By A. Pawlowski
CNN
As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched.
Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.
There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."
He made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" -- planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter -- discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.
Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.
"Now that's not saying that they're all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.
"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."
Putting a number on alien worlds
Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.
In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.
Duncan Forgan, a doctoral candidate at the university who led the study, said he was surprised by the hardiness of life on these other worlds.
"The computer model takes into account what we refer to as resetting or extinction events. The classic example is the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs," Forgan said.
"I half-expected these events to disallow the rise of intelligence, and yet civilizations seemed to flourish."
Forgan readily admits the results are an educated guess at best, since there are still many unanswered questions about how life formed on Earth and only limited information about the 330 "exoplanets" -- those circling sun-like stars outside the solar system -- discovered so far.
The first was confirmed in 1995 and the latest just this month when Europe's COROT space telescope spotted the smallest terrestrial exoplanet ever found. With a diameter less than twice the size of Earth, the planet orbits very close to its star and has temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius (more than 2,700° Fahrenheit), according to the European Space Agency. It may be rocky and covered in lava.
Hunt for habitable planets
NASA is hoping to find much more habitable worlds with the help of the upcoming Kepler mission. The spacecraft, set to be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida next week, will search for Earth-size planets in our part of the galaxy.
Kepler contains a special telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years. It will look for small dips in a star's brightness, which can mean an orbiting planet is passing in front of it -- an event called a transit.
"It's akin to measuring a flea as it creeps across the headlight of an automobile at night," said Kepler project manager James Fanson during a during a NASA news conference.
The focus of the mission is finding planets in a star's habitable zone, an orbit that would ensure temperatures in which life could exist. Watch a NASA scientist explain the search for habitable planets
Boss, who serves on the Kepler Science Council, said scientists should know by 2013 -- the end of Kepler's mission -- whether life in the universe could be widespread.
Finding intelligent life is a very different matter. For all the speculation about the possibility of other civilizations in the universe, the question remains: If the rise of life on Earth isn't unique and aliens are common, why haven't they shown up or contacted us? The contradiction was famously summed up by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 in what became known as the Fermi paradox: "Where is everybody?"
The answer may be the vastness of time and space, scientists explained.
"Civilizations come and go," Boss said. "Chances are, if you do happen to find a planet which is going to have intelligent life, it's not going to be in [the same] phase of us. It may have formed a billion years ago, or maybe it's not going to form for another billion years."
Even if intelligent civilizations did exist at the same time, they probably would be be separated by tens of thousands of light years, Forgan said. If aliens have just switched on their transmitter to communicate, it could take us hundreds of centuries to receive their message, he added.
As for interstellar travel, the huge distances virtually rule out any extraterrestrial visitors. iReport.com: Share your view of the universe
To illustrate, Boss said the fastest rockets available to us right now are those being used in NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Even going at that rate of speed, it would take 100,000 years to get from Earth to the closest star outside the solar system, he added.
"So when you think about that, maybe we shouldn't be worried about having interstellar air raids any time soon," Boss said.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Galaxy May Be Full of 'Earths,' Alien Life
Monday, January 19, 2009
The Humiliation of America
Paul Craig Roberts
Served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics".
A former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
"Early Friday morning the secretary of state was considering bringing the cease-fire resolution to a UNSC vote and we didn’t want her to vote for it." Olmert said.
“I said ‘get President Bush on the phone.’ They tried and told me he was in the middle of a lecture in Philadelphia. I said ‘I’m not interested, I need to speak to him now.’ He got down from the podium, went out and took the phone call.”
Olmert gloated as he told Israelis how he had shamed US Secretary of State Condi Rice by preventing the American Secretary of State from supporting a resolution that she had helped to craft. Olmert proudly related how he had interrupted President Bush’s speech in order to give Bush his marching orders on the UN vote.
“Let me see if I understand this,” wrote a friend in response to news reports that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert ordered President Bush from the podium where he was giving a speech to receive Israel’s instructions about how the United States had to vote on the UN resolution. “On September 11th, President Bush is interrupted while reading a story to school children and told the World Trade Center had been hit--and he went on reading. Now, Olmert calls about a UN resolution when Bush is giving a speech and Bush leaves the stage to take the call. There exists no greater example of a master-servant relationship.”
Israeli politicians have been bragging for decades about the control they exercise over the US government. In his final press conference, President Bush, deluded to the very end, said that the whole world respects America. In fact, when the world looks at America, what it sees is an Israeli colony.
Responding to mounting reports from the Red Cross and human rights organizations of Israel’s massive war crimes in Gaza, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted 33-1 on January 12 to condemn Israel for grave offenses against human rights.
On January 13, the London Times reported that Israelis have gathered on a hillside overlooking Gaza to enjoy the slaughter of Palestinians in what the Times calls “the ultimate spectator sport.”
It is American supplied F-16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships, missiles, and bombs that are destroying the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and murdering the Palestinians who have been packed into the tiny strip of land. What is happening to the Palestinians herded into the Gaza Ghetto is happening because of American money and weapons. It is just as much an attack by the United States as an attack by Israel. The US government is complicit in the war crimes.
Yet in his farewell press conference on January 12, Bush said that the world respects America for its compassion.
The compassion of bombing a UN school for girls?
The compassion of herding 100 Palestinians into one house and then shelling it?
The compassion of bombing hospitals and mosques?
The compassion of depriving 1.5 million Palestinians of food, medicine, and energy?
The compassion of violently overthrowing the democratically elected Hamas government?
The compassion of blowing up the infrastructure of one of the poorest and most deprived people on earth?
The compassion of abstaining from a Security Council vote condemning these actions?
And this is a repeat of what the Israelis and Americans did to Lebanon in 2006, what the Americans did to Iraqis for six years and are continuing to do to Afghans after seven years. And still hope to do to the Iranians and Syrians.
In 2002 I designated George W. Bush “the White House Moron.” If there ever was any doubt about this designation, Bush’s final press conference dispelled it.
Bush talked about connecting the dots, but Bush has failed to connect any dots for eight solid years. “Our” president was a puppet for a cabal led by Dick Cheney and a handful of Jewish neoconservatives, who took control of the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and “Homeland Security.” From these power positions, the neocon cabal used lies and deception to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, pointless wars that have cost Americans $3 trillion, while millions of Americans lose their jobs, their pensions, and their access to health care.
“These obviously very difficult economic times,” Bush said in his press conference, “started before my presidency.”
Bush has plenty of liberal company in failing to connect a $3 trillion dollar war with hard times. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities blames Bush’s tax cut, not the wars, for “the fiscal deterioration.”
Bush told the White House Press Corps, a useless collection of non-journalists, that the two mistakes of his invasion of Iraq were: (1) Putting up the “mission accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier, which, he said, “sent the wrong message,” and (2) the absence of the alleged weapons of mass destruction that he used to justify the invasion.
Although Bush now admits that there were not any such weapons in Iraq, Bush said that the invasion was still the right thing to do.
The deaths of 1.25 million Iraqis, the displacement of 4 million Iraqis, and the destruction of a country’s infrastructure and economy are merely the collateral damage associated with “bringing freedom and democracy” to the Middle East.
Unless George W. Bush is the best actor in human history, he truly believes what he told the White House Press Corps.
What Bush did not explain is how America is respected when its people put a moron in charge for eight years.
Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza
Gerald Kaufman MP Denounces Israel
The inimitable Galloway
*****
Related Material...
Hard Talking Galloway
Friday, January 16, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Measurement Problem
Arguably the most onerous philosophical question attached to Quantum Mechanics is that of Measurement. The accepted (a.k.a. Copenhagen) Interpretation of QM says that our very act of conscious, intelligent, observable measurement – determines the outcome of the measurement in the quantum (microcosmic) realm.
It seems that just by knowing the results of a measurement – we determine its outcome, determine the state of the system and, by implication, the state of the Universe as a whole.
This notion is so counter-intuitive that it fostered a raging debate which has been on going for more than 7 decades now.
The conclusions are obviously subjective, as is, as it seems is reality.
*****
Related Material...
Our World May Be a Giant Hologram
Science: Things That Do Not Make Sense
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
The Miracle Birth (Repost)
As explained in the Qur'an
Stoning for adultery, or other similar acts, was practiced at the time, however, for some reason Mary was spared.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Eid Mubarak
Jihad: the inner battle
Peace to people of all faiths.
Those who advocate murder of innocents are merely agencies of evil, educate and protect yourself from those of fork tongues - Seek the truth.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Celente Says:
When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente. — CNN Headline News
A network of 25 experts whose range of specialties would rival many university faculties. —The Economist
Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.
"There will be a revolution in this country," he said. "It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen."
Gerald Celente has earned is reputation as "The most trusted name in trends" by accurately forecasting hundreds of social, business, consumer, environmental, economic, political, entertainment, technology trends, etc
The greater depression...
Related Material...
Money as Debt
The American Dream
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Eisenhower's Fears
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation in what is called his Military Industrial Complex Speech, said:
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
His children suggest that in an earlier draft of the speech, he refered to the "military-industrial-congressional complex".
Anyway, here's how it works...
Still have confidence in the 'official' 911 report?
Related Material...
War is a Racket
This War on Terrorism is Bogus
Who is Hamid Karzai'?
Former Italian President Speaks Out
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The Empire Strkes Back
The Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing occurred on 20 September 2008, when a dump truck filled with explosives detonated in front of the Marriott Hotel.
The attack occurred mere hours after President Asif Ali Zardari made his first speech to the parliament.
A case of with us or against us?
A mere slap on the wrist, this time.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
The End of the Snowman
Due to overriding commitments, Pasha Law will be going into recess.
Note for other bloggers, feel free to link to, or even extract, any of the fascinating articles from archives into your own sites.
And for our readers who want to stay topical, Pasha Law recommends that you hook on over to Weazl's Revenge
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Food Shortages: 'Problem-Reaction-Solution' ?
Times
Expensive food will make economic slowdowns a lot harder to manage.
Over the past half-century, Western consumers have come to expect plentiful food supplies, at costs that have declined both in real terms and as a proportion of their earnings. Had it not been for the price-distorting peculiarities of the Common Agricultural Policy, the benefits for Europe of these years of plenty would have been still more marked, but the cost of food has in general been one thing that governments in industrialised countries have not needed to worry about.
The “Great Grain Robbery” in the 1970s, when massive Soviet purchases of US grain sent world prices through the roof, was an exception that proved the rule; Moscow was denounced so bitterly at the time precisely because stable supplies and prices were thought of in rich nations almost as a birthright. Similarly, what Europeans most resented about the adoption of the euro was the way that their grocery bills jumped overnight.
The grocery bills are jumping again today, not just in Europe but all over the world. The age of cheap food has abruptly come to an end, and food prices are likely to remain high for some considerable time. The reasons are soaring demand in the developing world, high oil prices contributing to the costs of planting, fertiliser, harvesting and transport, poor harvests in major grain and rice-producing regions because of drought in Australia and cold summers in Europe and parts of North America, and, finally, disastrously timed official policies on ethanol and other biofuels. Take all these together, and the result is a jump of 40 per cent in the UN's 2007 global food price index.
For British households, more expensive food means less spare cash at the end of the month. For Afghans faced by flour costing up to 80 per cent more, it means going hungry - and, probably, even greater political instability.
For many governments, from Mexico to Malaysia, it means food riots. For everyone, persistently higher food costs will translate into hefty wage demands, and make it much harder for governments to finesse the nasty combination of weakening economies and gathering inflationary pressures. No one is talking stagflation yet, nor should they - but double-digit inflation of any kind is bad news and commodities such as soya beans, maize and wheat are up by as much as 100 per cent.
Governments are worried not only by costs, but by supply, as traditional sources of imports dry up. US wheat stocks are at their lowest since just after the Second World War, and in Europe proverbial seas and mountains of surplus produce have vanished. Argentina has set ceilings on its beef exports, and China, where inflation is at a ten-year high in large part because the prices of pork and other staple foods have gone through the roof, has, Heinz-like, slapped export taxes on 57 varieties of farm produce.
Export tariffs are the worst possible response to shortages. Farmers need every encouragement to expand production. Trade barriers send the opposite signal. There is scope for increasing productivity per hectare right across Asia and, even more so, in Africa. Genetics has the potential to usher in a second green revolution, if science is not fettered by superstition. But these are long-term solutions. There is one thing that politicians can do in the here and now: free up farm trade while the going (for farmers) is good, and when even the EU is busy cutting tariffs unilaterally and has eliminated, albeit “temporarily”, all barriers to cereal imports. A Doha deal will be done this year, or not at all. The time is now.
Source: Times Online
***
Pasha Law: Points to Note
- Companies such as Monsanto have successfully copyrighted seeds that farmers around the world have used for centuries.
- One of the most active funders of GM research has been the Rockefeller Foundation.
- Henry Kissinger’s words in the 1970s capture the motivation: ’Control the oil and you can control entire continents. Control food and you control people ...’
Further Reading:
Scientists Warn of Wheat Disease
Who is Responsible?
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
LHC: Curiosity that Killed at CET?
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Located in Switzerland, LHC is a bold six billion dollar experiment to enable physicists to look back in time by recreating the conditions of the BIG BANG!
However, safety concerns have been expressed by many in various scientific journals, mainly pertaining to:
1. Micro blackholes, according to the 'standard calculations' these are harmless because they would quickly decay by Hawking radiation, the problem is that Hawking radiation (which is still debated) is not yet an experimentally-tested phenomenon, and so micro black holes might not decay as rapidly as calculated, and accumulate inside the earth and eventually devour it.
2. If the hypothetical Strangelets exist, and produced at LHC, they could initiate a uncontrolable fusion where the nuclei in the planet were converted to strange matter.
Anyway, sync your watches to Central European Time 10th September 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider project becomes operational, however, the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on 21st October, 2008.
Friday, February 8, 2008
New Way to Kill Viruses: Shake Them to Death
Live Science
Scientists may one day be able to destroy viruses in the same way that opera singers presumably shatter wine glasses. New research mathematically determined the frequencies at which simple viruses could be shaken to death.
