“Enemy Attack And UFO Potential” - It would be remiss to not give some part to the role fire departments might play in the even of the unexpected arrival of UFO’s in their communities…In a less optimistic scenario, you may have engine trouble upon approaching the scene, and radio contact could be lost with your dispatcher. If at night, your headlights could go out, the city could be blacked out, and your portable generators may malfunction when you attempt to use them for fans and portable lights.
No detail on how to avoid the apparently mandatory alien anal probes.
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Death Metal Band Stoked To Be Number One On Prisoner Torture Play List
“It’s Cool…We’re Up To Military Standards Of Audio Abuse”
Anti-Christian death metal band, Deicide, are proud and loud that they have been ranked Number One on a list of songs used by the American military, and private military contractors, to interrogate and torture ‘War on Terror’ prisoners.
So stoked are Deicide that their song ‘Fuck Your God’ has reached the top of at least one chart that they’ve renamed their MySpace to pay homage to torture and, well, themselves :
“It’s cool. If we’re up to military standards of audio abuse, it makes me feel like Deicide’s doing our part for the troops.”
The non-Christian troops anyway.
Of course this moment is not the only history that Asheim has with the armed forces. “My dad was a marine, as were my uncle and grandfather…I didn’t follow in their footsteps since I was so busy with the band thing….”
Some of the tactical circumstances where prisoners may have heard “Fuck Your God” include sleep deprivation and interrogation disorientation.
It is our time to remove the savior,
Christians are weak and the bible is beaten….
Fuck Your God, Holy mother for the whore she is,
Fuck your God, bible thumper preaching threats from hymn,
Fuck your god, his revival and the holy Ghost,
Fuck your god; only tell us what we need to know,
Fuck your god, pointing fingers and then do as me,
Fuck your god, you are nothing and you’ll never be,
Fuck your god; it is Satan who in trusts my soul,
Fuck your god, where the Christians are I will not go.
And stranger still is this song choice considering that the ‘God’ of Christians and Muslims is the same alleged entity.
So who’s God is supposed to be fucked here?
Of course, as any Deicide fan will tell you, it’s all but impossible to decipher most Deicide lyrics from out of the apocalyptic blast of rampaging guitars and drums usually hammered at cyclonic speeds.
As the Torture Playlist reveals, it’s not so much the lyrics that are supposed to break the prisoners, but the chanting choruses and rhythms, some of which you would probably agree would be absolutely torturous to hear 20 or 30 times in a row at jet-engine level volume in a concrete cell or locked inside a shipping container :
If the inclusion of music from Sesame Street and Barney The Dinosaur for the purposes of sleep deprivation and general torture confuses you (and you don’t have young children), consider that while some of the music blasted at prisoners in Abu Ghraib, in Gitmo and at US bases in Afghanistan was chosen by military personnel and contractors, military psychological operations (psy-ops) also had a hand in song selection. Which probably explains Barney The Dinosaur and ‘Staying Alive’. And how many times could you take ‘Raspberry Beret’ or anything by Matchbox Twenty played at 130 decibels before you snapped?
The problem of lyrical content, and theme, of the Songs To Torture Prisoners By (Or With) doesn’t end with Deicide.
Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes
Not need, just feed tha war cannibal animal
I walk tha corner to tha rubble that used to be a
Library
Line up to tha mind cemetery
They don’t gotta burn tha books they just remove ‘em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as tha cells
Rally round tha family, pockets full of shells
Rally round tha family
With pockets full of shells
Not exactly singing the praises of the military industrial complex, and clearly a call to arm for those ready to take up weapons to protect their families. Why blast insurgents with a pro-insurgency song?
(I’ve been) sent to lead the march right up to the steps of Congress
and piss on the lawns of the White House
To burn the flag….
