Zebra 3 Report by Joe Anybody
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
The Idea of a Police State in America - and What Happened
Mood:  blue
Now Playing: Police State in America - What Happened?
Topic: CONSPIRACY

The Idea of America
By Jeffrey Tucker

[copied from an email from WhiskeyandGundpowder.com]

There are occasions in American life -- and they come too often these days -- when you want to scream: "what the heck has happened to this country?!" Everyone encounters events that strike a particular nerve, some egregious violations of the norms for a free country that cut very deeply and personally.

We wonder: do we even remember what it means to be free? If not -- and I think not -- The Idea of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost (hardcover and Kindle), a collection of bracing reminders from our past, as edited by William Bonner and Pierre Lemieux, is the essential book of our time.

I'll just mention two outrages that occur first to me. In the last six months, I came back to the country twice from international travel, once by plane and once by car. The car scene shocked me. The lines were ridiculously long and border control agents, clad in dark glasses and boots and wearing enough weaponry to fight an invading army, run up and down the lines with large dogs. Periodically, US border control would throw open doors of cars and vans and let the dogs run through, while the driver sits there poker faced and trying to stay calm and pretending not to object.

When I finally got to the customs window, I was questioned not like a citizen of the country but like a likely terrorist. The agent wanted to know everything about me: home, work, where I had been and why, and whether I will stay somewhere before getting to my destination, family composition, and other matters that just creeped me out. I realized immediately that there was no question he could ask me that I could refuse to answer, and I had to do this politely.

That's power.

The second time I entered the country was by plane, and there were two full rescans of bags on the way in, in addition to the passport check, and a long round of questioning. There were no running dogs this time; the passengers were the dogs and we were all on the agents' leashes. Whatever they ordered us to do, we did, no matter how irrational. We moved here and there in locked step and total silence. One step out of line and you are guaranteed to be yelled at. At one point, an armed agent began to talk loudly and with a sense of ridicule about the clothes I was wearing, and went out of his way to make sure everyone else heard him. I could do nothing but smile as if I were being complimented by a friend.

That's power.

Of course these cases are nothing like the reports you hear almost daily about the abuse and outrages from domestic travel, which now routinely requires everyone to submit to digital strip searches. We have come to expect this. We can hardly escape the presence of the police in our lives. I vaguely remember when I was young that I thought of the police as servants of the people. Now their presence strikes fear in the heart, and they are everywhere, always operating under the presumption that they have total power and you and I have absolutely none.

You hear slogans about the "land of the free" and we still sing patriotic songs at the ballpark and even at church on Sunday, and these songs are always about our blessed liberty, the battles of our ancestors against tyranny, the special love of liberty that animates our heritage and national self identity. The contrast with reality grows starker by the day.

And it isn't just about our personal liberty and our freedom to move about with a sense that we are exercising our rights. It hits us in the economic realm, where no goods or services change hands that aren't subject to the total control of the leviathan state. No business is really safe from being bludgeoned by legislatures, regulators, and the tax police, while objecting only makes you more of a target.

Few dare say it publicly: America has become a police state. All the signs are in place, among which is the world's largest prison population. If we are not a police state, one must ask, what are the indicators that will tell us that we've crossed the line? What are signs we haven't yet seen?

We can debate that all day about when, precisely, the descent began but there can be no doubt when the slide into the despotic abyss became precipitous. It was after the terrorists hit on 9/11 in 2001. The terrorists wanted to deliver a blow to freedom. Our national leaders swore the terrorists would never win, and then spent the following ten years delivering relentless and massive blows to liberty as we had known it.

The decline has been fast but not fast enough for people to be as shocked as they should be. Freedom is a state of being that is difficult to recall once it is gone. We adapt to the new reality, the way people adapt to degenerative diseases, grateful for slight respites from pain and completely despairing of ever feeling healthy and well again.

What's more, all the time we spend obeying, complying, and pretending to be malleable in order to stay out of trouble ends up socializing us and even changing our outlook on life. As in the Orwell novel, we have adjusted to government control as the new normal. The loudspeakers blared that all of this is in the interest of our security and well being. These people who are stripping us, robbing us, humiliating us, impoverishing us are doing it all for our own good. We never fully believe it but the message still affects our outlook.

The editors of The Idea of America are urging a serious national self assessment. They argue that freedom is the only theme that fully and truly animates the traditional American spirit. We are not united in religion, race, and creed, but we do have this wonderful history of rebellion against power in favor of human rights and freedom from tyranny. For this reason the book begins with the essential founding documents, which, if taken seriously, make a case for radical freedom not as something granted by government but as something that we possess as a matter of right.

The love of liberty is rooted in our Colonial past, and it is thrilling to see Murray Rothbard's excellent account of the pre-revolutionary past printed here, with followups to make the point by Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. Lord Acton makes the next appearance with a clarifying essay about the whole point of the American Revolution, which was not independence as such but liberty. He forcefully argues that the right of secession, the right to annul laws, the right to say no to the tyrant, the right to leave the system, constitute great contribution of America to political history. As you read, you wonder where these voices are today, and what would happen to them if they spoke up in modern versions of the same thoughts. These revolutionaries are pushing ideas that the modern regime seeks to bury and even criminalize.

The voice of the new country and its voluntaristic themes is provided by Alexis de Tocqueville, along with the writings of James Madison. As Bonner and Lemieux argue in their own contributions, the idea of anarchism, that is, living without a state, has always been just beneath the surface of American ideology. Here they bring it to the surface with an essay by proto-anarchist J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, who said of America: "we have no princes for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world."

The anarchist strain continues with marvelous writings by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Volairine de Cleyre, plus some court decisions reinforcing gun rights. The book ends with another reminder that America is an open society that is welcoming to newcomers. The final choice of Rose Wilder Lane's "Give Me Liberty" is inspired.

The value of this book is dramatically heightened by the additional material from Bonner, whose clear prose and incisive intellect is on display here both in the foreword and the afterword, as well as Lemieux, whose introduction made my blood boil with all his examples of government gone mad in our time. Bonner in particular offers an intriguing possibility that the future of the true America has nothing to do with geography; it exists where the free minds and free hearts exist. The digitization of the world opens up new opportunities for just this.

The contrast is stark: what America was meant to be and what it has become. It is hard to take this kind of careful look. Truly honest appraisals of this sort are rare. Adapting, going along, pretending not to notice are all easier strategies to deal with the grim situation we face. But this is not the way America's founders dealt with their problems. This book might inspire us to think and act more like we should.

We should prepare.

In the words of Thomas Paine:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. -- Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

[Editor's Note: Idea of America is considered a must read here at Agora Financial. The ideas inside are more powerful than any options, stock or bond tip we could ever pass along.

At less than $25 per copy, the book is well worth the small fee. We're not the only ones who think that way...

"I hope everyone will read this to see why America became a great country -- so we can keep it a great country," says Jim Rogers, best-selling author of Adventure Capitalist.

Edward Crane, president of CATO Institute says, "The Idea of America is a gem!"

"This is a superb book," starts reviewer R. Hall, "and gives very good and varied ideas of America in its founding days. Should be recommended reading for all ages, especially in school."

"This book cannot be recommended too highly," says Amazon.com reviewer P. Anderson.

But to celebrate the holiday, we're not asking you to pay $25 for Idea of America. In fact, we've worked out a special way for you to claim a free e-book copy.

It's an offer we've never done before. And one we may never do again.

So go ahead... before you catch the fireworks this evening, take advantage of our generosity this holiday, right here.]


Posted by Joe Anybody at 3:11 PM PDT
Sunday, 6 February 2011
A defense mechanism, which they labeled “backfire...
Mood:  d'oh
Now Playing: Stephen Dufrechou - Are We Too Dumb for Democracy?
Topic: CONSPIRACY

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Stephen Dufrechou - Are We Too Dumb for Democracy? The Logic Behind Self-Delusion

 http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2010/12/stephen-dufrechou-are-we-too-dumb-for.html

That's not a rhetorical question. But I also am not convinced "dumb" is the right word. Dufrechou is solid footing in referencing George Lakoff, but much less so when referring to psychoanalysis.

To be honest, Dufrechou has it backwards in saying that psychoanalysis supports Lakoff's research - it's the other way around. There is little to no empirical support for psychoanalysis, while Lakoff, as a linguist, is rivaled only by Chomsky.

Anyway, this is an interesting look at why people hold on to false beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

When faced with facts that do not fit seamlessly into our individual belief systems, our minds automatically reject (or backfire) the presented facts.
A recent cognitive study, as reported by the Boston Globe, concluded that:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

In light of these findings, researchers concluded that a defense mechanism, which they labeled “backfire”, was preventing individuals from producing pure rational thought. The result is a self-delusion that appears so regularly in normal thinking that we fail to detect it in ourselves, and often in others: When faced with facts that do not fit seamlessly into our individual belief systems, our minds automatically reject (or backfire) the presented facts. The result of backfire is that we become even more entrenched in our beliefs, even if those beliefs are totally or partially false.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” said Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher of the Michigan study. The occurrence of backfire, he noted, is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

The conclusion made here is this: facts often do not determine our beliefs, but rather our beliefs (usually non-rational beliefs) determine the facts that we accept. As the Boston Globe article notes:

In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

Despite this finding, Nyhan claims that the underlying cause of backfire is unclear. “It’s very much up in the air,” he says. And on how our society is going to counter this phenomena, Nyhan is even less certain.

These latter unanswered questions are expected in any field of research, since every field has its own limitations. Yet here the field of psychoanalysis can offer a completion of the picture.

Disavowal and Backfire: One and the Same

In an article by psychoanalyst Rex Butler, Butler independently comes to the same conclusion as the Michigan Study researchers. In regards to facts and their relationship to belief systems (or ideologies), Butler says that:

there is no necessary relationship between reality and its symbolization … Our descriptions do not naturally and immutably refer to things, but … things in retrospect begin to resemble their description. Thus, in the analysis of ideology, it is not simply a matter of seeing which account of reality best matches the ‘facts’, with the one that is closest being the least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are determined, we have already – whether we know it or not – made our choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts, which facts are relevant, and so on.

This places the field of psychoanalysis on the same footing as that of cognitive science, in regards to this matter. But where cognitive studies end, with Nyhan’s question about the cause of backfire, psychoanalysis picks up and provides a possible answer. In fact, psychoanalysts have been publishing work on backfire for decades; only psychoanalysis refers to backfire by another name: “disavowal”. Indeed, these two terms refer to one and the same phenomena.

The basic explanation for the underlying cause of disavowal/backfire goes as follows.

“Liberals” and “conservatives” espouse antithetical belief systems, both of which are based on different non-rational “moral values.” This is a fact that cognitive linguist George Lakoff has often discussed, which incidentally brings in yet another field of study that supports the existence of the disavowal/backfire mechanism.

