Free Learner

Pentagon buzzes lower Manhattan just for kicks

This was not an accident, poor judgment, or lack of sensitivity.  Nobody's that stupid.  It was deliberate.

On Monday morning, one of the 747s used to ferry around the U.S. president was dispatched to the Statue of Liberty, escorted by a fighter jet. Assignment: Get some fresh glamour shots of the plane.

The Air Force said the flight needed to remain confidential. So while New York police knew about it, as did at least one person in the mayor's office, regular New Yorkers remained in the dark.

As a result, to onlookers Monday all across downtown Manhattan -- where the World Trade Center once stood -- the photo shoot looked like a terrorist attack. People watched in horror as a massive aircraft, trailed closely by an F-16 fighter jet, banked and roared low near the city, in a frightening echo of the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Fearing the worst, thousands of people streamed out of the skyscrapers and into the streets. Some buildings ordered evacuations. (Wall Street Journal)

If you want a photo of Air Force One in front of the Statue of Liberty, you use Photoshop.  If, for some unimaginable reason, you actually need to fly this plane at low altitude over Manhattan, you let everybody know in advance and you do it at 7am Sunday morning.  You DO NOT do THIS (courtesy HuffPo and CNN) during business hours:

One comment on this post read:

Normally, if there are going to be any planes flying down here at all the building sends out memo's to all offices DAYS in advance. Seems a bit fishy to me. The plane was within a few hundred feet of my building - you'd think they would have warned us if it was planned. People were running out of the buildings down here.

If it was a photo-op then there is no reason not to notify the public... unless, of course, the whole point was to scare people, and measure public reaction as part of ongoing psyops research.

Take a look at this short (< 40 seconds) YouTube video to get an idea just how low this plane was, and how upset people became.

I'm not sure what this is all about, but it's obviously disturbing when the Pentagon deliberately tests the public's reaction to impending acts of terrorism.  What is it they were trying to find out?

ADDENDUM:  This news story includes a letter from a NYC council member to the FAA demanding to know why the FAA approved the low-altitude flyover.  Quote:

We understand that there is a need to conduct military activity and even, under some circumstances, near lower Manhattan. However, this does not appear to have been a serious military exercise that would have required a "need to know" classification. Additionally, if this was indeed an aerial photo mission, why you would approve such an exercise for a Monday morning defies reason.

We ask that you urgently advise New Yorkers of the purpose of this exercise, why it needed to be undertaken in New York, and without any public notice.

Who's flu?

There's been a nasty flu outbreak in Mexico, with a few scattered cases in Texas, California, Kansas, and New York.

If you don't have two weeks' worth of food in your house, as the US government advises, now might be a good time to lay in the necessary supplies.  This virus, similar to pandemic flu viruses in previous decades, appears to be most lethal in young adults (20's and 30's), but is less dangerous in the young or elderly.  Mexico City has closed all schools, museums, theaters, etc.

It could be... y'know... the real thing.

I say this as a person who got obsessed with H5N1 news and read flu forums for months, before finally tiring of the always-impending avian flu pandemic.  So I'm not trying to freak anyone out... we've been on the verge of flu pandemic for years now.  I'm just saying: hey, man-- dried beans are cheap, and don't forget the coffee and vodka.  Just in case.

I read Gina Kolata's book Flu and various articles on the 1918 flu (here's an example) some years back.  The story of the 1918 flu and how it got into humans (killing between 2 and 4 percent of all humans alive on Earth in less than a year) is a bit foggy.  For one thing, Establishment Science did not like the little army pathologist who first began genotyping the 1918 flu, so they refused to publish his work-- humankind be damned!!  He wasn't in the club!  Hell, he wasn't even in academia!!  [More details at this old 2005 post.]

Once we got past that hurdle, it turned out that the 1918 flu wasn't quite what most people had thought.  Pandemic flus tend to contain avian flu genes, but the thinking had been that avian flu would have a hard time jumping straight into humans.  Pigs, however, can be a breeding ground for both bird flus and human flus.  And if a pig happens to be infected with both sorts of flu at the same time, it's singles night at the Roman bathhouse-- the viruses swap genes and the genes get mixed.  And then emerges a nasty bird/swine/human flu, one that humans don't have immunities against, and we're screwed.

The problem was, there wasn't so much evidence of swine flu genes.  Possibly the 1918 flu went straight from birds to humans, which no one can exactly explain (after all, it hasn't happened very successfully with the H5N1 bird flu that's been around since 1997).  Maybe it made a brief stop in pigs, but... there isn't too much swine influence, so it wasn't percolating in pigs for very long, if at all.

