Thriller in the Philippines

Arctic Monkeys

One of my favorite groups, The Arctic Monkeys, has a new CD out. I am very late posting this. My bad. But definitely check it out, it's amazing!!! Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Castleberry's Announces Voluntary Recall of Chili Products

Georgia Firm Recalls Canned Meat Products That May Contain Clostridium botulinum

WASHINGTON, July 19, 2007 - Castleberry's Food Company, an Augusta, Ga., establishment owned by Bumble Bee Foods, LLC, is voluntarily recalling approximately 721,389 pounds of canned meat products that may contain Clostridium botulinum as a result of an equipment malfunction, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced today.

FDA...Castleberry Recall now includes Dog Food Sunday, 9:36 AM

Ok, is it just me, or does anyone else find it very disturbing that the same factory that does human canned food, is doing dog food.

Injured Iraq war veterans sue VA head

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer 10 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Frustrated by delays in health care, injured Iraq war veterans accused VA Secretary Jim Nicholson in a lawsuit of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.

The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, seeks broad changes in the agency as it struggles to meet growing demands from veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans, it charges that the VA has failed warriors on numerous fronts. It contends the VA failed to provide prompt disability benefits, failed to add staff to reduce wait times for medical care and failed to boost services for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The lawsuit also accuses the VA of deliberately cheating some veterans by allegedly working with the Pentagon to misclassify PTSD claims as pre-existing personality disorders to avoid paying benefits. The VA and Pentagon have generally denied such charges.

"When one of our combat veterans walks into a VA hospital, then they must see a doctor that day," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, which filed the lawsuit. "When a war veteran needs disability benefits because he or she can't work, then they must get a disability check in a few weeks."

"The VA has betrayed our veterans," Sullivan said.

VA spokesman Matt Smith said Monday he could not comment on a pending lawsuit
-continued-

July 23, 2007

LONG BEACH, California (Ticker) - A minor league baseball has announced that on Sunday they will host "Michael Vick Animal Awareness Day."
The Long Beach Armada of Los Angeles of California of the United States of North America including Barrow, Alaska in the Independent Golden League are holding the event on the heels of Vick - the quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons - being indicted on federal dogfighting charges.
Fans are invited to bring their dogs and sit in a special section at Blair Field.
Also, any fan who trades in a Michael Vick jersey will receive free admission to the game. The Armada also will destroy all Vick jerseys in protest to the inhumane treatment of animals.

WOW

11 Things Women Don't Know About Men

By Evan Marc Katz

1. Getting angry at us for not reading your mind is like getting angry at yourself for not being able to fly. It's not just futile, it's physically impossible.

2. Yes, we do think Jessica Alba is hot. Sometimes we're even dumb enough to admit it.

3. Don't ask us to understand your shoe fetish. Asking us to respect it is even sort of pushing it.

4. You do look good without makeup, just not as good as you look with it.

5. Ever notice how we don't fight with our male friends? That's why we get so frustrated when we fight with you.

6. You care what you're wearing infinitely more than we do. In fact, if you're naked when you open the front door, you won't hear an argument from us.

7. You don't like to get hit on in public, you don't want to date online and you don't want to be set up on blind dates. Tell us if sending messenger pigeons is an appropriate way of courting. Because if it is, we're all over it.

8. There should a statute of limitations on stupid things that we said that can come back to haunt us. I propose 24 hours.

9. Cooking dinner for a man is like buying flowers for a woman, except it takes a lot more time, effort and thought for you to do it. Thanks. We appreciate it.

10. We actually like your girly pet-names for us, but please, not in front of the guys!

11. Just because we like looking at the women in Maxim doesn't mean we want to actually converse with the women in Maxim. Not for long, anyway.

12. Your nice guy friends are the most reliable source for telling you if your new boyfriend's a jerk. And he probably is. (By the way, you might want to consider marrying that nice guy who's giving you advice about the jerk.)

US toddlers tuning in for a Disney cartoon in the state of New Jersey this week got more than they bargained for, when the local cable company mistakenly started broadcasting hardcore pornography.(AFP/Illustration)

Mommy, what is Mickey doing to pluto??

Walt Disney World: The Government's Tomorrowland?

Karen Harmel, Laura Spadanuta
Wed May 16, 8:00 PM ET

Walt Disney World, which bills itself as one of the happiest and most magical places anywhere, also may be one of the most closely watched and secure.

Walt Disney World, which bills itself as one of the happiest and most magical places anywhere, also may be one of the most closely watched and secure. And control over park entrances is getting even tighter: the nation's most popular tourist attraction now is beginning to scan visitor fingerprint information.

For years, Disney has recorded onto tickets the geometry and shape of visitors’ fingers to prevent ticket fraud or resale, as an alternative to time-consuming photo identification checks.

By the end of September, all of the geometry readers at Disney’s four Orlando theme parks, which attract tens of millions of visitors each year, will be replaced with machines that scan fingerprint information, according to industry experts familiar with the technology.

“It’s essentially a technology upgrade,” said Kim Prunty, spokeswoman for Walt Disney World. The new scanner, like the old finger geometry scanner, "takes an image, identifies a series of points, measures the distance between those points, and turns it into a numerical value." She added, "To call it a fingerprint is a little bit of a stretch."
Prunty said the new system will be easier for guests to use and will reduce wait times. The old machines required visitors to insert two fingers into a reader that identified key information about the shape of the fingers. The new machines scan one fingertip for its fingerprint information. Prunty said the company does not store the entire fingerprint image, but only numerical information about certain points.

Theme park consultant Arnold Tang said parks like Disney use the technology because it is more convenient for guests than showing photo identification and more accurate for theme parks, which have a significant ticket fraud problem.

“There’s a lot of subjectivity,” Tang said about traditional identification checks. “People can look at a photo and identify it differently.”

Prunty said the technology ensures that multiday passes are not resold. A one day, one-park ticket to Walt Disney World costs $67, but the daily price falls dramatically for a 10-day pass. Prunty said multiday pricing is the reason for the scanners. “It’s very important that a guest who purchases the ticket is the guest who uses it,” she said.
-continued-
Soon Homeland security will be handed over to Disney. All airports will be transformed into little wonderlands, were the armed guards are dressed as your favorite characters. Just be careful. If you get a body cavity search I heard they don't take off the big glove/hands. OUCH!!!

The Future of Spying

Beth Davidz
Wed May 16, 8:00 PM ET

A relatively unknown branch of the CIA is investing millions of taxpayer dollars in technology startups that, together, paint a map for the future of spying. Some of these technologies can pry into the personal lives of Americans not just for the government but for big businesses as well.

The CIA's venture capitalist arm, In-Q-Tel, has invested at least $185 million in startups since 1999, molding these companies' products into technologies the intelligence community can use.

More than 60 percent of In-Q-Tel’s current investments are in companies that specialize in automatically collecting, sifting through and understanding oceans of information, according to an analysis by the Medill School of Journalism. While In-Q-Tel has successfully helped push data analysis technology ahead, implementing it within the government for national security remains a challenge, and one of In-Q-Tel’s former CEOs, Gilman Louie, has concerns about whether privacy and civil liberties will be protected.

