Man...
Shit's crazy.
I ain't trippin'...
Well...
Okay.
I'll 'fess up.
I'm trippin'... (...)
Your world is made of Jell-O.
Your world is made of people selling you and people telling you.
Your world is made of people lying to you and people trying to help you.
So: who do you trust?
(...)
A criminal record indicates a history of criminal behavior, and thus is a measure of how trustworthy a criminal may be.
If the crimes are several years old and they've since spent years behaving well, some clemency is in order. If the crimes have been ongoing for several years culminating in a recent arrest and review, then perhaps a stiffer sentence is in order.
And if the crimes continue today?
Right now, as we seek?
(...)
WMD's. Katrina. Guantanamo. Bird-flu.
Don't. Trust. Them. Ever. Again.
Fahrenheit 9/11 showed all of us they ALL lied.
Downing Street Memo's too.
Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
(...)
They ALL lied.
This ain't just about The Bushitler Administration.
That's too easy. Don't be a punk.
It's about all the trusted sources of information that didn't tell us the truth.
It's about all the trusted sources of information that can't be trusted.
(...)
A friend is a high-school teacher, and she mentioned the media had overblown the issue of violence in schools and helped create authoritarian policies that are only leading to problem-kids becoming long-term societal problems through suspensions, drop-outs, and ventures into criminality. Racism and stereotypes are now more frequently indulged by staff and students as legitimate means of profiling, and the heightened tension as a result of Government Overlords mandating draconian measures is making students nervous irritable depressing wrecks.
Again, and I'm quoting from the above:
"...she mentioned that the media had overblown the issue..."
I said because you know your "industry" and how the media is spinning it in the worst-possible fashion to achieve the worst-possible results, you can clearly see the disgusting lies and their real practical impact on your environment, and how they took a fairly clear and balanced picture and warped it for popular consumption.
So, why do you then trust them to tell the "truth" about other "issues"?
Why do you believe they are telling the "truth" about other "industries"?
What makes you think there aren't people exactly like you tearing their hair out in every other sector of society that's being sodomized for ratings and sold as far more screwed up than they are with no empathizing context?
Where do they get the audacity to justify hyberbole as "news" when it is not leading to a better world and their sins of omission are making us all feel weaker?
What makes them think we wouldn't "buy" news that makes us feel better?
Why don't we?
(...)
"Qui bono?" is latin for "Who profits?"
As long as Bill O'Reilly is making $7mm a year for Fox News, he's going to do exactly what they want in warping the reality his viewers understand.
But, he's just a scapegoat. Don't be a punk.
He's the extreme that makes the rest of us feel comfortable with our local nightly newscasts. It's like we know he beats the hell out of his wife and kids, while at least our local anchor only beats his dog and black kids.
There. That's not so bad.
After all, as long as there's someone worse then obviously we're safely in the "middle" of popular opinion, just catching enough poison to work on us slowly, just watching the headlines that made deadlines designed to quickly brand us with their stamp of approval:
"THIS IS THE WORLD!"
No it's not.
It's a thin-gruel of half-knowledge that makes you choke on your tears.
Go ahead, try to explain it.
You've got a half-dozen Talking Points to work with per issue.
That's it.
Hurricanes?
Gas prices?
Go on...
I dare you to explain what's happening when for last 30 years a huge increase in the price of Gas has deliberately foreshadowed a recession to structurally weaken society and fracture happily co-existing cultural groups into selfish tribalism. And how Gas companies are making record profits. And how nobody else in the world has been affected by Gas prices like this. And how the Gas supply-chain has never been properly explained to identify the problem and exactly what is causing the spikes.
And exactly how many good people are screwed by this?
Isn't that a good metric for deciding what's news?
The more people affected the more important a story is?
And how badly they're affected?
And how to fix it?
Can't we judge "news" based on the "quality" of what we are seeing, hearing, or reading, as opposed to having absolute faith in the "source"?
