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August 2008


Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Why won’t the world, and Americans in particular, believe and rally around the NeoCon packaged media fable about Evil Russians being The New Nazis?

Paul Craig Roberts explains :

The many years of lies–9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, yellowcake, anthrax attack, Iranian nukes, “the United States doesn’t torture,” the bombings of weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo, various fabricated “terrorist plots,” the determined assault on civil liberties–have taken their toll on American credibility.

No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government.

BushCo. didn’t destroy the credibility of the supposedly once great and influential mainstream American media institutions on their own. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC Nightly News, let themselves be utterly compromised, used as propagandists for war, running trash as news and lies as truth.

Now the media news titans pay the price for their betrayal of their readers and viewers, in plunging circulations, audiences, and credibility, as we expected they eventually would.

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What is trailed and tested in the war zone, usually, eventually, returns to the homeland. It will take something special for most people to accept that heavily armed hunter-killer robots are a necessity in the skies above our cities.

Then again, maybe we won’t show any resistance at all, and we won’t need to be shocked into accepting a reality where armed killer robots patrol, overhead.

From SpaceWar :

An MQ-9 Reaper dropped a 500-pound bomb against an anti-Iraqi target…
The Reaper began flying combat sorties in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom July 18 and joined the MQ-1 Predator as another UAS patrolling the sky to protect coalition forces.

“This was a great example of the Reaper’s unique capabilities,” Colonel Morgan said. “We searched for, found, fixed, targeted and destroyed a target with just one aircraft.”

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It was the greatest mass extinction of plants and animals in the history of the planet. Comparatively little life “The Great Dying”, a quarter of a billion years ago.

“An estimated 95% of all marine species and up to 85% of land creatures perished…”

For decades the popular theory was that a comet impact was to blame. But the truth, according to new theories, may have been even more spectacular :

…it was a cascade of events that began with a monstrous outpouring of hot, reeking lava in Siberia. Repeated floods of lava released massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which produced a runaway greenhouse effect, oxygen-starved oceans and a poisoned atmosphere.

Over a period of about a million years, an enormous quantity of lava from deep in the Earth’s interior oozed up through giant cracks in Siberia’s crust. The molten mass “froze” into step-like slabs of flood basalts, volcanic rocks known as the Siberian Traps.

Enough lava gushed out to cover an area almost as large as the continental U.S.

The lava from the Siberian Traps sent huge quantities of carbon dioxide and methane (natural gas) into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases caused an epic spell of global warming. Toxic acid rain drizzled from the sky, and the ozone shield in the atmosphere thinned, letting deadly ultra-violet radiation pass through.

…the Earth warmed more near the poles than it did at the Equator. The smaller temperature difference slowed the great ocean currents that keep the waters circulating. The oceans stagnated and lost most of their oxygen. Marine plants and animals suffocated.

Some researchers believe that bacteria in the ocean, living on sulfur instead of oxygen, churned out vast quantities of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a lethal gas with a rotten-egg smell. As the hydrogen sulfide gas emerged from the sea, it choked half of all land creatures.

Theories for now. But very interesting ones. Comets are clearly owed an apology.

We really have little idea of the world before “The Great Dying”, 250 million years ago. What creatures hopped or crawled across those vast lands consumed by all that lava? We sift through fossils and old rocks and pick up clues, possibilities that spark new ideas which become new theories. We find mostly tiny shards of the past. We lose the history of this planet as fast it it creates itself, covers itself, destroys itself. We try to make sense of events tens of millions of years ago, billions of years ago, but we mostly only have theories.

While scientists may be close to locking down the cause of such a beyond-armageddon event as “The Great Dying”, there may be another explanation entirely we haven’t even begun to examine, yet alone contemplate.

The truth of our planet’s history is mostly dark to us, beyond the dim light of fairly certain knowledge that stretches back a few thousand years, at the most. There are still vivid arguments about what methods exactly were used to construct The Great Pyramids.