News reports about programs like Total Information Awareness -- an anti-terrorism government program that would have mined not only government data but also personal information -- and National Security Agency wiretaps, have sparked criticism by lawmakers, privacy advocates and the public.
-continued-

A Sinking Presidency

By Kenneth T. Walsh
Mon May 7, 2:47 PM ET

President Bush's admiration for Abraham Lincoln knows no bounds. In a recent meeting at the White House, Bush told visitors how Lincoln (whose portrait he has installed in the Oval Office) persevered in the Civil War despite many defeats on the battlefield, tens of thousands of casualties, and doubts among Northern voters that the conflict could ever be won. As the campaign of 1864 approached, Bush related, Lincoln admitted privately that he didn't think he would be re-elected, but pursued his policies anyway. Bush also described how Lincoln pressed on despite his grief when his beloved 11-year-old son Willie died in February 1862. The visitors came away with the conviction that Bush sees himself in Lincoln's mold more deeply than ever.

To Bush's critics, the incident is unsettling. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, noting that the president has also compared himself to Harry Truman, told U.S. News: "This is delusional-comparing the equivalent of Warren Harding to two of our greatest presidents!" Adds presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power: "He may come across to some people as a man of principle, but a great majority see him as stubborn and unyielding. ... And everything he touches turns to dust."

This is all nonsense, according to senior White House officials. They say that Bush isn't delusional at all and that history will vindicate him, just as it vindicated Lincoln and Truman. "He believes the correctness of his policies-including the war in Iraq-may not be recognized for 10, 15 years," says a Bush adviser. Adds another confidant: "If something reaches his level, it tends to be bad news, but he keeps it all in perspective, and there's no equivocation."

These assessments reflect a fundamental fact about George W. Bush's presidency as it approaches what many consider a twilight stage. Despite a cascading series of setbacks that convey the impression of a White House in crisis, Bush continues to exude an aura of calm and self-confidence. Like him or not-and he is one of the most polarizing leaders in American history-he rarely if ever backs down or exhibits self-doubt. This intransigence infuriates his critics and delights his admirers, and it will remain perhaps the most vivid characteristic of his leadership. Friends say one of Bush's favorite self-descriptions is "the decider." It's an inelegant but apt definition of his whole approach to governing. Whether it's an approach that still works is another question entirely.
-Continued-

Please tell me that this Piece of Shit is not compairing himself to President Lincoln. I love the line in the third paragraph "They say that Bush isn't delusional at all". Yeah I am sorry, if you expect to be thought of differently 10-15 years from now, your fucking delusional!!!!

Hillary '1984'

The Enlightenment of Resistance

Manuel Valenzuela

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Exorcising Our Demons

Into the infancy of the 21st century has humanity somehow managed to reach, despite our insatiable addiction for violence and suffering that has for millennia been both endemic and devastating, in spite of the continued tribalism, now called the nation state, that fosters competition, ignorance, fear, hatred and war among the peoples of the world, even with the hierarchical need among peoples to perpetually follow corrupt, immoral and warmongering leadership that continues to lay ruin the vast potential within us and notwithstanding the locust-like hunger of six billion primates whose consumptions and needs for resources are raping and pillaging Earth at unsustainable levels, thus accelerating our inevitable implosion.

Into the early years of the 21st century does humanity find itself in, in the present seeing our past, in our future seeing the present, refusing to learn from the sands of time and the chronicles of those who have come before, knocking on the heavy iron doors of progressive modernity yet hearing only the echoing thuds of regressive primitiveness, desperately seeking the keys that will allow us to finally escape the pestilence of times past and malignant cancers of the present.

Yet in turbulent times do we once more find ourselves living in, surrounded by war, destruction and death, gnawed at by suffering and misery, living among the ignorant, fearful and easily led, taken hostage by fundamentalists, zealots and extremists, refusing to eradicate from our condition the plague called violence and the warmongering, greed-infected leaders who birth it.
-continued-

Stop the War

Oily truth emerges in Iraq

Saturday, February 24th, 2007

Juan Gonzalez

Throughout nearly four years of the daily mayhem and carnage in Iraq, President Bush and his aides in the White House have scoffed at even the slightest suggestion that the U.S. military occupation has anything to do with oil.

The President presumably would have us all believe that if Iraq had the world’s second-largest supply of bananas instead of petroleum, American troops would still be there.

Now comes new evidence of the big prize in Iraq that rarely gets mentioned at White House briefings.

A proposed new Iraqi oil and gas law began circulating last week among that country’s top government leaders and was quickly leaked to various Internet sites - before it has even been presented to the Iraqi parliament.

Under the proposed law, Iraq’s immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq’s reserves.

In other words, Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and the other Western oil giants could end up on the board of directors of the Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council, while Iraq’s own national oil company would become just another competitor.

The new law would grant the council virtually all power to develop policies and plans for undeveloped oil fields and to review and change all exploration and production contracts.

Since most of Iraq’s 73 proven petroleum fields have yet to be developed, the new council would instantly become a world energy powerhouse.

“We’re talking about trillions of dollars of oil that are at stake,” said Raed Jarrar, an independent Iraqi journalist and blogger who obtained an Arabic copy of the draft law and posted an English-language translation on his Web site over the weekend.

Take, for example, the massive Majnoon field in southern Iraq near the Iranian border, which contains an estimated 20 billion barrels. Before Saddam Hussein was toppled by the U.S. invasion in 2003, he had granted a $4 billion contract to French oil giant TotalFinaElf to develop the field.

In the same way, the Iraqi dictator signed contracts with Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian and Spanish companies to develop 10 other big oil fields once international sanctions against his regime were lifted.

The big British and American companies had been shut out of Iraq, thanks to more than a decade of U.S. sanctions against Saddam.

But if the new law passes, those companies will be the ones reviewing those very contracts and any others.

“Iraq’s economic security and development will be thrown into question with this law,” said Antonia Juhasz of Oil Change International, a petroleum industry watchdog group. “It’s a radical departure not only from Iraq’s existing structure but from how oil is managed in most of the world today.”

Throughout the developing world, national oil companies control the bulk of oil production, though they often develop joint agreements with foreign commercial oil groups.

But under the proposed law, the government-owned Iraqi National Oil Co. “will not get any preference over foreign companies,” Juhasz said.

The law must still be presented to the Iraqi parliament. Given the many political and religious divisions in the country, its passage is hardly guaranteed.

The main religious and ethnic groups are all pushing to control contracts and oil revenues for their regions, while the Bush administration is seeking more centralized control.

While the politicians in Washington and Baghdad bicker to carve up the real prize, and just what share Big Oil will get, more Iraqi civilians and American soldiers die each each day - for freedom, we’re told.

737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire

Monday, February 19th, 2007

With more than 2,500,000 U.S. personnel serving across the planet and military bases spread across each continent, it’s time to face up to the fact that our American democracy has spawned a global empire.

The following is excerpted from Chalmers Johnson’s new book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” (Metropolitan Books).

Chalmers Johnson

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America’s version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial “footprint” and the militarism that grows with it.

It is not easy, however, to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records available to the public on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department’s annual inventories from 2002 to 2005 of real property it owns around the world, the Base Structure Report, there has been an immense churning in the numbers of installations.

The total of America’s military bases in other people’s countries in 2005, according to official sources, was 737. Reflecting massive deployments to Iraq and the pursuit of President Bush’s strategy of preemptive war, the trend line for numbers of overseas bases continues to go up.

Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005 — mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets — almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

Using data from fiscal year 2005, the Pentagon bureaucrats calculated that its overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion — surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic products of most countries — and an estimated $658.1 billion for all of them, foreign and domestic (a base’s “worth” is based on a Department of Defense estimate of what it would cost to replace it). During fiscal 2005, the military high command deployed to our overseas bases some 196,975 uniformed personnel as well as an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employed an additional 81,425 locally hired foreigners.

