Tell-A-Vision = Why Not Try Love Again?

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ALOHA

Posted here, so one does not have to search this page:

It has been suggested in a number of documents, publications, and books [pprs.org] that Curtis Spangler developed and built a QAM modulated data radio computer / transceiver interface and designed THE STANFORD PACKET RADIO NETWORK, under the direction of Michael J. Flynn, with assistance from Andrew Zimmerman, at Computer Systems Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Department, Stanford University, and that he was the person who completed ALOHA's goal, when he successfully transmitted and received [16 signals of] quadrature amplitude modulated data with Dr. Flynn on August 23, 1984.

HIGH-SPEED PACKETS

ARRL GATEWAY, Vol. 1, No. 2, August 28, 1984 ~ ARRL Home

On August 23, Curtis Spangler, N6ECT, and Mike Flynn, W2FRT, exchanged packets at 9600 bauds using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) techniques. Both stations were using personal computers, 9600-bit/s modems, homemade radio/modem interfaces, and 440-MHz radios. Special software, written in Turbo Pascal, drove the synchronous data link controller (SDLC) cards in the computers. Over the five-mile path between the stations, there were no errors using 10 watts, and 60% to 70% throughput at one watt. Via KA6M

Your Gateway to Packet Radio

by Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
The American Radio Relay League
Page 2-8, Chapter 2

Click for large image

1984: Historic Firsts

Curtis Spangler and Mike Flynn exchanged packets at 9600 bauds on August 23, 1984, using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) techniques. Over a five-mile path, there were no errors using 10 watts, and 60% to 70% throughput using one watt.

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PPRS - Pacific Packet Radio Society - Historic Wireless Digital Communication

Pacific Packet Radio Society

Wireless Digital Communication was introduced (in the United States) by Dr. Hank Magnuski (Co-founder of PPRS), when his historic KA6M-1 Digital Packet Radio Repeater began operation on:

December 10, 1980

Pacific Packet Radio Society gateway | history | photos | papers | links | packet audio | video

Dear Packet Radio Enthusiast,

Thanks very much for the letter of inquiry which you sent me. The response I've received to the initial publicity about the packet repeater has been very enthusiastic, and I have been deluged with requests from hams, both locally and from various points around the country, for more information about the repeater, for schematics, for listings, specifications, modems, proms, SDLC chips, Vancouver boards, and for talks at clubs. Needless to say, all this activity, plus continuing development on the packet hardware and software has kept me very busy, and I apologize for the long delay in responding to your letter. Let me bring you up to date on what has happened, or is happening, since the initial announcement of the repeater, which went on the air in December of 1980.

World's First Digital Repeater for Wireless Data Communications
KA6M/R - Packet Radio Repeater. 1980 ~ Front View ~ PPRS photos

World's First Digital Repeater for Wireless Data Communications
KA6M/R - Packet Radio Repeater, 1980 ~ Back View ~ PPRS photos

In the early months of this year, the packet repeater was operating out of my residence, and was still an experimental machine. Since then, we have installed a couple of upgrades to the control software, we have used a better CPU card, increased the power level, moved the repeater to 700 feet elevation, and integrated its operation to be 100% compatible with the protocol used by the Vancouver Digital Communications Group (VADCG). The repeater has changed from being a laboratory curiosity to a major Bay Area repeater heard from Berkeley to south San Jose, and the user community has grown from a couple of stations to a network of some 30 users. The packet system here now has a mailbox on-line 24 hours a day, several on-line personal computers, and network links (courtesy of a commercial packet network) to the other active packet radio centers in Vancouver and Ottawa. We have also just installed an HF port on 20 Meters, and are beginning some experiments aimed at establishing connection with AMRAD in Washington and with equipment located at W1AW.

VADCG TNC built by C. Spangler, N6ECT- PPRS photos

Most of the original packet radio experiments were done in Canada (in part due to the Canadians' pioneering communications spirit, and in part due to less restrictive regulations up there), and three main centers were at work: Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver. The technology employed by each of these groups differed, and each approach has its own merits. My thinking and ideas very closely paralleled the work started by Doug Lockhart, VE7APU, and I can best report on what is happening with groups which have adopted HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) framing as the basis of their protocol. The HDLC/ SDLC frame is a new, universally accepted standard in the data communications industry, and Doug and I feel it offers a good starting point on which to build a packet radio network. As it turns out, groups in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, El Paso, Denver, Sacramento, and Hamilton have also taken up this technology, and it is likely that we already have a sufficient number of people using this technique that it will become the defacto standard in the amateur radio community.

It would be impossible for me to completely describe the protocol and equipment being used in this letter, so I will briefly cover some of the topics and give you some pointers on where to find additional information. As you might guess, this is a new area for amateur radio, and tutorial material and handbooks simply do not yet exist. Many issues and problems remain to be discussed, and there is opportunity to make substantial contributions to the state of the art. [Snip] [Continue Reading] - Thanks again for your interest. See you on the net. Best regards, Hank Magnuski, KA6M - [More Papers and History]

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Reasons 2-B Happy by Xeth #112: THE MAYANS ARE PROBABLY WRONG ABOUT 2012

Amestizo - BLOG

happy new year,

The Great Bell Chant (The End of Suffering) from R Smittenaar on Vimeo.

end world suffering, Amestizo

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Kid Cudi - Mr. Rager

Marliese's Corner - San Francisco Events

Friends,

There are some great events coming up at the Book Smith, 1644 Haight Street, between Clayton & Cole.

Love, Marliese

Shut Up War Criminal Tony Blair
You, the Bush Administration, and Most 2003 Republicans / Democrats Are:
Baby Murderers

 

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Grand Jury Closing Argument Part 1 (The Last War Crime)

War crimes: Dick Cheney & George Bush still torturing in 2008, Rachel Maddow comments

8. Secrets of Cheney's Energy Task Force Come to Light

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/8-secrets-of-cheneys-energy-task-force-come-to-light/

Documents turned over in the summer of 2003 by the Commerce Department as a result of the Sierra Club's and Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents, dated March 2001, also feature maps of Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the project's costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date.

Documented plans of occupation and exploitation predating September 11 confirm heightened suspicion that U.S. policy is driven by the dictates of the energy industry. According to Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, "These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public."

When first assuming office in early 2001, President Bush's top foreign policy priority was not to prevent terrorism or to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction-or any of the other goals he espoused later that year following 9-11. Rather, it was to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to U.S. markets. In the months before he became president, the United States had experienced severe oil and natural gas shortages in many parts of the country, along with periodic electrical power blackouts in California. In addition, oil imports rose to more than 50% of total consumption for the first time in history, provoking great anxiety about the security of the country's long-term energy supply. Bush asserted that addressing the nation's "energy crisis" was his most important task as president.

The energy turmoil of 2000-01 prompted Bush to establish a task force charged with developing a long-range plan to meet U.S. energy requirements. With the advice of his close friend and largest campaign contributor, Enron CEO, Ken Lay, Bush picked Vice President Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, to head this group. In 2001 the Task Force formulated the National Energy Policy (NEP), or Cheney Report, bypassing possibilities for energy independence and reduced oil consumption with a declaration of ambitions to establish new sources of oil.

The Bush Administration's struggle to keep secret the workings of Cheney's Energy Task Force has been ongoing since early in the President's tenure. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, requested information in spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Task Force was meeting with in developing the Bush Administration's energy plan. When Cheney refused disclosure, Congress was pressed to sue for the right to examine Task Force records, but lost. Later, amid political pressure building over improprieties regarding Enron's colossal collapse, Cheney's office released limited information revealing six Task Force meetings with Enron executives.

With multiple lawsuits currently pending, the Bush Administration asserts that its right to secrecy is a matter of executive privilege in regard to White House records. But because the White House staffed the Task Force with employees from the Department of Energy and elsewhere, it cannot pretend that its documents are White House records. A 2001 case, in which the Justice Department has four times appealed federal court rulings that the Vice President release task force records, has been brought before the Supreme Court. The case Richard B Cheney v. U.S. District Court for the District of Colombia, No. 03-475, to be heard by Cheney's friend and duck hunting partner, Justice Scalia, is now pending. Cases based on the Federal Advisory Committee Act and Freedom of Information Act which require the Task Force a balanced membership, open meetings, and public records, are attempting to beat the Bush Administration in its battle to keep its internal workings secret.

UPDATE BY MICHAEL KLARE: The issue of U.S. dependence on imported oil has only become more critical over the past few months as U.S. oil demand has risen and global supplies have contracted, pushing up gasoline prices in the U.S., and thereby threatening the economic recovery now (supposedly) under way. This, in turn, has made oil prices and dependency an issue in the presidential election, with President George W. Bush defending the status quo and Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic nominee, calling for dramatic action to reduce U.S. dependence on imported petroleum.

The contraction of global supplies is due in large part to political turmoil in the major producing areas – precisely the sort of situation I predicted in my article. In particular, the pace of overseas oil production has been moderated by repeated sabotage of oil infrastructure in Iraq, terrorist strikes on foreign oil firms in Saudi Arabia, ethnic unrest in the Delta region of Nigeria, and continuing political turbulence in Venezuela. Together, these developments have pushed oil prices to their highest levels in decades. At the same time, the Bush Administration has shown no inclination to reduce U.S. military involvement in major overseas producing areas, especially the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin and Africa.

All of this has had one effect: The major news media are beginning to pay much closer attention to the links between political turmoil abroad and the economics of oil at home. Most major newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have published articles on various aspects of this problem. Still, the media remains reluctant to explain the close link between the energy policies of the Bush Administration and U.S. military strategy.

A number of new books have come out (or soon will) that bear on this subject. My own book, "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency" will be published by Metropolitan Books in August. Also highly recommended are: "Out of Gas," by David Goodstein (W.W. Norton); "The End of Oil," by Paul Roberts (Houghton Mifflin); and "The Party's Over," by Richard Heinberg (New Society Publishers).

Mitch McConnells Right Wing Circus- http://www.zinasaunders.com/

The new wave of US voter suppression

Rightwing state legislatures are pushing laws that seek to restrict voter access. It's an alarming trend, and Democrats will lose out

Amy Goodman, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 December 2011 18.11 GMT, Article history, Article Source

Civil rights groups say the restrictions amounts to an attack on voting rights on a level not seen since segregation. Photograph: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

All eyes are on Iowa this week, as the hodgepodge field of Republican contenders gallivants across that farm state seeking a win, or at least "momentum," in the campaign for the party's presidential nomination. But behind the scenes, a battle is being waged by Republicans – not against each other, but against American voters. Across the country, state legislatures and governors are pushing laws that seek to restrict access to the voting booth, laws that will disproportionately harm people of color, low-income people, and young and elderly voters.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have just released a comprehensive report on the crisis, "Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America." In it, they write: "The heart of the modern block-the-vote campaign is a wave of restrictive government-issued photo identification requirements. In a co-ordinated effort, legislators in 34 states introduced bills imposing such requirements. Many of these bills were modeled on legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – a conservative advocacy group whose founder explained: 'Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'"

It is interesting that the right wing, long an opponent of any type of national identification card, is very keen to impose photo identification requirements at the state level. Why? Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, calls the voter ID laws "a solution without a problem … it's not going to make the vote more secure. What it is going to do is put the first financial barrier between people and their ballot box since we got rid of the poll tax."

You don't have to look far for people impacted by this new wave of voter-purging laws. Darwin Spinks, an 86-year-old world war two veteran from Murfreesboro, Tennesee, went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a photo ID for voting purposes, since drivers over 60 there are issued driver's licenses without photos. After waiting in two lines, he was told he had to pay $8. Requiring a voter to pay a fee to vote has been unconstitutional since the poll tax was outlawed in 1964.

Over in Nashville, 93-year-old Thelma Mitchell had a state-issued ID – the one she used as a cleaner at the state capitol building for more than 30 years. The ID had granted her access to the governor's office for decades, but now, she was told, it wasn't good enough to get her into the voting booth. She and her family are considering a lawsuit, an unfortunate turn of events for a woman who is older than the right of women to vote in this country.

It is not just the elderly being given the disenfranchisement runaround. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law points to "bills making voter registration drives extremely difficult and risky for volunteer groups, bills requiring voters to provide specific photo ID or citizenship documents … bills cutting back on early and absentee voting, bills making it hard for students and active-duty members of the military to register to vote locally, and more."

US attorney general Eric Holder recently spoke on this alarming trend. He said: "Our efforts honor the generations of Americans who have taken extraordinary risks, and willingly confronted hatred, bias and ignorance – as well as billy clubs and fire hoses, bullets and bombs – to ensure that their children, and all American citizens, would have the chance to participate in the work of their government. The right to vote is not only the cornerstone of our system of government – it is the lifeblood of our democracy."

Just this week, the Justice Department blocked South Carolina's new law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls, saying data submitted by South Carolina showed that minority voters were about 20% more likely to lack acceptable photo ID required at polling places.

By some estimates, the overall population who may be disenfranchised by this wave of legislation is upward of 5 million voters, most of whom would be expected to vote with the Democratic party. The efforts to quash voter participation are not genuine, grassroots movements. Rather, they rely on funding from people like the Koch brothers, David and Charles. That is why thousands of people, led by the NAACP, marched on the New York headquarters of Koch Industries two weeks ago en route to a rally for voting rights at the United Nations.

Despite the media attention showered on the Iowa caucuses, the real election outcomes in 2012 will likely hinge more on the contest between billionaire political funders like the Kochs and the thousands of people in the streets, demanding one person, one vote.

• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2011 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate

US-CERT: Vulnerability Note VU#723755

WiFi Protected Setup PIN brute force vulnerability

Overview

The WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) PIN is susceptible to a brute force attack. A design flaw that exists in the WPS specification for the PIN authentication significantly reduces the time required to brute force the entire PIN because it allows an attacker to know when the first half of the 8 digit PIN is correct. The lack of a proper lock out policy after a certain number of failed attempts to guess the PIN on some wireless routers makes this brute force attack that much more feasible.

I. Description

WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) is a computing standard created by the WiFi Alliance to ease the setup and securing of a wireless home network. WPS contains an authentication method called "external registrar" that only requires the router's PIN. By design this method is susceptible to brute force attacks against the PIN.

When the PIN authentication fails the access point will send an EAP-NACK message back to the client. The EAP-NACK messages are sent in a way that an attacker is able to determine if the first half of the PIN is correct. Also, the last digit of the PIN is known because it is a checksum for the PIN. This design greatly reduces the number of attempts needed to brute force the PIN. The number of attempts goes from 108 to 104 + 103 which is 11,000 attempts in total.

It has been reported that some wireless routers do not implement any kind of lock out policy for brute force attempts. This greatly reduces the time required to perform a successful brute force attack. It has also been reported that some wireless routers resulted in a denial-of-service condition because of the brute force attempt and required a reboot.

II. Impact

An attacker within range of the wireless access point may be able to brute force the WPS PIN and retrieve the password for the wireless network, change the configuration of the access point, or cause a denial of service.

III. Solution

We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem.

Workarounds

Disable WPS.

Although the following will not mitigate this specific vulnerability, best practices also recommend only using WPA2 encryption with a strong password, disabling UPnP, and enabling MAC address filtering so only trusted computers and devices can connect to the wireless network. [click to continue]

Karl Cohen - Association International du Film d'Animation-SF Newsletter

ASIFA-SF NEWSLETTER
Association International du Film d'Animation
(International Animated Film Association)
December 2011

LEONARD COHEN, AN UP-AND-COMING ANIMATOR FROM PARIS, HAS MOVED TO BERKELEY. HE WON TWO MAJOR PRIZES AT ANNECY AND DID THE ANIMATION FOR SPIKE JONZE’S “TO DIE BY YOUR SIDE”

Leonard Cohen’s Plato won both the Best Graduation Short and the Junior Jury Prize at Annecy 2011. His first big commercial work, animating Spike Jonze’s To Die By Your Side, is a hit at festivals and on the Internet. Continue

Cheetah, chimp from Tarzan films, dies

By Ashley Hayes, CNN, December 28, 2011 -- Updated 1305 GMT (2105 HKT), Article Source

Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan hold hands with Cheetah the chimpanzee in "Tarzan and His Mate."

(CNN) -- Condolences poured in to a Florida primate sanctuary Wednesday after the death of Cheetah, a chimpanzee who starred in the Tarzan movies during the 1930s.

"I grew up watching Tarzan and Cheetah from a boy," a man identifying himself as Thomas from England wrote on the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary's website. "God bless you Cheetah. Now you and Tarzan are together again."

The chimpanzee died Saturday after suffering kidney failure the week before, the sanctuary foundation said on the site. He was roughly 80 years old, Debbie Cobb, the sanctuary's outreach director, told CNN affiliate WFLA.

Cobb recalled Cheetah as an outgoing chimp who loved finger painting and watching football and who was soothed by Christian music, the station said.

Cheetah appeared in the Tarzan moves from 1932 through 1934, Cobb told WFLA. According to the website Tarzanmovieguide.com, "Tarzan the Ape Man" was released in 1932 and "Tarzan and his Mate" in 1934.

Both movies starred Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. Weissmuller -- the first speaking Tarzan, according to the Internet Movie Database website -- died in 1984.

Cheetah came to the primate sanctuary from Weissmuller's Florida estate around 1960, Cobb told WFLA. He was the most famous of the sanctuary's 15 chimpanzees.

"He was very compassionate," Cobb said. "He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day. He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings."

Cheetah was known for his ability to stand up and walk like a person, sanctuary volunteer Ron Priest told WFLA.

Another distinguishing characteristic: "When he didn't like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them," Priest said. "He could get you at 30 feet with bars in between."

Still, Cobb told the station, "He wasn't a chimp that caused a lot of problems."

Cheetah is not believed to have any children, Priest said.

Condolences on the sanctuary site were received from numerous countries and in several different languages. A few posters credited him with helping them develop a love for animals.

"Cheetah will remain forever remembered in history," wrote one man from Malta.

"This little man was almost human," an anonymous poster wrote. "Some of the antics he got up to used to make me laugh when I was in my teens many years ago. Thanks Cheetah for all the good times you had and made us all laugh. You will be a star that will be always remembered. I am in my 60s now and grew up with you."

[NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

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Mike Pinder - Peace Planet Proclamation

Four Minutes - Roger Waters - Attention CW Operators get your pencil out!

The Tide Is Turning - Roger Waters - Attention CW Operators get your pencil out!

RAP NEWS X - #Occupy2012 (featuring Noam Chomsky & Anonymous) - Turn Your Eff'n TV Off

Keith Lampe - Co-Founder of YIPPIE and Progressive Activist Groups

Bodhisattva Associates
+ Tools for Activists +
Stabilizing Neurality for Mood Enhancement Within Today's Urgencies
Via <prez@usa-exile.org>
December 25, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

What's below [Myths of Mass Deception] is not intended as a rain on folks' various Christmas parades.

Rather, I want to feature another major example of the degree to which homeplanet history is falsified by the 1% before it's circulated among us 99%.

This is why I'm so pleased that some locales within the vast Occupy Movement have begun taking "education" (inducation, actually) into their own hands in order to begin a truly higher one--that is, one that truly "leads out" rather than merely leading/inducing/inducting into the narrow, tightly controlled heritage of the ill-fated Occident.

Here's part of a post on one such effort from Angelina Llongueras of Occupy San Francisco:

"Special Guest" Circle Chat on Sunday January 1st at 4 pm at El Rincon Center Lobby, 101 Spear Street at Mission.

Special Guest: Eden of #OB-FSU: Occupy Boston's Free School University. FSU scheduled 150+ teach-ins, mostly in Dewey Square, and has 25+ teach-ins videoed on YouTube. See wiki and YouTube for more info:

http://wiki.occupyboston.org/wiki/Solidarity/FSU

http://www.youtube.com/user/FSUOccupyBoston

Eden is also a member of #OB-Interoccupy connecting #Occupys Internationally and OB-RADIO.

I hope especially that these Occupy folks can blast their way out of the constricted Newtonian physics of the Occident and open to the fullness of High Himalayan physics as presented, say, in Tarthang Tulku's TIME, SPACE AND KNOWLEDGE.

This way, they then can blast out of solar and wind as the best replacements for coal/oil/nuclear/gas--and open to much better modes like cold fusion, zero point and advanced hydrogen/water.

In High Himalayan physics they lift boulders with carefully quantified sonic frequencies via drums and trumpets. [ Click to continue reading]

Meanwhile, Merry Saturnalia.

Yours for tapping the ether, Keith Lampe, Ro-Non-So-Te, Ponderosa Pine

PS: And let's also hope that these Occupy folks can blast their way out of the simplistic capitalist propaganda of Darwin's biology and open to the fullness of Kropotkin's biology where relationships in nature are seen as primarily cooperative and only secondarily competitive.

PPS: Of course chemtrails should be a major topic within any free curriculum.

Happy Chanukah

Paul Krassner - The Realist/Writer/Comic

Paul has been invited to participate in the LA Times Festival of Books, during the weekend of April 21st–22nd, 2012, where he will discuss his forthcoming book, Pot Stories for the Soul, as part of a group discussion. (smile) Here is Paul's reply:

Maren,

Definitely. Absolutely. Positively. I swear I was thinking about this earlier today, wondering if Soft Skull would have a presence at the festival.