It’d be interesting to know how people 500 years on from now look back on our most popular theories today, particularly about the ultra-ancient history of the planet. Do they mock us, as we now roll our eyes at 500 year old scientific theories about dinosaurs and primitive man?

The article, quoted above, ends with the now standard warning, about The Warming :

While the evidence points to natural processes on Earth as the culprits in the P-T mass extinction, scientists warn that humans may now be contributing to a repeat.

“In the late Permian, Earth itself was the villain, but today we’ve stepped in as the villain,” Kump said.

“Earth was the villain.” What an utterly bizarre thing to say.

Those pushing these new theories behind “The Great Dying” describe what happened as “natural processes”, and yet Earth itself is “the villain” in a mass extinction?

Definitely sounds like a convert to my favoured theory of Vengeful Nature’s War On Humans.

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All photos above by Arkady Babchenko. His photo essay is here.

The reality of what happened in South Ossetia in early August has already been memory-holed by the western media. We weren’t told soon enough that the Russians are now the New Bay Guys. We weren’t prepared in advance with the usual NeoCon propaganda that teaches us that any bunch of civilians who resist invasion by US-backed military are “terrorists” and “insurgents”.

When the news of a new war in the Caucasus broke, the natural instinct was to root for those being attacked, and killed. That is, the normal human instinct. But those who were doing the slaughtering were our, apparent, allies. Those being slaughtered by our allies, with American and Israeli equipment training and support, were the South Ossetians.

The actions of the Georgian military, who’d spent the previous few months being trained by US and Israeli forces, in attacking the South Ossetian capital with missile barrages, looked, and was, appalling. The killing was indiscriminate and clearly aimed at the civilian population (a hospital, for example, was repeatedly hit, for hours).

It has been a hard sell for the western media in making the South Ossetians, backed by Russia, look like the inhuman monsters in this war. They’ve mostly failed in that task.

And most of the western media, by taking the ‘Russia Bad!’ meme from the NeoCons as headline fact, missed out on some of the best stories. Unlike Spiegel Online, for example, whose coverage of the war has been outstanding, and astounding.

So to the headline - In early August, in the first days of a new war, gangs of South Ossetian teenagers did exactly what you would do, if an invading army rolled tank into your neighbourhood, after bombing the shit out of your city :

 

When Georgian forces moved into the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7, they underestimated the Ossetians’ determination to resist them. Young men opened fire with Kalashnikovs and teenagers hurled petrol bombs at tanks. Now the local Russian-sponsored regime is triumphant.

The invaders who rode into the destroyed town of Tskinvhali on the morning of Aug. 8 in US jeeps wore US-made uniforms and helmets. Many of them were trained by US officers or served in Iraq as brothers-in-arms of the Americans.

They quickly realised that they weren’t facing just a “few dozen separatists”….

The attitude of South Ossetia’s youth can be summed up by what student Julia Beteyeva of the University of Tskhinvali told SPIEGEL back in June 2004: “One can only take our republic away from us by killing us.”

On Aug. 8, groups of young Ossetians, some of them just 16 years of age, attacked Georgian tanks with petrol bombs. Young men took Kalashnikov rifles from hidden arsenals and fought the Georgians on their own or in groups. At midday, Alan Ulumbegov, 34, born in the eastern German town of Meiningen as the son of a Soviet officer, saw Georgian troops coming up the road. He got his rifle out of a wardrobe. His mother pleaded with him not to go. “I want to protect our people,” he replied and went off to fight.

**********

Babeyev was about to cook his dinner when shells started falling around his apartment block. He fled into the cellar of an adjoining building with nine neighbors. It was a sleepless, frightening night. Hours of artillery bombardment reduced apartment blocks into ruins, wrecked cars and turned gardens into shell holes.

The following morning Georgian warplanes flew bombing runs to complete the destruction. Then tanks arrived to “restore the constitutional order,” as Saakashvili put it — an order that never existed in South Ossetia.

