Television
Lot’s of interesting stuff today. Unfortunately, that makes for a longer entry.
As always I have to emphasize I am putting it in because it is interesting and not because I have specifically checked each and every facet of each and every link for accuracy. However, I think that even the inaccuracies can be instructive. I encourage everyone to check everything out for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions.
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[This is one of the worst ones to come to trial I think. ]
Sixty-six residents are facing charges that include child sex abuse, incest and pimping their own children for not much more than the price of a carton of cigarettes.
The 45 alleged victims are children aged from six months to 12 years old. The accused are their mothers, fathers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles. Last week at Angers assizes court, it took three days for four clerks to read out the 430-page charge sheet against the 39 men and 27 women. The charges include abusing 26 girls and 19 boys during at least 100 orgies, some of which included sado-masochistic sex games.
Marine - not her real name - was mentioned time and again. From the age of seven, she was allegedly raped by her grandfather, Philippe, now 59, her father, Franck, and two dozen others. Franck, a 36-year-old former drifter, and his wife, Patricia, 32, allegedly prostituted Marine, her younger sister, InËs, and their little brother, Vincent, in return for small amounts of money and cartons of cigarettes. As an inducement for playing 'doctors and nurses' or 'the lock and key game', the children were said to have been offered a 'first prize' of camping trips by the nearby River Loire.
http://www.rense.com/general63/town.htm
Photographer Russell E. "Rusty" Nelson was recently arrested two days after journalist Hunter Thompson reportedly committed suicide four weeks ago on February 10, according to two phone interviews with attorney John DeCamp last week.
Nelson was allegedly employed by a former Republican Party activist to take pictures of current or retired U.S. House-Senate members and other prominent government officials engaging in sexual criminality by receiving or committing sodomy and other sex acts on children during the Reagan-Bush 41 administrations.
...
The evidence DeCamp presented was so credible and substantial that Urbom awarded Paul Bonacci $1 million for child abuse on February 19, 1999 regarding his lawsuit involving Larry King.
http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=107&mode=&order=0&thold=0
[I can hardly decide which article to put first here.]
In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute.
The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel. In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill.
He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Ands o he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head. During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.
That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem." From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did.
By the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent. The Methods in this Madness: Desensitization How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling.
I will explain these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture. Brutalization and desensitization are what happen at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality.
This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world. Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our children through violence in the media--but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television.
At that age, a child can watch something happening on television and mimic that action. But it isn't until children are six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets them understand where information comes from. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.
When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child's eyes.
And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times. Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's just TV." And they nod their little heads and say okay. But they can't tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That's what the media are doing to them. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence.
The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate.
Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three-to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old. Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media.
The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the 1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually."
The article went on to say that ". . . if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992).
http://www.rense.com/general63/train.htm
It seems that we Americans are getting progressively more {stupid}. They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels in all age groups tested. Americans read less and understand what they read less than they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since research began to study such things.
As for writing skills, Americans are, in general, unable to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among the least literate people on this planet, and we're getting worse. It's the change--the constant trendline downward--that interests these researchers. More than one study has correlated this increasing stupidity of our population to the amount of television they watch.
http://www.rense.com/general63/traid.htm
As a former Air Force intelligence officer, I would argue that this statement is absolutely ludicrous. Based upon intelligence collection capabilities of even 3 decades ago, it is reasonable to assume that the US intercepted all phone communication between Italian agents in Iraq and Rome, monitored such traffic in real time and knew precisely where Sgrena's vehicle was at all times, without advanced notice being provided by Italian officials.
During the early 1970s, it was my job to monitor intelligence collected on the Korean peninsula. It was my responsibility to report serious anomalies to the White House by means of a secure phone.
http://www.rense.com/general63/denps.htm
It is the ship of the future - powered by the sun, wind and waves. The futuristic vessel has no conventional engines, uses no fossil fuels and releases no harmful emissions into the atmosphere or pollution into the sea.
The first ship to use the technology will be a cargo vessel that will transport up to 10,000 cars from Britain to Australia, New Zealand and other countries. If successful, it will be used on passenger ferries and cruise ships.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sea.htm
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, wrote Robert Frost. But whatever is to be our fate, it is now overdue.
After analysing the eradication of millions of ancient species, scientists have found that a mass extinction is due any moment now.
Their research has shown that every 62 million years - plus or minus 3m years - creatures are wiped from the planet's surface in massive numbers.
And given that the last great extinction occurred 65m years ago, when dinosaurs and thousands of other creatures abruptly disappeared, the study suggests humanity faces a fairly pressing danger. Even worse, scientists have no idea about its source.
http://www.rense.com/general63/extinct.htm
A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn't been seen since.
Milan investigators, however, now appear to be close to identifying his kidnappers. Last month, officials showed up at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy and demanded records of any American planes that had flown into or out of the joint U.S.-Italian military installation around the time of the abduction. They also asked for logs of vehicles that had entered the base.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30275-2005Mar12?language=printer
[it’s the kind of news coverage every president of the Soviet union covets.]
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031305Z.shtml
Communism is a satanic movement devoted to human degradation and tyranny, not public ownership, social justice or human brotherhood. Of course, no one would support it if they knew the truth. (See my "The Conspiracy is Against God," http://www.savethemales.ca/000305.html)
AN EX-US COMMUNIST SPEAKS
Many high-ranking former-Communists have risked their lives to alert their fellow Americans. One is Bella Dodd whose shocking book "School of Darkness" I reviewed two years ago. http://www.savethemales.ca/160303.html
She describes how Communists morph into liberals, feminists and socialists, and myriad front groups (identifiable by words like "international," "equality" and "peace") to divide and subvert society.
http://www.rense.com/general63/subbb.htm
Italy's Justice Minister has urged former hostage Giuliana Sgrena to stop making "careless" accusations after being shot by US forces in Baghdad, saying she had already caused enough grief.
Ms Sgrena has repeatedly suggested US soldiers shot her on purpose and said on Friday she had little faith in a joint investigation by Italy and the United States into the "friendly-fire" incident.
"She has created enormous problems for the government and also caused grief that perhaps was better avoided," Italian Justice Minister Roberto Castelli told reporters in Bologna.
http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200503/s1321953.htm
The film titled The Bomb in my Garden is a biography of Iraq's top nuclear scientist who tried to turn himself in following Saddam Hussein's capture but wasn't believed by CIA.
http://netindia123.com/showdetails.asp?id=72756&cat=Entertainment&head=Johnny%20Depp%20to%20produce%20'The%20Bomb%20in%20my%20Garden'
The secrecy surrounding the current use of university classrooms as covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies now threatens the fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines. A new test program that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university classrooms for now operates without detection or protest,. With time these students who cannot admit to their true intentions will inevitably pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now enrolled.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price03122005.html
This nation, its political leadership and the vast majority of its religious leaders, have thrown away their moral compass and replaced it with a rabid nationalism unseen on the world stage since Germany in the 1930s. Torture and murder of hundreds of thousands are readily accepted, as long as it is done for the graven image called the State. Eventually, unless we take a different path, the number of those tortured and murdered will include those in this country who refuse to submit to the State as it pursues its "mission from God." The venom readily spews forth from the shills for the State now, building a hate and resentment in the masses for any who would challenge the official position of perpetual war for peace.