To spit liquor in the faces of this democracy of hypocrisy
I got in a little hometown jam
And so they put a rifle in my hands
Sent me off to Vietnam
To go and kill the yellow man
I had a buddy at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
The inclusion of a song called ‘Born In The USA’ would seem to make sense, but Springsteen’s classic is clearly an anti-war song, even though a number of Republican politicians have, over the years, stupidly chosen it as their campaign theme songs. Springsteen was pissed when he learned Ronald Reagan was blasting ‘Born In The USA’ at rallies. How ticked off will he be when he finds out Americans are torturing Muslims to his biggest hit?
Hell’s Bells by AC/DC is probably closer to the ‘get the message’ word blast they might have been looking for :
I’m rolling thunder, pouring rain
I’m coming on like a hurricane
My lightning’s flashing across the sky You’re only young but you’re gonna die
I won’t take no prisoners won’t spare no lives
Nobody’s putting up a fight
I got my bell I’m gonna take you to hell
I’m gonna get ya
Satan get ya
‘Hell’s Bells’ has been an immensely popular song for the American military for more than two decades. It was used as a sound weapon (to terrify the locals and force enemies from their hiding places) in Panama, the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and in the Battle Of Fallujah in 2004.
Drowning Pool’s ‘Bodies’ was a popular tune for US Army tank crews in Iraq during the first year of the war, as detailed in the excellent documentary Soundtrack To War.
Note - Back in an earlier career as a music journalist, I had a couple of interview-conversations with Deicide’s notorious singer/bassist Glen Burton. His voice on the phone was deep, threatening and perhaps just a little Satanic. Until, that is, he learned I was not taping the interview, and was getting down his quotes in shorthand. Then he laid off the Satan-voice, and sounded like an average suburban American dad. Which he was. The interview was interrupted by his wife (or partner) reminding him to pick up toilet paper and more milk when he went to the shops, after picking up the kid(s) from school. He had to wrap up the interview a few minutes early because one of his pets was sick and needed feeding.
So little time left in a day to kill God with a family and a mortgage to worry about.
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Children don’t want to see stupid dancing n’ singing mice and ducks when they go to a theme park. They want to see things that kids are interested in - like poo, like vomit, like snot, like animals farting.
Forget Disneyland, the Danes obviously know how to put together a theme park that will really capture the attention of bored children. Welcome to Bon Bon Land :
A video tour of Bon Bon Land. Enjoy the human powered and self-operated rides :
But Bon Bon Land isn’t the most bizarre theme park, by any stretch. There’s plenty more here.
The internet is stuffed with stories, photos, rants and warnings about the building of ‘concentration camps’ inside the United States. Many of these stories come from blogs, small independent newspapers and media sites, and might encourage the more paranoid to reach for a tin-foil hat. The problem, however, is that the weight of evidence that large-scale internment camps for illegal immigrants and American citizens are now being built tips the scales on this supposed conspiracy theory towards fact, into reality.
Stories about internment camps large enough to hold tens of thousands of people (collectively), and the nightmarishly dictatorial powers now available to President Bush (and the next American president) are hitting the mainstream American media. For now at least.
A few days ago, the following story was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, and sparked a storm of reader comments, the vast majority of which took the story utterly serious and expanded on the details and scope of a presidentially decreed Police State America :
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of “an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.”
Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.
According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists.”
What kind of “new programs” require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?
Sect. 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to “a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order.”
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of “terrorist” organizations, or who speaks out against the government’s policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and noncitizens alike.
Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure “continuity of government” in the event of what the document vaguely calls a “catastrophic emergency.” Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure “continuity of government.” This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51.
U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice (Los Angeles County) has come up with a new way to expand the domestic “war on terror.” Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), which passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a commission to “examine and report upon the facts and causes” of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combatting it.
According to commentary in the Baltimore Sun, Rep. Harman and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle believe the country faces a native brand of terrorism, and needs a commission with sweeping investigative power to combat it.
A clue as to where Harman’s commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who “engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights” as terrorists. Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, Second Amendment rights supporters … the list goes on and on.
What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?
Today, a Bin Laden worshiping Muslim-American who buys absurd amounts of fertilizer is a terror suspect worthy of detainment. Tomorrow it may be the ex-mayor who organises local protests against food and water shortages in an Ohio town centre.