Which one makes you feel better?
Makes you feel like you "know" what's going on?
Is that a bad thing?
Is the "news" supposed to make you feel "bad"?
Does that then make it "real news"?
Doesn't that friggin' "suck"?
(...)
A random sampling of apocrypha below, "sensationalism" is something we expect but somehow never see.
Look for it, and for the lies in how they are telling a story vs. what's actually in it, the few "facts" in the story can easily be interpreted differently.
Here...
Just some shit buried in a Reuters article via Yahoo! News...
"The H5N1 avian influenza virus has killed or forced the destruction of tens of millions of birds and infected more than 100 people, killing at least 60 in four Asian nations since late 2003."
http://blackkrishna.blogspot.com/2005/10/rights-wing-republicans-vs-reich-wing.html#comments
Okay...
So, "60 people" in four Asian nations have been killed since 2003, and we're supposed freak-out?
Weren't 60 people killed yesterday by something else?
If this is so "viral", then how come in nearly 3 years in filthy Asian chicken-chop-shops only 100 people got infected and 60 people died?
Why did the U.S. Government put the 1914 Spanish Flu virus back together just in time to say it's almost exactly like a new plague about to kill us all?
Why should we should now agree to martial law and order billions of dollars worth of Rumsfeld-owned vaccines that only help the marginalized virus mutate into something worse and weaken our immunity for everything else?
"Bird-flu".
"Fuck-u."
(...)
This shit's getting old to me...
But hey, shit's real, and getting shit-on is worse... (...)
BONUS: Numbers don't lie, people do...
Yahoo! News
Consumer Confidence Unexpectedly Falls
By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO, AP Business Writer 40 minutes ago
NEW YORK - The outlook for the holiday shopping season darkened Tuesday as the latest consumer confidence reading showed Americans even more pessimistic about the economy during October. Hurricanes, surging gasoline prices and worries about the job market took a further toll on consumer psyches.
A separate report on home sales during September also pointed to consumers' growing uneasiness.
The Conference Board said its
Consumer Confidence Index fell to 85 in October, the lowest level since October 2003 and down from September's revised reading of 87.5, which had been the sharpest drop in 15 years. Analysts expected an October reading of 88 for the index, which is compiled from a survey of U.S. households.
"Much of the decline in confidence over the past two months can be attributed to the recent hurricanes, pump shock and a weakening labor market," said Lynn Franco, director of the private research group's Consumer Research Center in a statement.
She said the "degree of pessimism, in conjunction with the anticipation of much higher home heating bills this winter, may take some cheer out of the upcoming holiday season."
The decline in confidence helped send the
Dow Jones industrial average down 15.37, or 0.15 percent, to 10,369.63 in morning trading.
Meanwhile, the
National Association of Realtors said sales of previously owned homes were unchanged in September. The Realtors said sales would have fallen without an increase in demand among people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.
The nation's retailers are already preparing for a difficult season. Although gasoline prices have slipped back from recent weeks, they still are quite high, and home heating costs are expected to soar this fall and winter, forcing many consumers to budget carefully for the holidays.
"The unexpected decline means optismism is under more pressure than we thought," said Patrick Fearon, senior economist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. Fearon believes all the political uncertainty is also weighing on consumers' confidence.
"There is certainly more going on than just hurricanes and a resulting spike in gasoline prices," said Fearon. He noted President Bush's drop in approval ratings, political unrest in the Middle East and concerns about the Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers "could weigh on people's attitudes."Economists closely track consumer confidence because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.
One component of the Conference Board report, which examines
consumers' views of the current economic situation, fell to 108.2 from 110.4 last month. The Expectations Index, which measures consumers' outlook over the next six months,
fell to 69.5 from 72.3.
Consumers' assessment of the current employment market was somewhat bleaker than in September. The number of
consumers saying jobs are "hard to get" rose to 25.3 percent from 25.0 percent, while the number saying jobs are
"plentiful" was virtually unchanged at 20.8 percent.
