29 June, 2009
26 June, 2009
Journalist Files Charges against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder
by Barbara Minton, Natural Health Editor
(NaturalNews) As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from apandemic.
Summary of claims and allegations filed with FBI in Austria on June 10, 2009
In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO. This bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu pandemic virus with the intent of causing death. This group has annexed high government offices in the U.S.
Specifically, evidence is presented that the defendants, Barack Obama, President of the U.S, David Nabarro, UN System Coordinator for Influenza, Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, David de Rotschild, banker, David Rockefeller, banker, George Soros, banker, Werner Faymann, Chancellor of Austria, and Alois Stoger, Austrian Health Minister, among others, are part of this international corporate criminal syndicate which has developed, produced, stockpiled and employed biological weapons to eliminate the population of the U.S. and other countries for financial and political gain.
The charges contend that these defendants conspired with each other and others to devise, fund and participate in the final phase of the implementation of a covert international bioweapons program involving the pharmaceutical companies Baxter and Novartis. They did this by bioengineering and then releasing lethal biological agents, specifically the "bird flu" virus and the "swine flu virus" in order to have a pretext to implement a forced mass vaccination program which would be the means of administering a toxic biological agent to cause death and injury to the people of the U.S. This action is in direct violation of the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.
Burgermeister's charges include evidence that Baxter AG, Austrian subsidiary of Baxter International, deliberately sent out 72 kilos of live bird flu virus, supplied by the WHO in the winter of 2009 to 16 laboratories in four counties. She claims this evidence offers clear proof that the pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies themselves are actively engaged in producing, developing, manufacturing and distributing biological agents classified as the most deadly bioweapons on earth in order to trigger a pandemic and cause mass death.
In her April charges, she noted that Baxter's lab in Austria, one of the supposedly most secure biosecurity labs in the world, did not adhere to the most basic and essential steps to keep 72 kilos of a pathogen classified as a bioweapon secure and separate from all other substances under stringent biosecurity level regulations, but it allowed it to be mixed with the ordinary human flu virus and sent from its facilities in Orth in the Donau.
In February, when a staff member at BioTest in the Czech Republic tested the material meant for candidate vaccines on ferrets, the ferrets died. This incident was not followed up by any investigation from the WHO, EU, or Austrian health authorities. There was no investigation of the content of the virus material, and there is no data on the genetic sequence of the virus released.
In answer to parliamentary questions on May 20th, the Austrian Health Minister, Alois Stoger, revealed that the incident had been handled not as a biosecurity lapse, as it should have been, but as an offence against the veterinary code. A veterinary doctor was sent to the lab for a brief inspection.
Burgermeister's dossier reveals that the release of the virus was to be an essential step for triggering a pandemic that would allow the WHO to declare a Level 6 Pandemic. She lists the laws and decrees that would allow the UN and WHO to take over the United States in the event of pandemic. In addition, legislation requiring compliance with mandatory vaccinations would be put into force in the U.S. under conditions of pandemic declaration.
She charges that the entire "swine flu" pandemic business is premised on a massive lie that there is no natural virus out there that poses a threat to the population. She presents evidence leading to the belief that the bird flu and swine flu viruses have, in fact, been bioengineered in laboratories using funding supplied by the WHO and other government agencies, among others. This "swine flu" is a hybrid of part swine flu, part human flu and part bird flu, something that can only come from laboratories according to many experts.
WHO's claim that this "swine flu" is spreading and a pandemic must be declared ignores the fundamental causes. The viruses that were released were created and released with the help of WHO, and WHO is overwhelmingly responsible for the pandemic in the first place. In addition, the symptoms of the supposed "swine flu" are indistinguishable from regular flu or from the common cold. The "swine flu" does not cause death anymore often than the regular flu causes death.
Burgermeister notes that the figures for deaths reported for the "swine flu" are inconsistent and there is no clarity as to how the number of "deaths" has been documented.
There is no pandemic potential unless mass vaccinations are carried out to weaponize the flu under the guise of protecting the population. There are reasonable grounds for believing that the mandatory vaccines will be purposely contaminated with diseases that are specifically designed to cause death.
Reference is made to a licensed Novartis bird flu vaccine that killed 21 homeless people in Poland in the summer of 2008 and had as its "primary outcome measure" an "adverse events rate", thereby meeting the U.S. government's own definition of a bioweapon (a biological agent designed to cause an adverse events rate, i.e death or injury) with a delivery system (injection).
She alleges that the same complex of international pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies that have developed and released pandemic material have positioned themselves to profit from triggering the pandemic with contracts to supply vaccines. Media controlled by the group that is engineering the "swine flu" agenda is spreading misinformation to lull the people of the U.S. into taking the dangerous vaccine.
The people of the U.S. will suffer substantial and irreparable harm and injury if they are forced to take this unproven vaccine without their consent in accordance with the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, National Emergency Act, National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, and the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza.
Continue reading here:
http://naturalnews.com/z026503_pandemic_swine_flu_bioterrorism.html
(NaturalNews) As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from apandemic.
Summary of claims and allegations filed with FBI in Austria on June 10, 2009
In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO. This bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu pandemic virus with the intent of causing death. This group has annexed high government offices in the U.S.
Specifically, evidence is presented that the defendants, Barack Obama, President of the U.S, David Nabarro, UN System Coordinator for Influenza, Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, David de Rotschild, banker, David Rockefeller, banker, George Soros, banker, Werner Faymann, Chancellor of Austria, and Alois Stoger, Austrian Health Minister, among others, are part of this international corporate criminal syndicate which has developed, produced, stockpiled and employed biological weapons to eliminate the population of the U.S. and other countries for financial and political gain.
The charges contend that these defendants conspired with each other and others to devise, fund and participate in the final phase of the implementation of a covert international bioweapons program involving the pharmaceutical companies Baxter and Novartis. They did this by bioengineering and then releasing lethal biological agents, specifically the "bird flu" virus and the "swine flu virus" in order to have a pretext to implement a forced mass vaccination program which would be the means of administering a toxic biological agent to cause death and injury to the people of the U.S. This action is in direct violation of the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.
Burgermeister's charges include evidence that Baxter AG, Austrian subsidiary of Baxter International, deliberately sent out 72 kilos of live bird flu virus, supplied by the WHO in the winter of 2009 to 16 laboratories in four counties. She claims this evidence offers clear proof that the pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies themselves are actively engaged in producing, developing, manufacturing and distributing biological agents classified as the most deadly bioweapons on earth in order to trigger a pandemic and cause mass death.
In her April charges, she noted that Baxter's lab in Austria, one of the supposedly most secure biosecurity labs in the world, did not adhere to the most basic and essential steps to keep 72 kilos of a pathogen classified as a bioweapon secure and separate from all other substances under stringent biosecurity level regulations, but it allowed it to be mixed with the ordinary human flu virus and sent from its facilities in Orth in the Donau.
In February, when a staff member at BioTest in the Czech Republic tested the material meant for candidate vaccines on ferrets, the ferrets died. This incident was not followed up by any investigation from the WHO, EU, or Austrian health authorities. There was no investigation of the content of the virus material, and there is no data on the genetic sequence of the virus released.
In answer to parliamentary questions on May 20th, the Austrian Health Minister, Alois Stoger, revealed that the incident had been handled not as a biosecurity lapse, as it should have been, but as an offence against the veterinary code. A veterinary doctor was sent to the lab for a brief inspection.
Burgermeister's dossier reveals that the release of the virus was to be an essential step for triggering a pandemic that would allow the WHO to declare a Level 6 Pandemic. She lists the laws and decrees that would allow the UN and WHO to take over the United States in the event of pandemic. In addition, legislation requiring compliance with mandatory vaccinations would be put into force in the U.S. under conditions of pandemic declaration.
She charges that the entire "swine flu" pandemic business is premised on a massive lie that there is no natural virus out there that poses a threat to the population. She presents evidence leading to the belief that the bird flu and swine flu viruses have, in fact, been bioengineered in laboratories using funding supplied by the WHO and other government agencies, among others. This "swine flu" is a hybrid of part swine flu, part human flu and part bird flu, something that can only come from laboratories according to many experts.
WHO's claim that this "swine flu" is spreading and a pandemic must be declared ignores the fundamental causes. The viruses that were released were created and released with the help of WHO, and WHO is overwhelmingly responsible for the pandemic in the first place. In addition, the symptoms of the supposed "swine flu" are indistinguishable from regular flu or from the common cold. The "swine flu" does not cause death anymore often than the regular flu causes death.
Burgermeister notes that the figures for deaths reported for the "swine flu" are inconsistent and there is no clarity as to how the number of "deaths" has been documented.
There is no pandemic potential unless mass vaccinations are carried out to weaponize the flu under the guise of protecting the population. There are reasonable grounds for believing that the mandatory vaccines will be purposely contaminated with diseases that are specifically designed to cause death.
Reference is made to a licensed Novartis bird flu vaccine that killed 21 homeless people in Poland in the summer of 2008 and had as its "primary outcome measure" an "adverse events rate", thereby meeting the U.S. government's own definition of a bioweapon (a biological agent designed to cause an adverse events rate, i.e death or injury) with a delivery system (injection).
She alleges that the same complex of international pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies that have developed and released pandemic material have positioned themselves to profit from triggering the pandemic with contracts to supply vaccines. Media controlled by the group that is engineering the "swine flu" agenda is spreading misinformation to lull the people of the U.S. into taking the dangerous vaccine.
The people of the U.S. will suffer substantial and irreparable harm and injury if they are forced to take this unproven vaccine without their consent in accordance with the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, National Emergency Act, National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, and the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza.
Continue reading here:
http://naturalnews.com/z026503_pandemic_swine_flu_bioterrorism.html
22 June, 2009
Support our troops by not supporting illegal wars!
by: Leslie Thatcher, Truthout Book Review
"Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent"
By Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen GilberdPoll Point Press, Sausalito, 2009.
Although regular Truthout contributor, National Lawyers Guild president and Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn and longtime activist co-author Kathleen Gilberd conceived "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" as "a practical guide, not an abstract analysis" and have certainly produced a primer on the available legal and honorable means for redress of the many grievances the US military may suffer, they have also authored a deeply suggestive meditation on the military "we have" and how it may have come to be the source of so many and such varied grievances.
Their crucial insight - which runs counter to the complete anti-military bias of some in the anti-war movement - is that "Poor healthcare, poor gear, poor safety conditions, poor training, and the use of racist stereotypes and sexism are not inherent in a military - rather they are inherent in a military fighting illegal and immoral wars and ignoring basic rules of engagement ..."[1] Cohn and Gilberd are on the side of US service members who didn't check their conscience - and their sense of honor - at the door when they signed up.
"Rules of Disengagement" provides a brief history of service member challenges to illegal war based on the Nuremberg Principles and Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) which establish a duty to disobey unlawful orders. The authors determine that while US military judges have been largely unwilling to rule that US military engagements per se are unlawful, they have sometimes been open to using such arguments to mitigate sentencing of service members who resist or refuse orders on the basis of their illegality.
A chapter on conscientious objection highlights specific cases and focuses on clarifying the actual law and means for redress while debunking some of the stereotypes about conscientious objectors that prevent service members from applying for that status when it covers their situation. The authors maintain that a large number of service members who could be eligible to be conscientious objectors go AWOL, unaware that they might qualify as COs. They also helpfully point out that the chances of achieving CO status are enhanced when the belief system used as the basis for the application is religious, i.e. NOT political.
Once objection to all war or a specific war is covered, the authors move on to the law of war which requires that the US promulgate rules of engagement (ROE) for its military "that place limitations on the use of force to ensure its lawful use," most notably that all possible measures be taken to protect civilians. They cover the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971 and 2008, showing the devastating long-term impact on service members themselves resulting from the military's failure to communicate and/or respect ROE in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. "Rules" also highlights the risks and rights of service members who testify publicly concerning war crimes they witnessed or participated in.
Cohn and Gilberd cover the various forms of dissent available to members of the military and "examine the military's heavy-handed response to even the most legal forms of dissent." And although, as they illustrate, even the most protected forms of dissent may provoke informal and illegal or extra-legal reprisals, service members' courage, imagination and ingenuity in devising new and legal forms of dissent maintain and enlarge the space for freedom of speech and belief among active duty military, and even ultimately change the laws and rights that apply. Both authors (see interview below) feel that dissent by GIs and their families is critical to military disengagement from Iraq and Afghanistan and to preventing future wars of aggression.
"When soldiers cannot be motivated by patriotism and the belief that they are fighting for a just cause, other basic motivating concepts must be found to replace them. Sexism, racism, and homophobia are coldly and manipulatively used to get soldiers to fight." Racism is used to objectify the enemy and make it easier for troops to kill. Sexism, including sexual assault, is part of a training process that intentionally uses sexual images and sexual brutality. These attitudes, inculcated for use against "the enemy," backfire in the harassment of and assaults on US armed services members by US armed services members Truthout has reported on extensively. Although one might imagine that this blowback would be so damaging to troop morale and necessary camaraderie the military would revise its training and retool its culture, Cohn and Gilberd document how deeply entrenched racist and sexist attitudes are in the military, how they are used - and what recourse is available to troops who have been victimized.
Continue reading here:
http://www.truthout.org/062209A?n
"Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent"
By Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen GilberdPoll Point Press, Sausalito, 2009.
Although regular Truthout contributor, National Lawyers Guild president and Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn and longtime activist co-author Kathleen Gilberd conceived "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" as "a practical guide, not an abstract analysis" and have certainly produced a primer on the available legal and honorable means for redress of the many grievances the US military may suffer, they have also authored a deeply suggestive meditation on the military "we have" and how it may have come to be the source of so many and such varied grievances.
Their crucial insight - which runs counter to the complete anti-military bias of some in the anti-war movement - is that "Poor healthcare, poor gear, poor safety conditions, poor training, and the use of racist stereotypes and sexism are not inherent in a military - rather they are inherent in a military fighting illegal and immoral wars and ignoring basic rules of engagement ..."[1] Cohn and Gilberd are on the side of US service members who didn't check their conscience - and their sense of honor - at the door when they signed up.
"Rules of Disengagement" provides a brief history of service member challenges to illegal war based on the Nuremberg Principles and Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) which establish a duty to disobey unlawful orders. The authors determine that while US military judges have been largely unwilling to rule that US military engagements per se are unlawful, they have sometimes been open to using such arguments to mitigate sentencing of service members who resist or refuse orders on the basis of their illegality.
A chapter on conscientious objection highlights specific cases and focuses on clarifying the actual law and means for redress while debunking some of the stereotypes about conscientious objectors that prevent service members from applying for that status when it covers their situation. The authors maintain that a large number of service members who could be eligible to be conscientious objectors go AWOL, unaware that they might qualify as COs. They also helpfully point out that the chances of achieving CO status are enhanced when the belief system used as the basis for the application is religious, i.e. NOT political.
Once objection to all war or a specific war is covered, the authors move on to the law of war which requires that the US promulgate rules of engagement (ROE) for its military "that place limitations on the use of force to ensure its lawful use," most notably that all possible measures be taken to protect civilians. They cover the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971 and 2008, showing the devastating long-term impact on service members themselves resulting from the military's failure to communicate and/or respect ROE in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. "Rules" also highlights the risks and rights of service members who testify publicly concerning war crimes they witnessed or participated in.
Cohn and Gilberd cover the various forms of dissent available to members of the military and "examine the military's heavy-handed response to even the most legal forms of dissent." And although, as they illustrate, even the most protected forms of dissent may provoke informal and illegal or extra-legal reprisals, service members' courage, imagination and ingenuity in devising new and legal forms of dissent maintain and enlarge the space for freedom of speech and belief among active duty military, and even ultimately change the laws and rights that apply. Both authors (see interview below) feel that dissent by GIs and their families is critical to military disengagement from Iraq and Afghanistan and to preventing future wars of aggression.
"When soldiers cannot be motivated by patriotism and the belief that they are fighting for a just cause, other basic motivating concepts must be found to replace them. Sexism, racism, and homophobia are coldly and manipulatively used to get soldiers to fight." Racism is used to objectify the enemy and make it easier for troops to kill. Sexism, including sexual assault, is part of a training process that intentionally uses sexual images and sexual brutality. These attitudes, inculcated for use against "the enemy," backfire in the harassment of and assaults on US armed services members by US armed services members Truthout has reported on extensively. Although one might imagine that this blowback would be so damaging to troop morale and necessary camaraderie the military would revise its training and retool its culture, Cohn and Gilberd document how deeply entrenched racist and sexist attitudes are in the military, how they are used - and what recourse is available to troops who have been victimized.
