http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_octopus_conspiracy/all/1
The Octopus Conspiracy: One Woman’s Search for Her Father’s Killer
Andrew Rice
February 4, 2011
On the morning of July 1, 1981, three bodies were discovered behind a shabby, concrete ranch house on Bob Hope Drive, a main drag in a sand-swept stretch of California’s scorching Coachella Valley. The corpses were sprawled in a semicircle, on chairs and beds that had been dragged into the backyard. Each of the victims—the house’s owner, Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend, Patricia Castro, and a guest named Ralph Boger—had been killed by a single .38-caliber gunshot to the head. Police surmised that Alvarez and his friends had been planning to sleep outdoors to escape the heat of the house, which had no air-conditioning, and were surprised in the dark by one or more assailants. There were few clues and no witnesses left at the scene; the crime had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.
Boger’s daughter, Rachel Begley, who was 13 at the time, says she learned of her father’s death from a television news bulletin. Her parents were divorced, and though she spent occasional days with her dad, riding in his motorcycle’s sidecar, she didn’t know enough about his life to make sense of what had happened. The police would eventually conclude that Boger and Alvarez were killed in connection with shady doings at the nearby Cabazon Indian reservation. But Begley’s mother shielded her from all the murky details of the investigation.
After the murders, Begley went through a rebellious phase and fell in with a bad crowd. By the time she was 15, she was pregnant and had dropped out of high school. Eventually she got her GED and moved to Iowa. She says she would periodically wonder about the case and check in with the police, who never seemed to have any new information. Beyond that, she didn’t have time or tools to delve too deeply.
Then one night in 2007, she idly typed her father’s name into Google. She didn’t find much, but as she clicked through the few results that came up, she found a book entitled The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Based on the work of a fringe freelance journalist, the book argued that the 1981 triple slaying was wrapped up in an enormous plot involving arms dealing, private-security firms, and the upper echelons of the Reagan administration. Skeptical but intrigued, Begley dug deeper and discovered that over the years the murder case had taken on a curious life of its own, preserved on obscure websites and nurtured by a grassroots community of obsessives. To these conspiracy theorists, Boger’s killing was the work of a secret syndicate that they called the Octopus, because its tangled tentacles supposedly reached into some of the most powerful organizations in the world.
Begley’s simple Google search launched a four-year-and-counting odyssey, during which she has devoted herself to tracking down forgotten documents, corresponding with federal prisoners, putting questions to Oliver North, and even confronting the man who may have shot her dad. Her work, she says, has placed her own life in danger and made her a target of the same forces that killed her father. And yet she cannot stop. She keeps following the siren song of the conspiracy theory, the same beguiling cognitive path that lures others to the JFK assassination and Area 51. What was once a family tragedy has blossomed into something else entirely, a vast puzzle whose solution promises to illuminate not only her father’s death but the dark forces behind the world’s apparent chaos.
On a sweltering afternoon last June, Begley was sitting in front of a wheezing Dell Dimension 8300 desktop, beneath a photocopy of a prayer for protection from “evil spirits who prowl about the world,” trying to sum up the dimensions of the Octopus conspiracy. “You’ve got the drug people, mixing with the mafia, mixing with the Hells Angels, mixing with the government—various governments, actually,” she says as she clicks around on the computer. “This is where I piece it all together.”
Begley lives and works in a rickety house at the end of a gravel road, next to a small pond and a rotting wood barn in a rural town outside Louisville, Kentucky, that she doesn’t want named for security reasons. Out front, her “guard dog,” an aging flat-coated retriever named Lucky, lazes beneath her porch. Begley is 43 and heavyset, with piercing blue eyes. On this day, her air conditioner is broken, and her round face glistens with sweat. She has four children, and for the moment she is collecting unemployment and selling a line of weight-loss shakes to make money on the side.
Before she heard about the Octopus, she never gave much thought to politics or read the newspaper, and she certainly didn’t size up her dad—a bearded mechanic who liked to drink, smoke pot, and ride motorcycles—as the type to be tied up in byzantine plots. “I thought it was a normal thing,” Begley says of the killings. “Well, murder is never normal, but I thought somebody went to try and rob them or something.”
