American Blog

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Real-World Hackers Attack During Simulated Attack By Hackers

It’s important that emergency drills are conducted to deal with eventualities that could throw society into chaos, whether they come from terrorists or natural disasters. Doesn’t always mean they will cope with all eventualities, however.

Bizarrely enough, there were terror-and-accident related drills being held on the mornings of September 11, 2001 and July 7, 2005, simulating almost the same kinds of terrorist attacks that occurred on those very same days, at the same times, in the US and England.

From the Associated Press :

It’s the government’s idea of a really bad day: Washington’s Metro trains shut down. Seaport computers in New York go dark. Bloggers reveal locations of railcars with hazardous materials. Airport control towers are disrupted in Philadelphia and Chicago. Overseas, a mysterious liquid is found on London’s subway.

And that’s just for starters.

Those incidents were among dozens of detailed, mock disasters confronting officials rapid-fire in the U.S. government’s biggest-ever “Cyber Storm” war game, according to hundreds of pages of heavily censored files obtained by The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department ran the exercise to test the nation’s hacker defenses, with help from the State Department, Pentagon, Justice Department, CIA, National Security Agency and others.

Imagined villains include hackers, bloggers and even reporters. After mock electronic attacks overwhelmed computers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an unspecified “major news network” airing reports about the attackers refused to reveal its sources to the government. Other simulated reporters were duped into spreading “believable but misleading” information that worsened fallout by confusing the public and financial markets, according to the government’s files.

The $3 million, invitation-only war game simulated what the U.S. described as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers. The government is organizing another multimillion-dollar war game, Cyber Storm 2, to take place in early March.

For the participants — including government officials from the United States, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and executives from leading technology and transportation companies — the mock disasters came fast and furious: Hacker break-ins at an airline; stolen commercial software blueprints; problems with satellite navigation systems; trouble with police radios in Montana; school closures in Washington, Miami and New York; computer failures at border checkpoints.

The incidents were divided among categories: computer attacks, physical attacks or psychological operations.

…key players didn’t understand the role of the premier U.S. organization responsible for fending off major cyber attacks, called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group, and it didn’t have enough technical experts.

Also, the sheer number of mock attacks complicated defensive efforts.

The little-known Cyber Response group, headed by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, represents the largest U.S. government departments — including law enforcement and intelligence agencies — and is the principal organization for responding to cyber attacks and recovering from them.

…government’s files hint at a tantalizing mystery: In the middle of the war game, someone quietly attacked the very computers used to conduct the exercise. Perplexed organizers traced the incident to overzealous players and sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked “IMPORTANT!” reminding them not to probe or attack the game computers.

Obviously the next drill will have to include the scenario of a hacker attack using a terror drill as a cover for a real-world attack on electronic infrastructure.

Which would then require the follow-up exercise to include the scenario of a real-world hacker attacking the terror drill exercise scenario of a real-world hacker attacking the a terror drill attack by hackers.

Infinite regress.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Did you know strong coffee can lead to fathers beating and abusing their children?

Neither did I.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

An ‘added colour’ image of Mercury from the Messenger probe

NASA’s Messenger probe took a swing around Mercury on January 18, and there’s a heap of photos, videos, graphs and laser-spectral-thingy majiggys to be viewed here.

NASA hopes further analysis of its images, and the information provided by future fly-bys and orbits of Mercury by the Messenger probe will solve some of the mysteries of the Sun’s closest planet.

But here’s a more immediate mystery that requires answering : why did NASA spend hundreds of millions of dollars flinging a space vehicle into Mercury’s orbit and then release a pile of only black-and-white footage and photos? (or ’single colour’ as NASA calls black-and-white).

Doesn’t that seem kind of strange?

It sure is annoying.

UPDATE : The bizarre Mercury surface formation nicknamed ‘The Spider’ is getting scientists and space freaks very, very excited. Here’s what it looks like :

And here’s what they think it is :

…a central depression with more than 100 narrow troughs radiating from it.

…the puzzling feature is the kind of surprise that researchers live for.

The researchers wives, children and parents will be happy to know that.

The principal investigator, Sean Solomon, said: “Messenger has sent back data near perfectly, and some of it confirms earlier understandings and some of it tells us something brand new. The Spider is definitely in the category of something we never imagined we’d find.”

Again, why can’t we see this image in colour?

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Snowball Fights In Syria, Floods Carry Crocodiles Into African Towns

Blame climate change, global warming, worldwide media interest or James Bond-esque villains firing up their weather control systems, but there sure seems to be a lot of freakish weather events breaking out across the planet in these first few weeks of 2008 :

Extreme or rare weather conditions played havoc with much of the world yesterday with snowball fights in the Holy Land, ravenous crocodiles terrorizing flood-stricken Africa and China’s worst winter storms in 50 years crippling the transport system.

