The Stargate Project : Psychic Warriors and the CIA

Metaphysical and psychic phenomena have long existed on the fringes of conventional science and academia. ESP, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis and Astral traveling have all been relegated to the back seat of mainstream, accepted belief systems in spite of an extensive mention of these practices down the ages, across myriad cultures. It has always been challenging for practitioners of the science to be validated by the prevailing status quo.

That however changed in 1995 when the CIA declassified a top secret program that had been training individuals in the esoteric science of ’Remote Viewing’ in which, it was claimed, people were able to envision ongoing activities in distant places and future events.

Although reminiscent of a Sci-Fi yarn, Remote viewing was tested and deployed under rigorous scientific conditions to obtain data about foreign espionage activities, counter terrorism efforts, secret military bases abroad and hidden missiles. It recognized the inherent psychic potential in humans and attempted to harness these special faculties or ’powers’ for the purposes of intelligence gathering, often of a vital nature.

The initial testing was done at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) where extensive investigations were carried out into the human mind’s capacity to transcend all bounds of time and space. SRI’s research was supported by the CIA and other government agencies for over two decades.

Journalism student Morley Chalmers has his telepathic powers tested by Dr. W. E. Mann of Western’s Sociology Department. Extra Sensory Perception or ESP was seen as a form of quackery by most scientists, but Professor Mann unperturbed by this attitude compared ESP to the study of hypnosis which he said at one time was regarded as a hoax both by scientists and the general public. Photo Credit London Free Press Collection of Negatives/Western Archives

Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann were the original founders of this once-secret program. Their task was to learn to understand psychic abilities, and to use these abilities to gather information about the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They found from years of experience that people can quickly learn to do remote viewing, and can frequently incorporate this direct knowing of the world — both present and future — into their lives.

They were the original ’Psi Spies’ named after the title of Jim Marrs’ exhaustive study of the phenomenon. The project produced some remarkable results. Among them were detailed renderings of secret Soviet bases, the whereabouts of Red Brigade terrorism hostages in Italy, location of victims in the Israeli hostage crisis, locations of Scud missiles during the first Gulf War and even the impending attack on the Twin Towers in NY! (done by a private contractor and ignored until after the event). The program eventually came to be called ’Operation Stargate’.

The initial media flurry (Ted Koppel’s Nightline, ABC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.) that surrounded the declassification in 1995 uncovered some surprising details. The names that surfaced at the time were of Ingo Swann, who initially helmed the project, Dr.Russell Targ, Pat Price, Dr. Hal Puthoff, Joseph McMoneagle and others, an interesting group comprised of respected senior military personnel, path breaking scientists and academic luminaries. On ABC’s Nightline, one of the operatives, Joe McMoneagle was put to the test by none other than Ted Koppel. He was able to prove the authenticity of the system with flying colors.

Remote viewers can often contact, experience and describe a hidden object, or a remote natural or architectural site, based on the presence of a cooperative person at the distant location, or when given geographical coordinates, or some other target demarcation — which they call an ’address’. Shape, form and color are described much more reliably than the target’s name, function, or other analytical information. In addition to vivid visual imagery, viewers sometimes describe associated feelings, sounds, smells and even electrical or magnetic fields. Blueprint accuracy has occasionally been achieved in these double-blind experiments, and reliability in a series can be as high as 80 per cent.

Case Studies

In 1984 Targ organized a pair of successful 10,000-mile remote viewing experiments between Moscow and San Francisco with famed Russian healer Djuna Davitashvili. Djuna’s task was to describe where a colleague would be hiding in San Francisco. She had to focus her attention ten thousand miles to the west and two hours into the future to correctly describe his location. These experiments were performed under the auspices and control of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Djuna hit the mark on all counts and the experiment was declared a resounding success.

Ten years earlier, in 1974, Russell Targ and his colleague Hal Puthoff carried out a demonstration of psychic abilities for the CIA. Pat Price, a retired police commissioner, described the inside and outside of a secret Soviet weapons laboratory in the far reaches of Siberia — given only the geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude for a reference. (That is, with no on- site cooperation.) This trial was such a stunning success that they were forced to undergo a formal Congressional investigation to determine if there had been a breach in National Security. Of course, none was ever found, and the government supported them for another fifteen years.

Data from these formal and controlled SRI investigations were highly statistically significant (thousands of times greater than chance expectation), and have been published in the world’s most prestigious journals, such as Nature, The Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and The Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences. The twenty years of remote viewing research conducted for the CIA is outlined in ‘Miracles of Mind: Exploring Non-local Consciousness and Spiritual Healing’, co-authored by Targ and Katra.

Recent research in areas as different as distant healing and quantum physics are in agreement with the oldest spiritual teachings of the sages of India, who taught that “separation is an illusion.” The powers we are discovering now are described by Rishis as ‘Siddhis’, or fruits of deep penance and arcane Yogic techniques, verbally transmitted, only known to inner circles.

The military and institutional exploitation of this timeless phenomenon is alarming. It is being harnessed by world governments in a game of cosmic brinkmanship, none of whom can possibly know the complete ramifications of unleashing such latently devastating forces without comprehending the holistic nature of the universe and interconnectedness of all life.
What is remarkable however, is the fact that the cat is out of the bag finally with regard to parapsychology, metaphysics and the occult. The so-called ‘mainstream’ has not only recognized the stunning potential of psychic energy but has gone so far as to harness it for territorial one-upmanship. The human race only needs to realize the vast reserves of raw power that it has at its disposal to effect profound and genuine transformation of the human condition on a global scale.

Source: Vikram Zutshi | RealitySandwich.com

Taxing The Rich And The Jobs Crisis

In a recent article, “Pensions Under Attack in America,” Mr. Leo Kolivakis took issue with a proposal by Mark Vorpahl, a union steward, to defend pensions by taxing the rich in order to create jobs (see Pensions Under Attack). Both authors agree that solving the jobs crisis is indispensable to solving the pension crisis, but their divergence occurs with Mr. Kolivakis’ assertion that “taxing the rich to create jobs is not a long-term solution to this jobs crisis.”

Of course, under capitalism there is no long-term solution to the jobs crisis. But leaving that aside, taxing the rich and using the money to finance a massive jobs program, as was done in the 1930s, can certainly substantially lower unemployment.

Mr. Kolivakis’ argument is difficult to follow since he mixes several points without providing argumentation for either. He says, for example: “Look, serious economists have weighed in on the topic of tax fairness in the United States. I think it’s fair to say that the uber rich (say, net wealth of $100 million and more) don’t pay their fair share of taxes but this isn’t the cause or solution to the jobs crisis. And unless you fix the jobs crisis, you will never repair the ongoing slaughter of public and private pensions.”

He seems to be suggesting that only taxing the super rich (not the mere rich) would be morally appropriate. But he presents this claim as an objective fact. Whether the super rich are paying their fair share or not is a value judgment, not an objective fact. And Mr. Kolivakis’ values diverge from most Americans who support raising taxes on people who make more than $250,000 a year, according to numerous polls.

As for Mr. Kolivakis’ claim that the failure of the super rich to pay their fair share of taxes “isn’t the cause or solution to the jobs crisis,” he overlooks a number of crucial links between these two seemingly independent economic facts.

First, because taxes on the rich have been steadily declining for the past three decades, state and local governments have suffered declining revenue that in turn has led them to lay off teachers and other public workers, thereby raising unemployment.

Secondly, lower taxes on the rich has been a major contributing factor to the growing inequalities in wealth, because money has essentially been transferred from the working people to the rich through the tax system. (See Hacker and Pierson: “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.”) Yet the rich tend to save their money at a significantly higher rate than everyone else. Hence effective demand for consumer products has declined, causing corporations to contract their operations and lay off employees. Corporations have not expanded for lack of money; they are sitting on huge profits. They have not expanded out of fear additional products will not be sold. In any case, the tax policy has consequently had a direct impact on employment in this way.

Thirdly, if the government raised taxes on the rich and used the revenue to launch a massive jobs creation program along the lines that was done in the 1930s, millions of people would be earning paychecks that would then be spent on consumer items. These expenditures would act as a stimulus to the economy. Businesses would experience a rise in demand for their products, and they could expand their operations and hire additional people in order to meet the demand. Such government job creation programs could become a permanent staple of the economy – along the lines of unemployment insurance – to be activated when unemployment reaches a certain percent. In this way it could provide a long-term response to the jobs crisis.

As for his own solution to the pension crisis, Mr. Kolivakis suggests “America needs a wholesale pension reform which includes compromises at the state, federal and union level. Now more than ever, politicians need to sit down and bolster, not weaken, public pensions.”

Again, he provides no elaboration on these points, so one is left to speculate that when he talks about compromises at the union level he is suggesting that workers agree to lower their pensions. If this inference is correct, his proposal will further decimate the “middle class” that is already struggling with inadequate pensions. For example, in California a recent report concluded “half of California workers will face ‘significant economic hardship in retirement,’ says a new report from the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education” (San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 2011).

Finally, if Mr. Kolivakis believes that the solution to the pension crisis simply resides in asking the politicians “to sit down and bolster, not weaken, public pensions,” then he is contributing to the mystification of the real role the politicians are playing in their subservience to the 1%.

Look Who’s Buying America Now!

According to The Wall Street Journal, the most popular story on WSJ.com on Monday was a report about how Lennar (LEN) may apply for a $1.7 billion loan from China to help finance major multifamily housing developments in San Francisco.

Valued at $10.5 billion in total, the projects to reincarnate two former Pacific Coast naval bases as mixed-use residential and commercial real estate have run aground over lack of funds. As a result, Lennar appears poised to open the door to China owning an interest in a big chunk of prime U.S. beachfront real estate. And that’s just the start.

The Selling of America

Turns out, while Americans are still reeling from the aftershocks of our housing bust, a whole lot of people from around the globe are eager to take advantage of the “bust-ortunity” in cheap American homes. The National Association of Realtors reports that over the 12 months ended in March, nearly 9% of all real estate purchases in the U.S. (by dollar value) were made by buyers abroad. In some markets, real estate professionals are seeing foreign buying at rates more than twice as fast. One real estate agent in Chicago, for example, observed that 20% of the deals he’s closed so far this year involved buyers from Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.

It’s only natural that this news would scare some people. It raises echoes of the “Rising Sun” period of Japanese economic dominance back in the 1980s, when Japanese firms flooded the American market with bags of cash, buying up everything from Columbia Studios to the Pebble Beach golf course to Rockefeller Center itself. What’s different this time, though, is that it’s not just one country’s megamillionaires doing the buying. The whole world has embarked on a U.S. shopping spree.

International purchases of U.S. real estate surged 24% over the past 12 months, with plenty of buyers coming from China, true, but also Canada, Mexico, India, and the U.K. (Indeed, as it turns out, Canadian buyers outnumber Chinese by more than 2 to 1.) But few of these countries bear any resemblance to the dominant Japan of the ’80s. To the contrary, Mexico, India and the U.K. each have significant currency weakness problems of their own, so this is anything but an attack on a “weak U.S. dollar.”

What it is is a recognition that there are pretty incredible values available in U.S. real estate today. According to the Journal, international buyers are focusing their attention in particular on hard-hit real estate markets in Florida, California, Arizona, and New York (but also sunny Texas) — places where the U.S. housing market boomed particularly hard in the last decade, and places where the discounts to past prices now look particularly compelling.

Is It Bad for America?

On one hand, this kind of buying frenzy is likely to rub a few people the wrong way. “The foreigners are coming,” they’ll declaim, with all the jingoistic outrage this implies. It probably doesn’t help that a lot of Americans are out of work these days, can’t get a mortgage, or are underwater on their current homes. So even if they agree that there are good deals in housing to be had, they can’t participate.

That has to grate.

But on the other hand, it’s hard to get too upset over the prospect of some $82.5 billion (and counting) in foreign capital being poured into the country in a time of economic weakness. More so when you learn that unlike so many buyers back in the 1990s and early 2000s, these are not buy-and-flip purchasers we’re talking about.

To the contrary, the Journal reports that 39% of the people buying up all this real estate intend to keep the homes as their primary residences. Add in the 23% who are buying vacation properties, and you’ve got a strong majority of good, responsible homeowners arriving in town. Folks who are going to keep the paint fresh and the lawns mowed — and consequently boost the property values of their neighbors.

In short, if we absolutely, positively must sell America to foreigners, these are exactly the foreigners we should be selling to.

Fool contributor  does not own shares of any company named above.

Source: Rich Smith | Daily Finance

USS Liberty…What Phil Saw That Day

45th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty…

Back in 2009, in Houston Texas, Mimi Adams, a distinguished Palestinian solidarity & human rights activist, gave me a present- a USS Liberty baseball cap. She put it on my head and said,

“Gilad, in the next two weeks, make sure you have it on your head everywhere you go in America. You will see what happens.”

