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Sir Tim Berners-Lee looks at the online world he helped to create and sees a future of more intense, international and creative collaboration amongst more and more people. It’s still early days for the web :

Making the web free to use had a vital role in spreading its use worldwide.

“The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating across the globe has just been a fantastic experience,” he said.

“The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit that really we have only started to explore the possibilities of [the web], that continues.”

The ubiquity of the web gives the impression that its success was inevitable but that was not always the case, said Robert Cailliau, who worked alongside Sir Tim.

Mr Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web and later helped convince the directors at Cern to “give the web away”.

“The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was going to be,” he said.

“We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore Cern couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away.”

He said competing technologies, such as Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota, were also offering a method of using hyperlinks to connect documents across computers on the internet.

“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.”

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A video game reality crossed over into this realm for a bunch of kids queuing in London to buy GTA IV :

The launch of the ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto IV video game descended into real-life horror when a man was stabbed repeatedly in a queue of fans waiting to buy it.

Shoppers thought they were witnessing a promotional stunt for the launch when the blood-soaked victim staggered among them.

They realised the attack was genuine only when police arrived.

Malcolm Critchell, queueing with his nephew Jordan, said: “The victim was covered from shoulder to belly in blood. Everyone thought it was a show to promote the game.”

Another queuer, Marcus Henderson, 24, said: “It was a scene straight from the game itself. In Grand Theft Auto, when you attack someone but don’t finish them off they’ll come and get you. We thought it was a stunt put on by the makers of the game.”

The reality in the video game became the standard against which these kids were assessing the violence they were actually witnessing, and they did what you can do in the game when you see someone else being attacked. Intervene, or stand back and watch. Or run them both over with a car. They stood back and watched, comparing a real world stabbing to a fake one, and believing the reality wasn’t real. Reality didn’t look real enough.

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The US Democratic Party has released a new ‘attack ad’ on Republican presidential candidate John McCain over the War On Iraq.

The Republicans almost unamiously voted to approve the War On Iraq, and so did the majority of Democrats. They can complain all they want about how Republicans and NeoCons won’t end this appalling war and bring the troops home, but every time President Bush asks for another hundred billion to continue the war, the Democrats give him what he wants.

The War On Iraq continues because most Republican and Democrat senators refuse to end it by cutting off the funding.

Half-trillion dollar defence budgets mean that almost every state of the US gets its cut of the ‘War On Terror’ action, and senators from both sides don’t want to see their constituents losing defence and war-related jobs and income by voting to turn off the torrents of money.

The American people, in the majority, don’t want the War On Iraq to continue, but the majority of Democrats and Republicans do.

So it goes on.

Democracy in action.

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The United States and Canada are two of the many countries that may come into conflict over scarcity of fresh water supplies in the coming decade :

Parched U.S. states could start “water wars” in the years ahead and fight for access to Great Lakes resources as they become more desperate to meet growing needs…

Water issues that are currently emerging will develop into bitter conflicts in the not too distant future when those dry states become increasingly desperate, said Milton Clark, a senior health and science adviser for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“We will, in fact, get into major water wars,” Clark said. “You will see water wars coming in every way, shape or form. In the U.S., there are some leading politicians who have said the Great Lakes do, in fact, belong (to everyone) and all water should be nationalized — and this certainly is a concern.”

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Oil Corporations Now Control Less Than 10% Of World Reserves Of Oil, Gas

The New York Times reports on a coming energy crunch that has the potential to change Western societies in ways that Osama Bin Laden can only dream about :

Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries. To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency…

To meet world demand, oil producers will have to find and pump some 11 billion extra barrels of oil. Stunning. And those greatly needed extra 11 billion barrels of oil will only quench part of the thirst of a projected overall increase in energy demand of some 65% in the next twenty years.

….petroleum, the dominant fuel of the 20th century, will remain the top energy source. It accounts for more than a third of the world’s total energy needs, ahead of coal and natural gas. Refined into gasoline, kerosene or diesel fuel, oil has no viable substitute as a transportation fuel, and that is not likely to change much in the next 30 years.

