....

"You could hear a roaring sound and the whole motel shook, waking up the guests,'' Vibha Ambelal, manager of the Super 8 Motel in Mount Carmel, Illinois, near the epicenter, said in a telephone interview."

Now, add the above to what happened just a little over a week earlier:

2008 - 6 April - Argentina - The space rock reportedly crashed late Sunday somewhere in Entre Rios Province, some 260 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, reports the daily Clarin, which quoted a witness, Milton Blumhagen, a student and astronomy buff: "For three or four seconds I saw an object in flames, changing color until it turned blue when it approached the ground.'' A fire department source said the impact was felt for miles around. No damage was reported.

Keep your eyes and ears open!

Via SOTT

Merkel blames the victim

2008-04-18T23:24:00.001Z

Speechless. Stunned. We've heard some incredible statements in the last few years, since the coup d'etat of 911, but this one is unbelievable even by the standards of GW. Listen to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, explain why there is a food shortage:

Bad policy, not biofuel, drive food prices - Merkel

BERLIN (Reuters) - Bad agricultural policies and changing eating habits in developing nations are primarily to blame for rising food prices, not biofuel production as some critics claim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday...

But Merkel, whose country is Europe's largest biofuel producer, said the rise in food prices was not mainly due to biofuels but to "inadequate agricultural policies in developing countries" as well as "insufficient forecasts of changes in nutritional habits" in emerging markets.

"If you travel to India these days, then a main part of the debate is about the 'second meal'," Merkel said.

"People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people. That's a large part of the European Union," she said.

"And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100 million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas become skewed, and much else too," she said referring to EU limits on dairy production....

Merkel is blaming the food crisis on the poorest people, the ones who are the victims. They are eating two meals a day instead of one. And, gosh, if those Chinese start drinking milk, then we'll really be in trouble!

I'm sorry, but how can this be reported on a major news service and not provoke an outcry from anyone with a conscience! Could there be any clearer expression of disdain and contempt? Any more gut-wrenching glimpse into the psyche of the deviant?

What about the headline: "Bad policy, not biofuel, drive food prices - Merkel". Bad policy? It is bad policy when people start eating two meals a day? How many meals does Merkel eat?

And all of this is going on in public, in front of our noses!

Via SOTT

Sorcha Faal: COINTELPRO

2008-03-05T15:07:00.004Z

Remember my post back on February 13 about Barack the Terrible? Remember the question at the conclusion: "In the end, you just have to wonder what the "Sorcha Faal" psy-op is trying to do here." As I mentioned, I was pretty certain that the source calling itself "Sorcha Faal" with its hokey background story was a psy-op, but I couldn't quite figure out what they were up to an who might be backing them. For all I knew, they were backed by Russians or French or god-knows-who just to keep the noise factor high. And item that caught my eye today may, however, gives us the solution to this problem. Have a look at this:

Why the War on Obama While some cynics still view Barack Obama’s appeal for “change” as empty rhetoric, it’s starting to dawn on Washington insiders that his ability to raise vast sums of money from nearly one million mostly small donors could shake the grip that special-interest money has long held over the U.S. government.
This spreading realization that Obama’s political movement might represent a more revolutionary change than previously understood is sparking a deepening resistance among defenders of the status quo – and prompting harsher attacks on Obama.

Right now, the front line for the Washington Establishment is Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, which has been stunned by Obama’s political skills as well as his extraordinary ability to raise money over the Internet. Obama’s grassroots donations have negated Clinton’s prodigious fundraising advantage with big donors.

Powerful lobbies – from AIPAC to representatives of military and other industries – also are recognizing the value of keeping their dominance over campaign cash from getting diluted by Obama’s deep reservoir of small donors. It’s in their direct interest to dent Obama’s momentum and demoralize his rank-and-file supporters as soon as possible.

So, neoconservatives and other ideological movements – heavily dependent on grants from the same special interests – are now joining with the Clinton campaign to tear down Obama by depicting him as unpatriotic, un-vetted, possibly a “closet Muslim.”

On Feb. 25, the New York Times’ new neocon columnist William Kristol attacked Obama’s patriotism by citing the Illinois senator decision to stop wearing an American flag lapel pin because, Obama said, he saw how George W. Bush was exploiting the flag to stampede the nation toward war with Iraq.

Well, well, well. I guess now we know something about Sorcha Faal - a pretended opponent of the pathocrats that does their dirty work from the alleged "other side." Maybe some of those billions of dollars the U.S. gives to Israel each year as "foreign aid" ends up in the pockets of groups like whoever is behind "Sorcha Faal". Can we say COINTELPRO? How about Protocol 12?

The essence of war in an image

2008-02-24T19:40:00.004Z

I saw this picture on the web today and I thought I would share it with you. It made a great impression on me as it reflects what war is really all about: the destruction of the human spirit and of anything that is good and creative about us. Children in uniform who are ordered to murder strangers and get exposed to being murdered; all for the sake of some concepts invented by schizoids and psychopaths in power who care not for those concepts, nor for the well being of anyone except their own. Even if these children survive they will have to face the desolation of trauma for the rest of their lives. Each and every human story becomes a tragedy - and war is nothing but millions of personal tragedies.

Maslow the schizoidal humanist

2008-02-19T12:16:00.001Z

"Peak performance", "human potential". These terms have entered our vocabulary thanks to the work in humanistic psychologist of Abraham Maslow.

The book Fascism And Democracy In The Human Mind: A Bridge Between The Mind And Society by Israel Charny includes some excerpts from the diary Maslow that reveal a rather disturbing mindset.

Seems he may have had a rather good mask of a very warped mind.

From pg 42-44 of Charny:

An excellent and sadly shattering example of the way the mind of a devoted humanistic psychologist can move along the same track of the fascist paradigm to a point where he calls for execution [sic] of the nonbelievers -- in this case, nonbelievers in humanism! -- is found in the posthumously published writings of no less than Abraham Maslow, recognized and beloved as the founder of modern humanistic psychology! The same Maslow who conceptualized the unfolding development of the mind and personality of a person as the highest state of human development, and who attributed to the "self-actualized" person an ethical and empathic orientation toward other human beings and the society in which he lives, was revealed after his death to be a highly self-involved, bitter loner filled with contempt and rage at the many people who did not appreciate him or his ideas, and who dared to conceive on a broader community level the identification and execution of those who opposed proposed humanistic policies for the betterment of society.

The following are shocking, almost unbelievable excerpts from Maslow's posthumously published writings:

Humanistic psychology absolutely needs a doctrine of an elite, degrees of humanness, health and sickness, winners and losers, aggridants (whether by heredity or by learning), good specimens, no equal votes, non-equal weighting. The taste or judgment of one superior can and should outweigh 1000 or a million blind ones.

The Third-Force philosophy is antideath-wish, anti-exploiting of others, antistunting or crippling, antivalue-destroying, antibaby-crippling and diminishing; anti-unrealism = antifake.... We keep alive many of the people whom nature left to itself would kill off. So we are hurting the human gene pool, which must be deteriorating. We can certainly continue to do this, to be compassionate with anyone living, but this right to reproduce might very well be limited. In the immediate future -- within the next century -- we must anyway cut hack the population of the world. The right to reproduce must surely become rather a privilege which is socially controlled and socially granted.... One could speculate that the worsening gene pool is partly responsible for the large number of naysayers, death-wishers and born losers and schlemiels.

I find myself secretly entertaining all sorts of "cold-blooded" possibilities... drug users are performing a kind of biologically unselfish act, a sort of noblesse oblige for the good of the species and voluntarily killing themselves "for the good of the gene pool." ... Sooner or later, after the catastrophes force us to pace theoverpopulation, we'll stop with all the crap about more food, or better strains of rice {which just produce more people). How can we give up on humanitarianism? But how can we not permit voluntary (or maybe involuntary) euthanasia and suicide? One day we'll have to talk about the exposure or killing of monster-babies, or even of healthy surplus babies.

As with some, nothing will work ultimately but shooting.

These are terrifying statements from anyone, let alone a great psychologist, especially one who is recognized as one of the fathers of "humanistic psychology." Maslow's fascist intolerance of lesser beings and his readiness to call for real murderous actions on behalf of a super race of humanists is a powerful warning to all of us to look for the corresponding readiness in us, and to overcome such readiness with what we will be describing as a democratic mindset.

Sounds like Maslow was in agreement with what Łobaczewski calls the schizoidal declaration, so let's look at the traits of the schizoidal type:

Literature provides us with descriptions of several varieties of this anomaly, whose existence can be attributed either to changes in the genetic factor or to differences in other individual characteristics of a non-pathological nature. Let us thus sketch these sub-species’ common features.

Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, while, at the same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people’s intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psy- chological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and writings: “Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea.” Let us call this typical expression the “schizoid declaration”.

Human nature does in fact tend to be naughty, especially when the schizoids embitter other people’s lives. When they become wrapped up in situations of serious stress, however, the schizoid’s failings cause them to collapse easily. The capacity for thought is thereupon characteristically stifled, and frequently the schizoids fall into reactive psychotic states so similar in appearance to schizophrenia that they lead to misdiagnoses.

The common factor in the varieties of this anomaly is a dull pallor of emotion and lack of feeling for the psychological realities, an essential factor in basic intelligence. This can be attributed to some incomplete quality of the instinctive substratum, which works as though founded on shifting sand. Low emotional pressure enables them to develop proper speculative reasoning, which is useful in non-humanistic spheres of activity, but because of their one-sidedness, they tend to consider themselves intellectually superior to “ordinary” people.

I wonder how many other "great psychologists" are as sick as Maslow? And they are the ones setting the standards by which the rest of us are measured! It is amazing that someone with such a distorted capacity for psychological insight could become such a highly regarded psychologist. But in a world where deviant values rule, up is down and right is left.

What's all the fuss about your rights?

2008-02-19T00:52:00.001Z

Bush wants to get his wiretap bill renewed. It's called the 'Protect America Act' and it gives him the right to continue with warrantless wiretapping. You gotta love that Orwellian name. According to this story, News: What's all this fuss over FISA? | bill, court, fisa, intelligence, government - OCRegister.com, the Republicans want Bush to have a free hand:

"It's not dumb luck that we haven't been hit since 9/11," says Rep. Ed Royce. The Fullerton Republican says that the government needs to continue to intercept the phone calls and other communications. He says those methods have thus far thwarted attempts to get money transferred to terrorist organizations, stopped terrorists from obtaining guns and ammunition and stopped attempts to plan future terrorists attacks in the United States, England, France, the Middle East and Pakistan.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher brought the issue closer to home.

"Just think about shutting down the interceptions because of some misplaced notion about protecting American rights and we end up with families being murdered at Disneyland because some messages weren't intercepted," said Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach."

I guess the message is to stay away from Disneyland.

Barack the Terrible?

2008-02-13T19:59:00.005Z

How many of you get those e-newsletters from "Sorcha Faal"? Admit it! You read them surreptitiously whenever they come out! And you wonder "just who the heck is "Sorcha Faal." Well, we have an idea that it is a well funded psy-op that plays on what people really may wonder or think about things, but think it is too crazy to voice it. Only Faal always takes things the wrong way or gives it a misleading half-twist at the end.

Be that as it may, we always find these little psy-op bytes to be fascinating because they always lead to more reasonable assessments of our own.

Take today's edition for example. The "mysterious Sorcha" (supposed to be a title, not a person doncha know?) writes:

Reports from the United States today are trumpeting the primary election victories of US Senator Barack Obama [pictured top left] as he nears his coronation as the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate and is likely to become the next President of the American People.

More interestingly about these events, for our purposes of discussion, are the Western Media reports describing Senator Obama’s ‘messianic’ appeal to masses of American people seemingly intent upon breaking away from their current War Leaders. So popular to the American people has Senator Obama become that an Internet video promoting his candidacy has become the most popular in history with nearly 4 million views.

However, not to Senator Obama should these American people be looking for their greatest insight into this man, and their future, but rather their attention should be placed upon last centuries great Kenyan Prophet, Johanwa Owalo, the founder of Kenya’s Nomiya Luo Church, and who among the Kenya people of the Luo religion is believed to be a prophet similar to Jesus Christ and Muhammad, and who in 1912 made this horrific prophecy about the United States:

“So far have they [the United States] strayed into wickedness in those [future] times that their destruction has been sealed by my [father]. Their great cities will burn, their crops and cattle will suffer disease and death, their children will perish from diseases never seen upon this Earth, and I reveal to you the greatest [mystery] of all as I have been allowed to see that their [the United States] destruction will come about through the vengeful hands of one of our very own sons.” [1]

To the greatest accuracy of the Kenyan Prophet Johanwa Owalo’s words we must note the striking coincidence that this nearly 100-year-old prophecy seemingly echoes into our troubled times, Senator Obama does appear to be the fulfillment of this prophecy as he is, indeed, a ‘son’ of the Kenyan Luo tribal religion (a mixture of Christianity and African tribal beliefs) as he was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (born in Nyanza Province, Kenya, of Luo ethnicity) and Stanley Ann Dunham (who was given her fathers first name). [...]
One of the questions we must ask ourselves in the light of the messianic rise of Barack Obama, towards the most powerful military/political office in the World, is if the current events of his fathers homeland, Kenya, and when juxtaposed with the prophecies of Johanwa Owalo, are providing us with a vision of the United States future as it too appears to be boarding upon open civil war due to the destruction of its Middle Class and the continued rise to total rulership of its Imperial Class?

