American Blog

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News Limited, Australia, CEO John Hartigan claims the Murdoch media empire has plans to remove its stories from Google News, and forge their own path :

“We from this day own our own material and are going to go about getting it to the masses through our own sources without going through businesses like Google.”

This will be fun to watch.

Rupert Murdoch, and his CEOs, are particularly narky about bloggers and independent news sites using “our content” for free in writing commentary or opinion about the power and influence and mistakes and major failings of the world’s biggest media empire, which includes the obsessively, dementedly, pro-war Fox News.

Murdoch CEO Labels Bloggers “Political Extremists”

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An account by Osama Bin Laden’s wife confirms a New Yorker journalist’s own investigations that Osama Bin Laden once visited the United States. Bin Laden and his wife flew into Indiana, and stayed in the US for two weeks. Osama Bin Laden left his wife for one full week to hold meetings in Los Angeles, also visiting Chicago :

One evening he [Osama] arrived home with a surprise announcement: ’Najwa, We are going to travel to the United States. Our boys are going with us.’I was shocked, to tell you the truth…Pregnant, and busy with two babies, I remember few details of our travel, other than we passed through London before flying to a place I had never heard of, a state in America called Indiana. Osama told me that he was meeting with a man by the name of Abdullah Azzam. Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions.

…I am sometimes questioned about my personal opinion of the country and its people. This is surprisingly difficult to answer. We were there for only two weeks, and for one of those weeks, Osama was away in Los Angeles to meet with some men in that city. The boys and I were left behind in Indiana with a girlfriend whom I would rather not name.

You can fit a lot of interesting meetings into a week in LA.

A few years later, Osama Bin Laden, with the militiant training resources of the CIA behind him, helped raise an army of mujahadeen and went to war against Russia in Afghanistan. This action inspired United States president, Ronald Reagan, to hail Bin Laden’s Islamist warriors as “freedom fighters.”

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This Is Insane. Pure Treason. But understandable.

When tragedy and disaster strikes, people run to their TVs. Fox News pulled more than 10 million viewers on 9/11 and for a week or two after. They nearly hit those same ratings highs when Rupert Murdoch’s droogs fermented from fantasy into reality an unprovoked War On Iraq.

Imagine how many people would watch Fox News if American cities started getting blown apart by “major weapons”?

It’d be the mecca of ratings.

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By Darryl Mason

The Moon : one day, we may have to bomb the shit out of it

In a couple of decades, when the various Moon-based colonies of Russia, the North American Union, China and Japan have joined together in their Earth-deprived isolation, and vow to never bring their families back to Terra, they will demand the right to build nuclear power plants, using Moon uranium. Of course, what they will really want is not cheap plentiful power, but the opportunity to build nuclear weapons.

Once the Moonalists get nuclear weapons, no-one on Earth will be safe.

A team of scientists has found the first conclusive signature for the presence of uranium on the lunar surface, an element not seen in previous Moon-mapping efforts.

In addition to uranium, the Kaguya GRS data also is showing clear signatures for thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron.

Powering autonomous space craft out of the solar system on nuclear explosions will become more attractive to Earth-based humans if we could mine uranium on the Moon, and never have to send it up from Terran mines.

The less we need to send to the Moon from Earth to build colonies and industry on the Moon, the first permanent residents would presumably be robots, the less expensive such a project will become and the more likely then it is turn from science fiction into reality within the next two to three decades.

The more mineral wealth the Moon holds, the more likely it is that children born this decade will be able to take a retirement years trip to the outer planets of our solar system. A shuttle stopover at The Moon to do some sight-seeing, before boarding a nuclear-fueled space liner, constructed where needed from the most useful mineral elements of The Moon, for an unimaginable voyage from The Moon to Saturn and back in two months.

The trip of a lifetime.

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Supposedly a sewer cam vid from North Carolina, US. It may be a viral vid for a game, or something else. Maybe it’s real. I couldn’t care less if there are shit monsters living down there in the sewers, as long as they don’t work out how to get back up the pipes and out of the toilet.

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Glenn Greenwald :

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least. While some of those deaths were the result of “rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others.

100 tortured or interrogated to death and the FBI still haven’t got enough evidence to officially list Osama Bin Laden as “Wanted” for the 9/11 attacks.

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By Darryl Mason

A spectacular attack from John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, against bloggers and independent media.

He did not specify certain bloggers, he said and meant All Bloggers :

“Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for. Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”

“Bloggers don’t go to jail for their work. They simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights.”

“In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart.”

“Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common.”