...
Most of the military officers, who excel at unconstitutional, aggressive war, will move into positions of higher authority once this war is over and will dictate military policy in the future. They will remember the path they took to attain the lofty status of general and so will those who are younger and seek to emulate them. They will have learned that to follow the lies of unprincipled civilian leadership is indispensable to success, and conscience and morals will never take you past colonel – if that far.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy15.html
Two million Britons could die in the bird flu pandemic that experts warn is both imminent and inevitable, one of the country's leading authorities has told The Independent on Sunday
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=619562
“The man who called was very polite and nice,” says John Gasquet, owner of Empire coffee at 2 N. Main in Downtown Memphis. “He said he was special agent Something-or-other. He said that due to the fact that in some states the President had been to, there were issues of security regarding area businesses, he was calling businesses to tell them not to put up any negative signs in their windows that were negative toward President Bush. He said there were designated areas of protest and this would cut down on the possibility of problems.”
http://www.memphisflyer.com/content.asp?ID=3184&onthefly=1
Terry Ratzmann, the man who police say killed seven people and then himself during a church service, was a member of the Living Church of God, a denomination that focuses on "end-time" prophecies.
The church's estimated 6,300 members in 40 countries place a strong emphasis on using world news to "prove" that these are end times, to be followed by Christ's second coming.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050313/ap_on_re_us/hotel_shooting_religion
[This is a big, fat infuriating lie. US authorities do NOT remain vigilant. They couldn’t be any less vigilant if they were asleep.]
The bulletin also notes the Iraq-based master terrorist's apparent belief that "if an individual has enough money, he can bribe his way into the U.S.," specifically by obtaining a "visa to Honduras" and then traveling across Mexico and the southern U.S. border.
Al-Zarqawi's aide also revealed that his boss, after pondering the absence of attacks in the U.S. in recent years, concluded that a lack of "willing martyrs" was to blame. Al-Zarqawi believes, according to his lieutenant, that "if an individual is willing to die, there was nothing that could be done to stop him," even in the U.S. There is no evidence, say intelligence agencies, that al-Zarqawi's agents have infiltrated the U.S. But authorities remain vigilant.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1037626,00.html
When you move from the state to the federal level of government, the fog begins to fall. Right now, for example, we observe the coming together of three trends that would seem to contradict each other.
First many Americans are receiving refunds on their taxes as well as unexpected rebates for money already paid into the federal system. Second, government revenue has actually fallen for nearly three years in a row, due not to tax cuts but to lower economic growth. Third, government spending is soaring, with defense and non-defense spending increases breaking all postwar records. Meanwhile, Congress and the President are instituting new mega-spending programs that break all records.
How could all this be happening at the same time? Has government learned how to create something out of nothing? Hardly. The leakage is visible in the federal deficit, which is estimated to exceed the $600 billion mark, and the federal debt, which now stands at $6.7 trillion. And then there's the problem of unfunded liabilities in the system itself, which exceed $44 trillion.
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1328
Doctors in Thailand's southern resort province of Phuket were left perplexed today over the mysterious case of a teenage construction worker who was admitted to hospital after vomiting a three-inch nail, a knot and a length of string.
http://etna.mcot.net/query.php?nid=36663
[I wonder if it is possible to photograph a mirage.]
Just recently it was discovered that in the maritime waters of China°¶s Guangdong Province, a mirage was spotted. It can be seen clearly as a small islet with a number of mountains and even a structure that looks like a castle. As it mysteriously appeared, it also left the same way only to have appeared for a bit of over three hours.
http://www.ettoday.com/2005/03/11/11195-1763598.htm
Elephants in Thailand's northeastern province of Loei are descending from their mountain homes to raid villages for food, as the north-eastern province becomes firmly gripped by drought.
Farmers, villagers and animals are all suffering from severe drought conditions, which have pushed water levels in 13 of the province’s reservoirs to under 20 percent.
http://etna.mcot.net/query.php?nid=36711
Then they say, "No, I meant how can you take a picture of a mirage? How can you photograph it if it isn't really there?"
Almost all of my friends I have talked to about this project assumed it would be impossible to photograph a mirage. "It's just an illusion, right? So it doesn't show up in photographs, right?"
A mirage happens when a bunch of rays of light take a detour on the way to your eyes -- or your camera. When you look down a blacktop highway, and see a pool of water in the distance, you understand the "water" you see is an illusion. The light rays that create that image, however, are real. Your eye can see them, and your camera can record them.
http://www.greatestplaces.org/mirage/howcanyou.html
The workers in Honolulu said they had no way to alert the potential victims.
"We talked to the State Department Operations Center and to the military. We called embassies. We talked to the navy in Sri Lanka, any local government official we could get hold of," Barry Hirshorn, one of the geophysicists, said in December.
"We spoke to people in the foreign ministries, and everywhere we could think of," duty officer Stuart Weinstein said.
Pacific Tsunami Warning Center chief Charles "Chip" McCreery has said that by the time his agency learned that a tsunami had been generated, it was already on the news.
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Mar/13/ln/ln26p.html
A German man, who persuaded doctors to give him a second penis, lost his wife after he showed her the result.
Biker Michael Gruber, 40, lost his original penis in a motorbike accident and doctors built him a second one using a mixture of skin, bone and other tissues from his own body.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=iol1110634589552A551
Police in Spain say they have smashed a massive international money-laundering ring centred on the southern coastal resort of Marbella.
Forty-one people of at least five nationalities were arrested.
The group is suspected of laundering more than $300m (£155m) for gangs involved in murder, drug trafficking, arms dealing and prostitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4344447.stm
[Part of the media campaign to promote torture.
Gordon says 24 taps into the public's ìfear-based wish fulfillmentî of having protectors, such as Bauer, who will do whatever is necessary to save society from harm. But it shows a dark side, too.
ìJack Bauer is a tragic character. He doesn't get away with it clean. He's got blood on his hands,î Gordon says. ìIn some ways, he is a necessary evil.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/life/20050314/d_bottomstrip14.art.htm?POE=click-refer
[I know people don’t like to hear this, but an unprovoked invasion of a prostrate country doesn’t usually fall under the heading of “worthy cause”. It might be better to say they had worthy intentions.]
War notoriously robs parents of their sons, but it also steals husbands and fathers, and increasingly wives and mothers. The Pentagon doesn't keep these statistics, but using figures compiled by the Scripps-Howard News Service and other sources, NEWSWEEK has calculated that as of last week 1,043 American children had lost a parent in Iraq. To put it another way, nearly two years after the invasion on March 19, 2003, among the 1,508 American troops who have died as of March 11 were an estimated 450 fathers, and 7 mothers. A wartime death presents unique hardships for children. It occurs in a far-off country, often to a parent who left home months earlier; young children may find it hard to grasp the finality of the event. Offsetting that is the impressive panoply and ritual of a military funeral, and the consoling knowledge that the sacrifice was in a worthy cause. The death of a parent often leaves a family not just sadder, but poorer, and surviving spouses are agitating for improvements in their benefits. But there are needs no government program can fill.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7169451/site/newsweek/
On October 6, 2004, Greenhouse was summoned by the Corps's deputy commander, Major General Robert Griffin. She knew that the top brass was eager to finalize the Corps's latest contract for KBR, a $75 million extension for troop support in the Balkans. Already it had gone through several drafts, mostly because Greenhouse kept questioning the rationale for giving it to KBR without competitive bidding. What she didn't know was that her superiors had closed ranks against her.