South Ossetians can’t understand people who call them “separatists.” They say they never broke away from Georgia because they never joined the new country when it was formed after the Soviet Union collapsed. It’s impossible to find anyone in this part of the world who can seriously imagine the territory being a part of Georgia in future. What much of the world is labelling as “separatism” is in fact the yearning for autonomy by a small people that was divided against its wishes.

Russia Recognises Rebel Regions - Georgia Begs The West For Help, But Finds Little Interest

Russia To Establish Permanent Military Base In South Ossetia

Russia Warns It Will Respond Militarily To New American Missiles In Europe

Key Events In Georgia Crisis

A Photo Essay On The Georgian Attacks, And Aftermath, In South Ossetia
Seven Days That Plunged Russia And Georgia Into War

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Some of the poorest people in the world are still struggling to rebuild their lives in Myanmar, four months after a cyclone and tsunami-like tidal surge swept away the lives of more than 138,000 people, and left 800,000 more homeless.

The aid trickles in, mass starvation was avoided, but many of the people of the devastated Irrawaddy Delta are haunted by ghosts, the scale of destruction, the remaining corpses and some of the most remarkable stories of survival you will ever hear :

(The storm surge) leveled most of the fragile thatch homes in its path, uprooted trees, swept away the livestock and fishing boats that provided a livelihood and polluted many rice fields with salt.

For those fields that survived, this year’s planting season has now passed, and experts say it may be more than a year before many people see their next decent harvest.

Although some houses are being rebuilt and some fields are being worked, the delta remains a vista of ruin and debris, where human and animal bones and the last decomposing bodies still cluster at the edges of waterways.

Fantastical tales circulate among the survivors, the photographer said, weaving a tapestry of stories from this world and the next.

There is the tale of the boy who survived by clinging to the back of a crocodile, and the story of the boatload of people stranded at low tide who sat waiting on the silt for the water to rise, surrounded by stranded corpses.

There is the story of the mother who was reunited with her baby after it was swept away in a washtub, and the story of the woman who gave birth as the cyclone hit and pulled her baby from the water by its umbilical cord.

And there are the stories of wandering ghosts, whose cries for help can be heard at night in haunted places that no villager dares to enter.

Read the rest of the story here.

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Just another few dozen dead kids in the ‘War On Terror’. But don’t worry, they weren’t our children. They were poor, brown kids with hard to pronounce names. These innocent children had to die, to stop all the terrorism that, you know, kills innocent children :

A United Nations human rights team has found “convincing evidence” that some 90 civilians — among them 60 children — were killed in air strikes on a village in western Afghanistan on Thursday night….making it almost certainly the deadliest case of civilian casualties caused by any United States military operation in Afghanistan since 2001.Mohammad Iqbal Safi, the head of the parliamentary defense committee and a member of the government commission, said the 60 children were between three months old and 16 years old, all killed as they slept. “It was a heart breaking scene,” he said.

The bombing occurred around midnight…

…the villagers were preparing for a ceremony the next morning in memory of a man who had died some time before. Extended families from two tribes were visiting the village and there were lights of fires as the adults were cooking food for the ceremony, he said.

Russia, at odds with the United States and much of the West over its recognition of two breakaway regions in the Central Asian country of Georgia, said it would raise the issue on Tuesday afternoon at the Security Council.

Aerial bombing of Afghanistan villages by American and NATO forces just makes the Taliban’s job so much easier. We’ve killed about the same number of civilians in Afghanistan this year as the Taliban and ‘Al Qaeda’ have. That is, more than a thousand, and probably closer to 2000.

All bombs are terror.

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A casually depressing photo essay from Forbes dams the following cities to likely apocalyptic destruction and potential ‘ghost city’ status by 2100 :

Mexico City - The aqaufer on which the entire city is built runs dry, the city sinks into the big hole where all the fresh water used to be.

San Francisco, USA - earthquake.

Detroit, USA - population flight.

Timbuktu, Mali - swallowed up the desert.

Venice, Italy - rising sea levels, rising tides.

Naples, Italy - Mt Vesuvius erupts, again.