In fact, within days of the crime, investigators had fixed their suspicion on John Philip Nichols, who was serving as financial manager for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, a group of fewer than 30 descendants of a desert people that had long inhabited the Coachella Valley. Nichols was encouraging the Cabazons to open a casino, a radical idea at the time that caused clashes with the police and attracted some alleged mob associates to the reservation. Boger’s friend Fred Alvarez, a dissident tribe member, opposed the plan. Before his death, Alvarez had approached a local reporter to talk about blowing the whistle. “There are people out there who want to kill me,” he warned. No one knew what Alvarez was preparing to disclose, but initial speculation involved embezzlement.
When Begley stumbled upon The Octopus, though, she found a more nefarious explanation: Nichols proposed to use the tribe’s sovereign status to build an arms factory on the reservation and ship weapons to Central American rebel groups like the Contras. Drawing heavily on a San Francisco Chronicle investigation, the book reported that he had struck a partnership arrangement with Wackenhut, a private-security firm with alleged ties to the CIA and Republican Party.
That strange story was widely reported in the early 1990s. But since then, others had embroidered those findings with more bizarre information, speculation, and extrapolations. Before long, Begley was tearing through websites and bulletin boards, finding herself drawn into the conspiracy. Much of what she found traced back to Danny Casolaro, the freelance journalist who had been the first to write about a shadowy “international cabal” of covert operatives he dubbed the Octopus. Casolaro tied the Cabazon tribe’s arms company to a Reagan crony, who figured in the so-called October Surprise of 1980 and was connected to a computer program called Promis, which was supposedly used for spying. In 1991, the writer was found dead in the bathtub at a West Virginia hotel, his wrists slashed. Authorities deemed the death a suicide, but others presumed Casolaro was killed because he knew too much.
“Most of the stuff, I didn’t believe,” Begley says. “I thought all these people were making money off my dad’s murder, writing these books.” She was angry enough, in fact, that she was determined to prove the speculators wrong. At the time, Begley was working in customer service for an Internet service provider, which was moving its back-office operations to another state, and she was spending her days sitting idly at her computer, waiting to get laid off. Begley had once worked for a collections agency, and she knew how to track people down. “I went into it with a mindset, I guess, almost like a police officer would,” she says.
No one had ever been charged in the killings. Nichols was long gone—he had died of a heart attack in 2001. But Begley talked to Alvarez’s sister, who recounted her family’s thwarted efforts to get the police to pursue the case. She then found William Hamilton, the developer of the Promis software, who had collaborated with Casolaro on his investigation. Hamilton called her back on her cell phone as she was leaving work one day, and he talked and talked until his battery died. “It was like—boom,” she later said. “He dumped it all in my lap.” Begley may have started out trying to resist the Octopus, but she gradually gave in to the theory’s implications: Her father had been caught up in a vast conspiracy, and it had killed him.
So Begley dove deeper, into the submerged ecosystem of interconnected message boards where initiates continued to discuss and dissect the Octopus. “I was one of those thinking that the conspiracy people were weird,” she posted on one of these boards in 2008. “Then I had my eyes opened, REALLY FAST.”
As she set out on her search, one of the first things Begley did was fashion a new identity. She came up with a screen name, Desertfae, and introduced her character in a series of YouTube videos. The first ones, set to pounding music, consisted of montages of images—an Indian chief, a close-up of her eyes—and cryptic messages: “I am lost … I need your help and guidance to bring closure … I will be silent no longer … Soon the clues and proof will be found.”
As Begley plunged into the world of the conspiracy theorists, she found more than facts and assertions—she found a community with its own rules, ethics, and currency. And it was a difficult one to penetrate; the cluster of people devoted to studying the Octopus tended not to throw their arms open to newcomers. Over the years, they had built a kind of gnostic society, a belief system that was both all-encompassing—a grand unified theory of everything sinister—and exclusionary, open only to the select few who could accept the devastating truth. They were suspicious of outsiders and divided into factions that warred over arcane points, often accusing one another of being double agents.
With persistence and a convert’s zeal, Begley managed to win the trust of some of the leading theorists. She formed a particularly tight bond with Cheri Seymour, a matronly San Diego woman who had been working for nearly 20 years on a book called The Last Circle. The two sealed their friendship with a transaction of weathered documents, the Octopus community’s customary medium of exchange. Copying Seymour’s files, which the author had gathered from archives, courts, and a confidential source’s hidden trailer, Begley glimpsed the far reaches of the speculation: bioweapons, Lebanese heroin shipments, Howard Hughes, the yakuza.
