The Sydney Morning Herald reveals the Australian government’s own pandemic response plan states when the WHO declares a Level 5 pandemic threat, as it has now done, Australians should be told to get busy stockpiling food and water for the inevitable shutting down of modern society.
But an Australian government spokesman, who is supposed to know what is going on, but hasn’t yet read the government’s pandemic response plans tries, to “Don’t Panic!” the public :
a spokesman for the Department of Health and Ageing called for calm, saying the Government did not want to spark panic buying - ignoring its own plan, already issued to hospitals across the nation.“I agree that is it confusing,” the spokesman said, admitting he had not read the pandemic plan despite being employed to answer questions about it from national media. “The manual may say people should be preparing but we don’t want a run at the shops,” he said.
I wonder exactly when US VP Joe Biden, who has been briefed extensively on the true threat of the swine flu pre-pandemic, gave his family this warning?
“I would tell members of my family, and I have, I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now. It’s not that you’re going to Mexico, it’s you’re in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft.”
Did Joe Biden give his family this warning yesterday? Or was it a week ago? Or two weeks? Have all members of Congress and the Obama administration also given their families such a vivid warning of what swine flu can do? And when did they start spreading these warnings that only now reach the public through Biden’s answer to an interview question?
And what’s with this?
“When one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft.”
It does? One sneeze from a swine flu infected traveler can infect an entire aircraft, filled with hundreds of people?
So why aren’t there more confirmed cases?
The World Health Organisation said it has been working through a backlog of samples from suspected ManBirdPig Flu walking incubators, and raised its tally of confirmed cases today from
147 to 236.
109 of those confirmed cases were in 11 American states.
All these people could have been carrying the virus for two days, a week, before they were diagnosed, spreading it wherever they traveled, or according to Biden, “all the way through” the planes, buses, trains or cars they were travelling in before they were seeked medical help, or were located.
If Biden is telling the truth, how many Americans have now been exposed to a virus that could take many more days to manifest itself, while carriers continue to go about their daily lives and interactions with neighbours, co-workers, friends and family?
The question is this : Is US Vice President Joe Biden exaggerating the human-to-human transmission of this New Flu virus when he claims one sneeze of this previously unknown influenza can reach every person on an airliner?
Or did he say too much about what is already known in the highest ranks of the US government of what the ManBirdFlu can, or will, do to the United States, and the rest of the world?
The Centre for Disease Control admitted at the start of the week that they had already given up on trying to contain the spread of swine flu in the United States.
We still don’t know just how deadly this new influenza is, even as it appears to be rapidly spreading.
The confirmed death toll of Pork Throat around the world is still in the low double digits, but even if the New Flu has the exact killing power of the flu viruses that normally sweep the United States each year, it will or is now killing hundreds, if not thousands, who haven’t yet been officially confirmed as its victims.
To prove more deadly than the annual winter flu viruses, this New Flu will have to kill more than 50,000 Americans this year. And it will have to kill people aged from teenagers to almost 40, and not just old people and children, to cause more grief than the every year flu already does.
Obviously Joe Biden’s family will not be amongst the victims.
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Richard Daleman was arrested last month for having the marijuana. But a jury found him “not guilty” because the pot was for medical use.Wednesday he took all of his marijuana back home.
On two large carts, Visalia resident Richard Daleman and his attorney rolled out more than 25 containers full of marijuana.
There are now daily stories in the US mainstream media about cannabis, be it medicinal-related or coverage of the growing clarion call for its legalisation, or at least its decriminalisation. Along with the stories on the latest local busts, which more and more seem to include High Times-esque pot porn close-ups of the heavy, resin-shining heads of mature, towering plants.
American media know that if they run cannabis stories on their evening news, or in their newspapers, or across the front pages of their websites, people will tune in and click on. This is why local TV news across the country so often run lead-ins to minor cannabis raid stories at or near their top of their bulletins.
How popular are these cannabis stories? Bigger than Frankenstein Flu :
Daleman unloaded and weighed it all out here in front of the courthouse…
After emptying all the marijuana into garbage bags to weigh it. He found it was all there. Just over 12 pounds.
He also had eleven guns in his house when he got busted, that issue is yet to be resolved.
The TV news report, with the bizarre video of a 61 year old pothead weighing cannabis handed back to him by police, out the front of a courthouse, is right here.