Another curious aspect of this new messianic figure Barack Obama, and in the context of the United States Presidential election as a whole, are that the two major American political parties have both fielded candidates whose families pasts included adherents to the practice of polygamy, with the Republican candidate Mitt Romney (currently not campaigning) being an adherent to the Mormon faith (whose mainstream members shun this practice), and Senator Obama, whose father, Barack Obama Sr., and upon his death in 1982 from an automobile accident, left behind 3 wives, 6 sons, and one daughter.

This last bit caught my eye: 3 wives? I just had to go and check out the link. There I found the following information about Barack's parents:

Barack Hussein OBAMA Sr. was born in 1936 in Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya and died in a car crash in Nairobi, Kenya in 1982, leaving three wives, six sons and a daughter. All but one of his children live in Britain or the United States. One of the brothers died in 1984. He is buried in the village of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya.
Shirley Ann DUNHAM was born on 27 November 1942 in Wichita, Kansas and died in 1995 of ovarian cancer.
Barack Hussein OBAMA Sr. and Shirley Ann DUNHAM were married in 1960 in Hawaii and had the following children:
1 i. Barack Hussein OBAMA, Jr.

Then, there are the grandparents, the parents of Barack's father:

Hussein Onyango OBAMA had several wives. His first wife was Helima, with whom he had no children. Second, he married Akuma and they had the following children:
i. Sarah OBAMA 1. ii. Barack Hussein OBAMA, Sr. iii. Auma OBAMA
Onyango's third wife was Sarah, the one often referred to by Barack as his "grandmother." She was the primary caregiver for Barack OBAMA Sr. after his mother, Akuma, left the family when her children were still young.

Well, who am I to criticize a woman who leaves her family when she is one of three wives? But, in that particular culture, being one of several wives was common, so it strikes me strange that this woman would abandon her child to another wife to raise. But that's what seems to have happened.

Apparently, the genealogists have been busy because you can track Obama's family on his American mother's side back a few more generations without much of interest about any of them.

So, why is this interesting?

Research shows that there are powerful genetic components to much of what we consider to be "personality" - including deviant personalities like psychopaths.

Now, I'm not saying that Barack is a psychopath, but I am saying that we ought to know as much about his forebears as possible because it is there that we will find the clues to what makes up Barack Obama and whether or not he has the potential to be "Obama the Terrible" or not. Frankly, other than having a grandmother who abandoned her child to another woman to raise on one side, and a suicide on the other, the whole family appears to be drearily mediocre.

And that is not to say that I even think that there is anything to this crazy "prophecy" quoted above. If you will notice, there is a little [1] at the end of the italicized quote that tells you there is a footnote source to the text. The footnote says: ""Visions of the Great Nyasaye, A Study of the Luo Religion in Kenya", Order of Sorcha Faal, Sister Mary McCrea © 1915"

Yeah, right! Cooked up by ole Sorcha his/herself! (Or is that "itself"?)

The only thing I could find on the net about this Kenyan Prophet, Johanwa Owalo, was the following:

In the Luo religion, troublesome spirits may cause misfortunes if they are not remembered or respected. Luo refer to spirits by the term juok, or "shadow." The Luo refer to God by many names that indicate his power. For example, Were means "one certain to grant requests"; Nyasaye, "he who is begged"; Ruoth, "the king"; Jachwech, "the molder"; Wuon koth, "the rain-giver"; and Nyakalaga, "the one who flows everywhere." Prayers and requests are addressed to God by those in need of his assistance.

Christianity has fused most notably with traditional religious beliefs and customs in "independent Christian churches," which have attracted large followings. For example, the Nomiya Luo Church, which started in 1912, was the first independent church in Kenya. The founder of this church, Johanwa Owalo, is believed to be a prophet similar to Jesus Christ and Muhammad. Owalo later teamed up with a Catholic priest and began teaching a new theology that rejected both the Pope and the doctrine of the trinity. [ LUO ]

So, no cigar!

In the end, you just have to wonder what the "Sorcha Faal" psy-op is trying to do here.

We are ruled by monsters

2008-01-28T16:57:00.001Z

We are ruled by monsters: "This is an unbelievable statement from one of our top medical advisors. Heroin overdoses kill many people; there is a cheap rescue option, though, kits called Narcan that cost a mere $9.50 and allow people to save lives. The Bush administration opposes their distribution."

We are indeed ruled by monsters. As Myers points out:

And it just gets worse. She opposes saving lives because watching a friend go into delirium, spasm, turn blue, and die in front of you is a pretty good deterrent to drug use. Even better, if you turn blue and die you won't be repeating your filthy drug habits ever again — the War on Drugs chalks up a win! We have a public health official advocating more deaths among victims of drug abuse as part of their compassionate approach to improving the health of our citizens.

(Via Pharyngula.)

ei: Closure turns Gaza's streets into sewers

2008-01-28T16:41:00.001Z

ei: Closure turns Gaza's streets into sewers: "GAZA CITY, 28 January (IPS) - A stream of dark and putrid sludge snakes through Gaza's streets. It is a noxious mix of human and animal waste. The stench is overwhelming. The occasional passer-by vomits.

Over recent days this has been a more common sight than the sale of food on the streets of Gaza, choked by a relentless Israeli siege."

For how long will this barbarism continue? The world looks on and does nothing. Seventy-six more Palestinians have died and 293 have been injured since the first of the year.

The future of the Palestinians is your future and my future. The pathocrats are using Palestine as the test case, a place to try out their weapons, their strategies. It will end up on your doorstep because for the pathocrats, we are as insignificant and subhuman as the Zionists consider the Palestinians.

The fundamentalist Chrsitians think Jesus is going to come and haul their butts out of the fire before it gets too rough. It is obvious that such an idea is wishful thinking to the extreme.

What is your excuse?

Probably a lot more subtle.

The Disappeared: SOTT.net and Google's conspicuous omissions

2008-01-28T00:05:00.000Z

Google omitting SOTT.net from search results?

A few days ago one of our readers brought this curious detail to our attention. While searching for an article on Google, they discovered a problem with results from SOTT.net being consistently omitted from Google listings.

Our correspondent writes:

"I find just now that if you search any of the text in "quotes" from Henry See's 'Provoking Stupidity and Violence' piece on Hal Turner, Google brings back zero results from SOTT. The same text will be brought up from other sites carrying the story though.

So, say you grab the first few words from it: "Dave Neiwert at Orincus" and search it, according to Google it doesn't exist on SOTT!

But if you do the same with the title: "Provoking Stupidity and Violence", the article is there!

Other search engines do bring back the SOTT page though. Now how might that happen!?"

How indeed!

Well, our curiosity piqued, we thought it best to go have a look. Was it possible that original articles written by the SOTT team were being 'disappeared' by Google, the thread back to the author snipped? Well, lets see...

Agents, Witches and other omissions

First up is the article brought to our attention:

Provoking Stupidity and Violence: Hal Turner outed as Agent Provocateur

Click for larger view.

Sure enough, if you copy the first few words of the article - "Dave Neiwert at Orincus" - as a search term for Google, the above is what you get and no, no sign of SOTT in there. To find SOTT we had to click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" and dig for another five pages to find where the original article lay buried.

Now that might just be some quirk of the system, so to be fair we gave it another shot with this next article written around the same time:

Wars Pestilence and Witches

This time taking the key phrase "triggered by reading Victor Clube", something specific so as not to have results diluted by any possible returns from other articles. The result, one return!

So you're thinking, well that has to be SOTT right? Wrong! Click below to see the results, on the left is the solitary return from Google, on the right the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" results - where once again we find SOTT and the Laura-Knight-Jadczyk blog.

Well, maybe these articles are 'too new' and for some reason not yet picked up by Google as 'relevant' enough. Though how a copy of an article on a lone blog in the example above is more 'relevant' than the article's originating page would seem more than a little nonsensical.

So for good measure, here we have some 'not so new' examples, to see if time has made any difference (apparently not). As above, initial quoted text search results are on the left, Google's 'omitted' results to the right.

Ultra-terrestrials and 9-11

Transmarginal Inhibition

The Bushes and The Lost King

Seems SOTT.net is one site that Google does not want inquiring minds to visit!

Rice: U.S. has no permanent enemies_English_Xinhua

2008-01-25T17:38:00.001Z

Rice: U.S. has no permanent enemies_English_Xinhua: ""I can assure you that America has no permanent enemies, because we harbor no permanent hatreds," Rice said in a speech to the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos."

Choke, gurggle, gurggle. No permanent hatreds? How about the Palestinians, the Iraqis, and anyone else that tries to resist US wishes?

"If Iran would suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities ...we could begin negotiations, and we could work over time to build a new, more normal relationship," Rice told political and business leaders at the meeting.

Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons development according to US intelligence.

"We do not want Iran to become a nuclear weapons power, and we will continue to hold Iran to its international obligations," she said.

What about Israel? Oh, yeah. Israel doesn't have any international obligations because it never signed the treaty.

Terrorist Blah Blah: U.S. says threat against airlines remains high

2008-01-25T17:29:00.001Z

U.S. says threat against airlines remains high: "DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - The United States is likely to keep a high threat designation for the airline industry because militants still see air travel as a target, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said."

Give me a break! Keep the people humiliated and cowed is more like it.

(Via Reuters: Top News.)

Spain: Suing the victim's family to repair his Audi

2008-01-25T17:23:00.001Z

Espagne: il poursuit la famille de sa victime pour réparer son Audi: ""

Tomas Delgado Bartolomé was going 160 km/h on a road where the limit was 90. He hit and killed a seventeen year old cyclist. The parents of the victim received 33,000 euros as compensation. Now, the driver is seeking compensation as well:

"I'm also a victim", he says. "We can't fix what happened to the boy, but mine we can". He is asking for 14,000 euros for damages to his car, an Audi A8 and another 6,000 euros to pay for the rental of a replacement car while his was being repaired.

(Via Rue 89.)

Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (7)

2008-01-20T16:51:00.001Z

From chapter 2 of The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Shoenman

The South African Connection

There is a particular dimension to this secret consort between Balfour and the Zionist leadership to betray the aspirations of the Palestinian people. It was Weizmann's close friend and future Prime Minister of South Africa, General Jan Smuts, who, as South African delegate to the British War Cabinet during World War I, helped push the British government to adopt the Balfour Declaration and to make a commitment to construct a Zionist colony under British direction.

The relationship between the Zionist movement and the South African settlers had evolved earlier, as had the friendship between General Smuts and Chaim Weizmann. By the turn of the century, a large Jewish population, primarily from Lithuania, had settled in South Africa. The Zionist movement regarded this population as particularly susceptible to Zionist ideas because of their already established settler status in South Africa. Zionist leaders travelled constantly to South Africa seeking political and financial support.

N. Kirschner, former chairperson of the South African Zionist Federation, provides a vivid account of the intimate interaction between Zionist and South African leaders, the identification of Zionists like Weizmann and Herzl with the South African conception of a racially distinct colonizing populace, and the importance of a virtual pact between the two movements. [22]

In identifying Zionism with South African settler ideology, Chaim Weizmann was following the early admiration expressed by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, for the quintessential colonial ideologue, Sir Cecil Rhodes. Herzl attempted to model his own political future on the achievements of Rhodes:

Naturally, there are big differences between Cecil Rhodes and my humble self, the personal ones very much in my disfavor; the objective ones are greatly in favor of the Zionist movement. [23]

Herzl advocated achieving Zionist dispersal of the Palestinians by using the methods pioneered by Rhodes, and he urged the formation of a Jewish counterpart to a colonial chartered company, an amalgam of colonial and entrepreneurial exploitation:

The Jewish Company is partly modelled on the lines of a great acquisition company. It might be called a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has no other than purely colonial tasks. [24]

The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconceived plan they will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations, regulate rivers and build their own habitations; their labor will create trade, trade will create markets, and markets will attract new settlers. [25]

By 1934, a major group of South African investors and large capitalists had established Africa-Israel Investments to purchase land in Palestine. The company still exists after 54 years with South Africans as joint stockholders, the assets held by Israel's Bank Leumi. [26]

General Jan Smuts was an active member of the Milner Group and had also gotten on well with Rhodes.

Footnotes:

22. N. Kirschner, Zionism and the Union of South Africa: Fifty Years of Friendship and Understanding, Jewish Affairs, South Africa, May 1960.
23. Theodor Herzl, Diaries, Vol.II, p.793.
24. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, p.33. Cited in Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1987), p.4.
25. Ibid., p.28.

Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (6)

2008-01-13T15:00:00.001Z

Concentric Circles

The Society of the Elect, the secret society founded and funded by Cecil Rhodes, was structured as follows:

1. General of the Society: Rhodes
2. Junta of the Three: Stead, Brett, Milner
3. Circle of Initiates: Cardinal Manning, General Booth, Bramwell Booth, "Little" Johnson, Albert Grey, Arthur Balfour
4. The Association of Helpers
5. A College, under Professor Seely, to be established "to train people in the English-speaking idea". [Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment,p. 39]

The structure was inspired by the structure of the Jesuits.

The fourth group, the Association of Helpers, were people who would be involved in promoting and implementing the policies of the group without being aware of the group's existence. For example, the Round Table groups organized in English-speaking countries around the globe were part of this Association of Helpers, but few of its members would have been aware of the secret group. The Round Table provided the official academic aura to the ideas, much the way the Israeli lobby groups like PNAC give legitimacy to the ideas of the neocons today. If public opinion needed to be turned for or against some idea, The Times could call in a member of the Round Table for the official justification of policy, just as the New York Times or the Washington Post, or Fox News or CNN can do the same today.