The worldwide total of U.S. military personnel in 2005, including those based domestically, was 1,840,062 supported by an additional 473,306 Defense Department civil service employees and 203,328 local hires. Its overseas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and 16,527 more that it leased. The size of these holdings was recorded in the inventory as covering 687,347 acres overseas and 29,819,492 acres worldwide, making the Pentagon easily one of the world’s largest landlords.

These numbers, although staggeringly big, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2005 Base Structure Report fails, for instance, to mention any garrisons in Kosovo (or Serbia, of which Kosovo is still officially a province) — even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained ever since by the KBR corporation (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root), a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston.

The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq (106 garrisons as of May 2005), Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though the U.S. military has established colossal base structures in the Persian Gulf and Central Asian areas since 9/11. By way of excuse, a note in the preface says that “facilities provided by other nations at foreign locations” are not included, although this is not strictly true. The report does include twenty sites in Turkey, all owned by the Turkish government and used jointly with the Americans. The Pentagon continues to omit from its accounts most of the $5 billion worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no one — possibly not even the Pentagon — knows the exact number for sure.
-continued-

US ratchets up ‘psy-ops’ against Tehran

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

Mahan Abedin

Psychological warfare is fast emerging as the key component of the conflict between Iran and the United States. It is being used extensively by the latter to influence Iranian behaviour in Iraq and secure a climb down by the Islamic Republic in the intricate negotiations over the country’s controversial nuclear programme.

As the Iranians analyse and react to this carefully crafted psychological warfare campaign, they run the risk of miscalculating broader developments in the region. The most important of these is Saudi Arabia’s new pro-active foreign policy. In this climate of heightened tensions and widespread misunderstanding it is easy for the Iranians to dismiss Saudi diplomacy as yet another plank of America’s psychological warfare against the Islamic Republic. Miscalculations of this kind can have drastic long-term consequences for Iranian interests in the Middle East.

war of Words

Psychological warfare has been a feature of Iranian-US relations since the 1979 revolution. Both sides have made extensive use of it, not only to damage the morale of the other, but also as a means of managing the conflict and preventing it from escalating into a shooting war. But never has this psychological war been so intense and potentially dangerous as it is now. Given the unprecedented instability across the Middle East – with opposing factions either allied to Iran or the US – there is a real danger of misunderstandings spinning out of control.

As always, it is the Americans who have ratcheted up the war of words, with the Iranians trying to come to terms with it.
-continued-

RFID chips shrink to powder size

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

Yuri Kageyama

Tiny computer chips used for tracking food, tickets and other items are getting even smaller. Hitachi Ltd., a Japanese electronics maker, recently showed off radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips that are just 0.002 inches by 0.002 inches and look like bits of powder. They’re thin enough to be embedded in a piece of paper, company spokesman Masayuki Takeuchi said Thursday.

RFID tags store data, but they need to be brought near special reading devices that beam energy to the chips, which then send information back to the readers.

The technology is already widely used to track and identify items, such as monitoring the distribution of food products or guarding against forgery of concert tickets.

Shown to the public for the first time earlier this month, the new chip is an improvement on its predecessor from Hitachi - the Mu-chip, which at 0.4 millimeters by 0.4 millimeters, looks about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

The latest chip, which still has no name, is 60 times smaller than the Mu-chip but can handle the same amount of information, which gets stored as a 38-digit number, according to Hitachi.

One catch is that the new chip needs an external antenna, unlike the Mu-chip.

The smallest antennas are about 0.16 inches - giants next to the powder-size chip.

There are no plans yet to start commercial production of the new chip, Takeuchi said.

Invisible tracking brings to mind science-fiction-inspired uses, or even abuses, such as unknowingly getting sprinkled with smart-tag powder for Big Brother-like monitoring.

“We are not imagining such uses,” Takeuchi said, adding that the latest chip is so new - and so miniature - Hitachi is still studying its possible uses.

‘Big Brother’ clocks in at the Royal Mail

Abigail Townsend

The Royal Mail, which earlier this month revealed an 86 per cent plunge in profits, is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds installing television screens in every delivery and sorting office in the country.

Management will use the screens to convey information and updates on the company’s performance to staff, including speeches by chief executive Adam Crozier and chairman Allan Leighton - prompting wags inside the state-controlled postal group to dub it “Allan Leighton Direct” and to compare it to George Orwell’s Big Brother.

A Royal Mail spokesman declined to comment on the cost of the new communication system, but insiders believe it will set the business back considerably. The TVs are understood to be 42-inch Fujitsu screens, which retail for around £2,000 each.

The Royal Mail will be able to negotiate a discount but it is still buying a considerable amount: at least one will be installed in every site, including 1,400 delivery offices, the 470 post offices the group manages directly, administration centres and other depots. The spokesman defended the communication system, commenting: “It’s absolutely normal good practice for any large company to have effective and swift communications with its people, especially when we’re operating out of many different sites nationwide.”
-continued-

Egyptian blogger sentenced to jail

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

An Alexandria court has convicted an Egyptian blogger for insulting both Islam and the Egyptian president, sentencing him to four years in jail over his writings on the internet.

During the trial, an Egyptian imam allegedly kidnapped by CIA agents in Italy and taken to Egypt, showed up to speak to the media, breaking his release conditions.

Known as Abu Omar, the former Milan-based imam on Thursday told reporters that he was tortured in an Egyptian prison and that he wants to return to Italy.

He showed the cameras scars he said were from torture in Egyptian jails and said he will resort to the Italian government to help him.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent, Amr El-Khaky reported: “Abu Omar also pleaded to both the Egyptian and American presidents to release all political prisoners”, including US prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Later on Thursday, Abdel Karim Nabil Suleiman, the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his internet writings, was sentenced to four years in jail.

Convicted blogger

Suleiman, a 22-year-old former law student, has been in custody since November over eight articles he had written under the name “Kareem Amer” on his blog since 2004.

Rights groups and opposition bloggers have watched Suleiman’s case closely, and worried the conviction could set a legal precedent limiting internet freedom in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country.

A blogger attending the trial who goes by the name “Sandmonkey” said: “It’s a dangerous precedent because it will impact the only free space available now, which is the internet. The charges were undefined and vague.”

Human Rights Watch condemned the trial, saying that the charges Suleiman was convicted for “contradict guarantees of free expression under international law”.

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The Egyptian government should abide by its commitments to uphold free expression and release Suleiman without delay.”

Criticism or insult?
-continued-

Friends don't let friends play Alliance

When I first started playing WoW, I started as a Night Elf, a member of the alliance. After 20 minutes I killed the character, and started a undead character, which is on the Horde side. I have never looked back. I can say from my experience that the Alliance side, is boring and full of people that will completely ruin your playing experience. The Horde side seems to attract people who are more interested in playing the game, working together, and having fun. I am sure there are some good people on the alliance side, but there few and far between, and hopefully, they will see the errors of there ways, and come to the light. Now, i do have a dwarf alt. but that is only because I am trying to take them down from the inside, and convert the few good I find. Honestly, I swear, I never enjoy my time with that alt. I'm doing it for the good of the horde.

My Guild

The guild, (in WoW), that I belong too is Silent Vendetta . I have been in a few other guilds, and considered many others, but in all honesty must say that this is by far the best guild. I could not ask for anything more from a group of people. Many guilds are very clicky, or full of immature players, who just like making rude/crude jokes. This guild is full of fun, friendly and very helpful people that will jump at the chance to help other players. I can not even count the number of times that a fellow guildy has stopped what they are doing, and come helped me with something, usually it is helping me find my way, thence I tend to get lost a lot.

