UPDATE : The Australian newspaper has illustrated a thoroughly discredited story about Al Qaeda and WMDs with a piece of art from an online video game. The Australian newspaper claimed the above was “supplied”. But supplied by who? Al Qaeda? News agencies? Corporate American intelligence agencies? Or someone in The Australian’s own art department?
Previously : According to Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, the above image turned up on an Al Qaeda website. Or on a website populated by people who claim to be Al Qaeda. Or it was ’supplied’ to The Australian newspaper by the corporate American intelligence agency that claims to monitor Al Qaeda websites, and then sells what they find for big dollars to the world’s media? It’s hard to keep track.
The Australian newspaper is supposed to Murdoch’s ‘quality broadsheet’ down under, but clearly they are more than happy to pump Al Qaeda propaganda as much as the dozens of trash Murdoch tabloids in the US, the UK and Australia.
But don’t worry about that massive credibility gap. This imagery (we now know comes from a video game - ed) came with a terrible warning of doom…. or as it’s more commonly known, complete and utter bullshit :
Groups that monitor Islamic websites say al-Qaeda will post a new video in the next 24 hours urging jihadists to use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to attack the West, the FBI said.
The FBI warning came as the US-based monitoring group SITE said the video encouraging terrorists to develop and detonate weapons of mass destruction in the US and Europe was posted on an Islamist militant forum.SITE also released a computer-generated image, showing Washington DC in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, which reportedly appeared on an Islamist forum.
The 39-minute, documentary-style video, titled Nuclear Jihad: The Ultimate Terror, was posted on the al-Ekhlaas forum on May 25, SITE said in a statement.
“The idea of killing lots of people, this idea is available to us, and it must be used under the idea of treating others the same, so I say that terror in their countries must involve human losses and these human losses must be with WMDs,” the video says, according to SITE’s translation.
Paul Joseph Watson has some very interesting information on American ‘intelligence specialists’ who have turned the distribution of all but meaningless Al Qaeda propaganda into a very profitable business, and explains why we don’t see anymore beheading videos from ‘Al Qaeda’ :
Nearly four years after Benjamin Vanderford hoodwinked the global media by manufacturing a fake Al-Qaeda beheading tape, America’s corporate press whores are once again gearing up to fearmonger about the prospect of mushroom clouds over American cities by instantly ascribing gospel status to a dubious “Al-Qaeda fan” Internet videotape that encourages the use of WMD in a terrorist attack.
Since the dubious series of beheading videos, which coincidentally came to a stop when one of our readers managed to expose the ludicrousness of accepting such propaganda at face value by hoodwinking the world media with a fake beheading tape, “Al-Qaeda” has been resigned to spreading its message through Mossad agents like Adam Pearlman and alleged sketchy Bin Laden audio recordings…
Now Al Qaeda ‘fan made’ videos, as this ‘documentary’ is being described, are getting mass media exposure. The MSM is petrified that if they don’t pump any and all AQ propaganda that comes their way, and there is another attack on the US, they will be seen as being guilty of not having informed the public of what they knew might have been coming.
Whatever Al Qaeda is, the American (and Australian) mainstream media is doing their job of spread the threat of terror for them, and making money at the same time utilising dramatic free content supposedly supplied by terrorists.
It doesn’t matter how absolutely crap and ridiculous the supposed Al Qaeda videos are, the mainstream media gives them all front page and lead evening news story exposure, almost seven years after the United States was last attacked.
How much longer can this Al Qaeda crapfest be kept up? Not much longer. The bitter cynicism from reader-commenters across the American media spectrum in reaction to this ‘documentary’ has been almost unanimous, and many are disgusted and furious. Not at Al Qaeda necessarily, but at the MSM for once again doing the terrorists’ job of trying to spread fear and unease.
Rupert Murdoch, and the rest of the MSM, should give this shit a fucking rest, Or at the very least start mocking the creators of this propaganda for being absolutely crap at what they do.
All the great enemies of the West were mocked relentlessly during the wars of the 20th century. But for this war we are told, by President Bush in particular, that we must listen closely to and believe every word that Osama Bin Laden, or one of his lackey arseholes, have to say.
The scary truth is that the American war machine has as much interest in prolonging this war as Al Qaeda, or whatever passes for Al Qaeda, has. Neither side wants it to end.