The problem is that no one can say for sure where all this oil is going to come from.

Running out of oil, fuel too expensive for minimum pay commuters and regular electricity blackouts may sound like good news to Al Gore (carbon emissions will have no choice but to fall), but regular, devastating ‘energy wars’, as countries try to snap up remaining resources, may give us more to worry about than the possible effects of global warming.

Some oil industry executives are already panicking about a looming oil crisis “if the world (does not) deal with runaway demand and strained supplies” :

…the world’s oil supplies are already stretched.

The North Sea and Alaska are slowly running out of oil and producers there are struggling to keep production from falling. Russia’s phenomenal oil surge is coming to an end…Nigeria is battling a violent militancy. Mexico…has been stuck in a crippling political debate over keeping out foreign investors while witnessing a dramatic drop in production that some analysts say may be irreversible.

The 13 members of the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) account for three-quarters of the world’s proven oil reserves. But for various reasons, most of those countries are making it harder, if not impossible, for foreign oil companies to invest within their borders. With energy prices rising, OPEC producers are seeing record revenues, which have reduced the incentive to dip into their supplies by boosting production.

At the same time, major oil companies like Exxon Mobil, BP and Chevron are finding it harder to compete worldwide, as national oil companies erode their once-dominant positions. Fourteen of the world’s Top 20 oil companies are state-owned giants, like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Gazprom. That leaves Western oil companies in control of less than 10 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves.
Apparently, in just 100 years, we’ve burned up about a trillion barrels of oil. There may be another 1.2 trillion barrels of drill-and-pump oil reserves to be recovered, according to BP. But one trillion barrels of those reserves will have been consumed by 2038.

Some analysts believe another trillion barrels are waiting to be tapped on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and in countries that now, or may soon, restrict access to global oil corporations.

….the growth in oil consumption almost certainly will need to slow in coming years. But it seems unlikely that developing nations will cut their consumption first. China, India and the Middle East are in the midst of exceptional economic booms and need cheap energy, which is largely subsidized by their governments, to keep growing and modernizing.

Oil now accounts for just 19 percent of China’s energy needs. But China’s oil demand is expected to more than double by 2030 to over 16 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency, as more people rise from poverty, move out of villages and buy more cars.

Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba :

“The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don’t realize how dire the situation is.”

I think we’re well on the way to finding out how dire the situation is. Speculators are pushing oil to $120 a barrel, and we may see it hit $200 within a few years, and China, the United States and Russia are privately and publicly clashing over European energy pipeline routes, control of international shipping lanes, the right to exploit untapped oil reserves in the Arctic and Africa, the rise of Iran and the carving up of Iraq.

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Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai tells American and British troops to stop arresting Taliban, and he rips NATO for civilian casualties :

The stinging attack, made in an interview with the New York Times published yesterday, is the latest in a series of rows between Western governments with troops in Afghanistan and the elected leader of the country.

Karzai said he wanted American forces to stop arresting suspected Taliban members and their supporters, saying that fear of arrest and their past mistreatment were discouraging them from coming forward to lay down their arms.

Karzai also attacked the number of civilian deaths inflicted by the coalition. Up to 9,000 civilians have died since 2001.

‘I want an end to civilian casualties,’ the Afghan president said…

Within a few days of giving that interview, Karzai is attacked. By the Taliban :

Afghan President Hamid Karzai escaped unhurt after an assassination attempt by Taliban fighters with guns and rockets during an official celebration in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday.
What’s wrong with this story?

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

It’s getting ugly out there. There are very real and very shocking shortages of rice and wheat, soy and barley, and cold-blooded Wall Street speculators who have moved from oil to food will ensure that the age of cheap food, for hundreds of millions in the West at least, is over, forever. When the price of rice rises 40% in a year, it means a few more dollars at the supermarket for us. For more one billion people who are primarily sustained, kept alive, by rice, the one meal of the day for the family has almost doubled in price. The poor can easily now become the starving, in the West as well as the East.