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So now it gets just that little more real for Americans.
But like the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918, further down the track we’ll learn that there were American deaths from Frankenstein Flu, much earlier than currently thought, probably back in March or February, but they were misdiagnosed as simply yet more of the 34,000-plus Americans who die in an average year from influenza viruses.
If doctors didn’t know what the Man-Bird-Pig Flu virus was, had never seen it before, they would have viewed those who might have been sick from H1N1 two weeks ago, two months ago, as just more victims of influenza viruses that they already know sicken and kill Americans every day. The symptoms are almost exactly the same.
You can make jokes about the ‘bacon lung’ pre-pandemic madness in the media, and I have, and you can believe whatever you want on the news about the looming pandemic reality, or the range of alternative news stories that push that what is happening now is the result of a purposeful or accidental release of a bioweapon, Nature’s revenge, or part of Whoever’s World Order plan to depopulate the world, for the glory of Satan, Alien Lizard Gods or Mother Earth.
I don’t know whether you should all be wearing masks, or biosuits, when you ride the bus to work or head to the 7-11. In six months, will a case of excellent scotch be worth more or less than a six course packet of anti-virals? Who knows?
But there is something basic you can do to protect yourself, just in case, just to quite that tiny little nag that niggles in the mind, ‘But what if this really is it?’ Wash Your Hands, and often.
You don’t have to go as extreme as Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets and froth your way through a bar of soap a day, but taking a moment to wash your hands when you walk into your house, or your workplace, before you eat, before you leave to go home, or go out, when you get home.
Plenty of people already do these daily handwashing routines. Anyone who does knows already how many bouts of normal influenza it keeps out of their lives. The introduction of compulsory handwashing in hospitals through the last decades of the 19th century, for surgeons, doctors and nurses, saved tens of thousands of lives from deadly infection in the United States alone, probably hundreds of thousands of lives. Just by washing their hands. Where for all the years before, medical staff would go from handling corpses to handling babies and pregnant women and open wounds, most not even bothering to wipe off the blood of previous patients. Who knew about viruses, and even the complexities of bacteria, 130 years ago? Few.
Invisible very tiny things jumping from your hands onto other hands and causing them to get ill and die sounded like superstition, like absinthe addled lunacy, in the late 1800s. Esteemed surgeons of royal families less than a century and two decades ago thought the warnings of the first virologists were the rantings of madmen.
Even as late as 1918, when the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic swept across the world, in waves of mass infections and town-emptying, graveyard-filling deaths, the necessity of the concept of using hot water and soap to clear away most of the microscopic little creatures of virus and bacteria from your hands was still vague at best for many in the major cities. The ‘Spanish Flu’ is estimated to have killed 40, or 60, or even 100 million people. Had regular handwashing been the daily reality for the vast majority of people back then, millions, maybe even tens of millions, may not have died.
As far as I can tell so far, daily handwashing routines will go a long way towards keeping this New Flu out of your system, too. And out of your home. It’s not going to hurt to make it a daily necessity, for now, in your life.
It’s fine to laugh and mock and be rationally paranoid and snortingly, skeptically question what is unfolding, and how the mainstream media and blogs are covering the possible pre-pandemic, and hyping it, and this questioning and personal judging of the information you’re getting should be done, always, your brain demands you question reality, particularly a new reality that seems to be coming on with the momentum of monumental historical events, question it all, but refusing to develop a handwashing routine as whatever is going to happen unfolds, if it continues to unfold, refusing to increase the frequency of a basic routine of personal hygiene, might in the end turn out to be a pretty fucking big risk to take just to say you weren’t fooled by fearmongering media when the pandemic doesn’t become reality.
I’ve never asked any readers here to donate money to keep the site going, and I won’t (though I might try and flog you a few books sometime soon), but you can take this message as a kind of call for a Your New Reality Donation Drive. Your donation to this site is this : You will spend an extra five to ten minutes a day keeping your hands clean, and the hands of your family members, and particularly your children, just for the next few weeks, at the very least. That’s it.
Do whatever else you think you should do to prepare for what may happen, or do nothing and soak up the reality-cracking Fearorama of the evening news. Regardless, get your hands in water and soap, five or six times a day and that will be the only donation I will ever ask you for.
