7-7-09 POPE URGES FORMING NEW WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER

By RACHEL DONADIO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: July 7, 2009
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a “true world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good.”

He criticized the current economic system, “where the pernicious effects of sin are evident,” and urged financiers in particular to “rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity.”

He also called for “greater social responsibility” on the part of business. “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty,” Benedict wrote in his new encyclical, which the Vatican released on Tuesday.

More than two years in the making, “Caritas in Veritate,” or “Charity in Truth,” is Benedict’s third encyclical since he became pope in 2005. Filled with terms like “globalization,” “market economy,” “outsourcing,” “labor unions” and “alternative energy,” it is not surprising that the Italian media reported that the Vatican was having difficulty translating the 144-page document into Latin.

Reportedly delayed to take into consideration the financial crisis, it was released by the Vatican on the eve of the Group of 8 industrialized nations summit meeting, which opens in Italy on Wednesday, and before Benedict is expected to receive President Obama at the Vatican on Friday.

“It’s not an encyclical done for the crisis,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, said at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he added, “if the encyclical had come out before the crisis, you would have said it was prophetic.”

In the encyclical, Benedict wrote that “financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.”

In many ways, the document is a puzzling cross between an anti-globalization tract and a government white paper, another signal that the Vatican does not comfortably fit into traditional political categories of right and left.

“There are paragraphs that sound like Ayn Rand, next to paragraphs that sound like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ That’s quite intentional,” Vincent J. Miller, a theologian at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution in Ohio, said by telephone.

“He’ll wax poetically about the virtuous capitalist, but then he’ll give you this very clear analysis of the ways in which global capital and the shareholder system cause managers to focus on short-term good at the expense of the community, of workers, of the environment.”

Indeed, sometimes Benedict sounds like an old-school European socialist, lamenting the decline of the social welfare state and praising the “importance” of labor unions to protect workers. Without stable work, he noted, people lose hope and tend not to get married and have children.

But he also wrote, “The so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders — namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society — in favor of the shareholders.” And he argued that it was “erroneous to hold that the market economy has an inbuilt need for a quota of poverty and underdevelopment in order to function at its best.”

Benedict also called for a reform of the United Nations so there could be a unified “global political body” that allowed the less powerful of the earth to have a voice, and he called on rich nations to help less fortunate ones.

“In the search for solutions to the current economic crisis, development aid for poor countries must be considered a valid means of creating wealth for all,” he wrote.

John Sniegocki, a professor of Christian ethics at Xavier University in Cincinnati, said one of the most controversial elements of the encyclical, at least for some Americans, would be the call for international institutions to play a role in regulating the economy.

“One of the things he’s saying is that the global economy is escaping the power of individual states to regulate it,” Mr. Sniegocki said. He said the encyclical also contained elements “very critical” of how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “have required cuts in social spending in the third world.”

Michael Novak, a philosopher and theologian at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a conservative research organization, said he thought that the encyclical was stronger on principles than policy suggestions. He said he was particularly uncomfortable with the idea of a strong international institution to regulate the global economy.

“I like limited government. I would much prefer to have many limited governments than one overriding authority,” Mr. Novak said by telephone.

Benedict, arguably the most environmentally conscious pope in history, wrote, “One of the greatest challenges facing the economy is to achieve the most efficient use — not abuse — of natural resources, based on a realization that the notion of ‘efficiency’ is not value-free.”

NORTH KOREA ACCUSES OBAMA OF PLOTTING NUCLEAR WAR

via Breitbart

North Korea has accused US President Barack Obama of plotting a nuclear war on the communist nation by reaffirming a US assurance of security for South Korea, the North’s state media said.

In a first official response to last week’s US-South Korean summit, the state-run weekly Tongil Sinbo said in its Saturday edition Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak “are trying to ignite a nuclear war”.

“The US-touted provision of ‘extended deterrence, including a nuclear umbrella’ (for South Korea) is nothing but ‘a nuclear war plan,’” Tongil Sinbo said.

It said it wasn’t a coincidence that the United States has brought “nuclear equipment into South Korea and its surroundings and staged massive war drills every day to look for a chance to invade North Korea.”

Pyongyang has created weeks of tension by conducting a second nuclear test and test-firing missiles.

At a summit with Lee in Washington Wednesday, Obama warned that North Korea is a “grave threat” and vowed to defend South Korea.

A Seoul presidential official told Yonhap news agency Lee would seek a written US commitment to provide a nuclear “umbrella” for Seoul as part of “extended deterrence” against Pyongyang.

North Korea detonated its second nuclear device on May 25, following the first one in 2006. It also went ahead with what Washington said was a disguised test of a long-range missile in April.

The United Nations Security Council in response agreed to tighter cargo inspections, a stricter arms embargo and new targeted financial curbs to choke off revenue for the North’s nuclear and missile sectors.

In response Pyongyang has vowed to build more nuclear bombs and start enriching uranium for a new atomic weapons program.

Some analysts say the sabre-rattling is part of an attempt by 67-year-old ailing North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il, to bolster a succession plan involving his youngest son, Kim Jong-Un

IRANIAN UNREST:EVIDENCE OF WESTERN MEDDLING

Iranian Unrest: Evidence Of Western Intelligence Meddling
Current events and historical precedents highlight covert operations
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, June 22, 2009
The following summary, with extensive links, highlights the major evidence that suggests western intelligence agencies are aiding in stirring up unrest inside Iran as part of a “color revolution” to foment regime change.
Current events:
The announcement of the results of the election were planned in advance:
Corporate-controlled media mouthpieces had already declared Mousavi the winner even before the people of Iran had had an opportunity to cast their vote. When the result turned out to be contrary to their perceived wisdom, it was immediately denounced as “rigged”. It seems even Mousavi had fallen for this propaganda because as soon as the polls closed, he told a press conference in Tehran that he had “won”. How he could make such a claim when no results had come in?
CIA/Mossad flooding Iranians with contradicting SMS messages, Twitter Feeds:
The news of alleged election fraud has spread through Tehran like wildfire, pitching ayatollah Rafsanjani’s supporters against ayatollah Khamenei’s in street confrontations. This chaotic situation is secretly stirred by the CIA which has been spreading confusion by flooding Iranians with contradicting SMS messages and Twitter feeds. The temporary loss of the mobile phone network in Iran during the announcement of the election results, was blamed on the government.
Sophisticated cyber attacks on Iranian government websites:
Sites belonging to Iranian news agencies, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were knocked off-line with tools designed to barrage these websites with traffic. The media blamed activists opposed to the Iranian government. The temporary loss of access to websites such as Facebook and Youtube and Iranian news websites, during announcement of the election results was blamed on the government.


Western media focus on opposition rallies, hype protests:
The Western media supported the opposition’s claims by focusing the news on opposition rallies and demonstrations against Ahmadinejad, while ignoring the pro-Ahmadinejad rallies which were on some occasions much bigger. The BBC was so desperate to push the pro-Mousavi cause, it claimed that pictures of a massive pro-Ahmadinejad rally were of a pro-Mousavi rally. A retraction followed after we pointed out the grossly misleading claim. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi, said Monday that some European countries and the US have played a major role in provoking the post-election violence that killed scores of people in the past few days.
CIA has Distributed 400 Million Dollars Inside Iran to Evoke a Revolution:
Former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig claims the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has distributed 400 million dollars inside Iran to evoke a revolution.


Kissinger Calls for Iran Attack if Color Revolution Fails:
It is sincerely creepy to watch master globalist criminal Henry Kissinger call for an invasion of Iran in this BBC new clip. Herr Kissinger says that if the color revolution fails — and it is now obvious the protests in Iran are orchestrated by the CIA and the usual “democracy” NGO suspects — an outside alternative will have to be used in the name of “regime change,” in other words shock and awe à la Baghdad.



Iran finds US-backed MKO/MEK fingermarks in riots
The terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) has reportedly played a major role in intensifying the recent wave of street violence in Iran.
Historical precedents:
KEY ARTICLE - CIA Covert destabilization campaign is ongoing:
Military, intelligence, and congressional sources say a secret war is being vamped to bring down the current Iranian leadership. This involves funding anti-government terrorist groups inside Iran, such as Jundullah and the MEK/MKO.
On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”




The U.S. has laid economic siege to Iran for 30 years
Recently, Congress voted $120 million for anti-regime media broadcasts into Iran and $60-75 million in funding for opposition, violent underground Marxists and restive ethnic groups such as Azeris, Kurds and Arabs under the “Iran Democracy Program.”
US Policies May Have Contributed to Iran Revolution, Study Says
A report based on declassified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations, angry with the shah for his support for raising oil prices, worked to curb his ambitions.
The 1953 CIA coup in Iran:
Recently admitted to by Obama, in 1953 the CIA and MI6 carried out Operation Ajax (officially TP-AJAX), a covert operation by the United Kingdom and the United States to remove the democratically elected nationalist cabinet of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, to support the Pahlavi dynasty and consolidate the power of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in order to preserve the Western control of Iran’s hugely lucrative oil infrastructure.
The ousting was achieved by means of staged bombings and shootings which were blamed on the Iranian government in order to antagonize the population and enable the coup.
During the coup, the CIA also bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen, and reporters, and paid Iranians to demonstrate in the streets.



Both the US and the UK have given Iran the materials it needs to go nuclear:
After installing the Shah Globalists like Henry Kissinger opened the door for Iran to develop sophisticated nuclear energy programs which laid the foundation for today’s crisis. Twenty three reactors were built with the help of American corporations like General Electric and Westinghouse.
Iranian Professor: US and Israel have Been Trying To Divide Iran For Years:
Prominent Iranian political science professor, Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, has emphasized that Iran and the US signed an agreement in 1978 which allowed Tehran to seek nuclear technology in order to meet its future energy demands but no one now talks about the agreement. He has also asserted that Zionists in Israel in co-operation with neoconservatives in the US have intentionally been trying to divide Iran for decades.
Cheney, Neocons Considered Killing Americans in Pretext to Attack Iran:
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reveals how the neocons convened around Dick Cheney and brainstormed ways to kick off World War IV, as they fondly call their pet project to take out the Muslims and foment a contrived “clash of civilizations.”
Cheney Call For Iran Attack PR Blitz - 2007:
The New Yorker magazine reported that Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, had a conversation with a member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him that “instructions” had been passed on from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day.
Baiting Iran with aggressive maneuvers:
U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups are routinely deployed to the Gulf in order to send a clear signal to Iran that they will be crushed if they continue to defy the wishes of the US government by enriching uranium.
Fabricated 2008 Strait of Hormuz incident:
A respected American Journalist accused a Pentagon spokesman of falsifying events surrounding the encounter between Iranian patrol boats and a US navy vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, which was eventually labeled a “provocation” by the White House.
Operation Praying Mantis:
This provocation operation began after a US warship had entered mined Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.
The Shoot down of Iran air flight 665:
The fallout of Praying Mantis also resulted in the U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian civilian commercial airliner.

HAVE SCIENTISTS FOUND THE SECRET OF IMMORTALITY??

Scientists are working on mutations to generate immortality. This is not a comic book. Early experiments have greatly extended the lifespan of bioengineered worms, enhancing their genetic integrity and giving them resistance to many things that would normally kill them. Again, this is not a comic book. Or a horror movie.

Caenorhabditis Elegans, or C. Elegans for scientists who don’t want to waste half their life saying the first word, are the all rounders of the genetic modification world. An extremely simple and easy-to-incubate lifeform, they nevertheless model many vital genetic aspects and have been used in everything from cancer studies to biological computing prototypes.

Harvard medical school staff have engaged in (Elegans) immortality research based on a simple observation: certain cell lines are immortal. You’ll be gone by the end of the century, and your current skin’ll be gone before the end of the month, but in your very existence the immortality of the first primate lives on. While “somatic” cells (the cells that make everything except babies) wither and die, the “germ” cells (sperm and ova for us) make new organisms, which then replicate and make new germ cells, and are effectively immortal.

There’s more to this than Reader’s Digest essays on living on through your children – germ cells are far, far better at staying alive than their somatic siblings. Specially designed to convey genetic information to offspring (the entire point of a species), germ cells express enhanced immune abilities and resistance to many genetic stresses which break up regular cells. And the Harvard team have tricked their somatic cousins into acting the same way.By modifying the DAF-16 transcription factor the team gifted the millimeter-scale worms with extended lifespans, and if you guessed that there are an insane number of extra effects beyond “one single gene tweak” then congratulations on understanding genetics better than Hollywood does.