This video from CNN is positive and useful, in its promotion of a return to filling gardens and plots of land with food, focusing on a small village community in England drawn closer together by the formation of a food grower’s co-op. CNN doesn’t mention the fact that should the day come that delivery trucks stop servicing such a small village, or vegetable, milk and egg prices become outrageous and absurd, the people there will have enough food to feed themselves. That should have been a key focus of the story of course, now a Starve To Profit market becomes exploitable strategy for unregulated, deadly cynical speculators.

Just how terrified your government leaders are about the possibility of widespread food shortages, or basic food prices rising beyond the reach of more than 30-40% of the population, will become clear in the next few months. Maybe we’ll see government sponsored ads telling us to plant food in the backyard or on the balcony, and local government programs to pay for the setting up of more food co-ops. When those houses in the neighbourhood that will never sell get bulldozed, even tree-fee suburban communities get some room to start growing their own food.

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It’s an impressive movie poster, and hauntingly familiar.

Too Soon?

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All images are screen grabs of background detail from GTAIV.

Aaron Garbut helped build a city, a big city, in three years. It’s filled with people, shops, cars, buses, crime, tragedy, death and violence. It would take you hours to walk all the way around it. Days and weeks to go down every street and look in every window, check out every alleyway, climb every staircase.

You could take a bus in this city, if you wanted to. But why would you want to, when you can take any car you think will be fun to drive, and smash, and jump, and somasualt, and flip through explosions. You like a car, you just open the door, drag out the driver, get in and drive away. Fast. As fast as you want. If you don’t like the look of someone you can pull over and kill them. Then kill the paramedics who come to clean up your carnage. Or you can walk, take your time, enjoy the atmosphere, stroll through the busy and quiet neighbourhoods.

The city is Liberty City.

In the next few days, millions of people across the planet will the streets of that city and start exploring. Tens of millions more will follow within a few months.

Aaron Garbut is art director for Rockstar, the makers of Grand Theft Auto IV. Garbutt explains what it’s like to build, and more importantly, to detail a city as big, as dense, and as alive as Liberty City :

“We have a broad cross-section of backgrounds on the art team, architects among them. But every artist has a great eye for both detail and the bigger picture. The same artists model the buildings, lay out the city and place the props. Everyone on the team has dedicated a large part of their lives over the past three years to create as detailed a city as possible, and every one of them has taken a great deal of pride in making their own part of the game as unique, crafted and beautiful as they could.

“…we flew the entire team out to spend some time in New York at the start of the project…,we take the research very seriously and I think we all have numerous stories of the weird or scary things that we end up seeing and experiencing or the bizarre places we end up.

“We took around a quarter of a million photos and a silly amount of video footage. We spent another year or so working up the city based on this research then about a year or so ago we flew a smaller group across for more research. We also had a full time research team based in New York to handle our numerous little requests for particular details – anything from ethnic breakdowns of particular areas to photos of certain interior types or videos of traffic patterns.

“I have 20 DVDs of traffic flows at random junctions at various times of the day sitting on my desk here as an example, and a few hours of footage of a night in a Russian supper club. They also sent across various reports, census data, even information on drainage, sewage, electrical and other infrastructure.

I keep seeing game worlds of sprawling futuristic metropolis or whatever and the first thing that occurs to me is where the hell do people buy milk, where do they get a cup of coffee? It’s too easy to get lost in the aesthetics of something and forget to think in those terms. How does it work? How do these people live their lives? Where do they eat? Where do they work? How do they get home? Where do they park their cars? When you start thinking along those lines it gets easier to work on something of this scale. It’s emulating life so you have to imagine living in the world you are making.

“We even created history in the branding with older variations on old painted ads fading on the side of old buildings. You’ll see virtual artists advertised outside galleries, see some of their work through the window and then see other examples in some of the homes you’ll get inside. Tiny businesses, dry cleaners for example will have a store on a certain street, and you will see their van driving around the area.