"The capsid of a virus is something like the shell of a turtle," said physicist Otto Sankey of Arizona State University. "If the shell can be compromised [by mechanical vibrations], the virus can be inactivated."
Recent experimental evidence has shown that laser pulses tuned to the right frequency can kill certain viruses. However, locating these so-called resonant frequencies is a bit of trial and error. "Experiments must just try a wide variety of conditions and hope that conditions are found that can lead to success," Sankey told LiveScience.
To expedite this search, Sankey and his student Eric Dykeman have developed a way to calculate the vibrational motion of every atom in a virus shell. From this, they can determine the lowest resonant frequencies.
As an example of their technique, the team modeled the satellite tobacco necrosis virus and found this small virus resonates strongly around 60 Gigahertz (where one Gigahertz is a billion cycles per second), as reported in the Jan. 14 issue of Physical Review Letters.
A virus' death knell
All objects have resonant frequencies at which they naturally oscillate. Pluck a guitar string and it will vibrate at a resonant frequency.
But resonating can get out of control. A famous example is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which warped and finally collapsed in 1940 due to a wind that rocked the bridge back and forth at one of its resonant frequencies. 
Viruses are susceptible to the same kind of mechanical excitation. An experimental group led by K. T. Tsen from Arizona State University have recently shown that pulses of laser light can induce destructive vibrations in virus shells.
"The idea is that the time that the pulse is on is about a quarter of a period of a vibration," Sankey said. "Like pushing a child on a swing from rest, one impulsive push gets the virus shaking."
It is difficult to calculate what sort of push will kill a virus, since there can be millions of atoms in its shell structure. A direct computation of each atom's movements would take several hundred thousand Gigabytes of computer memory, Sankey explained.
He and Dykeman have found a method to calculate the resonant frequencies with much less memory.
In practice
The team plans to use their technique to study other, more complicated viruses. However, it is still a long way from using this to neutralize the viruses in infected people.
One challenge is that laser light cannot penetrate the skin very deeply. But Sankey imagines that a patient might be hooked up to a dialysis-like machine that cycles blood through a tube where it can be hit with a laser. Or perhaps, ultrasound can be used instead of lasers.
These treatments would presumably be safer for patients than many antiviral drugs that can have terrible side-effects. Normal cells should not be affected by the virus-killing lasers or sound waves because they have resonant frequencies much lower than those of viruses, Sankey said.
Moreover, it is unlikely that viruses will develop resistance to mechanical shaking, as they do to drugs.
"This is such a new field, and there are so few experiments, that the science has not yet had sufficient time to prove itself," Sankey said. "We remain hopeful but remain skeptical at the same time."
Source: Live Science
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Travel to Parallel Universes
New Scientist
Wormholes, time travel, white holes, extra spacial dimensions, parallel universes - all arose as solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity, meaning theoretical physics predicts they should all be likely to exist in the fabric of space-time. ere
But will we ever be able to open a wormhole into space-time to travel towards a parallel universe, and how would we even know if we did? Russian physicist Alexander Shatskiy from the Lebedev Physical Institute argues we have already seen the evidence that indeed parallel universes exist in the gravitational lensing effects that are able to bend light in a unnatural way.
The first prediction of the possibility of traveling to parallel universes was made shortly after Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity. Austrian physicists Ludwig Flamm found that the field equations of general relativity pointed towards the existence of a structure commonly known today as a wormhole, a connection between two regions of space which would permit faster-than-light travel between them. Matter entering one end of the wormhole would immediately exit the other end, at least as long as the wormhole is stable and remains open during the process.
Shatskiy says the only reason why we haven't been able to directly observe wormholes yet is because they are indistinguishable from the black holes. The only problem is that we seem to know more about wormholes than the actual singularity of the black hole. Furthermore, wormholes are though to be extremely unstable, collapsing out of existence as soon as they form. A way to keep a wormhole open for an indefinite amount of time would involve the use of exotic matter, presenting negative energy and mass.
Ordinary matter has positive energy and mass, meaning that massive objects such as black holes bend light through gravitational lensing much in the same way a optical lens would do here on Earth. However, the unique characteristics of the exotic matter would have the exact opposite effect, deflecting light as it passes through a wormhole from a universe to another. Thus, if a star would shine light into a wormhole, at the other end it would emerge in a divergent pattern to form a bright ring of light.
By detecting such signatures, one might point towards the existence of wormhole. The problem is that black holes and large mass accumulations also have the capability of forming rings of light through the gravitational lensing effect, the well known Einstein rings. While Lawrence Krauss from the Case Western Reserve University seems to appreciate Shatskiy's theoretical study, by pointing out the immense effort made by the Russian physicist to find the signature of real wormholes, critics add that Shatskiy avoided to specify the characteristics of the required exotic matter, and even the basic interactions with light.
Furthermore, it is not known yet if exotic matter even exists, but, even if it does, the signature proposed by Shatskiy is indistinguishable from a series of other signatures routinely detected throughout the universe. They do not dispute the fact that wormholes might exist, but they argue that such a possibility is extremely remote.
Source: New Scientist
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Recap - Andreas von Buelow: 911 Brainwashing
Served as state-secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Defence and Minister for Research and Technology.
Tagesspiegel
In a full-page interview with the Sunday edition the Berlin Tagesspiegel daily, Andreas von Buelow, said he does not buy any of the official theories that have been presented to date, on the events of September 11.
The apparent failure of the U.S. Administration including its 26 secret agencies with an annual budget of $30 billion, to come up with any convincing assessment, was one big problem that von Buelow addressed, in quite some detail.
He then addressed the role of the official "brainwashing of the Western mass democracies" on the Sept. 11 issue, in promoting the new enemy image of "Islamic terrorism," along lines developed earlier, by senior advisors of the U.S. Administration:
"I am not the origin of the idea of the enemy image. It originates with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, two pioneers of American secret intelligence and foreign policies.
"Already in the mid-1990s, Huntington opined that people in Europe and the USA needed someone they could hate -- that would strengthen the identification with their own society. And Brzezinski, that mad dog, already at his time as advisor to President Jimmy Carter, campaigned for the sole right of the USA to all the world's raw materials, especially crude oil and natural gas."
Von Buelow also addressed the role of Brzezinski, personally, in setting up the afghani operation of armed "Islamic" guerilla warfare against the USSR Afghanistan invasion in and after 1979 -- the Taliban being generated by the same operation, after all.
As for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as such, von Buelow remarked: "Planning the attacks was a master deed, in technical and organizational terms. To hijack four big airliners within a few minutes and fly them into targets within a single hour and doing so on complicated flight routes! That is unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatuses of state and industry."
He added that laying false tracks of investigation has been an accompanying feature of covert operations ever since they have been launched by influential agencies, so that he is convinced that the full truth behind Sept. 11 still has to be sought.
A partial translation follows.
Question: You seem so angry, really upset.
Andreas Von Buelow: I can explain what's bothering me: I see that after the horrifying attacks of Sept. 11, all political public opinion is being forced into a direction that I consider wrong.
Q: What do you mean by that?
Von Buelow: I wonder why many questions are not asked. Normally, with such a terrible thing, various leads and tracks appear that are then commented on, by the investigators, the media, the government: Is there something here or not? Are the explanations plausible? This time, this is not the case at all. It already began just hours after the attacks in New York and Washington and --
Q: In those hours, there was horror, and grief.
Von Buelow: Right, but actually it was astounding: There are 26 intelligence services in the U.S.A. with a budget of $30 billion--
Q: More than the German defense budget.
Von Buelow: --which were not able to prevent the attacks. In fact, they didn't even have an inkling they would happen. For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies let the fighter planes stay on the ground, 48 hours later, however, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers. Within ten days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive.
Q: What, please?
Von Buelow: Yes, yes. And why did the FBI chief take no position regarding contradictions? Where the list came from, why it was false? If I were the chief investigator (state attorney) in such a case, I would regularly go to the public, and give information on which leads are valid and which not.
Q: The U.S. government talked about an emergency situation after the attacks: They said they were in a war. Is it not understandable that one does not tell the enemy everything one knows about him?
Von Buelow: Naturally. But a government which goes to war, must first establish who the attacker, the enemy, is. It has a duty to provide evidence. According to its own admission, it has not been able to present any evidence that would hold up in court.
Q: Some information on the perpetrators has been proven with documents. The suspected leader, Mohammad Atta, left Portland for Boston on the morning of Sept. 11, in order to board the plane that later hit the World Trade Center
Von Buelow: If this Atta was the decisive man in the operation, it's really strange that he took such a risk of taking a plane that would reach Boston such a short time before the connecting flight. Had his flight been a few minutes late, he would not have been in the plane that was hijacked. Why should a sophisticated terrorist do this? One can, by the way, read on CNN (Internet) that none of these names were on the official passenger lists. None of them had gone through the check-in procedures. And why did none of the threatened pilots give the agreed-upon code 7700 over the [Steuerknueppel: STEERING NOB?] to the ground station? In addition: The black boxes which are fire and shock proof, as well as the voice recordings, contain no valuable data--
Q: That sounds like--
Von Buelow: --like assailants who, in their preparations, leave tracks behind them like a herd of stampeding elephants? They made payments with credit cards with their own names; they reported to their flight instructors with their own names. They left behind rented cars with flight manuals in Arabic for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip, wills and farewell letters, which fall into the hands of the FBI, because they were stored in the wrong place and wrongly addressed. Clues were left like behind like in a child's game of hide-and-seek, which were to be followed!
There is also the theory of one British flight engineer:
According to this, the steering of the planes was perhaps taken out of the pilots' hands, from outside.
The Americans had developed a method in the 1970s, whereby they could rescue hijacked planes by intervening into the computer piloting [automatic pilot system]. This theory says, this technique was abused in this case. That's a theory....
Q: Which sounds really adventurous, and was never considered.
Von Buelow: You see! I do not accept this theory, but I find it worth considering. And what about the obscure stock transactions? In the week prior to the attacks, the amount of transactions in stocks in American Airlines, United Airlines, and insurance companies, increased 1,200%. It was for a value of $15 billion. Some people must have known something. Who?
Q: Why don't you speculate on who it might have been.
Von Buelow: With the help of the horrifying attacks, the Western mass democracies were subjected to brainwashing. The enemy image of anti-communism doesn't work any more; it is to be replaced by peoples of Islamic belief. They are accused of having given birth to suicidal terrorism.
Q: Brainwashing? That's a tough term.
Von Buelow: Yes? But the idea of the enemy image doesn't come from me. It comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, two policy-makers of American intelligence and foreign policy. Already in the middle of he 1990s, Huntingon believed, people in Europe and the U.S. needed someone they could hate-- this would strengthen their identification with their own society. And Brzezinski, the mad dog, as adviser to President Jimmy Carter, campaigned for the exclusive right of the U.S. to seize all the raw materials of the world, especially oil and gas.
Q: You mean, the events of Sept. 11--
Von Buelow: --fit perfectly in the concept of the armaments industry, the intelligence agencies, the whole military-industrial-academic complex. This is in fact conspicuous. The huge raw materials reserves of the former Soviet Union are now at their disposal, also the pipeline routes and--
Q: Erich Follach described that at length in Spiegel: ``It's a matter of military bases, drugs, oil and gas reserves.''
Von Buelow: I can state: the planning of the attacks was technically and organizationally a master achievement. To hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes and within one hour, to drive them into their targets, with complicated flight maneuvers! This is unthinkable, without years-long support from secret apparatuses of the state and industry.
Q: You are a conspiracy theorist!
Von Buelow: Yeah, yeah. That's the ridicule heaped [on those raising these questions] by those who would prefer to follow the official, politically correct line. Even investigative journalists are fed propaganda and disinformation. Anyone who doubts that, doesn't have all his marbles! That is your accusation.
Q: Your career actually speaks against the idea that you are not in your right mind. You were already in the 1970s, state secretary in the Defense Ministry; in 1993 you were the SPD [Social Democratic Party] speaker in the Schalk-Golodkowski investigation committee--
Von Buelow: And it all began there! Until that time, I did not have any great knowledge of the work of intelligence agencies. And now we had to take note of a great discrepancy: We shed light on the dealings of the Stasi and other East bloc intelligence agencies in the field of economic criminality, but as soon as we wanted to know something about the activities of the BND [German intelligence] or the CIA, it was mercilessly blocked. No information, no cooperation, nothing! That's when I was first taken aback.
Q: Schalck-Golodkowski mediated, among other things, various business deals abroad. When you looked at his case more closely--
Von Buelow: We found, for example, a clue in Rostock, where Schalck organized his weapons depot. Well, then we happened upon an affiliation of Schalck in Panama, and then we happened upon Manuel Noriega, who was for many years President, drug dealer, and money launderer, all in one, right? And this Noriega was also on the payroll of the CIA, for $200,000 a year. These were things that really made me curious.
Q: You wrote a book on the dealings of the CIA and Co. In the meantime, you have become an expert regarding the strange things related to intelligence services' work.
Von Buelow: ``Strange things'' is the wrong term. What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes.
Q: What would you say determines the work of intelligence services?
Von Buelow: So that we don't have any misunderstandings: I find that it makes sense to have intelligence services....
Q: You don't think much of the earlier proposals by the Greens, who wanted to dismantle these agencies?
Von Buelow: No. It is right to take a look behind the scenes. Getting intelligence about the intentions of an enemy, makes sense. It is important when one tries to put oneself into the mind of the enemy. Whoever wants to understand the CIA's methods, has to deal with its main tasks, covert operations: below the level of war, and outside international law, foreign states are to be influenced, by organizing insurrections, terrorist attacks, usually combined with drugs and weapons trade, and money laundering. This is essentially very simple: One arms violent people with weapons. Since, however, it must not under any circumstances come out, that there is an intelligence agency behind it, all traces are erased, with tremendous deployment of resources.
I have the impression that this kind of intelligence agency spends 90% of its time this way: creating false leads. So that, if anyone suspects the collaboration of the agencies, he is accused of the sickness of conspiracy madness. The truth often comes out only years later. CIA chief Allen Dulles once said: In case of doubt, I would even lie to the Congress!