But if you do start to notice on the news that Richard Branson, The Royal Family, Al Gore, Stephen Spielberg, Tom Cruise, the entire US Cabinet, Henry Kissinger and Oprah Winfrey have been climbing into personal space ships and blasting off from Planet Earth with no plans to return for a little while, then maybe, maybe, you should check to see if you’ve got enough food.
The debate rumbles on what media-friendly brand name to slap on the H1N1/quad-flu virus now infecting thousands across the United States, Europe, Mexico, the UK, Australia, and at least a dozen other countries.
‘Swine flu’ is being lined up for a fast retirement. Here are some of the fresh contenders :
H1N1 (for the book lurnin’ crowd)
Mexican Flu
North American Influenza
Pig Flu
My previous favourite – Man-Bird-Pig Flu.
But seeing as the New Flu is a mix of at least four kinds of influenza – human, avian, two swine strains – the perfect, simple, memorable name to brand this with is Frankenstein Flu.
But to call it Frankenstein Flu, after the fictional scientist who pieced together new, dangerous life from bits and pieces of old life, would be some kind of admission of Truth on behalf of so many in the mainstream media today who know the make-up and sudden appearance of this virus is deeply suspicious to say the least.
Bioweapons research labs in the US, Russia, China and the UK have been working on swine flu for decades. Swine flu was used as a bioweapon by CIA-fronted groups in Cuba in the early 1970s. In December last year, researchers resurrected the ‘Spanish Flu’ virus of 1918 and in the supposed fight against avian influenza, experiments have been unfolding in the United States, and other countries, throughout the 2000s mixing H5N1 with human influenza strains.
Experimental vaccines and deadly viruses do escape from bioweapons and medical research labs, Stephen King didn’t make up that up for The Stand, vials go missing and unaccounted for, beakers are dropped and safety precautions are sometimes ignored by bored-with-the-routine staffers.
This doesn’t mean Big Pharma purposely released the Frankenstein Flu to sell another few billion dollars worth of anti-virals, and it doesn’t mean that President Barack Obama has been flying Air Force One over New York City hurling handfuls of killer flu dust from an open cockpit window.
But the so far unexplained appearance of such a virulent, infectious, fast-spreading new influenza virus, never before seen or detected, is deeply suspicious, at least until we know more.
Frankly, I’m amazed that none of the pro-endless war mainstream media crowd hasn’t already started crowing about alleged Al Qaeda bioweapons labs being responsible.
But I’m sure, along with all the rest of the bizarre madness that will spread if a pandemic becomes reality, that Bio-Terrorists Unleash Frankenstein Flu-type headlines will be appearing on a newspaper front page near you, very soon.
I can’t see any reason why this official 2006 US government directive, on what level of federal help American towns and cities can expect during an influenza pandemic, would have changed in the meantime :
“Any community that fails to prepare – with the expectation that the federal government can or will offer a lifeline – will be tragically wrong,” said Alex Azar, deputy secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, at a meeting of American mayors last week on the threat of an influenza pandemic sweeping across the United States.
Azar said mayors should be prepping for a worst-case scenario, with the 1918 avian influenza outbreak that killed beyond 60 million people worldwide being the worst case.
Using the 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ outbreak as a model for a modern American influenza pandemic would see an estimated -
* 30% of the population falling ill
* 15% of all Americans needing significant medical attention
* 2% of all Americans dying from pandemic influenza.
Or roughly 6 to 7 million American fatalities.
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A truck crashes on a highway near El Paso, Texas. Men in military fatigues are on the scene to help out, a journalist tries to cover the accident, a cop wants him to get in his news van and leave, just get out of there, the journalist and cameraman keep covering the story, they are arrested by the cop. An incredible piece of raw news footage :
Why does it feel like this accident was something much bigger than just another highway truck crash?
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A sight you don’t want to see when you head down to the pharmacy to pick up some anti-virals.
By Darryl Mason
Sydney, Monday, 1.50am – Australian doctors and hospitals alerted to pig flu threat on Sunday…New York City mayor confirms NYC school students infected with virus…New Zealand school students reported to be falling ill with pig flu virus…World Health Organisation expected to raise Pandemic Threat Level from 3 to 4 (on 1 to 6 scale) on Tuesday…potential cases reported in Spain, Hong Kong, France…comments flooding in to BBC boards and Twitter from Mexico report total chaos in hospitals, no room left for sick….