The ‘War on Terror’ hooks state governments and city councils on federal funds to ‘fight terror’, but what happens when the pool of suspected, or potential, terrorists dries up, and future funding for ‘anti-terror’ programs on a local level is threatened?
Find more terrorists, or create new categories for what constitutes a suspected or potential terrorist.
The international ‘War on Terror’ ultimately becomes a war waged by the state against its own people. The more they fight back against ceaseless surveillance, profiling, privacy violations and ridiculously intrusive security screenings at airports, malls and the workplace, the more suspected terrorists there are for the ‘war’ to be waged against.
This is just one of a number of major news stories piling up on how the fermenting deep recession in the United States, along with falling and flailing house prices, are likely to turn great swathes of suburban American ‘McMansionLand’ into the slums of tomorrow :
Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”
In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied.
The decline of places like Windy Ridge and Franklin Reserve is usually attributed to the subprime-mortgage crisis, with its wave of foreclosures. And the crisis has indeed catalyzed or intensified social problems in many communities. But the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it. A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.
Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.
If there are not enough customers to buy these millions of homes, entire suburbs may have to be bulldozed, or McMansions will have to be converted into apartments.
Americans are moving back to the cities, searching for lifestyles that don’t include long hours of commuting and lifeless mall complexes. Town planners are reacting to new lifestyle demands that don’t include needing to pile the family into the car to go and buy an ice-cream, or to catch a movie. Americans, apparently, want to do more walking.
If the American Dream was actually the Suburban Dream, owning your own three or four bedroom home on a large block in tree-lined suburbia, it sounds like that dream is coming to an end. At least, the growth of suburban America as typified by 1950s and 1960s television shows and domestic-bliss Hollywood movies is apparently peaking. Smaller families, lower wages, higher inflation means smaller homes for most.
Tens of thousands, and expected to soon be hundreds of thousands of Americans, are giving up on fighting the banks to keep their homes in the suburbs, and are choosing instead to walk away rather than attempt to pay off a home they brought for far more than what it’s now worth.
They are simply packing up and disappearing into the night, abandoning their homes to intruders, squatters and the elements.
The rest of the story, from The Atlantic, includes a fascinating history of how in the 1940s, Americans home from World War 2, and starting families, were sold on the suburban dream and how the rise of American suburbia denotes one of the most successful marketing campaigns in all history.
How the United States deals with the long-term economic destruction of the sub-prime fiasco, and how Americans return to the cities and urban centres and what results from such a monumental reshaping of where Americans choose, or are forced, to live will be extremely interesting to watch.
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Is it all over for Hillary Clinton yet? Has she effectively trashed her chances of entering the White House as POTUS in January, 2009?
Probably not, but the likelihood of her winning the tick from the Democratic Party as their choice for POTUS is fading by the day.
Americans are clearly sick of the Clintons, as they are sick to death of the Bushes. They know they are being conned by the establishment, regardless of whether it is Democrat or Republican or CNN.
Barack Obama has managed to give the impression, which is hopefully true, that he is not a part, or party to, the power elite who did everything they could to ensure the United States invaded, destroyed and depopulated Iraq, and so very quickly emptied the US Treasury.
Some journalists are not waiting until the results are in, they’re already writing off Hillary, and deconstructing how she managed to blow what was widely deemed, only this time last year, to be one of the sweetest and easiest rides into the White House in American presidential history :
She had everything going for her. The most famous name in politics. A solid lead in the polls. A war chest of at least $133 million.
Yet Hillary Clinton now finds herself struggling for political survival, her once-firm grasp of the Democratic presidential nomination seemingly slipping away.
What happened?
Barack Obama, for one thing, a uniquely gifted speaker with a face that appeals deeply to the Democratic Party. He also had a better-organized campaign.
But Democrats say that Clinton, whose central theme is her readiness to be president, also made blunder after blunder. She chose an inexperienced campaign manager, crafted a message that didn’t match the moment, fielded poor organizations in key states and built a budget that ran dry just when she needed money most.