Back then, as today, the people who seel to influence the body politic know that if something is repeated often enough it will be believed by enough people that these policies can be justified, regardless of whether the arguments are nothing but a pack of lies. Just look at the repeated assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam was linked to al Quaeda.

So it seems clear that a small group of people, with access to larger numbers of people, can influence events and can play what W.T. Stead called, in the quote cited in the first post of this series, "so large a part in the history of the world". Rhodes, Stead, and Milner obviously thought so, and Quigley's book looks at their influence as individuals and as a group over a period of more than 50 years.

It is also obvious that the very rich have more influence than those who are poor. Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or David Rockefellar are heard in places that even people who are very comfortable are not. We also know that there are many people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Why, then, do so many people have trouble accepting that much of what happens in the world may well be the result of the influence of small groups of people?

And if one group were able to have members in several or many others, all without the knowledge of the other members, why could it not be able to influence a wide selection of these groups?

Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (5)

2008-01-11T18:28:00.001Z

Now let's look a little more closely at the interval of three years that Quigley suggests "is of some significance". The description given by Quigley of the removal of Lord Northcliffe from The Times hardly does justice to the story. The fight between Steed and Northcliffe is described in great detail by Douglas Reed in his book The Controversy of Zion. After explaining that with the easing of the censors after WWI, the free press reporting the actual facts on the ground in Palestine were the worst enemies of the Zionists, Reed describes how the most prominent of those enemies in Great Britain was taken off the scene:

At that stage in the affair England was of paramount importance to. the conspirators (I have shown that Dr. Weizmann and Mr. House both used this word) and in England the energetic Lord Northcliffe was a powerful man. The former Alfred Harmsworth, bulky and wearing a dank Napoleonic forelock, owned the two most widely read daily newspapers, various other journals and periodicals, and in addition was majority proprietor of the most influential newspaper in the world, at that time, The Times of London. Thus he had direct access to millions of people each day and, despite his business acumen, he was by nature a great newspaper editor, courageous, combative and patriotic. He was sometimes right and sometimes wrong in the causes he launched or espoused, but he was independent and unpurchasable. He somewhat resembled Mr. Randolph Hearst and Colone1 Robert McCormick in America, which is to say that he would do many things to increase the circulation of his newspapers, but only within the limits of national interest; he would not peddle blasphemy, obscenity, libel or sedition. He could not be cowed and was a force in the land.

Lord Northcliffe made himself the adversary of the conspiracy from Russia in two ways. In May 1920 he caused to be printed in The Times the article, previously mentioned, on the Protocols. It was headed, "The Jewish Peril, A Disturbing Pamphlet, Call for Enquiry". It concluded, "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable . . . are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?"

Then in 1922 Lord Northcliffe visited Palestine, accompanied by a journalist, Mr. J.M.N. Jeffries (whose subsequent book, Palestine: The Reality, remains the classic work of reference for that period). This was a combination of a different sort from that formed by the editors of The Times and Manchester Guardian, who wrote their leading articles about Palestine in England and in consultation with the Zionist chieftain, Dr. Weizmann. Lord Northcliffe, on the spot, reached the same conclusion as all other impartial investigators, and wrote, "In my opinion we, without sufficient thought, guaranteed Palestine as a home for the Jews despite the fact that 700,000 Arab Moslems live there and own it . . . The Jews seemed to be under the impression that all England was devoted to the one cause of Zionism, enthusiastic for it in fact; and I told them that this was not so and to be careful that they do not tire out our people by secret importation of arms to fight 700,000 Arabs. . . There will be trouble in Palestine. . . people dare not tell the Jews the truth here. They have had some from me".

By stating this truth, Lord Northcliffe offended twice; he had already entered the forbidden room by demanding "inquiry" into the origins of the Protocols. Moreover, he was able to publish this truth in the mass-circulation newspapers owned by him, so that he became, to the conspirators, a dangerous man. He encountered one obstacle in the shape of Mr. Wickham Steed, who was editor of The Times and whose championship of Zionism Dr. Weizmann records.

In this contest Lord Northcliffe had an Achilles heel. He particularly wanted to get the truth about Palestine into The Times, but he was not sole proprietor of that paper, only chief proprietor. Thus his own newspapers published his series of articles about Palestine but The Times, in fact, refused to do so. Mr. Wickham Steed" though he had made such large proposals about the future of Palestine, declined to go there, and denied publicity to the anti-Zionist case.

These facts, and all that now follows, are related (again, with surprising candour) in the Official History of The Times (1952). It records that Mr. Wickham Steed "evaded" visiting Palestine when Lord Northcliffe requested him to go there; it also records Mr, Wickham Steed's "inaction" following Lord Northcliffe's telegraphed wish "for a leading article attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism".

In what follows the reader' s attention is particularly directed to dates.

In May 1920 Lord Northcliffe had caused publication of the article about the Protocols in The Times. Early in 1922 he visited Palestine and produced the series of articles above mentioned. On February 26, 1922 he left Palestine, after his request, which was ignored, to the editor of The Times. He was incensed against the incompliant editor and had a message, strongly critical of his editorial policy, read to an editorial conference which met on March 2, 1922. Lord Northcliffe wished that Mr. Wickham Steed should resign and was astonished that he remained after this open rebuke. The editor, instead of resigning, decided "to secure a lawyer's opinion on the degree of provocation necessary to constitute unlawful dismissal". For this purpose he consulted Lord Northcliffe's own special legal adviser (March 7, 1922), who informed Mr. Wickham Steed that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal", "incapable of business" and, judging from his appearance, "unlikely to live long" and advised the editor to continue in his post! The editor then went to Pau, in France, to see Lord Northcliffe, in his turn decided that Lord Northcliffe was "abnormal" (March 31, 1922), and informed a director of The Times that Lord Northcliffe was "going mad".

The suggestion of madness thus was put out by an editor whom Lord Northcliffe desired to remove and the impressions of others therefore are obviously relevant. On May 3, 1922 Lord Northcliffe attended a farewell luncheon in London for a retiring editor of one of his papers and "was in fine form". On May 11, 1922 he made "an excellent and effective speech" to the Empire Press Union and "most people who had thought him 'abnormal' believed they were mistaken". A few days later Lord Northcliffe telegraphed instructions to the Managing Director of The Times to arrange for the editor's resignation. This Managing Director saw nothing "abnormal" in such an instruction and was not "in the least anxious about Northcliffe's health". Another director, who then saw him, "considered him to have quite as good a life risk as his own"; he "noticed nothing unusual in Northcliffe's manner or appearance" (May 24, 1922).

On June 8,1922 Lord Northcliffe, from Boulogne, asked Mr. Wickham Steed to meet him in Paris; they met there on June 11, 1922, and Lord Northcliffe told his visitor that he, Lord Northcliffe, would assume the editorship of The Times. On June 12,1922 the whole party left for Evian-les-Bains, a doctor being secreted on the train, as far as the Swiss frontier, by Mr. Wickham Steed. Arrived in Switzerland "a brilliant French nerve specialist" (unnamed) was summoned and in the evening certified Lord Northcliffe insane. On the strength of this Mr. Wickham Steed cabled instructions to The Times to disregard and not to publish anything received from Lord Northcliffe, and on June 13, 1922 he left, never to see Lord Northcliffe again. On June 18, 1922 Lord Northcliffe returned to London and was in fact removed from all control of, and even communication with his undertakings (especially The Times; his telephone was cut). The manager had police posted at the door to prevent him entering the office of The Times if he were able to reach it. All this, according to the Official History, was on the strength of certification in a foreign country (Switzerland) by an unnamed (French) doctor. On August 14, 1922 Lord Northcliffe died; the cause of death stated was ulcerative endocarditis, and his age was fifty-seven. He was buried, after a service at Westminster Abbey, amid a great array of mourning editors.

Such is the story as I have taken it from the official publication. None of this was known outside a small circle at the time; it only emerged in the Official History after three decades, and if it had all been published in 1922 would presumably have called forth many questions. I doubt if any comparable displacement of a powerful and wealthy man can be adduced, at any rate in such mysterious circumstances.

For the first time, I now appear in this narrative as a personal witness of events. In the 1914-1918 war I was one participant among uncomprehending millions, and only began to see its true shape long afterwards. In 1922 I was for an instant in, though not of the inner circle; looking back, I see myself closeted with Lord Northc1iffe (about to die) and quite ignorant of Zionism, Palestine, Protocols or any other matter in which he had raised his voice. My testimony may be of some interest; I cannot myself judge of its value.

I was in 1922, a young man fresh from the war who struggled to find a place in the world and had become a c1erk in the office of The Times. I was summoned thence, in that first week of June when Lord Northc1iffe was preparing to remove Mr. Wickham Steed and himself assume the editorship of The Times, to go as secretary to Lord Northc1iffe who was at Boulogne. I was warned beforehand that he was an unusual man whose every bidding must be quickly done. Possibly for that reason, everything he did seemed to me to be simply the expression of his unusual nature. No suspicion of anything more ever came to me, a week before he was "certified" and, in effect, put in captivity.

I was completely ignorant of "abnormal" Conditions, so that the expert might discount my testimony. Anyway, the behaviour I observed was just what I had been told to expect by those who had worked with him for many years. There was one exception to this. Lord Northcliffe was convinced that his life was in danger and several time said this; specifically, he said he had been poisoned. If this is in itself madness, then he was mad, but in that case many victims of poisoning have died of madness, not of what was fed to them. If by any chance it was true, he was not mad. I remember that I thought it feasible that such a man should have dangerous enemies, though at that time I had no inkling at all of any particular hostility he might have incurred. His belief certainly charged him with suspicion of those around him, but if by chance he had reason for it, then again it was not madness; if all this had transpired in the light of day such things could have been thrashed out.

I cannot judge, and can only record what I saw and thought at the time, as a young man who had no more idea of what went on around him than a babe knows the shape of the world. When I returned to London I was questioned about Lord Northcliffe by his brother, Lord Rothermere, and one of his chief associates, Sir George Sutton. The thought of madness must by that time have been in their minds (the "certification" had ensued) and therefore have underlain their questions, but not even then did any such suspicion occur to me, although I had been one of the last people to see him before he was certified and removed from control of his newspapers. I did not know of that when I saw them or for long afterwards. In such secrecy was all this done that, although I continued in the service of The Times for sixteen years, I only learned of the "madness" and "certification" thirty years late , from the Official History. By that time I was able to see what great consequences had flowed from an affair in which I was an uninitiated onlooker at the age of twenty-seven.

Lord Northcliffe therefore was out of circulation, and of the control of his newspapers, during the decisive period preceding the ratification of "the mandate" by the League of Nations, which c1inched the Palestinean transaction and bequeathed the effects of it to our present generation: The opposition of a widely-read chain of journals at that period might have changed the whole course of events. After Lord Northcliffe died the possibility of editorials in The Times "attacking Balfour's attitude towards Zionism" faded. From that time the submission of the press, in the manner described by the Protocols, grew ever more apparent and in time reached the condition which prevails today, when faithful reporting and impartial comment on this question has long been, in suspense.

Lord Northcliffe was removed from control of his newspapers and put under constraint on June 18, 1922; on July 24, 1922 the Council of the League of Nations met in London, secure from any possibility of loud public protest by Lord Northcliffe, to bestow on Britain a "mandate" to remain in Palestine and by arms to instal the Zionists there (I describe what events have shown to be the fact; the matter was not so depicted to the public, of course).

After reading the above account, I think you will agree that it throws an interesting light on the web we have been untangling that begins with Rhodes' 'vast semi-religious, quasi-political association'.

I note, as well, that the World Zionist Congress was also begun in the same decade as Rhodes' Society of the Elect. Coincidence?

Acknowledging Reality

2008-01-10T22:44:00.000Z

Some days it is really difficult to post articles to SOTT. I tend to generally go for the ones about Palestine or the plight of the Iraqis because this is what makes me angry and motivated. but some of the time recently I've been kind of avoiding those subjects (or at least diluting the impact, with some nice safe stuff about economic meltdown or cometary armageddon!) because the shock of some of these stories, about the rampant infliction of unimaginable suffering, is really... shocking. it hurts.

and it is cumulative. it is not just one mad senseless decapitation of a child somewhere in Sierra Leone. Instead it is layer upon layer of countless terror and misery and greed and pain and violence and wanton destruction that spans the globe whichever way I look. and every day there is more. It is crushingly horrific to contemplate.

Yet contemplate it, I must. Some stubborn part of me refuses to turn a blind eye, because to turn away in denial and to ignore the suffering of others, is somehow worse, denying a part of myself and making me complicit in perpetuating the world of pain.

It seems that facing up to and acknowledging this reality without flinching is a most important and most difficult task.

All I can do is take inspiration from others who work tirelessly on this day after day, and hope that my small contribution is of some value to the universe.

Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (4)

2008-01-10T12:41:00.001Z

The Milner group, according to Quigley, controlled The Times of London from 1912 on, although "[e]ven before this last date, members of the innermost circle of the Milner Group were swarming about the great newspaper." Quigley suggests that The Times had been controlled by what he calls the Cecil Bloc, a network of power and influence built up around the Cecil family, since 1884, and which had a great deal of overlapping with the later Milner Group. Quigley then remarks:

"When it became clear in 1911 that [Times editor] Buckle must soon retire [Geoffrey] Dawson was brought into the office in a rather vague capacity and, a year later, was made editor. The appointment was suggested and urged by Buckle. Dawson held the position from 1912 to 1941, except for the three years 1919-1922. This interval is of some significance, for it revealed to the Milner Group that they could not continue to control The Times without ownership. The Cecil Bloc had controlled The Times from 1884 to 1912 without ownership, and the Milner Group had done the same in the period 1912-1919, but, in this last year, Dawson quarreled with Lord Northcliffe (who was chief proprietor from 1908-1922) and left the editor's chair. As soon as the Milner Group, through the Astors, acquired the chief proprietorship of the paper in 1922, Dawson was restored to his post and held it for the next twenty-two years. Undoubtedly the skillful stroke which acquired the ownership of The Times from the Harmsworth estate in 1922 was engineered by Brand. During the interval of three years during which Dawson was no editor, Northcliffe entrusted the position to one of The Times' famous foreign correspondents, H.W. Steed." [Quigley, p. 102]

Northcliffe would come to regret his choice of Steed as editor and worked ardently to have him replaced in 1922, as we shall in another installment. We will also see what the "skillful stroke" really was.