Don’t worry about overcrowding or hiring Soylent chefs just yet, though. While the research is applicable to mammalian cells in many ways, the simple fact is that you are your neurons, not your germ cells, and those neural cells are pretty different from the C Elegans model. It’s certainly conceivable that we could adapt neurons the same way (though conceiving isn’t something we’ll want to do when everyone lives eternally), but unless the Einstein and Feynmann of genetics already exist and are the same person, you’re one or two generations too early.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/foundations/articles/researchers-learn-how-mutations-extend-life-span

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nature08106.pdf

TEXT:HOMEGROWN TERRORISM PREVENTION ACT

Indypendent, November 16, 2007
Title: “Bringing the War on Terrorism Home”
Author: Jessica Lee

In These Times, November 2007
Title: “Examining the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act”
Author: Lindsay Beyerstein

Truthout, November 29, 2007
Title: “The Violent Radicalization Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007”
Author: Matt Renner

Student Researchers: Dan Bluthardt and Cedric Therene
Faculty Evaluator: Robert Proctor, PhD

In a startling affront to American freedoms of expression, privacy, and association, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955) passed the House on October 23, 2007, by a vote of 404–6. The Senate is currently considering a companion bill, S. 1959. The act would establish a national commission and a university-based “Center for Excellence” to study and propose legislation to prevent the threat of “radicalization” of Americans.

Author of the bill Jane Harman (D-CA) explains, “We’re studying the phenomenon of people with radical beliefs who turn into people who would use violence.”

The act states, “While the United States must continue its vigilant efforts to combat international terrorism, it must also strengthen efforts to combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States. Understanding the motivational factors that lead to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence is a vital step toward eradicating these threats in the United States.”

The act’s purpose goes beyond academic inquiry, however. In a press release Harman stated, “The National Commission will propose to both Congress and [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff initiatives to intercede before radicalized individuals turn violent.”

The act states, “Preventing the potential rise of self radicalized, unaffiliated terrorists domestically cannot be easily accomplished solely through traditional Federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts, and can benefit from the incorporation of State and local efforts.”

Harman, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment, also has close ties to the RAND Corporation, a right-wing think tank, which appears to have influenced the bill. Two weeks prior to the introduction of H.R. 1955 on April 19, 2007, Brian Michael Jenkins of RAND delivered testimony on “Jihadist Radicalization and Recruitment” to Harman’s subcommittee.

In June, Jenkins was back before Harman’s subcommittee discussing the role of the National Commission. “Homegrown terrorism is the principal threat that we face as a country and it will likely be the principal threat that we face for decades. . . . Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time,” he stated. In a 2005 RAND report titled “Trends in Terrorism,” one chapter is devoted entirely to a non-Muslim “homegrown terrorist” threat—the threat of anti-globalists.

In an effort to prevent people from becoming “prone to” radicalization, this preemptive measure of policing thought specifically identifies the Internet as a tool of radicalization: “The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens,” says Harman.

The legislation authorizes a ten-member National Commission (the Senate bill calls for twelve members) appointed by the President, the Secretary of Homeland Security, congressional leaders, and the chairpersons of both the Senate and House committees on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

After convening, the Commission is to submit reports at six-month intervals for eighteen months to the President and Congress, stating its findings, conclusions, and legislative recommendations “for immediate and long-term countermeasures . . . to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism and ideologically based violence.”

This commission has disturbing similarities to the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which was investigated by a US Senate select committee on intelligence activities (the Church Committee), in 1975. The Church Committee found that from 1956 to 1971, “The Bureau [FBI] conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

H.R. 1955 would give the DHS secretary power to establish a “Center of Excellence,” a university-based research program to “bring together leading experts and researchers to conduct multidisciplinary research and education for homeland security solutions.” the DHS currently has eight Centers at academic institutions across the country, strengthening what many see as a growing military-security-academic complex. Harman, in an October 23 press release, stated that the Center would “examine the social, criminal, political, psychological and economic roots of domestic terrorism.”

Hope Marston, regional organizer with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) warns against the danger of vaguely defined terms in this legislation, which, open to very broad interpretation, mirrors a historical pattern of sweeping government repression.

Jules Boykoff, author and professor of politics and government at Pacific University, is alarmed by the circular definition, for example, of “ideologically based violence,” which itself fails to define the terms “threat,” “force,” or “violence.” Boykoff commented that the bill used the terms “extremism” and “radicalism” interchangeably. “The word ‘radical’ shares the etymological root to the word ‘radish,’ which means to get to the root of the problem,” he says. “So, if the government wants to get at the actual root of terrorism, then let’s really talk about it. We need to talk about the economic roots, the vast inequalities in wealth between the rich and poor.”

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, says of the Act, “Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be ‘extreme.’”

UPDATE BY JESSICA LEE

While civil liberties and religious freedom groups credit independent journalists and grassroots activists with helping to stall the passage of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, some members of Congress continue to push for Internet censorship and racial profiling as necessary to prevent “homegrown terrorism.”

The House of Representatives approved the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act in October 2007 by a 404-6 vote, but widespread opposition forced the Senate to shelve the bill. As of June 1, 2008, no vote was scheduled or expected during the current legislative year.

I became aware of the Act in early November 2007. Other than an article by Lindsay Beyerstein, “Examining the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,” (In These Times, November 1, 2007), no major media outlet had reported on the bill despite the dangers it posed to civil liberties, privacy, and Muslim and Arab communities in the United States. Nonetheless, I did discover active online discussion about the bill, mainly on blogs and videos posted to YouTube.com.

Isabel Macdonald, communications director for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, commented: “Perhaps due to the symbiotic relationship between corporate media outlets and government officials, the corporate media has shown a consistent aversion to offering critical coverage of the erosion of civil liberties. The independent media—and specifically The Indypendent—played a critical role in breaking the story of this bill, and, through coverage in blogs and on Democracy Now!, keeping the story alive.”

Within a month of The Indypendent article, rallies were held from Maine to California, and numerous civil liberties, religious freedom and American Muslim and Arab organizations issued action alerts encouraging people to contact their congressional representatives in an effort to stop the US Senate companion bill, S. 1959.

According to civil rights lobbyists, the public outcry forced Senate committee chair Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) to put the bill on the backburner. However, Lieberman and committee ranking minority leader Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) continue to claim “homegrown terrorism” by Islamists is a grave menace, and on May 8, 2008, issued their own report, without public backing by other committee members, that warned “the threat of homegrown terrorism is on the rise, aided by the Internet’s capacity to spread the core recruitment and training message of violent Islamist terrorist groups.”

In response, more than thirty civil liberties and religious freedom groups sent a letter to the Senate committee on May 30, expressing concern that the report could impinge on freedom of expression, unjustly target Muslims, and define the Internet as a “weapon.”

A group of organizations representing American Muslim and Arab communities also submitted a letter in response to the report and the Senate hearings charging that they have been largely excluded from the legislative process and that the report relies on a discredited 2007 New York Police Department report that attempts to explain the process of “violent radicalization” of Muslim individuals.

Shortly after issuing the report, Lieberman demanded that Google remove YouTube videos produced by “terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.” Google responded May 19 by removing eighty videos that the company agreed violated YouTube’s Community Guidelines, which depict gratuitous violence, advocated violence or used hate speech. Google, however, refused to meet all of Lieberman’s demands, which included censoring all videos mentioning or featuring groups listed by the US State Department as foreign terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaeda.

“Senator Lieberman stated his belief . . . that all videos mentioning or featuring these groups should be removed from YouTube—even legal nonviolent or non-hate speech videos,” Google said. “YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view.”

Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the Boston-based Political Research Associates, said that he believes Lieberman’s actions are a “political dirty trick” with the motive of trying to push the presidential candidates towards accepting a more aggressive stance in the Middle East.

Organizations leading the effort to oppose the legislation include Defending Dissent Foundation (http://www.defendingdissent.org), the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (http://www.bordc.org), the Center for Constitutional Rights (http://www.ccrjustice.org), the American Civil Liberties Union (http://www.aclu.org), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (http://www.cair.com).

UPDATE BY LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN

The Homegrown Terrorism bill has been bogged down in the Senate since last October. The bill sailed through the House with little public comment but subsequently encountered stiff opposition from across the political spectrum. Until recently, it appeared that civil liberties groups and Muslim civic organizations had successfully blocked the Senate version of the bill.

The bill seemed destined to die in committee—that is, until Sen. Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, signaled his eagerness to revisit the issue by releasing a new report and picking a fight with YouTube.

On May 8, Chairman Lieberman and ranking member Susan Collins (R-ME) released “Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat,” a bipartisan report based on hearings before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security.

Even before it was released to the public, the report drew fire from a coalition of civil liberties organizations spearheaded by the ACLU. The coalition outlined its concerns about the report in a May 7 memo to committee members.

“Our concern is that this focus on the Internet could be a precursor to proposals to censor and regulate speech on the Internet. Indeed, some policy makers have advocated shutting down objectionable websites,” the memo said.

Lieberman reinforced those misgivings on May 19 when he wrote to the CEO of Google (YouTube’s parent company) demanding that an unspecified number of Islamic propaganda videos be removed from the popular video-sharing site. Lieberman alleged in the letter that the clips were the work of a sophisticated Islamic propaganda network discussed in his committee’s recent report. He also claimed that these videos violated YouTube’s community guidelines.

YouTube rules expressly forbid gratuitous violence, hate speech, threats, harassment, and depictions of crimes such as bomb-making. Hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded to the site daily. Rather than prescreening the content, YouTube relies on users to flag material that violates community standards. Content that breaks the rules is routinely removed.

After reviewing the clips, YouTube refused to remove the bulk of the material flagged by Lieberman’s staff. A handful of clips that violated community standards were taken down, but the rest stayed up.

“Most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines,” read a statement issued by the YouTube Team. The statement went on to affirm the right of YouTube users to express unpopular points of view.

Lieberman was not satisfied with the response.

“No matter what their content, videos produced by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda that are committed to attacking America and killing Americans should not be tolerated. Google must reconsider its policy,” Lieberman stated on May 20.

No vote has been scheduled, but Lieberman’s fight with Google has pushed the Homegrown Terrorism bill back into the spotlight. After months of silence, the established media are finally beginning to ask questions about the government’s increasing enthusiasm for monitoring “radical” speech online. The New York Times sharply criticized Lieberman and the bill in a May 25 editorial. The op/ed called Lieberman a “would-be censor” whose efforts to restrict constitutionally protected speech on YouTube “contradict fundamental American values.”

Readers can make their views on the Homegrown Terrorism bill known by contacting their senators and the members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. The two frontrunners in the 2008 presidential race are senators. Now is a good time for voters to pressure the presidential candidates to take clear positions on the Homegrown Terrorism bill. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) sits on the Homeland Security Committee, but did not contribute to the report. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is closely allied with Sen. Lieberman, especially on issues pertaining to terrorism.

UPDATE BY MATT RENNER

A controversial plan to study and profile domestic terrorism was scrapped after popular push back, but the spirit of the legislation lives on in Senator Joe Lieberman’s office.

H.R. 1955, “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007” passed the House in October 2007 with almost unanimous support. The bill immediately came under fire from civil liberties watchdogs because of what many saw as a deliberate targeting of Muslims and Arabs and the possible chilling effect it might have on free speech.

The original bill intended to set up a government commission to investigate the supposed threat of domestically produced terrorists and the ideologies that underpin their radicalization. The ten-member commission was to be empowered to “hold hearings and sit and act at such times and places, take such testimony, receive such evidence, and administer such oaths as the Commission considers advisable to carry out its duties.” The bill also singled out the Internet as a vehicle for terrorists to spread their ideology with the intention of recruiting and training new terrorists.

After significant public pressure, the bill stalled in the Senate. However, Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), the current chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, embraced the thrust of the legislation and has been working to push forward some of the goals of the original bill, including an attempt to weed out terrorist propaganda from the Internet.

On May 19, Lieberman sent a letter to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt demanding that YouTube’s parent company Google “immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube.”

“By taking action to curtail the use of YouTube to disseminate the goals and methods of those who wish to kill innocent civilians, Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort,” Lieberman wrote.

Google fired back, refusing to take off material that did not violate the site’s code of conduct. “While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view,” Schmidt said in response, adding, “we believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate, we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds.”

Google removed some of the videos that violated their rules against posting violence and hate speech, but made a point to write, “most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines.”

According to civil liberties activists, Chairman Lieberman has been spearheading an effort to censor speech on the Internet. His committee recently released a report titled “Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat,” a report detailing the use of web sites and Internet tools to spread pro-terrorism propaganda.

The report repeatedly blames websites and chat rooms for “radicalization,” calling the websites “portals” through which potential terrorists can “participate in the global violent Islamist movement and recruit others to their cause.” As civil liberties groups have pointed out, the report focuses solely on terrorism seen as associated with Islam.

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington, DC, legislative office, said that Lieberman “is trying to decide what he thinks should go on the Internet,” which, she said, “reeks of an interest in censoring all sorts of different dialogs.”

“If someone criticizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and favors Hamas, should that be censored?” Fredrickson asked.

Links:

“Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat”: http://hsgac.senate .gov/public/_files/ IslamistReport.pdf.

New York Times editorial on Lieberman’s attempt to censor YouTube: http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/05/25/opinion/25sun1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin.

Lieberman’s response to the New York Times editorial: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/opinion/ 25sun1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion &oref=slogin.