There were many competing interpretations of the Octopus—Seymour was particularly interested in the alleged role of entertainment company MCA—and they were infinitely adaptable, able to accommodate the Patriot Act or the financial crisis. Devotees found and fought one another on sites like Above Top Secret, conspiracy clearinghouses that host every conceivable thread of discussion. Begley forged an alliance with a retired FBI agent who was exploring a link between the Octopus and Satanic cults. She did battle with a prominent UFO enthusiast who thought the Octopus was hiding the government’s collaboration with a colonizing alien force. (In January, online sleuths discovered that alleged Arizona assassin Jared Lee Loughner was a regular poster on Above Top Secret, but his bizarre ramblings about currency and space travel, widely disdained by other contributors, never touched on the Octopus threads.) Begley also developed a venomous rivalry with Virginia McCullough, a California writer who accused her of being an enemy impostor, not really Ralph Boger’s daughter. When Begley posted a copy of her birth certificate online, McCullough called it “a cut-and-paste job.”
“I do not believe that Desertfae is a ‘victim,’ and she has not posted any information that she is who she claims to be,” McCullough wrote on one message board. “She is a low-stage puppet reporting to the puppet master and two or three of his minions.”
The man McCullough called the puppet master is a federal narcotics prisoner named Michael Riconosciuto, Casolaro’s principal source, who had worked for the Cabazon arms company in the 1980s. The convict, who claimed he’d been framed, continued to play a leading role in the factional wars, penning letters in loopy cursive to numerous correspondents. Shortly after Begley began communicating with Riconosciuto, she posted a new video, entitled “OMG Michael Called!!!!!” Looking rattled, she reported that Riconosciuto had warned that the Octopus was watching. Then she cut to shaky handheld footage of a black helicopter that had appeared over her house.
Begley wasn’t scared off the trail. She interviewed retired cops and unearthed new witnesses. She amassed thousands of documents: news clippings, police reports, Casolaro’s notes, leaked memos, reams of legal filings and depositions. (For a secret cabal, the Octopus was remarkably litigious.) Informants found her website or friended her on Facebook and promised they could tell her about the Octopus from the inside. “If you’re involved with some kind of high-level weird thing,” she explains, “and you’ve held it in for 20 or 30 years, and you can’t talk about it, eventually you’re going to be, like, ‘I want to tell somebody before I die.’”
Begley continued to post YouTube videos documenting her investigations, and before long they started winning a small but avid viewership—and not just fellow conspiracy theorists. It seemed the police were paying attention as well. Back when she had first begun investigating, Begley called the police department in Riverside County, where Coachella is located, telling them the case was bigger than Watergate. She got a dismissive response. But after she started posting her videos, she received a phone call telling her that the cold-case squad was reopening the inquiry into her father’s murder.
Soon, Begley focused her attention on one player in the killing: Jimmy Hughes, a former Cabazon reservation employee who worked for John Philip Nichols. In 1984, in the midst of a business dispute, Hughes implicated Nichols to the police, claiming he had ferried a cash payment from Nichols to some unidentified contract killers for the Alvarez hit, which he said his boss had called a “US government covert action.” The police had looked into Hughes’ claims but gradually shifted their suspicion to the informant himself. At that point, Hughes fled town, and the grand jury investigation into the murders fizzled.
Begley discovered that Hughes had become an evangelical minister based in Honduras. In December 2007, she began trying to contact him, but he ignored her. She had an idea why: On the website of a religious group, she discovered an autobiographic essay Hughes had posted that sounded eerily familiar. In it, he called himself “a hit man with a new mission” and told a story of elite military training and a career as a contract killer, a life that was transformed when he was born again. She also found a list of upcoming speaking engagements, which indicated that Hughes was scheduled to address an evangelical banquet in Fresno, California. Begley booked a flight.
On a rainy evening in February 2008, Begley sat in the gilded ballroom of a historic Fresno bank building as Hughes took the floor to preach. Inside her handbag, she carried a hidden camera that peeked out through a discreet hole she’d cut just beneath the zipper. Next to it sat a loaded pistol—just in case.
Hughes, a stocky 51-year-old with a graying buzz cut and raspy voice, bounded around, bellowing tales of his past brutality. Begley, nervous and bleary-eyed from a sleepless cross-country flight, exchanged incredulous text messages with an accomplice who had come along as backup: Mikel Alvarez, Fred’s son. When Hughes finished his performance, Begley and Alvarez came forward with a rush of adrenaline, introducing themselves to the sweat-soaked evangelist as the children of the murder victims.