There are stickers, graffiti, posters, signage, billboards, adds on the internet, phone numbers to call, company cars and vans, products, tv shows, films, radio shows, theatres, fashion, jewelry, food, drink, sweets, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, businesses, perfume, institutions, law firms, banks, credit cards, garages, warehouses, car dealers, city services, shops, airlines, travel agents, sports teams and brands…

I love the cohesiveness of the entire experience. It feels to me like a real place. The “living, breathing city” phrase gets bandied about a lot, but I think this feels more vibrant and alive than anything I’ve experienced in a game.

When you have that feeling, and you are standing on top of a skyscraper with the world sprawled out beneath you and you know you can climb down and visit every inch that you can see and that it will all feel as vibrant, varied and detailed as the area you are in, I think that’s pretty special.

Read The Full Interview Here

Hollywood is cringing at the expected loss of tens of millions of dollars at cinemas all over the United States, plus Europe, China, Japan, Australia, Canada, and everywhere bought and bootlegged games keep youth away from cinemas, thanks to the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

The game is expected to do such extraordinary business ($200 million in sales in three or four days?) that major movie release dates are now being quietly re-scheduled so as not to clash with the release of other big game titles this year, and every year from now on. Hollywood film and TV audiences have been shearing away to video games for years now, and it’s starting to impact on the film industry. Most who pushed away their remotes and picked up a control pad will never go back to watching TV and hitting cinemas like they once did.

This weekend, next weekend, millions of people who would normally be buying a few tickets to the cinema will be, instead, in Liberty City, where you don’t even have to pay for fuel, let alone wallet-emptying popcorn and drinks.

Hollywood doesn’t just lose those millions of suddenly non-cinema going people for one weekend. Millions will get lost in Liberty City, that city in another reality, for three or four or more weekends.

And there will be others who will dedicate months to exploring every inch, driving every car, walking every street, jumping every truck, firing every weapon, completing every mission.

“We haven’t seen you for two months Doug, where the hell have you been?”

“I’ve been in Liberty City. On business. I like it there. You can do anything you want, and you never have to die.”

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Chinese Government Officials Helped Co-Ordinate Massive Pro-China Demonstration In Australia

The Chinese government, through its Australian embassy, has been accused of helping to organise and co-ordinate a show of Chinese nationalism in Canberra during the Olympic torch relay yesterday.

Australian Capital Territory chief minister Jon Stanhope said that Chinese officials helped pay for more than 10,000 Chinese students to be bussed from Sydney and Melbourne to the nation’s capital, and supplied with huge Communist China flags and other bunting.

Chinese students, and intelligence agents, some clearly co-ordinating events through mobile phones and walkie-talkies, surrounded pro-Tibet supporters, hitting them with flag poles, screaming “One China” and hurling racist abuse.

Local families who turned out to watch the Olympic torch relay through the streets of Canberra were also caught up in the melee, as dozens of Chinese students swarmed through the crowd looking for pro-Tibet supporters.

Police had to pull pro-Tibet supporters, many weeping and clearly intimidated, out of throngs of visibly angry and abusive Chinese students, who used the long flag poles to hold pro-democracy supporters in place so others could shout abuse and threats into their faces.

Australia just got a full frontal lesson in how to suppress freedom of speech by the masters.

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Going Hungry : ‘Food Speculators’ Make Sure Age Of Cheap Food Is Gone Forever

By Darryl Mason

The New York Times recently told its more wealthy readers to consider buying a rural cottage, or even log cabin, to ride out the water and food riots that militarised police forces are preparing and training for, and now Wall Street recommends its readers to begin stockpiling rice and cereals, not only to fend off hunger but as an investment opportunity :

Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

“Load up the pantry,” says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street’s top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. “I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn’t going to happen here. But I don’t know how the food companies can absorb higher costs.”

The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

You can’t easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.

If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it’s the rosy memory of a bygone age.

The readers of the Wall Street Journal now know it’s time to get busy stockpiling. For good reasons. Shortages of rice and other essentials are now being reported in American cities :

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon : Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.
At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

“There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don’t realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short,” Mr.Rawles , a former Army intelligence officer, said. “Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out.”