A rare snowstorm swept the Middle East, blanketing the Holy Land in white, shutting schools and sending excited children into the streets for snowball fights. The weather in Jerusalem topped local newscasts, eclipsing a government report on Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon.

Men in long Arab robes pelted each other with snowballs and children used inflatable tubes as sleds in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Snow blanketed the hills overlooking the Syrian capital of Damascus and covered most mountain villages and blocked roads in Lebanon. Many residents were surprised to see snow when they awoke. For some, it was their first time.

“I am just astonished with the snow. When I saw the snow … I felt happy, my heart was laughing,” Mary Zabaro, 17, said in Ramallah.

“The white snow is covering the old world and I feel like I am in a new world where everything is white, clean, and beautiful,” said Bothaina Smairi, 28.

There was little of beauty in southern regions of Africa where floods and heavy rains have left about 70,000 people in Malawi homeless and destroyed farming communities along the Shire River valley. Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have also been hit by floods that have killed dozens and ruined lives.

Amid the destruction, hungry crocodiles hunted the displaced, emergency officials said. Some 3,000 Mozambicans fled floods in their own country seeking refuge in Malawi.

“They are coming in dug-out canoes from the Mozambican side of the Shire River and our reports indicate that crocodiles are just swimming all over attacking people,” emergency agency official Lillian Ngoma said.

More on the horrors of crocodile-infested floodwaters in southern Africa here :

Crocodiles have killed five people forced to wade through floodwaters devastating Somalia, officials said on Sunday, as the interim government appealed for international help.

Floods have killed scores, driven tens of thousands from their homes, submerged villages, and washed away bridges and roads in south-central Somalia, making it difficult to get aid to victims still trapped and stoking fears of epidemic disease.

Residents in Bulo Burde town in the worst-hit central Hiraan region climbed trees to escape both the floodwaters and hungry crocodiles.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

No country in the world has been as severely hammered by chaotic weather in the past three years than China. Monumental floods, typhoons, drought, desertification and now snow storms so intense that entire cities have virtually shut down.

With the Olympic Games only a few months away, the Chinese government is promising to take control of the weather over Beijing, and banish the usually sudden, and intense summer storms.

The cloud-seeding program to break up storm fronts, or to encourage them to dump their rain before reaching Beijing, has been under trials for years, with the help of the Russians, who claim they can guarantee rain free military parades and celebrations in Red Square.

The official Chinese government news agency says that “all out war” has now been declared on unruly, and disruptive, weather :

There has been much interest in China’s attempt to reduce pollution ahead of the Olympic Games - but that is just one area of intense activity.

There is also a team of scientists working on reducing rainfall, to try to ensure that the Games’ Opening, on August 8, goes as smoothly as possible.

At a news conference, Beijing Meteorological Bureau deputy chief Wang Jian Jie announced that the work is beginning to pay off.

The scientists explained that, depending on the temperature, they have been seeding clouds with liquid nitrogen or silver iodide, to try and curb rainfall.

As the meteorologists work on manipulating the weather later this year, officials across the country are struggling to cope now with the worst winter the country has seen in decades.

Heavy snowfalls and freezing conditions have left hundreds of thousands of people without power.

The outages have led to the cancellation of trains, just as millions of migrant workers try to head home for the Lunar New Year holiday season.

Hundreds of thousands of travellers have been stranded ahead of the peak holiday season.

One worker said he had been stranded for 10 days.

The chaos saw Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao travel to the southern city of Guangzhou to address the crowds at the train station with a megaphone.

In a rare political event, he apologised for the inconvenience.

“I have come to see how everyone is,” he said.

“You’re all suffering. Everybody wants to go home. We totally understand how you’re all feeling.”

…with frustration growing among those stranded, the official Xinhua news agency has spoken of the need to wage “all out war” on the weather chaos.

500,000 Stranded At Chinese Train Station During Massive Blizzard

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

From Empire Magazine
The new Indiana Jones movie is due to hit cinema screens around the world on May 22, but so far there has been no trailer, no leaked footage, no special clip previews on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ type shows, no major publicity push outside of the cover story for January’s Vanity Fair magazine and only a handful of official photos released.

Did producer George Lucas and director Stephen Spielberg decide that a low-key build up to release would be wiser than a full-on, all guns blazing, in your face marketing assault? It sure seems like it.

Compare the relentless publicity and viral marketing campaigns for Cloverfield, which began more than a year before the movie was released. Even the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, has been seen in great detail through trailers and ‘leaked’ YouTube clips, including the first six or eight minutes of the movie, more than a half a year before it hits cinemas.

Then again, Indiana Jones is a movie ‘brand’ that doesn’t need a whole heap of marketing. There are probably 40 or 50 million people around the world who would cancel their own weddings if it meant they could go and see a new Indy Jones flick if the movie was dumped in cinemas with only a few days notice.