The outlook for the labor market also worsened. The number of consumers expecting more jobs to become available in the coming months fell to
12.2 percent from 14.0 percent, while those expecting fewer jobs eased to
23.7 percent from 24.8 percent in September. The proportion of consumers anticipating their incomes to rise in the months ahead fell to
16.8 percent from 18.1 percent last month.
The Conference Board index is derived from responses received through Oct. 18 to a survey mailed to 5,000 households in a consumer research panel. The figure released Tuesday include responses from at least 2,500 households.
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SOURCE - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051025/ap_on_bi_ge/economy
[Ed note: a nice short link too, perfect to pass-on and piss-off friends...](...)
BONUS: "I believe that torture is the future, TV-teach us well, and let us slave-away..."Infowars.com
General in charge of Abu Ghraib: Torture still going on, Iraq just the beginning
General says she was deliberately kept out of the loop and scapegoated to protect higher uppers
Prisonplanet.com | October 25 2005
The General commanding troops in Iraq whose career was ruined in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, Janis Karpinski, appeared on the Alex Jones Show yesterday and made some amazing revelations.
Prisonplanet.tv subscribers can hear the entire interview here.
Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski will be reduced to the rank of colonel as a result of an Army Inspector General investigation into a scandal that tarnished the United States' reputation abroad and set in motion a string of high-level inquiries.
Karpinski was the only general punished in the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Karpinski had previously admitted that rather than being an isolated incident under her command, the abuses were, "the result of conflicting orders and confused standards extending from the military commanders in Iraq all the way to the summit of civilian leadership in Washington."
The General described how the abuses came to pass and how she was used as the scapegoat.
"It started when we were assigned this new mission for detention operations. We were basically sold a false bill of goods, they told us that we were going to Baghdad, that we were going to receive support from the CJTF7, General Sanchez's headquarters, and from Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, that we would be working with these prison experts at the Coalition Provisional Authority to work towards restoring Iraqi Prisons to turn them back over to Iraqi control."
"To arrive in Baghdad to discover that they had just begun to identify some locations, they had a list of 121 prisons that they wanted to restore and that they wanted us to run, and I told them I didn't have nearly that number of resources, I could run about fifteen, we settled on seventeen and they were responsible for providing the funding to restore and renovate those prisons."
"That was very slow in coming, only to discover after those contractors had left, most of the contract work had been allegedly done and paid for was in fact never done. So we had MP's that were running these facilities, very very austere conditions, the prisons that were restored were done to the minimal standard. In one case the contractors put all the hinges on the inside of the doors and the prisoners took all the hinge pins out."
"Abu Ghraib was never intended to be a permanent prison or permanent detention centre, it was used as an interim facility, largely because there was real estate inside the twenty foot high retaining wall, which was the first line of defence, for us to establish temporary camps."
"If there was still a war going on, this would have been much like a prisoner of war camp. It was never an ideal location of any kind, for detention operations, let alone interrogation operations as it ultimately became."
Karpinski went on to describe how military intelligence took over and became rooted within her own reservations.
"The Military Intelligence Brigade Commander relocated to Abu Ghraib after two of his soldiers were killed in an RPG attack out at the prison facility. He was visiting one night, only intended to stay one or two nights and there was an attack and two of his soldiers were killed and shortly after that he decided to relocate inside Abu Ghraib."
"He had six interrogation teams shortly after this became about a dozen. These were military interrogation teams, soldiers who were serving as interrogators, they were following the regulations, their doctrine. We had a very small number of prisoners that needed to be interrogated, they were mostly Iraqi criminals, nonviolent crimes, looting, missing curfew, a weapon in the trunk of the car, whatever it may have been."