“She got outmaneuvered,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic strategist who isn’t aligned with any of this year’s candidates. “Her campaign allowed her to be outmaneuvered on several fronts.”
“To think that someone named Clinton with $130 million could end up here is amazing,” another neutral Democratic strategist said.
It’s not that amazing. Americans have become more politically aware since the War On Iraq began, and it’s not exactly a secret that Hillary Clinton voted for the war, and refuses to commit to withdrawing the troops. Obama said he will bring them home. Considering how deeply unpopular the War On Iraq now is, and how its military bodycount has reached into cities, towns and villages across the country, the knowledge that Clinton will keep the war going and Obama will end it (or so he now claims) might be enough in itself to end Hillary’s White House dreams.
The biggest problem of all for Hillary is, of course, that her job is not to end the War On Iraq. Her job is to keep the war going and to keep those hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the American war industries.
If you were a dedicated viewer of the West Wing’s final series, relax, you’re not going mad, the rise of Barack Obama really is spectacularly close to the WW’s storyline of how an outsider Democratic wannabe presidential nominee ultimately reaches the White House.
Some of the coincidences, detailed below, are downright uncanny.
But the story gets even weirder. Barack Obama, even before he became a senator, turns out to have been a major inspiration for the West Wing’s key final series storyline. Reality into fiction into reality :
Both the real and imagined (West Wing TV show) campaigns have centred on a young, charismatic candidate from an ethnic minority, daring to take on an establishment workhorse with a promise to transcend race and heal America’s partisan divide.
But there’s a twist.
For what those West Wing fans stunned by the similarity between the fictitious Matthew Santos and the real-life Barack Obama have not known is that the resemblance is no coincidence. When the West Wing scriptwriters first devised their fictitious presidential candidate in the late summer of 2004, they modelled him in part on a young Illinois politician - not yet even a US senator - by the name of Barack Obama.
The result is a bizarre case of art imitating life - only for life to imitate art back again.
In the TV show, Santos begins as the rank outsider up against a national figure famous for standing at the side of a popular Democratic president. There are doubts about Santos’s inexperience, having served just a few years in Congress, and about his ability to persuade voters to back an ethnic minority candidate - even as his own ethnic group harbour suspicions that he might not identify with them sufficiently.
But the soaring power of his rhetoric, his declaration that the old divisions belong in the past and his sheer magnetism, ensure that he comes from behind in a fiercely close primary campaign and draws level with his once all-commanding opponent. Every aspect of that storyline has come true for Barack Obama. Axelrod, now chief strategist for the Obama campaign, recently joked in an email to Attie: “We’re living your scripts!”
What’s more, the West Wing had the Republicans choose between a Christian preacher - a pre-echo of Mike Huckabee - and an older, maverick senator from the American west whose liberal positions on some issues had earned the distrust of the party’s conservative base: a dead ringer for John McCain.
In the West Wing, the McCain figure emerges comfortably as the party’s choice. Apparently the character was not based on the current Republican frontrunner, but was simply a function of the casting of Alan Alda.
“It was always an inside joke on the West Wing that the show had a prophetic quality…”
It’s also interesting to remember that when the final series of the West Wing was written, Hillary Clinton was deemed to not only be the rolled-gold choice for the Democratic nomination but all but a sure thing to win the 2008 presidential elections.
Even President Bush had a few chuckles about the whole “Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton” thing, referring to the fact that if Hillary Clinton were to win two terms in the West Wing, the most powerful political office in the world would have been ruled by members of two elite American families for three decades. Four decades if you accept that then vice-president George HW Bush was pulling most of Ronald Reagan’s strings during his final years in the White House.
Barack Obama? It was never supposed to be this way. Hillary had been promised the top job, and it was hers for the taking. Which is why the fight will get even nastier. Which is why the ‘Obama Is Gay’ rumours will begin, within a week or two.