We don’t seem to get to have a say in this. No matter who we vote for, the war goes on. And on. And onandonandon.
If you preach hatred, violence and intolerance, you should not expect the mainstream media to do most of your work for you in getting out your vile message.
Enough is enough.
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Innocent people who are blown to pieces by a new generation of “environment friendly” bombs can die happy and secure in the knowledge that the bombs that killed them are not polluting the atmosphere as much as the bombs of previous wars did :
New explosives could be more powerful and safer to handle than TNT and other conventional explosives and would also be more environmentally friendly.
TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks.
To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do.
Sounds like the makers of these bombs might qualify for some carbon credits.
No word yet on how progress is going on the development of “human friendly” bombs.
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Republican presidential nominee John McCain faces an almighty task trying to convince the majority of American voters to give him the tick for POTUS, if only because of his heavy association with President Bush, who can claim the crown now as the most despised, ridiculed and dangerous American president since Richard Nixon.
Ramping up the fact that Bush is now total political poison, anti-Republicans are pumping the claims that McCain is too old and too dim to be a revolutionary president, and that he is little more than a stand-in for a president who can’t legally serve a third term. Unless he declares martial law. Vote for McCain, goes a fresh Democratic Party mantra, and you will actually be voting for the continuation of failed, catastrophic and horrifically deadly Bush administration policies.
That John McCain is really a ‘McBush’ is not a reality that has really caught on in the United States yet. Yet. But you sure are going to be hearing and seeing a hell of a lot more McBush references as the November election draws closer. And for someone who was devastatingly smeared by BushCo. back in 2000, McCain has stupidly allowed himself to be seen hugging, kissing and humbling himself before President Bush on numerous occasions in front of the media. Obviously, the McCain camp doesn’t intend on giving the Democrats any fresh imagery of Bush and McCain together, not that it matters now. It’s too late. The Democrats already have hours of footage, and thousands of photos to pump the McBush mantra.
When the McBush reality catches fire, it will prove devastating to the McCain campaign for the White House. Imagine thousands of anti-Republican protesters haunting McCain everywhere he goes, all of them holding up the exact same sign, with the above image and that one word : McBush.
Ron Paul still is, of course, waiting in the wings, and he is one Republican wannabe president who has absolutely no history sucking up to BushCo. It’s still not impossible that come November, Ron Paul will be the Republican nominee for POTUS. Stranger things have happened in American politics.
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…there aren’t many of us left. And it’s a lonely world out there when you realise that you’re closer in age to Homer Simpson than to Jessica Simpson. And that your lifelong fantasy of sleeping with a Yummy Mummy no longer involves an older woman.
It’s the double standards where babies are concerned that I find objectionable. If a baby pukes, everyone rushes around like a Kennedy has been shot. But, if I should do likewise after three vodka tonics, a bottle of red and four sambucas, does anyone mop my fevered brow? No, they leave me to make my own way to KFC for a party bucket with mashed potatoes, gravy and onion rings. And when a baby kicks up a fuss, it is rewarded with boob. But if I start crying and demanding boob, I’m simply asked to leave the bus/cinema/restaurant/church.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and now the Washington Post appear to be very interested in what is loosely being called ‘New Survivalists’ or ‘Peak Oil Survivalists.’ The theme is simple : normal, middle class Americans are terrified of the day that the oil stops flowing and society as we know it breaks down into chaos, rioting and extreme violence. It’s a post-Green, beyond Al Gore, mindset. Save the world? Forget that hippie shit, it’s too late, or to quote in Aliens, “Game over, man!”
Load up on solar panels and water tanks and non-Monsanto seed, get out of suburbia, bunker down, get a bicycle, get a gun to protect your organic carrots and prepare for life after society’s collapse.
Convinced the planet’s oil supply is dwindling and the world’s economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn’t prepare.
These energy survivalists are not leading some sort of green revolution meant to save the planet. Many of them believe it is too late for that, seeing signs in soaring fuel and food prices and a faltering U.S. economy, and are largely focused on saving themselves.
Some are doing it quietly, giving few details of their preparations _ afraid that revealing such information as the location of their supplies will endanger themselves and their loved ones. They envision a future in which the nation’s cities will be filled with hungry, desperate refugees forced to go looking for food, shelter and water.