I can't tell you how delighted I am about this. It's already on my calendar.

I've been a panelist a few times there -- my favorite was with Christopher Hitchens, Arianna Huffington and Larry Beinhart, which can be Googled on YouTube (a phrase that would've sounded like gibberish a couple of decades ago) -- so I'm excited about returning to the scene of the crime.

I look forward to working with you in promoting the book.

Happy Holidaze, Paul

Season's Greetings by Xeth

(I'm Gonna) Hang Myself By Christmas (HD) by Xeth

Reasons 2-B Happy by Xeth #110: THAT OLD-FASHIONED HOLIDAY SPIRIT

This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression

It's the disguise used by those who wish to exploit without restraint, denying the need for the state to protect the 99%

George Monbiot, guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 December 2011 20.30 GMT, Article history, Article Source

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

[George Monbiot continued] Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

Rightwing libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers' Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Policy Exchange. Their concept of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.

So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it's the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.

Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.

As Berlin noted: "No man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. 'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows'." So, he argued, some people's freedom must sometimes be curtailed "to secure the freedom of others". In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.

Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. "If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral." It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that interfere with other people's freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.

These conflicts of negative freedom were summarised in one of the greatest poems of the 19th century, which could be seen as the founding document of British environmentalism. In The Fallen Elm, John Clare describes the felling of the tree he loved, presumably by his landlord, that grew beside his home. "Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom's ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be. / Thou'st heard the knave, abusing those in power, / Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free."

The landlord was exercising his freedom to cut the tree down. In doing so, he was intruding on Clare's freedom to delight in the tree, whose existence enhanced his life. The landlord justifies this destruction by characterising the tree as an impediment to freedom – his freedom, which he conflates with the general liberty of humankind. Without the involvement of the state (which today might take the form of a tree preservation order) the powerful man could trample the pleasures of the powerless man. Clare then compares the felling of the tree with further intrusions on his liberty. "Such was thy ruin, music-making elm; / The right of freedom was to injure thine: / As thou wert served, so would they overwhelm / In freedom's name the little that is mine."

But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak, like Clare's landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – "do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon other people's freedoms?" – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned "freedom" into an instrument of oppression.

A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

How Many PG&E or CPUC Executives Have Been Charged With Murder? NONE
Are Smart Meters Safe ? NO Is It Time for a Corporate Death Penalty? YES

The Above Quote was: Spoken by War Criminal Dick Cheney, June 2004

 

[VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/SsKpeFXuHdc

Yippie for Pigasus in 1968 by Ed Sanders - Narrated by Keith Lampe

[Note: Rock ran for President & Roll for Vice President in 1972, where dinner rolls were brought to the rallies, one could eat the Vice President, and change the Role. The Birthday Party's Nobody for President campaign started in 1975 and continues today, because out of all choices for President, Nobody is perfect!]

Senior Bush figures could be prosecuted for torture, says Obama
[Political Lie]

President says use of waterboarding showed US had 'lost moral bearings' as Dick Cheney says CIA memos showed torture delivered 'good' intelligence

The US is blind to the price of war that is still being borne by the Iraqi people
[Illegal Iraq War was based on Republican and Democrat lies]

Every effort must be made to thwart those who seek to embellish and distort America's lamentable legacy in Iraq

Pelosi: Bush Impeachment 'Off the Table'
[And it only cost Bush a lunch and visit to the Whitey House]

Pelosi said she received a brief, early-morning call from Bush, who invited her to lunch on Thursday. "We both expressed our wish to work in a bipartisan way for the benefit of the American people."

Almost Gone by Graham Nash and James Raymond via Phoenix

Mike Wilhelm - Charlatans, Flamin' Groovies, and more - Local - Alternative

High Curtis,

I will be opening for The Unauthorized on New Years Eve at Club Fox in Redwood City. Press release and promo video link listed on my main page. 201112.24 Addendum

Happy trails, Mike Wilhelm

Raptured or Sent to Gitmo?

Bush/Cheney Administration with Republican and Democrat Congress
Guilty of Murdering Women and Children & Destroying U.S. Economy

ENCASING THE COLORS, BAGHDAD DECEMBER 2011 - Steve Bell Cartoon

"God told me to strike at al Qaeda, and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East." George W. Bush, Minister of Satan - Ha'aretz [Note: According to Congress: Next time you're in court, tell'em 'God instructed you to do it,' site this case, and you'll walk free ???]

Herb reminds us GOD said, thou shall not kill and
JESUS extended this concept when he said,

Christians are to no longer execute sinners, so they should not wage carnal war, but spiritual warfare. - (John 18:36; 2 Corinthians 10:1-6; Ephesians 6:10-18; 1 Timothy 1:18-20; 6:11-14; 2 Timothy 2:3-5; 4:6-8).

Christians must be peacemakers forgiving those who do them harm treating their enemies with love and not seeking revenge. - (Matthew 5:9; Romans 14:19), (Ephesians 4:29-32; Colossians 3:12-14; Matthew 6:9-15; Mark 11:25-26), (Luke 6:27-36), (Romans 12:17-21; 1 Peter 3:8-12).

Hatred which is the same as murder is unforgiving, vengeful and hostile towards one's enemies. - (1 John 3:15)

When Elected Politicians Become Traitors

Military given go-ahead to detain US terrorist suspects without trial

Civil rights groups dismayed as [LIAR] Barack Obama abandons commitment to veto new security law contained in defence bill

Chris McGreal in Washington, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 December 2011 04.34 GMT, Article history, Article Source

Americans can be arrested on home soil and taken to Guantánamo Bay under a provision inserted into the bill
that funds the US military. Photograph: John Moore/Getty

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no end".

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the "war on terror" to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

The legislation's supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. But the law's critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country.

"It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent."

There was heated debate in both houses of Congress on the legislation, requiring that suspects with links to Islamist foreign terrorist organisations arrested in the US, who were previously held by the FBI or other civilian law enforcement agencies, now be handed to the military and held indefinitely without trial.

The law applies to anyone "who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaida, the Taliban or associated forces".

Senator Lindsey Graham said the extraordinary measures were necessary because terrorism suspects were wholly different to regular criminals.

"We're facing an enemy, not a common criminal organisation, who will do anything and everything possible to destroy our way of life," he said. "When you join al-Qaida you haven't joined the mafia, you haven't joined a gang. You've joined people who are bent on our destruction and who are a military threat."

Graham added that it was right that Americans should be subject to the detention law as well as foreigners. "It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next," he said. "And when they say, 'I want my lawyer,' you tell them, 'Shut up. You don't get a lawyer.'"

Other senators supported the new powers on the grounds that al-Qaida was fighting a war inside the US and that its followers should be treated as combatants, not civilians with constitutional protections.

But another conservative senator, Rand Paul, a strong libertarian, has said "detaining citizens without a court trial is not American" and that if the law passes "the terrorists have won".

"We're talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk," he said. "Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts."

Paul was backed by Senator Dianne Feinstein.

"Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge," she said. "We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge."

Paul said there were already strong laws against support for terrorist groups. He noted that the definition of a terrorism suspect under existing legislation was so broad that millions of Americans could fall within it.

"There are laws on the books now that characterise who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect according to the department of justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist," Paul said. "If you are suspected because of these activities, do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantánamo Bay for indefinite detention?"

Under the legislation suspects can be held without trial "until the end of hostilities". They will have the right to appear once a year before a committee that will decide if the detention will continue.

The Senate is expected to give final approval to the bill before the end of the week. It will then go to the president, who previously said he would block the legislation not on moral grounds but because it would "cause confusion" in the intelligence community and encroached on his own powers.

But on Wednesday the White House said Obama had lifted the threat of a veto after changes to the law giving the president greater discretion to prevent individuals from being handed to the military.

Critics accused the president of caving in again to pressure from some Republicans on a counter-terrorism issue for fear of being painted in next year's election campaign as weak and of failing to defend America.

Human Rights Watch said that by signing the bill Obama would go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.

"The paradigm of the war on terror has advanced so far in people's minds that this has to appear more normal than it actually is," Malinowski said. "It wasn't asked for by any of the agencies on the frontlines in the fight against terrorism in the United States. It breaks with over 200 years of tradition in America against using the military in domestic affairs."

In fact, the heads of several security agencies, including the FBI, CIA, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general objected to the legislation. The Pentagon also said it was against the bill.

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, said he feared the law could compromise the bureau's ability to investigate terrorism because it would be more complicated to win co-operation from suspects held by the military.

"The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain co-operation from the persons in the past that we've been fairly successful in gaining," he told Congress.

Civil liberties groups say the FBI and federal courts have dealt with more than 400 alleged terrorism cases, including the successful prosecutions of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber", Umar Farouk, the "underwear bomber", and Faisal Shahzad, the "Times Square bomber".

Elements of the law are so legally confusing, as well as being constitutionally questionable, that any detentions are almost certain to be challenged all the way to the supreme court.

Malinowski said "vague language" was deliberately included in the bill in order to get it passed. "The very lack of clarity is itself a problem. If people are confused about what it means, if people disagree about what it means, that in and of itself makes it bad law," he said.

Lies, Lies, Lies
BlackMustache.com

The January 26, 1998 NEOCON letter to William J. Clinton, President of the United States, Adulterer, stated:

Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished.

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.

If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country.

and was signed by the following people; some of which have criminal records, or, are admonished racists:

Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Robert B. Zoellick

Lying Criminal Politicians

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. - Dick Cheney - August 26, 2002

Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States. - Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-CT - September 4, 2002

If we wait for the danger to become clear, it could be too late. - Sen. Joseph Biden D-Del. - September 4, 2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. - George W. Bush - September 12, 2002

If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world. - Ari Fleischer - December 2, 2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there. - Ari Fleischer - January 9, 2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. - George W. Bush - January 28, 2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more. - Colin Powell - February 5, 2003

Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations. - Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY - February 5, 2003

We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have. - George Bush - February 8, 2003

So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? I think our judgment has to be clearly not. - Colin Powell - March 8, 2003

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. - George Bush - March 18, 2003

We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. - Tony Blair, Prime Minister - March 18, 2003

Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes. - Ari Fleischer - March 21, 2003

There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them. - Gen. Tommy Franks - March 22, 2003

One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites. - Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark - March 22, 2003

I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction. - Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board - March 23, 2003

We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad. - Donald Rumsfeld - March 30, 2003

Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction - Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary - April 2, 2003

Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty. - Neocon scholar Robert Kagan - April 9, 2003

I think you have always heard, and you continue to hear from officials, a measure of high confidence that, indeed, the weapons of mass destruction will be found. - Ari Fleischer - April 10, 2003

We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them. - George Bush - April 24, 2003

There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country. - Donald Rumsfeld - April 25, 2003

Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit. - Tony Blair - April 28, 2003

We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so. - George Bush - May 3, 2003

I am confident that we will find evidence that makes it clear he had weapons of mass destruction. - Colin Powell - May 4, 2003

I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. - Donald Rumsfeld - May 4, 2003

I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program. - George W. Bush - May 6, 2003

U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction. - Condoleezza Rice - May 12, 2003

I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden. - Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne - May 13, 2003

Before the war, there's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found. - Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps - May 21, 2003

Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction. - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff - May 26, 2003

They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer. - Donald Rumsfeld - May 27, 2003

For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on. - Paul Wolfowitz - May 28, 2003 - Permmalink Source

These 1%ers Don't Need Colors:

Revealed: huge increase in executive pay for America's top bosses

Exclusive survey shows America's CEOs enjoyed pay hikes of up to 40% last year – with one chief executive earning $145m

Dominic Rushe in New York, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 December 2011 18.55 GMT, Article history, Article Source

Chief executive pay has roared back after two years of stagnation and decline. America's top bosses enjoyed pay hikes of between 27 and 40% last year, according to the largest survey of US CEO pay. The dramatic bounceback comes as the latest government figures show wages for the majority of Americans are failing to keep up with inflation.

America's highest paid executive took home more than $145.2m, and as stock prices recovered across the board, the median value of bosses' profits on stock options rose 70% in 2010, from $950,400 to $1.3m. The news comes against the backdrop of an Occupy Wall Street movement that has focused Washington's attention on the pay packages of America's highest paid.

The Guardian's exclusive first look at the CEO pay survey from corporate governance group GMI Ratings will further fuel debate about America's widening income gap. The survey, the most extensive in the US, covered 2,647 companies, and offers a comprehensive assessment of all the data now available relating to 2010 pay.

Last year's survey, covering 2009, found pay rates were broadly flat following a decline in wages the year before. Base salaries in 2009 showed a median increase of around 2%, and annual cash compensation increased just over 1.5%. The troubled stock markets took their toll, and added together CEO pay declined for the third year, though the decrease was marginal, less than three-tenths of a percent. The decline in the wider economy in 2007, 2008 and 2009 far outstripped the decline in CEO pay.

This year's survey shows CEO pay packages have boomed: the top 10 earners took home more than $770m between them in 2010. As stock prices began to recover last year, the increase in CEO pay outstripped the rise in share value. The Russell 3000 measure of US stock prices was up by 16.93% in 2010, but CEO pay went up by 27.19% overall. For S&P 500 CEOs, the largest companies in the sample, total realised compensation – including perks and pensions and stock awards – increased by a median of 36.47%. Total pay at midcap companies, which are slightly smaller than the top firms, rose 40.2%.

GMI released a preliminary report on 2010 CEO pay earlier this year, before all the data was available. Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate at GMI, said that report had shown a significant bounce but he had expected a wider sample to dampen the effect.

"Wages for everybody else have either been in decline or stagnated in this period, and that's for those who are in work," said Hodgson. "I had a feeling that we would see some significant increases this year. But 30-40% was something of a surprise." Bosses won in every area, with dramatic increases in pensions, payoffs and perks – as well as salary.

Still, there are no bankers among this year's big winners. Three of this year's top 10 earners come from the healthcare industry. Top earner John Hammergren at McKesson, the world's largest healthcare firm, made $145,266,91 last year – most of it from stock options.

The rising stock markets were especially good to CEOs, said Hodgson. Stock options were the main area that drove these outsized awards. "They got the options, the market collapsed, then it came back – and all of a sudden they were in the money again," he said.

And there will be more to come. GMI, formerly known as the Corporate Library, is expecting a rash of massive stock option bonuses as many firms awarded their top executives big option deals when the stock markets hit their lows in 2007-2008.

"There's still a lot of money just waiting in the market," said Hodgson. He described the upcoming awards as a "bombshell" likely to dwarf this year's figures.

2010 was a great year to lose your job as a CEO. Four of the 10 highest paid CEOs were retired or departing executives. Ronald Williams, former head of Aetna, a health insurer, exercised 2.4m options for a profit of $50.4m. Aetna's stock price declined by 70% from when Williams assumed the role of CEO in February 2006 until his retirement. At pharmacy chain CVS, Thomas Ryan made a $28m profit on his options. During Ryan's 13-year tenure as CEO, CVS Caremark's stock price decreased almost 54%.

Omnicare's Joel Gemunder retired last August and received cash severance of $16m, part of a final-year pay package worth $98.28m. Adam Metz, the former boss of General Growth Properties, a real estate company that specialises in shopping malls, walked away with a $46m cash bonus in 2010. GGP executives received nearly $115m in bonuses from the firm as it emerged from bankruptcy.

But this year's top earner may have his biggest payday still to come. Hammergren is due a $469m payoff if McKesson changes ownership. "Boards make these decisions, but they don't work out what happens if they stay in the job," said Hodgson.

"If they had have done, one hopes, they would have looked at each other and said: 'This is ridiculous.'"

High Curtis,

I, again, have CDs available of the solo acoustic blues album Keys to the Highway... Information is on my main page.

Happy trails, Mike Wilhelm

 

Reasons 2-B Happy by Xeth #109: WATCHING THE DOG EAT

Notes from ~@~

Libraries, Technology, and Learning at MIT in the 21st Century
presented by Ann J. Wolpert via MIT Club of Northern California by Hank Magnuski
tags: education learning libraries media books MIT MITCNC

MIT students learn individually, collaboratively, and interactively, often in fast-paced, technology-enabled environments. They must be able to acquire knowledge and manage information whether they are 300 miles from campus, in a campus library, or sitting in a classroom.

MIT's libraries are acknowledged leaders among research libraries for their innovative and experimental approach to academic library service. They share MIT’s creative drive, commitment to research, and passion for excellence in support of MIT students.

Learn about the ways MIT's libraries use new technology and new ideas to empower students to thrive at MIT and prepare for a lifetime of learning. Click to view: http://vimeo.com/33447268

Only Ministers of Satan and Pimp/Whores of Fox Support Newt the Adulterer

Palestinians are an invented people, says Newt Gingrich

Republican frontrunner says Israelis have a right to their modern-day homeland but implies Palestinians do not

Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after 'invented people' claim

Officials in West Bank and Gaza say Republican presidential hopeful is cheaply trying to win the pro-Israel vote in US

Newt Gingrich condemned for calling Palestinians 'terrorists'

Palestinian officials say Republican frontrunner's claim children are taught to kill in textbooks is based on Israeli propaganda

Newt Gingrich Supports Terrorism of U.S. Military
Israel Attacked the U.S.S. Liberty
http://www.flyingsnail.com/Dahbud/index.html#ussliberty

34 U.S. Military Dead, 171 Wounded

Hi Curtis,

During the December 31st Boptime program I'm gonna play music from the movie "The Magical Mystery Tour," in the sequence which it was heard, in the movie. This'll include the song "Flying," "The Bus," and "Death Cab For Cutie," by the Bonzo Dog Band. This'll be for the "Beatlemania" segment. In the second hour of the program (7am) I'll play the entire "Her Satanic Majesty Requests" along with selections from the Jefferson Airplane's "After Bathing at Baxter's," because like "The Magical Mystery Tour" they were all popular near the end of 1967. Actually, except for the "Rockabilly Ridge" segment heard at 8am, that entire Boptime program'll be music from 1967.

You might wanna check out the website, www.jazzonmymind.com, and the live television broadcast imbedded therein. I've been showing up as a somewhat frequent guest there. The site/program is produced by Richard Blackwell, who used to do broadcasting in Los Angeles, but moved to Wilmington because his wife is a native here. Richard's been a guest on the "Clifford's Corner" segment on Boptime and from time to time will be sitting in with me and some of the other regulars. Maurice, who will be 86 on Christmas, will continue to sit in with me, but because of his advancing age, not every time.

My Best to you, Steve

Myths of Mass Deception

Merry Saturnalia

[VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/880mWMoPyL8

Rotary Connection Peace at Least

Saturnalia or Brumalia
A Winter Solstice Ritual

by Apollonius Sophistes

YOU ARE A PAGAN IF:

YOU BUY A CHRISTMAS TREE AND DECORATE IT

The evergreen tree is a symbol of the green to come at the re-birth of Mother Earth. In ancient Egypt they laid gifts under Palm Trees during the winter celebration. In ancient Rome they used the fir tree (called the Baal Berith) as a testimony to the Pagan messiah, Baal Tamar.

YOU EXCHANGE PRESENTS DURING DECEMBER

The Babylonians celebrated the birth of the God Tammuz on the Winter Solstice and God Nimrod would visit the evergreen trees of the people and leave gifts upon them.

The early Christian Church frowned upon the exchange of gifts because of its Pagan origins. People refused to give up the customs of their old Pagan religions, though. Ultimately, around 700 years ago, the Christian Church decided to attribute the gift exchange to symbolize the gifts given to Jesus by the three Wise Men. It took the Church over 1,300 years to finally "borrow" the Pagan ritual of gift exchanging and call it their own.

YOU KISS SOMEONE UNDER MISTLETOE

The Romans and Saturnalia celebrations are even credited with the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe. Mistletoe was used as a means to get a pretty girl to kiss you during the celebration and ultimately instigate an orgy. The Druids in Scotland and Ireland also believed that mistletoe was a symbol of fertility; a husband and wife desiring a child would hang the mistletoe around their bed during intercourse.

YOU BURN A YULE LOG

The Yule log and Yule Day have Babylonian origins. Yule is the Chaldee name for an infant or little child. December 25th was called Yule Day by Pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The night preceding Yule Day was known as Mother's Night.

Yule Log

YOU CELEBRATE DECEMBER 25th

The Bible does not tell Christians to celebrate the birth of Jesus. The Bible doesn't even tell us when Jesus was born. Of course we can look for "clues" within the gospels to when Jesus might have been born, and people have done that. The assumption of course is that these "clues" are authentic and not stolen from other Pagan mythology.

When the angels appear to the shepherds of Bethlehem to advise them of the birth of Jesus, the shepherds are feeding their flocks at night in the open fields. From late October to early March in Palestine one will encounter bitterly cold weather, icy rain, and sometimes even snow. Tending the flocks, much less tending them at night, is not what one finds Shepherds doing in Palestine (Bethlehem) in the middle of winter. The climate of Palestine dictates that flocks are in the field at night no later than late-October or mid-November and no sooner than early to mid-March. If we base the birth of Jesus on that clue alone, then Jesus would have been born sometime between March and late October.

It is also interesting to note that the Qur'an in Surah 19 talks about the birth of the prophet Jesus. The mother Maryam shakes the trunk of a palm tree (Qur'an 19:25) so that ripe dates fall upon her. Dates ripen in Palestine in the summer.