“Can’t say nothing about that,” Hughes stammered. “It’s a long time ago—it’s in the past.”
“Not for us,” Begley said, insistently. “We’re trying to get resolution.”
“I don’t care who got killed,” Hughes shouted, attracting the bewildered attention of others at the banquet. “I was trainedin the military. I killed people all over the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to.”
Hughes stalked off, fuming, and Begley began to cry. That seemed to bother the minister, because he came back, speaking in a tone that was softer but full of veiled menace. Apparently, he had seen her web videos. “Are you aware that that goes all over the world? Are you a crazy lady?” Hughes said. “Think about your children. They need a mother.” He told Begley and Alvarez that the murder was a “mafia hit,” and though he didn’t explicitly admit to carrying it out, he intimated that he knew much more.
“Your parents were involved in some very dangerous things,” Hughes said. “It’s a lot bigger than just the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. You’re talking political people. You’ve got babies to take care of, mama. Go home tonight and be at peace.”
Suddenly, the murky crime had come into focus, and the conspiracy theorist confronted an unaccustomed feeling: vindication. Hughes’ outburst seemed to confirm Begley’s deepest fears and also her most far-fetched fantasies. After so many decades of false starts and mysterious ends, Begley had finally hit upon something undeniably tangible—an actual lead in the case. Within two days, Begley posted excerpts of the confrontation to YouTube, ending her video with a postscript in stark black and white: “This ‘crazy lady’ wants the murders solved. The Octopus will be exposed.”
Shortly before Begley confronted Hughes, she began cooperating with John Powers, a Riverside County homicide detective who was investigating the reopened 1981 murder case. When Powers saw the video of her run-in with Hughes, he was impressed. “The statements she got from him,” Powers says, “no police officer would ever have been able to get.” He and Begley went on to form an unusually tight partnership. She shared everything she learned with the man she called “my detective” and helped to persuade a pair of reluctant witnesses to offer damning testimony against Hughes.
Still, the case had to overcome some curious obstacles. Powers was surprised to find that the records of the 1980s grand jury investigation had somehow disappeared. And it turned out that the district attorney of Riverside County, a long-serving prosecutor, was actually related to Hughes. Because of the conflict of interest, the case was transferred to the California attorney general’s office. After much procedural wrangling, a warrant was finally issued. In September 2009, Hughes was arrested at Miami’s international airport. Begley posted a celebratory video, scored to Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” It flashed up an image of Hughes’ mug shot, across which she had scrawled: “Gotcha.”
As fond as he was of Begley, Powers’ arrest complaint completely ignored the Octopus conspiracy. The detective doubted that a jury would believe—or even be able to follow—the abstruse connections that purportedly linked Hughes to the CIA, the Contras, and all the rest. Instead, he wanted to focus on the old dispute over building a casino on the Cabazon reservation. “Nichols thought he was going to be making millions, and Fred Alvarez was a threat to that,” Powers says. “That was motive enough for murder.”
On the afternoon of July 1, the 29th anniversary of the murders, a grim-faced Begley walked into a courtroom in Indio, California, for an important hearing. The chamber was packed with an expectant crowd of reporters, members of Hughes’ family, and a few supporters from the Octopus community, including Cheri Seymour. Hughes was ushered in, wearing chains and an orange jumpsuit.
Then Michael Murphy, a dapper prosecutor from the attorney general’s office, rose and delivered a shocking blow. “We have lost confidence in our ability to proceed with the prosecution,” he said. Begley closed her eyes tightly as the prosecutor gave a vague reason for his sudden about-face, something about “new information” and a reassessment of the evidence. Begley was allowed to address the court. “How many people must die or suffer at the hands of Jimmy Hughes,” she asked, “before he is brought to justice?” But the judge dismissed the charges anyway. It was enough to make you wonder, if you were of a certain mindset, whether the fix was in.