COMMENT BY MICKEY S. HUFF, author of Chapter 14

The coverage of this story by these journalists is highly commendable. However, another element that appears to have been censored regarding the possible application of H.R. 1955 and S. 1959, even in the independent and progressive press coverage, is the specificity of possible domestic activists mentioned in the hearings Representative Jane Harman held in Washington, DC. While the aforementioned authors allude to animal rights activists and anti-globalists as potential targets of these bills, none mention 9/11 Truth activists and scholars even though they were mentioned by name in the Harman hearings at the Capitol. (For possible explanations, see Censored 2008, Chapter 7, for more on the propaganda model inside left progressive press.)

Among the claims of those testifying to Congress about the “need” for H.R. 1955 was that anyone who questions the official government line on 9/11 is akin to a terrorist or a material supporter to terrorism. One speaker, Mark Weitzman of the Wiesenthal Center (ironically founded by Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal to educate the public about war crimes), claimed that architects, engineers, and scientists that question the official 9/11 narrative are the same as alleged violent jihadist groups. This was further implied in a Powerpoint presentation in which Weitzman showed architect Richard Gage’s website, http://AE911Truth.org, alongside alleged violent jihadist sites. Gage has criticized the 9/11 official story about the destruction of the Twin Towers and WTC7. On the basis of his professional expertise of steel frame buildings, Gage contends the buildings could not have been brought down the way the government has explained and offers alternative theories supported by evidence. Regardless of whether one believes the counterarguments about the events of 9/11, free speech and questioning of the government on such crucial issues should not be criminalized.

This is the latest round of official conflation between terrorists and activists in the US. Is there a proven link between these aforementioned groups? No, there is not. But that didn’t stop people from simply saying so on the public record while providing no evidence. And Jane Harman, Democratic cosponsor of the bill, didn’t ask for any, nor did she invite rebuttal. This is reminiscent of McCarthyism of the Red Scare period of the 1950s.

I originally wrote about this issue here:

http://mythinfo.blogspot.com/2007/11/state-terror-hr-1955-weapon-of-mass.html

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2007112285903892.

For C-Span video footage of the hearing (just after thirty-nine minutes), see:
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product _video_info&products_id=202123-1.

EXOPLITICAL DISCLOSURE AND THE PERVASIVE CONVERGENCE

Exopolitical Disclosure and the Pervasive Convergence!
5:03 PM / Posted by Andre Heath / comments (21)
"He must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see some Great Purpose or Design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honour to be faithful servants." - Sir Winston Churchill, 1941.

Most historians would agree that Churchill's speech before the United States Congress was largely a rallying cry to his allies following America's entry into the second World War, galvanized around the pursuit to destroy Hitler and Nazism. However, Churchill's fiery rhetoric has transcended the war era and have come to symbolize the times we currently live in, where an avalanche of innumerable and inexplicable events stretches across all dimensions into the very fabric of our existence.

"Who am I?" "Why am I here?" "Who created us? "Is God real?" "Is Jesus God?" "Are all religions a worship of the Sun?" "Are aliens real?" "What are UFOs?" "Who created the pyramids and what are they for?" "Were we genetically manipulated?" "Is this a dream matrix or an alternate reality?" "Who are the Greys?" "Are the Reptilians real?" "Did we really go to the Moon?" Is there life on Mars?" "Is there a Planet X?" "What is the meaning behind crop circles?" "When will disclosure occur?" "What will happen in 2012?"
In our quest, we ask fundamental questions along the way, as if we are investigators deciphering the real meanings behind Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or the lyrics and artwork of Pink Floyd. Never ever coming close to understanding the monolith or what is on the dark side of the moon. In my humble opinion, the answers to these questions will not be revealed by bullhorning the Bilderbergs, or watching the pedophiles worship Moloch at Bohemian Grove, or espousing some outlandish and fanciful theory concocted by the covert boys at the NSA, CIA and the Pentagon, or issuing ultimatums to the government for disclosure, or for that matter hoping that President Obama will usher in a Golden Age. The urgency of this moment requires the end of ego in the alternative movement and the establishment of truth as the sole objective. The ego is not based on reality, therefore if the aim is to uncover and disperse truth, a major shift must happen. Our perception of reality must change from the demands for attention and the distortions that fits within that mindset. There is no need to be postulating like Pharisees or yearn to be leaders, gurus, masters or reincarnated prophets. That is silly and quite childish, to be frank. Our efforts must be channeled into understanding what is the great purpose of which Churchill speaks. We need to discern meaningful answers by thoroughly examining our rich history, ancient mythologies, and current news headlines. Even the seemingly mundane occurrences can offer up significant mystical or esoteric answers through the symbolistic language of interconnectivity. Drawn interconnectivity from event markers that can even be visualized prior to the actual instance through a recognition of patterns or signs in popular culture.

For how long can we continue to dwell on which talk show has the highest rating or whose website has the greatest following or who predicted what first, when the week of the released of the new Star Trek movie featured stories that highlights this obvious symbolical pattern. As this rebooted saga invokes the idealism of the 1960s and the JFK era of space exploration for the Obama generation, where the Starfleet is seen as the force to explore the galaxies, we learn of an actual secret antigravity space fleet controlled by the U.S. Strategic Command called Solar Warden.
"Solar Warden, according to cited whistleblowers, has already established bases on the Moon and Mars, and is involved in interplanetary exploration. Strategic Command currently contains the space commands of the three main U.S. military services. These are the Air Force Space Command, the Naval Space Command and the US Army Space Command." - Dr. Michael Salla
In synchronized sequence, we are told that the Warp Drive, the distinctive invention from the Star Trek mythos is quite possible, by physicists working to bring it to fruition.
"The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving."... One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened... So perhaps some unique geometry of mass or exotic form of energy can manipulate a bubble of space-time so that it moves faster than light-speed, and carries any objects within it along for the ride. - SPACE.com
All in the same week that President Obama orders a review of NASA's antiquated and problem-plagued rocket system in-order to forge a new direction that will ultimately take astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Obviously resonating perfectly with the coming of age journey of the young Kirk as he is recruited into Starfleet. If that isn't enough, Jeff Greenwald of Salon.com compares Obama to Spock, a cultural translator to the universe leading us into a future of abundance and prosperity with transporter beams and warp drive-capable starships.
"... drawing parallels between the dependably logical half-Vulcan and another mixed-race icon: Barack Obama. They're not just talking about the ears... Nimoy's alter ego was the harbinger of a future in which logic would reign over emotion, and rational thought triumph over blind faith. He was a digital being in an analog world; the Pied Piper who led our generation into the Silicon Age..."
I wonder what Trekkies think of that.

While this is happening, NASA astronauts from space shuttle Atlantis (I wonder who concoct these names) are busy repairing and upgrading the Hubble Telescope in the hopes that it will become powerful enough to find the Holy Grail of Cosmology - the source of the dark matter and dark energy that is believed to construct the majority of the universe.

You can't help but see a pattern emerging from these events and the symbolic motifs associated with them. Now, try to place all that you have just read with the following stories and you might have a clue to where this is all leading: The European Space Agency (ESA) will peer deeper into space and time using the Herschel, the largest and most powerful infrared telescope ever launched into space, meanwhile, astronomers using infrared light have just found a small galaxy of about a billion stars in the constellation Canis Major that is only about 25,000 light years away from the Sun. Stunning, right. This comes against the background of the discovery of a gorgeous shot of a planetary nebula of gas and dust that looks like a giant eye by Hubble. Not to be discounted, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute is going to launch a project called ‘Earth Speaks’, which will collect messages online from people around the world, asking them about their questions to an alien civilization. I think that you can guess where this is headed, don't you?

Speaking of movies and matter, opening this week at your favorite cinema is the film adaptation of Dan Brown's controversial novel Angels & Demons, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, the follow up to the Da Vinci Code. In the book, the secret society the Illuminati steals antimatter from CERN, a nuclear research laboratory on the Swiss/French border, and uses it to make a bomb with which they intend to destroy the Vatican. For those who haven't watched it yet, it is a pulsating mystery movie cast against a scenic Roman backdrop, enveloped by a haunting historical storyline that deviates significantly from the book in several areas. But, enough of the reviews, let's look at events revolving around this release and how they relate to the great purpose.

Despite the controversies swirling around the movie, scientists and researchers experimenting on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will be hosting lectures and other related events worldwide, even the reviewer in the Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, called the movie "harmless entertainment" that is both "gripping" and "a bit of fun." Therefore, at the end of it's theatrical run, the myth regarding the Illuminati would be greatly perpetuated, absolving and ameliorating the Vatican Church State of its dark history. Have you ever wondered why many in the alternative movement would hang outside the Astir Palace hotel in Greece to shout insults at the Bilderbergs and make endless assertions and accusations online and on various alternative media about the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Zionists and numerous other organizations promulgating conspiracy theories about the New World Order. Forgetting that from St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican Church State exerted control over many by incorporating the Atlantean/Babylonian/Egyptian mystery system, changing the spiritual laws by establishing and superimposing the risen Jesus Christ over the Magic Square of the Sun. The Spiritual Sun of a new age, the Vatican established Jesus as the incarnate Solar Logos and formulated laws, symbols, policies and directives that killed millions from the persecutions of the crusades to the world wars. It has continued it's influence and control over European royalties, politicians, spiritual leaders, businessmen and other organizations through the Jesuits, utilizing the major intelligence agencies worldwide like the CIA and MI6 to continued the Nazi agenda with NASA.

We must understand that the Illuminati was created by the Jesuit trained Adam Weishaupt, as was done with other groups. Even the symbol that is often associated with the Illuminati, the cosmic eye above the pyramid on the American one dollar bill is more symbolic of the Holy See, the episcopal jurisdiction of the Pope. Even the Knights Templar, who the Vatican now officially blamed for secretly hiding and venerating the Shroud of Turin, were once under the absolute control of the Vatican. It must be noted that in 1139, Pope Innocent II conferred great powers onto the Templar Order when he issued the papal bull, Omne Datum Optimum stating that the Knights Templar could pass freely through any border, owed no taxes, and were subject to no one's authority except that of the Pope. When the Templars fell out of favor with King Phillip IV of France and other royalties, it was officially dissolved by Pope Clement V. Tells a story, no?

The Vatican Church State is not responsible to any parliament or government and is run like a state corporation, as is the City of London (the financial capital of the world) which was originally created out of the Roman Catholic Church dioceses in England. The same is true of the Washington DC Corporation (the military wing of the Holy See), since the United States of America was first established as a foreign corporation and a subsidiary of the City of London Corporation. As we examine the news headlines that confronts us on a daily basis, it is essential for us to establish the truth, understand historical facts in-order to know the real power structure atop the pyramid. We must not be swayed by the recent headlines of child molestation and sex scandals that has become quite a blow to the facade of normality projected by the Church State, the Vatican is still a very powerful ecclesiastic organization controlling about 10% of the world's population and is worth trillions given the rich collection of treasures it confiscated and compensations from settlements with royalties.

Currently Pope Benedict XVI is touring the Middle East, formally paving the way for a lasting peace agreement between Palestinians and Jews, by officially calling for a Palestinian state. In tandem with Jordan's King Abdullah II called on Israel on Thursday to immediately announce its commitment to the two-state solution and its acceptance of the Arab Peace Initiative and take necessary steps to end the Israeli-Arab conflict. President Obama is schedule to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas later in May to further the discussion on finding a peaceful solution to the Middle East question. Now, the Jews, Muslims and Buddhists are awaiting the return of their Messiah, known respectively to these believers as Jesus, the Mahdi and Buddha. Consider too, that many in the prophetic and evangelical community are expecting a messianic figure called the Antichrist or the Man of Sin, who will sign a peace treaty with Israel for seven years following a major war in the Middle East. In the exopolitical field, many are awaiting disclosure, contact and the arrival of extraterrestrials. Since the start of this year, we have seen several countries opening up their classified documents and disclosed entries relating to UFOs. Countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Sweden,... and more is expected later this year.

Along with Star Trek and Angels & Demons, we have already seen this year, movies from Hollywood dealing with extraterrestrial, messianic, genetic engineering and post-apocalyptic themes like Monster vs Aliens, Coraline, Push, Impact 1 and 2, Race to Witch Mountain, Outlander, Knowing, Watchmen, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Underworld 3: The Rise Of The Lycans, Inkheart, Butterfly Effect 3: Revelation, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Spirit, X-Men Origins: Wolverine,... It doesn't end there. Here's a few upcoming ones that will extend and more than likely wrap up the alien mythological arc with the 2012 theme: Iron Sky, Predators, Jetsons, World War Z, Hunter Prey, Men in Black 3, Green Lantern, Deryni Rising, Westworld, The Mutant Chronicles, Battle for Terra, Terminator 4, Transformers 2, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood, Aliens in the Attic, Pandorum, 9, District 9, 2012, AstroBoy, Planet 51, Avatar, The Sky Crawlers, Alien Trespass, Legion, Moon, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Countdown, The Flash, Ghost Rider 2, Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Zero Theorem, Halo, Jericho, John Carter of Mars, Jurassic Park IV, Last Equation, Logan's Run, Lost Planet, Robotech, The Thing, V, Voltron - Defender of the Universe, X-Files 3, Battle: Los Angeles, The Days Before, Akira, Conan, The Crazies, Dune, Escape from New York, Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet, Ghost in the Shell 3-D, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Judge Dredd, Robocop 3-D, They Live, When Worlds Collide, Brave New World, Chrysalis, Ender's Game, The Forever War, The Graveyard Book, The Hobbit, Hyperion Cantos, Neuromancer, Ubik, End of Eternity, Y: The Last Man, The Avengers, Hiding In Time, Iron Man 2, Thor, First Avenger: Captain America, Justice League: Mortal, Spider-man 4, Witchblade, X-Men Origins: Magneto, Cloverfield 2, Superman: The Man of Steel, Tron 2, Resident Evil 4: Afterlife,... Long list, but you get the picture, right?