Q: The American journalist Seymour M. Hersh, wrote in the New Yorker, that even some people in the CIA and government assumed, that certain leads had been laid in order to confuse the investigators. Who, Herr von Buelow, would have done this?
Von Buelow: I don't know that either. How should I? I simply use my common sense, and-- See: The terrorists behaved in such a way to attract attention. And as practicing Muslims, they were in a strip-tease bar, and, drunken, stuck dollar bills into the panty of the dancer.
Q: Things like that also happen.
Von Buelow: It may be. As a lone fighter, I cannot prove anything, that's beyond my capabilities. I have real difficulties, however, to imagine that all this all sprung out of the mind of an evil man in his cave.
Q: Mr. von Buelow, you yourself say that you are alone in your criticism. Formerly, you were part of the political establishment, now you are an outsider.
Von Buelow: That is a problem sometimes, but one gets used to it. By the way, I know a lot of people, including very influential ones, who agree with me, but only in whispers, never publicly.
Q: Do you still have contact with old SPD companions, such as Egon Bahr and former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt?
Von Buelow: There are no close contacts any more. I wanted to go to the last SPD party congress, but I was sick.
Q: Can it be, Mr. von Buelow, that you are a mouthpiece for typical anti-Americanism?
Von Buelow: Nonsense, this has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Americanism. I am a great admirer of this great, open, free society, and always have been. I studied in the U.S.
Q: How did you get the idea that there could be a link between the attacks and the American intelligence agencies?
Von Buelow: Do you remember the first attack on the WorldTrade Center in 1993?
Q: Six people were killed and over a thousand wounded, by a bomb explosion.
Von Buelow: In the middle was the bombmaker, a former Egyptian officer. He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack. They were snuck into the country by the CIA, despite a State Department ban on their entry. At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant.
And he made a deal with the authorities: At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material would be replaced by a harmless powder.
The FBI did not stick to the deal. The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI. The official story of the crime was quickly found: The criminals were evil Muslims.
Q: At the time Soviet soldiers marched into Afghanistan, you were in the cabinet of Helmut Schmidt. What was it like?
Von Buelow: The Americans pushed for trade sanctions, they demanded the boycott of the Olympic games in Moscow....
Q: .... which the German government followed...
Von Buelow: And today we know: It was the strategy of the American security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to destabilize the Soviet Union from neighboring Muslim countries They lured the Russians into Afghanistan, and then prepared for them a hell on earth, their Vietnam. With decisive support of the U.S. intelligence agencies, at least 30,000 Muslim fighters were trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a bunch of good-for-nothings and fanatics who were, and still are today, ready for anything.
And one of them is Osama bin Laden. I wrote years ago: ` `It was out of this brood, that the Taliban grew up in Afghanistan, who had been brought up in the Koran schools financed by American and Saudi funds, the Taliban who are now terrorizing the country and destroying it
Q: Even though you say, for the U.S. it was a matter of raw materials in the region, the starting point for the U.S. aggression, was the terrorist attack which cost thousands of human lives.
Von Buelow: Completely true. One must always keep this gruesome act in mind. Nonetheless, in the analysis of political processes, I am allowed to look and see who has advantages and disadvantages, and what is coincidental. When in doubt, it is always worthwhile to take a look at a map, where are raw materials resources, and the routes to them? Then lay a map of civil wars and conflicts on top of that --they coincide. The same is the case with the third map: nodal points of the drug trade.
Where this all comes together, the American intelligence services are not far away. By the way, the Bush family is linked to oil, gas, and weapons trade, through the bin Laden family.
Q: What do you think of the Bin Laden films?
Von Buelow: When one is dealing with intelligence services, one can imagine manipulations of the highest quality. Hollywood could provide these techniques. I consider the videos inappropriate as evidence.
Q: You believe the CIA is capable of anything, [wouldn't stop at anything].
Von Buelow: The CIA, in the state interests of the U.S., does not have to abide by any law in interventions abroad, is not bound by international law; only the President gives orders.
And when funds are cut, peace is on the horizon, then a bomb explodes somewhere. Thus it is proven, that you can't do without the intelligence services; and that the critics are nuts, as Father Bush called them, Bush who was once CIA head and President.
You have to see that the U.S. spends $30 billion on intelligence services, and $13 billion on anti-drug work. And what comes out of it?
The chief of a special unit of the strategic anti-drug work declared, in despair, after 30 years of service, that in every big, important drug case, the CIA came in and took it out of my hands. (Rosalinda: Michael Levin)
Q: Do you criticize the German government for its reaction after Sept. 11?
Von Buelow: No. To assume that the government were independent in these questions, would be naive.
Q: Herr von Buelow, what will you do now?
Von Buelow: Nothing. My task is concluded by saying, it could not have been that way [according to the official story]. Search for the truth!
Source: Tagesspiegel, 13 Jan 2002
*****
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International Terrorism Does Not Exist
General Leonid Ivashov
Vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical affairs.
He was the chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union’s ministry of Defense, secretary of the Council of defense ministers of the Community of independant states (CIS), chief of the Military cooperation department at the Russian federation’s Ministry of defense and Joint chief of staff of the Russian armies
General Leonid Ivashov was the Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces when the September 11, 2001, attacks took place. This military man, who lived the events from the inside, offers an analysis which is very different to that of his American colleagues. As he did during the Axis for Peace 2005 conference, he now explains that international terrorism does not exist and that the September 11 attacks were the result of a set-up.
What we are seeing is a manipulation by the big powers; this terrorism would not exist without them. He affirms that, instead of faking a “world war on terror”, the best way to reduce that kind of attacks is through respect for international law and peaceful cooperation among countries and their citizens.
As the current international situation shows, terrorism emerges where contradiction aggravate, where there is a change of social relations or a change of regime, where there is political, economic or social instability, where there is moral decadence, where cynicism and nihilism triumph, where vice is legalized and where crime spreads.
It is globalization what creates the conditions for the emergence of these extremely dangerous phenomena. It is in this context that the new world geo-strategic map is being designed, that the resources of the planet are being re-distributed, that borders are disappearing, that international law is being torn into pieces, that cultural identities are being erased, that spiritual life becomes impoverished...
The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its “godfather”. The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity.
Today’s international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people’s intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance inside power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries’ policies and the behavior of people.
Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the exiting reality.
In this context, if we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following conclusions:
1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction.
Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time.
2. Only secret services and their current chiefs – or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations – have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these organizations cannot exist – let alone carry out operations of such magnitude inside countries so well protected. Planning and carrying out an operation on this scale is extremely complex.
3. Osama bin Laden and “Al Qaeda” cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.
The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet’s natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance
The use of the term “international terrorism” has the following goals:
- Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control;
- Turning the people’s demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy;
- Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation;
- Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services;
- Establishing the principle of renunciation to national interests, transforming objectives in the military field by giving priority to the war on terror, violating the logic of military alliances to the detriment of a joint defense and to favor the anti-terrorist coalition;
- Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the war on terror as a pretext. In order to fight in an efficient way against international terrorism it is necessary to take the following steps:
- To confirm before the UN General Assembly the principles of the UN Charter and international law as principles that all states are obliged to respect;
- To create a geo-strategic organization (perhaps inspired in the Cooperation Organization of Shanghai comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a set of values different to that of the Atlantists; to design a strategy of development of states, a system of international security, another financial and economic model (which would mean that the world would again rest on two pillars);
- To associate (under the United Nations) the scientific elites in the design and promotion of the philosophical concepts of the Human Being of the 21st Century.
- To organize the interaction of all religious denominations in the world, on behalf of the stability of humanity’s development, security and mutual support.
Source: Voltaire
*****
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Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Proxy Leader vs Proxy Terrorists
Independent, UK
The Afghan government claims they prove British agents were talking to the Taliban without permission from the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, despite Gordon Brown's pledge that Britain will not negotiate.
The Prime Minister told Parliament on 12 December: "Our objective is to defeat the insurgency by isolating and eliminating their leaders. We will not enter into any negotiations with these people."
The British insist President Karzai's office knew what was going on. But Mr Karzai has expelled two top diplomats amid accusations they were part of a plot to buy-off the insurgents.
The row was the first in a series of spectacular diplomatic spats which has seen Anglo-Afghan relations sink to a new low. Since December, President Karzai has blocked the appointment of Paddy Ashdown to the top UN job in Kabul and he has blamed British troops for losing control of Helmand.
It has also soured relations between Kabul and Washington, where State Department officials were instrumental in pushing Lord Ashdown for the UN role.
President Karzai's political mentor, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, endorsed a death sentence for blasphemy on the student journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh last week, and two British contractors have been arrested in Kabul on, it is claimed, trumped up weapons charges. The developments are seen as a deliberate defiance of the British.
An Afghan government source said the training camp was part of a British plan to use bands of reconciled Taliban, called Community Defence Volunteers, to fight the remaining insurgents. "The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taliban fighters and 200 low-level commanders," he said.
The computer memory stick at the centre of the row was impounded by officers from Afghanistan's KGB-trained National Directorate of Security after they moved against a party of international diplomats who were visiting Helmand.
A ministry insider said: "When they were arrested, the British said the Ministry of the Interior and the National Security Council knew about it, but no one knew anything. That's why the President was so angry."
Details of how much President Karzai was told remain murky. Some analysts believe Afghan officials were briefed about the plan, but that it later evolved.
The camp was due to be built outside Musa Qala, in Helmand. It was part of a package of reconstruction and development incentives designed to win trust and support in the aftermath of the British-led battle to retake the stronghold last year.
But the Afghans feared the British were training a militia with no loyalty to the central government. Intercepted Taliban communications suggested they thought the British were trying to help them, the Afghan official said.
The Western delegates, Michael Semple and Mervyn Patterson, were given 48 hours to leave the country. Their Afghan colleagues, including a former army general, were jailed. The expulsions coincided with a row within the Taliban's ranks which saw a senior commander, Mansoor Dadullah, sacked for talking to British spies. One official claimed the camp was planned for Mansoor and his men.
The computer stick contained a three-stage plan, called the European Union Peace Building Programme. The third stage covered military training.
Curiously, the European Union says the programme did not exist and there were no EU funds to run it.
Afghan government officials insist it was bankrolled by the British. UK diplomats, the UN, Western officials and senior Afghan officials have all confirmed the outline of the plan, which they agree is entirely British-led, but all refused to talk about it on the record. President Karzai's office claimed it was "a matter of national security".
The memory stick revealed that $125,000 (£64,000) had been spent on preparing the camp and a further $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008, an Afghan official said. The figures sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taliban.
President Karzai's spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, accused Mr Semple and Mr Patterson of being "involved in some activities that were not their jobs."
The camp would also have provided vocational training, including farming and irrigation techniques, to offer people a viable alternative to growing opium. But the Afghan government took issue with plans to provide military training, to turn the insurgents into a defence force.
Afghan government staff also claimed the "EU peace-builders" had handed over mobile phones, laptops and airtime credit to insurgents. They said the memory stick revealed plans to train the Taliban to use secure satellite phones, so they could communicate directly with UK officials.
Mr Patterson, a Briton, was the third-ranking UN diplomat when he was held. Mr Semple, an Irishman, was the acting head of the EU mission. Officially, the British embassy remains tight-lipped, fuelling speculation that the plan may have been part of a wider clandestine operation.
A spokesman repeated the line used since Christmas: "The EU and UN have responded to inquiries on this. We have nothing further to add."
But privately, the UN maintains it had no role in setting up the camp. Meanwhile, Mr Semple's EU boss, Francesc Vendrell, admitted he had very little idea what was going on.
Yet the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, cut short his Christmas holiday to meet President Karzai and "spell out the Foreign Office paper-trail" which diplomats claim proves his government had agreed. They met twice, but it was not enough to stop Mr Semple and Mr Patterson being forced to leave.
Gordon Brown has also said Britain would increase its support for "community defence initiatives, where local volunteers are recruited to defend homes and families modelled on traditional Afghan arbakai".
Background to the proposal
* December 11
British and Afghan troops take Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand, after President Hamid Karzai reveals that a senior Taliban commander swapped sides.
* December 23-24
The acting head of the EU mission, Michael Semple, and the third-ranking UN diplomat in Afghanistan, Mervyn Patterson, hold talks with local dignitaries and Taliban sympathisers in Helmand. Afghan secret police arrest their colleague, General Stanikzai, and seize a memory stick containing plans for training camps.
* December 25
Semple and Patterson are given 48 hours in which to leave Kabul.
* December 27
The two diplomats fly out of the Afghan capital, despite international appeals to let them stay.
Source: Independant
*****
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Thursday, January 31, 2008
No Child Left Behind
Greg Palast
A New York Times bestselling author and a journalist for the BBC
Here’s your question, class:
In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.”
So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?- George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.
- $20 won’t cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.
If you can’t buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local citizens call a “rock” of crack cocaine. For $20, we were guaranteed we could fulfill any kid’s dream for at least 15 minutes.
Now we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don’t say, ‘crack vials,’ they’re, ‘Democracy Rocks’!
The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft which read, “I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq this year – and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not among them.”
Of course, there’s an effective alternative to Mr. Bush’s plan – which won’t cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let’s give each millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.
And, there’s an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from his heart.
Source: One Bush Left Behind
John Mcain: More Wars
"More wars" could prove to be the oddest of all presidential campaign slogans. Especially if it works.
"That's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him", Pat Buchanan
This War on Terrorism is Bogus
Michael Meacher MP
UK's environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003.
Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too.
The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.
We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".
The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".
Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.
The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.
This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.
A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.
Source: The Guardian
meacherm@parliament.uk
*****
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
War is a Racket
Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940)
At the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.
The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people – not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.
Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:
"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."
Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war – anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.
Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.
Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.
Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war – a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit – fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.
But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?
Yes, and what does it profit the nation?
Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.
It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people – who do not profit.
WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits – ah! that is another matter – twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent – the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.
Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket – and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people – didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent. 
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump – or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather.
For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company – and you can't have a war without nickel – showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public – even before a Senate investigatory body.
But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought – and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it – so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches – one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!
Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.
There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 – count them if you live long enough – was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.
Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them – a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers – all got theirs.
Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment – knapsacks and the things that go to fill them – crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them – and they will do it all over again the next time.