The "Brand" mentioned is Lord Robert H. Brand who was one of the pillars of the Milner Group from the 1920s through the 1940s, after having served under Milner in South Africa in a group that came to be known as Milner's Kindergarten. He was the economist of the Round Table Group, an international organization set up by Milner to promote the ideas of his group. He was active at the Paris Peace Conference following WWI. Lord Brand was a partner and managing director of Lazard Brothers and Company.

Dawson was, according again to Wikipedia, "also a life-long friend and dining companion of Edward Wood, later Lord Halifax" who was instrumental in Britain's appeasement policy towards Hitler. Dawson was also a member of Milner's Kindergarten in South Africa.

Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (3)

2008-01-10T12:35:00.001Z

Lord Milner

Rhodes' Society of the Elect was formed in 1891 according to Quigley.

Among the first members of this "semi-religious, quasi-political association" were the aforementioned W.T. Stead, along with Baron Rothschild, Arthur Balfour, R.B. Brett, and Alfred Milner, who took over the direction of Rhodes' society upon the death of the latter in 1902. It then became known informally as the Milner Group.

Milner was an important figure in British politics from then until his death in the 1920s, but considering his role as heir to Rhodes, his importance is probably even greater than is appreciated. The most powerful member of the War Cabinet during the final years of the Great War, Milner made the remark that, "if the Arabs think that Palestine will become an Arab country they are much mistaken."

We should not be surprised, then, to learn that it was Lord Milner who drafted the 1917 letter declaring British support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the letter that came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. IT might also be noted that the letter was addressed to Lord Rothschild, the son of the Baron Rothschild who looked after the Rhodes fortune.

Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (2)

2008-01-09T20:26:00.001Z

R.B. Brett, Lord Esher

R.B. Brett, later to become Lord Esher, was another of the charter members of the Society of the Elect. His journal contains the following remarks after talking with Rhodes at Lord Rothschild's country house in February 1890:

"Came here last night. Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Balfour, Harcourts, Albert Grey, Alfred Lyttleton. A long talk with Rhodes today. He has vast ideas. Imperial notions. He seems disinterested. But he is very ruse and, I suspect, quite unscrupulous as to the means he employs." [Quigley, C., The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 38]

Let's Play "Connect the Dots": "Vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations..." (1)

2008-01-09T20:24:00.001Z

Cecil John Rhodes

"Mr. Rhodes was more than the founder of a dynasty. He aspired to be the creator of one of those vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations which, like the Society of Jesus, have played so large a part in the history of the world. To be more strictly accurate, he wished to found an Order as the instrument of the will of the Dynasty, and while he lived, he dreamed of being both its Caesar and its Loyola. It was this far-reaching, world-wide aspiration of the man which rendered, to those who knew him, so absurdly inane the speculations of his critics as to his real motives." [W.T. Stead, writing about Rhodes and cited in Quigley, C., The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 36]

William Thomas Stead was a journalist in late 19th century Great Britain. He was a close friend and confident of Cecil Rhodes, the man who funded the Rhodes Scholarships and gave his name, as they say, to Rhodesia. However, before founding the Rhodes Scholarships, Rhodes had drawn up four wills that mentioned a secret society called the Society of the Elect to be funded by his great fortune. Stead was a charter member and its chief representative in Britain.

Rhodes' fortune had come from his "business interests" in Africa that began in the diamond market. According to Wikipedia: "Financed by N.B. Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes achieved a virtual monopoly in the diamond mining industry. Rothschild also profiting on the yield from the future exploitation."

Emperor Sarkozy sparks storm

2008-01-09T10:50:00.001Z

Emperor Sarko spoke yesterday. Sarkozy sparks storm with wish to end 35-hour week this year - Expatica:

[Fillon] said Sarkozy had set the course for 2008, "planning to press

ahead with getting our country into line with changes in the world, changes

which we have for so long refused to recognise"...

Sarkozy defeated Socialist candidate Segolene Royale to win the presidency last year with a pledge to reform and modernise a France that many felt had lagged economic progress elsewhere, largely due to the burden of its generous social welfare system.

The neo-liberal discourse down to a T.

However, it is clear that the changes that the rest of the world are undergoing haven't been for the benefit of ordinary people. In country after country, their hard-won rights are being stripped away. Look at the current economic situation in the US, a country entering a new recession. The unions in the US have been effectively killed, first by buying them off, then by breaking them. Most workers get two weeks or less of vacation time a year compared to four, five, or six weeks for their co-workers in other countries, that is if they have any vacation time at all.

Is this the model the French want? It is certainly the model Sarko would like to impose. Of course, it isn't going to cut into his vacation time.

Look at the effects of neo-liberalism on Latin America. Look at the policies of globalization on agriculture, on small business, on the mom and pop corner stores, which mean the health of small communities as their downtowns die off at the hands of the chains like Wal-Mart or Leclerc.

The French have been wise to avoid it. Now Sarko is dragging them into it.

Just look at the reasoing hidden in the final paragraph. France's economic progress is hindered by its generous social programs! That translates as: the rich can't make as much money as they would like because the state is redirecting too much of it to the less fortunate.

Of course, in the neo-liberal economic discourse, that's OK. There should be no state aid for individuals, only for corporations.

Voters who go to the polls may win $1m - Telegraph

2007-12-20T19:48:00.001Z

And then there is this from Arizona: Voters who go to the polls may win $1m - Telegraph:

"Who wants to be a millionaire? Anyone using the ballot box in America's western state of Arizona, if campaigners have their way.

Under the scheme, which is designed to increase turnout, a $1 million (£550,000) prize will be handed to a voter selected at random after elections held every two years. Those taking part in party primary elections could win another $1 million prize. [...]

The next step will be openly paying people to vote for a particular candidate.

But the scheme has been attacked by those arguing that voting is a civic duty. They worry that voters would cast their ballots without examining the issues, or the candidates."

Uh, isn't that what is happening already?

A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US -- Signs of the Times News

2007-12-20T19:07:00.001Z

We put this story up a few days ago:A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US -- Signs of the Times News.

Eva Ósk Arnardóttir was on her way for a few days of shopping with some friends in New York. When she arrived at JFK airport, she was pulled aside for a visa violation stemming from 1995. In her account, she describes the humiliation she suffered, including being put into chains, being refused any communication with her embassy, refused a chance to sleep, and put into jail.

The story has drawn a lot of comments, most of which express outrage at the conduct of the customs and immigration officials. Most people are genuinely appalled at how she was treated.

Then there have been a few "America can do no wrong" type comments. What is of concern is that there are people who equate a visa violation (Arnardóttir overstayed her visa in 1995) and dangerous and violent criminal activity. For these black and white 'thinkers', a crime is a crime is a crime. For those who are able to think a little more clearly, the episode is one of many that show how the US is turning into a police state. For the a desscription of how this change has been happening through new laws passed by Congress, check out the excellent article by Stephen Lendman, Police State America - A Look Back and Ahead. For an overview of incidents similar to that befalling Eva Ósk Arnardóttir, read Militarized Police, Overreaction and Overkill: Have You Noticed It In Your Town Yet?.

New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection -- Signs of the Times News

2007-12-20T00:10:00.001Z

Laura has a new article up, a review of Mike Baillie's important book New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection:

Medieval depiction of the Black Death

I just finished reading this one and all I can say is: Wow! This was an intense book! Not a long one, either - just 208 pages including appendices. It's tight and economical with no wasted words or idle rambling around. Every example and temporary diversion is crucial to the central argument which is - brace yourself for this one - Mike Baillie (yeah, a real scientist and not a crackpot), is saying that the Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, said to have killed possibly two thirds of the entire population of Europe, not to mention millions all over the planet, probably wasn't Bubonic Plague but was rather Death By Comet(s)!

Oh yeah! That's far out, isn't it?

Then when you are done with that one, check out our article Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!

US woman launches 'Taserware' parties | The Register

2007-12-17T21:37:00.001Z

And then there was this gem....:

An enterprising Arizona woman has redefined the Tupperware party paradigm for the 21st century, and is hosting girlie get-togethers where security-conscious women can get to grips with the US's fave non-lethal lethal weapon - the Taser...

Shafman explained: 'I felt that we have Tupperware parties and candle parties to protect our food and house, so why not have a Taser party to learn how to protect our lives and bodies?'

The end of the last century saw the advent of Tupperware-inspired sex toy parties, which somehow seems fitting with the general ethos of the times. And, unfortunately, taser parties are very much part of the ethos of the period of the Bush Reich, the period opened by the false flag attacks on 9/11... "the day everything changed".

As excited as these women are by the tasers, there does appear to be a down side:

The only cause for concern among mothers was the C2's range of colours - black, blue, pink and silver - some of which might lead their kids to view the weapon as a toy. Mum-of-two Caily Scheur said: "I want to protect my children from [the Taser] just as much as I want to protect myself by using it."

Forbes: World No.1 baby--Shiloh _English_Xinhua

2007-12-17T14:40:00.001Z

It can now be reported that::

BEIJING, Dec. 17 -- Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's 1-year-old daughter Shiloh has been named the most influential infant in the world by Forbes magazine.

The only biological child of two of Hollywood's hottest stars tops the newly published list, compiled through media exposure over 2007-- beating an army of celebrity under-fives to the No. 1 spot.

Say what?

Influential with who? Their peers? The readers of Forbes?

The mind boggles at the lunacy of it all.

OK. You can resume your normal lives.

Militarized Police, Overreaction and Overkill: Have You Noticed It In Your Town Yet? -- Signs of the Times News

2007-12-16T15:08:00.000Z

Militarized Police, Overreaction and Overkill: Have You Noticed It In Your Town Yet? -- Signs of the Times News: Do you think that reports of police overreactions are overblown? Check out the pattern described in this article. Police in the US are being militarized, and that is not a good thing. The friendly neighbourhood cop on the corner is becoming a thing of the past....

Freedom's just another word for...

2007-12-14T19:47:00.001Z

©Richmond Times-Dispatch

People fighting over used iBooks offered for $50 by the Henrico County school system in Virginia. "A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday [August 2005], with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line."

Ever feel a compulsion to shop?

The following comes from an interview with Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, by Terrence McNally, AlterNet: Born to Shop: How Marketers Brainwash Babies:

Linn: Studies suggest that marketing is a factor in many of the problems facing children today. It's not the sole cause of any of them, but it's a factor in childhood obesity, eating disorders, precocious and irresponsible sexuality, youth violence, certainly underage drinking and tobacco use, family stress, the acquisition of materialistic values, the false notion that things will make us happy.

And the one that is dearest to my heart, the erosion of children's creative play. Which doesn't sound like much until you realize that such play is the foundation of learning, critical thinking, and empathy -- and I believe, also essential to democracy."[...]

McNally: You write that two of the most worrisome things to you -- and I suspect these are not things that people might think of immediately: One, that it's having an adverse effect on creativity and children's creative play, and two, on democracy itself.

Linn: There's a threat to creative play in a lot of different ways. One of them is the notion that you need certain products or brands in order to play. You can't play Harry Potter without a Harry Potter wand or a Harry Potter broomstick or this or that. Creativity comes out of silence and emptiness in some ways and out of desire. You need that in order to create. So if everything is given to you -- all of these media-linked toys, and the scripts themselves, and your seeing them over and over again. One thing that happens is that you don't need to be creative.[...]

McNally: You say it has a ripple effect on democracy. How so?

Linn: What children learn through marketing or in commercial culture is antithetical to democracy. What do marketers want them to learn? Impulse buying -- that's terrible in a democracy. Lifetime brand loyalty, unthinking brand loyalty -- well, we're certainly experiencing the problem with that. They're learning "me first" -- that's not helpful in a democracy.

A more subtle message in marketing is that there is a right way to do something. That's where we get the connection to the erosion of children's creative play. Creativity thrives in democracy and democracy thrives because of creativity. When we squelch that, we'd do very well in a dictatorship.

Long gone are the days when a couple of sticks served as guns or dolls were made by mothers for their daughters. Now it has to be a toy recognizable from the television or Internet.

The rights and responsibilities of citizenship have been reduced to one: the right to shop. Democracy has become having a choice between competing products. You vote with your dollar, or now, with your credit card. For those who are old enough to remember the propaganda during the cold war, one of the harshest critisisems directed at the Soviet Union was that the people there didn't have any choice. The state decided what products were on the shelves. There was only one of everything.

Academics who are considered serious theorists told us that the advent of the information multiverse, with 500 channels of TV coming to your home, would turn us into something more than consumers. With all of that choice, we would somehow become creators. Merely selecting from the programmes offered would allow us to customize our own newspapers or news programmes.

What a joke!

Citizenship has been emptied of its political and civic responsabilities. It is no longer a question of forming an opinion yourself in order to contribute to the political debate on the future of your society. Your only responsibility is economic. All you need to do is get down to the shopping centres and spend, spend, spend. Empty your wallet for America! Go into debt for America!