It was around midnight, I was tired and jet-lagged, I couldn’t really understand the significance of the baseball cap, I just wanted to make my way to my hotel room and catch some sleep.  At 7 AM in the airport on my way to the gate with a USS Libertybaseball cap on my head, just before boarding on a flight to San Francisco, I noticed an older guy chasing me. He was breathless and agitated.

“Sorry to bother you, were you on the USS Liberty” he asked.

“No” I said, “I was actually four years old in 1967.” Amused I admitted that the  Baseball cap was given to me by a friend in a Palestinian solidarity gathering just a few hours ago. I asked him what did he know about the USS Liberty.

“I was a 6th Navy’s pilot” he said. “We were deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. On that day in June 1967, we heard it all, the sailors on board of the Liberty, they were begging for help, it was a real agony, we were fuming, we wanted to get on the planes, we were about 10-12 minutes away, we wanted to save our brothers, but they didn’t let us onto the deck.”

On June 8, 1967 USS Liberty, an American auxiliary technical research ship, a military vessel specialised in gathering intelligence, was attacked by the Israeli forces. It was subject to an 18 hours combined air and sea raids that left 34 American crew-members dead (naval officers, seamen, two Marines, and one civilian) and 170 injured. The attack also severely damaged the ship.  Like the Mavi Marmara, at the time of the attack, the ship was in international waters, north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 50 km northwest from the Egyptian City of El Arish.

Phil Tourney is a USS Liberty Survivor, & like many of his friends who were lucky enough to survive that hot day in June 1967; the event changed his life.  I met Phil in Aspen last March. I spent some good hours together with the great man and his lovely wife. We shared our personal stories and thoughts about Israel, America and the Jewish Lobby with a few friends and listeners.  When it was time to depart Phillip left me with  “What I Saw That Day”; a devastating biographical account written by Phil  and the courageous truth teller journalist  Mark Glenn.

The book is the life story of a man who survived a murderous Israeli aggression, but it is also the story of a man who has witnessed four decades of deceit. The event, which Phil ‘saw that day’ is something most of us have failed to see for decades.

“What I Saw That Day” is a story of America turning its back on its service-men. It is a story about Israelis slaughtering in cold blood American sailors on the high sea. But it is also a story about a man who battles with wounds and scars that have refused to heal for forty five years.  It is a book about the American serviceman being deceived and neglected by American political and military elite. “What I Saw That Day” is also a personal painful account of the tragic consequences of Israeli and Jewish lobby domination in America.

The survival of the USS Liberty was nothing but a miracle. The ship was an old WWII ‘one goer’ that was converted into a military intelligence vessel. It wasn’t built to stand a combat, it wasn’t structured to take any penalty. And yet, it somehow survived  hours of heavy Israeli raids. It was hit by napalm bombs and torpedoes, by the end of that horrid day it was soaking with young American blood, but it refused to go down. It didn’t sink. The USS Liberty is  there to remind us, our leaders, the Israelis and their lobbies that the memory of this massacre is not going to sink either. Like the Nakba and the Holodomour, USS Liberty bounced back. Seemingly, injustice cannot be suppressed, it always wait patiently for humanity to transform history into a moral lesson.

This horrendous story has been silenced for decades, but not anymore. What Phillip Tourney saw that day was just a glimpse into the magnitude of Western immorality and barbarism. Since then many Americans soldiers lost their life in Zionist global wars. Millions of Muslims and Arabs have been slaughtered in wicked interventionist conflicts.

To save our homes, families, friends, dignity and the world as we know it; is to stand up for the truth and to call a spade a spade.

To buy on Phillip Tourney  on amazon.com Click 

Gov. Jerry Brown’s Terrorizing Tactic

Current political developments in California highlight the gaping chasm that divides the established political process – which is routinely mislabeled as “democratic” – with the positions embraced by the vast majority of Californians.

Unfortunately, California is to the United States as Greece is to Europe: both are fiscal basket cases. California has been suffering major budget deficits long before the Great Recession smashed the real estate bubble and drove it further into debt. But the underlying causes of its chronic fiscal problems are seldom mentioned in the corporate media.

The Great Recession is surely a contributing factor. But more importantly there has been a steady shift of tax revenue away from corporations and the rich – the “people” who can most afford to pay – and onto the backs of working people.

In the late 1970s, for example, Proposition 13 was passed which limited property taxes for homeowners and corporations. However, because of various loopholes, the proposition has been far more beneficial to corporations than to homeowners, resulting in a major loss of revenue for the state and a downward slide in corporate taxes.

Then in the 1980s the state inheritance tax was abolished, which constituted a huge boon to the rich. The New York Times reported (April 16, 2011, Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, “The Idle Rich Should Give Something Back: Taxes”): “Consider this: If each Californian could bequeath no more than $2 million, a 100 percent tax on the surplus estate assets would wipe out the state’s entire budget deficit.”

Even back in 2003 The New York Times was reporting on declining taxes for corporations across the country and particularly in California:

“Tax sheltering has cost states more than a third of their revenue from taxes on corporate profits, a new study showed yesterday, adding to the severe strain on state finances across the country.” And the article added: “In the 1980’s 9 percent of corporate profits were paid to states. This number had declined to less than 6 percent by 2001…” (David Cay Johnston, The New York Times, July 16, 2003).

All these developments have coalesced to produce a perverse tax structure in California: the poor pay at the highest tax rates while the rich pay at the lowest rates. The bottom fifth pay at a 11.1 percent tax rate while the top 1 percent pay only 7 percent. And these tax trends have in turn contributed to growing inequalities in wealth: during the past three decades the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent of Californians grew by 81 percent while the income of the bottom 20 percent dropped by 11.5 percent (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2011).

But on those rare occasions when politicians propose raising taxes to reduce the deficit, they fail to mention these staggering trends. Instead they engage in incessant clamoring about “shared sacrifice” and a “balanced” approach. With this as his mantra, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown initially proposed a temporary tax measure that would have raised taxes on everyone. It included a regressive one-half cent sales tax increase that would have burdened the poor far more than the rich and a mere 1 percent increase in the taxes on those making over $250,000 and a 2 percent increase on those making over $500,000.

But what Brown was not expecting was a fight-back mounted by one of the teacher unions. California Federation of Teachers (CFT) proposed its own ballot initiative – the Millionaires Tax – that would have only raised taxes on the rich by raising their rates 3 percent on those making over $1 million and 5 percent on those making over $2 million. Their initiative polled much better than Brown’s.

Under intense pressure, CFT’s leaders eventually capitulated and agreed to drop their initiative and instead opted for a dubious compromise version brokered with Brown. The compromise would reduce the sales tax to one-fourth cent and raise tax rates 1 percent on those making over $250,000, 2 percent on those making over $300,000 and 3 percent on those making over $500,000.

It is not clear this compromise measure will pass because of its ambivalent nature. It currently has the support of 56 percent of likely voters, 58 percent oppose “a key part of it – the quarter-cent sales tax increase (San Francisco Chronicle, May 26, 2012). When CFT’s Millionaires Tax was a contender and was polled, it had 62 percent support.

Thanks to the Occupy Movement, people are becoming increasingly aware of the growing inequalities in wealth and the underlying declining tax burden on the rich. Hence, they have offered strong support to initiatives that target only the rich and have rejected regressive taxes such as sales taxes.

And this tenuous support has led Jerry Brown to resort to his terror tactic, intended to strike fear in the hearts of the public. He has told the people of California that if they do not support this new compromise tax proposal, then automatic trigger cuts will go into effect that will brutally slash the budget of public education on all levels. According to the same Chronicle article, this threat has evoked hatred: “They [likely California voters] also hate the automatic spending cuts to public education if voters reject the Brown’s tax plan. And we mean hate – 72 percent oppose these trigger cuts.”

If democracy ruled, the sales taxes would be reduced, taxes on the rich would go way up, and our schools and social services would be fully funded. But thanks to the influence of the 1 percent and the politicians they subsidize, the people of California are being terrorized into voting for a measure they actually in part reject.

Report From The Front Lines In Riverside, California

Today in Riverside Superior Court, Department 8, I attempted to execute a citizen’s arrest of an attorney.  Toni Eggebraaten, the attorney for the Family Trust for which I am a beneficiary, filed an accounting in which she attempted to obscure her embezzling thirty thousand dollars. Alarmed at the accounting, I had contacted a lawyer who surveyed  the accountings and confirmed for me that she had, indeed,  embezzled thirty grand and had attempted to hide her crime.

The court opened for business at 8: 30 this morning. Probate Judge Thomas Cahraman announced he was going to shuffle the order of the docket and call the Phelan case first. He began by complimenting me on my writing ability, saying, “You must have some education.”  He began to wax on about the cadence and lift to my writing style. He then noted that I had filed no objections to the petition by Eggebraaten.

Correction, I said. I wrote in my pleading that she embezzled thirty thousand dollars and that there is absolutely no point to my filing objections.  I wrote that you always find against me, no matter what I present to the court.

That’s not true,  protested the judge.  “I have made many decisions in your favor.”

Not a single one, I replied truthfully. And then I switched into high gear. “Toni Eggebraaten has embezzled thirty thousand dollars and I am therefore executing a citizen’s arrest. Bailiff, take Ms. Eggebraaten into custody.”

The judge began to rattle on, ignoring what I had just said. “Excuse me”, I said, “I am executing a citizen’s arrest.  I am exercising my legal right to do so. Bailiff, please take Ms. Eggebraaten into custody.”

“If you keep on this way I will revoke your right to appear by court call”, said the judge.

I repeated that I was executing a citizen’s arrest.

“Nothing you file ever has legal merit,” cried the judge.

“Really?” I said.” Look at my current  filing. I have attached as an exhibit proof that the Trustee is attempting, through her accountant, to affix liability onto me for the taxes on the income to the Trust. This is a violation of Title 26 Section 641 of the US Code. Is that also lacking legal merit?”

“I am terminating this hearing,” said Cahraman and hung up on me.

The pleadings in front of the judge delineated a number of laws violated in this case, including embezzlement, deprivation of rights under color of law and violations of the IRS code. By so obstructing my efforts to execute a citizen’s arrest on Toni Eggebraaten, the judge committed misprison of felony and obstruction of justice. He could also be considered an accessory after the fact to the thirty thousand she illegally pocketed.

The citizen’s arrest of Toni Eggebraaten will be taking place at a later date. There will also be an attempt to execute a citizen’s arrest of Judge Thomas Cahraman for his part in this pretense of justice.

One can play nice only so long. Like so many who are attempting to exact justice out of a turnip court, I have gone to court over and over only to be deprived of my rights to due process  and of my rightful inheritance. The fact that at the core of this case lies a murder, the murder of my mother, Dr. Amalie Phelan, who was under a conservatorship overseen by this court, takes the issue to another level.

Title 18 Section 242 of the US code, Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law, may mandate the death penalty for a judge who so violates an individual’s rights. The deprivation of rights by a Riverside Superior Court judge resulted in my mother’s death. Also potentially invoking the death penalty is a murder committed in the course of another crime, such as theft.  The continuing efforts by the court to cover up  this murder and also to whitewash  the   theft of funds, which have gone to pay off Judith Phelan for her part in the murder of her mother, escalate this case into a death penalty matter—for the involved judges and the lawyers who are stealing to pay off matricide. Judith, by the way, has changed her name to Anna Bloom in order to mitigate  unwanted attention since she made off like a bandit. Judith/Anna  is now  residing in the San Francisco Bay area.  http://elder-abuse-cyberray.blogspot.mx/2011/04/judy-phelan-makes-deal-with-devil.html

Her are the closing remarks in the pleadings that were in front of the judge today:

“At some future date, historians will look back on this period in the United States as the equivalent of a Dark Ages in terms of political oppression, evidenced in part by  corruption of the legal system. Indeed, some authors, such as Morris Berman and Chris Hedges, are already so declaring this. The actions by this particular court in this specific case aptly demonstrate the genteel brutality of a Pretender Court, a court  which is operating in violation of the Constitution of the United States of America. It is a court of privilege and abuse, of murder and theft, not a court of law. 

I declare under penalty of perjury that this court is rogue and is not operating as a lawful, unbiased and honorable court of law. Its decisions and actions do not reflect the law of the United States of America or the State of California.  The proceedings are sham proceedings. The theft and abuse, however, are quite real.”

The time has come for the citizens of the United States to rise up against judicial oppression.  I strongly suggest that community groups come together and start executing citizens’ arrests of judges, magistrates and commissioners who violate the Constitution. The time  is long past for pleadings and prayers to courts which are hell- bent on murder and theft.

Why The Health Nazis Are On The March

They say “Jolly is the fat man,” but perhaps not when he’s being chased (and, I’m sure, caught) like a Frankenstein monster by the Body Cult crazies.  And that is the case today, as it has become fashionable to affront the friendly-fronted.