There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float! The seams opened up – and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.
The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.
Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee – with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator – to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn't suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses – that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.
There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.
Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.
WHO PAYS THE BILLS?
Who provides the profits – these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them – in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us – the people – got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par – and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill. 
If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.
There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement – the young boys couldn't stand it.
That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead – they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded – they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too – they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam – on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain – with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.
But don't forget – the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share – at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.
Napoleon once said,
"All men are enamored of decorations...they positively hunger for them."
So by developing the Napoleonic system – the medal business – the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side...it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies...to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed.
But wait!
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance – something the employer pays for in an enlightened state – and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all – he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back – when they came back from the war and couldn't find work – at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly – his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too – as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.
HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!
WELL, it's a racket, all right.
A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. 
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation – it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages – all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers –
yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders – everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn't they?
They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!
Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket – that and nothing else.
Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won't permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people – those who do the suffering and still pay the price – make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.
Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn't be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant – all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war – voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms – to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.
There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide – and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.
A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.
At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.
Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.
The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.
To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
We must take the profit out of war.
We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
TO HELL WITH WAR!
I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.
Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.
In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.
Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?
Money.
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:
"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.
If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won't.
So..."
Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."
Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.
And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.
Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?
The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.
The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.
There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.
The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.
Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munitions makers.
So...I say,
TO HELL WITH WAR!
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_is_a_Racket
Nato: Pre-Emptive Nuclear Strike a Key Option
by Ian Traynor
The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.
Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".
The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to Nato's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April. "The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible," the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. "The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
The authors - General John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and Nato's ex-supreme commander in Europe, General Klaus Naumann, Germany's former top soldier and ex-chairman of Nato's military committee, General Henk van den Breemen, a former Dutch chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, a former French chief of staff, and Lord Inge, field marshal and ex-chief of the general staff and the defence staff in the UK - paint an alarming picture of the threats and challenges confronting the west in the post-9/11 world and deliver a withering verdict on the ability to cope.
The five commanders argue that the west's values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.
· The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.
· The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.
To prevail, the generals call for an overhaul of Nato decision-taking methods, a new "directorate" of US, European and Nato leaders to respond rapidly to crises, and an end to EU "obstruction" of and rivalry with Nato. Among the most radical changes demanded are:· A shift from consensus decision-taking in Nato bodies to majority voting, meaning faster action through an end to national vetoes.
· The abolition of national caveats in Nato operations of the kind that plague the Afghan campaign.
· No role in decision-taking on Nato operations for alliance members who are not taking part in the operations.
· The use of force without UN security council authorisation when "immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings".
In the wake of the latest row over military performance in Afghanistan, touched off when the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said some allies could not conduct counter-insurgency, the five senior figures at the heart of the western military establishment also declare that Nato's future is on the line in Helmand province.
"Nato's credibility is at stake in Afghanistan," said Van den Breemen.
"Nato is at a juncture and runs the risk of failure," according to the blueprint.
Naumann delivered a blistering attack on his own country's performance in Afghanistan. "The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner." By insisting on "special rules" for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin was contributing to "the dissolution of Nato".
Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels and a former senior US state department official, described the manifesto as "a wake-up call". "This report means that the core of the Nato establishment is saying we're in trouble, that the west is adrift and not facing up to the challenges."
Naumann conceded that the plan's retention of the nuclear first strike option was "controversial" even among the five authors. Inge argued that "to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence".
Reserving the right to initiate nuclear attack was a central element of the west's cold war strategy in defeating the Soviet Union. Critics argue that what was a productive instrument to face down a nuclear superpower is no longer appropriate.
Robert Cooper, an influential shaper of European foreign and security policy in Brussels, said he was "puzzled".
"Maybe we are going to use nuclear weapons before anyone else, but I'd be wary of saying it out loud."
Another senior EU official said Nato needed to "rethink its nuclear posture because the nuclear non-proliferation regime is under enormous pressure".
Naumann suggested the threat of nuclear attack was a counsel of desperation. "Proliferation is spreading and we have not too many options to stop it. We don't know how to deal with this."
Nato needed to show "there is a big stick that we might have to use if there is no other option", he said.
The Authors:
John Shalikashvili
The US's top soldier under Bill Clinton and former Nato commander in Europe, Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw of Georgian parents and emigrated to the US at the height of Stalinism in 1952. He became the first immigrant to the US to rise to become a four-star general. He commanded Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war, then became Saceur, Nato's supreme allied commander in Europe, before Clinton appointed him chairman of the joint chiefs in 1993, a position he held until his retirement in 1997.
Klaus Naumann
Viewed as one of Germany's and Nato's top military strategists in the 90s, Naumann served as his country's armed forces commander from 1991 to 1996 when he became chairman of Nato's military committee. On his watch, Germany overcame its post-WWII taboo about combat operations, with the Luftwaffe taking to the skies for the first time since 1945 in the Nato air campaign against Serbia.
Lord Inge
Field Marshal Peter Inge is one of Britain's top officers, serving as chief of the general staff in 1992-94, then chief of the defence staff in 1994-97. He also served on the Butler inquiry into Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and British intelligence.
Jacques Lanxade
A French admiral and former navy chief who was also chief of the French defence staff.
Henk van den Breemen
Source:The Guardian
A 'Pearl Harbour Event' ?
The science behind the collapse of the THREE BUILDINGS on that fateful day
FEMA could not even begin to explain WTC 7.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
World Wrestling Federation of Journlism
The dangers of ever-enlarging corporations with agendas taking control of public media
Filtered news isnt exclusive to PK media, Fox News may be a template of things to come everywhere.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
A Freudian Slip Up?
George Bush's favorite painting is an 28x40 oil on canvas by W.H.D. Koerner called "A Charge to Keep."
Bush loves the painting so much (the rider bears an eerie resemblance to the President), his own autobiography is named after it, in is his interpretation:
"When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves."
However, that interpretation is wrong, this is in fact the depiction of a criminal fleeing the law.
The original title to this painting was "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught," and it was drawn by Koerner to illustrate a short story in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916 called "The Slipper Tongue," about a horse thief who escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska.
Read More...
Friday, January 25, 2008
Science: Things That Do Not Make Sense
New Scientist
Listing 13 mysteries of science, ranging from cold fusion to suspected life on Mars and the benefits of homeopathy, in spite of the fact they exist.
That's what happens when people try to explain the world through a narrow prism as conventional modern medicine often does in diagnosing conditions treatable only with dangerous and frequently useless drugs and procedures.
What follows are more brief descriptions of the topics covered in this fascinating New Scientist piece.
• Tetraneutrons
• An always-uniform horizon
• The changing constants of physics and science
• Dark energy
• The placebo effect
1. The placebo effect
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2. The horizon problem
OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen, but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
3. Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.
Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.
Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.
4. Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
5. Dark matter
TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.
Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.
And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.
Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
6. Viking's methane
JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.
So why no party?
Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
7. Tetraneutrons
FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist (see Ghost in the atom). They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.
Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.
The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.
Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).
And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.
8. The Pioneer anomaly
THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant. Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."
Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).
"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.
9. Dark energy
IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.
10. The Kuiper cliff
IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.
Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.
The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.
There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.
11. The Wow signal
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.
Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?
The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.
The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.
Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.
12. Not-so-constant constants
IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.
If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.
But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?
No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.
Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.
The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).
There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.
"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.
13. Cold fusion
AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.
That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.
That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."
Source: New Scientist
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Class Room: Money as Debt
The banking system explained
The video explains why debt is deemed necessary for a country's growth - until the system goes 'pop' of course.
A War Crime Pardon
Retroactive immunity for possible war crimes
*****
Related Material...
Hard Talking Galloway
Monday, January 21, 2008
When It's Cool to be Evil
By Henry Makow Ph.D. 
"My friends and I did three whores yesterday," my son, 16, remarked casually. "Then we killed them and took our money back."
He was referring to the video game craze, "Grand Theft Auto --Vice City" which allows impressionable teens to pretend they are psychotic gangsters. They become ex-con "Tommy Vercetti," a Darwinian survivor in a pitiless hedonistic Vice City.
They have a choice of 120 vehicles and 30 weapons (meat cleaver, machete) to use to gun down policemen, rob liquor stores and jack cars. Made by Sony, the game teaches the young it's cool to be evil. The predecessor game "Grand Theft Auto-3", (only 50 vehicles, 20 weapons) sold seven million copies.
My son added: "If I had a high-powered rifle and wasn't afraid of the law, it's what I'd do."
He was just goading me; but I was taken aback. I didn't say anything.
Boomers like me who got zero moral education are not prepared to instruct our children. This is exacerbated by the fact that our children often don't live with us, as in my case.
I see this with other male friends. One told me his wife caught his 12-year-old daughter in a chat room where assorted sexual positions were being compared. Another discovered his 17-year-old daughter had lost her virginity and acted as if it were a glove. Both fathers do not live with their daughters and wouldn't know how to react if they did.
Our reflex is to be laid back and tolerant. To say:" This is natural experimentation."
I might have done this a few years ago but I am beginning to see the world differently. I no longer believe trends like family breakdown, promiscuity and violence are random. 
GOD'S THREE-MILLION-YEAR EXPERIMENT IS IN TROUBLE
As you know from my previous articles, I believe a satanic, criminal cabal rules the world controlling illegal drugs, prostitution as well as banking, oil, defence and the media. In order to consolidate its power and weaken society, it actively promotes these destructive trends.
Following a centuries-old plan, it has subverted all social institutions: business, politics, education, and religion. (Most people don't realize that success today depends on serving this cabal.) It started all wars. It fabricated the war on terror to advance the creation of an Orwellian world-police-state.
We are on the cusp of a New Dark Age from which we may never emerge. How did this happen?
It happened because they took God out of the universe. "They" are members of secret Satanist societies. They are too smart to say, "Here's the devil. You'll like him better." But when they removed God, which is essentially a belief in the reality of morality, they opened the door for evil.
They used a sleight of hand. They preyed on mankind's innate desire for justice by promising "fraternity, liberty and equality." They gave us liberalism, socialism and communism, not to help but to control us. They gave us feminism, pornography and sexual liberation, not to free but to enslave us. They used them all to undermine family, nation, and religion.
Without vision, a people will perish. God is vision. God is Goodness: this is how we perceive the difference between good and evil. Man is blind without God,
There IS Moral Order in the universe. Morality, (obedience to God) far from being old fashioned and boring, is extremely useful and necessary.
Just look at our satanic masters! They are notoriously dysfunctional: drug addicts, pedophiles, and murderers. Their families are a mess. If only we could convince them they could find true love and happiness by serving rather than defying God.
Jesus said, "God is a spirit. We worship Him in spirit and in truth." God is Goodness, Truth, Justice and Beauty. We all have an innate sense of these spiritual absolutes. We all have a direction connection with our Creator. We can serve Him by doing whatever we think He wants us to do. This is the key to happiness.
A lot of Christians are fatalistic. They think the end times are near and necessary for the fulfillment of prophesy. I can't comment on this but I don't believe God intended us to sit back and let His creation go to hell.
We were created to serve God. We must sacrifice ourselves to His purpose. We must not cowardly cling to life, if increasingly life is not worth living.
Men need to begin by taking control of their own families. 
THE FATHER IS THE CORNERSTONE OF THE FAMILY
A man cannot be strong without a connection to God. He must align himself with God's purpose, and provide a strong moral vision for his family.
Heterosexual union involves the exchange of power and love. Men love women who obey them. Men love women who empower them. I love my wife more and more each day because she is helpful and adaptable. This makes me want to make her happy.
My wife's career is not her first priority. She is happy because I am devoted to her. A man's love is a woman's power, and vice versa.
Dutiful daughters (women who love their parents and are devoted to them) make the best wives. This devotion is naturally transferred to their husbands. And when wives obey their husbands, children obey their parents.
Heterosexual marriage involves a profound fusion necessary for emotional and psychological development. It takes place when a woman loves a man enough to trust him completely. She self effaces, assuming an aspect of his identity. He assumes a part of her essence as well. This mystical exchange produces the sense of "completion" that people are seeking.
Many men confuse their relationship to God with their love of women. They are seeking themselves, which women can't give them. Women want to be enlisted for a higher purpose, and loved for their contribution. 
GOD IS REALITY
In conclusion, men must represent God in their family and society.
The next time I see my son, I'll remind him that criminals are sick, tormented, losers. There is nothing glamorous about their lives; playing "Vice City" pollutes the soul. (My son isn't really into this game and I'm not sure I'd forbid it if he were. I'd rather he came to my way of thinking himself.)
As for my friends' daughters, I'll suggest that sex is a profound psychological and emotional experience, not only a physical one.
Psychologically and emotionally, sex is always self-surrender for a woman. She MUST love and be loved; otherwise, she will be damaged. Sex is an expression of love, and a mystery. Teenage girls need to mature in order to explore this mystery.
Truth, Justice, Goodness and Beauty are absolutes. Our satanist leaders can distort them but can't change this Reality. A true civilization would be devoted to discussing how to enact these absolutes. Ours is devoted to suppressing or mutilating them.
God is Reality. The more we evade Reality, the more unreal we become. We inch toward the edge of extinction.
We must be fearless in confronting the cabal. Its power is built on lies. Evil is unreal. It is the absence of Good, a kind of obsessive envy. Sick and unwholesome, it resembles a dilapidated shed. Kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will collapse!
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Scientist Makes a Clone of Himself
Telegraph, London
Fertility doctor Samuel Wood and colleagues created three early-stage embryos by replacing the DNA of donated eggs with his own and another man's genetic material from skin cells.
It is the first time cloned human embryos has been produced from adult cells, and raises the prospect that further embryos could be used to provide stem cells tailored to any patient.
Although the embryos only lived for five days, the breakthrough is seen as an important step towards new treatments for incurable diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
In 2005 Prof Woo Suk Hwang at Seoul National University in South Korea claimed to have produced human embryonic stem cells, the research was later shown to be fraudulent.
The only confirmed cloned human embryo was created by a team at Newcastle University, however this was made by cloning human embryonic stem cells that are not routinely available from patients.