Afterward, Powers stood next to Begley outside the courtroom as she addressed the television cameras, sobbing. The detective was disgusted by the outcome. The attorney general’s office gave no further public explanation for its decision, but Powers sensed that the prosecutors were eager to “dump” the case. Murphy, he said, started to question the credibility of the witnesses Begley had uncovered. Throughout, Begley had used Twitter and Facebook to mobilize the Octopus believers to pressure Murphy, and at least a few called the prosecutor to urge him to look beyond Hughes and dig into the myriad connections they had spent decades documenting. Begley’s devotion and inventive use of the Internet had helped to ensnare Hughes, but the obsessions of her fellow travelers may have helped to undermine the prosecutor’s confidence. (Murphy declined to comment.)
Powers, for his part, doubts there ever was an Octopus. The detective blames Nichols, the self-aggrandizing adviser who convinced the Cabazons to build a casino, for conjuring the intrigue that continued to befog the case long after his death. “Nichols had a lot of people fooled,” Powers says, “believing that he was some secret spook working for the government.” Even Nichols’ own underlings bought into his mystique; Powers thought it entirely plausible that Hughes truly believed his boss gave orders on behalf of shadowy overlords. In that sense, the Octopus may have existed, if only as a deceived and malignant state of mind.
On the night of his release, Hughes emerged from jail into a furnace blast of desert darkness. “Only God can justify and vindicate those who are really innocent,” he triumphantly told reporters outside the Indio jailhouse. Fearing retribution, Begley had already split, driving over the mountains to San Diego, where she holed up at Seymour’s house. “It’s not over by a long shot,” she told me on the phone. Her cell phone kept ringing: the Los Angeles Times, Dateline NBC, her newly materialized pro bono lawyer, a victims’ rights advocate who often appeared on Nancy Grace’s talk show.
Finally, the world seemed to be listening. “Actually, this might be better,” Begley says, sounding curiously invigorated. Though this experience has been draining, it has given her a sense of purpose, of a momentous cause. Hughes might be free, heading back to Honduras, but in a way, defeat offered a perverse validation. The Octopus wouldn’t be the enemy she thought it was if it gave up its secrets so easily. “You’re going to find out real soon,” Begley says, “that the world isn’t what you think it is.”
Andrew Rice (andrewrice75@yahoo.com) is the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget. This is his first piece for Wired.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
RIP: Kenneth Grant
"The influential occultist and author Kenneth Grant died on 15 January 2011. Grant was the last living link to both Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and played a central role in developing the lore surrounding both men.
Deeply influenced by weird fiction authors including Sax Rohmer and HP Lovecraft, Grant had an uncanny knack for generating mystery, which he made good use of in his ‘non-fiction’ occult works, but was perhaps better suited to the eldritch tales that so inspired him.
Such ambiguity is what makes Grant’s writings such effective magickal texts; like fellow slipstream author John Keel working in more fortean realms, it’s often difficult to discern where reality ends and the imaginal begins. The usual checkpoints have been overrun by slithering, crawling, pullulating things… As others have noted, Grant was a powerful surrealist who used the medium of pulp literature to work his magic. Whatever one may feel about his writing, there can be no denying that Grant was a pivotal figure in late 20th century occultism, and his legacy is unlikely to diminish in his afterlife."
RIP Kenneth Grant
February 2, 2011
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/further/rip-kenneth-grant
Deeply influenced by weird fiction authors including Sax Rohmer and HP Lovecraft, Grant had an uncanny knack for generating mystery, which he made good use of in his ‘non-fiction’ occult works, but was perhaps better suited to the eldritch tales that so inspired him.
Such ambiguity is what makes Grant’s writings such effective magickal texts; like fellow slipstream author John Keel working in more fortean realms, it’s often difficult to discern where reality ends and the imaginal begins. The usual checkpoints have been overrun by slithering, crawling, pullulating things… As others have noted, Grant was a powerful surrealist who used the medium of pulp literature to work his magic. Whatever one may feel about his writing, there can be no denying that Grant was a pivotal figure in late 20th century occultism, and his legacy is unlikely to diminish in his afterlife."
RIP Kenneth Grant
February 2, 2011
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/further/rip-kenneth-grant
Crunchberry Beast
February 2, 2011
http://www.retroland.com/crunchberry-beast
Ah, there is nothing like the fresh taste of Crunchberries in season. With hints of strawberry and, of course, a crunchy exterior, it would almost seem you could live on the little pink fruit. And, in case you were wondering, there was a particular species of animal that thrived upon these berries for its daily nutritional needs – the Crunchberry Beast.