If global warming doomology comes true, and coastlines around the world are pounded heavily, regularly, by house eating tides, a flight to inland cities is predicted. San Francisco is cited as a city losing its population at a steady rate, a sign of what is to come for crowded, crime-ridden cities around the world, apparently.

Technology will allow the construction of smaller, more self-sufficient cities, where older cities, like London, like San Francisco, will be cursed with aging infrastructure too expensive to fully replace, or even maintain.

It will be cheaper, more efficient, to build new cities than preserve and update the old and crumbling.

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All images by Darryl Mason

More Photos Of No Great Importance Here

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All images by Darryl Mason

More Photos Of No Great Importance Here

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They don’t even pretend to be making this stuff for foreign wars anymore. We will see fast, darting mini-flying saucers, armed with tasers, chasing down suspects in our cities :

Flying saucers could potentially be used to support troops engaged in urban warfare. The military is to assess whether the alien-like aircraft, Moon buggies and miniature flying robots are capable of detecting roadside bombs and insurgents without putting troops in the line of fire.

The saucers, which are less than a metre (3ft) across, have optical and infra-red cameras and can fly over enemy positions without the need for a remote-control operator.

The unusual devices are among the entrants in a Ministry of Defence competition aimed at encouraging the development of urban warfare equipment.

Military analysts believe that street fighting will become an increasing part of armed conflict in the future and want to make sure that British troops have the edge.

Hence, the excitement over manmade mini-flying saucers.

The Stella system operates as a robotic team, with one unmanned aircraft mapping an enemy stronghold, and the second aircraft working with the ground vehicle to provide close inspections.

The devices, like others in the competition, are fitted with thermal and normal lens cameras linked to intelligent software that can interpret pictures to identify potential threats.

Readers of the London Times (in comments) appear to know that these robotic hunter (and eventually killer) flying surveillance systems will eventually be deployed in the skies and in the streets of London.

Just in time for the Olympics, in 2012.

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The next president of the United States is going to have one hell of a hard time selling the carbon tax to Americans, as a way to stop global warming, when they’re enduring winters like this :

“Numb’s the word,” says the 192-year-old (Farmer’s Almanac) publication, which claims an accuracy rate of 80 to 85 percent for its forecasts that are prepared two years in advance.

…two-thirds of the country can expect colder than average temperatures….

“This is going to be catastrophic for millions of people,” said almanac editor Peter Geiger, noting that the frigid forecast combined with high prices for heating fuel is sure to compound problems households will face in keeping warm.

Eat or keep warm will be the choice for tens of millions of Americans in such a scenario.

The forecasts...are prepared by the almanac’s reclusive prognosticator Caleb Weatherbee, who uses a secret formula based on sunspots, the position of the planets and the tidal action of the moon.

The almanac’s winter forecast is at odds with that of the National Weather Service, whose trends-based outlook calls for warmer than normal temperatures over much of the country, including Alaska, said Ed O’Lenic, chief of the operations branch at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.


Blame Global Warming? Okay : Record Flooding Swamps Ireland

Blame Global Warming? Okay : Transfusion Blood At Risk

Blame Global Warming? Okay : Welcome To Your New Submersible Pod Home In The Depths Of A Polar Ocean

Blame Global Warming? Okay : New York’s Bridges And Tunnels Could Turn To Wreckage

World Climate Change Providing Fresh Challenges For Farmers

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According to this story, China’s newspapers have already declared China the winner of the most gold medals in the 2008 Olympics. With 43 gold medals already bagged, Chinese media declares, the United States has been defeated.
Confused? China’s Dongguan Times is not. Headline : “China Is Not Confused.”
I’d have written more about the onslaught of totalitarian-tech that has been on display during the Beijing Olympics - the ultra-surveillance, the constant body scanning, the crushing of free protest in the streets and free speech online, the massive databases that suck up every online detail of everyone who enters the country and generates multiple profiles, the military vehicles roaming public events laden with yet more cameras and yet more scanners - if this was not the way cities in Australia, across the UK, the US, Europe, even New Zealand were already heading.