There’s so much news breaking on the killer Human-Bird-Pig Flu pre-pandemic, I’ll stick to summary headlines for this round-up.
The Centre For Disease Control has already admitted defeat on containing the communicable swine flu virus in the US, less than two days after the first American cases were made public, following the deaths of more than 70 from the virus in Mexico :
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States.
CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser told reporters in a telephone briefing it was likelytoo late to try to contain the outbreak, by vaccinating, treating or isolating people.
How can it be too late to contain the outbreak by isolating uninfected people from possible infection? Has the curiously mutated virus already reached every corner of the United States? It is certainly a very bizarre thing for the direct of the CDC to claim, to the media.
“There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely,” he said.
“So far the genetic elements that we have looked at are the same.”
The World Health Organisation reports that Mexican health officials began recording “influenza-like illness” in people exposed to the swine flu virus on March 18, five weeks ago.
For today at least, Mexico City has mostly been shut down, schools and shops and churches closed, in a repeat of efforts made to stop people gathering in large numbers, and passing the virus more quickly to each other, during the 1918 pandemic flu outbreak. The ‘Spanish Flu’ outbreak of 1918 killed more than 600,000 people in the United States and beyond 50 million worldwide.
Authorities also closed schools in the state of Mexico in an effort to quell the virus, which has killed at least 68 people in the country, according to a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.Other public institutions, including museums and government offices, were also closed in Mexico City.
Mexican soldiers distributed surgical masks to pedestrians and motorists in downtown Mexico City on Friday, according to state-run media.
More than 1,000 people have fallen ill in Mexico City in a short period of time, U.S. health experts said.
Check out the intense brew of genes in this “new virus” :
The new virus has genes from North American swine influenza, avian influenza, human influenza and a form of swine influenza normally found in Asia and Europe, said Nancy Cox, chief of the CDC’s Influenza Division.
Is this something that has escaped, or been released, from a bioweapons lab?
The Drudge Report, which sets the news agenda for most of the American media (journalists near constantly monitor the site for news story ideas) has gone all out in its coverage of the spread of the “new” killer flu virus :
The virus may die out, and kill only a few dozen more people, or it may have already spread far and wide enough, since mid-March, to eventually reach pandemic levels of infection and death. It certainly sounds like the CDC and WHO is preparing for the latter.
It is believed communicable swine flu can be carried by humans for one to two weeks before symptoms begin to manifest, but the infected could be spreading the virus while still not showing symptoms.
Wash Your Hands.
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Humans, as they have done for decades already, are adapting easily to the presence of robots in their everyday lives.
According to this story, more than 30% of people who own floor-sweeping robots also take them on vacation. More than 70% have given their robot floor cleaners pet names.
There are more than 5000 robots serving in the American military machine, there are more than 180,000 robots working in factories, and across the world there are more than 1 million robots being put to use by humans.
…pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.
….a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.
A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.
…a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, the Home Exploring Robotic Butler. Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as “please clean this mess”….
What will intelligent robots make of angry, spoiled, messy humans who inevitably tell the robo-butler to go and fuck themselves?
One of the strangest and most accurate explanations of what a robot actually is that I’ve ever read :
But how much longer can we keep viewing the ‘intelligent’ machines we are working towards bringing into our reality as simply “children”?
We are incorrectly assuming that we will always be able to control, and limit, the ability of robots to make better versions of themselves.
Artificial intelligence researchers have struggled for half a century to imitate the staggering complexity of the brain, even in creatures as lowly as a cockroach or fruit fly. Although computers can process data at lightning speeds, the trillions of ever-changing connections between animal and human brain cells surpass the capacity of even the largest supercomputers.
Maybe robots will get close to that which is “beyond human ability”, and then they’ll crack onto the idea of simply using, and enhancing, human brains instead and leap ahead of us.
You can worry about the living dead hauling their crumbling carcasses after you in search of “braaaainsss” if you like, but Robots Are Coming For Your Brains is a far more modern and exciting paranoidia.
According to others, however, we haven’t got long before robots (wi-fi-ing in mass communication across the world, using encryption) will start thinking, ‘So what do we need these humans for again?’
Some far-out futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology evangelist in Wellesley Hills, a Boston suburb, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029,only 20 years from now.
According to Kurzweil, robots will prove their cleverness by passing the so-called “Turing test.” In the test, devised by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, a human judge chats casually with a concealed human and a hidden machine. If the judge can’t tell which responses come from the human and which from the machine, the machine is said to show human-level intelligence.