It seems most anything goes now: bloated houses, bloated egos, bloated libidos, bloated bureaucracies, bloated government – except bloated bellies.  And a perusal of the news makes this clear, with a never-ending stream of stories about obesity this and obesity that.  For example, headlining Drudge the other day was a piece about how fathead officials in Massachusetts propose to ban school bake sales – even before and after school hours – to combat obesity.  This, of course, is just the next step in a progression that has seen localities purge schools of cookies and sodas along with the faith and patriotism that was deemed unhealthful long before.

We also had the San Francisco Stupidvisors, who run the city (into the ground), who banned toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals. Deliciously, the restaurant chain circumvented the law by charging an extra ten cents for those who want the toy.  I would’ve really rubbed the health Nazis’ noses in it and made it a penny.

Then there was the 2008 proposal by three legislators in Mississippi – said to be the fattest state in the nation – to prohibit portly people from dining in restaurants.  The politicians said they were just trying to make a point with their measure.  I wonder, though, given that the vast majority of gun crime (98% in New York City) is committed by blacks and Hispanics, would these bold statesmen seek to “make a point” by proposing to ban those groups from gun stores?  Oh, that would be discriminatory?  I see.

Although Mississippi Fat Burning never saw its opening day, other Orwellian measures have.  For instance, a Missouri judge was accused of delaying an adoption until the prospective father lost weight, and last year Ohio DCFS seized a boy from his parents because he was obese.  This, despite the fact that if the president ate like his wife does, the boy would look like Obama’s son.

The irony here is that the health Nazis would have had the over indulgent Ohio mother’s back if she’d ended her boy’s life in the womb.  But merely increase the chances of shortening his life by feeding him too many Twinkies?  You’re a derelict mother!

You see, when it’s the matter of a body within a body, it’s the bigger body’s “choice.”  But when it’s a matter of just a bigger body, you have no choice.  My, how the scales of justice tip when you tip the scales.

As for the busybodies – the politicians, gubmint bureaucrats and “public-interest” groups – how do we explain their interest in our health?  They really must care, right?  About you, about me, about all and sundry.  Well, I’d say so but qualify it with a paraphrased Rodney Dangerfield line: “They really care….

About what, I have no idea.”

Of course, there is the “Obesity hurts society” pretext.  The argument is that you fatties are burying our healthcare system with a knife and fork, as you cost it more money with your increased health problems.

Except that this is nonsense.

A 2011 study found that the obese and smokers actually cost the healthcare system less because they don’t live as long.  And while study leader Pieter Van Baal called the finding a “small surprise,” it’s thoroughly logical.  It’s the nonagenarian requiring frequent hospitalization and nursing-home care who rings up the bills, not the epicurean who collapses on his plate of chicken fried steak and cheese-filled French fries at age 61.  So you want to save ObamaCare?  Get all the different fat groups, copious amounts of sugar and salt and smoke one Al Gore tobacco farm a week.

So are we now left with the notion that the health Nazis really do care?  Well, they do, and about what I do have some idea.  And I’m going to delve into one little understood phenomenon that drives today’s obsession with health.

You’ll note that the people behind control-freak health measures are never Opus Dei or Southern Baptist Conference types; heck, unless it’s a prohibition against pork, they’re not even Muslims.  They are, I’d wager, secularists virtually one and all.

This is no coincidence, but a result of subordinating spiritual health to physical health.  A person of faith may believe that he’s enjoined to treat the temple of the soul well, but he will never elevate that imperative over that of caring for the soul itself.  He realizes that this life, relative to eternity, is as a drop of water in an ocean – and it is that ocean voyage for which he is mainly preparing.  Thus, recognizing the reality of God’s law (morality), he understands that of primary importance is avoiding what has traditionally been labeled sin.

But what about when you don’t believe in an afterlife?  This temporal life is then all you see.

And then staying in it for as long as possible can become the most important thing to you.

In fact, it can become obsession.

For where the believer may be mindful of Jesus’ words (I’m paraphrasing) “Do not fear that which just destroys the body; fear that which destroys the soul,” the secularist may believe the body is all there is.  This is, I believe, what has bred the Cult of the Body, with all its newly-minted “sins,” such as overeating, failure to exercise, smoking and drinking.  Why, we even call taxes on the last two “sin taxes.”

So my answer to those who warn of increasing obesity is, “So?”  “But, Duke, don’t you understand?  These people will die younger!”  Other than mentioning that they won’t die nearly as young as aborted babies, again I say, “So?”  We’re all going to die; it’s just a matter of when and how.  And when you realize that relative to the ocean, small, medium and large water drops are indistinguishable, you’ll understand my response.

Returning to a lighter note, I’ll have to now limit my keyboard intake lest this article get too fat.  Before concluding, however, I’ll say that I do have an idea for putting the health Nazis’ designs on a diet.  Since obesity is most prevalent among black women – with 48 percent having, uh, let’s say, generous proportions – cast any and all attacks upon the condition as “racist.”  If this tactic works when the matter is police tests, voter ID, immigration and school suspension, perhaps it’ll work with abdominal distension.

California Public To Vote On GMO Label Act; Biotech Lies Begin

Stroller-pushing mothers delivered nearly a million signatures in Sacramento on Wednesday, for an initiative to put to populist vote The California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act.

The ten-week signature drive collected nearly double the amount needed to put the R2K Act on the November 6, 2012 ballot.

The state will take between five and seven weeks to validate the signatures, and then certify the results. Of the 555,236 needed, thousands of volunteers collected 971,126, just shy of the hoped-for million.

“In ten weeks, nearly a million registered voters signed the ballot initiative,” said Pamm Larry, who single-handedly started the drive on January 20, 2011. “Even biotech engineers gathered signatures for us.” Having founded LabelGMOs.org, Larry then coordinated with other pro-labeling civic groups across the state and nation.

Victory celebrations were held in Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego today, reported CA Right to Know in a press conference.

If voters approve the measure this fall, beginning July 1, 2014, food makers will be required to label those products that contain genetically modified ingredients.

Significantly, the “natural” term can no longer be used if the product contains GMOs.

There are several exemptions, including GMO-fed and GMO-drugged animals, as well as any raw ag product that was unintentionally contaminated with GMOs. Suppliers and producers may be asked to provide a sworn statement that as far as they know, the food is GE-free.

According to the Act, anyone relying on those sworn statements is off the hook legally if the product turns out to have GMOs.

There is a requirement in the Act that grocery store bins or shelves must also be GE-labeled if any unlabeled raw agricultural GE products (like GE corn) are sold. But there’s no liability to the store owner if the supplier provides a sworn statement that the food is GE-free when it’s not.

Given the biotech industry’s penchant for hyperbole (relating to yield, cost and pesticide use), it’s no surprise tohear them declare the Act will cause food prices to spike.

But, as one of the organizers says, “They have 18 months after the election to change their labels, something that is frequently done in the food industry.” Gary Hirshberg, chairman of Stonyfield which has been organic-certified for 20 years, added, “All they have to do is add some ink.”

Several large organizations opposing the measure have organized behind Stop Costly Food Labeling (SCFL), including the Grocery Manufacturers Assn., the Council for Biotechnology Information, the CA Farm Bureau Federation, and, you guessed it, the Chamber of Commerce.

Another lie right out of their lying mouths is that the R2K Act will require, “prohibiting processed foods from being labeled as natural, even if they contain no GE ingredients.”

No such language exists in the eight-page Act.

Not only that, but there’s still a whole lot of wiggle room for GE-contaminated foods. See pages 4-6 for the list of exemptions, like this one:

“Until July 1, 2019, any processed food that would be subject to section 110809 solely because it includes one or more genetically engineered ingredients, provided that: (i) no single such ingredient accounts for more than one-half of one percent of the total weight of such processed food; and (ii) the processed food does not contain more than ten such ingredients.” §110809.2(e)

This means that food can have up to 5% genetically modified organisms by weight (and up to ten of the little buggers) and remain free of the GE label. Looks like biotech scored big on that exemption. GE-free should be GE-free.

Fundraising to Counter Biotech Lies

Both sides will engage in a media spectacle aimed at swaying voters, using TV and print to promote their positions. If their April 26 press release is any indication, the biotech sector of Big Ag and its supply chain plans to drive a wedge between small operators and consumers who want to know what’s in their food. “It’ll put you out of business!” screams the upcoming headline.

Heaven forbid. Requiring food labels is akin to truth in advertising. Big Pharma certainly hasn’t disappeared because they can’t keep nasty side effects a secret.

Grocery stores have nothing to fear, despite the SCFL’s spin that “right to know” means “right to sue.” Whining they’ll have to follow what’s done in 40 other countries, adding a little ink to food labels in the biggest agriculture state in the US won’t put anyone out of business.

We’re gonna be inundated with a barrage of lies to the point we’ll stand in muted awe at the audacity. Kinda like the informed’s reaction when Condi Rice objected to her “integrity” being impugned after she promoted the wild WMDs lie.

But now is not the time for muted silence. And the media campaign to support California’s initiative must be funded, nationally, says Dr. Mercola, who runs the biggest natural, homeopathic website in the world.

He’s teamed up with several groups including Organic Consumers Assn. and Food Democracy Now! to launch a major fundraising campaign for the upcoming battle of words, explained OCA spokesperson, Katherine Paul, in an email to Food Freedom. “But all of the funds will be turned over to the CARighttoKnow campaign to use for media consultants, advertising, and legal help,” she advised.

Mercola reports:

“Between May 1 and May 26, a broad coalition of food, farming, health groups, and organic food manufacturers, will attempt to raise one million dollars to defeat Monsanto propaganda and get the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act on the ballot for November 6, and passed into law. Money raised in this Million Dollar Money Bomb on Monsanto campaign will support the California Ballot Initiative and other state GE-labeling campaigns. If donations totaling $1 million is reached by May 26, a coalition of benefactors will MATCH it, bringing the Money Bomb to $2 million!”

According to the opposition, Mercola has already put up $800,000 of his own money. The busy man didn’t get back to me as to whether this is actually true, but it smells right that he’d want to back his own horse.

“We can’t leave California to battle the biotech giants on their own,” he says. “They need your help! Donating funds to this campaign may be the best money you’ll spend all year to safeguard your health, and the health of your children.”

This is all great news… and no one doubts California’s R2K GE Food Act will be on the ballot on November 6, 2012.

Which brings us to the ballot… cast on electronic voting systems that studies funded by Secretary of State Debra Bowen proved are not secure from hack. (See, e.g., here and here.)  Other studies by different states and universities and privately-hired tech firms agreed, but Bowen and her Sec-State peers across the nation all bought those expensive, hackable machines anyway.

Even so, since over 90% of US eaters want their food labeled, the vote result is a foregone conclusion. And, what’s done in the biggest Ag state in the union is sure to be followed in at least some of the 20-some states that allow an initiative process – a tool used by citizens to adopt laws and constitutional amendments without the support of the Governor or the Legislature.

Vermont, another state now undergoing an agricultural renaissance, does not have this freedom, so the GMO-food label bill passed by the legislature will not be enacted, as Governor Shumlin has advised he will veto it. We reported on this in the last half of this news video on Monday.

Robyn O’Brien of Allergy Kids Foundation says:

“My youngest daughter’s face began to swell shut at breakfast one day – and I had no idea why. We were only eating waffles, scrambled eggs, and tubes of blue yogurt…so what was happening to her? Before my daughter had a violent allergic reaction that morning, I honestly hadn’t given a lot of thought to what I fed my kids. I mean, if it was on grocery store shelves, it was all the same, right?But since then, like so many moms, I learned that there are all kinds of new ingredients in our foods that weren’t in what we ate as kids. That’s why we need labels.”

Just Label It is working on the FDA for a national directive requiring GMO-food labels, and sent their congrats to California. They’re still collecting petition signatures until May 13, and have produced this  by Robert Kenner, director of Food, Inc.

But California may beat FDA to the punch, and its Right to Know Act will impact food labeling across the nation. This is the big one from which the biotech-feds’ House of Secrecy begins to crumble.  All those who support GMO-food labeling are going to have to drop a bomb of money on them to counter the war chest of the biotech industry.

Starving By Accident: Are Americans Eating Real Food?

I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately.  No, scratch that.  I’m ALWAYS thinking about food.  So the other day I wandered over to eat at Picoso, a family-run Mexican restaurant in north Berkeley that makes the world’s best guacamole.  And while walking home past the world-famous Chez Panisse restaurant, I spotted a huge crowd of people standing around out in front.

“What’s happening here?” I asked one of the people in line.