So, what does all this mean? Well, unlike others who think that the Vatican is backpedaling on the UFO issue, I believe that they are making great preparations for alien contact or contact of some kind. I will elaborate more on this later, but keep this in mind - sometime last year, the Vatican announced that aliens might exist and Christians should treat them as an "extraterrestrial brother" and part of God's creation. Stunning, no? While you are thinking about that, have a chew on this - the Vatican Church State owns a vast underground vault storing millions of seeds from around the world in Norway called the 'doomsday seed bank' on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean along with Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway. You must understand that the Vatican doctrine is synthesized and aligned with scientific discovery and progress. These discoveries have been used to modify time and laws, which is why the Gregorian calendar was established. The same organization that tried Galileo for saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun in the 17th century controls one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world, the Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, Italy. The Vatican Observatory Research Group (VORG) also set up shop at the Mount Graham International Observatory in Arizona. Together with the University of Arizona, they house one of the world's largest and most modern centers for observational astronomy staffed with a small group of professional astronomers and cosmologists, the Vatican Observatory Research Group includes one of the world's largest collections of optical telescopes, called the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. It is a fact that these scientists are all Jesuits and are working closely with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

If you still haven't made the connection, let me enlighten you further. Firstly, put on your astrology hat. The following is neither novel or original, but fits perfectly here. Jesus Christ is the mythological Sun God of the Vatican Church State. The date of his birth is officially December 25. Now, according to the constellations of the Zodiac, a Great Year spans 25,920 years. A Great Year consists of 12 Ages, therefore each age lasts 2160 years. Follow closely. Now the earth rotates with a wobble called precession, it does not return to the exact point of departure from the previous year. When the sun is at its highest position during the spring equinox, the constellation in its background determines the Age it is in. Therefore Jesus' birth on December 25 two thousand year ago, occurred when the Sun entered Pisces on the Spring Equinox, marking the Age of Pisces, the Age of the Fish. In the Bible, we are told that three wise men following a bright star with 3 gifts for the Savior Child in the Nativity scene. The representation for the three wise men can be found in the Constellation of Orion the Hunter. It has three stars on its belt that aligns with the bright star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky next to our Sun. On December 25, Sirius rises above the horizon in Jerusalem marking the start of the Age of Pisces. The three stars on the belt of Orion points directly towards Sirius, the star of Bethlehem.

Now, what does this have to do with the Vatican Church State. Everything, actually. It is not just the Giza pyramids in Egypt that are geometrically aligned to the Belt of Orion in the Orion constellation, the entire layout of the Vatican City is. As well as to the Pleiades Star System. Completely in essence.

As above, so below.
St. Peter’s Square, when the Pleiades are placed correctly over the Seven Hills of Rome, the Silver Gate resides perfectly East and aligns with the eight-pointed cross on St Peter’s Square. - Jan Wicherink and Aaron Parlier
Further, the image clearly illustrates the close link between the Holy See and the Babylonian Sun God Shamash, seated on the right on the tablet. On this ancient table he holds the symbols or emblems of his authority a staff and ring before three kings. Notice at the center of the altar is a large 4 point sun image. Then have a look at St. Peter's Obelisk in the Sacred Cross Piazza. A obvious match. This symbol is also seen on the Pope's hat. Which means that Papal Rome is Mystery Babylon. And since, freemasonry is the embodiment of the Mystery Babylonian system, therefore the Vatican and freemasonry are inseparable. The Masonic Tracing Board illustrates this fully with its staircase to the Sirius Star System. Symbolic of the DNA connection linking humans to their heavenly progenitors. If that is not enough, check out the Pope's hat, it resembles the fish's head. Symbolic of the Piscean Age. No surprise there. But did you have a close look at Pope Benedict's coat of arms, notice the keys at the top of the image, this is important as the entire Vatican complex is laid out like a key. This not only points to the Sirius as the real Babylonian Sun God, but tells us of our own true lineage - as they were our human ancestors. In my humble opinion, it is becoming quite obvious that the Vatican Church State is a consolidation of the Shemsu Hor (the followers of Horus), the Akeru Aku (Sphinx Masters), and the overall Atlantean/Babylonian/Egytian mythos merged into one religion that encompass Judaism, Christianity, Astrotheology, Druidism, Templarism and Masonry given the obviously synchronized links between Jesus Christ and Horus. Consider the following:
Jesus was the “only begotten son” of the god Yahweh. Horus was the “only begotten son” of the god Osiris. The mother of Jesus was Mary. Sometimes referred to as Maria (Gospel of Mark) or Miriam. The mother of Horus was Meri. The foster father of Jesus was Joseph The foster father of Horus was Jo-Seph The birth of Jesus was heralded by a star in the East (where the Sun rises in the morning) The birth of Horus was heralded by the star Sirius (the morning star) After the birth of Jesus, Herod tried to have him murdered After the birth of Horus, Herut tried to have him murdered Jesus was taken from the desert in Palestine up a high mountain to be tempted by his arch-nemesis Satan. Horus was taken from the desert of Amenta up a high mountain to be tempted by his arch-rival Set. Jesus was known as the Christ (which means “anointed one”) Horus is known as KRST, the anointed one. Jesus is identified with the Tau (cross) Horus was identified with the Tau
There's so much more, including comparisons with other deities like Attis, Krishna, Dionysus and Mythra, or how the Vatican's worship of Mary, the Mother of God synchronize with the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar/Astarte or the Egyptian Goddess Isis of the Sirius Star System and it how it all relates to the Divine Femininity, Goddess Gaia, and the environmental movement. But you get the point. It is interesting to note that Joseph Ratzinger, born on the April 16, 1927 took the title of Pope Benedict XVI (16) considering that he is regarded by several prophetic scholars as the penultimate leader of the Roman Catholic Church and given the fact that the number 17, has been synchromystically linked by the author Christopher Knowles of the Secret Sun with Horus, Isis, Osiris and the Sirius Star System. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Finally, it seems to me that what we in the alternative movement should really be focusing on the root of these events, the esoteric and mystical connections and how they seem to be converging harmonically and synchromystically, as we exit one age and enter another. The Age of Aquarius will be a turning point that fuses all systems of beliefs into one, by ushering entities to fulfill embedded messianic programming from our consciousness. There will be no moment akin to a cosmic big bang, when all will be revealed like a instantaneous blast of countless random thoughts at our cerebral cortex. No, this is a carefully orchestrated plan. We must awake from our amnesia, become keenly aware of the ticking clock, be able to piece together these loose threads and recognize that we are witnessing the emergence of a hidden reality. A ecumenical spirit of convergence that will be the synthesis of all thesis and antithesis, uniting all races, creed and religion under the umbrella of the Babylonian Mystery System. It is the grand purpose of the Vatican and it has been at the heart of the work of its agents like Albert Pike, Adam Weishaupt, Helena P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Alice Bailey, Lucifer Publishing Company, Benjamin Creme, the Theosophical Society, Aleister Crowley, the United Nations, the Club of Rome, Aspen Institute, the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, the City of London, the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, and many others. They are all of the same root. They are all identical. They are the instruments, descendants and keepers of the ancient secrets of the descended beings, the ancient alien astronauts. It is the great work of the ages, a grand illusion and essentially the great deception.

Perhaps, noted historian, lecturer and writer Ralph Epperson said it best:

"The Sun was a symbol of something that only the believers in the religion... understood. These believers,... knew that the people would not accept their mystery religion, so they had to conceal it from them. So the task became one of creating a religion around a belief that they knew the people would accept. Their basic purpose was to create a popular religion as a cover for their secret worship. They would have to keep their beliefs from the people, and conceal their secret worship in hidden symbols... the obelisk stands for the very presence of the Sun God! And the Sun God is LUCIFER!"



NOTE
In part two of this look at the exopolitical convergence, I will continue to examine the Sirius Star System, consider the rise to power of Barack Obama, the strange happenings in Dubai, the release of the new Terminator movie and the quickening approach of 2012 in an effort to show how technology and messianic themes plays a critical role in understanding the great purpose being worked out here below.

MULTIRACIAL PEOPLE (aka HALFRICANS) BECOME FASTEST GROWING US GROUP

Call it the Drake Factor or the Obama Effect but light skinned negroes are finnin’ to take this continent over in the next 10 years. Well, them and Mexicans.

Multiracial Americans have become the fastest growing demographic group, wielding an impact on minority growth that challenges traditional notions of race. The number of multiracial people rose 3.4 percent last year to about 5.2 million, according to the latest census estimates. First given the option in 2000, Americans who check more than one box for race on census surveys have jumped by 33 percent and now make up 5 percent of the minority population _ with millions more believed to be uncounted.

Demographers attributed the recent population growth to more social acceptance and slowing immigration. They cited in particular the high public profiles of Tiger Woods and President Barack Obama, a self-described “mutt,” who are having an effect on those who might self-identify as multiracial.

Population figures as of July 2008 show that California, Texas, New York and Florida had the most multiracial people, due partly to higher numbers of second- and later-generation immigrants who are more likely to “marry out.” Measured by percentages, Hawaii ranked first with nearly 1 in 5 residents who were multiracial, followed by Alaska and Oklahoma, both at roughly 4 percent.Utah had the highest growth rate of multiracial people in 2008 compared to the previous year, a reflection of loosening social morals in a mostly white state.

MAGNETS IN ANT ANTENNAE WORK AS INTERNAL GPS

May 20, 2009 -- Miniscule magnets found in ant antennae could help to explain why these insects seem to always know where they are going, according to researchers who suspect the magnets are a key component of a sophisticated, nature-made GPS system.

Watch the ants raid a termite stronghold in this video.

While human global positioning systems rely upon power-consuming receivers that pick up information from clunky, orbiting 3,000-4,000-pound satellites, the probable ant system weighs next to nothing, requires little body energy to operate and is Earth-friendly to the max.

The system, in fact, appears to be mostly built out of dirt.

"The ants we studied dwell in tropical soils that are full of very fine-grained iron minerals, so there is plenty of material available," said researcher Jandira Ferreira de Oliveira of the Technical University of Munich and the Brazilian Center for Physics Research.

"The incorporation of minerals probably starts as soon as ants start getting in touch with soil," she added, explaining to Discovery News that her team found ultra fine-grained crystals of magnetic magnetite, maghemite, hematite, goethite, and aluminum silicates in ant antennae. These particles could make a "biological compass needle" that drives ant GPS.
space station
WATCH VIDEO: Watch ants mount an attack.

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For the study, published in the latest Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Oliveira and her colleagues collected worker ants from the species Pachycondyla marginata in Sao Paulo. Prior studies found these ants tend to always migrate at an orientation of 13 degrees relative to Earth's geomagnetic north-south axis, and that the ant's strongest magnetic signal comes from its antennae.

High-powered microscopes and chemical analysis revealed the presence of the dirt-acquired magnetic particles in the antennae, intriguingly next to a body part called the Johnston's organ that may also be part of the ant's GPS.

Oliveira explained how the system might work.

Our planet is magnetized, likely due to rotational forces of liquid iron in Earth's core. Although the resulting magnetic field is one-twenty thousandth as strong as a refrigerator magnet, ants appear to "perceive the geomagnetic information through a magnetic sensor (the dirt particles), transduce it in a signal to the nervous system and then to the brain," she said.

Not all ants may use this particular system. Desert ants, for example, appear to have evolved special eyes that detect skylight polarization, which they then use to find their way around their sandy habitat. Magnetic particles, however, have been detected in many fish, birds, butterflies, flies, bees, bats, mole rats, newts, sea turtles and spiny lobsters, suggesting these animals find their way like the Brazilian ants do.


An almost identical GPS system might operate in rainbow trout, which have magnetic material in their noses, and homing pigeons. Gerta Fleissner of the University of Frankfurt and her colleagues discovered maghemite and magnetite in the skin lining the upper beaks of these birds famed for their directional skills.

Fleissner believes this "pigeon-type receptor system ... might turn out to be a universal feature of all birds."

The University of Oxford's Robert Srygley, one of the world's leading insect experts, told Discovery News that the new study "is a major advance toward finding the magnetic compass in this nomadic ant."

Nanotechnologists have their eye on such ant, bird and other nature-made GPS systems, as they could in future lead to more accurate drug targeting in humans, and might even serve as tiny data storage devices.