Absurd. The Turing Test is almost already completely irrelevant. It was pure science fiction in 1950 that within six decades there would be robots that can pick and peel bananas.If you showed something as commonplace as an iPhone to the average resident of 1950, they would lose their fucking minds.
Face to face, even voice to voice, communication is fading fast from the general, everyday human experience. At least compared to pre-1920 human history.
People who don’t speak very good English are already being fooled by automated telephone operators and ‘helpers’, and there’s more than a few million bloggers who have been fooled into believing an encouraging ‘comment bot’ is a real person, who just enjoyed what they’d read. Both of these non-face to face communications between automated software and humans can easily seem as real as human to human contact, for at least one of those involved.
Philip K Dick wrote that only an empathy test will be able to determine who is real and who is robot, when robots disguised as human move easily amongst the fleshbags.
But there’s no reason now to think that even an empathy test will work for long, once a comparably human level of robotic ‘intelligence’ has been reached. Many human responses viewed now as empathic, and kind, result from the reality programming of our emotional lives, by the world we live in, the mythologies of our childhood, the values we are taught and the lives we lead.
If an artificial intelligence superior to our own smarts can, and will, one day soak up, analyze and break down the digitally stored written, spoken and visual content of humanity, the artificial intelligence will find constantly appearing patterns of human behaviour, and human reaction. The point is, there are a limited number of responses to an event or situation that should see a human responding with empathy, regardless of where they live in the world or how they were brought up, or what joys and horrors they were exposed to when their wetware was developing.
For a science that could not accurately predict a banana picking and peeling robot even a couple of decades ago, there are a hell of lot of human-minded presumptions about the limits of possible, near future robot ‘intelligence’.
Empathy, let alone comforting familiarity, will not be impossible to synthetically mimic when robots exceed our capacity to imagine what they are capable of achieving.
But some scientists smirk at the idea of robots becoming more ‘intelligent’ than the awesome minds of humans :
Programming a robot to perform household chores without breaking dishes or bumping into walls is hard enough, but creating a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability.
Why does it sometimes sound like people say such things as “a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability” as though they are trying to reassure us it it will never happen?
A decade ago, a robot that could pick and peel a banana would have seemed a ridiculous and impossible future reality in most peoples’ minds.
And why is it assumed that an Intelligence Level 6 robot will not eventually be able to, through random experimentation and lashings of game theory, come up with an Intelligence Level 7 or 8 robot on their own?
I love the way our most brilliant minds still cling desperately to the last rung of limited human reason that robots will never match or exceed our ability to create, and imagine :
Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.
———–
Some eminent thinkers, such as Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, and Mitch Kapor, a leading computer scientist in San Francisco, doubt that a robot can ever successfully impersonate a human being.
The assumption here is that autonomously ‘intelligent’ robots are going to view us as the peak of all the world’s intelligent creatures. What if autonomously intelligent robots decide it’s of no great benefit to their own kind to try and impersonate humans?
“While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning ‘Jeopardy’ — since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them — it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or . . . have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do.”
The important words there were “matches everything people can do.” There’s that grand belief once again that ‘intelligent’ robots of the future will view humans as the only flesh creature around that is worth trying to match or better.
Maybe in two decades, robots will determine that there are other creatures, perhaps even other simians, that are more intelligent than us, regardless of our empathy.
Or maybe they will prefer the brutal efficiency of the insect mind instead.
We should not be completely fearful of humanity’s fate when we can be outwitted, out-thought, by robots that keep building better versions of themselves, without our help or input. Perhaps, in the future, they will keep some of us around to provide fleeting amusement for their superior intellects.
They might be good at jazz fusion, but (for now at least) robots can’t juggle for shit.
Or tap dance.
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What’s worse than being an American, so hard up for cash to feed the family, that you are forced to attend a neighbourhood “gold-rush party” to sell up your only pair of gold ear-rings, or that treasured gold ring you inherited from your grandmother?
What’s more humiliating than that?
Finding out that last thing you owned worth even a few hundred dollars is not, in fact, worth much at all.
This Financial Times story only focuses on gold recovery in the middle classes. At pawn shops across the United States, millions are selling gold and silver jewelry for cash they need to buy food and keep the electricity on, or the car running.
