Honeyman's reality perspective

Libya war lies worse than Iraq

2011-08-12T20:42:00.002+01:00

By Thomas C. Mountain

(source)

ASMARA, Eritrea—The lies used to justify the NATO war against Libya have surpassed those created to justify the invasion of Iraq. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both had honest observers on the ground for months following the rebellion in eastern Libya and both have repudiated every major charge used to justify the NATO war on Libya.

According to the Amnesty observer, who is fluent in Arabic, there is not one confirmed instance of rape by the pro-Gadaffi fighters, not even a doctor who knew of one. All the Viagra mass rape stories were fabrications.

Amnesty could not verify a single “African mercenary” fighting for Gaddafi story, and the highly charged international satellite television accounts of African mercenaries raping women that were used to panic much of the eastern Libyan population into fleeing their homes were fabrications.

There were no confirmed accounts of helicopter gunships attacking civilians and no jet fighters bombing people, which completely invalidates any justification for the No-Fly Zone inSecurity Council resolution used as an excuse for NATO to launch its attacks on Libya.

After three months on the ground in rebel-controlled territory, the Amnesty investigator could only confirm 110 deaths in Benghazi which included Gadaffi supporters.

Only 110 dead in Benghazi? Wait a minute, we were told thousands had died there, ten thousand even. No, only 110 lost their lives including pro-government people.

No rapes, no African mercenaries, no helicopter gunships or bombers, and only 110 deaths prior to the launch of the NATO bombing campaign; every claim was based on a lie.

Today, according to the Libyan Red Crescent Society, over 1,100 civilians have been killed by NATO bombs, including over 400 women and children. Over 6,000 Libyan civilians have been injured or wounded by the bombing, many very seriously.

Compared to the war on Iraq, these numbers are tiny, but the reasons for the Libyan war have no merit in any form.

Saddam Hussein was evil, he invaded his neighbors in wars that killed up to a million. He used weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the form of poison gas on both his neighbors and his own people, killing tens of thousands. He was brutal and corrupt and when American tanks rolled into Iraq, the Iraqi people refused to fight for him, simply putting down their weapons and going home.

Libya under Col. Gadaffi hasn’t invaded their neighbors. Gadaffi never used WMD on anyone, let alone his own people. As for Gadaffi being brutal, in Libya’s neighbor, Algeria, the Algerian military fought a counterinsurgency for a decade in the 1990s that witnessed the deaths of some 200,000 Algerians. Now that is brutal and nothing anywhere near this has happened in Libya.

In Egypt and Tunisia, Western puppets like Mubarak and Ben Ali had almost no support amongst their people with few, if any, willing to fight and die to defend them.

The majority of the Libyan people are rallying behind the Libyan government and “the leader,” Muammar Gadaffi, with over one million people demonstrating in support on July 1 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Thousands of Libyan youth are on the front lines fighting the rebels and ,despite thousands of NATO air strikes, authentic journalists on the ground in western Libya report their morale remains high.

In Egypt, the popular explosion that resulted in the army seizing power from Mubarak began in the very poorest neighborhoods in Cairo and other Egyptian cities where the price of basic food items, like bread, sugar and cooking oil, had skyrocketed and led to widespread hunger. In many parts of Egypt’s poor neighborhoods, gasoline/benzene is easier to find then clean drinking water. Medical care and education is only for those with the money to pay for it. Life for the people of Tunisia is not that much better.

In contrast, the Libyan people have the longest life expectancy in the Arab world. The Libyan people have the best, free public health system in the Arab world. The Libyan people have the best, free public education system in the Arab world. Most Libyan families own their own home and most Libyan families own their own automobile. Libya is so much better off than its neighbors that every year tens of thousands of Egyptians and Tunisians migrated to Libya to earn money to feed their families, doing the dirty work the Libyan people refused to do.

When it comes to how Gadaffi oversaw a dramatic rise in the standard of living for the Libyan people, despite decades of UN inSecurity Council sanctions against the Libyan economy, honest observers acknowledge that Gadaffi stands head and shoulders above the kings, sheiks, emirs and various dictators who rule the rest of the Arab world.

So why did NATO launch this war against Libya?

First of all, Gadaffi was on the verge of creating a new banking system that was going to put the IMF, World Bank and assorted other Western banksters out of business in Africa. No more predatory Western loans used to cripple African economies, instead, a $42 billion dollar African Investment Bank would be supplying major loans at little or even zero interest rates.

LIbya has funded major infrastructure projects across Africa that have begun to link up African economies and break the perpetual dependency on the Western countries for imports have been taking place. Here in Eritrea the new road connecting Eritrea and Sudan is just one small example.

What seems to have finally tipped the balance in favor of direct Western military intervention was the reported demand by Gadaffi that the USA oil companies, which have long been major players in the Libyan petroleum industry, were going to have to compensate Libya to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for the damage done to the Libyan economy by the USA instigated “Lockerbie Bombing” sanctions imposed by the UN inSecurity Council throughout the 1990s into early 2000s. This is based on the unearthing of evidence that the CIA paid millions of dollars to witnesses in the Lockerbie Bombing trial to change their stories to implicate Libya which was used as the basis for the very damaging UN sanctions against Libya. The government of the USA lied and damaged Libya so the USA oil companies were going to have to pay up to cover the cost of their government’s actions. Not hard to see why Gadaffi had to go, is it?

Add the fact that Gadaffi had signaled clearly that he saw both Libya’s and Africa’s future economic development linked more to China and Russia rather than the west and it was just a matter of time before the CIA’s contingency plan to overthrow the Libyan government was put on the front burner.

NATO’s war against Libya has much more in common with NATO’s Kosovo war against Serbia. But one still cannot compare Gadaffi to Saddam or even the much smaller criminals in the Serbian leadership. The Libyan War lies are worse than Iraq.

Stay tuned to Inteprid Report for more news that the so-called free press in the West refuses to cover.

Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He was a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya in 1987.

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US State Department Gives Benghazi Rebels the Former Libyan Embassy: al Qaeda Terrorists Get a Privileged Sanctuary in Downtown Washington DC

2011-08-10T17:38:00.000+01:00

Where Have Libya's Children Gone?

2011-08-10T17:32:00.001+01:00

By FRANKLIN LAMB

(source)

Tripoli, Libya.

The quality of life continues to degrade in certain areas of western Libya while public anxiety noticeably rises over missing Libyan children as the first week of an unusually stressful Ramadan passes.

The shortage of gasoline has become acute and despite government efforts to curtail price gouging, one taxi driver told this observer yesterday that while the usual price of 'benzene' was 3.75 liters (one gallon) for $.40 (forty US cents) he is now having to pay as much as " 4 dinars for one liter of petrol!" That is roughly the equivalent of 13 US dollars for a gallon of gasoline, a huge price surge in a country long accustomed to cheap, heavily subsidized fuel. "Informal economy" (black market) fuel arrives in car trunks from the Tunisian border and its increasingly common to see fellows with a make shift funnel trying to get more benzene into their vehicle tanks than they splash and spill on neighborhood streets.

Walking around the "medina" off Omar Muktar Street near my hotel yesterday afternoon, the angst over deteriorating conditions is apparent. Shops, like homes, are now subject to rolling blackouts and quickly become hot and stuffy, discouraging would be customers from entering. Some food stores have to discard milk and other perishable items given the up to 11 hour power cuts that send temperatures above 100F. One gentleman on Rashid Street in downtown Tripoli said his family had not had power for five days and the pump that supplies water to his apartment building stopped working so they lack two essential utilities.

NATO's arguable act of piracy earlier this week in commandeering the fuel tanker ship Cartagena off the coast of Malta that was bringing gasoline to Tripoli and sending it instead to rebel militia based close to Benghazi is yet again explained from NATO HQ as necessary for "protecting the civilian population of Libya."

According to Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim, "The age of piracy is coming back to the Mediterranean because of NATO."

Some frustrated shop keepers just shutter their shops and seek relief at the beach or take a nap waiting for sundown and their Ramadan Iftar (feast) to begin. But lack of electricity even affects its preparation. (note: 15 minutes ago NATO bombed the public beach near my hotel as three other bombs landed nearby—targets unknown)

Every time a bomb blast is heard, a chorus of passersby and kids invariably point toward the bomb site and watch the rising white or black smoke (the color depending on the type of bomb or missile) and some shout, "F— NATO! F—Obama!" Etc.

If a foreigner is confronted by angry citizens who may blame Americans for NATO's bombing, a sure fire way to quickly reduce crowd tension is for the foreigner to make the peace sign and make a fist with his other hand and chant a few times: "Allah! Mohammad! Muammar! Libye! Abass!" (God!, Mohammad!, Qadaffi!, Libya!, that's all we need!") The locals appreciate the sentiment and pre-teens often join the popular chant and dance.

As of the morning of 8/7/11 NATO statistics show that since 3/31/11, NATO forces have launched 18,270 sorties, mainly against Western Libya, including 6,932 bomb/missile strike sorties. Last night (8/6/11) there were 115 sorties including 45 bombings of which 12 were in central Tripoli starting a 10 p.m.

To their great credit, some Congressional staffers on the US Senate Armed Services Committee who liaise with the Pentagon, have acted on constituent complaints and have criticized NATO's incomplete description of its bombing of Libyan civilians.

For example earlier this week NATO reported its bombing of the village on Zlitan, about 160 miles east of Tripoli in the Western Mountains as follows: "In the vicinity of Zlitan:1 Ammunition Storage Facility, 1 Military Facility, 2 Multiple Rocket Launchers."

However, still absent from this particular NATO report on its website is the fact that its bombing attack killed the wife and two children of Mustafa Naji, a local Zlitan physics teacher. Mustafa's wife Ibtisam, and their two children, Mohammad 5 and Muttasim, were pulverized. Once again, NATO said it could not confirm the "accidental killings" but would investigate.

Where are the children?

Also of growing public and government concern in Western Libya is the whereabouts of 53 female and 52 male children aged one to 12 years and another group ranging from 12 to 18 years, both part of a government-run home for orphans and abused children that until February was operating in Misrata, now under rebel control. According to several reports over the past three months and testimony presented last Thursday evening to the international media gathered at the Tripoli Rexis Hotel, by the General Union for Civil Society Organizations:

The 105 children, part of more than 1000 missing, were "kidnapped" by rebel forces as they entered Misrata and went on a killing spree, some of which has been documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International among other groups. There is no question that the children are no longer in their sheltered facility. But from there what became of them remains a mystery.

The Libyan government claims the youngsters were kidnapped by rebels who went on a rampage in late February. Several reports from eyewitnesses claim that the children were last seen being put onto either a Turkish, Italian, or French boat. More than one witness claimed to have witnessed some of the children being sold in Tunisia. On his tweeter page, the local Russian Telesur reporter said that "several sources have affirmed that the 105 children were taken out of the country in a ship that could be Turkish, French or Italian."

Libyan Social Affairs Minister Ibrahim Sharif told reporters in Tripoli this week that, "We want the truth and we hold those countries responsible for the well-being of these children who are neither soldiers nor combatants." Sharif added that a rebel doctor captured by government troops testified that some of the orphans had been taken to France and Italy.?Given Misrata's history as a main North African slave trading port, a fact that today partially explains tensions among the one third of Libya's population that is black and who are descendants of slaves and many of whom live in western Libya in villages now fighting the Misrata and Benghazi based rebels, concern is acute.

While Libya has had perhaps the most strictly enforced child protection laws in the Middle East and Africa, people here remember clearly that France was at the center of a scandal in 2007 when aid workers from the Zoe's Ark charity attempted to fly 103 children out of Chad, to the south of Libya, who they said were orphans from neighboring Sudan. International aid staff later found that the children were in fact Chadian and had at least one living parent. People here fear a similar fate for the Libyan youngsters.

Also on people's minds in Libya is what happened two years ago in Haiti when "orphans," according to local authorities, were kidnapped. Given the epidemic of human trafficking in this region, especially of children, fears are well founded.

NATO has not replied to inquiries demanding information about the disappeared children nor has UNICEF, Save the Children or Secretary of State Clinton's office. Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has agreed to demand that the White House order an immediate investigation and of course any human rights advocate could raise this issue in the West and demand an urgent inquiry from her/his government.

The Libyan government as well as both the Roman Catholic Papal representative Bishop Giovanni Martinelli, and Father Daoud of the Anglican Church of Christ the King, in Tripoli have demanded that the UN investigate and find the children.

As for the National Transition Council, its spokesman denied charges that they have sold the children and claim that the Libyan government in Tripoli have all the children and that they are using them as human shields at the now five times bombed Bab al Azizya complex in central Tripoli. No known human rights organization or journalist who has investigated this claim has reported seeing any sign of the children at Bab al Azizya. The General Union, noted above, has photos and names and ages of all the missing children and have widely publicized them.

More than a dozen social welfare organizations, women's groups and Libya's Lawyer syndicates have launched an intensive media and public involvement campaign to find the children who have now been missing for nearly six months.

2011-07-25T21:00:00.001+01:00

After Oslo: Time to Crack Down On Mossad Terrorism

Wayne MADSEN (USA) | 25.07.2011 | 09:05

Israel’s most secret and tried-and-true weapon is the “false flag” terrorist attack.

State-sponsored terrorism is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as the “systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective [and] is employed by governments -- or more often by factions within governments -- against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups.”

On July 22, a bomb, said to be an Oklahoma City-type explosive device, crafted with fertilizer and diesel fuel, blew up in downtown Oslo, Norway, in the heart of the government district. Shortly thereafter, a man dressed in a Norwegian police uniform opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya in Tyri fjord. Access to the island was by boat only. Over 100 people were killed in the twin terror attacks.

Almost immediately, the world’s corporate media began pushing the story that those who were responsible for the blast and mass shooting were associated with “Al Qaeda” and other radical Islamist groups. CNN’s Washington, DC chief anchor Wolf Blitzer, a former spokesman for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby and a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, began his late afternoon program by pointing to “Al Qaeda” and radical Islamists as the chief culprits for the terrorist attacks in Norway.

CNN paraded out a number “experts,” in actuality, propagandists for the Israeli agenda linked to neo-conservative outlets and the Pentagon’s “terrorism industrial complex,” before the cameras to advance the radical Islamist meme even as Norwegian authorities pinned blame on the attack on at least one perpetrator, a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. CNN constantly showed footage of frightened people in downtown Oslo running for their lives from the site of the blast, as well as still photograph of a pall of light-brown smoke over downtown Oslo. Of course, CNN’s intention was to evoke memories of the 9/11 attack in Manhattan.

Breivik, who sometimes anglicized his name as Andrew Berwick in his numerous web postings, was said to be a right-wing Islamophobe who sympathized with Zionism and who was a Freemason… Breivik was also reported to be a fundamentalist Christian but he adopted a stance against the Lutheran Church, the state church of Norway, and argued for a “collective” counter-reformation to return the Protestant churches to the control of the Vatican and the Pope. Breivik lambasted the Lutheran Church and other mainstream Protestant churches, condemning “Priests in jeans who march for Palestine.”

More incredibly, the London tabloid of Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-plagued News International, The Sun, went to press with the following false headline: “Norway’s 911: ‘Al Qaeda’ Massacre.” On March 29, 2011, Harvard Law School’s extremist Zionist Professor Alan Dershowitz penned a piece in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that actively discriminates against the hiring of non-Jews as reporters and editors in violation of U.S. civil rights and equal opportunity employment laws, in which he called Norway anti-Semitic. Dershowitz cited as an example former Norwegian Prime Minister Kare Willock’s criticism of President Barack Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff because he is Jewish. In fact, Emanuel’s pro- Israeli sympathies as a former member of the Israel Defense Force are what prompted many political observers in Washington and elsewhere to question his primary loyalty to the United States.

A network of Israeli bloggers pushed a claim of responsibility on a previously-unknown group called Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (the Helpers of the Global Jihad). The group’s claims were picked up and run by several corporate media outlets and then pulled when it was discovered the claim was a hoax. Mossad has a program to distribute bogus claims of responsibility for Islamist terrorist attacks via “Jihadist” websites that are actually operated by the Mossad and a network of “hasbaratchiks,” Israeli and foreign Jews who act as propagandists on the web. These hasbara (propaganda) agents and volunteers operate through such programs as Megaphone and GIYUS (“Give Israel Your United Support.”) After the attempt to blame the Norway attacks on Islamists failed, the “hasbaratchiks” shifted to “sock puppet” troll mode, posting comments on blogs that criticized allegations that Mossad and Zionists were behind the Norway attacks, emphasizing that such beliefs were “anti-Semitic” and wild “conspiracy theories.” Some Israeli “sock puppets” even offered lunatic suggestions that Breivik was planted by Islamists to make Israel and Zionists look bad.

When the “Islamist” connection to the holocaust in Norway was shown to be non-existent after Norwegian security and police agencies began looking at the evidence, the corporate media switched its propaganda line from “radical Islam” being responsible to “far –right extremism” opposed to multiculturalism and immigration in Europe as the culprit. Even outlets that in the past had been known for their independence from the corporate media line, including Al Jazeera and RT [formerly known as Russia Today], echoed the line that Breivik primarily represented right-wing opposition to Muslim immigrants in Europe. Al Jazeera repeated the line that Breivik was a “lone madman,” the insinuation being that he was not linked to any wider network. While Breivik certainly was associated with the far-right xenophobic elements in Norway, Europe, and North America, there was no mention by the corporate media of his admiration for such American Zionist Islamophobes as Richard Pipes and Pam Geller. Geller led the bigoted anti-Muslim campaign against an Islamic Center near the site of “Ground Zero,” the former World Trade Center site, in lower Manhattan. Breivik posted a number of his anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist screeds on the Norwegian website www.document.no, which is operated by Hans-Kristian Rustad, a Norwegian pro-Israeli journalist.

No corporate media outlets reported that the brand of far-right extremism of Breivik is closely associated with Zionist-supported far-right anti-immigrant political parties and movements in Western Europe, including the mis-named Progress Party of Norway, the Dutch Freedom Party of Islamophobe Geert Wilders, the Sweden Democrats, Finland’s True Finns Party, the Danish People’s Party, the English Defense League, the Pro-Germany Citizen’s Movement, and a pan-Nordic fascist terrorist group called “Nordiske.” Breivik also expressed support for the Tea Party in the United States…

The European anti-Muslim xenophobic network is linked to the notorious publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons by the neo-conservative Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and Norway’s Dagbladet. The Euro-xenophobes are supported by the longtime Zionist Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher who is a friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and disgraced former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It is noteworthy that Levy is one of the major backers of the Libyan rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi. Norway announced it was pulling its aircraft from the NATO campaign in Libya at the end of July. Norway also announced its support for Palestine’s sovereignty resolution in the UN General Assembly in September.

As more and more evidence pointed to Oslo being yet another example of a state-sponsored terrorist attack by Israel’s Mossad, the corporate media studiously avoided mentioning how the Norwegian government through its recent actions, had become a major problem for Israel and its allies abroad, especially on the Palestine sovereignty issue… In addition, Norwegian police and intelligence are painfully aware of Mossad’s past operations in Norway, including the infamous Lillehammer Affair in 1973. On July 21, 1973, Mossad agents assassinated Ali Hassan Salameh, a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, wrongly believing he was the operations chief for the Palestinian terrorist group “Black September.” Norwegian police arrested the Mossad agents who killed Salameh and uncovered an intricate network of Mossad safe houses, phone numbers, and Norwegian sleeper agents for Mossad.

Just as was the case with the coordinated bombings of Madrid trains on March 22, 2004 and London buses and trains on July 7, 2005, viewed by European security services as being the work of not “Al Qaeda” but domestic “radicals,” there was no link to Islamist radicals with the attacks in Norway. However, there was every indication that the attack on Norway was intended to shake up the Norwegian population and damage the reputation of the left-of-center Norwegian government of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.

The corporate media insisted that Breivik was solely responsible for Norway’s worst violent attack since World War II. Norwegian police reports that a second gunman, described as having “thick dark hair and a non-Nordic appearance,” were suppressed in much of the corporate media. The time line of the Oslo attack causes anyone’s imagination to be stretched on being sold a “lone gunman/bomber” theory.

At 3:26 pm Oslo time a massive car bomb was detonated outside the office of the Prime Minister of Norway. Since July 22 was a public holiday, there were relatively few people inside the Prime Minister’s office or the surrounding offices of the Petroleum and Energy Ministry and the VG [Verdens Gang] newspaper, Norway’s largest paper.

As police responded to the downtown Oslo blast, Breivik was said to have taken a boat the Utoya island dressed as a policeman and began opening fire on young members of the Norwegian Labor Party youth camp meeting. The shooting allegedly began at 4:50 pm. Norwegian SWAT team “Delta” had trouble getting a helicopter started and struggled to find a boat to get to Utoya island. The SWAT team finally arrived on the island at 6:20 pm only to find scores of the next generation of Norwegian Labor Party leaders dead. Breivik calmly surrendered to the police. When Breivik arrived on Utoya he told police on the island that he was there for a routine security check following the bombing in downtown Oslo.

Norway’s Acting Police chief Sveinung Sponheim said the police were still investigating whether Breivik was acting with a larger network. Sponheim’s revelation countered the “lone wolf” theory advanced by corporate media outlets in Western nations.

Norway’s coalition Labor-Socialist Left government has been seen as hostile to the interests of Israel and the United States. There is now a widespread belief that the terrorist attack against Norway was engineered to shock erstwhile peaceful Norway, a nation where police generally still patrol the streets unarmed, into adopting the police state tactics of the United States, Israel, Britain, and other Western nations. Norway’s pro-Palestinian foreign policy also irked the Zionist and the far-right anti-Islamic factions in Europe and North America, as well as the governments of Israel and the United States.

In a move that complements American and Israeli propaganda that Norway has not stepped up to the surveillance state model imposed by other Western governments, the suspicious WikiLeaks decided to release U.S. State Department cables from the U.S. embassy in Oslo that criticized Norway for not recognizing the “Al Qaeda” threat and maintaining an insufficient security apparatus to combat Islamist terrorism and Pakistani immigrants.

The Barack Obama-appointed U.S. ambassador in Oslo, Barry White, who is Jewish and received a 2005 award from the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee, complained that the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) rejected two twelve-person British MI-6 intelligence surveillance teams to monitor an “Al Qaeda” cell in Norway. Last November, the Norwegian government was shocked to learn that the U.S. embassy was operating a Surveillance Detection Unit in Oslo that was monitoring Norwegian citizens. Norwegian Justice Minister Knut Storberget said he was not informed of the presence of the U.S. spy unit in Oslo, which employed retired Norwegian police and intelligence officials. The Norwegian Data Protection Commissioner, Bjorn Erik Thon, said he had never seen such an intelligence operation in Norway. White complained that Norwegian security officials were apathetic and incompetent in dealing with the Islamist “terrorist threat.” The failure of the Norwegian SWAT team to quickly respond to the massacre on Utoya may indicate that Norway’s law enforcement and security networks and command-and-control systems had been interfered with by infiltrators with knowledge of the Norwegian systems. Those retired police and intelligence officials working for the U.S. embassy’s surveillance unit are likely suspects in sabotaging the Norwegian police reaction capabilities on 7/22. Just 48 hours before the bombing in Oslo, police units were engaged in a terrorist bombing exercise at the Oslo Opera House, near what would later be “ground zero.” In addition, in the days before the terrorist bombing, there was suspicious sewer work being conducted in the area near the Prime Minister’s office.

In March, the leader of the Socialist Left, Kristen Halvorsen, the Minister of Education of Norway and a former Finance Minister, called for military action against Israel if it attacked Gaza. The Socialist Left and Labor Party, along with the Norwegian Peace Association and the Norwegian energy and telecommunications union, strongly support the Boycott Israel campaign, which includes backing the pan-European Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) committee and an embargo on arms sales to the Jewish state. In August 2010, the Norwegian pension fund divested in two Israeli companies controlled by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and its subsidiary Danya Cebus.

Halvorsen had recently met with a delegation of American Jews who complained about Norway’s “anti-Semitism,” the tired and worn-out canard used by Zionists in confronting anti-Israeli sentiment around the world. In January, Halvorsen and her husband, Christo Halvorsen, a producer for the Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK) television and radio network, took part in an anti-Israel and U.S. march in Oslo where picket signs with phrases like “USA and Israel: Axis of Evil” appeared. The Halvorsens and NRK were subjected to a vicious campaign launched by Zionists and the Israel Lobby in Norway.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labor Party has been criticized by the Israel Lobby and Zionists for comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. Støre has also called for the demolition of Israel’s “Separation Wall” that runs through Palestinian territory on the West Bank, a stance that has earned him enmity and hatred from Israel’s government and their Zionist allies in the West. Store paid a visit to Utoya before the massacre. The Foreign Minister was on the island as some of the Labor Party youth were participating in a “Boycott Israel” demonstration. The city of Trondheim was criticized by Israel for funding a trip to the UN in New York for Norwegian students to participate in a play called the “Gaza Monologues.” Israel also blasted Norway for distributing a film called “Tears of Gaza.”

After Israel offered assistance to Norway, including forensic and medical assistance, as well as the evacuation of the wounded from the 7/22 attack, Norway declined the offer. The rejection of assistance from Israel indicates that the Norwegian government was suspicious of the offer from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Other Israeli military teams in the West Bank have been accused of trafficking in human organs, an expose brought to light by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in August 2009. That same month, Israel’s anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman accused Sweden and Norway of anti-Semitism, adding the outrageous charge that Norway was pro-Nazi, even though Norway’s anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist activists were affiliated with neo-Nazi organizations. On December 11, 2010, a suspicious terrorist explosion took place in downtown Stockholm, injuring two people and blamed on a Swedish-Iraqi suicide bomber. The bombing took place two weeks after the Swedish media reported that a Surveillance Detection Unit, operated form the U.S. embassy in Stockholm, was spying on Swedish citizens.

In the past few months, the Mossad has committed blatant acts of espionage and possible other terrorist attacks against nations it perceives as pro-Palestinian. During last year’s devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a team of Mossad agents was caught in the city. One of the agents died in the quake. The Mossad agents were found with multiple passports and thumb drives believed to have been used to download sensitive data from New Zealand government computer systems. New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key, who seemingly came from obscurity in New Zealand politics and whose Jewish mother immigrated from England, disregarded claims of Mossad espionage during the quake, even though he spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu four times on the day of the quake, after the dead Mossad agent was discovered by New Zealand police and intelligence.

New Zealand’s Southland Times was criticized by New Zealand’s Jewish community and Israel for promoting “conspiracy theories,” the typical modus operandi for pro-Israeli Jews, known as sayanim and katsas, who are used by Israel abroad as propaganda and espionage agents. Ironically, Key was meeting with Obama at the White House as the bombing and shootings were occurring in Norway. Key was believed to have attended the homo-erotic annual meeting of a men-only fraternity composed of American and foreign political and business elitists at the secluded Bohemian Grove in northern California, a conclave that also saw the attendance of Israel’s most notorious agent-of-influence in America, Henry Kissinger, who also serves as Obama’s “special envoy” to the Russian leadership. Key’s Labor Party predecessor, Helen Clark, was the subject of criticism in leaked 2004 State Department cables from the U.S. embassy in Wellington for cracking down on a Mossad team’s acquisition of forged New Zealand passports. Once again, the cable leaks were courtesy of the suspect WikiLeaks operation.

One of the Mossad perpetrators, Zev William Barkan, who fled New Zealand to avoid arrest, had also been reported in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he and other Israelis were producing pornographic and “snuff” movies, in which unsuspecting vagrants were murdered on camera.

In Egypt, Mossad agents have been accused by the present government of fomenting riots between Muslims and Coptic Christians. A recent explosion of seized Iranian weapons and ammunition being stored at a Cypriot naval base, a blast that killed the head of the Cypriot Navy, remains suspicious. The blast followed the decision of Cyprus’s left-of-center government to recognize the sovereignty of Palestine. The resulting public outrage over the blast resulted in the resignation of pro-Palestinian Foreign Minister Markos Kyprianou and a major political embarrassment for Cyprus’s president Dimitris Christofias, a member of the Communist AKEL party.

Mossad is a master at false-flag terrorist attacks designed to alter perceptions and punish opponents of Israeli policy. The fingerprints of Israeli intelligence are all over the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the 3/22 train bombings in Madrid, the 7/7 transit bombings in London, and, now, the 7/22 attacks in Norway… While the Israeli-influenced corporate media has droned on and on about the dangers of Islamist terrorism, it is now obvious that the major threat to public safety comes from the State of Israel, a rogue nation that does not hesitate to murder the innocent to achieve its sordid political aims.

Norway’s Mass Killer Copied the Unabomber Word for Word - Ted Kaczynski Known Victim of CIA Mind Control Experiments

2011-07-24T17:42:00.002+01:00

From: nrk.no

Anders Behring Breivik was thought to have worked nine years of his so-called manifesto. Now it turns out that large parts of the script is plagiarism - copied verbatim from a known American terrorist.The site Document.no as Sunday reveals that some of Anders Behring Breivik’s book, called "2083 - A European Declaration of Independence," is straight out of the so-called Unabomber manifesto.

While Breivik several places in the text is careful to cite external sources, Theodore Kaczynski - known as the Unabomber - is not mentioned once.

Kaczynski is an American terrorist who was sentenced to life in prison for a series of letter bombs he sent to universities and airlines from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.

Previous Stories:

* Anders Behring Breivik’s "Manifesto Video": Knights Templar 2083

* A 32 Year Old Freemason, Christian, Conservative and Nationalist Arrested for Oslo Bombing and Shootings

Exchanged a few words

Some online newspapers have already compared Kaczynskis manifest with the 1,511-page document Breivik posted on the Internet shortly before the terrorist attack.

Now it turns out that the Northern man simply copied large parts of the text.

But where Kaczynski reviews the enemy as "leftism" and "leftist," Breivik use the words "Multiculturalism" and "Cultural Communism."

- This must be a way of version 2.0 of the Unabomber Manifesto, says Aage Borchgrevink, advisor to the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, to NRK.no

Kaczynski writes:

"When we speak of leftist in this article we garden in mind Mainly Socialists, Collectivist, ’politically correct’ types, feminists, gay and disability Activists, Animal Rights Activists and the like."

With a few changes in wording, type Breivik the same:

"When we speak of cultural Marxists in this article we garden in mind Mainly Individuals WHO support Multiculturalism; Socialists, Collectivist, ’politically correct’ types, feminists, gay and disability Activists, Animal Rights Activists, Environmentalist, etc."

Breivik has especially been inspired by the Kaczynskis theory that the left is suffering from a crippling inferiority complex.

"The two psychological Tendencies That underlie modern leftism we call" feelings of inferiority ’and’ oversocialization, ’"writes Kaczynski.

"The two psychological Tendencies That underlie cultural Marxists we call ’feelings of inferiority’ and ’over-socialisation," repeats Breivik - without quoting.

Again, he has replaced "leftism" with "cultural Marxists". Apart from paraphrasing from American to British English is the wording is identical.

Cultural chauvinism

According to a source Document.no talked with Breivik has in several places replaced Kaczynskis use of "black" with the word "Muslim".

In a explanation about affirmative action, for example, Kaczynski writes:

"Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. More over, much leftist behavior is not Rationally Calculated to Be of benefit to the people WHOM the leftist claim to Be Trying to help. For example, if one believe That Affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense two demand Affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms?"

Here Breivik not only replace "leftist" with "cultural Marxist", but also "black people" with "Muslim":

"Hostility is too prominent a component of cultural Marxist Behaviour, so is the drive for power. More over, much cultural Marxist Behaviour is not Rationally Calculated to Be of benefit to the people WHOM They claim to Be Trying to help. For example, if one believe That Affirmative action is good for Muslims, does it make sense two demand Affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? "

Aage Borchgrevink is not surprised that Breivik wrote Muslim rather than black or dark-skinned.

The Last Word on Snake Oil

2011-06-22T21:04:00.001+01:00

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=2287

The image of the traveling snake oil salesman of 19th century America is by now a familiar trope. It is the image of the heartless huckster who preys upon the trust of the general public to swindle them out of their hard-earned savings. With a bottle of useless tonic and the help of a plant in the audience, the snake oil salesman made a living out of lies and deceit.