In accordance with these different non-rational belief systems, any individual’s ideology tends to function also as a ‘filtering system’, accepting facts that seamlessly fit into the framework of that ideology, while dismissing facts that do not fit.

When an individual—whether a “liberal”, “conservative”, or any other potential ideology—is challenged with facts that conflict with his/her ideology, the tendency is for that individual to experience feelings of anxiety, dread, and frustration. This is because our ideologies function, like a lynch pin, to hold our psychologies together, in order to avoid, as Nyhan puts it, “cognitive dissonance”. In other words, when our lynch pins are disturbed, our psychologies are shaken.

Psychoanalysts explain that, when this cognitive dissonance does occur, the result is to ‘externalize’ the sudden negative feelings outward, in the form of anger or resentment, and then to ‘project’ this anger onto the person that initially presented the set of backfired facts to begin with. (Although, sometimes this anger is ‘introjected’ inward, in the form of self-punishment or self-loathing.)

This non-rational eruption of anger or resentment is what psychoanalysts call “de-sublimation”. And it is at the point of de-sublimation, when the disavowal/backfire mechanism is triggered as a defense against the cognitive dissonance.

Hence, here is what mentally occurs next, in a matter of seconds:

In order to regain psychological equilibrium, the mind disavows the toxic facts that initially clashed with the individuals own ideology, non-rationally deeming the facts to be false—without assessing the validity of the facts.

The final step occurs when the person, who offered the toxic facts, is then non-rationally demonized. The person, here, becomes tainted as a ‘phobic object’ in the mind of the de-sublimated individual. Hence, the other person also becomes perceived to be as toxic as the disavowed facts, themselves.

At this point, ad hominem attacks are often fired at the source of the toxic facts. For example: ‘stupid liberal’ or ‘stupid conservative’, if in a political context. Or, ‘blasphemer’ or ‘heretic’, if in a religious context. At this point, according to psychoanalysis, psychological equilibrium is regained. The status quo of the individual’s ideology is reinforced to guard against future experiences of de-sublimation.

Why Do Different Ideologies Exist?

This all begs the obvious question about the existence of differing ideologies between people. Why do they exist? And how are they constituted differently? George Lakoff has demonstrated in his studies (which are supported strongly by psychoanalysis), that human beings are not born already believing an ideology. Rather people are socialized into an ideology during their childhood formative years. The main agents which prescribe the ideology are the parental authority figures surrounding the child, who rear him, from infantile dependency on the parent-figures, into an independent adult. The parental values of how the child should be an independent and responsible adult, in regards to his relations between his self and others, later informs that child’s ideology as an adult.

Lakoff shows that two dominant parenting types exist, which can determine the child’s adult ideology. Individuals reared under the “Strict Parent” model tend to grow-up as political conservatives, while those raised under a “Nurturing Parent” model tend to become political liberals. His most influential book on these matters, “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think”, was published in 1996.

Of course, peoples’ minds can fundamentally change, along with their ideological values. But short of a concerted effort by an individual to change, through one form of therapy or another, that change is mostly fostered by traumatic or long-endured life experiences.

Yet many minds remain rock solid for life, beliefs included. As psychiatrist Scott Peck sees it, “Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”

Thus to answer Nyahan’s question—how can society counter the negative effects of backfire?—it seems only one answer is viable. Society will need to adopt the truths uncovered by cognitive science and psychoanalysis. And society will have to use those truths to inform their overall cultural practices and values. Short of that, Peck’s “fortunate few” will remain the only individuals among us who resist self-delusion.

~ Stephen Dufrechou is Editor of Opinion and Analysis for News Junkie Post.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PST
Updated: Monday, 7 February 2011 9:55 AM PST
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Conspiracy 10 Theories
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: 'Patriot' Paranoia: A Look at the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories
Topic: CONSPIRACY

'Patriot' Paranoia: A Look at the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/fall/patriot-paranoia?ondntsrc=MBQ100870NWS&newsletter=newsgen-20100819

Illustration by Paul Rogers

Conspiracy theorizing has flourished as a virtual art form in all nations and across all political persuasions. But the American radical right has to be considered a strong contender for the title of modern conspiracy champion. A vast body of academic literature exists exploring this history, of which Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is the most famous. Hundreds of books and articles have chronicled the rise (and fall) of an unceasing march of disparate conspiracy-based movements that, at different points in American history, have trembled before and warned against imaginary threats posed by Catholics, Mormons, Jews, American Communists, Freemasons, bankers, and U.S. government officials and agencies.

Scholars continue to debate the psychological and sociological origins of conspiracy theories, but there is no arguing that these theories have seen a revival on the extreme right in recent years. Over the last two decades, a far-right conspiracy culture of self-proclaimed "Patriots" has emerged in which the United States government itself is viewed as a mortal threat to everything from constitutional democracy to the survival of the human race. This conspiracy revival — which has been accompanied by the explosive growth of Patriot groups over the last year and a half — kicked into overdrive with the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, who is seen by Patriots as a foreign-born Manchurian candidate sent by forces of the so-called "New World Order" to destroy American sovereignty and institute one-world socialist government.

Since Obama's election, the constituent theories within the overarching narrative of the New World Order have increasingly made inroads into the mainstream national discourse. Thanks to conservative cable news hosts like Glenn Beck (of Fox News) and Lou Dobbs (formerly of CNN), conspiratorial rants about FEMA concentration camps and the "North American Union" have been beamed directly into the living rooms of millions of Americans. Websites popular with Tea Party conservatives, meanwhile, have further stoked fears of a socialistic one-world government takeover by "un-American" forces. Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily.com, for example, has grown its influence by peddling paranoia about the president's birth certificate and AmeriCorps' "domestic armies." Earlier this year, the John Birch Society, a group with a long history of hatching and promoting wild conspiracy theories (including the idea that President Eisenhower was a communist agent), co-sponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual powwow of leading conservatives and Republican Party figures. Speakers at this year's conference included such mainstream names as Washington Post columnist George Will, former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner. 

Here is a compilation of 10 of the most popular conspiracy theories currently circulating on the radical right and, increasingly, on points of the political spectrum much too close to the center for comfort. 

01 Chemtrails
In the world of Patriot antigovernment paranoia, New World Order forces attempt to manipulate and control the unwitting population from every conceivable source and direction — from the images on your television screen to the very water that comes out of your kitchen tap. In recent years, the New World Order has been meddling most nefariously from above, high among the clouds.

Few Internet-age antigovernment conspiracies have spread as quickly or as widely as the idea of "chemtrails": the belief that air and water vapor contrails that form in the wake of high-altitude aircraft are really clouds of toxic soup being deliberately sprayed by hundreds, if not thousands, of secret government planes executing the designs of the New World Order. What is the insidious purpose of the chemtrails program? It depends which paranoid Patriot you ask. The most popular theories include population control, weather manipulation, and outright human extermination. If, as some cultural historians suggest, the UFO sightings of the 1940s and 50s were the skyward projection of early atomic-age fears, chemtrails are the climate-change-age corollary, with cultural panic over pollution and strange weather mixing with deeper traditions of Patriot antigovernment animus.

Hundreds of websites currently peddle chemtrails theories, along with books, DVDs and all manner of survivalist gear. They maintain that toxic clouds in the sky are easily distinguished from normal contrails by their longer duration and expansive dissipation patterns. Most of the spraying is believed to take place at night over the population centers of the NATO countries, especially the United States.

Who, exactly, is responsible for the program? There are conflicting schools of thought here as well. But among Patriot groups it is generally agreed that some alignment of New World Order lords — sometimes referred to as the Illuminati — is busy spraying cities and towns with pathogens. In the grimmest of the scenarios, the spraying represents the first of a two-stage depopulation program. Stage one involves spreading pathogens to weaken humanity's collective immune system; once general T-cell weakness is attained, goes the theory, we can expect aerial dispersal of smallpox or anthrax to finish us off.

Fear over chemtrails long ago spread beyond the Patriot fringe. Twenty years ago, the buzz surrounding chemtrails had grown to the extent that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt compelled to issue a joint "Aircraft Contrails Factsheet." The six-page illustrated report patiently explained the science of contrails, such as the role humidity plays in the variance between how long contrails linger and spread, sometimes forming cirrus cloud cover, and pointed out that they have zero impact on human health.

But as these things go, official efforts to confront the conspiracy only fueled its growth. It is today bigger than ever, commanding adherents across the globe.

02 Martial Law
If Patriot groups fear anything more than the water vapor in the sky, it is the imminent imposition of martial law. A longstanding and central plank of the Patriot catechism is the belief that one day — very soon! — federal forces, in league with the states, will suspend constitutional government and institute a police state. 

During the first few years after the 9/11 attacks, this fear was also discussed on the left. But what was a temporary concern there has long been an absolute certainty on the far right. Today, hundreds of Patriot groups around the country are actively preparing for the declaration of martial law, some of them by mapping wilderness areas, learning how to set booby traps, studying and practicing guerrilla warfare tactics, and setting up short-wave radio communications systems. The question is not if, but when, the New World Order will come crashing down.

Patriot groups believe the legal groundwork for the inevitable imposition of martial law is being laid in Washington, within the pages of a steady stream of classified National Security documents and directives. At the local level, meanwhile, they suspect town and city governments are also in on the plan, as evidenced by their passing of emergency powers ordinances.

Once the legal mechanisms are in place, all that's needed is a "crisis trigger," for which Patriots are constantly on the lookout. Whether this trigger is real or manufactured matters less than the fact that it will succeed in frightening the population into submission and be used to justify suspension of the Constitution. This crisis trigger could take any form. Common scenarios suggested on Patriot discussion boards include economic collapse, followed by massive social unrest; a global (and likely government-created) pandemic; multiple acts of mega-terrorism (again, featuring government collusion); or possibly a fraudulent presidential election, resulting in rioting in major cities around the country.

Patriot groups often refer to the unelected junta that will rule the coming police state as a "metropolitan government." This language, like the martial law scenario, has a long pedigree. As Patriot/survivalist Don Harkin explains in the Idaho Observer, a conspiracy rag popular among militia groups: "Metropolitan government was exposed in the late 1950s by Jo Hindman. … [Today] this unconstitutional form of government is being implemented all over the country — particularly in the nation's more densely populated areas such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle."

Once the "metropolitan government" is instituted, most Patriots are certain they will immediately be rounded up and sent to internment camps — which takes us to our next conspiracy. 

03 FEMA Concentration Camps
Following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Domestic Terrorism held hearings on the Patriot/militia subculture that bred and nurtured the bombers. Throughout the hearings, a running theme expressed by Patriots was a fear that "urban gangs," directed by Washington and possibly acting in concert with U.N. and foreign troops, would sweep in from the coasts, confiscate their guns, and round them up. This home-invasion force would hold down the streets during the imposition of martial law, then send the members of Patriot militias to internment camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which most Patriot groups consider to be "the executive arm of the coming police state."