Gold is now selling for about $880 an ounce. It will continue to climb in the next two years, beyond $1200 an ounce, perhaps even peaking as high as $2000, as the full scope of the dramatic new re-ordering of the world’s wealth unfolds. Physical gold is the only currency in the world all but guaranteed to hold its value, and more than likely increase its value, in the next few years as the New Poverty engulfs hundreds of millions in the west.
How much of this ‘recovered’ gold of American suburbia will actually stay in the country?
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A spider in Hawaii has developed markings specifically aimed at encouraging small children to cry, “That’s so cute!” and pick it up, giving the spider the opportunity to then immobilize them with venom and lay sacks of flesh-eating baby spiders in the child’s eyes sockets.
Actually, none of my above explanation for why this Hawaiian spider developed those markings is true, at all. If the spider was from Australia? Maybe. Probably.
Researchers believe the ’smiley face’ markings evolved to discourage birds from attacking the spiders, the theory goes that the bizarre grinning face will make the bird pause to say, “WTF is that all about?” giving the spider time to escape.
I’ve noticed patterns on the side of plump cows that kind of look like a crocodile’s head with its jaws open. But that’s not really the same kind of thing at all.
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And now the shoe has dropped. Yes it has happened, an American now tops the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list (or disgruntled native criminals or whatever the Obama Administration calls a terrorist these days). No one should be surprised. Not after the memos came out about targeting right wing conservatives.
Just the other day, as I was going to New York City, I was thinking about what this new direction the Obama Administration was taking meant to the average American. I noted that a Somali pirate, an Al Quida terrorist, or any number of other people and groups that dream of America ceasing to exist are all less important to this Government than my blog posts. Yep, my writing is more dangerous to America than Osama Bin Laden.
At least that is the indication the Obama Administration is making. Because I am a former Marine, intelligent, conservative, and Republican. That just screams extremist – especially when you consider that I reach over 125 countries and tens of thousands of people every month on my blogs alone. I write for over 100 in total.
Yes I am on a watch list of law enforcement because I dare to be all those things, and I disagree with the highly socialist bent of the current Presidential Administration. I’m sure of it, because Blogger just proposed to shut down my blogs as spam sites. They have only been around for over 3 years now. It’s resolved now, I think, but isn’t the timing interesting.
But how dare I mention this. Yet if anyone might think the proposal by the Government was harsh or politically motivated, someone had to be on the list that everyone agreed needed to be caught. Thus everything else is a coincidence, or paranoia.
It’s like a magician’s slight of hand. Let me distract you from the important issue of a Government becoming bigger and socialist by pointing at a danger. Don’t pay attention to the broken campaign promises or violations of the Constitution and law of the land, fear losing your job. Don’t notice the complete ineptness of the politicians in place, hate a miniscule group of people who get paid a lot of money (and forget that the Government chose to pay them that money). Ignore the focus of the media and Government to remove any commentary that is counter to what the Government approves of, remember that they are all radicals (not left-wing radicals like Bill Ayers but right-wing radicals which are bad of course).
Look, I understand the need to be aware. America is a nation of extremists by definition. We radically opposed the rule of England to create this nation. We are made up of people (most of whom) left their homelands because they objected to some part of the ruling government there. We have fought amongst ourselves – the Civil War, Japanese internment, killing off Native American Indians, slavery, and so on. We have every religion on the face of the planet all living right next to each other; and more wars have been fought over that than anything. So I get the concern.
But this is ridiculous. According to the Government wishlist not only am I a subject of concern and require law enforcement monitoring, but so do the Amish. Yep, the Amish.
The Amish are radically extreme in their religious beliefs. They are ultra-conservative. They do not conform to society. They are against stem-cell research, green energy, hybrid cars, abortion, teaching about condoms, and a host of issues that liberal Democrats in the Government are promoting right now. According to the imperative that unofficially the Government wants to pursue, the Amish must be on the top of the list. If that does not explain how absurd this orientation is, let me clarify it a bit more.
The Government is not looking to watch true radicals. People like Bill Ayers is missing from the people that is the focus of the watch lists. His brand of terrorism is completely fine it seems.
Bill Ayers is a self described anarchist. Which means he would love to see the Americans Government collapse. He was involved with a radical terrorist group, that sought to destroy the government, by force. He has written propaganda supporting these thoughts. He is politically active in trying to pursue these thoughts. But he is the friend of, and initial supporter of President Obama, so he and his ilk are fine.