Continue reading here:
http://www.truthout.org/062209A?n
18 June, 2009
Rethink Afghanistan (Part 4): Civilian Casualties
Rethink Afghanistan (Part 4): Civilian Casualties
Director: Robert Greenwald
“They should kill the Taliban, not my family”
“We are converting villagers every day to the Taliban.”
“The Americans don’t do us any good.”
“We are all deformed people missing limbs, missing eyes…”
When foreign policy consists of applying a military solution to a political problem, we see death, destruction, and suffering. Director Robert Greenwald witnessed the latter during his recent trip to Afghanistan--the devastating consequences of U.S. airstrikes on thousands of innocent civilians.
The footage you are about to see is poignant, heart-wrenching, and often a direct result of U.S. foreign policy.
Americans out of Afgahnistan!!!
Director: Robert Greenwald
“They should kill the Taliban, not my family”
“We are converting villagers every day to the Taliban.”
“The Americans don’t do us any good.”
“We are all deformed people missing limbs, missing eyes…”
When foreign policy consists of applying a military solution to a political problem, we see death, destruction, and suffering. Director Robert Greenwald witnessed the latter during his recent trip to Afghanistan--the devastating consequences of U.S. airstrikes on thousands of innocent civilians.
The footage you are about to see is poignant, heart-wrenching, and often a direct result of U.S. foreign policy.
Americans out of Afgahnistan!!!
These Are Obama’s Wars Now
By Joshua Frank
http://original.antiwar.com/joshua-frank/2009/06/17/these-are-obamas-wars-now/
On Monday the Democrat controlled House voted 226-202 to approve a rushed $106 billion dollar war spending bill, guaranteeing more carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan (and lately Pakistan) until September 30, 2009, which marks the end of the budget year. The Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill’s first draft last month, with the final vote on a compromised version to occur in the Senate sometime in the next couple of weeks.
The majority of opposition in the House came from Republicans who opposed an add-on to the bill that would open up a $5 billion International Monetary Fund line of credit for developing countries. This opposition in the House led Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday to quip, "It’ll be interesting to see what happens here. Are my Republican colleagues [in the Senate] going to join with us to fund the troops? I hope so."
No longer can the blame for the turmoil in Iraq and Afghanistan rest at the feet of George W. Bush alone. This is now Obama’s War on Terror, fully funded and operated by the Democratic Party.
The bill that passed the House on Monday, once approved by the Senate, will not be part of the regular defense budget as it’s off the books entirely. Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, Congress has passed similar emergency spending bills to finance US military ventures in the Middle East. The combined "supplementals" are fast approaching $1 trillion, with 30% going to fund the war in Afghanistan.
In addition to the latest increase in war funds, Obama is also asking for an additional $130 billion to be added on to the defense budget for the new fiscal year starting on October 1. The president is upholding his campaign promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan, which also means increasing the use of remote controlled drone planes in neighboring Pakistan that are to blame for hundreds of civilian deaths since Obama took office last January.
Despite Obama’s historic (albeit rhetoric filled) speech in Cairo, the new Commander in Chief is still not about to radically change, let alone reform, the US’s long-standing role in the Middle East. A master of his craft, Obama is simply candy coating the delivery of US imperialism in the region. Given the lack of opposition to Obama’s policies back home, it is becoming clear that he may well be more dangerous than his predecessor when it comes to the US’s motivations internationally.
Had Bush pushed for more military funds at this stage, the antiwar movement (if you can call it that) would have been organizing opposition weeks in advance, calling out the neocons for wasting our scarce tax dollars during a recession on a never-ending, directionless war. But since Obama’s a Democrat, a beloved one at that, mum's the word.
Continue reading at:
http://original.antiwar.com/joshua-frank/2009/06/17/these-are-obamas-wars-now/
http://original.antiwar.com/joshua-frank/2009/06/17/these-are-obamas-wars-now/
On Monday the Democrat controlled House voted 226-202 to approve a rushed $106 billion dollar war spending bill, guaranteeing more carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan (and lately Pakistan) until September 30, 2009, which marks the end of the budget year. The Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill’s first draft last month, with the final vote on a compromised version to occur in the Senate sometime in the next couple of weeks.
The majority of opposition in the House came from Republicans who opposed an add-on to the bill that would open up a $5 billion International Monetary Fund line of credit for developing countries. This opposition in the House led Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday to quip, "It’ll be interesting to see what happens here. Are my Republican colleagues [in the Senate] going to join with us to fund the troops? I hope so."
No longer can the blame for the turmoil in Iraq and Afghanistan rest at the feet of George W. Bush alone. This is now Obama’s War on Terror, fully funded and operated by the Democratic Party.
The bill that passed the House on Monday, once approved by the Senate, will not be part of the regular defense budget as it’s off the books entirely. Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, Congress has passed similar emergency spending bills to finance US military ventures in the Middle East. The combined "supplementals" are fast approaching $1 trillion, with 30% going to fund the war in Afghanistan.
In addition to the latest increase in war funds, Obama is also asking for an additional $130 billion to be added on to the defense budget for the new fiscal year starting on October 1. The president is upholding his campaign promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan, which also means increasing the use of remote controlled drone planes in neighboring Pakistan that are to blame for hundreds of civilian deaths since Obama took office last January.
Despite Obama’s historic (albeit rhetoric filled) speech in Cairo, the new Commander in Chief is still not about to radically change, let alone reform, the US’s long-standing role in the Middle East. A master of his craft, Obama is simply candy coating the delivery of US imperialism in the region. Given the lack of opposition to Obama’s policies back home, it is becoming clear that he may well be more dangerous than his predecessor when it comes to the US’s motivations internationally.
Had Bush pushed for more military funds at this stage, the antiwar movement (if you can call it that) would have been organizing opposition weeks in advance, calling out the neocons for wasting our scarce tax dollars during a recession on a never-ending, directionless war. But since Obama’s a Democrat, a beloved one at that, mum's the word.
Continue reading at:
http://original.antiwar.com/joshua-frank/2009/06/17/these-are-obamas-wars-now/
Barack O’Bomber is at it again!
He's at war against anti-war Democrats.
http://www.truthout.org/061809A
By Normal Solomon, Truthout.org
Days ago, a warning shot from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue landed with a thud on Capitol Hill near some recent arrivals in the House. The political salvo was carefully aimed and expertly fired. But in the long run, it could boomerang.
As a close vote neared on a supplemental funding bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no." In effect, it was so important to President Obama to get the war funds that he was willing to paint a political target on the backs of some of the gutsiest new progressives in Congress.
But why would a president choose to single out fellow Democrats in their first Congressional term? Because, according to conventional wisdom, they're the most politically vulnerable and the easiest to intimidate. Well, a number of House Democrats in their first full terms were not intimidated. Despite the presidential threat, they stuck to principle. Donna Edwards of Maryland voted no on the war funding when it really counted. So did Alan Grayson of Florida, Eric Massa of New York, Chellie Pingree of Maine, Jared Polis of Colorado and Jackie Speier of California.
Now what? Well, for one thing, progressives across the country should plan on giving special support to Edwards, Grayson, Massa, Pingree, Polis and Speier in 2010. If we take the White House at its word, they may find themselves running for re-election while President Obama withholds his support - in retaliation for their anti-war votes.
But it's not enough to just play defense. We also need to be supporting - or initiating - grassroots campaigns to unseat pro-war members of Congress.
In the Los Angeles area, the military-crazed and ultra-corporate Congresswoman Jane Harman will face the progressive dynamo Marcy Winograd in the Democratic primary next year.
Harman's vote for the latest war funding was predictable. But dozens of Democrats with longtime anti-war reputations also voted yes. Among the most notable examples were Oregon's Peter DeFazio and Washington's Jim McDermott, who apparently found their anti-war constituencies in Eugene and Seattle to be less persuasive than the White House chief of staff.
"White House aides worked the halls during the hours before the vote, and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called some lawmakers personally," McClatchy news service reports. "DeFazio, who was undecided and wound up voting yes, said he talked to Emanuel by phone for about five minutes as Obama's top aide explained the administration's strategy in the war on terror."
This is a crucial time for anti-war activists and other progressive advocates to get more serious about Congressional politics. It's not enough to lobby for or against specific bills - and it's not enough to just get involved at election time. Officeholders must learn that there will be campaign consequences.
When progressives challenge a Democratic incumbent in a primary race, some party loyalists claim that such an intra-party contest is too divisive. But desperately needed change won't come to this country until a lot of progressive candidates replace mainline Democrats in office.
On behalf of his war agenda, the president has signaled that he's willing to undermine the political futures of some anti-war Democrats in Congress. We should do all we can to support those Democrats - and defeat pro-war incumbents on behalf of an anti-war agenda.
http://www.truthout.org/061809A
By Normal Solomon, Truthout.org
Days ago, a warning shot from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue landed with a thud on Capitol Hill near some recent arrivals in the House. The political salvo was carefully aimed and expertly fired. But in the long run, it could boomerang.
As a close vote neared on a supplemental funding bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no." In effect, it was so important to President Obama to get the war funds that he was willing to paint a political target on the backs of some of the gutsiest new progressives in Congress.
But why would a president choose to single out fellow Democrats in their first Congressional term? Because, according to conventional wisdom, they're the most politically vulnerable and the easiest to intimidate. Well, a number of House Democrats in their first full terms were not intimidated. Despite the presidential threat, they stuck to principle. Donna Edwards of Maryland voted no on the war funding when it really counted. So did Alan Grayson of Florida, Eric Massa of New York, Chellie Pingree of Maine, Jared Polis of Colorado and Jackie Speier of California.
Now what? Well, for one thing, progressives across the country should plan on giving special support to Edwards, Grayson, Massa, Pingree, Polis and Speier in 2010. If we take the White House at its word, they may find themselves running for re-election while President Obama withholds his support - in retaliation for their anti-war votes.
But it's not enough to just play defense. We also need to be supporting - or initiating - grassroots campaigns to unseat pro-war members of Congress.
In the Los Angeles area, the military-crazed and ultra-corporate Congresswoman Jane Harman will face the progressive dynamo Marcy Winograd in the Democratic primary next year.
Harman's vote for the latest war funding was predictable. But dozens of Democrats with longtime anti-war reputations also voted yes. Among the most notable examples were Oregon's Peter DeFazio and Washington's Jim McDermott, who apparently found their anti-war constituencies in Eugene and Seattle to be less persuasive than the White House chief of staff.
"White House aides worked the halls during the hours before the vote, and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called some lawmakers personally," McClatchy news service reports. "DeFazio, who was undecided and wound up voting yes, said he talked to Emanuel by phone for about five minutes as Obama's top aide explained the administration's strategy in the war on terror."
This is a crucial time for anti-war activists and other progressive advocates to get more serious about Congressional politics. It's not enough to lobby for or against specific bills - and it's not enough to just get involved at election time. Officeholders must learn that there will be campaign consequences.
When progressives challenge a Democratic incumbent in a primary race, some party loyalists claim that such an intra-party contest is too divisive. But desperately needed change won't come to this country until a lot of progressive candidates replace mainline Democrats in office.
On behalf of his war agenda, the president has signaled that he's willing to undermine the political futures of some anti-war Democrats in Congress. We should do all we can to support those Democrats - and defeat pro-war incumbents on behalf of an anti-war agenda.
Controversy over James DeMeo’s Saharasia hypothesis
This excellent rebuttal of James DeMeo's lecture on patriarchy and desertification is a must read. DeMeo makes a mess of the whole thing with his egregious colonial thinking, "often unwitting affirmation of sanctioned ignorance, their denial of subject status to the colonized, and their reading of the colonial archives.”.
To wit:
"Claiming a Saharan origin of patriarchy occurs in a context of intensely negative racialized portrayal of African societies. DeMeo says he uses anthropological evidence to prove Saharan patriarchy, but modern ethnographic data does not constitute evidence of ancient culture. In the absence of real historical documentation, it is beyond dubious to extrapolate a 6000-old patriarchy based on present-day excision customs, or even on the last 1000 years. Why would Africans not be offended by a claim that people who come from lands like theirs are more likely to create oppressive societies? Such continued inattention to colonial patterns and inaccurate generalizations show profound ignorance about African history."
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/saharasia.html
By feminist author, Max Dashu.
I felt impelled to write down my thoughts about the controversy that erupted on the last day of the World Congress on Matriarchy in Luxembourg, 2003. An outcry followed James De Meo’s presentation, which proposed that patriarchy arose in “Saharasia” because of desertification. Many people were upset that the moderator cut off his responses. Others, including me, were much more disturbed at the content of the presentation itself, and felt that De Meo, even before his responses were interrupted, wasn’t addressing the concerns being raised. Unfortunately there was no time for most critics to voice our objections.
The North African women felt that De Meo’s analysis seriously misrepresented the Saharan cultures. Malika Grasshoff spoke quite passionately in defense of her Kabyle culture. Helene Claudot-Hawad (who married into a Tuareg community) rejected the presentations as “essentialist.” It collapses the origin of patriarchy down to a single factor, and failed to address the presence of the Tuareg in the Sahara. This striking survival of mother-right culture was simply deleted from the maps De Meo showed, which depicted all of North Africa as one bleak expanse of patriarchy.
The distinguished anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday called the theory “reductionist and dangerous.” She was shocked that De Meo was relying on a discredited data set, “the most flawed data-base I can imagine.” Its “data” was collected before 1956, Sanday explained, by white men “who had no idea what was going on” in the cultures they were studying. Much of it was collected in the 30’s, when ethnology was riddled with racial and gender bias. Sanday later told me that no anthropologist would take seriously conclusions based on this bad information. Even its creator, George Peter Murdock, later came to recognize that it was problematic.
Sanday knows whereof she speaks, having studied with Murdock and worked with these statistical ethnic data collections for decades. It was Sanday, by the way, who first proposed back in 1981 that eco-stressors -- especially food shortages -- may have been a factor in the development of patriarchy (but not the factor). This was long before James De Meo came on the scene. So I ask, why would he be treated as a more credible source than this eminent feminist anthropologist who has been researching women’s status and matriarchy for decades?
Women’s issues seemed to be an afterthought in De Meo’s exposition. Women and patriarchy are missing from his book’s title: Saharasia: the 4000 BCE Origins of Child-Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, in the Deserts of the Old World.
He ignores important differences in the treatment of women and men, as when he showed a slide treating male circumcision and female “circumcision” (genital excision, to be exact) as equivalent. These practices are of entirely different orders of magnitude, not to speak of their contrasting socio-political functions. One cuts around, removing the hood covering the male genital organ, while the other amputates a greater or lesser portion of the female organ itself. One acts to shore up masculine privilege, the other to subordinate women and place their sexuality in service to patrilineage.
Sanday was also disturbed about De Meo’s devotion to the Reichian hypothesis, which she said is not really concerned with patriarchy, but with sexual repression, positing that removing sexual taboos would do away with social ills, without any structural or historical analysis of women’s oppression.
I haven’t read De Meo’s book, not having been able to get hold of a copy. I did look it over at the conference; a chapter heading claiming that women were just as responsible for patriarchy as men didn’t inspire my confidence. (This feeling only deepened when the author sent out a promotional email shortly afterwards asserting, “The lecture by Dr. DeMeo was well-received but stirred a bit of controversy in some quarters where "politically correct" thinking prevailed.” This is not only offensive and inaccurate--there was more than “a bit of controversy”--but it also employs the stock rhetoric used to attack feminism and anti-racism. What follows is based upon De Meo’s own exposition of his desertification theory at the conference, including slides he showed of charts from his book.
De Meo paints a picture of patriarchy beginning with the desertification of North Africa and west Asia. He claims in his summary for the conference program, “The anthropological data, and a correlated global archaeological /historical survey, suggest a source region for armored/ patristic/ dominator cultures within Saharasia predominately after c. 4000 BCE...” when the region began to desertify. He thinks that “Semitic cultural migrations” spread patriarchy from Africa, and Indo-European ones from west-central Asia.