When Greenhouse entered the general's office, he handed her a letter that explained she was being demoted for poor performance—a curious indictment, given that she'd received high performance ratings before the war. The demotion would knock her down to the government rank of GS-15. That was like going from senior vice president in a Fortune 500 company to middle management. She could retire instead with full benefits if she liked, the letter went on to say. She was, after all, 60.
Greenhouse chose a third alternative: she hired a lawyer and began to fight.
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050307roco02
[Tyranny thy name is coincidence.]
Strange suicides and car crashes among foes of the former regime bring calls for investigations.
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
KIEV, Ukraine — By all official accounts, Yuri Kravchenko died by his own hand.
The former Ukrainian interior minister, scheduled to meet in just a few hours with prosecutors to give testimony in a high-profile case of political murder, aimed a gun at his chin and fired, sending a bullet ripping through his cheek and out his upper jaw. Then he aimed it at his temple and fired again.
Suicide, government investigators ruled.
Exactly 13.1% of Ukrainians who responded to a Kiev Post Internet poll believed it was suicide. More than 80% thought Kravchenko was slain this month to prevent him from testifying, possibly implicating former President Leonid D. Kuchma in the decapitation of journalist Georgi Gongadze and other crimes. Many are sure that even if Kravchenko pulled the trigger, he was driven to it by his powerful former friends
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-kuchma13mar13,0,5770955.story?coll=la-home-headlines
The United States, Canada and Mexico should form a "common security perimeter" as part of a broad security and economic plan aimed at boosting trade and bolstering the continent's borders, a tri-national task for report urged Monday.
"Our vision of North America is one of three sovereign states whose formal collaboration must reflect their mutual interdependence while respecting their differences," a joint statement issued by the task force's chairman said.
The Independent Task Force on the Future of North America is headed by former Canadian deputy prime minister John Manley, former Mexican finance minister Pedro Aspe and former Massachusetts governor William Weld.
...
The task force was jointly sponsored by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.rense.com/general63/asam.htm
[Heaven forbid Montana’s state militia should do something for Montana.]
Gov. Brian Schweitzer has touched off a political fight with Montana Republicans after calling for the return of National Guard troops serving in Iraq to help out in what many fear will be a record-setting wildfire season.
Mr. Schweitzer, a newly elected Democrat, infuriated Republican lawmakers who see his request as a way to criticize the Bush administration over Iraq.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mtboh.htm
[I don’t understand why people in England were willing to go to war with Iraq, which did NOTHING to them, and run around shooting and invading and refusing to negotiate. And yet when someone is literally standing directly in front of them, literally chopping someone up with an axe, right there in front of them, right in their own neighborhood-RIGHT THERE, all they do is ASK the axe murderer to stop.
How do they account for the different in behavior between one situation and the other?
I can tell you if I saw someoen attacking someone with an axe the last thing to enter my head would be to ASK the nice axe murderer to please stop axe murdering.]
A man was beheaded in a frenzied and prolonged axe attack in a London street today.
.....
"The axeman saw me but he just ignored me. He hacked his victim's head, cutting it as if it was a block of wood for a fire. His victim was unconscious on the ground, but he kept bringing his axe down on him.
"I begged him to stop and he just looked at me without emotion. There was no anger in his face, he did not seem crazy. He was just coolly finishing off his victim. He wanted to destroy him. ."
Another woman passing in a car stopped and pleaded with the man to stop his attack. He also ignored pleas from builders working nearby. Police arrested a man at the scene and he is being held for questioning at Holborn police station.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/17262526?source=Evening%20Standard&ct=5
[I bet you it is nearer 5%.]
In some countries, such as Greece, Spain and France, 98 per cent of consumers believe the euro has favoured higher prices.
Mr Almunia and his officials offered a flurry of statistics and explanations, insisting the euro was not to blame.
Officials pointed to everything from bad weather and epidemics of animal disease in the year after the euro's introduction, to oil price rises and sharp hikes in cigarette taxes, as causes of inflation.
Above all, they said that inflation was not as high as people thought.
Officials said actual inflation had been held to about two per cent across the euro-zone, though EU attitude surveys found the public believed inflation was nearer five per cent.
http://www.rense.com/general63/dev.htm
[I agree with a lot of the stuff this guy writes, but not this. As a general rule I think the notion of following Europe’s lead is not a very good idea for any subject, so I immediately reject his appeal to “the Europeans are doing it”. We followed them into WWI and look where that got us.
I believe if you are born somewhere you ought to have a right to live there. If you look at Europe they have had Gypsies and Jewish people running back and forth across the continent for thousands of years, precsiely because no matter where they were born, they were never entitled to citizenship rights in whatever country they were in. The reason for this was the racist nature of the different countries. Traditionally the king of this or that country was really referred to as “The Kind of the French” or “The King of the Britons” or something, not the “King of France” or “the King of Britain”, because they were the king of a particular ethnic group. That is why up until recently you could be of irish or German descent for example, and never having set one foot in your country of origin you could get a passport and citizenship.
The united States is supposed to be different. You are an American because you are here, not because you are a member of a particular race or religion or whatever. That is the whole point of the 14th Ammendment, to throw off that European racist notion of citizenship. I do not think it is appropriate to bring it back just because the government can’t be bothered to secure the borders.]
An illegal alien can cross the border, have a baby five minutes later, and that baby is automatically declared a citizen of the USA automatically."
The illegal aliens don't have to go through any legal doors. They are exempt from that. They are, in fact, rewarded for disobeying U.S. laws by having their children granted automatic citizenship. In addition, the happy family is entitled to welfare benefits. And, illegal alien parents who have children born in the U.S. are seldom deported. That's why their children are called "anchor babies" - they anchor their families securely in the USA.
It doesn't have to be this way. Most European countries have done away with birthright citizenship because they experienced the same abuses we are seeing. The Irish Supreme Court recently ruled that immigrant parents could be deported even if they have an Irish child. "It was becoming common for 'single pregnant woman' to come to Ireland from countries outside the 15-nation EU, most frequently from Nigeria, to claim political asylum," states Shawn Pogatchnik, AP writer. Ireland saw a wave of immigration abuse and promptly put a stop to it. Recently, the Irish voted to end birthright citizenship. Britain and Australia both changed their citizenship laws in the 1980's for the same reasons. If you are born in Switzerland you will not automatically become a Swiss citizen. Why should Americans allow our country to be invaded by people who do not honor allegiance to our laws?
http://www.rense.com/general63/14th.htm
[This what the press gets for selling out the American people. They will pass along whatever half-assed propaganda anyone wants to pay for, so Lindsey Pendergrass is right about that. But look where it has gotten them. The press has been made the instrument of its own undoing.]