Remember what the decider-in-chief said in the days after 9/11?

I see an opportunity at home when I hear the stories of Christian and Jewish women alike, helping women of cover, Arab American women go shop because they're afraid to leave their home. Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, 2001

He must have loved that idea so much that he repeated a week later.

I was struck by this: that in many cities, when Christian and Jewish women learn that Muslim women — women of cover — were afraid of going out of their homes alone, that they went shopping with them, that they showed true friendship and support — an act that shows the world the true nature of America. Presidential Prime Time News Conference, Oct. 11, 2001

We'll pass by his remarks about "women of cover"... but the president's idea of what "true friendship and support" means is revealing and quite in tune with his other remarks. And it certainly does "show the world the true nature of America, or at least the America shaped by the pathocrats.

And then there was his famous cry of encouragement to rally Americans after 9/11:

I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity. They did not touch its source. America is successful because of the hard work, and creativity, and enterprise of our people. These were the true strengths of our economy before September 11th, and they are our strengths today. (Applause.)

Five years later, he stayed with this theme with his year end press conference on December 20, 2006.

As we work with Congress in the coming year to chart a new course in Iraq and strengthen our military to meet the challenges of the 21st century, we must also work together to achieve important goals for the American people here at home. This work begins with keeping our economy growing. … and I encourage you all to go shopping more.

In the interview above, Susan Linn mentions how marketing efforts are directed now towards babies. With different marketing campaigns aimed at younger and younger children, our children are being led straight from the cradle to the shopping centre, and the shopping centre has replaced the commons as the public meeting place. Just don't wear the wrong t-shirt because unlike the commons, the shopping centre is private property.

To paraphrase an old song, freedom's just another word for having the right to shop.

U.S. tightens screening of Canadians with visas

2007-11-24T17:27:00.001Z

U.S. tightens screening of Canadians with visas:

Canadians entering the United States with visas will have to scan 10 digits rather than just two under a newly expanded security program launching later in November.

It is instructive to see that at the same time the pathocrats of North America are making it easier and easier for capital to move from the US into Mexico and Canada and for resources to move from Mexico and Canada into the US, the citizens of the US's neighbours are finding it harder and harder to actually visit the greatest and freest country on earth.

The neoliberal economic religion, given from the prophet Milton Friedman, has no concern for the populations of the countries on which it is imposed, a point made with painstaking research by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, where she details how the imposition of Friedman's free market theology is intricately linked with the imposition of tyrannical regimes.

It is only going to get worse.

Right-Wing Pundits on Killing Liberals

2007-11-24T15:25:00.001Z

One of the indices of the ponerization of society is a change in the use of language. Not only do spurious arguments get made, such as "We invaded Iraq to bring democracy", but language takes on an emotional colour intended to provoke and incite animosity and hatred, as the cleavage between the haves and the have-nots, the insiders and the outsiders, those in power and those without power, deepens.

Here are some examples of right-wing venom collected by Dave Neiwert in a recent article entitled The Politics of the Personal: The Urge to Purge:

Rush Limbaugh: "I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus -- living fossils -- so we will never forget what these people stood for."

Ann Coulter: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Or: "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too."

Bill O’Reilly: “Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you're a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything and they don't care, couldn't care less.”

Michael Barone: “Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and ... transnationalism.”

Karl Rove: “Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”

Kathleen Parker: “Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: ‘These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.’ "

When confronted with the bad taste, to put it mildly, of such remarks, the pundits say that it is only a rhetorical flourish, that no one takes it seriously, that they don't really mean that liberals should be killed. But even if that were the case, which I doubt, it reveals the pathological underpinnings of their thought processes. They are intolerant, authoritarian, and violent. They are not interested in dialogue and any exchange of ideas. They believe that they have the truth. They mirror the same attitude towards people who disagree with them as does the president when he said in December 2000 that things would be a lot easier if he were a dictator.

Ha ha. Some joke. Look where we are seven years into the Bush Reich. The US Constitution has been disembowled, the rights of US citizens have been exchanged for tyrannical measures that we are told will increase our security, anyone can now be taken away and tortured with no recourse to the due process of the law.

Dictator indeed.

No Mandela’s in Iraq, no gays in Iran, what’s a world leader to do?

2007-09-27T10:11:00.000Z

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela? Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas." -- George W. Bush, September 19, 2007

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country." -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, September 25, 2007

Listening to these lines from two religious leaders, Ahmedinijad democratically elected, Bush imposed by judiciary fiat, one must come to the conclusion that nuclear weapons were on the mind of both as they said it. No gays in Iran? Not possible! No Mandelas in Iraq? How can that be after all the promises from Donald Rumsfeld that they were North, South, East and West of Baghdad. Where did Saddam hide all those Mandelas? Is Ahmedinijad hiding all those gays in subterranean nuclear weapons factories? Are we to believe that no gays exist in Iran? Show me the evidence! Or is the lack of evidence, evidence that Iran is in fact the Islamic world's answer to Provincetown?

Maybe I have it backwards. George Bush is really gay. That's why James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, the Republican Christian Homosexual Military Prostitute and White House Press Reporter had numerous "sleepovers" at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue according to Secret Service logs. It's not about nuclear weapons. George Bush really wants to invade Iran to liberate the homosexual community with the added benefit of opening up Iran to gay conservatives. You see, all those Republicans and their supporters soliciting sex in Men's rooms and from Congressional pages really need a place to go where they aren't so oppressed by the laws they helped to write and to get free sex change operations if they want to because the health care in the US really sucks.

Wait. Don’t bother. I have a solution. Lock Bush in the same room as Ahmedinijad and let them either discover that one needs a sex change or the other is Mandela. No. That wouldn't be right. After all, Bush doesn't look good in drag.

I have the answer. Invite George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a forum to discuss petty tyrants. Columbia University president Lee Bollinger could host it. Among the questions he could ask Bush is if Mahmoud is trying to kill his daddy like Saddam had, and he could ask Ahmadinejad if he denies the native American holocaust, too. Of course Ahmadinejad doesn't stand a chance against Bush, who should know, since his grand daddy was such a huge supporter of Nazi Germany, that is when he wasn't trying to overthrow the US government.

“I Wake Up Screaming—Vietnam and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”

2007-08-13T12:08:00.001Z

An exerpt from “I Wake Up Screaming—Vietnam and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” by Lucian J. La Joie describing his experiences in Vietnam:

...A native village flooded during the monsoon season. Every year this village floods during the rainy season. An American would think, move the village to higher ground. To the native peasant Vietnamese, the ancestral homeland where the past generations are buried is one of the most precious, important possessions of life. This is one of the reasons that the Strategic Hamlet Program of the South Vietnamese government failed. Uprooting the peasant farmers from their homeland and keeping them in "protected enclaves" generated resentment between the peasants and the South Vietnamese Government.

At this particular village, the villagers were being evacuated by the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). There was a shortage of boats to evacuate the villagers. Too many people, not enough boats. The ARVN were in charge of the operation. Our squad was assigned for extra security under operational control of the ARVN. The ARVN Captain said because of the shortage of boats the peasants could only bring one item as a carryon. One suitcase, one bag, one box, one only, no exceptions, one only.

A Vietnamese peasant woman shows up. Under one arm she has her baby about one year old. Under her other arm she had a small pig about fifteen inches long. The ARVN Captain stops her and says only one item as carryon. The peasant woman protests, arguing that the human baby is a live child and not a carryon. The ARVN Captain will not budge on his position. Only one carryon per person.

The peasant woman steps back and places her baby face down in the river and drowns it, holding the baby until it quits kicking and lets go of the baby's body and climbs into the boat with the pig under her arm. The peasant woman could always have another baby but she might not ever own another pig. That is how poor the peasants were.

Tears stream down the mother's face as she watches the small corpse float down the river. The ARVN Captain gloats and the Marines are getting pissed off. We are here to help these people, not to enforce a police state. The ARVN troops think what has just happened is funny.

After the baby's corpse floats down stream about fifty yards the ARVN troops use it as target practice, laughing all the while. I walk over to the ARVNs who are shooting and use my steel helmet and hit the ARVNs in the head and knock one of them unconscious. I sucker punch them with my helmet. The rest of the ARVNs point their weapons at me and, in response, all the marines point their weapons at the ARVNs. It is a Mexican standoff.

Here we are, supposed to be allies and we are pointing weapons at each other ready to shoot the shite out of each other. The ARVN Captain orders the u.s. Marines to lower their weapons because he outranks everybody. I tell the ARVN Captain he is a bad officer and marines do not take orders from bad officers. The ARVN Captain then orders the marines to provide security until the ARVNs had evacuated all the peasants. I tell the Captain ''F**k you, we're leaving! 'The marines promptly get into their boat and escort the boats of peasants that are already loaded in boats down the river.

Upon returning to our parent unit, Echo Company, I filed an after action report detailing the incident, including statements from those who witnessed the Vietnamization [i.e. “pornerization”] was in progress. The report was buried in the paperwork. Life is cheap in a war zone.

What can you say? You know it goes on. You know it is happening right now in Iraq. You know this is the attitude of the IDF to the Palestinians.

Rudy Giuliani on Freedom

2007-08-13T12:01:00.001Z

From the Rocky Mountain Chronicle - RUDY! we get this quote from Rudy Giuliani on his vision of freedom:

"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

Psychopathic Bosses Get Promoted

2007-08-04T14:30:00.001Z

In a Reuters article Bad bosses get promoted, not punished?: we learn that "In the study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways."

One of the study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia, wrote that:

"The fact that 64.2 percent of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable -remarkably disturbing."

It won't come as a shock to anyone who has worked in an American company. A large part of the frustration of workers in the US comes from facts like this. The corrupt, the cruel, and those without a sense of compassion rise to the top while people who treat others with curtesy, respect, and understanding fall to the bottom. It is explained away with rhetoric about needing to be lean and mean in "today's economy", about being loyal to the company -- as opposed to your fellow humans. These are examples of what Andrew Łobaczewski calls "paramoralisms", phrases that appear on the surface to appeal to our best instincts but which on analysis are found have a meaning that is exactly the opposite, that is, to cover-up and excuse the worst horrors under a blanket of righteous-sounding words:

Paramoralisms: The conviction that moral values exist and that some actions violate moral rules is so common and ancient a phenomenon that it seems to have some substratum at man’s instinctive endowment level (although it is certainly not totally adequate for moral truth), and that it does not only represent centuries’ of experience, culture, religion, and socialization. Thus, any insinuation framed in moral slogans is always suggestive, even if the “moral” criteria used are just an “ad hoc” invention. Any act can thus be proved to be immoral or moral by means of such paramoralisms utilized as active suggestion, and people whose minds will succumb to such reasoning can always be found.

In searching for an example of an evil act whose negative value would not elicit doubt in any social situation, ethics scholars frequently mention child abuse. However, psychologists often meet with paramoral affirmations of such behavior in their practice, such as in the above-mentioned family with the prefrontal field damage in the eldest sister. Her younger brothers emphatically insisted that their sister’s sadistic treatment of her son was due to her exceptionally high moral qualifications, and they believed this by auto-suggestion. Paramoralism somehow cunningly evades the control of our common sense, sometimes leading to acceptance or approval of behavior that is openly pathological.

Paramoralistic statements and suggestions so often accompany various kinds of evil that they seem quite irreplaceable. Unfortunately, it has become a frequent phenomenon for individuals, oppressive groups, or patho-political systems to invent ever-new moral criteria for someone’s convenience. Such suggestions often partially deprive people of their moral reasoning and deform its development in youngsters. Paramoralism factories have been founded worldwide, and a ponerologist finds it hard to believe that they are managed by psychologically normal people.

The conversive features in the genesis of paramoralisms seem to prove they are derived from mostly subconscious rejection (and repression from the field of consciousness) of something completely different, which we call the voice of conscience.

A ponerologist can nevertheless indicate many observations supporting the opinion that various pathological factors participate in the tendency to use paramoralisms. This was the case in the above-mentioned family. When it occurs with a moralizing interpretation, this tendency intensifies in egotists and hysterics, and its causes are similar. Like all conversive phenomena, the tendency to use paramoralisms is psychologically contagious. That explains why we observe it among people raised by individuals in whom it was developed alongside pathological factors.

This may be a good place to reflect that true moral law is born and exists independently of our judgments in this regard, and even of our ability to recognize it. Thus, the attitude required for such understanding is scientific, not creative: we must humbly subordinate our mind to the apprehended reality. That is when we discover the truth about man, both his weaknesses and values, which shows us what is decent and proper with respect to other people and other societies.

(Via Signs of the Times.)

Boris Berezovsky: Oligarch, Murderer, MI6 Agent

2007-07-13T15:59:00.000Z

Today there's an interesting item on SOTT that caught my attention: Brazil orders Berezovsky, soccer bosses detained. It's one of those little "tip of the ice-berg" things that just make you go "hmmmm..." The story tells us that:

Judge Fausto Martin de Sanctis froze the bank accounts of one of Brazil's most popular teams and said Interpol would be asked to carry out the overseas arrests of Berezovsky, Kia Joorabchian and Nojan Bedroud.

The article then notes - rather disingenuously in my opinion - that:

Berezovsky was Russia's most prominent and controversial businessman in the mid- and late-1990s and a Kremlin insider under Russia's first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin.

But he fled to London in 2000 and has become a vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin. Britain has annoyed Moscow by rejecting requests to extradite the businessman to Russia on corruption charges.