In these respects, William Levingston was your average snake oil salesman...

Rense & Dr Chris Fichtner - Time To Put Marijuana In Every Home

2011-06-21T19:04:00.003+01:00

Dr Christopher Fichtner MD is a psychiatrist and the former mental health director for the state of Illinois.

In his new book, Cannabinomics: The Marijuana Policy Tipping Point www.cannabinomics.com, Fichtner predicts that marijuana policy is about to change radically.

Dr Fichtner points out three public policy trajectories converging; The medical marijuana movement is gaining momentum. People are increasingly waking up to the fact that drug prohibition creates more public health problems than it solves. And, in the same way that the Great Depression caused people to reprioritize how we spend our public dollars, the current economic crisis has got people thinking that bringing the biggest cash crop in the US back into the open might not be such a bad idea.

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The CIA’s Fake “Arab Spring” Becoming A Long, Hot Summer Of War

2011-06-21T18:52:00.003+01:00

Obama Regime Courts World Conflagration: Imperial Overstretch Threatens as US, NATO Wage Five Wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen – Are Syria, Iran, Lebanon Next?

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
June 20, 2011

Washington DC, June 20- With the previously covert US bombing of Yemen out in the open, the Obama administration is now waging illegal wars against at least five countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen. Given Obama’s absurd and Orwellian theory that acts of war from the air in the sea do not constitute hostilities under the terms of the War Powers Act, this list may be incomplete, and stealth US attacks may be going on elsewhere as well. As spring turns into summer along the banks of the Potomac, there are signs that Obama’s next move may be a trifecta of aggression – an attack on Syria which would also embroil the US in war with Iran and with the Hezbollah forces of Lebanon. Or, the Obama rampage may strike Pakistan. The “Arab Spring” of color revolutions, military coups, and destabilizations is moving inexorably towards a possible world conflagration whose outlines are already visible.

According to military sources speaking on the Alex Jones radio program on June 15, US Special Forces units based at Fort Hood, Texas, have been told to prepare for deployment to Libya no later than July. Also on alert, reportedly for September or October, are the heavy armored units of the First Cavalry Division, currently located in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with other components of the US III Corps at various US bases. Observers point out that US Special Forces have been in Libya since February at the latest. They also note that, while the Libyan destination is highly plausible, some of these units may also find themselves on the way to Yemen, Syria, Iran, or beyond. At the same time, the Russian Foreign Ministry was denouncing the presence of the US Aegis cruiser Monterrey in the Black Sea. The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan and its task force are presently off the coast of Syria. One very plausible explanation for these deployments might be that a US attack on Syria, under the pretext of protecting civilians, is imminent.

On June 19, CNN reported¹ a large-scale US Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps military drill, the biggest of its type in history, along much of the American Atlantic coast under the code name of Exercise Mailed Fist, to be conducted from June 19-24. “The exercise is designed to test the capability of every type of Marine Corps aircraft, including MV-22 Ospreys and F/A 18 Hornets, as well as some Navy ships and Air Force planes,” CNN reported. This drill appears designed to train for amphibious landings on the coast of the Mediterranean, as in Libya or Syria.

June-July Turning Point, as in 1848

The US-UK putsch wave of 2011 continues to exhibit similarities to an earlier historical model, the insurrections of 1848 in Europe. The 1848 events started with a revolt in Sicily (not far from Tunisia), and forced the ouster of King Louis Philippe of France in February and of the powerful Austrian Chancellor, Prince Metternich, in March. These insurrections drew on the pent-up tensions accumulated over decades under the post-1815 Holy Alliance system, but they were by and large detonated by the networks of Italian ultra-nationalist firebrand Giuseppe Mazzini, an agent of the British Admiralty. Tides of unrest swept through central Europe.

The turning point came in June-July 1848. When a Czech nationalist insurrection broke out in Prague, it was crushed by the Austrian army of Gen. Windischgrätz after June 12. An attempted coup by the radical working class and city mob of Paris, organized in Louis Blanc’s National Workshops, was defeated by the reactionary Gen. Cavaignac in the June Days – June 24-26, 1848. In northern Italy, the army of the Italian Kingdom of Sardinia – which had declared war² on Vienna in support of a rebellion in Milan and with the hope of using the upheaval to drive the Austrians out of Italy and thus achieve national unity – was defeated on July 25 by Marshal Radetsky at Custozza. In September and October, Hungarian nationalist radicals under the Mazzini disciple Kossuth set off a civil war with the Croatians, leading to social chaos and (as R. R. Palmer put it), “the war of all against all.” Somewhat later, Russian troops were invited in to put down the Hungarian rebellion. There was a renewed flare-up of insurrectionary activity in the spring of 1849, notably with the creation of Mazzini’s Roman Republic, before the insurrectionary movements subsided during the late summer of 1849, and gave way to a phase of oppression, cynicism, and reaction. It may be useful to keep this time frame in mind as a rough guide to evaluating events today, while of course bearing in mind no mechanistic or cyclical repetition should be anticipated.

Ahmadinejad of Iran to Obama: Only the US Mask Has Changed, Hands Off Syria

On June 8, President Ahmadinejad of Iran warned the US-NATO bloc not to assail Syria: “Syria is a pioneer of resistance. The Syrian government and nation can settle their issues and there is no need for the interference of others,” Ahmadinejad said. He cautioned certain US-led countries in the region to “stop interfering in Syria’s affairs,” and added that Washington will turn against these states immediately after it achieves its objectives in Syria.³ These warnings may be addressed to Jordan, the Iraqi Kurds, or Turkey, whose territories may have been used by CIA/MI-6 networks to smuggle weapons and commandos into Syria to help constitute the armed gangs of the Moslem Brotherhood which have killed 400 Syrian military and security forces so far. “The Americans want to gain popularity among the regional nations through the implementation of this plan and portray themselves as the upholder of people’s rights,” Ahmadinejad went on, and noted that while a new regime took power in the U.S. in 2009, the nature of the ruling system has not changed: “Only the masks have changed. Campaign against terrorism was the mask of the previous U.S. administration, but the mask of the current administration is supporting human rights.”⁴ More recently, the Iranian Foreign Ministry and leading Iranian generals have issued stern warnings against any aggression at the expense of Syria, which they evidently would regard as casus belli. Increased attacks on US forces by Shiite militias in Iraq in recent weeks may be a token of Tehran’s alarm over the possible loss of its main ally.

“Gay Girl in Damascus” a US Hoax – Like So Many Reports on Syria and Libya?

On June 14, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued an unusual dual condemnation of both Damascus and Tehran, repeating the US line that Iran is assisting in the repression of Syrian protests. “Today in Syria, Iran is supporting the Assad regime’s vicious assaults on peaceful protesters and military actions against its own cities,” said Clinton. Back in the real world, suspicions were growing up that much media reporting concerning events in Syria represented pure fiction in the tradition of the Kuwait incubator babies and Jessica Lynch: the much-touted “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog, which had been cited as a primary source of information about Syria by mainstream news media across the western world, was exposed as a total hoax. This hoax was the handiwork of Tom McMaster, a 40-year-old American man, and his wife Britta Froelicher, an activist with the American Friends Service Committee, an organization linked to the US intelligence community since the Cold War. How many of the films, photos, and interviews broadcast and posted about supposed war crimes in Libya, Syria, and other countries have also been invented out of whole cloth by this CIA cottage industry of disinformation and black propaganda? How much of the social media hype associated with the “Arab Spring” derives from the trolls at US Cyber Command?

Egypt’s Asterisk Revolution: Run by Samantha Power and McFaul From the White House

The “Gay Girl in Damascus” stunt may be seen in retrospect as a microcosm of the entire “Arab Spring”: a cynical manipulation of idealistic (or nihilistic) young dupes under the aegis of US-designed color revolutions and people power coups, playing these affluent computer-oriented young people against the fragile structures of the modern state under conditions of world economic depression. But even so, the activities of the golden youth in the public squares have been largely a media spectacle, a diversion, a smokescreen. Street demonstrations do not amount to a struggle for power. The overthrow of governments has been accomplished behind the scenes by generals and government officials who have been bribed, blackmailed, and otherwise subverted into mounting putsches sponsored by CIA/MI-6/DGSE. In Tunisia this worked well, with Ben Ali fleeing the country when the general staff made clear that they had turned against him. In Egypt, the procedure finally ousted Mubarak, but with much greater difficulty. US assets like Tantawi and Enan proved unable to drive out the Rais until the Obama White House made some heavy-duty threats of direct US action, the exact nature of which has yet to be determined, but which may have involved the menace of US action against the Suez Canal.

As US Egyptian asset Saad Eddin Ibrahim told Lally Weymoth of the Washington Post: “The Egyptian chief of staff [Tantawi] on orders from the White House was escalating the pressure. President Obama’s advisers, who are good friends — Samantha Power and Michael McFaul — asked me to come [to Washington]. They relied on me as a source. . . . After Mubarak’s second speech, Obama became convinced [that Mubarak had to go].”⁵ Nationalist colonels in the Egyptian Army may be interested to know that their supreme commander, now the virtual dictator of Egypt, acted on orders from the likes of McFaul and Power, who control the “democratic” opposition as well.

In Libya, the color revolution has worked far less well, as armed al Qaeda gangs have been unable to conquer the loyalist stronghold of Tripoli, and are also having trouble subduing loyalists in the Benghazi-Darna-Tobruk corridor. In Syria, the color revolution model has not worked at all, since the middle class is not interested in undergoing a total Iraq-style bloodbath and Moslem Brotherhood reign of terror for the sake of some vapid slogans about democracy. In Algeria, where the population has immediate experience of the nightmarish slaughter wrought by the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) a few years back, no appetite whatever for new adventures has been observed. Al Jazeera has now shifted target to destabilize Morocco, and we will see how that turns out. The destabilization of Jordan has gone nowhere.

An attack on Syria could come soon. “It has gotten to the point where Qaddafi’s behavior and Assad’s behavior are indistinguishable,” commented warmonger GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who noted “You need to put on the table all options, including a model like we have in Libya.”⁶ This meant a much wider war.

Yemen: Government of Wounded President Saleh Crumbles, US Drone Strikes Begin

Yemen’s President Saleh was seriously wounded on June 3 when rockets allegedly fired by insurgent tribesmen struck his palace. Saleh was flown to Saudi Arabia the next day for emergency treatment. While Saleh’s relatives and allies tried to hold onto power, the Pentagon exploited the resulting power vacuum to begin large-scale Predator drone attacks in the country. It was revealed that the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the CIA were operating out of a headquarters in Sanaa, and that the CIA would soon begin a wide-ranging program of Predator drone assassinations outside of any rules of military engagement. There were also reports that the US was building a large Predator drone base for operations in Yemen. In the meantime, Islamic militants of the Ansar al-Sharia group, equated by the US media to “al Qaeda,” seized parts of a provincial capital in southern Yemen. It should be remembered that the two leading spokesman for “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (“AQAP”) are US citizen Anwar Awlaki and Guantanamo alumnus al-Shiri, both obvious US double agents. The purpose of the entire Yemen destabilization is to open an avenue of attack against Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s immediate neighbor.

US Strike Against Pakistan Nukes On Front Burner

On June 17, Pakistan said “NATO aircraft attacked one of its military posts in the northwest near the Afghan border and it had expressed its serious concern to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad…. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry said NATO aircraft intruded around 2.5 km (1.5 miles) inside Pakistani territory” to make the attack.⁷ These probes by NATO aggressors along Pakistan’s border are now a frequent occurrence, and threaten to break out in an open, shooting war – all the more so since any one of these raids could represent a US attempt to cripple Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent with a conventional first strike below the nuclear threshold. Afghanistan President Karzai has officially announced that peace talks with State Department participation are now going on with Mullah Omar and others leaders of the Afghan Taliban. These talks have nothing to do with peace; they rather represent a US attempt to recruit the Afghan and other Taliban and Pushtuns generally as kamikaze puppets to be launched against Pakistan in military attacks.

Certain parts of the US media – particularly the ones addressed to policy elites — have mounted a sustained campaign of demonization against Pakistan. Here are some recent samples of top front-page headlines from the Washington Post:

May 28: “Infiltrators worry Pakistani military; ‘We are under attack’; US unsure of army’s commitment to purging ranks”
May 30: “In Afghan war, Haqqani group is ‘resilient’ foe; Operations based in Pakistan; Network is seen as least reconcilable insurgent faction”
June 11: “Thwarted raids add to tension with Pakistan; US shared intelligence; Bomb-making sites were later found vacant”
June 16: “Pakistan Relations Reach a new low; security ties fraying; Anti-US sentiment in Pakistani army on rise”

Iran’s Ahmadinejad was also taking seriously the spate of media reports about a coming US attack on Pakistan’s nuclear forces. “We have precise information that America wants to sabotage Pakistan’s nuclear facilities in order to control Pakistan and to weaken the government and the people of Pakistan,” he said on June 6. The U.S. is also seeking to “use the United Nations Security Council and some other international organizations as a lever to pave the way for its increased presence in Pakistan with the aim of undermining Pakistan’s national sovereignty,” said the Iranian President.⁸ The Pakistani government has requested that Iran share with them the detailed intelligence that was the basis for this report.

The Pakistan nukes scenario was the centerpiece of a widely noticed study entitled “Terrorist Tactics in Pakistan Threaten Nuclear Weapons Safety,” by British academic Shaun Gregory, published on June 1 in the CTC Sentinel, the house organ of the Combating Terrorism Center of the US Military Academy at West Point, NY. Gregory’s thesis is that Pakistan, now equipped with over 100 nuclear weapons, will not be able to defend all of them against a determined terrorist attack. He estimates that some 70,000 Pakistanis are now involved in the nation’s nuclear program, and that terrorists would inevitably be able to infiltrate and subvert some of this personnel, including by recruiting rogue commanders of the tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons which Pakistan is currently deploying to guard against an attack by India. Gregory also asserts that it would be enough for terrorists to get possession of fissile materials that would allow the construction of a dirty bomb. Even a failed attack on a nuclear site would cause world hysteria: “The successful location and penetration of such a site by terrorists, even if they were ultimately unsuccessful in accessing nuclear assets, would itself be a transformative event both in terms of the U.S.-Pakistani nuclear relationship and in terms of international anxiety about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,” writes Gregory.⁹

Reuters commented: “It’s a nightmare scenario: al Qaeda militants gain control of a Pakistani nuclear weapon, either through a base assault, theft or a rogue commander’s cooperation, possibly in the event of hostilities with nuclear-armed neighbor India.¹⁰ The Pakistanis were on full alert: “We know that the ultimate objective of the United States here is not to get a piece of land but to target our nuclear facilities….” said a Pakistani source quoted by Ansar Abbasi in News International on June 9.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen confirmed that this is indeed what the Pentagon has in mind, saying of Pakistan: “It’s a country with an awful lot of terrorists on that border… Things that I fear in the future, it’s the proliferation of that [nuclear] technology, and it’s the opportunity and the potential that it could fall into the hands of terrorists, many of whom are alive and well and seek that in that region.”

As if to provide a suitable pretext for such an attack, the US media has been trumpeting the alleged selection of notorious MI-6 asset Ayman al-Zawahiri as Bin Laden’s successor as top dog of “al Qaeda.” Zawahiri has allegedly sworn to avenge the death of Bin Laden, meaning that the door to new false flag terror events is wide open. This coverage was accompanied by the assurance that Zawahiri’s home base was nowhere else but Pakistan. Mullen immediately proclaimed that Zawahiri would soon meet the same fate as his predecessor, meaning that the US is determined to carry out more unilateral attacks on Pakistani territory, despite the virtual certainty that these will meet with Pakistani countermeasures. Pakistan’s Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik “has said that a foreign hand is involved in terror incidents in Pakistan,” and called for national unity against terrorists in “the fight for our survival.”¹¹

The other main US goal is to block the creation of the Pakistan energy corridor, the fabled Pipelinestan. These projects involve oil and gas pipelines from Iran to China and India, all crossing through Pakistan. The US and UK are determined to block such peaceful infrastructure development, which would give all these countries a rational common economic interest. One key part of the Pakistan energy corridor has been halted; on June, IANS reported that “the proposed Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline has run into delays as Islamabad has failed to raise the necessary funds…. Pakistani officials have told their Iranian counterparts that the pipeline was unlikely to be completed by the scheduled deadline of December 2014, the Urdu daily Jang reported. According to reliable sources, Pakistan has neither been able to raise the necessary $1.24 billion funding nor plan out the proposed route for the pipeline within its territory.”¹²

An Anti-US Coup d’État by Nationalist Colonels in Islamabad?

On June 15, the New York Times and Washington Post both published front-page articles highlighting the rapid growth of anti-American resentment in the Pakistani officer corps. The New York Times wrote that many military officers were so disgusted by the servility of army chief Kayani towards Washington that “a colonels’ coup, while unlikely, was not out of the question,” according to “a well-informed Pakistani who has seen the general in recent weeks, as well as an American military official involved with Pakistan for many years.”¹³

The neocon National Review, genuinely alarmed by the prospect of a new generation of modernizing military officers in the great tradition of Colonel Nasser of Egypt, spun out some grim scenarios and asked, “would the outcome of a break between America and Pakistan be war–whether low-level or outright?”¹⁴ In reality, a regime of progressive colonels might provide a better outcome than Islamic fundamentalists not just for Pakistan, but also for Egypt.

Panetta’s New Pearl Harbor of Virtual Flag Cyber-Attacks

Islamabad continues to enjoy support from China, which pledged a month ago to regard any attack on Pakistan as an attack on the Middle Kingdom itself. China has military options for retaliation, ranging from ICBMs to sensitive points like the Taiwan Straits, but these are less likely. China could also express displeasure by divesting some U.S. Treasury bonds. More likely might be operations in the cyber-realm. US sources allege that Lockheed Martin, the CIA, and other websites are under cyber assault, and some commentators have tried to pin this on China. CIA Director Panetta, now moving over to the Pentagon, told a Senate Committee, “The next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyber attack that cripples our power systems, our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems.”¹⁵ Since no known cyber-attack has thus far been able to create such devastating effects, we may assume that Panetta is preparing the way for virtual flag terrorism, in which the US government would simply assert that some catastrophic event had been caused by a country it wishes to target. In a possibly related development, German attorney Thorsten van Geest is in court seeking a temporary restraining order against the Merkel government to shut down all anti-terror drills around at the June 26 opening of the World the Women’s Soccer Championship in Berlin, citing the danger that these exercises might be flipped live.

Saudi Arabia Signals Break from Washington

Saudi Arabia is known to be seeking cooperation with Pakistan and with other countries as part of its attempted exit from the collapsing US empire. Prince Turki al-Faisal, a leading figure of the royal family, signaled Riyadh’s broad-based rage against Washington with a June 7 op-ed warning Obama that “there will be disastrous consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes UN recognition of a Palestinian state.” Turki concluded with a threat: “We Arabs used to say no to peace, and we got our comeuppance in 1967 [with a crushing military defeat] …. Now, it is the Israelis who are saying no. I’d hate to be around when they face their comeuppance.”¹⁶ These blunt words, which reflect a Saudi hostility to the Obama regime that goes beyond the Palestinian issue to include the whole range of national strategy, has caused shock behind closed doors in official Washington.

The March visit of Saudi Prince Bandar to Pakistan is widely regarded as having sealed a defensive alliance between these two powers, which may be regarded (along with Egypt) as regional pillars of the US empire. Both are seeking to exit the empire. Pakistan is thought to have guaranteed the Saudis protection under Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella, as well as a division or more of Pakistani troops to quell any color revolution or other destabilization the CIA might attempt. A possible signal of US rage over this cooperation came on May 16, when “motorcycle-riding assassins gunned down a Saudi diplomat in the Pakistani city of Karachi, four days after a grenade attack on the Saudi consulate there.”¹⁷

NATO Facing Logistical Overstretch in Libya

Resistance by Colonel Qaddafi of Libya against the attacking US-NATO forces has exposed the grave logistical and political weakness of the supposedly omnipotent Western alliance. A US military source speaking on the Alex Jones broadcast reported that US stocks of depleted uranium (DU) munitions are currently very low. This may be the reality behind outgoing Defense Secretary Gates’ complaint last week that NATO is running out of bombs in Libya, and similar remarks by French NATO General Stephane Abrial in Belgrade. The US still has some stocks, but how long would these last against Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran?

Obama is Impeachment Bait for Violating the War Powers Act

At a recent Republican presidential debate, candidates Bachman, Gingrich, and Cain hinted that the Libyan rebels include al Qaeda terrorists. Obama’s arrogant and cynical management of the attack on Libya has raised the possibility of congressional action to cut off funds for the war. The Republican fanatics of the Tea Party are seeking to force the US government to default on Treasury securities payments as a way of destroying Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and other economic rights of the American people recognized under the New Deal. However, it is possible that the zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas of Wall Street who fund and generally own the Republican Party will use threats and bribes to force these Tea Party extremists to knuckle under and increase the debt ceiling over the next month. That will leave the Tea Party fanatics in desperate need of an issue they can use to make a loud show of hostility to Obama to placate their extremist supporters, and that issue may be the aggression against Libya, which has become thoroughly unpopular despite Obama’s attempts to conceal that it is going on.

Libya: A War Too Far, even for GOP

The House of Representatives has voted to demand that Obama seek congressional approval for his stealth Libya war. Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich and others are suing Obama in federal court to force him to get such approval. Speaker of the House John Boehner has warned Obama that, if he does not come to Congress for approval by June 20, he will be in violation of the War Powers Act. Senators like Lugar, Corker, and Webb have also called on Obama to get a congressional resolution to prosecute hostilities. It has also been revealed that Obama was told by lawyers from the Department of Justice and the Pentagon that the Libyan war was indeed covered by the War Powers Act, but that Obama chose to endorse legal opinions from White House and State Department lawyers telling him he did not need to get any go-ahead from Congress. Naturally, Obama’s flagrant violation of the War Powers Act in Libya would make him subject to impeachment, and this possibility might become more likely if the US economy continues to deteriorate. Another approach would be for Congress to cut off the money for the Libyan aggression. Usually, such a move would be blocked with the argument that US troops would be left stranded in harm’s way. But in this case, by Obama’s own assurances, no US ground troops are officially involved (although they are already there nonetheless). Since Obama claims that only air and naval attacks are being mounted, it may prove easier to cut off the funding and end the illegal attacks on Libya.

As Chinese political scientist Kiyul Chung told RT on June 16, the world was at an historic crossroads, on the brink of deciding whether US and NATO military interventions on the Libyan model would subdue the entire world, or whether Russia, China, and other participants in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization would be able to create a worldwide movement to counterbalance the “unilateral, aggressive, and colonial” methods of the NATO bloc.

References

¹ http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/17/marine.corps.exercise/index.html?&hpt=hp_c2

² King Carlo Alberto of Sardinia declared war on Austria on March 23, 1848. He was joined by a coalition which included the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Papal States under Pope Pius IX, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This marked the first transformation of the domestic insurrections of 1848 into cross-border wars. There is an eerie congruence between this event and the initiation of the NATO bombing of Libya on March 19, 2011.

³ Iran censures US interference in Syria, Press TV, June 8, 2011, at http://www.presstv.ir/detail/183696.html

⁴ http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=242059

⁵ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-egypt-a-revolution-with-an-asterisk/2011/05/20/AF0W3M9G_print.html, emphasis added.

⁶ http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/165943-graham-military-intervention-in-syria-should-be-on-the-table

⁷ http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110617/wl_nm/us_pakistan_nato/print

⁸ http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=242059

⁹ Shaun Gregory, “Terrorist Tactics in Pakistan Threaten Nuclear Weapons Safety,” West Point CTC Sentinel, June 1, 2011, at http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/terrorist-tactics-in-pakistan-threaten-nuclear-weapons-safety; see also http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20110614_5737.php; Professor Shaun Gregory is Director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford, UK.

¹⁰ Reuters, June 1, 2011, at http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/01/how-pakistans-nuclear-weapons-could-be-jeopardised.html

¹¹ http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=98524

¹² http://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/Pakistan-Iran-gas-pipeline-ians-490610859.html?x=0

¹³ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/world/asia/16pakistan.html?_r=1

¹⁴ Stanley Kurtz, “Anti-American Coup in Pakistan?,” National Review, June 16, 2011, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/269822/anti-american-coup-pakistan-stanley-kurtz

¹⁵ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/13/panetta-cyberattack-next-pearl-harbor_n_875889.html

¹⁶ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/palestinian-rights-wont-be-denied-by-the-united-states-and-israel/2011/06/07/AGmnK2OH_story_1.html

¹⁷ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/16/saudi-diplomat-killed-pakistan

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The Placebo Effect - The Triumph of Mind over Body