These survivalists believe in “peak oil,” the idea that world oil production is set to hit a high point and then decline. Scientists who support idea say the amount of oil produced in the world each year has already or will soon begin a downward slide, even amid increased demand. But many scientists say such a scenario will be avoided as other sources of energy come in to fill the void.Determined to guard themselves from potentially harsh times ahead, Lynn-Marie and her husband have already planted an orchard of about 40 trees and built a greenhouse on their 7 1/2 acres. They have built their own irrigation system. They’ve begun to raise chickens and pigs, and they’ve learned to slaughter them.
The couple have gotten rid of their TV and instead have been reading dusty old books published in their grandparents’ era, books that explain the simpler lifestyle they are trying to revive. Lynn-Marie has been teaching herself how to make soap. Her husband, concerned about one day being unable to get medications, has been training to become an herbalist.
By 2012, they expect to power their property with solar panels, and produce their own meat, milk and vegetables. When things start to fall apart, they expect their children and grandchildren will come back home and help them work the land. She envisions a day when the family may have to decide whether to turn needy people away from their door.
“People will be unprepared,” she said. “And we can imagine marauding hordes.”
So how many Americans are we talking about here? Millions? Hundreds of thousands? The fact-checking Washington Post crunches the numbers :
The exact number of people taking such steps is impossible to determine, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the movement has been gaining momentum in the last few years.
Perhaps it’s not so important how many ‘Peak Oil Survivalists’ there actually are. Perhaps the more important mission for the Washington Post, the WSJ and the NYTimes is to further publicise the ‘Peak Oil’ theory and seed the media ground for the societal breakdown and inner city food rioting that appears to be now so widely, sometimes wildly, anticipated.
Or maybe the Washington Post editors simply know that if they run a story tagged ’survivalism’ they will get a few hundred thousand extra readers that day, and in the following days, when blogs and AM radio link and talk it up, just like I’ve done here.
But is it really necessary for the action of citysiders deciding to get the hell out of CrapTown to pursue a better quality of life to be labeled ’survivalism’? What happened to simply wanting to get back to a simpler and more self-sufficient way of living? Or deciding that there are more satisfying ways to look after and feed the family than the daily warfare of many modern city workplaces?
You don’t need to be an Al Gore advocate, or a believer in ‘Peak Oil’ Armageddon, to understand that the fruit, herbs and vegetables you grow in your backyard, or on your apartment balcony, will always taste better than the old, treated junk you find in most supermarkets.
Expect more mainstream media ‘Survivalism’ and ‘Peak Oil Armageddon’ stories.
But there’s plenty of positives to flow from a MSM fixation on Americans supposedly preparing to survive in a post-oil and food shortages stricken America. The more who read these stories and decide to grow their own food, or to keep chickens and goats, the less likely that widespread food shortages will become a reality.
It’s hard, however, not to view this sudden rush of interest from the mainstream media as part of a conscious and somewhat practical reshaping of society from a heavily consuming culture to one that is far more self-sufficient. At the very least it is a further fermentation of the post-Katrina message from the Bush administration (paraphrased) “When disaster strikes, don’t expect the government to come to your rescue. You’re on your own.”
More and more Americans, apparently, have taken that warning as a herald for a new reality and are getting on with the business of making sure they can largely fend for themselves. Just in case.
Experts have proposed a water diversion channel to drain Tangjiashan Lake, formed by landslides that blocked a river known as the Jianhe after the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province.
Tangjiashan, one of 35 such lakes, is inaccessible by road and can only be reached by foot or air.
The lake currently holds 130 million cubic meters of water, said Liu Ning, Ministry of Water Resources of China chief engineer, who is in Tangjiashan to oversee the diversion. Its water level was 725.3 meters on Monday, only 26 meters below the lowest part of the barrier, he said.
Li Huzhang, an engineer with the armed police force, said three emergency plans had been made to dig out the sluice. He said at least 50,000 cubic meters of debris blockage would have to be removed. Rescuers, however, were aiming to remove 100,000 cubic meters of debris if the weather allowed to minimize the bursting risk.
A Mig-26 helicopter transported a large bulldozer from Leigu, near Tangjiashan. By 7 p.m. on Monday, more than 10 diggers and bulldozers and 40-plus tons of relief materials, including tents, drinking water, food and gasoline, had been airlifted to the site.
Altogether, 35 barrier lakes were formed by landslides after the quake that left 65,080 people dead and 23,150 others missing as of Monday noon, according to the Information Office of the State Council.
