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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Author William Gibson reads this story about Philip K Dick and then rips into him, on Twitter :

I think Philip K Dick would be highly amused to see so many taking so much of what he said so damn seriously.

I had to reply :

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

By Darryl Mason

A good question, not asked often enough :

I have one simple question though for anyone free-thinking enough not to immediately follow whatever the voice on the radio tells them. What “conspiracy theorists” are more dangerous and deserve to be shunned by public opinion?

The ones trumpeted by people like Alex Jones whose goal is to have the 9/11 attack investigations to be reopened?

Or the ones feverishly hawked by the likes of Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh that call for the American military to begin attacking Iran?

I don’t believe, or subscribe, to everything I read or hear on alleged ‘conspiracy sites’ like the ones run by Alex Jones or Mike Rivero’s WhatReallyHappened.com, nor does anyone there demand I do so.

I don’t see columnists or commenters, anyone in fact, at those sites demanding my country go to war against people on the other side of the planet who have never done me or my family harm, based on the flimsiest of evidence, or flat-out fearmongery.

But when I go to The Washington Post, or the New York Times, I see columnists demanding Iran be bombed, now. Again and again. It’s no coincidence of course that is it usually the exact same people who in 2002 filled column after column in those newspapers demanding Iraq be bombed, then invaded.

I often think of the extremely brave men I met and spent time talking to in bars and coffee shops around Ground Zero, back in December 2001. While I went back to my hotel room, or to do more sight-seeing, they went back into the ruins of the World Trade Centre to keep digging for the bits and pieces of their missing friends and former colleagues in the police and fire departments they hoped were still there, so they could give them a proper burial and help their families move on.

Those rescue workers I met, who were near the Twin Towers on 9/11, and were still working at Ground Zero months later, didn’t talk about grand plots or conspiracy theories. They didn’t blame Bush or Cheney or Israelis or Haliburton or the Project For The New American Century.
They just wanted to know why they saw those buildings exploding before, and as, they fell down.

They just wanted to know the truth about what they saw that day, and why their friends died, and why the only pieces of flesh and bone they usually found could fit into a coffee cup. Or a matchbox.

Soon it will be a decade on from 9/11, and those rescue workers (the ones who haven’t died from the effects of 9/11 dust) still don’t know the answers to the questions they asked all those years ago.

The truth. That’s all.

They just want to know the truth.

And that, according to Fox News, makes them “dangerous people”?

The truth, then, must be a whole lot more spectacular and shocking than the Bush administration official story would have us believe.

What other explanation can be there for such hatred and venom directed at those who seek answers to their questions?

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The latest in “Hey! Look At Me! I’m A Fucking Arsehole With A Real Short Memory” t-shirts :

The Bush “Miss Me Yet?” image and tag line is quickly becoming iconic, and congratz to whoever came up with it and is now selling a shitload of merchandise at CafePress.

You can’t blame people for wanting to make a buck, however they can, in what’s left of Bush’s America.

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In a fairly weak piece of clickbait (and the mainstream media knows ‘conspiracy theories’ are click magnets), Newsweek lists the following as “hip, trendy, least likely fringe beliefs” :

* Obama Is A Secret Muslim, With No American Birth Certificate

* FEMA Is Establishing Detention Camps For American Gitizens

* BushCo. Knew The 9/11 Attacks Were Coming

* Media Corporations Want Internet Licenses For All Users, IndieMedia & Bloggers

* AGW Is A Hoax

* Goldman Sachs Purposely Created Fragile Investment Bubbles And Then Bet On Them Failing
Incredibly, Newsweek uses this story to claim that business links tying the Bush and Bin Laden families together are just more “fringe” conspiracy theories.

And they wonder why their media is dying.

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By Darryl Mason

The White House on Twitter has about 1.7 million followers. White House postings on Twitter are often ‘retweeted’ by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of followers. If the White House wants to get information out to Americans, unfiltered or tainted by the mainstream news media, Twitter is better than sending a few million people out to knock on doors.

So it’s of reasonable internet historical importance to note that the White House on Twitter is now linking to stories the White House clearly approves of.

War On Terror success stories.

Today :

So what does the story say? Excerpts :

It was not the first (unmanned armed drone) airstrike on Obama’s watch, but it marked the first major victory in his war on terrorism, a campaign the administration believes can be waged even more aggressively than its predecessor’s. Long before he went on the defensive in Washington for his handling of the failed Christmas Day airline bombing, Obama had widened the list of U.S. targets abroad and stepped up the pace of airstrikes.

Obama’s national security team believed that the president’s campaign promise to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq would have a side benefit: freeing up manpower and resources to hunt terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Intelligence officials, lawmakers and analysts say that approach is showing signs of success.

Intelligence officials and analysts say the drawdown of troops in an increasingly stable Iraq is part of the reason for the increase in drone strikes. The military once relied on drones for around-the-clock surveillance to flush out insurgents, support troops in battle and help avoid roadside bombs.