No historical or archaeological evidence shows that patriarchal culture patterns originated in the Sahara. There’s no sign of waves of conquest pouring forth to subjugate people in other places. Au contraire! no empires appear in this region until quite late. And the first of these was (atypically as empires go) matrilineal: the 10th century empire of Ghana. The warrior images that De Meo points to in Saharan rock art date later than the earliest known patriarchal states. And these (Iraq, Egypt, China) occur in river valleys, not deserts.
If we can say anything about the Sahara, it is not a region that stands out as a historical bastion of male supremacy. Rather, it has been characterized by the persistence of mother-right cultures and female liberty. The Tuareg, who have been in the Sahara for a very long time, remained a matrilineal society into the 20th century, and the less-islamicized groups of the north still are today. Another major Saharan people, the Wodaabe, also show significant retentions of female liberty and are less patriarchal than many of the cultures DeMeo counts as matristic (such as in the Pacific and South America). The Fulani and Hausa have become quite patriarchal in modern times, but historical sources are clear that the picture looked very different 400 or 500 years ago.
Another region DeMeo describes as a patriarchal homeland is Arabia. This idea has more to do with modern stereotypes of the Arabs than the facts of early Arabian history. Tribal names and other indicators point to ancient Arab observance of matrilineal descent. Early Muslim writers also remark on matrilocal marriage, women’s right to divorce and marry at will, and female ownership of tents. If anything, a pattern of Arab female power contrasts with the well-watered regions of Iraq or the Levant. Genesis lists a significant proportion of female chiefs among the Arabs of Edom, and Assyrian inscriptions mention Arab queens. We even have evidence of women taking several husbands in matrilocal polyandry. Leila Ahmed points to ‘Aisha’s testimony to the variety of marriage types in pre-Islamic times, concluding that “Islamic reforms apparently consolidated a trend toward patrilineage in 6th century Arabia.” [Women and Gender in Islam, Yale, 1992, p 48]
Counter to popular opinion, veiling and female seclusion originated with bronze age Indo-European peoples, not the Arabs. For many centuries, Arabia was subject to conquest by Assyrians, Romans, and other peoples who were far more patriarchal than their Bedouin contemporaries. Eventually the Arabs began adopting some of these patriarchal customs, including the veil. Contra the stereotype of “Semitic patriarchy,” similar matrilineal and matrilocal patterns have been noted for the Hebrews, by Julian Morgenstern, David Bakan, Savina Teubal and other scholars.
In modern times, it is precisely in the most difficult terrains (and therefore the most inaccessible to conquest) that most matrix cultures have lasted the longest: in remote highlands and deserts, and some islands or peninsulas. This is exactly the opposite of what DeMeo’s thesis predicts. Looking at deserts, we find not only the Tuareg but also the Hopi, the New Mexico pueblos, the Dineh (Navajo). Then there are the Seri of Sinaloa in Mexico and the Wayúu, a matrilineal and matrilocal society whose country is the most arid land in Colombia, the desert of the Guajira peninsula.
The deserts of Nubia were matrilineal into the middle ages, and so were several other circum-Saharan peoples. The Kalahari peoples are not matrilineal, but have kept relatively egalitarian traditions in one of the driest deserts of the world. The Himba in Namibia appear to have been matrilineal in the recent past, though they now show some patriarchal elements. There are, of course, desert patriarchies, but they do not prove that desert life is the catalyst for cultures of male domination, or conquest either.
The theory that patriarchy begins in deserts can be tested another way. If it were true, we should be able to show that male domination in rainforest cultures was imported or imposed by outsiders. But the strongly patriarchal cultures of New Guinea are by all accounts indigenous. There is no archaeological or historical evidence of invasions -- nor do the oral histories testify to them. So how did patriarchy arise in these well-watered, geographically isolated islands of the tropics? The same problem is presented by the Yanomamo and a number of other Amazon basin cultures, as well as patriarchal systems in the Congo basin.
Continue reading here:
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/saharasia.html
To wit:
"Claiming a Saharan origin of patriarchy occurs in a context of intensely negative racialized portrayal of African societies. DeMeo says he uses anthropological evidence to prove Saharan patriarchy, but modern ethnographic data does not constitute evidence of ancient culture. In the absence of real historical documentation, it is beyond dubious to extrapolate a 6000-old patriarchy based on present-day excision customs, or even on the last 1000 years. Why would Africans not be offended by a claim that people who come from lands like theirs are more likely to create oppressive societies? Such continued inattention to colonial patterns and inaccurate generalizations show profound ignorance about African history."
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/saharasia.html
By feminist author, Max Dashu.
I felt impelled to write down my thoughts about the controversy that erupted on the last day of the World Congress on Matriarchy in Luxembourg, 2003. An outcry followed James De Meo’s presentation, which proposed that patriarchy arose in “Saharasia” because of desertification. Many people were upset that the moderator cut off his responses. Others, including me, were much more disturbed at the content of the presentation itself, and felt that De Meo, even before his responses were interrupted, wasn’t addressing the concerns being raised. Unfortunately there was no time for most critics to voice our objections.
The North African women felt that De Meo’s analysis seriously misrepresented the Saharan cultures. Malika Grasshoff spoke quite passionately in defense of her Kabyle culture. Helene Claudot-Hawad (who married into a Tuareg community) rejected the presentations as “essentialist.” It collapses the origin of patriarchy down to a single factor, and failed to address the presence of the Tuareg in the Sahara. This striking survival of mother-right culture was simply deleted from the maps De Meo showed, which depicted all of North Africa as one bleak expanse of patriarchy.
The distinguished anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday called the theory “reductionist and dangerous.” She was shocked that De Meo was relying on a discredited data set, “the most flawed data-base I can imagine.” Its “data” was collected before 1956, Sanday explained, by white men “who had no idea what was going on” in the cultures they were studying. Much of it was collected in the 30’s, when ethnology was riddled with racial and gender bias. Sanday later told me that no anthropologist would take seriously conclusions based on this bad information. Even its creator, George Peter Murdock, later came to recognize that it was problematic.
Sanday knows whereof she speaks, having studied with Murdock and worked with these statistical ethnic data collections for decades. It was Sanday, by the way, who first proposed back in 1981 that eco-stressors -- especially food shortages -- may have been a factor in the development of patriarchy (but not the factor). This was long before James De Meo came on the scene. So I ask, why would he be treated as a more credible source than this eminent feminist anthropologist who has been researching women’s status and matriarchy for decades?
Women’s issues seemed to be an afterthought in De Meo’s exposition. Women and patriarchy are missing from his book’s title: Saharasia: the 4000 BCE Origins of Child-Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, in the Deserts of the Old World.
He ignores important differences in the treatment of women and men, as when he showed a slide treating male circumcision and female “circumcision” (genital excision, to be exact) as equivalent. These practices are of entirely different orders of magnitude, not to speak of their contrasting socio-political functions. One cuts around, removing the hood covering the male genital organ, while the other amputates a greater or lesser portion of the female organ itself. One acts to shore up masculine privilege, the other to subordinate women and place their sexuality in service to patrilineage.
Sanday was also disturbed about De Meo’s devotion to the Reichian hypothesis, which she said is not really concerned with patriarchy, but with sexual repression, positing that removing sexual taboos would do away with social ills, without any structural or historical analysis of women’s oppression.
I haven’t read De Meo’s book, not having been able to get hold of a copy. I did look it over at the conference; a chapter heading claiming that women were just as responsible for patriarchy as men didn’t inspire my confidence. (This feeling only deepened when the author sent out a promotional email shortly afterwards asserting, “The lecture by Dr. DeMeo was well-received but stirred a bit of controversy in some quarters where "politically correct" thinking prevailed.” This is not only offensive and inaccurate--there was more than “a bit of controversy”--but it also employs the stock rhetoric used to attack feminism and anti-racism. What follows is based upon De Meo’s own exposition of his desertification theory at the conference, including slides he showed of charts from his book.
De Meo paints a picture of patriarchy beginning with the desertification of North Africa and west Asia. He claims in his summary for the conference program, “The anthropological data, and a correlated global archaeological /historical survey, suggest a source region for armored/ patristic/ dominator cultures within Saharasia predominately after c. 4000 BCE...” when the region began to desertify. He thinks that “Semitic cultural migrations” spread patriarchy from Africa, and Indo-European ones from west-central Asia.
No historical or archaeological evidence shows that patriarchal culture patterns originated in the Sahara. There’s no sign of waves of conquest pouring forth to subjugate people in other places. Au contraire! no empires appear in this region until quite late. And the first of these was (atypically as empires go) matrilineal: the 10th century empire of Ghana. The warrior images that De Meo points to in Saharan rock art date later than the earliest known patriarchal states. And these (Iraq, Egypt, China) occur in river valleys, not deserts.
If we can say anything about the Sahara, it is not a region that stands out as a historical bastion of male supremacy. Rather, it has been characterized by the persistence of mother-right cultures and female liberty. The Tuareg, who have been in the Sahara for a very long time, remained a matrilineal society into the 20th century, and the less-islamicized groups of the north still are today. Another major Saharan people, the Wodaabe, also show significant retentions of female liberty and are less patriarchal than many of the cultures DeMeo counts as matristic (such as in the Pacific and South America). The Fulani and Hausa have become quite patriarchal in modern times, but historical sources are clear that the picture looked very different 400 or 500 years ago.
Another region DeMeo describes as a patriarchal homeland is Arabia. This idea has more to do with modern stereotypes of the Arabs than the facts of early Arabian history. Tribal names and other indicators point to ancient Arab observance of matrilineal descent. Early Muslim writers also remark on matrilocal marriage, women’s right to divorce and marry at will, and female ownership of tents. If anything, a pattern of Arab female power contrasts with the well-watered regions of Iraq or the Levant. Genesis lists a significant proportion of female chiefs among the Arabs of Edom, and Assyrian inscriptions mention Arab queens. We even have evidence of women taking several husbands in matrilocal polyandry. Leila Ahmed points to ‘Aisha’s testimony to the variety of marriage types in pre-Islamic times, concluding that “Islamic reforms apparently consolidated a trend toward patrilineage in 6th century Arabia.” [Women and Gender in Islam, Yale, 1992, p 48]
Counter to popular opinion, veiling and female seclusion originated with bronze age Indo-European peoples, not the Arabs. For many centuries, Arabia was subject to conquest by Assyrians, Romans, and other peoples who were far more patriarchal than their Bedouin contemporaries. Eventually the Arabs began adopting some of these patriarchal customs, including the veil. Contra the stereotype of “Semitic patriarchy,” similar matrilineal and matrilocal patterns have been noted for the Hebrews, by Julian Morgenstern, David Bakan, Savina Teubal and other scholars.
In modern times, it is precisely in the most difficult terrains (and therefore the most inaccessible to conquest) that most matrix cultures have lasted the longest: in remote highlands and deserts, and some islands or peninsulas. This is exactly the opposite of what DeMeo’s thesis predicts. Looking at deserts, we find not only the Tuareg but also the Hopi, the New Mexico pueblos, the Dineh (Navajo). Then there are the Seri of Sinaloa in Mexico and the Wayúu, a matrilineal and matrilocal society whose country is the most arid land in Colombia, the desert of the Guajira peninsula.
The deserts of Nubia were matrilineal into the middle ages, and so were several other circum-Saharan peoples. The Kalahari peoples are not matrilineal, but have kept relatively egalitarian traditions in one of the driest deserts of the world. The Himba in Namibia appear to have been matrilineal in the recent past, though they now show some patriarchal elements. There are, of course, desert patriarchies, but they do not prove that desert life is the catalyst for cultures of male domination, or conquest either.
The theory that patriarchy begins in deserts can be tested another way. If it were true, we should be able to show that male domination in rainforest cultures was imported or imposed by outsiders. But the strongly patriarchal cultures of New Guinea are by all accounts indigenous. There is no archaeological or historical evidence of invasions -- nor do the oral histories testify to them. So how did patriarchy arise in these well-watered, geographically isolated islands of the tropics? The same problem is presented by the Yanomamo and a number of other Amazon basin cultures, as well as patriarchal systems in the Congo basin.
Continue reading here:
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/saharasia.html
16 June, 2009
Black Squirrels & Doppelgangers at Conspiracy Con 9
Adam Gorightly Reports on the 2009 Conspiracy Con event
Conspiracy Con 9 started out rather weirdly for this humble gonzo reporter, when — after checking into the hotel where the event was being been held — I was approached by a middle aged man who asked me if I had “brought the books?” Well, indeed, I had brought some books I was planning to sell at the event, however — as far as I could tell — these bore no relation to this fellow, who I didn’t know from Adam.
Upon further interrogation, it became apparent that this gentleman — who I soon discovered was Roger Tolces, a speaker at the conference — had mistaken me for someone he had just talked to in regards to the aforementioned books, and so I informed Tolces that it was probably my doppelganger he had spoken to, which got a chuckle out of his wife, but left Mr. Tolces somewhat perplexed until he realized I was pulling his leg…sort of. This is not the first (nor will it be the last!) of an alleged Gorightly double sighting at a conspiracy or paranormal conference. Years ago, psychic Eugenia Macer Story informed me that she saw a Gorightly doppelganger at some such conference, although I forget the exact details of Eugenia’s anomalous encounter.
Tolces, it so happens, is a private investigator who specializes in — as he calls them — “electronic countermeasures”, which includes ways to ward off MK-ULTRA-like harassers. Later, I visited briefly with Tolces at his table and related certain experiences, nearly a decade old, I had had with what I perceived as some sort of microwave harassment. Tolces replied that he didn’t think my story was “crazy” and that he has heard similar stories many, many times.
Conspiracy Con inevitably brings about interactions between likeminded spirits from all ends of the conspiratorial spectrum, including meeting up with colleague, and Mothman experiencer, Andy Colvin. After picking Andy up at the San Jose airport and arriving back at the hotel parking lot, another inexplicable incident occurred when a black squirrel crossed our path. In all my years of traveling up and down the Golden State, never before in my life had I witnessed such a spectacle, and Andy was able to snap a photo of said anomalous squirrel before it scampered out of the view. Afterwards, I did a bit of research and discovered that the rare black squirrel is a melanistic variation of the common grey squirrel, in essence a genetic mutation, which a quick web search revealed has been seen on occasion in the greater Santa Clara area, home of Conspiracy Con.
Later inspection of this black squirrel photo revealed a possible MIB (or Man In White, as the case may be) standing behind a tennis court fence, in the background of the photo, apparently monitoring our activities.
The Black Squirrel and The Man In White - Photo by Andy Colvin
Andy and I later evolved several theories explaining the haunting appearance of this white-shirted mystery man and the black squirrel and soon came to suspect that either this odd squirrel was remote controlled, or perhaps even a holographic projection used to mesmerize Andy and myself for means of MK-ULTRA tomfoolery.
Continue reading at;
http://forteanswest.com/wordpress-mu/norcallowfi/2009/06/15/black-squirrels-doppelgangers-at-conspiracy-con-9/
Conspiracy Con 9 started out rather weirdly for this humble gonzo reporter, when — after checking into the hotel where the event was being been held — I was approached by a middle aged man who asked me if I had “brought the books?” Well, indeed, I had brought some books I was planning to sell at the event, however — as far as I could tell — these bore no relation to this fellow, who I didn’t know from Adam.
Upon further interrogation, it became apparent that this gentleman — who I soon discovered was Roger Tolces, a speaker at the conference — had mistaken me for someone he had just talked to in regards to the aforementioned books, and so I informed Tolces that it was probably my doppelganger he had spoken to, which got a chuckle out of his wife, but left Mr. Tolces somewhat perplexed until he realized I was pulling his leg…sort of. This is not the first (nor will it be the last!) of an alleged Gorightly double sighting at a conspiracy or paranormal conference. Years ago, psychic Eugenia Macer Story informed me that she saw a Gorightly doppelganger at some such conference, although I forget the exact details of Eugenia’s anomalous encounter.
Tolces, it so happens, is a private investigator who specializes in — as he calls them — “electronic countermeasures”, which includes ways to ward off MK-ULTRA-like harassers. Later, I visited briefly with Tolces at his table and related certain experiences, nearly a decade old, I had had with what I perceived as some sort of microwave harassment. Tolces replied that he didn’t think my story was “crazy” and that he has heard similar stories many, many times.