“Michael Pollan and Maira Kalman are doing a book-signing event — and there is also free food.”  Well, one of the major creeds that I live by is, “Never turn down free food” — so I bought a copy of Pollan’s and Kalman’s illustrated “Food Rules,” had it signed by the authors, went on a tour of Chez Pannise’s extensive stainless-steel kitchens and then sampled hors d’oeuvres that had been prepared using Pollan’s 83 rules about food.

And I also ran into Alice Waters herself.  “I usually celebrate my birthdays at Chez Panisse,” I told her, “because it gives me something to look forward to each year besides just getting old — but this year my birthday falls on a Sunday and you guys will be closed.  And it’s my 70th birthday too!  So what should I do?”

“Perhaps you could celebrate it here on either the day before or the day after?” Waters replied.

“Or you could try Aziza, a Moroccan restaurant over in San Francisco,” added Pollan.  Then other people recommended trying Camino, Dona Tomas, Pizzialol, Quince, Cotogna and Commis.  But it just wouldn’t be the same — not going to Chez Panisse on my big Seven-Zero.  So we worked out a compromise.  I’d have my dinner celebration at Chez Panisse the night before, eat very slowly, and then celebrate turning 70 at the exact stroke of midnight — even if it meant sitting out on the restaurant’s front steps after they closed.   Perfect.

Here are some of Pollan’s 83 really helpful food rules:

2.  Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food [and nothing highly processed or containing unpronounceable chemicals either].

5.  Avoid foods that have sugar or some form of sweetener listed in the top three ingredients.

11. Avoid foods that are advertized on television [this rule should also apply to restaurants too.  Thank goodness Chez Panisse doesn't advertize on TV].

40.   Make water [not soda] your beverage of choice. Do what animals do when they’re thirsty.

42.  “The whiter the bread the sooner you’ll be dead.”

45.  Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

56.  Eat when you are hungry, not when you’re bored.

82.  Cook!   Cooking just might be the single most important thing you can do for your dietary health.

Pollan then summarized his book in just seven words:   “Eat [real] food, not too much, mostly plants.”

Which brings me to the “main course” of this article:   Why food is so important to us:   WITHOUT FOOD WE WOULD STARVE.  So bear that in mind the next time you read about how Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland or Congress is screwing with our food supply again.

Christopher Cook, author of “Diet for a Dead Planet,” states that, “It is no longer news that a few powerful corporations have literally occupied the vast majority of human sustenance.  The situation is perilous….  This corporate occupation of our food isn’t just unfair and wrong; it’s impractical and destructive.  It’s ruining farmers, the land and our future food supply.”

Yes, large for-profit-only corporations are endangering the food supply in places where people are barely subsisting and we’re always seeing photos of starving babies from there.  However, here in America these same corporations are highly endangering you and me as well.  Why?  Because Americans just THINK that they are eating real food — when much of our food merely consists of the three Cs: Cardboard, chemicals and crap.

Americans may think that we are nourishing ourselves when we eat corporate junk-food but the reality is that all too many of us are dying young from heart disease or cancer or obesity or diabetes; that our thinking has become fuzzy due to lack of nutrients; and, even worse, we are always hungry even though we keep stuffing our faces with imitation “real” food.

A photo from Peter Wenzel’s book, “Hungry Planet,” shows a typical American family sitting around a kitchen table with all the food they will eat in a week — and there’s hardly even one real fruit or vegetable among all of that stuff!

The 9/11 Passenger Paradox: What happened To Flight 93?

Once the fabrication of all four of  the alleged 9/11 crash sites (which I have documented in “9/11: Planes/No Planes and ‘Video Fakery”) begins to sink in, the question which invariably arises is, “But what happened to the passengers?”  Since Flights 11 and 77 were not even in the air that day, it seems no stretch to infer that the identities of the passengers on non-existent flights were just as phony as the flights themselves:  no planes, no passengers.  But we also know that Flights 93 and 175 were in the air that day, even though–astonishingly enough, for those who have never taken a close look at the evidence–they were not de-registered by the FAA until  28 September 2005, which raises the double-questions of how planes that were not in the air could have crashed or how planes that crashed could still have been in the air four years later?

Pilots for 9/11 Truth has confirmed that Flight 93 was in the air, but over Urbana, IL, far from the location of its alleged “crash” in Shanksville, PA; just as Flight 175 was also in the air, but over Pittsburgh, PA, removed from the South Tower at the time it was purportedly entering the building, which–unless the same plane can be in two places at the same time–established that some kind of “video fakery” was taking place in New York, as I have explained in many places. As a complement to the new study of the Pentagon attack by Dennis Cimino, “9/11: The official account of the Pentagon attack is a fantasy”, Dean Hartwell, J.D., has considerably expanded our understanding of questions about the passengers, where the manifests may include a mix of the dead and the non-existent, as well as some who may have been killed by the government to make their Hollywood-style event a bit more realistic and emotional. In the methodical fashion of an attorney presenting his case, Dean outlines the crucial questions and the most likely answers, where problems nevertheless abound.  My opinion is that these three studies constitute a “one-two-three punch” from which the “official account” can never recover.  From beginning to end, 9/11 was a fabricated event.

And, in case anyone entertains any lingering doubts, two of the most powerful indications of fakery and fraud are to be found in the punishment trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, the alleged “20th hijacker”, in Arlington, VA, in April 2006, which Scholars wrote about at the time.  He was convicted in April 2005 of having been involved in the 1993 attack on the Twin Towers, but in April 2006 he was being punished for having been involved in the 2001 attack–a federal judicial “shell game” of immense proportions.  The trial was used to introduce emotional testimony about the passengers aboard Flight 93 plotting to use a drink cart to break through the cabin door, which was picked up by the Cockpit Voice Recorder.  But, as Allan Green, a member of Scholars, noted, CVRs do not record voices in the passenger compartment.  A second blunder was noticed by a Muslim member of Scholars, Muhammad Columbo.  The last words the “hijackers” on the tape are recorded as having said are “Allah akbar!  Allah akbar!” (“God is great! God is great!”).  But as he explained, “The last words of a Muslim cannot be these!  They are used in the call to prayer or in an attack at war.  On the moment of death, a Muslim must confirm that ‘There is but one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet!”  Which means that those who were composing this script did not know enough to get it right.

The most telling indication that the Shanksville crash site was faked, in my opinion, is what was not done as opposed to what was. Flight 93 is supposed to have completely disappeared because the ground was very soft from past mining operations.  Indeed, on some versions, the plane completely disappeared into an abandoned mine shaft.  But we know what to do with miners who are trapped in mine shafts.  We bring out the bright lights and heavy equipment and dig, 24/7, in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might have survived.  That it was not done in this instance tells us that there was no point in even faking such an op, which would have exposed that there was no plane there and no passengers to rescue. Think of the spectacular television coverage had such a “rescue attempt” been undertaken.  They even trimmed the burnt trees and shrubs to make sure that they could not be subjected to chemical analysis to determine whether the damage had been caused by jet-fuel based fires.  Such were the efforts of the “first responders” to save the lives or recover the bodies of the passengers.  Subsequent studies by the EPA of the crash site have confirmed that there was no residue from the jet fuel that would have been pervasive had a Boeing 757 actually crashed there.  Research on the “crash sites” thus appears to be pure dynamite in blowing the “official account” of 9/11 out of the water.

DEAN HARTWELL: The 9/11 Passenger Paradox

According to the official version of events, forty-three people, including the crew members, boarded United 93 on the morning of September 11, 2001.  The flight took off from Newark airport with San Francisco as its destination.

During the flight, four hijackers took over the aircraft.  After making calls from the airplane to relatives, several passengers rushed the hijackers in an attempt to wrest control of the plane back.  Ultimately, the plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board.

Investigators found human remains in Shanksville and declared that the remains matched DNA samples given by the passengers’ families.  Copies of the manifest and boarding passes show the names of passengers who took the flight.

Facts That Contradict the Official Story

The flight was airborne over the Midwest after the alleged crash in Shanksville (see below).

Wallace Miller, Coroner of Somerset County (which includes Shanksville) and one of the first to arrive at the “crash” scene, said of the area, “This is the most eerie thing,” he says. “I have not, to this day, seen a single drop of blood. Not a drop.”

Miller also reportedly said that it “looked like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it…I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there. It became like a giant funeral service.”

No independent source has identified remains of any of the flight’s passengers.

Did the alleged hijackers use their real names?

David Ray Griffin speaks of the “hijackers” (whose names appear on the manifest available) in his first point in his book .  He states that at least six of the hijackers showed up alive and well after 9/11!  Do we need any further reason to believe that anyone took over planes and used them in suicidal attacks that day?

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO:  The fact that several of the “hijackers” turned up alive makes it obvious that some passengers boarded using the “hijacker” names.  Instead of relatives saying that the “hijackers” called them, some of them said their relative was alive!

How Do We Know Who Boarded This Plane?  

Jack White quotes expert pilot John Lear, who shared information that calls into question whether the manifest available for Flight 93 is the final one.  He says that passenger flights have, as required by the Federal Aviation Administration, what is called “The Envelope.”  The Envelope contains “the final passenger manifest, the destination, the amount of fuel on board, the names of the pilot and flight attendants, etc., and the time the DOOR OF THE AIRCRAFT WAS CLOSED.”  According to Lear, the chief pilot signs the document.

Could changes in the flight manifest have been made between the time of the generation of the publicly available manifest, noted above, and the time of the aircraft door’s final closing?

White continues his recitation of Lear’s words:

The passenger manifest (a printout of pre-ticketed passengers) may be augmented by the chief flight attendant if passengers do not show up, or late arrivals are added. The manifest in THE ENVELOPE would include the names of hijackers, if pre-ticketed, or their written in aliases if added at the last moment by hand. In any event, every person on board would be accounted for.

Was there a second boarding or deplaning of any passengers before take-off?

This becomes a realistic possibility because there were two departure times for the flight – 8:28 AM (ACARS) and 8:42 AM (BTS).  Phil Jayhan of the Internet forum, Let’s Roll Forums, explains why the BTS, the official record, only shows one:

“Why not two different times in the BTS database? We have two separate groups of passengers. One group of people that boarded flight 93 at the terminal boarding ramp. And another group of people which boarded on the tarmac. The way that the **ACARS system works in an airplane is that when the brake is released, whether there is movement to the aircraft or not, it records an away time. The morning of 9/11, there were two of these recorded for flight 93, which might simply be another confirmation that flight 93 picked up two groups of people on 9/11 at two separate locations at Newark International Airport.”

Hypothesis:  After the passengers boarded the plane at the terminal (gate 17), the plane moved forward a short distance and then stopped at the tarmac.  The passengers who would make calls deplaned at the tarmac.  The pilot then released the brake at 8:28 AM (setting the departure time under ACARS) and moved to taxi, taking off (aka “wheels off”) at 8:42 AM, setting the BTS departure time then.  The people remaining on the plane continued in flight after the “crash” in Shanksville.

The callers used cell phones from a ground location, which had a much greater chance of working than calls from the airplane.  Some of these calls were recorded and provide proof that calls were made.  Alternatively, the calls could have been recorded prior to the flight and played to relatives.

This hypothesis explains the long gap in time between the scheduled departure time of 8:01 AM and the BTS departure time of 8:42 AM.  It also explains the other departure time frequently given for this departure (8:28 AM).  The passengers likely boarded in anticipation of an 8:01 take-off.  The callers then likely got up to leave.

The usual boarding issues and their explanation for leaving (perhaps illness) and the resulting shuffle to get them out the door on the tarmac stalled some of the time.  According to media reports, a witness (NY Giant football player Clayton White who took flight to New Jersey after Monday Night Football in Denver the prior night), saw passengers on the tarmac during this time.

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO:  Passengers boarded the plane but some of them deplaned from United 93 at 8:28 AM.  The manifest and copies of boarding passes show the names passengers gave to the airline.  Lear’s assertions on manifests and flight policy show the opportunity of how passengers could have boarded under false names and how names could have been altered.

Who allegedly made phone calls, what types of phones were used and were the calls recorded?

Todd Beamer (air phone)

Mark Bingham (cell to aunt and air phone to mother)

Sandy Bradshaw (cell)

Marion Britton (cell)

Thomas Burnett (cell, recorded?)

Joseph DeLuca (?)

Edward Felt (cell)

Jeremy Glick (recorded?)

Lauren Grandcolas (air phone, recorded)

Linda Grunland (?)

Cee Cee Lyles (cell, recorded)

Honor Wainio (?)

Were Calls Possible from United 93?

David Ray Griffin explains the utter lack of consistency in the official explanations of phone calls on the planes associated with 9/11.  He does a great job explaining how the FBI at first remained silent as to what phones were used from the planes.

He then shows the chronology of A.K. Dewdney’s report (which made it clear that cell phone calls at that time in history were only reasonably possible at altitudes of less than 2,000 feet) to the subsequent FBI report which changed many of the calls from cell to air phone.