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Where there was once a deep reservoir, and a mostly drowned cathedral, there are now only puddles
Rain falls on Barcelona, sometimes, but according to this story, there’s not enough rain to quell growing fears that this city could be the first in Europe to run out of water. Fresh water is now being shipped to Barcelona from across the Mediterranean in converted oil tankers :
Its fountains and beach showers are dry, its ornamental lakes and private swimming pools drained and hosepipes banned. Children are now being taught how to save water as part of their school day. This iconic, avant-garde city is in the grip of the worst drought since records began and is bringing the climate crisis that has blighted cities in Australia and throughout the Third World to Europe. A resource that most Europeans have grown up taking for granted now dominates conversation. Nearly half of Catalans say water is the region’s main problem, more worrying than terrorism, economic slowdown or even the populists’ favourite – immigration.
The political battles now breaking out here could be a foretaste of the water wars that scientists and policymakers have warned us will be commonplace in the coming decades. The emergency water-saving measures Barcelona adopted after winter rains failed for a second year running have not been enough. The city has had to set up a “water bridge” and is shipping in water for the first time in the history of this great maritime city.
A tanker from Marseilles with 36 million litres of drinking water unloaded its first cargo this week, one of a mini-fleet contracted to bring water from the Rhone every few days for at least the next three months. So humbled was Barcelona when prolonged drought forced it to ship in domestic water from Tarragona, 50 miles south along the Catalan coast, 12 days ago, that city hall almost delayed shipment and considered an upbeat publicity campaign to lift morale and international prestige.
The whole country is suffering from its worst drought in 40 years and the shipments from Tarragona prompted an outcry from regions who insist they need it more. For now the clashes are being soothed by intervention from Madrid, and plans to ship water from desalination plants in parched Almeria in Andalusia are shelved until October. But there is little indication of a strategy to deal not just with an immediate emergency but an ongoing crisis. Buying water on an epic scale from France has given the controversy an international aspect as French environmentalists question whether such a scarce natural resource should be sold as a commodity to another country.
What Barcelona authorities are fast discovering is that chronic water shortages are not a problem that money alone can solve.
Its 5.5 million inhabitants need a lot of the stuff: the 20 million litres/20,000 tonnes/five million gallons of water brought from Tarragona on 13 May were enough for barely 180,000 people and were consumed within minutes of being channelled through the city’s taps. Wednesday’s shipment from Marseilles was bigger, 36 million litres, but similarly short lived.
In reference to the photo at the top of the page :
A striking image of the seriousness of the drought is provided by the emergence of a church from the waters of a drying reservoir. For 40 years, all you could see of the drowned village of Sant Roma was the belltower of its stone church, which peeped from time to time above the surface of the artificial lake in a valley flooded in the 1960s to supply Catalonia with water. This year falling water levels have revealed the 11th-century church in its entirety for the first time, attracting curious onlookers who walk round it on the reservoir’s dusty bed.
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Belgian TV reported that the plane was carrying diplomatic baggage belonging to the US Ambassador to Belgium…The US embassy in Brussels refused to comment.
The five-strong crew were all Americans, and the plane was bound for the Gulf state of Bahrain, according to another airport official, Jan Van der Cruysse.
No obvious cause for the crash was immediately apparent and an inquiry has been opened.
The inquiry will take many months, if not years, and we will never hear about this bizarre incident again.
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I’ve read a fair bit about suicide over the years, for various reasons, and there can sometimes be a morbid fascination in soaking up the details of the often troubled life that led to such self-imposed finality. But the following reads like a horror movie, and is one of the most disturbing suicide accounts I’ve read. The torment that plagued this soldier, who was sent back to Iraq after a psychiatrist diagnosed massive mental health problems resulting from PTSD, is beyond comprehension :
Until the day he died, Sgt. Brian Rand believed he was being haunted by the ghost of the Iraqi man he killed.The ghost choked Rand while he slept in his bunk, forcing him to wake up gasping for air and clawing at his throat.
(snip)
As the war dragged on and Rand was sent first to Kuwait, then Iraq, he told family members that he felt torn about the things he saw.
Once while wounded soldiers were being evacuated by helicopter in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, Rand waved at a man he knew. The man turned and Brian saw that half of the man’s face was ripped off.