With fewer of those missions required, the U.S. has moved many of those planes to Afghanistan, roughly doubling the size of the military and CIA fleet that can patrol the lawless border with Pakistan, officials said.

Talk about getting the message out. The AP story also includes this photo released by the US Air Force of a fully armed unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drone.

Or as they’re known around here : A Flying Killer Robot (FKR).

Since that photo was taken in August, 2007, FKRs have killed primary Taliban leaders and Al Qaidaists in what should more accurately now be called The Flying Killer Robot Vs Terrorists War.

Look at it again.

They’ve also killed at least 1000 innocent men, women and children in wrong target horror airstrikes in Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pakistan.

But it doesn’t matter. They do not feel sorrow, or pity, or empathy.

Yet.

They do not cry. They cannot be prosecuted for killing civilians.

The FKRs.

Now the White House, through Twitter and the Associated Press, wants you know the ‘Robot Vs Terrorists War’ is ramping up.

What is tested and hailed a success in the warzones, always returns to the homelands.

And you were worried about black helicopters.

The Future, it’s always so much fucking weirder than you ever expected.

What is that strange buzzing sound outside?

.
Posted by DARRYL MASON at 1:39 AM
Labels: Flying Killer Robots, Robert Gibbs, Robots Vs Terror War, Twitter
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Time Magazine ran this story on the United States’ Snowpocalypse :

The story was left open for comments. After a few hours of relentless mockery from commenters, someone at Time Magazine decided another headline might be necessary :

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

I’ve changed my mind. I will pay to read Rupert Murdoch newspapers online, but only if they consistently come up with stories of such a high quality as this one :

From The Sun :

The lad hallucinated for 18 hours and mutilated himself because he believed centipedes were crawling over his body and biting him.

Durham Police are warning that its use can result in severe nose bleeds, nose burns, hallucinations, blood circulation problems, rashes, anxiety and paranoia, fits, delusions and can lead to a heart attack.

But a police report – some of which was based on online forums about the drug – revealed a lad in Durham had tried to rip off his testicles after taking it.

Let me guess. The bit about a user getting so fucked up he wrenched off his own nuts came from an anonymous person on an online forum.

There’s a bunch of kids in the UK high-fiving each other right now that the cops and The Sun are reporting this incident of testicle sack mutilation as fact.

The drug may well be causing a terrible amount of damage to users, but it’s hard not to reminded of another British drug hysteria outbreak.

The drug purportedly affected an area of the brain called “Shatner’s Bassoon” (altering your perception of time), can give you a bloated neck due to “massive water retention”….and…”…you can puke yourself to death on this stuff — one girl threw up her own pelvis-bone”

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By Darryl Mason

Tony Blair has discovered that nobody, but nobody, believes his bullshit anymore, and the possibility of far more hostile attention to come, from signing his country up for the illegal War On Iraq back in 2002, is dampening his trousers and dementing his mind. He’s now ranting like a fucking loon :

Tony Blair yesterday launched an extraordinary attack on the Iraq inquiry – as the chairman warned that he and others could be recalled over ‘gaps’ in their evidence.

Speaking on Fox News he said critics of the war were obsessed with conspiracy theories, and refused to accept that his motives were ‘genuine’.

‘There’s got to be some conspiracy behind it. Some great, you know, deceit that’s gone on, and people just find it hard to understand that it’s possible for people to have different points of view and hold them reasonably for genuine reasons.’

The claims of a conspiracy are in themselves a conspiracy….right.

Everybody knows where the deceit truly lies. That’s why so many Brits, including many, many family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, would like to see him dragged through the streets of London to the Tower.

Blair’s been abandoned by just about everybody who served with him, and it’s clear there is a ‘”If I’m going down you’re fucking coming with me” attitude developing amongst former staffers and fellow New Labour MPs.

Tony Blair on Fox News :

An absolute rictus grin. But let’s take a closer look at his eyes :

Yep, he’s shitting himself.

Good.

A taste of what’s to come in the ongoing inquiry was served up to one of Blair’s closest allies in the 2002 war to lie the UK into an illegal war :

Justice Secretary Jack Straw yesterday looked taken aback when he was asked detailed questions about official notes of conversations which apparently showed the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had told him the U.S. would invade Iraq ‘come what may’.

Mr Straw initially said he could not ‘recollect’ such a conversation but later agreed to consult his records after members of the inquiry made it clear they knew the conversations had taken place.

Let’s have a look at Jack Straw’s eyes on his way into the inquiry :

He’s shitting himself, too.

Even better.

It’s a shame Robin Cook isn’t still here to see all this.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

From a speech by Bill Duddley at the low-key world bankers gathering now underway in
Sydney :

It is critical that we ensure that no firm is too big to fail. This is about both fairness and having proper incentives in the financial system. Having some firms that are too big to fail creates moral hazard. These firms are able to obtain funding on more attractive terms because debt holders expect that the government will intervene rather than allow failure. In addition, too big to fail creates perverse incentives. In a too-big-to-fail regime, firms have an incentive to get large, not because it facilitates greater efficiency, but instead because the implicit government backstop enables the too-big-to-fail firm to achieve lower funding costs.