So, Russia wants Boris but the UK won't give him up, and now, all of a sudden, Brazil wants him too and is issuing an arrest warrant? Say what?! Is somebody putting the screws to Boris? It's hardly likely that London will give him up... hmmm... maybe that's the point: somebody is putting the screws to MI6 through Boris? Just to refresh your mind, have a look at the following items:

Berezovsky on wanted list in 2001

Russians point finger at Berezovsky over ex-spy's death

Polonium detected at Berezovsky's office

Boris Berezovsky: The first oligarch

Berezovsky to be interviewed by Russian detectives

Blockbuster Revelations!! Mystery witness implicates Berezovsky in Litvinenko murder

Berezovsky:'I am plotting a new Russian revolution'; London exile Berezovsky says force necessary to bring down President Putin

Russia vows legal action against Berezovsky on sedition charges

Lugovoi be aware! Berezovsky says you are a dead man.

Britain: Litvinenko murder not intelligence-linked. Berezovsky denies his MI6 connections

Lugovoi says Litvinenko, Berezovsky spied for U.K.

Russia says Litvinenko visited Chechnya to kill for Berezovsky

Berezovsky fraud case goes to court

Berezovsky charged with plotting coup in Russia - lawyer

No surprise! CPS advises police no prosecution of Boris Berezovsky over press report

Russia says U.K. refusal to open case vs. Berezovsky ungrounded

UPDATE!! Oooh! Things are heating up! Lookit this:

Britain 'will expel Russian diplomats over Litvinenko'

Russian diplomats are facing expulsion from Britain as the crisis over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko escalated today.

Moscow and London are on the brink of a damaging showdown after President Vladimir Putin refused to hand over the main suspect in the poisoning of the former spy.
The Foreign Office is expected to announce a tough response as early as next week after Moscow formally confirmed it would not extradite Andrei Lugovoi. Downing Street is considering a range of "punitive measures" including ejecting diplomats - a move certain to prompt a "tit for tat" response from Moscow.

Looks to me like some "tit for tat" stuff is already going on here!

Myth and History in The Bible

2007-07-08T11:23:00.000Z

As an amateur historian, researcher and author, I spend most of my time reading scholarly papers, articles and books on a wide range of historical topics. Giovanni Garbini, author of the "Myth and History in The Bible" is my new favorite and I am hoping that more of his work will be translated into English and read by everyone, not just scholars.

It would be difficult to summarize the many fascinating subjects covered in this small volume: "The Myths of the Origins of Israel", "Cain's Impunity", "Abraham and Damascus", "Reuben's Incest and the Contested Primogeniture", "Moses and the Law", "Davidic Traditions", "The Calf of Bethel", "Ezra's Birth", "Birth and Death of a Messiah", "The End of Myth". In summation, Garbini writes:

"The examination of some aspects, usually neglected, though evident and essential, of the mythic reconstruction of Israel's past and of the figure of its God as the Hebrew religious thought presented them in the Bible presents us an apparently paradoxical situation. The Law and the Prophets ... codify and exalt a kind of religion centred on the cult of Yahweh, national and sole true god, who established the Jerusalem temple as his only seat; from the other, they reveal explicitly the moral inconsistency of that god... his unfulfilled promises and the vacuity of all the practices related to his cult.

"The first chapter of Isaiah, which opens the section of Latter Prophets and, as all the writings placed at the beginning of a collection, gives the key to its interpretation, cannot be more explicit in this regard. The chiefs of Jerusalem, that is the high priests, are called 'rulers of Sodom' and its population 'people of Gomorrah (Isa. 1:10). Against them, in the following verses, God refuses all the cultic practices: sacrifices, burnt offerings, visits to the temple, oblations, incense, new moon, Sabbath, readings, fastings, assemblies, feasts, prayers. It is not pointless to ask ourselves what was the effect on the priests of the obsessive motif, present in all the Bible, of gratitude to Yahweh for the deliverance of Israel from Egypt: such a deliverance never took place and was invented by themselves to allude, probably, to their return from Babylon.

"...[T]he interesting thing is that, apart from the many details concerning the external activities of the priesthood (which any Jew in Jerusalem could easily see with his own eyes), the texts do not contain any information about the structures, the organization and the other activities of the priestly class; it is like seeing only the front of a building.

"In these biblical writings we find not only a description of the religious practices, but often also their history, their meaning and their mythic origin, and since the religion of Israel is the expression of its relationship with Yahweh, all Israel's history becomes the history of this religion. In other words, these books fix a precise moment in the history of Hebrew religion, when a deep reflection on its nature was carried out. On the basis of this reflection, the entire past was reinterpreted (not as it was, but rather as they wanted it to be) and the future imagined, a glorious future with Jerusalem at the centre of the world."

Garbini writes in a companion volume, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel, an amplification of the above problem:

"Biblical Yahwism certainly reflects a monotheistic conception, but at the same time it is something less and something more than monotheism. ...Yahwism seems to be something less than monotheism: God is certainly one, but he is essentially the God of just one people and he acts only with them. If we reflect on this aspect, which is the central nucleus of the Old Testament, we discover that here we have what the historians of religions call henotheism rather than monotheism. On the other hand, Yahwism is also, and perhaps above all, an extremely rational vision of the world and of the privileged position that the people of Israel occupies in the world. So it would be legitimate to ask whether one could consider as a real religion, with all that this word implies.. a doctrine like that taught in the Old Testament in the first millennium BC, which denies the survival of the spirit."

He then asks how it is that a 'religion' which attributes importance to liturgies practiced only in Jerusalem, (that is, not by all Jews at that period of history), which denies survival of the human spirit, could even have survived and spread, especially after the destruction of said temple.

Good question.

Myth and History in the Bible is full of detailed linguistic analyses that are rational, sophisticated and, at the same time, easy to follow. An interested non-scholar can easily read this book and begin to understand just exactly what a "religious scam" Judaism really is, though, of course, it offers no answer as to how it managed to be foisted on the Western world via its equally mythical Christianity. (Those answers are contained in Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology). It also makes it abundantly clear that the Jews have no right to steal the land of the Palestinians at all because their whole history and claim to Palestine is based on myth and fraud.

A definite "must-read" though be prepared for a (very) few awkwardnesses in the translation; I'm sure it wasn't easy to translate academic Italian. Even so, it is a surprising easy read even if you must often pause to consider the importance of Garbini's insights.

Paul Krugman: Sacrifice Is for Suckers

2007-07-06T23:01:00.001Z

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Sacrifice Is for Suckers: "Back when the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson%u2019s identity began, Mr. Bush insisted that if anyone in his administration had violated the law, %u201Cthat person will be taken care of.%u201D Now we know what he meant. ..."

No comment necessary.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

US warns of 'spectacular acts of terror' | Herald Sun

2007-06-29T17:47:00.001Z

US warns of 'spectacular acts of terror' | Herald Sun: ""

They'd know, wouldn't they?

(Via Ron Paul Online.)

Progress???

2007-06-18T15:05:00.001Z

In an recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Steven Landsburg talks about "progress".

After arguing that real incomes have been growing for the past one-hundred years and that it will continue on into the future, he writes:

Against a backdrop like that, the temporary ups and downs of the business cycle seem fantastically minor. In the 1930s, we had a Great Depression, when income levels fell back to where they had been 20 years earlier. For a few years, people had to live the way their parents had always lived, and they found it almost intolerable.

Can you spot the sleazy argument here, the cherry-picking of data? He reduces the Great Depression to income levels falling back to levels seen 20 years earlier. And people found having to live like their parents 'almost intolerable'!

Gone are the bankruptcies, the lost houses, the lost farms, the unemployment, the food lines, the riots, and the suffering of real people faced with a world that was collapsing around them. Landsburg abstracts the blood out of this sorrowful period in US history by reducing it to a few statistics. For him, it was a moment when incomes levels fell back... that is, pay cheques weren't as big... The point is, there were no pay cheques for many people. There were no jobs. Income "fell back" to zero. Sure, average all of them together and you get his antiseptic paramoralism. But statistics only live on a page of paper. They don't have houses and children to feed.

You can almost hear him, "Sure, it may have been rough for a few years, but when it got better, everyone benefited! They were better off than they had been before!"

Maybe, the ones who didn't die fighting in the Second World War.

Are there people who actually believe this trash?

We've got more comments on this article on the Signs site. Feel free to add your own.

De Gaulle and the Seven Day War

2007-06-10T15:54:00.001Z

Robert Fisk cites the following comment from Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, on the Israeli attack on Egypt in June 1967:

Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel "is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism'"

As Fisk points out in his article, de Gaulle was the only French politician at the time to see it as it was and have the courage to speak it. He may well have been the only non-Arab politician!

A year later, the events of May 1968 in France pushed de Gaulle out of power.

Unconscionable Squatters

2007-06-09T15:07:00.001Z

The Forward, which bills itself as "the Jewish daily", had an article this week on American Jews who choose to become illegal settlers on occupied Palestinian land. The "difficulties" they face are illustrated by the following comment:

"'Before we found Neve Daniel, my husband told me, 'I love you and I want to live in Israel, but I'm very materialistic and if I don't have a nice house, we're not moving,' said Lara Kwalbrun, a peppy mother of six, as she gave a tour of her luxurious new home while toting a baby in her arms."

As long as moving into an illegal settlement meant life in a mobile home, a large number of American Jews weren't interested. They left it up to their more pioneering and violent brethren to go out and "colonize" the area, to actually confront the owners of the land with clubs and guns and chain saws and bulldozers. Now that the out and out outlaws have "claimed" the land, so to speak, and the base can move into a gated community fed by water siphoned away from the Palestinians and policed by troops paid for by American taxpayers, these new settlers can move in and never have to come into contact with the people they have displaced. You know, the ones walled in.

Another choice quote:

"Jerusalem has evolved to be like Manhattan in terms of prices and having to live in an apartment," said Michael Chernofsky, an orthopedic surgeon from Pennsylvania who recently moved with his family to Efrat, a Gush Etzion settlement. "If you want to live in a house, you need to move out to the suburbs."

Language is a powerful means of creating an illusory world. We make up words to replace other words, antiseptic words to replace bothersome and ugly words, neutral or comfortable words that point away from injustice and suffering. The Palestinians are being ejected out of Jerusalem by force and by a series of laws that mean that if they are essentially imprisoned on the West Bank and unable to return to their homes in East Jerusalem, after a certain amount of time, the state can confiscate their property.

"Suburbs" brings to mind the manicured lawns of the New Jersey many of these settlers have left. "Suburbs" has associations of being the epitome of American life. "Suburbs" is a telling example of how language is used to create an illusory world that we take for reality.

Settlements on Palestinian land are illegal in international law. The settlers are criminals. Not only that, they are actively abetting the genocide of the original inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians who have been walled off into compounds on their own land.

If such actions don't make your blood boil, then you probably don't have a conscience. I'm not talking about a set of rules you live by that let you believe you are a 'good person', the kind of thing you can apply mechanically as a series of if-then statements that allow you to see how much you can get away with in any given situation. We all go through that stage as kids, and some people do actually outgrow it. Though from the state of the world, it is clear that it is a small percentage. But there are unfortunately large numbers of people for whom this stage represents the pinnacle of their moral development.

Illegal settlers are certainly counted among their number. They are, however, buttressed in their selfishness by the ideology that justifies killing off the Palestinians in the name of their god, so their crimes, crimes to anyone of conscience, become holy acts under the ideology of Judaism as well as to their Christian supporters.

There is no excuse for these acts. None. And anyone with a functioning conscience knows this, feels this deep in his or her gut. Any attempt to justify or explain away the theft of land and genocide of the people of Palestine is a clear marker that the individual has no conscience or that it is so far asleep that it may as well not exist.

USA TODAY/Gallup Poll results - USATODAY.com

2007-06-08T19:22:00.001Z

The following rather scary news came fromUSA TODAY/Gallup Poll results today. Sixty-six percent (66%) of Americans, according to the poll, think that "Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" is either "Definitely true" (38%) or "Probably true" (27%).

The weird, though perhaps not surprising, thing is that 53% of Americans also think that evolution is either definitely or probably true. And just to make it simple for them, the poll defined evolution as "the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life". That a certain percentage of the respondents were unable to see a contradiction between the two responses is what is weird. Millions of years on the one hand, under ten thousand on the other... anyone see a problem here?

The poll also checked on whether or not the people responding considered that they were familiar with the ideas of evolution and creationism. Here, 82% thought they were either very familiar or some-what familiar with evolution, while 86% thought they were very or some-what familiar with the ideas of creationism. What can we say? No one thinks they're stupid.

That Perception Thing: Romney bemoans tarnished U.S. image

2007-06-06T20:33:00.001Z

Really. It is all out there for anyone with two firing neurons to see. The Associated Press offers us the following:

Republican Mitt Romney on Wednesday jabbed at President Bush, saying the image of the United States has suffered globally based on the perception that it invaded Iraq unilaterally.

[...] "There has been the perception that we have not been as open and participative with other nations as is our normal approach," he said.

Perception? Because most of the rest of the world opposed the invasion, this is only a "perception"???

He said the next president must not only re-engage Middle East and European leaders — labeling France's new conservative leader Nicolas Sarkozy as a potential "blood brother" — but also Latin American nations.

Romney said his call for expanding the U.S. prison camp for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was consistent with that world view, despite condemnation from some human rights groups and other countries. He said the prison's intense interrogating environment is necessary to prevent future attacks.

"I think some people see Guantanamo as a source of America's arrogance, and I see it as a source of America's resolve," Romney said.