What is far more remarkable than a low-key marketing campaign for the movie, is just how effectively Lucas and Spielberg have been able to keep even the most minor plot details out of the media, and away from bloggers and movie geek websites.

But in the past week, there have been two interesting clumps of plot detail released. One through a description of the trailer, which is set to hit cinemas in two or so weeks, and the other info coming from Gizmodo descriptions of the Lego sets based on the new Indy Jones movie.

Here’s what we know of the storyline for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.

The movie is set in 1957 and will open with an extended chase sequence, before Indiana Jones goes back to his university and finds out what his new quest will be.

There’s a lengthy car chase through the same secret US government warehouse where the Ark Of The Covenant was stored at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. At least one large crate in the warehouse is labeled Roswell, which would confirm that there will be a plot line involving the legendary ‘crash’ of a UFO in New Mexico in 1947.

Indiana Jones is reunited with Marion Ravenwood, 20 years after their last meeting in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and learns he has a 19 year old son.

Indy and Marion and the son are captured by Russian agents, who are searching for a mystical crystal skull. In one scene, Indy’s son will be seen engaging the Russian agent played by Cate Blanchett in a sword fight.

Indy, meanwhile, will be seen battling…..errr….giant ants.

Indy and Marion escape from the Russians and take off in an amphibious vehicle, while the Russians try to capture them with huge nets, fired from a gun.

Reunited with his son, Indy and Marion then have to escape a massive jungle cutting vehicle the Russians are using to hack through the trees and vines of a Mayan jungle, to uncover the Temple Of The Crystal Skull. Indy makes use of a bazooka to ensure their escape.

Indy and his son eventually enter the lost temple of Akator to retrieve the crystal skull, before the Russian agent can get her hands on it.

The temple is ‘activated’ and unleashes its ancient defenses to stop the thieves making off with the skull. Indy and his son will be seen fighting to escape from quicksand and trying to run down a flight shifting, disappearing stairs.

In one scene, which apparently shows the kind of humour that Spielberg and Lucas are so excited about (and expect critics to hate), Indiana Jones is punching out a bad guy while his son looks on.

I thought you were a teacher!” the son says, surprised at his father’s pummeling abilities.

“Part time!” Indy Jones quips.

Lucas and Spielberg have promised the new movie will have the feel of a 1950s science fiction/action b-movie, instead of the serial-chase adventure style of the first three movies.

Rumours, and the Roswell crate, would suggest that the crystal skull is modeled on an alien and provides the key to extraterrestrial technology that the Russians want to get their hands on so they can win the Cold War.

Spielberg and Lucas have also promised that the movie will not be overloaded with CGI special effects. What we will see on screen, they’re promising, will be real stunts filmed on real sets at real locations.

The first trailer from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of The Crystal Skull should be out in two weeks.

Giant ants?

Indiana Jones And The Aliens

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

This report from New Scientist basically boils down this - the more aware you are of the passage of time, the faster that time seems to go by. By reducing your perception of how much time is actually ticking by, and by allowing yourself to slow down, to think, to be more aware of where you are and what you are doing, to even become bored, the more likely you are to feel that time is passing by much more slowly.

Which all seems sort of obvious. But still fascinating :

Mike Hall has taught himself to stretch time. He uses his powers to make him a better squash player. “It’s hard to describe, but it’s a feeling of stillness, like I’m not trapped in sequential time any more,” he says. “The ball still darts around, but it moves around the court at different speeds depending on the circumstances. It’s like I’ve stepped out of linear time.”

Hall, a sports coach from Edinburgh, UK, is talking about a state of mind known as “the zone”. He puts his abilities down to 12 years of studying the martial art t’ai chi, and now makes a living teaching other sportspeople how to “go faster by going slower”.

For most people, getting into “the zone” at work or home isn’t a realistic option. But the idea of stretching time - or at least having more control over its frantic pace - is an attractive one. And there may be things we can do. There is a growing understanding of how our brains measure the passage of time, and it turns out we have more conscious control over it than previously thought.

…as everyone knows, time flies when you’re absorbed in a task and drags when you’re bored. But now researchers are beginning to understand the reasons for these subjective distortions of time. Some even think it will one day be possible to manipulate our perception of time whenever we feel like it.

So how might we alter our experience of time? The first option might be to manipulate brain chemistry, in particular the dopamine system. Patients with disorders of this system, such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s or schizophrenia, also suffer disturbances in their perception of time. It turns out this is because their neurochemistry - specifically their dopamine system - somehow alters the speed of their subjective internal clock. “Schizophrenics have too much dopamine activity in the brain so their clock is so fast that it feels like the whole world is crazy,” says Meck. “If you block dopamine receptors with drugs you can bring the speed of their internal clock back to an acceptable level.”

Recreational drugs that affect the dopamine system can also alter our perception of time. Stimulants such as cocaine, caffeine and nicotine make time pass faster, while sedatives such as Valium and cannabis slow it down.