Camp Hillary has got nothing left. Obama will be the Democratic presidential nomination. Unless, of course, he suddenly develops cancer, or has a brain anueryism, or the ‘gay thing’ really hits him hard.
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Hallucinatory experiences are only truly fun when real-life reality doesn’t intrude too much. And there’s nothing fun at all about suddenly suffering a reality-shattering hallucination when you’re drug free, or a small child.
When it first happened, I was a 21-year-old undergraduate…..
I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet. It was a disturbing sensation, but it lasted only a few seconds, so I put it down to over-tiredness and forgot all about it.
It wasn’t long, however, before I started experiencing more extreme spatial distortions. Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges. When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance.
Everything was now distorted, all the time. Walking down the road, parked cars appeared the size of Corgi models, while I’d feel disproportionately tall. At work, my chair seemed enormous, while I seemed to have shrunk.
Seeing the world through a fisheye lens made day-to-day life very difficult. Unable to judge distances accurately, I would often move clumsily or overcompensate. Soon I found it a struggle to leave the house; I had difficulty correctly perceiving the ground, so walking was tricky. If I didn’t think about it I was OK, but as soon as I did, I found myself slumping and struggling to walk in a straight line. Crossing the road began to feel dangerous; when I saw a car coming, I had no idea what size it was, or how far away.
….but there is one part of it that I really enjoyed: sometimes, especially shortly after waking up, I would experience a kind of binocular vision. Lying in bed, I would find myself staring out of the window, watching crows flying over trees 100m away, but able to see the details on each bird and treetop as if they were at arm’s length. That particular side-effect seems to have stopped now, and I almost miss it.
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Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.
A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.
“It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer,” said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv.
“It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively,” she added.
The Epoc technology can be used to give authentic facial expressions to avatars of gamers in virtual worlds. For example, if the player smiles, winks, grimaces the headset can detect the expression and translate it to the avatar in game.
It can also read emotions of players and translate those to the virtual world. “The headset could be used to improve the realism of emotional responses of AI characters in games,” said Ms Le.
“If you laughed or felt happy after killing a character in a game then your virtual buddy could admonish you for being callous,” she explained.
The $299 headset has a gyroscope to detect movement and has wireless capabilities to communicate with a USB dongle plugged into a computer.
The Emotiv said the headset could detects more than 30 different expressions, emotions and actions.
They include excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis).
Gamers are able to move objects in the world just by thinking of the action.
Eventually, this kind of brain-directed activation of electronic equipment will find its way into Human 2.0, the new generation of robots and androids that will increasingly become a part of everyday life in the next two decades. Your brain is wired to the ‘brain’ of the Human 2.0 so you can see, hear and feel what it sees, hears and feels. And vice-versa, if you allowed the artificial brain to access your human brain.
And computers will want to come down the pipeline and get into your head once this level of interactivity becomes commonplace. The video game will eventually reshape itself to fit your skill level, or to ramp up the challenge levels.
The science fiction era of fear of computers linking to human brains barely exists for youth now raised on computers and video games. Ditching the controls for direct human-to-computer control will not seem futuristic, or too tempting of the implementation of the inevitable robotic overthrow of humanity. It will simply be seen as a much easier and far more practical way for humans to operate their computers and artificial brains.
The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity.
Ms Le said: “Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we’ve created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically.”
Soon you won’t have to pause in the middle of completing another important raid in WoW just to cram in a life-sustaining slice of pizza. Progress!
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Fidel Castro, the Communist dictator of Cuba, has survived numerous assassination attempts and plots during his 49 years in power. Now he is stepping down, presumably a few weeks or months before his death, you can expect more light to be thrown on the ways the CIA plotted to kill Castro as more warehouses of paper are declassified.
The CIA has killed a slew of elected leaders and dictators around the world, since the end of World War II. The CIA already knew plenty about Latin American revolutionary Fidel Castro before he took control of Cuba in 1959, and they tracked him relentlessly during the next five decades, fermenting dozens, if not hundreds, of assassination plots, while Castro refused to bow to the demands of nine American presidents.