The Watchtower in December of 1991 stated, "The date of December 25 does not correspond to Christ's birth but to the feast of the Natalis Solis Invicti, the Roman sun festival at the solstice."

The celebration of Jesus' birth on December 25th did not start until 354 CE when Pope Gregory proclaimed the date as that of The Nativity.. Prior to 354 the Church had even guessed Jesus' birth to be in April. After the Church changed the date to December, there were Christians that refused to worship Jesus' birth in December and continued celebrating it in April. They became known as "April's fools."

Why did the Christian Church change the date to December 25th? They changed it because they were having a difficult time converting Pagans that did not want to give up their celebrations of Saturnalia, Natalis Solis Invicti, and Mithraism (among other winter solstice celebrations). Basically the change was made so Christians could say, "Hey look! We have a party, too!"

Another reason for the change to December 25th was not just to coincide with the five-day Pagan festival but also with Hanukkah. Hanukkah occurs on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, which occurs usually in December. So by creating a Christian holiday around the same times as Hanukkah and the winter solstice, the early Christian Church was able to convert Pagans and Jews with the lure of a "grand party" to replace the one that the Pagans and Jews already celebrated.

Zeitgeist The Greatest Story Ever Told Part 1, December 25th

Did you know Puritans banned Christmas in England during 1552 and you did read the disclaimer, didn't you? (-;

Rotary Connection - Shopping Bag Menagerie (Cadet Concept 1968)

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Saturnalia

By Judy Andreas

PEACE ON EARTH
Give Peace a Chance

Wars happen when intolerance reaches epic proportions, when the reasons for war become greater than the sanctity of peace. Wars happen when we fail to realize the value of being alive. World leaders try to bring peace, but it is not an issue of institutions. It is human beings who start wars. Before a war begins outside, it starts inside.

The war on the inside is more dangerous because it is a fire that may never be put out. Wars are being fought because peace is not being found within, because it is not being allowed to unfold. We are all searching for something, we may call it success, peace, love, or tranquility. It is the same thing. What we are looking for has many names because we do not know what we need. To find what we need, we look around us. To know where to find what we are looking for, we first need to ask ourselves where we can find it. Have we considered looking within?

Living is not an easy task, especially if we want the best of it. We have to mine for it. Mining is not easy. We have to take out what we need and leave the rest. If we want to mine for peace, then we have to seek what is precious and discard what is not. The thing that we are searching for is not outside of us. It is within us. It always has been and always will be. Contentment feels good, and it is not an accident. It is not an accident that peace feels good. Peace is already here, and it resides in the hearts of all human beings.

Peace is something that has to be felt. One of the most incredible powers we have is that we can feel. When we place peace in front of that power to feel, we feel peace. We are here to be filled with gratitude, love and understanding. We carry a lamp within so bright that even in the darkest night, it can fill our world with light. This light is waiting to be found. Peace makes no distinctions. It does not care if we are rich, if we are poor, or what religion we belong to. It does not care which country we live in.

Peace is waiting to be found. Waiting to once again feel whole, not separated by all the issues that divide our lives. Peace is when the heart is no longer in duality, when the struggle within has been resolved. When peace comes to the heart, serenity follows. Love comes flooding in, uncontrolled. Joy cannot be held back. It bursts through because it is right. That is peace. Peace needs to be felt, love needs to be felt, truth needs to be felt. As long as we are alive, the yearning to feel good, to feel joy, will always be there, and as long as it is there, there will be a need for it to be discovered.

Life is a journey. We are passengers in a train called life, and we are alive in the moment called now. The journey of life is so beautiful that it needs no destination. On this journey, we have been given a compass. The compass is the thirst to be fulfilled. The true journey of life begins the day we begin to seek to quench our thirst. This quest is the most noble one. For many centuries, a voice has been calling out: "What you are looking for is within you. Your truth is within you, your peace is within you, your joy is within you." In our hearts, peace is like a seed waiting in the desert to grow, to blossom. When we allow this seed to blossom inside, then peace is possible outside. We have to give peace a chance.

Will we give peace a chance? - Prem Rawat - India Times

...and now a word from Politicians:

John Ashcroft as Santa - a Ben Sargent cartoon:

Brought to U.S. by Our Elected, Corporate Lobby Paid, Republican and Democrat Traitors

You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry,
You'd better not pout, I'm telling you why:
He [Government] Taps Your Phone & Reads Your E-Mail Too....

He's [Government's] making a list, he's [Government's] checking it twice,
[Government's] Gonna find out who's naughty or nice [unless you're a Corporation who's paid off a Politician]:
He's [Government's] Got A File On Everything You Do.

He [Government] sees when you are sleeping,
He [Government] knows when you're awake,
He [Government] knows if you've been bad or good,
So Be Good, For Goodness' Sake!

[VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/FiMK9e0h6YE

Adele - Rolling In The Deep

Mike Wilhelm plays the Blue Wing solo
Sunday Brunch on December 11, 11:30-2pm.
9520 Main St., Upper Lake, California 707-275-2233

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Pacific Packet Radio Society
31st Anniversary
Historic KA6M Digital Packet Radio Repeater
First United States Wireless Data Communications

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Rolling Stones to pay for Hubert Sumlin's funeral

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards 'insist' on covering expenses for blues guitarist's memorial services, according to his manager

Sean Michaels, guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 December 2011 10.52 GMT, Article history, Article Source

'God bless the Rolling Stones' … Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to pay for Hubert Sumlin's funeral. Photograph: Rich Lee/PA

The funeral of blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin will be paid for by the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have reportedly "insisted" on footing the bill for the services, to be held in New Jersey this weekend.

"I just wanted to share with you, Hubert's loving fans, that [Mick and Keith] have insisted on picking up the full expenses for Hubert's funeral," revealed Toni Ann Mamary, Sumlin's manager and partner. "God bless the Rolling Stones."

Jagger and Richards are long-time admirers of Sumlin, who died of heart failure on 4 December. Richards not only featured him on his 2005 album – in recent years, he helped cover the guitarist's medical expenses. "The Stones – they're nice people," Sumlin told the New York Times earlier this year. Musicians such as Richards "can run a ring around me as guitar players", he explained, "but they respect me … They came to [Howlin'] Wolf's house because, you know, they heard us doing Little Red Rooster."

The Stones stars issued statements following Sumlin's death:

"Warm, humourous and always encouraging, he was a gentleman of the first order," wrote Richards. "Miss him, yes, but we have his records. All my condolences to his family. One love, Hubert."

"Hubert was an incisive yet delicate blues player," Jagger wrote. "He had a really distinctive and original tone and was a wonderful foil for Howlin' Wolf's growling vocal style … He was an inspiration to us all."

Sumlin will be honoured with public services on 11 and 12 December in Totowa, New Jersey. He will be laid to rest in a private service in Illinois on Tuesday 13 December.

No Matter What THEY Say, It Is A Stupid Idea:

Fukushima Daiichi operator considers plans to dump treated water into sea

Tepco says it is running out of space to store water and may dump it, prompting protests from fishing groups

The Staple Singers Respect Yourself Live Filmed Performance 1972

Family Value Republicans Support Adulterers?

If elected President, will Newt do to the country, what he did to his faithful wife?

Nobody Refuses to Vote for Adulterers, Ask Cain

A Vote for Newt Is A Vote for Adultery ?

The “big” one that got away

Five years ago, I chased the story that Speaker Newt "Family Values" Gingrich was messing around with a young Capitol Hill staffer, but I just couldn't pin it down. Now the tabloids have "outed" him.

BY DAVID CORN, THURSDAY, AUG 12, 1999 3:30 AM PST, Salon Article Source

These days, Newt Gingrich may be little more than a political has-been whose policy pronouncements barely register in the press, but his sex life, apparently, still can make headlines.

After learning that the Star magazine would publish an article on the alleged extramarital affair between the former House speaker and a congressional aide named Calista Bisek, the New York Post and the New York Daily News both rushed out breathless stories on the supposed tryst — which Gingrich and Bisek would neither confirm nor deny.

“Newt’s Fooling Around with His Girl on the Hill,” shouted the Post headline.

The Daily News Web site polled readers: “Do you think Newt Gingrich is a hypocrite?”

Short answer: Of course. This is a guy who gained the speakership of the House of Representatives by posing as a champion of family values. Remember how Gingrich repeatedly referred to liberals and Democrats as deviants and miscreants? And, later, how he gleefully tried to exploit Monicagate?

Well, Gingrich, the advocate of families, informed his first wife he was divorcing her when she was ill with cancer. Now, he is divorcing his second wife, Marianne, and a tabloid will soon publish a picture of him holding hands with his much-younger girlfriend.

As far as inveterate Newt-watchers are concerned, however, the Gingrich-Bisek story is old news. For years, word of this relationship was commonplace on the Hill. It was one of those “everybody-knows-it” stories that seem to float endlessly around Washington.

Unfortunately, such stories can be the most difficult to prove. I should know, for I tried to prove this one back in 1994.

It was the time of Gingrich’s ascendance to power. After years as a backbencher, he had led the Republicans to a historic election victory that wrested control of the House from the Democrats for the first time in four decades. Newt was riding high and talking the family values talk.

Democratic aides on Capitol Hill, who long had traded in gossip about Gingrich’s extramarital recreations, were beside themselves with anger. From such sources, I received a number of leads and tales. My favorite was from an aide who swore she had once spotted Gingrich’s pale-green Mustang bouncing up and down in an underground House parking garage, with the windows all fogged up — signs that not-so-conservative behavior may have been occurring within.

The aide said she had tried to peer through the condensation to determine with whom Gingrich was rocking and rolling, but that she just couldn’t get a clear-enough view.

After all, it could have been his wife.

In any event, the most prevalent rumor concerned the supposed relationship between Gingrich and Bisek, 23 years his junior. A close friend of mine told me that Bisek had talked openly to a co-worker about her affair with Newt. But the co-worker turned out to be a loyal Republican who would not talk to me.

Hill aides further reported that Bisek and Gingrich routinely had breakfast together at the Supreme Court cafeteria. That seemed plausible enough, since Gingrich’s Capitol Hill apartment was right across the street from the Court, in the same building, in fact, as my office.

Chasing after any politician’s personal life raised awkward questions for me — this was before Monicagate — but it seemed justified in this case if the leading family-values campaigner was in fact nothing more than a rank hypocrite.

But how do you prove a sexual affair between two adults? Reporters cannot subpoena dresses and compel DNA submissions. Even if you catch sight of the two together — say, at breakfast in the Supreme Court cafeteria — what is that supposed to mean?

As I pondered how to proceed, I was contacted by the producer of a tabloid television show who had heard what I was up to; he offered to set up a stakeout in front of Gingrich’s apartment. For a week, the show’s staff watched for Bisek coming or going, especially at odd times like late at night and early in the morning.

Yet there was no sign of her. My guess at the time was that Gingrich, just weeks away from being handed the speaker’s gavel, realized he was under intense scrutiny, and may therefore have been acting with more caution than previously had seemed necessary to him.

The show’s correspondent finally managed to obtain some video footage of Bisek as she left her own condominium in northern Virginia one day, but that hardly made for a story. Not to worry, however; he would find an excuse to air the video soon enough, even though our mutual effort to nail down the affair was turning into a bust.

Soon, Gingrich was sworn in as speaker. None of the reporters chasing the story, including me, wrote about the Gingrich-Bisek affair. But whenever I saw his wife, Marianne, in our building I felt sorry for her. If I — and practically everyone else in Washington — had heard of the liaison, I had to assume that she had, too.

Months later, in a Vanity Fair profile of Gingrich, Gail Sheehy partly outed Bisek as Gingrich’s “frequent breakfast companion.” This was, I believe, the first public mention of their relationship. The Vanity Fair piece, in turn, gave the tabloid TV show cause to air its “exclusive” video tape of Bisek leaving her apartment.

Clearly, Sheehy had heard the same rumors I had, and also couldn’t prove them. But she had devised a clever way to transmit the information to her readers. It was a pretty unfair hit on Newt, though, when so little evidence was available to substantiate the insinuation, even if it may now appear to have been true.

A couple of weeks ago, on July 29, Gingrich filed divorce papers to end his second marriage, but “congressional sources” told the New York Post that the Bisek affair was not the reason for his breakup with Marianne.

Still, the Post also reported that Gingrich has been taking Bisek to dinner with friends. It seems that the Gingrich secret that “everybody” in Washington once knew to be true is finally about to be shared with the public at large.

David Corn is the Washington editor of the Nation, a columnist for the New York Press and author of a political suspense novel, "Deep Background" (St.Martin's Press)

Riddle Me This, Pleurodelinae:

Why would a Republican Congress spend $55 (now $100) million tax payer dollars to discover if somebody swallowed and only spend $3 million tax payer dollars investigating MASS MURDERS ON 9/11 ?

newtron bomb

WILL GINGRICH'S SELF-PURGE SAVE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

BY BRUCE SHAPIRO, SALON | Nov. 6, 1998

In 1968, a North Vietnamese Communist leader offered a visiting American this analysis of President Lyndon Johnson's abrupt decision not to seek reelection: "In my country, we have purges." Late Friday afternoon, Newt Gingrich, who expended his party's energies for the past two years in trying to purge President Clinton, instead decided to purge himself.

Gingrich's decision -- not only to step aside as speaker but apparently to resign from the House -- is the head-spinning climax to a head-spinning week that began with the downfall of conservatives Al D'Amato and Lauch Faircloth; the survival and, in some cases, triumph of many vulnerable Democrats; and the erosion of the Republican congressional majority. By Friday morning, Gingrich and Majority Leader Dick Armey (who as the polls closed on election night was still predicting to an incredulous Peter Jennings that the GOP would pick up 12 to 15 seats) were both being devoured by a Republican caucus turned into a school of frenzied piranhas. Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston, running for speaker, accused Gingrich of being "lost in a haze of high rhetoric and misplaced priorities." Even Rep. Bob Barr from the district adjacent to Gingrich in Georgia declared that "the current team, I don't think, will remain, nor should it."

But in fact the postelection disarray of the Republicans is not just about Gingrich's personal leadership. It marks a historic turning point, the collapse of an agenda and a style that have defined the Republican Party and driven national politics since 1994. That year, Gingrich proposed his Contract with America to unite the competing wings of the GOP and offer a sense of certainty to middle-class Americans uneasy with President Clinton's perpetually morphing agenda.

But what Gingrich and his allies delivered in various forms was something different: a politics of meanness and intolerance, beginning with easy targets like welfare but finally running aground on the inquisition into the Lewinsky affair. What's more, Clinton himself proved so adept at co-opting a crucial part of the Reagan Republican constituency -- Wall Street -- that the GOP's most distinctive voices in the Gingrich years have been not economic conservatives but the Christian Coalition fringe. It was this narrowing of the Republican constituency -- not the speaker's overreliance on focus groups, as he was charged with on Friday by would-be majority leader Steve Largent, R-Okla. -- that led to the Republican disaster of the last nine months, with Gingrich and his team betting the farm on impeachment while abandoning all other legislative initiatives.

In the short run, the collapse of Gingrich's leadership seems likely to short-circuit the Impeach Clinton campaign. Even Republican attack dog Barr has already confessed that the Republicans' narrowed majority may make an impeachment resolution more difficult to pass. Moderate Republicans like campaign finance reformer Christopher Shays and former ethics chair Nancy Johnson, both from Connecticut, who voted for the impeachment inquiry only out of loyalty to Gingrich, seem likely to take the opportunity of his absence to vote their conscience should an actual impeachment resolution come to the floor. Yet at the same time, with the impeachment hearings beginning in days, the vacuum in Republican leadership could cede the floor to the party's most fanatical voices, the Barrs and McCollums and other petty Torquemadas. Indeed it is precisely at such moments of political crisis that raising the temperature of the inquiry may seem an appealing distraction for politicians and media alike.

In the longer term, Gingrich's departure strips bare the deep philosophical chasms in the Republican Party. Livingston, the only current candidate for speaker, is an economic conservative. But it was the Christian Coalition who first expressed dissatisfaction with Gingrich's leadership as, one by one, he dropped the moral right's legislative initiatives. This division between moral and economic right is sure to plague the party between now and the presidential election in 2000.

Democrats, of course, were jubilant on Friday night. But in the long run, Gingrich's resignation is not doing either Bill Clinton or his party any favors. For all the perils posed by Gingrich's leadership, he's been a massively useful bête noir, the locus of Democratic campaign strategy (run against Gingrich!), the inspiration for liberal fundraising (donate against Gingrich!) and most of all a sort of black-hat villain against whom Bill Clinton can define himself. Without Gingrich in the room, Clinton's I-feel-your-pain politics has far less urgency.

A shrewd new GOP leader will declare victory in the impeachment proceeding and withdraw; but for Clinton, Gore and the Democrats, with a global economic crisis creeping toward American shores, it will no longer be enough to define the president as the Un-Newt. Thus for Democrats no less than Republicans, the end of the Gingrich era -- and the end, perhaps, of the politics of meanness that has defined it -- marks a crisis whose outcome will not be known until the election of 2000.

Bruce Shapiro, who writes the column Law and Order for the Nation, is a regular contributor to Salon.

Nobody makes huge gains in the Russian election

Russian Anarchists protest parliamentary elections and citizens boycott vote - photo by SERGEI KARPUKHIN/RUSSIA

Article Sources via Hank

"Today, I am not voting for someone but against someone, because there is no one appealing to vote for," said Sergei Tarakanov, 62, who wore a leather coat and porkpie hat, in the light snow outside a school in central Moscow where he cast his ballot. "So, I am a protest voter. Today, I am voting against the party of thieves and swindlers."

Dear Citizens of the World,

I believe the time has come to reveal to you some of the perplexities you have faced in recent decades.

It is important to understand some of these things, so that you might know how to behave in the New Order now taking shape on this planet you call Earth. We want you to be able to become fully involved and integrated into our new society. After all, doing this is for your best interest.

First of all, it is best if you understand some of our purposes so that you may more fully cooperate. I cannot tell you the hard times you will face if you resist us.

We have ways of dealing with resisters and you are being told this now, since it is much too late to turn things around. The days of putting a stop to us have long since past.

We have full control of the earth and it's finances, along with control of major corporate media propaganda, and there is simply no way any nation or power can defeat us.

We have eyes in every level of government in every nation of the world. We know what is being planned, for our ears and eyes are ever present. State secrets are fully known to us.

U.S. corporate media are constantly accused of lying for their government by everyone; including foreign governments.

Oh, you silly people, of course we lie. In this way we can keep the people unbalanced and always facing controversy, which is very helpful to us. Have you not seen the talk show spectacles on FOX?

Some of you believe we are the liberals and the good people are the conservatives. In reality, both serve our purposes. Each camp merely serves with the stamp of our approval, but they are not allowed to present real issues.

For example, consider BP's Oil Spill. By creating controversy on all levels, no one knows what to do. So, in all of this confusion, we go ahead and accomplish what we want with no hindrance. If fact, we teach this within a fraternity in one of your nation's older universities.

Consider President George W. Bush of the United States. Even though he regularly broke every known check on his power, no one could stop him, and he went ahead, and did whatever we wanted him to do.

Congress and 'The People' had no power to stop him. He did what we wanted, since he knew, if he did not, because of his rather dark character, we could have him removed in an instant. I'd say it was, "Rather brilliant strategy on our part?"

You cannot take us to court because you can't see us and the courts are our servants as well. We run everything and you do not know who to attack. I must say this invisible hand is wonderfully devised without any known historical precedent on this scale. We rule the world and the world cannot even find out who is ruling them.

This is truly a wonderful thing. In our corporate media, we present before you exactly what it is we want you to do. Then, as if in a flash you, our little servants, obey!

We can send American or European troops to wherever we like, whenever we like, and for whatever purpose we like, and you dutifully go about our business and don't even look up to see the poisons we are spraying on you in the form of chemtrails. How much more evidence do you need?

We can make you desire to leave your homes and family and go to war merely at our command. We only need to present some nonsense to you from the president's desk, or on the evening news, and we can get you all fired up to do whatever we like. You can do nothing but what we put before you.

Your Vain Resistance

When any of you seek to resist us, we have ways of making you look ridiculous with corporate media, as we have done with all your movements to show the world how impotent any resistance is.

Look at what we did near Waco. Did the Davidian's little store of weapons help them?

We have generously taxed you and used that money to make such sophisticated weapons you can in no way compete. Your own money has served to forge the chains we bind you with; especially, since we are in control of all money.

Some of you think you may escape by buying some land in the country and growing a garden. Let me remind you that you still pay us ground rent. Oh, you may call it property taxes, but it still goes to us.

You see, you need money no matter what you do. If you fail to pay your ground rent to us, we will take your land and sell it to someone who will pay us. Do you think we cannot do this? And with your ground rent we pay for the indoctrination of your children in the public schools we have set up.

We want them to grow up well trained into the system of our thinking. Your children will learn what we want them to learn, when we want them to learn it, and you pay for it through your ground rent.

Those funds are also used for other projects we have in mind, like drilling for oil in the Gulf, and our contractors are paid handsomely for their work.