Brian later told his sister he was shocked by how white the bones looked under the flesh.
Then one day, while standing guard near the Green Zone, Rand killed an Iraqi man.
“The spirit of the man that he killed didn’t leave him, it kept harassing him,” Somdahl said of her brother. “He said this guy is following me around in the mess hall, he’s trying to kill me. I told him to leave me alone but he says he wants to take me with him.’”
To help ease his nightly terrors, April would log onto her computer and talk to her brother over the Internet until he fell asleep.
She ended every conversation the same way.
“Sleep well, baby boy. Tomorrow is a new day.”
But when he returned from Iraq in 2005, Brian Rand was a different man.
His voice was distant. His jokes were morbid. He moved as if trapped in a nightmare.
Months after he returned to Iraq in November 2005, Rand picked up a fork, stabbed a fellow soldier in the neck in the mess hall, then crawled into the fetal position and sobbed. The soldiers in Rand’s unit picked him up and carried him over to a phone, dialed his sister and placed the phone to his ear.
“I asked why did you do that?” Somdahl said. “He said (he) thought (he) was a vampire.”
“He wanted to hibernate with me, he started to be more clingy,” Dena Rand said. “One day he got upset and he started punching himself and gave himself a black eye. He went to formation with that black eye.”
Eventually Rand’s thoughts turned to death.
More American soldiers back home are trying to take their own lives than are dying in the war zone. This kind of fallout from Iraq has only really just begun. Read The Full Story Here
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When the bird flu pandemic comes, and medical centres and hospitals are overloaded with the sick and the dying, not everyone is going to find the help they need.
• Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.
• Severely burned patients older than 60.
• Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
• Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.
The Centre For Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security were all involved in selecting the categories under which people will be left to die.
The above categories are almost exactly the same as the “Leave Them To Die” health care rationing plans prepared by governments in Australian, South East Asia, the UK and most of Europe.
“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.
To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won’t get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival.
If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, “there are some real ethical concerns here.”
While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.
Devereaux said compiling the list “was emotionally difficult for everyone.”
Particularly for 86 year old car accident victims with mental health problems and limited lung capacity.
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Billary won’t quit because, hey, who knows? maybe Barack Obama will be assassinated.
We all know that the Bush-Clinton political monarchy demands that Billary at the very least gets the Democratic nomination for POTUS, but Billary is clearly tied of waiting. Barack Obama isn’t part of the plan. It was never supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be Billary for two terms, and then Jeb Bush, and then perhaps Chelsea Clinton, or one of the Bush twins. And here’s this outsider, a black man, thinking he can take the crown? Seriously, what the fuck is this? A democracy?
Is this the most reckless and stupid thing anyone has ever said in American politics? Judge for yourself :
“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.
Billary is waiting for yet another handy political assassination to clear the way to the White House. And why not? It wouldn’t be the first time, as Billary was all too keen to remind us.
And what happens to the United States if Billary is proven accurately, disturbingly, prophetic?
What kind of anarchy will result if rifle fire sounds and half of Barack Obama’s head cleaves away in the middle of a speech before tens of thousands of people?
It wouldn’t just be the black people rioting, this time.
President Bush, of course, has a martial law plan he can snap into action in the event of the mass civil disobedience and outraged protests that would follow an Obama assassination. The American military has conducted numerous exercises in locking down cities and towns, Blackwater Security is Iraq War-hardened and waiting to do the real dirty work in the streets, the databases of potential trouble makers, and dissenters, is prepared and the detention camps are ready, with room for more than 100,000 Americans.
But who would vote for this Angel Of Death after such horror, even if elections were allowed to go ahead?
Through three decades, the Bush-Clinton aristocracy has ruled the United States and unleashed violence in more than a dozen countries, through direct warfare or war by proxies, resulting in the deaths of millions, and the deprivation of tens of millions more.
But it all ended yesterday when a desperate and frustrated Billary spoke all too clearly of a dark and mortifying reality, long hinted at, long whispered of, and long dismissed as mere conspiracy theories.
It’s over.
But will Billary go quietly?
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Soldiers and rescue workers were rushing to unload the earthquake victims into a mass burial pit, where the dirt was still loose and sprinkled with white lime powder.