Secondly, nobody to this day seems to be able to understand why it was quite so virulent, quite so contagious, quite so deadly-- and especially in young, healthy adults.

There's an explanation, but it simply MUST be wrong because it has definitely not been endorsed by NPR and it qualifies as tinfoil hat.  The theory goes:

1. In 1918 we were inoculating army soldiers against typhoid.
2. In 1918 we didn't know what in the hell we were doing, re: viruses.
3. We incubated the vaccine in chicken eggs.
4. We had no ability to test for avian viruses in the finished vaccine.
5. We inoculated thousands of soldiers while they were living near a hog farm in Kansas.
6. The virus began in soldiers.
7. Conclusion: the virus came from avian-flu-infected typhoid vaccine.  We gave it to ourselves.

The first wave of the flu, in the spring of 1918, was not nearly so deadly.  But it provided ample opportunity for mutation of the virus to become more contagious and lethal in humans.  Rather than assuming that the flu mutated inside pigs, one has to wonder whether soldiers in Fort Riley, Kansas contracted both low-pathogenic swine flu (which most livestock veterinarians and hog farmers have antibodies against) and avian flu from infected typhoid vaccine.  Quite possibly, humans were the 'swinging singles bar' of flu viruses which led to the pandemic flu strain-- not pigs.

The worst hit city in the US was probably Philadelphia, where they were unable even to bury their dead for some time due to massive fatalities.  The Philadelphia outbreak, though it was spread by a war fundraising parade (at which, one can assume, soldiers were present), actually originated in a Navy shipyard.

Fast-forward to today, Mexico City.  Keep in mind that outbreaks of polio, chicken pox, flu, and foot-and-mouth disease in livestock have all been traced to vaccination or accidental releases of materials used in making vaccines.

The Mexico City H1N1 flu strain has elements of North American swine flu, Europe / Asian swine flu, North American avian flu, and North American human flu (New York Times).  The assumption, as with the 1918 pandemic, is that these viruses mingled together and mutated inside pigs.  Overcrowded hog farms near Mexico City have been blamed over at HuffPo, and certainly this is one reason not to have insanely contagious and horribly unhealthy pig farms (beyond the obvious moral reasons, as pigs are likely as intelligent as dogs).

That being said, this four-viruses-in-one combination, never seen before, and found in 19 Americans in 4 states, none of whom have had contact with pigs, suggests that perhaps the viruses had a bit of help in recombining.  Consider, as a bit of context, the article "Baxter: Product contained live bird flu virus":

The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses....

The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.

The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.

Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a “serious error” on Baxter’s part have assumed the death of the ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live....

On Friday, the company’s director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.

“It was live,” Christopher Bona said in an email....

Baxter makes its flu vaccine — including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly — at a facility in the Czech Republic.

To recap: a European vaccine manufacturer contaminated materials (to be used to make human flu vaccine) with live H5N1 avian flu.  Whooops!

And then there's this debacle:

Homeless people die after bird flu vaccine trial in Poland

Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus.

The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus.

Had any of these homeless people had human flu at the same time they were injected (apparently) with live avian flu virus, the necessary mutations to cause pandemic could have occurred.  What in the hell are they doing injecting live H5N1 into people?  Trying to give the pandemic bug a leg up?

Flu vaccination in general contains serious risks, even when it's only for human flu, because the genes contained in the vaccine itself may provide genetic material to other circulating flu viruses, accelerating the rate of mutation.  It may also provide for an emptier "playing field" for flu strains that would have had competition... except that the competition was kept down by vaccination.  In short, flu vaccination may result in more dangerous flu strains over time.

The Mexican government is rushing forward with a mass swine flu vaccination program, which is likely to exacerbate the problem.  [UPDATE: It isn't a swine flu vaccine, it's the regular seasonal flu vaccine-- utterly pointless.]  The vaccine they have does not match the flu virus currently infecting Mexicans and is unlikely to be effective.  To create a vaccine that matches would take months, and that's the whole issue with the flu-- months from now, it's always a very different virus, because influenza mutates quickly.  This is also why the regular flu vaccine usually does not work (it totally fails, most years).  The swine flu vaccine will, however, provide interesting new genes which may or may not be picked up by the current flu virus.  Mind you, the vaccine necessarily contains genes that make swine flu contagious in humans.  That should be obvious, since they would hardly bother with a vaccine against a variety of swine flu that was not contagious in humans, now would they?  Therefore, quite possibly, this flu is about to get a whole lot more contagious, after a helpful boost from a futile swine flu vaccine campaign.