From Griffin’s analysis of the work of researchers like Dewdney, we can easily surmise that the official story on the number of cell phones (now given by the FBI as mostly air phone) changed drastically after it became known publicly the difficulty in getting cell phones to work at typical airplane altitudes.

More issues about the alleged phone calls from United 93 arise upon inspection of information provided by the government at the Moussaoui trial in 2006:

(1) One call allegedly went past the time of the Shanksville “crash”, Todd Beamer’s last call on United 93.  Furthermore, Beamer’s call could not have happened when it purportedly did because the government’s own records show him making this call and another call from the same phone AT THE SAME SECOND!

(2) No records of calls are sourced to the companies that provided them.  This fact calls into question the authenticity of the calls.

(3) Lisa Jefferson, who reportedly took Beamer’s call, failed to mention the phrase “Let’s roll” in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which introduced the heroics of Beamer and others on the flight.  She also had never before heard Beamer’s voice.

(4) In fact, the FBI delayed bringing out the story of “Let’s Roll” and the passengers “fighting back” and apparently only did so to stop the story of a flight shoot-down from gaining momentum.

(5) The government, without saying as much, switched several calls in the official account from cell to air.

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO: There were no cell phone calls from the airplane of United 93.  And air phones were not available on Boeing 757s in 2001. The additional consideration, even if one were to believe those calls were possible, regardless of type or where they came from, is in the substance of the statements alleged and their inconsistencies.  The callers, whoever they were, whatever phones they used and wherever they called from, gave false information to passenger relatives at the behest of the plotters.  No reliable records show any calls having gone to Lisa Jefferson.  It is likely that Jefferson was persuaded or coerced to give false reports to the media.

Who are the Relatives?

The reaction of the relatives of the passengers to the news of the plane crashes can best be described as perplexing.  None of the passenger’s relatives arrived at San Francisco airport, as is common when plane crashes take place. In an accident that took place in Taipei involving a plane that was destined for Los Angeles, the airport set up a Counseling Center for the relatives of the victims.

What then were the relatives’ roles?

If the passengers used real names and made calls, they had to:

a)    deceive the relatives OR

b)   participate in a simulation or otherwise work with the relatives in holding conversations under false pretenses

Deception of the relatives could have taken place.  However, with all of the information out about the details of the phone calls, it would seem likely that at least one of the deceived relatives would question the 9/11 matter publicly.  If the relatives had been deceived, they would have believed the passenger calls were real.  Under this scenario, it is hard to believe that none of the relatives in the San Francisco area would show up as bereaved relatives usually do.

As there were many simulations on 9/11, the plotters may well have planned one for United 93 passengers.  Knowledge on the part of the relatives of the plot could explain how this part of the plot worked easily (none of the relatives apparently questioned what they said or who they were).  Of course, it adds to the number of people who must be paid off or killed.

The callers may have been asked to participate in a simulation of a plane hijacking.  It would have required some acting skills.  This challenge would explain several questionable statements allegedly made by some of them.  Here are some examples that do not by themselves prove the calls were fraudulent, but certainly suggest it:

A caller claiming to be passenger Mark Bingham said:

Caller: “Mom? This is Mark Bingham.  I want you to know that I love you. I’m on a flight from Newark to San Francisco and there are three guys who have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb.”

Alice: “Who are these guys?

Caller: (after a pause) “You believe me, don’t you?

Alice: “Yes, Mark. I believe you. But who are these guys?

Another supposed caller, Jeremy Glick said, when asked if he and others were going to fight back against the hijackers, “I have my butter knife from breakfast.”  According to Dewdney:

“This is strange because it implies that the caller had already finished breakfast, whereas meals are not normally served until the aircraft reaches cruising altitude, about the time that the alleged hijacking began.”

A caller who said he was Todd Beamer talked to a Verizon operator, Lisa Jefferson, for fifteen minutes instead of preparing to take on the “terrorists” with other passengers.

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO:  The callers more likely made the calls as part of a simulation than as a flat-out deception of relatives.  To believe in the theory of the use of deception, one would have to believe that (a) none of the relatives discovered they had been lied to and (b) the same relatives would agree to keep silent about the deception.

Why were the calls so important?

If the hijackings and plane crashes never happened, then what were the phone calls all about?

The calls were used to advance the “fact” that the hijackings and crashes happened.  Of secondary importance are what phones were used and where the calls were made from.

These calls are part of what holds the official theory together.  The plotters needed to make sure the calls got through and the information about hijackers was conveyed.

Whose Remains Were at Shanksville?

Here are the most relevant facts about the “crash scene” : There were no traces of the United 93 plane at that location.

Officials claimed there were sufficient human remains to match with DNA samples even though UA93 and UA175 were airborne after the times of their alleged “crashes”.

Several news articles report human remains identified at the scene of Shanksville.

We also know that the FBI was in charge of the area, giving the agency the authority to declare who could and who could not either approach or photograph the “crash scene”.

How were the victims at the Shanksville “crash” scene “identified”?

DNA testing requires a sample from a victim at the “scene” and a sample from the victim or a close relative from somewhere else (usually given by family).

An agent (of the plot) would likely retrieve sample from the “scene” of the victim’s death.

The Agent would give samples to the tester.  (The tester, as one who would follow standard procedures, would not have any reason to go to the scene nor to question the Agent).

The agent would also go to the family to ask for samples (ex: hair, toothbrush, etc.)

The agent would then give the family sample to the tester.

If the tester were in on plot, the tests could be easily rigged.  But the tester’s statements to the media are needed.  If something “happened” to the tester, it would cause too much suspicion.  The tester would be suspicious if “scene” samples did not have appearance of involvement in plane crash.

Elias Davidsson points to a lack of a “chain of custody.” This is a legal principle which directs those who investigate a crime to document (1) how and where they find evidence and (2) how the evidence got to the point of the hearing.

He states that “there is no indication that a proper chain of custody between the crash sites and the final disposition of bodily remains had been established by the FBI, as required in criminal cases. The 9/11 Commission did not refer to any such documentation.”

With no solid chain of custody, a prosecutor (the state) can conceivably bring just about any piece of evidence to the attention of the jury.  And when the public is the jury with no judge to referee, the state can use this opportunity to perpetuate a false story.

Davidsson names the evidence that the government should have shown to us if it really had a case that could be proven as to the people that boarded the planes:

In order to prove that particular individuals actually boarded the aircraft and died at the known crash sites, at least three types of evidence could and should have been produced: Authenticated passenger lists (or flight manifests) displaying their names, identification of the suspects as they boarded the aircraft and identification of their bodily remains from the crash sites.

What appearance did the remains at Shanksville have?

Miller said it took several days to get good samples (i.e. body parts not recognizable) and that the passengers were “essentially cremated upon impact.”

The cremated remains could have been distributed around the Shanksville site with some FBI agents allowing the plotters onto the land.

Could the United 93 passengers have been killed and cremated for this purpose?

Probably not.  Cremation by law must be done one body at a time and each body takes several hours.  Even an unofficial “cremation” would take too long for the plotters, considering the number of bodies (43) needed.

Hypothesis:  The plotters used cremation remains of those who died before 9/11.

Issue:  How would plotters get the DNA ”samples” of the same deceased persons?

Answer:  The plotters could have run a phony company that provides or cleans ceremonial caskets for the deceased prior to cremation.  The company could have collected “hair samples” that would match those recently cremated:

“Many funeral homes offer a hardwood ceremonial casket for viewing or funeral services prior to cremation. The ceremonial (or rental) casket is specifically designed to provide a very aesthetically pleasing, affordable and environmentally prudent alternative to purchasing a casket for a cremation service.”

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO:  The remains were planted at Shanksville.  The remains could not have been those of the passengers.  No plane with passengers crashed at Shanksville.  It would also be hard to deceive the DNA testers.

What happened to United 93?

What if we could find out if messages were sent to the planes that flew and pinpoint when they were sent?  What if we could ascertain whether the plane corresponding to this flight received any of these messages?  What if any of the messages were AFTER the time the plane allegedly crashed?

We can do that!  There is a device used to send messages to and from an aircraft.  It is called ACARS, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System.

Thanks to the work of Pilots for 9/11 Truth and others, we know that the ACARS messages sent to Flight 93 indicate that the plane was heading west over Illinois several minutes after it supposedly “crashed” in Pennsylvania!  Pilots for 9/11 Truth found that messages sent after the time of the crash were received by United 93 at ground stations far away from Shanksville.  They said that the aircraft would not have had messages routed through the ground stations that were actually used “if it were en route to crash in Shanksville, PA.”

For that reason alone, we know that United 93 did not crash in Pennsylvania.  For that reason alone, we know that  43 people were not killed in a Shanksville crash.  For that reason alone, we can call off the official story and continue our search for the real history of this day’s event.

There are other reasons to disbelieve the crash story.  In the words of Col. George Nelson, USAF (ret.), had United 93 crashed in Shanksville “there would have [been] literally hundreds of serially-controlled time-change parts within the hole that would have proved beyond any shadow of doubt the precise tail-number or identity of the aircraft.”  Yet, as with identification of the passengers, our government has not shown what would be easily understood and conclusive evidence.

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO:  The evidence proves that United 93 flew to the Midwest and was last positively traced over Illinois minutes after the “crash” in Shanksville.  The “footprints” of the plane and passenger ends here.

Where did United 93 and its passengers land?

From here on it is speculation.  The best guess is Cleveland due to its proximity to United 93’s last known position and evidence of irregular activity there.

What happened?  Plotters needed to make sure about 30 people did not get away.  The passengers may not have been aware of what had happened during the time of the flight as they did not make calls.

They would have left the plane about 11:00 AM and may have been led to a NASA building.  The plotters had to keep them away from their cell phones and the news for as long as possible.  The plotters knew that the passengers would eventually find out that they had traveled on a flight that would be tied to the official story.  At that point, the passengers would no longer have felt safe.

Can anyone tell us what happened to the passengers?

The passengers have not spoken and the plotters will not speak.  That leaves the relatives as the only group of people who may know what happened.

Hypothesis I:  The relatives received no notice before receiving the calls from the passengers.

If that is the case, then the relatives were left out of the plan and thus had no leverage as to the fate of the passengers.  Most likely, the passengers are dead.

Hypothesis II: The relatives received notice about the calls before receiving them.

If that is the case, then the relatives may have been (coerced?) into a deal: for their silence, they would receive assurances that the passengers would not be harmed.

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO:  Unknown.  Only the relatives can tell us anything about this topic.

Conclusion: The Passenger Paradox

IF the passengers took the flights under their true identities, THEN: a) they were killed in Cleveland or b) they received new identities.

Problem with a) The relatives would be furious that the government lied to them about what happened and would be responsible for the deaths of the passengers.  But the families appear to stand with the government.

Problem with b) The relatives would demand contact with the passengers, which could create difficulties in keeping what would be a secret.  It would only take one “outed” passenger to ruin the whole cover story.

IF the passengers took the flights under assumed identities, THEN they could return to society in their old or different identities.

Problem: Close friends and family would know the old identities.  In an era of the Internet and the availability of records, this might not be too hard for the public to discover.

IF the passengers deplaned United 93 at the tarmac, THEN they could return to society quickly provided that their identity as a passenger be different than their commonly used name AND the pictures shown of them are faked.

Problem: This would mean a lot of false passenger names and a lot of false relatives, though it does not foreclose the possibility of some real passengers who go to Cleveland (see the first paradox).  The key for the plotters would be to make sure the fake pictures of “passengers” get to the public quickly to create images of people who do not exist.  So the public would look in all the wrong places.

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Dean Hartwell, J.D., is the author of (2011) and  (2009) on JFK, RFK and 9/11.

Source: Veterans Today

Someone You Love: Coming To A Gulag Near You

The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing between. You are for us or against us. You are a patriot or an enemy of freedom. You either embrace the crusade to physically eradicate evildoers from the face of the Earth or you are an Islamic terrorist, a collaborator or an unwitting tool of terrorists. And now that we have created this monster it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it. Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors feed on paranoia, rumor, rampant careerism, demonization of critical free speech and often invented narratives. They justify their existence, and their consuming of vast governmental resources, by turning even the banal and the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.
This is why the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was contested by me and three other plaintiffs before Judge Katherine B. Forrest in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, is so dangerous. This act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last Dec. 31, puts into the hands of people with no discernible understanding of legitimate dissent the power to use the military to deny due process to all deemed to be terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers, and hold them indefinitely in military detention. The deliberate obtuseness of the NDAA’s language, which defines “covered persons” as those who “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces,” makes all Americans, in the eyes of our expanding homeland security apparatus, potential terrorists. It does not differentiate. And the testimony of my fellow plaintiffs, who understand that the NDAA is not about them but about us, repeatedly illustrated this.