Lindsey Pendergrass trusts the government more than she trusts the press.
That's why she doesn't believe that newspapers should be allowed to publish everything without government approval.
"The press just wants to print something that people will buy," she says. "The government has to be true to the public."
http://www.rense.com/general63/press.htm
The US military's senior officer responsible for security co-operation in Latin America has warned of the destabilising potential posed to the region by the Venezuelan government's controversial, and opaque, arms procurement programme.
Hugo Chavez, the president of the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, has begun signing contracts to buy an array of weapons to revamp his defences to thwart what he claims could be outside "aggression".
Such fears were intensified two weeks ago when Venezuelan officials were alarmed by the presence of US warships and marines near Curacao, off Venezuela. US officials said it was a routine manoeuvre.
http://www.rense.com/general63/vedn.htm
From the land down under a report written by Russell Skelton surfaces - It's time to admit we've created a Gulag. "The Baxter detention centre, once touted as a model holding centre for illegal arrivals, has degenerated into an immigration Gulag. Unlike convicted criminals, immigration detainees serve no set term and can be held indefinitely. John Harley, South Australia's Public Advocate, is incensed at the lack of rights accorded Baxter's 225 detainees, many of whom are entering their fourth year there. Peter Qasim, a Kashmiri, is in his sixth year with no hope of release because no country will accept him."
http://www.batr.org/gulag/031505.html
Olavi Kajander didn't mean to discover the mysterious particles that have been called the most primitive organisms on Earth and that could be responsible for a series of painful and sometimes fatal illnesses.
He was simply trying to find out why certain cultures of mammalian cells in his lab would die no matter how carefully he prepared them.
http://www.rense.com/general63/anano.htm
In coming issues, we will show you the brainwashers' vision of a hell on earth and how television is being used to get us there; we will discuss television programming, revealing how it has helped produce what is called a ``paradigm'' shift in values, creating an immoral society; we will explain how the news is presented and how its presentation has been used to destroy the English language; we will discuss the mass entertainment media, showing who controls it and how; we will deal with America's addiction to spectator sports and show how that too has helped make you passive and stupid; and finally, we will show where we are headed, if we can't break our addiction to the tube.
http://www.rense.com/general63/traid.htm
And this spring, more seals will be killed than in any previous year.
Indeed, up to 350,000 seals could be killed by early May. That is almost three times as many as when the anti-seal-hunt campaign was launched more than 30 years ago.
If anything, despite years of protests and boycotts, the campaign against the hunt has been a failure.
About all it has accomplished is that sealers have been banned since 1987 from killing those cute little white seal pups whose adorable faces were splashed on anti-seal-hunt posters around the world.
That dismal record of failure is the reason why animal rights groups from around the world are massing for another major push to stop the controversial seal hunt once and for all.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1110582613710&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
[The more I hear about Canada, the less warm and fuzzy it sounds.]
Canada's new "management plan" for harp seals authorizes what will be the world's largest slaughter of marine mammals.
http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/features/details?item_id=778025
Britain could run seriously short of natural gas supplies if an unseasonably cold spell of late winter weather persists through this week, a report said on Sunday.
The situation is so critical that the company which distributes gas throughout Britain is preparing to cut supplies from some industrial users to ensure householders are not left shivering, the Sunday Telegraph said.
http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050312235215.p5jpwlt0.html
In the strange calculus nations use to measure strategic power, individual pieces of equipment can have radical, even world changing, implications.
China, for example, has long possessed ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. But in the last few years China has developed a system to launch those missiles from trucks.
The system is called a Transporter-Erector-Launcher, or TEL. The missile it carries is called a Dongfeng-31. "Dongfeng" means East Wind.
The TEL not only transports the DF-31. The missile is erected and then launched from the vehicle. The entire system is mobile.
"This means in a crisis China can disperse its ballistic missile forces and have a high degree of confidence some of it would survive a pre-emptive strike by a foreign power," says James Mulvenon, who heads a new private think tank in Washington, the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis (Cira).
US analysts believe the DF-31 will be deployed in the next few years. They also believe the missile has the range to hit the north-western United States.
http://www.rense.com/general63/watches.htm
Global warming is causing Himalayan glaciers to rapidly retreat, threatening to cause water shortages for hundreds of millions of people who rely on glacier-dependent rivers in China, India and Nepal, WWF warned Monday.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iceage-05h.html
At the recent European Space Agency's Mars Express conference, scientists announced they had found a frozen sea on the martian equator. John Murray, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the Open University in the UK, is lead author on the paper to be published in the journal Nature. Astrobiology Magazine editor Leslie Mullen sat down with Murray to discuss the new finding.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-05e.html
[Is it just me or does this sound like people standing under the radar beams are going to get fried? Not that that isn’t already happening with the cell phone system.]
"I believe there is a strong need for us to provide persistent intelligence collection to combatant commanders day and night in all weather conditions," Mr. Teets said. "Only space radar can do that. In open areas and in denied areas, space radar can provide us with persistent intelligence collection."
Providing that persistent intelligence to commanders in the field will require a constellation of satellites launched into space. Each satellite will use radar to take pictures of the earth, through any kind of weather, to provide both military and civilian intelligence communities information about what is happening on the ground and over the hill ahead, officials said.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-comms-05i.html
In a Lewinite brainwashing group, a number of individuals from varying backgrounds and personalities, are manipulated by a "group leader" to form a "consensus" of opinion, achieving a new "group identity." The key to the process is the creation of a controlled environment, in which stress is introduced (sometimes called dissonance) to crack an individual's belief structure. Using the peer pressure of other group members, the individual is "cracked," and a new personality emerges with new values. The degrading experience causes the person to deny that any change has taken place. In that way, an individual is brainwashed without the victim knowing what has taken place.
This method is the same, with some minor modification, used in all so-called "sensitivity groups" or "T-groups," or in the more extreme rock-drug-sex counterculture form, "touchy-feely groups," such as the kind popularized from the 1960s onward by the Esalen Institute, which was set up with the help of NTL.
From the mid-1950s onward, NTL put the majority of the nation's corporate leaderships through such brainwashing programs, while running similar programs for the State Department, the Navy, the Department of Education, and other sections of the federal bureaucracy. There is no firm estimate of the number of Americans who have been put through this process in last 40 years at either NTL, or as it is now known the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences, which is based in Rosslyn, Virginia, or its West Coast base of operations, the Western Training Laboratories in Group Development, or in various satellite institutions. The most reliable estimate is in the several millions.
http://educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwotavistockbestkeptsecret.shtml
A resistance to the HIV/AIDS virus shown by some Europeans might be a genetic legacy of plague outbreaks which swept through the continent centuries ago, a report said late Thursday.
