Airport Security

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?