2009-07-03T07:46:00.001+01:00

By Peter Arguriou | nexusmagazine.com via Red Ice Creations

A neglected phenomenon
One of the most commonly used terms in medical language is the word placebo. The placebo effect is used as a scale for evaluating the effectiveness of new drugs. But what exactly is the placebo effect and what are its consequences in the deterministic structure of Western medicine? The placebo effect has been frequently abused by health professionals to denote and stigmatise a fraud or fallacy. Alternative therapies have often been characterised as merely placebos. But the placebo effect is not a fraudulent, useless or malevolent phenomenon. It occurs independently of the intentions of charlatans or health professionals. It is a spontaneous, authentic and very factual phenomenon that refers to well-observed but uninterpreted and contingent therapies or health improvements that occur in the absence of an active chemical/pharmacological substance. Make-believe drugs—drugs that carry no active chemical substances—often act as the real drugs and provoke therapeutic effects when administered to patients.
In many drug trials, the manufacturers of the drug sadly discover that their product is in no way superior to the effect of a placebo. But that does not mean that a placebo equates to a null response of the human organism. On the contrary, a placebo denotes nonchemical stimuli that strongly motivate the organism towards a therapeutic course. That is, the placebo effect is dependent not on the drug's effectiveness but solely on therapeutic intention and expectation.
Effects of positive and negative thinking
The placebo effect has been often misunderstood as a solely psychological and highly subjective phenomenon. The patient, convinced of the therapy's effectiveness, ignores his symptoms or perceives them faintly without any substantial improvement of his health; that is, the patient feels better but is not healthier. But can the subjective psychological aspect of the placebo effect account for all of its therapeutic properties? The answer is definite: the placebo effect refers to an alternative curative mechanism that is inherent in the human entity, is motivated by therapeutic intention or belief in the therapeutic potential of a treatment, and implies biochemical responses and reactions to the stimulus of therapeutic intention or belief.
But placebos are not always beneficial: they can also have adverse effects. For example, administering a pharmacologically inactive substance to some patients can sometimes bring about unexpected health deteriorations. A review of 109 double-blind studies estimated that 19 per cent of placebo recipients manifested the noceboeffect : unexpected deteriorations of health. In a related experiment, researchers falsely declared to the volunteers that a weak electrical current would pass through their head; although there was no electrical current, 70 per cent of the volunteers (who were medical students) complained of a headache after the experiment.
In a group of patients suffering from carotid atherosclerosis, prognosis and progression of the disease were burdened when their psychological health was bad (i.e., they were affected by hopelessness or depression). In another group of carotid atherosclerosis patients, prognosis and progression were burdened not only by hopelessness but also by hostility. In patients with coronary heart disease, hopelessness was a determinative risk factor. Social isolation, work stress and hostility comprised additional risk factors. Positive or negative thinking seems to be a decisive risk factor for every treatment, perhaps even more important than medical intervention.
The nocebo effect appears to have a specific biological substrate. A group of 15 men whose wives suffered from terminal cancer participated in a small perspective study. After their wives' deaths, the men experienced severe grief that caused immunodepression. The spouses' lymphocytes for a period of time after their wives' deaths responded poorly to mitogenes. Grief had assaulted their immune system. The study proposed that grief and grief-induced immunodepression resulted in high-level mortality of the specific group.
A short history of a small miracle
The term placebo (meaning "I shall please") was used in mediaeval prayer in the context of the phrase Placebo Domino ("I shall please the Lord") and originated from a biblical translation of the fifth century AD. During the 18th century, the term was adopted by medicine and was used to imply preparations of no therapeutic value that were administered to patients as "decoy drugs". The term began to transform in 1920 (Graves), and through various intermediate stages (Evans and Hoyle, 1933; Gold, Kwit and Otto, 1937; Jellinek, 1946) was fully
transformed in 1955 when it finally claimed an important portion of the
therapeutic effect in general. Henry K. Beecher, in his 1955 paper "The
Powerful Placebo", attributed a rough percentage of 30 per cent of the overall therapeutic benefit to the placebo effect.
In certain later studies, the placebo effect was estimated at even higher, at 60 per cent of the overall therapeutic outcome. In a recent review of 39 studies regarding the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs, psychologist Guy Sapirstein concluded that 50 per cent of the therapeutic benefits came from the placebo effect, with a poor percentage of 27 per cent attributed to drug intervention (fluoxetine, sertaline and paroxetine). Three years later Sapirstein, along with a fellow psychologist Irving Kirsch, processed the data from 19 double-blind studies regarding depression and reached an even higher percentage of therapeutic results attributed to the placebo effect: 75 per cent of depression therapies or ameliorations were placebo induced!
Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche (2001 1 4, 2004) doubted the effectiveness of the placebo phenomenon, attributing it solely to the subjective factors of human psychology. And indeed, there is a major aspect of the placebo effect related to psychology. In two studies where placebos were exclusively administered, the placebo effect seemed to be effected from the subject's perception of the applied therapy, i.e., two placebo pills were better than one, bigger pills were better than smaller, and injections were even better.
The placebo induced a reaction not only to the therapy but also to its form, suggesting that the placebo phenomenon is shaped according to the personal symbolic universe of the patient. Before the placebo response occurs, human perception has already interpreted the applied therapy and has prepared a certain response to it. It would appear that not only chemical but also non-chemical stimuli participate in the motivation of the human organism towards therapy.
But is the placebo reaction solely a psychological phenomenon
or does it have additional tangible somatic effects?
One of the more dramatic events regarding placebo therapy was reported in 1957 when a new wonder drug, Krebiozen, held promise as the final solution to the cancer problem. A patient with metastatic tumours and with fluid collection in his lungs, who demanded the daily intake of oxygen and the use of an oxygen mask, heard of Krebiozen. His doctor was participating in Krebiozen research and the patient begged him to be given the revolutionary drug. Bent by the patient's hopelessness, the doctor did so and witnessed a miraculous recovery of the patient. His tumours melted and he returned to an almost normal lifestyle. The recovery didn't last long. The patient read articles about Krebiozen's n o t delivering what it promised in cancer therapy. The patient then had a relapse; his tumours were back. His doctor, deeply affected by the aggravation, resorted to a desperate trick. He told his patient that he had in his possession a new, improved version of Krebiozen. It was simply distilled water. The patient fully recovered after the placebo treatment and remained functional for two months. The final verdict on Krebiozen, published in the press, proved the drug to be totally ineffective. That was the coup de grâce for the patient, who died
a few days later.
In spite of the melodrama of the Krebiozen case, there is no single case or personal testimony that can denote or prove a therapy to be effective. Statistical studies, not personal testimonies, can verify a proposed therapy's effectiveness, and wellplanned studies are able to concur that the placebo phenomenon has somatic properties. One such study was implemented in 1997. The two study groups consisted
of patients with benign prostatic hypertrophy. One group took actual
medication while the control group received placebo treatment. The placebo recipients reported relief from their symptoms and even amelioration of their urinary function.18 A placebo has also been reported to act as a bronchodilator in asthmatic patients, or to have the exact opposite action—respiratory depression— depending on the description of the pharmacological effect the researchers gave to the patients and therefore the effect the patients anticipated. A placebo proved highly efficient against food allergies and, subsequently, impressively effective in the sinking of biotechnologies on the stock market. How could that be? Peptide Therapeutics Group, a biotech company, was preparing to launch on the market a novel vaccine for food allergies. The first reports were encouraging. When the experimental vaccine reached the clinical trials stage, the company's spokesperson boasted that the vaccine proved effective in 75 per cent of the cases—a percentage that usually suffices to prove a drug's effectiveness. But the good news didn't last long. The control group, given a placebo, did almost as well: seven out of 10 patients reported getting rid of their food allergies. The stock value of the company plunged by 33 per cent. The placebo effect on food allergies created a nocebo effect on the stock market! 2 0 In another case, a genetically
designed heart drug that raised high hopes for Genentech was clobbered by a placebo.
As aptly put by science historian Anne Harrington, placebos are "ghosts that haunt our house of biomedical objectivity and expose the paradoxes and fissures in our own self-created definitions of the real and active factors in treatment". The placebo's pharmacomimetic behaviour can even imitate a drug's side effects. In a 1997 study of patients with benign prostate hypertrophy, some patients on a placebo complained of various side effects ranging from impotence and reduced sexual activity to nausea, diarrhoea and constipation. Another study reported placebo side effects as including headaches, vomiting,
nausea and a variety of other symptoms.
The placebo effect in surgery
But how deep can the placebo effect trespass into the well-defined area of medicine? Surely it can't joust with medicine's strike force; it cannot challenge surgery. Or can it? In 1939, an Italian surgeon named Davide Fieschi invented a new technique for treating angina pectoris (chest pain due to ischaemia or lack of blood/oxygen getting to the heart muscle, usually due to obstruction of the coronary arteries).24 Reasoning that increased blood flow to the heart would reduce his patients' pain, he performed tiny incisions in their chests and tied knots on the two internal mammary arteries. Three quarters of the patients showed improvement; one quarter of them was cured. The surgical intervention became standard procedure for the treatment of angina
for the next 20 years. But in 1959, a young cardiologist, Leonard Cobb, put the Fieschi procedure to the test. He operated on 17 patients: on eight of them he followed the standard procedure; on the other nine he
performed only the tiny incisions, letting the patients believe that they'd had the real thing. The result was a real upset: those who'd had the sham surgery did as well as those who'd had the Fieschi technique. That was the end of the Fieschi technique and the beginning of the documented surgical placebo effect.
In 1994, surgeon J. Bruce Moseley experimented with the surgical placebo. He split a small group of patients suffering from osteoarthritis of the knee into two equal groups. Both groups were told that they would undergo arthroscopic surgery, but only the first group got the real thing. The other group was left virtually untreated, with the doctor performing only tiny incisions to make the arthroscopic scenario credible. Similar results were reported in both groups.
Moseley, stunned by the outcome, decided to perform the trial with a larger statistical sample in order to reach safer conclusions. The results were replicated: arthroscopic surgery was equal therapeutically to the placebo effect. The placebo had found its way into surgical rooms. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of surgical placebo arose in a groundbreaking 2004 study. In the innovative field of stem-cell research, a new approach was taken with Parkinson's disease. Human embryonic dopamine neurons were implanted through tiny holes in the patients' brains. Once again, the results were encouraging. And once again, the procedure failed to do better than a placebo. In this case, the placebo involved tiny holes incised in the skull without implantation of stem cells. As the researchers confessed, "The placebo effect was very strong in this
study".
But how can it be that the therapeutic expectancy alone often produces results equal to those from actual surgery? It appears that the mind is exerting control over somatic processes, including diseases. The biochemical traces of this influence are only beginning to be outlined. Modern research indicates a biological, tangible substrate to the placebo effect.
Somatic pathways
In the mid-1990s, researcher Fabrizio Benedetti conducted a novel experiment whereby he induced ischaemic pain and soothed it by administering morphine. When morphine was replaced by a saline solution, the placebo presented analgesic properties. However, when naloxone (an opiate antagonist) was added to the saline solution, the analgesic properties of the water were blocked. Benedetti reached the conclusion that the placebo's analgesic properties were a result of specific biochemical paths. Naloxone blocked not only morphine but also endogenous opioids—the physical pain-relievers.
The endogenous opioids, endorphins, were discovered in 1974 and act as pain antagonists. Benedetti's suggestion of a placebo-induced release of endorphins was supported by findings produced with MRI and
PET scans. Placebo - induced endorphin release also affects heart rate and respiratory activity. As researcher Jon-Kar Zubieta described, "...this [finding] deals another serious blow to the idea that the placebo effect is a purely psychological, not physical, phenomenon".
Further findings support the notion that the placebo effect presents a biochemical substrate in both depression and Parkinson's disease. Analysing the results of PET scans, researchers estimated the glucose metabolism in the brains of patients with depression. Glucose metabolism under placebo presented differentiations that were similar to those caused by antidepressants such as fluoxetine. In patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, a placebo injection promoted dopamine secretion in a similar way to that caused by amphetamine administration. Benedetti demonstrated that the placebo effect provoked decreased activity in single neurons of the subthalamic nucleus in patients with Parkinson's disease.
From numerous research findings, it is logical and rather safe to conclude that there is a biochemical substrate to the placebo effect. But what is more intriguing to it is its relation to perception. It would appear that perception and the codes and symbols that the animate computer, the brain, utilises in order to process internal and external information strongly determine the potency and form of placebo response.
In a recent study, patients were purposely misinformed that they had been infected by hazardous bacilli and they subsequently underwent treatment. However, there were no bacilli and the treatment administered was a placebo. Guess what? Some of the study subjects developed infection-like conditions that were not treatable by the placebo medication. The mind interpreted the fictional bacilli as hazardous and instructed the body to respond to them as if they were real.
Despite the placebo's potency and its importance for a new perception of health where body and mind heavily interact, large numbers of scientists continue to regard the placebo as an insignificant systematic error, a troublesome nought. According to cancer researcher Gershom Zajicek: "There is nothing in the pharmacokinetic theory which accounts for the placebo effect. In order to keep the theory consistent, the placebo effect is regarded as random error or noise which can be ignored."
One of the most perceptive placebo researchers was Stewart Wolf, "the father of psychosomatic medicine", who as early as 1949 had given it a thorough description. Wolf not only defended the placebo as a non-fictional and very "real" phenomenon but also described the placebo's pharmacomimetic behaviour. He was perhaps the first researcher to correlate the placebo effect not only with psychology and predisposition but also with perception. More than half a century ago, he stated that "the mechanisms of the body are capable of reacting not only to direct physical and chemical stimulation but also to symbolic stimuli, words and events which have somehow acquired special meaning for the individual".
In this context, a pill is not merely an active substance but also a therapeutic symbol and thus the organism is able to respond not only to its chemical content but also to its symbolic content. Likewise a bacillus, beyond its physical properties, acquires symbolic properties that can cause an organism's reaction even in the absence of the bacillus.
The presence and extent of the nocebo effect should also be studied in regard to drug resistance. Perhaps drug resistance is a multifactorial phenomenon involving not only microbial evolutionary aptness but also human psyche mechanics. Placebo and nocebo phenomena might prove fundamental not only on the personal level but also in the public health arena.
They might even provide the foundation stone for a new model of health, a new medicine that was envisioned by Wolf in the 1950s: "...in the future, drugs will be assessed not only with reference to their pharmacologic action but also to the other forces at play and to the circumstances surrounding their administration".
Five centuries ago, Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) wrote: "You must know that the will is a powerful adjuvant of medicine." It seems that our scientific arrogance has blinded us to the teachings of the past.
About the Author:
Peter Arguriou was born in Greece in the summer of 1973. He studied medicine at the University of Athens Medical School, but left disappointed by the mechanistic perceptions governing medicine. Later, he briefly studied classical homoeopathy at the Aegean University under Alternative Nobel Prize winner George Vithoulkas. He writes for the Greek press and is the author of eight books (fiction, science fiction, poetry—most of them still unpublished). He is a member of the Hellenic MENSA and currently is working on a book regarding novel epidemics, bad science, the gene promise, the media travesty in coverage of science news, orchestrated propaganda and the corruption of the scientific establishment by big business and political agendas.
Article from: nexusmagazine.com

Warning of Severe Economic Collapse, Mainstream Media Sustainable Recovery Hype

2009-07-03T07:38:00.001+01:00

By: ArbitraryVote at www.marketoracle.co.uk

The mainstream media and government are communicating that the economy is on a positive track toward recovery while downplaying the likelihood of another economic catastrophe similar or worse than that experienced in the fourth quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009. In actuality, there is a significant chance that the US will experience a severe economic collapse, beyond what has already been experienced, either this year or within the next few years. If there is a perceived, sustainable economic rebound before this happens, do not be fooled - the underlying economic problems still exist and will likely eventually surface in economic collapse.

This following analysis further explores this warning by describing:

The 4 key reasons an economic collapse is likely imminent
Why these 4 reasons make the economy vulnerable
Warning signs and triggers to monitor to foresee a collapse before it happens
What can result from an economic collapse
Ideas for preparation

The 4 Key Reasons an Economic Collapse is Likely Imminent

The U.S. has unprecedented, massive amounts of current and coming debt.
Foreign countries have experienced their own crises, and they cannot offer added levels of debt funding for the U.S. Even if they could, they are unlikely to do so.
Productivity is declining, and everything the government is doing is further hurting productivity.
The U.S. is printing unprecedented, massive amounts of money and no longer has an ability to control inflation and deflation.

1. The U.S. has unprecedented, massive amounts of current and coming debt.

Over $11.4 trillion in current debt and growing
$1.8 trillion deficit in current budget - $9.3 trillion over next decade (likely to be higher)
Outstanding future debt of $43 trillion to $102 trillion from entitlements
Debt Comparison to U.S. GDP

A. Over $11.4 trillion in current debt and growing

U.S. federal debt is now over $11.4 trillion. As this graph is slightly outdated, you can imagine how far off the graph the line will need to go to chart the increase.

B. $1.8 trillion deficit in current budget - $9.3 trillion over next decade (likely to be higher)

The $3.6 trillion budget most recently passed is estimated to incur a $1.8 trillion deficit. The deficit is estimated to add up to $9.3 trillion over next decade. These are estimates by the government, but they include economic assumptions that have already been exceeded.

For example, the budget assumes a max of 8.1% unemployment. We are now at 9.4% unemployment. This means the deficit will most likely be larger than projected.

Even with the current estimates, the deficit line on the outdated graph below will go far off the chart. Also, the federal debt discussed above (bullet "A") will increase over time by the amount of the deficit.

C. Outstanding future debt of $43 trillion to $102 trillion from entitlements

The U.S. has made long-term commitments to fund Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Because of the increase in the retiring Baby Boomer population and the continuing increase in medical costs in the U.S., the demand on these payments is also increasing. Additionally, the U.S. government borrows from already-collected funds to undertake additional spending, adding to the entitlement funding problem.

The coming added debt estimates from entitlements are as low as $43 trillion and as high as $102 trillion. To put these debt levels in context, total U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is about $14.1 trillion and falling.

Graph from a 2008 U.S. Government Accountability Office report

As the above U.S. Government Accountability Office graph is outdated from 2008, here are a few important points to note:

The graphed values are based on the $43 trillion low-end estimate as of 2008. There are several other estimates all the way up to $102 trillion.

Since this graph was created, there are already significant increases required given the recently reported acceleration of the social security shortfall.

Increasing interest rates beyond 2008 projected levels are likely to add to the debt beyond what is stated here.

Likely slower GDP growth will increase the percentage of GDP stated here.

Healthcare reform is an attempt to ease the blow of the coming Medicare debt tsunami. While it is possible that this will have some medium-term effect on the debt outlay (to the detriment of healthcare quality, of course), on the contrary it is also quite possible that it will quickly add cost/debt, and regardless, the timing for these changes to take effect will have little impact for several years.

D. Debt Comparison to U.S. GDP

Below is a government-created graph of U.S. public debt (i.e. not including intragovernmental holdings, which bring the current debt total to $11.4 trillion) projections as a percent of GDP through the coming decades.

Graph from a 2008 U.S. Government Accountability Office report

As the above U.S. Government Accountability Office graph is outdated from 2008, here are a few important points to note:

We have already exceeded debt that is 50% of GDP and we are moving quickly past this level given our unexpectedly large current and projected budget deficits.

The data line must be shifted significantly to the left given the recently reported acceleration of the social security shortfall.

Increasing interest rates beyond 2008 projected levels are likely to add to the debt beyond what is stated here.

Likely slower GDP growth will increase the debt percentage of GDP stated here.

2. Foreign countries have experienced their own crises, and they cannot offer added levels of debt funding for the U.S. Even if they could, they are unlikely to do so.

The issuance of U.S. Treasury securities is how the government gets loans to fund its spending activity beyond what it collects in taxes. If you buy a Treasury, you are giving the government a loan, which it has to pay back to you with interest. About half of public-owned government debt is held by foreign creditors.

The 3 most significant U.S. debt holders are Europe (European Union and UK), Japan, and China. Japan and China make-up almost 50% of foreign held U.S. Treasurys at 21% and 24% respectively. It is unlikely that these lenders will continue funding U.S. debt to its requirements.

Largest Holders of U.S. Debt - U.S. Treasury (2009)

The 2 key reasons why the U.S. is losing support from its debt holders are:

Countries are experiencing their own crises and funding (and having trouble funding) their own stimulus
Countries do not like our currency devaluation as it hurts the value of the return on their U.S. Treasury investments.

Take a look at the recent status of the larges U.S. creditors:

Europe

Several EU countries and Russia are significant holders of U.S. debt. All of these countries have their hands full with economic problems in their own countries and with countries for which they are responsible within the EU. Take a look at the current landscape in Europe.

Countries in Europe that have recently collapsed or are on the brink of collapse:

- Iceland (collapsed) - Latvia (collapsed) - Russia (on brink) - Hungary (on brink) - Ukraine (on brink) - Additional Eastern Europe countries (on brink)

In recent time as Eastern European countries have attempted to emerge as viable economies they have become significant borrowers from Western Europe. As Eastern Europe feels pain, the banks and economies of Western Europe feel pain as well.

Failure to save East Europe will lead to worldwide meltdown - Telegraph (2009)

World Agenda: Eastern Europe's economic collapse stalks the West - Times Online (2009)

Eastern Europe's Economic Crash - Business Week (2009)

In addition to Russia's severe economic struggles, they are signaling a move away from the U.S. dollar:

Russia to propose new reserve currency at G20 - Reuters (2009)

Russia Warns Against Relying on Dollar - New York Times (2009)

Russia plans to reduce U.S. Treasury holdings in its reserves - MarketWatch (2009)

While all Western Europe countries are struggling, here are a few noteworthy economic situations currently unfolding:

Britain

Will Britain go bankrupt? - MoneyWeek (2009)

George Soros: Britain may have to seek IMF rescue - Times Online (2009)

Germany

Germany's slump risks 'explosive' mood as second banking crisis looms - The Telegraph (2009)

Spain

Spain's Economic Outlook Grimmest in Europe - New York Times (2009)

Ireland

Is Ireland fated to be another Iceland? - Guardian News (2009)

Celtic Tiger tamed as economy collapses - The Independent (2009)

Ireland is ECB's sacrificial lamb to satisfy German inflation demands - The Telegraph (2009)

Switzerland

Switzerland threatened with bankruptcy - CreditWritedowns (2009)

Japan (holds 21% of foreign held U.S. Treasurys)

Japan: Worst crisis since war's end - CNN (2009)

Japanese exports plunge by nearly 50% - Guardian News (2009)

Japanese GDP falls at biggest rate since 1955 - MSNBC/Associated Press (2009)

China (holds 24% of foreign held U.S. Treasurys)

China is the largest creditor for the U.S. The country is currently growing at close to half the projected pace before the crisis. The lifeblood of their economy (exports) is declining rapidly, and unemployment is rising quickly.

China exports down 25% - Washington Post (2009)

China Puts Joblessness for Migrants at 20 Million - New York Times (2009)

ADB Cuts China 2009 GDP Forecast On Global Crisis - Wall Street Journal (2009)

China is making loud signals about the declining value of their U.S. Treasury holdings, and backing up their words with consistent moves from long-term treasury holdings to short-term treasury holdings. They are also quite vocal about the need for the world to move away from the U.S. dollar to a new global currency.

Wen Voices Concern Over China's U.S. Treasuries - The Wall Street Journal (2009)

China Takes Aim at Dollar - The Wall Street Journal (2009)

China pushes SDR as global super-currency - Reuters (2009)

A 'Copper Standard' for the world's currency system? - The Telegraph (2009)

China's gold reserves jump, making nation No. 5 holder - MarketWatch (2009)

China's central bank frets over Fed bond purchases - MarketWatch (2009)

China's Short-Term Treasury Binge - The Wall Street Journal (2009)

China is quickly diversifying their investments away from the U.S. so that they do not have so much dependence on exports to the U.S. and the declining value of their U.S. Treasury holdings. They are doing this by investing in other country's tangibles and through focusing more on growing their own domestic economy.

China said to mull buying oil with foreign reserves - MarketWatch (2009)

China Starts Investing Globally - New York Times (2009)

China's shopping spree - The Independent (2009)

China overtakes the US as Brazil's largest trading partner - The Telegraph (2009)

Brazil Turns to China to Help Finance Oil Projects - The Wall Street Journal (2009)

Most recent statistics show China's holdings of U.S. Treasurys now likely at nearly half of China's GDP. Given the country's troubled economic situation in the crisis, signals of looking for a U.S. dollar alternative, and the diversification of their investments into other country's tangibles and their own domestic economy, China is not a reliable source for ongoing elevating levels of U.S. debt.

3. Productivity is declining, and everything the government is doing is further hurting productivity.

Economic productivity is were value is created, which enables the government to collect the money it requires (i.e. in the form of taxes) to pay for its spending and debt. Additionally, productivity enables U.S. citizens to grow their savings and makes them more likely to invest the savings in U.S. Treasurys (i.e. debt). In our current situation, not only is productivity declining, but the government is overwhelmingly hurting the ability for productivity to grow at a pace that would allow our debt to be managed.

Signs of declining productivity:

-GDP is declining

-Corporate earnings are down

-Layoffs/unemployment is up

-Productivity centers like automotives and manufacturing suffering

-Venture capital is suffering

-Private equity is suffering

-Mergers & acquisitions (M&A) and IPOs are suffering

-Technology, biotech, and other cutting edge industries are suffering

-Exports are suffering

-Growing population of retiring baby boomers

-Low international competitiveness in education; not in PISA top 20 of math, science and reading

-Personal and business savings are low

-Personal and business debt is stretched

What government is doing to hurt productivity for the long-term:

-Causing regulatory uncertainty through bailouts and changed rules/laws

-Protectionist policies are being implemented

-Tax structure hurts productivity - corp taxes, increases on cap gains, talk of national sales tax, etc.

-Attacking property rights/contracts

-Crowding out investment and industry with special public works projects

-Nationalization of industries - auto, banks, and more to come

-Welfare and unemployment entitlements expansion

-Unionism is getting more government support

-Implementing stifling health care reform

-Economically invalid environmental approach

-Adding equal opportunity laws

4. The U.S. is printing unprecedented, massive amounts of money and no longer has an ability to control inflation and deflation.

There is a common fallacy that the definition of inflation is rising or higher prices. Instead, inflation is actually an increase in the supply of money to a level that devalues the currency's purchasing power. Higher prices are not inflation, but a result of inflation; when there is more money to buy the same amount of stuff, the prices of the stuff rise. Inflation harms the economy as it causes the following:

Errors in economic calculation (organizational planning) for entrepreneurs
Products and services become more expensive before incomes can rise to afford them.
Dilution of the value of the dollar.

As described above, the U.S. cannot rely on other countries' or our own productivity to manage our exorbitant debt. Rather than allowing defaults on this debt, the government is resorting to unprecedented amounts of money printing:

$10.5 trillion committed, $2.7 trillion spent for crisis bailouts
$1.2 trillion Fed balance sheet expansion - expected to expand to $4.5 trillion by September '09. Much of the purchases for this expansion are illiquid, long-term assets that are not easily sold when the money supply needs to be reined in as inflation escalates.
Included is $300 billion dollars for Treasury bond purchases (i.e. quantitative easing) expected to expand to $1 trillion in purchases, especially since interest rates are quickly becoming uncontrollable.

Here is the recent history of the Fed's balance sheet:

Here are the implications for the monetary base:

You may ask yourself why we haven't yet experienced inflation given all this money printing. What is actually happening is we are experiencing less deflation (contraction of the money supply, and appreciation of the dollar) than we otherwise would have without the money printing. Any kind of economic stabilization in the near future would cause the excess reserves (held-back credit) now in the banking system to quickly infiltrate throughout the economy and inflation would ensue. However, it's important to note that economic stabilization is not a requirement for inflation to surface and we could see inflation before any kind of recovery.

Why These 4 Reasons Make the Economy Vulnerable

Imagine if a guy named John took on a bunch of debt above the level of income and potential income that would allow the debt to be paid off. John then tries to float the debt by taking on new debt to pay off old loans hoping eventually he would make enough income to pay off all of the debt - except his income continues to decline. Eventually creditors would not be willing to lend to him and he would default and need to start over.

This is the state of the U.S. government, except for one difference; the government's ability to print money to eventually pay off the debt at a diluted value. However, this makes the government's economic situation worse off than John, who would have defaulted. The below information more directly outlines the current U.S. situation.

Because of the government's bailout philosophy and long-term policy plans, U.S. debt will continue to grow larger. Eventual rising interest rates will add to this debt load.
The debt has to be paid off - If it is not paid off, we will default and collapse.
Productivity and taxes normally pay off debt, but we are becoming less productive and tax revenues are declining rapidly. Also, dramatic tax increases to cover debt are counterproductive to the economy. Even a good case turnaround in productivity is not likely to be enough to service the rapid debt growth.
We are resorting to printing money to pay off the debt, but this devalues the dollar, which hurts our creditors when they are paid back with money of less value than they lent out.
Major creditors, such as China and Russia, are swiftly switching their policies to have less dependence on the U.S. dollar.

These factors alone can cause a flee from the U.S. dollar (i.e. a currency crisis), which would have a catastrophic effect on the economy. In the near term, it is not likely that a given country would make a bold move to run from the dollar as it would hurt their own economy to harm one of their most important customers (i.e. U.S. imports). However, much international tension has built during the crisis that makes the international community more likely to run away from the dollar in the case of an unknown event (e.g. another financial catastrophe, a natural catastrophe, a significant terrorist attack, another war, etc.)

On top of these factors and despite what the mass media is communicating about "green shoots" and economic recovery, the U.S. economic situation is not getting better. There are several economic factors existing and forming that could cause an exacerbation of the current situation to trigger a full breakdown of our economic system.

Status of the Banking System

At the core of our economic system is the banking system. Despite the mass media and government's claims, the banks are in bad shape with significant threats to their survival approaching in the near future:

1. The government's bank stress test results were not good, but still depicted U.S. banks as much healthier than they actually are.

a. The criteria used for the worst case economic scenario was about as bad as the current economic situation, and will most likely be surpassed within the year.

b. Recently changed accounting rules propped up the financial condition of the banks to favor better test results.

c. The banks argued aggressively with the government to release better than actual results so that shareholders and customers would not lose faith.

d. The tests were performed in a short period of time. Past bank stress tests have historically been quite inaccurate, and that is under testing processes performed over significantly longer time periods.

e. The tests focused on 19 banks making up about 70% of the banking industry. The other 30%, which are smaller more localized banks, face different kinds of current and approaching problems.

2. The banks need more capital to survive, hence the government bailouts and capital-raise requirements. The government estimates the banks will need about $600 billion to cover approaching losses. Given this total and the allotment to each loss category, it is highly likely that the estimate will miss the mark by hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. Several significant problems that have not yet hit the banks and were underrepresented in the stress tests are:

a. Residential Mortgages - estimated $1.1 trillion to $2.6 trillion in losses approaching from non-subprime Alt-A and Option ARM mortgages. Take a look at the below Credit Suisse graph to see the magnitude of resets approaching.

b.   Commercial Real Estate - estimated $1 trillion+ losses starting in 2009 through 2013; 60% of commercial real estate lending comes from non-stress-test banks (smaller/regional banks)

c.   Corporate loans and bonds - estimated $390 billion in losses to come

d.   Credit card and auto loans - estimated $350+ billion in losses to come; most of the losses by 2010

e.   Leveraged buyout (LBO) exposure - several hundred billion dollars in likely private equity leveraged buyout losses stemming from $1.4 trillion in deals made in 2006 and 2007

f.   Interest rate swaps (IRS) - these derivatives add several trillion dollars of exposure in the event of volatile and/or rising interest rates.

Note: The TALF and other government programs are supposed to help stifle the blows from the coming residential and commercial real estate losses. However, so far the TALF has been extremely ineffective. Less than $20 billion out of $1 trillion has been activated because the associated underlying assets are not deemed as good investments. Additionally, most of the key approach through these programs is to support the asset-backed securities and to refinance risky loans. The ability to refinance is highly problematic with dramatically declining residential and commercial real estate values, let alone rising interest rates.

The diagram below depicts how the underlying problems are likely to play out within the banking sector, a current linchpin to the U.S. economy.

Diagram 1: Likely Progression of the U.S. Banking Sector and its Economic Impact

Below is further explanation of the above diagram:

Given the banks current conditions and coming wave of losses (residential real estate, commercial real estate, LBOs, etc) described above the diagram, the banks will likely need to be nationalized as the government will not allow them to collapse.
This will be done by converting bank debt to equity and diluting non-government shareholders.
This does not remove the underlying asset and capitalization problems. Instead, the government will print money and take on more debt to cover the losses.
The money printing and increased debt supply will cause a natural rise in interest rates (i.e. to drive demand to buy U.S. debt) and decline of the dollar. If higher interest rates stifle the ensuing inflation, they will also further hurt the economy (e.g. causes more defaults, harder for lending, etc). If inflation continues despite higher interest rates, hyper-inflation is likely to ensue causing an economic collapse.

Other Noteworthy Factors

California (13% of U.S. GDP), New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and other states are having multi-billion dollar budget deficit problems because of rapidly declining tax revenue and over-spending. If this doesn't lead to further bailouts (and therefore more money printing and/or debt), their infrastructures and economies will further breakdown before a leaner spending structure can emerge.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has a $33.5 billion dollar deficit (tripled in the last six months). They also estimate that the auto sector has $77 billion in underfunded liabilities, with $42 billion not funded at all. Pension breakdown is likely to continue to rise with state pension stress rising and as the auto sector triggers additional pension cancellation in other sectors.
Obviously rising unemployment, expiring unemployment benefits, prematurely rising interest rates, rising oil prices, and a weakening stock market will only exacerbate and add to the banking and broader economic problems outlined.

The banking and economic conditions, combined with the U.S. debt situation and money-printing practices, can lead to economic breakdown or more money printing to stave off the economic breakdown. The latter is the more likely case given the government's economic philosophy and direction during the crisis. However, this strategy only delays the inevitable as the underlying problems still exist. The resulting catch-22 of inflation and rising interest rates are what can cause catastrophe.

The economic dangers of inflation were touched on in an earlier section, but there are also several significant economic dangers of spiking interest rates:

Loans (personal and business) based on adjustable rates are more likely to default or become more difficult to service.
People and businesses are less likely to borrow or be able to borrow, which can actually be a good thing, but slows the economy in the short-term.
The interest on budget deficits and the national debt increases, adding significantly to the country's debt load.
Interest rate swaps (i.e. hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives) run risk of default.

The U.S. interest rate and inflation conundrum is unavoidable as debt is too large, productivity is too low, and money printing is our way of remedying the situation. The U.S. is vulnerable to an economic collapse through spiking interest rates, extremely high inflation (i.e. hyperinflation), or both spiking interest rates and extremely high inflation. The below diagram depicts the dangerous spiral.

Diagram 2: Inflationary Spiral Toward Collapse

Unprecedented Situation

Because of America's great history and foundations of patriotism, many have said that we've been through this before, the country is resilient, we've always figured it out, and we will again. Positive thinking can certainly work wonders, but it is also important to not let it cloud the logic behind the critical nature of the current U.S. situation. The U.S. has been a great country, but history shows that even great countries can fail.

As the first several graphs on this page depict, the U.S. is in a situation of unprecedented debt, deficits, and money printing. Additionally, the recent economic crisis has triggered problems in several sectors, and there are new, large problems on the horizon. All of this while policy direction shows little sign of an ability to fuel significant economic growth that might solve U.S. debt problems and cushion the coming economic blows.

The comparison has been made of our current situation to Japan's "lost decade" or the U.S. Great Depression with the assumption that this crisis likely can't exceed the pain of those periods. However, there are many differences in today's U.S. economic situation that remove much of the relevance of a comparison. Aside from these differences, key underlying factors that spared Japan and the U.S. from a severe economic collapse were:

Japan had high savings rates and high demand for their exports (core to their economy) from healthy countries elsewhere. Although Japan did not experience a severe collapse, 20 years later their stock market is still around 80% lower than its peak before their crisis and they are experiencing continued economic stagnation.
In the Great Depression and different from today's status, the U.S. had:
1. High savings rates
2. Excellent productivity increases to fuel the move out of the depression
3. Countries with the wherewithal to purchase a strong base of exports from a key producer
4. No weighty entitlement programs hanging over to add gargantuan debt levels to large preexisting debt
5. High proportion of high character citizens that were not reliant on entitlement programs and better knew the value of hard work

Scenarios for the U.S. economy:

The conditions described to this point are enough to cause a severe economic catastrophe. However, the recent crisis combined with the current monetary policy direction, add extra elements to the equation that make catastrophe more likely.

Scenarios #1 and #2 below both stem from the Fed's plan to inflate (increase the money supply to cover the output gap) its way out of the crisis and eventually pull back the money supply once the economy begins to grow. The Fed knows it must rein in the money supply once growth begins, because if they do not, inflation will become uncontrollable. It is important to note that this has never worked in the past without experiencing heavy economic pain. However, the main problem with the Fed's current situation (unlike past crises and inflationary periods) is that they have virtually no ability to pull back. The Fed cannot effectively sell its balance sheet assets to rein in the money supply because:

The political nature of the assets they have purchased and are propping up
The long-term nature of the assets they have purchased
The political nature of forcing interest rates up to appropriate levels

Even if they could sell off significant enough levels of balance sheet assets and increase interest rates to rein in money, an economic breakdown would follow because of the newly removed support of the latest grown asset bubbles within the economy.

Here are possible scenarios for the U.S. economy:

Scenario #1: Hyperinflation

Hyperinflation is the dramatic devaluing of the currency in the case of a mishandled money supply increases by the central bank. This has happened many times in many countries in recent and distant history, and is most likely when a country has a fiat money system (currency backed by no assets), a lack of confidence in the government, and significant national debt that the country cannot manage to service. To understand the conditions that lead to hyperinflation and the results that stem from it take a look at the hyperinflation periods experienced by Zimbabwe, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and others. Once hyperinflation begins, government tools used to fight it may stop the process, but deep economic pain is not avoided. As outlined at the beginning of this section, the Fed has put itself in a unique situation in which these tools are unlikely to be effective.

Scenario #2: Deflationary spiral

As the Fed continues to put trash onto its balance sheet (which it has continually done during this crisis) and prices rise from inflation, there can come a point where the collapsing asset prices of the Fed's purchases will cause a panic for lenders (people and countries) to sell those assets at the highest possible price - getting their dollars back before the asset prices fall. As the economy prior to this scenario will be in pain from higher prices, there will be no production to replace the perceived value of the Fed balance sheet. The Fed will not be able to meet this elevated demand. Dollars would be quickly sucked out of the market causing them to spike in value (the opposite of inflation). Global currencies in turn collapse with the increase of the dollar and exports are halted. Locally, as the dollar rises dramatically, prices collapse and borrowing is stopped making the economy motionless. [Arbitrary Vote came aware of this particular deflationary scenario through an article by Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker blog]

Scenario #3: Long term stagnation and economic deterioration

The government's bailout and money printing policies distort pricing, hinder economic calculation, perpetually increase interest rates, cause fascist corruption, and leave no ability for genuine economic productivity to increase as entrepreneurs and businesses are discouraged from participating in the economy. Ultimately this is likely to create an environment that makes one of the above collapse scenarios more likely, but stagnation and slow decline can last for many years if not decades.