On the other hand, perhaps flu-infected pigs in Europe spread the virus to migrating birds, who combined the swine and avian flu genes and then infected pigs in North America, who then passed along all three kinds of flu genes to humans in North America.  Yeah, it's possible.  But if this thing goes pandemic, my money is on human intervention as a major cause.

Mexico has shut down schools, libraries, and other public places.  Of roughly 1,000 people infected (surely an underestimate) about 60 have died, which suggests a 6% fatality rate.  That's unlikely, in my opinion.  Lots of people caught this who did not know they had this particular flu, or have not been recorded among the infected.  The real fatality rate is more likely 1-2% or less, in keeping with the 1918 flu and considering improved nutrition and medical science.

All the same, some boxed spaghetti and N95 masks wouldn't go amiss.

Connections in high places

I just found out that the department within the Ford Foundation where Obama's mother worked, the Asia department, was headed by Timothy Geithner's father.  The two met in person at least once, according to Wiki.  All I can do is roll my eyes, heave a sigh, and say "Typical."

Mind you, when Tiny Tim Geithner pulled the plug on Lehman Brothers and cast the world of finance into turmoil, insuring terrible economic headlines for weeks on end, he cemented Obama's win.  It was gentlemanly quid pro quo for Obama to make Tiny Tim head of the Treasury.

The dirty mechanics to one side, the larger point is that the American aristocrats run the country via their "philanthropic" institutes.  It's not so much that the Geithners and the Obamas colluded.  It's that the Geithners and the Obamas had the same boss.

Obama was doubly blessed, also being the favorite of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who's a Rockefeller man.  It's like being related to not only a Duke in England but a Duc in France to boot.

An artist named Mark Lombardi used to make drawings illustrating the numerous connections between the elites [until he was suicided in his New York apartment-- much like the CFO of Freddie Mac, who apparently shot himself after having hung himself first].  I remember that one of Lombardi's drawings centered on Texan James R. Bath, one of those men who run the world even though no one's heard of them (well, unless you are a conspiracy theorist).  Bath was especially connected with the Bushes.  You remember the Bushes?  Prescott, the Nazi banker photographed with Presidents Truman and Eisenhower?  Or his son, who was involved in assassinating JFK (heck, maybe ran the whole thing, especially the earlier Miami attempt)?  Or his son Neil, who apparently played a role in the Reagan assassination attempt?

The Bushes, of course, are in with the Harrimans, another important family, from way back.  They funded the Nazis together.  Averell Harriman was, needless to say, a fellow Bonesman, plus he gave the Bush family the money to start Zapata Petroleum, which was a front company for the CIA and was used in the Bay of Pigs fiasco....

Sigh.

Anyone who uses the term "conspiracy theorist" in a derogative way should check out the work of Mark Lombardi-- such an extraordinary number of connections strongly suggests the presence of a de facto American (and global) aristocracy.  Or, try out another name: the secret government.  When you start researching this stuff you discover connection after connection after connection.  Sometimes I am actually nauseated and sometimes I just laugh in sheer disbelief.  E.g. I also just found out that Michael Moore's agent is the brother of the fascist Rahm Emanuel-- that is, Michael is represented by "Ari" [Emanuel] of HBO's Entourage.  Blech!!!

Perhaps I will try and post a "Connection of the Day" for a while.

Just sign here

The idea that we have representative democracy at the federal level is utterly false for one simple reason:

The bills are so damned long, no member of Congress could possibly read them prior to the vote.

The stimulus bill was 1,071 pages long.  Among other things, it created a new federal bureaucracy that will collect all of our medical records and review them to make sure that the federal government approves of the treatment we're receiving from our doctors.  Gee, who knew that was in there??

Our members of Congress are a bunch of overpaid, bribed, corrupt, cocktail-party-attending Forest Gumps who vote how they're told to vote, on bills written entirely by lobbyists.

I have two words to describe this:  Banana.  Republic.

The doomsayers

A lot of people disregard disastrous predictions because they usually don't come true.  But from my perspective, what's amazing is how often these predictions almost come true.  While our esteemed politicians may not know how to do anything but attend cocktail parties and bloviate, the people behind the curtain who actually run the show turn out to be reasonably competent... on occasion.  We come to the brink of disaster time and again, only to be dragged back by the seat of our pants.