You may doubt that we own your children, or have such control, but you will find that we do. We can declare that you abuse your children, when you spank them, and have them confiscated. If they do not show up for school indoctrination, we can accuse you of neglect, thereby, giving them to us.

Your children are not yours. They are ours. You must inoculate them, you must bring them to our hospitals, if we decree, or we will take them from you. You know this and we know this.

Through our electronic commerce and iDevices we are able to see where you are, what you are buying, and how much you have to buy things with. Where do you suppose we come up with our monthly financial statistics?

Through the Internet, Telecoms, and other sources we can even know how you think and what you say. It is not especially important to us what you believe as long as you do what we say.

Your beliefs are nonsense anyway. But if you think you have a following, and we perceive that you might be somewhat dangerous to our agenda, we have ways to deal with you. Do you remember how we used Telecoms to spy for us?

We have a Pandora's box of mischief with which to snare you. We can have you in court so long, you will never get out. We can easily drain away all your assets over one pretext or another. We have an inexhaustible fund with which to draw from to pay our lawyers.

These lawyers are paid by you in the form of taxes. You do not have this vast supply of wealth. We know how to divide and conquer. Have we not brought down rulers of countries through our devices?

Do you think your tiny self will be any match for us?

Your Vain Organizations

Let us consider your religions, tea parties, and "moral majority."

The "moral majority" is neither moral nor is it in the majority. We have delighted to use this wet noodle of a movement to make ridiculous the Christian faith.

The silly men who run that organization always end up with egg on their faces. We have always put them in defense of themselves, as we have so successfully done with the NRA.

We can make it seem, by our corporate media propaganda, that the National Rifle Association is actually the new Al Qaeda.

Have we not turned the American conservative movement on its ear? If it serves our purposes we can use the conservatives to turn the liberals on their ear.

It makes no difference to us but it serves to make you believe there are two sides struggling for their particular position. This helps to make things seem fair and free, since everyone has a voice.

Actually, there is only one side now with all kinds of masks on, but you are unable to penetrate our purposes.

You see, we can do whatever we like and you can do nothing about it.

Does it not seem reasonable that you should simply obey and serve us? Otherwise, you get eaten up in the resistance you suppose that will liberate you.

You cannot be liberated ... Try to Imagine how you can.

We supply fuel for your cars and we can turn it off whenever we like, claiming there is some sort of fuel shortage. What if your car breaks down? You cannot get parts for it without us.

We supply all money you use and at any whim of our desire, we can stop the money supply, or ... cause a complete crash all together.

We can then order the president to declare all money worthless and that we will have to have new money. All of your stashes of cash will go up in smoke in an instant.

Don't you need food?

If necessary, we can cause a trucker's strike which would stop deliveries of food to your local store. We can starve you whenever we like. You only have food because we have provided it for you from our 'supermarket to the world' table.

During the great depression we controlled food and heaped mountains of it behind fences, to let it rot.

The hungry were then made to work in our labor camps, even though there was enough, and more, to feed them. Do you really think you can beat us?

You say you will hoard gold coins so you will still have money in the time of the crash. We can simply pass a law which outlaws the possession of gold as we have done in the past.

If we find gold in your possession, we would simply confiscate it, and put you in prison for breaking the law.

While in prison, or at one of our recently reconstructed FEMA camps, you would be required to work for one of our prison industries. We have so formed a picture of the labor camps in our prisons, these days, that no one seems to object to them.

We tell people that murderers should pay for their own keep.

No one seems to consider that we have the power to put tomato growers in prison.

We can pass laws that prohibit gardens, and then make up some scientific reason why you may only buy food from our sources.

If someone sees you growing tomatoes, they will report you to us, and then we will have you in our fields, working for us.

Oh, silly, stoned out of your minds, people, there is no escape for you, for since long before you were born, we were planning your capture.

Your teachers and ministers have been forming your thoughts for us, for generations now. You have been tricked into taking corporate drugs that were intended for short term usage, which have turned you into a nation of controlled mood zombies, and you have no idea how to pull out of our influence, short of suicide. Go ahead and commit suicide, it will only help us to deal with excessive population.

You cannot hurt us, find us, or even imagine what we are up to. I am throwing you these few crumbs only so that you may, if you have a little good sense, obey and follow our orders.

Your Controlled Mind

We run Hollywood. The movies such as Terminator and Armageddon, along with a great host of others, were simply created to get you thinking according to our directions.

You have been made to delight in violence, so that when we send you off to kill some bad man, we have put before you, you move without a whimper.

We have placed violent arcade games in your malls to prepare your young children's minds in the art of battle.

We have made you view our armies and police as the good forces, which cause you to submit to things that were unthinkable a few decades ago.

We totally orchestrated 9/11 and blamed it on somebody else using our corporate media and through our lobbies, Congress.

Think about it ... Congress spent about 60 million (60,000,000) of your income tax dollars, to discover if Monica swallowed (a little pre-reality show we dreamed up) and a little over 3 million dollars on the 9/11 Commission because we did not want an investigation of secret energy meetings or 9/11 to surface. See how easy it is to trick you?

Our artful programs are all designed to help you to submit and help the New World Order. Star Trek, and other such creations, have taught you to simply: obey orders from new international rulers.

Oh, silly people, you thought you were being entertained, while you were actually being educated. Dare I use the words, "brainwashed" or "mind control?" By the way, have you ever seen Star Wars?

What a masterpiece of mental manipulation. Humans confer with nondescript beasts of all shapes and sizes, and they confer in English.

I wonder where those space beasts learned English. Oh, the simple-ness of the mind of the citizen, for sh-he never considers sh-he is being taken into fairyland.

We placed advertisements for Star Wars everywhere you go. They were in WalMart, K-Mart, Taco Bell and a host of our institutions of corporate commerce.

There is something we want you to learn from Star Wars. Or, perhaps it could be said, there is something we do not want you to learn. Either way, we will have what we want in the whole affair.

Of course, to keep you off guard, we have instructed our elected officials to appear to be correcting the evil of our violence. Presidents often speak against violence in Hollywood movies.

This will not solve the problem, but it will make the people believe the problem is being worked on.

Sex and violence are the very best powers to use, to help us gain our advantage. How the people loathe to give up their sex and violence, so we place all they want before them. In this way, we keep them so occupied they do not have the integrity or brain-power to deal with the really important matters which are left entirely in our hands.

President Bush was very helpful to us. We knew of what character he was before we placed him as president. Exposing him was very helpful in adjusting the moral habits of the youth downward and this is too, our advantage.

Even more agreeable to us were the vain efforts of those who thought they could remove him against our will. He was useful to us and we control who is removed or not removed.

Excuse me if I seem to be mocking your system of beliefs, but they are rather outdated. Have you no eyes to see your vain liberties and your righteous pontifications are nothing before us? You can only do what we say you can do.

We remove presidents when we are ready and the leader we set up will be there until it serves us to have another. At that time we place our purposed politicians before you, and you vote for what we want.

In that way we give you the vain voting exercise in the belief you had something to do with placing your politicians in office.

Our Unfathomable Mysteries

Our recent war in Iraq had many purposes to it, but we do not speak of these things openly. We let the talk show hosts blather all sorts of nonsense, but none of it touches the core.

First of all, there is a wealth of natural resources on the planet we must have complete control of.

Iraq has large supplies of oil in its soil and oil is very helpful to our regime. Also, it suits us to keep this oil out of the hands of potential enemies.

For those who have not been helpful in getting these resources into our hands, we simply make things difficult until submission. Does anyone recall the word "sanction?"

We can reduce any proud nation to the level of humility we require from all people. For example if Zionist Israel does not sufficiently humble itself, we will take them to the world court, and have them charged with "war crimes." We made up that term; rather ingenious, don't you think?

How could there be such a thing as a war crime? The very nature of war is that the rules are off. It is so entertaining to watch the nations try to fight war according to the laws we have placed before them.

The only war crime there really is, involves the crime of being against us.

Anyone against us is violating our law and, as you have seen, when someone is for us, we do not care what they do. Was not Ariel Sharon a self professed murdering terrorist who tortured and horribly killed many of his enemies women and children? We made a hero of him. And what about the Bush administration? Are any of them in jail? No, they are still working for us and on your televisions, getting paid big salaries.

We observe no laws when it comes to war. We do what we want, when we want, and where we want.

We can starve nations to death, ruin civilizations, and commit other horrors for which we take our enemies to court. Look at one of our examples.

We bomb Iraq out of its wits. We can bomb rock throwing Palestinians out of their homes, poison their rivers and streams, turn off their electricity, making a grand crisis, and then we masterfully make it appear it is the fault of Islam.

It is the same way we made our inferno at Waco look like Mr. Koresh's fault. Then there was our chief villain, Saddam with all of his non existent weapons of mass destruction.

Bad men are a dime a dozen, we can conjure one up whenever it suits us, and ultimately, this is really quite funny when you think of it.

I am not one who is usually given to 'this sort' of humor, but I do catch myself laughing sometimes at the absolute absurdity of the notions we place before you, that you readily accept.

Do you wonder that the leaders of the world tremble at our presence? They know they have no power except the power we give them.

We have no fear of Russia or China, for we are already in full control of their system of things.

China knows we can freeze any number of their corporations in America and all of its capitol at the stroke of a pen. We use nations for what we want to use them for. Everyone knows that they must yield to us or die.

Fortunately, we have had a few resisters, such as Saddam, that have been helpful in showing world leaders what we will do to them if they do not submit.

There is only glory in following our purposes and doing what we say. If one does not, there will be a sad and tragic result.

I would have spared you of such an end, but, then, again, if you are not spared, it is of no consequence to us. We will use you to alleviate some of the overpopulation problem.

Your Silly Rebellions Against Us

Some of you have thought you could stop us by placing a bomb in one of our abortion clinics or in a government building.

Silly souls! How can that hurt us? All that does is give us an example to use so that we might place more controls, and heavy burdens, on the population.

We love it when you rebel and blow something up. You are our reason for making more laws against all those things, which might contribute to your freedom from us.

If someone did not blow something up on occasion, we would have no justification in placing more laws on you. Can't you see how impossible it is for you to resist us? The more you wiggle, the more we squeeze.

It is said our kingdom is the kingdom of money, but I must confess we are rulers of a kingdom of non-money.

You must see the humor in that statement. We have given you a piece of paper or some numbers on a computer screen that we have termed money.

It is backed up by nothing and proven by nothing, but what we say it is. We create it from nothing, we print it, we loan it, we give it its value, we take its value away. All things that have to do with money are in our hands.

Think of it, what is it that you can do against us without money? If you try to resist, we can cancel your credit or freeze your accounts. Your cash is easily confiscated.

We have made so many rules in the realm of living that you cannot live without money.

Camp on government land and you must move in two weeks. You cannot grow much of a garden in two weeks.

Many of our wilderness trails are entered by permit only.

We have passed laws that do not allow you to live in trailers over a certain period without moving to another location.

Have you not thought it ridiculous that we will allow a man to live in a box, full time, but we will not allow a man to live in a RV, full time, unless he is in a taxpaying campground? We want you to be in the system.

When you are buying a house, we not only receive the tax revenue to use for our purposes, but we gain large increases from the interest on the loan. You may pay for your house two or three times over from the interest alone. The interest is also taxed which is again placed for use in those sectors of influence we choose.

We do not want you to escape free and that is why we have made it as we have.

You are our property. We will not permit you to buy or sell unless you submit to our mark of authority.

If you go to court against us, we will wear you out, and in the end you will lose.

If you use violence, we will end up having you in one of our labor camps; more specifically called, prison industries.

You need our money, our entertainments, our fuel, and our utilities to function and if you don't have them, you feel deprived. By this, you are made to yield to our will.

You don't even know how to think anymore since we have thoroughly emasculated your religions and your faith in God. Now, you only have yourself ... and we have gotten 'that self' pretty well chasing its tail these days.

I hope this little note is sufficient to inform you what the new millennium is all about.

The 21st century is our century. You may stay if you do as you are told.

We have no intention of playing around with your so-called human rights or your so-called Constitution. These things were only used for our purposes, for a time. Your Constitution is a joke to us, and we can do with it what we please.

It probably never occurred to you, that years ago, your Constitution was used to refuse abortions. When we decided to have abortions legalized, we used the same Constitution to justify it.

Your human rights are what we say they are and your Constitution is what we say it is.

We have only used this phrase of "human rights" to keep things sufficiently in turmoil. The more things are unsettled, the better we like them, until we have everything in complete servitude.

This little letter may offend some of you, because it is presented so plainly, but that truly is no concern of ours. In simple terms, to quote our boy Dick Cheney, "You're eff'd!" Have a nice day... [permalink]

An OBSERVER Reminder
Be Aware: The Nexus Approaches!

Posted on October 10, 2010 by mayasoma

10-10-10 Star Gate Portal

"The human race is headed towards a great change, many spirits will return to the stars and something magnificent is going to happen!" - Astral Walker

Can you feel it? The race is on, the diaspora has begun and souls are scrambling to make sense of the intensifying energies on Planet Earth. If only our history books had documented the truth of the astrological cycles as the Maya, and many other indigenous tribes, have long done for their own people, then there would not be so much uncertainty and fear. Unfortunately, that is not how this part of our homo-sapien history is to be played out. At present, the 3D world is going crazy and the only way to manuever these times is to understand the facts. And so, without further ado, here is some of our history…

26,000 years ago, the galactic center of the Milky Way emitted an enormous energetic wave better known as the Nexus. It does this every 26,000 years, as they say, there is nothing new under the sun. This emissions are what have caused the tumultuous transitions from each of our previous world eras. If you are not familiar with these facts, simply research indigenous tribes and their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and soon to be 5th worlds.

What was released all that time ago will soon reach our earth in full strength. The Nexus has its own personal rhythm and does take some time to cross the galaxies and skies. I believe its arrival correlates to the Mayan Long Count End Date of December 2012. Afterall, the center of the Milky Way is where the Maya believe their Creator Hunab Ku resides. Our Creator has sent out an energy impulse, this Supreme Being is blowing us/creation a kiss. Unfortunately, our consciousness resides too far away from our original empowered selves to simply receive that kiss in bliss.

That incoming energy is meant to completely change our world, in other words, to wake us all up to who we are: infinite Gods and Goddesses with incredible abilities and powers. This incoming beam of bluish-white light will alter and restore our DNA from its current state which only uses 3% of its capacities to a renewed state of 100% remembrance. Translated: 97% of what scientist call junk DNA will be reactivated. WoW…a jolt of electricity that courses through our veins, awakening our souls and minds. No one is going to escape this phenomena. Thank you Hunab Ku!

Our main problem lies then with the Dark Lords who currently control the 3D world. They are also fully aware of the approaching Nexus and have set out a program to depopulate the Earth as much as possible. Why would they do that? Who are these Dark Lords? It’s an old story, again, much of our missing history, but the short and long version of it is there is an inter-galalctic battle on right now, a war that is being waged for souls. If the Dark Lords, negative Et’s, have their way, the coming earth catastrophes will take people into fear and fear is a place where they can trap one’s soul, one’s consciousness, forevermore. On a distant planet, in a distant place, maybe somewhere that looks exactly like our Earth, a new slave race can be created with the trapped souls. The Dark Lords know, full well, that their “time” on Planet Earth is over. A new era has cometh… the age of peace and enlightenment…and they must flee. They intend to flee with as many captives as possible. Sound like a bad sci-fi movie? I wish it were, but these are our current events and the facts are unknown to almost everyone. How frightening! Wake up, please, before you are whisked away to another dimension without personal agreement to do so.

“Right now the realm of darkness is not interested in this (peace). They are organized to block it. They seek to unbalance the Earth and its environment so we will be unready for the alignment in 2012.” - Carlos Barrios, Mayan Datekeeper

Take a look around…. ecological disasters leading to worldwide famines and extinction, environmental catastrophes that destroy the lives of millions, economical collapses that create a fearful, dependent race and threats of terrorism and world wars loom over our existence. Is this the four horsemen spoken of in the Book of Revelations? It clearly is the workings of the Dark Lords and its about to get more intense, after all, these are their death throes.

“From that 1987 date until now, Mr. Barrios says, we have been in a time when the right arm of the materialistic world is disappearing, slowly but inexorably. We are at the cusp of the era when peace begins, and people live in harmony with Mother Earth. We are no longer in the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun. This is the time in-between, the time of transition.

As we pass through transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth changes. All this, Mr. Barrios says, was foreseen via the simple, spiral mathematics of the Mayan calendars. It will change, Mr. Barrios observes. Everything will change. He said Mayan Daykeepers view the Dec. 21, 2012 date as a rebirth, the start of the World of the Fifth Sun. It will be the start of a new era resulting from — and signified by — the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator, and the earth aligning itself with the center of the galaxy.” - Carlos Barrios, Mayan Datekeeper

Meanwhile, the Family of Light is exerting every effort for a mass awakening, for gathering, for consciously uniting as we know on some level that everything is dependent on us to do so. We are supposed to be creating an astral force field around the planet and ourselves in the shape of the Flower of Life (see Drunvalo Melchizedek’s work on this matter for more information). This symbol can and will prepare us for the enormity of the approaching Nexus. We are supposed to be clearing our fields as much as possible of debris, creating no new karma, so that we are a crystal clear channel for receiving the Nexus energy. We must give praise and thanks as we have received, and will continue to receive, so much help from the Galactic Federation of positive Et’s.

I ask myself though, have enough souls awoken to make this transition happen with ease? Can geological earth disasters be diminished? The Dark Lords are earnestly working hard to create as many earth catastrophes as possible in these last days in order to capture their slave race of unaware humans. Many will succumb to this fate due to fear, many will go to the stars as their earth contracts are complete, and a handful of ascended beings will remain on the New Earth.

If you happened to be a person who was to die in shock and fear, your consciousness would be lost and confused on the astral plane for a moment. It is in those crucial moments that the negative Et’s can and will capture your essence in a containment vehicle if you are not aware. As quickly as you come into consciousness, get to the benevolent blue light. I have been warned not to be drawn down any tunnels or caves, nor gravitate to any bright yellow-red lights and by no means go with any beckoning ET’s.

The benevolent ET’s, the light ones, are calling us home and their bioluminescent blue-white light is the signal. You can feel this with your heart. They have said Operation Victory is at hand. They have stated that the Dark Lords cannot succeed and all disasters will be minimized (let’s hope so as some seriously dangerous threats are presenting themselves on the earth right now). They have also said the Dark Lords are at their most dangerous as they face defeat, so it is crucial to be fully present! Be aware! Vaccines? Genetically modified foods? Chemical spraying? Understand, these are some of their tools for mind control and keeping the masses asleep. Whatever cometh, wherever you find yourself in these last days where we count days, simply remember, you have only one thing to do: get to the bluish-white light, reach out for the Nexus. If you do, your full consciousness will be re-instated and you will be safe and empowered.

Let us recall the last sign in the Hopi prophecy which states that a blue planet from the Heavens will crash into Earth causing earth destruction, this last sign is what all elders are awaiting as our entry into the 5th world. Possibly, it is not a planet, but an energy wave: the Nexus?

Lightwalkers, we are going home now. We have felt the Nexus approaching for years, even if we could or could not put words to it. Our Creator desires our remembrance and this collective shift to magnificence is welcome. Stay in your heart and the Dark Lords will lose power. It is promised and all is well!

Navajo, awaiting portal 11-11-11 and 12-12-12 to the Nexus! - Source

SEC. 1031. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.

(a) In General- Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.

(b) Covered Persons- A covered person under this section is any person as follows:

(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.

(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

(c) Disposition Under Law of War- The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:

(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

(2) Trial under chapter 47A of title 10, United States Code (as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (title XVIII of Public Law 111-84)).

(3) Transfer for trial by an alternative court or competent tribunal having lawful jurisdiction.

(4) Transfer to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.

(d) Construction- Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

(e) Requirement for Briefings of Congress- The Secretary of Defense shall regularly brief Congress regarding the application of the authority described in this section, including the organizations, entities, and individuals considered to be `covered persons' for purposes of subsection (b)(2).

(The Coup's) Ride the Fence by Haik Hoisington - BlackMustache.com - NOT WORK SAFE

Your Elected Politicians Are Traitors

The entire United States is now a war zone:
S.1867 passes the Senate with massive support

Madison Ruppert, Editor of End The Lie, Article Source, Short URL: http://EndtheLie.com/?p=29620

This is one of the most tragic events I have written about since establishing End the Lie over eight months ago: the horrendous bill that would turn all of America into a battlefield and subject American citizens to indefinite military detention without charge or trial has passed the Senate.

To make matters even worse, only seven of our so-called representatives voted against the bill, proving once and for all (if anyone had any doubt remaining) that our government does not work for us in any way, shape, or form.

S.1867, or the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the fiscal year of 2012, passed with a resounding 93-7 vote.

That’s right, 93 of our Senators voted to literally eviscerate what little rights were still protected after the PATRIOT Act was hastily pushed in the wake of the tragic events of September 11th, 2001.

The NDAA cuts Pentagon spending by $43 billion from last year’s budget, a number so insignificant when compared to the $662 billion still (officially) allocated, it is almost laughable.