This conspiracy has recently surged in popularity, especially after the Senate in March 2009 passed the Serve America Act, the meat of which was a multi-billion-dollar expansion of AmeriCorps, a federal program that employs many inner-city youths in community service jobs. For the Patriot fringe (and media enablers like Glenn Beck), the thought of billions of dollars going to employ inner-city youth evoked images of "domestic armies." Soon, the far-right media was full of warnings about "Obama's brown shirts" and "slavery."

The renewed chatter about "FEMA concentration camps" took many forms. Glenn Beck promised to "look into it." Films such as "Camp FEMA: American Lockdown," featuring conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, have been wildly popular on conspiracy-driven websites like martiallawsurvival.com, outselling all previous conspiracy-driven pseudo-documentaries. Aerial photographs, each supposedly showing secret government holding facilities, went viral on the Web.

Of course, the photos showed nothing of the sort. A careful review of some of the photographs carried out by Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs made clear that the visual "evidence" was bogus in every instance. For example, a photograph of an alleged secret prison was actually a North Korean work camp. Other photographs showed nothing more sinister than well-known National Guard training centers and Amtrak rail yards.

Just as the agencies responsible for air travel and air quality have tried to respond to the chemtrails conspiracy allegations, so, too, has FEMA gone on record reassuring Americans that it has no intention of abrogating the Constitution or rounding up citizens. An internal FEMA memo, however, made clear that agency brass understands the losing-battle nature of trying to quell the conspiracies. "Most people know us as the agency that responds to natural disasters," the memo read. "Others believe we have a somewhat sinister role. For the latter, it is not realistic to think that we can convince them otherwise and it is advisable not to enter into debate on the subject."

04 Foreign Troops on U.S. Soil
While "urban gangs" are considered a leading candidate to enforce a New World Order (NWO) lockdown, they are not the only threatening force clouding the Patriot mind. There is also a belief on the radical right that treasonous government officials are colluding with other governments to suppress Americans with the use of foreign troops. Patriots believe this foreign assistance will be necessary due to the patriotism of America's own troops. As explained on the Patriot website libertyforlife.com, many U.S. active military personnel and veterans would likely refuse orders to suppress the rights of their fellow citizens, and so "the US/NWO/UN government is importing foreign troops into the USA to do what US soldiers did to Iraq." Among the many Patriot groups dedicated to resisting this is the Oath Keepers, made up of veteran and active-duty U.S. military personnel.

Whose troops, exactly, would be deployed here? Those of whichever allies the U.S. is partnering with at any given moment. For example, Patriot sites were atwitter with news that, in July 2009, FEMA organized a terrorist-response exercise in conjunction with troops from 14 allied countries, including Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

After the 2009 exercise, the Web burst with YouTube clips attempting to alert people to the sinister presence of foreign troops. Like other popular conspiracies to see a revival in recent years, this one is hardly new. In 1997, one Patriot blogger warned that Red Chinese troops would be allowed to take over America. The fevered language of this Clinton-era theorist nicely captures the frantic energy that has always defined Patriot conspiracy culture, as well as the racial dimension never far from the surface of so many conspiracies:

"During the 1950's, the elitists planning for world government made plans to use occupation forces in every country that did not submit to their greedy, arrogant ambitions. Their plan called for using Chinese troops in America… . Now that American soldiers have been used in Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, a precedent has been set to bring the red Chinese troops here. The UN could justify such an action if the Black Muslims instigate a race war. I expect this scenario if the Democrats loose [sic] the White House and Congress in the 2000 elections. Comrade Clinton could not be slicker in making himself Commandant of Gulag America."

05 'Door-to-Door' Gun Confiscations
One of the defining features of Patriot/militia subculture is an obsession with firearms. Patriot groups stockpile them, train using them, and, perhaps most of all, worry about losing them. Any attempt to restrain their gun rights is viewed as the thin-edge-wedge of a New World Order crackdown. Patriots believe it inevitable that NWO forces in black masks and jackboots — and possibly UN blue helmets — will one day be sent door to door to take away their weapons by force. This fear is also stoked by mainstream figures within the conservative movement. Wayne LaPierre, the president of the National Rifle Association, a major player in the Republican Party coalition, is the author of a book entitled, The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the UN Plan To Destroy the Bill of Rights. In 2006, Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter attached an amendment to a domestic-security spending bill that prohibited the confiscation of legally owned guns during an emergency. The measure passed by a vote of 84-16.

Within Patriot subculture, the gun-confiscation fear sometimes dovetails with other conspiracies of an anti-Semitic flavor. Proponents of gun control in these instances are seen as representing a New World Order cabal run by Jews. At the website Real Zionist News, for example, a New York State gun control law aimed at protecting police officers was described as "the first step toward confiscation." According to the site, "The real agenda is to disarm law-abiding GENTILES, whom Zionist Jews fear will soon discover Jewry's anti-American, freedom-hating mission." 

06 9/11 as Government Plot
The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., were seen by both the far left and far right as fitting the bill for an intentional "crisis trigger." In the weeks and months after the attacks, a subculture of "9/11 Truthism" emerged in which the attacks were seen as anything but a simple case of well-trained Al Qaeda operatives flying planes into landmark buildings. Instead, "truthers" argued that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by controlled demolitions, that a missile brought down United Airlines 93, and that a missile — and not an airliner at all — struck the Pentagon. Who was responsible? The U.S. government, of course. On the far left, the reason seen for attacking the American people was to justify a perpetual state of war; on the far right, it provided an excuse for the government to, at long last, institute a police state.

On both extremes, a distinct current of anti-Semitism runs through 9/11 conspiracies. Especially in the right-wing variants associated with Patriot groups — and in a number of radical-right black separatist group as well — the central agents are often very pointedly described as either high officials of Jewish descent or outright Israeli agents. Another feature of anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracies is the popular claim that 4,000 Israelis and Jews did not show up for work at the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks. The origins of that conspiracy theory appear to have come from a statement by the Israeli Foreign Ministry that some "4,000 Israelis" were in the New York and Washington areas the day of the attacks. Here again, we see how a misread or misconstrued fact can be distorted through paranoia and multiplied by the power of the Internet, allowing totally unfounded rumors to travel the globe at warp speed. 

For many Patriot groups dedicated to the fight against the New World Order — often referred to as "American Revolution II" — the American people have been denied the truth about the 2001 attacks by "the New World Order-controlled corporatist-Jewish media."

Of course, when this media does mention 9/11 truther claims, this, too, is seen as evidence of a conspiracy within a conspiracy. For example, when former White House official Van Jones was found to have signed a petition calling for an investigation into truther-related allegations, Patriots saw the subsequent media attention as a ruse. "Our patriot movements are totally being hijacked," said Jeffrey Grupp of the popular conspiracy website AntiMatterRadio.com, "not by infiltrators, but by a takeover of our patriot discussions." 

That's typical of most conspiracies in the Patriot pantheon: When the mainstream media does not address the conspiracists' allegations, it is proof of their propaganda role. And when they do, it is a sign of an even more sophisticated and perfidious manipulation. 

07 Population Control  
For the conspiracy-minded, there is no such thing as an accidental tragedy or historical caprice. Each epidemic, mass industrial poisoning and medical advance (vaccinations, in particular) is just another highly suspicious example of the latest technologies being employed to further the agenda of hidden New World Order forces.

When the fluoridation of the U.S. water supply began in the middle of the last century, proto-Patriot groups screamed of a poisonous plot by communists in high places. A half century later, when the Food and Drug Administration approved aspartame as an ingredient in numerous food items, the descendents of the anti-fluoride conspiracists sounded yet another poison-ingredient alarm. But even aspartame paled in comparison to the threat supposedly posed by the avian flu virus, which many Patriots, from the late 1990s to the present, believe to be the result of research conducted at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Maryland's Fort Detrick.

In the Patriot mind, population control is often intimately linked to gun rights. After all, they say, it was gun control that led to large-scale slaughters in nations as diverse at Idi Amin's Uganda, Josef Stalin's Russia, Adolf Hitler's Germany and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Turkey. American citizens, they believe, once deprived of their guns, will be next in line for a slaughter worthy of the history books.

What is the point of limiting — or even intentionally decimating — the U.S. population? One Patriot theory says the United Nations wants to create a "biosphere" out of most of the United States, and that eliminating the humans who put pressure on the environment will be a necessary first step. 

Increasingly, devastating weather events are considered the result of government-engineered efforts to depopulate the country. In Patriot circles, Hurricane Katrina was not only seen as a pretext to begin confiscating guns, but is sometimes viewed as a man-made disaster orchestrated in secret government command centers where sophisticated high-altitude weapons control both the weather and the minds of men.

Chief among these weapons is one allegedly operating high above the earth, appropriately enough named after the instrument traditionally favored by mythological angels. 

08 HAARP
This is the "Death Star" of the Patriot conspiracy galaxy, around which so many other conspiracies orbit and often intersect.

According to the U.S. government, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is a joint scientific research project of the Air Force and Navy, based in Gakona, Ala., whose stated purpose is "studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes."

Few true-blue Patriots believe that — and they aren't alone in their skepticism. Earlier this year, former Minnesota governor and tele-conspiracist Jesse Ventura visited the HAARP site for his TV show in an attempt to probe the official claims and find out "what's really going on." For those enthralled to a Patriot view of the world, the government's description of HAARP only scratches the surface. To the conspiracy-minded, HAARP is a government program tasked with creating secret directed-energy weapons, instruments for weather and mind control, and even potent new methods to cause earthquakes. Predictably, after January's devastating earthquake in Haiti, some Patriot sites noted that the neighboring Dominican Republic was undamaged, leading them to speculate that the U.S. government was responsible and had targeted Haiti alone — ignoring the more relevant explanation that the Republic's capital and major population center, Santo Domingo, was 160 miles from the quake's epicenter.

Discussions of HAARP often overlap with the chemtrails conspiracy. Many Patriot sites argue that NATO aircraft are spraying the toxic soup as part of a top-secret HAARP-related weather-modification program, or are refining a new-generation of high-frequency atmospheric weapons developed at the HAARP research center. Any number of wild-eyed (and self-published) introductions to the subject of HAARP are circulating on the web; one example is HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, by Jerry E. Smith.

09 The Federal Reserve Conspiracy
It wasn't long after its creation under Woodrow Wilson that the Federal Reserve System became a central fixture in the world of right-wing conspiracy. It was seen, rightly, as introducing European-style central banking into the United States. It was also seen, this time wrongly, as the latest form of spreading Jewish and banker control over every aspect of American life. No one did more to promote anti-Fed hysteria in the early years than automobile magnate Henry Ford, who in the 1920s penned a multi-volume, anti-Semitic conspiracy opus called The International Jew, in which the Fed plays a starring role.

