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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Can it really be this simple?

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

This from Big Train, a sometimes genuinely bizarre, often surreal and all but forgotten British sketch comedy show from the late 1990s.

And this, absolutely brilliant :

More Big Train Here

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Richard Pryor on how dogs always know when you’re sad :

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The wisdom of Magnus Mills, novelist and bus driver :

“There was a bloke who said he was going to get his knife out and stab me because I wouldn’t let him travel with an open can of alcohol. The next day he was at the same bus stop and he was very apologetic and said he didn’t carry a knife and that the alcohol had mixed with his medication. He’s now one of my best mates whenever he gets on the bus.”

“Every bus shelter has a poster for a film on it. Most have an actor posing with a gun, and often it’s pointing at people waiting for a bus.”

More Magnus Mills here

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Philip K Dick :

“We are here to choose the true from the counterfeit, and we will be given much time, perhaps thousands of years, and when and if we do choose correctly at last, we will then be shown what we have chosen: shown what reality is like. And not before; for during the choosing all is reduced…We live as children and choose as children, but once we choose correctly we become true adults. Only then does the real purpose of life become evident; before that it was a dream and a guess and a search among mists….”

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

For Harry Patch, the last veteran of World War One’s now incomprehensibly brutal killing fields, who died today at age 111.

Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But it’s written in the starlight
And every line on your palm
We’re fools to make war
On our brothers in arms

From Your New Reality, July 2007 :

Harry Patch remains haunted by the Battle of Passchendaele, where three thousand young Britons were killed or wounded every single day, for almost 100 days straight.

Harry Patch’s comments should be etched in the stone of every war memorial :

“Too many died. War isn’t worth one life,” said Mr Patch.

He said war was the “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings”.

During the three months of fighting Harry Patch experienced in France in 1917, the heaviest rains in 30 years churned mud so thick, men and horses drowned in it.

Mr Patch also paid his respects to the tens of thousands of young Germans who died in the same fields as his friends.

“The Germans suffered the same as we did,” he said.

Harry Patch commenting during a ceremony at a Flanders field war cemetary, July 2007 :

“Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left.”

And now there are none.

Harry Patch’s Memories Of The Flanders Battlefield

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

I’d imagine if you’ve been suffering through kidney dialysis for a few years, only finding this out now might make you just a little bit angry :

New research by British scientists suggests sodium bicarbonate – otherwise known as baking soda – can dramatically slow the progress of chronic kidney disease.

The simple household product used for baking, cleaning, bee stings and acid indigestion is so effective it could prevent patients having to be put on kidney machines…

A piece of important information worth filing away for when you might need it.

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Oliver Stone on why President John F. Kennedy had to die :

….many of his (more peaceful world) steps remain unfamiliar: Kennedy’s back-channel dialogue with Khrushchev and their shared pursuit of common ground; his secret opening to dialogue with Fidel Castro (ongoing the very week of his assassination); and his determination to pull out of Vietnam after his probable re-election in 1964.
All of these steps caused him to be regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community. These were the forces that planned and carried out his assassination. Kennedy himself said, in 1962, after he read Seven Days in May, which is about a military coup in the United States, that if he had another Bay of Pigs, the same thing could happen to him. Well, he did have another “Bay of Pigs”; he had several. And I think Kennedy prophesied his own death with those words.

Why does it matter? The death of JFK remains a critical turning point in our history. Those who caused his death were targeting not just a man but a vision — a vision of peace. There is no calculating the consequences of his death for this country and for the world. Those consequences endure. To a large extent, the fate of our country and the future of the planet continue to be controlled by the shadowy forces of what Douglass calls “the Unspeakable.” Only by unmasking these forces and confronting the truth about our history can we restore the promise of democracy and lay claim to Kennedy’s vision of peace.

This is from a review by Oliver Stone of James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

Oliver Stone was interviewed by a UK film magazine called Neon in the late 1990s. Stone was asked why he has never made a movie exposing the worldwide corporate arms industry. He laughed, then said for him to make such a movie would be to guarantee an early death, or words to that effect.