Around 10 percent of modern Europeans enjoy a natural protection against AIDS as a result of the suffering of their forbears as plague outbreaks spread from the Middle Ages, a pair of British scientists say.
http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050310233114.7zrlo9lv.html
As always I have to emphasize I am putting it in because it is interesting and not because I have specifically checked each and every facet of each and every link for accuracy. However, I think that even the inaccuracies can be instructive. I encourage everyone to check everything out for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions.
=====
[This is one of the worst ones to come to trial I think. ]
Sixty-six residents are facing charges that include child sex abuse, incest and pimping their own children for not much more than the price of a carton of cigarettes.
The 45 alleged victims are children aged from six months to 12 years old. The accused are their mothers, fathers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles. Last week at Angers assizes court, it took three days for four clerks to read out the 430-page charge sheet against the 39 men and 27 women. The charges include abusing 26 girls and 19 boys during at least 100 orgies, some of which included sado-masochistic sex games.
Marine - not her real name - was mentioned time and again. From the age of seven, she was allegedly raped by her grandfather, Philippe, now 59, her father, Franck, and two dozen others. Franck, a 36-year-old former drifter, and his wife, Patricia, 32, allegedly prostituted Marine, her younger sister, InËs, and their little brother, Vincent, in return for small amounts of money and cartons of cigarettes. As an inducement for playing 'doctors and nurses' or 'the lock and key game', the children were said to have been offered a 'first prize' of camping trips by the nearby River Loire.
http://www.rense.com/general63/town.htm
Photographer Russell E. "Rusty" Nelson was recently arrested two days after journalist Hunter Thompson reportedly committed suicide four weeks ago on February 10, according to two phone interviews with attorney John DeCamp last week.
Nelson was allegedly employed by a former Republican Party activist to take pictures of current or retired U.S. House-Senate members and other prominent government officials engaging in sexual criminality by receiving or committing sodomy and other sex acts on children during the Reagan-Bush 41 administrations.
...
The evidence DeCamp presented was so credible and substantial that Urbom awarded Paul Bonacci $1 million for child abuse on February 19, 1999 regarding his lawsuit involving Larry King.
http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=107&mode=&order=0&thold=0
[I can hardly decide which article to put first here.]
In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute.
The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel. In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill.
He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Ands o he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head. During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.
That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem." From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did.
By the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent. The Methods in this Madness: Desensitization How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling.
I will explain these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture. Brutalization and desensitization are what happen at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality.
This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world. Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our children through violence in the media--but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television.
At that age, a child can watch something happening on television and mimic that action. But it isn't until children are six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets them understand where information comes from. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.
When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child's eyes.
And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times. Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's just TV." And they nod their little heads and say okay. But they can't tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That's what the media are doing to them. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence.
The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate.
Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three-to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old. Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media.
The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the 1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually."
The article went on to say that ". . . if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992).
http://www.rense.com/general63/train.htm
It seems that we Americans are getting progressively more {stupid}. They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels in all age groups tested. Americans read less and understand what they read less than they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since research began to study such things.
As for writing skills, Americans are, in general, unable to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among the least literate people on this planet, and we're getting worse. It's the change--the constant trendline downward--that interests these researchers. More than one study has correlated this increasing stupidity of our population to the amount of television they watch.
http://www.rense.com/general63/traid.htm
As a former Air Force intelligence officer, I would argue that this statement is absolutely ludicrous. Based upon intelligence collection capabilities of even 3 decades ago, it is reasonable to assume that the US intercepted all phone communication between Italian agents in Iraq and Rome, monitored such traffic in real time and knew precisely where Sgrena's vehicle was at all times, without advanced notice being provided by Italian officials.
During the early 1970s, it was my job to monitor intelligence collected on the Korean peninsula. It was my responsibility to report serious anomalies to the White House by means of a secure phone.
http://www.rense.com/general63/denps.htm
It is the ship of the future - powered by the sun, wind and waves. The futuristic vessel has no conventional engines, uses no fossil fuels and releases no harmful emissions into the atmosphere or pollution into the sea.
The first ship to use the technology will be a cargo vessel that will transport up to 10,000 cars from Britain to Australia, New Zealand and other countries. If successful, it will be used on passenger ferries and cruise ships.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sea.htm
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, wrote Robert Frost. But whatever is to be our fate, it is now overdue.
After analysing the eradication of millions of ancient species, scientists have found that a mass extinction is due any moment now.
Their research has shown that every 62 million years - plus or minus 3m years - creatures are wiped from the planet's surface in massive numbers.
And given that the last great extinction occurred 65m years ago, when dinosaurs and thousands of other creatures abruptly disappeared, the study suggests humanity faces a fairly pressing danger. Even worse, scientists have no idea about its source.
http://www.rense.com/general63/extinct.htm
A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn't been seen since.
Milan investigators, however, now appear to be close to identifying his kidnappers. Last month, officials showed up at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy and demanded records of any American planes that had flown into or out of the joint U.S.-Italian military installation around the time of the abduction. They also asked for logs of vehicles that had entered the base.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30275-2005Mar12?language=printer
[it’s the kind of news coverage every president of the Soviet union covets.]
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031305Z.shtml
Communism is a satanic movement devoted to human degradation and tyranny, not public ownership, social justice or human brotherhood. Of course, no one would support it if they knew the truth. (See my "The Conspiracy is Against God," http://www.savethemales.ca/000305.html)
AN EX-US COMMUNIST SPEAKS
Many high-ranking former-Communists have risked their lives to alert their fellow Americans. One is Bella Dodd whose shocking book "School of Darkness" I reviewed two years ago. http://www.savethemales.ca/160303.html
She describes how Communists morph into liberals, feminists and socialists, and myriad front groups (identifiable by words like "international," "equality" and "peace") to divide and subvert society.
http://www.rense.com/general63/subbb.htm
Italy's Justice Minister has urged former hostage Giuliana Sgrena to stop making "careless" accusations after being shot by US forces in Baghdad, saying she had already caused enough grief.
Ms Sgrena has repeatedly suggested US soldiers shot her on purpose and said on Friday she had little faith in a joint investigation by Italy and the United States into the "friendly-fire" incident.
"She has created enormous problems for the government and also caused grief that perhaps was better avoided," Italian Justice Minister Roberto Castelli told reporters in Bologna.
http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200503/s1321953.htm
The film titled The Bomb in my Garden is a biography of Iraq's top nuclear scientist who tried to turn himself in following Saddam Hussein's capture but wasn't believed by CIA.
http://netindia123.com/showdetails.asp?id=72756&cat=Entertainment&head=Johnny%20Depp%20to%20produce%20'The%20Bomb%20in%20my%20Garden'
The secrecy surrounding the current use of university classrooms as covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies now threatens the fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines. A new test program that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university classrooms for now operates without detection or protest,. With time these students who cannot admit to their true intentions will inevitably pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now enrolled.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price03122005.html
This nation, its political leadership and the vast majority of its religious leaders, have thrown away their moral compass and replaced it with a rabid nationalism unseen on the world stage since Germany in the 1930s. Torture and murder of hundreds of thousands are readily accepted, as long as it is done for the graven image called the State. Eventually, unless we take a different path, the number of those tortured and murdered will include those in this country who refuse to submit to the State as it pursues its "mission from God." The venom readily spews forth from the shills for the State now, building a hate and resentment in the masses for any who would challenge the official position of perpetual war for peace.