We've nearly run out of diesel fuel in certain regions of the country, as predicted by many peak oil analysts, but we've never had the trucking system break down.  We've nearly run out of heating fuel in the Northeast -- we've come within a few days' worth of usage, in fact -- but, again, contrary to some peak oil forecasts, the fuel did not quite run out.  To go way back to the Clinton era, some non-establishment researchers thought the Serbian conflict was all about launching another war (cold or otherwise) with Russia.  And indeed, Wesley Clark nearly bombed the Russians, but the British general receiving those orders simply refused to carry them out.  Nuclear weapons were almost shipped off to the Middle East in late August 2007, right around the time Webster Tarpley was going nuts on radio shows hollering about imminent war with Iran-- but those nuclear weapons were stopped at Barksdale Air Force base (apparently costing several soldiers their lives). 

And although I don't know of anyone who predicted a possible incident with Russia in 2001, some worrying things happened vis-a-vis Russia on September 11th.  That morning, when we went to Defcon 3 and locked down the Norad facility made famous in the movie War Games, both the US and Russia were conducting nuclear war drills over the North Pole.  (During such war games, the other side cannot be 100% sure that it's truly all a simulation, and not an actual attack.  Thus, the simultaneous war exercises, just in case.)  Additionally, it appeared to some in the foreign intelligence community that a coup might be taking place (i.e., where the hell was Bush? and what of the multiple threats against Air Force One?).  We had to call the Russians and request that we both stand down, to avoid any unfortunate accidents.  Both sides behaved like rational adults and backed off.

One way to look at near-disasters is to be scared by how close we came to catastrophe (the Cuban Missile Crisis being first on my list), but on the other hand, it suggests there are better and smarter people behind the closed doors of the Establishment than you might think from watching C-SPAN.  They have snatched us back from the precipice quite a few times.

I think analysts issue dire warnings because they feel they're acting proportionally to the danger.  True, they may be wrong, but if they're not it's going to be very bad.  This is why I've urged people to get a couple of weeks' worth of food together and shove it in a closet or the basement or wherever.  Sure, bank closures or diesel shortages or massive power outages may carry only a small probability of occurrence.  But if you don't buy that spaghetti and one day you're explaining to your hungry kids that there is nothing to eat, well... better to be safe than sorry.  I always think of the line "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"  You don't ever want to go there.  The better reaction to Doom and Gloom predictions is to listen to them, take them with a grain of salt, but see if there's anything simple you can do to prepare for the given calamity.

* * * * *

On October 7 of last year I passed along my own dire warning about bank closures, under the title The Fed buys us another day:

[The news today] is all very bad, but we did not suffer utter implosion today.  Jim Sinclair wrote: "If the Fed hadn't taken the rather strange action they took today by becoming OTC derivative dealers themselves this would have been the day the USA banking system imploded."

Sinclair is predicting a bank holiday, and quite soon.  If you do have extra cash available in your bank accounts (lucky you), go and withdraw some.  If not, consider going to a discount or bulk store and getting some pasta and pasta sauce and canned tuna and canned beans on credit.  The US government says you should have 2 weeks worth of food on hand, anyway... and this way, if for some reason there is a banking crisis, you will not have to scramble and borrow cash from others to buy something to eat.  If you bank with Bank of America, this goes double for you.

Today I found out that on October 10, three days later, the UK came within a hair's breadth of having a systemic bank closure (including ATM withdrawals, known as "hole in the wall" withdrawals in the UK).

Britain was just three hours away from going bust last year after a secret run on the banks, one of Gordon Brown's Ministers has revealed.

City Minister Paul Myners disclosed that on Friday, October 10, the country was 'very close' to a complete banking collapse after 'major depositors' attempted to withdraw their money en masse.

The Mail on Sunday has been told that the Treasury was preparing for the banks to shut their doors to all customers, terminate electronic transfers and even block hole-in-the-wall cash withdrawals.  Only frantic behind-the-scenes efforts averted financial meltdown. (source: International Forecaster newsletter)

Had UK banking shut down, investors in other countries would have doubted their own banking systems, and the panic would have spread.  As the UK is 5 hours ahead of us, there would have been ample time on Friday, October 10 to create bank runs in the United States.