Conspiracy Con inevitably brings about interactions between likeminded spirits from all ends of the conspiratorial spectrum, including meeting up with colleague, and Mothman experiencer, Andy Colvin. After picking Andy up at the San Jose airport and arriving back at the hotel parking lot, another inexplicable incident occurred when a black squirrel crossed our path. In all my years of traveling up and down the Golden State, never before in my life had I witnessed such a spectacle, and Andy was able to snap a photo of said anomalous squirrel before it scampered out of the view. Afterwards, I did a bit of research and discovered that the rare black squirrel is a melanistic variation of the common grey squirrel, in essence a genetic mutation, which a quick web search revealed has been seen on occasion in the greater Santa Clara area, home of Conspiracy Con.
Later inspection of this black squirrel photo revealed a possible MIB (or Man In White, as the case may be) standing behind a tennis court fence, in the background of the photo, apparently monitoring our activities.
The Black Squirrel and The Man In White - Photo by Andy Colvin
Andy and I later evolved several theories explaining the haunting appearance of this white-shirted mystery man and the black squirrel and soon came to suspect that either this odd squirrel was remote controlled, or perhaps even a holographic projection used to mesmerize Andy and myself for means of MK-ULTRA tomfoolery.
Continue reading at;
http://forteanswest.com/wordpress-mu/norcallowfi/2009/06/15/black-squirrels-doppelgangers-at-conspiracy-con-9/
15 June, 2009
Agent Orange in the City of New Orleans
The War At Home:
Agent Orange in the City of New Orleans
Agent Orange was born and bred in our backyard to tame the thicket of forest and "savage" people that dwelled in another country. It is still lounging about the water tables and the particulate matter in New Orleans.
Jane Crown Reports
In 1929 the stock market crash was on the lips of people in many cities. New Orleans was no different. There would have been people living in the B. W. Cooper housing project then, mostly of Italian descent; one of my aunts (by marriage) lived in one of them until the latter part of the 1930s.
Nobody seemed to notice when Thompson Hayward Co. moved in near the housing project on an acre plot in 1941. Times were still tough; manned industry, progress and business in general must have been seen as prosperous and worthy of a flailing city. Families needed work—some sense of hope that things were growing and changing.
Things were indeed changing in the city in a major way. Thompson Hayward Co. was cooking chemicals indoors. Inside large kettles, a dry production not unlike the spice companies in some ways—a cayenne of some considerable potency—was being manufactured. Like the goods flowing into the new decade, a new product was emerging.
By 1949 production of chemicals was changing. Folks in this era, twenty years after the Great Crash of 1929, Black Thursday to Black Tuesday, were not looking for any more bad signs. There were now large cooking vats outdoors—the largest gumbo pots you can imagine. The rue was now leaning towards a wet product, and residents were starting to get a hint of what was happening at the plant. The neighbors of Gert Town were complaining of dust in the air and “overflowing outdoor vats.”1
What was overflowing from those pots was an herbicide known as 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). The inherent issue with this toxic defoliant is that once it reaches a peak temperature of 160 degrees Celsius, portions of it can transform into a byproduct called dioxin. Dioxin is the most dangerous human carcinogen known.
Life crawled on until World War II. People must have been too busy to be concerned about what was going on at 7700 Earhart Blvd. Many fathers, sons and brothers were drafted halfway across the world, and those who remained were doing their civic duty, supporting the war effort like any patriotic American would do. A vicious German enemy with a queer little mustache was threatening to rule the world with fascist ideology.
If anybody was thinking about what that secretive little acre held—where cousin Rene or Uncle Salvador may have worked before going off to war—there was little mention of it. They were too busy looking forward. Agent Orange was not used during World War II. “In the early years of World War II, a grant was provided by the National Research Council to develop a chemical to destroy rice crops in Japan (the major food source of the Japanese). 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (Agent Orange) was the result. A discussion between President Roosevelt and White House Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy determined that this heinous chemical should not be used." 2
The nuclear age brought with it a fear of bombs and Castro. Kennedy stood down the Cuban Missile Crisis. Again we feared something worlds away which could directly impact us. The year 1961 saw the sale of Thompson Hayward Company and its moniker to T.H. Agriculture (THAN). Although it changed hands, the company still possessed an itching need to destroy our enemies. Deadly toxins were starting to consume the workers behind the large steel doors of Earhart’s sole acre.
One can imagine that many of the men who had returned from World War II were trying to return to some sort of normalcy—going to work for THAN and perhaps inviting their cousins and friends. Jobs had never been an easy thing to come by in New Orleans, in a widespread service industry and a floundering French Quarter that people were calling skid row by the early 1960s. If you were a Gert Town resident, you could very well have been making the chemical dinner inside those gates, and bringing home the proverbial bacon at better wages than most.
By the 1960s the company had been open for business twenty years. Production of herbicides was still actively pursued by THAN. Hippies were out smoking grass and enjoying their own chemical high, preaching free love and peace for mankind. The hard working individuals who were less dreamy lived and conducted daily business in Gert Town, still mostly unaware of the toxins. It was the counterculture revolution and people were more concerned with getting their children into college, and away from the escalating war talk.
Vietnam was on the verge of spilling into something catastrophic, and the company was setting an unparalleled pace to reach its goals in production. Thousands of men were dripping into the jungles of North Vietnam, but they did not go without chemical armor. Their brothers in Gert Town had provided them with a most effective herbicide. Known for the orange stripe on the side of its barrels, some 18 million tons of Agent Orange was used in the era of 'Nam.
Nobody seemed to be looking into the yards to see if there was any change. Nobody was really home, once again, to complain of anything foul reeking in the air. The old clay pipes of New Orleans were just a fact of life. Water is not supposed to have a taste, but New Orleans water has always been a bit grainy and salty. People were simply doing the sign of the cross, shuffling in and out of the Catholic churches and Baptist too, praying for an end to the conflict. The conflict raged on at home and across leagues of a foreign sea.
The year 1971 ushered in many other new bad boys on the block: Diedrin, Aldrin, Chlordane and dry cleaning agents were contained in the old factory. Newer fluids and progressive chemicals suited the community needs. Herbicides were still in fashion for farmer and city dweller alike. The crisis in Vietnam had ended and Agent Orange was now an internationally banned agent, having been used from 1961-1971.
Now here in our story things start to slow a pace. Like the horse and buggy by the curb waiting for an easy fare and jaunt through the Garden District or Quarter, things were sort of limping along. There was no more wet production inside or outside of 7700 Earhart. At the height of disco in 1976, the owners of the company decided to use the building solely for storage purposes.
While you were listening to Credence Clearwater Revival or ABBA, the doors of the company were rusting from the toxic chemicals being contained inside. Nobody was asking questions. The company quietly turned over its ownership in 1981 to Harcros Chemicals, Inc., and again the THAN moniker was sustained. Bell bottoms, Cadillacs and spectators were creeping out of style, but big business and the fast life were enjoying a new rebirth in industrial greed.
By the time tab collars and high-heeled shoes for men changed again, things were morphing inside the doors of Harcros Chemicals. The company finally closed its chemical gates for production in 1986. Harcros still owned the building and the contents were left to be stored. In 1987, the wrists of Harcros and THAN were slapped for dumping something curious into the New Orleans drains, the identity of which was never disclosed. The cost for Harcros/THAN was around 4 million dollars to remediate the dumping, and they were forced to remove thousands of gallons of liquid toxins along with tons of foul soil.
Continue reading at:
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/agentorange.html
Agent Orange in the City of New Orleans
Agent Orange was born and bred in our backyard to tame the thicket of forest and "savage" people that dwelled in another country. It is still lounging about the water tables and the particulate matter in New Orleans.
Jane Crown Reports
In 1929 the stock market crash was on the lips of people in many cities. New Orleans was no different. There would have been people living in the B. W. Cooper housing project then, mostly of Italian descent; one of my aunts (by marriage) lived in one of them until the latter part of the 1930s.
Nobody seemed to notice when Thompson Hayward Co. moved in near the housing project on an acre plot in 1941. Times were still tough; manned industry, progress and business in general must have been seen as prosperous and worthy of a flailing city. Families needed work—some sense of hope that things were growing and changing.
Things were indeed changing in the city in a major way. Thompson Hayward Co. was cooking chemicals indoors. Inside large kettles, a dry production not unlike the spice companies in some ways—a cayenne of some considerable potency—was being manufactured. Like the goods flowing into the new decade, a new product was emerging.
By 1949 production of chemicals was changing. Folks in this era, twenty years after the Great Crash of 1929, Black Thursday to Black Tuesday, were not looking for any more bad signs. There were now large cooking vats outdoors—the largest gumbo pots you can imagine. The rue was now leaning towards a wet product, and residents were starting to get a hint of what was happening at the plant. The neighbors of Gert Town were complaining of dust in the air and “overflowing outdoor vats.”1
What was overflowing from those pots was an herbicide known as 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). The inherent issue with this toxic defoliant is that once it reaches a peak temperature of 160 degrees Celsius, portions of it can transform into a byproduct called dioxin. Dioxin is the most dangerous human carcinogen known.
Life crawled on until World War II. People must have been too busy to be concerned about what was going on at 7700 Earhart Blvd. Many fathers, sons and brothers were drafted halfway across the world, and those who remained were doing their civic duty, supporting the war effort like any patriotic American would do. A vicious German enemy with a queer little mustache was threatening to rule the world with fascist ideology.
If anybody was thinking about what that secretive little acre held—where cousin Rene or Uncle Salvador may have worked before going off to war—there was little mention of it. They were too busy looking forward. Agent Orange was not used during World War II. “In the early years of World War II, a grant was provided by the National Research Council to develop a chemical to destroy rice crops in Japan (the major food source of the Japanese). 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (Agent Orange) was the result. A discussion between President Roosevelt and White House Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy determined that this heinous chemical should not be used." 2
The nuclear age brought with it a fear of bombs and Castro. Kennedy stood down the Cuban Missile Crisis. Again we feared something worlds away which could directly impact us. The year 1961 saw the sale of Thompson Hayward Company and its moniker to T.H. Agriculture (THAN). Although it changed hands, the company still possessed an itching need to destroy our enemies. Deadly toxins were starting to consume the workers behind the large steel doors of Earhart’s sole acre.
One can imagine that many of the men who had returned from World War II were trying to return to some sort of normalcy—going to work for THAN and perhaps inviting their cousins and friends. Jobs had never been an easy thing to come by in New Orleans, in a widespread service industry and a floundering French Quarter that people were calling skid row by the early 1960s. If you were a Gert Town resident, you could very well have been making the chemical dinner inside those gates, and bringing home the proverbial bacon at better wages than most.
By the 1960s the company had been open for business twenty years. Production of herbicides was still actively pursued by THAN. Hippies were out smoking grass and enjoying their own chemical high, preaching free love and peace for mankind. The hard working individuals who were less dreamy lived and conducted daily business in Gert Town, still mostly unaware of the toxins. It was the counterculture revolution and people were more concerned with getting their children into college, and away from the escalating war talk.
Vietnam was on the verge of spilling into something catastrophic, and the company was setting an unparalleled pace to reach its goals in production. Thousands of men were dripping into the jungles of North Vietnam, but they did not go without chemical armor. Their brothers in Gert Town had provided them with a most effective herbicide. Known for the orange stripe on the side of its barrels, some 18 million tons of Agent Orange was used in the era of 'Nam.
Nobody seemed to be looking into the yards to see if there was any change. Nobody was really home, once again, to complain of anything foul reeking in the air. The old clay pipes of New Orleans were just a fact of life. Water is not supposed to have a taste, but New Orleans water has always been a bit grainy and salty. People were simply doing the sign of the cross, shuffling in and out of the Catholic churches and Baptist too, praying for an end to the conflict. The conflict raged on at home and across leagues of a foreign sea.
The year 1971 ushered in many other new bad boys on the block: Diedrin, Aldrin, Chlordane and dry cleaning agents were contained in the old factory. Newer fluids and progressive chemicals suited the community needs. Herbicides were still in fashion for farmer and city dweller alike. The crisis in Vietnam had ended and Agent Orange was now an internationally banned agent, having been used from 1961-1971.
Now here in our story things start to slow a pace. Like the horse and buggy by the curb waiting for an easy fare and jaunt through the Garden District or Quarter, things were sort of limping along. There was no more wet production inside or outside of 7700 Earhart. At the height of disco in 1976, the owners of the company decided to use the building solely for storage purposes.
While you were listening to Credence Clearwater Revival or ABBA, the doors of the company were rusting from the toxic chemicals being contained inside. Nobody was asking questions. The company quietly turned over its ownership in 1981 to Harcros Chemicals, Inc., and again the THAN moniker was sustained. Bell bottoms, Cadillacs and spectators were creeping out of style, but big business and the fast life were enjoying a new rebirth in industrial greed.
By the time tab collars and high-heeled shoes for men changed again, things were morphing inside the doors of Harcros Chemicals. The company finally closed its chemical gates for production in 1986. Harcros still owned the building and the contents were left to be stored. In 1987, the wrists of Harcros and THAN were slapped for dumping something curious into the New Orleans drains, the identity of which was never disclosed. The cost for Harcros/THAN was around 4 million dollars to remediate the dumping, and they were forced to remove thousands of gallons of liquid toxins along with tons of foul soil.
Continue reading at:
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/agentorange.html
Agent Orange Continues to Poison Vietnam
By Marjorie Cohn
From 1961 to 1971, the US military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects).
Between 2.5 and 4.8 million people were exposed to Agent Orange. The spraying covered 1.4 billion hectares of land and forest - approximately 12 percent of the land area of Vietnam.
Vietnamese who were exposed to the chemical have suffered from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity, and skin and nervous disorders. Children and grandchildren of those exposed have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases and shortened life spans. The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam have been devastated and denuded. They may never grow back and if they do, it will take 50 to 200 years to regenerate. Animals that inhabited the forests and jungles have become extinct, disrupting the communities that depended on them. The rivers and underground water in some areas have also been contaminated. Erosion and desertification will change the environment, contributing to the warming of the planet and dislocation of crop and animal life.
The US government and the chemical companies knew that Agent Orange, when produced rapidly at high temperatures, would contain large quantities of Dioxin. Nevertheless, the chemical companies continued to produce it in this manner. The US government and the chemical companies also knew that the Bionetics Study, commissioned by the government in 1963, showed that even low levels of Dioxin produced significant deformities in unborn offspring of laboratory animals. But they suppressed that study and continued to spray Vietnam with Agent Orange. It wasn't until the study was leaked in 1969 that the spraying of Agent Orange was discontinued.
US soldiers who served in Vietnam have experienced similar illnesses. After they sued the chemical companies, including Dow and Monsanto, that manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the government, the case was settled out of court for $180 million which gave few plaintiffs more than a few thousand dollars each. Later the US veterans won a legislative victory for compensation for exposure to Agent Orange. They receive $1.52 billion per year in benefits.
But when the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange sued the chemical companies in federal court, US District Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that Agent Orange did not constitute a poison weapon prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907. Weinstein had reportedly told the chemical companies when they settled the US veterans' suit that their liability was over and he was making good on his promise. His dismissal was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The chemical companies admitted in their filing in the Supreme Court that the harm alleged by the victims was foreseeable although not intended. How can something that is foreseeable be unintended?
Continue reading
http://www.truthout.org/061509R
What this article doesn’t say is Agent Orange was created in New Orleans and that the U.S. “hot spot” for Agent Orange is New Orleans.
See, Jane Crown, The War At Home: Agent Orange in the City of New Orleans
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/agentorange.html
From 1961 to 1971, the US military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects).
Between 2.5 and 4.8 million people were exposed to Agent Orange. The spraying covered 1.4 billion hectares of land and forest - approximately 12 percent of the land area of Vietnam.
Vietnamese who were exposed to the chemical have suffered from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity, and skin and nervous disorders. Children and grandchildren of those exposed have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases and shortened life spans. The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam have been devastated and denuded. They may never grow back and if they do, it will take 50 to 200 years to regenerate. Animals that inhabited the forests and jungles have become extinct, disrupting the communities that depended on them. The rivers and underground water in some areas have also been contaminated. Erosion and desertification will change the environment, contributing to the warming of the planet and dislocation of crop and animal life.