Of course, the official army report on Abu Ghraib said that between seventy five and ninety percent were totally innocent and just hadn't had their papers in order. The General confirmed this:
"That's correct and I believe that it remains so today because they are still doing these raids, these round ups where they will go out and target an individual, and whoever happens to be around that individual, they bring them all in. And then there is no avenue to release them, once they are tagged as security detainees, they fall into this relatively new and unsupervised category."
Karpinski went on to say that the General in charge of the military interrogations at Abu Ghraib had the authority to do whatever he wanted and was not required to report any of his findings through her.
She also stated that even though innocent detainees had been deemed of no further Intel use and were recommended to be released by their interrogators, the higher uppers read the riot act and started a pattern whereby no one was to be released and innocent people were kept locked up without trial or charges.
The General went on to speak about the direct links to leading members of the Bush Administration:
"We can trace back now, through documents that were released through court order, back to the original document, the one that Alberto Gonzales reviewed and discussed with the President of the United States, a departure from the Geneva Convention. These are not prisoners, these are terrorists and these techniques will be more effective."
"And then Secretary Rumsfeld putting his signature on a document authorizing more aggressive and harsher techniques during interrogation. That document goes over to Guantanamo Bay and over to Afghanistan, and it's used first in smaller groups and then it's used at Guantanamo Bay as a standard practice."
The General also agreed that private contractors were brought in to over see the interrogations. The orders to use torture techniques can be traced back to the criminals in Government.
"The orders came right from the top, filtered down from the secretary of defence, with the endorsement of the President, the Vice President, whatever advisors are surrounding them, filtered down through the Commanders in the field, these practices were not only endorsed, but were in use at Guantanamo bay and in locations in Afghanistan. And when General Miller visited Iraq he brought those techniques with him. And then he sent contract interrogators who had 'performed well' at Guantanamo Bay to Iraq as well."
The General agreed that in effect torture seminars were taking place as Miller would teach how to make techniques of torture more effective.
Karpinski also went on to explain how it came about that photographs and video of the torture were taken and how despite Congress having seen thousands of them, few of the persons responsible for authorizing the raping of women, the beating to death of innocent people, and the torture of minors have been brought to justice.
"They needed a group of people to scapegoat and they must have believed naïvely that they were going to take the punishment, go to jail and be quiet and that they were never going to go out and hire their own attorneys and representatives for themselves and their own cases. They certainly believed that I was going to be quiet."
General Karpinski was not even informed of charges against her until the investigation was under way and she received a late night e-mail from the Commander of the Criminal Investigation Commission. His agent on site at Abu Ghraib was the one who received the disc of pictures from the MP. So the Commanding officer of all the reopened prisons in Iraq was not informed about an ongoing criminal investigation into occurrences at the prisons.
"They kept me out of the loop on purpose" Karpinski angrily asserted.
Karpinski reiterated that it was almost inconceivable to have an operation taken over by Military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, a site in the middle of the Sunni Triangle, that was being bombarded with mortars every night. Further more the objective of military intelligence is completely different from that of a military police soldier. MP's know how to humanly treat detainees and they did so at every facility, the only breach was at Abu Ghraib under the control of the military intelligence.
The MI would even hire former federal prison guards with bad records to undertake these operations.
"The prisons experts that were hired, we were supposed to have about eighty of them down at the Coalition Provisional Authority, there was three and then one of them got fired, and these are US contractors, of course they didn't share the information about their previous positions with us." Karpinski said.
The General went on to state that she saw many instances of decision makers being worried more about the political ramifications of their decisions back in Washington than the moral ramifications. She asserted that to disagree with Donald Rumsfeld would mean instant dismissal and everyone knew this.
"There is no backbone any more that the US military is so famous for. Our leaders are now afraid. They are afraid to voice their opinions, and they are afraid to say, no you're wrong." The General said.
Furthermore, all the data before the war, and the advice of all the big think tanks, suggested that more than 300, 000 troops would be needed to succeed. Of course all of this was ignored by the crazy Neo-Cons who are so convinced by their own convictions that they will not tolerate any one else's opinions or suggestions.