Scenario #4: Another economic boom and more dramatic bust

In the unlikely event that the Federal Reserve succeeds at credit expansion to turn the economy back to significant growth, the new growth will be based on the same artificial fundamentals as our recent two bubbles - the dot com bubble and the housing bubble. A new bubble would be larger and more far reaching than ever and would burst harder than ever, sure to break what should have been allowed to break during the last two bursts, but with added problems from the most recent government remedies.

Scenario #5: War

The worst case scenario, and hopefully the least likely, is war. Throughout history times of economic stress have spurred on wars for various reasons (protectionism, government breakdown and disorder, desperation, the belief that it is an economic net positive, etc).

Scenario #6: Sudden revolutionary breakthrough to avoid collapse

All of the above scenarios are doom and gloom scenarios. Unfortunately that is the reality of the situation. However, there is a reason for hope no matter how unlikely this scenario may be to transpire. A revolutionary breakthrough, similar in economic magnitude to the industrial revolution or the information revolution, could ignite powerful, genuine growth that would allow the U.S. to grow its way out of its dire circumstances. We have no way of knowing if this will take place, but a couple possibilities might be an artificial intelligence revolution or a breakthrough in a ubiquitous energy source, such as cold fusion.

Warning Signs and Triggers to Monitor to Foresee a Collapse Before it Happens

One event or a combination of several events can signal or trigger an economic collapse. Below are several events to keep an eye on to gauge the likelihood of a collapse:

An strong increase of treasury yields/interest rates - 10-year bonds are used to set mortgage rates. The Fed has tried to suppress these rates through expanding the Fed balance sheet and quantitative easing. Rates dropped shortly after announcing their plans, but have risen against their will since. A strong move above 4 or 5% on the 10-year yield could signal the abandonment of faith in U.S. Treasurys, or the ability for the U.S. to pay back the loans with money of held value. A spike in this rate can trigger a run on treasuries and a stifling of the economy. Additionally, the 1-month T-bill spiking above the current 0-.25% level could have a harmful effect.

A failed treasury auction - Throughout the year, the Fed holds auctions to sell Treasurys so that it may borrow money to fund the budget deficit. There can come a time when the supply of those Treasurys is so high and demand for them so low that not all treasuries offered are sold. This is a failed auction. We have already had a few auctions this year that did not fail, but interest rates on the treasuries had to be raised to entice people to participate, which sends signals that U.S. debt is not very attractive. If an auction were to fail, the consequences could be a run on the U.S. dollar.

A U.S. debt rating downgrade - The credit ratings agencies (Moody's, S&P, Fitch) rate U.S. treasurys just as they would any loan. The U.S. has long held a AAA rating on its debt. A downgrade of the U.S. credit rating would send a loss of confidence to its creditors and potential creditors which could cause rates to rise and an abandonment of the dollar.

A strong drop in the U.S. dollar index - A declining value of the U.S. dollar is a sign that inflation (the increase in the supply of money) is increasing and confidence is being lost in the currency. A strong dip in value could cause an abandonment of the dollar.

A bank holiday - Although unlikely given the potential for bank nationalization, a bank holiday could be ordered if the government believes the public has lost confidence in the banks and fears a run on the bank deposits. Bank business would be halted for a day or so to allow the government to absorb or prepare for potential losses.

Bank nationalization - Given the high probability of U.S. banks experiencing losses beyond existing losses and those projected through the stress tests, the government has put in place triggers to convert bank debt to equity. This is the technical way of saying that the government is taking increased ownership in the banks under the premise that it will instill confidence and health in the banking system. This process will be accompanied with the announcement that the ownership will only be temporary, but the magnitude of the situation makes this highly unlikely. As Diagram 1 above depicts, nationalization does not solve the underlying problems and can lead to a worsened economic situation.

Another economic boom - If a collapse does not happen first, eventually the Fed's massive money printing and credit expansion could artificially boost economic indicators and GDP. Given the likelihood that this would reach all parts of the economy (i.e. rather than just housing or a given sector) the size of the unjustified over-investment could lead to a much more powerful and deep economic bust.

Other economic signs and triggers - In conjunction and in addition to the signs and triggers outlined above, significant stress in the following economic areas could contribute to or trigger an economic collapse:

Commercial real estate defaults
Alt-A and Option ARM residential mortgage defaults
Credit cards and auto loan default increases
Life insurance company struggles from falling stock market
Private equity problems from past leveraged buyouts
Retail struggles
Oil prices rising
Food shortages from recent record droughts around the world
Default on commodities futures contracts
Interest rate swap defaults from rising interest rates
Pension collapse
Corporate bond defaults
Municipal bond defaults
State fiscal collapses
Collapse of Eastern European countries or other countries to spur contagion

Unknown disaster - Other events that could trigger economic turmoil in the economy's vulnerable state are:

Natural disaster (hurricane, earthquake, flooding, pandemic, etc)
Unnatural disaster (terrorist attack, escalation of international tensions such as Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, etc)

What Can Result From an Economic Collapse?

Imagine if the money you have in your savings account, checking account, or U.S. treasurys, which you thought were all safe places save your hard-earned money, lost half or even 90% of their value overnight. This is exactly what can happen in our current situation. This can have a catastrophic effect on the economy and social well-being.

Further economic deterioration leads to rising unemployment. Unemployment benefits eventually run out. The government has added an extension to unemployment benefits, but hundreds of thousands of people are passing the time limit of the extension. People will have devalued dollars and in many cases no income or hope of income at all.

Historically this type of financial stress on a mass basis often leads to civil unrest. In an extreme economic crisis, unrest is possible in the U.S. because of:

General desperation from extreme financial hardship
Racial tensions because Obama ratings may drop and blame could be placed – Various races may attempt to place blame on one another.
Class tension because of a large percentage of the population receiving entitlements and bailouts (handouts) while producing nothing. Entitlement and bailout outlays are increasing while ability to produce/create is decreasing.
Class tension because handouts will eventually have to be cut back which will cause more stress and anger
Class tension because of the mass perception of corporate and executive greed

Ideas for Preparation

With so many possibilities of how the U.S. economic situation can play out, it is difficult to know exactly how to prepare. Below are some ideas that may be helpful as you evaluate your own personal situation.

Protect your finances

A major challenge will be to protect your finances, especially since the normal safe-havens of treasurys, money markets, and cash are no longer safe. Verify what has been written within this webpage with other sources and evaluate your own situation accordingly. Arbitrary Vote is not offering investment advice, but here are a few ideas to help you think about such an unfamiliar situation:

Don't play the stock market unless you are intimately familiar with the economic situation and investing. There will be continued extreme volatility in the markets and a lot of known and unknown triggers for industries to collapse, while very few winners will emerge. PE ratios are still quite high. The stock market will rise if there is inflation, but the business and currency values won't. For example, Zimbabwe had the greatest performing stock market in the world during their hyperinflation, yet their economy was in complete collapse.
Diversify your investments. Precious metals such as gold and silver are strong with uncertainties in inflation, government, and currencies. Have at least a little gold and silver in your house as a safety fund. Also various other commodities do well in economic crises. Food/agriculture commodities could be a nice idea as they usually do quite well in inflationary environments, and food shortages are likely to be prevalent in the near future as recent major droughts and population growth are effecting food supply and demand.
Minimize your fixed income investment exposure, such as money markets, CD's, savings accounts, or U.S. Treasurys. The amount of money you have in cash should be minimal and as liquid as possible so that you can move money to safer places in anticipation of a crisis. Note that you want to try to figure out where to put your money before the crisis happens, as once it happens, it will be too late as your money will have already lost its value.
If you have significant debt, there are two sides to the payoff argument. One side says pay off debt as quickly as possible so that you don't run the risk of it becoming more expensive in a deflationary environment or with rising interest rates. The other side says don't feel the need to pay off quickly as debt becomes cheaper for you as inflation kicks in; plus the government's policy moves are likely to eventually give your debt relief anyway. Evaluate your unique personal situation and come to the best conclusion for yourself.
If relevant, get pension dollars as quickly as possible, or at least a strong understanding of your pension's status and funding source. Pensions are extremely pained and may not be reliable sources of income.
If relevant, accelerate receiving social security payments. Social security is extremely pained and a run can be made on it. Additionally, the government is likely to decrease payment amount and extend the point at which benefits may be claimed. Aside from the payment amount decreasing, the value of the dollar amount will decrease because of inflation.
Thinking of buying a house? Housing prices may still have a long way to go down for the following reasons:

Foreclosures are still rising.

Another heavy wave of defaults is on the way from non-subprime Option ARM and Alt-A mortgages.

In many cases where the Option ARM and Alt-A problems don't cause foreclosure, they will cause early sales that will add to inventory and/or push prices down further.

Many are leaving major residential real-estate states such as California, Florida, Michigan, New York, etc adding to inventory and/or hurting prices in those areas.

Layoffs are continuing.

Interest/mortgage rates are rising.

Loans are harder to get considering interest rates and bank reluctance.

The government's activity is artificially propping up housing prices (even though prices are still declining).

The banks will eventually have to start moving foreclosed assets off of their books at lower prices or they will face bankruptcy/nationalization. Both scenarios are not good for housing prices.

This means lowered demand and excess and increasing supply. This translates to falling prices that will take a long time to bottom with a slow turnaround after the bottom. Keep in mind that after Japan's housing bubble and bust in the 80's, housing prices are still about 80% lower than they were at their peak.

This does not mean there aren't still a few decent buys out there. Be sure people are moving to and not away from the area where you are buying, and viewing the purchase as a long-term living investment (as opposed to a 2 or 3 year flip) will likely be your best bet. After all, houses are real and valuable assets that act as shelter and will still be standing even if the surrounding economy takes an unprecedented dive.

Other preparation measures to think through

Protect yourself and your family
Be aware of increasing crime
Self-defense skills could be valuable
Owning a gun may be valuable
A stock of extra preservable food
Communication plans and meeting plans with your family in case of emergency
Evaluate your city or region and its demographics, government, and economic situation. An accessible second home or family/friend home as a retreat may be valuable depending on where you live. Additionally, it may make sense to begin evaluating your country in a similar manner. Aside from the potential future safety issues in the U.S., you may be surprised to hear that the country ranks 6th on The Heritage Foundation & Wall Street Journal's Index of Economic Freedom and 36th on the Reporters Without Borders' 2008 Press Freedom Index.
Educate yourself - Understanding the situation and the potential outcomes is a major step toward proper preparation. Don't take this website's word for it. Compare mainstream and non-mainstream media and information sources and look at the facts yourself. Investigate economics, political, and financial books, blogs, and websites. A few suggestions are: Meltdown by Tom Woods, Peter Schiff books and blogs, Jim Rogers books and blogs, Ron Paul books and blogs, Mises.org, etc.

Some of these measures may sound extreme. All of it may not be necessary. However, in this environment, being mentally and physically prepared for the worst case scenario is a wise strategy as anything less, but potentially still harmful, will be easier to deal with.

If you have any questions, thoughts, opinions, ideas, or helpful information, feel free to post or discuss them within the forum. Updates based on new information and the evolving situation will be posted at the bottom of this webpage.

Note: All of the graphs within this report are cited. In the interest of time, much of the other statistics are not. Arbitrary Vote is happy to provide citations and background information on any of this information at your request.

UPDATE: Hope and Solutions

Before and since posting this “Warning” page, a few private comments have been submitted claiming that Arbitrary Vote harps about the problems of the world, but does not offer hope through proposed solutions.
If you dig deeper within several of the main pages of the website (e.g. industry regulation, healthcare, climate change, etc.) you will find suggestions for solutions; there will be more to come. While specifics are mentioned, the overriding theme of the solution ideas is that it is impossible to find all solutions through one person or single group of people (e.g. the government). Instead, free markets will offer the widest range of possibilities to most efficiently find the best solutions.
Hope lies in the next blossoming of this approach just as it has blossomed many times in world history to provide the greatest periods of economic growth and improvements in living standards our species has ever experienced. The application of this approach includes, but is not limited to: fixing healthcare, solving global warming, regulating the economy, regulating industries, minimizing hunger, etc. It is a system of freedom based on the merit of individuals and their rights to their own private property. It produces the many ideas that improve our living standards and chances of survival as a species.
As it stands, the government is swiftly building on its monopoly on ideas and property, while its citizenry stands by believing it will fashion them into the right solutions. It is implementing a system that has failed every time attempted throughout history. Not only has it failed to produce, but it has ended painfully in all instances. The magnitude of its reach and momentum is overwhelming to any individual wanting it to change. This can easily drain hope from all who realize this.
The Arbitrary Vote website is alerting you of the truth behind the causes and consequences of the problems we face; the biggest problem being our society’s approach to solving problems. It is not up to Arbitrary Vote to find the specific solutions. It is up to each of us, not as a government, but as individuals, to think, work, and create them. This is what has worked in the past, and this is real reason for hope.
With that said, it helps to clearly understand the inherent problems of government, the superior potential of following sound economic principals, and why these contradicting forces make it unlikely to solve major problems. Aside from the introduction to these concepts that Arbitrary Vote provides, deeper understanding can be found through Mises.org, Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, and other suggested organizations, books, and blogs dispersed throughout this website and beyond.
One can live their life each day blindly hoping problems will be solved and things will get better by means of their government. They may be sorely disappointed as have the many in the past who have taken the same route. Wouldn’t your hope be better founded if you took the action to solve the problem yourself?

http://www.arbitraryvote.com/

The U.S. is the most prosperous nation on earth. Prosperity has led to the comfort of its citizens. Mainstream media and government have long been the predominant channels for educating the broad public on affairs that directly affect their lives. What they communicate is generally what is believed and accepted.

Arbitrary Vote aims to provide to its readers an alert about the direct and underlying causes of America's economic troubles while elucidating the consequences of leaving the country's current direction unchanged.
Few of the concepts within this website are new, but are seldom heard by the broad public. While the presentation of concepts is simple, the website allows readers to dig deeper toward background facts and theory that elaborate on simplified statements. Additionally, the community nature of the website enables interaction and debate around the issues, which certainly can influence the core website content.

The Population Reduction Agenda For Dummies

2009-06-27T18:38:00.002+01:00

The elite agenda for global population control is not a “conspiracy theory,” it is on the record and documented

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

There are still large numbers of people amongst the general public, in academia, and especially those who work for the corporate media, who are still in denial about the on-the-record stated agenda for global population reduction, as well as the consequences of this program that we already see unfolding.

We have compiled a compendium of evidence to prove that the elite have been obsessed with eugenics and its modern day incarnation, population control, for well over 100 years and that goal of global population reduction is still in full force to this day.

The World’s Elite Are Discussing Population Reduction

As was reported only last month by the London Times, a “secret billionaire club” meeting in early May which took place in New York and was attended by David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Bill Gates and others was focused around “how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population”.

We questioned establishment media spin which portrayed the attendees as kind-hearted and concerned philanthropists by pointing out that Ted Turner has publicly advocated shocking population reduction programs that would cull the human population by a staggering 95%. He has also called for a Communist-style one child policy to be mandated by governments in the west. In China, the one child policy is enforced by means of taxes on each subsequent child, allied to an intimidation program which includes secret police and “family planning” authorities kidnapping pregnant women from their homes and performing forced abortions.

Of course, Turner completely fails to follow his own rules on how everyone else should live their lives, having five children and owning no less than 2 million acres of land.

In the third world, Turner has contributed literally billions to population reduction, namely through United Nations programs, leading the way for the likes of Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet (Gates’ father has long been a leading board member of Planned Parenthood and a top eugenicist).

The notion that these elitists merely want to slow population growth in order to improve health is a complete misnomer. Slowing the growth of the world’s population while also improving its health are two irreconcilable concepts to the elite. Stabilizing world population is a natural byproduct of higher living standards, as has been proven by the stabilization of the white population in the west. Elitists like David Rockefeller have no interest in “slowing the growth of world population” by natural methods, their agenda is firmly rooted in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is all about “culling” the surplus population via draconian methods.

David Rockefeller’s legacy is not derived from a well-meaning “philanthropic” urge to improve health in third world countries, it is born out of a Malthusian drive to eliminate the poor and those deemed racially inferior, using the justification of social Darwinism.

As is documented in Alex Jones’ seminal film Endgame, Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller, exported eugenics to Germany from its origins in Britain by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich’s ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top German eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their “expertise” in the post-war world.

As Dr. Len Horowitz writes, “In the 1950s, the Rockefellers reorganized the U.S. eugenics movement in their own family offices, with spinoff population-control and abortion groups. The Eugenics Society changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology, its current name.”

“The Rockefeller Foundation had long financed the eugenics movement in England, apparently repaying Britain for the fact that British capital and an Englishman-partner had started old John D. Rockefeller out in his Oil Trust. In the 1960s, the Eugenics Society of England adopted what they called Crypto-eugenics, stating in their official reports that they would do eugenics through means and instruments not labeled as eugenics.”

“With support from the Rockefellers, the Eugenics Society (England) set up a sub-committee called the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which for 12 years had no other address than the Eugenics Society. This, then, is the private, international apparatus which has set the world up for a global holocaust, under the UN flag.”

In the latter half of the 20th century, eugenics merely changed its face to become known as “population control”. This was crystallized in National Security Study Memorandum 200, a 1974 geopolitical strategy document prepared by Rockefeller’s intimate friend and fellow Bilderberg member Henry Kissinger, which targeted thirteen countries for massive population reduction by means of creating food scarcity, sterilization and war.

Henry Kissinger: In the now declassified 1974 document, National Security Memorandum 200, Kissinger outlines the plan to use food scarcity as a weapon in order to achieve population reduction in lesser-developed countries.

The document, declassified in 1989, identified 13 countries that were of special interest to U.S. geopolitical objectives and outlined why population growth, and particularly that of young people who were seen as a revolutionary threat to U.S. corporations, was a potential roadblock to achieving these objectives. The countries named were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

The study outlined how civil disturbances affecting the “smooth flow of needed materials” would be less likely to occur “under conditions of slow or zero population growth.”

“Development of a worldwide political and popular commitment to population stabilization is fundamental to any effective strategy. This requires the support and commitment of key LDC leaders. This will only take place if they clearly see the negative impact of unrestricted population growth and believe it is possible to deal with this question through governmental action,” states the document.

The document called for integrating “family planning” (otherwise known as abortion) with routine health services for the purposes of “curbing the numbers of LDC people,” (lesser-developed countries).

The report shockingly outlines how withholding food could be used as a means of punishment for lesser-developed countries who do not act to reduce their population, essentially using food as a weapon for a political agenda by creating mass starvation in under-developed countries.

“The allocation of scarce PL480 (food) resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production,” states the document.

Later in the document, the idea of enforcing “mandatory programs” by using food as “an instrument of national power” is presented.

The document states that the program will be administered through the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), thereby “avoiding the danger that some LDC leaders will see developed-country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.”

As Jean Guilfoyle writes, “NSSM 200 was a statement composed after the fact. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. had worked diligently behind the scenes to advance the population-control agenda at the United Nations, contributing the initial funding of $1 million.

A Department of State telegram, dated July 1969, reported the support of John D. Rockefeller III, among others, for the appointment of Rafael Salas of the Philippines as senior officer to co-ordinate and administer the UN population program. The administrator of the UN Development Program reported confidentially that he preferred someone such as Salas who had the “advantage of color, religion (Catholic) and conviction.”

A comprehensive outline of what is contained in the National Security Memorandum document can be read at http://www.theinterim.com/july98/20nssm.html

Evidence of the actual consequences of this program can be found with the link between vaccines and sterilization, as well as other diseases such as cancer, in both the west and the third world.

In the following video clip, after an introduction by Alex Jones, women of the Akha tribe who live predominately in Thailand, describe how they miscarried shortly after taking vaccines when they were eight months pregnant. The videos below highlight the efforts of supporters of the Akha tribe to get answers from the University of Oregon and the United Nations, who provided funding for the vaccination and sterilization programs.

Further evidence of the link between vaccinations, birth control, cancer and other diseases can be researched here.

In the 21st century, the eugenics movement has changed its stripes once again, manifesting itself through the global carbon tax agenda and the notion that having too many children or enjoying a reasonably high standard of living is destroying the planet through global warming, creating the pretext for further regulation and control over every facet of our lives.

As we have tirelessly documented, the elite’s drive for population control is not based around a benign philanthropic urge to improve living standards, it is firmly routed in eugenics, racial hygiene and fascist thinking.

The London Times reports that the secret billionaire cabal, with its interest in population reduction, has been dubbed ‘The Good Club’ by insiders. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyone who takes the time to properly research the origins of the “population control” movement will come to understand that the Rockefeller-Turner-Gates agenda for drastic population reduction, which is now clearly manifesting itself through real environmental crises like chemtrails, genetically modified food, tainted vaccines and other skyrocketing diseases such as cancer, has its origins in the age-old malevolent elitist agenda to cull the human “chattel” as one would do to rodents or any other species deemed a nuisance by the central planning authorities.

Sterilization And Eugenics Returns In Popular Culture

We are now seeing the return of last century’s eugenicist movement through the popular promotion of sterilization as a method of birth control.

A popular women’s magazine in the UK recently featured an article entitled, Young, Single and Sterilized, in which women in their 20’s discussed why they had undergone an operation to prevent them from ever having children. The article is little more than PR for a “women’s charity” called Marie Stopes International, an organization that carries out abortions and sterilizations and was founded by a Nazi eugenicist who advocated compulsory sterilization of non-whites and “those of bad character”.

In the article, sterilization is lauded as an “excellent method of birth control” by Dr. Patricia Lohr of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

The article includes an advertisement that encourages women to seek “more information about sterilization” by contacting Marie Stopes International. We read that, “Over the past year, a quarter of the women who booked a sterilisation consultation with women’s charity Marie Stopes were aged 30 or under.”

Marie Stopes was a feminist who opened the first birth control clinic in Britain in 1921 as well as being Nazi sympathizer and a eugenicist who advocated that non-whites and the poor be sterilized.

Stopes, a racist and an anti-Semite, campaigned for selective breeding to achieve racial purity, a passion she shared with Adolf Hitler in adoring letters and poems that she sent the leader of the Third Reich.

Stopes also attended the Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935, while calling for the “compulsory sterilization of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character.” Stopes acted on her appalling theories by concentrating her abortion clinics in poor areas so as to reduce the birth rate of the lower classes.

Stopes left most of her estate to the Eugenics Society, an organization that shared her passion for racial purity and still exists today under the new name The Galton Institute. The society has included members such as Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the evolutionist), Julian Huxley and Margaret Sanger.

Marie Stopes, the Nazi and pioneering eugenicist who sent love letters to Hitler, honored recently by the Royal Mail.

Ominously, The Galton Institute website promotes its support and funding initiative for “the practical delivery of family planning facilities, especially in developing countries.” In other words, the same organization that once advocated sterilizing black people to achieve racial purity in the same vein as the Nazis is now bankrolling abortions of black babies in the third world.

While the issue of abortion is an entirely different argument, most would agree that no matter how extreme it sounds, a woman has the right to sterilize herself if she so chooses, just as a man has the right to a vasectomy.

But when a magazine aimed primarily at young women all but encourages girls as young as 20 to have their fallopian tubes tied in order to prevent the “irritation” of children entering their lives and then advertises an organization founded by a Nazi eugenicist that can perform the operation, something has to be amiss.

Even more shocking than this is the fact that the majority of people in the UK routinely express their support for society’s “undesirables” to be forcibly sterilized by the state, harking back to a time when such a thing was commonplace right up to the 1970’s in some areas of America and Europe.

As we highlighted at the time, respondents to a Daily Mail article about Royal Mail honoring Marie Stopes by using her image on a commemorative stamp were not disgusted at Royal Mail for paying homage to a racist Nazi eugenicist, but were merely keen to express their full agreement that those deemed not to be of pure genetic stock or of the approved character should be forcibly sterilized and prevented from having children.

“A lot of people should be sterilized, IMO. It’s still true today,” wrote one.

“Just imagine what a stable, well-ordered society we’d have if compulsory sterilisation had been adopted years ago for the socially undesirable,” states another respondent, calling for a “satellite-carried sterilisation ray” to be installed in space to zap the undesirables.

Shockingly, another compares sterilization and genocide of those deemed inferior to the breeding and culling of farmyard animals, and says that such a move is necessary to fight overpopulation and global warming. Here is the comment in full from “Karen” in Wales;

We breed farm animals to produce the best possible stock and kill them when they have fulfilled their purpose. We inter-breed pedigree animals to produce extremes that leave them open to ill-health and early death. It is only religion that says humans are not animals. The reality is that we are simply intelligent, mammalian primates.

The world population of humans has increased from 2 billion to 6.5 billion in the last 50 years. This planet can support 2 billion humans comfortably. 6.5 billion humans use too many resources and leads to global warming, climate change and a very uncertain future for all of us - humans and all other life sharing this planet with us.

Marie Stopes believed in population control and in breeding the best possible humans. So did Hitler. Neither of the aims are bad in themselves. It is how they are achieved that is the problem. The fact that we still remember Marie Stopes is an achievement in itself.

The nature of these comments is so fundamentally sick and twisted that one is tempted to dismiss them as a joke - but these people are deadly serious. Presumably they would also agree with China’s one child policy, which is routinely enforced by intimidation as young pregnant women are grabbed off the streets by state goons and taken to hospitals where forced abortions are carried out.

Now with popular women’s magazines advising women in their 20’s where they can go to be sterilized and ensure a lifetime of partying and carefree sex, it’s no surprise that experts predict that by 2010 one in four western women will be child free for life.

The yearning to have children is the most beautiful, natural and innate emotion either a man or a woman can possibly experience. That is not to say that it’s always wrong for some people not to have children - extreme circumstances can justify such a decision. But to have yourself sterilized because you find children to be an “irritant” and want to live a life free of responsibility or consequences is an awful message to send to young women, especially in the sex-saturated entertainment culture that we are now forced to endure.

Furthermore, the outright promotion of Marie Stopes International as ‘the place to go’ to get sterilized if you’re under 30 is stomach-churning considering the fact that the origins of this organization can be found in Nazi ideology, racist and backward early 20th century eugenics and a long-standing agenda to cull the population of undesirables, an abhorrent belief still held by elites across the planet today.

Genocidal Population Reduction Programs Embraced By Academia

One such individual who embraces the notion that humans are a virus that should be wiped out en masse for the good of mother earth is Dr. Eric R. Pianka, an American biologist based at the University of Texas in Austin.

Dr Erik Pianka, the American biologist who advocated the mass genocide of 90% of the human race and was applauded by his peers.

During a speech to the Texas Academy of Science in March 2006, Pianka advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the world’s population through the airborne ebola virus. The reaction from scores of top scientists and professors in attendance was not one of shock or revulsion - they stood and applauded Pianka’s call for mass genocide.

Pianka’s speech was ordered to be kept off the record before it began as cameras were turned away and hundreds of students, scientists and professors sat in attendance.

Saying the public was not ready to hear the information presented, Pianka began by exclaiming, “We’re no better than bacteria!”, as he jumped into a doomsday malthusian rant about overpopulation destroying the earth.

Standing in front of a slide of human skulls, Pianka gleefully advocated airborne ebola as his preferred method of exterminating the necessary 90% of humans, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period. Ebola victims suffer the most tortuous deaths imaginable as the virus kills by liquefying the internal organs. The body literally dissolves as the victim writhes in pain bleeding from every orifice.

Pianka then cited the Peak Oil fraud as another reason to initiate global genocide. “And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.”

Later, the scientist welcomed the potential devastation of the avian flu virus and spoke glowingly of China’s enforced one child policy, before zestfully commenting, “We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth.”

At the end of Pianka’s speech the audience erupted not to a chorus of boos and hisses but to a raucous reception of applause and cheers as audience members clambered to get close to the scientist to ask him follow up questions. Pianka was later presented with a distinguished scientist award by the Academy. Pianka is no crackpot. He has given lectures to prestigious universities worldwide.

Indeed, the notion that the earth’s population needs to be drastically reduced is a belief shared almost unanimously by academics across the western hemisphere.

In 2002, The Melbourne Age reported on newly uncovered documents detailing Nobel Peace Prize winning microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet’s plan to help the Australian government develop biological weapons for use against Indonesia and other “overpopulated” countries of South-East Asia.

From the article;

Sir Macfarlane recommended in a secret report in 1947 that biological and chemical weapons should be developed to target food crops and spread infectious diseases. His key advisory role on biological warfare was uncovered by Canberra historian Philip Dorling in the National Archives in 1998.

“Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions,” Sir Macfarlane said.

The Victorian-born immunologist, who headed the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1960. He died in 1985 but his theories on immunity and “clonal selection” provided the basis for modern biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Controversy surrounding the comments of another darling of scientific academia, geneticist James Watson, who told a Sunday Times newspaper interviewer that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites, should come as no surprise to those who are aware of Watson’s role in pushing the dark pseudo-science of eugenics.

Watson told the interviewer that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”.

Watson was the Head of the Human Genome Project until 1992 and is best known for his contribution to the discovery of DNA, an achievement that won him the Nobel Peace prize in 1962.

But what most people are unaware of is the fact that Watson has played an integral role in advancing the legitimacy of the eugenics/population reduction movement for decades.

Watson is a strong proponent of genetic screening, a test to determine whether a couple is at increased risk of having a baby with a hereditary genetic disorder.

Since such screening obviously increases the rate of abortions of babies considered “imperfect,” many have slammed its introduction as nothing more than a camouflage for eugenics or “voluntary eugenics” as British philosophy professor Philip Kitcher labeled it.

Watson’s advocacy of genetic engineering stretched to his call for the “really stupid” bottom 10% of people to be “cured”.

Watson even urged woman to be given carte blanche to abort babies should tests determine that they are likely to be homosexual, despite the vast body of evidence indicating homosexuality is a result of environment rather than genetic code.

The geneticist has gone so far as to promote the idea of creating a kind of Nazi super-race, where the attractive and physically strong are genetically manufactured under laboratory conditions.

“People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great,” said Watson.

Dr. Erik Pianka’s doomsday warning of the population bomb, for which he presented no evidence whatsoever, is complete pseudo-science. Populations in developed countries are declining and only in third world countries are they expanding dramatically. Industrialization itself levels out population trends and aside from this, world population models routinely show that the earth’s population will level out at 9 billion in 2050 and slowly decline after that. “The population of the most developed countries will remain virtually unchanged at 1.2 billion until 2050,” states a United Nations report. Conservation International’s own study revealed that 46% of the earth’s surface was an untouched wilderness, that is land areas not including sea.

Think about the magnitude of Pianka’s statements. He wants to kill nine out of every ten members of your family and he wants to kill them in one of the most painful and agonizing ways imaginable.

If Pianka, or ‘The Lizard Man’ as he likes to be called, is so vehement in embracing the necessity of culling the human population will he step forward to be the first one in line? Will he sacrifice his children for the so-called greater good of the planet? We somehow doubt it.

Will the students and other top academics who so enthusiastically greeted his ideas go home and kill themselves for the cause if it is so righteous?

It was noted how Pianka presented his argument with the kind of glee that you would see in a demented serial killer before dispatching his victim. This is an attitude we have encountered again and again. To discuss killing 90% of the world’s population via a horrific plague is sick enough within itself but you would at least expect its advocates to be serious and sober in their approach to the subject. The opposite seems to be the case, where the subject is aired in a context of lighthearted lip-smacking and hand-rubbing as if the individual was about to sink his teeth into a T-bone steak.

This window gives us a clear view of exactly why these deranged bastards encompass this ideology. They love death and their lives are motivated by dark influences very different to you or I.

Throughout history, elites have invented justifications for barbaric practices as a cover for their true agenda of absolute power and control over populations.

More Examples Of Population Reduction & Eugenics

From 1932 until 1972, the Tuskegee Study Group (pictured below) deliberately infected poor black communities in Alabama with syphilis without their consent and withheld treatment as the diseased rampaged through the town killing families.

In 1951 the Israeli government used US government provided technology to irradiate 100,000 Jewish children in a mass atomic experiment with an entire generation of Sephardi youths used as guinea pigs. 6,000 died immediately after the experiments and the rest suffered for the rest of their lives with debilitating illnesses and cancer.