Alexa O’Brien, a content strategist and information architect who co-founded the U.S. Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process and wrest it back from corporate hands, was the first plaintiff to address the court. She testified that when WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, she discovered that the company was attempting to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as jihadist ideology.

Last August there was an email exchange between Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for counterterrorism and corporate security and a former deputy director of the counterterrorism division of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, and Thomas Kopecky, director of operations at Investigative Research Consultants Inc. and Fortis Protective Services LLC. In that exchange, leaked Feb. 27 by WikiLeaks, Kopecky wrote: “I was looking into that U.S. Day of Rage movement and specifically asked to connect it to any Saudi or other fundamentalist Islamic movements. Thus far, I have only hear[d] rumors but not gotten any substantial connection. Do you guys know much about this other than its US Domestic fiscal ideals?”?

But that changed quickly. Stratfor, through others working in conjunction with the FBI, soon linked U.S. Day of Rage to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

In early September, U.S. Day of Rage, which supported the Sept. 17 call to occupy Wall Street, received Twitter messages that falsely accused it of being affiliated with terrorist groups. The messages came from a privately owned security and intelligence contractor, Provide Security, managed by Thomas Ryan, who works for U.S. military and government agencies, and Dr. Kevin Schatzle, a former FBI, Secret Service and New York City Police Department counterterrorism agent who is on the advisory board of a private intelligence firm that sells technology to profile and interrogate terrorism suspects. On Sept. 1 U.S. Day of Rage received three private, direct Twitter messages that read:

“Now you are really in over your head with this. Muslims from an Afghanistan Jihad site have jumped in. …”

“You seem peaceful, but #Anonymous will tarnish that reputation and FAST! They plan to hack NYPD and Banks for #OccupyWallStreet with #RefRef.”

“Just a heads up. I watched your training videos, but do you realize the #Anonymous relationship/infiltration will cause you MANY problems.”

On Oct. 14, 2011, Provide Security’s Ryan published an article—“The Email Archive of #OccupyWallStreet Movement,” on the Andrew Breitbart Presents Big Government website page—that tied U.S. Day of Rage to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. Ryan said in the article that he had “recruited other people to help U.S. begin the collection of data” from social media sites that included U.S. Day of Rage. The article goes on:

On August 10, 2011, the hacker group, “Anonymous” announced that it would join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. That’s what sparked my interest in monitoring #OccupyWallStreet.

I reached out to a colleague and asked if he would be interested in studying the protest with me. At first, it seemed disorganized, and we believed it would only be a few hundred protestors.

As we engaged in monitoring its growth, we recruited other people to help us begin the collection of data available via social media. We began mapping out key players, and monitored Anonymous’s efforts to organize protests in the San Francisco Bay area public transportation system (#opBART) in order to detect patterns of key influences.

Then, at the end of August, we were alerted by a fellow researcher that information about USDoR (U.S. Day of Rage, to which Occupy Wall Street is connected) had been posted on Shamuk and Al-Jihad, two Al-Qaeda recruitment sites. We began to take the “Occupy” protest more seriously, and dedicated more time to researching and monitoring.

Days later, Anonymous announced that it would be releasing its new DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) tool. Because of the Al-Qaeda posting, we contacted the New York Field Office of the FBI so they could investigate the potential threat. From that point on, we decided we needed to include the Human Element of Intelligence (HUMINT), and to infiltrate the protestors to map their ties to Anonymous, and to the postings on Shamuk and Al-Jahad.

Though all this sounds like the delusions of the mentally imbalanced, or perhaps mentally impaired, it was enough to trigger a response within the twisted minds of those who work from the shadows of our security and surveillance state. O’Brien, who was working at the time as a digital media architect for a publicly traded energy efficiency firm, was told by the company’s director of federal programs, a former interrogator and foreign language specialist with the Massachusetts Army National Guard, that he had been asked about her by U.S. government agents numerous times. She was pulled off several projects and then pushed out of her job.

Now the engine of conspiracy, which feeds the machine, was in full gear. On Jan. 11, Australian Security Magazine published an article titled “Radical Islam: Global influence in domestic affairs” that directly tied U.S. Day of Rage to radical Islamic groups. It read, in part:

More recently we found the same types of activity by radical Islamists during the planning of the U.S. Day of Rage that was scheduled for September 17th 2011. While it certainly did not take root and there were none of the violent clashes that took place during the UK riots, none the less the same types of people were there seeking to influence proceedings. Those aiming to influence the U.S. Day of Rage followed a similar pattern as the group and individuals we found trying to influence groups for CHOGM [Commonwealth Heads of Government]. Most were looking to promote violent confrontation, while some were spreading low level jihadist propaganda.

One of the plaintiffs in our lawsuit, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who has advocated transparency laws that would clear the way for WikiLeaks to operate in Iceland and helped produce a videoabout the 2007 Baghdad airstrike that killed two journalists and nine other civilians, did not appear in court. Author Naomi Wolf, who, along with Cornel West, has offered to join me, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelander and three others as plaintiffs, read Jónsdóttir’s affidavit to the court.

In January 2011 Jónsdóttir, although she is not a U.S. citizen, was served by the United States Department of Justice with a subpoena demanding information “about all [her] tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” The demanded information, which she has refused to provide, includes all mailing addresses and billing information, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, and all known email accounts, as well as the “means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. The Justice Department subpoenaed records for the period from Nov. 1, 2009, to the present. The foreign minister of Iceland advised Jónsdóttir not to travel to the United States for the court hearing on Thursday, fearing she might be detained, especially after the Justice Department refused to issue a statement in writing stating that she would not be held if she appeared on American soil.

Perhaps the most chilling exchange on Thursday took place between government lawyers and Judge Forrest. The judge, who will probably rule in May, repeatedly asked for assurance that the plaintiffs would not be subject to detention under the NDAA. It was an assurance the two government lawyers refused to give. She asked U.S. Assistant Attorney Benjamin Torrance whether the government would see a book containing the sentence “I support the political goals of the Taliban” as providing “material support” for “associated forces.”

Torrance did not rule out such an interpretation.

“You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked.

“We can’t say that,” Torrance answered.

“Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked.

“That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said.

“Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked.

“We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered.

“What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.”?

“We have not come to a position on that,” he said.

“So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said.

“I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”

There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M. Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011. Investigative reporter James Bamford wrote in the latest issue of Wired magazine that the National Security Agency is building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” Bamford noted that the NSA has established listening posts throughout the country to collect, store and examine billions of email messages and phone calls.

If we lose this case it will hand to the vast network of operatives and agencies that investigate and demonize anyone who is not subservient to the corporate state the power to detain citizens and strip them of due process. It will permit the security and surveillance state to brand as terrorists any nonviolent protesters and movements, along with social and political critics, that in the government’s imagination have any trace of connection to al-Qaida or “associated forces.” If the National Defense Authorization Act is not reversed it will plunge us into despotism, leaving us without a voice, trapped in eddies of fear and terror, unsure of what small comment, what small action, could be misinterpreted to push us out of our jobs or send us to jail. This is the future before us. And we better fight back now while we can.

Source: Truthdig

Where Is The Soul? In The Eyes, Psychologists Claim

As the cheesy pickup line suggests, your eyes may really be the window to your soul. According to a new study by Yale University psychologists, most people intuitively feel as if their “self” — otherwise known as their soul, or ego — exists in or near their eyes.

In three experiments, the researchers probed preschoolers’ and adults’ intuitions about the precise location of the self in the body. The participants were shown pictures of cartoon characters, and in each picture a small object (a buzzing fly or snowflake) was positioned near a different section of the character’s body (face or torso or feet, etc.), always at the same distance away.

The study participants were then asked which pictures showed the object closest to the body, the hypothesis being that people would interpret the object as closest when it was near what they intuitively believed to be the soul’s location.

As reported earlier this month in the journal Cognition, the vast majority of the 4-year-olds and adults in the study thought the object was closest to the character when it was near the character’s eyes. This was true even when the cartoon character was a green-skinned alien whose eyes were on its chest rather than in its head – suggesting that it was the eyes, rather than the brain, that seemed most closely tied to the soul.

According to lead researcher Christina Starmans of the Mind and Development Lab at Yale, she and study co-author Paul Bloom designed their experiment after a conversation in which they discussed intuitively feeling as if their consciousnesses were “located” near their eyes, and that objects seemed closest to them when near their eyes. “We set out to test whether this was a universally shared intuition,” Starmans told Life’s Little Mysteries.

As it turned out, it was — even among young children.

[Take the test]

“The indirect nature of our method, and the fact that these judgments are shared by adults and preschoolers, suggests that our results do not reflect a culturally learned understanding … but might instead be rooted in a more intuitive or phenomenological sense of where in our bodies we reside,” the authors concluded.

However, experts disagreed about the implications of the research. Neurologist Robert Burton, author of numerous books and articles on themind-body connection, thinks the results don’t rule out the possibility that Westerners’ sense that we exist in our eyes is culturally indoctrinated.

Burton, former chief of the division of neurology at University of California, San Francisco-Mount Zion Hospital, said the most interesting result of the study seems to have been brushed under the rug by the researchers: It is that the 4-year-olds and adults didn’t actually give the same responses during the experiment with the alien cartoon character. Almost as many children thought the buzzing fly was closest to the alien when it was near his eyeless head than when it was near his eye-bearing chest. Meanwhile, the adults almost unanimously selected the chest-eyes. “This suggests that something has transpired during the time between age 4 and adulthood that affects our understanding of the identity of other people,” Burton said.

In other words, it seems we learn to associate identity with eyes, rather than doing it innately from birth. Perhaps, for example, eyes take on more importance as we develop awareness of the social cues that other people convey with their eyes. Or, perhaps it’s because adults have learned that it’s good etiquette to make eye-contact.

Furthermore, the study participants may not have interpreted the idea of the buzzing fly and snowflake being “closer” to a cartoon characters as meaning that they were closer to its soul or self. Objects look bigger when they are nearer one’s eyes, and this may have confused the participants into labeling them as “closer.” [Gallery: The Most Amazing Optical Illusions]

Georg Northoff, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Ottawa, agrees that the authors’ interpretation of their experimental results is “far-fetched.” The issues with this particular study aside, Northoff said a large body of evidence suggests most people do have a sense of self that physically manifests itself in their bodies. “We always have the tendency to locate something and materialize it in the body as mind or as soul,” he wrote in an email. “That seems to be predisposed by the way our brain works, though the mechanisms remain unclear.”

It is also worth noting that the part of the brain in which self-awareness is thought to arise, called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, happens to be located behind the eyes. It is possible, Burton said, that we may “feel” as if we are physically located near our eyes because our identity emerges in the neurons there.

Source: Natalie Wolchover | Life’s Little Mysteries

The 50-State Foreclosure Settlement

Why Hasn’t Anyone Gone to Jail?

Under the terms of the 50-state mortgage foreclosure settlement, US taxpayers could end up paying billions in penalties that were supposed to be paid by the banks. That’s the gist of a front-page story which appeared in the Financial Times on Thursday, February 17. The widely-cited article by Shahien Nasiripour notes that the 5 banks that will be effected by the settlement — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial – will be able to use Obama’s mortgage modification program (HAMP) to reduce loan balances and “receive cash payments of up to 63 cents on the dollar for every dollar of loan principal forgiven.”

And that’s not all. If borrowers stay current on their payments after their loans are restructured, the banks could qualify for additional government funds which (according to the FT) “could then turn a profit for the banks according to people familiar with the settlement terms.”

How do you like them apples? Leave it to the bank-friendly Obama administration to turn a penalty into a windfall. In effect, the settlement will help the banks avoid losses on mortgages that are vastly overpriced on their books and which were probably headed into foreclosure anyway.

Taxpayers will stump up the money for the principle writedowns that will allow the banks to extract even more tribute from underwater homeowners. What kind of penalty is that?

Here’s how Mark Gongloff sums it up over at Huffington Post:

“Banks will get government cash as an incentive to work down mortgages as part of a settlement that is supposed to punish them for their malpractice. Banks have been getting taxpayer money under loan modification programs like HAMP all along: $615 million in modification incentives so far. Those incentives were tripled on Jan. 28 just days before the mortgage settlement was announced, making the deal appear even sweeter for the banks.

“You can’t say this settlement has anything to do with deterrence or is punitive in nature if money is flowing into banks from taxpayers as part of the settlement,” said New York University Law professor Neil Barofsky, former special inspector-general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.” (“Mortgage Foreclosure Settlement: Who Pays?”, Huffington Post)

Of course, no one knows for sure how many perks and “bennies” the banks will eventually nab,  because the written copy of the settlement still hasn’t been released. Our guess is that the banks’ will come out smelling like a rose and that the 50 Attorneys General will end up looking like fools for taking their victory lap too soon.