The US government and the chemical companies knew that Agent Orange, when produced rapidly at high temperatures, would contain large quantities of Dioxin. Nevertheless, the chemical companies continued to produce it in this manner. The US government and the chemical companies also knew that the Bionetics Study, commissioned by the government in 1963, showed that even low levels of Dioxin produced significant deformities in unborn offspring of laboratory animals. But they suppressed that study and continued to spray Vietnam with Agent Orange. It wasn't until the study was leaked in 1969 that the spraying of Agent Orange was discontinued.
US soldiers who served in Vietnam have experienced similar illnesses. After they sued the chemical companies, including Dow and Monsanto, that manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the government, the case was settled out of court for $180 million which gave few plaintiffs more than a few thousand dollars each. Later the US veterans won a legislative victory for compensation for exposure to Agent Orange. They receive $1.52 billion per year in benefits.
But when the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange sued the chemical companies in federal court, US District Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that Agent Orange did not constitute a poison weapon prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907. Weinstein had reportedly told the chemical companies when they settled the US veterans' suit that their liability was over and he was making good on his promise. His dismissal was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The chemical companies admitted in their filing in the Supreme Court that the harm alleged by the victims was foreseeable although not intended. How can something that is foreseeable be unintended?
Continue reading
http://www.truthout.org/061509R
What this article doesn’t say is Agent Orange was created in New Orleans and that the U.S. “hot spot” for Agent Orange is New Orleans.
See, Jane Crown, The War At Home: Agent Orange in the City of New Orleans
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/agentorange.html
The CIA’s Torture Teachers
Two Psychologists – James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen -- Helped the CIA Exploit a Secret Military Program to Develop Brutal Interrogation Tactics
Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon.com. He joins us from Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mark.
MARK BENJAMIN: Thank you so much for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you have discovered.
MARK BENJAMIN: Well, what we’ve learned is that there is a special school, a secretive school, called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. And that’s where we train elite troops to resist, if captured by an enemy who ignores the Geneva Conventions, things like waterboarding, stress positions, sexual humiliation, isolation, that sort of thing. And reporters, including myself, have been working for years now to try to show that it looks like the Pentagon sort of reverse-engineered those tactics to use to interrogate real prisoners. The Pentagon said, “No, no, no,” until last month. You mentioned an Inspector General report that came out and said, well, yes, in fact, the Pentagon did do that. What we’ve learned now is that it appears that the CIA, working very closely with the Pentagon, did the same thing very early in the war on terror, relying on psychologists very close to this program. And because both agencies turned to this program they call the SERE program early in the war on terror, it suggests very high-level coordination in the Bush administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain just what the SERE program is.
MARK BENJAMIN: The SERE program is a Cold War era program, where we literally set up mock prisons at places like Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which is where we have sort of the flagship program, where elite soldiers—for example, Special Forces soldiers—are subject to brutal mock interrogations. As I mentioned, waterboarding is just one of the things that they face—isolation in very, very small pens, hooding, that kind of thing, stress positions. And it is intended to teach those soldiers to resist those illegal tactics if they are captured.
And that raises an obvious problem. If you’re going to take that training, which is designed to get people to resist illegal interrogations, and flip it around to interrogation tactics, which is now what we’re learning the Pentagon and the CIA both did, you’re very likely, obviously, to come up with tactics that are violations of the Geneva Conventions. That’s a problem for the Bush administration, which has been saying that their tactics are safe, effective and legal. SERE training is not designed to be safe, effective or legal.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about two CIA-employed psychologists who are under investigation right now. Explain who they are.
MARK BENJAMIN: The two psychologists are named James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, and these are psychologists who have been affiliated with this training program—again, called the SERE program—for years. What we have learned is that the Senate Armed Services Committee—this is a committee run by Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan—is now looking into the activities of these two psychologists, in particular.
What our sources on Capitol Hill and, in fact, some of Mitchell and Jessen’s own colleagues say is that these guys, these psychologists who are affiliated with the military’s SERE training, were then employed by the CIA as contractors to do the same thing that the military was doing, which was to flip these tactics around and use them on real terrorists. And, in fact, Jane Mayer from the New Yorker, who’s done some wonderful reporting also on this issue, put one of these guys, James Mitchell, in the room with a high-level CIA detainee in early 2002, and, according to Mayer, he was urging some very rough stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is investigating them?
MARK BENJAMIN: The Senate Armed Services Committee is looking into these guys, and, in fact, based on Carl Levin’s request, the Department of Defense has ordered anybody associated with the Department of Defense, in a memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, that any document that has the name of these two guys, Bruce Jessen or James Mitchell, has to be preserved, and nobody can destroy documents associated with those two guys, because they’re part of this Senate investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the letter that psychologists have written to the American Psychological Association and the controversy that’s brewing within this organization of close to 150,000 psychologists?
MARK BENJAMIN: There is a major rift in the American Psychological Association, a professional association for psychologists. In 2005, the American Psychological Association came up with ethics guidelines that essentially say that a psychologist can help participate in a military interrogation. This is a big deal, because the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatrists said no, we won’t have any part of it. It turns out that six of the ten individual psychologists who helped draft those ethics guidelines for the American Psychological Association were affiliated with the military. And, in fact, several of them were affiliated with this SERE school.
This issue has been really tearing apart the American Psychological Association for years now, and there is an expanding group of psychologists who are very, very concerned that the American Psychological Association’s own ethical guidelines are allowing psychologists, like these guys Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, to reverse-engineer training tactics into really brutal interrogation techniques. And there’s a bunch of letter-writing back and forth, frankly, to the head of—the president of the American Psychological Association, objecting to these ethic guidelines and perhaps the use of these tactics.
AMY GOODMAN: You write about the dozens of psychologists who made public a joint letter to the American Psychological Association President Sharon Brehm, fingering another CIA-employed psychologist. He was one of the ten on that committee in 2005 that was convened to look at psychologists’ involvement in these interrogations. Explain who he is.
MARK BENJAMIN: That’s a guy whose last name is Shumate. He’s a psychologist for the Counter Terrorism Center at the CIA. This is the center that reported—at the time of 9/11 was a guy named Cofer Black was in charge of that unit. You may recall Cofer Black is very well known for going up to Congress early in the war on terror and saying, you know, “There’s a before-after-9/11 and there’s an after-9/11; after 9/11 the gloves come off.”
What the psychologists are concerned about is that their fellow psychologists who are associated with that center, the Counter Terrorism Center, seem to be also, you know, crucial in reverse-engineering these tactics, these training tactics in the brutal interrogation techniques, or at least that’s the concern among these psychologists. And what they’re doing is alerting their organization that there could be a real problem here.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, Cofer Black now involved with Blackwater, the private security company based in North Carolina, and an offshoot of that around intelligence. Now, R. Scott Shumate was one of the ten people involved in this PENS Task Force, this advisory task force that ultimately advised that the psychologists could continue in these military interrogations, despite the fact that three of the members—we had two of them on on Democracy Now!—have expressed great concern about them, one of these members handing over all of her notes leading up to the meeting and afterwards, the email listservs, over to the Senate Armed Services Committee, as they conduct their investigation.
MARK BENJAMIN: That’s right. And some of the psychologists, as you mentioned, these civilian psychologists, sort of feel like they were railroaded or misled or, you know, in other words, the military folks who were on that panel which came up with these ethics guidelines sort of ran the show. I think that’s sort of what you’re referring to there. And, yes, there’s very serious concern about these psychologists, that their own fellow professionals may have played a vital role in flipping these techniques around, both at the Pentagon and, now we’ve learned, also at the CIA, into some really brutal interrogation techniques.
Continue reading:
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/6/25/the_cias_torture_teachers_psychologists_helped
See this article which states that the two are Mormons.
Dr Mengele Award Goes To James Mitchell & Bruce Jessen
http://tenpercent.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/dr-mengele-award-goes-to-james-mitchell-bruce-jessen/
Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon.com. He joins us from Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mark.
MARK BENJAMIN: Thank you so much for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you have discovered.
MARK BENJAMIN: Well, what we’ve learned is that there is a special school, a secretive school, called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. And that’s where we train elite troops to resist, if captured by an enemy who ignores the Geneva Conventions, things like waterboarding, stress positions, sexual humiliation, isolation, that sort of thing. And reporters, including myself, have been working for years now to try to show that it looks like the Pentagon sort of reverse-engineered those tactics to use to interrogate real prisoners. The Pentagon said, “No, no, no,” until last month. You mentioned an Inspector General report that came out and said, well, yes, in fact, the Pentagon did do that. What we’ve learned now is that it appears that the CIA, working very closely with the Pentagon, did the same thing very early in the war on terror, relying on psychologists very close to this program. And because both agencies turned to this program they call the SERE program early in the war on terror, it suggests very high-level coordination in the Bush administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain just what the SERE program is.
MARK BENJAMIN: The SERE program is a Cold War era program, where we literally set up mock prisons at places like Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which is where we have sort of the flagship program, where elite soldiers—for example, Special Forces soldiers—are subject to brutal mock interrogations. As I mentioned, waterboarding is just one of the things that they face—isolation in very, very small pens, hooding, that kind of thing, stress positions. And it is intended to teach those soldiers to resist those illegal tactics if they are captured.
And that raises an obvious problem. If you’re going to take that training, which is designed to get people to resist illegal interrogations, and flip it around to interrogation tactics, which is now what we’re learning the Pentagon and the CIA both did, you’re very likely, obviously, to come up with tactics that are violations of the Geneva Conventions. That’s a problem for the Bush administration, which has been saying that their tactics are safe, effective and legal. SERE training is not designed to be safe, effective or legal.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about two CIA-employed psychologists who are under investigation right now. Explain who they are.
MARK BENJAMIN: The two psychologists are named James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, and these are psychologists who have been affiliated with this training program—again, called the SERE program—for years. What we have learned is that the Senate Armed Services Committee—this is a committee run by Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan—is now looking into the activities of these two psychologists, in particular.
What our sources on Capitol Hill and, in fact, some of Mitchell and Jessen’s own colleagues say is that these guys, these psychologists who are affiliated with the military’s SERE training, were then employed by the CIA as contractors to do the same thing that the military was doing, which was to flip these tactics around and use them on real terrorists. And, in fact, Jane Mayer from the New Yorker, who’s done some wonderful reporting also on this issue, put one of these guys, James Mitchell, in the room with a high-level CIA detainee in early 2002, and, according to Mayer, he was urging some very rough stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is investigating them?
MARK BENJAMIN: The Senate Armed Services Committee is looking into these guys, and, in fact, based on Carl Levin’s request, the Department of Defense has ordered anybody associated with the Department of Defense, in a memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, that any document that has the name of these two guys, Bruce Jessen or James Mitchell, has to be preserved, and nobody can destroy documents associated with those two guys, because they’re part of this Senate investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the letter that psychologists have written to the American Psychological Association and the controversy that’s brewing within this organization of close to 150,000 psychologists?
MARK BENJAMIN: There is a major rift in the American Psychological Association, a professional association for psychologists. In 2005, the American Psychological Association came up with ethics guidelines that essentially say that a psychologist can help participate in a military interrogation. This is a big deal, because the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatrists said no, we won’t have any part of it. It turns out that six of the ten individual psychologists who helped draft those ethics guidelines for the American Psychological Association were affiliated with the military. And, in fact, several of them were affiliated with this SERE school.
This issue has been really tearing apart the American Psychological Association for years now, and there is an expanding group of psychologists who are very, very concerned that the American Psychological Association’s own ethical guidelines are allowing psychologists, like these guys Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, to reverse-engineer training tactics into really brutal interrogation techniques. And there’s a bunch of letter-writing back and forth, frankly, to the head of—the president of the American Psychological Association, objecting to these ethic guidelines and perhaps the use of these tactics.
AMY GOODMAN: You write about the dozens of psychologists who made public a joint letter to the American Psychological Association President Sharon Brehm, fingering another CIA-employed psychologist. He was one of the ten on that committee in 2005 that was convened to look at psychologists’ involvement in these interrogations. Explain who he is.
MARK BENJAMIN: That’s a guy whose last name is Shumate. He’s a psychologist for the Counter Terrorism Center at the CIA. This is the center that reported—at the time of 9/11 was a guy named Cofer Black was in charge of that unit. You may recall Cofer Black is very well known for going up to Congress early in the war on terror and saying, you know, “There’s a before-after-9/11 and there’s an after-9/11; after 9/11 the gloves come off.”
What the psychologists are concerned about is that their fellow psychologists who are associated with that center, the Counter Terrorism Center, seem to be also, you know, crucial in reverse-engineering these tactics, these training tactics in the brutal interrogation techniques, or at least that’s the concern among these psychologists. And what they’re doing is alerting their organization that there could be a real problem here.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, Cofer Black now involved with Blackwater, the private security company based in North Carolina, and an offshoot of that around intelligence. Now, R. Scott Shumate was one of the ten people involved in this PENS Task Force, this advisory task force that ultimately advised that the psychologists could continue in these military interrogations, despite the fact that three of the members—we had two of them on on Democracy Now!—have expressed great concern about them, one of these members handing over all of her notes leading up to the meeting and afterwards, the email listservs, over to the Senate Armed Services Committee, as they conduct their investigation.
MARK BENJAMIN: That’s right. And some of the psychologists, as you mentioned, these civilian psychologists, sort of feel like they were railroaded or misled or, you know, in other words, the military folks who were on that panel which came up with these ethics guidelines sort of ran the show. I think that’s sort of what you’re referring to there. And, yes, there’s very serious concern about these psychologists, that their own fellow professionals may have played a vital role in flipping these techniques around, both at the Pentagon and, now we’ve learned, also at the CIA, into some really brutal interrogation techniques.
Continue reading:
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/6/25/the_cias_torture_teachers_psychologists_helped
See this article which states that the two are Mormons.
Dr Mengele Award Goes To James Mitchell & Bruce Jessen
http://tenpercent.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/dr-mengele-award-goes-to-james-mitchell-bruce-jessen/
Mexico: Alleged UFO Over Teotihuacán?
This week Prof. Ana Luisa Cid sends us a photo of an alleged unidentified flying object taken from the summit of one of the pyramids in the Teotihuacán archaeological zone, northeast of Mexico City. This photo was taken on March 8, 2009 at 14:28 hours using a Sony DSC W30 camera.
Many thanks as always to Prof. Cid for sharing her photographs with us!
12 June, 2009
It's a Bird! No, it's a paint job
The U.S. is currently terrorizing the people of Afghanistan with this bird in the skies. Imagine being a child and looking up and seeing that?
U.S. puppet in Peru doing America's dirty work
Corporate Capitalism = “Give the People What They Don’t Want!”
The Peru Free Trade Agreement kills indigenous people and hurts the environment. Ever think maybe they don’t want or need our crap in the Amazon rain forest?
US-Peru FTA Sparks Indigenous Massacre
from truthout.org
During the last week, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, confrontations between nonviolent indigenous protesters and police have left up to 100 people dead. The vast majority of the casualties are civilians, who have been conducting peaceful demonstrations in defense of the Amazon rain forest.
For almost two months, as many as 30,000 indigenous people have been blocking road and river traffic, demanding the repeal of presidential decrees issued last year to facilitate implementation of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement. According to the indigenous leaders, several of these decrees directly threaten indigenous territories and rights. After having attempted several times to negotiate with the government the repeal of the most egregious of the decrees, and faced with a permanent influx of extraction equipment into the region, the people decided it was imperative to "put their bodies in front of the machines" in order to prevent this equipment from entering their territory.
On Friday, June 5, the government decided the protests needed to end and launched an aggressive assault against the people protesting on the road outside of Bagua. The dislocation was conducted from helicopters and the ground, with police and army using automatic weapons and heavy equipment against people armed with only rocks and spears. As videos, photos and testimonies from the region slowly emerge, it is clear that this was designed to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, and deter those in other regions from continuing protests. Pictures circulating on the Internet depict snipers in uniform firing at protesters from the streets, tanks and from on top of buildings. On Saturday, in Lima, Peru's capital, a large spontaneous demonstration in support of the Amazonian indigenous was broken up by police.