A superb review, and summary of the book, from Nick Anez on Amazon :

The author meticulously examines the evidence and draws conclusions which ring with unassailable truth:

(1) The CIA coordinated and implemented the assassination of President Kennedy, an act of treason which destroyed democracy in the U.S.

(2) The Warren Commission was created to propagate lies to conceal the truth from the American people.

(3) There has been a continued cover-up by successive administrations and their stooges in the mass media.

(4) The murder of JFK is directly related to the current domination of the American people by powerful oppressors within a shadow government that will continue to insist that only sustained war can keep the country safe from its enemies, never admitting that they themselves are the supreme evil.

An early serious warning about the growing power and influence of American war industry came 107 years ago, in JA Hobson’s ‘Imperialism’ : A Study‘ :

“Our economic analysis has disclosed the fact that it is only the interests of competing cliques of business men – investors, contractors, export manufacturers, and certain professional classes – that are antagonistic; that these cliques, usurping the authority and voice of the people, use the public resources to push their private interests, and spend the blood and money of the people in this vast and disastrous military game, feigning national antagonism which have no basis in reality.”

It’s easy to imagine that in 1000 years, people will look back at wars of America and other nations that consumed most of the 20th century, and the first decades of the 21st century, and believe that a savage death cult then ruled entire nations.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Is swine flu more infectious than we were led to believe? Is it more deadly? Soon, we won’t know the answer to either question, as official counts of both infections and deaths are set to be abandoned by government departments dealing with infectious diseases and the World Health Organisation.

Googling “swine flu” and scanning through the comments flowing in from the public on stories about the ManBirdPig Flu in British newspapers reveals an overwhelming majority of commenters pledging to resist the coming mass vaccination program, even if it’s mandatory. A very similar view against being vaccinated for an influenza virus whose origins are yet to be explained and one that appears to be continuing to mutate, can be seen in mainstream media comment boards across the US, Australia, Canada, Europe.

The Influenza A H1N1 infection rates in the UK are doubling week to week. Last week in the UK there were 55,000 known infections. This week, there are more than 100,000 new cases :

“Underlying conditions” is a phrase in heavy use by the media at the moment. It seems to allow many people to reassure themselves, “Well, he was sick already anyway.” But how many kids with diabetes were dying from the disease before ’swine flu’ came along?

It sounds like England is getting closer to a full-blown pandemic panic.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Cocaine infused wine fights influenza? The Pope says “Yes!”

Drugs and religion have always been intertwined. If you were around eight thousand years ago and you ate hallucinogenic mushrooms, or ergot-infested barley, and didn’t know what the fuck was going on, you’d be looking to blame a God, or The Gods, for the glorious, mind-bogglingly twisted things you were seeing and hearing.

Jesus, of course, was The Original Stoner.

And while there has been no doubt many popes over the centuries who have loved wine, cannabis, opium, one particular pope loved cocaine so much he wanted to give it awards :

…Leo XIII back in the 19th century. He didn’t just take cocaine. He advertised it, appearing on a poster having awarded a Gold Medal to the manufacturer of the “tonic” he carried in a personal hipflask to fortify himself in those moments when prayer was insufficient.

(The coca leaves) did not travel well, so only occasional supplies were transported to Europe, though tests on 17th century pipes found in Shakespeare’s garden a few years back are said to have showed up cocaine residues – which would presumably explain the references to “eternal lines” in this most famous sonnet, or the constant use of the word “blow” in King Lear.

By the Victorian era, however, they were on top of the technology.

In 1863 an Italian chemist named Angelo Mariani brought onto the market a wine called Vin Mariani which had been treated with coca leaves. He first tried his new tonic on a depressed actress. The results were spectacular. The ethanol in the wine acted as a solvent and extracted the cocaine from the leaves – creating a compound called cocaethlyene that hugely reinforced the impact of both drugs…

Vin Mariani contained 11 per cent alcohol and 6.5 mg of cocaine in every ounce, which is presumably why Leo XIII gave it his gold medal.

Leo was known for his happy personality, he lived into his 90s, and had some great success in helping to ‘modernise’ the thinking of the Catholic Church to take more interest in the working classes, and the plight of the poor.