Becoming emotional, the General asserted that the higher uppers have been attempting to run the war "from their lap top computers". They refused to go out and walk the ground in Baghdad that the soldiers are walking, but they had no trouble sending those under them out there WITHOUT the armored vehicles which were being used to protect their own spokesmen and their own headquarters.
"The person who stopped the orders for additional armored equipment and armored vehicles is today a FOUR STAR GENERAL, and is in the Pentagon, and is serving as the acting chief of staff of the army." Karpinski angrily commented.
"You see how it works, you play the game, you go along with whatever is being spun by the Neo-Cons or by the Pentagon and you get promoted. But the people who have the strength and the moral courage to stand up and say This is wrong, this is a lie, they are removed from their positions, they take their security clearance away and then they're out on the street."
General Karpinski went on to say that the reason talk of banning torture has come to the forefront, even though there should be no need for discussion on the topic is because it IS STILL GOING ON.
"There is overwhelming proof that torture is going on, that it has been directed and is likely continuing, even to this day. I don't want to believe it is but the statements from the people just returning from the theater give every indication that in fact it is, they still don't know where to draw the line." The General said.
On the topic of why the torture is so extreme and degrading, the General suggested that the interrogators are getting a bizarre pleasure out of it. She gave the example of using naked menstruating women to break Muslim Iraqi men.
"Who studied the Arab culture to come up with such a n idea, this is insulting to anybody." She said. "And the fact that they are using female soldiers to conduct this demonstrates what they think the likely;y role of women in the army is."
If you wrote a horror movie where the army was doing this it would be too unbelievable, yet this is happening in reality and the media has just accepted it as the norm now.
It seems clear and the General agrees that we are seeing the formation of a cold blooded torture core with Iraq as the beta test. Iraq is often referred to as a "laboratory". The test is to see how the prisoners, the soldiers and the public react to this.
"They are looking for the kind of people with this mind set, who can live with themselves whilst they are going forth with this global war on terrorism and trying to make a difference."
Related Information
Daily life at Abu Ghraib: Filthy conditions, sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations
Gen. Karpinski demoted in prison scandal
Abu Ghraib disciplinary actions set
REAL SOURCE - http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/abu_ghraib_karpinski_torture_still_going_on.htm(...)
BONUS: FBI friggin' knew this COINTELPRO crap was still going on... Infowars.com
Congress asked to increase FBI oversight
Request made after agency's files show it violated law and policy in a number of cases
New York Times | October 25 2005
By Eric Lichtblau
WASHINGTON -- Civil rights advocates called Monday for Congress to increase its oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's surveillance of suspects in intelligence investigations, in light of newly disclosed records indicating the FBI violated the law.
But the FBI defended its record, saying it had been diligent in policing itself and in correcting lapses it considered to be largely technical and procedural.
The debate was prompted by a set of internal FBI documents made public Monday that disclosed at least a dozen violations of federal law or bureau policy from 2002 to 2004 in the handling of surveillance and investigative matters.
Expanding on that data, the FBI said Monday that internal reviews identified a total of 113 violations since last year that were referred to a federal intelligence board.
In several cases, the documents showed, FBI agents extended investigations and surveillance operations for months without getting proper approval from supervisors or giving notification.
In one case documented in 2002, an unidentified target was watched for nearly two years by agents in Indianapolis without the required oversight of Justice executives, the papers say. In a separate case in 2002, the documents say, agents' 15-month delay in reporting the status of their surveillance of an unidentified person in Detroit kept Justice "from exercising its responsibility for oversight and approval."
In another case, an FBI agent still on probation gained access to banking records without getting needed approval, in violation federal privacy restrictions.