One of the assassination plots involved the use of poisoned cigars…in August 1960, the CIA instructed an official to lace a box of Castro’s favourite cigars with a toxin so potent it could kill simply by being placed in the mouth. CIA records showed they were passed on to an unidentified person, but it was unclear if they ever made their way to Castro.
The CIA also tried to use the criminal underworld to assassinate Castro….The CIA made contact through intermediaries to underworld figures in the United States hoping they could make arrangements with gambling syndicates in Cuba.
Before the Bay of Pigs invasion, poisonous pills were passed via the shadowy figures on several occasions to individuals in Cuba who supposedly had access to Castro. Those plots never panned out and eventually agents tapered off their communications with Cuban operatives.
A post-Bay-of-Pigs plot was later launched that again involved the use of the mafia, this time using pills and small arms. But when it appeared the operation would not succeed, it was called off.
The CIA later explored the possibility of using an “exotic seashell” laden with explosives that could be placed in waters where Castro was known to go diving. The shell’s illuminating appearance, according to the plan, would lure Castro to it, then blow him up. The plan was later dismissed as “impractical”….
The CIA also explored giving Castro a diving suit contaminated with a fungus that would cause a infectious skin disease. That suit, however, never left the laboratory.
In another of the plots that went on until 1965, the CIA devised and passed on poison-tipped pens to agents in Cuba.
The CIA also weighed methods of humiliating Castro, including a poison that would cause his legendary beard to fall out, and a chemical agent similar to LSD that would make him look foolish during public speaking events.
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Cactus flavoured ice-cream anyone? How about corn n’ soy? Cheeseburger swirl? Anyone?
The Great Bee Dying Off in the United States right now is putting the nation’s food supply at risk, claims ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs, particularly the food supply that goes into their most popular flavours.
If the bees keep dying, and the pollination of fruits and nut-bearing plants and trees becomes scarcer, ice-cream makers will have no choice but to diversify their flavours, to make use of more inexpensive and bountiful produce.
There has been a wave of theories attempting to explain the massive dying off of American bee colonies. Was it cell phone radiation or a mysterious virus? Surely it can’t be long now before global warming gets to take some credit for the disaster?
Haagen-Dazs is warning that a creature as small as a honeybee could become a big problem for the premium ice cream maker’s business.
At issue is the disappearing bee colonies in the United States, a situation that continue to mystify scientists and frighten foodmakers.
That’s because, according to Haagen-Dazs, one-third of the U.S. food supply - including a variety of fruits, vegetables and even nuts - depends on pollination from bees.
Haagen-Dazs, which is owned by Nestle, said bees are actually responsible for 40% of its 60 flavors - such as strawberry, toasted pecan and banana split.
Pien said Haagen-Dazs is hoping scientists get a breakthrough in this mystery soon. Otherwise, she said, the company may have to “re-examine the flavors that we currently offers our customers.”
Perhaps they can draw inspiration from this story about bizarre ice-cream flavours from around the world, including chunky bacon, raw horseflesh, carrot and fried pork rind.
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A few weeks before he was found dead from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs in New York City, actor Heath Ledger was hanging from a noose beneath a London bridge.
He was shooting a scene for the new Terry Gilliam movie The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus, and it was one of the last on location scenes Ledger had to shoot. In late January, Ledger was supposed to be back on set but this time acting in front of green screens, so CGI special effects and backgrounds could be added later.
Ledger died before most of his green screen scenes had been shot. But director Terry Gilliam thinks he has found a way to finish the movie, with only half of Ledger’s scenes completed. Fortunately for Gilliam, Ledger’s character takes repeated trips through a magical mirror, and this ‘gateway’ now turns out to be the key to salvaging Dr Parnassus and paying tribute to Ledger (who starred in Gilliam’s take on The Brothers Grimm). Whenever Ledger’s character climbs through the mirror to enter fantasy lands, his character will be played by another actor. Or three actors.
Movie industry insiders in London insist that Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law have all signed up to stand in for Ledger and to help Terry Gilliam finish what has turned out to be yet another troubled production.