They are unknown people being quickly cremated or buried in unmarked graves, and there are thousands or tens of thousands of them across quake-ravaged Sichuan Province. It may be months or years before family members discover their fate, if they ever do. They are very likely to be among the nearly 25,000 people the Chinese government classifies as missing in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake.
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have urged rescue workers to save lives “at any cost.” But the scale of the disaster has forced the government to dispose of the dead with little ceremony, closing the door on any opportunity family members have of identifying their kin by sight and upsetting the traditional Chinese reverence for the deceased.More than 60,000 people have died in China’s greatest natural disaster in three decades, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told The A.P. Officials ordered any bodies found to be burned or buried in mass graves starting May 16, citing the corpses’ state of decay and the threat of epidemics, even though many international health experts say dead bodies do not spread disease.
For many of the dead, no trace remains except photos and names printed on thousands of posters put up by searching family members, like the forests of fliers that sprang up in New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
In this mountainous corner of China, where customs run deep, Chinese of the majority Han ethnicity insist on cremating family members to ensure a smooth passage to the afterlife. Those from the Qiang ethnic group, who are numerous here, want to bury their dead.
As of Tuesday, 80 percent of corpses in Sichuan Province had been buried or cremated…
“Many local people were staying in Beichuan and were reluctant to leave because their family members died there,” she said. “Some continued to stay there because they hadn’t found their missing relatives. But they had to face reality. We have this saying: ‘The dead should give way to the living.’ ”
It is unlikely to be any different in our towns and cities when natural disasters claim death tolls in the tens of thousands.
Unless we all get ID chips, of course, and you can bet that natural disasters like the Chinese earthquakes and the Burma cyclone will be used as part of the marketing to convince us, or guilt trip us, into accepting them, if not for our own sake, then for the sake of friends and relatives.
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The helicopter’s unmarked paint job belies what’s inside: an arsenal of sophisticated surveillance and tracking equipment powerful enough to read license plates—or scan pedestrians’ faces—from high above the nation’s largest metropolis.Police say the chopper’s sweeps of landmarks and other potential targets are invaluable in helping guard against another terrorist attack, providing a see-but-avoid-being-seen advantage against bad guys.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that no other U.S. law enforcement agency “has anything that comes close” to the surveillance chopper…
Not yet, but real soon.
The $10 million helicopter is just part of the department’s efforts to adopt cutting-edge technology for its counterterrorism operations.
The NYPD also plans to spend tens of millions of dollars strengthening security in the lower Manhattan business district with a network of closed-circuit television cameras and license-plate readers posted at bridges, tunnels and other entry points.
Kelly even envisions someday using futuristic “stationary airborne devices” similar to blimps to conduct reconnaissance and guard against chemical, biological and radiological threats.
So New York City, the bastion of free markets, capitalism and an emblem of democracy, will soon have surveillance blimps, thousands of networked CCTV cameras and unseen black helicopters scanning peoples’ faces as permanent fixtures of a free society.
Police insist that law-abiding New Yorkers have nothing to fear.
Of course not, they never do. Until they are mistakenly accused of associating with terror suspects for telling the wrong person what time it is outside a coffee bar on Wall Street when the helicopters, blimps and CCTV are watching and recording.
“Obviously, we’re not looking into apartments,” Diaz said during a recent flight.
Well not yet, anyway.
“We don’t invade the privacy of individuals. We only want to observe anything that’s going on in public.”
The helicopter’s powers of observation come from a high-powered robotic camera mounted on a turret projecting from its nose like a periscope. The camera has infrared night-vision capabilities and a satellite navigation system that allows police to automatically zoom in on a location by typing in the address on a computer keyboard.
So what happens to all this anti-terrorist security apparatus when the ‘War On Terror’ is won? It would have to be dismantled, and the mega-million security budgets for cities like New York would have to be wound back. Right?
That’s the thing about ‘terror’ suspects. If you keep widening the definition of what terrorism is, there will always be plenty of suspected terrorists, and terror threats, to blame for having to put the entire city of New York under total, 24 hour surveillance, forever.
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The news agency your newspaper sources its Iran Vs United States (via Israel) from determines what version of comments made by Iranian president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, you end up reading.
Does Ahmadinejad want to “wipe Israel off the map” or is he more interested in Zionist regime change?
It’s an important question because war drums are being beaten by the Bush White House, and their NeoCon propagandists, and the “Bomb them now!” chanting will only get louder as President Bush enters the last few months of his soft dictatorship.