In the wake of what appears to be a massacre perpetrated by the police, the government of President Alan Garcia is mounting a massive propaganda campaign, claiming that indigenous protesters attacked the police, and accusing them of being terrorists. Human rights lawyers have accused Peru's government of a cover-up, and have been impeded from getting in to investigate more fully. The Bishop's Vicariate for the Environment for Jaen, Nicanor Alvarado, said "The main problem is that injured and deceased civilians are being transferred to the "El Milagro" military base ... so, it's possible that a group of injured and deceased people are disappeared later on."
Credible accusations are emerging that the police are systematically disappearing civilian bodies by burning or throwing then in rivers. Right now, people in the region are preparing lists of those missing to document the large number of civilians disappeared. Amnesty International has issued a warning expressing concern for the scores of demonstrators who were detained last weekend.
Continue reading
http://www.truthout.org/061109B
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2009/06/105777.shtml
REPEAL THE PERU FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
ACTIVISTS CHAINED THEMSELVES TO DOORS OF CHUCK SCHUMER'S OFFICE BUILDING IN PROTEST OF HIS VOTE FOR THE PERU FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
A One World Order, and happiness for All, unless you disagree, then you are not needed.
The United States - Peru Trade Promotion Agreement was signed on April 12, 2006. Eighty percent of U.S. exports of consumer and industrial goods to Peru and more than two-thirds of current U.S. farm exports to Peru will be duty-free immediately upon entry into force of the Agreement. This comprehensive free trade agreement will eliminate other barriers to goods and services, promote economic growth, and expand trade between the two countries.
http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/peru-tpa/final-text
The Peru Free Trade Agreement kills indigenous people and hurts the environment. Ever think maybe they don’t want or need our crap in the Amazon rain forest?
US-Peru FTA Sparks Indigenous Massacre
from truthout.org
During the last week, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, confrontations between nonviolent indigenous protesters and police have left up to 100 people dead. The vast majority of the casualties are civilians, who have been conducting peaceful demonstrations in defense of the Amazon rain forest.
For almost two months, as many as 30,000 indigenous people have been blocking road and river traffic, demanding the repeal of presidential decrees issued last year to facilitate implementation of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement. According to the indigenous leaders, several of these decrees directly threaten indigenous territories and rights. After having attempted several times to negotiate with the government the repeal of the most egregious of the decrees, and faced with a permanent influx of extraction equipment into the region, the people decided it was imperative to "put their bodies in front of the machines" in order to prevent this equipment from entering their territory.
On Friday, June 5, the government decided the protests needed to end and launched an aggressive assault against the people protesting on the road outside of Bagua. The dislocation was conducted from helicopters and the ground, with police and army using automatic weapons and heavy equipment against people armed with only rocks and spears. As videos, photos and testimonies from the region slowly emerge, it is clear that this was designed to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, and deter those in other regions from continuing protests. Pictures circulating on the Internet depict snipers in uniform firing at protesters from the streets, tanks and from on top of buildings. On Saturday, in Lima, Peru's capital, a large spontaneous demonstration in support of the Amazonian indigenous was broken up by police.
In the wake of what appears to be a massacre perpetrated by the police, the government of President Alan Garcia is mounting a massive propaganda campaign, claiming that indigenous protesters attacked the police, and accusing them of being terrorists. Human rights lawyers have accused Peru's government of a cover-up, and have been impeded from getting in to investigate more fully. The Bishop's Vicariate for the Environment for Jaen, Nicanor Alvarado, said "The main problem is that injured and deceased civilians are being transferred to the "El Milagro" military base ... so, it's possible that a group of injured and deceased people are disappeared later on."
Credible accusations are emerging that the police are systematically disappearing civilian bodies by burning or throwing then in rivers. Right now, people in the region are preparing lists of those missing to document the large number of civilians disappeared. Amnesty International has issued a warning expressing concern for the scores of demonstrators who were detained last weekend.
Continue reading
http://www.truthout.org/061109B
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2009/06/105777.shtml
REPEAL THE PERU FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
ACTIVISTS CHAINED THEMSELVES TO DOORS OF CHUCK SCHUMER'S OFFICE BUILDING IN PROTEST OF HIS VOTE FOR THE PERU FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
A One World Order, and happiness for All, unless you disagree, then you are not needed.
The United States - Peru Trade Promotion Agreement was signed on April 12, 2006. Eighty percent of U.S. exports of consumer and industrial goods to Peru and more than two-thirds of current U.S. farm exports to Peru will be duty-free immediately upon entry into force of the Agreement. This comprehensive free trade agreement will eliminate other barriers to goods and services, promote economic growth, and expand trade between the two countries.
http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/peru-tpa/final-text
Absurdity: A Dick and Jane Porn Story
The story of how Don Rumsfeld met his demise because of Dick Cheney's dog (revised edition)
The title (above) is the link to the article
11 June, 2009
The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy
The new issue of Paranoia is now posted on the website.
Please Pre-order now by paypal, or send $7 to the address at the website.
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/
Featuring Shane O’Sullivan on Bobby Kennedy and Sirhan-Sirhan
Interview with Shane O’Sullivan on Irish talk show, author of "Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy". O'Sullivan also has produced a documentary, "RFK Must Die." http://www.rfkmustdie.com/
“RFK Epilogue” - Shane O’Sullivan’s update to “RFK Must Die” featuring new audio evidence that suggests a second gunman fired the shot that killed Bobby Kennedy. http://www.rfkmustdie.com/
1st of eleven parts by Discovery Channel. A sound recording of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, unknown to the world for 39 years, is found and analyzed. Did the second gun belong to security guard, Thane Cesar?
It's raining tadpoles in Japanese town
Fafrotskies! Where are you, Charles Fort?
"People speculate that a waterspout picked them up and dropped them from the air," said an official at a local weather observatory. "But from a meteorological point of view, I have to say it is most unlikely."
Meteorologists in Japan say the rainy season has just started in Tokyo, but residents in a small coastal town have reported a different phenomenon -- tadpoles dropping out of the sky.
An office clerk in Nanao said he first noticed the anomaly when he heard a dull thud in a parking lot last week, news reports said. Looking around, he saw about 100 dead amphibians splattered on car windshields and the ground.
More reports followed from bewildered residents in Nanao.
"People speculate that a waterspout picked them up and dropped them from the air," said an official at a local weather observatory. "But from a meteorological point of view, I have to say it is most unlikely."
"We have checked the weather conditions of last week, thinking gusts of wind might have hit the area but confirmed no damage," he said. "To be honest, I don't think it was anything caused by a weather condition."
Similar events -- in what is sometimes called the "Fafrotskies" phenomenon, short for "fall from the sky" -- have been reported around the world, with whirlwinds passing over water bodies and picking up frogs, jellyfish or other unfortunate animals before dumping them back to earth. –
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-06-10-its-raining-tadpoles-in-japanese-town
"People speculate that a waterspout picked them up and dropped them from the air," said an official at a local weather observatory. "But from a meteorological point of view, I have to say it is most unlikely."
Meteorologists in Japan say the rainy season has just started in Tokyo, but residents in a small coastal town have reported a different phenomenon -- tadpoles dropping out of the sky.
An office clerk in Nanao said he first noticed the anomaly when he heard a dull thud in a parking lot last week, news reports said. Looking around, he saw about 100 dead amphibians splattered on car windshields and the ground.
More reports followed from bewildered residents in Nanao.
"People speculate that a waterspout picked them up and dropped them from the air," said an official at a local weather observatory. "But from a meteorological point of view, I have to say it is most unlikely."
"We have checked the weather conditions of last week, thinking gusts of wind might have hit the area but confirmed no damage," he said. "To be honest, I don't think it was anything caused by a weather condition."
Similar events -- in what is sometimes called the "Fafrotskies" phenomenon, short for "fall from the sky" -- have been reported around the world, with whirlwinds passing over water bodies and picking up frogs, jellyfish or other unfortunate animals before dumping them back to earth. –
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-06-10-its-raining-tadpoles-in-japanese-town
09 June, 2009
William Bramley Interviewed in 2008 by Linda Moulton Howe
I was just wondering whatever happened to William Bramley and came upon this great interview by Linda Moulton Howe
This one is 2 of 3 and is really awesome!
This one is 2 of 3 and is really awesome!
08 June, 2009
Was Horus Crucified?
By D.M. Murdock
In my book Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection, I delve deeply into various parallels between the Jewish godman Jesus Christ and the Egyptian gods Horus and Osiris. Along with the claim that Horus was born on "December 25th" or the winter solstice of a virgin called Mery comes the contention that he was "crucified between two thieves," as Jesus is depicted to have been in the New Testament. Although I included this motif in my book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, this assertion does not originate with me but can be found in older sources, as highlighted in Christ in Egypt ("CIE"), which contains a 40-page chapter on the subject entitled "Was Horus 'Crucified?,'" with 120 footnotes citing primary sources as well as the works of respected Egyptologists and other scholars in relevant fields. This chapter in CIE also provides 18 images to illustrate the various points, such as the abundance of Pagan gods and goddesses in cruciform or cross shapes.
The list of sources cited in the chapter "Was Horus 'Crucified?'" includes: ancient Egyptian primary sources such as the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead and other artifacts; the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus and Plutarch, philosophers Plato and Philo, and the Egyptian priest Horapollo; the Bible; noncanonical early Christian writings such as the Epistle of Barnabas, Acts of John and Acts of Pilate; the writings of early Church fathers Justin Martyr, Tertullian and Minucius Felix; Gnostic writings; Coptic writings such as the Kebra Nagast; the Catholic Encyclopedia; the works of modern Egyptologists Drs. Erik Hornung, Raymond O. Faulkner, Jan Assman and Barbara S. Lesko; and the works of various theologians, historians and other professional scholars such as Pope Benedict XVI, Jean Doresse, Joseph Campbell, Dr. Roger Beck and Dr. Tryggve N.D. Mettinger.
Even with all of the scholarship put together in Christ in Egypt, there remains much confusion concerning this subject, because many people erroneously believe that the contention is that Horus or Osiris were killed via crucifixion, as allegedly happened to Jesus. In actuality, the most common myths concerning the deaths of Osiris and Horus are that the former was rent into pieces, while the latter was stung by a scorpion, after which both were resurrected. In this regard, the same Greek word used by historian Diodorus Siculus in the first century BCE to describe Horus's resurrection - anastasis - is utilized by later biblical writers in the New Testament to depict Christ's resurrection (e.g., Mt 22:23).
It needs to be emphasized that the claim is not that Horus was a human being thrown to the ground and nailed to a piece of wood. In CIE, I discuss the etymology of the word "crucify," which comes from the Latin crucifigere, composed of cruci/crux and affigere/figere, meaning "cross" and "to fix/affix," respectively. Crucifigere and its English derivation "to crucify" mean "to fix to a cross," but not necessarily to throw down and nail to a piece of wood. What we are interested in, then, is whether or not pre-Christian gods and goddesses were depicted as fixed to a cross or in cruciform, appearing as a crucifix. This motif of a pre-Christian or non-Christian god or man on a cross or cross-shaped is expounded upon by the Church fathers Tertullian (c. 160-c. 200) and Minucius Felix (2nd-3rd cents.). In his Apology (16), Tertullian remarks:
"We have shown before that your deities are derived from shapes modelled from the cross. But you also worship victories, for in your trophies the cross is the heart of the trophy. The camp religion of the Romans is all through a worship of the standards, a setting the standards above all gods. Well, as those images decking out the standards are ornaments of crosses. All those hangings of your standards and banners are robes of crosses." (Roberts, ANCL, 85)
The place where Tertullian had "shown before" his contentions about the Pagan gods being cross-shaped was in his work Ad Nationes (12), in a lengthy treatise which includes the following remarks:
"...The Heathens Themselves Made Much of Crosses in Sacred Things; Nay, Their Very Idols Were Formed on a Crucial [Crosslike] Frame.
"...your gods in their origin have proceeded from this hated cross... if you simply place a man with his arms and hands outstretched, you will make the general outline of a cross...." (Roberts, ANF, III, 122)
In his Octavius (29), Minucius echoes the same sentiment:
"...The Egyptians certainly choose out a man for themselves whom they may worship... Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for. You, indeed, who consecrate gods of wood, adore wooden crosses perhaps as parts of your gods. For your very standards, as well as your banners, and flags of your camp, what else are they but crosses gilded and adorned? Your victorious trophies not only imitate the appearance of a simple cross, but also that of a man affixed to it." (Roberts, ANF, IV, 191)
Continue reading at:
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/washoruscrucified.html
In my book Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection, I delve deeply into various parallels between the Jewish godman Jesus Christ and the Egyptian gods Horus and Osiris. Along with the claim that Horus was born on "December 25th" or the winter solstice of a virgin called Mery comes the contention that he was "crucified between two thieves," as Jesus is depicted to have been in the New Testament. Although I included this motif in my book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, this assertion does not originate with me but can be found in older sources, as highlighted in Christ in Egypt ("CIE"), which contains a 40-page chapter on the subject entitled "Was Horus 'Crucified?,'" with 120 footnotes citing primary sources as well as the works of respected Egyptologists and other scholars in relevant fields. This chapter in CIE also provides 18 images to illustrate the various points, such as the abundance of Pagan gods and goddesses in cruciform or cross shapes.
The list of sources cited in the chapter "Was Horus 'Crucified?'" includes: ancient Egyptian primary sources such as the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead and other artifacts; the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus and Plutarch, philosophers Plato and Philo, and the Egyptian priest Horapollo; the Bible; noncanonical early Christian writings such as the Epistle of Barnabas, Acts of John and Acts of Pilate; the writings of early Church fathers Justin Martyr, Tertullian and Minucius Felix; Gnostic writings; Coptic writings such as the Kebra Nagast; the Catholic Encyclopedia; the works of modern Egyptologists Drs. Erik Hornung, Raymond O. Faulkner, Jan Assman and Barbara S. Lesko; and the works of various theologians, historians and other professional scholars such as Pope Benedict XVI, Jean Doresse, Joseph Campbell, Dr. Roger Beck and Dr. Tryggve N.D. Mettinger.
Even with all of the scholarship put together in Christ in Egypt, there remains much confusion concerning this subject, because many people erroneously believe that the contention is that Horus or Osiris were killed via crucifixion, as allegedly happened to Jesus. In actuality, the most common myths concerning the deaths of Osiris and Horus are that the former was rent into pieces, while the latter was stung by a scorpion, after which both were resurrected. In this regard, the same Greek word used by historian Diodorus Siculus in the first century BCE to describe Horus's resurrection - anastasis - is utilized by later biblical writers in the New Testament to depict Christ's resurrection (e.g., Mt 22:23).
It needs to be emphasized that the claim is not that Horus was a human being thrown to the ground and nailed to a piece of wood. In CIE, I discuss the etymology of the word "crucify," which comes from the Latin crucifigere, composed of cruci/crux and affigere/figere, meaning "cross" and "to fix/affix," respectively. Crucifigere and its English derivation "to crucify" mean "to fix to a cross," but not necessarily to throw down and nail to a piece of wood. What we are interested in, then, is whether or not pre-Christian gods and goddesses were depicted as fixed to a cross or in cruciform, appearing as a crucifix. This motif of a pre-Christian or non-Christian god or man on a cross or cross-shaped is expounded upon by the Church fathers Tertullian (c. 160-c. 200) and Minucius Felix (2nd-3rd cents.). In his Apology (16), Tertullian remarks:
"We have shown before that your deities are derived from shapes modelled from the cross. But you also worship victories, for in your trophies the cross is the heart of the trophy. The camp religion of the Romans is all through a worship of the standards, a setting the standards above all gods. Well, as those images decking out the standards are ornaments of crosses. All those hangings of your standards and banners are robes of crosses." (Roberts, ANCL, 85)
The place where Tertullian had "shown before" his contentions about the Pagan gods being cross-shaped was in his work Ad Nationes (12), in a lengthy treatise which includes the following remarks:
"...The Heathens Themselves Made Much of Crosses in Sacred Things; Nay, Their Very Idols Were Formed on a Crucial [Crosslike] Frame.