The doomsayers are not way off the mark, but when disaster is narrowly averted the general public rarely hears so much as a whisper about it.  Even when bad things do happen (say, a 6,000-point fall in the Dow in 12 months) many people fail to notice the magnitude because it happens gradually and things seem more or less normal.  If someone had said, as the Dow approached its 14,165 high, that it would dip below 8,000 within a year, they would surely have been labeled the most pessimistic of all doomsayers.  All the while the Dow was plummeting, television was broadcasting its 24/7 "Everything Is Normal" message, and anyone who became too disheartened was ridiculed because "the market always bounces back" or some such tripe.

This is not a normal environment.  This is the reversal of globalization, the end of some currencies, the Great Depression II, and a time of insurrections and revolutions.  You may disagree with the doomsayers, but it's no time to ignore them.

Anti-semitism is made in Israel

Some days ago I read this perspective on Uruk.net, regarding the Gaza crisis:

Unfortunately, many innocent Jews will pay the price just as mostly innocent Palestinians are paying the price, with their lives and the lives of their children and beloved ones, for the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mindset. In the final analysis, anti-Semitism is manufactured in Israel, not in Damascus or Cairo or even Gaza.

This seems to me to be plainly and obviously true, and I don't understand why Jews worldwide don't protest against Israeli / IDF apartheid, cruelty, slaughtering, and war crimes.

Some of the stories coming out about the IDF have been so bad they've made me skeptical.  They smacked of old propaganda about the Huns (meaning the Germans circa WWI) or those imaginary Iraqis who tipped over infant incubators in Kuwait.  I mean, do grown men really shoot a 9-year-old boy and then use his body as target practice in front of his parents?  But there is quite a bit of evidence that the Israelis actually are behaving in this inhuman way:

Cairo: Doctors operating the only brain-scanning machine at an Egyptian hospital near Gaza have been almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children arriving with bullet wounds to the head.

Among them last week was nine-year-old Anas Haref, who arrived with a bullet in her brain. Dr Ahmad Yahia, head of the trauma team, broke the news to her grandmother that the girl was not expected to live.

"The bullet has damaged a big part of her brain," said Dr Yahia. "It came in, hit the skull wall and then changed direction downwards." 

Dr Yahia, a professor of neurosurgery, believes that the bullet was shot from close range. "If it changes course inside the brain it has high velocity and its penetrative force is also high," he said.

"I can't precisely decide whether these children are being shot at as a target, but in some cases the bullet comes from the front of the head and goes towards the back, so I think the gun has been directly pointed at the child."

Dr Ayman Abd Al Hadi, a medical team leader at the hospital, said: "We've had one child with two bullets in the head and nowhere else. We think this shows something."

He praised the medical teams in Gaza for managing to save so many lives despite a shortage of staff, supplies and equipment. "But only a very small percentage of children can survive bullet wounds to the head," he said.

"If we see three children here who have survived bullet wounds to the head, there are probably 97 still in Gaza who have not."

Another story claims that the Israelis shelled a Palestinian home, killing a 4-year-old girl who was out in the back yard.  When her parents and siblings attempted to rush to her side, they were fired upon by Israeli snipers and were forced to take refuge in their house.  Over a period of 4 days, they made repeated attempts to collect her body, in part to preserve it from being eaten by dogs who were frequenting her corpse in search of food.  Each attempt was repelled by Israeli snipers, until finally her two older brothers were fired upon and killed in the attempt.  I have no reason to doubt this story, since it's documented that this is exactly how the IDF treats the Red Cross when they attempt to collect the killed and injured.

The IDF are shooting toddlers, children, the elderly, women; pregnant women are shot in their bellies, to kill the unborn baby.  There is ample photographic evidence, but you don't want me to prove it to you.

James Kunstler recently suggested that anti-Israeli sentiment is all because Alan Greenspan is Jewish and so is Goldman Sachs management, and therefore, in the current economic downturn, people are becoming anti-Semitic.  The man has his head firmly up his ass.  We have anti-Israeli sentiment because the Israeli army is a big fraternity of goddamn psychopaths who willfully murder women and children.  It's really not that hard to explain, frankly.

And yeah, I could make you feel as angry as I do, but I'd have to show you pictures, and I'm conflicted about that.  I'm not really here to upset anyone.  Let's just say that after a time, when viewing photos of the carnage in Gaza, you stop thinking things like "Are they dead?" or "But those kids just look like they're sleeping...?"

They're all dead, in the photographs.  After a while, you start to understand that.  Not just the gray hand sticking out of the rubble, but also all those kids wrapped up in white, and even the ones simply lying there in everyday clothes, looking peaceful.  They're all dead.  And the goddamn Israelis killed them.

"He got off the podium and spoke to me...."