I have to admit that there is one slightly bad thing about the guild, and it is really a silly, minor thing. The guild is full of happy couples, husband, and wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, what ever. This does cause the slight odd man out feeling at times. But that is OK, you get used to it, and it's actually pretty sweet. I'm just a bit jaded lately I guess.

Sorry, for my Absence, but I have a really good reason

I would like to take a moment to say how sorry I am for my extended absence. But I have been very busy, with many, many things. Most of all, I have been addicted to the game WoW, for those of u not familiar with it, it is World of Warcraft, and is a great online game that will totally consume all of your free time if you allow it.


This is a picture from http://www.blizzard.com/inblizz/fanart/page1.shtml . It is a collection of fan art, from players of the game.

Other then that, I have been very busy with work, with storm after storm, we have been very, very busy. Also, to be totally honest, I have been feeling very burnt out. Like I am screaming at a tree, or wall. I have been staying as far away from anything political as humanly possible. I still feel the same way, so I guess this blog will be slowly changing directions, and going into different subjects for a while.

Rumsfeld’s Fake News Flop in Iraq

Sheldon Rampton

The following is an excerpt from The Best war Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Tarcher, 2006).

The danger of negative news, according to President Bush, is that it may undermine morale and support for the war, as Americans “look at the violence they see each night on their television screens and they wonder how I can remain so optimistic about the prospects of success in Iraq.” But propaganda itself is a danger to the nation, as the United States has long recognized, both in theory and in law. In 1948, Congress, concerned by what it had seen propaganda do to Hitler’s Germany, passed the Smith-Mundt Act, a law that forbids domestic dissemination of U.S. government materials intended for foreign audiences.

The law is so strict that programming from Voice of America, the government’s overseas news service, may not be broadcast to domestic audiences. Legislators were concerned that giving any U.S. administration access to the government’s tools for influencing opinion overseas would undermine the democratic process at home. Since 1951, this concern has also been expressed in the appropriations acts passed each year by Congress, which include language that stipulates, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.”

Economic and media globalization, however, have shrunk the planet in ways that blur the distinction between foreign and domestic propaganda. This has been acknowledged in the U.S. Defense Department’s Information Operations Roadmap, a 74-page document approved in 2003 by Donald Rumsfeld. It noted that “information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP [psychological operations], increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa. PSYOP messages disseminated to any audience… will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public.”

This ought to be of particular concern to Americans because the Pentagon’s doctrine for psychological operations specifically contemplates “actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. … In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and deception, and psyops.”

An example of a psyops operation that used “deception” in Iraq occurred during the 2004 preparations for the U.S. military assault on Fallujah, which had become a stronghold for insurgents. On October 14, a spokesman for the marines appeared on CNN and announced that the long-awaited military campaign to retake Fallujah had begun. In fact, the announcement was a deliberate falsehood. The announcement on CNN was intended to trick the insurgents so that U.S. commanders could see how they would react to the real offensive, which would not begin until three weeks later. In giving this bit of false information to CNN, however, the marines were not merely reaching a “foreign audience” but also Americans who watch CNN.

Much of the U.S. propaganda effort, however, is aimed not at tactical deception of enemy combatants but at influencing morale and support for the war in the United States. The Office of media Outreach, a taxpayer-funded arm of the Department of Defense, has offered government-subsidized trips to Iraq for radio talk-show hosts. “Virtually all expenses are being picked up by the U.S. government, with the exception of broadcasters providing their own means of broadcasting or delivering their content,” reported Billboard magazine’s Radio Monitor website.

Office of media Outreach activities included hosting “Operation Truth,” a one-week tour of Iraq by right-wing talk-show hosts, organized by Russo Marsh & Rogers, a Republican PR firm based in California that sponsors a conservative advocacy group called Move America Forward. The purpose of the “Truth Tour,” they reported on the Move America Forward website, was “to report the good news on Operation Iraqi Freedom you’re not hearing from the old line news media… to get the news straight from our troops serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including the positive developments and successes they are achieving.” Even before the trip began, however, the radio talkers’ take on Iraq was already decided. “The war is being won, if not already won, I think,” said tour participant Buzz Patterson in a predeparture interview with Fox News. “[Iraq] is stabilized and we want the soldiers themselves to tell the story.”

In September 2004, the U.S. military circulated a request for proposals, inviting private public relations firms to apply for a contract to perform an “aggressive” PR and advertising push inside Iraq to include weekly reports on Iraqi public opinion, production of news releases, video news, the training of Iraqis to serve as spokesmen, and creation of a “rebuttal cell” that would monitor all media throughout Iraq, “immediately and effectively responding to reports that unfairly target the Coalition or Coalition interests.”

According to the request for proposals, “Recent polls suggest support for the Coalition is falling and more and more Iraqis are questioning Coalition resolve, intentions, and effectiveness. It is essential to the success of the Coalition and the future of Iraq that the Coalition gain widespread Iraqi acceptance of its core themes and messages.”
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UK troops ‘to spend 10 years’ in Afghanistan

Michael Smith

THE commander of the British taskforce in southern Afghanistan said last week that UK troops could be in the country for as long as 10 years.

In his first interview since arriving in Afghanistan, Brigadier Ed Butler said: “I don’t think there’s any doubt we will be here for a considerable time. There will need to be training teams and embedded officers for 10 years or so.”

Butler, commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, took full responsibility for setting up the “platoon houses” at Sangin and Musa Qala, where 15 British soldiers have died. But he said the decision to send troops into the frontline bases, described by many of his men as “hellholes”, was made “under not inconsiderable pressure” from Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president.

When British troops began arriving in April to take charge of Helmand province, they met immediate Taliban resistance, Butler said. Baghran district centre had been overrun by the Taliban.

“The governor [of Helmand] was concerned, and the Afghan government was concerned, that northern Helmand was about to fall to the Taliban,” said Butler.

British troops had shown immense bravery in intense combat. “They have been in almost constant engagement with the enemy. Some of these guys are barely out of school. Killing someone is a very difficult thing to do,” Butler said. “People think: ‘Well, that’s what soldiers are paid to do’, but it still takes raw courage to go out and do it.”

The ID Chip You Don’t Want in Your Passport

Bruce Schneier

If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it — even if it’s not set to expire anytime soon. If you don’t have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don’t want one of these chips in your passport.

RFID stands for “radio-frequency identification.” Passports with RFID chips store an electronic copy of the passport information: your name, a digitized picture, etc. And in the future, the chip might store fingerprints or digital visas from various countries.

By itself, this is no problem. But RFID chips don’t have to be plugged in to a reader to operate. Like the chips used for automatic toll collection on roads or automatic fare collection on subways, these chips operate via proximity. The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: Your passport information might be read without your knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements, a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious about your citizenship.

At first the State Department belittled those risks, but in response to criticism from experts it has implemented some security features. Passports will come with a shielded cover, making it much harder to read the chip when the passport is closed. And there are now access-control and encryption mechanisms, making it much harder for an unauthorized reader to collect, understand and alter the data.

Although those measures help, they don’t go far enough. The shielding does no good when the passport is open. Travel abroad and you’ll notice how often you have to show your passport: at hotels, banks, Internet cafes. Anyone intent on harvesting passport data could set up a reader at one of those places. And although the State Department insists that the chip can be read only by a reader that is inches away, the chips have been read from many feet away.