Surveillance, luggage and body scanning and profiling technology developed in Australia and the US, and elsewhere in the west, was marketed to China for the Beijing Olympics years ago. They brought at least a billion dollars worth of totalitarian-tech tested in the streets of cities like Sydney, London, Melbourne, New York, LA, specifically for the Games.

What worked here, was sold there. And what is perfected there, while our media shouts “Look! Look how unfree they are!”, will be sold back to our governments, and added to the arsenal of anti-privacy measures available to those we bless with control over us.

We may not be right there with China on the re-education camps, the many executions, the farming of organs from political prisoners, but the same attitude, the same unwarranted distrust of your own people, the same disturbing desire to digitally lock away their secrets while stealing yours, is there. Here.

For today at least, you will still be captured on surveillance cameras more times walking through the streets of London then you would were you in Beijing, attending the Olympics.

The next big marketing mecca for normalising the daily, often deeply personal intrusion of totalitarian-tech will be, of course, the London Olympics in 2012.

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A selection of Philip K Dick quotes from the Paul Williams book Only Apparently Real :

The police informally said, “We don’t want a crusader here in Marin County. You better move away or you’ll get a bullet in your back some night. Or worse.” I was shucked by deadly people playing a deadly game.

I’m sure within my circle there was at least one agent provocateur.

…your consciousness is built up on introjected moral values that authority figures have deliberately laid on you.

The unconscious relates to the entire world, the whole panoply of the universe. It learns from birds, it learns from ads it sees, it learns from television commercials, it learns from everything at once, not just from a few narrow authority figures…

I could never mock my characters, for screwing up, especially. See, these people are no longer freaks to me, I mean in the sense of being incompetent and fucking up their lives. Because I had completely fucked up my life, I was completely incompetent, and I loved my characters for their incompetence, you see? I could never write down to my characters. Also it made me need my characters more, as compatriots, friends, cohorts…

…my novels are my make-believe world, and they’re full of my friends. …

…it makes me wonder, you know, are these characters really real? Do I think I invent them, but in actual fact I am merely picking them up from somewhere?

You know, the greatest incentive to write is that you can’t figure out the universe. And you keep trying to do it by writing about it. You can coerce it into making sense by writing a book that makes sense, but what happens is, your books don’t make any sense either.

My mind is more important than my possessions.

When things got really bad, miserable and wretched, you know, or I got really frightened, I began to blank out, retrospectively.

You’ve got three possibilities. (The Universe) is either malicious; or it is completely uninterested and cold, in the sense of it doesn’t care, you get ground up in the machinery and it doesn’t notice you; or that it actually has a certain concern for you, and will do - make efforts, if you will only notice its proferring of help, but you must notice its proferring of help.

I didn’t really groove with the universe. Now, I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it. My only suspicion about it was that it would find out the truth about me, and its reaction would be perfectly normal: It would get me.

There are no private lives. …one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private.

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From ‘The Fourth World War’ blog :

The US Vs Russia, Via Georgia War has seen an avalanche of faked news, and purposeful manipulation of dramatic footage, being released from all sides of the conflict, but the truth manages to cut through most of the reality tinkering.

The more they try to hide the truth, the more those interested will try to seek it out, sensing they are being fed crap and wanting to find out for themselves what is going on.

Here’s how the war began. Broadcast two days before Georgia attack the capital of South Ossetia, killing hundreds, if not thousands of civilians.

It’s hard to have confidence in a president who picks a fight with Russia, and then eats his tie on the BBC :

Censorship is rarely this blatant, and clumsy. Or creepy :

“There are grsy areas in war.”

It’s even creepier the second time around.

Now Russia can rightly accuse the US, and Murdoch, of faking a news reality for this war. They did it just as well with video as Pravda ever did with newspapers.

We in the West mostly got the Fox News version of how this new war began from the mainstream media.

And this ‘accident’ of using footage of a city laid to waste by Georgia with missiles fired into civilian populations and trying to pass it off as a Georgian city smashed by Russia was all over Australian TV news, and news channels, as well. It was everywhere, around the world.