John Hartigan is full of shit. Bloggers have gone to jail for their work, and to protect their sources, in North Korea, Iran, Egypt, the list of countries persecuting bloggers grows longer by the week. And the CEO of Australia’s biggest news corporation doesn’t know this?

The jailing of bloggers for speaking too much truth is obviously not the kind of news that John Hartigan, a Rupert Murdoch CEO, is interested in. How could he not know about those jailing and prosecutions.

Remember those words. “Political extremism”.

You will hear that call more and more as the major news corporations scale up their war against independent media, and bloggers.

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Correction : Pure Disaster Porn with John Cusack :

As long as people have packed cinemas, they’ve been watching disaster porn. This 1933 movie Deluge did some fine work when everything had to be made out of models. Somehow, it still looks pretty good, all these decades later :

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Jeremy Clarkson takes the side of hairy, dope-smoking old Druid hippies against the constant WTF? impositions of a rapidly expanding British police state :

Last week (the Druids) were at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice. Apparently, 36,500 poor souls got up in the middle of the night and were dragged by their beliefs and their little Citroëns to a field in Wiltshire where they were forced by custom to mark the disappointingly cloudy dawn by chanting and pretending to be King Arthur.

What in the name of whatever god you hold dear were the police doing using an unmanned spy drone to fly around, taking pictures of these people as they swayed gently in stillness of morning?

I can see why the army might need a spy drone in Afghanistan. But how on earth could the Wiltshire constabulary justify the purchase of such a thing? To catch crop circlists? It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

The Rest Is Here

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This is only one of the smaller, most minor examples of how the recent unparalleled theft of Americans’ wealth, under the guise of the Global Financial Crisis, is tearing away at the fabric and the traditions of the American people. It should be no big deal for such an event to be cancelled, when towns and states don’t have the resources to pay for it, but it still sounds just so terribly, terribly sad :

As the economic crisis has dragged on, city leaders around the country say fireworks are a luxury they can no longer afford. Big and small, urban and rural, the skies will remain dark over at least four dozen communities nationwide come July 4.

“It came down to this: Did we want to spend $150,000 on something that would be over in a few hours?” Cervenik said. “Or did we want to use that money to keep city workers employed?”

The news has sparked outrage and protests among residents who long to preserve an American tradition that dates to 1777. They say that fireworks displays are more than a nod to nostalgia: They allow communities to come together, set aside their woes and build up town pride — even if only for a few hours.

“Good times, bad times, there’s always been fireworks,” said Robert Baker, who heads the Fourth of July festival committee in Abington, Mass.

Not this year. Some cities are cancelling the July 4 fireworks so have a bit more money to give to the food banks and charities feeding the rapidly rising ranks of the unemployed :

Some cities would rather feed their residents than entertain them. In the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello, where unemployment hovers at 12%, the City Council unanimously voted to use its $39,000 fireworks budget on donations to local food banks.

“The last food bank line I saw had more than 1,000 people in it,” said Mayor Rosemarie Vasquez. “We figured that, instead of burning the money in the air, why not give it to people who need it.”

Christmas decorations and town square Christmas trees will join July 4 fireworks for dozens of cities and towns across the United States this year.

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Michael Jackson before and after he became heavily addicted to pharmaceutical painkillers, and assorted mindfreakers

By Darryl Mason

It seems likely a murder, or at least involuntary manslaughter, investigation into the death of Michael Jackson will be announced within the next few weeks, once toxicology reports are finished. The massive insurance policies connected to Michael Jackson, his business interests and the 50 London concerts he was never going to perform, will demand it.

The pharmaceutical industry that allows one person to run up $100,000 in local drug store debt to pay for even more pills would be my first suspect.

But others may have been involved. Besides being only 58 kilos, and ravaged by two decades of addiction to prescription drugs, Jackson’s body apparently bore wounds around the knees and shins and cuts across his back.

Some quotes not getting headlines :

Liza Minnelli - “all hell’s going to break loose when the autopsy results come in”.Reverend Jesse Jackson : “It’s abnormal. We don’t know what happened. Was he injected and with what? All reasonable doubt should be addressed.”

Lisa Marie Presley : “Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general…he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my father’s death. At some point he paused, he stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did’.”

Michael Jackson’s father, Joe Jackson, thinks something sinister happened to his son :

“Michael was dead before he left the house. I’m suspecting foul play somewhere. He was waving to everybody and telling them he loves them and all the fans at the gate. A few minutes after Michael was out there, he was dead.”

What will Americans think, or do, if it turns out the King of Pop was murdered?

Aides claimed the ailing star even believed be would be killed if he pulled out (of the 50 London concerts) on health grounds.