So would the dopamine system be a place to start the hunt for designer drugs that alter our perception of time? Perhaps. The pharmacological knowledge is certainly there, says Meck. “I think it would be possible to develop a boutique drug that did the same but without the addictive properties. I’m sure it could be done if the market was there.” But while we wait for the arrival of the ultimate “chill pill”, what about more natural ways of controlling our internal clock?

When it comes to using the power of the mind to control time perception, one of the most important factors is the attention we pay to the passage of time. According to Meck, although we are rarely conscious of time passing, we keep a subconscious check on our interval-timing system and every now and again consciously access the information. This sporadic attention keeps our perception of the passage of time chugging along nicely.

But if for some reason we disengage attention from the clock, our sense of time can go astray. This accounts for the old adage that “time flies when you’re having fun”, or more accurately, “time flies when you are focusing on something other than the passage of time”. It is equally possible to push the clock in the other direction. At last year’s meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC, the Dalai Lama gave a talk to the assembled neuroscientists on how time seems to slow down during meditation, as you focus away from the internal clock. Yet when you surface from meditation, he said, you think more time has passed than actually has. This is uncannily like being in the zone.

Though these effects seem paradoxical, a number of experiments show how the attention we pay - or don’t pay - to the passage of time affects our perception of it. As it turns out, the answer depends on whether you are thinking about time “in the moment” or after the event.

You can stretch your perception of time, but only if you’re prepared to spend it in the equivalent of a waiting room. Perhaps the best option is to just accept the hectic pace of modern life, but make a serious effort to spend at least some of your time doing nothing much.

That might sound like common sense. But according to social psychologist Robert Levine of California State University in Fresno, it is common sense that’s well worth remembering. “Time is our most valuable possession,” he says. “Until the biomedical people can make us live forever, the closest thing we have is to stretch the moment.”

Go Here To Read The Full Story

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

The US subprime housing fiasco is already turning once prosperous suburbs into ghost towns :

The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.
This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.

Faded “for sale” signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.

A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.

Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminum siding.

The police station parking lot is full. The officers, who have seen their numbers triple since 2006, are coming back from their rounds. They speak of installing alarms in some of the homes claimed by squatters.

At 9422 Chagrin Street, a hand-scrawled sign attached to a window indicates someone lives there: “Please Used.”

After three rings of the bell, Sarah Evans, 60, opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

She says she is one of the last people left on the street. And she is on the verge of losing this two-bedroom house in which she has lived for more than 30 years because she simply cannot afford her monthly payments.

“When folks buy a home they expect to die in it, I guess,” she said as she stood outside in the cold. “I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare.”

Her words are echoed by the angry barks of the guard dogs pacing behind a chain link fence two houses away that was installed by the new owner: a bank.

The massive parking lot of the Eagle Fresh supermarket is empty.

Behind her till, Myra Bibldwit lifts her head when a bell signals the entrance of a customer.

“Not many folks come anymore. We’re used to it,” said the 24-year-old cashier, one of the few in the neighborhood who managed to hold onto her job.

In the five hours since she started working today she has served just 10 customers. “Maybe you will buy something,” she says with a smile.

Laura Johnston, 50, says that her street — about 10 minutes away by car — was alive two years ago. Today, half the houses are abandoned.

“Folks could not afford their payments. They were asked to pay loans which doubled. They could not afford it, some lost their job. Lenders were greedy. They threw them out of their homes,” she told AFP.

“I’m very upset. I missed my friend Helen. She disappeared overnight. She did not even say goodbye.”

For county treasurer Jim Rokakis, the greed of the banks is to blame for this man-made disaster.

“All you needed was a pulse to buy a house. Some loans were written with no money down, no proof of buyer’s incomes. They did not even check what people were saying. Most of those folks were jobless,” he said in an interview.

“Shaker Heights was the perfect storm: poor folks, unemployed and a desire to get a piece of the American Dream.”

And it’s not going to get any better any time soon.

Record Plunge For Sales Of New American Homes

Home Foreclosures Soared In US In 2007

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Milan artist Guido Daniele is using human hands as a canvas to create an extraordinary series of animal artworks.

Go Here For The Story And More Images

Go Here To See Videos Of Guido Creating His Hand Art

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Robots are now fighting in wars against human enemies on the land, in the sky…

and now on the water :

Armed robot boats, on patrol.

What if a robot boat decides it doesn’t like the look of one of those Hellfire-armed robot planes, now quietly killing humans in Iraq and Afghanistan, returning to an aircraft carrier that it is acting as a water-based sentry for and opens fire?

Or if the drone decides a robot sentry boat is a clear and present danger?

Then we have Robot War I.

It will probably be best to just stand back.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Aerial view of the wreckage pile of WTC 7

That Rudy Guiliani was warned by any number of police officials, terrorism specialists and secret service agents that placing his emergency command centre in the World Trade Centre 7 building was a really, really bad idea is an important, but fairly exhausted story now. It’s not old news, but for anyone following the ups and downs of the 2008 presidential primaries, the details of Guiliani’s incompetence have been extensively reported, as has the damage the allegations have caused to Guiliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination.