From the NY Times:

In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Israel opposed the resolution, which called for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, because the government said it did not provide for Israel’s security. It passed 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining.

Mr. Olmert claimed that once he made his case to Mr. Bush, the president called Ms. Rice and told her to abstain. “She was left pretty embarrassed,” Mr. Olmert said, according to The A.P.

Thanks go to Mr. Olmert for clarifying precisely which politician controls US Middle East policy: the Prime Minister of Israel.

If you're going to tell a lie...

tell a big one.  That's the first rule of any propaganda minister / press secretary.  So, when Obama nominated William J. Lynn III as Deputy Secretary of Defense, his press office released this massive lie:

“Lynn brings decades of experience and expertise in reforming government spending and making the tough choices necessary to ensure that American tax dollars are spent wisely.”

Wow.  It took some audacity to release such a statement.

William J. Lynn III was the comptroller (chief financial officer) of the Pentagon during fiscal years 1999 and 2000, during which OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS WENT MISSING.

Pardon me for shouting, but Mr. Lynn inadvertently misplaced $3,300,000,000,000.00.  That's over 4 times the amount Obama is proposing to spend to goose the economy.  This money has never been recovered.  Nobody knows where it went.

(Thanks go to Kandylini, without whom I would have totally missed the story of Lynn's appointment.)

By the way, Donald Rumsfeld did hold a press conference to announce that the mysterious loss of over three trillion dollars was going to be investigated.  He announced this on September 10, 2001.  No investigation took place.  It was all forgotten in the aftermath of the attacks.

And thus, William J. Lynn III was spared, and could go on to become the #2 man in the Pentagon, ostensibly because he manages money so wisely.

Reuters is shameless

I went over to the Reuters photos page for the Gaza crisis, and the bias is just unfuckingbelievable.  It's all crying Israeli soldiers, injured Israeli soldiers, pictures of discolored but intact pavement where "rockets" landed in Israel, Israelis cowering on the sidewalk while sirens warn of a possible incoming rocket, etc.

The reason, of course, is that Reuters is controlled by the uber-Zionist Rothschild banking family, the same family which essentially invented the state of Israel.  So if you find yourself reading an article on the Middle East and it turns out it's a Reuters piece, just close the tab and go elsewhere.  Unfortunately AP is also controlled by the Rothschilds, so that won't help you either.

Some of the best reporting on the Middle East is done by Robert Fisk.  In his latest piece he mentions the endless "What would you do if rockets were landing everywhere for years on end" justification which can be found in newspaper after newspaper:

I open The Irish Times to find a letter from the local Israeli ambassador, trying to explain to the people of the Irish Republic what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. Know what's coming? Of course you do. "What would you do," Zion Evrony asks readers, "if Dublin were subjected to a bombardment of 8,000 rockets and mortars..." And so it goes on and on and on. Needless to say, I'm waiting for the same writers to ask how we'd feel if we lived in Don Mills or Brossard or Dublin and came under sustained attack from supersonic aircraft and Merkava tanks and thousands of troops whose shells and bombs tore 40 women and children to pieces outside a school, shredded whole families in their beds and who, after nearly a week, had killed almost 200 civilians out of 600 [now 900] fatalities.

In his January 7 piece titled "Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask," he debunks the myths used to excuse Israeli atrocities:

After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue.

. . .

And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.

The world protests Israeli acts of genocide

 

"Stop the Palestinian Genocide," Mexico City

There have been some pretty spectacular protests against Israeli aggression in many large cities around the world.  Some of these turned violent, especially in England.  I don't want to see anyone hurt, but I am sympathetic toward acts of vandalism, setting off fireworks, throwing eggs and paint, etc.  A little tear gas and some busted windows, and you double the number of people who hear or read the arguments of the protesters.  (The idea that a nice, polite parade is much more effective, and that angry youth spoil everything, is sheer bunk.  That's some kind of left-cover COINTELPRO, that is.)

Prison Planet has a number of YouTube links to protest videos, while the Daily Mail has some amazing still photos.  Prison Planet cites an estimate of over 100,000 protesters in London, while the London Daily Mail estimates 250,000 protesters in Madrid.  Numerous protests took place all over France, amounting to well over 100,000 people in total.  Around 20,000 people protested across from the White House in Washington, DC.

Lastly, as evidence that one person can influence the world, people all over the globe are hurling shoes at Israeli and American embassies (as well as #10 Downing Street).  Cheap flip-flops must be selling like hotcakes.