The other security mechanisms are also vulnerable, and several security researchers have already discovered flaws. One found that he could identify individual chips via unique characteristics of the radio transmissions. Another successfully cloned a chip. The State Department called this a “meaningless stunt,” pointing out that the researcher could not read or change the data. But the researcher spent only two weeks trying; the security of your passport has to be strong enough to last 10 years.

This is perhaps the greatest risk. The security mechanisms on your passport chip have to last the lifetime of your passport. It is as ridiculous to think that passport security will remain secure for that long as it would be to think that you won’t see another security update for Microsoft Windows in that time. Improvements in antenna technology will certainly increase the distance at which they can be read and might even allow unauthorized readers to penetrate the shielding.

Whatever happens, if you have a passport with an RFID chip, you’re stuck. Although popping your passport in the microwave will disable the chip, the shielding will cause all kinds of sparking. And although the United States has said that a nonworking chip will not invalidate a passport, it is unclear if one with a deliberately damaged chip will be honored.

The Colorado passport office is already issuing RFID passports, and the State Department expects all U.S. passport offices to be doing so by the end of the year. Many other countries are in the process of changing over. So get a passport before it’s too late. With your new passport you can wait another 10 years for an RFID passport, when the technology will be more mature, when we will have a better understanding of the security risks and when there will be other technologies we can use to cut the risks. You don’t want to be a guinea pig on this one.

Pope sorry for reaction to his remarks

AP - 1 hour, 12 minutes ago

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy - Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that he was "deeply sorry" about the angry reaction to his recent remarks about Islam, which he said came from a text that did not reflect his personal opinion. Despite the statement, protests and violence persisted across the Muslim world, with churches set ablaze in the West Bank and a hard-line Iranian cleric saying the pope was united with President Bush to "repeat the Crusades."

He then went on to tell his notoriously naughty joke about the Islamic Cleric and the Rabbi, that walked into the topples bar,,,, then finished with a heartfelt medley of Hitler speach highlights.

U.S. holds AP photographer in Iraq 5 month

By ROBERT TANNER, AP National Writer
1 hour, 7 minutes ago

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for "imperative reasons of security" under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative's review of Hussein's work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

"We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable," said Tom Curley, AP's president and chief executive officer. "We've come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure."

Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide — 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.

In Hussein's case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. "He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces," according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

"The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities," Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.

That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn't make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP's executive editor.

"Journalists have always had relationships with people that others might find unsavory," she said. "We're not in this to choose sides, we're to report what's going on from all sides."

AP executives in New York and Baghdad have sought to persuade U.S. officials to provide additional information about allegations against Hussein and to have his case transferred to the Iraqi criminal justice system. The AP contacted military leaders in Iraq and the Pentagon, and later the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.

The AP has worked quietly until now, believing that would be the best approach. But with the U.S. military giving no indication it would change its stance, the news cooperative has decided to make public Hussein's imprisonment, hoping the spotlight will bring attention to his case and that of thousands of others now held in Iraq, Curley said.

One of Hussein's photos was part of a package of 20 photographs that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography last year. His contribution was an image of four insurgents in Fallujah firing a mortar and small arms during the U.S.-led offensive in the city in November 2004.
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Dear “Terrorist” Child

Imprisoned in the Vortex of the Pax Americana

Growing up, young child, as you surely are, affected in some way, shape or form by the tentacles of America’s malevolent imperialism in the Middle East, whether by market colonialism, economic genocide or military occupation, surely bitterness, hatred, rage and a thirst for vengeance are slowly yet inevitably building inside your tiny body. Like a seed planted into the fertile soils of American hegemony, sprouting in anger with every downpour of American interference in your land, over time nurtured to become a tree bearing the blowback fruit America will be forced to reap, ready to ripen at maturity, your emotions against the Empire growing stronger with every year that passes, with every act of further humiliation and dehumanization, with every display of blatant hypocrisy or lost opportunity, with every new maiming and death upon your family and people.

Whether living in lands overrun by American-sponsored and supported despotic, undemocratic puppets depriving you of real “freedom and democracy,” whether living under the billions-of-dollars-a-year in financial and military assistance American subsidized brutal Israeli occupation and apartheid in the world’s largest concentration camps, Gaza and the West Bank, whether living in lands under constant American military threats, sanctions and embargoes imposed on their citizens, depriving you of healthcare, opportunity, full nourishment and a chance to grow up as a child should, simply because your people happen to resist the Empire’s gluttonous desire for your nation’s location and/or resources, or whether subjected to American styled “birth pangs” of a new Middle East, living amongst the violence-riddled, security-absent, depleted uranium-infested, radioactive-filled rubble and destroyed infrastructures of Iraq, Afghanistan and recently Lebanon, now but birth pangs of death and destruction, not life and freedom, the claws of America’s appetite for the lands of the Middle East are as omnipotent as they are malfeasant, an inescapable reality for millions of Arab and Muslim children such as yourself whose only crime is being born Arab in lands deemed strategic and vital to the continued expansion of the greed-mongering American Leviathan.
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Empire in the Mirror

Empire – A Tribe on Steroids

Inside the belly of the beast can the harbinger of what is to come be seen, for the internal machinations of the Pax Americana have become rusted and decrepit, its lifeblood infected and diseased by the spoils of its conquests and the narcissism of its hubris. In pursuit of unmatched wealth and power its internal organs have been infected by the malignancies of greed, arrogance and corruption, spreading from coast to coast, a haze of barrenness infiltrating every city and every town, afflicting a society 300 million strong, slowly yet invariably eroding the foundations of an Empire on fast-forward time, as if America’s domination has been accelerated, her reign compressed and her demise made absolute. Yet in her accelerated cycle can civilization once more bear witness that while the greatness of man may build empires, it is the deep flaws inherent in our nature that crumbles them as well.

What the genius of humankind helps construct the vices of the human condition will assuredly destroy, for what is history but a written record of our greatness always decimated by our weaknesses, of our vices, corruption and incurable penchant for death, violence and destruction as always laying waste to the marvels humankind is capable of constructing? What is history if not a linear pattern, repeated over and over and over again, regardless of time, location or of cultural differences, of the triumphs of humankind trumped and squashed by the mammalian passions and emotions inherent in our primate species, of our species taking a leap forward only to have us take two leaps back?
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Two Axioms of 9/11

Axiom One: November Fears


With government and corporate media propaganda echoing the traumatic memories of five years ago, from sea to shining sea, enveloping the airwaves and print media of the nation with a clenched fist of wall to wall coverage, Americans have again been bombarded with the exploitation of the mass murder of 3,000 human beings, their death once more serving the political interests of the Bush cabal as well as the financial concerns of the corporate Leviathan. The War on the American People – that psychological operation against our minds and emotions that began with the demolition of the World Trade Center and has continued unabatedly for five consecutive years – has been reinvented and redeployed, its army of lackey journalists, talking heads, government institutions and authoritarian politicians eager to spread the language and images needed to resurrect emotions and feelings, spreading the filth designed to manipulate our fears and hatreds, conditioning us into accepting the dictates of the state and the corporation along with the reality of a world of perpetual war and perpetual terror.