He said terrorists such as Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed had broken when they were kept from the traditional U.S. justice system with legal representation and typical court proceedings.

Romney added: "The food down there is unbelievable. This is not this gulag; this is a modern prison which treats people with dignity and respect."

Romney's call for expanding Guantanamo is certainly consistent with his world view because his world view is to make an alliance with the pathological elite of other countries against people of conscience the world over. They will need camps such as Guantanamo spread out over the globe to handle those who resist the increasing authoritarianism and tyranny of the pathocrats.

What is worrisome is that Romney can say this stuff and no one bats an eye. He whitewashes the use of terror using the antiseptic wording "intense interrogating environment" while in the same breath describing it as a place that treats people with dignity and respect! Now, anyone with a conscience will know that the two concepts are contradictory and mutually exclusive. There can't be torture and respect and dignity at the same time. Torture is predicated on treating the victim as less than human, as not worthy of respect. Yet this man is a contender for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party.

So where does that leave the United States? Is it only a question of perception? Torture, invasion, occupation, the thoughtless killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, support for the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel, all only a question of perception?

If you're a psychopath, yes. In the mind of the psychopath, reality is whatever they think it is. And as long as people of conscience don't call them out on it and insist on the reality of reality, the one we share, that we are born into and die in, then nothing is going to change. As long as we define reality as that little bit of turf we touch in our own lives, that turf that is as yet untouched by false arrests, torture, job loss, illegal detention and the like, and as long as we turn our backs on what is happening to others of our kind, that is, people of conscience, just because it is out of sight, out of mind and doesn't touch us directly, we are all a bit psychopathic ourselves.

'I did what I thought was right'

2007-06-06T19:48:00.001Z

The Guardian brings us the following report on Tony Blair's exit from politics:

Mr Blair announced the handover date in a conciliatory, confessional, almost humble speech in his Durham constituency, in which he apologised for when he had fallen short, but insisted "hand on heart" that he had always done what he had thought was right for the country. [...]
He added: "I was, and remain, as a person and as a prime minister, an optimist. Politics may be the art of the possible; but at least in life, give the impossible a go. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong, that's your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country."

And that is really the trouble. Everybody thinks that what they are doing "is right". How many people do you know who do things because they think they are wrong?

Meanwhile, a report from the new French news site set up by former journalists from Liberation, Rue89 tells us that Hillary Clinton made the outrageous remark over the weekend that the Iraqis didn't seize the opportunity that the US gave them! And there are people who still think that there are differences of importance between the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States! No wonder the Dems are still supporting the war.

Al "Joseph Goebbels" Gore

2007-06-03T06:21:00.000Z

While reading Global Warming: They call this a consensus? this morning, I noted a very telling statement:

I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

The article also tells us:

Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.

This, of course, reminded me of the fact that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, followed two primary rules when brainwashing the German public. The first was to tell a big lie loud enough and long enough so that people would eventually start to believe it. The second rule was to always accuse your enemy of your own worst crime.

Airport Security

2007-05-07T19:56:00.001Z

I recently had the... opportunity... to fly through the UK. It was a brief stopover on my way somewhere else. Flying these days is an absurdity designed to insult our intelligence. First, there is the new regulation that liquids must be placed inside a clear plastic freezer bag. The bag keeps the items separate from the rest of your belongings on any bag you carry on. This rule is the aftermath of last summer's accusations that the invisible but omnipresent 'Islamic terrorists' had a plan to make explosives in an aircraft toilet, a dastardly plot that was, fortunately, foiled by the heroic efforts of British intelligence.

Well, more than one expert has written on the absurdity of making explosives on an airplane without the necessary laboratory equipment, but that information doesn't make it onto Fox News, the BBC, or the mainstream newspapers.

The long and the short of it is that flyers are forced to put their toothpaste, shampoo, perfume, bottled water, and any other liquid into plastic bags. And we are supposed to think that we are safer for it. In France, certain soft cheeses, such as camembert, must also be put into the plastic bags.

I arrived in the UK with two bags: the first a small bag with my clothes and the second a bag with papers, books, and my laptop. I had no trouble getting onto the plane in France with them. That changed in the UK. Arriving at the security checkpoint before having my bags scanned, I was stopped and told that I was only permitted one carry-on bag. A new rule, I was told. I stopped, more than a little non-plussed by the remark. I said I hadn't had any problems in France with the two bags. I said to the security agent that I only had one carry-on bag, the clothes bag, but the other was more a briefcase. The reply was that I had two bags and only one was permitted. Well, quite obviously I wasn't in France, or Kansas, anymore. Fortunately, the woman security agent was friendly. She asked if the book bag would fit into the larger clothes bag. I knew there was no way it would fit, but I duly unzipped the clothes bag and placed the book bag on top. Very little of the book bag was on the inside of the clothes bag. I made a move to try and force it more deeply inside, but before I could do anything the woman said, "See, now you only have one bag!" I looked up to see if she was joking. She smiled and said, "You see, you have one bag. You can proceed".

So I proceeded... on to the scanning machine, carefully holding my 'one' bag in my arms so that it wouldn't fall apart into two bags. Arriving at the scanner, they asked me to remove the book bag from the clothes bag to send them to be x-rayed separately. And so they stayed for the rest of the trip, through the x-ray machine, through the wiping down to check for explosives, and as I walked to the gate, one bag on each arm.

An hour later I was out of the UK. What can you say about such absurdities? It is clear that the entire 'airport security' scam has nothing whatsoever to do with 'terrorism', Arab or otherwise, and a lot to do with programming the population to accept greater and greater levels of interference in their lives. The message is "Big brother is ubiquitous: get used to it". The trouble is that no individual can do anything abut it: One by one we move through the airports, and any pointed remarks about the ridiculousness of it all only brings down the potential for being detained as a 'suspicious character', never to be permitted to fly again.

We have accepted each move put into place by the pathocrats against our rights and liberties, preferring to feel secure against a non-existant enemy. Hard-fought gains of freedom have been thrown out the window with little thought.

The planet is being put into lock down mode. What are you doing about it?

The Masks are Falling

2007-05-07T19:36:00.001Z

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about an evening spent watching the Al Gore global warming film An Inconvenient Truth sponsored by the local branch of Attac, a French association active in questions of globalization. Last week was an evening with another group, the monthly Repas UFOlogique in Toulouse. I have been attending these meetings fairly regularly for almost two years, but not because of any particular interest in UFOs. Once you look at the data and see that a small percentage of the sightings cannot be explained by any known technology, and you study the reports that have come down through the ages of strange phenomena reported in the skies, you come to understand that our reality is a lot weirder than they teach us in school or in the mainstream media. After that, to chase after some nuts and bolts craft that might be peopled with god knows what, well, no thanks.

But there are open and friendly people there each month, and it's a chance to get away from the computer for an evening....

So the subject of the evening was the recent opening of the files of Le groupe d'études et d'informations sur les phénomènes aérospatiaux non identifiés [Geipan], a working group within the French research network called the CNES. The files the group are putting on-line are the reports from the Gendarmerie made by individuals who have seen something curious in the skies. None of the information was ever classified. They amount to police reports of unexplained sightings. In other words, nothing special: no declassified documents from the government, the military, or the French intelligence agencies.

However, there has been a certain amount of press about the publication of this material on the web, and so this evening there was a journalist from the Depêche du Midi, the local paper, coming to cover the Repas UFOlogique and the presentation by a member of Geipan. Before the presentation started, the journalist moved from table to table (the meetings are held in a restaurant, which is why they are the 'Repas' UFOlogique) asking the participants about their interest in UFOs.

When she got to my table, the other person present began to say that he wasn't interested in UFOs more than that. He was interested, however, in the reasons the governments of the world lie about UFOs and why they refuse to publish their classified info on the subject. If there is nothing there, if UFOs are nothing more than swamp gas or sightings of Venus, then what do they have to hide? He then brought up the subject of 9/11, pointing out that once again the government had lied, and that it was an inside job.

The journalist then turned to me. I said I agreed. I was there because I am an editor at Les Editions Pilule Rouge, and we publish books that attempt to bridge the gap between science and the mysterious. I concurred that it was the way governments treated the question that was intriguing, once one admitted that there was 'something' there. I said that the study of history shows that myth and legend is replete with appearances by creatures who appear to have a mastery of space and time, beings that we label gods or fairies. My working hypothesis was that UFOs were manifestations of these beings, not ETs from other plantes. History also shows that these beings don't have our best interests at heart... and that led to more talk on 9/11 and the coming cyclic catastrophe...

Well, the poor journalist was having her head spun six ways to Sunday by then, but she continued to ask questions, and, wanting to be helpful, I continued to answer them.

Then, the organizer of the evening came running over to the table in a fit. She grabbed the journalist and said, "This is suppose to be a story about the meeting tonight, not about conspiracy theories. I don't want you to report anything that he (pointing to me) has been saying." And the two of them moved away.

Whoa!

Talk about the mask falling. The organizer, who until then had been extremely friendly with me for as long as I had been going to the meetings, showed another side. I was simply answering the questions I was asked, and WHAM!

Then the conference started. The speaker knew his stuff and took a scientific approach. When members of the audience said, "Yes, but given what we know, these unexplained sightings have to be extra-terrestrial...", he said that, no, all forms of human technology haven't been ruled out. There are top secret programmes that have billions of dollars of financing that could produce such technology. The true believers in the crowd didn't want to hear that. As the speaker said, "When you say 'we don't know of any human technology like this, therefore it must be ET', you lose me at the 'therefore'. That is where science confronts conviction".

And he is correct. That is where science does meet conviction, but it also shows that science has blinders because there is a lot of info that can be used to support the non-human working hypothesis from history, as Laura has shown in The Secret History of the World.

After the conference was finished, the organizer came over to me and explained that if I wanted to get any publicity, I could phone the newspaper myself and arrange an interview. By then I was so disgusted with the entire evening that I muttered under my breath, "Whatever...", the first time I have ever descended to valley-girl speak....

On the sidewalk after the restaurant closed, the discussion continued. I was talking with a regular participant, and we were discussing the way things seem to be speeding up and the world is becoming more openly polarized between those who want to believe their subjective interpretation of the world, which amounts to believing an illusion, or, to be more blunt, the lie, and those who are working to see the world as it is. The masks are starting to fall as quickly as the meteorites.

The evening was an excellent example.

Auguries of Innocence

2007-04-22T16:22:00.000Z

Some recent news items in Signs of the Times and on the web have moved me to pain and tears. An Arab woman speaks of her sorrow; Israel imprisons mothers and wives of political prisoners to pressure confessions; Guatemala's women being murdered in the thousands; children in Sudan enduring "unspeakable" abuse; Baghdad being turned into a prison; and a small disturbing example of everyday inhumanity: women laughed as they forced their toddlers to take part in a 'dog fight'. It is the Terror of the Situation: a world tormented by psychopaths.

Meanwhile, many in 'developed' countries of the Western world enjoy the comfort of their daily lives undisturbed.

The stark contrast and contradiction of human life reminds me of the last lines of William Blake's poem 'Auguries of Innocence':

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet Delight.
Some are Born to sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro' the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to Perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in the Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day.

The EU should imprison John McCain

2007-04-20T10:49:00.000Z

This is not an opinion of mine. It is simple logic. European interior ministers have agreed on a new law that "makes it an offence to condone or grossly trivialise crimes of genocide - but only if the effect is incitement to violence or hatred." Turns out that US presidential contender John McCain grossly trivialises crimes of genocide and incites to violence and hatred. AP reports:

In response to an audience question about military action against Iran, the Arizona senator briefly sang the chorus of the surf-rocker classic "Barbara Ann." "That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran," he said in jest Wednesday, chuckling with the crowd. Then, he softly sang to the melody: "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah ..." The audience responded with more laughter.

You can watch the YouTube video of the grotesque moment through this SOTT article. I think I ought to send it to those EU ministers.

Manufacturing Terror

2007-04-18T09:51:00.000Z

Things were getting pretty warm for the administration over the past few weeks, what with the Prosecutor's purge and Bush's "Fascist Law Czar" - Gonzales - getting ready to be called on the carpet in a serious way. (If you want to know how hot it was getting, just go to SOTT and use the search to find "prosecutors".)

Thankfully, all that is over now: we have a new media feeding frenzy: the Va. Tech. Massacre.

Yes, indeedy. Who cares if Bush and Rove were stacking the courts now?! After all, it is not JUST about "terr'rists" anymore since ANYBODY can be one and they can be anywhere!

A correspondent wrote to me last night an interesting remark: "Imagine billionaires with sick and twisted minds and a warped view of government who get together to manufacture a wave of terror against the American people so they demand a dictator."

Wow! What a concept!

You could say that what we have here is the "Suicide Bombing Cycle" on our doorstep. Heck, we've had it for awhile, but those clever Pathocrats have tailored it just for us.

'Very lucky' folks on Maui possibly saw meteor - The Honolulu Advertiser - Hawaii's Newspaper

2007-04-13T17:11:00.001Z

Ran across the following today:

'Very lucky' folks on Maui possibly saw meteor - The Honolulu Advertiser - Hawaii's Newspaper: ""

In the article, there is this comment:

Mike Maberry, assistant director of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, said he was not aware of any reports of an object in the sky. But he said its description sounded like a meteor.

"Whoever got to see that was very lucky," he said, adding that chances are "very slim" of a meteor landing in the vicinity of Maui in the middle of the Pacific.

I don't know... I have really mixed emotions when reading this. If Mr Maberry really had a clue what was in store for us in the near future with fireballs and meteorites, he might be less inclined to make such a statement. For some idea on the reasons, check out our Fireballs and Meteorites blog.