An anonymous high-tech professional writing on an investment Web site, Seeking Alpha, said he recently bought 10 50-pound bags of rice…”I am concerned that when the news of rice shortage spreads, there will be panic buying and the shelves will be empty in no time. I do not intend to cause a panic, and I am not speculating on rice to make profit. I am just hoarding some for my own consumption,” he wrote.

The presidential Bush family’s favourite newspaper, the Washington Times, notes the rapidly growing chaos and panic in American food industries, and the demented greed of Wall Street :

Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher. Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas.

Community Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)….regulators said high prices are mostly the result of soaring world demand for grains combined with high fuel prices and drought-induced shortages in many countries.

Costco and other grocery stores in California reported a run on rice, which has forced them to set limits on how many sacks of rice each customer can buy. Filipinos in Canada are scooping up all the rice they can find and shipping it to relatives in the Philippines, which is suffering a severe shortage that is leaving many people hungry.

While farmers here and abroad generally are benefiting from the high prices, even they have been burned by a tidal wave of investors and speculators pouring into the futures markets for corn, wheat, rice and other commodities and who are driving up prices in a way that makes it difficult for farmers to run their businesses.

U.S. wheat stocks are at the lowest levels in 60 years because worldwide consumption of wheat has exceeded production in six of the past eight years, said U.S. Agriculture Department chief economist GeraldBange . Adding to tight supplies was the back-to-back failure of two years of wheat crops caused by drought in Australia, a major wheat exporter, he said.

In addition, the diversion of one-third of the U.S. corn crop into making ethanol for vehicles has increased prices for corn and other staples such as soybeans and cotton as more acreage is set aside for ethanol production.

The upswing in prices has been exaggerated by the massive influx of investors and speculators seeking to profit from rising prices for corn, wheat, oil, gold and other commodities. Big Wall Street firms and hedge funds have taken huge positions in futures markets that once were dominated by relatively small operators such as farmers and grain-elevator owners.

Oil speculation helped drive the price of a barrel beyond $100, and now ‘food speculators’ are going to do the same for the food you need to buy to feed your family. And the government doesn’t want to stop it happening.

Maybe they’re hoping Monsanto with save the day, and bellies, of Americans with GM crops, but the ‘miracle’ of GM crops is turning out to be little more than clever marketing. Monsanto now admits their genetically modified crops do not actually produce higher yields of rice and grains. More food from less acreage is something they aspire to achieve, not something they can actually do yet.

Food prices will stay high simply because oil prices will never drop below $100 again. It will only ever increase, drop back a few dollars, then increase again. We’re already being softened up by oil cartels and governments to expect $200 a barrel prices within the next few years.

When oil hits $150 a barrel, trucking and freight companies will start projecting big losses, and will reconsider whether it pays to service longer, less profitable routes to smaller urban population pockets. The sort of places that need nearly everything trucked in, but produce little to truck back out again. When the delivery trucks slow, or cease altogether, most supermarkets will be emptied of food within a few days.

Soaring food prices, and food shortages, are impacting across the world.

In Japan, people are trying to cope with the savage shock of shortages of staple foods, stunning rises in the price of rice and emptying supermarket shelves :

“I went to another supermarket, and then another, and there was no butter at those either. Everywhere I went there were notices saying Japan has run out of butter. I couldn’t believe it..”

Japan’s acute butter shortage, which has confounded bakeries, restaurants and now families across the country, is the latest unforeseen result of the global agricultural commodities crisis.

A sharp increase in the cost of imported cattle feed and a decline in milk imports, both of which are typically provided in large part by Australia, have prevented dairy farmers from keeping pace with demand.

While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the quality and quantity of its food.

The wealthy can only afford to buy the food that the poor cannot while that food is still available. When supplies run out, they too must either go without, grow their own or pay absurd prices for what was, only last year, so cheap.

How bad could global food shortages ultimately get? The lives of many hundreds of millions who have never known hunger before are threatened.

Will we be reduced to the pitiful state of Haitians, who have been driven by food shortages and extreme hunger to start eating the earth beneath their feet?

…the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar…

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

The age of cheap and plentiful food, at least from supermarkets, is clearly over.