As we have documented, members of the elite are quite open in their feverish lust to commit mass murder and ethnic cleansing. In the foreword to his biography If I Were An Animal, Prince Philip, another closet Nazi, wrote, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

This is just one of many on the record statements where Prince Philip has advocated his desire to “cull” the surplus human population. In another speech, he even lambasted the fact that lives were saved in Sri Lanka through Malaria treatments because it meant there were three times as many mouths to feed.

One of the most chilling admissions of the elitists’ deadly intent to forcibly commit genocide to reduce global population came from the lips of the late Jacques Cousteau, the sainted environmental icon. In an interview with the UNESCO Courier for November 1991 the famed oceanographer said:

“The damage people cause to the planet is a function of demographics — it is equal to the degree of development. One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangaladeshes. The damage is directly linked to consumption. Our society is turning toward more and needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer….”

“This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”

It is important to stress that this essay merely scratches the surface of both the stated goals of global population reduction from elitists and insiders, along with concrete examples of these programs being carried out. We could not possibly list them all in one article because this would take a book the length of an encyclopedia.

Further information is covered in Alex Jones’s Endgame, a pertinent segment from which can be viewed below.

What Actually Happened In The Iranian Presidential Election?

2009-06-26T09:27:00.002+01:00

A Hard Look at the Numbers

By ESAM AL-AMIN

counterpunch.org

Since the June 12 Iranian presidential elections, Iran "experts” have mushroomed like bacteria in a Petri dish. So here is a quiz for all those instant experts. Which major country has elected more presidents than any in the world since 1980? Further, which nation is the only one that held ten presidential elections within thirty years of its revolution?

The answer to both questions, of course, is Iran. Since 1980, it has elected six presidents, while the U.S. is a close second with five, and France at three. In addition, the U.S. held four presidential elections within three decades of its revolution to Iran’s ten.

The Iranian elections have unified the left and the right in the West and unleashed harsh criticisms and attacks from the “outraged” politicians to the “indignant” mainstream media. Even the blogosphere has joined this battle with near uniformity, on the side of Iran’s opposition, which is quite rare in cyberspace.

Much of the allegations of election fraud have been just that: unsubstantiated accusations. No one has yet been able to provide a solid shred of evidence of wide scale fraud that would have garnered eleven million votes for one candidate over his opponent.

So let’s analyze much of the evidence that is available to date.

More than thirty pre-election polls were conducted in Iran since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main opponent, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, announced their candidacies in early March 2009. The polls varied widely between the two opponents, but if one were to average their results, Ahmadinejad would still come out on top. However, some of the organizations sponsoring these polls, such as Iranian Labor News Agency and Tabnak, admit openly that they have been allies of Mousavi, the opposition, or the so-called reform movement. Their numbers were clearly tilted towards Mousavi and gave him an unrealistic advantage of over 30 per cent in some polls. If such biased polls were excluded, Ahmadinejad’s average over Mousavi would widen to about 21 points.

On the other hand, there was only one poll carried out by a western news organization. It was jointly commissioned by the BBC and ABC News, and conducted by an independent entity called the Center for Public Opinion (CPO) of the New America Foundation. The CPO has a reputation of conducting accurate opinion polls, not only in Iran, but across the Muslim world since 2005. The poll, conducted a few weeks before the elections, predicted an 89 percent turnout rate. Further, it showed that Ahmadinejad had a nationwide advantage of two to one over Mousavi.

How did this survey compare to the actual results? And what are the possibilities of wide scale election fraud?

According to official results, there were 46.2 million registered voters in Iran. The turnout was massive, as predicted by the CPO. Almost 39.2 million Iranians participated in the elections for a turn out rate of 85 percent, in which about 38.8 million ballots were deemed valid (about 400,000 ballots were left blank). Officially, President Ahmadinejad received 24.5 million votes to Mousavi’s 13.2 million votes, or 62.6 per cent to 33.8 per cent of the total votes, respectively. In fact, this result mirrored the 2005 elections when Ahmadinejad received 61.7 per cent to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s 35.9 per cent in the runoff elections. Two other minor candidates, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaee, received the rest of the votes in this election.

Shortly after the official results were announced Mousavi’s supporters and Western political pundits cried foul and accused the government of election fraud. The accusations centered around four themes. First, although voting had been extended several hours due to the heavy turnout, it was alleged that the elections were called too quickly from the time the polls were closed, with more than 39 million ballots to count.

Second, these critics insinuated that election monitors were biased or that, in some instances, the opposition did not have its own monitors present during the count. Third, they pointed out that it was absurd to think that Mousavi, who descended from the Azerbaijan region in northwest Iran, was defeated handily in his own hometown. Fourth, the Mousavi camp charged that in some polling stations, ballots ran out and people were turned away without voting.

The next day, Mosuavi and the two other defeated candidates lodged 646 complaints to the Guardian Council, the entity charged with overseeing the integrity of the elections. The Council promised to conduct full investigations of all the complaints. By the following morning, a copy of a letter by a low-level employee in the Interior Ministry sent to Supreme Guide Ali Khamanei, was widely circulating around the world. (Western politicians and media outlets like to call him “Supreme Leader” but no such title exists in Iran.)

The letter stated that Mousavi had won the elections, and that Ahmadinejad had actually come in third. It also promised that the elections were being fixed in favor of Ahmadinejad per Khamanei’s orders. It is safe to assume that the letter was a forgery since an unidentified low-level employee would not be the one addressing Ayatollah Khamanaei. Robert Fisk of The Independent reached the same conclusion by casting grave doubts that Ahmadinejad would score third – garnering less than 6 million votes in such an important election- as alleged in the forged letter.

There were a total of 45,713 ballot boxes that were set up in cities, towns and villages across Iran. With 39.2 million ballots cast, there were less than 860 ballots per box. Unlike other countries where voters can cast their ballots on several candidates and issues in a single election, Iranian voters had only one choice to consider: their presidential candidate. Why would it take more than an hour or two to count 860 ballots per poll? After the count, the results were then reported electronically to the Ministry of the Interior in Tehran.

Since 1980, Iran has suffered an eight-year deadly war with Iraq, a punishing boycott and embargo, and a campaign of assassination of dozens of its lawmakers, an elected president and a prime minister from the group Mujahideen Khalq Organization. (MKO is a deadly domestic violent organization, with headquarters in France, which seeks to topple the government by force.) Despite all these challenges, the Islamic Republic of Iran has never missed an election during its three decades. It has conducted over thirty elections nationwide. Indeed, a tradition of election orderliness has been established, much like election precincts in the U.S. or boroughs in the U.K. The elections in Iran are organized, monitored and counted by teachers and professionals including civil servants and retirees (again much like the U.S.)

There has not been a tradition of election fraud in Iran. Say what you will about the system of the Islamic Republic, but its elected legislators have impeached ministers and “borked” nominees of several Presidents, including Ahmadinejad. Rubberstamps, they are not. In fact, former President Mohammad Khatami, considered one of the leading reformists in Iran, was elected president by the people, when the interior ministry was run by archconservatives. He won with over 70 percent of the vote, not once, but twice.

When it comes to elections, the real problem in Iran is not fraud but candidates’ access to the ballots (a problem not unique to the country, just ask Ralph Nader or any other third party candidate in the U.S.) It is highly unlikely that there was a huge conspiracy involving tens of thousands of teachers, professionals and civil servants that somehow remained totally hidden and unexposed.

Moreover, while Ahmadinejad belongs to an active political party that has already won several elections since 2003, Mousavi is an independent candidate who emerged on the political scene just three months ago, after a 20-year hiatus. It was clear during the campaign that Ahmadinejad had a nationwide campaign operation. He made over sixty campaign trips throughout Iran in less than twelve weeks, while his opponent campaigned only in the major cities, and lacked a sophisticated campaign apparatus.

It is true that Mousavi has an Azeri background. But the CPO poll mentioned above, and published before the elections, noted that “its survey indicated that only 16 per cent of Azeri Iranians will vote for Mr. Mousavi. By contrast, 31 per cent of the Azeris claim they will vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad.” In the end, according to official results, the election in that region was much closer than the overall result. In fact, Mousavi won narrowly in the West Azerbaijan province but lost the region to Ahmadinejad by a 45 to 52 per cent margin (or 1.5 to 1.8 million votes).

However, the double standard applied by Western news agencies is striking. Richard Nixon trounced George McGovern in his native state of South Dakota in the 1972 elections. Had Al Gore won his home state of Tennessee in 2000, no one would have cared about a Florida recount, nor would there have been a Supreme Court case called Bush v. Gore. If Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards had won the states he was born and raised in (South and North Carolina), President John Kerry would now be serving his second term. But somehow, in Western newsrooms Middle Eastern people choose their candidates not on merit, but on the basis of their “tribe.”

The fact that minor candidates such as Karroubi would garner fewer votes than expected, even in their home regions as critics charge, is not out of the ordinary. Many voters reach the conclusion that they do not want to waste their votes when the contest is perceived to be between two major candidates. Karroubi indeed received far fewer votes this time around than he did in 2005, including in his hometown. Likewise, Ross Perot lost his home state of Texas to Bob Dole of Kansas in 1996, while in 2004, Ralph Nader received one eighth of the votes he had four years earlier.

Some observers note that when the official results were being announced, the margin between the candidates held steady throughout the count. In fact, this is no mystery. Experts say that generally when 3-5 per cent of the votes from a given region are actually counted, there is a 95 per cent confidence level that such result will hold firm. As for the charge that ballots ran out and some people were turned away, it is worth mentioning that voting hours were extended four times in order to allow as many people as possible the opportunity to vote. But even if all the people who did not vote, had actually voted for Mousavi (a virtual impossibility), that would be 6.93 million additional votes, much less than the 11 million vote difference between the top two candidates.

Ahmadinejad is certainly not a sympathetic figure. He is an ideologue, provocative, and sometimes behaving imprudently. But to characterize the struggle in Iran as a battle between democratic forces and a “dictator,” is to exhibit total ignorance of Iran’s internal dynamics, or to deliberately distort them. There is no doubt that there is a significant segment of Iranian society, concentrated around major metropolitan areas, and comprising many young people, that passionately yearns for social freedoms. They are understandably angry because their candidate came up short. But it would be a huge mistake to read this domestic disagreement as an “uprising” against the Islamic Republic, or as a call to embark on a foreign policy that would accommodate the West at the expense of Iran’s nuclear program or its vital interests.

Nations display respect to other nations only when they respect their sovereignty. If any nation, for instance, were to dictate the United States’ economic, foreign or social policies, Americans would be indignant. When France, under President Chirac opposed the American adventure in Iraq in 2003, some U.S. Congressmen renamed a favorite fast food from French Fries to “Freedom Fries.” They made it known that the French were unwelcome in the U.S.

The U.S. has a legacy of interference in Iran’s internal affairs, notably when it toppled the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. This act, of which most Americans are unaware, is ingrained in every Iranian from childhood. It is the main cause of much of their perpetual anger at the U.S. It took 56 years for an American president to acknowledge this illegal act, when Obama did so earlier this month in Cairo.

Therefore, it would be a colossal mistake to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs yet again. President Obama is wise to leave this matter to be resolved by the Iranians themselves. Political expediency by the Republicans or pro-Israel Democrats will be extremely dangerous and will yield serious repercussions. Such reckless conduct by many in the political class and the media appears to be a blatant attempt to demonize Iran and its current leadership, in order to justify any future military attack by Israel if Iran does not give up its nuclear ambition.

President Obama’s declarations in Cairo are now being aptly recalled. Regarding Iran, he said, “I recognize it will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with courage, rectitude, and resolve. There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.”

But the first sign of respect is to let the Iranians sort out their differences without any overt –or covert –interference.

Journalist Files Charges against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder

2009-06-26T09:09:00.001+01:00

by: Barbara Minton

(NaturalNews) As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic.

Summary of claims and allegations filed with FBI in Austria on June 10, 2009

In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO. This bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu pandemic virus with the intent of causing death. This group has annexed high government offices in the U.S.

Specifically, evidence is presented that the defendants, Barack Obama, President of the U.S, David Nabarro, UN System Coordinator for Influenza, Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, David de Rotschild, banker, David Rockefeller, banker, George Soros, banker, Werner Faymann, Chancellor of Austria, and Alois Stoger, Austrian Health Minister, among others, are part of this international corporate criminal syndicate which has developed, produced, stockpiled and employed biological weapons to eliminate the population of the U.S. and other countries for financial and political gain.

The charges contend that these defendants conspired with each other and others to devise, fund and participate in the final phase of the implementation of a covert international bioweapons program involving the pharmaceutical companies Baxter and Novartis. They did this by bioengineering and then releasing lethal biological agents, specifically the "bird flu" virus and the "swine flu virus" in order to have a pretext to implement a forced mass vaccination program which would be the means of administering a toxic biological agent to cause death and injury to the people of the U.S. This action is in direct violation of the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.

Burgermeister's charges include evidence that Baxter AG, Austrian subsidiary of Baxter International, deliberately sent out 72 kilos of live bird flu virus, supplied by the WHO in the winter of 2009 to 16 laboratories in four counties. She claims this evidence offers clear proof that the pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies themselves are actively engaged in producing, developing, manufacturing and distributing biological agents classified as the most deadly bioweapons on earth in order to trigger a pandemic and cause mass death.

In her April charges, she noted that Baxter's lab in Austria, one of the supposedly most secure biosecurity labs in the world, did not adhere to the most basic and essential steps to keep 72 kilos of a pathogen classified as a bioweapon secure and separate from all other substances under stringent biosecurity level regulations, but it allowed it to be mixed with the ordinary human flu virus and sent from its facilities in Orth in the Donau.

In February, when a staff member at BioTest in the Czech Republic tested the material meant for candidate vaccines on ferrets, the ferrets died. This incident was not followed up by any investigation from the WHO, EU, or Austrian health authorities. There was no investigation of the content of the virus material, and there is no data on the genetic sequence of the virus released.

In answer to parliamentary questions on May 20th, the Austrian Health Minister, Alois Stoger, revealed that the incident had been handled not as a biosecurity lapse, as it should have been, but as an offence against the veterinary code. A veterinary doctor was sent to the lab for a brief inspection.

Burgermeister's dossier reveals that the release of the virus was to be an essential step for triggering a pandemic that would allow the WHO to declare a Level 6 Pandemic. She lists the laws and decrees that would allow the UN and WHO to take over the United States in the event of pandemic. In addition, legislation requiring compliance with mandatory vaccinations would be put into force in the U.S. under conditions of pandemic declaration.

She charges that the entire "swine flu" pandemic business is premised on a massive lie that there is no natural virus out there that poses a threat to the population. She presents evidence leading to the belief that the bird flu and swine flu viruses have, in fact, been bioengineered in laboratories using funding supplied by the WHO and other government agencies, among others. This "swine flu" is a hybrid of part swine flu, part human flu and part bird flu, something that can only come from laboratories according to many experts.

WHO's claim that this "swine flu" is spreading and a pandemic must be declared ignores the fundamental causes. The viruses that were released were created and released with the help of WHO, and WHO is overwhelmingly responsible for the pandemic in the first place. In addition, the symptoms of the supposed "swine flu" are indistinguishable from regular flu or from the common cold. The "swine flu" does not cause death anymore often than the regular flu causes death.

Burgermeister notes that the figures for deaths reported for the "swine flu" are inconsistent and there is no clarity as to how the number of "deaths" has been documented.

There is no pandemic potential unless mass vaccinations are carried out to weaponize the flu under the guise of protecting the population. There are reasonable grounds for believing that the mandatory vaccines will be purposely contaminated with diseases that are specifically designed to cause death.

Reference is made to a licensed Novartis bird flu vaccine that killed 21 homeless people in Poland in the summer of 2008 and had as its "primary outcome measure" an "adverse events rate", thereby meeting the U.S. government's own definition of a bioweapon (a biological agent designed to cause an adverse events rate, i.e death or injury) with a delivery system (injection).

She alleges that the same complex of international pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies that have developed and released pandemic material have positioned themselves to profit from triggering the pandemic with contracts to supply vaccines. Media controlled by the group that is engineering the "swine flu" agenda is spreading misinformation to lull the people of the U.S. into taking the dangerous vaccine.

The people of the U.S. will suffer substantial and irreparable harm and injury if they are forced to take this unproven vaccine without their consent in accordance with the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, National Emergency Act, National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, and the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza.

In the U.S. since 2008, Burgermeister charges that those named in her allegations have implemented new and/or accelerated the implementation of laws and regulations designed to strip the citizens of the U.S. of their lawful constitutional rights to refuse an injection. These people have created or allowed provisions to remain in place that make it a criminal act to refuse to take an injection against pandemic viruses. They have imposed other excessive and cruel penalties such as imprisonment and/or quarantine in FEMA camps while barring the citizens of the U.S. from claiming compensation from injury or death from the forced injections. This is in violation of the laws governing federal corruption and the abuse of office as well as of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Through these actions, the named defendants have laid the groundwork for mass genocide.

Using the "swine flu" as a pretext, the defendants have preplanned the mass murder of the U.S. population by means of forced vaccination. They have installed an extensive network of FEMA concentration camps and identified mass grave sites, and they have been involved in devising and implementing a scheme to hand power over the U.S. to an international crime syndicate that uses the UN and WHO as a front for illegal racketeering influenced organized crime activities, in violation of the laws that govern treason.

She further charges that the complex of pharmaceutical companies consisting of Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi Aventis are part of a foreign-based dual purpose bioweapons program, financed by this international criminal syndicate and designed to implement mass murder to reduce the world's population by more than 5 billion people in the next ten years. Their plan is to spread terror to justify forcing people to give up their rights, and to force mass quarantine in FEMA camps. The houses, companies and farms and lands of those who are killed will be up for grabs by this syndicate.

By eliminating the population of North America, the international elite gain access to the region's natural resources such as water and undeveloped oil lands. And by eliminating the U.S. and its democratic constitution by subsuming it under a North American Union, the international crime group will have total control over North America.

Highlights from the complete dossier

The complete dossier of the June 10th action is a 69 page document presenting evidence to substantiate all charges. This includes:

Factual background that delineates time lines and facts that establish probable cause, UN and WHO definitions and roles, and history and incidents from the April, 2009 "swine flu" outbreak.

Evidence the "swine flu" vaccines are defined as bioweapons as delineates in government agencies and regulations classifying and restricting vaccines, and the fear of foreign countries that "swine flu" vaccines will be used for biological warfare.

Scientific evidence the "swine flu" virus is an artificial (genetic) virus.

Scientific evidence the "swine flu" was bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus of 1918 including quotes from Swine Flu 2009 is Weaponized 1918 Spanish Flu by A. True Ott, Ph.D., N.D., and a Science Magazine report from Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger et.al.

The genome sequence of the "swine flu"

Evidence of the deliberate release of the "swine flu" in Mexico

Evidence as to the involvement of President Obama that delineates his trip to Mexico which coincided with the recent "swine flu" outbreak and the death of several officials involved in his trip. Contention is made that the President was never tested for "swine flu" because he had been previously vaccinated.

Evidence as to the role of Baxter and WHO in producing and releasing pandemic virus material in Austria includes a statement from a Baxter official stating the accidentally distributed H5N1 in the Czech Republic was received from a WHO reference center. This includes delineation of evidence and allegations from Burgermeister's charges filed in April in Austria that are currently under investigation.

Evidence Baxter is an element in a covert bioweapons network

Evidence Baxter has deliberately contaminated vaccine material.

Evidence Novartis is using vaccines as bioweapons

Evidence as to WHO's role in the bioweapons program

Evidence as to WHO's manipulation of disease data in order to justify declaring a Pandemic Level 6 in order to seize control of the USA.

Evidence as to the FDA's role in covering up the bioweapons program

Evidence as to Canada's National Microbiology Lab's role in the bioweapons program.

Evidence of the involvement of scientists working for the UK's NIBSC, and the CDC in engineering the "swine flu".

Evidence vaccinations caused the Spanish killer flu of 1918 including belief of Dr. Jerry Tennant that the widespread use of aspirin during the winter that followed the end of World War I could have been a key factor contributing to the earlier pandemic by suppressing the immune system and lowering body temperatures, allowing the flu virus to multiply. Tamiflu and Relenza also lower body temperatures, and therefore can also be expected to contribute to the spread of a pandemic.

Evidence as to manipulation of the legal framework to allow mass murder with impunity.

Constitutional issues: the legality vs. illegality of jeopardizing the life, health and public good by mass vaccinations.

The issue of immunity and compensation as evidence of intent to commit a crime.

Evidence as to the existence of an international corporate crime syndicate.

Evidence of the existence of the "Illuminati".

Evidence as to the depopulation agenda of the Illuminati/Bilderbergs and their involvement in the engineering and release of the artificial "swine flu" virus.

Evidence that weaponized flu was discussed at the annual Bilderberg meeting in Athens from May 14-17, 2009, as part of their agenda of genocide, including a list of attendees who, according to a statement once made by Pierre Trudeau, view themselves as genetically superior to the rest of humanity.

Media is keeping Americans clueless about the threat they are under

Jane Burgermeister is a dual Irish/Austrian who has written for Nature, the British Medical Journal, and American Prospect. She is the European Correspondent of the Renewable Energy World website. She has written extensively about climate change, biotechnology, and the ecology.

In addition to the charges currently under investigation that she filed against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology in April, she has filed charges against WHO and Baxter among others concerning a case of exploding "swine flu" vials meant for a research lab on a busy IC train in Switzerland.

In her view, control of the media by the ruling elite has allowed the world crime syndicate to further its agenda unabated while the rest of the people remain in the dark about what is really going on. Her charges are an attempt to get around this media control and bring the truth to light.

Her greatest concern is that "in spite of the fact Baxter has been caught red handed nearly triggering pandemic, they are also moving ahead, together with allied pharma companies, with supplying the vaccine for pandemics." Baxter is hurrying to get this vaccine to market some time in July.

For more information:
http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html
http://birdflu666.wordpress.com/200...
http://in.news.yahoo.com/137/200906...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...

Financial Dictatorship Spreads To Europe

2009-06-19T22:27:00.001+01:00

Gordon Brown looks to have surrendered significant powers over the City of London to new bodies of European Union financial regulators, according to a high-ranking Brussels official.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, left, shares a word with Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende during a round table at an EU summit in Brussels.

The European Commission and other EU officials are celebrating after the Prime Minister accepted on Thursday night the creation of European supervisors over national regulators.

Senior EU officials described how in return for a promise that Brussels regulators can not have power to tell the British government when, and by how much, to bail out banks, Mr Brown has given ground on a broad range of other supervisory powers.

"One year ago, if you had asked if was it possible to go so far as to have the Prime Minister of Britain accepting not only common principles but common systems of auditing and binding decisions at the EU level, then I think that no one would have believed it," said a senior official.

Meeting in Brussels, EU leaders are agreed on the need for better oversight of banks and financial institutions to prevent a repeat of last year's crisis, which has tipped the global and European economy into its worst downturn for 70 years.

The proposals involve creating three pan-European watchdogs next year to ensure countries introduce new rules on supervision. Under the proposals, there is to be a European Banking Authority in London, an Insurance Authority in Frankfurt, and a Securities Authority in Paris. All European leaders agreed today to their creation.

The new bodies will have the authority to ensure European Union market laws are implemented similarly in every country.

There is also to be the establishment of a new European Systemic Risk Board that would monitor the build-up of risks to stability in the region.

According a draft EU summit communiqué, Mr Brown has also lost a battle to keep control of a powerful "Systemic Risk Board" (ESRB) out of the hands of the European Central Bank.

The ESRB will monitor potential threats to financial stability and, where necessary, issue risk warnings and recommendations for action and supervise their implementation. Britain had fought hard to ensure chairmanship of the new body was rotated among all EU countries but appears to have conceded control to eurozone countries.

"The members of the general council of the European Central Bank will elect the chair of the ESRB," the draft communique states.

As Iraq runs dry, a plague of snakes is unleashed

2009-06-15T20:13:00.001+01:00

An unprecedented fall in the water levels of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has left the rural population at the mercy of heat, drought – and displaced wildlife. Patrick Cockburn reports

The Independent

The Desert Horned Viper lurks in sand, only eyes, nostrils and horns above the surface.

Swarms of snakes are attacking people and cattle in southern Iraq as the Euphrates and Tigris rivers dry up and the reptiles lose their natural habitat among the reed beds.

"People are terrified and are leaving their homes," says Jabar Mustafa, a medical administrator, who works in a hospital in the southern province of Dhi Qar. "We knew these snakes before, but now they are coming in huge numbers. They are attacking buffalo and cattle as well as people." Doctors in the area say six people have been killed and 13 poisoned.

In Chabaysh, a town on the Euphrates close to the southern marshland of Hawr al-Hammar, farmers have set up an overnight operations room to prevent the snakes attacking their cattle.

"We have been surprised in recent days by the unprecedented number of snakes that have fled their habitat because of the dryness and heat," Wissam al-Assadi, one of the town's vets said. "We saw some on roads, near houses and cowsheds. Farmers have come to us for vaccines, but we don't have any."

The plague of snakes is the latest result of an unprecedented fall in the level of the water in the Euphrates and the Tigris, the two great rivers which for thousands of years have made life possible in the sun-baked plains of Mesopotamia, the very name of which means "between the rivers" in Greek. The rivers that made Iraq's dry soil so fertile are drying up because the supply of water, which once flowed south into Iraq from Turkey, Syria and Iran, is now held back by dams and used for irrigation. On the Euphrates alone, Turkey has five large dams upriver from Iraq, and Syria has two.

The diversion of water from the rivers has already destroyed a large swathe of Iraqi agriculture and the result of Iraq being starved of water may be one of the world's greatest natural disasters, akin to the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest. Already the advance of the desert has led to frequent dust storms in Baghdad which close the airport. Yet this dramatic climatic change has attracted little attention outside Iraq, overshadowed by the violence following the US-led invasion in 2003 and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The collapse in the water levels of the rivers has been swift, the amount of water in the Euphrates falling by three-quarters in less than a decade. In 2000, the flow speed of the water in the river was 950 cubic metres per second, but by this year it had dropped to 230 cubic metres per second.

In the past, Iraq has stored water in lakes behind its own dams, but these reservoirs are now much depleted and can no longer make up the shortfall. The total water reserves behind all Iraqi dams at the beginning of May was only 11 billion cubic metres, compared to over 40 billion three years ago. One of the biggest dams in the country, on the Euphrates at Haditha in western Iraq, close to the Syrian border, held eight billion cubic metres two years ago but now has only two billion.

Iraq has appealed to Turkey to open the sluice gates on its dams. "We need at least 500 cubic metres of water per second from Turkey, or double what we are getting," says Abdul Latif Rashid, the Iraqi Minister of Water Resources. "They promised an extra 130 cubic metres, but this was only for a couple of days and we need it for months." His ministry is doing everything it can, he says, but the most important decisions about the supply of water to Iraq are taken outside the country – in Turkey, Syria and Iran. "In addition there has been a drought for the last four years with less than half the normal rainfall falling," says Mr Rashid.

Large parts of Iraq that were once productive farmland have already turned into arid desert. The Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture says that between 40 and 50 per cent of what was agricultural land in the 1970s is now being hit by desertification.

Drought, war, UN sanctions, lack of investment and the cutting down of trees for firewood have all exacerbated the crisis, but at its heart is the lack of water for irrigation in the Tigris and Euphrates. Farmers across Iraq are being driven from the land. Earlier this month, farmers and fishermen demonstrated in Najaf, a city close to the Euphrates, holding up placards demanding that the Iraqi government insist that foreign countries release more water.

"The farmers have stopped planting and now head to the city for work to earn their daily living until the water comes back," said Ali al-Ghazali, a farmer from the area.

"We pay for our seeds at the time of the harvest, and if we fail to harvest, or the harvest has been ruined, the person who sold us the seeds still wants his money." Najaf province has banned its farmers from growing rice because the crop needs too much water.

The drop in the quantity of water in the rivers has also reduced its quality. The plains of ancient Mesopotamia once produced abundant crops for the ancient Sumerians. From Nineveh in the north to Ur of the Chaldees in the south, the flat landscape of Iraq is dotted with the mounds marking the remains of their cities. There is little rainfall away from the mountains of Kurdistan and the land immediately below them, so agriculture has always depended on irrigation.

But centuries of irrigating the land without draining it properly has led to a build-up of salt in the soil, making much of it infertile. Lack of water in the rivers has speeded up the salinisation, so land in central and southern Iraq, highly productive 30 years ago, has become barren. Even such rainfall as does fall in northern Iraq has been scant in recent years. In February, the Greater Zaab river, one of the main tributaries of the Tigris, which should have been a torrent, was a placid stream occupying less than a quarter of its river bed. The hills overlooking it, which should be green, were a dusty brown.

Experts summoned by the Water Resources Ministry to a three-day conference on the water crisis held in Sulaimaniyah in April described the situation as "a tragedy".

Mohammed Ali Sarham, a water specialist from Diwaniyah in southern Iraq, said: "Things are slipping from our hands: swathes of land are being turned into desert. Farmers are leaving the countryside and heading to the city or nearby areas. We are importing almost all our food, though in the 1950s we were one of the few regional cereal-exporting countries."

The experts recommended that, in addition to Turkey releasing more water, there should be heavy investment to make better use of the waterways such as the Tigris and Euphrates. But this year Mr Rashid says that his budget for this year has been cut in half to $500m (£300m) because of the fall in the price of oil.

The outcome of the agricultural disaster in Iraq is evident in the fruit and vegetable shops in Baghdad. Jassim Mohammed Bahadeel, a grocer in the Karada district, says that once much of what he sold came from farms around the Iraqi capital. "But today, the apples I sell come from America, France and Chile; tomatoes and potatoes from Syria and Jordan; oranges from Egypt and Turkey. Only the dates come from Iraq because they do not need a lot of water."

Rightly feared: Iraq's deadly reptiles

*Saw-Scaled Viper (Echis carinatus) About 2ft long, this viper is blamed for more deaths than any other species in the world. Its bite causes extensive internal haemorrhaging in its victims. Recognisable by an arrow-shaped marking on the head.

*Desert Horned Viper (Cerastes cerastes) The Desert Horned Viper is typically found in sandy terrain and is a common sight in Iraq's southern deserts, identified by the bony horns over its eyes. It lurks in sand, only eyes, nostrils and horns above the surface.

*Desert Cobra (Walterinnesia aegyptia) Like most cobras, it is easily adaptable to various habitats. But locations occupied by humans are a particular favourite where shelter and rodents are on offer. Whilst this glossy snake does not actively seek confrontation, it can move with lethal speed when provoked.

US military: Heavily armed and medicated

2009-06-01T18:49:00.001+01:00

Prescription pill dependency among American troops is on the rise

MSNBC

By Melody Petersen

Marine Corporal Michael Cataldi woke as he heard the truck rumble past.

He opened his eyes, but saw nothing. It was the middle of the night, and he was facedown in the sands of western Iraq. His loaded M16 was pinned beneath him.

Cataldi had no idea how he’d gotten to where he now lay, some 200 meters from the dilapidated building where his buddies slept. But he suspected what had caused this nightmare: His Klonopin prescription had run out.

His ordeal was not all that remarkable for a person on that anti-anxiety medication. In the lengthy labeling that accompanies each prescription, Klonopin users are warned against abruptly stopping the medicine, since doing so can cause psychosis, hallucinations, and other symptoms. What makes Cataldi’s story extraordinary is that he was a U. S. Marine at war, and that the drug’s adverse effects endangered lives — his own, his fellow Marines’, and the lives of any civilians unfortunate enough to cross his path.

“It put everyone within rifle distance at risk,” he says.

In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two ongoing wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies and troubled minds. And many of those service members are then sent back to war theatres in distant lands with bottles of medication to fortify them.

According to data from a U. S. Army mental-health survey released last year, about 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent of those in Afghanistan reported taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or sleeping pills. Prescriptions for painkillers have also skyrocketed. Data from the Department of Defense last fall showed that as of September 2007, prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty troops had risen to almost 50,000 a month, compared with about 33,000 a month in October 2003, not long after the Iraq war began.