To any sane person, it seems all but unbelievable that Guiliani would okay the locating of his mayoral emergency command centre in a building complex that had already been attacked by terrorists (in 1993), and clearly remained a terrorist target. But that’s exactly what he did. Guiliani had been briefed any number of times that terrorists were likely to strike the trade towers again, and knew that US intelligence agencies had intercepted discussions between known Islamic terrorists musing, or confirming, they would hit the trade centre again if they got the chance.

That the New York Times have got their hands on an official memorandum confirming that Guiliani was warned repeatedly not to locate the command centre anywhere even near the WTC site, and preferably off Manhattan Island altogether, is probably worth another NYT story on the subject, but it’s the final couple of paragraphs in which the real point of the story may be residing :

The memorandum sets out in detail the reasons why the Police Department concluded that the site was a poor choice for a command center, including its vulnerability to a biological attack and the ease with which a bomber could have damaged the building and crippled the center.

It has nine sections, the longest one headed “Explosives.” It describes a blast analysis conducted by the Police Department’s bomb squad, aided by the Secret Service, which looked at the likely impact of bombs of varying sizes, from one that could be carried in a car or a van to a large truck bomb.

It concluded that the largest of such bombs would have led to the collapse of the building.

The World Trade Centre 7 was damaged by debris from the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 on September 11, 2001, and fires could be seen burning inside the building for most of the day.

The BBC and other news channels reported the collapse of WTC 7 some 20-30 minutes before it came down, and to this day there has been no official US government agency report released confirming the cause of the collapse of the 47 stories tall office building, which had office space leased by the US Defence Department, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

An official government agency report on the collapse of WTC 7 is due later this year, seven years after the event, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) :

NIST’s working hypothesis for the collapse of WTC 7 is that fire and/or debris caused damage to a critical column and triggered a progressive and “disproportionate collapse of the entire structure”—essentially that the wounded building fell in on itself. In its report, NIST will also review hypothetical blast scenarios…

Does the New York Times already know some crucial details of NIST report?

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

“Do Not Be Afraid”

Jack Nicholson had never met Heath Ledger, but he was nonetheless struck by the waste of a clearly talented 28 year old actor not being able to survive the pitfalls of fame.

Nicholson didn’t truly become a star until he was in his early 30s. By then, he’d been around Hollywood for more than a decade, and he’d witnessed actor friends who he started out with hit the heights and then fall back down just as quickly. Nicholson had small acting roles in numerous low-budget films, along with screenwriting gigs, before he broke through with Easy Rider in 1969. So when stardom came calling for Jack, he was ready.

He told Garth Pearce from the London Times the secrets of surviving Hollywood, and fame :

Hollywood, Nicholson said, is like a monster. It is to be ridden, understood and conquered. There are rules of engagement, and those who do not grasp them can be swept aside.

“Let’s go back to when I was first working in Hollywood, nearly 50 years ago….The movie business was star-driven then and it is star-driven now. There were people like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster setting up their own independent movie companies. There was the gossip, the tabloids and the news stories. They had to handle them – as I’ve had to handle them. If you don’t like it, it’s exceptionally tough.”

“There are too many around today who are lonely,” Nicholson said. “Film acting will drive you nuts – if you let it. You can get everything out there if you are young and famous. Any woman. Any drug. But you have to build up your safety zone. You’ve got to build up friendships and keep to them. When I was wild I would tell my friends, ‘We have to develop some social graces’.”

He set out rules early on: “I planned a certain life in leisure. I decided to take up tennis at 28, skiing at 35 and golf at 50. I hit those targets pretty well on the nose. I also made my own rules for publicity. Don’t do television interviews – I never do it. And when I do [print] interviews, I talk. You cannot take too much of what I say too seriously. But this business is about being on show occasionally.

“You’ve got the rewards and you have to take the heat. It’s not an easy business.”

Asked about his own advice for life, the old survivor replied: “Do not lie, do not steal and do not be afraid. Mainly, do not be afraid.”

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Smokers in Germany are staging a rebellion against the rising tide of anti-smoking laws. And they are using the lingering stain of supreme anti-smoking activist A. Hitler as a weapon against those who they believe can’t stop trying to strip away their freedoms.

From the UK Guardian :

The new law has triggered a rebellion and many people have taken drastic and imaginative measures so they can continue smoking.

One campaigner went as far as to issue a T-shirt bearing a yellow star of David along with the word ’smoker’, comparing the ‘persecution’ of smokers to that of Jews under the Nazis. The outrage of Jewish groups led to its withdrawal.

Refusing to face reality, some pub and club owners have even tried to turn their establishments into member-owning smoking clubs, like Hamburg’s Association for the Preservation of Smoke Culture and Advancement of Tolerance.