The music industry, where history never stops repeating itself.

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Michael Jackson in make-up and costume as a fat, gray, balding man from his 1997 movie Ghosts. Funny, and astounding, with the best moonwalk you will ever see :

Michael Jackson was about 38 years old when he performed that dance routine.

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Michael Jackson guest-starred in the ‘Stark Raving Dad’ episode of The Simpsons, playing a psychiatric patient who claimed to be Michael Jackson but clearly was not, being tall and white and bald :

Jackson pitched several story ideas for the episode, including Bart telling everyone in town that Michael Jackson was coming to his house.

He also requested several script changes, including that he wanted to have a scene in which he and Bart wrote a song.

Jackson especially liked Bart and wanted to give him a number one single, so he wrote much of the song “Do the Bartman” although he did not receive credit for it.

Jackson also wrote the song “Happy Birthday Lisa” for the episode….

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By Darryl Mason

Michael Jackson recently passed a four hour physical in Los Angeles to comply with insurers demands for his 50 date, $100 million sold out run of shows in London. The biggest of all comebacks from the biggest pop star in history.

How much was Jackson insured for to complete those concerts? $100 million? $200 million?

Michael Jackson was notorious for breaking very expensive business deals, leaving a trail of extremely pissed off and slightly less wealthy entertainment industry players in his wake.

He had some very big debts indeed, and his most prized possessions and collection of strange but valuable antiques were recently auctioned off.

The London concerts for Michael Jackson were not just his Big Comeback. He needed that money to pay off tens of millions in heavy debts, and to fight to keep control of his remaining assets, like the royalties he got every time a Beatles song was played or performed, thanks to the massive music publishing catalogue he co-owned with Sony Music.

On May 31, the London Times prophetically asked :

As his fortune ebbs away, Michael Jackson is relaunching his pop career with a 50-date residency at London’s 02 arena. Thanks to record ticket sales, he could be moonwalking to fiscal salvation. But can the middle-aged comeback kid survive this musical marathon? By Robert Sandall

“….(there is) the sincere belief of some of Jackson’s former business associates that he will bottle it.

Even before the reports that Jackson may be suffering from the early stages of skin cancer and the news that the first four dates of the tour are to be postponed, scepticism was rife.

One top British manager who spent time in 2007 attending meetings called by Jackson, then cancelled at the last minute, says: “Let’s see how many concerts he turns up for.”

“He’s a serial betrayer of business deals. He’ll probably play a couple of shows, then get a doctor’s sick note. Jackson’s not a well man. To do 50 concerts you need real strength, mentally and physically. He couldn’t even read the teleprompter at the press conference.”

The story goes on to speculate that Michael Jackson could have used a lookalike at the press conference to announce the London shows, and that he was rehearsing lookalikes to fill in for him during the more rigorous dance routines.

Here’s concert promoter CEO, Randy Phillips on Michael Jackson and the London gigs :

“Michael is a magnet for weird stories like that! He’s in fine shape. Very sharp, asks succinct questions. When we first started talking he was a little thin maybe. Today he feels much healthier.”

“It isn’t about the money, it’s all about the money!”

The insurance worries :

But there have been dark mutterings in the business pages about the difficulty of insuring the O2 concerts with a notorious no-show like Jackson. Marcel Avram, a German concert promoter, won a multi-million-dollar judgment against the singer at a 2005 civil trial in California for damages arising out of Jackson’s no-show for some millennium concerts. As usual, Phillips is sanguine. “Michael is totally focused now, and the insurance wasn’t a problem, it was just expensive.”

He reveals a phased three-year touring plan that will take Jackson to Europe, then the Far East, winding up in the Americas in 2011. He estimates that Jackson will make $50m-$100m from the London dates, and that this could rise to $500m if the world tour materialises.

A half billion dollar tour just went up in smoke.

Jackson was on the brink of losing the rights to his treasured collection of Beatles songs, and about 400,000 other songs. Sony owned half of the Beatles catalogue with Jackson, and were on the brink of seizing it all from Jackson, riddled as he was with small nation sized bad debts.

But here was Michael Jackson, a very astute business man, back in 1993 :

He had recently signed a new contract with his label Sony that was reputedly worth $100m, making it the richest record deal in history. He had outbid Paul McCartney for the publishing rights to the Beatles songs — which meant every time one of their tunes was played or performed in public, he received half the royalty. He had acquired a 2,700-acre ranch with a funfair and zoo attached, which was later valued at $100m and which he named Neverland after the fictional nirvana of Peter Pan.