In other words, thousands of American fighters armed with the latest killing technology are taking prescription drugs that the Federal Aviation Administration considers too dangerous for commercial pilots.

Military officials say they believe many medications can be safely used on the battlefield. They say they have policies to ensure that drugs they consider inappropriate for soldiers on the front lines are rarely used. And they say they are not using the drugs in order to send unstable warriors back to war.

Yet the experience of soldiers and Marines like Cataldi show the dangers of drugging our warriors. It also worries some physicians and veterans’ advocates. “There are risks in putting people back to battle with medicines in their bodies,” says psychiatrist Judith Broder, M. D., founder of the Soldiers Project, a group that helps service members suffering from mental illness.

Prescription drugs can help patients, Dr. Broder says, but they can also cause drowsiness and impair judgment. Those side effects can be dealt with by patients who are at home, she says, but they can put active-duty soldiers in great danger. She worries that some soldiers are being medicated and then sent back to fight before they’re ready.

“The military is under great pressure to have enough people ready for combat,” she says. “I don’t think they’re as cautious as they would be if they weren’t under this kind of pressure.”

Brought more than memories back

When Cataldi talks about what happened to him in Iraq, he begins with an in incident that took place on a cold January night in 2005, when he and five other Marines received a radio call informing them that a helicopter had disappeared. The men roared across the desert of western Iraq and found what was left of the chopper. Flames roared from the pile of metal. Cataldi, 20, was ordered to do a body count.

The pilot’s body was still on fire, so he shovelled dirt on it to douse the acrid flames. He picked up a man’s left boot in order to find the dog tag every Marine keeps there. A foot fell to the ground. “People were missing heads,” Cataldi remembers. “They were wearing the same uniform I was wearing.”

The final death toll from that crash of a CH-53E Super Stallion was 30 Marines and one sailor.

For days, Cataldi couldn’t escape the odor of burning flesh. “I had the smell all over my equipment,” he says. “I couldn’t get it off .”

When he returned to his stateside base at Twentynine Palms, California, he knew he’d brought more than memories back from Iraq. He would cry for no reason. He flew into fits of rage. One night he woke up with his hands around the throat of his wife, Monica, choking her.

“It scared the crap out of me,” he says.

He went to see a psychiatrist on base. “He said, ‘Here’s some medication,’ ” Cataldi recalls. The prescribed drugs were Klonopin, for anxiety; Zoloft, for depression; and Ambien, to help him sleep.

Later, other military doctors added narcotic painkillers for the excruciating pain in his leg, which he’d injured during a training exercise. He was also self-medicating with heavy doses of alcohol.
Those prescriptions didn’t stop the Marine Corps from sending Cataldi back to Iraq. In 2006, he returned to the same part of the Iraqi desert to do the same job: performing maintenance on armoured personnel carriers known as LAVs. He also took his turn driving the 14-ton tanklike vehicles, one of which was armed with a 25 mm cannon and two machine guns and loaded with more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Marine Major Carl B. Redding says he can’t talk about the medical history of any Marine because of privacy laws. He says the Corps has procedures to ensure that service members taking medications for psychiatric conditions are deployed only if their symptoms are in remission. Those Marines, he says, must be able to meet the demands of a mission.

But it’s difficult to square those regulations with Cataldi’s experience. His medications came with written warnings about the dangers of driving and operating heavy machinery. The labels don’t lie.

One night, Cataldi took his pills after his commander told him he was done for the day. Five minutes later, however, plans changed, and he was told to drive the LAV. He asked the Marine sitting behind him to help keep him awake. “I said, ‘Kick the back of my seat every 5 minutes,’ and that’s what he did.”

Cataldi says he managed on the medications — until his Klonopin ran out. The medical officer told him there was no Klonopin anywhere in Iraq. So the officer gave him a drug called Seroquel. That’s when Cataldi says he started to become “loopy.”

“I’d go to pick up a wrench and come back with a hammer,” he says. “I wasn’t able to do my job. I wasn’t able to fight.”

Soldiers on medication

Soldiers have doped up in order to sustain combat since ancient times. Often their chosen drug was alcohol. And Iraq isn’t the first place U. S. military doctors have prescribed medications to troops on the front. During the Vietnam war, military psychiatrists spoke enthusiastically about some newly psychiatric medicines, including Thorazine, an anti-psychotic, and Valium, for anxiety. According to an army textbook, doctors frequently prescribed those drugs to soldiers with psychiatric symptoms. Anxiety-ridden soldiers with upset bowels were sometimes given the antidiarrheal Compazine, a potent tranquilizer.

But the use of those drugs in Vietnam became controversial. Critics said it was dangerous to give soldiers medications that slowed their reflexes, a side effect that could raise their risk of being injured, captured, or killed. That risk was real. In a report supported by the U. S. Navy 14 years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam, researchers looked at the records of all Marines wounded there between 1965 and 1972. Marines who’d been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons before being sent back to battle were more likely to have been injured in combat than those who hadn’t been hospitalized.

Critics of medication use in Vietnam also said that a soldier traumatized by battle may not be coherent enough to give his consent to take the drugs in the first place. Plus, a soldier would risk court-martial if he refused to follow orders, they said, making it unlikely he could make a reasoned decision about taking the medications.

After the war, the practice of liberally giving psychiatric drugs to warriors fell out of favour. In War Psychiatry, a 1995 military medical textbook, a U. S. Air Force flight surgeon warned about the use of psychiatric drugs, saying they should be used sparingly.

“Sending a person back to combat duty still under the influence of psychoactive drugs may be dangerous,” he wrote. “Even in peacetime, people in the many combat-support positions… would not be allowed to take such medications and continue to work in their sensitive, demanding jobs.”

Colonel Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, M. D., M. P. H., a psychiatrist and the medical director of the strategic communication directorate in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, acknowledges that writing more prescriptions for frontline troops was a change in direction for the Pentagon. “Twenty years ago,” she says, “we weren’t deploying soldiers on medications.”

Today it’s not uncommon for a soldier to arrive in Iraq while taking a host of prescription drugs. The Pentagon explained its new practice in late 2006, stating that there are “few medications that are inherently disqualifying for deployment.”

According to Colonel Ritchie, military officials have concluded that many medicines introduced since the Vietnam War can be used safely on the front lines. Military physicians consider antidepressants and sleeping pills to be especially helpful, she says. Doctors have also found that small doses of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic, can help treat nightmares, she says, even though the drug is not approved for that use.

Oldest Human Hairs Found in Hyena Dung Fossil

2009-05-20T17:45:00.001+01:00

By Sarah Hoffman, Natural History Magazine

The oldest known human hair belonged to a 9,000-year-old mummy disinterred from an ancient Chilean cemetery.

Until now. A recent discovery pushes the record back some 200,000 years. (And the newly discovered strands received a rather less dignified burial.)

While excavating in Gladysvale Cave, near Johannesburg, South Africa, a team of researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand discovered an ancient brown-hyena latrine. Upon inspection, hyena coprolites — fossilized dung — appeared to contain uncannily hair-like structures.

Lucinda Backwell, a palaeontologist in the group, took a sediment block containing several coprolites back to the lab for a closer look. She and a colleague carefully removed forty of the "hairs apparent" from one of the coprolites and subjected half to scanning-electron microscopy. Sure enough, fossilized hairs they were, and five showed remarkably preserved surface scales.

Comparing the scales to those of a variety of animals — an admittedly tricky undertaking — Backwell's team concluded that human hairs were the best match.

Dating of the cave's limestone layers showed that the dung had been deposited sometime between 257,000 and 195,000 years ago. During that period, both early Homo sapiens and a relation, H. heidelbergensis, roamed the South African landscape.

A couple of chilling explanations spring to mind as to how human hairs might have become lodged in hyena dung. Backwell thinks it most likely that a brown hyena scavenged an ancestral human's remains.

The finding was detailed in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Pouring cold water on global warming

2009-05-19T09:35:00.001+01:00

Global cooling has arrived. Global warming is dead.

By Terri Jackson

(Belfast Telegraph) There is now irrefutable scientific evidence that far from global warming the earth has now entered a period of global cooling which will last at least for the next two decades.

Evidence for this comes from the NASA Microwave Sounding Unit and the Hadley Climate Research Unit while evidence that CO2 levels are continuing to increase comes from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Professor Don Easterbrook one of the principle speakers at the recent World Conference on climate change held in New York in March this year attended by 800 leading climatologists, has documented a consistent cycle of warm and cool periods each with a 27 year cycle. Indeed the warm period from 1976 to 1998 exactly fits the pattern of climate changes for the past several centuries long before there were any CO2 emissions. Greenland Ice core temperature measurements for the past 500 years show this 27 year cycle of alternating warm and cool periods. Recently the global temperature increased from 1918 to 1940, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased again from 1976 to 1998 and has been decreasing ever since.

However throughout this time CO2 has been added to the atmosphere in increasing amounts. This point was brought out by at the New York conference by Vaclav Klaus the rotating President of the EU and President of the Czech Republic. If CO2 emissions cause temperature rises than why is it that every 27 years the earth climate switches to a cooling mode with decreasing temperature? Clearly there is another explanation that does not include humans. .

Nearly ten years into the 21 century it is clear that the UN IPCC computer models have gone badly astray. The IPCC models have predicted a one degree increase in global temperature by 2011 with further large temperature rises to 2100. Yet there has been no warming since 1998 with a one degree cooling this year being the largest global temperature change ever recorded. Nasa satellite imagery from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has confirmed that the Pacific Ocean has switched from the warm mode it has been in since 1977 to its cool mode, similar to that of the 1945-1977 global cooling period.

The evidence that the earth is in a cooling mode rather than a warming mode is there for all to see. the RSS(Remote Sensing System) in Santa Rosa California has recorded a temperature fall of two to three degrees in the Arctic since 2005, while US Army buoys show an increase in Arctic ice thickness to 3.5 metres. North America has had two of its worst winters for sixty years with the temperature in Yellowstone Park falling to a staggering minus 60 degrees.

About 46” of snow fell in New York in two weeks! Last February Toronto had over 70 cms of snow, more than anything since 1950! Snow has fallen in parts of China and Asia for the first time in living memory while Britain had its worst January for twenty years. Alps have best snow conditions in a generation ran a newspaper headline last December. Strange indeed that the BBC , who likes us to believe it is impartial does not mention these freezing temperatures and Arctic conditions.

Some warming in the Antarctic has only been on a small 20 mile strip of the Antarctic Peninsula as a result of the 1977- 1998 warming period. This is insignificant compared to the overall size of the huge Antarctic continent.

Studies by the WeatherAction team(weatheraction.com) led by astrophysicist Piers Corbyn and also the measurements of sun spots by the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial physics in Irkutsk in Russia show that over the last 50 years solar activity has been at its highest for the past several thousand years.

The Russian physicists have analysed sun spot activity from 1882 to 2000 and have noted that the minimum of the cycle of solar activity will occur around 2021 to 2026 and that we will be facing not global warming but global cooling leading to a deep freeze around 2050.

The UN IPCC graphics have left out the medieval warming period (950-1300AD) and the Little Ice Age (1350- 1850). This alters the picture entirely

and does not then portray the alternating warm cool warm cool cycle of recorded world temperatures. Also statements put out by the UN IPCC are unrepresentative of many of its members. I do not recall any votes being taken of the opinion of members.

At the New York climate change conference in March as well as Vaclav Klaus delegates also heard Dr Richard Linzen from MIT probably the leading climatologist in the world today, as well as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute who all demolished the global alarmists case piece by piece.

In his speech the EU President Vaclav Klaus had these controversial words for the environmentalist lobby.

“Environmentalists-even mainstream environmentalists are less concerned about any crisis posed by global warming than they are eager to command human behaviour and restrict economic activity” He also said “their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back.

They are interested in their businesses and their profits made with the help of politicians”

He got a standing ovation from the assembled audience.

His assertion about the involvement of politicians is not surprising. This whole movement is in many parts a political movement with nearly all the recognised climatologists throughout the world dissenting from the man made global warming theory.

This can be seen on the US Senate Environment committee web site with over 700 leading climatologists from 24 different countries including Nobel Prize laureates all dissenting from the man made global warming theory. It has been well reported that at least one of the architects of Kyoto has strong links with the New Age Movement which is not a movement that would promote economic growth.

We have all recently noticed the escalating price of food. The reason for this is because American grain, the breadbasket of the world, is increasingly being turned into ethanol which has led to a three fold increase of maize prices worldwide. This has the potential to cause worldwide starvation!

Terri Jackson is a Queens graduate physicist, climatologist and formerly founder of the Energy Group at the Institute of Physics, London.

Britain lays claim to vast area potentially rich in oil and gas in Atlantic ocean

2009-05-12T18:16:00.001+01:00

(Press TV) -- The United Kingdom has claimed a vast area of the South Atlantic seabed in a bid to extend control over potentially rich oil and gas reserves in the area.

Britain submitted a claim to extend its Atlantic territory by a million square kilometres around the Falkland Islands to the United Nations on Monday despite strong opposition from Argentina.

Argentina has angrily rejected the British move, which would allow it to exploit natural resources in areas relevant to Argentina, calling it "unacceptable."

Argentina claims the same area, which is a self-governing overseas territory of the United Kingdom. The two countries fought a brief, but bitter war over the seabed off the coast of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

The UN commission on the limits of the continental shelf will decide the fate of disputed islands after considering the data presented by Britain and Argentina for possession of extended continental shelves.

Under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, coastal states may explore and exploit the natural resources of their continental shelf for up to 200 nautical miles from shore, which can be extended up to 350 nautical miles through application to the UN commission.

Hasting Center's Nazi Doctors Set Orszag's Agenda to Kill Useless Eaters

2009-05-12T18:11:00.001+01:00

(LPAC)—Last May 20, 2008, Peter Orszag — then Director of the Congressional Budget Office, sent his deputy, Philip Ellis, to speak at a meeting of the Hastings Center, a propaganda group for euthanasia. The Hastings meeting discussed the main point of the health-care "reform" agenda that Orszag was bringing into the government: that elderly, poor, and very sick people must be denied medical care so that they will die and thus drastically reduce medical costs, to enrich financiers in insurance and hedge funds.

The deputy whom Orszag sent to the Hastings meeting, Philip Ellis, was the Congressional Budget Office expert on "Comparative Effectiveness," a doctrine for slashing health care using cost and pro-euthanasia criteria.

Now that Peter Orszag is President Obama's Budget Director, this agenda is being rushed into implementation. Orszag's deputy in the White House, Ezekiel Emanuel — a Fellow of the Hastings Center — is the leading director of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is drawing up a list of approved medical procedures which is to be imposed on all American physicians and patients, public and private, according to the Hastings Center's agenda: treatments and medicines that preserve lives not worth living, are to be banned.

At the 2008 Hastings meeting, Orszag's deputy Ellis remarked on the meeting's warning that one-third of health care expenses go for treating people for conditions they die from anyway. Ellis declared that "This translates into a stark economic crisis." Two weeks later Orszag himself briefed the Strategy Unit of the British cabinet in London, on how this "crisis" might drive the agenda of a new U.S. Presidential Administration.

Now Orszag has Obama addressing this "crisis" of old and poor people refusing to die, by rushing to cut off their care.

The Hastings Center was founded in 1969, to counter the optimistic American idea that every sacred human life might contribute creatively to human progress, as reflected in first moon landing that year.

The Rockefeller, Ford and New World Foundations paid for Hastings Center to carefully revive and popularize euthanasia, which the Nazi German "Action T4" killing centre had carried out against "useless eaters" three decades earlier, and for which the U.S. had punished the Nazi perpetrators in the Nuremberg Trials only 23 years before Hastings was set up.

As the London-Wall Street financier axis increasingly acquired the "income streams" from medical care payments (through HMOs, etc.), Hastings was their chief agency for creating the new field of "bioethics," promoting the "right to die" as a major ethical concern that trumped the right to live.

For example, in 1985, the Prudential Life Insurance Company's Foundation ran a crusade called "Bioethics in the Community: A Program of Local Decision Making" directed entirely by the Hastings Center, to promote medical cost-cutting and euthanasia laws and policies.

At a recent meeting co-sponsored Hastings and Yale University, Hastings founder Daniel Callahan said that half of the cost increase in health care comes from the use of new technology or the increased use of old technology, and to control the costs we must "rethink the value we place on endless progress and innovation."

Peter Orszag's health care policy advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel, the Hastings Fellow, is the nation's leading spokesman for the "bioethics" doctrine developed by Hastings. His point of view is that suicide is unnecessary: we can accomplish the same thing through cost-cutting. Emanuel heads the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. He developed the Medical Directive, a form of the "living will" that euthanasia advocates convinced a depressed population to adopt after the great 1960s paradigm shift.

Swine flu 2009: hog hype or global threat?

2009-05-04T22:12:00.001+01:00

Analysis of the 'swine flu' epidemic by the The Alliance for Natural Health

Swine flu 2009 – the flu that has not been detected before in either pigs or humans—makes headlines around the world.

It’s big news for sure. Virtually every paper and news channel is saturated with news of the spread of this supposedly ‘deadly’ strain of the influenza A (H1N1) virus that the World Health Organization (WHO) confirms has never been detected before in either pigs or humans.

Given that viruses can remain stable for some time and then suddenly mutate, the fact that the organism from which it originated cannot be detected is not altogether surprising, but it does beg the possibility of other explanations. A substantial amount of recent research has been carried out on the strain of the H1N1 virus responsible for the so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 which was responsible for the death of between 20-50 million people around the world. Could we be looking at an 'escapee' subtype from some of this work? It would be difficult to rule out this possibility. But people may be happier to blame intensive animal farming for the time being despite there being thus far no evidence of the virus in their midst.

Please click below to see this important article in full.

Putting it into perspective

Let’s start by looking at the deadliness of the strain of the virus responsible for the current concern. To generate the sort of fear the epidemic—or near-pandemic— is presently generating, surely the virus must be deadly and capable of causing mass deaths around the world?

When you look at death rates from the strain of seasonal influenza A (H1N1) endemic in humans, which is responsible for the well-known seasonal deaths of influenza and pneumonia, and compare this with that associated so far with this new strain, we see an interesting picture emerge. Let’s remember that regular influenza, which itself jumped to humans from birds or pigs back in the early 20th century, is actually derived from the very same virus that caused the 1918-20 pandemic.

Data from the USA is usually fairly complete, so looking at data from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), the death rate from influenza and pneumonia is around 32 per 100,000 of the US population. This, according to the CDC, makes it the sixth leading cause of death in the United States following heart disease, cancer, stroke, unintentional injuries, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. If you then convert this death rate to a daily death rate, you’ll find that on average, taking into account even the non-influenza seasons when death rates are substantially lower, on average around 270 people die from this cause in the USA every day, 365 days a year.

In contrast, so far in the USA (1 May 2009), the US Government has reported 109 confirmed cases of swine flu, with just a single death. Over the same period, Mexico has reported just nine deaths, and 156 confirmed cases. Sixty six further cases have been reported in a further nine countries—with no deaths. None.

On this basis, surely thre's no basis to claim that 'swine flu' represents a massive threat, when it is clearly responsible for considerably less death than the common and garden seasonal influenza A….?

Fortunately, if you listen to those who are a little more in the know than the rabid media channels, you'll find experts like Professor Wendy Barclay, chair of influenza virology at Imperial College London, quietly referring to this recent bout as a "mild strain" and "of no particular concern".

We get some further perspective when we look at other diseases. Malaria for example kills over 1.14 million people a year. This means that—every day—365 days a year, over 3,000 people die from the mosquito-vectored plasmodium, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. But the media is conspicuously silent about this, perhaps because the pharma and pesticide companies have failed over such a long time to get anyone excited over their mostly unsuccessful attempts to deal with the disease. More cynically, there's also less money available in malaria-infected countries than there is in western countries susceptible to the swine flu hype.

What is swine influenza?

Genetically, this virus appears to contain a combination of swine, avian, and human influenza virus genes. Technically, this why it is being referred to as a novel human flu virus. So while intensive farming of pigs, poultry and other animals have the potential to be fertile production grounds for new strains of pathogenic disease organisms, you can’t help feeling that, given the media hype about ‘swine flu’, pigs are in this case being unfairly maligned.

Historically, human transmission of swine flu from birds or pigs may often have gone undetected due to them yielding mild or even no symptoms at all, or assumed to be normal seasonal flu. Subsequent human to human transmission has happened before too, although this has been limited to close contacts or closed groups of people. As with seasonal flu, deaths would occur, particularly among those with poor immunity, and among the vulnerable such as the very old, the very young or the already sick. The World Health Organisation (WHO) website provides some answers to frequently asked questions about swine influenza, as well as giving the official figures for infections and deaths in the current outbreak of what they now refer to as influenza A (H1N1).

The particular strain or subtype of the H1N1 virus associated with the current concern could of course also cross to pigs, something the pig industry is justifiably concerned about. But for the time being it has found a way of transmitting readily between humans, mainly cause it binds to tissues in the nose and throat where it can easily be passed on by coughing or sneezing. In contrast, the much more virulent H5N1 bird flu virus, although it has not yet found ways of sustainable ways of human to human transmission—and may never mutate to do this—binds to tissues in the lung. There it causes much more serious disease, notably viral pneumonia, and creates a massive imbalance in the immune system referred to as a 'cytokine storm'.

When looking at ways of reacting to the current situation we should particularly draw from the lessons of the past. The swine flu epidemic of 1976 is of particular relevance and is a good example of hype leading to catastrophe. In this epidemic more people were harmed by the efforts to deal with the virus—notably vaccination—than they were by the virus itself, which remained fairly non-virulent.

One particualar problem was the increase in Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) among the more than 40 million Americans who received swine flu immunizations. The syndrome causes paralysis from the legs upward as a result of a response in the immune system which attacks the nerve sheaths. The condition may be fatal while some may be left permanently paralysed. Click here to read the CDC’s reflections on the events of 1976. It is estimated that some 500 vaccinated people developed GBS, and of these, 25 died. This means that vaccinated persons were between 4 and 8 times more likely to get GBS. Are you prepared to trust vaccine companies and governments this time around?

If we’re not careful, another 'debacle' or 'fiasco'—the terms frequently used after the 1976 event—could be in the making today.

Is there cause for alarm?

It is of course early days, and vigilance and reasonable precautions are prudent due to the unpredictable and fast evolving nature of influenza viruses. We have a new strain of a virus that has acquired the ability to transmit from human to human rather easily. But the big question is: what will be its effect in the infected? All signs thus far is that the virus produces mild symptoms and the lack of a sky-rocketing death rate in Mexico might mean that its effects will become even less marked in time. But we can’t be sure—a single mutation could increase its virulence—and that means surveillance is a worthwhile venture. What about anti-viral drugs and vaccines? The current pattern of the disease would suggest that any use of drugs or vaccines would be utter madness, given that both carry significant risks to health and may have very little if any beneficial effect.

The apparent trend of lowering virulence of this viral epidemic of course makes the increasing alarm around 'swine flu' even more absurd. The facts: we have a flu virus that already causes relatively mild symptoms, milder than the seasonal flu virus to which it’s related, and even the World Health Organization is telling us that it doesn’t warrant anti-viral drug treatment or vaccines to be developed. And it’s effects will likely become even milder……

Who benefits from the hype?

This swine flu pandemic scare is very timely indeed for the pharmaceutical industry, which has not been enjoying, in the recent years, the easy ride it had in previous decades. The hype has already seen share prices in the pharma companies Roche and GSK, makers of the anti-viral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza, soar. Even if a pandemic does eventuate, the companies will have some difficulty making a killing (excuse the pun…[ed]) from immediate sales because of the significant lead time required to prepare for large-scale manufacture. But the pharma companies are already gaining from sales to countries to replace or even increase country-held stockpiles of anti-virals that will be approaching the end of their shelf life. You’ll remember how countries built up their stocks following the bird flu scare of 2006? Well, now it’s three years on and, yes—you’ve guess it— the shelf life of Tamiflu is 36 months, and around the same for Relenza.

Hogwash or hog hoax? The maligned swines?

You can see how GSK is gearing people up by checking out its Pandemic Planning webpage, which is nothing short of a commercial.

There’s also a lot of money to be made from countries that decide they want stockpiles held by the drug companies ready for use. The drug companies themselves manage these stockpiles on behalf of individual countries, being paid a fat retainer for the privilege, allowing them to rotate stocks keeping them in date. But certainly in the case of Roche and its anti-viral drug Tamiflu, when a country wants the stock because of an imminent pandemic, it will be shipped within 48 hours and the drug company receives in exchange a fat cheque from selling the drug at wholesale price. Not a bad business arrangement if you can ensure a pandemic from time to time so you get your cash prize on top of your retainer!

So, saying that the current epidemic is convenient for the pharma companies is a bit of an understatement. The vaccine companies will also be major beneficiaries of 'swine flu 2009'; they are already increasing their sales of seasonal flu vaccines to countries, knowing full well that that they will have little effect on a mutated form of H1N1. In due course, they will also be able to 'upgrade' their future seasonal flu vaccines by incorporating swine flu, and governments will no doubt try to persuade or force ever more people to be vaccinated. Illinois-based Baxter are about to get started making a vaccine for this particular strain and increased use of vaccines in the pig industry is also likely.

Looking back at the bird flu scare

The pharma companies certainly benefitted enormously from the avian flu pandemic scare: The Independent, a leading UK paper, reported on the 12th March 2006 that Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, made more than $5m (£2.9m) in capital gains from selling shares in the pharma company that discovered and developed Tamiflu, the drug that was stockpiled by Governments in more than 40 countries to treat a possible human pandemic arising out of avian flu.

While it was presumed by the innocent public that anti-viral stockpiles would be the best way of helping a threatened population, the public were not told much about Tamiflu’s potential side effects. Here’s the list of side-effects as printed on the UK/Ireland in-pack leaflet of the drug:

"Common side effects of Tamiflu

The most common side effects of Tamiflu are, nausea, vomiting and stomach ache. These side effects mostly occur only after the first dose of the medicine and will usually stop as treatment continues. The frequency of these effects is reduced if the medication is taken with food.

Less common side effects of Tamiflu

Skin reactions and liver function disorders have been very rarely reported.

Children (aged 1 to 12 years)

Other less common side effects, which may also be caused by influenza, are diarrhoea, ear inflammation, inflammation of the lungs, sinusitis, bronchitis, aggravation of pre-existing asthma, nose bleeding, ear disorders, inflammation of the skin, swelling of the lymph nodes and conjunctivitis.

Adults and adolescents (children aged 13 years and older)

Other less common side effects, which may also be caused by influenza, are nausea, diarrhoea, bronchitis, dizziness, tiredness, headache and sleeping difficulties".

This in-pack leaflet ignores the potentially fatal neuropsychiatric effects of Tamiflu. Drugs.com is more revealing, saying: "Influenza can be associated with a variety of neurologic and behavioral symptoms which can include events such as hallucinations, delirium, and abnormal behavior, in some cases resulting in fatal outcomes."

The Australian division of Roche gives a more accurate warning : "People with influenza, including those taking TAMIFLU may be at an increased risk of seizures, confusion, hallucinations, and/or abnormal behaviour during their illness. These events may occur shortly after beginning TAMIFLU or may occur when influenza is not treated. These events are uncommon but may result in accidental injury to the patient."

But even here, Roche appears to have cleverly worded its statement to suggest such lethal side effects could be caused by influenza and not by Tamiflu!

The ANH looked at the problem with both anti-viral drugs and vaccination strategies in some detail when, back in 2006, we were requested by the WHO to prepare guidelines for how natural products might be used to support the body's immune system in the event of an H5N1 pandemic.

Don’t panic, get some perspective

When you look at the bigger picture and see the facts and figures in context, the present situation does look to be massively overblown by the media, by governments and by the drug companies.

Here’s what we advise for the time being:

Keep a watchful eye on reliable media sources informing you of the spread of the new strain of 'swine flu'
In particular, watch out for evidence of its virulence. If the virus is decreasing rather than increasing in virulence, there is really nothing to worry about
To see official figures about confirmed cases, go to the WHO's swine influenza pages and read its regular updates
Keep your immune system in tip-top shape (see ANH's Food4Health campaign page and the recommendations about natural products given in our 2006 avian influenza report)
Watch this space for more information!

Mexican Flu Outbreak 2009: SPECIAL REPORT

2009-04-29T08:15:00.001+01:00

by Dr Leonard Horowitz

This unprecedented H1N1-H5N1 flu outbreak implicates the Anglo-American Vaccine Pipeline, says world leading consumer health protector, Dr. Leonard Horowitz

Consider the skyrocketing stock values of Novavax, Inc., precipitated by dozens of alleged flu deaths in Mexico. Then investigate the leading Anglo-American network of genetic engineers manipulating, mutating, and distributing these viruses. The evidence compels you, for the benefit of public health and safety to seriously consider, even decree, a conspiracy to commit genocide, according to this Harvard trained expert in emerging diseases.

Here, Dr. Horowitz urges an investigation of Dr. James S. Robertson, England's leading bioengineer of flu viruses for the vaccine industry, and avid promoter of U.S. Government funding for lucrative bio-defence contracts, along with collaborators at the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). These suspects helped Novavax, Inc., in Bethesda, Maryland, produce genetically-modified recombinants of the avian, swine, and Spanish flu viruses, H5N1 and H1N1, nearly identical to the unprecedented Mexican virus that is allegedly spreading to the United States at the time of this posting. The outbreak was precisely timed to promote the company's new research and huge vaccine stockpiling contracts.

Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are implicated through collaborations and publications involving private contracts with Novavax, a company that obtains its biosimulars through CDC Influenza Branch director, Ruben O. Donis, and Dr. Rick Bright, previously working with Donis at the CDC, now Novavaxs Vice President of Global Influenza Programs.

Descriptions of this virus is pathognomonic, or diagnostic, of a virus that came from Robertson's circle of friends, Dr. Horowitz charges. No other group in the world takes H5N1 Asian flu infected chickens, brings them to Europe, extracts their DNA, combines their proteins with H1N1 viruses from the 1918 Spanish flu isolate, additionally mixes in swine flu genes from pigs, then reverse engineers them to infect humans. The end product could only have ended up in Mexico via the United States from Britain in care of the CDC. The CDC had to have sent them to Novavax, where Rick Bright’s team is now implicated in a conspiracy to commit genocide—the mass killing of people for profit.

Mexican Flu Outbreak 2009: SPECIAL REPORT by Dr Leonard Horowitz

Baxter To Develop Swine Flu Vaccine Despite Bird Flu Scandal

2009-04-27T20:31:00.002+01:00

The fox has been given the duty of guarding the henhouse

Steve Watson
Infowars.net

A U.S. based pharmaceutical company that just weeks ago was involved in a scandal involving vaccines tainted with deadly avian flu virus has been chosen to head up efforts to produce a vaccine for the Mexican swine flu that has seemingly migrated into the U.S. and Europe.

Baxter confirmed over the weekend that it is working with the World Health Organization on a potential vaccine to curb the deadly swine flu virus that is blamed for scores of deaths in Mexico and has emerged as a threat in the U.S., reports the Chicago Tribune.

Baxter has previously worked with governments all over the globe to develop and produce vaccines to protect against infectious disease or potential threats from bioterrorism. After 9/11 Baxter helped supply stockpiles of a smallpox vaccine and in 2003 the company was contracted to develop a vaccine to combat the SARS virus. In 2006 the UK Government announced plans designed to inoculate every person in the country with Baxter’s vaccines in the event of a flu pandemic.

However, Baxter has a very recent and most disturbing connection to flu vaccines.

As reported by multiple sources last month, including the Times of India, vaccines contaminated with deadly live H5N1 avian flu virus were distributed to 18 countries last December by a lab at an Austrian branch of Baxter.

It was only by providence that the batch was first tested on ferrets in the Czech Republic, before being shipped out for injection into humans. The ferrets all died and the shocking discovery was made.

Czech newspapers immediately questioned whether the events were part of a conspiracy to deliberately provoke a pandemic, following up on accusations already made by health officials in other countries.