Inhabiting the fruit islands, the Crunchberry Beast (or C.B., as his friends call him) was a dimwitted but lovable creature who subsisted on a steady diet of the vitamin-fortified berries. The world might never have known he even existed had it not been for an expedition by the famed explorer, Capt. Horatio Magellan Crunch – who took the beast under his wing and aboard his ship, the S.S. Guppy.
C.B. was an odd looking creature. With his yellow skin, covered in large red dots, a bushy head of red hair and a pronounced overbite, it is difficult to ascertain exactly from which species he evolved. Not much for words, although he did manage a few noises that the Captain was apparently able to translate, his animations were all that were necessary to convey his thoughts. And his thoughts were always on Crunchberries.
The Crunchberry Beast first appeared on cereal boxes and in television ads in the early 70s. Jay Ward Productions, famous for Rocky and Bullwinkle (not to mention a plethora of other cartoon characters) created the beast, and veteran voice actor, Bill Scott (who you might remember as George (of the Jungle,) Bullwinkle and Dudley-Do-Right), gave the beast his quirky vocal chords. When Bill passed away in 1985, that was the last the world would see of the Crunchberry Beast.
To end on a positive note, we know that C.B. wasn’t the only one of these crunch-addicted critters; we once saw a whole island filled with them. And, with that, the possibility exists that another expedition may someday unearth another of these bucktoothed beasts. After all, these creatures have existed for this long, thanks to the complete dietary needs that the Crunchberry provides, so perhaps there is hope for a comeback.
Head: The Monkees’ ‘Ulysses of a hip New Hollywood’
Richard Metzger
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/head_the_monkees_ulysses_of_a_hip_new_hollywood/
Tags:
Frank Zappa
Jack Nicholson
The Monkees. Head
Bob Rafelson
As habitual readers of Dangerous Minds know, when I do “product reviews” I try to stay away from debating the merits of the music of “classic rock” acts because, frankly who cares what I think about Neil Young or The Beatles? As for me, I really don’t care what you or anyone else has to say about their music, either. If you don’t like Young or the Fab Four, too bad, buddy, I just can’t help you. They’re awesome, and it’s been long ago settled. Done.
But what I do care about is: Does it sound/look good? Is this newest version a significant upgrade from the last “definitive collector’s edition” they put out? And most importantly, “Is it really worth shelling out the money for this sucker if I’ve already bought this goddamned album in several obsolete audio formats, including 8-track tapes?”
Admittedly, oft-times the answer is “No.” (I don’t think the newly released Tommy Blu-ray sounds all that great, for instance. The surround mix of David Bowie’s Station to Station album is just terrible). Other times the answer is a resounding “Yes!” as in the case of the newly restored Criterion Collection Blu-ray of The Monkees’ psychedelic opus, Head.
Head was written and produced by Bob Rafelson (co-creator of The Monkees) and Jack Nicholson, and directed by Rafelson. The film aimed to deconstruct the “manufactured” image that the Monkees wished to leave behind far behind them in 1968. The group wander through a number of surrealistic scenes, Hollywood sound stages and trippy pop art musical production numbers. Along the way, they encounter the likes of Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Annette Funicello, Terri Garr, stripper Carol Doda, Frank Zappa, Toni Basil, fighter Sonny Liston, and weirdo character actor Timothy Carey. Victor Mature, an over the hill actor known for appearing in Biblical epics and sword and sandals films, played a King Kong-sized version of himself (I’m not old enough to have much context for Victor Mature, but the way I take it is that he’s playing himself in a “human punch-line” kind of way, something that will no doubt be lost on future audiences for whom he’ll just appear to be a weird old giant who appears appropos of nothing).
Head was initially released with a mysterious advertising campaign that never mentioned the Monkees and instead featured the head of a balding man (John Brockman, future literary super agent). The Monkees’ teenbopper fan base must have been mighty confused. These were still the Monkees they loved, but what was with all the lysergic Marshall McLuhan stuff, the Viet Nam footage and the hookahs? Head is an audio-visual mindfuck. Head was a total flop.
Head’s reputation grew during a couple of national CBS late night TV airings in the 1970s. A VHS was released in the mid-80s during the revival of interest in the group brought on by MTV screening The Monkees for a new generation. Today Head is properly considered a odd milestone in Hollywood history—it’s one of the highest budgeted rock films of the era (and what a stylish time capsule it is!) and one of the first counter culture films to be produced by the studio system. In his liner notes, Chuck Stephens called Head, “the Ulysses of a hip New Hollywood about to be born.” What he said!