The short answer is that we're going to be seeing more and more of these things. More than you would ever want.... They might well be the last thing we see...

(Via Signs Of The Times.)

Media Spin, Limited Hangout, and the Melting of the American Mind or Who is Stupid Enough to Believe it is Springtime in Iraq?

2007-04-10T23:18:00.001Z

We spend a lot of time gathering the news from many sources here at SOTT. We go all over the world via the Internet to bring the news to our readers. Of course, you won't find much, if anything, from Fox News, and very little from sources like USA Today, the "national" newspaper in the US of A. We can't get Fox TV so we are spared the most outrageous of the propaganda and brainwashing.

Every once in awhile, however, a real newspaper from the axis of evil falls into our hands. So it happened that a couple of days ago, we came across the Easter weekend edition of USA Today. We were so astonished by the lies and subterfuges it contains that we were inspired to do a podcast.

On the editorial page, we find the title: "Today's debate: How the surge is going".

Sounds promising, right? In response to the growing calls for a US exit from Iraq, drugstore fly-boy-by-night George W. decided to do the opposite and send an extra 30,000 poor blacks, latinos, and white boys from the wrong side of the tracks to Iraq to ensure that freedom wins. The media spin doctors have labelled this increase in troops, blood and violence "the surge". USA Today, never one to shy away from a phoney debate, promises to give both sides of the story. The debate to end all debates. Well, we deal with this in greater detail in the podcast, but I can't let pass a couple of comments made by the "pro" side of the debate, representative Mike Pence, who was with John McCain last week for the photo op at the Baghdad market. Remember while reading these comments that they are the arguments from the pro-Bush side of the debate.

Pence writes:

"We have a long way to go in Iraq. There is tough, difficult work ahead of us. But we are making progress, and there is reason for cautious optimism about President Bush's surge."

"Cautious optimism"??? Things are so bad that the lackeys defending the Bush "surge" can do no better than tell us there is reason for "cautious optimism"?!?! Are we soon to be told that "there is light at the end of the tunnel", the famous phrase used by the Nixon administration to justify the continued carnage during the Vietnam war?

The good representative, elected to office by the people of Indiana, who describes himself as a "Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order", offers up a couple of bits of evidence to back up his hopeful claim for "cautious optimism".

"Despite all you see and hear in the media, there is a springtime of hope beginning in Iraq."

Springtime of hope in Iraq?!?!

Springtime for Hitler and Germany Winter for Poland and France

is more like it, as the Mel Brooks' song from The Producers puts it... But what is really sinister is his placing of the blame on "the media". The media are lying about what is happening in Iraq. There is lots of good news! They just aren't reporting it! The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the news that the US media isn't reporting about Iraq would be the real numbers of deaths of Iraqi civilians, now close to 1 million since the invasion and occupation started. Add to that the million killed during the years of the embargo, mostly children, under the Democrats, and you've got both US parties responsible for killing 2 million Iraqis since 1991. But, somehow, I don't think that even a scoundrel like Pence would openly admit that these deaths are the good news to which he was referring.

So what kind of good news does he have in mind?

You're not gonna believe these....

"From the moment of our arrival, I could sense that things were different. Gen. David Petraeus met us at the airport, and, instead of boarding helicopters to the Green Zone, we drove into town. I hadn't done this since my first trip several years ago."

The man's a bloodsucking idiot. If he'd been alive in Germany under Hitler, he'd have been praising his Furher and the "freedom" brought to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

What kind of person could wax nostalgic over those heartwarming and heady early days of the occupation when the infrastructure of the country was destroyed and US moneymen took control of the country? Oh, yeah. I forgot. They also toppled a statue of Saddam. Hooray! Unfortunately, while Pence can now drive into the heavily fortified Green Zone and feel like the clock has been turned back to the good old days, none of the Iraqi dead will rise up out of the graves and return to their families. None of the US soldiers killed to implement the imperialist dream will come back to life either. But for the pathocrats, we're all just cannon fodder.

Well, if Pence's trip throught the streets of Baghdad in armoured vehicles rather than via helicopter isn't enough evidence for continued hope and trust in the Great Leader's Surge, how about this:

"Along with a squad of military security, we spent more than an hour at a bustling, open air marketplace. While we were instructed to leave our bulletproof vests on, Gen. Petraeus took off his helmet and urged us to leave our helmets in the vehicles."

Hallyluuuujah! "Hey, Ma! I took off my helmet in Baghdad! Aren't I a brave boy?!"

Did he mention the three Apache attack helicopters hovering over the market? Did he mention the sharpshooters on the rooftops and the 100 heavily armed Marine troop on the ground? Well, sure. "Military security" covers that, right?

It truly boggles the mind. How can people like Pence get away with such glaring paramoralisms and outright stupidities? Is there no one left in the media in the United States to point out that not only does the emperor not have any clothes, but he has no brains either? And I'm not talking about making jokes about the intellectual faculties or lack thereof of Bush. There's plenty of that. But to what ends? All it does is reinforce the buffers while nothing changes. People can pump themselves up because they are smarter than the president, but then they roll back over to sleep and think that the political process will somehow put things right in the 2008 presidential elections.

Wake up, people! It isn't a joke. The United States is the aggressor. If you are an American, you are the aggressor. The United States is the bad guy. You are the bad guy. The United States and its allies are the Axis of Evil. It isn't Iran. It isn't North Korea. It isn't Russia. It isn't any of the bogeymen erected as strawmen to be taken down in the puff pieces for imperialist agression that pass for editorials or opinion pieces like that written by Pence. It is you. You are the new Nazis. You are the German people condoning and benefiting from violence and aggression committed in your name against innocent people.

The people of Iraq have every right to fight against the occupier, YOU, in the same way the Poles had the right to fight against the Nazis. The resistence in Iraq is legitimate, and any American who isn't fighting against the policies of his government is complicit in the crimes. There is no neutral position in the fight against the pathocracy. There is no sitting on the fence, no standing on the sidelines. You either stand up for what is right, live by conscience, or you are part of the problem. There is no excuse.

If there is a future, you are going to be judged by your grandchildren. They will ask you what you did. They will ask you how it was that Bush and his pathological buddies were able to subvert the US constitution. They will ask you why you did nothing while innocents were tortured and brutalized in detention camps that span the globe. They will ask you how it was that you couldn't see the, oh, so obvious lies that were told to justify this violence and aggression, not the first time after 9/11, not the second time for Iraq, and not the third time for Iran.

What will you have to say for yourself?

An Inconvenient Truth

2007-04-04T08:58:00.000Z

The other night I went off to a showing of "An Inconvenient Truth", the Al Gore, global warming film so dear to activists the world over. True to form, the showing was sponsored by the local branch of Attac, a French association working against neo-liberalism and globalisation.

Not much to say about the film itself. There is a lot of data about the fact of global warming, a fact that I have no problems with. Yes, there are some very ugly things happening on the planet at the moment: the melting of the glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic, drought and the increasing power of hurricanes and typhoons, the increase in disease as mosquito populations increase and spread, the extinction of many species as their natural habitats are destroyed, and on and on. We have a very serious problem here.

The problem comes with Gore's explanation of the causes of global warming: manmade production of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Undoubtedly, our production of carbons is one factor, but it is not the only one, and if we look a little more closely, we might discover that our contribution is not the one that is the most dangerous for our survival.

After the film, there was a discussion moderated by a member of the local Attac group. As was to be expected, it was all about what we could do as individuals to save the planet: better insulate our houses, walk or use a bike instead of using our cars, recycle. The moderator listed about ten things that we could do that could reduce carbon emissions to below 1970 levels.

Then I raised my hand....

I said that, yes, global warming is a very serious issue and we are in deep trouble, but given that the Earth is not the only planet subject to global warming, it is happening on Mars, on Saturn, and the last time I looked, there was neither a neo-liberal economy nor a problem of globalisation on either of these planets, so maybe the real problem may be elsewhere.

Well, the moderator knew his global warming talking points, and he said that, yes, we knew that the sun was responsible for X percent of the increase in temperatures...

To which I responded, yes, but that is not what I was talking about. I asked if anyone in the audience had heard the report of the Chilean jet that had almost been hit my a meteorite that day. Murmers in the audience. I then referred to a scene in the film when Gore is explain the conveyor belt of the ocean's currents, how the warm and cold water circulates keeping Europe warm. He shows an image of North America 12,000 years ago with the glaciers of the last ice age. He explains how a large quantity of fresh water from the glaciers broke through an ice dam and flooded the North Atlantic with water, cutting off the conveyor belt and plunging Europe into an ice age. Gore didn't explain how the water was created or why the ice damn broke.

We know from the research by Richard Firestone and others, as discussed in their book "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization", that the glacier melted because of a cometary impact in Hudson Bay. I mentioned this overlooked fact of Gore's film, and the nature of the nuclear winter we would undergo, those of us left alive, should such a meteor or comet hit the planet in the near future. I wanted to go on and further explain the nature of the cyclic catastrophes, but I only got as far as mentioning that if we are all still here in ten years to continue our activism, we'll be very lucky. Activists want problems about which they can be active, can do their busy work to find solutions, and their attitude was that if we are struck by a meteor, there isn't anything we can do about it, so let's concentrate on recycling and riding our bikes.

So I sat down. The people behind me started asking me questions about what I was discussing, and I explained about the binary star system, the sun's dark companion, and the increasing moons of Jupiter, Saturn, etc, as explained in our article Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!. They asked for the URL of the Signs page, which I happily gave them.

Four out of 150 ain't bad, all things considered.

After the discussion, we moved out to the sidewalk in front of the theatre. I was feeling really depressed. I had done what I had come to do, raise an issue that is extremely important, and, as usual, the crowd didn't want to hear the message. I was talking to one of the Attac organizers and said I thought it was because what I had to say was too depressing.

He said that, no, it wasn't that it was depressing, but that there was nothing that we could do against a meteor.

I said that the point is that all of this is known by the powers that be. They are building themselves their underground cities where they are going to hide, and they are creating chaos on the planet in order to reduce the population by at least 80% with disease, war, and starvation, and they are sowing disinformation by explaining the obvious fact that the Earth's ecology is getting more and more screwed up by saying it is our fault, thereby diverting our attention from the real issue: the pathocracy and their plans to exterminate the rest of us.

His response was that by working for a decentralized power, with power on the local level, we could get the power away from the psychopaths in the centre.

He really needs to read Political Ponerology on how social movements get infiltrated by pathological types!

Well, by then I could see his eyes glazing over, and behind his polite attitude, I could tell he was thinking, "This guy is a nutter!"

He said that psychopaths have always been in power, an easy way to dismiss the problem... or so I think.

On the way home, spewing carbon into the atmosphere from the car, it seemed hopeless. Will it really take a first or second or third meteor impact to break these people out of their sleep? And, by then, will it be too late?

Getting Started: Signs Of The Times Blog!

2007-04-04T08:55:00.000Z

Over the past few days the SOTT team and I have been discussing the bizarre story about the airliner that had a close encounter with a meteorite. (See: Airliner Almost Hit: It was a meteorite, not a satellite, says Russia ). Coming so soon after the publication of my article Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction! it struck us almost as a "sign of the times" that we really needed to pay closer attention to this phenomenon. Odds are increasing daily that the ideas presented in that piece are on the money: Humanity is facing a global cataclysm of Atlantean proportions in the near future from which very little of our modern world will emerge intact - if anything at all.

I mulled it over for a few days, considering all the angles, including the fact that most of the masses are truly blissfully asleep and unaware of the danger. Sure, I know that a lot of people - if you brought it to their attention - would just shrug and say "Well, there's nothing I can do about it, so just let me live my life as I see fit until it happens and when it does, I'll be happy that I did what I wanted." But then, there are other people who feel a sort of responsibility to the future of humanity and it is those people we are concerned about.

It is very likely that the PTB ARE thinking about their future and the future of humanity in terms of them surviving and coming out on top and making slaves of anyone else who might happen to have survived, and for some reason, that idea really irks me. If someone I loved were to survive some terrible cataclysm on earth, I certainly wouldn't want them to survive only to be made into a slave. (If you want a good idea of what such a life might be like, just read The Thrall's Tale!) If you can consider your children and your children's children living such a life and it doesn't bother you, then you obviously aren't SOTT reader material, so move along and go back to sleep!

So, thinking about it and the many difficulties we often face keeping the site online, dealing with defamers and attackers and so on (who are also frequently involved in maneuvers to force our site off the net), it occurred to me that we need to have some additional back-up systems for the information. I decided to create a new blog just for that purpose: to collect and present the data that we have been accumulating in our database for a number of years now. So, I created it and we are getting the material formatted to upload it there and soon I will announce it. It will consist of most of the material from the News Category on SOTT: Our Haunted Planet. (No, I'm not crazy about that heading, but that's the most "open" and comprehensive title I could come up with at the time. If you have a better idea, let us know.)

BUT, while I was creating the blog to host the "Signs of the Coming Apocalypse" (not trying to be dramatic here, but that does seem to fit!), it occurred to me that I could also create a SOTT blog where readers could go for information in the event that SOTT is down, where we can announce important news that really deserves focus, new features of SOTT, and also where those of us who work on SOTT can post our occasional thoughts about this Service that we perform and how we deal with it on a day to day basis. I can give you a hint: it isn't easy to observe that humanity swims in a sea of lies daily and that nowhere on the planet does there seem to be a place where Truth is actually valued as a social or cultural precept!

And so, the SOTT Blog has been born.