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The battering ram of fear mongering and rampant propaganda really does smash through :

A clear majority of voters believe freedom of speech should not extend to groups that are sympathetic to terrorists (56.8 per cent agreed with this proposition and only 23.2 per cent disagreed).

A smaller majority also said police should be allowed to search the houses of these people without a court order (50.5 per cent in favour versus 33.2 per cent opposed).

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“Ha! If Russia invades, I will eat my tie! On the BBC! You forget we have America and Israel backing us…”

The president of Georgia loses the bet, and does the only honourable thing :

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Okay, it turns out I was wrong yesterday when I said I was wrong about us all living in a Philip K. Dick reality :

A War On Terror board game designed in Cambridge has been seized by police who claim the balaclava in the set could be used in a criminal act.

The board game was deemed to be a “criminal item.”

“Surely no member of the public is going to believe that a board game could be used as a weapon?”

War on Terror, similar to games like Risk, revolves around creating empires that compete and wage war.

Each player starts as an empire filled with good intentions and a determination to liberate the world from terrorists and from each other.

Then the reality of world politics kicks and terrorist states emerge.

Andrew said: “The terrorists can win and quite often do and it’s global anarchy. It sums up the randomness of geo-politics pretty well.”

All High Street retailers declined to stock the controversial game. But more than 12,000 copies have been sold online or through independent stockists.

12,000 non-mainstream sales for an independent board game is excellent work.

More here.

Here are the rules for the War On Terror board game :

The game is for two to six players.

All players begin with fledgling empires on a world map which they expand through the acquisition of land, oil and cities.

At any time players can abandon the “pursuit of liberty and oil” in favour of becoming a terror state - or they are designated a terror state by a random “Axis of Evil” spinner.

Empires can also train their own terrorists to target rival empires, although these groups often turn on you later in the game.

What’s the problem here? This is the exact same kind of scenario-exploring, role-playing games that the world’s militaries have been using intensely in the past decade.

So they can play war games with toys and we can’t?

(via BoingBoing and the Cambridge News)

More on the game from the official website :

Everyone starts with the best intentions. Then things start to get cramped. Then you notice your neighbour has more oil than you. Before long, war is waged, nukes are dropped, revolutions are fought and terrorists are doing your dirty work…

So how do you ‘liberate’ the world these days? Is it OK to fund terrorism to defeat a greater evil? Do weapons of mass destruction exist? And what’s with that balaclava?

A selection of game play cards from the War On Terror board game :




A reality based board game explaining the methodology, ideologies, and exploring the desires, that link state warfare and terrorist violence.

Just like the real world.

Too close to reality.

“You’re Either With Them Or Against Them…Sometimes You’re Both!” from the ‘WoT’ board game.

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I thought we were living in a Philip K Dick reality. I was wrong.

We’re actually living in a Tom Clancy videogame :

Recent news coverage of the worrying ground war between Russia and Georgia could well leave gamers with a sense of deja vu.The South Ossetia war, which began on August 7, bears a close resemblance to events portrayed in the 2001 Xbox and Playstation 2 game “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon,” the first level of which takes place against the backdrop of a struggle between Georgian rebel forces and the legitimate Georgian government in the South Ossetian region.

Ghost Recon’s plot follows these skirmishes with a full-scale Russian invasion of the region, a subsequent evacuation of US forces, and ultimately the fall of the Georgian government.

The creators of Ghost Recon had their Georgia-Russia war beginning in April, 2008. The build up to the real war had certainly begun by then, with Russian special forces and psychological warfare experts working away in South Ossetia, helping to build up resistance to the increasingly US-controlled Georgian government, aiming to keep the territory for larger Russia. At the same time, American and Israeli ‘military trainers’ were flying into Georgia to prepare the locals who would do the actual fighting for the coming conflict.

How did Tom Clancy see the Georgia Vs Russia war playing out?

…we can expect the South Ossetia conflict to culminate in a dramatic assault on Red Square and the Kremlin by NATO troops…”

Okay, now we know it was all just fiction.