While smoking in bars is technically already illegal, fines of between €5 and €100 for those who continue to light up will not be implemented until July, when orderlies will be sent to inspect establishments.

Indeed, another quirk in the law, allowing smokers into establishments with separate rooms, has led to an explosion of creative solutions, from no-smoker tunnels now being mass-produced out of plaster cast to mobile smoker rooms, complete with DJ and sofas, which are touring the city picking up disgruntled smokers.

The reason for Germans’ refusal to take lying down a law that has now become the norm even in European nations that have traditionally taken pride in their subversiveness - such as Italy, Ireland and Scotland - is repeatedly put down to German history.

Campaigners for smokers’ rights have been quick to draw on the comparison between the recent clampdown and the little-known nationwide tobacco ban introduced by the Nazis in 1941 as part of their quest for bodily and racial purity.

While few Germans would dare to point it out publicly, for fear of appearing to praise the Nazi era, some of the most advanced research into the links between tobacco consumption and lung cancer was carried out under the Nazis.

Under the supervision of the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, the ban was imposed in every public building and public space, including air-raid shelters, with Hitler even personally intervening in 1944 to ensure it was extended to trains and buses in order to protect young female conductors. It was even pointed out that Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were all non-smokers, while the ‘evil enemies’ - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin - all enjoyed a tobacco fix.

Some of the 30% or so of Germans who refuse to give up smoking are now leaving the country. Briefly :

Bars on the Polish side of the border are full of Germans coming to enjoy their customary cigarette. In the London Pub in Slubice, across the river from Frankfurt an der Oder, a group of middle-aged Germans are swigging and puffing to their hearts’ content. ‘It’s just like in the old days,’ says Dieter Neubauer, who strolled over the border after work.

That would be the old days of East and West Germany, not the “old days” of Nazism. Though with the relentless crusade by those who are trying to stop people from filtering city pollution through cigarette filters, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Even though this unusual ‘event’ occurred in England’s Hertfordshire, where crop circles are common, the most likely explanation is that the farmer laid out the sheep feed in a circle shape.

Excellent photo, though.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

More Than $690 Billion Spent So Far, And More To Come

Now Who’s Winning The ‘War On Terror’?

By Darryl Mason

President Bush came to power backed by a cabal of former diplomats, war industry lobbyists, defence business leaders and NeoCon propaganda specialists. In the late 1990s, this core group of utterly compromised war industry whores, issuing non-democratic declarations under the Project For The New American Century, demanded massive increases to US defence budgets.

The September 11, 2001, attacks provided the “opportunity” for the group to not only get their dream of vastly increased defence budgets, but to ratchet up the spending beyond even that of the Vietnam War years.

Within one year of taking control of the White House, President Bush was already paying back those NeoCons and war industry whores who had helped him into power by sending troops into Afghanistan, ramping up Army recruitment and training, kickstarting new weapons production facilities across the American heartland (where steel mills and car makers once ruled) and fermenting the propaganda campaign that would lead to the illegal War On Iraq.

If you, like Dick Cheney, are a major shareholder of American corporations who are profiting obscenely from the ‘War On Terror’, Bush is not a failure, he’s one of the most successful American presidents of all time. For funneling almost unlimited billions in cash into the war industries.

No wonder Bush and Dick Cheney, and the owners of the world’s biggest war-related corporations, most based in the US, have had so much to smile about lately.

Sure, nearly 4000 Americans, tens of thousands of Afghans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the ‘War on Terror’ so far, with millions more wounded, but you’re focusing too much on the negative.

These are salad days for America’s war industries. They’ve never made so much money, and Bush and Cheney are doing everything they can to make sure the cash spigot is not turned off any time before the Bush White House fades into blood-soaked history.

Before you consider the numbers below, remember that President Bush has now also been granted a new US defence budget of almost $700 billion in recent days :

War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Congress has written checks for $691 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and such related activities as Iraq reconstruction, the CBO said.

…$440 billion had been spent on fighting in Iraq launched with the goal of ousting President Saddam Hussein from power and securing weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

All of the Iraq and Afghanistan war money — about $11 billion a month — is effectively being put on a government credit card at a time when U.S. government debt has skyrocketed to more than $9 trillion, up from around $5.6 trillion when Bush took office in January 2001.

President Bush has increased the US national debt by almost $4 TRILLION dollars. Well done!

…nearly every penny spent gets added to the U.S. debt…the interest payments on the debt would total $234 billion this year, more than the likely $250 billion budget deficit for the year.

Interest payments on the debt will total an estimated $2.7 trillion over the next decade…

So, in the end, by 2020 say, the NeoCon/Bush ‘War On Terror’ will have cost Americans almost $3 TRILLION.