Dr Miodrag Stojkovic, a member of the Newcastle team and co-editor of the journal Stem Cells, which published the research yesterday, said: "These researchers have for the first time developed cloned embryos up to blastocyst [five-day-old embryo] stage using adult cells as donor cells.
"This is a key advance in the development of patient-specific stem cell lines for therapeutic and drug development purposes.
Although these results are preliminary since no stem cell lines have been derived from the cloned embryos, this may now be attempted."
The researchers from the Stemagen Corporation based in La Jolla, California, used 29 eggs donated by three women in their early twenties.
Using a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer - involving hollowing out an egg and injecting it with the nucleus of a cell from a donor - they grew five early-stage embryos consisting of 40 and 72 cells. Three of these contained DNA from either Dr Wood or the other man who provided skin cells.
Asked whether it was true that Dr Wood was one of the men who gave skins cells to produce the clones, a spokesman for Stemagen, said: "Yes, that is true. It stands to reason, we had to use somebody's skin cells and the review board said it should not be a patient who might be given false hope."
Dr Stephen Minger, a stem cell expert at King's College London, said: "This is academically interesting research that shows that another group have managed to create clone human embryos using nuclear transfer.
"Disappointingly the researchers did not go on to do the next step - to create embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.
"The community is waiting to baited breath to see if anyone can do both steps together."
However pro-life groups accused the scientists of reducing human embryos to nothing more than a factory of spare parts.
John Smeaton, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: "We have got scientists wandering around in an ethical wilderness, completely forgetting about matters of justice relating to our fellow human beings."
Future of a DNA-Driven World?
Dr J Craig Venter
"Imagine scientists in the near future sitting at their computers and designing the chromosome of a new organism, an organism that perhaps could PRODUCE FUELS BIOLOGICALLY, fuels like octane, diesel fuel, jet fuel even hydrogen all from sugar or even sunlight with the carbon coming from carbon dioxide."
"Sounds like science fiction right? Not to me, because I believe this is the future"
Dr Venter founded 'The Institute for Genomic Research' and was instrumental in mapping the human genome. He is listed by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
See Full Transcript...
Friday, January 18, 2008
Out of Chaos Comes Order
Philip Jones
Britain is sliding inexorably into Fascism. Of this there can be no doubt. The 'land of my father's', seems today like a foreign country to me . The once friendly 'Bobby on the beat' is no more to be seen.
In his place are legions of surveillance cameras, many fitted with loudspeakers to terrorize and shame pedestrians and shoppers publicly into abject conformity.
Around the 'Mother Of Parliaments', an area of one square kilometre has been declared a 'no protest zone'. This would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Is this really the country of Byron, Shakespeare, Bronte and Charles Dickens ?
I was a teenager in South Wales back in the seventies, , when 'Coal was King' and Steel it's consort. All our men folk were either Miners or Steelworkers. The family unit was very tight, and communities helped each in good times and bad. The only `surveillance` was Sgt. Evans, our local Cop. Thirty eight years on, I still remember him, as being somehow always there, and usually friendly and helpful, yet with an air of authority and decency sadly lacking in today's Officers.
That country is gone 'with the wind' one might say. In it's place is a far more ominous, impersonal 'State' where the 'regime' has become all powerful and intrusive. I was a Police Officer for fifteen years. I carried no Gun, no Taser, no Pepper Spray and wore no Body Armour. My only protection was a short piece of wood, and my wits.
Britain's Police 'Service' has become a politicized paramilitary arm of of the state. They can 'gun down' innocent people (as in John Menezes), shoot them eight times in the head at point blank range and go unpunished. Unmanned `Drones` fly over the London skies with intrusive camera equipment and microwave weapons on board. Peaceful protesters are battered with `nightsticks`, and then arrested for their trouble. The ancient right of trial by jury is under constant attack, egged on by the `Code Napoleonists` in Brussels..
For most of my career , I watched successive governments do nothing as crime and disorder escalated out of control. Paedophiles, were allowed (perhaps encouraged) to prowl our land with apparent impunity and State sponsored anonymity. Traffic chaos, road rage, the break down of the family, `feral` children, football hooliganism. All out of control. Why did government stand idly by and pay only lip service to 'law and order'. 
The Masonic Motto is , "Out of Chaos comes order". In other words, create the problem incite the reaction, then offer your solution. One of Blair's solutions was the `Civil Contingencies Act of 2004. This is in spirit a direct descendent of the Nazi Enabling Act of 1936, and a first cousin to the 'US Patriot Act'. In effect, it gives 'the government' the power to declare a 'state of emergency' and impose Martial Law. Of course, the Al Qaeda bogeyman has played it's part further justifying this 'necessary restriction of liberties'. It was only the first of other tyrannical statutes to be introduced subsequently in order 'To protect the people'.
Surveillance Cameras, Drones in the sky, Bio ID Cards, 'Tooled Up' Police on the Streets, no protest zones, free speech zones, intrusive and invasive Council Tax Inspectors. It is hard to fathom how this could have happened to that country I loved so much in only half a lifetime. It was Huey long who said, "When Fascism comes to America, it will come in the name of Anti Fascism". Well Fascism came to Britain in 1997 in the guise of a liberal left wing government, led by a 'liberal' 'child of the sixties' Mr 'Phoney' Blair.
My late father fought with Montgomery during WWII. He was a damaged man when he came home, and never realised his own potential. That can be said of a generation of British men who went to war to 'fight for freedom'. What a betrayal of millions of lives.
I moved to live in Denmark in 1996, one year prior to the New Labour 'coup d'etat' but in truth, in my heart, I never left Britain, it left me and all my generation. Blair's 'Cool Britania' was and is something very different. A nation of TV addicts, sports crazy's and hedonists, mixed into a cocktail with multiculturalism, anti social behaviour and ruthlessness.
This essay could be entitled 'Problem Reaction Solution versus The Hidden Threat'. Here in Denmark, things are done differently. It is my thesis that the Utopian Danish Social State is actually something other from that which on face value at least, it appears to be. Denmark is not about Welfare, nor has it ever been. Welfare was the 'Carrot' and now 'the Stick' is being used to beat the Danish people down economically, having installed over five decades, deep within their national character, a complete dependency on the State apparatus.
The nearest example to this is Huxley's nightmare novel, 'Brave New World'. Denmark' apparent prosperity, comprehensive social welfare, and corporate efficiency, are I would suggest products not of enlightenment, but of a profound insecurity and uniformity in the Danish character. The political system here, has not only successfully undermined the role of the Danish Parliament and substituted a vast bureaucracy that has contrived a firm pact between labour and the establishment, it has also presided over a process by which the Dane has become the obedient and malleable item in a 'town planners' or sociologist's dream.
A friend, the Danish Political Commentator Kjeld Heising (www.heising.dk) wrote recently on the Danish condition, "Danes live within narrow margins. Inside these margins, we can live normally, as part of the labour force, as consumers and as members of a 'thought community'. Outside of this is a steep slope to poverty, social isolation and deroute. The slope is vertical, there are no 'in betweens'. Constants heaps of legislation ensure that no Dane understands his conditions and therefore no Dane can operate in them. Consequently, the middle class Dane lives under a constant threat of bills, fines, penalties, duties, charges, fees, loss of income and esteem. These 'narrow margins' ensure that even minor sanctions can tip the scales. That's why he can be controlled with a smile, a raised finger and a subtle reminder of small sanctions. A 'Silent Threat'."
For the moment, there seems no reason for the more obvious, draconnian and overt measures here in Denmark that we see being put in place across the North Sea. The 'Silent threat' is enough for the present. The incessant economic turning of the screw is doing its job well enough for now. But, I just wonder how many turns are left before Danes wake up and 'smell the coffee' or should I say 'Kaffe'.
PS. The book 'The New Totalitarians' by Roland Huntford written in the 1970's was an ominously correct analysis of the Swedish Social Model. Denmark, Sweden, potato, potaato. It's well worth a read.
Brave New Denmark
Philip Jones
My awakening began upon my relocation to this small, cold northern country. Up until then, I had `bought` into the consensus viewpoint, and although as a serving officer in London, I had been aware of all the rapid changes taking place in society, I had not realised that these changes were orchestrated and designed, as opposed to `evolutionary`.
I had imagined that Denmark would be little more than a smaller version of my homeland. My wife was/is not much different in views and culture from myself, and our countries shared a joint history. For the first half year or so, I didn't take too much notice of my surroundings, as we were occupied with the day to day business of setting up our home and all those other mundane necessities.
It was when I was able to sit back and take note of my new environment that I was struck immediately at how different Danes were from British people. My wife had lived in the UK for some years and I soon learned that she was not typical of her country folk. The most immediate, and annoying character trait I noticed was the habitual need Danes have to tell other people how wonderful Denmark is, and how much better everything is compared to other places. To even the casual onlooker, it was clear that they were deeply delusional.
Denmark is an okay place, but no better and a degree worse than some places. It is small, with a population of around 5,000,000. Until very recently, it has been very homogenous, (and to a great extent still is) and somewhat isolated, tucked away as it is up on the top edge of Europe. In fact, if one wished to conduct a `social experiment`, few places would be better suited, or located. Add to this the truth that Danish people are by nature in awe of authority, compliant and passive.
Forget the `Vikings` of yore. Most of them settled in Britain, Northern France and down the Volga.
I began to question this pride in all things Danish. The food variety and quality was nothing like as good as in the UK. The public infrastructure was inadequate, and oh so slow. Monopoly was the name of the game in business. No competition whatsoever. Danish produce and Danish produce only was the rule of things. The sheer cost of living in the place was/is at least 2-3 times that of the UK, and yet everyone was asking me so proudly if I felt lucky to be living in Denmark. Then there is the much vaunted Danish Medical System. Again according to Danes `the best in the world`. But that's just the thing, it wasn't/isn't and the standards are dropping continually, whilst the costs of prescription medicine and Dental care, even on the back of this `public health service` are out of control.
As a former London Police Officer, I was often asked to give lectures at Odense University, on matters relating to crime etc. Over the next few years, I gave dozens of these presentations, and was shocked at how unquestioning and compliant young Danish people were. They were immune even to provocation, which I used on several occasions in order to get a response, but usually to no avail. I was able to attend several classes over this period, and was appalled and shocked at the levels of Marxist/Feminist views being foisted on the young people. The history of their country prior to the end of WWII is just not taught at all, and very few Danes have any grasp of their country's past. Almost all the teachers were female (of a sort), and the classes themselves were overwhelmingly populated by girls. Almost every lecture I attended was weighted heavily towards a `European` future, and very few were not heavily biased in that direction. And yet, pardoxically, the `Denmark is the best country in the world, with the best education system, best medical system, best social system, best economy, ad nauseum was also a constant theme. This is the same message transmitted through every media outlet, and Danes take love of flag to a new height, even decorating Xmas trees and birthday cakes with that national banner. This apparent contradiction, caused me great confusion at the time, but no longer. Today, I understand.
This acceptance/compliance extended into society in general, where complaints against the system of any kind were in very short supply, or non existent to be truthful. With every new law, or government inspired price increase or tax hike, would come the standard response "there's nothing you can do about" or in Danish, "Saadan er Danmark", which literally means, "that's how it is in Denmark".
Denmark is the country of rules. There are rules for everything here. Even the rules seem to have rules, and the people have an annoying way of interfering in each others lives to the point of self regulation. One of the world's smallest countries has one of the `biggest` governments, and `The State` is by far the biggest employer here, so people depend upon it for their livelihood.
The ID Card was introduced to Denmark back in the 1970's. Every Dane, or foreign resident here has a `personal number` and unlike the `National Insurance` number in the US or UK, it must be quoted in order to do almost everything. One cannot get a bank account, travel, do business of any kind, learn to drive, drive, be educated etc etc. without it. It masquerades as a health insurance card, but has a far more all encompassing purpose. It is also backed up by a national register data base. The coming Biometric model will simply be accepted as an `improvement` and or progress.
Conformity in all things is the way of life here. People dress the same, cut their hair the same, eat the same, do the same, like the same, say exactly the same phrases, in fact, modern Danish is more a language of phraseology than anything else (Newspeak ?). They like the same food (and will serve the same `fayre` to guests every time, no matter which Danish home one visits). An evening out at a Danish household, could/can be scripted beforehand, from start to end.
Danish women and girls have with a few exceptions, become almost androgynous in appearance, and most are fiercely feminist in their views, actions and manners. Danish men are for the most part emasculated. Danes love their country, but will not fight for it.
Danes loathe all things foreign, and resist all such influences, to the point where their shops have very little on the shelves, and what there is is rediculously expensive, and yet, they absolutely fail to recognise or resist the looming shadow of the European Superstate, still believing it to be something they can just walk away from when they have had enough.
Danes rarely smile, are very reserved to the point of being rude, and yet, a recent (ish) opinion poll carried out throughout the EU showed them to be the most content of Europe's people. It was this that really got my juices flowing. Danes had been telling me for nearly eight years that `they had it so good`. But they didn't. Not at all. They had it good like a bird in a cage has it good.
I had the feeling even back then that if one made too many comments of an unfavourable `Anti Denmark`nature, then just maybe my residiency might be revoked, or I might come into contact with the `State Authorities`, (Danes are encouraged to `Spy` on each other and do so with gusto). Of course no such thing occured, but the feeling was there. Such is the insideous nature of Danish society, which heralds `Free speech` as an inalienable right (As in the Mohammad Drawings) and yet damns that same `free Speech` to foreigners or dissenters
By the end of the 1990's, I had begun to understand the extent to which the Danish population had been completely indoctrinated. Any form of criticism was fiercly resented. Nobody ever complained about anything of an official nature. Nearly everybody I knew, or those I saw speaking on TV seemed to believe that the Danish Government wished only good things for them. That the ever burgeoning tax burden was necessary, even a good thing. We are speaking of an income tax of on average 50% plus a sales tax of 25%. This level of taxation is across the board, and includes tax on cars, houses, food, and well, everything you can imagine could be taxed is taxed and then some. And all prices on all things rise on 31st January every year, without fail. This is just understood and accepted without comment by the majority of the people. "Saadan er Danmark".