The bill also contained an amendment which enacts strict new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank and any entities that do business with it, a move which will likely have brutal repercussions for the Iranian people – just like the sanctions on Iraq did.

Not a single Senator voted against this amendment, which was voted on soon before the entirety of S.1867 was passed, despite the hollow threats of a veto from the Obama White House.

Based simply on historical precedent, I trust Obama’s promises as much as I trust the homeless man who told me he was John F. Kennedy.

I wish that I could believe that the Obama administration would strike down this horrific bill but I would be quite ignorant and naïve if I did so.

Furthermore, the White House’s official statement doesn’t even say that they will veto the bill. In fact, it says, “the President’s senior advisers [will] recommend a veto.”

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the objection isn’t even about opposing the detention of accused terrorists without a trial, instead it is the contention that, “whether an accused Terrorist is put in military detention rather than civilian custody is for the President alone to decide.”

Obama’s opposition has nothing to do with the rule of law or protecting Americans, in fact, Senator Levin disclosed and Dave Kopel reported that, “it was the Obama administration which told Congress to remove the language in the original bill which exempted American citizens and lawful residents from the detention power”.

As I have detailed in two past articles entitled Do not be deceived: S.1867 is the most dangerous bill since the PATRIOT Act and S.1253 will allow indefinite military detention of American civilians without charge or trial, the assurances that this will not be used on American citizens are hollow, evidenced by the fact that the Feinstein amendment to S.1867, amendment number 1126, which, according to the official Senate Democrats page, was an attempt at “prohibiting military authority to indefinitely detain US citizens” was rejected with a 45-55 vote.

Let’s examine some of the attempts to convince the American people that this will not change anything and that we will still be protected under law.

Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Antonio said:

In particular, some folks are concerned about the language in section 1031 that says that this includes ‘any person committing a belligerent act or directly supported such hostilities of such enemy forces.’ This language clearly and unequivocally refers back to al-Qaida, the Taliban, or its affiliates. Thus, not only would any person in question need to be involved with al-Qaida, the Taliban, or its surrogates, but that person must also engage in a deliberate and substantial act that directly supports their efforts against us in the war on terror in order to be detained under this provision.

While this might sound reassuring to some, one must realize that the government can interpret just about anything as engaging “in a deliberate and substantial act that directly supports their efforts against us in the war on terror”.

Consider the fact that the Homeland Security Police Institute’s report published earlier this year partly focused on combating the “spread of the [terrorist] entity’s narrative” which sets the stage for the government being able to declare that spreading the narrative amounts to “a deliberate and substantial act that directly supports their efforts against us in the war on terror”.

At the time I wrote:

Part of these domestic efforts highlighted in the report is combating the 'spread of the [terrorist] entity’s narrative' but never addressed is why exactly extremist groups have the ability to spread their narrative.

A frightening conclusion that can be drawn from the focus on the 'spread of the entity’s narrative' is that such claims could be used to justify limiting the American right to free speech.

It would be very easy to justify eliminating free speech if much of the United States was convinced of the danger of spreading terrorist narrative.

The report doesn’t specifically explain what the narrative is or why it is so dangerous, but one could assume that any anti-government, anti-war, anti-corporatist and pro-human rights speech could be squeezed under this umbrella. Essentially, anything that criticizes or questions the United States could easily be demonized because it is allegedly spreading 'the entity’s narrative'.

This raises an important question: could my work and the work of others devoted to exposing the fraud that is the “war on terror” and the intimate links between our government and the terrorist entities they are supposedly fighting be considered to be supporting these entities?

Unfortunately, the only conclusion I can come to is that it is possible for the following reasons:

1) The Department of Defense actually put a question on an examination saying that protests are an act of “low-level terrorism” (which they later deleted after the ACLU sent a letter demanding it be removed).

2) Anti-war activists and websites are deemed worthy of being treated as terrorists and being listed on terrorist watchlists.

3) We likely will never even be told how exactly the government is interpreting S.1867.

In the case of the PATRIOT Act (which is overwhelmingly used in cases that are unrelated to terrorism in every way), there is in fact a secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, as revealed by Senator Ron Wyden back in May.

In October, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit (read the PDF here) in an attempt to force the government to reveal the details of the secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act.

As of now, we still do not know how the PATRIOT Act is interpreted by the government, meaning that we have no idea how it is actually being used.

I do not believe that it would be reasonable to make the assumption that S.1867 would be interpreted in a straightforward manner, meaning that all of the assurances being made by Senators are worthless.

Glenn Greenwald verifies this in writing the following as an update to the post previously quoted in this article, “Any doubt about whether this bill permits the military detention of U.S. citizens was dispelled entirely today when an amendment offered by Dianne Feinstein — to confine military detention to those apprehended “abroad,” i.e., off U.S. soil — failed by a vote of 45-55.”

Furthermore, as I detailed in my previous coverage of S.1867, Senator Lindsey Graham clearly said, in absolutely no uncertain terms whatsoever, “In summary here, [section] 1032, the military custody provision, which has waivers and a lot of flexibility doesn’t apply to American citizens. [Section] 1031, the statement of authority to detain does apply to American citizens, and it designates the world as the battlefield including the homeland.”

The fact that the establishment media continues to peddle the blatant lie that is the claim that S.1867 will not be used on American citizens is beyond me.

This is especially true when one considers the fact that lawyers for the Obama administration reaffirmed that American citizens “are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida,” although we all know that no proof or trial is required to make that assertion.

As evidenced by the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, no trial is needed for our illegitimate government to assassinate an American citizen.

We can only assume that it is just a matter of time until American citizens are declared to be supporting al Qaeda and killed on American soil without so much as a single court hearing.

CNN claims, “Senators ultimately reached an agreement to amend the bill to make clear it’s not the bill’s intent to allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and others legally residing in the country.”

Yet, of course, they fail to cite the amendment, and quote Senator Feinstein in saying, “It supports present law,” even though Feinstein’s amendment was not passed.

The Associated Press reported, “Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., repeatedly pointed out that the June 2004 Supreme Court decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld said U.S. citizens can be detained indefinitely.”

Yet they still quoted senior legislative counsel for the ACLU Christopher Anders who said, “Since the bill puts military detention authority on steroids and makes it permanent, American citizens and others are at greater risk of being locked away by the military without charge or trial if this bill becomes law.”

The fact that the corporate-controlled establishment media is barely covering this – if at all – is just another piece amongst the mountains of evidence showing that they are complicit in the criminal conspiracy that is dominating our government.

Every single Senator that voted for this amendment is a traitor. It’s that simple. 97 of our so-called representatives, which you can see listed in full here, are actively working against the American people.

They are turning the United States into such a hellish police state that the world’s most infamous dictators would be green with envy.

Unsurprisingly, the top stories on Google News makes no mention of the atrocious attack on everything that America was built upon that is embodied by S.1867.

This legislation is clearly being minimized and marginalized in the press, as if it is some minor bill that will never be invoked in order to detain Americans indefinitely without charge or trial.

That is patently absurd and to assume such would be nothing short of ignorant to an extreme degree, given that the American government utilizes every single possible method to exploit, oppress and assault Americans who stand up for their rights.

Furthermore, the Senators who voted against S.Amdt.1126, the amendment to S.1867 which would have limited “the authority of the Armed Forces to detain citizens of the United States under section 1031” should be considered traitorous criminals of the highest order, not to say that all 97 of those who voted for S.1867 are any better.

These Senators are not only defying their oath of office in waging war on the Constitution, they are also fighting to destroy the most critical rights we have in this country and in doing so are desecrating everything that our forefathers gave up their lives for.

Instead of British troops patrolling the streets in their red coats, it will be American soldiers who have the authority to detain you forever without a shred of evidence if they decide you’re a terrorist or supporting any organization affiliated with al Qaeda.

How they define that is anyone’s guess, but given that the entire interpretation of the PATRIOT Act is regarded as a state secret, we can assume that we will never even get to know.

Moreover, the fact that no charges or trial are needed under S.1867, the government needs no proof of supporting, planning, or committing terrorism whatsoever.

Since no evidence will ever be presented given that no trial or charges will ever be filed, they need not worry about that pesky thing called habeus corpus or anything resembling evidence of any kind.

All they need to do is declare that you’re an enemy combatant and suddenly you’re eligible to be snatched up by military thugs and locked away never to see the light of day again.

As far as I have seen, there are no detailed requirements set forth in the bill which have to be met before the military can indefinitely detain, and torture (or conduct “enhanced interrogation” if you’d prefer the government’s semantic work-around), Americans and people around the world.

What is stopping them from creating accounts for Americans who are actively resisting the fascistic police state corporatocracy which our once free nation has become on some jihadi website and using it has justification to claim these individuals are involved with terrorists?

What is stopping them from manufacturing any flimsy piece of evidence they can point to, even though they never actually have to present it or have it questioned in a court of law, in order to round up American dissidents?

The grim answer to these disturbing questions is: nothing. I regret having to say such a disheartening thing about the United States of America, a country I once thought was the freest nation in the world, but it is true.

I must emphasize once again that our government considers even ideology and protest to be a low-level act of terrorism, so if you’re anti-war, pro-peace, pro-human rights, pro-justice, anti-corruption, or even worse, if you’re like me and expose the criminal government in Washington that supports terrorism while criminalizing American citizens, you very well might be labeled a terrorist.

Keep in mind that the House sister bill, H.R.1540, was passed with a 322-96 vote on May 26th, now all that is stopping this ludicrous from utterly eliminating the Bill of Rights is resolving the differences which will be done by the following appointed conferees: Levin; Lieberman; Reed; Akaka; Nelson NE; Webb; McCaskill; Udall CO; Hagan; Begich; Manchin; Shaheen; Gillibrand; Blumenthal; McCain; Inhofe; Sessions; Chambliss; Wicker; Brown MA; Portman; Ayotte; Collins; Graham; Cornyn; Vitter.

Unsurprisingly, not a single person who voted against S.1867 is included in that list.

I do not hesitate in saying that what our so-called representatives have done is an act of treason that represents the single most dangerous move ever made by our government.

Every single square inch of the United States is now a war zone and you or I could easily be declared soldiers on the wrong side of the war and treated as such.

No proof, no charges, and no trial are required. They do not even have to draw spurious links to terrorist organizations in order to indefinitely detain you as they could easily declare the evidence critical to national security and thus withhold it for as long as they please.

I will continue to hope that Obama decides to go against every single thing he has done after being sworn in, but I think the chances are so slim that it is almost delusional to believe that he will do this.

After all, the only reason his administration is opposing it is because it doesn’t give the executive enough power, not because it strips away every legal protection we have.

If this is not the most laughably illegitimate reason to oppose the attack on all Americans that is S.1867, I don’t know what is.

The most important question that remains unanswered, for which I am not sure that I have a viable solution, is: how do we stop this? Is there any way we can bring down a criminal government packed to the brim with traitorous co-conspirators in a just, peaceful manner?

After all, if the American people resort to violence, we are no better than those bloodthirsty members of our armed forces and law enforcement who kill and beat human beings around our nation and the world with impunity.

However, if our military and police forces realize that at any moment they too could be deemed enemy combatants and treated like subhuman scum and thus decide to refuse all unlawful orders and arrest the real terrorists in Washington, we might be able to reinstate the rule of law, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights which once defined our nation.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with your ideas, comments and information for future articles on this subject and any other issue for that matter. You can get in touch with me directly at Admin@EndtheLie.com and hopefully I will be able to read and respond if I’m not deemed an enemy combatant and shipped off to a CIA black site to be tortured into confessing to killing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914.

Occupy Las Vegas Repudiates the National Defense Authorization Act

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Article Source via prez @ usa-exile

Today [December 6, 2011] the General Assembly of Occupy Las Vegas agreed by consensus to send a statement to Washington D.C. regarding our position on S.1867, "The National Defense Authorization Act". Below is the content of that statement.

Occupy Las Vegas Repudiates the National Defense Authorization Act

The National Defense Authorization Act, which would allow American troops to detain US citizens indefinitely without trial, is effectively a declaration of war upon the American people, and will turn this great land of ours into a battlefield. It is clear that this law will be used to further American Imperialism and to finance illegal and immoral wars which the vast majority of Americans oppose.

The General Assembly of Occupy Las Vegas demands that President Obama veto the National Defense Authorization Act, and that each of the 93 senators who voted for Senate Bill 1867 stand trial for the High Crime of Treason. As a sign of good faith, we demand that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder immediately state his position on this matter.

We are the 99%. - We will prosecute our oppressors. - We will not be silenced.

How to Fix the Debt:
Confiscate Halliburton's Resources,
Arrest Cheney & Take His Family Fortune!

BP accuses Halliburton over Gulf of Mexico oil spill

US contractor destroyed evidence about possible problems with cementing of Macondo well before disaster, allege court papers

Associated Press, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 December 2011 07.41 GMT, Article history, Article Source

The Deepwater Horizon blast, which killed 11 workers, led to the biggest oil spill in US history,
which affected wildlife such as pelicans. Photograph: Sean Gardner/Reuters

BP has accused Halliburton of destroying damaging evidence relating to last year's Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

In a court filing, BP has alleged that the US oil services firm of intentionally destroying evidence about possible problems with its cement slurry poured into the deep-sea Macondo well about 100 miles (160 km) off the Louisiana coast. An oil well must be cemented properly to avoid blowouts.

Also in the documents filed in a New Orleans federal court, BP accuses Halliburton of failing to produce incriminating computer modelling evidence.

BP asked a US judge to penalise Halliburton and order a court-sponsored computer forensic team to recover the modelling results.

Halliburton has told media outlets that the accusations are untrue.

The allegations in the 310-page motion add to a showdown among BP and the contractors Halliburton and Transocean over blame in the Deepwater Horizon blast in April 2010, which killed 11 workers and led to 206m US gallons (780m litres) of crude oil escaping into the Gulf of Mexico. So far, BP, the majority owner of the Macondo well, has footed the bill for the emergency response and cleanup.

Also involved are Anadarko Petroleum and Cameron International.

The first trial over the disaster is scheduled to start 27 February in New Orleans. It is expected to last three months and determine the liability of each company involved in drilling the Macondo well. There will be other phases over cleanup costs, punitive damages and other claims.

US federal and independent investigations into the disaster have found fault in Halliburton's cementing because it failed to properly plug the well. The firm used a foamy cement slurry.

In Monday's court filing, BP alleges that Halliburton employees discarded and destroyed early test results they performed on the same batch of cement slurry used in the Macondo well during an internal investigation into the disaster.

BP said Halliburton's chief cement mixer for Gulf projects testified in depositions that the cement slurry seemed "thin" to him but that he chose not to write about his findings to his bosses out of fear he would be misinterpreted.

"I didn't want to put anything on an email that could be twisted, and turned," Rickey Morgan, the Halliburton cement expert, said in depositions. He worked at a laboratory in Duncan, Oklahoma.

"Upon reviewing these latest testing results, Halliburton employees destroyed records of the testing as well as the physical cement samples used in the testing," BP alleged.

Dick Cheney and the oil spill

Michael Tomasky's blog

As we know from our own comment threads right here on this very blog, right-wingers are expert at taking a few facts from situations that appear to be superficially similar but really aren't upon reflection or closer examination and using them to attack liberals.

And so, in the last few days, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has become Obama's Katrina. Um...look, I'm as pro-pelican as the next guy, and obviously I don't mean to gainsay the scope of this environmental catastrophe, which will end up being staggering.

But Katrina killed about 1,500 humans. And no, it's not George Bush's personal fault that they died, either. But I still rate Katrina a far bigger tragedy for that reason.

And now it turns out, according to an environmental lawyer whose interview on Ed Schultz last week is getting a lot of circulation, that this leak may well be traceable in part to...Dick Cheney.

How? It's hardly as far-fetched as it sounds. From the Wall Street Journal:

The oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills.

The lack of the device, called an acoustic switch, could amplify concerns over the environmental impact of offshore drilling after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig last week...

... regulators in two major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, in effect require them. Norway has had acoustic triggers on almost every offshore rig since 1993.

The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.

The U.K., where BP is headquartered, doesn't require the use of acoustic triggers.

The Journal's report doesn't come out and say this, but the environmental lawyer, Mike Papantonio, said on the Schultz show in an interview you can watch here that it was Cheney's energy task force - the secretive one that he wouldn't say much about publicly - that decided that the switches, which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry. The Papantonio segment starts at around 5:00 in and lasts three minutes or so.

In the interests of disclosure I will note that I haven't heard the phrase "acoustic switch" until this weekend, so I don't really know. And obviously the fact that the US isn't alone in not requiring this switch indicates that there are legitimate questions about cost v. efficacy. So maybe it's just one of those things.

But then again, maybe it's not. Regulatory decisions have consequences all the time, and the people who made them should be asked to justify their decisions in a democracy. It'll be very interesting to watch this week and see if other news outlets pursue this.

Dick Cheney lies here

Seven years ago today Dick Cheney assured us Saddam Hussian had WMDs and was friends with al-Qaida. Whoops

Richard Adams's blog

Dick Cheney: "We will be greeted as liberators." Photograph: Atef Hassan/Reuters

Lest we forget: on 16 March 2003 Dick Cheney appeared on Meet The Press to make the Bush administration's case for the US invasion of Iraq. Hindsight is a wonderful thing of course but we now know that Cheney had no basis for claiming the things that he claimed that day, and that he himself knew there was little or no evidence for the words coming out of his mouth.

Here's a couple of questions from MTP's Tim Russert, with Cheney's more interesting responses:

Russert: Many Americans and many people around the world are asking one question: Why is it acceptable for the United States to lead a military attack against a nation that has not attacked the United States? What's your answer?

Cheney: We know [Saddam Hussain's] used chemical weapons. We know he's reconstituted these programmes since the Gulf War. We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaida organization.

...

Russert: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

Cheney: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.

Dick Cheney's tortured lies

The former vice president has declared that secret CIA memos would show that torture works. Except that they don't

Richard Adams's blog

Dick Cheney made a splash last year when he asserted that his support for torture – including waterboarding – was vindicated by secret CIA memos showing the effectiveness of so-called "enhanced interogation". But like a disturbing number of Cheney's statements – remember the link between Saddam Hussain and al-Qaida? – this claim also seems a stranger to the truth.

Cheney told Fox News back in April last year:

There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified. I formally ask that they be declassified now.

The memos are still secret, despite Cheney's request. But Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, in reporting the latest review on the use of torture, published last Friday, explains:

A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained "plainly inaccurate information" that undermined its conclusions, according to Justice Department investigators.

Isikoff's piece is confirmation of earlier reporting by Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent, which concluded:

Cheney's public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don't.

Interview with a raving, unconfined ACORN crack-er
with Paul Krassner and Andrew Breitbart
Playboy magazine, December 2011 viaPaul

Few people have more street cred with American liberals than Paul Krassner. He published the groundbreaking satirical magazine, The Realist (1958–2001). He was a co-founder of the Yippies (Youth International Party). He received the Feminist Party Media Award for journalism, the ACLU Uppie (Upton Sinclair) Award for freedom of speech, he was inducted into Counterculture Hall of Fame at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, and in December 2010, the writers organization PEN honored him with their Lifetime Achievement Award. “I want to say how happy this award makes me,” he concluded his acceptance speech, “and the only thing that makes me happier is that it’s not posthumous.” At the age of 79, his goal is to complete his first novel, about a contemporary Lenny Bruce-type performer.

Andrew Breitbart is 42, and his goal is “to take down the institutional left,” a job he attacks with gusto and much success. He describes himself as a Reagan conservative with libertarian sympathies. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, was an editor of the Drudge Report, was a researcher for Arianna Huffington and helped create the Huffington Post. He currently oversees a group of his own controversial online blogsites, Breitbart.com, BigHollywood.com, BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com--“to hold the mainstream media’s feet to the fire”--and he plans to launch BigEducation.com, which will take on the academic establishment. He has been a commentator on Fox News and is the author of Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! In February 2010, he was honored with the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

Krassner thought it might be fun if these two cultural adversaries sat down over coffee and chatted. The result, we think you’ll agree, is one hell of an interesting dialogue.

---

KRASSNER: I was surprised to learn that you consider my work to be one of your inspirations. But you also claim that the mainstream media had a double standard and didn’t criticize me the way they do with you and the conservative movement that you represent. It’s not true, though. I’ve been excoriated in papers from the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune to the Washington Post. My favorite headline was, “Give This Man a Saliva Test.” And you’ve also praised Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as heavy influences. They were both close friends of mine and remain as my touchstones, and yet you’re at the other end of the social and political spectrum. So what I want to know is, how do they fit into the context of your own personal mission?

BREITBART: Well, at the time that you were doing what you were doing and trailblazing and causing mischief and mirth and affecting the type of political and social change that you were attempting to do, there’s no doubt that you were being challenged by others at the time. What I’m talking about is the current order of the media in the 21st century and how history now looks upon the Merry Pranksters and the Abbie Hoffmans and the Ken Keseys and Hunter Thompson with great reverence, and it’s as if they’ve been given their own wing of the journalism school. And so I don’t want to simplify history. I understand at the time that you went through hell, and the same could be said of Matt Drudge. From 1995 until about 2002, the same forces were trying to claim that Matt Drudge had no right to be doing what he was doing, which now everybody accepts as commonplace and accepted practice, and the Huffington Post was just purchased for $350 million by AOL for replicating what Matt Drudge does on the left-of-center bent. So the trailblazers, while they’re trailblazing, can beget the arrows and slings hurled at them, and I’m not trying to diminish the peril that you went through. I’m stating that right now, when I’m reporting truths on Wednesday and causing mirth on Thursday, the press has a problem dealing with that. And I’m saying, no, you’re not going to define me; I’m going to define what it is that I do, and you’re going to have to deal with it. And I gained my inspiration from the knowledge that you guys went through the same process, and I’m using you guys as a model.