Ford's modern-day ideological descendants in the Patriot movement continue to view the Fed — without question, an opaque institution to most — through a lens colored by deep suspicion, paranoia, and hatred. For many, it remains the ultimate symbol of New Word Order power, in both Jewish and non-Jewish variants. Nor is anti-Fed paranoia limited to the Patriot fringe. Both the Idaho-based neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations and the black separatist Nation of Islam have claimed significance for the fact that the Federal Reserve System and the Anti-Defamation League both were founded in 1913.

In May 2009, a group of leading radical rightists convened on the South Georgia key known as Jekyll Island, where 100 years earlier bankers and government officials first hashed out plans for what became the Federal Reserve System. This meeting played a key role in launching the current resurgence of militias. Less than five months into the Obama Administration, the Jekyll Island conclave warned of "increasing national instability," worried about the coming New World Order, denounced secret schemes to merge Canada, Mexico and the United States, and furiously attacked the President Barack Obama's "socialized" policies.

Which leads, appropriately, to our final top conspiracy.

10 The North American Union 
Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, fears of economic dislocation and loss of sovereignty have animated both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, these fears are centered on the growth of transnational corporate power at the expense of U.S. labor and national policy. In some circles on the right, the trade bill is seen as the beginning of the so-called "North American Union" (NAU), the goal of a secret plan to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada and, in the process, eliminate sovereign government for each country. It is also a dominant conspiracy theory animating the hard-line anti-immigration movement, which overlaps heavily with Patriot territory.

As proof of the NAU plot, left- and right-wing conspiracy theorists typically point to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a series of working groups between the countries of North America to study regulatory cooperation in transportation, energy, aviation, the environment and more. To many adherents, participants at these meetings plot how best to send millions of Mexico's citizens to the United States, erect international courts designed to overrule and undermine American law, and pass continental hate crime laws that will send anti-gay Christian preachers to prison, and more.

In recent years, the paranoia about the SPP process has become so intense that a proposed highway project linking Canada, Mexico and the United States — the NAFTA-inspired Canamex Corridor concept which has managed only 85% completion after 15 years of planning — is seen as part of an evil design that will end with the Mexican government seizing control of Kansas City's Missouri River port. Other conspiracy theorists fear that a new currency, the "Amero," will displace American dollars — though no U.S. official of even marginal influence has ever proposed such a thing. (This last fear is odd coming from Patriot circles that otherwise have no love for Federal Reserve-issued greenbacks.) 

As with so many conspiracies, the NAU plot is often inflamed by real news items that are seen as vastly more significant than they really are. This is especially true when the news items involve traditional New World Order bogeymen. In 2005, for example, when the Council on Foreign Relations released a document entitled "Building a North American Community" — calling for exploring the idea of further integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico — Patriot sites responded as if the report were a New World Order directive, spelling the imminent end of national sovereignty. 

Alexander Zaitchik is a former Intelligence Report staff writer and free-lance journalist based in New York. His first book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, has just been published by John Wiley & Sons Inc.


Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:29 PM PDT
Friday, 18 June 2010
Joe Vialls - Nuke bombs and Tsunami
Mood:  quizzical
Now Playing: Tsunami result of U.S. nuclear bomb?
Topic: CONSPIRACY

cyberjournal.org/newslog/show_archives/10 Jan 2005


When articles come across my desk that particularly catch my interest, I post them to newslog. Some of these articles provide real information, others are examples of matrix propaganda, and some are in between. One must always consider the source when evaluating articles, but much can be learned by listening to those with whom we disagree or even whom we mistrust.
—rkm


Original article found here:
http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?id=388&batch=16&lists=newslog


Joe Vialls: Tsunami result of U.S. nuclear bomb?

From: richard-at-cyberjournal.org

Date: 10 Jan 2005

Subject: Joe Vialls: Tsunami result of U.S. nuclear bomb?

To: newslog-at-cyberjournal.org

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------

http://newswire.indymedia.org/fr/newswire/2005/01/816749.shtml

Tsunami nuclear blast, not earthquake? Copyright Joe Vialls,  5 January 2005

Was the tsunami the result of a U.S. nuclear bomb?

With Afghanistan and Iraq already lost, the Wall Street

bankers were all desperately looking for other ways to control

our world, when suddenly and very conveniently, the Sumatran

Trench exploded. Trick or Treat?

 

http://www.vialls.com/subliminalsuggestion/tsunami.html

 

"Others are engaging even in an eco type of terrorism, whereby

they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes or volcanos

remotely, through the use of electromagnetic waves."  American

Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, April 1997.  Big

surprise! Presumably Cohen already knew that a nuclear weapon

generates what he refers to obliquely as "electromagnetic

waves".

 

Despite having a huge number of tsunami victims in its own

State of  Tamil Nadu, India completely converted the survey

ship INS Nirupak into a 50-bed floating hospital in less than

72 hours, then sent it unarmed to help the desperate people of

Aceh in Indonesia. . By direct comparison, America sent combat

ships and armed Marines. The US Navy has two 1,000 bed

hospital ships, the 'Comfort' and the 'Mercy', but neither one

was dispatched. Though the USNS Comfort was deployed to New

York when 3,000 Americans died in September 2001,  this

current lack of action sends a strong signal that 150,000

(mostly Muslim) dead in South East Asia, and half a million

injured, are of no concern whatever to the power brokers in

New York.

 

The Indian Government knew full well that this was not a

"normal" earthquake. On 27 December India refused to join

George Bush's planned exclusive 'club of four', which would

have effectively pulled this Asian nuclear power out of its

new coalition  with Russia, China and Brazil. On 28 December

the Indian Government politely warned the American military to

stay clear of Indian sovereign territory, and on 29 December

the India Daily Editorial publicly questioned the nature of

the event: "Was this a showdown by a country to show the

region what havoc can be created?" ... "Given the level of

devastation and given the fact India is a regional power in

South Asia, [the] Indian Navy has an obligation to investigate

and tell the world what they found."

 

Theoretically, the American 9 megaton W-53 thermonuclear

warhead shown on the left, could easily be encased in a small

'lookalike' saturation diving chamber similar to that on the

right, to protect it from the massive 10,000 pounds per square

inch pressures at the bottom of the Sumatran Trench. The whole

armored package would weigh less than five tons, allowing it

to be slipped over the stern of any oil rig supply vessel, of

which there are more than 300 in Asia alone. Who would even

notice?

 

Despite a natural human tendency to be shocked into silence by

the sheer number of dead and injured across Asia on 26

December 2004, and despite also being slightly fearful of

losing personal credibility because of the magnitude of the

apparent crime, there are many provable irregularities in the

official American tsunami story that simply have to be

recorded now, or forever be lost in the sands of time.

 

It is beyond any doubt that a giant tidal wave (tsunami)

smashed its way through South and South East Asia, and still

had enough legs to continue all the way across the Indian

Ocean to Africa, where it killed and injured a few hundred

more. So the only question we must ask, is whether this

tsunami was a natural or man-made catastrophe? A natural event

would be horrifying enough, but if the tsunami was man-made,

then we are unquestionably looking at the biggest single war

crime in global history.

 

To make any sense at all of the irregularities, we must start

at the very beginning, and then follow the course of events as

they unfold, especially events in the immediate vicinity of

the real tsunami epicenter, because the latter is quite

different from the location being remorselessly peddled by the

New York Times and CNN.

 

At midday local Australian time I faithfully recorded the

magnitude and position plotted by the Jakarta Geophysical

Office in Indonesia. An earthquake measuring 6.4 on the

Richter scale had hit the north of the Indonesian island of

Sumatra. The Jakarta Geophysical Office meticulously noted

that the epicenter of the event was located 155 miles

south-southwest of Aceh Province.

 

This location is approximately 250 miles south of the position

later selected by the American NOAA, which plotted the

epicenter to the north-west of Aceh, and initially claimed a

Richter reading of 8.0. Alas, even that was not enough to

cover the damage caused by this extraordinary event, so NOAA

progressively upgraded the reading to 8.5, then to 8.9, and

finally to 9.0 - at least for the present.

 

So, the first proven irregularities were peddled by American

officials at the NOAA, who suddenly invented a new 'flexible'

peak seismic wave for the event, of far greater magnitude than

Jakarta, when the Jakarta office was located much closer at

almost point-blank range. Believe me when I tell you there is

no such thing as the new 'flexible' peak claimed by NOAA. The

first seismic peak you record is the only real peak, unless of

course you later manually draw in a few more peaks of your

own, to match a contrived agenda. Naturally there is also only

one epicenter, which was faithfully recorded by dozens of

Indonesian and Indian seismographs.

 

Quite apart from the huge disparity in Richter values, the

Indonesians and Indians were disturbed to find that the normal

earthquake 'preamble' was missing from their seismograph

charts.  All this means is that the normal steadily increasing

number of transverse shear "S" waves that always precede an

earthquake were missing, as were later aftershocks, which

likewise always accompany a naturally occurring or Tesla

standing-wave generated earthquake. There were 'warnings' of

aftershocks from the NOAA, but none actually eventuated.

 

To simplify matters for non-technical readers, an earthquake

is always triggered by a resonant electromagnetic frequency in

the range 0.5 to 12 Hertz, but it is not an instant process,

because the resonant frequency must be precise. Thus as true

resonance approaches, the fault line starts to tremble like a

piece of rope under tension, and sends out warnings to the

seismographs in the form of steadily increasing transverse

shear waves.

 

If all you get is a cluster of "P" compression waves, then you

are almost certainly looking at an underground or sub sea

explosion. These were in fact the only copious seismic signals

that the Indonesians and Indians received, and they looked

curiously similar to those generated many years ago by large

underground nuclear weapons in Nevada.

 

We will return later to the relatively simple task of

delivering a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon to the bottom

of the Sumatran Trench, and then detonating it with awesome

effect, but right now we need to return to our initial task of

following the trail of events and inexplicable irregularities.

First we must travel south to the distant desert island of

Australia, currently ruled by an obsequious Wall Street toady

known as Little Johnny Howard. To the intense displeasure of

many of his Australian "subjects", Little Johnny never makes a

move outside Australia unless he first receives explicit

instructions from one of his New York minders. Remember this

reality, because it is extremely important in terms of what

Australia did next. On the morning of 27 December, the

Australian (New York owned) media was making it very clear

that the most badly hit nation in the region was Sri Lanka, an

island at the southern tip of India, which like Australia is a

member nation of the British Commonwealth.  Accordingly, Tim

Costello, head of one of Australia's largest charities, made

immediate plans to fly to the area and assess the need for

aid. But that same morning, Little Johnny was dancing to a

very different tune, which, based on his known subservience,

must have been playing down his secure telephone line from

Wall Street.

 

In true covert manner, Little Johnny secretly dispatched two

RAAF Hercules transport planes packed with supplies to

Malaysia on "Stand By", and directed two more to Darwin in

Australia's north. Please note that if Little Johnny had any

humanitarian concerns at all, all four Hercules could have

flown directly to Commonwealth partner Sri Lanka, where every

other Australian had already been told by the media that aid

was needed. But no, it wasn't to be, and Little Johnny waited

patiently for orders from New York.