"...your gods in their origin have proceeded from this hated cross... if you simply place a man with his arms and hands outstretched, you will make the general outline of a cross...." (Roberts, ANF, III, 122)
In his Octavius (29), Minucius echoes the same sentiment:
"...The Egyptians certainly choose out a man for themselves whom they may worship... Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for. You, indeed, who consecrate gods of wood, adore wooden crosses perhaps as parts of your gods. For your very standards, as well as your banners, and flags of your camp, what else are they but crosses gilded and adorned? Your victorious trophies not only imitate the appearance of a simple cross, but also that of a man affixed to it." (Roberts, ANF, IV, 191)
Continue reading at:
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/washoruscrucified.html
Extra! Extra! David Carradine: Killed By An Illuminatus?
Loren Coleman exposes the secret:
David Carradine may have been killed by an illuminatus, a supposed enlightened one, even if the victim also turns out to be the perpetrator. Maybe he was murdered because he had become a "seeker"? Carradine, it appears, was investigating "secret societies."
It turns out:
“While this image may be graphic, it seems to have certainly thrown into doubt the "cover story" by local law enforcement in Bangkok that this was a clear-cut suicide. Carradine's hands, bound, are shown over his head, and how one could tie up their own hands is now being questioned.”
Read here:
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/
David Carradine may have been killed by an illuminatus, a supposed enlightened one, even if the victim also turns out to be the perpetrator. Maybe he was murdered because he had become a "seeker"? Carradine, it appears, was investigating "secret societies."
It turns out:
“While this image may be graphic, it seems to have certainly thrown into doubt the "cover story" by local law enforcement in Bangkok that this was a clear-cut suicide. Carradine's hands, bound, are shown over his head, and how one could tie up their own hands is now being questioned.”
Read here:
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/
Is “Animal Rights Terrorism” really on the rise in North America?
sent to me by Jason Miller
According to Fox News “Animal Rights Terrorism” is on the rise in North America.
Is it rather animal abuse awareness that’s on the rise?
From The North American Animal Liberation Press Office
http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/
Says Jason Miller; "One of the primary reasons the North American Animal Liberation Press Office exists is to counter-balance mainstream media distortions like this one."
Fox News (Fair and Balanced???)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525039,00.html
So who are the terrorists here?
Answers provided by Jason Miller
Julie Leyva recently submitted some questions to the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. Jason Miller wrote the reply:
5/26/09
What is your occupation and for how long?
There are four of us serving as press officers for NAALPO:
Jerry Vlasak is a board certified trauma surgeon, a former vivisector, and a seasoned animal liberation activist who speaks, writes and debates on behalf of nonhuman animals. Jerry co-founded NAALPO and has been a board member of Sea Shepherd and the spokesman for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
Camille Hankins has over 20 years of corporate marketing and management experience; co-founded Win Animal Rights (WAR), a group dedicated to shutting down Huntingdon Life Sciences, in 2004; founded the New York Animal Liberation Front Supporters in 2003; and is heavily involved in outreach to educate the public about the underground animal liberation movement.
Lin Bingham works as a writer and graphic designer. He is a vehement advocate of total liberation, including humans, nonhuman animals and the Earth. He specializes in “propaganda and agitation” and is willing and available to speak anytime one or more persons are willing to listen.
Jason Miller started with NAALPO about two months ago and is the newest press officer. I have worked as a supervisor in a call center for nine years where I've cultivated respectable problem-solving, conflict resolution, and communication skills. An ardent and seasoned animal liberation activist, I also founded the notoriously radical blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, in 2004. TPC has become a popular site for activists to go for education and inspiration and to interact via comment threads. Like Lin, I too am a writer who specializes in “propaganda and agitation.”
What is the Animal Liberation Front all about?
I'll begin with NAALPO's disclaimer:
Disclaimer: The Animal Liberation Press Officers do not engage in illegal activities, nor do they know any individuals who do. Neither does this website or the Press Office intend to encourage illegal actions. Rather, the Press Office receives and posts communiqués from anonymous parties and provides comment to the media.
Since there isn't a way to contact individuals working underground (their identity is not known to anyone in the aboveground movement), the use of communiques is one way the underground communicates with the public at large. Communiques can be sent directly to anyone including the press, underground support groups, aboveground animal rights groups, etc.
Because the individuals who engage in underground actions cannot reveal their identities to anyone, a North American Animal Liberation Press Office has been created to try to answer some of the questions as to why these actions may have been carried out, and to place the actions in a historical and philosophical context. Since we do not engage in illegal activities ourselves, we do not know the details of these actions, but we can try to the best of our ability to give you a better understanding of why a particular action may have been carried out.
Now, about the ALF:
The Animal Liberation Front is a grass-root, underground, militant direct action group that frees nonhuman animals from laboratories, fur farms, factory farms and other places in which they are imprisoned and tortured. Besides rescues, the ALF also engages in the destruction of equipment and property used in the oppression and exploitation of other animals.
Rooted in the UK's hunt saboteur movement in the mid-1970s, the ALF is anarchist in structure, meaning there is no conventional leadership or central organization. Anyone who is a vegan and commits an act of sabotage against animal exploiters or frees other animals (while taking the necessary precautions to avoid taking a human life) can rightfully consider themselves a member of the ALF.
In the tradition of the Underground Railroad, John Brown, and the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance, the courageous members of the ALF are freedom fighters, fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.
And they have been effective, as evidenced by the fact that they've cost the animal exploitation complex hundreds of millions of dollars since their inception and by our corporatist government's foaming-at-the-mouth response to their actions. The FBI has labeled the freedom fighters of the ALF, who are engaged in extensional self-defense of nonhuman animals—sentient beings whom are being holocausted at the rate of billions per year— the “number one domestic terrorist threat.” So who are the terrorists here? Animal-defending members of the ALF or ruthless animal-slaughtering corporations and their government protectors?
Why do scientists test on animals?
There are four principal reasons that scientists continue to test on nonhuman animals, despite the availability of other means of conducting research and testing. These include:
— Money : Like most aspects of the pernicious socioeconomic paradigm of capitalism, the number one driving force behind vivisection is money. Vivisection (nonhuman animal testing) is big business for the companies that supply nonhuman animal research subjects (by capturing them or by breeding them in captivity); manufacture and supply cages, food, lab equipment and other accessories; and that do the actual research and testing. Researchers (vivisectors) who work for public institutions (like universities) and perform vivisection, can obtain federal grant money much more readily than those who don't do animal testing. Institutions and universities have also grown dependent on the large grants they receive for vivisection.
– Careerism : Because grant money is readily available and because institutions rely so heavily on that grant money, researchers who pursue nonhuman animal advance their careers much more readily than those who don't. Also, in the “publish or perish” environment of academia, employing the widely accepted practice of vivisection greatly enhances a researcher's chances of getting published.
— Inertia : Nonhuman animal testing is a practice dating back to the nineteenth century. While an immediate conversion to other means of research and testing may be unrealistic, there are many viable avenues scientists could pursue to eventually eliminate the abjectly immoral practice of torturing nonhuman animals in the interest of “science.” However, as is the case in most instances, there is a tremendous amount of resistance to radically changing the status quo. Vivisection has been the prevailing method of drug, procedure, and product testing for over a century and as new scientists are educated and trained, they are indoctrinated to believe that animal testing is both necessary and morally acceptable. Vivisection has become dogma. Therefore convincing scientists to embrace other means of research will be no easy task.
– Corporate cowardice : Corporations continue to employ nonhuman animal testing on their products to shield themselves from tort liability. If a human consumer of their products is harmed, injured, or killed, a corporation hides behind the defense that it tested the product on nonhuman animals and “determined it was safe.” Also, the FDA requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to rigorously test their drugs on other animals before beginning human clinical trials. Thus as is usually the case, the corporate-state complex sacrifices life to protect property and profit.
If we do not test on animals then what should we test on?
There are a host of research methods and technologies, both extant and developing, that do not involve vivisection and which have proven to be effective or potentially effective. These include but are not limited to: clinical and epidemiological studies (which revealed the cause and effect relationship between smoking and lung cancer after years of animal testing did not); human autopsies, biopsies, and post-mortem studies; post-marketing studies of drugs and other products; imaging scans (that have produced significant anatomical and physiological discoveries); in vitro and tissue culture tests; computer models; biochips containing human enzymes and cells, which can be used to predict how a human body will respond to a drug; specific types of human cells cultivated from embryonic stem cells; and tissue models to replicate human organs. While it is true that there is no ideal means of testing new drugs, medical procedures, foods, or consumer goods, vivisection is a barbaric practice that needs to end on moral grounds and can, from a pragmatic standpoint, be replaced by equally efficacious techniques.
Who/what do companies that do not test on animals test on?
I covered this in my answer to number four. Your question raises a valid point though. The fact that there are companies that do not employ animal testing ( http://search.caringconsumer.com/ offers a search feature which identifies companies that DO and companies that DO NOT test on other animals) provides further evidence that vivisection is an unnecessary and malevolent practice that can and should end.
Is there anything out on the market that has been tested on animals that is safe for humans?
Sure, there are plenty of products which have been tested on other animals that have proven to be safe for humans. However, in addition to the fact that nonhuman animals feel pain and experience suffering like humans, thus making vivisection abjectly immoral, there are vast physiological, genetic and behavioral differences between humans and other animals, making nonhuman animal testing very unreliable in terms of predicting the effect a product will have on people. Thus there are also many products that were tested on nonhuman animals which have proven to be highly detrimental or lethal to humans. For instance, adverse prescription drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.
What are alternatives to animal testing?
Please see my response to question 4. Again, let me emphasize that the transition from the prevailing paradigm of vivisection will not be simple, and may not happen immediately, but it is morally imperative that we end the torment and murder of other animals for money, career advancement, those who fear change, and corporate protection from lawsuits.
I also recommend that you read “Alternative Methods To What?” by Prof Pietro Croce at http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Animal%20Testing/Vivisection/AlternativetoWhat.htm
Jason Miller is a relentless anti-capitalist, vegan straight edge, animal liberationist, and press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. He is also the senior editor and founder of Thomas Paine's Corner.
http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/essays/2009-05-25_whoaretheterrorists.htm
According to Fox News “Animal Rights Terrorism” is on the rise in North America.
Is it rather animal abuse awareness that’s on the rise?
From The North American Animal Liberation Press Office
http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/
Says Jason Miller; "One of the primary reasons the North American Animal Liberation Press Office exists is to counter-balance mainstream media distortions like this one."
Fox News (Fair and Balanced???)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525039,00.html
So who are the terrorists here?
Answers provided by Jason Miller
Julie Leyva recently submitted some questions to the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. Jason Miller wrote the reply:
5/26/09
What is your occupation and for how long?
There are four of us serving as press officers for NAALPO:
Jerry Vlasak is a board certified trauma surgeon, a former vivisector, and a seasoned animal liberation activist who speaks, writes and debates on behalf of nonhuman animals. Jerry co-founded NAALPO and has been a board member of Sea Shepherd and the spokesman for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
Camille Hankins has over 20 years of corporate marketing and management experience; co-founded Win Animal Rights (WAR), a group dedicated to shutting down Huntingdon Life Sciences, in 2004; founded the New York Animal Liberation Front Supporters in 2003; and is heavily involved in outreach to educate the public about the underground animal liberation movement.
Lin Bingham works as a writer and graphic designer. He is a vehement advocate of total liberation, including humans, nonhuman animals and the Earth. He specializes in “propaganda and agitation” and is willing and available to speak anytime one or more persons are willing to listen.
Jason Miller started with NAALPO about two months ago and is the newest press officer. I have worked as a supervisor in a call center for nine years where I've cultivated respectable problem-solving, conflict resolution, and communication skills. An ardent and seasoned animal liberation activist, I also founded the notoriously radical blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, in 2004. TPC has become a popular site for activists to go for education and inspiration and to interact via comment threads. Like Lin, I too am a writer who specializes in “propaganda and agitation.”
What is the Animal Liberation Front all about?
I'll begin with NAALPO's disclaimer:
Disclaimer: The Animal Liberation Press Officers do not engage in illegal activities, nor do they know any individuals who do. Neither does this website or the Press Office intend to encourage illegal actions. Rather, the Press Office receives and posts communiqués from anonymous parties and provides comment to the media.
Since there isn't a way to contact individuals working underground (their identity is not known to anyone in the aboveground movement), the use of communiques is one way the underground communicates with the public at large. Communiques can be sent directly to anyone including the press, underground support groups, aboveground animal rights groups, etc.
Because the individuals who engage in underground actions cannot reveal their identities to anyone, a North American Animal Liberation Press Office has been created to try to answer some of the questions as to why these actions may have been carried out, and to place the actions in a historical and philosophical context. Since we do not engage in illegal activities ourselves, we do not know the details of these actions, but we can try to the best of our ability to give you a better understanding of why a particular action may have been carried out.
Now, about the ALF:
The Animal Liberation Front is a grass-root, underground, militant direct action group that frees nonhuman animals from laboratories, fur farms, factory farms and other places in which they are imprisoned and tortured. Besides rescues, the ALF also engages in the destruction of equipment and property used in the oppression and exploitation of other animals.
Rooted in the UK's hunt saboteur movement in the mid-1970s, the ALF is anarchist in structure, meaning there is no conventional leadership or central organization. Anyone who is a vegan and commits an act of sabotage against animal exploiters or frees other animals (while taking the necessary precautions to avoid taking a human life) can rightfully consider themselves a member of the ALF.
In the tradition of the Underground Railroad, John Brown, and the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance, the courageous members of the ALF are freedom fighters, fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.
And they have been effective, as evidenced by the fact that they've cost the animal exploitation complex hundreds of millions of dollars since their inception and by our corporatist government's foaming-at-the-mouth response to their actions. The FBI has labeled the freedom fighters of the ALF, who are engaged in extensional self-defense of nonhuman animals—sentient beings whom are being holocausted at the rate of billions per year— the “number one domestic terrorist threat.” So who are the terrorists here? Animal-defending members of the ALF or ruthless animal-slaughtering corporations and their government protectors?
Why do scientists test on animals?
There are four principal reasons that scientists continue to test on nonhuman animals, despite the availability of other means of conducting research and testing. These include:
— Money : Like most aspects of the pernicious socioeconomic paradigm of capitalism, the number one driving force behind vivisection is money. Vivisection (nonhuman animal testing) is big business for the companies that supply nonhuman animal research subjects (by capturing them or by breeding them in captivity); manufacture and supply cages, food, lab equipment and other accessories; and that do the actual research and testing. Researchers (vivisectors) who work for public institutions (like universities) and perform vivisection, can obtain federal grant money much more readily than those who don't do animal testing. Institutions and universities have also grown dependent on the large grants they receive for vivisection.
– Careerism : Because grant money is readily available and because institutions rely so heavily on that grant money, researchers who pursue nonhuman animal advance their careers much more readily than those who don't. Also, in the “publish or perish” environment of academia, employing the widely accepted practice of vivisection greatly enhances a researcher's chances of getting published.
— Inertia : Nonhuman animal testing is a practice dating back to the nineteenth century. While an immediate conversion to other means of research and testing may be unrealistic, there are many viable avenues scientists could pursue to eventually eliminate the abjectly immoral practice of torturing nonhuman animals in the interest of “science.” However, as is the case in most instances, there is a tremendous amount of resistance to radically changing the status quo. Vivisection has been the prevailing method of drug, procedure, and product testing for over a century and as new scientists are educated and trained, they are indoctrinated to believe that animal testing is both necessary and morally acceptable. Vivisection has become dogma. Therefore convincing scientists to embrace other means of research will be no easy task.
– Corporate cowardice : Corporations continue to employ nonhuman animal testing on their products to shield themselves from tort liability. If a human consumer of their products is harmed, injured, or killed, a corporation hides behind the defense that it tested the product on nonhuman animals and “determined it was safe.” Also, the FDA requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to rigorously test their drugs on other animals before beginning human clinical trials. Thus as is usually the case, the corporate-state complex sacrifices life to protect property and profit.
If we do not test on animals then what should we test on?