Once more we are being reminded, at the expediency of those in power, and just in case we had begun to forget, that fear is bravery, war is peace, authoritarianism is freedom, dissent is treasonous and a police state is security. Only those truly responsible for perpetrating the events of 9/11, we are made to believe, those lurking behind the smoke, mirrors and purple curtains of the state, can save and defend us from dark-skinned bogeymen of Arab/Muslim lineage that hate us for our freedoms and way of life. Only the fascists in power, we are told, care about preserving and protecting our freedoms, rights, liberties and democracy even as it is they, and not the barbarians at the gates, that are eroding and destroying each with every new day that passes, taking away what the evil terrorist cannot accomplish. It is the dreaded terrorist – of course always Arab in ethnicity or Muslim in faith – we are told by the deciders and the fascists, that roams like a giant cloud of death, hovering above the lands of America, wanting nothing more than to kill us and our children. However, it is the state and its propaganda machine that does not relent in its campaign at frightening and terrorizing the American people, as if it, and not the enemy, is the real terrorist, scaring families, creating stresses and causing insecurity among the masses.
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An Inconvenient Truth

Save a tree

A Shopper's Guide to Home Tissue Products
Shop smart. Save forests.

Learn More:
Tissue Paper & Forests
Forests are being destroyed to make toilet paper, facial tissues, paper towels and other disposable paper products. You can help stop this destruction by pressing manufacturers to use recycled content and clean manufacturing processes (click here to send a message to paper giant Kimberly-Clark), and by making smart shopping decisions.

If every U.S. household replaced one roll of regular paper towels with 100 percent recycled ones, we'd save 544,000 trees.

Need help lowering your energy bills?

With winter fast approaching, I thought it would be nice to share this site, and hopefully encourage people to be a little pro-active in weatherizing there homes, and making a smaller foot print on our planet. DOE Building Technology

Preliminary Draft Maps of Potential Energy Corridors

Preliminary draft maps of potential energy corridors on federal lands in eleven Western States.

The Departments of Energy, Interior, Agriculture, and Defense (the Agencies) are preparing a draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act to identify the impacts associated with designating energy corridors on federal lands in eleven Western states. Energy corridors may contain oil, gas, and hydrogen pipelines and electricity transmission facilities. The Agencies are preparing the PEIS at the direction of Congress, as set forth in Section 368 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Based upon the information and analyses developed in the PEIS, the Agencies will designate energy corridors by amending their respective land use plans.

The Government wants to build a new power grid through our national parks and protected wildlands. Please go to this site and write them, telling them to keep there hands off our parks and wildlands!!!!!!!!

The Liquid Bomb Hoax: The Larger Implications

James Petras

The charges leveled by the British, US and Pakistani regimes that they uncovered a major bomb plot directed against nine US airlines is based on the flimsiest of evidence, which would be thrown out of any court, worthy of its name.

An analysis of the current state of the investigation raises a series of questions regarding the governments’ claims of a bomb plot concocted by 24 Brits of Pakistani origin.

The arrests were followed by the search for evidence, as the August 12, 2006 Financial Times states: “The police set about the mammoth task of gathering evidence of the alleged terrorist bomb plot yesterday.” (FT, August 12/, 2006) In other words, the arrests and charges took place without sufficient evidence — a peculiar method of operation — which reverses normal investigatory procedures in which arrests follow the “monumental task of gathering evidence.” If the arrests were made without prior accumulation of evidence, what were the bases of the arrests?

The government search of financial records and transfers turned up no money trail despite the freezing of accounts. The police search revealed limited amounts of savings, as one would expect from young workers, students and employees from low-income immigrant families.

The British government, backed by Washington, claimed that the Pakistani government’s arrest of two British-Pakistanis provided “critical evidence” in uncovering the plot and identifying the alleged terrorist. No Western judicial hearing would accept evidence procured by the Pakistani intelligence services that are notorious for their use of torture in extracting ‘confessions’. The Pakistani dictatorship’s evidence is based on a supposed encounter between a relative of one of the suspects and an Al Qaeda operative on the Afghan border. According to the Pakistani police, the Al Qaeda agent provided the relative and thus the accused with the bomb-making information and operative instructions. The transmission of bomb-making information does not require a trip half-way around the world, least of all to a frontier under military siege by US led forces on one side and the Pakistani military on the other. Moreover it is extremely dubious that Al Qaeda agents in the mountains of Afghanistan have any detailed knowledge of specific British airline security, procedures or conditions of operations in London. Lacking substantive evidence, Pakistani intelligence and their British counterparts touched all the Propaganda buttons: A clandestine meeting with Al Qaeda, bomb-making information exchanges on the Pakistani-Afghan border, Pakistani-Brits with Islamic friends, family and terrorist connections in England . . .
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Spy software is coming your way

Stuff

Software capable of powerful and intrusive searches of personal computers is to be used in New Zealand.

The spy software, which can trace Google searches and other download attempts back to the computer they came from, is a new tool used by movie companies to combat piracy but it is upsetting privacy watchdogs and Internet companies.

The New Zealand Federation Against Copyright Theft (NZfact), the international Motion Picture Association’s representative here, will use the software to identify pirates by their IP address – a computer’s unique identity, the Weekend Herald reported today. The association is a consortium of major movie studios.

The software can track the IP address to the Internet company which holds the user’s details. The Internet company could then agree – or be compelled – to give those details to NZfact.

Federation executive director Tony Eaton said the pirate-hunting software was “basically a search engine that searches the search engines”.

The programme was used in a recent trial in New Zealand, discovering 1153 attempts to illegally download the children’s movie Chicken Little.

Action against pirates could begin with a “cease and desist” letter. In more serious cases, Mr Eaton said, the police could be informed, a search warrant executed, the computer seized and the user prosecuted under the Copyright Act.

Mr Eaton was seeking the co-operation of Internet companies in giving the details behind the IP addresses but ihug and Orcon have said they would not give up the information without a court warrant.

Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff said computer users could ask her to investigate as the software intruded into their personal space. But it was unclear if the software breached existing law because an IP address identified a computer that could be used by more than one person.

The move comes after John Houston was this week jailed for two years after admitting to 21 charges relating to pirating movies.

He is believed to have made $150,000 a year from selling pirated movies.

Judge David Harvey described it as a highly sophisticated operation in which Houston used decrypting programmes to get around encryption codes on compact discs aimed at stopping movies being copied.

Behind the Plan to Bomb Iran

Ismael Hossein-zadeh

It is no longer a secret that the Bush administration has been methodically paving the way toward a bombing strike against Iran. The administration’s plans of an aerial military attack against that country have recently been exposed by a number of reliable sources. [1]

There is strong evidence that the administration’s recent public statements that it is now willing to negotiate with Iran are highly disingenuous: they are designed not to reach a diplomatic solution to the so-called “Iran crisis,” but to remove diplomatic hurdles toward a military “solution.” The administration’s public gestures of a willingness to negotiate with Iran are rendered utterly meaningless because such alleged negotiations are premised on the condition that Iran suspends its uranium enrichment program. Considering the fact that suspension of uranium enrichment, which is altogether within Iran’s legitimate rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is supposed to be the main point of negotiations, Iran is asked, in effect, “to concede the main point of the negotiations before they started.” [2]

The administration’s case against Iran is eerily reminiscent of its case against Iraq in the run up to the invasion of that country. Accordingly, the case against Iran is based not on any hard evidence provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but on dubious allegations that are based on even more dubious sources of intelligence. Iran is asked, in effect, to prove a negative, which is of course mission impossible-hence grounds for “noncompliance” and rationale for “punishment.”

The administration’s case against Iran is so weak, its objectives of a military strike against that country are so fuzzy, and the odds against achieving any kind of meaningful victory are so strong, that even professional military experts are speaking up against the plans of a bombing campaign against Iran. [3] Furthermore, predominant expert views of such a bombing campaign maintain that it would more likely hurt than help the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States.