According to Agence France Presse (AFP), quoting the Fars news agency, Ahmadinejad….,said, “They [Israel] must know that the nations of the region hate this counterfeit regime. And if there is the slightest chance, they will uproot this counterfeit regime.”
Reuters had a much more bellicose take. According to its translation, “They [Israel] should know that regional nations hate this fake and criminal regime and if the smallest and briefest chance is given to regional nations they will destroy it.”
The Associated Press’s (AP) version of the quote is even more apocalyptic. It reads: “The criminals assume that by holding celebrations … they can save the sinister Zionist regime from death and destruction.” The AP copy notes, “Ahmadinejad used an Arabic word, ismihlal, than can also be translated as destruction, death and collapse.” An Arabic expert contacted by Asia Times Online said ismihlal means basically “to break down in smaller parts”. That’s not exactly nuclear annihilation.
We are back to the situation of Ahmadinejad’s 2005 alleged threat to “wipe Israel off the map”. What he actually said then, quoting his personal icon, the leader of the Islamic revolution in 1979, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was that the “regime occupying Jerusalem should vanish from the pages of time”. Yes, this means regime change - as much as the Bush administration always wanted regime change in Tehran. It does not mean a call for a nuclear holocaust.
What AFP translates as “the Zionist regime is on the verge of dying … throwing a birthday party for this regime is like having a birthday party for a dead person”, Reuters prefers to package as “the Zionist regime is dying. The criminals imagine that by holding celebrations … they can save the Zionist regime from death”.
But in this case it was up to APTN, the video arm of AP, to provide the meatier translation: “The criminals wrongly suppose that by holding celebrations, coming to the occupied lands of Palestine and supporting these criminals, they can save the resented Zionist regime from death, annihilation and from the claws of Palestinian fighters.”
And here’s what President Bush has cherry-picked from the fantastical incorrect quotes from Ahmadinejad to make his case for War On Iran :
“…the message to Iran is that your desire to have a nuclear weapon, coupled with your statements about the destruction of our close ally, have made it abundantly clear to everybody that we have got to work together to stop you from having a nuclear weapon. To me the single-biggest threat to peace in the Middle East is the Iranian regime.”
The Bush administration’s campaign to isolate Iran and Syria has backfired as the two Middle East hardliners ended up this week sidelining the United States, analysts said.
Supported by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah bolstered recent military gains in a deal with Lebanon’s pro-western government while Syria emerged from the shadows with the announcement of indirect talks with Israel, they contend.
For Brookings Institution analyst Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian scholar and dissident, both events flow from a broader plan orchestrated by “puppet master” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
“You end up realizing there is a strategy being worked out between Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, and they have actually managed to make quite strong headway in the last few days,” Abdulhamid told AFP.
“The Iranians are running the show right now,” he added.
BushCo. and the bumbling NeoCons couldn’t have fucked it up more if they tried.
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The epic scale of the destruction in China is hard to comprehend. The suffering of the millions left homeless will be less easy to understand because we won’t hear about it, or if we do, it will be through the positive new reality vision of China’s state media.
Fighting amongst aid volunteers and desperate quake victims for food and water in Mianyang :
For the tens of thousands who died, including many thousands of young children, there were no funerals. In the rush to remove the dead, to stop the spread of disease, many were quickly fed into crematoriums. For the rest, there were only mass graves :
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Scientists have warned that carbon nanotubes could pose a cancer risk similar to that of asbestos, saying the government should restrict the use of the materials to protect human health.
Carbon nanotubes were developed in 1991 and have proved extremely useful, conferring great strength while being very light. They are superb conductors of heat and electricity and have been touted as wonder materials that could form the basis of a new generation of electronics.
Scientists will have to show that exposure from products is safe, said Andrew Maynard, of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, in Washington. “What happens as you demolish products or throw them away in landfill sites? Is there a chance of carbon nanotubes coming out then and exposure occurring? We simply don’t know the answer to that and that needs to be addressed.”
“This is a reason for concern,” Anthony Seaton, an expert in asbestos-related diseases, at the Institute of Occupational Medicine, in Edinburgh, said. “Asbestos started in the same way - people used it experimentally.”
The highest potential risk was to workers involved in the manufacture of carbon nanotubes, he said.