Two of Osama Bin Laden’s reported strategies in attacking the US on 9/11 was to get oil prices up from about $30 per barrel to somewhere closer to $100 a barrel and to draw Americans into a long and extremely costly international conflict, which would, Bin Laden hoped, eventually bankrupt the country.

So who do you think is winning the ‘War On Terror’ so far? Bush? Bin Laden? Or the American and international war industries?

If you stop believing the tripe pumped out by much of the mainstream media, you will quickly realize that all three entities are winning. No great surprise then to lean that Bush now believes he will be unlikely to ‘catch’ Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.

The American public, and the American children not yet born who will have to pay off the War On Terror credit card bill, are the real losers in this absurd fiasco.

$3 trillion spent by 2020 on the ‘War On Terror’ represents the greatest robbery in history, and the stumbling destruction of the world’s biggest economy will be the end result.

Bin Laden wins. And Bush wins. And Cheney wins. And the war pigs win.

But you lose.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

If John Bolton, the former wannabe US ambassador, and full-time pro-Iran War promoter, had his way, the United States would have already bombed Iran. Now it’s clear that Bush is extremely reluctant to take military action against Iran, with the support of the US State Department, John Bolton is now telling Israel it has to act alone.

But going to Israel to flog a book and telling Israel it has to go to war against Iran, particularly following the disastrous Lebanon War II, has made John Bolton a suddenly very unpopular man amongst international NeoCons, who know Israel will get hammered if it hits even one Iranian nuclear energy installation and that Russia views attacks on Iran as attacks against its “international interests”.

Bolton’s job was to get the United States to attack Iran, and he failed to do his ‘duty’. Telling Israelis they have to sacrifice their own lives, instead of more American lives, to deal with the still unproven Iranian nuclear weapons threat, should pretty much put an end to Bolton’s so-called career for the moment.

In this very interesting story from the Jerusalem Post, Bolton admits that US intelligence staged a coup, of sorts, against the NeoCons and the White House when they released NIE reports saying that Iran poses no immediate nuclear threat to Israel, or to the world :

The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, as well as the skewed reporting around it, is a sign of the “illegitimate politicization” of the American intelligence establishment, according to former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

“I know the people who wrote this intelligence estimate,” Bolton continued. “They are not from our intelligence community. They’re from our State Department. It was a highly politicized document written by people who had a very clear policy objective.”

“Generating intelligence should be separated from policy-makers, but it should also be separated from intelligence analysts who impose their own policy views on the intelligence they generate,” insisted Bolton..

Bolton calls the NIE “a quasi-coup by the intelligence services,” which was “intended to have a political and policy effect.”

He’s saying that like it’s a bad thing. Yes, the NIE had a political and policy effect, as reported
here in December, 2007. A very impressive one. It killed any momentum the war-crazed NeoCons had built up for the US to attack Iran. Bolton didn’t like that one bit.

Bolton is just another fading NeoCon trying to flog a sad little book full of lies, distortions and propaganda. He was wrong on Iraq, wrong on Iran and wrong on just about everything to do with the ‘War On Terror’. Which is why he can always rely on a ’special analyst’ paycheck from Fox News.

Pathetic.

BushCo. Abandons Bolton Over Iranian Nuclear Weapons Propaganda

October 2007 : Bolton Gushes, Fantasises About The Days When The US Overthrew Democratically Elected Governments Around The World

September 2007 : Bolton Says US Has No Choice Left But To Attack Iran Immediately, Overthrow Regime

December 20006 : US Intelligence Agencies Strike Back At NeoCon Propaganda War On Nuclear Iran

June 2006 : Bolton Says United Nations Is An “Effective Tool” Of US

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

It sounds like someone was planning terror attacks against Jewish institutions and synagogues in New York City. Bizarrely, the man now being held for perpetuating hate crimes against Jewish targets there, is a Jew himself, and this report from the New York Times quotes him telling a judge he had been “trained by Mossad”.

Had the terror attacks gone ahead, you can guess who they would have been blamed on :

It all happened in less than three hours on a cool September night — a prolific spurt of anti-Jewish vandalism at more than a dozen locations in the heart of Brooklyn Heights.

On Monday, the police caught a break, arresting a man who they said had a trove of weapons inside a stately apartment building in the neighborhood. The man, Ivaylo Ivanov, admitted under videotaped questioning that he was behind the spree, which had mystified investigators for months, the police said.

And later Monday evening, after Mr. Ivanov’s arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court, his lawyer surprised reporters with his own announcement: Mr. Ivanov is himself Jewish.

The revelation was the latest twist in a bizarre story that features a man who, police said, shot his own finger; a sizable weapons collection, including pipe bombs and a sawed-off shotgun, found in an apartment in one of Brooklyn’s most exclusive neighborhoods…

So he was heavily armed and cashed up. Wonder who was funding his ‘operations’?