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American Jews Go On Nazi-Killing, Skull Smashing, Terror Spreading, Swastika-On-Forehead Carving Massacre

In a few weeks, Quentin Tarantino will begin shooting his long-awaited World War 2 revenge fantasy, ‘Inglorious Bastards’, starring Brad Pitt, Simon Pegg and Adam Sandler.

What’s it about? The short version is this : In 1941, a gang of American Jewish hillbillies are dropped into Nazi-occupied France on a simple, secret mission - kill as many Jew-hating Nazis as they can, and collect their scalps as mementos. The Jewish soldiers are vengeful, giggling terrorists, who mutilate the wounded and the dead, beating people to death with baseball bats and carving swastikas on foreheads.

For the ‘Basterds‘, this a suicide mission, with little connection to historical fact.

If you want to see Tarantino’sInglourious Basterds‘ (to use Tarantino’s spelling from the hand-written title of what is purported to be the last draft of the script) in mid-2009 knowing nothing more than the above, then stop reading right now. In fact, don’t visit this site in the next few weeks, because we’ll be coming back to look at more from the massive July, 2008 Tarantino script.

This is going to be a brutally violent, and extremely wordy movie. Nothing new there for Tarantino. QT addicts love his lengthy dialogue-rich scenes, and blood-splattering savagery.

But ‘Inglourious Basterds‘ is easily going to be the most controversial Tarantino movie, so far, and not solely because of the violence this time.

Basically, ‘Inglourious Basterds‘ is a very modern fantasy about how American Jews helped kill Adolph Hitler and thereby won World War 2, all before Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December, 1941.

This is how Brad Pitt’s character, Lt. Aldo Raine, lays out the Nazi-killing mission for his new recruits (all typos from the script are Tarantino’s) :

LT ALDO
I’m putting together a special team. And I need me eight soldiers. Eight-Jewish-American-soldiers. Now y’all might of heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leaving a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin, guerilla army, we’re gonna be doin one thing, and one thing only, Killin Nazi’s.
The members of the National Socialist Party, have conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation, and terror. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them. Now I don’t know bout y’all? But I sure as hell, didn’t come down from the goddamn Smoky mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my through half of Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity. There the foot soldiers of a Jew hatin, mass murderin manic, and they need to be destroyed.
That’s why any and every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin a Nazi uniform, there gonna die.
We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disembodied, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives.

Lt. Aldo then lays out the challenge.

LT. ALDO
…I got a word of warning to all would-be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And y’all will git me, one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazi’s…..or you will die trying.

This won’t be a subtle movie. Adolph Hitler (Joe Pesci? We wish!), channeled through Tarantino, is the living embodiment of every cliched mad-ranting Hitler of 1940s American cinema. Historians will gag in horror when they see ‘Inglorious Bastards’, but then Tarantino’s not doing this to cement the historical record on a foundation of facts. This is his World War 2 revenge fantasy and, presumably, it’s supposed to be fun, funny and mostly fact-free.

Here’s some Tarantino dialogue for one of the table-pounding Hitler scenes from the July, 2008 screenplay :

HITLER
How much more of these Jew swine must I endure? They butcher my men like they were fish bait! This pack of filthy degenerates, are doing what the Russian army didn’t, and Patton’s army couldn’t. Turning soldiers of The Third Reich, into superstitious old women!

Hitler pounds furiously on the desk with his fist.

HITLER
No, no, no, no, no! I have heard the rumors myself! Soldiers of the Third Reich, who have brought the world to there knee’s, now pecking and clucking like chickens. Do you know the latest rumor they’ve conjured up, in their fear induced delirium? The one that beats my boys with a bat. The one they call “The Bear Jew”….is a Golem. A avenging Jew angel, conjured up by a vengeful rabbi, to smite the Aryans!

Some more of Tarantino’s Hitler.

HITLER
You want to prove their flesh and blood? Then BRING THEM TO ME! I will hang them naked, by their heels, from the eiffel tower! And then throw their bodies in the sewers, for the rats of Paris to feast!