Initially, Baxter attempted to stonewall questions by invoking “trade secrets” and refused to reveal how the vaccines were contaminated with H5N1. After increased pressure they then claimed that pure H5N1 batches were sent by accident.

Since the probability of mixing a live virus biological weapon with vaccine material by accident is virtually impossible, this leaves no other explanation than that the contamination was a deliberate attempt to weaponize the H5N1 virus to its most potent extreme and distribute it via conventional flu vaccines to the population who would then infect others to a devastating degree as the disease went airborne.

The fact that Baxter mixed the deadly H5N1 virus with a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses is the smoking gun. The H5N1 virus on its own has killed hundreds of people, but it is less airborne and more restricted in the ease with which it can spread. However, when combined with seasonal flu viruses, which as everyone knows are super-airborne and easily spread, the effect is a potent, super-airbone, super deadly biological weapon.

Indeed, some have already suggested that the current scare could represent the use of such a weapon.

Now it has been announced that Baxter is seeking a sample of the potentially lethal never before seen form of swine/avian/human flu virus in order to assist the World Health Organization in developing a new vaccine, reaping billions in the process.

Why should Baxter be trusted, when they have already been proven to be at the very least criminally negligent, and at worst a prime suspect in attempting to carry off one of the most heinous crimes in the history of mankind?

The company has already put the safety of the entire human race at risk, and now, just a few weeks later, we’re expected to invest our confidence in them and take their shots with a smile and a still tongue?

As Mike Adams of Natural News has commented, “If you mail an envelope full of anthrax to your Senator, you get arrested as a terrorist. So why is Baxter — which mailed samples of a far more deadly viral strain to labs around the world — getting away with saying, essentially, ‘Oops?’”

WHO officials are reportedly still closely monitoring the investigation into Baxter’s contaminated flu vaccines, seemingly they are not too concerned. Perhaps we should be.

‘Superweed’ explosion threatens Monsanto heartlands

2009-04-22T10:32:00.002+01:00

“Superweeds” are plaguing high-tech Monsanto crops in southern US states, driving farmers to use more herbicides, return to conventional crops or even abandon their farms.

The gospel of high-tech genetically modified (GM) crops is not sounding quite so sweet in the land of the converted. A new pest, the evil pigweed, is hitting headlines and chomping its way across Sun Belt states, threatening to transform cotton and soybean plots into weed battlefields.

In late 2004, “superweeds” that resisted Monsanto’s iconic “Roundup” herbicide, popped up in GM crops in the county of Macon, Georgia. Monsanto, the US multinational biotech corporation, is the world’s leading producer of Roundup, as well as genetically engineered seeds. Company figures show that nine out of 10 US farmers produce Roundup Ready seeds for their soybean crops.

Superweeds have since alarmingly appeared in other parts of Georgia, as well as South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, according to media reports. Roundup contains the active ingredient glyphosate, which is the most used herbicide in the USA.

GM protesters demonstrate near the French town of Toulouse in March 2008.

How has this happened? Farmers over-relied on Monsanto’s revolutionary and controversial combination of a single “round up” herbicide and a high-tech seed with a built-in resistance to glyphosate, scientists say.

Today, 100,000 acres in Georgia are severely infested with pigweed and 29 counties have now confirmed resistance to glyphosate, according to weed specialist Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia.

“Farmers are taking this threat very seriously. It took us two years to make them understand how serious it was. But once they understood, they started taking a very aggressive approach to the weed,” Culpepper told FRANCE 24.

“Just to illustrate how aggressive we are, last year we hand-weeded 45% of our severely infested fields,” said Culpepper, adding that the fight involved “spending a lot of money.”

In 2007, 10,000 acres of land were abandoned in Macon country, the epicentre of the superweed explosion, North Carolina State University’s Alan York told local media.

The perfect weed

Had Monsanto wanted to design a deadlier weed, they probably could not have done better. Resistant pigweed is the most feared superweed, alongside horseweed, ragweed and waterhemp.

“Palmer pigweed is the one pest you don’t want, it is so dominating,” says Culpepper. Pigweed can produce 10,000 seeds at a time, is drought-resistant, and has very diverse genetics. It can grow to three metres high and easily smother young cotton plants.

Today, farmers are struggling to find an effective herbicide they can safely use over cotton plants.

Controversial solutions

In an interview with FRANCE 24, Monsanto’s technical development manager, Rick Cole, said he believed superweeds were manageable. “The problem of weeds that have developed a resistance to Roundup crops is real and [Monsanto] doesn’t deny that, however the problem is manageable,” he said.

Cole encourages farmers to alternate crops and use different makes of herbicides.

Indeed, according to Monsanto press releases, company sales representatives are encouraging farmers to mix glyphosate and older herbicides such as 2,4-D, a herbicide which was banned in Sweden, Denmark and Norway over its links to cancer, reproductive harm and mental impairment. 2,4-D is also well-known for being a component of Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide which was used in chemical warfare in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Questioned on the environmental impact and toxicity of such mixtures, Monsanto’s public affairs director, Janice Person, said that “they didn’t recommend any mixtures that were not approved by the EPA,” she said, referring to the US federal Environmental Protection Agency.

According to the UK-based Soil Association, which campaigns for and certifies organic food, Monsanto was well aware of the risk of superweeds as early as 2001 and took out a patent on mixtures of glyphosate and herbicide targeting glyphosate-resistant weeds.

“The patent will enable the company to profit from a problem that its products had created in the first place,” says a 2002 Soil Association report.

Returning to conventional crops

In the face of the weed explosion in cotton and soybean crops, some farmers are even considering moving back to non-GM seeds. “It’s good for us to go back, people have overdone the Roundup seeds,” Alan Rowland, a soybean seed producer based in Dudley, Missouri, told FRANCE 24. He used to sell 80% Monsanto “Roundup Ready” soybeans and now has gone back to traditional crops, in a market overwhelmingly dominated by Monsanto.

According to a number of agricultural specialists, farmers are considering moving back to conventional crops. But it’s all down to economics, they say. GM crops are becoming expensive, growers say.

While farmers and specialists are reluctant to blame Monsanto, Rowland says he’s started to “see people rebelling against the higher costs.”

Bank of England, Sterling and Government Treason

2009-04-18T11:12:00.002+01:00

Many people believe that the Bank of England is a privately owned corporation. Many people believe that it’s owned by the Rothchilds.

NEITHER of these beliefs is true.

The truth is much WORSE.

by Mike Robinson

The story of the Bank of England is the story of the British Empire. The British Empire was never a political empire. It was always a monetary financial empire, as much a parasite on the people of Great Britain as the rest of the world. The idea of the Victorian’s British Empire bringing civilisation to the darkest parts of the world is one that needs real reconsideration by many Britons.

The Bank of England was originally set up as a core part of the British Empire - making huge profits from loans to the British East India Company and other tendrils of the Great British parasite. The mainstays of the trading activities of these companies were drugs, warfare and the looting of raw materials from poverty stricken nations.

As the banker to the Government, the Bank also did quite nicely from lending to the Treasury, thank you very much. In those days, the profits of the Bank went into the hands of the shareholders.

In 1844, the Rothschild inspired desire to take complete control of Britain came true with the Bank Charter Act. This gave the Bank of England the monopoly on the production of Sterling, and control of Britain’s money supply. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, where to this day commercial banks are allowed to print their own money, they must have one Bank of England note in reserve for every note of their own that they issue.

1946 brought the “nationalisation” of the Bank. At the end of WWII, Britain was more or less bankrupt, so it was agreed that instead of paying cash for the shares of the Bank, shareholders would receive 3% Treasury stock instead. With the 1946 Bank of England Act, all the Bank shares were transferred into the possession of the Treasury solicitor, and there they are to this day. It remains a corporation, not a government department.

In 1977, the Bank set up a wholly owned subsidiary called BANK OF ENGLAND NOMINEES LIMITED, (BOEN), a private limited company, no. 1307478, with 2 of its 100 £1 shares issued. According to its Memorandum & Articles of Association, its objectives are;-

“To act as Nominee or agent or attorney either solely or jointly with others, for any person or persons, partnership, company, corporation, government, state, organisation, sovereign, province, authority, or public body, or any group or association of them….”

Bank of England Nominees Limited was granted an exemption by Edmund Dell, Secretary of State for Trade, from the disclosure requirements under Section 27(9) of the Companies Act 1976 , because, “it was considered undesirable that the disclosure requirements should apply to certain categories of shareholders.”

Add that to the fact that the Bank of England is protected from prying eyes by its “Royal Charter” status and the Official Secrets Act. What have we got here?

In 1998, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. In return for fixing the 1997 elections and getting New Labour into power, the Government enacted the 1998 Bank of England Act, which gave the Bank’s Court of Directors complete independence with regard to monetary policy.

So if we add this all together, we have a nationally owned institution which has the monopoly in the production of the national currency, and has independent control of the country’s monetary policy in the hands of a Court of Directors who serve the private banking system as they have since the Bank was established.

Think about it - private banking control of our currency and monetary policy, fully independent of government. When Gordon Brown signed away government oversight of the Bank, he committed Treason on a scale not seen in Britain since the Heath government took us into what would become the EU.

Since 1998 we have seen the Bank rapidly inflate the money supply, while at the same time relaxing regulation on how banks could lend. No longer were banks required to have cash in reserve for loans they made. Instead the vast majority of currency entering the economy did so as a result of commercial banks entering some numbers into a ledger - money out of thin air, literally.

Working for the private bankers, the Bank of England set things up to maximise the returns for their banking colleagues’ speculative activities, in the full knowledge that as a nationalised institution, it would be the UK taxpayer who was carrying all the risk, and not, as would have been the case before 1946, the shareholders.

The Court of Directors is working for the Anglo/Dutch/Saudi empire - the still-alive-and-kicking hidden hand behind the British Empire of the Victorian age. So it’s no surprise that the solution they provide to today’s manufactured monetary financial collapse is to print more money. Their aim is to destroy the last vestiges of British sovereignty; for a hyper-inflated and hyper-devalued Sterling to be replaced by a single, global, currency, under a single world fascist government.

Gordon Brown announced the new financial infrastructure at the G20. He announced the new global currency - to be issued and managed by the newly reinvigorated IMF.

This has to be stopped. It has to be stopped now. We want our country back, before there’s no country left. We want our country back from the parasites that use one square mile of London as their base of operations. Back in a way it hasn’t been for about 250 years. Join is in this fight - come to the next British Constitution Group conference in London on the 13th June, and find out what you can do.

Robert Fisk: How can you trust the cowardly BBC?

2009-04-17T07:05:00.002+01:00

The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.

But I am mincing my words.

The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth.

Let's go step by step through this pitiful business. Zionism does indeed instinctively "push out" the frontier. The new Israeli wall – longer and taller than the Berlin Wall although the BBC management cowards still insist its reporters call it a "security barrier" (the translation of the East German phrase for the Berlin Wall) – has gobbled up another 10 per cent of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" that Arafat/Mahmoud Abbas were supposed to negotiate. Bowen's own brilliant book on the 1967 war, Six Days, makes this land-grab perfectly clear.

Anyone who has read the history of Zionism will be aware that its aim was to dispossess the Arabs and take over Palestine. Why else are Zionists continuing to steal Arab land for Jews, and Jews only, against all international law? Who for a moment can contradict that this defies everyone's interpretation of international law except its own?

Even when the International Court in The Hague stated that the Israeli wall was illegal – the BBC, at this point, was calling it a "fence"! – Israel simply claimed that the court was wrong.

UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 called upon Israel to withdraw its forces from territories that it occupied in the 1967 war – and it refused to do so. The Americans stated for more than 30 years that Israel's actions were illegal – until the gutless George Bush accepted Israel had the right to keep these illegally held territories. Thus the BBC Trust – how cruel that word "trust" now becomes – has gone along with the Bush definition of Israel's new boundaries (inside Arab land, of course).

The BBC's preposterous committee claims that Bowen's article "breached the rules [sic] on impartiality" because "readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war".

Well, yes of course. Because I suppose the BBC believes that Israel's claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another "sensible" view of the war. The BBC Trust – and I now find this word nauseous each time I tap it on my laptop – says that Bowen didn't give evidence to prove the Jewish settlement at Har Homa was illegal. But the US authorities said so, right from the start. Our own late foreign secretary, Robin Cook – under screamed abuse from Zionists when he visited the settlement– said the same thing. The fact that the BBC Trust uses the Hebrew name for Har Homa – not the original Arab name, Jebel Abu Ghoneim – shows just how far it is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which so diligently abused Bowen.

Haaretz gave considerable space to the BBC's findings yesterday. I'm not surprised. But why is it that Haaretz's top correspondents – Amira Hass and Gideon Levy – write so much more courageously about the human rights abuses of Israeli troops (and war crimes) than the BBC has ever dared to do? Whenever I'm asked by lecture audiences around the world if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust Amira and Gideon more than they should ever believe in the wretched broadcasting station. I'm afraid it's the same old story. If you allow yourself to bow down before those who wish you to deviate from the truth, you will stay on your knees forever.

And this, remember, is the same institution which said that to broadcast an appeal for medicines for wounded Palestinians in Gaza might upset its "neutrality". Legless Palestinian children clearly don't count as much as the BBC's pompous executives.

How do we solve this problem? Well I can certainly advise viewers to turn to Sky TV's infinitely tougher coverage of the Middle East and – I admit I contribute to this particular station – I can recommend the courage with which Al-Jazeera English covers Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian-Israeli war.

I can well see how BBC executives will say that this article of mine today is "over the top". Jeremy Bowen may indeed think the same. But the First World War metaphor would be correct. For Bowen and his colleagues are truly lions led by BBC management donkeys.

The Road to Area 51

2009-04-12T23:39:00.002+01:00

After decades of denying the facility's existence, five former insiders speak out

by Annie Jacobsen

Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not— the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.
It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it's concealed inside Area 51's Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in "What Plane?" in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—for the record:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.

As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. "They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash." The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.
"Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle.
At the time of Collins' accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA's preemptive efforts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best.
"It wasn't always called Area 51," says Lovick, the physicist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and "rough it" out in the Nevada desert in the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. "Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it," says Lovick. "It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there."
When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed.

Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OXCART missions during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the Bahama Breeze restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, he says, "I was recruited for the Area after working with the CIA's classified Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland China. After that, I was told, 'You should come out to Nevada and work on something interesting we're doing out there.' "

Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart—he flew 84 missions in World War II—the opportunity to work at Area 51 was impossible to pass up. "When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me—this idea of flying three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the program. I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she said yes. And I said, 'You won't see me but on the weekends,' and she said, 'That's fine!' " At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily. Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years, are rarely apart today.

"We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there's a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the OXCART's specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales.

Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he became an electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a prime target for recruitment by the CIA—which indeed happened when he was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets.

"The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put us together for the programs at Area 51," says Barnes. As a security precaution, he couldn't reveal his birth name—he went by the moniker Thunder. Coworkers traveled in separate cars, helicopters and airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess hall. "Our special-projects group was the most classified team since the Manhattan Project," he says.

Harry Martin's specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychological and physical tests to see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. "My wife took one look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew not to ask where I was going."

So, what of those urban legends—the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact.

As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes offers some insight: "We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area"—even though the MiG wasn't shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51's backyard. "Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground," he says.
And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy—that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO.
In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. "That's a lot of UFO sightings!" Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and "when they'd land in California, they'd be met by FBI agents who'd make them sign nondisclosure forms." But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51's UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim.

Since only a few Air Force officials were cleared for OXCART (even though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised internal military alarms. Some generals believed the Russians might be sending stealth craft over American skies to incite paranoia and create widespread panic of alien invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are housed in 37 cubic feet of case files at the National Archives—74,000 pages of reports. A keyword search brings up no mention of the top-secret OXCART or Area 51.
Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969—more than a year after OXCART was retired. But what continues at America's most clandestine military facility could take another 40 years to disclose.

ANNIE JACOBSEN is an investigative reporter who sat for more than 500 interviews after she broke the story on terrorists probing commercial airliners. When she isn’t digging into intelligence issues for the likes of the National Review, she’s snapping together Legos with her two boys.

Royal Mint is warned that one in 20 £1 coins is fake

2009-04-11T20:00:00.001+01:00

BBC study finds fake rate is twice as high as first thought

The pound in your pocket may be worth even less than you thought. According to an investigation by the BBC, as many as one in 20 £1 coins may be a forgery – double the Royal Mint's estimate.

Willings, a company that specialises in detecting counterfeit coins for the banks and vending-machine industry, said that as many as 73 million may be circulating. The recession provides an additional incentive for people to turn to less legitimate methods of making money and the scale of forgery appears to be rising. In the last quarter of 2008, the Royal Mint removed 270,000 fake pound coins from circulation, compared with 97,000 for the whole of 2007. The Royal Mint said: "We are concerned at the apparent upward trend."

A spokesman for Willings said: "We would estimate that as many as 5 per cent of coins we test are fakes. We've been collating them for the past four months or so, and already have a collection of several hundred.

"We can manage a 50 to 60 per cent detection rate while the machines being used by the Royal Mint can only pick up around 30 to 40 per cent."

The former Queen's Assay Master Robert Matthews added: "The Mint is really trying to play down the problem and keep it as low-key as possible. They've not produced any publicity material for banks to tell us how to differentiate between real and fake coins. They don't want to undermine public confidence in the coins – you might get people refusing to take them."

A further challenge to the pound comes from the Swaziland lilangeni coin, worth about 14p and extremely similar to the British coin. While Royal Mint is making little comment, there is an outside chance that the authorities will be forced to withdraw the existing coins and replace them with a design that is harder to copy.

Going for gold: How the world's mints are coining it

2009-04-08T07:17:00.001+01:00

The world's mints are coining it as unprecedented numbers of savers search for safer investments

A few years ago his visits to the mint, founded more than 800 years ago, might have seemed eccentric. No longer. From the Russian Georgy Pobedonosets to the American Eagle, gold coin production is being cranked up in mints around the world to satisfy customers believing the assets may be immune to the global financial crisis.

Russia's state-controlled Sberbank says it has never seen such strong demand for investment coins. In Australia, the Perth Mint had to suspend new orders for gold coins because it could not keep pace with overseas demand. And, in America, the US Mint says sales of its one-ounce American Eagle gold bullion coins rocketed by more than 400 per cent to 710,000 ounces in 2008. "The demand for gold and silver," said US Mint spokeswoman Carla Coolman, "has been unprecedented."

Austria's Philharmonic, named after the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, was the world's best-selling gold coin in the last quarter and sales soared 544 per cent in the first two months of 2009. "There is no sign of demand abating," Austrian Mint's marketing director Kerry Tattersall said. Sales this year are expected to exceed 2008's record levels. "At present, production is struggling to keep up with demand."

Hans Dieter Rauch, who sells both collectors' and investors' coins in his boutique on Graben, one of Vienna's most exclusive shopping streets, said revenues rose 300 per cent last year. "It's the man in the street, not particularly rich people but normal citizens like you and me," said Mr Rauch, 65, monitoring the fluctuating price of gold on a screen in his back room.

Gold hit a record high of $1,030.80 (£700) an ounce in March 2008 and last month rose back above $1,000. Jewellery sales by cash-strapped Americans and Europeans have helped to slow the metal's rise in recent weeks.

The Czech Republic's Komercni Banka this month added gold coins and bars to its traditional portfolio of products. Even the Central Bank of Armenia is at it, issuing 10,000 gold coins with a Zodiac signs design. And, in New Zealand, Michael O'Kane, head bullion trader at the mint, said it was averaging a month's transactions in a day.

Wealthy investors are more likely to invest in bars than coins as the premium for production costs is lower, said Wolfgang Wrzesniok-Rossbach, head of sales at the precious metals group Heraeus. "If you buy a kilo bar you have to pay the surcharge for producing the bar, which is pretty low, only once" he said. "If you buy 30 1oz coins, which would be about equal to a 1kilo bar, you have to pay 30 times that amount."

Coins have the edge for small investors who want flexibility and appreciate their aesthetic allure. Demand is for more than physical products: in the past few years, gold has been sought after for speculative gains, with interest in gold-backed funds in particular soaring. But since the financial crisis accelerated last autumn, interest in coins and bars has increased, with investors seeking security rather than profit.

Other manufacturers are reducing output and jobs, but the Royal Canadian Mint quadrupled capacity to produce its bullion gold and silver Maple Leaf coins in late 2008, and the Austrian Mint is producing in one week what it usually churns out in a month. It has extended its shifts throughout the night and weekend and recruited more workers to cope with the surge in demand.

Duch - 'US helped Pol Pot's rise to power'

2009-04-07T22:02:00.001+01:00

(reuters)

A man watches a live feed of Duch's trial

Anne Barrowclough

The Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison chief told a Cambodia war crimes court today US policies in the 1970s contributed to the rise of Pol Pot's genocidal regime.

Kaing Guek Eav, or 'Duch,' the brutal director of the infamous torture centre S-21 said he believed the Khmer Rouge regime would have died out had the US not supported the right wing military government that removed Prince Norodom Sihanouk from power in a 1970 coup.

Duch, who is on trial charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, made the claims as part of a detailed testimony of his own journey from maths teacher to fanatical communist revolutionary.

Earlier, he told the UN backed tribunal that he had 'sacrified everything' to the revolution, but had realised early on that it would end in 'disaster'.

During the four years the Khmer rouge were in power from 1975 - 1979, over 1.7 million Cambodians - nearly a quarter of the population - died from starvation, disease and execution. Between 1977 and 1979 Duch himself presided over the deaths of up to 17000 victims who were brought to S-21 to be interrogated and murdered.

Last week, he took the stand to express his remorse at the atrocities committed under his command. As his trial entered its second week he took the stand again, this time to desribe his part in the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Describing the tangled politics of Cambodia as the Vietnam War raged on the country's eastern border, and the Khmer Rouge recruited peasants and intellectuals disillusioned with Prince Sihanouk's autocratic regime, he said he believed Pol Pot's revolution would have come to an end in 1970 if US policy had not presented him with a 'golden opportunity'.

"I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished," he said. "But Mr. Kissinger (the then U.S. Secretary of State) and Richard Nixon were quick (to back General Lon Nol, the right wing coup leader), and then the Khmer Rouge noted the golden opportunity."

Pol Pot seized on the US intervention in Cambodian politics as a propoganda tool to increase recruitment, and build power as it battled Lon Nol's regime between 1970 - 1975. The coup led to a significant increase in support from the Vietnamese communists which was to prove crucial in bringing Pol Pot to power.

Duch had begun the day recounting his personal odyssey to revolution, describing how he became interested in politics in 1957 and decided to join the Khmer Rouge in1964.

He said his parents were sympathetic to his belief in fighting oppression but afraid for him, because he risked arrest and imprisonment.

"I sacrificed everything to the revolution," the 66-year-old told the court.

When he decided to go to the countryside to become a full-time Khmer Rouge cadre, he went to say goodbye to his parents, he said.

"My father was shocked," he recalled, but gave him a lucky wristband. His friends presented him with a watch.

He was first given the job of teaching morality to his fellow guerrillas, but abilities of the meticulous former school master were swiftly recognized by his superiors, and he was put in charge of interrogation at a security prison known as M-13 in a jungle stronghold.

As prisoners and documents were sent to him, he saw that, even before the Khmer Rouge had taken power, its members were accusing, arresting and killing each other.

"I said to myself, 'Oh, this is going to be a disaster,'" he testified.

Duch is the first of five former Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried by the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and the only one to apologise for his war crimes.

His trial comes as once again allegations of corruption threaten to overshadow the court's proceedings.

Peter Taksoe-Jensen, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for legal affairs, isto meet government and tribunal officials this week to discuss allegations that Cambodian personnel at the ECCC were forced to pay kickbacks to obtain their positions.

Defense lawyers and human rights groups suggest that the allegations, if unanswered, could destroy the tribunal's credibility.

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

2009-04-07T20:45:00.001+01:00

A British Trident missile. Photograph: AP

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.

Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".

The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to Nato's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April.

"The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible," the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. "The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

The authors - General John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and Nato's ex-supreme commander in Europe, General Klaus Naumann, Germany's former top soldier and ex-chairman of Nato's military committee, General Henk van den Breemen, a former Dutch chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, a former French chief of staff, and Lord Inge, field marshal and ex-chief of the general staff and the defence staff in the UK - paint an alarming picture of the threats and challenges confronting the west in the post-9/11 world and deliver a withering verdict on the ability to cope.

The five commanders argue that the west's values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:

· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

· The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.

· The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.

To prevail, the generals call for an overhaul of Nato decision-taking methods, a new "directorate" of US, European and Nato leaders to respond rapidly to crises, and an end to EU "obstruction" of and rivalry with Nato. Among the most radical changes demanded are:

· A shift from consensus decision-taking in Nato bodies to majority voting, meaning faster action through an end to national vetoes.

· The abolition of national caveats in Nato operations of the kind that plague the Afghan campaign.

· No role in decision-taking on Nato operations for alliance members who are not taking part in the operations.

· The use of force without UN security council authorisation when "immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings".

In the wake of the latest row over military performance in Afghanistan, touched off when the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said some allies could not conduct counter-insurgency, the five senior figures at the heart of the western military establishment also declare that Nato's future is on the line in Helmand province.

"Nato's credibility is at stake in Afghanistan," said Van den Breemen.

"Nato is at a juncture and runs the risk of failure," according to the blueprint.

Naumann delivered a blistering attack on his own country's performance in Afghanistan. "The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner." By insisting on "special rules" for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin was contributing to "the dissolution of Nato".

Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels and a former senior US state department official, described the manifesto as "a wake-up call". "This report means that the core of the Nato establishment is saying we're in trouble, that the west is adrift and not facing up to the challenges."

Naumann conceded that the plan's retention of the nuclear first strike option was "controversial" even among the five authors. Inge argued that "to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence".

Reserving the right to initiate nuclear attack was a central element of the west's cold war strategy in defeating the Soviet Union. Critics argue that what was a productive instrument to face down a nuclear superpower is no longer appropriate.

Robert Cooper, an influential shaper of European foreign and security policy in Brussels, said he was "puzzled".

"Maybe we are going to use nuclear weapons before anyone else, but I'd be wary of saying it out loud."

Another senior EU official said Nato needed to "rethink its nuclear posture because the nuclear non-proliferation regime is under enormous pressure".

Naumann suggested the threat of nuclear attack was a counsel of desperation. "Proliferation is spreading and we have not too many options to stop it. We don't know how to deal with this."

Nato needed to show "there is a big stick that we might have to use if there is no other option", he said.

The Authors:

John Shalikashvili

The US's top soldier under Bill Clinton and former Nato commander in Europe, Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw of Georgian parents and emigrated to the US at the height of Stalinism in 1952. He became the first immigrant to the US to rise to become a four-star general. He commanded Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war, then became Saceur, Nato's supreme allied commander in Europe, before Clinton appointed him chairman of the joint chiefs in 1993, a position he held until his retirement in 1997.

Klaus Naumann

Viewed as one of Germany's and Nato's top military strategists in the 90s, Naumann served as his country's armed forces commander from 1991 to 1996 when he became chairman of Nato's military committee. On his watch, Germany overcame its post-WWII taboo about combat operations, with the Luftwaffe taking to the skies for the first time since 1945 in the Nato air campaign against Serbia.

Lord Inge

Field Marshal Peter Inge is one of Britain's top officers, serving as chief of the general staff in 1992-94, then chief of the defence staff in 1994-97. He also served on the Butler inquiry into Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and British intelligence.

Henk van den Breemen

An accomplished organist who has played at Westminster Abbey, Van den Breemen is the former Dutch chief of staff.

Jacques Lanxade

A French admiral and former navy chief who was also chief of the French defence staff.

More IMF Economic Medicine Is Not the Solution

2009-04-04T22:03:00.001+01:00

by Michel Chossudovsky

New World Order: Still A Conspiracy Theory?

2009-04-04T21:54:00.001+01:00

Wikipedia still thinks so, despite hundreds of pronouncements during G20 summit

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Despite the fact that the term “new world order” was mentioned in connection with the G20 this week hundreds of times by both global leaders and in news reports, it is still regarded as a “conspiracy theory” by that bastion of truthiness, Wikipedia.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown himself yesterday announced that the G20 heralded the creation of a “new world order” which would involve increased global regulation of economic markets.

A Google News search provides well over a thousand results of reports including the term “new world order” over the past couple of weeks.

Despite the fact that world leaders have been talking about a “new world order” for decades, in the context of the political agenda to diminish the power of sovereign states in favour of a move towards global governance, it was still regarded as a delusion of paranoid conspiracy theorists by the establishment media until relatively recently.

Now even Fox News and Sean Hannity are throwing their arms in the air and admitting that the “conspiracy theorists were right” as the agenda for global government is openly announced.

However, the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which is notorious for being completely infested with maniacally obsessive trolls, crooked insiders, and establishment apologists, claims that in its warped version of reality, the “new world order” as a sinister concept is still a nebulous conspiracy theory.

New World Order: So-called “conspiracy theorists” had to endure decades of ridicule for daring to claim such a political agenda existed - now it’s openly discussed in every major news outlet.

But according to Wikipedia, it’s still a “conspiracy theory”.

Wikipedia attempts to make the differentiation by claiming that the new world order in the context of a sinister, undemocratic, and ultimately totalitarian political agenda, is a characterization embraced only by paranoid conspiracy theorists.

Presumably, Wikipedia is only willing to accept the fact that an agenda to create a new world order exists if that new world order equates to a happy, loving, positive move, where world bankers and global elitists really have the best interests of all of us at heart. Forgive us for being somewhat sceptical of that conclusion.

In reality, as we have exhaustively documented, the new world order has nothing to do with saving the world and everything to do with centralizing power and control into the hands of a gaggle of criminal globalists who are concerned about nothing other than increasing their domination over the planet - at the expense of the rest of the population.

The new world order is totalitarian by its very nature - shifting power away from sovereign countries to global institutions which have no accountability to the general public whatsoever, and through which the public has no voice or influence. That cannot be defined as anything else but undemocratic. There is no such thing as a “benign” new world order.

This very agenda was again enunciated this week by World Bank President and and Bilderberg elitist Robert Zoellick, who openly admitted the plan to eliminate national sovereignty and impose a global government during a speech on the eve of the G20 summit.

Speaking about the agenda to increase not just funding but power for international organizations on the back of the financial crisis, Zoellick stated, “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.”

Proponents of a new world order have always disguised their rhetoric with flowery notions of achieving some kind of global utopia, but behind the scenes the real agenda has always been sinister, nepotistic and anathema to any reasonable notion of democratic freedom.

It’s about time the establishment media stopped parroting the words of globalists and blithely repeating the term “new world order” like it was going out of fashion, and actually started asking real questions about what it really means.

G20 Agreement must be rejected

2009-04-04T10:59:00.001+01:00

(LPAC)—In response to the release of the official communiqué today at the conclusion of the G20 summit in London, Lyndon LaRouche stated that "what they are proposing is the equivalent of recommending the use of cyanide for the cure of a headache. It is a permanent cure."

LaRouche was immediately referring to the assumption underlying the entire statement: "We believe that the only sure foundation for sustainable globalization and rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions." The statement further states: We are undertaking an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion ... that will, by the end of next year amount to $5 trillion, raise output by 4 percent, and accelerate the transition to a green economy."

LaRouche characterized the above statements as "tantamount to the confessions of an assembly of lunatics."

"This is fascism in its British form of Oswald Mosley. Mosley would be ecstatic, he and H.G. Wells who was backing Mosley back in 1933. At that time the City of London's allies on Wall Street supported Mussolini, as did the great American pragmatist, John Dewey. They also supported Hitler as the German Mussolini.

"This is fascism combined with insanity. It is a case of the criminal mind going insane."

LaRouche stated that he hoped "there will be enough patriotic men and women in the U.S. Congress to prevent the adoption of this agreement. It would be the death of the U.S. and much more besides. It has to be stopped. It must be stamped out now."