So, if the administration’s “national interests” argument as grounds for a military strike against Iran is suspect, why then is it so adamantly pushing for such a potentially calamitous confrontation? What are the driving forces behind a military confrontation with Iran?

Critics would almost unanimously point to neoconservative militarists in and around the Bush administration. While this is obviously not false, as it is the neoconservative forces that are beating the drums of War with Iran, it falls short of showing the whole picture. In a real sense, it begs the question: who are the neoconservatives to begin with? And what or who do they represent?

The neoconservative ideologues often claim that their aggressive foreign policy is inspired primarily by democratic ideals and a desire to spread democracy and freedom worldwide-a claim that is far too readily accepted as genuine by corporate Media and many foreign-policy circles. This is obviously little more than a masquerade designed to hide some real powerful special interests that lie behind the fa�ade of neoconservative figures and their ideological rhetoric.

The driving force behind the neoconservatives’ War juggernaut must be sought not in the alleged defense of democracy or of national interests but in the nefarious special interests that are carefully camouflaged behind the front of national interests. These special interests derive lucrative business gains and high dividends from War and militarism. They include both economic interests (famously known as the military-industrial complex) and geopolitical interests (associated largely with Zionist proponents of “greater Israel” in the Middle East, or the Israeli lobby).
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US spy agencies pressed for “intelligence” to justify war against Iran

Bill Van Auken

With the clock ticking to an August 31 deadline set by the United Nations Security Council’s resolution demanding that Iran abandon its uranium enrichment program, a section of the American ruling establishment is pressing US intelligence agencies to produce “evidence” that Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose an imminent nuclear weapons threat.

The aim is the same as that pursued by Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War who sought to manufacture phony “intelligence” that Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction justified a US invasion and occupation of the country.

This is the political significance of the hastily written and shoddy report issued by the House Intelligence Committee last Wednesday, a day after Iran issued its response to the UN ultimatum, which Washington deemed to have fallen “short” of the resolution’s conditions for avoiding sanctions.

While Russia and China—both veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council—have indicated support for Iran’s call for further negotiations, Washington is having none of it, demanding instead that Teheran unconditionally surrender to the UN diktat.

Iran has shown no inclination to follow such a course. Instead, on Saturday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad staged a symbolic inauguration of a heavy water plant near Arak, in central Iran. He insisted that the facility was intended solely for peaceful purposes, serving medical, scientific and agricultural needs. But Western powers have stressed that it is possible to extract plutonium—a material used in the production of nuclear weapons—from spent fuel produced at an associated heavy water, research reactor that is still under construction.
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Experts warn U.S. is coming apart at the seams

Chuck McCutcheon

WASHINGTON - A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.

None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country’s basic operating systems are deteriorating.

“When I see events like these, I become concerned that we’ve lost focus on the core operational functionality of the nation’s infrastructure and are becoming a fragile nation, which is just as bad — if not worse — as being an insecure nation,” said Christian Beckner, a Washington analyst who runs the respected Web site Homeland Security Watch (www.christianbeckner.com).

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation “D” for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

“I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm,” said Casey Dinges, the society’s managing director of external affairs.

British oil company BP announced this month that severe corrosion would close its Alaska pipelines for extensive repairs. Analysts say this may sideline some 200,000 barrels a day of production for several months.
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VeriChip wants to chip every US soldier

Despite some pretty significant security concerns, everyone’s favorite futurific company VeriChip is looking to get its chips under the skin of the largest group of people yet: the entire US military.

According to the DC Examiner, the company is lobbying the Pentagon to choose its RFID tags as a replacement for the famous metal dog tags, making information like a person’s name and complete medical record instantly available with the swipe of an RFID reader.

Needless to say, not everyone’s sold on the idea, with veterans’ groups and some members of Congress already raising concerns. There doesn’t seem to be any indication as to when a decision might be made, although given VeriChip’s political connections, we wouldn’t be so quick to bet against it.

—————–

VeriChip Wants To Test Human-Implantable RFID On Military

The amount of information on the chip would be up to the military sponsors and could range from basic name and serial number to more advanced medical data.

K.C. Jones

VeriChip is pitching its human implantable RFID chips to the U.S. military.

VeriChip spokesperson Nicole Philbin confirmed Wednesday that the company’s Board Chairman Scott Silverman has held informal meetings with U.S. Navy and Air Force leaders to suggest a feasibility study of its VeriMed system.

The system relies on an implant the size of a grain of rice, which VeriChip claims has an encrypted 16-digit identification number. Philbin said only proprietary RFID readers can decipher the number, which is then entered into a secure database. A login name and password are required to access the database on a secure Web site, Philbin said, adding that the system is more secure and more effective than things people normally carry in their wallets.

Like overall participation, the amount of information attached to the identification number is at the discretion of individuals who volunteer for the program, Philbin said. That could be limited to the most basic information, like name and telephone number, or it could contain advance directives, organ donor status and more.

VeriChip is owned by Applied Digital, which lists federal agencies among its clients. The company markets the VeriMed system as a way to ensure that emergency responders and healthcare providers can identify a patient who is or unable to communicate and learn of allergies and medical conditions.

“The Department of Defense already has an electronic health records program, and VeriChip would like to enhance the quality of care for vets and military members,” Philbin said. “There is no power source. It can’t be tracked. It’s not a GPS device. It contains no information other than the identification number. It’s not mandatory. If a person with the device is presented to an emergency room unconscious, they may be allergic to something or have a preexisting condition, and that information is crucial.”

The RFID implants were approved as Class II medical devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October 2004. In a letter, Donna-Bea Tillman, PhD, director of the F.D.A.’s Office of Device Evaluation, Center for Devices and Radiological Health, outlined potential health risks associated with VeriChip implants. They include adverse tissue reaction; migration of implanted transponder; compromised information security; failure of implanted transponder, inserter or electronic scanner; electromagnetic interference; electrical hazards; magnetic resonance imaging incompatibility; and needle stick.

“With any F.D.A. approval, they state the potential risks,” Philbin said. “The F.D.A. is satisfied with the product and that’s why they have given it the O.K.”

Some people have implanted chips in themselves to experiment with the technology and for fast access to their computer accounts.

Critics contend that VeriChip is peddling its products to governments, while targeting vulnerable populations ” like the elderly, inmates, immigrants and members of the military, who have less choice than the general population. They claim that RFID proponents’ eventual goal is to “chip” as many people as possible, then track consumers and their behaviors for marketing purposes.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center states that “the ability to track people, products, vehicles, and even currency would create an Orwellian world where law enforcement officials and nosy retailers could read the contents of a handbag—perhaps without a person’s knowledge—simply by installing RFID readers nearby.”

“Such a fear is not unfounded. Currently, some RFID readers have the capacity to read data transmitted by many different RFID tags,” the organization states on its Web site. “This means that if a person enters a store carrying several RFID tags—for example, in articles of clothing or cards carried in a wallet—one RFID reader can read the data emitted by all of the tags, and not simply the signal relayed by in-store products. This capacity enables retailers with RFID readers to compile a more complete profile of shoppers than would be possible by simply scanning the bar codes of products a consumer purchases.”

Some people have claimed to clone implants, saying that demonstrates how vulnerable they are, but Philbin said they are impossible to clone.

“The company can’t verify what hackers claim they can or cannot do,” she said.