While insects and animals seem to either get their magnetic materials from dirt or otherwise produce them, the crystals apparently aren't so easy to recreate in a lab.

According to Fleissner and her team, "Even though birds have been producing these particles for millions of years, the main problem for scientists who want to find benefits from their use will be the technical production of these particles."

FBI DEPUTIZES PRIVATE CONTRACTORS WITH EXTRAORDINARY POWERS,SHOOT TO KILL

FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive. Posted February 8, 2008.

shared by TawaretH

The FBI has a new set of eyes and ears, and they're being told to protect their infrastructure at any cost. They can even kill without repercussion.

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does -- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law. InfraGard is "a child of the FBI," says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

"Then the FBI cloned it," says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

"We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility," says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

"At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector," the InfraGard website states. "InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories."

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that "350 of our nation's Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard."

To join, each person must be sponsored by "an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization." The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. "To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard," he said. "From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America." He added a little later, "Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense."

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they "note suspicious activity or an unusual event." And he said they could sic the FBI on "disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers."

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members' website, Mueller says: "It's a great program."

The ACLU is not so sanguine.

"There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations -- some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers -- into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI," the ACLU warned in its August 2004 report The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.

InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the "trade secrets" exemption, its website says. And any conversation with the public or the media is supposed to be carefully rehearsed.

"The interests of InfraGard must be protected whenever presented to non-InfraGard members," the website states. "During interviews with members of the press, controlling the image of InfraGard being presented can be difficult. Proper preparation for the interview will minimize the risk of embarrassment. . . . The InfraGard leadership and the local FBI representative should review the submitted questions, agree on the predilection of the answers, and identify the appropriate interviewee. . . . Tailor answers to the expected audience. . . . Questions concerning sensitive information should be avoided."

One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.

The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: "Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more."

InfraGard members receive "almost daily updates" on threats "emanating from both domestic sources and overseas," Hershman says.

"We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members," Schneck says. "People are happy to be in the know."

On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.

"He said his brother talked to him before the FBI," recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis's press secretary at the time. "And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, 'I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn't the public know?' "

Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: "You'd think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last."

In return for being in the know, InfraGard members cooperate with the FBI and Homeland Security. "InfraGard members have contributed to about 100 FBI cases," Schneck says. "What InfraGard brings you is reach into the regional and local communities. We are a 22,000-member vetted body of subject-matter experts that reaches across seventeen matrixes. All the different stovepipes can connect with InfraGard."

Schneck is proud of the relationships the InfraGard Members Alliance has built with the FBI. "If you had to call 1-800-FBI, you probably wouldn't bother," she says. "But if you knew Joe from a local meeting you had with him over a donut, you might call them. Either to give or to get. We want everyone to have a little black book."

This black book may come in handy in times of an emergency. "On the back of each membership card," Schneck says, "we have all the numbers you'd need: for Homeland Security, for the FBI, for the cyber center. And by calling up as an InfraGard member, you will be listened to." She also says that members would have an easier time obtaining a "special telecommunications card that will enable your call to go through when others will not."

This special status concerns the ACLU.

"The FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans who get special treatment," says Jay Stanley, public education director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program. "There's no 'business class' in law enforcement. If there's information the FBI can share with 22,000 corporate bigwigs, why don't they just share it with the public? That's who their real 'special relationship' is supposed to be with. Secrecy is not a party favor to be given out to friends. . . . This bears a disturbing resemblance to the FBI's handing out 'goodies' to corporations in return for folding them into its domestic surveillance machinery."

When the government raises its alert levels, InfraGard is in the loop. For instance, in a press release on February 7, 2003, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General announced that the national alert level was being raised from yellow to orange. They then listed "additional steps" that agencies were taking to "increase their protective measures." One of those steps was to "provide alert information to InfraGard program."

"They're very much looped into our readiness capability," says Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. "We provide speakers, as well as do joint presentations . We also train alongside them, and they have participated in readiness exercises."

On May 9, 2007, George Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 entitled "National Continuity Policy." In it, he instructed the Secretary of Homeland Security to coordinate with "private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency."

Asked if the InfraGard National Members Alliance was involved with these plans, Schneck said it was "not directly participating at this point." Hershman, chairman of the group's advisory board, however, said that it was.

InfraGard members, sometimes hundreds at a time, have been used in "national emergency preparation drills," Schneck acknowledges.

"In case something happens, everybody is ready," says Norm Arendt, the head of the Madison, Wisconsin, chapter of InfraGard, and the safety director for the consulting firm Short Elliott Hendrickson, Inc. "There's been lots of discussions about what happens under an emergency."

One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation -- and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, "Partnership for Protection." On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out. But that's not all.

"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says.

I was able to confirm that the meeting took place where he said it had, and that the FBI and Homeland Security did make presentations there. One InfraGard member who attended that meeting denies that the subject of lethal force came up. But the whistleblower is 100 percent certain of it. "I have nothing to gain by telling you this, and everything to lose," he adds. "I'm so nervous about this, and I'm not someone who gets nervous."

Though Schneck says that FBI and Homeland Security agents do make presentations to InfraGard, she denies that InfraGard members would have any civil patrol or law enforcement functions. "I have never heard of InfraGard members being told to use lethal force anywhere," Schneck says.

The FBI adamantly denies it, also. "That's ridiculous," says Catherine Milhoan, an FBI spokesperson. "If you want to quote a businessperson saying that, knock yourself out. If that's what you want to print, fine."

But one other InfraGard member corroborated the whistleblower's account, and another would not deny it.

Christine Moerke is a business continuity consultant for Alliant Energy in Madison, Wisconsin. She says she's an InfraGard member, and she confirms that she has attended InfraGard meetings that went into the details about what kind of civil patrol function -- including engaging in lethal force -- that InfraGard members may be called upon to perform.

"There have been discussions like that, that I've heard of and participated in," she says.

Curt Haugen is CEO of S'Curo Group, a company that does "strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety," according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. "It's the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership," he says. "It's all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That's what makes it work."

He says InfraGard "absolutely" does emergency preparedness exercises. When I ask about discussions the FBI and Homeland Security have had with InfraGard members about their use of lethal force, he says: "That much I cannot comment on. But as a private citizen, you have the right to use force if you feel threatened."

"We were assured that if we were forced to kill someone to protect our infrastructure, there would be no repercussions," the whistleblower says. "It gave me goose bumps. It chilled me to the bone.

BIGGER,BLOODIER WARS EQUAL PEACE & JUSTICE

Obama's Animal Farm

Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice
By James Petras
5-17-9

"The Deltas are psychos. You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force", a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980's. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal's rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations. The point of the 'Special Operations' teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT's 'counter-terrorism' is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal's SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects. McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the 'direct action' forces of the 'Special Missions Units. 'Direct Action' operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in 'propaganda of the dead', assassinating local leaders to 'teach' the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama's appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country. The deteriorating position of the US is manifest in the tightening circle around all the roads leading in and out of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul as well as the expansion of Taliban control and influence throughout the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Obama's inability to recruit new NATO reinforcements means that the White House's only chance to advance its military driven empire is to escalate the number of US troops and to increase the kill ratio among any and all suspected civilians in territories controlled by the Afghan armed resistance. The White House and the Pentagon claim that the appointment of McChrystal was due to the 'complexities' of the situation on the ground and the need for a 'change in strategy'. 'Complexity' is a euphemism for the increased mass opposition to the US, complicating traditional carpet 'bombing and military sweep' operations. The new strategy practiced by McChrystal involves large scale, long term 'special operations' to devastate and kill the local social networks and community leaders, which provide the support system for the armed resistance. Obama's decision to prevent the release of scores of photographs documenting the torture of prisoners by US troops and 'interrogators' (especially under command of the 'Special Forces'), is directly related to his appointment of McChrystal whose 'SOT' forces were highly implicated in widespread torture in Iraq. Equally important, under McChrystal's command the DELTA, SEAL and Special Operations Teams will have a bigger role in the new 'counter-insurgency strategy'. Obama's claim that the publication of these photographs will adversely affect the 'troops' has a particular meaning: The graphic exposure of McChrystal's modus operendi for the past 5 years under President Bush will undermine his effectiveness in carrying out the same operations under Obama. Obama's decision to re-start the secret 'military tribunals' of foreign political prisoners, held at the Guantanamo prison camp, is not merely a replay of the Bush-Cheney policies, which Obama had condemned and vowed to eliminate during his presidential campaign, but part of his larger policy of militarization and coincides with his approval of the major secret police surveillance operations conducted against US citizens. Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism ­ the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy ­ at the center of US foreign policy. Obama's quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities. All of this will be committed by the Obama Administraton in the quest to 'empty the lake (displace entire populations) to catch the fish (armed insurgents and activists)'. Obama's restoration of all of the most notorious Bush Era policies and the appointment of Bush's most brutal commander is based on his total embrace of the ideology of military-driven empire building. Once one believes (as Obama does) that US power and expansion are based on military conquests and counter-insurgency, all other ideological, diplomatic, moral and economic considerations will be subordinated to militarism. By focusing all resources on successful military conquest, scant attention is paid to the costs borne by the people targeted for conquest or to the US treasury and domestic American economy. This has been clear from the start: In the midst of a major recession/depression with millions of Americans losing their employment and homes, President Obama increased the military budget by 4% - taking it beyond $800 billion dollars. Obama's embrace of militarism is obvious from his decision to expand the Afghan war despite NATO's refusal to commit any more combat troops. It is obvious in his appointment of the most hard-line and notorious Special Forces General from the Bush-Cheney era to head the military command in subduing Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan. It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace. Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as 'Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice'.

WHITE HOUSE CZAR CALLS FOR END TO "WAR ON DRUGS"W

Kerlikowske Says Analogy Is Counterproductive; Shift Aligns With Administration Preference for Treatment Over Incarceration

By GARY FIELDS

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.

In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues.

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

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Brendan Smialowski for The Wall Street Journal

Gil Kerlikowske, the new White House drug czar, signaled Wednesday his openness to rethinking the government's approach to fighting drug use.

Mr. Kerlikowske's comments are a signal that the Obama administration is set to follow a more moderate -- and likely more controversial -- stance on the nation's drug problems. Prior administrations talked about pushing treatment and reducing demand while continuing to focus primarily on a tough criminal-justice approach.

The Obama administration is likely to deal with drugs as a matter of public health rather than criminal justice alone, with treatment's role growing relative to incarceration, Mr. Kerlikowske said.

Already, the administration has called for an end to the disparity in how crimes involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine are dealt with. Critics of the law say it unfairly targeted African-American communities, where crack is more prevalent.

The administration also said federal authorities would no longer raid medical-marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states where voters have made medical marijuana legal. Agents had previously done so under federal law, which doesn't provide for any exceptions to its marijuana prohibition.

During the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama also talked about ending the federal ban on funding for needle-exchange programs, which are used to stem the spread of HIV among intravenous-drug users.

The drug czar doesn't have the power to enforce any of these changes himself, but Mr. Kerlikowske plans to work with Congress and other agencies to alter current policies. He said he hasn't yet focused on U.S. policy toward fighting drug-related crime in other countries.

Mr. Kerlikowske was most recently the police chief in Seattle, a city known for experimenting with drug programs. In 2003, voters there passed an initiative making the enforcement of simple marijuana violations a low priority. The city has long had a needle-exchange program and hosts Hempfest, which draws tens of thousands of hemp and marijuana advocates.

Seattle currently is considering setting up a project that would divert drug defendants to treatment programs.

Mr. Kerlikowske said he opposed the city's 2003 initiative on police priorities. His officers, however, say drug enforcement -- especially for pot crimes -- took a back seat, according to Sgt. Richard O'Neill, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild. One result was an open-air drug market in the downtown business district, Mr. O'Neill said.

"The average rank-and-file officer is saying, 'He can't control two blocks of Seattle, how is he going to control the nation?' " Mr. O'Neill said.

Sen. Tom Coburn, the lone senator to vote against Mr. Kerlikowske, was concerned about the permissive attitude toward marijuana enforcement, a spokesman for the conservative Oklahoma Republican said.

Others said they are pleased by the way Seattle police balanced the available options. "I think he believes there is a place for using the criminal sanctions to address the drug-abuse problem, but he's more open to giving a hard look to solutions that look at the demand side of the equation," said Alison Holcomb, drug-policy director with the Washington state American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Kerlikowske said the issue was one of limited police resources, adding that he doesn't support efforts to legalize drugs. He also said he supports needle-exchange programs, calling them "part of a complete public-health model for dealing with addiction."

Mr. Kerlikowske's career began in St. Petersburg, Fla. He recalled one incident as a Florida undercover officer during the 1970s that spurred his thinking that arrests alone wouldn't fix matters.

"While we were sitting there, the guy we're buying from is smoking pot and his toddler comes over and he blows smoke in the toddler's face," Mr. Kerlikowske said. "You go home at night, and you think of your own kids and your own family and you realize" the depth of the problem.

Since then, he has run four police departments, as well as the Justice Department's Office of Community Policing during the Clinton administration.

Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that supports legalization of medical marijuana, said he is "cautiously optimistic" about Mr. Kerlikowske. "The analogy we have is this is like turning around an ocean liner," he said. "What's important is the damn thing is beginning to turn."

James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest law-enforcement labor organization, said that while he holds Mr. Kerlikowske in high regard, police officers are wary.

"While I don't necessarily disagree with Gil's focus on treatment and demand reduction, I don't want to see it at the expense of law enforcement. People need to understand that when they violate the law there are consequences."

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER NEW SPECIES OF MAN DUBBED "HOBBITS"

A photo from the University of Wollongong in Australia shows an artist's impression of a human species.

The tiny ancient humans dubbed hobbits, whose remains were discovered on an Indonesian island in 2003, were a previously unknown species altogether, according to two new studies.
Debate has raged in the scientific community since the fossils were found on the island of Flores, with some experts insisting they were descended from Homo erectus and others saying evolution could not account for their small brains.

About a metre (three feet) tall and weighing 30 kilos (65 pounds), the tiny, tool-making hunters may have roamed the remote island as recently as 8,000 years ago. Their fossils are about 18,000 years old.

Many scientists have said Homo floresiensis, as the creature is now formally known, was a prehistoric human stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing.

Others countered that even this evolutionary shrinking, well documented in island-bound animals, could not account for the chimpanzee-sized brain -- just a third the size of that in a modern human being.

The only plausible explanation, they insisted, was that the handful of specimens found had a genetic disorder resulting in an abnormally small skull or that they suffered from "dwarf cretinism" caused by deficient thyroids.

Two new studies in the British journal Nature go a long way toward settling the debate.

A team led by William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York tackled the problem by analysing the hobbit's foot.
In some ways it is very human. The big toe is aligned with the others and the joints make it possible to extend the toes as the body's full weight falls on the foot -- attributes not found in great apes.

But in other respects it is startlingly primitive: far longer than its modern human equivalent and equipped with a very small big toe, long and curved lateral toes, and a weight-bearing structure closer to a chimpanzee's.

Recent archaeological evidence from Kenya shows that the modern foot evolved more than 1.5 million years ago, most likely in Homo erectus.
So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time -- considered extremely unlikely -- they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date.

For Jungers and colleagues, this suggests their ancestor was not Homo erectus "but instead some other more primitive hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented."

Companion studies published by the Journal of Human Evolution bolster this theory and conjecture that these more ancient forebears may be the still poorly understood Homo habilis.

In any case, Homo floresiensis would be confirmed as a separate species.
But what still has not been explained the hobbit's inordinately small brain.
That's where hippos come into the picture.
Eleanor Weston and Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum in London compared fossils of several species of ancient hippos found on the island of Madagascar with the mainland ancestors from which they had evolved.

They were surprised to find that insular dwarfing -- driven by the need to adapt to an island environment -- shrank their brains far more than had previously been thought possible.
"Whatever the explanation for the tiny brain of H. floresiensis relative to its body size, our evidence suggests that insular dwarfing could have played a role in its evolution," they conclude.

While the new studies answer some questions, they also raise new ones sure to spark fresh debate, Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman said in Nature.

Only more fossil evidence will indicate whether the hobbits of Flores evolved from Homo erectus, whose traces have been found throughout Eurasia, or from an even more ancient lineage not yet found outside Africa, he said.

WHATS YOUR STATUS?? PART 1 : THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE

EXCELLENT INFORMATION REGARDING THE BIRTH "CERTIFICATE" AND THE DANGERS ASSOCIATED WITH IT

Conscious "BEEF" or "Free" CHICKEN??? WAKE UP!!!!

THIS IS SOME REAL SHIT RIGHT HERE!!! LETS PAY ATTENTION TO WHATS REALLY HAPPENING AROUND US, IS IT SCRIPTED OR ORGANIC?? IS IT HEALTHY OR POISONOUS?? IS IT FREEDOM OR DEATH??? IS IT GENUINE OR FAKE?? IS IT DEVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION?? SPIKE CALLED IT ABOUT A DECADE AGO AND FAST FORWARD TO TODAY THEY REPEATING THE PROGRAM, MOORPHEUS(FISHBURN) SAID IT "GIVE EM FREE CHICKEN" AND PUT ON A BUS!!! THANK YOU OPRAH AND KFC FOR PLAYING YOUR PART!!! SWINE FLU IS CONTAGIOUS THE CHRISITAN PIGS ARE BEING SLAUGHTERED IN EGYPT THE MOORISH PIRATES ARE BEING PERSECUTED AND TARGETED IN SOMOLIA?? WHATS REALLY HAPPENING YALL??

CHRISTIAN CONVERT OPERATIONS IN AFGHANISTAN

Iraqi girl looks uncomfortable being helped to display a bible


May 6, 2009

There is a storm brewing because of U.S. soldiers bringing bibles into Afghanistan and distributing them to the local population. According to Al-Jazeera News in a report on May 4, 2009, called "Probe Call in Afghan 'Convert’ Row:"

A former Afghan prime minister has called for an inquiry after Al Jazeera broadcast footage showing Christian US soldiers appearing to be preparing to try and convert Muslims in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai said there must be a "serious investigation" after military chaplains stationed in the US air base at Bagram were filmed discussing how to distribute copies of the Bible printed in the country's main Pashto and Dari languages.

In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, tells soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him".

This may be news for some, but I have been following the religious activities of the U.S. military for years. There is an in-depth program that has been in place for some time in which officers indoctrinate soldiers to fight in the name of Jesus.

Currently, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force are heavily involved in teaching their underlings that a soldier can only be considered to be a good combatant if he/she is fighting for Jesus. Merely obeying military rules and going to war when ordered are not sufficient. Jesus is the soldier’s 18-star general.

I mention Christianity because this is the only religion being taught by the officers in the indoctrination. Muslims, Jews, and those who practice a religion other than Christianity, even though they are in the U.S. military, are being ostracized.

In the past year, several atheists stepped forward to complain. They were told by the higher-ups that this is not happening. Subject closed. Most received disciplinary actions for making such outrageous statements. Then, a Jewish soldier reported that he was beat up by other soldiers, while their sergeant looked the other way, because he complained about the Christian indoctrination. Finally, some Christians came forward and said they were offended that their religion was being used to justify the killing of people. In all instances, the aggrieved parties wrote to the Department of Defense, only to be told that it is illegal to do the things they stated and that the U.S. military does not have any part of it. In other words, the soldiers were told they were lying.

Many atheists in the U.S. are well aware of such occurrences. We have read report-after-report from soldiers who have been ostracized. Some send our groups letters asking what they can do. We refer them to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watch-dog organization for stopping religious indoctrination in the U.S. military. In the past two years, the number of cases the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received from military personnel has risen dramatically. All complaints talk of the escalation of the Christian preaching they are receiving. So far, despite hundreds of pieces of correspondence, the replies from the Department of Defense to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is basically the same as those given to the individuals: this is illegal and it isn’t happening.

Iraq has undergone a bombardment of imported bibles and Christian missionaries. One soldier in Afghanistan stated, "... the expressions that I got from the people in Iraq [were] just phenomenal, they were hungry for the word." I recently read that the allegations of sending bibles to Iraq came as a surprise to U.S. officials. This is nothing more than pure horseshit. In addtion to the articles I have written about the influx of bibles into Iraq, the Boston Globe daily newspaper has run several piece since 2003 concerning bibles in Iraq as well as billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars funding missionary work to convert Iraqi Muslims to Christianity.

Because I am aware of the background of military religious indoctrination, I don’t see these missionary actions as being incredible. However, I do find it quite outrageous that very little publicity has been given to these activities until now. Christians have wreaked havoc in Iraq with their evangelistic zeal. Tens, or hundreds, of thousands of bibles have been sent to Iraq, causing much chaos in the Christian community as well as the Islamic community. For some reason, the U.S. Christian missionaries thought they would be welcomed with open arms by Iraqi Christians. Instead, they were welcomed by the bottom of a shoe.

In my book, The Mother of All Battles: The Endless U.S.-Iraq War, I devote more than 25 pages to the use of Christianity as a weapon in the buildup to and the execution of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Military officers attended church services, in uniform, at which they spoke of the merits of invading Iraq. Some held a picture of Saddam Hussein and said he was "satan."

Below is an article I wrote four years ago about the quandary of trying to export evangelistic Christianity to Iraq. It’s too bad that it took four years for the public to learn of the religious mission of the U.S. military. The unfortunate aspect of this is that many U.S. citizens support such efforts.

THE ANGOLA THREE: TORTURE IN OUR BACKYARD

via AlterNet

“My soul cries from all that I witnessed and endured. It does more than cry, it mourns continuously,” said Black Panther Robert Hillary King, following his release from the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in 2001, after serving his last 29 years in continuous solitary confinement. King argues that slavery persists in Angola and other U.S. prisons, citing the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which legalizes slavery in prisons as “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” King says: “You can be legally incarcerated but morally innocent.”

Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace are known as the “Angola Three,” a trio of political prisoners whose supporters include Amnesty International, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Congressman John Conyers, and the ACLU. Kgalema Mothlante, the President of South Africa says their case “has the potential of laying bare, exposing the shortcomings, in the entire U.S. system.” Woodfox and Wallace are the two co-founders of the Angola chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) — the only official prison chapter of the BPP. Both convicted in the highly contested stabbing death of white prison guard Brent Miller, Woodfox and Wallace have now spent over 36 years in solitary confinement.The joint federal civil rights lawsuit of King, Woodfox, and Wallace, alleging that their time in solitary confinement is “cruel and unusual punishment,” will go to trial any month in Baton Rouge, at the U.S. Middle District Court. Herman Wallace’s appeal against his murder conviction is currently pending in the Louisiana Supreme Court, and on March 18, he was transferred to the Hunt Correctional Facility in St. Gabrielo, Louisiana, where he remains in solitary confinement. On March 2, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court heard oral arguments regarding Albert Woodfox’s conviction, after the Louisiana Attorney General appealed a lower court’s ruling that overturned the conviction.

An 18,000-acre former slave plantation in rural Louisiana, Angola is the largest prison in the U.S. Today, with African Americans composing over 75% of Angola’s 5,108 prisoners, prison guards known as “free men,” a forced 40-hour workweek, and four cents an hour as minimum wage, the resemblance to antebellum U.S. slavery is striking. In the early 1970s, it was even worse, as prisoners were forced to work 96-hour weeks (16 hours a day/six days a week) with two cents an hour as minimum wage. Officially considered (according to its own website) the “Bloodiest Prison in the South” at this time, violence from guards and between prisoners was endemic. Prison authorities sanctioned prisoner rape, and according to former Prison Warden Murray Henderson, the prison guards actually helped facilitate a brutal system of sexual slavery where the younger and physically weaker prisoners were bought and sold into submission. As part of the notorious “inmate trusty guard” system, responsible for killing 40 prisoners and seriously maiming 350 between 1972-75, some prisoners were given state-issued weapons and ordered to enforce this sexual slavery, as well as the prison’s many other injustices. Life at Angola was living hell — a 20th century slave plantation.

The Angola Panthers saw life at Angola as modern-day slavery and fought back with non-violent hunger strikes and work strikes. Prison authorities were outraged by the BPP’s organizing, and overwhelming evidence has since emerged that authorities retaliated by framing these three BPP organizers for murders that they did not commit.

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace

Both convicted of murder for the April 17, 1972 stabbing death of white prison guard Brent Miller, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have recently had major victories in court that may soon lead to their release. In response, Angola Warden Burl Cain and the Louisiana State Attorney General, James “Buddy” Caldwell, are doing everything they can to resist this and to keep the two in solitary confinement. In sharp contrast, Miller’s widow, Leontine Verrett, now questions their guilt. Interviewed in March, 2008, by NBC Nightly News, she called for a new investigation into the case: “What I want is justice. If these two men did not do this, I think they need to be out.”

Woodfox and Wallace were inmates at Angola, resulting from separate robbery convictions, when they co-founded the Angola BPP chapter in 1971. Woodfox had escaped from New Orleans Parish Prison and fled to New York City, where he met BPP members, including the New York 21, before he was recaptured and sent to Angola. Wallace had met members of the Louisiana State Chapter of the BPP, including the New Orleans 12, while imprisoned at Orleans Parish.

On September 19, 2006, State Judicial Commissioner Rachel Morgan recommended overturning Wallace’s conviction, on grounds that prison officials had withheld evidence from the jury that prison officials had bribed the prosecution’s key eyewitness in return for his testimony. However, in May 2008, in a 2-1 vote, the State Appeals Court rejected Morgan’s recommendation and refused to overturn the conviction. Wallace’s appeal is now pending in the State Supreme Court, with a decision expected any month.