When my wife and I tried to explain to people that in the UK, we paid a fraction of the Danish tax burden, and still managed at least a parity in social welfare, and medical care, they wouldn't believe it. When we told them that the food in DK was of an inferior quality, with no variety and rediculously priced. They again wouldn't hear of it. I just could not be.
We travelled to the US three times between 1996 and 2001 spending a total of fourteen weeks there and travelling some six thousand miles. Those three `trips` were milestones in my life, and I was bursting with tales of our adventures, but upon returning to DK, not one Danish friend or family member showed any interest whatsoever in our stories. It was as if we had never been away. The only people who were at all interested were our `international` contacts.
Now, I might be rambling at this point, but what I am trying to depict here is a society quite unlike anywhere else, even by European standards, Denmark is different. If it isn't Danish or Denmark, then they cannot contemplate it at all.
I felt totally disaffected with the country, and at that time, even with no knowledge whatsoever of any `Global Conspiracy`, would say things to friends such as; " These are not people, they're like `Body Snatchers`", or "There must be something in the water here", and even "It's in the food they eat". Little did I understand how close to the truth I was.
Then I started to put the pieces together; the inertia of the youth, the conformity of it's citizens. The `blind` obedience of the populace. The apparent contentment being voiced, which was in obvious conflict with the miserable demeanour of Danish people. The narrow, insulated `bubble` view of the world around them. The conditioned state of national denial, refusing to admit even the possibility that some place else might be in some way better. And the absolute kicker; the Danish obsession with work.
It is the only thing they talk about. To work is everything, and if one is not in work, then one is a member of a trade union, which will find some way of ensuring that one has little or no spare time to think and consider life, and what is happening all around.
In 2003, I read Sen. Pat Buchannan's book, `The Death Of The West`. This work set me on the path to discovery, and although I have moved a little beyond it, the facts and ideas expressed by the author were in many cases highly relevant to my experiences in Denmark. But the point is this; on page 77, Sen. Buchanan at the top of the page makes this quote, "The perfect totalitarian state, is one where the all powerful political bosses, and their army of managers, control a population of slaves, who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude". This is from Aldous Huxleys nightmare novel `Brave New World`, and it describes Danes and Denmark almost to a tee.
I spoke to my wife about this, and she told me that she had read the book. That in fact it was required reading at `Upper level` schooling. You see Ted, that is it. Denmark is `Brave New World`. I set about reading `the work`, and it chilled me to see all the parallels with Danish Society.
They have introduced so much of it here. The mindless compliance and conformity, the androgyny, the totally passive and non agitative demeanour. The all pervading Social State. The Brain washing and categorisng of students within the education or rather, `State indoctrination` program`. The resorting to the use of `Psycho Analysis` for any form of `anti social` behaviour, which can be nothing more than daring to publicly criticise the state, or asking awkward questions, or young males playing around in classrooms. The prescription of `happy pills` to supposedly depressed people or in other words, anyone who begins to see what it is that surrounds them. The Mass Media, State Education, State Health Service and all the other avenues of public information tell the same story incessantly. Denmark is the best country, Danes are the best at everything. All things Danish, are better than those which are non Danish. It has created a people so `dumbed down`, so afraid, so passive, so paradoxically proud yet obviously suffering from a deep seated inferiority complex. Arrogant, yet totally lacking in self confidence. Put another way, this is one `mucked up place`.
No need of `Tasers`, or heavy handed Police tactics here. Not much evidence of surveillance cameras either. If the government says inject your kids with this or that drug, Danes will do it because the government told them to. When the time comes to be microchipped, the State will tell them it's for the best and they will do it without question. Simply without question.
Joseph Goebbels said, " Propaganda must be able to be understood by even the most stupid members of society. Then you can make people believe that paradise is hell, and hell is paradise".
Denmark is not quite `hell`, but it's on it's way there. Yesterday, another `BS` news report told Danish people than the reason the cost of food had risen so much was because of problems in Australia and Nigeria. Well then, that's okay then isn't it. We just have to suck it up, there's nothing we can do about it`. The State has explained why we now pay almost double what most people are paying in the rest of Europe for food, Electricity.oil, clothing, transport, tax etc. etc.
The fools just accept it. Nobody asks "What has Australia and Nigeria got to do with a 25% price rise in the cost of Danish Dairy Products, Bacon, Meats, Bread and the spectrum of food stuffs produced in Denmark" ? They are told it's down to a recession, or inflation, or some other (bogus) cyclical economic phenomenon. But the point is, nobody asks any questions. They are simply `content in their servitude`.
Recently, the Danish Prime Minister signed the EU Reform Treaty. Then without bursting into fits of laughter told the Danish people that there would be no referendum on this `Treaty` as it did not affect Danish sovereignty. This is clearly a `bare faced` lie, as once ratified, it will remove Denmarks ablity to decide it's own economy, justice system, home affairs, defence and a whole lot more.
In other words, Denmark will be a nation no more, except in the daydreams of it's prozac popping citizenry. When I have tried to explain this to people here, they say things like "No, our Prime Minister would never do that. He would never sign such a document". Them when told he already has, I get, "Ah well, we can always withdraw later if it doesn't work out".
But that's just the point, they won't be able to. Short of declaring armed resistance, and that's just not the Danish way. To a Dane, raising one's tone a little above whisper level is considered displaying anger. The `Feminazi's` here have done their job very well.
It is my opinion that the EU is running two `Test Models` side by side. Model one is the UK `1984` type, which is intended for those member states whose populations are more prone to resistance, and Model two, the `Brave New World` type, as demonstrated here in DK, for smaller, less rebellious peoples.
I have probably not done this topic justice, but if I have introduced you to what is happening here, that will be my work done. Denmark, is like nowhere else, and Danes are unlike anyone else, except perhaps the Swedes and Norwegians, who from what others have said, are undergoing similar programming.
**
Prior to moving to Denmark back in 1996, Philip had spent 15 years as Police Officer in London and before that 6 years in the military.
The Bikini vs. Burka
By Henry Makow Ph.D.
On my wall, I have a picture of a Muslim woman shrouded in a burka. Beside it is a picture of an American beauty contestant, wearing nothing but a bikini.
One woman is totally hidden from the public; the other is totally exposed. These two extremes say a great deal about the clash of so-called "civilizations."
The role of woman is at the heart of any culture. Apart from stealing Arab oil, the impending war in the Middle East is about stripping Arabs of their religion and culture, exchanging the burka for a bikini.
I am not an expert on the condition of Muslim women and I love feminine beauty too much to advocate the burka here. But I am defending some of the values that the burka represents for me.
For me, the burka represents a woman's consecration to her husband and family. Only they see her.
It affirms the privacy, exclusivity and importance of the domestic sphere.
The Muslim woman's focus is her home, the "nest" where her children are born and reared. She is the "home" maker, the taproot that sustains the spiritual life of the family, nurturing and training her children, providing refuge and support to her husband.
In contrast, the bikinied American beauty queen struts practically naked in front of millions on TV. A feminist, she belongs to herself. In practice, paradoxically, she is public property. She belongs to no one and everyone. She shops her body to the highest bidder. She is auctioning herself all of the time.
In America, the cultural measure of a woman's value is her sex appeal. (As this asset depreciates quickly, she is neurotically obsessed with appearance and plagued by weight problems.) 
As an adolescent, her role model is Britney Spears, a singer whose act approximates a strip tease. From Britney, she learns that she will be loved only if she gives sex. Thus, she learns to "hook up" rather than to demand patient courtship and true love. As a result, dozens of males know her before her husband does. She loses her innocence, which is a part of her charm. She becomes hardened and calculating. Unable to love, she is unfit to receive her husband's seed.
The feminine personality is founded on the emotional relationship between mother and baby. It is based on nurturing and self-sacrifice. Masculine nature is founded on the relationship between hunter and prey. It is based on aggression and reason.
Feminism teaches woman that feminine nature has resulted in "oppression" and that she should convert to male behavior instead. The result: a confused and aggressive woman with a large chip on her shoulder, unfit to become a wife or mother.
This, of course, is the goal of the social engineers at the NWO: undermine sexual identity and destroy the family, create social and personal dysfunction, and reduce population. In the "brave new world," women are not supposed to be "nest" makers, or progenitors of the race. They are meant to be neutered autonomous creatures that indulge in sex for physical pleasure, not for love or procreation.
At his press conference on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld said that Iranian women and youth were restive under the rule of the Mullahs. He implied that the US would soon liberate them. To Britney Spears? To low-rise "see-my-thong" pants? To the mutual masturbation that passes for sexuality in America?
Parenthood is the pinnacle of human development. It is the stage when we finally graduate from self-indulgence and become God's surrogates: creating and nurturing new life. The New World Order does not want us to reach this level of maturity. Pornography is the substitute for marriage. We are to remain stunted: single, sex-starved and self-obsessed.
We are not meant to have a permanent "private" life. We are to remain lonely and isolated, dependent on consumer products for our identity, in a state of perpetual courtship. 
This is especially destructive for woman. Her sexual attraction is a function of her fertility. As fertility declines, so does her sex appeal. If a woman devotes her prime years to becoming "independent," she is not likely to find a permanent mate.
Her long-term personal fulfillment and happiness lies in making marriage and family her first priority.
Feminism is another cruel New World Order hoax that has debauched American women and despoiled Western civilization. It has ruined millions of lives and represents a lethal threat to Islam.
I am not advocating the burka but rather some of the values that it represents, specifically a woman's consecration to her future husband and family, and the modesty and dignity this entails.
The burka and the bikini represent two extremes. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Does Monogamy Spell Monotony?
by Henry Makow
Henry Makow, Ph.D. the inventor of the board game Scruples
"Monogamy" is not a real game. It is a clever satirical statement that illustrates the essential difference between homo and hetero-sexuality: monogamy.
Some homosexuals are monogamous and plenty of heterosexuals are promiscuous.
I am using the term "homosexual" to describe what is happening to heterosexual society due to confusion over sexual identity caused by feminism. As a result, people can't form successful marriages and therefore can't be monogamous.
Heterosexuality is about forming a stable monogamous relationship with someone of the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation, ie. family. For some time, heterosexual values have been under attack by homosexual and feminist values illustrated by this satirical game.
Monogamy, [i.e. marriage] is boring, the parody implies. "The Classic Game of Frustration based on the popular stable relationship of the same name." "Go to bed early." "Visit the in-laws." "Potter around the garden." "Go to IKEA."
In fact studies show married people have much more sex than single people, and are much more secure and happy. It stands to reason. You feel the passion. What's easier? Going out to find someone, risking AIDS and STD's and rejection, or making love with the person who loves you ?
HETERO-HOMOS
Young heterosexual singles now emulate the dominant homosexual pattern. They go to gatherings, "hook up" with relative strangers and have impersonal sex. They have become "hetero-homos."
They have more "variety" but is that what they really seek? I maintain they want what monogamy offers: security, trust and intimacy. This bond is the only thing that satisfies a craving for love which at bottom is not sexual, but spiritual.
Promiscuity is the self-defeating protest of people who can't form a permanent bond because of confusion over their sexual identity.
As my readers know, I believe masculinity is defined by power; femininity by love. Men want power. Women want love. Marriage (or monogamy) is based on the exchange of the two: a woman entrusts her power to a man in exchange for his power expressed as love. This is how two people become one. This is the basis of intimacy and trust. Naturally a woman cannot trust a man without a courtship.
Feminism causes sexual confusion by making women demand "equality" and "independence" effectively neutering both sexes and making marriage less viable.
The sex act symbolizes a woman's surrender of power in return for love and protection. This surrender requires permanence, especially if there are children. The married male and female is the best configuration for raising children because of the natural division of skills. Heterosexual children also need role models.
The sex act enacts the ritual of creation: a woman accepts a man's seed, which represents his spirit. It is an act of love. How did impersonal sex, so humanly degrading, become the norm? 
The short answer is that Western culture is secretly guided by central bankers who belong to a Satanic homosexual cult. It seeks to control people by erasing gender roles and eliminating the nuclear family. It seeks to divorce sex from love, marriage and procreation; and enshrine sex as a religion. It also seeks to reduce population. This cult, the Illuminati, is behind Communism and the New World Order (EU.NAU.)
We see its hidden hand in the promotion of homosexuality (i.e. gender confusion) in the name of "tolerance." Students are being suspended for voicing opposition to homosexuality or for refusing to participate in homosexual conditioning.
We see its hand in "Playboy" magazine which taught a generation of young men to see women as sex objects and marriage and family as a burden. We see it in feminism which encourage women to pursue career and casual sex instead of marriage and family.
We see its hand in the prevalence of pornography. There are four million pornographic sites on the Internet showing nearly identical naked images. Talk about monotony.
We see its hand in the common tendency to choose mates on the basis of sex appeal. Sex is 10% of married life. Shouldn't we choose a mate for the other 90%?
Isn't "variety" an illusion anyway? The best qualities of men and women are pretty universal. We need to find just one person who exhibits some of them.
CONCLUSION
I've said these things before but heterosexuals need to reaffirm their identity. We are under relentless psychological attack from elite media & social engineers who want to undermine the basic source of social stability- marriage/family.
Ideally, heterosexuality is about mating for life and raising children who represent the best we have to offer the world. It represents the continuity of family down through the generations. For this we need the stability that comes from monogamy.
They make monogamy seem "uncool" but there's nothing boring about a life devoted to something higher than sex.
Democratic Fantasies: Symbols, Slogans & Spin
By Tibor S. Friedman
Americans surround themselves with symbols that represent who they think they are or want to be. Symbols and slogans conveniently defer introspection and curiosity.
True patriotism and love of country requires we go beyond putting Support Your Troops magnets or flags on our cars. The Great American experiment in democracy is in crisis and immediate jeopardy. The most secretive administration ever has installed a repressive security apparatus paving the way for dictatorship and martial law awaiting an 'event' to trigger the trap set for us. Unless we become active participants and educate ourselves about the crisis that is rapidly enveloping us the Great Experiment will end.