All governments need to encourage backyard, and balcony, food gardens. Houses that will never sell and are decaying can be bulldozed to make way for community farms. There are at least two or three dozen villages in England returning to thispre-20th century method of feeding the people and bringing the community together.

For city dwellers, however, even those with balcony gardens crowded with carrots, tomatoes, herbs, salad greens and citrus trees, the food staples like milk, cooking oil, butter and wheat, however, will continue to grow only more expensive.

The psychological impact for most Americans of seeing food riots in their towns and cities will be immense, and destructive.

Around The World, Food Rioting Increases As Rice, Grain, Cooking Oil, Flour Supplies Dry Up

Shortages Rise, Prices Surge, The Era Of Cheap Food For West Is Over

December 2007 : The Big Hungry - Why Global Food Shortages Will Be Emptying Supermarket Shelves Near You Soon

Survivalism Goes Mainstream As American Wealthy And Middle Class Told To Consider Urban Retreats To Escape Food Riots In Cities

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Are we seriously supposed to take this ‘An Al Qaeda spokesman said today’ stuff as anything other than war propaganda?

Back in early April, I ran this hilarious video from The Onion, where a very annoyed Al Qaeda spokesman claims conspiracy theories about 9/11 are “ridiculous” because :

“How would you like it if you spent two months in a mountain cave, sleeping on rocks, planning something really special, only to have someone take the credit away from you…”

9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says

9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says

Well, in the supposedly real world of the ‘War On Terror’, a spokesman for whatever is passing as Al Qaeda is now claiming that, yes, 9/11 conspiracy theories are ridiculous because it takes credit away from Al Qaeda for the attacks :

Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy on Tuesday denied a theory that Israel carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and blamed Iran and Shiite Hezbollah for spreading the idea to discredit the Sunni al-Qaida’s strike against the U.S.
The comments in a recording posted on an Islamic Web site reflected the increasing criticism by al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri against Iran. Al-Zawahri has accused Iran in recent messages of seeking to extend its power in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and through its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

“The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said.

“Iran’s aim here is also clear — to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled al-Qaida’s allies, the Taliban.

You don’t see that mentioned very often in the mainstream media.

One more quick point, though it hardly seems worth mentioning :

“The authenticity of the two-hour audio recording could not be independently confirmed.”

Hell, who cares if it’s real or not, the Associated Press sure doesn’t? Dammit, it sounds like something the New Nazis would say, or should say, and that’s good enough.

So we’re supposed to now believe that Al Qaeda is trying to convince the more paranoid Muslims and Arabs that Israel wasn’t involved in 9/11, and they should blame Iran for trying to divert credit away from the entity branded by the CIA as Al Qaeda claims of responsibility for the terror attacks in New York and Washington DC, and Iran is actually in cahoots with the United States in the invasion of Iraq.

Confused? Well, maybe that’s the idea, from both sides (or is that all sides?) of the ‘War On Terror’.

Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld did promise the ‘WoT’ would be fought with sophisticated propaganda, online, as well in the front lines, and Osama Bin Laden has already proven how effective and how far only a few minutes of repeatedly recycled footage and speeches can go.

Paul Joseph Watson has some very interesting information on the American based IntelCenter, which supplies the American media with a steady stream of Al Qaeda videos, audio tapes and translated speeches and statements.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff no longer cares for the growing concerns Americans hold for their privacy, and the confidentiality of their personal, biometric data. Why would he? Chertoff believes that your is not your private property because “you leave it on glasses…all over the world”:

QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they’re like footprints. They’re not particularly private.

Which will surprise the Department of Homeland Security, which Chertoff runs :

In its definition of “personally identifiable information” — the information that triggers a Privacy Impact Assessment when used by government — the Department specifically lists: “biometric identifiers (e.g., fingerprints).”
Chertoff will ensure that fingerprints fall into the domain of government and corporate data-miners. Your DNA is next.