 

The waiting period was short, and after a high-flying

reconnaissance jet confirmed that the runway was clear at

Medan in eastern Sumatra, all four Australian Hercules

complete with troops, guns and other tackle, invaded Sumatra

just south of the devastated province of Aceh. In turn, with

90% of its population killed by the tsunami, Aceh might

perhaps one day soon become Indonesia's very own Guantanamo

Bay, crawling with hundreds of heavily armed Australians and

Americans.

 

Remember carefully though, at the time these four Hercules

touched down in Medan, the ordinary Australian public still

had no idea that Sumatra was badly hit.  Only Little Johnny

knew, and of course his trusty crystal ball in New York.  To

hell with Sri Lanka, his bosses wanted a main base for the

huge reconstruction contracts in Asia, designed to replace the

failed oil theft and reconstruction in Iraq, and keep poor old

Zion on its tottering New York legs for a few more weeks or

months.

 

In the end, what the hell did it matter how many Goyim had to

die? And, hey, on the credit side they'd already managed to

kill more than 100,00 Muslims in Sumatra with a single tidal

wave, which was partial payback for their own resounding

defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Needless to say the Australians were merely the advance party,

soon to be joined by a curiously well prepared and equipped

U.S. Military, though it is doubtful that any of the officers

and men involved really comprehend what is going on. Only a

handful thought to question why they had been spending a whole

year training for a "Humanitarian Mission", when the whole

point of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps is normally to kill

people in very large numbers. Just look at Fallujah, people,

look at Fallujah.

 

As if by magic, the Pentagon managed to have two battle groups

ready to sail at an instant's notice from Hong Kong and Guam

during the normally chaotic Christmas to New Year period.

Crikey! Military discipline has come a hell of a long way

since my day, when everyone including the ship's cat was

sleeping it off at some highly questionably hostelry or

another. Not these 10,000+ Americans though, who must have

been standing rigidly to attention beside their hammocks day

and night, tugging furiously at their forelocks whenever an

officer of NCO came in sight.

 

The next bit was superbly orchestrated, because it took place

at sea, far away from the prying eyes of dock spies or

imaginary KGB agents. But oops, first you have to know who was

involved. Out of Hong Kong rushed team one, comprised of the

nuclear-powered USS Abraham Lincoln and her escort vessels,

while the far more interesting team two rushed out of Guam,

led by the USS Bonhomme Richard, a marine amphibious assault

carrier crammed to the gunwales with gun-toting wooden tops. And that is not all, believe me, because the Bonhomme Richard

is in fact leading a veritable armada known as "Expeditionary

Strike Group 5".

 

Flagship USS Bonhomme Richard is accompanied by the U.S.S.

Duluth, an amphibious transport dock vessel; the USS Rushmore,

a landing ship dock; the guided missile cruiser USS Bunker

Hill, guided missile destroyer USS Milius, and the guided

missile frigate USS Thach. To take care of the underwater side

of things they are joined by the nuclear hunter-killer

submarine USS Pasadena, while the U.S. Coast Guard's

high-endurance cutter Munro is also tagging along, presumably

to deal with Asian Customs and Excise.

 

Now then, though 'Strike Group 5' may be toting enough nuclear

weapons to destroy half of the known world, and the title is

perhaps lacking when viewed from a strictly humanitarian

perspective, engineer chief Staff Sgt. Julio C. Dominguez says

otherwise: "The Marine Service Support Group has been

preparing for a humanitarian mission of this type for about 12

months now, and is more prepared for an actual mission". Well,

OK chief, but didn't you ask why you were being trained for a

mysterious humanitarian mission a year before it actually

happened, especially when your day job is normally shooting

Muslims full of holes?

 

The really sneaky (inexplicable) bit came as both battle

groups entered the Indian Ocean. The USS Abraham Lincoln

looked about as innocent as a carrier with 70 attack planes

can look, but was already carrying 2,000 marines instead of

her normal complement of around 500. That is a huge amount of

grunt firepower to put on the deserted streets of Banda Aceh,

especially when Wall Street normally expects these marines to

die quietly for Zion in Iraq. Now then, how did they know the

extra marines would be needed before team one left Hong Kong,

because the surplus 1,500 marines were certainly not just

standing around on Kowloon dock waiting to hitch a ride.

 

Then while the two battle groups (apparently) headed in two

different directions across the deserted Indian Ocean, an even

stranger event took place.  Though Expeditionary Strike Group

5 (Humanitarian) was supposed to help the folks in Sri Lanka,

the combat marines aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard transferred

to amphibious transport dock vessel U.S.S. Duluth, which then

split from ESG-5 and headed towards team one.  So without the

Indonesians really being aware of it, the (relatively)

harmless and Bulky aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has

been used to screen the arrival of at least 3,500

heavily-armed US Marines in tiny Aceh Province.

 

That more or less brings us up to date on known military

activity, though yesterday an Australian television cameraman

did accidentally film some of these heavily-armed US Marines

(who tried to shoo him away), searching a devastated

Indonesian military base for any remaining weapons. Now call

me old-fashioned, but if these guys and their bosses are

straight, that particular job should be left to the Indonesian

Army...

 

I will be circumspect as to exactly how a large American

thermonuclear weapon managed to arrive at the bottom of the

Sumatran Trench, though all of the seismic evidence and

preparedness for the resulting mission indicates strongly that

this is the case. After all, we are back to the age-old

question of "who benefits?", and in this particular case, "Who

is insane enough to kill more than 150,000 civilians just to

hang on to power?' Based on their past performance in Iraq and

other luckless countries, it would seem that the only

realistic candidates are Wolfowitz and company, striving as

always to create a "One World Government".

 

Certainly no other nuclear powers including Russia and China

stand to gain anything at all from such an outrageous mass

murder, so, as always in the end, we come back to  Sherlock

Holmes via the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "When you have

ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how

improbable, is the truth."

 

For the Zionist Cabal, obtaining a thermonuclear weapon in

America is no great trick, especially when we have the

precedent of 100 small 'decommissioned' air-to-air atomic

warheads being smuggled out the Pentagon's (civilian) back

door, to form the core of the Jewish State's current nuclear

arsenal. Once a weapon system is out date and out of service,

loyal uniformed US military personnel can no longer track it.

 

Those who wish to understand how such a seemingly small weapon

could rattle a 20,000 feet-deep oceanic trench, and then force

a giant tsunami right across the Indian Ocean, would do well

to look at the diagram of the famous 'Dambusters' attacking

the German dam below, most of which is self-explanatory.

 

The designer of the RAF's bouncing bomb (actually called

"Highball") was a scientist called Barnes Wallace, who had

already gained a formidable reputation with his Wellington

bomber,  which he constructed geodetically, thus enabling it

to absorb enormous punishment before actually being shot out

of the sky. Many Wellington returned to base literally in

tatters, while many luckless cousins like the Stirling and

Halifax were all too often consigned to the murky deep of the

North Sea.

 

Wallace knew that bombing the dams vertically was a complete

waste of time, and the only possibility of success lay in

placing a mine hard up against the dam wall at its base. You

see, water cannot be compressed, meaning that if the mine was

pressed against the dam wall at the moment of detonation, part

of its energy would automatically be expended on the wall

itself. Too far away in the relatively shallow water, and most

of the blast energy would be lost to atmosphere, in a huge

exploding cloud of water of course.

 

Though it was obvious that the dam wall could not be destroyed

by a single bomb from a single Lancaster bomber (it would

weight far too much for the aircraft to get off the ground),

Wallace pinned his hopes on the scientific fact that

cumulative stress should do the job, and he was proved right.

Though officially three of the bombs, each containing 6,500

pounds of TNT, were considered to be direct hits, one of these

veered off slightly, meaning that the giant Mohne Dam was

completely breached by a total of 13,000 pounds of tri-nitro

toluene.

 

It is the incompressibility of water in particular that

matters deep down in the Sumatran Trench.  At the bottom you

already have 10,000 pounds of pressure per square inch

pressing down on your weapon of choice, and above that weapon

there is a column of water 20,000 feet tall, which is what

caused the pressure in the first place. Not only that. The

trench narrows at the bottom, meaning that the weapon is

'hemmed-in', with a very real chance of moving a tectonic

plate if sufficient tonnage is used.

 

In this particular case there was no real need to shift a

tectonic plate, and science suggests that if this blast had

caused such an effect, several very powerful aftershocks would

have occurred, as has happened with every other major

earthquake in the past. But, as previously stated, and setting

aside the seemingly deliberate provocative though false

warnings from the American NOAA, there has not been a single

aftershock.

 

To force subservience on Asia, and ensure the lion's share of

incredibly lucrative reconstruction contracts, all that was

needed was a very large tsunami targeted on the selected

nations, which was easily within the capabilities of a large

thermonuke. There is nothing new about "Sea Bursts" as they

are called, and more than 30 years ago plans existed in both

America and Russia to wipe out each other's coastal cities

using exactly this technique. The tidal wave from a deep sea

burst is relatively clean, allowing the aggressor to take over

both land and remaining buildings etc. with the minimum of

delay.

 

If everything had gone to plan, then Indonesia, Sri Lanka and

India would have been in hock to the IMF and World Bank for

thirty or more years - time enough to wait for the price of

oil to come down again after the lethal fiasco in Iraq. At the

same time, if the Indian Government had taken the bait, the

deadly Russian-Chinese-Indian-Brazilian coalition would have

been dead in the water. Not a bad day's work for a single

thermonuclear weapon discreetly removed from the

decommissioning process.

 

There are those who may claim that I have 'left out' the giant

ExxonMobil gas fields in Aceh, but that is not the case.

Certainly they are very productive sub-surface fields, and

will unquestionably produce lots of gas again once the surface

equipment has been repaired, but in isolation they are

completely incapable of saving the New Zion from collapse.

Wall Street needs giant reconstruction contracts, and plenty

of them.

 

If I remember correctly, shortly before Christmas I received a

large number of emails from various people about some "German

Guy", who apparently claimed that Wolfowitz had got hold of a

critical weapon and was going to nuke Houston on either the 26

or 27 of December. I never did read the whole email, but it

seems very likely that it was initially circulated by

Wolfowitz or one of his ilk, as a classic disinformation

distraction. Try something along the lines of "You suckers all

watch Houston very carefully on 26 December, while I nuke Asia

behind your backs... "

 

[article.addcomment]

 

Sounds feasible

 

susanscully 05.Jan.2005 08:47

 

A quick comment.  Right from the start, I did not just assume

it was a natural disaster.  Thanks for the article.  I hope

you're wrong about this, but I have this creepy feeling...I

hope others will catch on and at least give it some thought.

 

Radiation?

 

Queer Planet 05.Jan.2005 15:43

 

While it wouldn't surprise me if Bush and company nuked Europe

so that they could start a cattle ranch, I have to wonder

about your scenario.