While most of the cases appeared to be related to intelligence and national security investigations in field offices around the country, the FBI blacked out virtually all details about the exact nature of the investigations. The documents were obtained through a public records act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a group that lobbies for greater privacy rights and civil liberties, and were first reported on Monday in The Washington Post.
Officials at the privacy center said the documents suggested abuses of authority by the FBI under the expanded powers granted under the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law that Congress will consider extending in coming weeks. The privacy group said congressional oversight committees had never been properly informed of the possible violations, and it called on Congress to exercise greater oversight.
"These are instances of alleged abuse in domestic intelligence investigations by the FBI, and we consider the failure to report these issues to Congress to be a really serious one," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the privacy center.
REAL SOURCE - http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/fbi_congress_asked_increase_oversight.htm(...)
BONUS: A former marine and UN weapons inspector breaks down how the people in charge may soon use real weapons on us... Former UN Weapons Inspector: Don't Rule Out Staged Government Terror
Ritter says Neo-Cons are embattled, surrounded, could resort to desperate measures to further global domination
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones | October 24 2005
Former United Nations weapons inspector and Marine Scott Ritter appeared on The Alex Jones Show and stated that he wouldn't rule out the possibility of the Bush administration staging a terror attack in order to jolt a wavering foreign policy agenda back on track.
Ritter compared the atmosphere within the administration to that during the time of Watergate, where Nixon considered utilizing America's nuclear arsenal to create a devastating diversion from domestic calamity.
"Nothing this administration would do would surprise me, they're desperate right now."
"If you go back and take a look at the Nixon administration during the height of Watergate Nixon was talking about using nuclear weapons against the Soviets in the Middle East, insanity of this nature."
"When you have an irresponsible administration like the Nixon administration, like this current administration, and they start to feel embattled, surrounded, they take on a fortress like mentality where everybody becomes the enemy."
Asked if he thought a staged terror attack was possible, a scenario previously considered by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Ritter responded,
"Yeah, you have people who have no regard for the rule of law. These aren't people who appreciate the Constitution, to them the Constitution is an impediment, it's an obstacle, it's something in the way, it's something to be avoided. They are married to an ideology of global domination, of global imperialism and they're not going to deviate from this."
Regarding the issue of imminent indictments of top Bush administration officials, Ritter stated,
"I think the President should be investigated to determine whether he's committed a crime and if a crime has been committed then the President must be held accountable, fully accountable, to the rule of law."
Ritter dispelled any potential charges of partisanship by stating, "If we're going to go after Bush then we have to go after Clinton."
"We've got to make sure that we set the record straight that this isn't about partisan bashing, Bush bashing. This is about reasserting the rule of law as set forth by the Constitution and reasserting the power of the people."
On the subject of which country will be subject to the next Neo-Con invasion, Ritter commented,
"There are elements within the Bush administration, especially Donald Rumsfeld's associates, Doug Fife, Wolfowitz and others whose long goal crossed the line of serving America and they started serving another country out there, Israel."
"This administration wants to go to Syria, wants to go to Iran. Iran has turned into a little more difficult of a proposition both diplomatically and militarily, and financially. So Iran may be pushed to the back-burner right now, doesn't mean it's going away, we should never forget that."
"We're going to go small first and I think that with Syria the feeling in the Bush administration is that this is a very easy target, it's one that would make Israel very happy if we took out this regime."
"I'm not sure it's going to be as easy as they think it's going to be."
Ritter's claims have continually been proven to be accurate even in the face of numerous establishment media and government attempts to defame his character.
Ritter is the latest of a rash of credible people both inside and outside of government to voice concerns that a staged terror attack blamed on Iran or Syria could be used as the pretext to instigate pre-planned invasions and further entrench a police state in the US.
Former CIA analyst and Bush 41 staffer Ray McGovern gave similar sentiments as well as British Member or Parliament George Galloway.
------------------------------------------
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REAL SOURCE - http://www.infowars.com/articles/terror/ritter_dont_rule_out_staged_gov_terror.htm
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