On June 10th, 2008, Federal Magistrate Christine Noland recommended overturning Woodfox’s conviction, citing evidence of inadequate representation, prosecutorial misconduct, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and racial discrimination. Then, on November 25, U.S. District Court Judge James Brady upheld Noland’s recommendation, overturned the conviction, and granted bail. Attorney General Caldwell responded by appealing to the U.S. Fifth Circuit. In December, the Fifth Circuit granted Caldwell’s request to deny Woodfox bail, but indicated sympathy for the overturning of the conviction, writing: “We are not now convinced that the State has established a likelihood of success on the merits.” On March 3, oral arguments were heard by appellate Judges Carolyn Dineen King, Carl E. Steart and Leslie H. Southwick, and a decision from them is now expected within six months. If the three judge panel affirms the overturning of Woodfox’s conviction, the state will have 120 days to either accept the ruling or to retry Woodfox. The state has already vowed to retry him if necessary. If the Fifth Circuit rules for the state, Woodfox’s conviction will be reinstated.

Ira Glasser, formerly of the ACLU, criticized AG Caldwell, writing that following the October 2008 announcement that Woodfox’s niece had agreed to take him in if granted bail, Caldwell “embarked upon a public scare campaign reminiscent of the kind of inflammatory hysteria that once was used to provoke lynch mobs. He called Woodfox a violent rapist, even though he had never been charged, let alone convicted, of rape; he sent emails to [Woodfox's niece's] neighbors calling Woodfox a convicted murderer and violent rapist; and neighbors were urged to sign petitions opposing his release. In the end, his niece and family were sufficiently frightened and threatened that Woodfox rejected the plan to live with them while on bail.” In his Nov. 25 ruling, Judge Brady himself criticized the intimidation campaign: “it is apparent that the [neighborhood] association was not told Mr. Woodfox is frail, sickly, and has a clean conduct record for more than twenty years.”

When the October 27-29 National Public Radio (NPR) series on the case reported directly from Angola, reporter Laura Sullivan observed, “a hundred black men are in the field, bent over picking tomatoes. A single white officer on a horse sits above them, a shotgun in his lap … It’s the same as it looked 40 years ago, and 100 years ago.” Commenting that many at Angola today “seem to want to bury this case in a place no one will find it,” NPR reported that Warden Burl Cain and others refused to comment. However, Caldwell told NPR he is convinced that Woodfox and Wallace are guilty, and that he will appeal Woodfox’s case all the way to the US Supreme Court. “This is a very dangerous person,” Caldwell says. “This is the most dangerous person on the planet.”

As NPR documented, there is no physical evidence linking Woodfox or Wallace to the murder. A bloody fingerprint was found at the scene but it matches neither prisoner’s prints. Prison officials have always refused to test that fingerprint against their own inmate fingerprint database. Caldwell vows to continue this policy, telling NPR: “A fingerprint can come from anywhere … We’re not going to be fooled by that.”

Caldwell also told NPR that he firmly believes the testimony of the prosecution’s key eyewitness, Hezekiah Brown, a serial rapist who had been sentenced to life without parole. Brown first told prison officials that he didn’t know anything, but he later testified to seeing Miller stabbed to death by four inmates: Woodfox and Wallace, and two others who are now deceased: Chester Jackson (who testified for the state and pled guilty to a lesser charge) and Gilbert Montegut (who was acquitted after an officer provided an alibi).

Pardoned in 1986, and now deceased, Brown always denied receiving special favors from prison authorities in exchange for his testimony. However, prison documents reveal special treatment, including special housing and a carton of cigarettes given to him every week. Testifying at Woodfox’s 1998 retrial, former Warden Murray Henderson admitted telling Brown that if he provided testimony helping to “crack the case,” he would reward him by lobbying for his pardon.

Solitary Confinement for “Black Pantherism”

In early 2008, a 25,000-signature petition initiated by ColorOfChange.org, calling for an investigation into Woodfox and Wallace’s convictions and solitary confinement, was delivered to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal by the head of the State Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, Cedric Richmond. To this day, Jindal remains silent on the case.

In March, 2008, following a visit from Congressman John Conyers, Chairman of the US House Judiciary Committee; Innocence Project founder Barry Scheck; and Cedric Richmond, Wallace and Woodfox were transferred from solitary and housed together in a newly-built maximum security dormitory for twenty men. This temporary release from solitary lasted for eight months, during which time Woodfox reflected: “The thing I noticed most about being with Herman is the laughing, the talking, the bumping up against one another … we’ve been denied this for so long. And every once in a while he’ll put his arm around me or I’ll put my arm around him. It’s those kinds of things that make you human. And we’re truly enjoying that.”

In April, following his visit, Conyers wrote a letter to the FBI requesting their documents relating to the case, stating: “I am deeply troubled by what evidence suggests was a tragic miscarriage of justice with regard to these men. There is significant evidence that suggests not only their innocence, but also troubling misconduct by prison officials.” The FBI responded by claiming that they had no files on the case, because, they had supposedly been destroyed.

In his deposition taken October 22, 2008, Warden Burl Cain explained why he opposed granting Woodfox bail and removing him from solitary confinement. Asked what gave him “such concern” about Woodfox, Cain stated: “He wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant … A hunger strike is really, really bad, because you could see he admitted that he was organizing a peaceful demonstration. There is no such thing as a peaceful demonstration in prison.” Cain then stated that even if Woodfox were innocent of the murder, he would still want to keep him in solitary, because “I still know he has a propensity for violence … he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kinds of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them. I would have chaos and conflict, and I believe that.”

The only other known U.S. prisoner to have spent so many years in solitary confinement is Hugo Pinell, in California. One of the San Quentin Six, Pinell was a close comrade of Black Panther and prison author, George Jackson. Currently housed in Pelican Bay State Prison’s notorious “Security Housing Unit”, Pinell has been in continuous solitary since at least 1971. The recently freed Angola 3 prisoner Robert Hillary King says Pinell “is a clear example of a political prisoner.” This January, Pinell was denied parole for the next 15 years, which King says “is a sentence to die in prison. This is cruel and unusual punishment, which may be legal but is definitely not moral.”

Robert Hillary King

The new book From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Robert Hillary King has just been released by PM Press. This inspiring book tells of King’s triumph over the horrors of Angola. Born poor in rural Louisiana, he was raised mostly by his heroic grandmother, who King recounts “worked the sugar cane fields from sun up ’til sun down for less than a dollar a day. During the off-season, she washed, ironed clothes, and scrubbed floors for whites for pennies a day or for leftover food. Her bunions and blisters told a bitter but vivid tale of her travails.”

King first entered Angola at the age of 18, for a robbery conviction. In his book, he admits to doing some non-violent burglaries at the time, but maintains his innocence regarding this conviction and every one since. Granted parole in 1965, at the age of 22, he returned to New Orleans, got married, and began a brief semi-pro boxing career as “Speedy King.” He was then arrested on charges of robbery, just weeks before his wife Clara gave birth to their son. After being held for over 11 months, his friend pled guilty to a lesser charge and was released on time served. Simultaneously, the DA dropped the charges against King, but he was not released, because his arrest, coupled with his friend’s guilty plea was deemed a parole violation. Therefore, King was sent back to Angola where he served 15 months and was released again in 1969.

Upon release, King was again arrested on robbery charges, and was convicted, even though his co-defendant testified that he had only picked King out of a mug shot lineup after being tortured by police into making a false statement. King appealed, and while being held at New Orleans Parish Prison, he escaped, but was re-captured weeks later. Upon returning to Orleans Parish he met some of the New Orleans 12–BPP members arrested after a confrontation with police at a housing project. He was radicalized and worked with the Panthers organizing non-violent hunger strikes, and engaging in self-defense against violent attacks from prison authorities.

In 1972, King moved to Angola shortly after the death of prison guard Brent Miller. Upon arrival, on grounds that King “wanted to play lawyer for another inmate,” he was immediately put into solitary confinement: first in the “dungeon,” then the “Red Hat,” and finally to the Closed Correction Cell (CCR) unit, where he remained until his 2001 release. At CCR, King writes that the Angola BPP chapter and others continued to struggle, using the one hour a day outside their cells (when they were allowed to shower and interact in the walkway) to organize: “That was how we talked, passed papers, educated each other, and coordinated our actions.”

King writes about the fight, started in 1977, to end the practice of routine rectal searches of prisoners: “Coming to a consensus conclusion that this practice was a carryover from slavery (before being sold, the slave had to be stripped and subjected to anal examination), and after months of appealing to our keepers, we decided to take a bold step: we would simply refuse a voluntary anal search. We would not be willing participants in our own degradation.” When King and others refused, they were viciously beaten. Woodfox hired a lawyer on the prisoners’ behalf and they filed a successful civil suit. The court ruled to ban “routine anal searches.” Another victory came after a one month hunger strike that stopped the unhealthy and dehumanizing practice of putting the inmate’s food on the floor to be slid underneath the cell door, whereby food would often be lost and the remaining food would usually get dirty.

In 1973, King was accused of murdering another prisoner, and was convicted at a trial where he was bound and gagged. After years of maintaining his innocence and appealing, his conviction was overturned in 2001, after he reluctantly pled guilty to a lesser charge of “conspiracy to commit murder” and was released on time served.

Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore

On June 21, 2008, Robert King attended the unveiling of a 40-foot mosaic dedicated to Angola prisoner and Angola BPP member Kenneth “Zulu” Whitmore, launching the “Free Zulu” campaign. King is working to publicize his case, saying “Zulu is a true warrior, Panther, a servant of the people. He has fought a good battle, for so long, unrecognized, unsupported!”

The mosaic adorns the back of activist/artist Carrie Reichardt’s home in the West London suburb of Chiswick. Reichardt says “we chose to base the design around a modern day interpretation of the Goddess Kali. She is considered the goddess of liberation, time and transformation. We wanted to use a strong, positive image of a female that would give hope and encourage others to join the struggle to bring about social change. Her speech bubble says ‘The revolution is now’.”

Imprisoned since 1977, Whitmore met Herman Wallace while imprisoned in 1973 at the East Baton Rouge Prison. Whitmore was released but then arrested and subsequently imprisoned at Angola when he was convicted of robbery and second-degree murder after he had returned to the community and been a political organizer. Just like the Angola 3, the case against him is full of holes, and he is appealing his conviction. Whitmore does not have a lawyer yet, so the freezulu.co.uk website is raising money to support his appeal.

Angola: The Last Slave Plantation

Three court cases are now pending: the federal civil rights lawsuit at the U.S. Middle District Court, Albert Woodfox’s appeal at the U.S. Fifth Circuit, and Wallace’s appeal at the State Supreme Court. At this critical stage, a new DVD has just been released by PM Press, titled The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation. The DVD is narrated by death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and features footage of King’s 2001 release, as well as an interview with King and a variety of former Panthers and other supporters of the Angola 3, including Bo Brown, David Hilliard, Geronimo Ji Jaga (formerly Pratt), Marion Brown, Luis Talamantez, Noelle Hanrahan, Malik Rahim, and the late Anita Roddick.

The perpetuation of white supremacy and slavery at Angola is a central theme throughout the film. Fred Hampton Jr., emphasizes that “we’ve got to make the connection between these modern day plantations, and what went down with chattel slavery.” Scott Fleming, a lawyer for the Angola 3, says: “That prison is still run like a slave plantation … People like Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace are the example of what will happen to you if you resist that system.”

Longtime Japanese-American activist Yuri Kochiyama says that Woodfox and Wallace “love people and will fight for justice even if it puts them on the spot. I think of them as real heroes … who hated to see people in the prison get hurt.” San Francisco journalist and former BPP member Kiilu Nyasha adds that “it behooves us to not forget those who were on the frontlines for us. … We need to come to their rescue because they came to ours.”

The many years of repression and torture have failed to extinguish the Angola 3’s spirit or will to resist, as Woodfox explains in the DVD: “At heart, mind and spirit, we’re still Black Panthers. We still believe in the same principles as the BPP, we still advocate the ten point program. We still advocate that all prisoners, black or white, are human beings. They deserve to be treated as human beings.”

A SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLINE FOR BANDS/MOVEMENTS

via Hypebot

This flow-chart is attempt to create the framework of a basic social media strategy for a band. The chart shows the basic tools of a social media strategy and it illustrates the primary movement of fans within these tools. It also attempts to document what the purpose of each site/tool is. This is by no means a full or complete strategy. Various other outposts sites or tools can be added (such as a PureVolume page) as desired. This is also only a framework. How and to what extend each tool is used is up to the person executing the strategy.

Note: blogs/press refers to third-party blogs that write about the artist, not an actual artist blog. That would fall under the “artist website”.

SCIENTISTS RECONSTRUCT FACE OF 1ST EUROPEAN

via Daily Mail

Dressed in a suit, this person would not look out of place in a busy street in a modern city.

The clay sculpture, however, portrays the face of the earliest known modern European - a man or woman who hunted deer and gathered fruit and herbs in ancient forests more than 35,000 years ago.

It was created by Richard Neave, one of Britain’s leading forensic scientists, using fossilised fragments of skull and jawbone found in a cave seven years ago.

His recreation offers a tantalising glimpse into life before the dawn of civilisation. It also shows the close links between the first European settlers and their immediate African ancestors.

To sculpt the head, Mr Neave called on his years of experience recreating the appearance of murder victims as well as using careful measurements of bone.