 

Nuclear weapons cause radiation.  The water would have been

irradiated and thousands of fish would be floating around the

Indian Ocean right now, not to mention sea plants.

 

The radiation would spread and eventually reach land if it

were that close to shore as you say.  There would now be

thousands of people dying from radiation exposure.

 

Now maybe they used a non radioactive device.  I don't know.

 

But what would be good for your article is if you could

present the actual records of the varying seismac readings,

proof that there were no aftershocks, and all else.

 

Bush and company are capable of all many of atrocity as we can

see in Iraq, but let's not stray into fiction when the truth

is bad enough.

 

Spurious

 

Peter Bevan 05.Jan.2005 17:52

 

I'm sure many of us would dep down love this to be true, but I

have to say it strikes me as fairly contencious.

 

1) Any atomic blast would have to be enormous (several

thousand Hiroshimas).. not impossible but expensive and

obvious.

 

2) There *WERE* aftershocks.. even one as sceptical as myself

about mainstream news media finds it hard to belive that so

many news agencies (and first hand accounts) are wrong on this

one.

 

3) This idea that P-Waves have a wavelength of 0.5-12Hz would

mean surely waves between 15,000 and 30,000 miles... far to

large to be discernable on such a tiny object as earth.

 

4) There are a number of pretty tenusous political links

here.. Does the disharmony between the US and India really

explain all this? Hardly...

 

 

It does raise some interesting questions to be sure..

primarily; Why did the US send so many armed combatents? There

is however a world of difference between oppurtunism and mass

murder. --

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"Escaping The Matrix - Global Transformation: WHY WE NEED IT, AND HOW WE CAN ACHIEVE IT ", current draft:

    http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/rkmGlblTrans.html

_____________________________

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      suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the

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    The system is the problem.

 

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_____________________________

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Posted by Joe Anybody at 9:46 AM PDT
Thursday, 15 October 2009
HAARP
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: Creates Bullseye In The Sky (experiment)
Topic: CONSPIRACY

HAARP

Creates Bullseye In The Sky

 

Published on 10-15-2009

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-5975-0-7-7--.html

    
 

Source: Britain News

An experiment that fires powerful radio waves into the sky has created a patch of 'artificial ionosphere', mimicking the uppermost portion of Earth's atmosphere.

According to a report in Nature News, the experiment is called the 'High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program' (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska.

It has spent nearly two decades using radio waves to probe Earth's magnetic field and ionosphere.

One of the most obvious results of the experiments is that they can create lights in the sky that are similar to auroras, the glowing curtains of light that naturally appear in the polar skies when electrons and other charged particles pour down from Earth's protective magnetosphere into the upper atmosphere.

There, at an altitude of about 250 kilometres, the charged particles collide with molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and make them emit light, similar to the process inside a fluorescent light bulb.

HAARP's high-frequency radio waves can accelerate electrons in the atmosphere, increasing the energy of their collisions and creating a glow.

The technique has previously triggered speckles of light while running at a power of almost 1 megawatt1.

But since the facility ramped up to 3.6 megawatts - roughly three times more than a typical broadcast radio transmitter - it has created full-scale artificial auroras that are visible to the naked eye.

But in February last year, HAARP managed to induce a strange bullseye pattern in the night sky.

Instead of the expected fuzzy, doughnut-shaped blob, surprising irregular luminescent bands radiated out from the centre of the bullseye, according to Todd Pedersen, a research physicist at the US Air Force Research Laboratory in Massachusetts, who leads the team that ran the experiment at HAARP.

The team modelled how the energy sent skywards from the HAARP antenna array would trigger these odd shapes.

They determined that the areas of the bullseye with strange light patterns were in regions of denser, partially ionized gas in the atmosphere, as measured by ground-based high-frequency radar used to track the ionosphere.

The scientists believe that these dense patches of plasma could be gas that was ionized by the HAARP emissions.

"This is the really exciting part - we've made a little artificial piece of ionosphere," Pedersen said.

"The novelty is not seeing the aurora - it's the fact that we can actually create enough high-energy electrons to form plasma," said Mike Kosch, chair of Experimental Space Science at Lancaster University, UK.

"It shows something completely different and new that we hadn't expected. We didn't know we could do that from a radio array on the ground," he added.

Watch This YouTube Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y67HmWTElLg


Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PDT
Updated: Sunday, 25 October 2009 7:22 PM PDT
Saturday, 3 October 2009
Investigation Could Sink American Police Force
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: Who are these people? Police? Military? Contractors? CIA?
Topic: CONSPIRACY

Investigation Could Sink American Police Force

Posted by sakerfa on October 2, 2009

The plans of American Police Force to boss the $27 million dollar detention center in Hardin Montana as well as expand their presence across the country while training foreign troops inside the U.S. could be mothballed after Montana’s Attorney General launched an investigation and demanded the organization turn over all its records.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, October 2, 2009

Investigation Could Sink American Police Force 021009top

Suspicions that the paramilitary unit, which attempted to pose as law enforcement in Hardin last week by placing decals on SUV’s that read “Hardin Police Department,” is a cut-out or a front group for a larger company, may be realized after AG Steve Bullock ordered Hardin city officials to turn over all their documents related to their dealings with APF by October 12.

“His office made a similar demand of American Police Force, including information that would back up (Michael) Hilton’s claims of multiple defense contracts with the U.S. government and other agencies,” reports the Associated Press.

As we have highlighted, APF grandstands as a major player in the world of international private security, even claiming on its own website that it runs the U.S. Training Center, a Blackwater or “Xe” owned facility. This has led many to claim that the company is a shell or a front organization for something far more sinister, rumors that have only grown with APF’s blanket refusal to name its parent company.

The investigation was prompted by the revelation yesterday that APF founder “Captain” Michael Hilton is a career criminal and a convicted fraudster who has operated under no less than 17 different aliases. Hilton, a native of Montenegro, was sentenced to 6 years in jail in 1993 for “Such schemes you cannot believe,” according to Joseph Carella, an Orange County, Calif. doctor, namely a dozen counts of grand theft. Hilton has defrauded numerous different individuals to the tune of $1.1 million dollars over the past 20 years.

APF’s plans to construct another facility in Hardin that will train international paramilitary forces also looks doomed following intense media scrutiny of the organization’s shady dealings with local authorities and their probable violation of article 2 section 33 of the Montana Constitution.

Judging by the reaction of Attorney Becky Convery, who negotiated the original deal between Hardin authorities and APF, the contract to man the detention center and build the training facility could be torpedoed.

“Convery said Two Rivers director Greg Smith had a tentative deal with Hilton’s company to provide law enforcement service, but she said it was never finalized and she was uncertain whether it would be legal,” reports the AP.

“We are not at all pleased with American Police masquerading as if they were the police for the city of Hardin,” she said.

American Police Force and Hilton are now obviously engaging in desperate damage control, trying to offset concerns that they were on the verge of transforming the town into a “privately run police state,” as the AP article puts it, before press scrutiny forced them to put the breaks on.

Hilton has now pledged to donate the SUV’s that were marked with the police decals to the city while still pushing ahead with plans to provide law enforcement for the area for $250,000 a year. The fact that APF’s training center plans to recruit foreign assets who could then be patrolling the streets of America bossing U.S. citizens is obviously a frightening prospect, completely unconstitutional, and another reason why APF needs to abandon its plans to act as a private police force completely.

Source: Infowars

See Also:

(Infowars) – Hardin, Montana town officials hornswoggled by American Police Force

This is an update on the story of the American Police Force arriving in Hardin, Montana last week with three blackened out Mercedes Benz SUV’s emblazoned with “Hardin Police Department” on their side doors. Read More Here


Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PDT
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Assassination Plot Against Hugo Chavez
Mood:  quizzical
Now Playing: Venezuela Opens Investigation
Topic: CONSPIRACY

Venezuela Opens Investigation of

Assassination Plot Against Hugo Chavez,

Following Key Testimonies

 

Merida, October 1st 2009 (www.Venezuelanalysis.com) -- The Venezuelan Attorney General's Office formally opened an investigation into an alleged assassination plot against President Hugo Chavez, following recently publicized declarations by a former paramilitary hitman and a former Colombian intelligence official.

 

Attorney General Luisa Ortega announced the opening of the investigation after National Assembly Legislator Reinaldo Garcia filed a formal accusation in the Attorney General's Office on Wednesday. He cited the groundbreaking testimony of former Colombian soldier Geovanny Velasquez, who is currently serving a forty-year prison sentence for his crimes as a paramilitary hitman.  

 

In a videotaped conversation with Colombian investigators earlier this year, Velasquez said he and other Colombian paramilitaries attended a secret meeting in Venezuela in 1999 at which Manuel Rosales, the former Venezuelan presidential candidate and president of the opposition political party Un Nuevo Tiempo, offered $25 million for Chavez's assassination. 

 

In the video, which Al Jazeera released in an exclusive report last weekend, Velasquez revealed previously undisclosed names and details of the alleged plot, and also said there are 2,500 Colombian paramilitaries in Venezuela with the object of assassinating Chavez and destabilizing his government.

 

Garcia's accusation also cited the declarations of Rafael Garcia, the former director of information for Colombia's main intelligence agency, DAS. During an interview with Telesur last month, the former DAS official named several high level Colombian authorities who used their contacts within the Colombian paramilitary organization AUC to assist the Venezuelan opposition in acts of economic sabotage, assassinations, and plans to overthrow the Chavez government between 2002 and 2004.

 

The AUC (United Self-Defense of Colombia) was formed in 1997 mainly to fight against guerrilla insurgents from the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). In recent years, dozens of Colombian politicians, including allies of President Alvaro Uribe, have gone to jail for their links to the illegal group, which both the U.S. and Colombia formally consider a terrorist organization.

 

In an interview with Telesur on Tuesday, U.S.-Venezuelan lawyer Eva Golinger said she obtained documents from the U.S. Southern Command, which show the U.S. has detailed knowledge of the AUC and other Colombian paramilitary groups and their operations.

"The U.S. has in its hands complete knowledge of the paramilitary groups that are coordinating the terrorist activities in Venezuela," Golinger said. "This is a small portion... who knows what else they have, this is the little that has been declassified," said Golinger, who presented some of the documents during the interview.

 

National Assembly Legislator Mario Isea declared earlier this week that the apparent connections among the Colombian government, paramilitary groups, the Venezuelan opposition, and the U.S. government should not be overlooked.

"Given the gravity of these indications," he said, referring to the testimonies of Velasquez, Garcia, and Golinger, "this information should be verified... we do not assume it to be completely true."

 

Referring to Rosales, who fled to Peru last April to avoid going to trial on charges of corruption during his term as governor of Zulia, Isea said the wealthy right-wing politician is more than a "common criminal," and in fact "a kind of paramilitary commander, for which he would be incurring treason."