So there’s a revealing explanation of what “Too Big To Fail” really meant. The biggest banks, insurance and investment firms knew, from well in advance of the global financial crisis, that they could do whatever the fuck they wanted, and did, because the government would not let them crash into a heap. They’d already been assured of that. A long understood arrangement.

Where was the incentive to not act like greed-crazed reprobates?

They knew they could not die, and so acted as thought they thought themselves immortal.

What a scam.

Perhaps they really do dose the water in the US with psychoactive drugs, as Philip K Dick wrote back in the late 1960s. What other explanation can there be for the fact that most of those ultimately responsible for tens of millions of Americans eventually losing their homes not only escaped any kind of punishment at all, but are still getting bonuses?

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More At NPR

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If half or most of the 100 million Americans who watched Superbowl 2010 sat through the ads, they would have been exposed to the following acts of violence :

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From ABC News :

John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

“It works, is the bottom line,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou’s ABC interview. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling — to this day — the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times.

Kiriakou did his job. He got the Torture Works! idea into the mainstream media.

Now he’s got a book out, he’s oh so sorry he lied, and so successfully seeded disinformation not only through US media, but international media as well.

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

….Kiriakou….didn’t have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

Right. That’s why he gave literally dozens of interviews, repeating the claim that waterboarding suspects works to stop terrorism.

I don’t believe him. Let’s waterboard him and see what he has to say then.

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So many great movies end with the ‘bad guy’ triumphing, escaping, surviving.

Obviously this is spoilertown, so be warned. Via Reddit :

Halloween

The Empire Strikes Back

No Country For Old Men

Saw

Se7en

12 Monkeys

The Silence Of The Lambs

The Usual Suspects

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

The Omega Man

Arlington Road

Brazil

Lord Of War

Breaker Morant

1984

Braveheart

The Thing

Angel Heart

Fallen

The Taylor Of Panama

Easy Rider

Friday The 13th

Gladiator

Nightmare On Elm Street

Rosemary’s Baby

Dawn On The Dead

The Mist

Cool Hand Luke

Memento

The Prestige

The Unforgiven

Chinatown

Oliver Stone’s W.

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By Darryl Mason

In 1980, a documentary on Nostradamus, screened all over the west to hundreds of millions of people, and repeated for years after, laid out the rise of political Islam through the 80s and 90s, leading to a terrorist attack on New York City (a nuclear attack was predicted).

I vividly remember watching this when I was about 10. It was the stuff of nightmares. It wasn’t a horror movie, it was our new reality to come. And, it’s probably worthy of a 6/10 for prophetic accuracy. While it might seem a bit cheesy now, watch the montages with the sound off. Repeated imagery of nuclear detonations, New York skyscrapers collapsing, dead people lying in the streets of America. What stunningly haunting images to pump into homes across half the world, claiming it was all going to come true. How many tens of millions of other children saw this and thought, ‘Holy Fuck!’ and were riven by nightmares? It’s a visual assault.

And it was Orson Welles telling us that our future held terror wars and mega-death natural disaster chaos. How could we not believe it?

How could some not resist making it come true?

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The majestically beautiful apex of a total solar eclipse

The Full Image Is Here

(via Reddit)

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It’s called The Worst Fight Scene ever. And yes, that may be so. But consider this, it’s a clip from a 40 year old, very low budget TV series, that has been watched almost 7 million times in just over 700 days at YouTube, let alone the hundreds of other places it can be seen online. I wonder if they ever contemplated how much simple pleasure, and laughter, this would bring to so many people in the 21st century?

It should be called The Best Worst Fight Scene Ever. I love how Shatner has to be so careful ‘fighting’ the alien so that the costume doesn’t fall apart. You just don’t get that kind of realism with CGI.

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An appallingly sad murder-suicide, announced via Facebook

What a tragedy.

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Here’s how BushCo. hoped, and prayed, the War On Iraq would unfold back in 2001 :

Just a few years ago, an overconfident George W Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating US presence in the Middle East.

These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of vice president Dick Cheney’s secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq’s monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves – more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran – including the quadrupling of Iraq’s capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

The dream in those distant days was to strip the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – the cartel consisting of the main petroleum exporters – of the power to control the oil supply and its price on the world market. As a reward for vastly expanding Iraqi production and freeing its distribution from OPEC’s control, key figures in the Bush administration imagined that the US could skim off a small proportion of that increased oil production to offset the projected $40 billion cost of the invasion and occupation of the country.

All in a year or two.

Michael Schwarz at Asia Times goes on to compare the reality, to the dream.

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On safari in Kenya, photographer Michel Denis-Huot snapped a series of incredible images which reveal when the pressure of hunger is sated, the hunter and the hunted can just hang out for a while.

A preview :

More Here

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