So Heath Ledger’s final movie role will not be The Joker in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, but will instead be that of a troubled man who is saved from his own suicide and welcomes the chance to escape reality by climbing into a fantasy realm.
After weeks of speculation and revelations by ‘close friends’, Heath Ledger’s death turned out to be an accident. Despite overdosing on a “low dose” combination of Valium, Oxycontin and other drugs, highlighting just how dangerous and deadly combining pharmaceuticals can be, the MSM has all but dropped the story :
The actor Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, the New York city medical examiner ruled today.
Ledger, 28, was found lying dead at the foot of his bed in his New York apartment on January 22. Sleeping pills and other medication were discovered near his body.
A statement issued by the medical examiner’s office said the Brokeback Mountain star had died after taking a combination of painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medicine.
It said: “Mr Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.”
The drugs are better known as OxyContin, Valium, Restoril, Xanax and Unisom. Hydrocodone is a widely used prescription painkiller.
Ledger’s father, Kim, said today: “While no medications were taken in excess, we learned today the combination of doctor-prescribed drugs proved lethal for our boy. Heath’s accidental death serves as a caution to the hidden dangers of combining prescription medication, even at low dosage.”
The Just Jared website snapped some photos of Ledger on the Blackfriar’s Bridge location for Dr Parnassus, hanging from the bridge itself, and taking a smoke between shots.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fantastical morality tale, set in the present day.
It tells the story of Dr Parnassus and his extraordinary ‘Imaginarium’, a travelling show where members of the audience get an irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom.
Blessed with the extraordinary gift of guiding the imaginations of others, Dr Parnassus is cursed with a dark secret. Long ago he made a bet with the devil, Mr Nick, in which he won immortality. Many centuries later, on meeting his one true love, Dr Parnassus made another deal with the devil, trading his immortality for youth, on condition that when his first-born reached its 16th birthday he or she would become the property of Mr Nick.
Valentina is now rapidly approaching this ‘coming of age’ milestone and Dr Parnassus is desperate to protect her from her impending fate. Mr Nick arrives to collect but, always keen to make a bet, renegotiates the wager. Now the winner of Valentina will be determined by whoever seduces the first five souls. Enlisting a series of wild, comical and compelling characters in his journey, Dr Parnassus promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to the man that helps him win. In this captivating, explosive and wonderfully imaginative race against time, Dr Parnassus must fight to save his daughter in a never-ending landscape of surreal obstacles - and undo the mistakes of his past once and for all….
The lives of 22,000 patients could have been saved if U.S. regulators had been quicker to remove a Bayer AG drug used to stem bleeding during open heart surgery, according to a medical researcher interviewed by CBS Television’s 60 Minutes program.
The drug Trasylol was withdrawn in November at the request of the FDA after an observational study linked the medicine to kidney failure requiring dialysis and increased death of those patients.
It had been given to as many as a third of all heart bypass patients in the United States at the height of its use over a period of many years, according to the report.
Dr. Dennis Mangano, the study’s researcher, said during the program that 22,000 lives could have been saved if Trasylol had been taken off the market when he first published his study in January 2006, according to a CBS News report on its Web site ahead of a broadcast slated for next Sunday.
He said in the broadcast that Bayer failed to disclose to the FDA during an FDA advisory panel meeting in September 2006 — at which Mangano’s negative findings were discussed — that the German drugmaker had conducted its own research which confirmed the same dangers established by his study.
“We Will Not Negotiate With Terrorists….Unless They’re Saudi Royalty”
It’s not often you get such insights into the secret world of international arms trading, still the second biggest money churning business in the world, second only to drugs.
Of course, you can rest assured that what it being revealed about the scandalous arms trading affair between the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, American ambassador at the time, is only a few orange wedges out of the whole fruit salad.
Still, it’s all incredibly greasy and raises interesting questions about targets in the ‘War on Terror’ :
Investigators working on the fraud probe into Saudi arms deals were told they faced “another 7/7″ and the “loss of British lives on British streets” if they continued the inquiry, secret papers reveal.