 

The Peruvian Foreign Ministry granted asylum to Rosales on the grounds that he is being politically persecuted. This week, Guarico Governor William Lara, who is also a national leader of Chavez's United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), called on Peru to repeal Rosales's asylum so that Rosales may be tried for the new charges brought against him in light of Velasquez's testimony.

 

The presence of Colombian paramilitaries in Venezuela is well known. Their threats against politicians, kidnappings, drug trafficking, and "social cleansing" campaigns aimed at murdering sex workers, drug dealers, and homeless people have been repeatedly denounced, especially in border states such as Zulia. Also, more than a hundred heavily armed paramilitaries were captured in a large estate outside of Caracas in 2004.


Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PDT
Saturday, 20 June 2009
dan Rathers and the riddle of why he got attacked in 1985
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: Solving the riddle of the Dan Rather beating
Topic: CONSPIRACY

Hello Z3 Readers

Here is a Riddle that I found in Harpers Mag: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2001/12/0075777

And here is the text --- lets see what we can figure out from this 1985 attack on Dan Rathers


 

The frequency:
Solving the riddle of the Dan Rather beating

By Paul Limbert

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2001/12/0075777



69


70


71


72
SEE ALSO: Assault and battery; Assault on, 1986—Humor; Coincidence; Rather, Dan; Barthelme, Donald; Involvement in assault on Dan Rather—Humor; Television journalists
Response: March 2002, page 82 · March 2002, page 82
Previous · Next

 

The frequency:
Solving the riddle of the Dan Rather beating

By Paul Limbert Allman

"I want Dan Rather to be free. I want my generation to be free, not trapped by conspiracy theories, like those who wrestle with the bloody puzzle of Dallas 1963. Our generation must have an answer to our riddle. And we will all know we have it when Dan Rather comes on the television and no longer looks anxious."

Dan Rather is the sphinx of our time, and his riddle is “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

Who can forget our collective shock and bewilderment when we opened the New York Times and learned of the event? October 1986. A cool evening, upper Park Avenue, in the Eighties. Newsman and reservoir of trust, Dan Rather, dressed casually, walks home from dinner at a friend's house.

Two well-dressed white men in their thirties—one six feet tall, with dark hair and a mustache—accost Rather, one of them demanding to know, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

“You have the wrong guy,” Rather replies.

One of the men responds with a punch to the newsman's jaw, under his left ear. Rather flees into the lobby of a building on Park Avenue, and the thugs pursue him, punching, kicking, badgering Rather repeatedly with the strange query: “Kenneth, what is the frequency!”

A doorman rings for the super, the super bursts upon the scene of the cruel interrogation, and the attackers flee. Mr. Rather is briefly hospitalized. The attackers are not caught. Their motives are unknown. It is presumed a case of mistaken identity.

Mr. Rather returned to his news broadcast, unbowed, and made a statement about the incident. Who did it, and why? “Why and exactly by whom remains unclear,” Mr. Rather announced to a television audience estimated to be 18 million households. “And it may never be determined.”


Dan Rather looks anxious on television. He needs the answer. The incident haunts him, and it shows. “For a while,” he said, “I made it a point to hang out on the street corner opposite from where it happened and observe things.” During these poignant forays, he disguised himself with sunglasses and a baseball cap.

I want Dan Rather to be free. I want my generation to be free, not trapped by conspiracy theories, like those who wrestle with the bloody puzzle of Dallas 1963. Our generation must have an answer to our riddle. And we will all know we have it when Dan Rather comes on the television and no longer looks anxious.

One day, Rather signed off a broadcast with the single word, “Courage.” A noble gesture, at once commanding and empathetic. But it had no more effect than if he had said, “Porridge.” Such is the great ineffable quality of Dan Rather.

Yes, there are those who would like to keep him anxious. The same people who jumped and pummeled him on Park Avenue, calling him “Kenneth,” demanding the frequency.

Bastards.

I ask you: if the victim had been somebody named Kenneth, what would he have made of “what is the frequency?” Was this some intimate reference known only to Kenneth and his attackers? If so, how could the attackers—who knew their victim well enough to communicate with coded language—then stalk and attack the wrong man, especially when the “wrong man” was nationally famous?

They knew their victim. Rather's face was broadcast to millions of Americans, on network television, five days a week. Nothing was taken from the victim: watch, wallet, or souvenir. Park Avenue is hardly a hot spot for random violence. The attackers had one motive: to punch Dan Rather, to punish him. If they had said, “Go to hell!” or, “Take that!” the whole thing would have been dismissed as random criticism and forgotten.

Instead, they taunted him: “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

The taunt was obviously some kind of code. We can assume that, knowing their victim, the attackers were intentionally identifying Rather as “Kenneth.” Was he supposed to recognize the cipher? I think not. I think the riddle was designed for their pleasure alone, designed to further torture Dan Rather. The coded language was another implement of the punishment.

What of the second part of the taunt: “What is the frequency?” “Frequency” could refer to a radio frequency, or perhaps to something in Rather's journalistic background. Or it might have been a scientific query, relating to the number of times a specific function or action is repeated within a given time.

But if the thugs were making a scientific inquiry, then their method was sloppy. The question, without a context, is meaningless, akin to asking somebody, “How much does it weigh?” without telling them what “it” is. Mr. Rather had every right to have answered the thugs with, “Frequency of what?” if he had been given the opportunity.

Rather did not have the opportunity, because the attackers were not expecting an answer. Rather was not expected to provide one. The encoded taunt was the verbal version of a sucker punch.


While I was puzzling over the case, I came across a story by a former professor of English at the University of Houston, the late Donald Barthelme. The story is called “The Indian Uprising.” It is a very beautiful and complex abstraction, in which wild, Hollywood-type Indians lay siege to the city. The outlook for the city, if the uprising succeeds, mirrors the fate of two lovers who are suffering from an uprising of bad feelings.

“What is the situation?” I asked.

“The situation is liquid,” he said. “We hold the south quarter and they hold the north quarter. The rest is silence.”

“And Kenneth?”

“That girl is not in love with Kenneth,” Block said frankly. “She is in love with his coat. When she is not wearing it she is huddling under it. Once I caught it going down the stairs by itself. I looked inside. Sylvia.”

Once I caught Kenneth's coat going down the stairs by itself but the coat was a trap and inside a Comanche who made a thrust with his short, ugly knife at my leg which buckled and tossed me over the balustrade through a window and into another situation.

The appearance of the name “Kenneth” made me pause over the passage. As a character, Kenneth was thinly drawn; just an important, distant personage, a little pretentious. One seldom sees the name “Kenneth” or hears it. But “Kenneth” appears in another story by Barthelme, called “Can We Talk.” He is referred to as a “friend.”

One can safely conclude that Barthelme had a running character in his fictions named Kenneth. This is arguably the only case of a running Kenneth in the history of literature. And Barthelme drew heavily from his life to make his fictions. But I was not reading Barthelme to look for clues; I was reading him because he, to my mind, is great and better with each read. So I gave the “Kenneth” coincidence no more thought until, in the same collection, Sixty Stories, I came across this exchange, in “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel”:

A. I use the girl on the train a lot. I'm on a train, a European train with compartments. A young girl enters and sits opposite me. . . . The book is in her lap. Her legs are fairly wide apart, very tanned, the color of—

Q. That's a very common fantasy.

A. All my fantasies are extremely ordinary.

Q. Does it give you pleasure?

A. A poor . . . A rather unsatisfactory . . .

Q. What is the frequency?

Imagine my shock at finding, quite out of the blue, the words “Kenneth” and “What is the frequency?” combined within the same text, by a writer from Houston, Dan Rather's hometown.

It was an odd coincidence. What are the chances of finding “Kenneth” and “What is the frequency?” in any way connected to each other, outside of the mouths of Mr. Rather's attackers? And yet here they were, inside Donald Barthelme's book.

The photo of Barthelme on the back of the dust jacket: a stocky fellow with a leprechaun's face and beard, wearing a checked shirt and a leather vest, with a patch of Rorschach-style wallpaper behind his head. Was this mischievous but gentle soul the type to rough up a news anchor or hire goons to do the job? He looked capable of a prank but not one so violent.

The coincidence seemed to be just that: a strange, puzzling, but unintentional juxtaposition, one of life's sublime jokes.


Intrigued by the Rather riddle, I researched Dan Rather's career as a newspaper reporter and editor in Houston but could find nothing except the tale of a tireless, ambitious young man—what used to be called a B.M.O.C.—with something of a roving eye for what his biographer referred to as “coeds.”

Mr. Rather excelled first as the editor of a college newspaper. Eventually he broke into radio and then television journalism. Might there have been a grudge or a simmering jealousy from as far back as then? Somebody Rather stepped over on his way up the ladder of success, or the boyfriend or husband of one of those “coeds”?

Mr. Barthelme, just six months younger than Mr. Rather, also grew up in Houston. Barthelme attended the University of Houston; Rather attended Sam Houston State College. After their stints in the military in the fifties, both went into journalism. Rather worked at a Houston radio station, while Barthelme went to work as a reporter for the Houston Post.

Rather and Barthelme, same age, same military backgrounds, were now reporting for competing news outlets in a city of modest size. Is it possible that they could not have known each other, or of each other, in the Houston of the late 1950s and early 1960s? That they could not have attended the same journalistic functions? Or that Rather, the rising star, could not have been the object of envy and speculation on the part of his peers?

I tried to imagine an imbroglio between these two men, both titans in their field: the burly, bristling, brilliant professor/writer and the eager, ambitious, glamorous, comparatively superficial news anchor. Titans who left large footprints in Texas soil but no legacy of mutual distemper, no trace of a grudge. The implication—that a brilliant writer would somehow get himself involved in a hugger-mugger retributionary ambush of a prominent news editor over an undisclosed dispute—was difficult to accept. Yet these giants were undoubtedly linked together by that strangely magical refrain—Kenneth, what is the frequency?—and by their oddly parallel lives.

In 1959, Rather became a TV reporter for KTRK in Houston; two years later, Barthelme became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Rather eventually transferred to New York City for CBS News, and Barthelme also landed in the city, teaching at City College.

I will never know what wrong Donald Barthelme perceived was done to him by Dan Rather during their mutual incubations in Houston. No one will ever know. It will have to be the one unknown that haunts our generation as we ponder the Rather/Barthelme connection with the incident on Park Avenue. But there are at least two well-dressed white men out there (now in their fifties) who know the complete truth. Did Barthelme know what they were doing? Or were the avengers acting on their own, loose cannons armed with quotes from Barthelme's canon?


In Barthelme's “The Emerald,” a reporter named Lily is interviewing a witch about her magic potions, and Lily wants to know if she can get one too, for her “problem.”

I have a problem.

What's the problem?

The editor, or editor-king, as he's called around the shop.

What about him?

He takes my stuff and throws it on the floor. When he doesn't like it.

On the floor?