Just like asbestos. Of course, mass producers of asbestos products were hiding studies showing how dangerous the fibres were from the 1930s on. Are producers of nanotubes sitting on similar toxic health reports?
If millions find their lungs affected by the presence of nanotubes, just like asbestos, we will be sold on the idea of using nanobots to go into the lungs and clean away the damage. Nanotechnology clearing away the potential wreckage of nanotechnology.
If you polled a thousand people and asked them if they though they had already been exposed to nanotubes, how many would answer : “What the hell is a nanotube?”
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Not many people can handle enclosed spaces for more than an hour or two. Confinement does strange things to the human mind, as the brain washers of high-security and military prisons around the world well understand. So what’s it like to be trapped inside an elevator for more than 40 hours?
Here’s the security camera video :
And here’s the detail on how Nicholas White spent his time in that elevator, from an utterly fascinating story in the New Yorker, that also details the evolution of elevators, without which we would never have built beyond 10 or 15 floors :
The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee.
After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.
At a certain point, he decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black. It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down. (Such a shaft is known as a blind hoistway.) He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft.
He started to call out. “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.
….White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby. He considered lighting matches and dropping them down the shaft, to attract notice, but still had the presence of mind to suspect that this might not be wise. The alarm bell kept ringing. He paced and waved at the overhead camera. He couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. To pass the time, he opened his wallet and compared an old twenty-dollar bill with a new one, and read the fine print on the back of a pair of tickets to a Jets game on Sunday afternoon, which he would never get to use. He imagined himself as Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” throwing the baseball against the wall. Eventually, he lay down on the floor, intent on sleep. The carpet was like coarse AstroTurf, and was lousy with nail trimmings and other detritus. It was amazing to him how much people could shed in such a short trip. He used his shoes for a pillow and laid his wallet, unfolded, over his eyes to keep out the light. It wasn’t hot, yet he was sweating. His wallet was damp. Maybe a day had passed. He drifted in and out of sleep, awakening each time to the grim recognition that his elevator confinement had not been a dream. His thirst was overpowering. The alarm was playing more aural tricks on him, so he decided to turn it off. Then he tried doing some Morse code with it. He yelled some more. He tried to pick away at the cinder-block wall.
At a certain point, he decided to go for the escape hatch in the ceiling. He thought of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” climbing up and down the shaft. He knew it was a dangerous and desperate thing to do, but he didn’t care. He had to get out of the elevator. The height of the handrail in the car made it hard for him to get a leg up. It took him a while to figure out and then execute the maneuver that would allow him to spring up to the escape hatch. Finally, he swung himself up. The hatch was locked.
At a certain point, Nicholas White ran out of ideas. Anger and vindictiveness took root. He began to think, They, whoever they were, shouldn’t be able to get away with this, that he deserved some compensation for the ordeal. He cast about for blame. He wondered where his colleague was, why she hadn’t been alarmed enough by his failure to return, jacketless, from smoking a cigarette to call security. Whose fault is this? he wondered. Who’s going to pay? He decided that there was no way he was going to work the following week.
And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor.
A voice woke him up: “Is there someone in there?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in there?”
White tried to explain; the voice in the intercom seemed to assume that he was an intruder. “Get me the fuck out of here!” White shrieked. Duly persuaded, the guard asked him if he wanted anything. White, who had been planning to join a few friends at a bar on Friday evening, asked for a beer.
Before long, an elevator-maintenance team arrived and, over the intercom, coached him through a set of maneuvers with the buttons. White asked what day it was, and, when they told him it was Sunday at 4 P.M., he was shocked. He had been trapped for forty-one hours.
The experience changed White’s life, for the worst. He never went back to his old job.
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Don’t reserve all your Al Gore-inflamed loathing for just carbon dioxide. Hell, everybody hates CO2 now, and they’re starting to get bored.
So hello, Nitrogen!
“The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world’s peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge,” University of Virginia environmental sciences professor James Galloway said in a statement.
While nitrogen alone is inert and harmless, reactive nitrogen compounds — such as ammonia — have been released by its use in nitrogen-based fertilizers and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels.
The researchers propose ways to reduce nitrogen use, ranging from encouraging its uptake by plants to recovering and reusing nitrogen from manure and sewage and decreasing nitrogen emissions from fossil fuel combustion.
I’ve already tried to encourage my food garden to uptake more nitrogen, but those plants just won’t listen.
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