I’m not convinced that this really is the ‘Final Draft’ of the script as Tarantino claims on its front page. A timed reading shows the movie, based on this script, will run more than four hours, most of it action-free dialogue, with one of the dumbest finales seen in any major movie in recent years. If the ending is filmed as the July 2008 script reads, cinemas will be pulsing with laughter. But the ending is not supposed to be funny.

And he wants to debut this at Cannes next June?

It’s hard to imagine actors of Brad Pitt’s calibre will do Tarantino’s dialogue exactly as it reads in this ‘Final Draft’ screenplay. A script doctor has probably been brought in for a bit of a polish, which may be why the rest of the cast (Adam Sandler, Simon Pegg) have not yet been 100% confirmed.

More Next Week….

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Rating 3.00 out of 5
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Written by Michael Vass

**This can also be found at Presidential Race Blog**

And here goes Strike 3 for the Democratic National Convention. The often discussed and well-rumored submission of Senator Hillary Clinton’s name for the nomination ballot has now been confirmed. The Democratic Party looks weaker and more dysfunctional by the day.

I’ve already noted the problems that will be created once House Speaker Nancy Pelosi takes the stage.

“But I think that having Nancy Pelosi speak is a mistake. She is the symbol of the ineffective Democrat-led Congress. She is a reminder that Democrats would prefer to allow millions of Americans to have to choose between food and/or work or paying their energy bills. She is the voice of the Democratic Party that refused to even consider having a vote on domestic drilling - effectively saying that Democrats have no intention of being bi-partisan if Senator Obama is elected.”

“Speaker Pelosi has walled-off any discussion of domestic drilling for oil. She has refused to allow any votes on the subject. And according to her most recent comments on Larry King she will only consider possibly allowing a vote on domestic drilling IF it also includes alternative energy incentives.

Effectively that means that Speaker Pelosi wants alternative energy to get more money to earn more money for herself. The higher the cost for oil, the better her alternative energy stocks will do. And the American public be damned.”

And in the recent past I noted the danger of the Clinton’s to any hopes of Senator Obama winning the Presidency:

“And the only real outcome of these actions by the Clinton’s is weakening of Senator Obama, possibly splitting the Democratic Party and causing Obama to lose. That would open the door to Senator Clinton claiming she could have won and paving the way for her run in 2012. That is unless she can’t get the nomination at the DNC. It’s so deceptive it can only be a Clinton plan.”

But today a joint press release from Senator Obma and Senator Clinton stated that Hillary will have her name submitted for nomination consideration. Senator Clinton stated in that release

“With every voice heard and the Party strongly united, we will elect Senator Obama President of the United States and put our nation on the path to peace and prosperity once again.”

Right. This is the same woman that

“It’s only taken her a day to realize that 2143 is over 2118, and that she has lost. Only a day to recognize that using race and religion as negative attacks has not helped her, that every woman in America will not flock to her just because of her gender, that taking every position possible on issues (like illegal immigrants getting driver’s liscences) or lying to the public (with Ireland and Bosnia to name a few) is not a means to gain votes.”

And whose husband, Former President Bill Clinton, has said on her behalf

And then there is

This all says nothing of the comments made during the actual Democratic Primaries.

So when you consider that Senator Hillary Clinton has never stopped her push to be the Democratic nominee, that former-President Bill Clinton refuses to acknowledge or support Senator Obama, that the Clintons have virtually blackmailed their ‘support’ to date to the repayment of the debt they incurred campaigning against Obama, and the fact that all of this is being used to weaken Senator Obama’s chance of winning the election the DNC looks to be a way to break Democratic unity as opposed to securing it.

All in all, between the Clinton’s and Nancy Pelosi the Democratic National Convention seems to be shaping up to be somewhat of a farce and a losing proposition for the chances of winning the election. But the Vice-Presidential candidate will be announced as well. Depending on who is picked it may be the base hit that Obama needs right now.

So is it 3 strikes and out or will the Democrats still be at bat?

Rating 3.00 out of 5
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