I know it's nothing to you but it hurts me. I cry. I know I shouldn't cry but I cry. When I see my stuff on the floor. Pages and pages of it, so carefully typed, every word spelled right

Don't you kids have a union?

Yes but he won't speak to it.

That's this man Lather, right?

Mr. Lather. Editor-imperator.

On the following page, Mr. Lather himself telephones Mad Moll:

Hello is this Mad Moll?

Yes who is this?

My name is Lather.

The editor?

Editor-king, actually.

Yes Mr. Lather what is the name of your publication I don't know that Lily ever—

World. I put it together. When World is various and beautiful, it's because I am various and beautiful. When World is sad and dreary, it's because I am sad and dreary. When World is not thy friend, it's because I am not thy friend. And if I am not thy friend, baby—

I get the drift.

All hell breaks loose in the story: a foot kills a man, an emerald begins to speak, and devils appear . . .

Three devils showed up! Lily's interviewing them right now!

A free press is not afraid of a thousand devils!

There are only three!

What do they look like?

Like Lather, the editor!

Just as I was prepared to dismiss the coincidence of finding “Kenneth” and “What is the frequency?” fifty pages apart in the same book, written by a Houstonian whose career mirrored Rather's, and who was reporting in the same town at the same time as Rather, I discover this rather ham-fisted swipe at an imperious news editor with a name so close to Rather's own that it seems almost unfair. An agitated, anxious, irritated man is said to be in a lather. There is something slightly foolish implied by that kind of lather, in a foamy, worked-up way. Donald Barthelme's editor-king, Lather, is a newsman in a lather, greatly agitated, foolishly grand. One begins to wonder how long Dan Rather has been wearing that anxious look on his face.


One cannot address the issue of the Rather beating without addressing the perplexing strangeness of the popular anchorman and, in the context of the crime committed against him, the exceedingly dubious attempt to pin the crime on a confessed murderer.

In January 1997, the Daily News published an article that connected the Rather mystery to a confessed killer, William Tager, who fatally shot NBC technician Campbell Theron Montgomery on August 31, 1994. The supposed scoop was written not by an investigative reporter but by a TV critic.

The tenuous connection was first made by Dr. Park Dietz, a celebrity forensic psychiatrist who interviewed Tager to see whether he was fit for trial. According to the Daily News, Dietz said there was “no question that it was William Tager who assaulted Dan Rather. The degree of consistency was exactly what I expect to find when the people were involved in the same incident and they're all telling the truth.”

If both parties are indeed telling the truth, then someone has some explaining to do, and the Daily News obliges. The published reports of “two well-dressed men” who accosted Rather, one of them demanding to know, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” becomes, in the revised version, “An agitated man [who] directed a stream of near-gibberish at him, including the question ‘What's the frequency?' and a word that Rather told police sounded like the name ‘Kenneth.’”

The merging of two carefully identified assailants badgering Rather repeatedly with the strange query, “Kenneth, what is the frequency!” into one gibbering madman slurring his words is explained away by the Daily News: “Some news accounts at the time referred to two attackers, but Rather said he had told police it was just his impression that the attacker was accompanied by another man. Only one person actually beat him.”

These are the rather clumsy footprints of a cover-up, and one wonders why.

The official eagerness to accept the ravings of a criminal who is described by his friends as “loony toons,” and by his psychiatrist as mentally incompetent, is highly questionable. Likewise, the willingness to accept Rather's identification of a picture of his supposed assailant—provided by the Daily News—more than ten years after the fact is troubling, when Rather has difficulty remembering even how many attackers were on hand for the fracas.

Every news account specifies two assailants, who were both described in great detail by Rather himself, on the night of the assault. Rather's description was supported by the doorman and the superintendent—Robert Sestak—who came to Rather's rescue. Are we to believe that all three men were suffering some form of group hallucination?


Donald Barthelme is one of my literary heroes. Thomas Pynchon—no stranger to Houston, I might add—described Barthelme, lovingly, as “perhaps a species of anarchist curse.” Dan Rather, while not one of my heroes, is a victim. He was minding his own business, set upon and pummeled, and sent to the hospital, which isn't fun and isn't funny. As a victim, Rather will have to live with the memory of that episode for the rest of his days. I hope that the revelations contained here will help him deal with the calamity.

Rather's eagerness to put the issue to rest is understandable. The event, fueled by rumor and gossip, has dogged him. The rock band R.E.M. turned the cryptic mugging into a song, “What's the Frequency, Kenneth?” Rather's curious misfortune has clearly entered the public consciousness and become a touchstone for a generation. I'm sure he would like it to go away, and there are undoubtedly many out there who would like to help Mr. Rather in this effort.

I am one of those. I want to release Dan Rather from the prison of his own perplexity. The bogus attempt to close the case via the Daily News must eat at Mr. Rather, for he knows better. If they had told him the Huntsman from Snow White had confessed, Dan Rather would have agreed, just to get it behind him.

My strong suspicion is that Mr. Rather does not know who did this to him, or why. “Why and exactly by whom remains unclear,” he stated on TV. “And it may never be determined.” I want Mr. Rather to be liberated by the truth: Donald Barthelme, or avengers acting on the master's behalf, did the nefarious deed upon you. The startling evidence is contained within the pages of Barthelme's oeuvre; you can read the stories for yourself. May this knowledge set you free. May you feel the yoke of mystery lift from your shoulders.

But there are forces that do not want my revelation to be known. Dan Rather—who once, by his own admission, “made it a point to hang out on the street corner opposite from where it happened and observe things,” now sits tight behind an impenetrable fortress, protected by gatekeepers. Word filters down from his aerie that he doesn't want to know. He is selling a book now; his face remains strangely tense. He weeps on TV and has expressed a wish to enlist in the military. I wish I could save him.

Rather is like Rapunzel, locked in a tower, peering out from his window, giving the evening news. Dan Rather, Dan Rather, let down your hair! But no, he's cut it short. He doesn't want to be saved.

Barthelme's brother Frederick has refused to comment. Perhaps he knows nothing, but one wonders. There are two younger Barthelme brothers, including Frederick. Maybe they know something about the two attackers. Maybe they know why brother Donald had it in for the Texas newsman.

The building super who came to Rather's aid and frightened off the attackers, Robert Sestak, has passed away. I spoke with his family, and they graciously recounted his remarkable tale of two well-dressed men and Dan Rather in a Park Avenue vestibule. It is those two men who know the truth. But they have disappeared, as if they had stepped out from the pages of a book and ducked back inside as the covers slammed shut.


Donald Barthelme liked to compare his work to a collage. “The point of collage,” he said, “is that unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality.” He was king of the irrational, the surprising juxtaposition. Dan Rather is king of the rational: news, facts, reports. Why did the irrational attack the rational? Is it always the way with these two? Rather's very name is contained within the name Barthelme. Barthelme's last novel was The King, about King Arthur. Rathur? Lather? Editor-king? Who can say?

There is Dan Rather, up in his tower, a prisoner of perplexity. He doesn't want to be saved, and yet, and yet . . . he gazes out, and the look on his face speaks volumes. His lips move and we hear the news, but if you read his lips you might see the words of Snow White, from Barthelme's novel of the same name, as she gazes out from her own tower:

There is something wrong with all those people standing there, gaping and gawking. And with all those who did not come and at least try to climb up. To fill the role. And with the very world itself, for not being able to supply a prince. For not being able to at least be civilized enough to supply the correct ending to the story.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PDT
Monday, 4 May 2009
SWINE FLU - "Lets Get Real"
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: Swine Flue & Propganda ... lets not freak out now on thisH1N1 !
Topic: CONSPIRACY

Hey Now...  (everybody got their mask n gloves on?)

Here is 3 tid-bit swine morsals for those Z3Readers that are not in deep hiding for fear of catching this HiN1 virus. Lets dtart with an older propganda video to get our bearings ..then read the two articles I linked to below

~joe 5/4/09


http://blacklistednews.com/?news_id=4062

YouTube Video on The Swine Flue (old propaganda commercial)  

 

 (Please keep all children out of the public spaces you life is at high risk)  (not)

 

 http://cryptogon.com/?p=8321

Via: Los Angles Times:  As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza — at least in its current form — isn’t shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics. In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare. READ MORE   

 http://blacklistednews.com/?news_id=4062 

If we are to believe what our trusted international media report, the world is on the brink of a global pandemic outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu, H1N1 as it has been labelled, or more popularly, Swine Flu. As the story goes, the outbreak of the deadly flu was first discovered in Mexico. According to press reports, after several days, headlines reported as many as perhaps 150 deaths in Mexico were believed caused by this virulent people-killing pig virus that has spread to humans and now is allegedly being further spread from human to human. Cases were being reported hourly from Canada to Spain and beyond. The only thing wrong with this story is that it is largely based on lies, hype and coverup of possible real causes of Mexican deaths. READ MORE


Posted by Joe Anybody at 1:06 PM PDT
Updated: Monday, 4 May 2009 1:12 PM PDT
Thursday, 2 October 2008
700 billion.... hell how about 2.5 trillion that is missing from the Pentagon
Mood:  celebratory
Now Playing: Fraud - Theft - Coverup - Spin - Lies - Corruption = USA GREED
Topic: CONSPIRACY


Hello my friendly Z3 Report Readers The Sky is Falling

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/

...Quote below is from the:

"The Daily Reckoning" website (link above)


(quote) Paris, France
Thursday, October 2, 2008below this email)
(( “According to Bloomberg : ‘Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion bank rescue that is likely to pass tonight. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.’ )) (end quote)



Oh hey Z3 Readers, … I was reminded by an email from a friend, about how no one is talking about the 3 trillion dollars that went missing from the Pentagon a few years ago (ha ha)
How do you spell “dumb American” …oh wait what is that saying used once in a while ….The average American is a (you spell it) “G R A P E”
The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes. LINK IS HERE: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL



So back to the 700 billion (forget the trillion for a minute ) (ha)
“A stack of 1,ooo dollar bills …..piled 63 miles high would equal one billion dollars
You would need to make 700 piles of 1,ooo dollar bills ….63 miles high to reach that amount !!!

Airplanes fly seven miles high (compared to 63 miles high)
LINK HERE: http://www.cjob.com/blogs/ExcuseMe/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10008510



Oh ya the missing trillion from the Pentagon budget is more like 2.5 trillion
It makes the 700 billion look like spare change
Read more “facts on the missing 2.5 trillion” LINK HERE: http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a091001defensebudget



A good forum on this topic is right here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x92233#92274






I say loudly & proudly:
Impeach Bush & Cheney
Vote Nader/Gonzales in 2008

Joe Anybody

Oh before I forget here is the YouTube video where Cynthia McKinney is jamming Rummy on a few topics ..this is priceless

McKinney takes on Donald Rumsfeld text from video is here: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/030105_mckinney_question.shtml

The video is here:

***************


Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:10 PM PDT
Updated: Friday, 3 October 2008 4:33 PM PDT

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