There are a host of research methods and technologies, both extant and developing, that do not involve vivisection and which have proven to be effective or potentially effective. These include but are not limited to: clinical and epidemiological studies (which revealed the cause and effect relationship between smoking and lung cancer after years of animal testing did not); human autopsies, biopsies, and post-mortem studies; post-marketing studies of drugs and other products; imaging scans (that have produced significant anatomical and physiological discoveries); in vitro and tissue culture tests; computer models; biochips containing human enzymes and cells, which can be used to predict how a human body will respond to a drug; specific types of human cells cultivated from embryonic stem cells; and tissue models to replicate human organs. While it is true that there is no ideal means of testing new drugs, medical procedures, foods, or consumer goods, vivisection is a barbaric practice that needs to end on moral grounds and can, from a pragmatic standpoint, be replaced by equally efficacious techniques.
Who/what do companies that do not test on animals test on?
I covered this in my answer to number four. Your question raises a valid point though. The fact that there are companies that do not employ animal testing ( http://search.caringconsumer.com/ offers a search feature which identifies companies that DO and companies that DO NOT test on other animals) provides further evidence that vivisection is an unnecessary and malevolent practice that can and should end.
Is there anything out on the market that has been tested on animals that is safe for humans?
Sure, there are plenty of products which have been tested on other animals that have proven to be safe for humans. However, in addition to the fact that nonhuman animals feel pain and experience suffering like humans, thus making vivisection abjectly immoral, there are vast physiological, genetic and behavioral differences between humans and other animals, making nonhuman animal testing very unreliable in terms of predicting the effect a product will have on people. Thus there are also many products that were tested on nonhuman animals which have proven to be highly detrimental or lethal to humans. For instance, adverse prescription drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.
What are alternatives to animal testing?
Please see my response to question 4. Again, let me emphasize that the transition from the prevailing paradigm of vivisection will not be simple, and may not happen immediately, but it is morally imperative that we end the torment and murder of other animals for money, career advancement, those who fear change, and corporate protection from lawsuits.
I also recommend that you read “Alternative Methods To What?” by Prof Pietro Croce at http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Animal%20Testing/Vivisection/AlternativetoWhat.htm
Jason Miller is a relentless anti-capitalist, vegan straight edge, animal liberationist, and press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. He is also the senior editor and founder of Thomas Paine's Corner.
http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/essays/2009-05-25_whoaretheterrorists.htm
06 June, 2009
help I'm alive!
To Devin LaRue,
Welcome Home after three months in the hospital getting new heart valves!
Here's to many happy years, even though you say it beats too loud . . .
This song is for you!
Welcome Home after three months in the hospital getting new heart valves!
Here's to many happy years, even though you say it beats too loud . . .
This song is for you!
04 June, 2009
Econocide: A Silent (and Violent) Epidemic
by Nick Turse
After David B. Kellermann, the chief financial officer of beleaguered mortgage giant Freddie Mac, tied a noose and hanged himself in the basement of his Vienna, Virginia, home, The New York Times made it a front-page story. The stresses of the job in economic tough times, its reporters implied, had driven him to this extreme act.
"Binghamton Shooter" Jiverly Wong also garnered front-page headlines nationwide and set off a cable news frenzy when, "bitter over job loss," he massacred 13 people at an immigration center in upstate New York. Similarly, coverage was brisk after Pittsburgh resident Richard Poplawski, "upset about recently losing a job," shot four local police officers, killing three of them.
But where was the front-page treatment when, in January, Betty Lipply, a 72-year-old resident of East Palestine, Ohio, "who feared she'd lose her home to foreclosure hanged herself to death" shortly after "receiving her second summons and foreclosure complaint from her mortgage lender"? And where was the up-to-the-minute cable news reporting on the two California dairy farmers who "killed themselves ... out of despair over finances, according to associates"?
Last summer, in the pages of the Nation magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich called attention to people turning to "the suicide solution" in response to the burgeoning financial crisis. Months later, major news outlets started to examine the same phenomenon. Last fall, a TomDispatch report on suicides and a range of other extreme acts - including self-inflicted injury, murder, arson, and armed self-defense - in response to foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, and layoffs, was followed, months later, by mainstream media attention to the notion of "econo-cide" - prompted, in large part, by a spate of familicides (murder/suicides in which both parents and their children die).
While it's impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to people resorting to drastic measures, violent or otherwise, many press reports suggest that the global economic crisis has played no small part in a range of extreme acts.
An analysis by TomDispatch of national, regional, and local news reports in 2008 and early 2009 indicates that a silent, nationwide epidemic of drastic measures may be underway. News of such acts linked to economic woes - from armed robberies to pay the rent to financially-motivated suicides - has filtered out of cities and towns in no less than 30 states, many of which have seen multiple incidents. And since only a fraction of such acts ever receives media coverage, what is being reported, even if mostly in local newspapers, qualifies as startling.
Continue this sad story here
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175079
After David B. Kellermann, the chief financial officer of beleaguered mortgage giant Freddie Mac, tied a noose and hanged himself in the basement of his Vienna, Virginia, home, The New York Times made it a front-page story. The stresses of the job in economic tough times, its reporters implied, had driven him to this extreme act.
"Binghamton Shooter" Jiverly Wong also garnered front-page headlines nationwide and set off a cable news frenzy when, "bitter over job loss," he massacred 13 people at an immigration center in upstate New York. Similarly, coverage was brisk after Pittsburgh resident Richard Poplawski, "upset about recently losing a job," shot four local police officers, killing three of them.
But where was the front-page treatment when, in January, Betty Lipply, a 72-year-old resident of East Palestine, Ohio, "who feared she'd lose her home to foreclosure hanged herself to death" shortly after "receiving her second summons and foreclosure complaint from her mortgage lender"? And where was the up-to-the-minute cable news reporting on the two California dairy farmers who "killed themselves ... out of despair over finances, according to associates"?
Last summer, in the pages of the Nation magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich called attention to people turning to "the suicide solution" in response to the burgeoning financial crisis. Months later, major news outlets started to examine the same phenomenon. Last fall, a TomDispatch report on suicides and a range of other extreme acts - including self-inflicted injury, murder, arson, and armed self-defense - in response to foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, and layoffs, was followed, months later, by mainstream media attention to the notion of "econo-cide" - prompted, in large part, by a spate of familicides (murder/suicides in which both parents and their children die).
While it's impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to people resorting to drastic measures, violent or otherwise, many press reports suggest that the global economic crisis has played no small part in a range of extreme acts.
An analysis by TomDispatch of national, regional, and local news reports in 2008 and early 2009 indicates that a silent, nationwide epidemic of drastic measures may be underway. News of such acts linked to economic woes - from armed robberies to pay the rent to financially-motivated suicides - has filtered out of cities and towns in no less than 30 states, many of which have seen multiple incidents. And since only a fraction of such acts ever receives media coverage, what is being reported, even if mostly in local newspapers, qualifies as startling.
Continue this sad story here
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175079
03 June, 2009
9/11 STRANGE COINCIDENCES
1: Unknown to JFK on 3/13/62, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on Lyman Lemnitzer's Operation Northwoods, a plan to blow up a US airplane, committing terrorist murders against U.S. citizens on American soil, and blaming it on Cuba to justify an invasion there. Kennedy demoted Lemnitzer 11/'62, and was assassinated 11/22/'63 (ABC News 05/1/'01)
2: In 1975, President Ford appointed Lemnitzer to the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (aka the Rockefeller Commission) to investigate whether the Central Intelligence Agency had committed acts that violated American laws.
3: 2/3/'64: WTC Engineer John Skilling issued white paper analysis stating WTC would survive Boeing 707 hitting it at at 600mph. (Seattle Times 2/27/'93)
4: Design of the structural framing of the 1,350-ft high Twin Towers gave the exterior columns great reserve strength, > 2,000% increase before failure (Engineering News Record 4/2/64)
5: John Hinckley, George HW Bush's associate who shot President Reagan in 3/30/'81, is the 'black sheep' of the family
6: The technology to fly a Boeing 720 remotely-controlled existed in 1984 (NASA)
7: Saddam, then a recipient of massive US military aid, said frigate USS Stark was mistaken as Iranian and refused a US request to interview the Iraqi pilot after a 17/5/1987 missile attack killed more than a sixth of the crew and almost sunk it. (Robert Fisk 12/31/'06)
8: From 1987 to 2000, Dov Zakheim was CEO of System Planning Corp (SPC). Through subsidiary Tridata Corp, oversaw the investigation after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. He had access to the buildings blueprints
9: SPC sells the Command Transmitter System, a remote control system for planes, which allow an operator to control a pilotless aircraft or drone within about 40 miles of the active transmitter (SPC)
10: SPC sells a radar simulator for target acquisition used by US Navy, the Ballistic Missile Defense Org (BMDO) Countermeasure Group, and DARPA (SPC)
11: SPC sells the Flight Termination System, a system used to destroy target drones in the event of malfunction or "misses" (SPC)
12: George H W Bush gave his speech calling for a New World Order on 9/11/90, eleven years before 9/11/01
13: George Bush succeeded in business only after the investment of reputed al Qaeda financiers Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. The bin Ladens and Bushes are family friends; Osama is the 'black sheep' of the family. (Forbes 3/18/'02)
14: 5/24/95: Only 150 lbs of explosives leveled the OK City Murrah Building's significant remains as planned, leaving the adjacent parking structure intact (AP, 5/24/95)
15: Unocal rep testified before congress in Feb 98 that an Afghan pipeline needed a stable Afghan gov't and asks the US to use its influence to end conflicts there (Washington Post 10/5/98)
16: 2/20/'98: Project for New American Century (PNAC) called for a war in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein (Wikipedia)
17: On 2/23/98 bin Laden proclaimed from his Afghan redoubt, "To kill Americans ... is an individual duty of every Muslim", to this day his strongest link to 9/11. (Al-Quds al-'Arabi, 2/23/98)
18: Left-handed Osama bin Laden was declared the US taxpayer's No. 1 fugitive. On 8/20/98 you wrecked just thousands of dollars' worth of his obstacle courses, field barracks, and tents with $79 million in cruise missiles, voiding any US claim that 9-11 was unprovoked (New Yorker, 1/24/'00)
19: In the 11/98 issue of Foreign Affairs, Philip Zelikow, part of President Bush's transition team in 2000-2001, speculated in an article, Catastrophic Terrorism that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, "an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history [involving] loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security ... The United States might respond with ... scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow ... Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently." (Wikipedia)
20: Bin Laden was a CIA asset, with al Qaeda cells fighting alongside the US in the Balkan conflict as recently as 1999
21: Unocal suspended Afghan pipeline work in Aug '98 due to political instability (Unocal)
22: Filming began in March 2000 for The Lone Gunmen's 'pilot' episode that depicts a US plot to crash an electronically hijacked Boeing 727 into WTC and blame foreign terrorists to provoke war and increase military's budget (Kansas City Star, 3/'01)
23: PNAC, 2000: need for a 'new Pearl Harbor' to advance militaristic plans, by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Pearle, Dov Zakheim, Feith, Bill Kristol and others (Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. 51 (2000))
Continue at
http://www.nc911truth.org/911_Coincidences.html
2: In 1975, President Ford appointed Lemnitzer to the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (aka the Rockefeller Commission) to investigate whether the Central Intelligence Agency had committed acts that violated American laws.
3: 2/3/'64: WTC Engineer John Skilling issued white paper analysis stating WTC would survive Boeing 707 hitting it at at 600mph. (Seattle Times 2/27/'93)
4: Design of the structural framing of the 1,350-ft high Twin Towers gave the exterior columns great reserve strength, > 2,000% increase before failure (Engineering News Record 4/2/64)
5: John Hinckley, George HW Bush's associate who shot President Reagan in 3/30/'81, is the 'black sheep' of the family
6: The technology to fly a Boeing 720 remotely-controlled existed in 1984 (NASA)
7: Saddam, then a recipient of massive US military aid, said frigate USS Stark was mistaken as Iranian and refused a US request to interview the Iraqi pilot after a 17/5/1987 missile attack killed more than a sixth of the crew and almost sunk it. (Robert Fisk 12/31/'06)
8: From 1987 to 2000, Dov Zakheim was CEO of System Planning Corp (SPC). Through subsidiary Tridata Corp, oversaw the investigation after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. He had access to the buildings blueprints
9: SPC sells the Command Transmitter System, a remote control system for planes, which allow an operator to control a pilotless aircraft or drone within about 40 miles of the active transmitter (SPC)
10: SPC sells a radar simulator for target acquisition used by US Navy, the Ballistic Missile Defense Org (BMDO) Countermeasure Group, and DARPA (SPC)
11: SPC sells the Flight Termination System, a system used to destroy target drones in the event of malfunction or "misses" (SPC)
12: George H W Bush gave his speech calling for a New World Order on 9/11/90, eleven years before 9/11/01
13: George Bush succeeded in business only after the investment of reputed al Qaeda financiers Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. The bin Ladens and Bushes are family friends; Osama is the 'black sheep' of the family. (Forbes 3/18/'02)
14: 5/24/95: Only 150 lbs of explosives leveled the OK City Murrah Building's significant remains as planned, leaving the adjacent parking structure intact (AP, 5/24/95)
15: Unocal rep testified before congress in Feb 98 that an Afghan pipeline needed a stable Afghan gov't and asks the US to use its influence to end conflicts there (Washington Post 10/5/98)
16: 2/20/'98: Project for New American Century (PNAC) called for a war in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein (Wikipedia)
17: On 2/23/98 bin Laden proclaimed from his Afghan redoubt, "To kill Americans ... is an individual duty of every Muslim", to this day his strongest link to 9/11. (Al-Quds al-'Arabi, 2/23/98)
18: Left-handed Osama bin Laden was declared the US taxpayer's No. 1 fugitive. On 8/20/98 you wrecked just thousands of dollars' worth of his obstacle courses, field barracks, and tents with $79 million in cruise missiles, voiding any US claim that 9-11 was unprovoked (New Yorker, 1/24/'00)
19: In the 11/98 issue of Foreign Affairs, Philip Zelikow, part of President Bush's transition team in 2000-2001, speculated in an article, Catastrophic Terrorism that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, "an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history [involving] loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security ... The United States might respond with ... scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow ... Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently." (Wikipedia)
20: Bin Laden was a CIA asset, with al Qaeda cells fighting alongside the US in the Balkan conflict as recently as 1999
21: Unocal suspended Afghan pipeline work in Aug '98 due to political instability (Unocal)
22: Filming began in March 2000 for The Lone Gunmen's 'pilot' episode that depicts a US plot to crash an electronically hijacked Boeing 727 into WTC and blame foreign terrorists to provoke war and increase military's budget (Kansas City Star, 3/'01)
23: PNAC, 2000: need for a 'new Pearl Harbor' to advance militaristic plans, by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Pearle, Dov Zakheim, Feith, Bill Kristol and others (Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. 51 (2000))
Continue at
http://www.nc911truth.org/911_Coincidences.html
02 June, 2009
Popery
Sotomayor would be 6th Catholic on Supreme Court
NEW YORK-If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed to the U.S Supreme Court, she will be the sixth Roman Catholic of the nine justices. On the high court, Sotomayor would join a group of regular Mass attendees: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justice Anthony Kennedy regularly attends the annual Red Mass, a worship service for Catholics in the legal field, in the Archdiocese of Washington. Two other justices--Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer--are Jewish. When Justice David Souter, an Episcopalian, soon retires, Justice John Paul Stevens will be the lone Protestant.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_rel_sotomayor_catholics
A little known period of mid-19th century American history concerns the "Know Nothing" movement, or American Party, which popularized the notion of a Roman Catholic or Vatican conspiracy directed against WASP America. Samuel Morse (1791-1872), the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and Morse code, even wrote a book called: "Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States", describing the plot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing_Party
NEW YORK-If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed to the U.S Supreme Court, she will be the sixth Roman Catholic of the nine justices. On the high court, Sotomayor would join a group of regular Mass attendees: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justice Anthony Kennedy regularly attends the annual Red Mass, a worship service for Catholics in the legal field, in the Archdiocese of Washington. Two other justices--Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer--are Jewish. When Justice David Souter, an Episcopalian, soon retires, Justice John Paul Stevens will be the lone Protestant.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_rel_sotomayor_catholics
A little known period of mid-19th century American history concerns the "Know Nothing" movement, or American Party, which popularized the notion of a Roman Catholic or Vatican conspiracy directed against WASP America. Samuel Morse (1791-1872), the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and Morse code, even wrote a book called: "Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States", describing the plot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing_Party
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