Saudi Arabia’s rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless the corruption investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was stopped, according to documents shown to the High Court.
Helen Garlick, assistant director of the SFO, told the court that officials from the Foreign Office had told her that “British lives on British streets” were at risk.
She said: “If this caused another 7/7 how could we say that our investigation, which at this stage might or might not result in a successful prosecution, was more important?”
And so investigations digging into claims that the Saudi Prince Bandar had taken more than $US1.6 billion in bribes from British Aerospace were dropped.
Blair was clearly so horrified by the Saudi threat of terrorism in England that he quickly folded, and within three days had called his attorney general and told him to get dump the entire corruption investigation.
What Blair should have done is called a press conference, with the Saudis invited, and then revealed the threat made against the British people and demand the Saudis explain themselves.
Of course that is not done in international diplomacy, and international arms trading when the deals reach double-digit billions. Dictators are forgiven of their sins if they buy enough arms, mass murderers are negotiated with and encouraged to do business and Saudi princes can threaten the British public with bomb attacks if the government doesn’t do the ‘right thing’ when billions in arms sales and trades gets dirtier than usual.
Sounds like the Saudis have more control over terrorists and Al Qaeda groups than they’ve previously disclosed. Terrorism is the new way of state sabotage and espionage. Governments around the world use ‘terrorists’ to unleash terror on civilian populations. How many acts of terrorism begin with a memo to a government agency, instead of a satellite phone conversation from Afghanistan wastelands to European hotel rooms?
Play the fucking game or we will bomb your people - the Saudis have a lot of explaining to do. Or none at all, as will probably be the case here, yet again.
After all, the Saudis do have a lot of oil and they do buy a lot of bombs, guns and jets.
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Like most people, I’ve often wondered if those classical musicians carrying around millions of dollars in rare instruments live in fear of taking a big stumble and landing on the thing.
The instrument is a 290-year-old Stradivarius, so rare that it would be almost impossible to estimate its value.
“I was all packed up and ready to go when I slipped…People said it was as if I’d trodden on a banana skin. I fell down a flight of steps and on to the case. When I opened it, the violin was in pieces. I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t get up. I didn’t even know if I was hurt – I didn’t care. I’ve had that violin for eight years. It was like losing a friend.”
The violin, known by its sobriquet San Lorenzo, is one of about 600 surviving instruments made by Antonio Stradivari.
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A 16th Century painting of Venus featuring the Roman goddess of love wearing little but a smile has been deemed too risque for the eyes of London’s Tube travellers.
London Underground bosses have banned a poster of the 1532 work by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, promoting an upcoming Royal Academy exhibition.
The Academy is outraged.
Don’t make the Academy angry. You won’t like them when they’re angry.
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The Michigan state police department responsible for this ‘Seven Signs Of Terrorism’ video expect to get some Homeland Security funding to distribute it to more schoolchildren, and they will surely get that money. It sends the right message. Don’t just be afraid of people who kinda look like Osama Bin Laden, that bird watcher of Irish ancestry who lives down the street and went to school with your dad could be up to something connected to Al Qaeda as well. What if he has just been pretending to be an avid birdwatcher for the past three decades to ‘deploy assets’ and mask his real Destroy America intentions?
But YouTube is already doing some of the distribution work for Michigan state police, and has turned up at least six suspects, as one YouTuber explains :
According to these standards I have positively identified the following terrorists. Just to name a few.
1. My landlord
2. Jehovahs witnesses
3. My hockey buddies.
4. The mayor
5. My birdwatching grandpa
6. The new to town parents.
The music from the ‘Seven Signs Of Terrorism’ will stay with you for days, like the themes from The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror or The Omen. Not an accident.
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Every year in the United States, such violence accounts for some 1,200 deaths and 2 million injuries among women, and almost 600,000 injuries among men, according to new statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday.
“One in four women and one of seven men experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime…”
Absolute carnage.
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