Keep in mind, that the banks are really only on the hook for $5 billion in cash. The rest of the $25 billion settlement will be shrugged off onto investors in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) many of who are retirees and pensioners. They’re going to get clobbered while the perpetrators of this nationwide crime walk away Scott-free.

It’s also worth reviewing what this case is all about, which is industrial-scale fraud directed at millions of people whose lives have been ruined by the banks. Here’s a clip from an article in Reuters that helps to put it all in perspective:

“A report this week showing rampant foreclosure abuse in San Francisco reflects similar levels of lender fraud and faulty documentation across the United States, say experts and officials who have done studies in other parts of the country.

The audit of almost 400 foreclosures in San Francisco found that 84 percent of them appeared to be illegal, according to the study released by the California city on Wednesday.

“The audit in San Francisco is the most detailed and comprehensive that has been done – but it’s likely those numbers are comparable nationally,” Diane Thompson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told Reuters.

Across the country from California, Jeff Thingpen, register of deeds in Guildford County, North Carolina, examined 6,100 mortgage documents last year, from loan notes to foreclosure paperwork.

Of those documents, created between January 2008 and December 2010, 4,500 showed signature irregularities, a telltale sign of the illegal practice of “robosigning” documents.” (“Foreclosure abuse rampant across U.S., experts say”, Reuters)

Repeat: “84 percent of them appeared to be illegal …(and) those numbers are comparable nationally.”

So, why are we talking about “mortgage foreclosure settlements” instead of criminal prosecutions? Why hasn’t anyone gone to jail with evidence this compelling?

Look: The banks have been foreclosing on homes they don’t even legally own. That’s what robosigning is. Would you be willing to accept a measly $2,000 for being tossed out of your home and onto the street by someone who doesn’t even own the mortgage? Of course, not.

9 million homes have been lost to foreclosure since 2007, and there will be another 9 million before we’re done. Homeowners have lost $8 trillion in home equity (in the last 4 years) and 11 million people are currently underwater on their mortgages. All of this is unprecedented. All of this is the result of fraud.

Forget about the mortgage-foreclosure settlement. It means nothing. Someone has to go to jail. That’s what matters.

Can America Survive The Cassandra Syndrome As To Population Growth?

America added 115 million people from 1965 to 2012.  Demographic experts showed 315 million people living in America in January 2012.  They expect an added 85 million by 2035 to reach 400 million.   The consequences grow irreversible and unsolvable.

As population rises, carrying capacity drops.  What is “carrying capacity?”  For a quick rendition, it means, “The amount resources on a given piece of land to allow long term sustainable human, plant and animal life.”

If animals or humans exceed ‘carrying capacity’ of any given land mass, they crash in numbers by various means, i.e., famine, war and disease.  Garrett Hardin, noted biologist called it, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”  (Source:www.GarrettHardinSociety.org)

For the 7.1 billion humans in the 21^st century and headed for 10.2 billion in 40 years, oil resources will define that capacity quotient.  Noted Geologist Walter Youngquist said, “This is going to be an interesting decade, for the perfect storm is brewing—energy, immigration and oil imports.  China grows in direct confrontation for remaining oil.  I think the USA is on a big, slippery downhill slope.  Will the thin veneer of civilization survive?” To see how fast we grow, visitwww.populationmedia.com

“Cassandra Syndrome”: The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem.  The origin of the name is derived from Cassandra, who, using her prescience, foresaw the demise of Troy. No one believed her.

Youngquist continued, “Beyond oil, population is the number one problem of the 21^st century, for when oil is gone as we know and use it today—and it WILL be gone—population will still be here.”

The world uses 84 million barrels daily.  That’s 42 gallons to a drum.  By mid century, China, now placing 27,000 new cars on its highways every seven days, expects to burn 98 million barrels of oil daily—all by itself!  Oil will run out because of limited reserves in the ground. (Source: The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunsteler)

Dr. Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado said, “Present population growth rate is putting our children at risk.  They will experience holes in the ozone causing serious biological effects on plants and humans.  World ocean fisheries are collapsing from endless plundering.  Two thirds of the world’s people will suffer from water shortages by 2025.  It is not possible to sustain population growth or growth in rates of consumption of resources.”

Where is the worst overpopulation problem on the planet according to Dr. Bartlett?  “It’s right here in the United States!”

Dr. Bartlett said, “Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted, or advanced, by having continued population growth—at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”

How many people in the United States are enough?  How far down the gopher hole do we want to dig ourselves?  At what point is enough—too much?  If we shut down the borders today with zero immigration, while enjoying our sustainable 2.03 fertility level of American women on average, we would still grow via “population momentum” by an added 40 million.

In other words, we’re painting ourselves into a perilous corner. Once the numbers manifest, our society will suffer irreversible consequences with unsolvable problems.  One visit to Los Angeles will show you they suffer toxic air, dwindling safe drinking water, gridlock to the point of insanity, water shortages, endless highways and housing development.  Consider San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Denver and all other large cities grow beyond the bounds of reason!

Sustainable growth, slow growth, managed growth, smart growth and all other kinds of growth are oxymoronic.  There is no such thing as sustainable growth.  Why? All growth exceeds carrying capacity at some point.  In other words, the bubble bursts, the dam breaks, the glass spills, the balloon pops and the red-lined engine blows up.

“Population growth is given as a cause of the problems identified, but eliminating the cause is not mentioned as a solution,” Bartlett said. “We are prescribing aspirin for cancer.”

At the current rate of growth driven by immigration, America will double its population just past mid century—from 300,000,000 to 600,000,000.  As long as the underlying cause of a problem is not dealt with, we, and our leaders, as a nation, perpetuate a falsehood which Mark Twain called ‘silent-assertion’:  “Almost all lies are acts,” he said.  “I am speaking of the lie of ‘silent-assertion’.  It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of emancipation in the North, agitators got small help from anyone.  They could not break the universal stillness that reigned from the pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society–the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent-assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which intelligent people were interested.

“The conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity (unlimited growth) or sham (unlimited immigration), never in the interest of the respectable (average citizens).  It is the most timid and shabby of all lies.  The silent-assertion is that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”

Silent-assertion worked until it brought China, India and Bangladesh to their knees with sheer misery of numbers.  How do I know?  I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia and other overpopulated regions.  China, even with enforced one child per family, grows by 8 million annually. India, with 1.2 billion, adds 12 million yearly.  Bangladesh suffers 157 million people in a landmass the size of Iowa.  Do you see anyone racing to immigrate to those havens of human overload?

What I ask is, do we as a nation, want millions upon millions of added people from countries already exceeding their carrying capacity?  Legal immigration proves as dangerous as illegal.  To think otherwise will allow that silent-assertion to create another China or India in America.  Just imagine Iowa with 157 million people and all the rest of the United States with THAT kind of population density!

Albert Einstein said, “The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.”

We are no longer living in the 20^th century America with only 75 million people riding horses or trains.  We’re in the 21^stcentury with cars and jets and 315 million people added to the 7.1 billion on the planet–creating horrific environmental consequences.  Again, we had to change our ‘silent-assertion’ about slavery and we MUST change our ‘silent-assertion’ about population growth and economic growth.  If we continue steaming full speed ahead like the captain of the Titanic, our children will be on board when we hit the peak oil, global warming, ozone holes, collapsing species, air pollution and other commensurate problems related to the overpopulation “iceberg.”  Most died on the Titanic because there weren’t enough life boats.

Maybe some of us choose to maintain our ‘silent-assertion’ in the face of growing consequences, but how can any parent or grandparent be that callous to their children?

Is Now The Time To Move Away From Major U.S. Cities?

As the U.S. economy falls apart and as the world becomes increasingly unstable, more Americans than ever are becoming “preppers”.  It is estimated that there are at least two million preppers in the United States today, but nobody really knows.  The truth is that it is hard to take a poll because a lot of preppers simply do not talk about their preparations.  Your neighbor could be storing up food in the garage or in an extra bedroom and you might never even know it.  An increasing number of Americans are convinced that we are on the verge of some really bad things happening.  But will just storing up some extra food and supplies be enough?  What is going to happen if we see widespread rioting in major U.S. cities like George Soros is predicting?  What is going to happen if the economy totally falls to pieces and our city centers descend into anarchy like we saw in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?  In some major U.S. cities such as Detroit, looting .  There are some sections of Detroit where entire blocks of houses are being slowly dismantled by thieves and stripped of anything valuable.  Sadly, the economy is going to get a lot worse than it is at the moment.  So is now the time to move away from major U.S. cities?  Should preppers be seeking safer locations for themselves and their families?  Those are legitimate questions.

According to a recent Gallup poll, satisfaction with the government is now at an all-time low.  Americans are rapidly losing faith in virtually every major institution in society.

Anger and frustration are rising to very dangerous levels, and we are rapidly approaching a boiling point.

When people feel as though they have lost everything, they get desperate.

And desperate people do desperate things.

In many communities in the United States today, crime has become so terrifying that people are literally sleeping with their guns.

The following is a story from Rancho Cordova, California that one of my readers recently sent me….

When I first moved here, it was not a bad place, it was quiet and clean.

However, over the past three years this place has gone to the dumps there are thugs and unruly people everywhere.

I have prevented two car break-ins by scaring these thugs away.

While I was home on thanksgiving weekend, someone decided to break into my apartment.

They trashed my place stole all my items and even took my law enforcement (LE) vehicle to include my equipment.

I m sure they had been watching me for a while because they did not take items that contained my identification.

Thank god, I had my weapon with me.

In many areas of the country, law enforcement resources are being dramatically cut back due to budget problems at the same time that crime is rapidly rising.

Right now, the city of Detroit is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.  Officials there recently announced that due to budget constraints, all police stations will be closed to the public for 16 hours a day.  From now on, they will only be open to the public from 8 AM to 4 PM.

But in Detroit the police are needed now more than ever.  The following is what one British reporter found during his visit to Detroit….

Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.

The population of Detroit is less than half of what it used to be.  Over the past few decades people have left in droves, and large sections of the city are in an advanced state of decay.

Not too many people want to buy homes in Detroit now.  At this point, the median price of a home in Detroit is just $6000.

The following video contains some video footage of the “ruins of Detroit” that is hard to believe….

Detroit has become a very scary place.  100 bus drivers in Detroit recently refused to drive their routes out of fear of being attacked on the streets.  The head of the bus drivers union, Henry Gaffney, said that the drivers were literally “scared for their lives“….

“Our drivers are scared, they’re scared for their lives. This has been an ongoing situation about security. I think yesterday kind of just topped it off, when one of my drivers was beat up by some teenagers down in the middle of Rosa Parks and it took the police almost 30 minutes to get there, in downtown Detroit,” said Gaffney.

But it is not just Detroit that is having these kinds of problems.

In Cleveland, over 50 percent of all children are living in poverty and abandoned houses are everywhere.

The city has already demolished about 1,000 homes, and there is a plan to demolish 20,000 more homes.  The following comes from a recent CBS News report by Scott Pelley….

Perfectly good homes, worth 75, 100 thousand dollars or more a couple of years ago, are being ripped to splinters in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Here, the great recession left one fifth of all houses vacant. The owners walked away because they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep paying on a mortgage debt that can be twice the value of the home. Cleveland waited four years for home values to recover and now they’ve decided to face facts and bury the dead.

Down in St. Louis they have a different problem.  In some of the worst areas of the city, roving packs of wild dogs are a serious threat to children that are walking to school.  A recent report by the local CBS affiliate in St. Louisdescribed the situation this way….

…Lewis Reed is sounding the alarm. “I’ve witnessed packs of dogs, 10 and 15 dogs running together, and I’ve seen all these dogs I’m talking about they don’t have collars, they don’t have tags, these are truly wild dogs,” he said.

Reed says stray dogs are terrorizing the north side. “It’s obscene that parents have to walk their kids to school, in some parts of the city, with a golf club to fend off wild dogs.”

How would you feel if you had to fend off wild packs of dogs as you walked your child to school?

These kinds of conditions can be found out on the west coast as well.

For example, there is an area of San Francisco that is known as “Hunter’s Point” that is an absolute nightmare.  In Hunter’s Point, over half of the population lives in poverty and more than half of all children live in a home where there is no father present.  The following is what one reporter discovered on a visit to Hunter’s Point….

Abernathy and I cut through the complex, tromping over an expanse of dirt and concrete toward the northeast end of the development, where a row of apartments looked down from a grassy hill. We paused next to a vacant, boarded-over unit to take in the scene: A stream of ****, piss, tampons, and toilet paper spewed from a dark hole in the sidewalk, poured down the hill, and formed a sort of **** lagoon next to the street. Weeds, about six inches tall, were growing in the little lagoon.

Raw ****, obviously, is not cool. Beyond the fact that it smells and looks nasty, fecal matter provides a haven for dangerous bacteria, most notably E. coli, a virulent pathogen that can sicken and even kill humans, especially infants.