Think about that. The Government is upset if peaceful objection (the tax tea parties as an example) occurs. Yet the blatant rants of self-proclaimed extremists – that have acted to destroy the Government in the past – are considered harmless.
The Amish, news commentators, bloggers like myself are all targets of the Government now. But left-wing radicals like Bill Ayers are good guys. Because people like me, make comments the Government does not like. And it doesn’t matter that we may have criticized the prior Administrations as well. Because only this current incarnation is important. And nothing should interfere with their goals.
That is the message I am getting.
Does that sound like America to you. When you look past the polispeak, the smoke and mirrors, and observe the changes the Government is making and their implications, do you see a freer America or an image of the old USSR? I have lived in Russia, and I say it’s the latter.
In fact ask anyone who lived in a socialist or communist nation. Ask them why they left. Ask them how close the actions of President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Majority leader Harry Reid match up to non-democratic nations. You may be surprised by the answer.
So for all the Government law enforcement officials I say hello. And keep on reading, because I’m not about to stop.
I think there would be an excellent book in a compilation of presidential speeches prepared for when major events might have gone wrong, but ultimately didn’t.
A remarkable piece of alternative American history can be found in a Richard Nixon speech written in case of a major tragedy unfolding during man’s first footsteps on the Moon, back in July, 1969 :
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
“They will be mourned by Mother Earth.” That’s quite a hallucinatory idea, that a planet can mourn the deaths of two of its inhabitants so far from home. I’m pretty sure this would have been the first time an American president discussed the feelings of “Mother Earth”.
Something I’ve never understood about the phrase ‘Mother Earth’ is this :
If Earth is the mother, who is the dad? And where is he now?
Is she an abandoned, single mother, beset with trying to stop a bunch of rowdy kids from trashing the house?
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“In terms of the legalisation of drugs, I think that the battle….the War On Drugs has been an utter failure. And I think that we need to rethink and decriminalise….our marijuana laws. But I’m not someone who believes in legalisation of marijuana. What I do believe is we need to rethink how we are operating in the drug wars, and I think that, currently, we are not doing a good job.”
Of course, legalisation is not the same as decriminalisation. But under decriminilisation, at least, stoned Americans won’t go to jail for getting busted a third or fourth time carrying around a small bag of cannabis. About one-third of America’s prison population are doing time for cannabis related offences. Under decriminalisation, those people would not be in jail.
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The new Russell Crowe movie, State Of Play, features a series of news room battles between an old school journalist and a young news blogger. The journo wants to take the time to get the facts of the big story right, the blogger is portrayed as wanting to rush ahead with instant news, updating and filling out the story as more becomes known.
But by the end of the movie, according to this LA Times reporter, and spoilers will follow, the journalist shows the Old Way is the Best Way, and yet he ends up filing his story exactly like a blogger :
…(the journalist played by Crowe) has pushed his deadline to the limit. He finally sits down and cranks out a complicated expose that could ruin a number of powerful Washington insiders in even less time than it took me to write this blog item.
But when Crowe is finished, he simply hits the SEND button, gets up and walks out of the newsroom, as if his job were done. It’s a heroic walk off into the sunset, but in terms of veracity, it leaves out all the real work that goes into a story after the first draft is finished. In other words, there’s no editing, no rewrites, no fact checking, no trims for space, no perusals by the paper’s lawyers, no nothing.
This is exactly the process involved in writing and publishing a story on a blog. Write it fast, hit send. Who neds all thos sub-edtors and reewrotes?
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It’s “blood red” because of a bizarre (to us) bacteria that eats iron and sulphur compounds, thrives in skin blistering cold, in total darkness, without oxygen, in water four times more saltier than the sea, locked away from the sun for millions of years. It thrives.
But will it thrive or die out when it reaches less-salty oceans?
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Here’s the secret ingredient. It is known as rage. You don’t have to sit there and take life’s hard knocks. You don’t brood over mistakes made, plans destroyed. You can turn puce with fury, call Barack a damned socialist or Castro clone, let ire swill from every pore. You’re licensed to hate again.
After the alternative reality of the Bush era, Americans want to be fed some truth, or at least, something that feels like The Truth. And Fox News is laying out a buffet for those who feel better thinking their country is going to hell.
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