...
Most of the military officers, who excel at unconstitutional, aggressive war, will move into positions of higher authority once this war is over and will dictate military policy in the future. They will remember the path they took to attain the lofty status of general and so will those who are younger and seek to emulate them. They will have learned that to follow the lies of unprincipled civilian leadership is indispensable to success, and conscience and morals will never take you past colonel – if that far.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy15.html
Two million Britons could die in the bird flu pandemic that experts warn is both imminent and inevitable, one of the country's leading authorities has told The Independent on Sunday
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=619562
“The man who called was very polite and nice,” says John Gasquet, owner of Empire coffee at 2 N. Main in Downtown Memphis. “He said he was special agent Something-or-other. He said that due to the fact that in some states the President had been to, there were issues of security regarding area businesses, he was calling businesses to tell them not to put up any negative signs in their windows that were negative toward President Bush. He said there were designated areas of protest and this would cut down on the possibility of problems.”
http://www.memphisflyer.com/content.asp?ID=3184&onthefly=1
Terry Ratzmann, the man who police say killed seven people and then himself during a church service, was a member of the Living Church of God, a denomination that focuses on "end-time" prophecies.
The church's estimated 6,300 members in 40 countries place a strong emphasis on using world news to "prove" that these are end times, to be followed by Christ's second coming.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050313/ap_on_re_us/hotel_shooting_religion
[This is a big, fat infuriating lie. US authorities do NOT remain vigilant. They couldn’t be any less vigilant if they were asleep.]
The bulletin also notes the Iraq-based master terrorist's apparent belief that "if an individual has enough money, he can bribe his way into the U.S.," specifically by obtaining a "visa to Honduras" and then traveling across Mexico and the southern U.S. border.
Al-Zarqawi's aide also revealed that his boss, after pondering the absence of attacks in the U.S. in recent years, concluded that a lack of "willing martyrs" was to blame. Al-Zarqawi believes, according to his lieutenant, that "if an individual is willing to die, there was nothing that could be done to stop him," even in the U.S. There is no evidence, say intelligence agencies, that al-Zarqawi's agents have infiltrated the U.S. But authorities remain vigilant.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1037626,00.html
When you move from the state to the federal level of government, the fog begins to fall. Right now, for example, we observe the coming together of three trends that would seem to contradict each other.
First many Americans are receiving refunds on their taxes as well as unexpected rebates for money already paid into the federal system. Second, government revenue has actually fallen for nearly three years in a row, due not to tax cuts but to lower economic growth. Third, government spending is soaring, with defense and non-defense spending increases breaking all postwar records. Meanwhile, Congress and the President are instituting new mega-spending programs that break all records.
How could all this be happening at the same time? Has government learned how to create something out of nothing? Hardly. The leakage is visible in the federal deficit, which is estimated to exceed the $600 billion mark, and the federal debt, which now stands at $6.7 trillion. And then there's the problem of unfunded liabilities in the system itself, which exceed $44 trillion.
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1328
Doctors in Thailand's southern resort province of Phuket were left perplexed today over the mysterious case of a teenage construction worker who was admitted to hospital after vomiting a three-inch nail, a knot and a length of string.
http://etna.mcot.net/query.php?nid=36663
[I wonder if it is possible to photograph a mirage.]
Just recently it was discovered that in the maritime waters of China°¶s Guangdong Province, a mirage was spotted. It can be seen clearly as a small islet with a number of mountains and even a structure that looks like a castle. As it mysteriously appeared, it also left the same way only to have appeared for a bit of over three hours.
http://www.ettoday.com/2005/03/11/11195-1763598.htm
Elephants in Thailand's northeastern province of Loei are descending from their mountain homes to raid villages for food, as the north-eastern province becomes firmly gripped by drought.
Farmers, villagers and animals are all suffering from severe drought conditions, which have pushed water levels in 13 of the province’s reservoirs to under 20 percent.
http://etna.mcot.net/query.php?nid=36711
Then they say, "No, I meant how can you take a picture of a mirage? How can you photograph it if it isn't really there?"
Almost all of my friends I have talked to about this project assumed it would be impossible to photograph a mirage. "It's just an illusion, right? So it doesn't show up in photographs, right?"
A mirage happens when a bunch of rays of light take a detour on the way to your eyes -- or your camera. When you look down a blacktop highway, and see a pool of water in the distance, you understand the "water" you see is an illusion. The light rays that create that image, however, are real. Your eye can see them, and your camera can record them.
http://www.greatestplaces.org/mirage/howcanyou.html
The workers in Honolulu said they had no way to alert the potential victims.
"We talked to the State Department Operations Center and to the military. We called embassies. We talked to the navy in Sri Lanka, any local government official we could get hold of," Barry Hirshorn, one of the geophysicists, said in December.
"We spoke to people in the foreign ministries, and everywhere we could think of," duty officer Stuart Weinstein said.
Pacific Tsunami Warning Center chief Charles "Chip" McCreery has said that by the time his agency learned that a tsunami had been generated, it was already on the news.
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Mar/13/ln/ln26p.html
A German man, who persuaded doctors to give him a second penis, lost his wife after he showed her the result.
Biker Michael Gruber, 40, lost his original penis in a motorbike accident and doctors built him a second one using a mixture of skin, bone and other tissues from his own body.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=iol1110634589552A551
Police in Spain say they have smashed a massive international money-laundering ring centred on the southern coastal resort of Marbella.
Forty-one people of at least five nationalities were arrested.
The group is suspected of laundering more than $300m (£155m) for gangs involved in murder, drug trafficking, arms dealing and prostitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4344447.stm
[Part of the media campaign to promote torture.
Gordon says 24 taps into the public's ìfear-based wish fulfillmentî of having protectors, such as Bauer, who will do whatever is necessary to save society from harm. But it shows a dark side, too.
ìJack Bauer is a tragic character. He doesn't get away with it clean. He's got blood on his hands,î Gordon says. ìIn some ways, he is a necessary evil.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/life/20050314/d_bottomstrip14.art.htm?POE=click-refer
[I know people don’t like to hear this, but an unprovoked invasion of a prostrate country doesn’t usually fall under the heading of “worthy cause”. It might be better to say they had worthy intentions.]
War notoriously robs parents of their sons, but it also steals husbands and fathers, and increasingly wives and mothers. The Pentagon doesn't keep these statistics, but using figures compiled by the Scripps-Howard News Service and other sources, NEWSWEEK has calculated that as of last week 1,043 American children had lost a parent in Iraq. To put it another way, nearly two years after the invasion on March 19, 2003, among the 1,508 American troops who have died as of March 11 were an estimated 450 fathers, and 7 mothers. A wartime death presents unique hardships for children. It occurs in a far-off country, often to a parent who left home months earlier; young children may find it hard to grasp the finality of the event. Offsetting that is the impressive panoply and ritual of a military funeral, and the consoling knowledge that the sacrifice was in a worthy cause. The death of a parent often leaves a family not just sadder, but poorer, and surviving spouses are agitating for improvements in their benefits. But there are needs no government program can fill.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7169451/site/newsweek/
On October 6, 2004, Greenhouse was summoned by the Corps's deputy commander, Major General Robert Griffin. She knew that the top brass was eager to finalize the Corps's latest contract for KBR, a $75 million extension for troop support in the Balkans. Already it had gone through several drafts, mostly because Greenhouse kept questioning the rationale for giving it to KBR without competitive bidding. What she didn't know was that her superiors had closed ranks against her.