Joe Davis, spokesperson for the Veterans of Foreign Wars office in Washington, D.C., said although it makes great sense to be able to scan a device and pull up a full medical history, he would like to see further study before the military uses the implants. He said his initial concerns include possible health effects, whether enemies could access soldiers’ information and whether the implants would replace dog tags, and, if so, stand up to an explosion.

“They issue two dog tags,” he said. “One goes around the neck and the other is laced into the boot. The foot and boot will survive an explosion. DNA from the foot in the boot will survive, plus you’ve got your metal dog tag right there. What type of survival rate does this little chip have in an explosion? From what I’ve read, it sounds like they’re trying to push this thing through. You don’t push things through when it’s new technology. You have to weigh all the pros and cons, and you have to ask the service members ‘What do you think of this?’ because it’s going in their neck, or wherever it’s going to go, and this proposal needs lot more study.”

'Lock up everybody!'

The monstrous cretin who runs America's "Homeland Security" is now publicly calling for new fascist laws that would make the Bush Administration's domestic-spying crimes totally legal.

Michael Chertoff -- who many say looks just like an undead version of Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin -- says the United States needs more constant surveillance of everybody so he can lock up more "possible terrorists."

It's just the latest outrage from an administration desperately trying to turn last week's phony terrorist scare into justification for more fascist laws before the bogus scare is completely forgotten by Americans.

"It's not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants," the little totalitarian said Sunday on one of those political talk shows.

"We've done a lot in our legal system the last few years, to move in the direction of that kind of efficiency. But we ought to constantly review our legal rules to make sure they're helping us, not hindering us."

Chertoff, who presided over the horrific drowning of more than 1,500 citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is very excited about the opportunity to put anybody in jail for no reason at all.

While the White House and the administration's henchmen in Congress rush to pass new laws that will make everyone a potential terrorist and Halliburton builds the new concentration camps that will soon hold hundreds of thousands of "political prisoners," Chertoff is pursuing a two-pronged assault on Americans.

First, his goons at airports around the nation are methodically getting Americans "comfortable" with constant fear, harassment and intimidation. Second, his outrageous public statements are intended as a "trial balloon" to see just how much the White House can get away with.

The lack of outrage over Chertoff's latest insane proclamations will be used as "proof" that the administration can move ahead with the next phase of canceling the "g-ddamned piece of paper" known as the U.S. Constitution.

Proving the "U.K. terror plot" was manufactured fearmongering, U.S. airports have already been told the "threat level" has been reduced to the usual constant hysteria rather than the top-level hysteria enacted last week.

Also revealed this weekend was the fact that the "U.K. terror plot" was just that: Cops encouraging young Muslims to entertain fantasies of striking back at Britain, not the United States.

Remarkably, it was Chertoff himself who admitted this Sunday on CNN.

Unabomber sale!

In a desperate bid to hang onto his fading fame, 1990s serial killer Ted Kaczynski is holding a crazy online auction.

The virtual garage sale, which was authorized by the U.S. District Court in California on Thursday, will benefit the families of Kaczynski's victims.

Items offered from his mountain lair include a hatchet, several of his infamous hooded sweatshirts, hundreds of history books, multiple versions of his manifesto and simple bomb-making tools.

"The Unabomber" was a media sensation in the 1990s.

His Luddite manifesto was published in big-time newspapers and his classic hoodie-and-shades look was heavily copied by wannabe hard players.

But home-grown terrorists lost their popularity after 9/11, because all terrorist activity is now said to be done by crazy Muslims from the Middle East rather than a crazy mathematical genius from Chicago living in a forest shack.

Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski was considered one of the finest modern minds when it came to advanced math such as geometric function theory, which is so complex that only a handful of people even understand the concept.

But for myriad reasons, Kaczynski was "socially retarded." So much smarter than normal people that he was pushed ahead to Harvard when he was only 16 years old, he never fit in and never had friends.

Suspiciously, he was chosen to take part in "psychological experiments" run by mad scientist Dr. Henry A. Murray, the psychologist who worked for the U.S. government's Office of Strategic Services -- which became the CIA after World War II.

Dr. Murray was instrumental in preparing the "Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler" for OSS spy chief William "Wild Bill" Donovan.

After whatever Murray did to the young, meek math wizard, Kaczynski was even more withdrawn.

He became a math professor at Berkeley in 1967, where he creeped out students and staff. In 1969, he quit without explanation and seemingly vanished from the world.

For a decade, he lived quietly in a mountain shed. And in 1978, he sent his first mail bomb. His targets were colleges, airlines, retail computer stores and even public-relations executives. His crude bombs eventually hurt 29 people and killed 3 victims.

The G-men gave him the codename UNABOM, for "University and Airline Bomber." The media eventually turned that into "Unabomber."

In 1995, the New York Times and Washington Post supported terrorism and printed his entire 35,000-word manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future."

The newspapers did this at the request of the U.S. Justice Department. While many were outraged over the federal government again supporting terrorists, FBI analysts argued that meeting the Unabomber's demand would actually help track him down, as somebody might be able to recognize his writing and theories.

And it worked, the FBI claimed, because Kaczynski's brother David reportedly recognized Ted's writing style and called the cops.

But the unintended result of the publication was that many of the top people in the technology industry were absolutely haunted by the Unabomber's conclusions.

Bill Joy -- "cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems and co-chair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research" -- found himself "most troubled" by Kaczynski's warning of a coming dystopia where robots either rule humanity or serve a tiny global elite who choose to exterminate the billions of undesirables:

"[T]he average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite -- just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques, the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite."

Just 10 years later, much of Kaczynski's "paranoid fantasy" is reality. Total surveillance and constant bombardment by corporate and government propaganda has softened the citizens of industrialized nations to any possible rebellion.

Citizens are now "consumers," so addicted to the Internet that knowledge of constant illegal spying on their every online activity hasn't even led to calls to abandon the technology, let alone any actual reduction in usage. In fact, hours and money spent on the Internet have seen double-digit growth this year alone.

And instead of reducing dependence on telephones after it was revealed that all calls are illegally logged and tracked by the federal government, protest was limited to the suggestion that people concerned about civil liberties transfer their business to one of the few telecom companies that hasn't yet admitted complicity in the domestic-spying scandal.

A long government "health campaign" in the United States has succeeded in making much of the population sick from chronic disease and so obese that they're physically incapable of doing much more than sitting on a sofa watching war and crime propaganda, while federal education efforts have succeeded in significantly reducing the population's ability to read, write and think critically -- as compared to both earlier generations of educated Americans as well as modern-day populations in Europe and industrialized Asia.

The world's most populous country and fastest-growing "capitalist" state, China, has brutally enforced birth-rate reduction and brazenly killed and tortured dissidents with no reprisals from "democratic" nations that fuel its dynamic economic growth.

And in five short years, an ambiguous "anti-terror crusade" has replaced all humanist ideology, democratic debate and civil liberties in the world's lone military superpower.

Most American factory labor is already performed by robots. As millions of working-class people in the United States have already learned, the value of a human completely depends on his or her worth as a consumer. When a human is no longer required for factory labor or industrialized farming -- either because the work is now performed by robots or done overseas for pennies on the dollar -- their value as a consumer is obliterated.

As a General Motors analyst recently said about the nation's 110,000 auto-factory robots, "They're almost human, but they don't seem interested in organizing."

If the Unabomber's horrifying scenarios are correct, the next stage will be the culling of the herd, or the killing off of those who serve no purpose to the robots and their human masters.