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So you’ve cut back on your flights, you’ve changed all your lightbulbs, you’ve taken to walking in the wind and the rain to the bus stop to get to work instead of driving, you’ve mandated that the family must endure a ‘No Electricity’ evening twice a week and so you are pretty well sure that you’ve successfully reduced your carbon footprint. Great. Well done.

But what about your Water Footprint?

Are you working hard enough to become Water-Neutral?

What do you mean you don’t know what the fuck that is? Hang your head in shame, useless eater.

Oh yes, you thought they were done with you since you’ve reduced your carbon emissions, but you were wrong. They’ve only just begun :

The concept of water footprints – or “virtual water” – will tell consumers the amount of precious H2O that has been used in the manufacture of products they buy. As with carbon footprints, a “virtual water” figure will indicate the extent to which a particular product has cost the earth. And, as with carbon footprints, the message is clear: less is better.

An apple weighing 100g has a water footprint of 70 litres, while a 125ml cup of coffee has a water footprint twice that size, 140 litres. But the water used in producing wheat or meat is much greater. A single kilogram of barley has a water footprint of 1,300 litres, while the industrial production of a kilogram of beef amasses a water footprint of 15,500 litres.

Poultry, meanwhile, has a smaller water footprint than red meat: producing a kilogram of chicken meat leaves a comparably much smaller water footprint of 3,900 litres.

Though it covers more than two-thirds of the earth’s surface, water has never been more precious. An influential UN report published in 2003 predicted severe water shortages would affect 4 billion people by 2050, adding that 40 per cent of the world’s population did not have access to adequate sanitation facilities.

According to the stats in the story, a pint of beer has one-tenth the water footprint of milk and ranks far below a lot of other foods.

Harassing people to reduce their water footprint will only work with the right of marketing :

“Reduce Your Water Footprint, Live On Beer”

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

It’s incredible to think that the world’s economic powerhouse functions so close to the edge of total disaster. If the coal ships stop entering China’s ports, China shuts down in less than two weeks and soon after store shelves empty across the planet :

China only has enough coal for 12 days of consumption…

In the period since early March, coal reserves have slumped by 12 per cent to 46.7 million tonnes…

Demand for coal has risen rapidly since China experienced brown-outs early this decade, motivating a construction frenzy in the power industry, with large numbers of new coal-fired plants emerging across the country.

China counts on coal for about 70 per cent of its energy consumption…

Would China goes as far as the United States to more fully secure its future energy supplies?

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Scientists are, like, fully heaps smart n’ stuff, so they must know loads of totally brain good books to make us, um, smart like them.

So what do scientists recommend you read?

A few suggestions found in New Scientist magazine :

Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape

Lewis Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy

Kurt Vonnegut’s Catch 22

Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard

Read the full list of books here, and click through to find out why scientists chose the book titles they did. Fascinating stuff.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

I’d thought I’d seen all the versions of James Cameron’s Terminator 2, plus a few days worth of DVD extras, but I’d never come across this before, the original ending for T2 as planned by director Cameron.

The Titanic-heavy extra sweet syrup is ladled on thick :

Test audiences apparently hated this ending, and it’s easy to see why. The ending of T2 as it stands now is one of the more simple and effective finales in cinema history. Rolling down a road at night, a simple VO of Sarah Connor talking about robots and empathy, the punching theme music. Fantastic.

But the original ending in the clip above is so gooey even Stephen Spielberg would have gagged. In the end, Sarah Connor isn’t a battle-hardened young mother heading into an unknown future with her son, she’s an old woman, nearing the end of her life, with the once future leader of the anti-robot revolution, John Connor, now grown into a man, with a child of his own, playing together in a park. Everyone’s safe and happy.

But the use of Sarah Connor as an old woman sitting on a bench, whose narration has carried us through the two and a half hours of T2, makes you wonder about the plot’s reality of killer robots being sent back from the future to assassinate future insurgency leaders.

What if, instead, Sarah Connor is really just some crazy old bird with a headful of dementia?

What if all that happened in T2, and Terminator 1, was the demented ravings of some aging single mother with an almost psychotic hatred of technology?

Now that would have been a surprise ending.

Dah dah dah dah, dah….