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Written by Black Entertainment USA

So I was watching the BBC America program Torchwood and the current 5 night event, Children of Earth. After the 3rd episode on Wednesday, I got into a bit of an argument with a friend of mine. It gets a bit geeky.

Background first. If you are a fan of Dr. Who, you probably are familiar with the character Captain Jack Harkness (played by John Barrowman). Fans of Torchwood obviously know him. For those that are not, he is a human being from the 51st century that was able to time travel to the past (1939 roughly). He met up with The Doctor, and was brought to the future – around 100,000 or 1 million years in the future, I forget which.

It was at this time, called the Bad Wolf episodes, that Capt Jack is killed. But via forces to long to explain, he is brought back to life. Brought back “wrong” as we later find out.

Jack is virtually immortal. By that I mean that if you shoot him in the head he will die and then get back up. Ditto if you stab, burn, nuke or otherwise blow him up. He has been electrocuted, drowned, buried in cement, shot by lasers, had creatures attempt to drain his lifeforce (killing them via overfeeding) and way more – but he always gets back up. The Doctor describes him as a

“…a fixed point in space and time. You are a fact.”

Now this is critical to my argument. We also find out via Dr. Who that some 10 million (or billion, I again forget) years from nowish, Capt Jack transforms into a being called the Face of Boh, and dies.

If you are not a fan of sci-fi, Dr. Who, or Torchwood I thank you for having read this far. If you are also not a bit of a science geek you really may get lost or hate the rest of this post.

So here is my argument. Does it make sense that Jack dies? Is this a contradiction in the 2 shows?

I think not. Because if you view time and space in terms of the Doctor’s universe, then they are not linear. They are like an enormously big, yet absolutely small ball of string. All points of the sting touch every other point. Thus time is simultaneous and instantaneous. We just see it as linear from our point of view.

That as a given, since Jack Harkness becomes a point AFTER the creation of the universe (and thus the start of time and space) he must not be eternal. Which means the Doctor is correct and the shows are right.

I view it like this:

If we view time as a ball, say that Jack is a point that starts maybe 2/3 into the ball. That is when he became a fact and fixed point. He continues to the end of the ball. But since he is not connected to 1/3 of the ball, he cannot be eternal. Because there is some point that is the beginning and end of time that he does not exist as a fact in. Which is one reason why the Doctor initially finds him repugnant after being brought back to life the wrong way.

My friend disagrees as being a fact implies being eternal in their view. That he must be forever, and since he is not The Doctor is wrong.

I told you this was geeky. But to me it’s on the same level as people arguing who deserves to win American Idol. Only better.

So, I leave it to the fans, and any quantum physicists out there. Am I right or is my friend?

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Fascinating. More all-but-forgotten American history. Donald Rumsfeld revealed on September 10, 2001, the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion in spending :

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By Darryl Mason

Those opposed to hundreds of thousands of Americans being sent to jail for being busted a third time with a couple of joints, or a couple of plants, are taking their fight to the billboards :

This is LEAP :

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States.

More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams.

Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars.

Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs.

Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before.

We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease…

The United States is so broke that many states are now quickly looking into how easy it will be to tax pot smokers, growers and sellers.

But will anti-tax cannabis consumers do more time if they refuse to pay tax on their naturally growing medication than they would have if they were busted with cannabis when it was still illegal?

The makers of an already widely praised iPhone app, that apparently can hook up some Americans with everything they need to score quality, legal cannabis, claim they will donate money from the sales of the app to the fight against cannabis prohibition.

I can’t see how millions of Americans choosing to legally use cannabis instead of family-destroying amounts of alcohol will do the nation any harm.

Perhaps as part of the ‘Cannabis Is Okay’ cultural readjustment campaign, President Barack Obama will be ’sprung’ by a photographer smoking a joint on a White House balcony.

You will also see various Hollywood celebrities and rock stars being ‘caught’ in public by the tabloids rolling scuds and choofing blunts.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

NASA has released what it calls a ‘new image’ from the Moon landing, 40 years ago yesterday, apparently showing Neil Armstrong’s face.

By Darryl Mason

A remarkable piece of alternative American history can be found in a Richard Nixon speech prepared just in case something went terribly, terribly wrong, 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”.