Americans aren't stupid but uninformed of what is really happening in their country and the world because of the dumbed down content and propaganda they consume in the mainstream media (MSM) and the public educational system. Recent studies have declared that high school graduates are unable to write a coherent sentence; schools teach information and expect students to retain and regurgitate data, not connect them. This is by design; the elite do not want too many critical thinkers in a diminished economy.
Information is the currency of the realm. The Internet today offers our best hope for our education and research, at least until the Elite figure out how to replace it with the restricted and establishment controlled Internet 2 currently being developed.
Information is managed and edited in the MSM and propaganda is an acceptable tool long used in media and education. Spin is the method of the day used to confuse and deflect. The Infotainment Industry?MSM and Hollywood combined?share financial, operational and propaganda interests. A recent example is the TV docudrama Oil Storm on Fox TV on June 5 that served the goals of putting fear into Americans about losing their oil lifeline and their American way of life and to gather support for the 21st Century Oil Wars by calling them the War on Terror, which is phony and being used by the psychopaths to divide us and reduce our numbers. The Bush administration is supported by Fox (aka GOP TV) owner Rupert Murdoch. Similarly, other media events usually have some ulterior motive to influence the public in some way.
For us to fully appreciate our current crisis we have to review our media history.
Walter Lippmann, the prominent journalist in the 1920s, said that the public must be put in its place. He believed, as did Woodrow Wilson and the Elite, that the responsible men (Elite) should manage the 'common interests' and 'live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,' the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. The only function the 'herd' has was to trample periodically in support of one or another element of the leadership class in an election.
As the 'herd' in the last century became more enlightened ever more sophisticated mechanisms for controlling information and perceptions have developed. The manufacture of consent, a term created by Edward Bernays, the father of the Public Relations industry, author of Propaganda and coincidentally Sigmund Freud's nephew, has become an art form and required of journalists.
Bernays says: "Those who manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons. . . as civilization has become more complex. . . . the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented. . . . I must lead the people. Am I not their servant?
"The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes."
Expanding on this understanding about the MSM and the Public Relations industry (the propaganda machine) we can include gatekeepers, or sources considered to be on the left (so-called liberals), who are charged with making sure that dissent and alternative views do not stray too far off the reservation of Elite acceptance.
Excluded topics include the 9/11 Truth Movement, the New World Order, the City Of London financial center, chemtrails, the Federal Reserve, Inc., etc. It is safe to assume that your letters to the editor are monitored and pre-selected prior to printing. I suspect that some letters and articles in The New York Times (as elsewhere) are fictitious, manufactured and planted, like the Judith Miller articles on WMDs (with con man Chalabi as her source) in the NYT prior to the current Iraq War that encouraged the congressional vote to go to war. MSM always supports and benefits from war. CNN's Aaron Brown declared that now that we are at war we have to get behind the government and the troops disregarding CNN's obvious cheerleading efforts to build support before the war.
My purpose of this article is to address the obvious fantasies about our democracy and the so-called free press (MSM) and their failure to provide Americans with real information for making educated decisions; we are considered the least informed population in the world. The MSM and most gatekeepers are believed to be infiltrated with CIA personnel and work explicitly for the Elites in power, in corporations, government and banking and serve to protect their interests in the US and abroad. My ultimate purpose is to compel Americans to wake up and begin to explore what is going on and to become engaged in their lives and their children's futures.
It is not my intent here to go into all the aspects that constitute the over arching plan (conspiracy, some would say) to create a One (New) World (Order) Government?a generational and incremental implementation process that, now in its final stages, presently threatens the world with the 21st Century Oil Wars and the destruction of what little sovereignty is left in America and elsewhere (observe this process in the EU).
Neo-liberalism / Globalism (imperialism disguised as democracy and free trade) are names used to describe the acquisition and consolidation of ever greater wealth, natural resources, total political power and control over others and are the motivational forces which drive the decisions by the international Elite. They control the transnational corporations, the 200-plus think tanks (the Council On Foreign Relations being foremost in the US) which exist to facilitate their goals, the foundations (Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, etc), the World Bank, IMF, WTO, the Federal Reserve (a private corporation never audited and with no congressional oversight); this influence is pervasive and can only be truly appreciated as one researches the various issues.
Themes and Trends
The recent Online Journal report on Bilderberg 2005 confirms the intent and complicity of our leaders and the transnational corporations and banking interests they serve to create a One World Government using the UN, or similar institution, and to further diminish America economically and to ultimately abdicate US sovereignty and the Constitution to a Regional and subsequent World Power while enriching themselves and accumulating power in the process.
The Congress, MSM (including CPB, NPR and PBS), all academic and other Institutions, with rare and generally marginalized, individuals as exceptions, are in general alignment with this 'conspiracy.' This diverse involvement is reflected in the roster of the 4,000 or so members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group described as, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessman, politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, the power elite that unilaterally determines US foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged - and obvious subversive?foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power (profits) for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London (one of the center of power for the elite), founded its American wing, the CFR, funded by the Rockefellers, in 1921. The RIIA's patron is the Queen of England.
CNN has recently been using CFR 'spokespeople' to get Americans to accept them as 'mainstream' and also uses other conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings and CATO Institutes to disseminate their views designed to shape American perceptions and beliefs.
Think tanks provide the two supposedly oppositional political parties with intellectual material and propaganda. Issues are used as smokescreens and for public distraction and confusion while greater and more relevant issues are ignored or downplayed. What we witness in MSM is the allowed official version of reality?much of it staged theatre. It is apparent as one examines (CFR, TC, Bilderberg member) Bill Clinton's record (presiding over NAFTA, media consolidation, FDA approval of GMO going into the world's food supply via Monsanto, laid the foundations for the USA PATRIOT Act, passed welfare 'reform' etc.) and associations that he is as much (if not more so) a Globalist / New World Order operative as George Bush is. Both parties serve the same masters as one can see from the Bilderberg attendance list.
John Edwards auditioned at the annual Bilderberg meeting in 2004; apparently the elite chose to stay the course with George Bush. One cannot become president of the US without the Elites' explicit approval. The election is a formality and exercise for the benefit of creating the illusion of an ongoing democracy. The 'free speech zone' areas created by both parties in 2004 were their version of democracy. The MSM (already) is focusing on the battle for the White House 2008, creating mythologies of opposing individuals and distracting the public with a hope for change that never comes?as both parties work towards the creation of a New World Order with the United States as a much reduced power, economically and militarily. Remember that politicians are the fronts for (or part of) the Elites and as such share in their fortunes and power. One need only look at the Bush dynasty and their involvement in and creation of their fortunes and power by the Military / Industrial / Intelligence Complex. War is profitable.
Henry Kissinger (perennial Bilderberg, Trilateral, CFR member) received knighthood from the Queen of England in 1995 for his lifelong devoted service to the Crown; after years of trying to retake the American colonies the City of London decided to infiltrate through the CFR and other ways to reclaim their perceived influence over their new addition to the Empire; and so it appears it has. Their conspiracy has become our fact. 
Conspiracy theories are a convenient 'slide' term used by MSM and others to short circuit further inquiry into a matter. The greatest conspiracy is the one created by this concept that keeps people from being inquisitive and concerned about the health and direction of their country.
As noted, only a small group of Elites know the full scope of their agenda while those outside are given information on a need to know basis and as loyalty and subservience is developed move closer to the center of affluence and control. A corporation is a perfect example of this where one can succeed and move up the hierarchy as long as one fulfills the needs of the corporation but if one challenges the system, then you could be ejected and possibly blacklisted from entry into other corporations. In this way, people buy into the system and by being invested in it are reluctant to jeopardize their position and wealth. Hierarchy assures compliance, promotions or corrective actions if needed. America is a transnational corporation (an Enron) disguised as a government; a form described as totalitarian corporatism.
What can you do?
As Catherine Austin Fitts and others suggest, voting, writing to your representatives or editors has limited, if any effect, but continue letting them know what you think. The system is generally rigged with gatekeepers to marginalize any dissent or resistance.
The only practical options open are to divert our financial and personal support for the tapeworm (the system) by withdrawing our attention from TV (shut it off) and its mind control and our money out of large multinational banks and corporations that depend on our money to survive, and putting it into local banks and businesses; cut up all your credit cards. Support local efforts to develop sustainable economies and environmental initiatives; get to know your neighbors and share what you know.
Ultimately, the tapeworm will have only itself to devour.
Stop supporting the so-called two-party system that is really two groups belonging to the same business party that share the One World Government agenda. The continuity of bipartisan corruption clearly shows that, with rare exceptions like Reps Cynthia McKinney and Ron Paul, their allegiance is to the international elite and not to the American people.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Mona Lisa Found
Reuters
German academics believe they have solved the centuries-old mystery behind the identity of the "Mona Lisa" in Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait.
Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the sixteenth-century painting.
But art historians have often wondered whether the smiling woman may actually have been da Vinci's lover, his mother or the artist himself.
Now experts at the Heidelberg University library say dated notes scribbled in the margins of a book by its owner in October 1503 confirm once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for one of the most famous portraits in the world.
"All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Armin Schlechter," a manuscript expert, the library said in a statement on Monday.
Until then, only "scant evidence" from sixteenth-century documents had been available. "This left lots of room for interpretation and there were many different identities put forward," the library said.
The notes were made by a Florentine city official Agostino Vespucci, an acquaintance of the artist, in a collection of letters by the Roman orator Cicero.
The comments compare Leonardo to the ancient Greek artist Apelles and say he was working on three paintings at the time, one of them a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.
Art experts, who have already dated the painting to this time, say the Heidelberg discovery is a breakthrough and the earliest mention linking the merchant's wife to the portrait.
"There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is another woman," Leipzig University art historian Frank Zoellner told German radio. "One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary, had we known."
The woman was first linked to the painting in around 1550 by Italian official Giorgio Vasari, the library said, but added there had been doubts about Vasari's reliability and had made the comments five decades after the portrait had been painted.
The Heidelberg notes were actually discovered over two years ago in the library by Schlechter, a spokeswoman said.
Although the findings had been printed in the library's public catalogue they had not been widely publicized and had been received little attention until a German broadcaster decided to do some recording at the library, she said.
The painting, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, is also known as "La Gioconda" meaning the happy or joyful woman in Italian, a title which also suggests the woman's married name.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Who Killed Bhutto and Why?
Stephen Lendman
Bhutto's now dead, shot in the back of the head by one or more assassins at close range, plus the effects of a suicide bombing that killed two dozen or more and wounded many others tightly packed around her. It happened in Rawalpindi, "no ordinary city" as Michel Chossudovsky explains. It's the home of Pakistan's military, its CIA-linked ISI, and is the country's de facto seat of power.
Chossudovsky adds: "Ironically Bhutto was assassinated in an urban area tightly controlled and guarded by the military police and the country's elite forces."
Rawalpindi and the country's capital, Islamabad, are sister cities, nine miles apart. They swarm with intelligence operatives including from CIA, and Chussodovsky stresses that Bhutto's assassination "was (no) haphazard event." Blaming Al-Queda misses the point, but that's how these schemes work. They're also clearer when convincing video is broadcast as UK's Channel 4 did on December 30. It debunked the official story and exposed Musharraf as a liar - that Bhutto died from a fractured skull "when she was thrown by the force of the (explosion's) shock wave (and) one of the levers of (her car's) sunroof hit her."
The video contradicts this. It shows a clean-shaven man in sunglasses watching close by with a concealed gun and the suspected suicide bomber behind him dressed in white. The gunman then approaches Bhutto's car and at point blank range fires three shots. Immediately after, the suicide bomber detonates his device, killing and wounding dozens nearby.
The question then is - not who killed her, but who ordered her killed and who profits from it? Musharraf quickly named the usual suspect - Al-Queda but ignored what William Engdahl observed in his January 4 Global Research article called "Bhutto's Assassination: Who Gains?" He notes how well protected political leaders are so it's no simple task killing them. "It requires agencies of professional intelligence training to insure the job is done" right, and no one can reveal who ordered it or the motive.
Engdahl also states that naming Al-Queda serves Musharraf and Washington. It increases public fear, revs up the "war on terror," and provides justification for it to continue. It also reinforces the Al-Queda myth as well as "enemy number one" bin Laden, and ignores the evidence that the CIA created both in the 1980s for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It's just as silent on the possibility bin Laden is dead, killed (as Bhutto told David Frost last fall) by Omar Sheikh whom the London Sunday Times called "no ordinary terrorist but a man who has connections that reach high into Pakistan's military and intelligence elite and into the innermost circles" of bin Laden and Al-Queda.
If true, a dead bin Laden disrupts Washington's national security doctrine that needs enemies to scare the public, eliminates "enemy number one" as the main one, and exposes strategically released bin Laden tapes as made-in-Washington frauds. Today, we're told that bin Laden-led Islamic terrorists endanger the West, but at the same time we use them for imperial gain as we did against the Soviets, in the Balkans and now do in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere. If Al-Queda operatives killed Bhutto, it means Pakistan's ISI and CIA were involved, and what's more likely than that. Forget a lone gunman theory, a lose cannon terrorist or a sole anti-Bhutto assassin. Consider "Cui bono," examine the evidence, and it points to Washington and Islamabad.
Today in Pakistan, intrigue abounds, and the country is destabilized as Michel Chossudovsky observes in his December 30 Global Research article called "The Destabilization of Pakistan." Assassinating Bhutto contributes to it, and Chossudovsky sees a US-sponsored "regime change" ahead. Musharraf is so weak and discredited "continuity under military rule is no long the main thrust of US foreign policy." Musharraf's regime "cannot prevail," and Washington's scheme is "to actively promote the political fragmentation and balkanization of Pakistan as a nation."
From it, a new political leadership will emerge that will be "compliant," have "no commitment to (Pakistan's) national interest," and will be subservient to "US imperial interests, while concurrently....weakening....the central government (and fracturing) Pakistan's fragile federal structure."
It makes perfect sense as part of Washington's broader Middle East-Central Asia agenda. Pakistan is a key frontline state, a "geopolitical hub," with a central role to play in the "Global War on Terrorism." It includes "balkanizing" the country Yugoslavia-style the way it's planned for Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran - a simple divide and conquer strategy. Chossudovsky adds: "Continuity, characterized by the dominant role of the Pakistani military and intelligence (that worked up to now) has been scrapped in favor of political breakup and balkanization." The scheme is to foment "social, ethnic and factional divisions and political fragmentation, including the territorial breakup" of the country.