KRASSNER: In your book, you wrote: “Man, how I long for the days of Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, and today the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.” And at first I thought you must be kidding. What about Louis C.K., Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Margaret Cho, Marc Maron, Rick Overton, Harry Shearer, Kathy Griffin, Wanda Sykes, Richard Lewis, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Larry David, Rachel Maddow, Paul Provenza? So the place is overflowing with “liberals” upholding their free-speech legacies.

BREITBART: I would say that they exist within a protected class, for the most part. As long as they adhere to liberal orthodoxy, they’re protected and can say anything against anyone at any time. But it’s the conservatives who are challenged by the reigning order of political correctness. There’s nothing transformative or dangerous about a liberal in Hollywood or a Sarah Silverman or a Chris Rock being offensive because they know that they’re granted a Get Out of Jail Free card, whereas Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter exist outside of that comfortable order. And so I’m rooting for those people over the ones like Jon Stewart, who are a protected class.

KRASSNER: By the way, I was once on a TV panel with Ann Coulter, and during a commercial break I suggested to her that the labels “conservative” and “liberal” had become obsolescent, and I asked her what she thought might be appropriate substitute labels. “Americans and cowards,” she said.

BREITBART: I love Ann Coulter to the core of my being. Nobody humors me more. If there’s anyone that I want to have a dinner with and that can have me on the floor laughing, and her laugh is infectious, and anybody that knows her, she is just a star. And anyone on the left that would spend five minutes would be laughing, and in puddles of their own urine laughing, even when she’s making fun of them. Leftists have an inability to have a sense of humor over their sanctimony.

KRASSNER: But humor is totally subjective. You’ve said that Bill Ayers probably wrote Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, but to me, that’s just an obvious joke. Ayers has said: “I wrote that book, and if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you.” But on the other hand, those billionaire Koch Brothers, the notorious oil merchants who oppose reduction of air pollution, when they claimed that smog prevents skin cancer, I thought that was a joke. But they had actually hired a think tank, which somehow managed to come up with that conclusion.

BREITBART: I believe that Bill Ayers is a moral relativist, and I think he’s protecting his intense and long-standing relationship with Barack Obama. The history of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn with the Obamas, they even babysat. They bragged about babysitting for the Obama kids. They helped usher Barack Obama into his political origins, which started in their house, in essence. And so of course the media’s going to downplay the relationship between Bill Ayers, an unrepentant radical domestic terrorist. Of course they’re going to protect Obama. They protected him from Reverend Wright, who he had 20 years of, Reverend Wright being his spiritual mentor, or his relationship with Father Pfleger. And the most controversial thing that they could glean from my book on the left was that I said that I believed, based upon Jack Cashill’s incredible writing on the Dreams of My Father, is that I believe he makes an incredibly compelling argument that Bill Ayers performed the mundane task of ghostwriting a politician’s memoirs. It’s what everyone does. Every politician has a ghostwriter, and I believe to the core of my being that Bill Ayers was the logical writer of the Dreams of My Father. If you don’t think it’s compelling, then don’t think it. It’s just what I happen to think. I don’t think that that’s even a controversial point. One is allowed to draw conclusions based upon well-argued writing.

KRASSNER: In your capacity as the Tea Party protector, you must be aware of the blatant disconnect between their plea for a small government and their desire for social issues to be controlled by the government.

BREITBART: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

KRASSNER: I’ll give you a few examples, related to my own experience. One would be abortion rights. During the ‘60s when abortion was still illegal, if a woman was a victim of botched back alley surgery and went to a hospital, they were required to call the police, who would not allow a doctor to give her a painkiller before interrogating her. I ran a free underground abortion referral service, got subpoenaed by DAs in two cities, but refused to testify. Two, marijuana decriminalization. My position is that as long as any government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and which are illegal, then anyone behind bars for a nonviolent drug offense is a political prisoner. I started smoking pot in 1965, and I still do, only now it’s medical. And three, gay rights, from “Don’t ask, don’t tell” to same-sex marriage, which is not the slightest threat to heterosexual marriage. I mean, take Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, David Vitter--please! In 1979, I covered the trial of Dan White for the San Francisco Bay Guardian--he had killed progressive Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk--

BREITBART: Dan White was a Democrat, and Harvey Milk was a libertarian.

KRASSNER: I’ll put those labels aside, though. When White was sentenced to only seven years for a double political assassination, I got caught in the middle of a post-verdict riot at City Hall. I was beaten by two cops shouting homophobic epithets--it made no difference to them that I was straight--and as a result I now have to walk with a cane. Anyway, how do you react to the conservative movement’s inconsistency about less government in their lives?

BREITBART: I don’t know what evidence you’re offering me that the Tea Party is focusing on any of those issues. The Tea Party is a bizarre amalgam of independents, conservatives and libertarians who have surgically excised the social issues from the table, and the people in those crowds have diverse opinions on all of the things that you said. I happen to be pro-marijuana, certainly marijuana decriminalization, but I’m not asserting myself and my social views in this current environment. And if you can’t see and if the media doesn’t want to see that the Tea Party is about financial restraint, and it has nothing to do with the social issues—nothing, nothing, nothing—to the consternation of the social conservatives. I’ve had rifts and schisms with social conservatives over my stances on these issues, and they can call me a libertarian if they want, I don’t care what labels they call me. But the Tea Party is abused by the mainstream media, who misinforms the public of what their rights are. And their rights are specific to the expansion of government and the inability to rein in budgets, and to spend money on things that don’t work, and we’re putting our children in economic peril, period. It has nothing to do with marijuana, it has nothing to do with abortion, it has nothing to do with gay marriage. There are gay people in the Tea Party. There are people of all different social stripes within the Tea Party who have a singular focus on restraining government’s debt and applying Constitutional principles.

KRASSNER: When Who’s Who in America invited me to fill out a form for inclusion in their book, where it said political affiliation I wrote “Independent Dupe,” and that’s just how they have me listed. But it’s interesting to see how in America the free enterprise system has become intertwined with democracy, and in the process socialism has become a dirty word.

BREITBART: It is a dirty word.

KRASSNER: It’s revealing that Norman Thomas ran for president six times as the Socialist Party candidate, and although he was defeated in each election, over the last several decades, every one of his platform planks has been adopted by both Republican and Democratic Administrations. The laws they passed just weren’t labeled Socialist. Now, I have no economic ideology, but I realize that there is something wrong with capitalism. I realized it as I read the business section in all those years before the recession was officially declared, and I noticed day after day these little news items about hundreds of employees being let go by different corporations, and yet their shareholders were pleased because the value of their stocks went up. There’s something wrong with that. And in the insurance industry especially, greed became a pre-existing condition.

BREITBART: Well, I think I’m leaning more towards an independent conservative myself, in that I do see problems with the Republican Party and a lack of consistency in their point of view, and not willing to fight for conservative principles. I controversially support people like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman and Allen West and Rick Perry, people who either are sort of in the Tea Party sphere or the more independent sphere of the conservative movement, who feel less represented by the Republican Party, and I’ve really come to appreciate the emancipation of that independence. And if anybody would have come to me with a scandal that involved blatant wrongdoings by a Republican, I would be blissful to report it. But when the mainstream media is so naturally left of center, people can go to ABC, CBS and NBC with those type of stories and they’re going to get maximum coverage. So people end up just coming to me when they have stories that perhaps hurt liberals or Democrats, because they know that if they go to ABC, CBS or NBC that the door’s going to be closed on them. I wouldn’t recommend that a person who has a scandal on a Republican come to me, because they can simply go to the New York Times and it will be exposed. But if somebody is going to do that, they should test me, because I would be happy to report on corruption within the Republican Party. Because I would like to think that my team, the people that I will relate to ideologically, hold themselves to a higher standard.

KRASSNER: So do you mean if Rick Perry, if somebody sent you the same kind of photos of him as Anthony Weiner, would you publish them?

BREITBART: No doubt. Would I have the same level of enthusiasm? No, because I expected nothing from Anthony Weiner, and I respect Governor Perry. But he has a farther way to fall. It would be more disappointing and more worthy of exposure, because he’s supposed to represent something in my mind that’s of a higher standard.

KRASSNER: I want to get to the topic of religion a little bit. As an atheist and an absurdist, the most absurd thing I could do was to develop an ongoing relationship with a deity I don’t believe exists. So as a standup comic, before a performance, I would say, “Please God, help me do a good show,” and then I would hear the voice of God bellow, “SHUT UP, YOU SUPERSTITIOUS FOOL.” But actually I stopped being a militant atheist in the ‘60s when I realized that Martin Luther King was a Christian whose actions I admired, whereas George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, was an agnostic whose actions I disdained. And so I no longer cared what anybody believes instead of what they do, whether they’re kind or cruel to others. I call myself a secular Humanist, and you call yourself a secular Jew, and I’m curious as to how that informs your views on controversies from circumcision to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Because, as a baby I was circumcised against my will, and so now, when San Francisco considers outlawing circumcision, I’m torn between—

BREITBART: Torn between?

KRASSNER: Yeah, that’s a poor verb--I’m trapped between--

BREITBART: Ripped apart—

KRASSNER: Yeah, that’ll do it. I’m ripped apart between freedom of religion and genital mutilation as a form of child abuse. And as for the Middle East, I say to God, “You are supposed to be all-knowing, and so you knew in advance that designating Palestine as the Promised Land for Jews would have devastating consequences.” And I heard the voice of God boom out, “I NEVER PROMISED LAND TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE, I ONLY SAID, ‘I’LL SEE WHAT I CAN DO.” But, getting back to what being a secular Jew means to you--

BREITBART: Well, first of all, from first-hand [Laughs] experience, I love my perfectly crafted bell end. I think that penile sculpture as religion is above my pay grade. I wouldn’t equate it to clitorectomies and the depravities that you see in Islamic culture, what they do to women, and it’s done for punitive purposes. Given the fact that I have a circumcised penis, it’s too damn sensitive, quite frankly.

KRASSNER: I thought it takes away from sensitivity.

BREITBART: Well, if it does, I’m still too sensitive. I may need a shot or an extra cut. Look, here’s how I look at it. I used to be an atheist, and I became an agnostic, and now I exist on a place where I say I bat third on the Judeo-Christian softball team. I’ve had too many things happen in my life that my father-in-law Orson [Bean] says, “There’s no such thing as coincidences,” where I’m starting to doubt my doubts. But I still would say that I’m an agnostic who, when he’s watching the debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens, I’m usually laughing and either slapping my knee during Hitchens, but I’m rooting for Dinesh D’Souza. And so I’m desirous of moving towards the Judeo-Christian side. In the past, I took solace in my agnosticism. And one of the reasons why is because, during my agnostic years--I call them my nihilistic years--in which I lived in a world of moral relativism and not believing in objective truths, I didn’t sleep well at night, and I was living in a world of moral chaos. And the more that I started to listen to people like Dennis Prager and rational people who were religious—not fly-by-nights, Tammy Faye Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart and Benny Hinn—when you get past the hucksters and you get to people like David Mamet, who now speaks of Judeo-Christianity, and you hear Dennis Prager, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the nihilism that I embraced. And I now find myself fighting alongside many Christians and many Jews who believe in Judeo-Christianity as being the backbone of American culture. And until somebody gives me a better replacement than that Judeo-Christianity, I’m not going to be part of the team that’s trying to tear down that pillar and replace it with nihilism and cultural and moral relativism.

KRASSNER: I know that you feel strongly about people succumbing to political correctness. As a performer, I’m a living paradox. Irreverence is my only sacred cow, yet I try not to let victims become the target of my humor. So there was one specific routine that I stopped using in 1970. It called for a “rape-in” of legislator’s wives—most legislators then were men—in order to impregnate their wives, so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortions. But my feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke, but I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men make the laws? Legislators’ wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves and their laws should have been the target. For me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn’t censorship, it was conscious evolution. It wasn’t political correctness, it was simple respect. However, in 1982 there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University. That weekend the festival sponsored anevening of radical comedy. The next day my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women’s caucus. Robin Tyler, who said, “I am not a lesbian comic; I am a comic who is a lesbian,” served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination. Tyler explained to me, “You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration.” But freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference. “Yeah,” I said, “but you have to understand some men still feel threatened by turkey basters.”

BREITBART: First of all, political correctness and human kindness, there’s a difference. I have a very specific definition of what political correctness is, and you sort of touched on it by the reference of a lesbian comedian having to differentiate her cultural identity, “I’m a comic who happens to be a lesbian.” That’s the problem, that cultural Marxism is political correctness, and political correctness is the translation of economic Marxist theories from the battle between the haves and the have-nots into the battle of the oppressor versus the oppressed. And so, given the oppressor/oppressed model, where the oppressed gets to maintain a permanent place of judgment against the oppressor, where blacks get to judge whites and say, “You’re not allowed to say that,” but the whites aren’t allowed to say to the blacks that “Chris Rock, you’re not allowed to make that joke at the expense of white people, because you’re the oppressor. It’s okay for us to make fun of you.” And this double standard has created a huge quandary in our country—that somehow there’s some type of an affirmative action where one group is allowed to castigate, excoriate, demean and defile the other as a means of some type of form of cultural reparations. And all it does in my mind is exacerbate the underlying social rifts, and I reject it wholly. I love Chris Rock, I love Sarah Silverman, but I also think Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay should be afforded the same rule-book. And I remember watching back in those late 1980s when political correctness really started to take over the comedy world, and the Sam Kinisons of the world and the Andrew Dice Clays of the world were marginalized and excoriated for their routines, and this day Sarah Silverman and Chris Rock get away with much harsher cultural criticism. And I want to exist in a world where comedy acts as an exhaust system, so that all members of our society can kind of go into that comedy room, into The Improv, and let it all hang out there. And when Tracy Morgan is forced to have to go into a re-education camp because he’s offended gay sensibilities, I don’t think that it does anyone in the gay community any favors that they show that they don’t have the ability to laugh at themselves. I love Caucasian jokes, I love Jew jokes. All I can say is, I like equal opportunity offenders. It is not political correctness to find outrage when somebody goes after Trig Palin because he’s mentally challenged. That’s just pure crudeness and it’s just beyond inappropriate. I guess it’s sort of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography—you know offense when you see it, and there is a difference between political correctness and saying something that’s just beyond the realm of propriety.

KRASSNER: Wouldn’t you apply that standard to Rush Limbaugh when he made fun of Michael J. Fox--

BREITBART: No, I wouldn’t. Rush was making a political point.

KRASSNER: Which was?

BREITBART: From what I recall, and I think that it was proved to be true, is that he chose not to take the medicines that calm his symptoms of Parkinson’s, so that when he did his ad, he was shaking more than he ordinarily would, in order to rev up the volume of the issue, to pour oil on the fire over the issue of stem cells—to create the perception that if you are for stem cell research, you’re for stopping this shaking. That was my perception of what it was. And accusing Hollywood of using emotionalism and liberals of using emotionalism in order to push an intellectual argument is incredibly fair game.

KRASSNER: I understand that the epiphany which caused you to make a political right turn occurred while you were watching the Clarence Thomas hearings about his nomination to the Supreme Court. You were genuinely convinced that the treatment of him was racist. I thought he was lying when he testified under oath that he had never discussed the subject of abortion, because in response to a question by Senator Hank Brown, Anita Hill testified that she had disagreed with Thomas in a discussion about Rowe versus Wade. But then-Senator Joe Biden quickly interrupted her, saying, “That is not the subject of these hearings.”

BREITBART: The reason why I was upset is, I was clear that the reason why the left and the Democrat media complex—that’s my description for the natural alliance of the Democratic Party liberal interest groups and the mainstream media--chose to put on a show trial by accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, and then had absolutely nothing to back it up. The pretense of this show trial was clearly abortion rights, but they were willing to try to embarrass him as much as humanly possible, and the mainstream media allowed for this to go on without challenge. And he’s sitting there and they’re asking him whether or not he’s rented a porn. Apparently a private detective finds out that he’s rented a pornography starring Long Dong Silver, and the point is? The point is, I guess, to make this conservative look like he’s a hypocrite because he enjoys sex. But if the whole point of Rowe versus Wade is a right to privacy, these people were flaunting that they invaded his privacy and publicly excoriated him, embarrassed him by flaunting what they found out about his private life. I found it to be utterly hypocritical, and to watch cads and manslaughter and human sexual harassment machinery--like Ted Kennedy sitting in judgment of him was beyond the pale. And to one year later watch the same crowd that had “I Believe Anita” bumper stickers and said that the threshold of sexual harassment is so low that if you mention that you see a pubic hair on a Coke can, that defines sexual harassment—for those same people, the same Democratic Party, the same Democrat media complex to anoint the Bill Clinton as their standard bearer, I couldn’t take the hypocrisy. I was writhing in pain. It didn’t mean that I immediately went to the supermarket and signed up to become a Republican. I just started to challenge the media narrative that was being handed to me, because I saw how disingenuous that complex was.

KRASSNER: As a Supreme Court Justice, Thomas has declared that the Constitution gives states a right to establish an official religion. That prisoners have no Constitutional rights to be protected from beatings by guards. That a school official is allowed to strip-search a 13-year-old girl to look for two extra-strength ibuprofen pills. That a key part of the Voting Rights Act giving blacks political power in the South should be struck down. That an American citizen could be held as an enemy combatant with no charges and no hearing. He announced a decision that threw out a verdict in favor of a black man who had been convicted of murder and nearly executed because prosecutors hid evidence that could have proved his innocence.

BREITBART: I don’t know answers to these things. If you had given me this detailed information, I could come back with my detailed response. But this is like to me a Sarah Palin “gotcha” question on Paul Revere because I’m not going to be able to answer this because you are coming to me armed with data that I don’t have the ability to see whether or not there is a rational argument to defend it or not.

KRASSNER: Well, it’s all a matter of record. But recently a campaign finance watchdog, Protect Our Elections, has asked the FBI to investigate Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, seeking his disbarment, alleging that he invested in a lobbying firm tied to the Tea Party. That he engaged in judicial corruption by receiving $100,000 in support from Citizens United during his nomination, and then in 2010 ruled in favor of Citizens United without disclosing that fact or disqualifying himself. And that he engaged in judicial insider trading to enrich his wife by providing her with information about that Court decision in Citizens United prior to the issuance of that decision, which she then used to launch a new company to take advantage of that decision.

BREITBART: Do you believe in innocent until proven guilty?

KRASSNER: Do I believe in that? Yes. [Chuckles] Okay, you know that Elliot Spitzer was arrested for spritzing around with a call girl in the same Washington, D.C. hotel room where he had just written an opinion piece for the Washington Post about the subprime loan disaster. He wrote, “Not only did the Bush Administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye…. When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.” In fact, the reason Spitzer had flown to Washington was to launch a campaign to attack the Bush cabal and the arrogant corporations that empower them. There was speculation that this was the real motivation for Spitzer’s arrest. And now blogger Joy Reid wrote a few months ago that Clarence Thomas “has never been held to account by the Justice Department, Congress or the media, for 20 years of false financial disclosure forms related to his wife’s six-figure salary from a Tea Party organization dedicated to undoing healthcare reform, an issue Thomas will almost certainly be called upon to rule on….But what’s interesting about the media’s latest obsession [Anthony Weiner] is Breitbart’s timing. This is a guy who understands news cycles and how to manipulate them, hence his veritable role as CNN’s assignment editor, replacing Matt Drudge. Did the timing of the Anthony Weiner ‘scandal pic’ release have something to do with Breitbart’s obsession with protecting Clarence Thomas?”

BREITBART: Who is alleging that I timed Congressman Weiner’s tweeting publicly his junk? He is the one that instigated it by his behavior on Friday night, May 27th. The question itself speaks to a fevered conspiratorial mindset that I think dominates the left, that it’s such an illogical question. He mis-tweeted that thing, nobody contests, including Weiner, that he tweeted that thing out on Friday night. How could I have preordained or had pre-knowledge that that would have occurred? It goes beyond illogical; it’s wishful thinking.

KRASSNER: But you have to admit that it’s great timing.

BREITBART: Did it time with Congressman Weiner attacking Clarence Thomas? Yes, it did. That would be called a coincidence, and there’s no logical or metaphysical way to make the argument that I was able to convince him to mis-tweet a picture of his erect penis to a woman in Seattle that he had had online communications with.

KRASSNER: Since you pressured Anthony Weiner into publicly apologizing to you for pretending that you hacked his Twitter site, I would think that conversely, you owe an apology to Shirley Sherrod. You publicized, out of context, a two-and-a-half-minute clip of her talk before the NAACP, where she told about the time 24 years previously when she didn’t help a farmer as much as she could have because he was white, which resulted in a scared Administration hurriedly forcing her to resign as the Georgia Director of Rural Development. But you insist that she wasn’t your target, that the NAACP was, for applauding what she said. Well, I’ve watched the entire 43-minute speech, and they did not applaud then.