Jackson’s Dangerous tour of 1993 grossed $200 million, and by then he’d already sold more than 100 million albums and singles.

Jackson was an extremely big spender :

One source who had access to Jackson’s accounts reckons that over the previous 20 years he had burnt through $1 billion: $650m in earnings and the rest borrowed.

The promoter of the London shows, Randy Phillips :

“When I asked him why he was doing this tour now, he said it was because his kids are old enough to appreciate it and he still felt young enough to do it. He’s told me that whatever profit he makes from these shows will go into a trust fund for his children.”

Profits, however, are still some way off. AEG expects to see no return on its investment of at least £20m until Jackson has played one-third of the O2 shows. The start-up costs for This Is It have been huge, covering the biggest stage set built for an indoor arena show and a number of what Phillips calls “grand illusions”.

His hope, along with that of the 800,000-odd fans who have bought tickets, must be that their trust in pop’s most charismatic but accident-prone Peter Pan doesn’t turn out to be the grandest illusion of all.

There will be many grande illusions quickly stitched up in the media about just how fit and ready Michael Jackson was for the London shows, and the inevitable world tour that would have followed. Jackson had to keep performing live to get the money to hang onto all those Beatles songs, a catalogue which will be worth at least a couple of billion dollars in the next few years as digital exploitation of those rights continues.

Kurt Cobain earned more than a billion dollars after he killed himself.

Elvis Presley earned dozens of times more after death than alive.

Michael Jackson, now he has Dead Legend Status, will likewise become an extremely profitable enterprise now for the music industry.

Now Jackson cannot destroy that heavily promoted Legend by failing to perform those 50 London shows, or by simply failing to perform anymore.

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This is for Jack. Only some robots want to kill us, others want to show off their 1980s-style breakdancing moves :

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A selection of possible movie promotion tag lines composed by Roger Ebert after exposing himself to Transformers 2 :

….a horrible experience of unbearable length…

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.The plot is incomprehensible.

The dialogue….is meaningless word flap.

(The Transformers) appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock.

The battle scenes are bewildering.

….an incomprehensible confusion.

….dumber than a box of staples.

Modern technology allows Ebert to immediately compare his review to some of those in the British online media :

“Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!” (Bradshaw, Guardian)

“Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!” (Tookey, Daily Mail);

“A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!” (Edwards, Daily Mirror).

The kids will love it. Transformers 2 will make a solid billion around the world before it hits the discount DVD bin.

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The Flying Killer Robot body count must be getting close to 1000 dead civilians, including dozens if not hundreds of children in some of the poorest regions on the planet. And this is before the flying killer robots become truly autonomous, when there is no longer 22 year old working what is basically computer game controls in a military base back in Nevada, when real robots are flying and killing and nobody will ever be held responsible for all the men, women and children they kill.

Another 60 Slaughtered By Flying Killer Robots

“Three missiles were fired by drones as people were dispersing after offering funeral prayers for Niaz Wali,” one intelligence official said, referring to a Taliban commander who was one of six militants killed in an earlier drone attack.

The army had no information on the attack on the funeral in the remote area under the control of Baitullah Mehsud, the country’s enemy number one, a military official said.

One local security official, who could not be identified as he was not authorised to speak to media, said that more than 60 had died of whom “half are civilians”. Funerals of Taliban are attended by local villagers, not just militants.

The most modern methods of killing come from the skies and rain slaughter in Waziristan, where some of the most ancient methods of killing remain popular.

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A shocking piece of video that shows what British police are willing to do members of the public who wish to hold them to account :

Britain Already Has A Police State Iranian Theocracy Would Be Proud Of

The women arrested did not resist, they were choked, assaulted and restrained and then jailed for three days before charges against them were dropped.

This is not Iran, this is the UK, supposedly one of the countries that the uprising youth of Iran are hoping their country will one day emulate. A lot may have to change in Iran before it becomes a beacon of myth-soaked Western Democracy, but the police in both countries are already use plenty of the same techniques and violence to break the spirit of those who will not submit, and be intimidated.

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Oh Really?

The Nation’s William Grieder takes President Obama apart over his justifications for the financial reforms that will make the Federal Reserve more powerful than ever before :

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama’s call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame. “A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street,” Obama explained. “And a regulatory system basically crafted in the wake of a 20th century economic crisis–the Great Depression–was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy.”

is not what happened, to put it charitably. Unlike some other presidents, Obama is much too intelligent not to know this. The regulatory system was not overwhelmed by historic forces. It was systematically gutted and dismantled by the government in Washington at the behest of the banking interests.

And so far, at least, the ‘banking interests’ have won.

The Full Story Is Here

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