It's a common US strategy with covert intelligence support, and consider The New York Times article on January 6 called "US Considers New Covert Push Within Pakistan" to exploit Bhutto's death. It states that senior national security advisers (including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen) may "expand the authority of the CIA and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan" against Al-Queda and the Taliban to counteract their efforts and "destabilize the Pakistani government."
The article states that Musharraf and the military are on board, gives the usual boiler plate reasons, but omits what's really at stake even as it admits Musharraf is unpopular and a US intervention could "prompt a powerful popular backlash against" both countries.
Chussodovsky fills in the blanks and explains that US strategy aims to trigger "ethnic and religious strife," abet and finance "secessionist movements while also weakening" Musharraf's government. "The broader objective is to fracture the Nation State....redraw the borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan" and replace Musharraf in the process. He's unpopular, damaged goods and has to go.
Bhutto was an unwitting part of the scheme but not the way she planned. She thought Washington needed here, and she was right - not as Prime Minister but as a martyr to destabilize the country and break it up if the plan works. It may as internal secessionist elements are strong, especially in energy rich (mostly gas) Balochistan province, and "indications" are they're supported by "Britain and the US." The idea is a "Greater Balochistan" by integrating Baloch areas with those in Iran and southern Afghanistan.
Chossudovsky explains that it was not "accidental that the 2005 National Intelligence Council-CIA report predicted a 'Yugoslav-like fate' for Pakistan" through internally and externally manufactured "economic mismanagment." Remember also that the country split before in 1971 when East Pakistan became Bangladesh following months of civil war and against India that took a million or more lives. Pakistanis may face that prospect again as US plans unfold.
Future Outlook Remains Uncertain
Big questions remain, and key ones are will breakup plans work, who'll emerge with enough popular support to lead it, and will the public go along. They've got no incentive to do it once anger over Bhutto's death subsides, and recent polling data show overwhelming public opposition to US or other foreign intervention that's very much part of the scheme. In the end, their views don't count, and it may happen anyway through political intrigue and Washington-led brute force.
Reports prior to Bhutto's assassination point that way. They suggest US Special and other forces already operate in Pakistan, and head of US Special Operations Command, Admiral Eric Olson, arranged with Musharraf and Pakistan's military last summer and fall to substantially increase their numbers early this year. Involved as well is what The New York Times reported in November that the "US Hopes to Use Pakistani Tribes Against Al Queda" in the country's "frontier areas."
The scheme is similar to the effort in Iraq's al-Anbar province with bribes and weapons to seal a deal apparently now finalized. US Central Command Commander Admiral William Fallon alluded to it in a recent Voice of America interview by saying we're ready to provide "training, assistance and mentoring based on our experience with insurgencies," but he left out the bribing part that's part of these deals.
Where this will lead is speculation, but consider a feature Wall Street Journal January 8 article. It's headlined "Bhutto Killing Roils Province, Spurring Calls to Quit Pakistan" and calls Bhutto's native Sindh province (second largest of Pakistan's four provinces) the "Latest Fault Line In a Fractured Country; Like Occupied Territory."
Mourners filed past Bhutto's grave chanting "We don't want Pakistan," and in the wake of her death "Sindh has been swept by nationalist rage." Many in the province are "calling for outright independence," and support for separation has grown among rank and file PPP members. There's even talk of an "armed insurgency" as anger is directed against neighboring Punjab, the largest province, and home of the military, ISI and government.
The Journal quotes Qadir Magsi, head of the nationalist Sindh Taraqi Passand movement saying...."Bhutto was the last hope (for unity). Now this Pakistan must be broken up." The article continues saying what's happening in Sindh is already in play in the Northwest Frontier province where central government authority withered in recent years. In addition, Pakistan's Army has been embroiled in Baluchistan's insurgency for the past few years adding to overall instability. The theme of the Journal article is that calls for unity are falling on deaf ears, and one PPP veteran sums it up: "What we need is separation."
That suits Bush administration officials fine, they're likely stoking it, and one thing is clear. US forces are in the region to stay, and Washington under any administration (Democrat or Republican) intends to dominate this vital part of the world with its vast energy reserves. The strategy appears similar to the divide and conquer one in Yugoslavia. There it worked, but the Middle East and Central Asia aren't so simple. Stay tuned as events will likely accelerate, the media will highlight them, and it looks like stepped up conflict (and its fallout) is part of the plan.
**
Michel Chossudovsky is a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa.
Chossudovsky has taught as visiting professor at academic institutions in Western Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia, has acted as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has worked as a consultant for international organizations including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the African Development Bank, the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (AIEDEP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
Blair Kicks Off Campaign to Become EU President
The Observer, London
Tony Blair launched his campaign to become the first fully-fledged President of the European Union yesterday by describing the notion of left- and right-wing politics as redundant.
With France preparing to oversee the appointment process, Blair set out his vision of modern European democracy at a meeting of the French governing conservative party by also claiming that EU countries could achieve far more by working together than acting in isolation.
'Europe is not a question of left or right, but a question of the future or the past, of strength or weakness,' said the former British Prime Minister, speaking in French.
In his most important speech since leaving Downing Street last June, addressing 2,000 supporters of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Blair said globalisation was eradicating traditional party lines and class distinctions and rendering old political remedies obsolete. 'It's about today versus yesterday. Less about politics and more about a state of mind; open as opposed to closed,' he said.
'Terrorism, security, immigration, organised crime, energy, the environment, science, biotechnology and higher education. In all these areas, and others, we are much stronger and able to deliver what our citizens expect from us as individual nations if we are part of a strong and united Europe,' he added before supporters of Sarkozy's Union Pour Un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) party. Blair, a close ally of Sarkozy who advised the French politician during his rise to power, is strongly backed by the French President to become President of the EU Council of Ministers in January next year, a position he has previously said he was not interested in.
Sarkozy, 52, who appeared at the Palais des Sports rally without his 40-year-old girlfriend, Carla Bruni, offered unequivocal backing for Blair yesterday, describing him as an ideal candidate to run Europe. 'He is intelligent, he is brave and he is a friend. We need him in Europe. How can we govern a continent of 450 million people if the President changes every six months and has to run his own country at the same time? I want a President chosen from the top - not a compromise candidate - who will serve for two-and-a-half years,' added Sarkozy.
A UMP party grandee, Jean-Pierre Rafarin, wrote in yesterday's Le Monde newspaper that Blair's experience in Europe positioned him well for the post. The position of President of the European Council - which meets at head-of-state and government level, usually four times a year - is due to be created by the 27-nation grouping in the second half of 2008, when France will chair EU ministerial meetings.
At the end of this month, Blair will continue his campaign to win the leadership of Europe when he addresses a conference at the Sorbonne of Les Progressistes, a breakaway socialist party group which has joined Sarkozy's government. Blair is also due to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this month.
After Blair's speech, Sarkozy took the former Prime Minister for lunch at the Hotel Bristol near the Elysee Palace. Despite support from Sarkozy - who is the architect of the mini-treaty for a European constitution - Blair is an outsider for the EU job.
His support for the war in Iraq and Britain's reluctance to join the euro and other core projects is likely to count against him when EU leaders vote for their president later this year.
*****
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Monday, January 14, 2008
Edouard Balladur: US of EU
The First Post
For the first time in several hundred years the West is on the losing side of history. This is the thesis of Edouard Balladur, the former French Prime Minister who in a recent essay argues that "history is starting to be made without the West and perhaps one day it will be made against it".
The 78-year-old statesman believes that Western values are so threatened that the only way to defend global democracy and the rule of law is for the US and the EU to consider a real political, economic and cultural union.
Like many he fears that the West is in cultural decline and unable to face the challenges that confront it. America and Europe, economically stagnant and unable to innovate and prosper in the face of Chinese and Indian economic success, face new shared dangers in Islamic fundamentalism, and the rise of hostile independent states such as Iran and Russia.
For Balladur, the West must undergo a revolution in thinking and come together and defend its common values in the face of unprecedented global threats.
This is more than the delightful delusions of an aloof French aristocrat. These ideas are taken seriously at the highest level. Nicolas Sarkozy is certainly listening: the current President of France, a close confidante and political ally of Balladur, is intrigued by the prospect of a renewed Western project with France at its centre.
Moreover, the British elite have long been seduced by the idea of a transatlantic free-trade pact. While Angela Merkel, the German PM, wants to extend the traditional trans-Atlantic military alliance into new cultural and economic agreements based around common values and beliefs.
Looking at it objectively, Balladur expresses unmistakable geo-political truths. The age of Western dominance is clearly over. America may still be a superpower but within a generation it will be equalled by other nations both economically and militarily. Similarly Europe may delight in its own expansion, but national governments and shallow self-interest still call the tune. As such, Europe's soft power is never really taken seriously by its adversaries: Russia, for instance, derides the EU and sidelines it diplomatically and economically.
Thus the reasoning goes that Europe needs the hard power of American military might. Moreover, America now recognises its limits; it knows it can no longer risk unilateral military action. The US needs the soft power of persuasion and the many friends that the EU represents.
And there I think this little daydream should end. There is no real chance of a Western Union because an alliance implies an equality of partners. The Europeans may well be prepared to pool sovereignty in the name of common values - but the Americans certainly aren't.
America, despite its vision and idealism, remains a deeply nationalist and supremacist nation - and such countries do not and cannot form a union of equals. The only real alliance the US has is with Britain and Israel. Because the former is painfully subservient and the latter utterly dependent, neither offers a model for a common Western future.
That said, there is a real common Western heritage that is worth defending - one that upholds the idea of the dignity of the person and the belief that power and wealth are not the ultimate values. This is the legacy of Plato and Aristotle, the Jewish prophets, Christianity and the Renaissance. It lies also in the enlightenment's refusal of absolute authority and the struggle by ordinary people to shape their lives and gain a just share of wealth and happiness.
However, these great Western achievements were attained by a high civilisation - whereas Europe and America are now at a cultural low, obsessed with consumerism and celebrity.
If Sarkozy can help revive a high European culture, and a new American President can restore a genuinely liberating American vision, then there might, just might, be a union of the West worth pursuing after all.
*
Chirac criticized Balladur as representing "dominant ideas" and the difference between the two decreased quickly. Left behind by the Socialist Lionel Jospin and Jacques Chirac, Balladur obtained 18.5% and was eliminated in the first round.
Despite Chirac declaring that they had been "friends for 30 years", the episode greatly strained their relationship. The Balladuriens, i.e. Balladur's followers, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, were ostracized from the new Chirac administration.
Reversal Of Alzheimer's Symptoms Within Minutes
ScienceDaily 
An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
This new study highlights the importance of certain soluble proteins, called cytokines, in Alzheimer’s disease. The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF), a critical component of the brain’s immune system.
Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses in the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interfere with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept. Excess TNF-alpha has been documented in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s.
The new study documents a dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect in an Alzheimer’s patient: improvement within minutes following delivery of perispinal etanercept, which is etanercept given by injection in the spine. Etanercept (trade name Enbrel) binds and inactivates excess TNF. Etanercept is FDA approved to treat a number of immune-mediated disorders and is used off label in the study.
The use of anti-TNF therapeutics as a new treatment choice for many diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and potentially even Alzheimer’s, was recently chosen as one of the top 10 health stories of 2007 by the Harvard Health Letter.
Similarly, the Neurotechnology Industry Organization has recently selected new treatment targets revealed by neuroimmunology (such as excess TNF) as one of the top 10 Neuroscience Trends of 2007. And the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives has chosen the pilot study using perispinal etanercept for Alzheimer’s for inclusion and discussion in their 2007 Progress Report on Brain Research.
The lead author of the study, Edward Tobinick M.D., is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of the Institute for Neurological Research, a private medical group in Los Angeles. Hyman Gross, M.D., clinical professor of neurology at the University of Southern California, was co-author.
The study is accompanied by an extensive commentary by Sue Griffin, Ph.D., director of research at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock and at the Geriatric Research and Clinical Center at the VA Hospital in Little Rock, who along with Robert Mrak, M.D., chairman of pathology at University of Toledo Medical School, are editors-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
Griffin and Mrak are pioneers in the field of neuroinflammation. Griffin published a landmark study in 1989 describing the association of cytokine overexpression in the brain and Alzheimer’s disease. Her research helped pave the way for the findings of the present study. Griffin has recently been selected for membership in the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, a nonprofit organization of more than 200 leading neuroscientists, including ten Nobel laureates.
“It is unprecedented that we can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes of therapeutic intervention,” said Griffin. “It is imperative that the medical and scientific communities immediately undertake to further investigate and characterize the physiologic mechanisms involved. This gives all of us in Alzheimer’s research a tremendous new clue about new avenues of research, which is so exciting and so needed in the field of Alzheimer’s. Even though this report predominantly discusses a single patient, it is of significant scientific interest because of the potential insight it may give into the processes involved in the brain dysfunction of Alzheimer’s.”
While the article discusses one patient, many other patients with mild to severe Alzheimer’s received the treatment and all have shown sustained and marked improvement.
The new study, entitled “Rapid cognitive improvement in Alzheimer’s disease following perispinal etanercept administration,” and the accompanying commentary, entitled “Perispinal etanercept: Potential as an Alzheimer’s therapeutic,” are available on the Web site of the Journal of Neuroinflammation (http://www.jneuroinflammation.com/content/5/1/2/abstract).
Author Hyman Gross, M.D., has no competing interests. Author Edward Tobinick, M.D. owns stock in Amgen, the manufacturer of etanercept, and has multiple issued and pending patents assigned to TACT IP LLC that describe the parenteral and perispinal use of etanercept for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders, including, but not limited to, U.S. patents 6015557, 6177077, 6419934, 6419944, 6537549, 6982089, 7214658 and Australian patent 758523.
Former Italian President: Speaks Out
Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies.
In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera:
"All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe…know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”
Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992.
Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio. This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s. Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed “false flag” operations—terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.
In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn a testimony,
“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, saying
“The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”