I’d have to say that of all of the various music related Blu-rays discs that have passed through my BD player since I got it last year, Head is the very best of all. It’s THE thing I’d reach for to geekily demonstrate my sound system for a guest. Seldom are things done this right, but when you consider that it’s Criterion behind this issue of Head, of course it makes more sense. I have no doubt that seeing this new Criterion version on a large HD screen with a good surround system is a superior experience even to seeing it in a movie theatre when it was first released. How could it have been better then? 42-years after Head’s initial release, we have the technology!
So, is it a significant upgrade from the Rhino DVD of Head, still on the market? Hell, yes. There’s simply no comparison, either in the video quality—Rhino’s DVD sucks on that count, they used a scratchy fullscreen print, whereas Criterion’s disc is letterboxed and immaculate, transferred from a 35mm negative—or in the audio department, either, as Head has been gloriously remixed in 5.1 surround. Holy shit did they do an amazing job with the audio.
Head’s opening moment, where Micky Dolenz runs through the dedication ceremony and jumps off the bridge, has, of course, as its soundtrack, one of the greatest numbers the Monkees ever did, “Porpoise Song.” The pristine quality of that scene’s solarized underwater footage combined with the HD DTS surround mix is nothing short of astonishing. Visually, it’s like looking at a stained-glass window. The audio is deeply immersive—like you’re standing in the midst of a strange waterlogged orchestra—and the video so vibrant that I must’ve played that one scene ten times in a row before moving on to “Circle Sky.” Again I wasn’t disappointed, the group’s presence is immediate and electrifying—Head’s performance of “Circle Sky” is the first time a “live” rock performance was used in a Hollywood film. I’ll say it again, they usually never get it this right. As far as slick audio/visual products go, Criterion’s Head deserves a special award.
At the moment, Head is only available as part of the Criterion Collection box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. Although the rest of the films in the set—Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, The King of Marvin Gardens, Drive, He Said and the first ever release of Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place (with Nicholson, Tuesday Weld, Orson Welles and Dangerous Minds pal Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theatre)—are all worthy, frankly I’d sooner have just had Head. Although it’s not on their current release schedule, I’m sure Criterion will release Head solo on Blu-ray soon enough. Surely the word of mouth, in the meantime, will continue to spread.
[A personal anecdote here: In 1994, I met Micky Dolenz and his (super cute) daughter Ami, at the Whisky Bar in New York. He was really cool and a gas to talk to, but after about 20 minutes I sheepishly revealed to him that although I could not have possibly had any forewarning that I was going to meet him, earlier that day I’d actually bought a CD of the Head soundtrack that I had in my coat pocket. The conversation got slightly awkward for a minute until I changed the subject and he politely allowed me to do so. I got the feeling that he had about as much desire to talk about something he’d done 30 years ago as most people would.]
Spider-Man Replaces The Human Torch
In case you didn't hear the news, The Human Torch, one of the original members of The Fantastic Four, died in issue 587 last month. This month, Fantastic Four 588 signifies the end of the comic series, with the group being renamed The Future Foundation. Not to worry: a new series begins next month with FF1, with Spider-Man filling out the new quartet. Some cynics may assume the whole thing is a scam to increase comic book sales. They would be right, and the scam is working. In any case, Vegas places the over/under at 10 months as to when The Human Torch returns to life...
Spider-Man joins the Fantastic 4
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gqFZdew-pSAXZuXTfXyOCAqr5bfw?docId=6480d98edc1d470f8f650e641d7b98fc
Andy Pettitte: Hall of Famer?
The next great baseball bar debate. Pro: a career 240-138 record equals 102 more wins than losses, he won 20 games twice and holds the career postseason record win 19 wins in the playoffs. Con: a career 3.88 ERA is high and he never won the Cy Young Award. And then there's the giant elephant in the room: his usage of HGH - which, to his credit, he admitted to, testimony that is central to the Roger Clemens' doping scandal.
In either case, let the argument begin!!!
Andy Pettitte career statistics
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/pettian01.shtml
In either case, let the argument begin!!!