When Greenhouse entered the general's office, he handed her a letter that explained she was being demoted for poor performance—a curious indictment, given that she'd received high performance ratings before the war. The demotion would knock her down to the government rank of GS-15. That was like going from senior vice president in a Fortune 500 company to middle management. She could retire instead with full benefits if she liked, the letter went on to say. She was, after all, 60.
Greenhouse chose a third alternative: she hired a lawyer and began to fight.
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050307roco02
[Tyranny thy name is coincidence.]
Strange suicides and car crashes among foes of the former regime bring calls for investigations.
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
KIEV, Ukraine — By all official accounts, Yuri Kravchenko died by his own hand.
The former Ukrainian interior minister, scheduled to meet in just a few hours with prosecutors to give testimony in a high-profile case of political murder, aimed a gun at his chin and fired, sending a bullet ripping through his cheek and out his upper jaw. Then he aimed it at his temple and fired again.
Suicide, government investigators ruled.
Exactly 13.1% of Ukrainians who responded to a Kiev Post Internet poll believed it was suicide. More than 80% thought Kravchenko was slain this month to prevent him from testifying, possibly implicating former President Leonid D. Kuchma in the decapitation of journalist Georgi Gongadze and other crimes. Many are sure that even if Kravchenko pulled the trigger, he was driven to it by his powerful former friends
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-kuchma13mar13,0,5770955.story?coll=la-home-headlines
The United States, Canada and Mexico should form a "common security perimeter" as part of a broad security and economic plan aimed at boosting trade and bolstering the continent's borders, a tri-national task for report urged Monday.
"Our vision of North America is one of three sovereign states whose formal collaboration must reflect their mutual interdependence while respecting their differences," a joint statement issued by the task force's chairman said.
The Independent Task Force on the Future of North America is headed by former Canadian deputy prime minister John Manley, former Mexican finance minister Pedro Aspe and former Massachusetts governor William Weld.
...
The task force was jointly sponsored by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.rense.com/general63/asam.htm
[Heaven forbid Montana’s state militia should do something for Montana.]
Gov. Brian Schweitzer has touched off a political fight with Montana Republicans after calling for the return of National Guard troops serving in Iraq to help out in what many fear will be a record-setting wildfire season.
Mr. Schweitzer, a newly elected Democrat, infuriated Republican lawmakers who see his request as a way to criticize the Bush administration over Iraq.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mtboh.htm
[I don’t understand why people in England were willing to go to war with Iraq, which did NOTHING to them, and run around shooting and invading and refusing to negotiate. And yet when someone is literally standing directly in front of them, literally chopping someone up with an axe, right there in front of them, right in their own neighborhood-RIGHT THERE, all they do is ASK the axe murderer to stop.
How do they account for the different in behavior between one situation and the other?
I can tell you if I saw someoen attacking someone with an axe the last thing to enter my head would be to ASK the nice axe murderer to please stop axe murdering.]
A man was beheaded in a frenzied and prolonged axe attack in a London street today.
.....
"The axeman saw me but he just ignored me. He hacked his victim's head, cutting it as if it was a block of wood for a fire. His victim was unconscious on the ground, but he kept bringing his axe down on him.
"I begged him to stop and he just looked at me without emotion. There was no anger in his face, he did not seem crazy. He was just coolly finishing off his victim. He wanted to destroy him. ."
Another woman passing in a car stopped and pleaded with the man to stop his attack. He also ignored pleas from builders working nearby. Police arrested a man at the scene and he is being held for questioning at Holborn police station.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/17262526?source=Evening%20Standard&ct=5
[I bet you it is nearer 5%.]
In some countries, such as Greece, Spain and France, 98 per cent of consumers believe the euro has favoured higher prices.
Mr Almunia and his officials offered a flurry of statistics and explanations, insisting the euro was not to blame.
Officials pointed to everything from bad weather and epidemics of animal disease in the year after the euro's introduction, to oil price rises and sharp hikes in cigarette taxes, as causes of inflation.
Above all, they said that inflation was not as high as people thought.
Officials said actual inflation had been held to about two per cent across the euro-zone, though EU attitude surveys found the public believed inflation was nearer five per cent.
http://www.rense.com/general63/dev.htm
[I agree with a lot of the stuff this guy writes, but not this. As a general rule I think the notion of following Europe’s lead is not a very good idea for any subject, so I immediately reject his appeal to “the Europeans are doing it”. We followed them into WWI and look where that got us.
I believe if you are born somewhere you ought to have a right to live there. If you look at Europe they have had Gypsies and Jewish people running back and forth across the continent for thousands of years, precsiely because no matter where they were born, they were never entitled to citizenship rights in whatever country they were in. The reason for this was the racist nature of the different countries. Traditionally the king of this or that country was really referred to as “The Kind of the French” or “The King of the Britons” or something, not the “King of France” or “the King of Britain”, because they were the king of a particular ethnic group. That is why up until recently you could be of irish or German descent for example, and never having set one foot in your country of origin you could get a passport and citizenship.
The united States is supposed to be different. You are an American because you are here, not because you are a member of a particular race or religion or whatever. That is the whole point of the 14th Ammendment, to throw off that European racist notion of citizenship. I do not think it is appropriate to bring it back just because the government can’t be bothered to secure the borders.]
An illegal alien can cross the border, have a baby five minutes later, and that baby is automatically declared a citizen of the USA automatically."
The illegal aliens don't have to go through any legal doors. They are exempt from that. They are, in fact, rewarded for disobeying U.S. laws by having their children granted automatic citizenship. In addition, the happy family is entitled to welfare benefits. And, illegal alien parents who have children born in the U.S. are seldom deported. That's why their children are called "anchor babies" - they anchor their families securely in the USA.
It doesn't have to be this way. Most European countries have done away with birthright citizenship because they experienced the same abuses we are seeing. The Irish Supreme Court recently ruled that immigrant parents could be deported even if they have an Irish child. "It was becoming common for 'single pregnant woman' to come to Ireland from countries outside the 15-nation EU, most frequently from Nigeria, to claim political asylum," states Shawn Pogatchnik, AP writer. Ireland saw a wave of immigration abuse and promptly put a stop to it. Recently, the Irish voted to end birthright citizenship. Britain and Australia both changed their citizenship laws in the 1980's for the same reasons. If you are born in Switzerland you will not automatically become a Swiss citizen. Why should Americans allow our country to be invaded by people who do not honor allegiance to our laws?
http://www.rense.com/general63/14th.htm
[This what the press gets for selling out the American people. They will pass along whatever half-assed propaganda anyone wants to pay for, so Lindsey Pendergrass is right about that. But look where it has gotten them. The press has been made the instrument of its own undoing.]