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A robot manufacturer moves to deny its new line of military killbots, that can power themselves by eating “organic matter”, will also devour the dead of the battlefields it will one day roam :

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population…”

More Here

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If you’re building a radical roller coaster, always offer protection for the wandering public :

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Written by Michael Vass

I saw something today that really stuck out in my mind. Something that you just aren’t hearing in the mainstream media. Coverage is so sparse that it surprised me to find it in the Wall Street Journal. And its about the hot topic for the Obama Administration this minute – in 5 minutes it may be something else.

Yes it’s about the health care reform. Another Bill that is being shoved through Congress with a speed that only the Stimulus plan might match. And we know how well that turned out.

But the Journal Items that got my attention was this

” On Tuesday, the Senate health committee voted 12-11 in favor of a two-page amendment courtesy of Republican Tom Coburn that would require all Members and their staffs to enroll in any new government-run health plan. Yet all Democrats — with the exceptions of acting chairman Chris Dodd, Barbara Mikulski and Ted Kennedy via proxy — voted nay.”

Really interesting isn’t it. The Healthcare reforrm Bill is so good, and such a boon for the public, that Democrat Senators – who back the Bill in the first place – would not accept the same mandatory terms that potentially 114 million Americans will be forced to face. They have such confidence that they declined to be involved with a system they have structured to be inefficient and more burdonsome than the current one.

I think there is no better evidence that the plans being rushed together right now are so problematic as to be the twin of the Obama Stimulus. This is something that I hope everyone remembers, and can be kept in the final law, when it comes time for the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. Because it’s the proof of the pudding.

I think it’s a fantastic idea. Let the husbands, wives, and children of Congress share the exact same “benefits” that you and I will receive. Let’s ensure that they have to endure the same restrictions and quality of care that their constituents will get. If Congressional Democrats think that emulating a Canadian or British health care system that refuses mammograms and has people waiting months for essential surgeries is such a brilliant idea, let’s see how good they feel when it’s their family.

Mark my words, this amendment will never make it to the final Bill. It will not be part of the law we will be forced to abide by. Congress will never accept that which they are requiring the public to me inflicted with.

If I am correct, that will be all the proof we will need to know we received polispeak and not legislation. But sadly at that same time we will be on the hook for a budget crushing, economy busting, $1.5 trillion dollars. By that time millions will be subjected to inferior healthcare. It will be too late for anything but the next round of votes.

Oh, that’s the other thing. The plan is that the reforms will not start to take effect until 2013. Just after the re-election bid of President Obama, and before another mid-term election in 2014. Funny that they will wait until after the elections for the public to react to the new “benefits”. Another vote of Democrat confidence?

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

The view out the window on the cover of my first novel, Max & Murray, published in 1996.

More Here

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Did the 9/11 Commission manage to work out who this soldier was at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001 warning of the imminent collapse of a steel skyscraper at the World Trade Centre? Did they find out where he was from, and exactly what American Army unit he was supposed to be representing?

No, they didn’t. Another mystery for the very, very long list :

Shy around cameras, isn’t he?

“Nothing informations.”

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

By Darryl Mason

A remarkable London Times editorial on ‘The Mystery Of Influenza’ from October 28, 1918 can be read here. A couple of excerpts to follow.

The first sees the unnamed writer speculating that the mental, emotional shock and trauma and grief at the loss and carnage of World War I had somehow made people more susceptible to infection from the ‘Spanish Flu’ virus. It’s a remarkable insight for 90 years ago. We know now that high stress can deplete the immune system and make you more vulnerable to influenza infection :

(click to enlarge)

This second excerpt ends the October 28, 1918 editorial. It is filled with good advice that applies well to avoiding swine flu today, and dealing with it once you become infected :

A 1918 ode to the power of positive thinking : “The surest way to catch (it) is to worry about it or be afraid of it.”

More than 200,000 more people across the country would die from influenza, or the pneumonia that often followed infection in the next nine months after that editorial was written.

The whole scanned page of the London Times from October 28, 1918, is fascinating. There is also a feisty editorial about how World War I “is not yet over”, and that the Germans must accept general terms for peace. The Armistice ending the war was declared only two weeks later.

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