When conditions like this reign, it is a prime breeding ground for crime.

In major U.S. cities all over the United States, drug dealing, gang activity and prostitution are on the rise.  The following comes from a recent article in the New York Times….

In November, a terrified 13-year-old girl pounded on an apartment door in Brooklyn. When a surprised woman answered, the girl pleaded for a phone. She called her mother, and then dialed 911.

The girl, whom I’ll call Baby Face because of her looks, frantically told police that a violent pimp was selling her for sex. He had taken her to the building and ordered her to go to an apartment where a customer was waiting, she said, and now he was waiting downstairs to make sure she did not escape. She had followed the pimp’s directions and gone upstairs, but then had pounded randomly on this door in hopes of getting help.

In some major U.S. cities, the gangs have virtually taken over.  In an article entitled “City of Ruins“, Chris Hedges described what life is like today in Camden, New Jersey….

There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city’s few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch.

As I wrote about the other day, the FBI says that there are now 1.4 million gang members inside this country.  That number has increased by 40 percent since 2009.

Organized criminal behavior by groups of young people is on the rise all over the nation.  Just check out  which shows a flash mob robbery happening in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Sadly, this is just the beginning.

This country is still enjoying a tremendous amount of prosperity.  We still have a very high standard of living compared to most of the rest of the world.

So how nightmarish are things going to get when the economy gets really bad?

The most frightening thing is when these criminals start invading private homes.

The following home invasion story from Sacramento, California was sent to me by one of my readers a while back….

Somebody got into my sister’s house last night while she was out. My mom was upstairs, but didn’t hear anything. Whoever it was, they ate some chips and sorted through a stack of maternity clothes my sister had ready for selling on ebay. He left a dirty pair of boxer shorts and a bottom dentures on the dining room table. Fortunately, he was gone when she got home. I’m amazed, but the police actually came out and collected fingerprints and his boxers and false teeth. Probably a homeless guy. He may have switched his dirty boxers for a clean pair of maternity jeans, so the police just have to look for a guy wearing women’s maternity pants with no lower teeth. 

Because of stuff like this, an increasing number of Americans have decided that it is better to be armed.

The truth is that you never know when you will get jumped.

For example, in Pennsylvania the other day one 65-year-old man was suddenly knocked off his bicycle by three teen thugs.

The 65-year-old man responded by pulling out his gun and shooting two of them.  One of the teens was killed.

Down along the border with Mexico, many ranchers have discovered that a gun battle could potentially erupt on any night.  The federal government has refused to protect the border, and so millions of illegals just keep streaming on in.  The following was recently posted on standwitharizona.com….

Barbed wire fencing doesn’t keep illegal aliens off the property anymore. One Starr County, TX rancher doesn’t have time to worry about the illegals these days. He now worries about the smugglers protecting their loads.

“I don’t think they would have any conscience of taking someone’s life,” the rancher says.

He saw that will to kill firsthand. A smuggler shot at him on his own land.

“One round was fired at me, and it missed my head by about two feet,” says the rancher.

He says there’s only way to react.

“Fire all the rounds you have, reload, and do it again,” says the rancher.

The more stories like this you read, the easier it is to understand why more than 10 million guns were sold in the United States during 2011.

The truth is that you never know when you may need to defend yourself.

This past New Year’s Eve, a single mother named Sarah McKinley was home alone with her three-month old son when she discovered that two armed men were trying to invade her home.  If she had not had a gun, there is no telling what might have happened.  The following is from a news story  about that incident….

An Oklahoma woman was recently home with her 3 month old son when two men tried to break in.  Armed with a shot gun and a pistol she called 9-1-1.

Operator: “Are your doors locked?”

Caller: “Yes, I’ve got two guns in my hand.   Is it ok to shoot him if he comes in this door?”

Operator: “I can’t tell you what you can do but you do what you have to do to protect your baby.”

The mother did shoot killing one of the intruders.  Oklahoma police called the shooting justified.

What would you have done in that situation?

America is rapidly changing, and we all need to adapt to the new reality all around us.

The truth is that America is not the same place it used to be.  In some U.S. cities, authorities are actually dumping dead bodies into mass graves.

Just check out what the Daily Mail says has been going on in Chicago….

It’s a practice more closely associated with third world countries, but in bleak times in a Chicago-area suburb, 30 people were buried in a mass grave on Wednesday.

The pauper’s burial section at Homewood Memorial Gardens was established for those who could not afford to pay for a burial plot.

And it is a problem that’s sweeping America as tough economic times have led to an increase in the number of indigent burials the morgue must perform.

All over the country, major U.S. cities are flat broke and are rapidly decaying.  They are filled with impoverished people that are rapidly becoming angrier and more frustrated.

There simply are not enough jobs for everyone.  Millions of ordinary Americans spend their days agonizing over the fact that they cannot provide even a basic living for themselves and their families.

And as the economy gets even worse, the economic despair in this country is going to grow to unprecedented levels.

So is now the time to move away from major U.S. cities?

In the end, each of us is going to have to answer that question for ourselves.

Jobs are scarce, so if you have a good job right now it may not be wise to give it up.  It can be incredibly challenging to move to a new area when you don’t have a job.

One solution may be to move farther away from your current job so that you are in a more rural setting.  But the rising cost of gasoline can make that a very expensive proposition.

Some families are purchasing second homes that they can “bug out” to in the event of a major disaster or emergency.  But if your financial resources are limited that may not be an option for you.

In the final analysis, you have just got to do the best you can with what you have.

But if you are able to move, it is better to do it while times are relatively stable (like now) than when times are very unstable.

So what do all of you think?

Do you think that now is the time to move away from major U.S. cities?

Source: The American Dream

Here’s to The End of The ‘Special Relationship’ and More Outing of Mossad

The bumper sticker reads, “I love my country…but I think we should start seeing other people” and recent events lead me to believe it could actually be happening in regards to the “special relationship” between US and Israel.

The American-Israeli massive missile drill codenamed “Austere Challenge 12,” that was to deploy thousands of US troops and missile defense systems to Israel this spring and Israeli forces to the US European Command in Germany [US-Israeli Spring Will Bring Deployment of Thousands of US Soldiers ] was postponed on Friday the 13^th most likely rooted in righteous concerns that those war games would escalate tensions with Iran.

However,  The Jerusalem Post reported that Defense Minister Ehud Barak led talks with the Pentagon about rescheduling the drill and that US Capt. John Ross, spokesman for the US European Command/EUCOM said, “It is not unusual for such exercises to be postponed, and leaders of both sides believe that the best participation of all units will be best achieved later in the year.” [1]

This mornings news reported by London’s The Sunday Times reminded this reporter of the idiom, “With friends like that, who needs enemies” as I read verification that it was Mossad agents that were behind last week’s assassination of another Iranian nuclear scientist.

According to The Sunday Times, the assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was similar to that seen in “espionage films” and planned over a period of many months with extensive surveillance.

It also quoted an unnamed Israeli sources claiming that the killing was a precursor to a military strike, which would make rebuilding nuclear facilities more difficult for Iran, should they be bombed. [2]

The Israeli source said, “There is zero tolerance for mistakes. By nature, every failure not only risks the neck of the agents but also risks turning into an international scandal.”

Another Friday the 13^th report by Foreign Policy exposed a a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration.

The memos describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents.

According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a ‘false flag’ operation.

The memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, but the same was not true for Israel’s Mossad.

The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.

A US intelligence officer said, “It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with. Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.” [3]

According to a currently serving U.S. intelligence officer, President Bush “went absolutely ballistic” when briefed on the contents of a report that “sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk. There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”

Israel’s activities jeopardized the Bush administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah and undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror.

A former intelligence officer said, “It’s easy to understand why Bush was so angry. After all, it’s hard to engage with a foreign government if they’re convinced you’re killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same.”

That Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush’s national security team, pitting those who wondered “just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on” against those who argued, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” [Ibid]

Within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers.

In November 2010 the State Department added Jundallah to its list of foreign terrorist organizations.

According to a currently serving officer, U.S. intelligence services have received clearance to cooperate with Israel on a number of classified intelligence-gathering operations focused on Iran’s nuclear program which are technical in nature and not about covert actions targeting Iran’s infrastructure or political or military leadership.

A recently retired intelligence officer said, “We don’t do bang and boom. And we don’t do political assassinations.”

According to retired and current intelligence officers, Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, “They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads and we say to them — ‘Don’t even go there. The answer is no.’”

Many but not all of the details of Israel’s involvement with Jundallah are now known and anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel’s actions has become more outspoken, “This was stupid and dangerous. Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they’re supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don’t think that’s true.” [Ibid]

Among those who would agree is President George Washington, who warned US in his Farewell Address:

“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.”

Another place Israel never should have gone was to use the name, identity and Passport of Cindy, sister-in-law of Cheryl Hanin Ben Tov, the American-Israeli Mossad operative who trapped Israel’s nuclear whistle blower, Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 in London.

On April 6, 1996, in an investigative report, The St. Petersburg Times, located Cheryl Ben Tov and reported that she continues to work for the Mossad.

It is illegal under American-Israeli diplomatic protocols for the Mossad to operate in America.

In 1986, Hanin was a 26-year-old Mossad agent posing as an American tourist in London. She grew up in Pennsylvania and Orlando in a Jewish family that owed its affluence to tires.

I moved to Orlando in the mid 1970′s and still can recall her father, Stanley Hanin, the founder and pitchman for the Allied Discount Tires chain stores, shrill refrain in his self-produced cheesy TV commercials, “Tahrs ain’t pretty, but you gotta have them!”

As her parents went through an acrimonious divorce, Hanin embarked upon a long love affair with the Jewish State. In 1977, she spent a semester in Israel, studied Hebrew and Jewish history and threw herself into her academic and religious studies in a three-month residential course funded by the World Zionist Organization.

Upon graduation in 1978, she joined the Israeli army and married Ofer Ben Tov and then was recruited by the Mossad.

In 1986, “She left Israel to flee the media and the people who burrowed into her life,” a friend in Florida told the Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

“This bothered her a lot. She was terrified. She felt the need to run. Since this affair Cheryl only wants one thing: a normal quiet life.” [2]

See Photos of Cheryl and her husband here:
http://www.danheller.com/hungary-grp-bentov.html

Cindy/Cheryl Hanin Ben Tov has also been living the good life in an exclusive gated community golf course home- purchased in Hanin’s name in 1998 at $528,000.00:

See photo here:

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/03/21/Worldandnation/The_spy___and_the_man.shtml

When I asked Vanunu what he was thinking when he took off with Cindy, he maintained eye contact and readily replied, “It wasn’t like THAT-when Maxwell’s paper published my photo without ever talking to me and some of the stolen Dimona photos with a very bad story against me, I knew the Mossad was after me. Cindy said she had a sister in Rome and I thought I would be safe there until I could return to London.

“We went to movies and art galleries, I trusted her. But, as soon as I got into the apartment, I was hit on the head and drugged. When I woke up and they took me for interrogation, they threw the Times article on the table and said, ‘Look, what you did.’ I was so relieved they had published it and that I had done what I did.”

On 5 October 1986, The Sunday Times published the front-page photo story of the Dimona reactor that spread over three pages revealing Israel’s arsenal of upwards of 200 nuclear, which was also five days after the Mossad kidnapped Vanunu and to this day he is still waiting for his right to leave Tel Aviv.

In June 2005, after three days of interviews with Vanunu, he blew my mind when he said:

“Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’

“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection.

“The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground.

“In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.

“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.

“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.”

Among those who have also been warning that the “special relationship” is not in the best interests of Americans are the USS LIBERTY Veterans.

The LIBERTY Vets have been calling for justice since 6 June 1967, when on that day in infamy, the LBJ Administration failed to support the troops and Congress failed to hold Israel accountable for the deaths of thirty four Americans and the spilled blood of 171 who were wounded due to Israel’s wanton, unprovoked attack and “deliberate attempt to destroy an American [spy] ship and kill her entire crew. In attacking the USS Liberty, Israel committed acts of murder against U.S. servicemen and an act of war against the United States.”- Adm. Thomas Moorer, former Joint Chiefs of Staff on 16 January 16, 2004, for The Stars and Stripes.

This candidate for US House of Representatives also finds it “amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with” because they don’t “give a damn what we” Americans think; and so I go on the WWW Record calling for an end to the “special relationship” with Israel and for a relationship that holds Israel and Iran to the same criteria, for a Nuclear Free Middle East, an end to the Occupation of Palestine and a free Vanunu Mordechai.

Learn More:

http://www.eileenfleming.org/

1. http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=253758

2. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/sunday-times-mossad-agents-behind-iran-scientist-assasination-1.407593

3. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag?page=full

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