Lindsey Pendergrass trusts the government more than she trusts the press.
That's why she doesn't believe that newspapers should be allowed to publish everything without government approval.
"The press just wants to print something that people will buy," she says. "The government has to be true to the public."
http://www.rense.com/general63/press.htm
The US military's senior officer responsible for security co-operation in Latin America has warned of the destabilising potential posed to the region by the Venezuelan government's controversial, and opaque, arms procurement programme.
Hugo Chavez, the president of the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, has begun signing contracts to buy an array of weapons to revamp his defences to thwart what he claims could be outside "aggression".
Such fears were intensified two weeks ago when Venezuelan officials were alarmed by the presence of US warships and marines near Curacao, off Venezuela. US officials said it was a routine manoeuvre.
http://www.rense.com/general63/vedn.htm
From the land down under a report written by Russell Skelton surfaces - It's time to admit we've created a Gulag. "The Baxter detention centre, once touted as a model holding centre for illegal arrivals, has degenerated into an immigration Gulag. Unlike convicted criminals, immigration detainees serve no set term and can be held indefinitely. John Harley, South Australia's Public Advocate, is incensed at the lack of rights accorded Baxter's 225 detainees, many of whom are entering their fourth year there. Peter Qasim, a Kashmiri, is in his sixth year with no hope of release because no country will accept him."
http://www.batr.org/gulag/031505.html
Olavi Kajander didn't mean to discover the mysterious particles that have been called the most primitive organisms on Earth and that could be responsible for a series of painful and sometimes fatal illnesses.
He was simply trying to find out why certain cultures of mammalian cells in his lab would die no matter how carefully he prepared them.
http://www.rense.com/general63/anano.htm
In coming issues, we will show you the brainwashers' vision of a hell on earth and how television is being used to get us there; we will discuss television programming, revealing how it has helped produce what is called a ``paradigm'' shift in values, creating an immoral society; we will explain how the news is presented and how its presentation has been used to destroy the English language; we will discuss the mass entertainment media, showing who controls it and how; we will deal with America's addiction to spectator sports and show how that too has helped make you passive and stupid; and finally, we will show where we are headed, if we can't break our addiction to the tube.
http://www.rense.com/general63/traid.htm
And this spring, more seals will be killed than in any previous year.
Indeed, up to 350,000 seals could be killed by early May. That is almost three times as many as when the anti-seal-hunt campaign was launched more than 30 years ago.
If anything, despite years of protests and boycotts, the campaign against the hunt has been a failure.
About all it has accomplished is that sealers have been banned since 1987 from killing those cute little white seal pups whose adorable faces were splashed on anti-seal-hunt posters around the world.
That dismal record of failure is the reason why animal rights groups from around the world are massing for another major push to stop the controversial seal hunt once and for all.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1110582613710&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
[The more I hear about Canada, the less warm and fuzzy it sounds.]
Canada's new "management plan" for harp seals authorizes what will be the world's largest slaughter of marine mammals.
http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/features/details?item_id=778025
Britain could run seriously short of natural gas supplies if an unseasonably cold spell of late winter weather persists through this week, a report said on Sunday.
The situation is so critical that the company which distributes gas throughout Britain is preparing to cut supplies from some industrial users to ensure householders are not left shivering, the Sunday Telegraph said.
http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050312235215.p5jpwlt0.html
In the strange calculus nations use to measure strategic power, individual pieces of equipment can have radical, even world changing, implications.
China, for example, has long possessed ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. But in the last few years China has developed a system to launch those missiles from trucks.
The system is called a Transporter-Erector-Launcher, or TEL. The missile it carries is called a Dongfeng-31. "Dongfeng" means East Wind.
The TEL not only transports the DF-31. The missile is erected and then launched from the vehicle. The entire system is mobile.
"This means in a crisis China can disperse its ballistic missile forces and have a high degree of confidence some of it would survive a pre-emptive strike by a foreign power," says James Mulvenon, who heads a new private think tank in Washington, the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis (Cira).
US analysts believe the DF-31 will be deployed in the next few years. They also believe the missile has the range to hit the north-western United States.
http://www.rense.com/general63/watches.htm
Global warming is causing Himalayan glaciers to rapidly retreat, threatening to cause water shortages for hundreds of millions of people who rely on glacier-dependent rivers in China, India and Nepal, WWF warned Monday.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iceage-05h.html
At the recent European Space Agency's Mars Express conference, scientists announced they had found a frozen sea on the martian equator. John Murray, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the Open University in the UK, is lead author on the paper to be published in the journal Nature. Astrobiology Magazine editor Leslie Mullen sat down with Murray to discuss the new finding.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-05e.html
[Is it just me or does this sound like people standing under the radar beams are going to get fried? Not that that isn’t already happening with the cell phone system.]
"I believe there is a strong need for us to provide persistent intelligence collection to combatant commanders day and night in all weather conditions," Mr. Teets said. "Only space radar can do that. In open areas and in denied areas, space radar can provide us with persistent intelligence collection."
Providing that persistent intelligence to commanders in the field will require a constellation of satellites launched into space. Each satellite will use radar to take pictures of the earth, through any kind of weather, to provide both military and civilian intelligence communities information about what is happening on the ground and over the hill ahead, officials said.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-comms-05i.html
In a Lewinite brainwashing group, a number of individuals from varying backgrounds and personalities, are manipulated by a "group leader" to form a "consensus" of opinion, achieving a new "group identity." The key to the process is the creation of a controlled environment, in which stress is introduced (sometimes called dissonance) to crack an individual's belief structure. Using the peer pressure of other group members, the individual is "cracked," and a new personality emerges with new values. The degrading experience causes the person to deny that any change has taken place. In that way, an individual is brainwashed without the victim knowing what has taken place.
This method is the same, with some minor modification, used in all so-called "sensitivity groups" or "T-groups," or in the more extreme rock-drug-sex counterculture form, "touchy-feely groups," such as the kind popularized from the 1960s onward by the Esalen Institute, which was set up with the help of NTL.
From the mid-1950s onward, NTL put the majority of the nation's corporate leaderships through such brainwashing programs, while running similar programs for the State Department, the Navy, the Department of Education, and other sections of the federal bureaucracy. There is no firm estimate of the number of Americans who have been put through this process in last 40 years at either NTL, or as it is now known the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences, which is based in Rosslyn, Virginia, or its West Coast base of operations, the Western Training Laboratories in Group Development, or in various satellite institutions. The most reliable estimate is in the several millions.
http://educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwotavistockbestkeptsecret.shtml
A resistance to the HIV/AIDS virus shown by some Europeans might be a genetic legacy of plague outbreaks which swept through the continent centuries ago, a report said late Thursday.
Around 10 percent of modern Europeans enjoy a natural protection against AIDS as a result of the suffering of their forbears as plague outbreaks spread from the Middle Ages, a pair of British scientists say.
http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050310233114.7zrlo9lv.html
posted by abu nakba at 3/14/2005 08:45:00 PM
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