BREITBART: They nodded and they murmured.

KRASSNER: They nodded and they murmured?

BREITBART: Yes. Look, if you heard somebody giving that speech, coming from a white audience, about a certain person talking about how they stuck it to a black farmer, and the audience was going along with it and audibly applauding it--and by applaud I mean affirming the narrative--and when she was talking about how, “I sent him to one of his own” and “I didn’t give him the full weight of what I could do,” they were like, “Uh-huh,” just like it was a church, they were nodding in agreement. And the whole point of this was, the week before, Ben Jealous of the NAACP was going on ABC, CBS and NBC to defame and defile, based upon a falsehood, that the Tea Party was racist, based upon the false narrative that the N-word was hurled at Congressmen Carson and Lewis. And I had proof, not through just a $100,000 reward that went unmet. Nobody came to me with any evidence that it was said once, in a group of 400 people. There wasn’t any audio or video that showed that it happened even once, let alone 15 times. I also was able to produce four videos from the exact moment that the incident allegedly occurred, and it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the incident didn’t happen, that it was made up. And yet Ben Jealous of the NAACP resurrected that falsehood as a means to propagandize against the Tea Party, to politically destroy it, to try and make it appear to be racist when it is not racist. And so I said the Thursday before the Monday that the two videos and the 1400-word article came out, I said, “Ben Jealous, you can go to hell. You’re trying to split this country on the schism of race. How dare you?” And I said, “I have evidence that shows your group acting in a racist manner.” And I stand by that. If the NAACP gets to go up on ABC, CBS and NBC and falsely claim that the Tea Party is racist, but it doesn’t have any audio or video evidence, and that it’s able to propagate a provable falsehood, I said, “Those that live in glass houses should not throw stones.” So when you have a video of an NAACP-sanctioned event in which Shirley Sherrod is getting nods and then murmurs of approval, it is far greater evidence of the NAACP reacting racist than anything that the left and the NAACP has been able to collect of the Tea Party behaving racist. And my point stands--those that live in glass houses should not throw stones.

KRASSNER: But getting back to Sherrod’s speech, after making her point that it wasn’t about black and white, it was about haves and have-nots, that she had overcome her own racial prejudice stemming from the fact that when she was 17 her father had been killed by a white man. And later in the video, she said, “What we have to do is get back out of our heads. There is no difference between us, but the difference is that those with money want to stay in power, whatever it is, what they need to do to keep that power.” And that’s when they did applaud.

BREITBART: But they had reacted in a positive fashion that caused the NAACP to acknowledge it and say they were going to investigate the audience’s behavior at that point that I pointed out in the actual speech. On day one, Shirley Sherrod blamed the NAACP. She said they got into a battle with the Tea Party and she blamed the NAACP, and the NAACP said it was going to investigate the audience for its behavior. And so I had hit the target perfectly and shut up the NAACP. They could no longer go on ABC, CBS or NBC, because it had been exposed. But when they spoke with the Administration, when Shirley Sherrod said to the Administration, “But I helped the white farmer, I helped the white farmer,” they still stood by the firing. If that is such an important crux, that she was allegedly fired because she discriminated against the white farmer, why is it that they kept her fired and said they stood by the firing, even after she said that she helped the white farmer? And the two-minute-and-thirty-second video includes the narrative, the redemptive part. Who is my number one defender on that, not once, but twice? Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, a guy who does not agree with me on anything, said to Joan Walsh and Howard Dean, “I’ve looked at the video. Breitbart included the part where she talks about ‘It’s not about black versus white, it’s about rich versus poor.’” In addition to that, my 1400-word piece, which everybody ignored, mentions the NAACP 17 times and Shirley Sherrod 4 times, and it says, “Eventually her basic humanity informs her to help the white farmer.” The redemptive part that you just talked about is included in the video. Chris Matthews defends me on that critical point.

KRASSNER: Just to balance Chris Matthews, ironically it was Glenn Beck who discredited you on Fox News and said you needed to apologize, and you responded, and this is the quote, “Next thing I know, I’m under complete attack without the support of Glenn Beck, who I thought was somebody I could count on. He threw me under the bus.” And it wasn’t the Merry Pranksters’ bus. So maybe Beck should apologize to you.

BREITBART: I agree with that. I was able to find out why is Beck throwing me under the bus. He had used so much of my content to build up his name, and why was he throwing me under the bus? Well, pretty interesting, because the president--his team said that they fired her too quickly without giving her due process because it was fearful that this was going to be on the Glenn Beck Show. So when Glenn Beck went on the TV and to talk about it for the first time, he took the stance that, “I didn’t touch this, because I knew that there was something wrong with the video. I saw the video in my office, and I knew that there was something critical missing, so I didn’t go with it.” Well, what we were able to find out later, wondering why he would state that, given what Chris Matthews had to say on the issue, is he didn’t do it on the TV show, but he did do it earlier in the morning on his radio show, before more information started to come out that granted greater context. And he was the one who cut the two-minute-and-30-second video into 15-second clips that isolated Shirley Sherrod and eviscerated her and removed the NAACP angle in its entirety. So he screwed the pooch on his radio show, then finds out that she was fired, based upon their fear that it would be on the Glenn Beck Show, so he went on his TV show and pretended that he had not touched it on his radio show. And he was doing damage control for Glenn Beck’s brand, period.

KRASSNER: I’ve said that “Truth is perceived through the filter of an agenda,” and you’ve said that “Truth has no agenda.” I’d like to apply our slogans to the ACORN scandal that you produced which, because it was believed, resulted in Congress defunding the agency. But a Congressional Research Service report commissioned by the House Judiciary Committee says that ACORN hasn’t violated any federal regulations in the past five years, that there were no instances of individuals who were allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN employees, that the undercover video makers who allegedly caught ACORN employees breaking the law may themselves have violated state law in their filming operation. A Brooklyn DA, Charles Hynes, announced that his office had found no criminal wrongdoing by ACORN. Another law enforcement source said that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles edited the tape to meet their agenda. Former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger’s report states that, “The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles's comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.” And California’s then-Attorney General Jerry Brown said, “The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor." O’Keefe admitted that he was out to make a point and to damage ACORN. In the sensational San Diego video that featured Giles discussing prostitution by underaged girls, 13 to 15, human trafficking from Mexico and cheating on taxes in the US, the ACORN worker acted as if he would help them. But when they left, he immediately called the police with the misinformation he had solicited from this couple of propagandists. And so the question is, did you ever share that fact about him calling the police with your readers?

BREITBART: There’s so much propaganda in that collection of data, that I don’t even know where to begin, but I’ll start at the beginning. When Hannah and James came to me with their edited video, I needed to know for sure that the truncated video--which is what all news services do, they take raw footage and create a narrative that allows for the story to be told so that one doesn’t have to watch hours and hours and hours of footage--and when they came to me, I said, “Even though ABC, CBS and NBC truncate time and selectively edit video, and we just trust them implicitly that they’re telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth and not manipulating the narrative, you’re going to be held to a higher standard, not just by the public, but by the mainstream media that is going to challenge you by virtue of your avowed conservative politics.” And so when they came to me with those videos, I said, “If I’m going to help you get this story out there, I’m going to ask that we simultaneously release the full transcripts and the full audio, so that nobody will be able to make the claim that there were any words put into these people’s mouths, so that the context of your edited videos makes it perfectly clear that you did not manipulate the situation.” For you to cite Scott Harshbarger as a resource, when John Podesta and Andy Stern of SEIU were the ones who hired Scott Harshbarger to allegedly investigate ACORN’s behavior on the case, I said immediately, “You’re going to tell me that John Podesta’s going to investigate ACORN? They’re going to investigate James, Hannah and me and come up with an ‘independent investigation’ to place us on the defensive.” And that’s precisely what they did by looking at the selectively edited videos, and to come up with sound bites such as “selectively edited,” it doesn’t mean anything, “selectively edited,” because we provided for everyone to see the whole full content from day one. And the reason why Congress voted to defund is because those who looked at the full tapes, the full transcripts, saw that there was no explanation other than absolute insanity at ACORN, that so many people in so many offices would offer service with a smile when a pimp and a prostitute walk through the door, stating that they wanted to create an underage sex slave operation. So telling me that political hacks like Scott Harshbarger and political hacks like Jerry Brown--these are political apparatchiks whose political careers are dependent upon organizations like ACORN. And so I would think that your skepticism of government and government officials would cause you to go, wait a second. Let’s look at the full tapes. And I have said to Scott Harshbarger, Jerry Brown, John Podesta, Andy Stern, Media Matters, “Let’s sit down, once and for all, and we will watch, in front of an auditorium of people, for all the world to see—we’ll film it—and we will watch the full, unedited videos. And at the very end, you’re going to tell me that the selective editing changed anything?” It’s garbage, it’s laughable garbage, and I am willing to put my name and my reputation on all of those ACORN videos.

KRASSNER: Okay, Andrew, thanks very much for this.

BREITBART: I thought it would be funnier.

Mario Savio: Sproul Hall Steps, University of California, Berkeley, December 2, 1964

Mike Wilhelm Plays Tonight, Saturday, December 3, 2011 @ 8 PM

Hi Curtis,

I will be playing this benefit for Jerilyn Brandelius Saturday night (12-3-11) at Presidio Yacht Club opening solo acoustic blues (roots of the Stones) for The Unauthorized Rolling Stones, the best Stones tribute band. Plan is for me to go on at 8pm for 45 min. and then play a few tunes with The URS before they swing into their high powered set.

Happy trails,
Mike Wilhelm

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius, the author of the Grateful Dead Family Album

As some of you already know, our friend Jerilyn Lee Brandelius, the author of the Grateful Dead Family Album, was graced with a new liver. She had been suffering from Hepatitis C since 2006 and on February 8, 2011 at the UCSF Transplant Clinic she received a liver transplant. We are happy to report that she is now recovering and looking forward to be able to do things on her own again. As you can imagine the medical bills are expensive, as is the assistance that she is in need of as she is recovering. Jerilyn's family has set up a Special Needs Trust to address her financial needs regarding her ongoing care.

The Unauthorized Rolling Stones are playing a Benefit Concert and all proceeds will go to the Jerilyn Lee Brandelius Special Needs Trust Fund. Advance tickets are recommended since this is a small venue.

Please come on out and show Jerilyn how much we love her and support her in her healing.

Thank you & God Bless!

Hosted by: The Grateful Dead Family Album, Jerilyn Brandelius

ERIK MOLL - Voksne Herrers Orkster - Bergen, Norway 21.11.11

The Green Thing

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Remember this: Don't make old People mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off.

I May Be Old, But I Got To Party With the Best Bands In Rock'n'Roll

Can science fiction lead us away from economic collapse?

Recent SF novels dealing with the fall of western capitalism seem right on the mark. But do they offer any answers?

Damien Walter's weird things, guardian.co.uk, 201112.01, Article Source

Post-apocalyptic visions ... Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

It's a truism that science fiction, however distinct its vision of the future, is always just as much a reflection of its present. The golden age of SF writers, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke, predicted near futures of a colonised solar system and an era of engineering marvels from robotics to space elevators. But, viewed through a historical lens, their futures say far more about the cold war politics of 1950s America than the post-industrial world of 2011. If science fiction provides a record of the hopes and fears of each generation for the future ahead, what do contemporary SFwriters say about today?

Seed, by debut novelist Rob Ziegler, extrapolates a future rooted in the economic and environmental concerns of the early 21st century. In common with novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, it explores one of the main preoccupations of science fiction in recent years, the collapse of western-style capitalism. Hardwired into Ziegler's post-apocalyptic vision of a US ravaged by famine and warfare, is an exploration of the extreme material scarcity that the collapse will create for generations to come.

Through a Rust Belt landscape of decaying cities and starving refugees, Ziegler weaves a fast-paced action plot, creating a powerful metaphor for the choices we face today in a world of economic uncertainty. Seed's narrative turns on the mega-corporation city state that controls the future economy, significantly named Satori, the Zen Buddhist term for spiritual enlightenment. Solutions lie, Ziegler's novel suggests, not in the military or political spheres, but in our capacity to address and improve our own nature as humans.

If western capitalism is the victim in much of contemporary science fiction, then China is often the beneficiary. Maureen F McHugh's China Mountain Zhang is surely among the most prescient SF novels of the last century. In McHugh's future, China's command economy dominates the world, and the US has become a secondary power following the Cleansing Winds Campaign, a socialist revolution similar in nature to China's own cultural revolution. At a time when the Occupy movement has taken centre stage in the battle against unbridled capitalism, it's an all too credible scenario (but one McHugh paints in both bright colours and deep shadows; she shows how many of the freedoms and civil liberties now taken for granted in the west might easily be lost in a swing back toward state socialism).

Too often, science fiction views the future from the macro scale, from the standpoints of the movers and shakers shaping its invented worlds. Conversely, McHugh opens China Mountain Zhang with a quote from Albert Camus' The Plague: "A simple way to get to know a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die." The novel's protagonist Rafael Zhang faces the dual problems of a mixed-race heritage and being a homosexual in a world where the first defines him as a second-class citizen, and the second merits "re-education" or even execution.

The world McHugh presents through Zhang's quest for individual freedom is all too recognisable today, where human lives are often controlled by the overwhelmingly powerful structures of both government and corporations. But McHugh guides Zhang to freedom from those structures – not through political or military struggle, but the improvement of his own nature as a human being. In his training as an organic or "Daoist" engineer – a discipline which combines computer design technology with the limitless capacity of the human imagination – Zhang finds his own personal Satori, and his own freedom.

Personal freedom, and the discipline required to attain it, are themes science fiction explores in its more positive views of our future. Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is one of the best explorations of a post-scarcity future, in which technology meets all of humanity's material needs. Money has been replaced with the "reputation-based currency" Whuffie, government is conducted through adhocracy, and the world for most humans is one big playground. The challenge in this scenario is how mankind deals with true freedom after a history of oppression and social conditioning.

The irony of a post-scarcity setting is that our civilisation could have achieved it a century or more ago. Once again, the solutions are not technological but rooted in our own nature as human beings. Overcoming or improving our nature may require a moment of society-wide Satori. Whether we are ready for that yet is up for debate.

Paul Krassner - The Realist/Writer/Comic

The Yippies and the Occupiers

By Paul Krassner

As a co-founder of the Yippies (Youth International Party)--known for demonstrating against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago--I find myself comparing and contrasting the Yippies and the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

We had to perform stunts to get media coverage of our cause, so a group of us went to the New York Stock Exchange, upstairs to the balcony, and threw $200 worth of singles onto the floor below, watching the gang of manic brokers suddenly morph from yelling "Pork Bellies" into playing "Diving for Dollars." Then we held a press conference outside, explaining the connection between the capitalist system and the war.

Now, a particular placard, "Wall Street Is War Street," gives me a sense of continuity. Other anonymous Occupier spokespersons carried posters proclaiming "God Forbid We Have Sex & Smoke Pot. They Want Us to Grab Guns & Go to War!" and "I am an immigrant. I came here to take your job. But you don't have one."

By the sheer power of numbers without the necessity of stunts, the Occupiers have broadened public awareness about the economic injustice perpetuated by corporations without compassion conspiring with government corruption resulting in immeasurable suffering.

NPR waited until eleven days of Occupy Wall Street had passed before reporting its existence. The executive news editor explained that the Occupiers "did not involve large numbers of people" (actually, there were already several hundred), no "prominent people" showed up (thus ignoring Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon), the lack of "a great disruption" (the police pepper-spraying protesters trapped in a cage of orange netting finally met that need), "or an especially clear objective" (oh, right, like all those flip-floppy pandering politicians whose clear objective is to get elected).

The Occupiers appear to be a leaderless community--most likely, you can't name a single one; not yet, anyway--whereas Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and I served as spokespeople for the Yippies. We had media contacts and knew how to speak in sound bytes. If we gave good quote, they gave free publicity for upcoming demonstrations. It was mutual manipulation.

Example: A reporter asked me about the 1968 counter-contention we were planning, "Will you be staying in tents?" I replied, "Some of us will be intense. Others will be frivolous."

During an interview with Abbie and me for the CBS Evening News, taped at his apartment, Abbie paraphrased Che Guevara and said, "I'm prepared to win or die." However, that never got on the air. When the reporter asked me, "What do the Yippies actually plan to do in Chicago?" I smiled at her and said, "You think I'm gonna tell you?" That portion of my answer was used to end Walter Cronkite's segment on the Yippies, but my follow-up sentence--"The first thing we're gonna do is put truth serum in the reporters' drinks"--was omitted. They had beaten me at my own game.

The Yippies were inspired by the Buddhist monk in Vietnam who set himself on fire in order to call attention to the war. The photo of that incident traveled around the globe, and I wore a lapel button which featured that flaming image. Similarly, in 2010, a young man immolated himself, which inspired the rebellion in Egypt, which inspired Arab Spring, which in turn inspired American Autumn.

Inspired by the Yippies attempt to levitate the Pentagon, Aron Kay wanted to get fellow Occupiers to levitate Wall Street, to no avail. Likewise, inspired by the Yippies nomination of an actual pig named Pigasus for president, Michael Dare tried unsuccessfully to persuade fellow protesters at Occupy Seattle to carry out his notion that, "If corporations are people, let's run one for president." I offered myself as Secretary of Greed.

The evolution of technology has changed the way protests are organized and carried out. The Yippies had to use messy mimeograph machines to print out flyers that had to be stuffed into envelopes, addressed, stamped and mailed. The Internet enables Occupiers to inexpensively reach countless people immediately.

When the Yippies were being tear-gassed, and beaten sadistically and indiscriminately, we chanted, "The whole world is watching!" But now, when a bloodbath was expected to happen if the New York police forced the Occupiers out of the park--and then that didn't happen--Michael Moore asked a cop, "Why don't you think the eviction happened?" The reply: "Because the mayor's afraid of YouTube."

(One month later, Mayor Bloomberg apparently lost that fear; by his order, the eviction happened at 1 a.m. The next afternoon, a protester, before being allowed back in, was overheard remarking, "The cops have occupied Zuccotti Park. We're just trying to figure out what their demands are.")

Not only what occurred in Chicago in 1968 was officially labeled "a police riot" by a government-sponsored investigation, but also an undercover police provocateur--who was disguised as a local biker and acted as Jerry Rubin's bodyguard--would ultimately state that he participated in pulling down the American flag in Grant Park, destroying it, then running up the black flag of the Viet Cong in its place.

"I joined in the chants and taunts against the police," he said, "and provoked them to hitting me with their clubs. They didn't know who I was, but they did know that I had called them names and struck them with one or more weapons."

As the Occupy model has spread around the country, police brutality has increased, and it's not surprising that there have been accusations of provocateurs sabotaging the nonviolent principle, not to mention an assistant editor at a conservative magazine who infiltrated a group of protesters in Washington, D.C., later claiming that his purpose was "to mock and undermine them in the pages of the American Spectator," and that he helped incite a riot at the National Air and Space Museum, getting pepper-sprayed in the process.

The Yippies were countercultural, an amalgam of stoned hippies political acttivists. And, although the Occupiers are essentially mainstream, their demonization by right-wing media pundits has been providing a replay performance of the Dinosaur Follies.

Bill O'Reilly called the Occupiers "drug-trafficking crackheads" and "violent America-hating anarchists." Ann Coulter referred to them as mobs of "teenage runaways" and "tattooed, body–pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun." Glenn Beck warned that they "will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you." Andrew Breitbart declared that Occupy Wall Street is "a group of public masturbating violent freaks." Rush Limbaugh labeled them "dumbed down" and "propagandized" and asked a rhetorical question reeking with layers of irony: "Whatever happened to the '60s Question Authority?" Limbaugh is like a castrated canine that is still busy humping the living-room sofa.

I'll conclude here with a little gift for the infamous 1% in the form of what could eventually become a riddle for reactionaries. "What do corporations and fetuses have in common?" And the answer is: "They're both persons."

David Normal - Artist

Hello !

I'm sharing some photos from my recent exhibit in Los Angeles. The show included an installation of my "Illumination" light boxes (pictured below), as well as a selection of my original paintings. You may view more documentation of the show here

Illuminations Installation at Sancho Gallery in Los Angeles. October 2011.

ALSO:

My studio, located in Stinson Beach, California, will be part of the " 2011 Stinson Beach/Bolinas Open Studios". This is an annual open studios event comprising nearly two dozen studios in the small coastal Northern California towns of Bolinas and Stinson Beach.

Many of my original works may be viewed, as well as Illuminations, and also work in progress. My wife, April Lelia, will be displaying her outdoor sculptures. Additionally, San Francisco sculptor, Dana Albany, will be our guest displaying her recent mosaics. All participating studios are open from 11 am to 5 pm on Thanksgiving weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun). My studio is at:

9 Calle Del Embarcadero
Stinson Beach, CA 94970

For further info:

http://www.coastalmarinartists.com/

Please come on out and visit if you can! Happy holidays! - David Normal

Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren't really important unless they're heard...It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. And there's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action. So I dedicated this Emmy to all the people who feel compelled to speak out and not afraid to speak to power and won't shut up and refuse to be silenced. - Tommy Smothers

The Original Occupy Wall Street Protestor
Jesus Throwing the 1% (Zionist Money Changers) Out of the Temple

Jesus Piked With Pepper Spray

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,
It Will Be Streamed On the Internet
Because, "citizen media is not a crime!"