It was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. This will follow the evolution of humans from the cradle of Africa to the waves of migrations that saw Homo sapiens colonise the globe.

The head has taken pride of place on the desk of Alice Roberts, an anthropologist at Bristol University, who presents the programme.


‘It’s really quite bizarre,’ she told Radio Times. ‘I’m a scientist and objective but I look at that face and think “Gosh, I’m looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago” and there’s something weirdly moving about that.

‘Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he’s used to looking at differences between populations.

‘He said the skull doesn’t look European or Asian or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them.

‘That’s probably what you’d expect of someone among the earliest populations to come to Europe.’

The head is based on remains of one of the earliest known anatomically modern Europeans.

The lower jawbone was discovered by potholers in the Carpathian mountains in Romania in 2002. The rest of the fragments were found the following year.

The bones were carbon-dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago when Europe was occupied by two species of human.

They were the Neanderthals, who had arrived from Africa tens of thousands of years earlier, and the more recent modern humans, also known as Cro-Magnons.

Although the skull is similar to a modern human head, it has a larger cranium, is more robust and has larger molars. Although it is impossible to work out the skin colour of the prehistoric hunter, it is likely to have been darker than modern white Europeans.

Fossil experts are also unsure if the skull was male or female.

Many scientists believe that modern humans evolved in Africa 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors left Africa around 60,000 years ago and migrated around the world, replacing other branches of the family tree which had left the continent earlier.

The earliest modern Europeans were far from primitive. Living in huts and caves, they used stone tools and spears made from antlers, painted on the walls of their caves and made jewellery from shells.

The programme will be shown on BBC2 at 9.30pm on May 10.

THE GEOMAGNETIC APOCALYPSE-AND HOW TO STOP IT

For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.

Entitled “Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts,” it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States “$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year,” concluded the panel, and “full recovery could take four to 10 years.” That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.

Needless to say, shorting out the electrical grid would cause major disruptions to developed nations and their economies.

Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth’s geomagnetic shield, meaning we’ll have less protection than usual from the solar flares.

The report received relatively little attention, perhaps because of 2012’s supernatural connotations. Mayan astronomers supposedly predicted that 2012 would mark the calamitous “birth of a new era.”

But the report is credible enough that some scientists and engineers are beginning to take the electromagnetic threat seriously. According to Lawrence Joseph, author of “Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End,” “I’ve been following this topic for almost five years, and it wasn’t
until the report came out that this really began to
freak me out.”

Wired.com talked to Joseph and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech, about the possibility of geomagnetic apocalypse — and how to stop it.

Gridmetatech

Wired.com: What’s the problem?

John Kappenman: We’ve got a big, interconnected grid that spans across the country. Over the years, higher and higher operating voltages have been added to it. This has escalated our vulnerability to geomagnetic storms. These are not a new thing. They’ve probably been occurring for as long as the sun has been around. It’s just that we’ve been unknowingly building an infrastructure that’s acting more and more like an antenna for geomagnetic storms.

Wired.com: What do you mean by antenna?

Kappenman: Large currents circulate in the network, coming up from the earth through ground connections at large transformers. We need these for safety reasons, but ground connections provide entry paths for charges that could disrupt the grid.

Wired.com: What’s your solution?

Kappenman: What we’re proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers’ ground onnections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid.

Wired.com: What does it look like?

Kappenman: In its simplest form, it’s something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine.

Wired.com: How much would it cost?

Kappenman: We’re still at the conceptual design phase, but we think it’s do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That’s less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer.

Wired.com: And less than what you’d willingly pay for insurance on civilization.

Kappenman: If you’re talking about the United States, there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission recommended it in a report they sent to Congress last year. We’re talking about $150 million or so. It’s pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

Big power lines and substations can withstand all the other known environmental challenges. The problem with geomagnetic storms is that we never really understood them as a vulnerability, and had a design code that took them into account.

Wired.com: Can it be done in time?

Kappenman: I’m not in the camp that’s certain a big storm will occur in 2012. But given time, a big storm is certain to occur in the future. They have in the past, and they will again. They’re about one-in-400-year events. That doesn’t mean it will be 2012. It’s just as likely that it could occur next week.

Wired.com: Do you think it’s coincidence that the Mayans predicted apocalypse on the exact date when astronomers say the sun will next reach a period of maximum turbulence?

Lawrence Joseph: I have enormous respect for Mayan astronomers. It disinclines me to dismiss this as a coincidence. But I recommend people verify that the Mayans prophesied what people say they did. I went to Guatemala and spent a week with two Mayan shamans who spent 20 years talking to other shamans about the prophecies. They confirmed that the Maya do see 2012 as a great turning point. Not the end of the world, not the great off-switch in the sky, but the birth of the fifth age.

Wired.com: Isn’t a great off-switch in the sky exactly what’s described in the report?

Joseph: The chair of the NASA workshop was Dan Baker at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Some of his comments, and the comments he approved in the report, are very strong about the potential connection between coronal mass ejections and power grids here on Earth. There’s a direct relationship between how technologically sophisticated a society is and how badly it could be hurt. That’s the meta-message of the report.

I had the good fortune last week to meet with John Kappenman at MetaTech. He took me through a meticulous two-hour presentation about just how vulnerable the power grid is, and how it becomes more vulnerable as higher voltages are sent across it. He sees it as a big antenna for space weather outbursts.

Wired.com: Why is it so vulnerable?

Joseph: Ultra-high voltage transformers become more finicky as energy demands are greater. Around 50 percent already can’t handle the current they’re designed for. A little extra current coming in at odd times can slip them over the edge.

The ultra-high voltage transformers, the 500,000- and 700,000-kilovolt transformers, are particularly vulnerable. The United States uses more of these than anyone else. China is trying to implement some million-kilovolt transformers, but I’m not sure they’re online yet.

Kappenman also points out that when the transformers blow, they can’t be fixed in the field. They often can’t be fixed at all. Right now there’s a one- to three-year lag time between placing an order and getting a new one.

According to Kappenman, there’s an as-yet-untested plan for inserting ground resistors into the power grid. It makes the handling a little more complicated, but apparently isn’t anything the operators can’t handle. I’m not sure he’d say these could be in place by 2012, as it’s difficult to establish standards, and utilities are generally regulated on a state-by-state basis. You’d have quite a legal thicket. But it still might be possible to get some measure of protection in by the next solar climax.

Wired.com: Why can’t we just shut down the grid when we see a storm coming, and start it up again afterwards?

Joseph: Power grid operators now rely on one satellite called ACE, which sits about a million miles out from Earth in what’s called the gravity well, the balancing point between sun and earth. It was designed to run for five years. It’s 11 years old, is losing steam, and there are no plans to replace it.

ACE provides about 15 to 45 minutes of heads-up to power plant operators if something’s coming in. They can shunt loads, or shut different parts of the grid. But to just shut the grid off and restart it is a $10 billion proposition, and there is lots of resistance to doing so. Many times these storms hit at the north pole, and don’t move south far enough to hit us. It’s a difficult call to make, and false alarms really piss people off. Lots of money is lost and damage incurred. But in Kappenman’s view, and in lots of others, this time burnt could really mean burnt.

Wired.com: Do you live your life differently now?

Joseph: I’ve been following this topic for almost five years. It wasn’t until the report came out that it began to freak me out.

Up until this point, I firmly believed that the possibility of 2012 being catastrophic in some way was worth investigating. The report made it a little too real. That document can’t be ignored. And it was even written before the THEMIS satellite discovered a gigantic hole in Earth’s magnetic shield. Ten or twenty times more particles are coming through this crack than expected. And astronomers predict that the way the sun’s polarity will flip in 2012 will make it point exactly the way we don’t want it to in terms of evading Earth’s magnetic field. It’s an astonoshingly bad set of coincidences.

Wired.com: If Barack Obama said, “Lets’ prepare,” and there weren’t any bureaucratic hurdles, could we still be ready in time?

Joseph: I believe so. I’d ask the President to slipstream behind stimulus package funds already appropriated for smart grids, which are supposed to improve grid efficiency and help transfer high energies at peak times. There’s a framework there. Working within that, you could carve out some money for the ground resistors program, if those tests work, and have the initial momentum for cutting through the red tape. It’d be a place to start.

MEXICAN SWINE FLU- WEAPONIZED BIOWAR??

MEXICAN SWINE FLU - Weaponized Biowar!?


"The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir, but resistant to both amantadine and rimantadine." - World Health Organisation (WHO), Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR) Report

According to the latest report from the WHO, dated April 24 2009, the deadly new swine flu strain that has killed over 60 persons and hospitalized thousands in Mexico City, has reached pandemic potential and the present fear is that it might be too late to contain the outbreak. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agrees, acting director Dr. Richard Besser told reporters in a telephone briefing Friday that "... it was likely too late to try to contain the outbreak, by vaccinating, treating or isolating people... the U.S. cases and Mexican cases are likely the same virus... so far the genetic elements that we have looked at are the same... "


"...viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir, but resistant to both amantadine and rimantadine..." What kind of virus is this? Resistant to laboratory diagnosis and clinical management? How is this possible? What are looking at here? Is this weaponized biological warfare? The words from the report, most certainly gives rise to lots of questions. Let's see if we can understand what is taking place here. Most of the victims are healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affect juvenile, elderly, or otherwise weakened patients. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Since this is so eerily similar to the Great Pandemic, commonly known as the Spanish Flu in the early twentieth century from March 1918 to June 1920, where the disease caused by an unusually severe and deadly Influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1 spread, replicating itself from the American continent across the earth killing from 20 to 100 million people worldwide. According to Wikipedia: the pandemic is estimated to have infected upto one billion people, half the world's population at that time. Is history repeating itself?

Now, according to the CDC, this virus is so unique they can't figure where it came from.

"Preliminary testing of viruses from the first two patients shows that they are very similar. Additional testing is ongoing with the newer isolettes. We know so far that the viruses contain genetic pieces from four different virus sources. This is unusual. The first is our North American swine influenza viruses. North American avian influenza viruses, human influenza viruses and swine influenza viruses found in Asia and Europe. That particular genetic combination of swine influenza virus segments has not been recognized before in the U.S. or elsewhere. Of course, we are doing more testing now and looking more aggressively for unusual influenza strains. So we haven't seen this strain before but we haven't been looking as intensively as we are these days. The viruses are resistant to amantadine and rimantadine anti-viral drugs but they are sensitive or susceptible to oseltamivir and zanamivir, the newer anti-viral drugs for flu. And at this time we don’t know exactly how people got the virus. None of the patients have had direct contact with pigs." - CDC, 2008-2009 Influenza Season Week 15 ending April 18, 2009.

How strange. The strains of H1N1 and its variations have been aggressively tested before, more so since the early part of the last century and yet the CDC wants us to believe that it has no idea of where did this virus came from. They can't be serious, can they? They must make us out for fools.

This certainly reminds me of the fictional Dark Winter exercise that took place over a period of 14 days on June 22 2001 at Andrews Air Force Base in three successive National Security Council (NSC) meetings, depicting a covert smallpox attack on citizens of the United States. Is this exercise finally coming to fruition? Order out of chaos? The final solution? Are we looking at something similar to what happened on September 11, 2001 (9/11) when the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) deployed fighter aircraft to northwestern sections of the America to conduct military exercises and drills in colloboration with the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Defense and the US Military. Exercises that illustrated a failure to report, scramble, intercept and redeploy; ultimately leading one to analyze and conclude that NORAD had a direct link and participation in the false flag events that lead to the death of thousands.

We must never forget that on the day of the London bomb attack on July 7 2005, what later became known as the 7/7 attacks, there was a fictional scenario of multiple bomb attacks on the London underground at exactly the same time by Visor Consultants, a private firm contracted to the London Metropolitan Police to organize and conduct anti-terror drills on behalf of an unnamed business client.

In a strange twist to this swine flu story, Reuters is reporting that the joint venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) located in Silicon Valley, will be reaping the benefits from the treatment for the swine flu pandemic, courtesy of the uptick in shares of the portfolio of eight pandemic and biological defense companies, primarily BioCryst Pharmaceuticals and Novavax. How fortunate. It should be noted that KPCB list their strategic limited partners as former US Vice President Al Gore and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell. One wonders what strategies have been formulated from this partnership. Profits from weaponized biological warfare, perhaps? What do you think?

Now, we don't have any idea how this flu reached Mexico City and how it reproduce itself into America mainland. Or whether it was deliberately or accidentally done by any government or private sector organization, or both. One thing is for sure, and this must be noted importantly, this new flu is a advanced genetically engineered biological virus. That can't be refuted or ignored. The obvious question is, what for?

The answer is quite clear:

"...Government scientists have identified five more people in Texas and California, who have been infected with swine flu, apparently confirming suspicions that the unusual strain of the respiratory infection is spreading from person to person, federal health officials said yesterday... Mexican authorities say as many as 60 people may have died from a swine flu virus in Mexico... the outbreak that has sickened thousands... and world health officials worry it could unleash a global flu epidemic... "

Need I say more?