Today's Financial Times publishes a column by Andrew Ward entitled "Can Obama make the difference?" In it he makes the point that in his account of the London economic conference in 1933, a conference which FDR boycotted in his opposition to British imperialism, HG Wells wrote that Roosevelt was the "last hope for mankind. There was no other personality visible who even promised to exorcise the spell that lay upon the economic life of the race. It was Roosevelt's conference or nothing."

Unfortunately, contrary to Roosevelt's rejection of HG Wells' fascist Open Conspiracy for world government at that time, President Obama has done just the opposite.

In a press conference after the conclusion of the G20 summit Obama endorsed the entire agenda of Gordon Brown, personally expressing his appreciation for the work of Brown and his entire staff. Moreover, he claimed to have himself played a decisive role in "forging a consensus."

LaRouche pointed out that the British suckered him based precisely on this profile he has of himself as the forger of consensus. As a consequence, LaRouche said, Obama is "on the edge of going down. They didn't have to control him, because he could control himself. This is tragic."

"This agreement cannot be accepted," LaRouche said. "If it were, it could very well lead to riots in the United States, the the breakup of the nation and to terrorism. Therefore, this must be rejected. The U.S. must not sign any treaty agreement with these elements. No patriot will allow this to be confirmed, no matter which side of the aisle he or she is on. To sign this would be to betray the United States.

"This is one ego trip from which the President may return, but the nation may not come back. The price of his ego trip is too high a price to pay. No man has a right to have his ego used in this way. Our country can't be put into jeopardy, humanity can't be put into jeopardy, because he wants to win a popularity contest."

Gordon Brown hails creation of a ‘New World Order’ out of crisis

2009-04-04T10:46:00.001+01:00

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, left, greets US President Barack Obama as he arrives for the G20 summit at the ExCel centre in London, Thursday, April 2, 2009. AP Photo

Gordon Brown announced the creation of a “new world order” after the conclusion of the G20 summit of world leaders in London.

Telegraph | Apr 3, 2009

By Andrew Porter, Robert Winnett and Toby Harnden

The Prime Minister claimed to have struck a “historic” deal to end the global recession as he unveiled plans to plough more than $1 trillion into the world economy.

“This is the day that the world came together to fight back against the global recession,” he said. “Not with words but with a plan for global recovery and reform.”

Barack Obama, the US President, hailed the deal as a “turning point” for the global economy which would put it on the path to recovery.

However, critics pointed out Mr Brown had been unable to secure agreement on a new co-ordinated fiscal stimulus package that he and Mr Obama had been urging. The Prime Minister has staked his political future on securing a deal at the summit.

Under the $1.1 trillion (£750 billion) agreement, which followed several days of intense negotiation, struggling economies will be offered money provided to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by wealthier nations.

The G20 leaders also agreed restrictions on bankers’ pay, rules to target tax havens and hedge funds and a new financial early warning system to prevent a future economic meltdown.

“Today’s decisions, of course, will not immediately solve the crisis. But we have begun the process by which it will be solved,” Mr Brown said. “I think a new world order is emerging with the foundation of a new progressive era of international co-operation,”

Following the announcement of the deal at the ExCeL conference centre in London’s Docklands, the FTSE share index closed up more than four per cent. Other stock markets around the world also rose sharply.

The conclusion of the summit also coincided with the release of figures that suggested the British economy could be starting to recover. House prices have risen and the Bank of England claims that lending to businesses has improved.

Mr Brown’s delight at securing the agreement — which had been under threat from Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor — was evident.

The success was echoed by Mr Obama. “By any measure the London summit was historic,” he said. “It was historic because of the size and the scope of the challenges that we face and because of the timeliness and magnitude of our response.”

Mr Sarkozy, who had threatened to walk out of the talks unless he got action on tax havens, said a “page has been turned” on the old financial model, the “Anglo-Saxon model”.

One trillion dollars will be made available to the IMF and, in turn, to countries threatened by the downturn. However, Mr Brown made it clear that he did not intend to apply for funds for Britain, despite opponents warning that the country will soon need a bail-out due to the growing deficit in the public finances.

Mr Obama, who leaves Britain after a three-day visit on Friday morning, played an important part in brokering the deal, in particular French concerns over the deal on tax havens. A senior White House official said the President took Mr Sarkozy to a corner of the room for a chat. He then acted as a go-between with President Hu Jintao, of China until they both agreed to a solution put forward by Mr Obama.

As The Daily Telegraph disclosed on Thursday, a key part of the global rescue package included united action to curb excessive pay to bankers and traders.

Downing Street will be relieved that the summit has not proved a failure, despite Mr Brown not securing some of his earlier objectives, notably a second round of fiscal stimulus.

Strasbourg turns into fortress for NATO

2009-03-31T22:20:00.001+01:00

STRASBOURG (Reuters) - Strasbourg is shutting schools, sending out up to 15,000 troops and police, and even sealing up the manholes into its sewers as the city readies itself to host NATO's 60th anniversary summit.

The intensive security, costing some 110 million euro ($147.4 million), is meant to protect leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama and control 20,000-50,000 peace activists who are expected to stage protests.

Both protesters and politicians will have a busy agenda as they flit between Strasbourg and its German co-hosts, Baden Baden and Kehl, during the summit.

But locals are expecting gridlock on both sides of the Rhine river during the summit on April 3 and 4, as France has reinstated controls along the German border and shut some roads, while left-wing activists are expected to try and block traffic.

With authorities worried about the risk of student riots, police have evacuated Strasbourg university and will keep it closed for a week.

Students protesting against the government's education policies had occupied the building, and university authorities feared anti-NATO demonstrators would join them.

"The potential for violence is there, it depends on the opportunity: what can be done, will be done," Heinz Fromm, the head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, told Reuters.

Organizers of the pacifist "NATO counter-summit," who are setting up a tent city to host thousands of activists, are angered by a ban on demonstrations in the town centre.

Their main demonstration, scheduled for Saturday, has been diverted out of the centre.

"That's totally unacceptable," said Frederic Henry, one of the spokesmen of the movement.

ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNS

Home to the European Parliament, Strasbourg is used to visiting VIPs and extra security -- though not in this scale.

Anti-aircraft guns have been installed near the city, and there will be a temporary no-fly zone, while traffic on the Rhine will also be halted.

French daily Le Monde said every resident or shopkeeper would have to wear a badge, 13 schools would be closed along with sports fields, while manholes would be sealed.

Some 6,000 delegates and other staff are expected to arrive from NATO's 26 member states, discussing issues from future strategies for the Cold War military alliance to a potential increase of troops in Afghanistan.

France's planned return to the military command of NATO, which it left in 1966, is also expected to be feted in style.

Faced with the prospect of protests and security controls, many residents of Strasbourg prefer to escape.

"My son's school will be closed and there's a risk it will be very hard to get around," said Sylvie Fintz, who has taken a day off work to leave town with her family for a few days.

(Additional reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich in Berlin; writing by Sophie Hardach in Paris; editing by Myra MacDonald)

Japan prepares to blast North Korean missile out of the sky

2009-03-28T10:57:00.001Z

The missile launch is believed to be a military test, though Pyongyang insists it is launching a satellite.

By Arthur Bright

Japan has authorized its military to shoot down a North Korean missile that is being prepared for launch in the coming weeks, should it endanger Japanese territory.

The Washington Post reports that the Japanese government has ordered two anti-missile destroyers into the Sea of Japan and is moving Patriot missiles to the coast to intercept the North Korean rocket or its debris.

The orders punctuated a week of rising tensions in Northeast Asia, as North Korea moved its rocket to a launch pad and warned the outside world not to interfere or impose sanctions for its planned launch of what it describes as a "communications satellite." The launch is scheduled for sometime between April 4 and 8.

Japan, South Korea, and the United States have repeatedly asked North Korea to cancel the launch, calling it a provocative pretext for the test of a long-range ballistic missile, which may be able to strike Alaska. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the launch could harm talks aimed at helping North Korea with food and fuel in return for abandoning nuclear weapons....

Japan took pains Friday to explain that it was preparing for a possible accident, not for an attack. Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada said he issued orders "to prepare for an event in which a North Korean projectile falls onto our country in an accident."

Reuters writes that the North Korean missile is a multi-stage long-range rocket, and that while the rocket's boosters are expected to crash in the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean, "a failed launch or accident could result in one of the stages of the rocket, or bits of it, falling on Japan and endangering lives and property." Reuters adds that Japan would have only 10 minutes notice if the missile or its debris were to threaten Japanese territory.

However, the Associated Press reported earlier this week that some in the Japanese government are not convinced that its military will be able to successfully intercept the missile or its debris.

Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone said "it would be difficult" to shoot down fragments from a failed launch of the North Korean missile.

"Our country has never done this before. And we don't know how or where it may come flying," Nakasone told reporters Tuesday.

He was echoing an unidentified top official, who said Monday that "there is no way you can hit a bullet if you exchange pistol fire in a distant duel," according to Kyodo and other Japanese media.

The Associated Press adds that Japanese Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada disagreed with the foreign minister's assessment.

Japan's order to prepare to intercept the North Korean missile comes a day after Dennis C. Blair, the US National Intelligence Director, issued "the most pointed US challenge so far to Pyongyang's repeated assertions that its upcoming rocket launch is for peaceful purposes," reports the Los Angeles Times.

"Most of the world understands the game they are playing," National Intelligence Director Dennis C. Blair said. "I think they're risking international opprobrium and hopefully worse if they successfully launch it."...

"They're trying to use the rationale of a legitimate space launch for a missile, which is in its foundation a military missile," Blair said, describing the rocket as a Taepodong, a multistage missile that may be capable of reaching Alaska.

Gerald Warner, blogging for The Daily Telegraph, adds that the US has dispatched two anti-missile destroyers, the USS McCain and the USS Chafee, to Japanese waters as well.

North Korea earlier this week reiterated its claim that the missile was for a peaceful satellite launch, and warned that any attempt to shoot down would be considered an act of war, reports The Korea Times.

"We will retaliate any act of intercepting our satellite for peaceful purposes with prompt counter strikes by the most powerful military means," a spokesman for the General Staff of the Korean People's Army was quoted as saying, specifically naming South Korea, the US, and Japan.

"Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war," the spokesman said in a statement carried in English by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Agence France-Presse reports that Russia, which typically has supported the North Korean government, today recommended that North Korea refrain from the missile test.

"North Korea would be better off refraining from it," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin told reporters in Moscow, Russian news agencies reported.

"There is no need to ignite passions around this problem," he said. "All the issues that arise in connection with the planned launch one way or another need to be decided by way of dialogue and consultations."

Russia, he said, "understands that the situation in the region of Northeast Asia is tense therefore it would be best if our partners from North Korea refrained from this launch."

Fred Goodwin’s house vandalised

2009-03-28T10:45:00.001Z

Source

by davidgerard

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, London EC1, Wednesday (NNN) — Sir Fred Goodwin’s house and car in the Grange, Edinburgh have been attacked by vandals.

Revellers queued for several hours for the opportunity of a piece of the action. Two scenes-of-crime officers from the Scottish Police Services Authority kept the crowd orderly. Neighbours, who said Sir Fred had not been seen there for weeks, did a roaring trade in rotten tomatoes and cabbages and bits of wood with a nail through the end.

Sir Fred is assumed to be overseas, reportedly hiding out with a false beard under an assumed name in a market stall in Marrakesh.

Lothian and Borders Police said that officers were acquiring CCTV footage and carrying out door-to-door inquiries in the neighbourhood. “Our inquiries are at an early stage and we are appealing for anyone with information about this incident to contact us. We’re looking at OBEs for the participants and recommending a knighthood for the organiser.”

The attack is considered likely to presage similar activity in the London G20 meeting protests planned for early April. Barack Obama, who will be attending, called on protestors to take action in an orderly and civilised manner. “Torching houses and smashing cars creates a horrific waste in spent carbon. All these materials can be recycled and used again. The same goes for the bankers — reusing their organs is a lot more socially responsible than tearing their guts out and hanging them from streetlights. What would Al Gore do? I beg you, think of the planet.”

Stasi HQ UK… where details of all your journeys are secretly logged and kept for a decade

2009-03-24T19:52:00.001Z

Snoop centre: The ‘Status Park 4′ building near Heathrow monitors travellers

Daily Mail | Mar 23, 2009

By Jason Lewis

This anonymous office building on a business park near Heathrow Airport is where the Government has begun monitoring millions of British holidaymakers using its controversial new ‘terrorist detector’ database.

The top-secret computer system - tied into the airlines’ ticketing network - makes judgments about travel habits and passengers’ friends and family to decide if they are a security risk.

Like something from a science-fiction film, the Home Office has designed it to spot a ‘criminal’ or terrorist before they have done anything wrong.

The building’s address is, some might say sinisterly, called Status Park 4.

But the intrusiveness of the system at the heart of Government’s so-called ‘e-Borders’ scheme has provoked such fury among civil liberties campaigners that some consider it akin to a modern-day Stasi headquarters.

All the information passengers give to travel agents, including home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, passport details and the names of family members, is shared with an unknown number of Government agencies for ‘analysis’ and stored for up to ten years.

But even as the ‘profiling’ system goes live, its reliability is being called into question.

An internal Home Office document obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveals that during testing one ‘potential suspect’ turned out to be an airline passenger with a spinal injury flying into Britain with his nurse.

‘Suspect’ requests likely to cause innocent holidaymakers to get ‘red flags’ as potential terrorists include ordering a vegetarian meal, asking for an over-wing seat and travelling with a foreign-born husband or wife.

The system will also ‘red flag’ passengers buying a one-way ticket and making a last-minute reservation and those with a history of booking tickets and not showing up for the flights.

A previous history of travel to the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iran will also trigger an alarm, as will those with a record of sponsoring an immigrant from any of these countries.

Starting during the Easter holiday rush, millions of people will be checked by the new National Border Targeting Centre (NBTC).

By the end of the year the NBTC, which is recruiting 250 staff, will have been relocated to another office near Manchester Airport and will be analysing the movements of 120million UK travellers.

Initially it will target airlines but will be expanded to check passengers on ferries and trains, including some journeys within the UK.

At the heart of the system is a highly classified computer algorithm designed to pick out people to be searched, questioned by security staff or barred from flying.

An internal Home Office Border and Immigration Agency document explains how Britain’s new system will work.

Written by Tim Rymer, head of the Joint Border Operations Centre, the forerunner to the new NBTC, it explains how it will use ‘Passenger Name Record’ (PNR) information given when travellers buy a ticket.

The document, written in March last year after a trial examining 30million passengers, reveals: ‘PNR is checked against profiles of behavioural patterns which indicate risk activity.

‘Profiles are run to identify behaviour, not to identify individuals, and are based on evidence and intelligence.’

Mr Rymer revealed that the information secured from the airlines for e-Borders would then also be available to other unnamed Government departments and held for up to ten years.

He wrote: ‘E-Borders acts as a single window for carriers to provide data to Government.’

The system is bound to cause concerns about the handling of confidential personal data.

But Mr Rymer reported that he was ‘confident our use of PNR data is proportionate and complies with robust data-protection safeguards’.

Intending to show how his team double-checked the computerised suspect reports, Mr Rymer admitted: ‘Profiling identified a potential suspect; however further examination of his booking details revealed that the passenger was suffering from a spinal injury and was being escorted by a nurse.

‘In this way the PNR information enabled the passenger to be eliminated from the profile match.’

Others flagged up then eliminated as suspects included travellers with comments on their bookings including: ‘Please treat passenger with sensitivity - death in the family’ or ‘Wheelchair requested - broken leg’.

The system was originally designed to identify suspect freight shipments.

Until now international no-fly lists have been based on painstaking intelligence and people’s criminal records.

But the Border and Immigration Agency’s new ‘rule-based targeting’ system works by building up a complete picture of passengers’ travel history and the detailed information they give to airlines and travel agencies when booking a flight.

It compares these answers and requests to other government databases and also shares the information with other countries around the world. The computer then makes value judgments about whether peculiar decisions and requests fit its secret terrorist or criminal profiles.

In the United States, where the Department of Homeland Security has been running a similar system for several years, people with a poor driving record have been subjected to further checks.

The American system has also been criticised for awarding so-called ‘terrorism points’ to passengers depending on their level of ’suspicious’ travel activity.

The Home Office argues the e-Borders system will ‘transform our border control to ensure greater security, effectiveness and efficiency’.

‘To do so,’ the department says, ‘we will make full use of the latest technology to provide a way of collecting and analysing information on everyone who travels to or from the United Kingdom.’

But the UK system, and others across Europe that all share their passenger data, are facing increasing criticism.

The EU’s Home Affairs Committee is currently carrying out an inquiry examining whether the use of profiling, particularly when it focuses on particular ethnic groups, is illegal.

In searching for terrorists, and flagging people who have travelled to the Middle East or Pakistan, the system is likely to pick out a high proportion of Muslims.

In its initial report the EU committee says using this data is against EU regulations and the practice is leading to a lack of trust in law enforcement and the fear of discrimination.

It adds that it is ‘concerned [the] system providing for the collection of personal data of passengers travelling to the EU could provide a basis for profiling…on the basis of race or ethnicity’.

And the EU report continues: ‘Repeated concerns raised by the [European] Parliament in connection with racial, ethnic and behavioural profiling in the context of data protection, law-enforcement co-operation, exchange of data and intelligence, aviation and transport security, immigration and border management and anti-discrimination measures have not so far been adequately addressed.’

ID cards not compulsory after all, says Home Office

2009-03-24T18:23:00.001Z

Blunkett plan finding favour?

By John Lettice

The Register

Plans to make ID cards compulsory for UK citizens at some point in the middle distance have been officially abandoned, apparently. According to the Home Office's revised counter-terrorism strategy document, published today, "It is not our intention that identity cards should be mandatory for UK nationals."

This in some senses reverses the previous plan, which was for ID cards to be made compulsory via a vote in parliament after they had achieved significant penetration among the UK population. In most senses, however, it changes nothing. ID cards will be issued to airport workers "initially for an 18 month evaluation period" this year, offered to "young people to assist them in proving their identity" next year, and will "start to enroll people at high volumes" from 2011/12.

The hordes of people desperate for ID cards and the luckless population of Manchester seem to have fallen off this roadmap, possibly for reasons of space but more likely because both ideas were ridiculous.

Presuming (possibly a big presume) that the Home Office doesn't change its mind about compulsion again, the roadmap is now more closely aligned to David Blunkett's cunning plan to save the ID scheme. Once ID cards become available to the general UK population, people will be given "a choice between an identity card, a passport or both". Whatever they choose, their details will be added to the National Identity Register, and as it's the database that's the point, not the card, the Home Office is happy to let them decline the latter.

The two problems with this, from the point of view of the Home Office, are first that people who don't want or need a passport won't go onto the NIR (which is why Blunkett wants to make passports compulsory instead), and second that EU citizens living in the UK will escape the scheme entirely. So in the unlikely event of New Labour and Smith (majority 1,948) remaining in place after the next election, we can perhaps expect a compulsory passport announcement in a few years time.

Should the 2011 part of the 2011/12 general rollout actually happen, incidentally, it's likely to be the last time you will be able to collect a passport, and presumably ID card, without handing in your fingerprints. These will be required for passport renewals from 2012, according to today's document. ®

Council uses spy plane to snoop on homes

2009-03-24T18:14:00.001Z

They already track innocent citizens’ movements with CCTV, are in cahoots with police over speed cameras, and have been using powers supposed to tackle terrorism to put tails on people suspected of minor ‘crimes’.

Now local authorities are putting spy planes in the air to snoop on homeowners who are wasting too much energy.

The data is being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take.

A scheme is already underway in Broadland District Council in Norfolk, which has spent £30,000 hiring a plane with a thermal imaging camera.

It said the exercise has been so successful other local authorities are planning to follow suit.

But critics have warned the crackdown was another example of local authorities extending their charter to poke their noses into every aspect of people’s lives.

Broadland, which covers towns including Aylsham, Reepham and Acle, hired the plane from a Leicestershire-based company for five days at the end of January.

The aircraft took images of homes and businesses, with those losing the most heat showing up as red, while better insulated properties appear blue.

The council’s head of environmental services, Andy Jarvis, said the original plan was to target businesses but it was realised the scope could be extended to include residential properties.

‘The project we put together was for a plane to go up on various nights flying strips of the district and taking pictures,’ he said.

‘Through those images, a thermal image photograph can be created in which you can pick out individual properties which are losing a lot of heat.

‘We do a lot on domestic energy conservation already and realised it would be useful to see if any of the homes which were particularly hot were properties where people had not insulated their lofts.

‘We were also able to look at very cold properties and think we might have picked up people on low incomes who are not heating their homes because they cannot afford to.’

More than half the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the domestic sector, which includes property and transport.

Almost 60 per cent of a household’s heat is lost through uninsulated walls, lofts and windows, costing the average home £380 a year.

Insulation is estimated to reduce each home’s carbon emissions by around two tonnes annually.

The first city in the UK to make a heat-loss map was Aberdeen, while the first local authority in England was Haringey Council, in London - although environmental groups at that time said they viewed the practice as a ‘gimmick’ of little real value.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance has added concerns about the issue of privacy.

Chief executive Matthew Elliott said: ‘People are sick and tired of being heckled and spied on by local government and this council has shown an utter disregard for the man on the street.’

He added: ‘We’re in a recession and you would have thought this council had better ways to spend £30,000.

‘Taxpayers are already footing the bill for innumerable advertising campaigns at a time when families are struggling to make ends meet.’

But Conservative-led Broadlands insisted the heat-loss map would allow officers to pinpoint offenders and point out how to get help and grants to improve insulation to cut carbon emissions.

Council leader Simon Woodbridge said the project would ‘effectively pay for itself within a few weeks in terms of the amounts of money we can help people to save’.

Lib Dem group leader Stuart Beadle added: ‘Cameras are in place all over today and we have to accept them. So long as the right guidelines are in place and it will bring benefits, I think the scheme is a good thing.’

Britain now has more than four million CCTV cameras - a fifth of those in use around the world - and around 8,000 speed cameras.

Almost 500 local authorities have been using anti-terrorism powers brought in under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to launch a string of bizarre investigations.

These have included checks on dog fouling, putting bins out on the wrong day and people trying to cheat school catchment area rules.

Andrew Levy

Commander confirms Netanyahu war plans

2009-03-24T18:05:00.001Z

Israel is preparing for all-out war on multiple fronts that include Iran, Syria and Lebanon, a senior military commander claims.

The last Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip claimed the lives of at least 1,350 Palestinians.

Israeli army Home Front Command Major General Yair Golan said Sunday that Tel Aviv is preparing for "all possible scenarios", indicating that one such scenario would be to fight a simultaneous war against Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The confirmation comes as US President Barack Obama seeks "new beginnings" with its arch-rival Iran. The US offer has been met with world praise but with fury in Tel Aviv.
Israeli media outlets late on Sunday began propagating wild scenarios that Iran is using the Lebanese Hezbollah to recruit Palestinian fighters to carry out terror attacks on Israel.
Citing anonymous sources, the reports began to surface after Tel Aviv countered an alleged bombing attempt outside a shopping mall in the northern city of Haifa.
"We are treating the attempted attack in Haifa with great gravity. A huge disaster was prevented by a miracle," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a weekly cabinet meeting after the bomb was defused on Sunday.
Israel has long accused Iran of arming Hezbollah and Palestinian groups via Syria, in an attempt to demonize the two Muslim countries.
Tel Aviv also accuses Tehran of developing nuclear weaponry -- a charge denied by the UN nuclear watchdog.
At a conference held in Tel Aviv, Golan also confirmed the likeliness of Israel staging another military confrontation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Although Israel does not consider rocket attacks from Gaza as a serious threat, there is the possibility of "dangerous" missile attacks by other countries, he said.
He failed to elaborate how such missile attacks would relate to Gaza.
His remarks came as reports claim that the soon-to-be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has plans for "a major military conflict in the coming months."
The commander also revealed that Tel Aviv will install new warning systems across Israel in preparation for its war plans.
The last Israeli-waged war on the Gaza Strip, which began on December 27, killed at least 1,350 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,450 others in the densely-populated sliver.
The aggression was the last in a series of operations carried out by the Israeli forces against the natives of the land since occupying Palestine in 1948.
SB/AA/MD

Germany and EU to Legalise Paedophilia

2009-03-24T17:59:00.001Z

German Government Publication Promotes Incestuous Paedophilia as Healthy Sex Ed Micheal O'Brien, author on crisis of culture in West, says this "German state intervention in family life is a new level of auto-destruction"

By John-Henry Westen

BERLIN, July 30, 2007(LifeSiteNews.com) - Booklets from a subsidiary of the German government's Ministry for Family Affairs encourage parents to sexually massage their children as young as 1 to 3 years of age. Two 40-page booklets entitled "Love, Body and Playing Doctor" by the German Federal Health Education Center (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung - BZgA) are aimed at parents - the first addressing children from 1-3 and the other children from 4-6 years of age.

"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex," reads the booklet regarding 1-3 year olds. The authors rationalize, "The child touches all parts of their father's body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same."

Canadian author and public speaker Michael O'Brien who has written and spoken extensively about the crisis of culture in the West spoke to LifeSiteNews.com about the shocking and extremely disturbing phenomenon. It is, he said, "State-encouraged incest, which in most civilized societies is a crime." The development is, he suggests, a natural outcome of the rejection of the Judeo-Christian moral order.

"The imposed social revolution that has swept the western world is moving to a new stage as it works out the logical consequences of its view of man's value," said O'Brien. "It is merely obeying its strictly materialist philosophy of man. If man is no more than a creature created for pleasure or power. If he is no more than a cell in the social organism, then no moral standards, no psychological truths, no spiritual truths can refute the 'will to power' and the 'will to pleasure'."

The pamphlet advises parents to permit young children "unlimited masturbation" except where physical injury becomes apparent. It advises: "Children should learn that there is no such thing as shameful parts of the body. The body is a home, which you should be proud of." For ages 4-6, the booklet recommends teaching children the movements of copulation.

Another product of the BZgA is a song book aimed at children of four and slightly older which includes several songs espousing masturbation. The song-book entitled "Nose, belly and bum" includes one song with the following lyrics: "When I touch my body, I discover what I have. I have a vagina, because I am a girl. Vagina is not only for peeing. When I touch it, I feel a pleasant tingle."

"The wiser and deeper position of most civilizations recognized that children need a period of innocence," commented O'Brien. "Now the state, the German state, is encouraging destruction of this state of innocence," he added. "This is consistent with the materialist philosophy that sees all moral norms and all truths about human nature as repressive. Pleasure and their distorted concept of freedom are their only guiding principles."

According to the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita, the BZgA booklet is an obligatory read in nine German regions. It is used for training nursery, kindergarten and elementary school teachers. Ironically it is recommended by many organizations officially fighting paedophilia, such as the German Kunderschutzbund. BZgA sends out millions of copies of the booklet every year.

"A society such as Germany's which is already in steep decline, indeed into degeneration, will only inherit the whirlwind of violence and further levels of degradation of their own people," warned O'Brien.

"It has happened before in Germany. It has happened in other nations. Different causes but the same dynamic, the rejection of the moral order of the created universe results in radical evil. The German state intervention in family life is a new level of auto-destruction," said O'Brien.

Rzeczpospolita reports that the Eckhardt Scheffer of BZgA claimed that before releasing the manual the organization consulted parents, educators and child psychologists. 93% of whom gave a positive evaluation.

Even for a Western nation, Germany's billboards and television ads push the limits of public pornography. Last year LifeSiteNews.com reported that a very popular teen magazine in Germany publishes nude photos of teens in sexual positions which would be in almost any other nation illegal child pornography.

With a licentiousness as the new morality of the secular materialist establishment and homeschooling a forbidden practice, parents in Germany may well wonder what will transpire in public education.

"Will those children who are not liberated by their parents have special classes in their schools where they're introduced to these practices," asked O'Brien rhetorically. "If the state intervenes in this way, what won't it intervene in?"

O'Brien concluded his comments quoting G.K. Chesterton: "When men cease to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing anything."

To express concerns to German authorities:
In Canada:

German Embassy
1 Waverley Street
Ottawa, ON, K2P 0T8
Tel.: 613-232-1101 Fax: 613-594-9330
Email: germanembassyottawa@on.aibn.com

In the US:

German Embassy
4645 Reservoir Road NW
Washington, DC, 20007-1998
(202) 298-4000
The embassy can be e-mailed from its website: http://www.globescope.biz/germany/reg/index.cfm

To express concerns to German authorities:

President of the Federal Republic of Germany
11010 Berlin
Germany
Telefon: +49 30 20 00-0
Fax: +49 030 20 00-19 99
E-Mail: Bundespraesident.Horst.Koehler@bpra.bund.de

Chancellor
Angela Merkel
Willy-Brandt-Straße 1
10557 Berlin
Germany
Telefon: +49 180 272-0000
Fax: +49 1888 272-2555
E-Mail: InternetPost@bundesregierung.de

To read Michael O'Brien's essay on the Family and the New Totalitarianism see:
http://studiobrien.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&amp...

(with files from the July 9 edition of the Polish daily "Rzeczpospolita" by Aleksandra Rybinska with English translation provided by Joanna Najfeld)

Shell dumps wind, solar and hydro power in favour of biofuels

2009-03-18T19:35:00.001Z

(source)

Shell will no longer invest in renewable technologies such as wind, solar and hydro power because they are not economic, the Anglo-Dutch oil company said today. It plans to invest more in biofuels which environmental groups blame for driving up food prices and deforestation.

Executives at its annual strategy presentation said Shell, already the world's largest buyer and blender of crop-based biofuels, would also invest an unspecified amount in developing a new generation of biofuels which do not use food-based crops and are less harmful to the environment.

The company said it would concentrate on developing other cleaner ways of using fossil fuels, such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. It hoped to use CCS to reduce emissions from Shell's controversial and energy-intensive oil sands projects in northern Canada.

The company said that many alternative technologies did not offer attractive investment opportunities. Linda Cook, Shell's executive director of gas and power, said: "If there aren't investment opportunities which compete with other projects we won't put money into it. We are businessmen and women. If there were renewables [which made money] we would put money into it."

Shell said biofuels fitted its core business of providing fuels, logistics, trading and branding. Cook added: "It's now looking like biofuels is one which is closest to what we do in Shell. Wind and solar are interesting [but] we may continue to struggle with other investment opportunities in the portfolio even with big subsidies in many markets. We do not expect material investment [in wind and solar] going forward."

The company also confirmed that it would increase its dividend payments this year by about 5% to $10bn.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) criticised Shell for freezing investment in renewables such as wind in favour of biofuels. "Shell is backing the wrong horse when it comes to renewable energy – biofuels often lead to more emissions than the petrol and diesel they replace," the campaign group said.

Until recently, Shell's investment in wind power featured prominently in its corporate advertisements. FoE said the company's move heralded a slightly more honest approach. "Shell is at least being a bit more honest about the fact they are a fossil fuel company. It has seen the limitations of the greenwash it was putting out a few years ago."

Shell has about 550 megawatts of wind farm capacity around the world, enough to power a city the size of Sheffield when the wind blows. Last year, it pulled out of the 1,000MW London Array project, the joint venture to build what would be the world's largest offshore wind farm, in the Thames Estuary. Former project partner E.ON has yet to decide to continue with the £3bn investment needed.

Outgoing chief executive Jeroen van der Veer admitted that the company had suffered some "technology baths" in the past when it backed unprofitable technologies. "We don't do it [renewables] all."

The company has predicted that by 2025, 80% of energy will come from fossil fuels and 20% from alternative energy sources. Yet it is spending just over 1% of its budget on alternative technologies. Over the past five years, only $1.7bn of the $150bn it has invested has gone towards alternative energies.

Cook pointed out that at one stage the company only invested 1% of its budget on liquefied natural gas, which is now a big part of its business. "You have to start somewhere," she said.Van der Veer also admitted that Shell's overall R&D budget would "fall a bit" as the company focused on the most promising technologies and in the wake of the oil price slump.

The company said it would raise debt levels to maintain dividend payments and its spending programme. Van der Veer insisted that energy demand in the long term was strong and oil prices would recover. "The problem is you don't know when the long term starts."