CALL FOR CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION TO REMOVE TRAITORS
WHO WOULD ABOLISH UNITED STATES LIBERTY AND FREEDOM

Bruce Springsteen & Tom Morello - The ghost of Tom Joad (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2009) via Phoenix

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

Naomi Wolf, guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 November 2011 17.25 GMT, Article history, Article Source

Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with
police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

 

[VIDEO HAS BEEN REMOVED]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/9lbbWAgBy7E

Peaceful Marine Veteran shot in the face by government projectile at Occupy Oakland protests

 

[VIDEO HAS BEEN REMOVED]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/UaruH5wZwDI

Peaceful Marine Veteran beaten by government receives lacerated spleen at Occupy Oakland protests

Peaceful UC Davis Student Protestors Brutally Pepper Sprayed by Government

Republican Bush Administration, with Democrat Help, Responsible for Veteran Suicides?
A veteran commits suicide every 80 minutes
Center For A New American Security Study Reveals Startling Statistic.

by Ken Smith, Article Source, via Phoenix

A veteran commits suicide every 80 minutes, according to a study published Monday.

Military suicides have increased since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a Center for a New American Security Suicide report. In the fiscal year 2009 alone, 1,868 veterans of these wars have made suicide attempts, according to armytimes.com.

Suicide Rates by Service (2001 - 2010) via Veterans Today

The VA estimates that about 18 veterans commit suicide every day, but this statistic is based on limited data. Only 16 states submit the cause of death among veterans and the VA relies on 3-year-old data for its reports. Improved information collection could help determine if veterans are committing suicide soon after leaving the military and if there's a higher risk among post-9/11 veterans compared with earlier generations, the study noted.

"The DOD does not currently take sufficient responsibility for veteran suicide," the authors said. "Given the potential implications of veteran suicide for the all volunteer force, the DOD should seek to understand which veterans, and how many veterans, are dying by suicide."

These staggering figures underscore the need for the VA to develop more mental-health programs and an accurate system for recording the number of veterans and service members who take their lives.

"America is losing its battle against suicide by veterans and service members," authors Dr. Margaret C. Harrell and Nancy Berglass concluded. "And as more troops return from deployment, the risk will only grow."

Faced with the stigma of post-traumatic stress disorder, unemployment rates tipping 12 percent and a loss of the military camaraderie, many veterans report feeling purposeless upon returning home.

Marine Corps veteran Jason Christiansen, 35, of St. Paul, Minn. is one such veteran that nearly killed himself after watching his life unravel upon completing his service. He lost his job as an auto dealer in 2008, avoided debt collectors and fell into a serious depression, Minnesota.publicradio.org reports.

"At one point, I was sitting there with a gun in my mouth," Christiansen told the news outlet.

A friend pushed Christiansen to seek help at a VA program, a key player in the rescuing of veterans in despair.

The Veterans Crisis Line, launched in 2007, has fielded more than 400,000 calls and has saved more than 14,000 lives, according to the Veterans Affairs mental health website.

The epidemic is raging among those who are currently serving too. From 2005 to 2010, approximately one service member committed suicide every 36 hours, the CNAS study revealed.

While the VA mental-health programs have proven to be effective, the authors of the report offered concrete suggestions on how to prevent even more military members and veterans from taking their lives.

According to Democrats & Republicans Receiving Corporate Money,
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE:

Americans were subjected to violence at the hands of their own government for
exercising the constitutional freedoms their government is sworn to protect.

Who Is Going To Protect U.S. From Congress?

ARM THE HOMELESS !!!?

Reasons 2-B Happy by Xeth #108: NOBODY CAN SEE INSIDE YOUR MIND

ERIK MOLL - Voksne Herrers Orkster - Bergen, Norway 21.11.11

PG&E Begins Removing 'Smart' Meters Due to Health Effects

by Joshua Hart, Indybay.org, Tuesday Nov 1st, 2011 1:39 PM, Article Source

Santa Cruz, Calif.—Just as PG&E enters the final phase of its deployment of wireless “smart” meters in California, the largest of the state’s Investor Owned Utilities (IOU’s) has reversed course, quietly beginning to replace the ‘smart’ meters of those reporting health impacts with the old trusty analog version. Consumer rights and health groups immediately seized on the news, demanding that millions of Californians unhappy with their new wireless meters get their analogs returned immediately at no cost.

‘Smart’ meters are new wireless utility meters being installed as part of the “smart” grid initiative, spearheaded by technology firms and backed by the Obama administration and the Department of Energy. Promises ranging from lower utility bills to enhanced renewable generation capacity have failed to materialize, with widespread reports of higher bills, privacy violations, fires and explosions, and commonly reported health impacts such as headaches, nausea, tinnitus, and heart problems associated with powerful wireless transmissions. Widely disparate political groups- from members of the Green Party to the Tea Party and Occupy protesters have attacked the program, and dozens of grassroots organizations have sprouted up over the past several months to fight what they call an undemocratic, unconstitutional and dangerous assault on people in their own homes and neighborhoods. Dozens of people have been detained or arrested for peaceful civil disobedience and even simply speaking out against deployments.

In California, more than 47 cities and counties have demanded a halt to halt installation, and a dozen local governments have passed laws prohibiting the controversial technology. The ‘smart’ meter issue has further angered a public already seething at the utilities over repeated gas explosions, safety breaches at nuclear reactors, and an increasingly extortionate rate structure. Word of California’s ‘smart’ meter nightmare has spread across the country and around the world, prompting some utilities to place smart meter plans on hold, and recently Nevada’s PUC to call for investigations into the health effects and other smart meter problems.

Now in a dramatic turnaround that could signal the beginning of a widespread recall of wireless ‘smart’ meters, on October 28th PG&E re-installed a classic spinning disc analog meter on the home of Santa Cruz, CA resident Caitlin Phillips, who had been suffering headaches and other symptoms from her ‘smart’ meter. The move comes in response to verbal directives from the California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey, who recently told members of the public that the utility “will provide for you to go back to the analog meter if that’s your choice.” The CPUC has been slow to respond to thousands of ordinary citizens reporting health effects from the new meters.

When a Wellington Energy installer (contracted with PG&E) came to install a smart meter at her home, Caitlin asked the installer to get off her property and not install, because of what a neighbor had told her about possible health damage and privacy violations. “When I returned home later, I discovered a smart meter on my house. That night I awoke to severe anxiety, headache, and buzzing in my teeth, and realized the new smart meter was on the other side of the wall from my bed.” Caitlin reported her experience to PG&E and the CPUC, who both declined to rectify the situation. When the symptoms persisted, Caitlin sought the assistance of the Scotts Valley based group Stop Smart Meters! who provided an analog meter and referred her to a professional who could help her remove her ‘smart’ meter. As soon as the analog was installed, Caitlin’s symptoms disappeared.

Frustrated and outraged about her treatment by the utility and the PUC, Caitlin travelled to San Francisco to speak at a commission meeting on Oct. 20th. About a week later, PG&E crews were at her house replacing her temporary analog meter with a brand new official PG&E analog meter. This is believed to be the first time PG&E have willingly replaced an analog meter on the home of someone suffering from health effects.

An “opt-out” proceeding overseen by an Administrative Law Judge is underway at the CA Public Utilities Commission, yet those suffering (in some cases severe) health impacts have been stuck in limbo as utilities refuse to remove the harmful meters upon request- until now.

“There are hundreds of thousands- if not millions- of people suffering in their homes from forced ‘smart’ meter radiation,” said Joshua Hart, Director of the grassroots organization Stop Smart Meters! “The utilities and PUC’s must respond promptly to all requests that analogs be returned. The alternative is that people will increasingly turn to independent professionals to remove unwanted ‘smart’ meters from their homes, a reasonable action we assert is within our legal rights. Protecting your family’s health is not tampering.”

PG&E and other utilities have also been responding to health complaints by replacing wireless ‘smart’ meters with digital meters that are “wireless-ready.” These digital meters have been associated with health problems from “dirty electricity” frequencies that pass into a home via the electrical wiring. These “trojan horse” meters have been roundly rejected by those who report continuing health impacts after installation. Susan Brinchman, Director of San Diego based Center for Electrosmog Prevention. said “At this point, the burden of responsibility is on the utilities to demonstrate that any new meter they want to install on our homes is safe. Communities have the right to retain analog meters at no extra charge. Period.”

~end~ http://stopsmartmeters.org - Time For A Corporate Death Penalty

Opposition to new online bill grows;
concerns rise over blacklisting, censorship

Written by Elizabeth Larson, Lake County News, Monday, 28 November 2011, Article Source

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A broad spectrum of businesses, organizations and citizens are banding together to fight a newly introduced bill in Congress that they believe could pose serious dangers to the freedom of the Internet.

HR 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” – or SOPA – is considered by its opponents to be an effort to give corporations the power to get Web sites shut down based on copyright infringement claims.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced SOPA on Oct. 26. It’s similar to the Senate’s Protect IP Act, which has been placed on hold.

Google, Mozilla, Facebook, AOL, eBay, LinkedIn, Twitter, Zynga Game Network and Yahoo are among many SOPA opponents, who cite myriad potential issues, from censorship to security.

Bill supporters, who want an end put to “rogue sites” that infringe on copyright law include the AFL-CIO, the Recording Industry Association of America, Directors Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, Independent Film & Television Alliance, National Association of Theatre Owners, Motion Picture Association of America, National Criminal Justice Association, National District Attorneys Association, Council of State Governments and National Sheriffs Association, among many more.

SOPA was praised on the day of its introduction by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said it would provide law enforcement with refined legal tools to act against rogue sites that attract an estimated 53 billion visits per year.

Such sites, the chamber said, jeopardize the more than $7.7 trillion of U.S. GDP and 60 percent of exports that the industries they steal from produce for our economy.

According to a bill summary, it would authorize the attorney general to seek a court order to stop foreign Internet sites suspected of committing or facilitating online piracy from publishing pirated materials.

The bill sets up an additional two-step process in which intellectual property rights holders can provide written notification to U.S.-directed sites alleged to contain pirated materials. Those notifications would direct that a site’s services be suspended unless the site’s owner or operator provides a counter notification that it is not involved in violations.

In that process, intellectual property rights holders would be allowed to pursue injunctive relief against sites accused of violations, according to the bill’s language.

Service providers – including Internet service providers, payment network providers and online advertising services – would be required to withhold services from sites accused of violations.

SOPA also makes service providers, payment network providers, Internet advertising services, advertisers, Internet search engines, domain name registries or domain name registrars that take action to block sites legally immune.

The bill would expose owners of blacklisted Web sites to potential criminal prosecutions by expanding criminal copyright infringement to include digital transmission of copyrighted work and work intended for commercial dissemination that’s made available on a computer network.

Intellectual property offenses would be added to criminal offenses of trafficking in inherently dangerous goods or services.

Opponents are concerned that the bill would give corporations too much power – including the authority to shut down Web sites that are only accused of wrongdoing and which have not actually been proved to have published copyrighted material.

Another issue is that it’s possible SOPA could lead to Web site shutdowns and prosecutions over something as seemingly minor as an amateur cover of a copyrighted song, such as one might see on YouTube.

On Nov. 10, several members of Congress, including North Coast Congressman Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), sent a letter to Smith and Congressman John Conyers expressing misgivings over the bill.

“You've previously stated that this legislation is intended to target 'rogue' foreign websites engaging in copyright infringement,” the letter stated. “While this is a laudable goal and one we support, the SOPA's overly broad language, in its current form, would target legitimate domestic websites, creating significant uncertainty for those in the technology and venture capital industries.”

The members of Congress who signed the letter warned that the legislation could in fact harm business and industry, causing investment in the Internet to dry up.

The House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on SOPA were held on Nov. 16.

In preparation for the hearing, Smith – who chairs the committee – and Conyers, the committee’s ranking member, wrote to their colleagues to urge them to support the legislation, which they said “will modernize our criminal and civil statutes to meet new IP enforcement challenges and protect American investment and jobs.”

They added, “Rogue sites do not pay taxes, they do not adhere to manufacturing standards, they do not innovate, and they do not respect U.S. laws. They do steal American jobs, harm consumers, thwart the incentives that promote innovation and creativity, and undermine those engaged in legitimate Internet commerce.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who in the Senate placed the hold on the Protect IP Act, read a statement into the record for the Nov. 16 meeting in which he warned that SOPA poses dangers to a free and open Internet, and vowed that he will fight such efforts.

No vote was reported as being taken in that hearing, and SOPA also is set for a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet.

Rep. Eshoo Letter Against SOPA:

9 Reasons Wired Readers Should Wear Tinfoil Hats

By David Kravets, November 24, 2011, Article Source

The FBI's Digital Collection System connects FBI offices and telecom providers around the
country to coordinate collection of phone taps for investigations of all sorts.

There's plenty of reason to be concerned Big Brother is watching.

We're paranoid not because we have grandiose notions of our self-importance, but because the facts speak for themselves.

Here's our short list of nine reasons that Wired readers ought to wear tinfoil hats, or at least, fight for their rights and consider ways to protect themselves with encryption and defensive digital technologies.

We know the list is incomplete, so if you have better reasons that we list here, put them in the comments and we'll make a list based off them.

Until then, remember: Don't suspect a friend; report him.

Warrantless Wiretapping

The government refuses to acknowledge whether the National Security Agency is secretly siphoning the nation's electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges. The lawsuit was based on evidence provided by a former AT&T technician Mark Klein that showed that AT&T had installed a secret spying room in an internet hub in San Francisco. The spying got so bad that Attorney General Ashcroft threatened to resign over it.

When a federal judge said a lawsuit on that issue could go forward, Congress passed legislation stopping the case in its tracks. Two American lawyers for an Islamic charity did, however, prevail in their suit that they were wiretapped without warrants, but the Administration is appealing. Much of the program was legalized in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act.

The FBI has also built a nationwide computer system called the Digital Collection System, connected by fiber optic cables, to collect and analyze wiretaps of all types, including ones used in ultra-secret terrorism investigations.

Warrantless GPS Tracking

The Obama administration claims Americans have no right to privacy in their public movements. The issue surfaced this month in a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if law enforcement agents should be required to obtain a probable-cause warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on a citizen's car. The government admitted to the Supreme Court that it thinks it would have the power to track the justices' cars without a warrant.

The invasive technology allows police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to engage in covert round-the-clock surveillance over an extended period of time, collecting vast amounts of information about anyone who drives the vehicle that is being tracked. The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with "great frequency," and GPS retailers have told Wired that they've sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

Tracking Devices in Your Pocket

That mobile phone in your pocket chronicles almost everything. Once-secret software developed by a private company pretty much chronicles all you do on your smartphone and sends it to the carriers. The carriers themselves keep a wealth of information, such as text messages, call-location data, and PINs -- though none of them disclose to their customers what data they store or how long they keep the data.

Law enforcement can get at much of that historical data -- and often get real-time tracking information without proving probable cause to a judge.

Fake Cell Phone Towers

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier's cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.

So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.

The government maintains that the stingrays don't violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don't have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower. While the technology sounds ultra-new, the feds have had this in their arsenal for at least 15 years, and used a stingray to bust the notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1995.

The Border Exception

The Fourth Amendment doesn't exist along the U.S. border. You know that if you're a close supporter of WikiLeaks or a friend of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning. You're no doubt very familiar with the U.S. government's laptop border search policy, which allows Customs and Border Protection agents to seize and search a laptop belonging to anyone crossing a border into the U.S.

Agents can search through files on a traveler's laptop, phone or other mobile device, read e-mail or view digital snapshots to uncover incriminating evidence, and they don't need any reason to do so.

The government argues, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court agrees that searching through a person's laptop for copyright violations is no different than looking through their suitcase for cocaine -- and thus fits squarely with what is known as the 'border exception' to the Fourth Amendment. That means a border agent doesn't need reasonable suspicion, probable cause or even a hunch to open your laptop, seize it and make copies of your data.

At least three supporters of WikiLeaks, including security researcher Jacob Appelbaum. have been subject to the policy and had devices seized and searched as they re-entered the U.S. from foreign trips. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seem to particularly like searching Appeblaum's devices and questioning him, despite the fact that Wikileaks has never been charged with a crime in the U.S..

The "6 Months and It's the Government's" Rule

If you're already not wanting a dose of Prozac, consider that the law allows the government to obtain Americans' e-mails, without a warrant, if it's stored on some other company's servers for more than six months. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, adopted in 1986, turned 25 this year. When written, the law assumed e-mails left on a server for that long were abandoned.

In the age of Gmail, that's simply ridiculous. A proposal to demand a court warrant for any and all e-mail never got a Senate hearing and was opposed by the Obama administration.

The Patriot Act

No paranoia list would be complete without including the Patriot Act, the now 10-year-old law adopted in the wake of September 11. The act, which has remained largely the same since former president George W. Bush signed the legislation six weeks after 9/11, gives the government, among other things, the power to acquire phone, banking and other records via the power of a so-called "national security letter," which does not require a court warrant.

National security letters, perhaps the most invasive facet of the law, are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, bank records and arguably websites you have visited.

The FBI need merely assert, in writing, that the information is "relevant" to an ongoing terrorism or national security investigation. Nearly everyone who gets a national security letter is prohibited from even disclosing that they've received one. More than 200,000 letters have been issued by the FBI, despite a series of stinging reports from the Justice Department's internal watchdog, who found FBI agents weren't just routinely sloppy; they also violated the law.

Moreover, a decade after Bush's signature, information is sketchy about how the law is being used in practice. For instance, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) claims the government applies a far broader, and classified, legal interpretation of the Patriot Act's power to let the government seize most anything it deems relevant to an investigation (Section 215).

"We're getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says," the Senate Intelligence Committee member said in a recent interview with Wired. "When you've got that kind of a gap, you're going to have a problem on your hands."

Government Malware

It's little known, but governments have their own malware/spyware that it deploys against suspected lawbreakers. The FBI's version, the last time we checked, was called CIPAV. Once an FBI agent convinced a target to install it (by clicking an e-mail attachment or link on the web), the spyware reports back everything that computer does online.

German states recently came under fire for misusing a similar program that reportedly could turn on a computer's camera and take screenshots. And a recent Wall Street Journal story catalogs a surveillance software company which trumpeted its ability to infect users via a fake iTunes update. The company sells its wares to governments around the world.

Known Unknowns

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took an unfair amount of abuse for his deployment of the phrase "known unknowns." And it's these known unknowns that might be the most disturbing part of the list. For instance, does the government think the Patriot Act allows it to force Google to turn over information about anyone who has searched for certain keywords using orders that come with a gag order? Is the NSA sucking up everything we say on our phones and that we do online, under the theory it pushed in a court case that it's not a search until a human actually looks at the data? How often do police investigating a crime ask wireless providers to give them a list of all the people whose phones were in use in the area when they think a crime was committed? What kind of sweeping surveillance orders have been issued under the 1998 law that Congress passed to legalize much of the warrantless wiretapping of Americans? And finally, how long is the government storing all this data, and how can we be sure that our future governments won't start using this data to target Americans based on activities protected by the First Amendment?

And no -- a tinfoil hat won't help you at all.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!

via Robin Kilgore

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling: "I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, e-mail, cellphones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message.

World Health Organization has classified SmartMeter
Radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."

PG&E Smart Meters via prez @ usa-exile

Republicans and Democrats are Lying Hypocrites
Who Support Selective Terrorism Against U.S. Military:
Israel Attacked the U.S.S. Liberty

34 U.S. Military Dead, 171 Wounded
http://www.flyingsnail.com/Dahbud/index.html#ussliberty

Beautiful World by Devo

George Carlin - The Owners of America

Nobody Brought Peace To Our Times
"None of the Above" Should Be On Voter Ballots

Oh, I hope that I see you again I never even caught your name As you looked through my window pane -- So I'm writing this message today I'm thinking that you'll have a way Of hearing the notes in my tune -- Where are you going? Where have you been? I can imagine other worlds you have seen -- Beautiful faces and music so serene -- So I do hope I see you again My universal citizen You went as quickly as you came -- You know the power Your love is right You have good reason To stay out of sight -- But break our illusions and help us Be the light -- Message by Michael Pinder

Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren't really important unless they're heard...It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. And there's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action. So I dedicated this Emmy to all the people who feel compelled to speak out and not afraid to speak to power and won't shut up and refuse to be silenced. - Tommy Smothers

The man whispered, "God, speak to me" and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear. So the man yelled "God, speak to me" and the thunder rolled across the sky. But the man did not listen. The man looked around and said, "God let me see you" and a star shined brightly. But the man did not notice. And the man shouted, "God show me a miracle" and a life was born. But the man did not know. So the man cried out in despair, "Touch me God, and let me know you are there" Whereupon God reached down and touched the man. But the man brushed the butterfly away and walked on.

Don't miss out on a blessing because it isn't packaged the way you expect.

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