The hate crimes had unsettled local residents, many of whom awoke on the morning of Sept. 25 to find swastikas and other slurs scratched, scrawled and spray-painted on cars, playgrounds, synagogues and building facades. Crude fliers reading “Kill All Jews” were strewn about.

Upon hearing that Mr. Ivanov was said to be Jewish, Aaron L. Raskin, the rabbi of Congregation B’Nai Avraham, one of the desecrated synagogues, was skeptical.

“Is his mother Jewish or is his father Jewish?” the rabbi asked, adding that to be “biblically Jewish,” Mr. Ivanov would have to have a Jewish mother.

I think this is called ‘parsing’.

In court, his lawyer said that Mr. Ivanov is a linguist. The authorities are not sure of his age, saying he is either 37 or 31 years old. Mr. Ivanov told the police that he was born in Sicily and raised in Bulgaria, and that he had been trained by Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

(Ivanov’s) arsenal included seven pipe bombs and two pounds of what the police called a “low-explosive powder”; a sawed-off shotgun and a crossbow with arrows; another pipe bomb, hidden in a foam football; and other rifles, including pellet guns.

According to a law enforcement official, detectives are exploring the possibility that Mr. Ivanov had planned to use the pipe bombs against synagogues.

The official said that Mr. Ivanov told investigators he intended to use the bombs for fishing; but, given his admission that he painted swastikas on synagogues, investigators became concerned he was planning violence.

You can expect this story to disappear very, very quickly into the memory hole.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

It looks like a blown-up image of someone, a woman perhaps, climbing down a rocky hill.

And going further back, it most definitely looks like someone, almost certainly a woman, climbing down a rock hill, or sitting and resting on her way down.

But here’s the problem. This is a photo from the surface of Mars.

The images come from a Mars rover that has been tooling around the surface of the planet for four years. The rover’s original mission was to have only lasted a few months, but every time it bogs down, or its solar panels get coated with dust, the rover finds a way to keep on exploring.

So what is that a photo of? A rock formation? Foreground or background objects pulled together by the camera lense?

As an occasional Mars addict, I can’t say I’ve seen photos of any other rock formation that even come close to mimicking the human form.

It’s certainly the most jaw-dropping image we’ve seen from Mars in a few years. And it gets the mind wondering : so what exactly would it take for the majority of humans to accept that there is life on Mars? Would the alien need to look more human, or less? Would it need to perform great feats beyond the capacity of humans, or would it have to deliver a competent and convincing interview on Oprah?

The more I look at the photos, the more I can see how the shadow of the not so strange rock formation give the illusion of a human form. And it’s the ’shape’ of what initially appears to be an extended arm that really sets off the illusion. A longer, closer look reveals that the arm shape is actually made up of rock colours and shapes from the distant background.

Of course I never believed for a second that those images really showed a human form, or a statue crafted by Martians to honour their Earth-based relatives.

Honest!

Or maybe it is simply one of these :

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

The above image is being promoted as a hologram of Prince Charles, delivering a pre-recorded speech :

….delegates were treated to a full-size, walking, talking, fiddling hologram of his royal highness, who made a brief speech then vanished back into thin air.

His appearance was the talk of the 2500 delegates at the World Future Energy Summit.

I suppose it was a solar-powered hologram then?

More importantly, exactly when did the quality of holograms get that good? If that’s really a photograph of a Prince Charles hologram, it’s a stunning piece of work. It’s almost HD quality.

So are holograms of this quality and definition already being used to flush out insurgents and roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

From The Orstrahyun :

Why did Australians fall so easily and with so little dissent into the clutches of a surveillance society?

We used to cherish our privacy and gag at the thought that our every movement outside the home could be captured on video and stored away somewhere. Or that our personal details, our opinions, our beliefs and our favourite food choices could be databased and monitored for the rest of our lives.

Did you even stop to think about how all that personal information about yourself that you so freely typed into MySpace questionnaires and quizzes and into Facebook profiles will be used? Do you even know that all that info will never disappear, and that those personal details are already being traded and circulated and analysed and used to build profiles of you, your emotions and your thought patterns?

And if you think that using fake names or profiles on MySpace or Facebook will keep you safely anonymous, think again. That little bout of Googling your own name a few months ago IDed you to your computer’s IP address.

Why make it any easier for them to know so much about you? They already know enough.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

Increasingly Australians are being bar-coded and scoped. Their whereabouts are checked, along with the company they keep. How they make money, how they spend it - all is monitored in the name of progress, profit and private and national security.

Australians had been sceptical about the surveillance industry and associated identity checks. But the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, and subsequent terrorist outrages changed much of that. And while law enforcement agencies’ activities have expanded considerably to fit new laws and demands, other surveillance industries and programs have enthusiastically jumped on the “new world order” band wagon and grown exponentially.

Traditionally Australians have been wary of such “Big Brother” developments but opinion polls show that - like Americans and the English - Australians now tend to support more rather than less surveillance.

Go Here For The Full Story

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.