Andy Pettitte career statistics
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/pettian01.shtml
Gaga Vs. Britney: Pop Music Battle of the Year
"Born This Way"
Lady Gaga
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4a8QtvOkBQ
Vs
"Hold It Against Me"
Britney Spears
http://www.mtv.com/videos/britney-spears/624145/hold-it-against-me.jhtml
Activision Axes Guitar Hero
In one of the sadder dark days in the hisory of videogames, Activision has declared the end to the Guitar Hero series due to declining sales. True, Guitar Hero has been of diminished quality in recent years, surpassed by Rock Band as the premier music-based game on the market, but from 2006-8, it was arguably the hottest franchise on the planet, and deserving of that title.
The immense importance of Guitar Hero on culture can't be ignored, and that may be why two other killed titles by Activision didn't get the notice they deserved. One was True Crime: Hong Kong, the proposed third in the True Crime series after Streets of L.A. and New York City. New York City didn't match expectations when released, and that seems to be the problem with TC:HK, which Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg bluntly stated "wasn't going to be good enough." Still, anyone who had the thrill of playing Streets of L.A. and driving the actual roads and highways of the entertainment capital, racing cars and shooting guns under an awesome B-movie action film plotline, will tell you it's one of the most underrated games ever and a pure joy to play. The other game, though not officially retired, looks that way, and it's the Tony Hawk skateboarding series, which at its peak was only a notch below Guitar Hero in quality and culture influence. RIP to all three classic series...
Activision cancels Guitar Hero franchise, True Crime
Dave Rudden
February 09, 2011
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/218158/activision-cancels-guitar-hero-franchise-true-crime
The immense importance of Guitar Hero on culture can't be ignored, and that may be why two other killed titles by Activision didn't get the notice they deserved. One was True Crime: Hong Kong, the proposed third in the True Crime series after Streets of L.A. and New York City. New York City didn't match expectations when released, and that seems to be the problem with TC:HK, which Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg bluntly stated "wasn't going to be good enough." Still, anyone who had the thrill of playing Streets of L.A. and driving the actual roads and highways of the entertainment capital, racing cars and shooting guns under an awesome B-movie action film plotline, will tell you it's one of the most underrated games ever and a pure joy to play. The other game, though not officially retired, looks that way, and it's the Tony Hawk skateboarding series, which at its peak was only a notch below Guitar Hero in quality and culture influence. RIP to all three classic series...
Activision cancels Guitar Hero franchise, True Crime
Dave Rudden
February 09, 2011
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/218158/activision-cancels-guitar-hero-franchise-true-crime
Interview with Wes Nations of Johnny Vagabond: Lucky 13 Questions
http://www.goseewrite.com/2011/02/interview-with-wes-nations-of-johnny-vagabond-lucky-13-questions/
Interview with Wes Nations of Johnny Vagabond: Lucky 13 Questions
February 2011
Wes is one of my favorite travel bloggers out there on the road right now. No one seems to get into more unusual and entertaining situations than him. Go read his post on getting into a poker scam in Vietnam for example. His photography is also becoming truly spectacular — check out his Ganges River photos and tell me you disagree — he is an amazing talent.
Where do you go see these things? Why at Johnny Vagabond, of course. Why isn’t his blog Wes Vagabond? Who the hell knows, buy him a beer and ask him. Right now, he’s in Southeast Asia with the rest of the Chiang Mai mafia. He went back to SE Asia after a few months in India, where he really wrote some great material (and took some great pictures). Go check out his website, follow him on Twitter, and in the meantime, enjoy his Lucky 13:
1 — best foreign curse?
It’s not really a curse but I met a young Irish woman once who always exclaimed “Well, f*ck me running!” which always puzzled me. It’s physically possible, I suppose, but what’s the hurry? People don’t take the time to do things properly anymore.
2 — most annoying nationality of travelers you have run across?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. While I think we’re all equally annoying, I’ve been feeling the need to have someone to pick on — a comic foil of a sorts. I considered the French, of course, but everyone picks on them and I actually kind of like the snooty buggers. So, after considerable thought, I’ve decided to make fun of Lithuanians for a couple of reasons. First, it’s just a funny name — I think whoever named the country had a lisp. And second, though I’ve never met one, I suspect they all wear funny little mustaches. Even the women.
3 — what is the superpower you most want?
I’d like to be able to cross my eyes, mutter a few ancient words and magically add three zeroes to my bank balance so I can keep traveling. A flying motorcycle would be cool, too.
4 -- celebrity that you’d most want to slap or otherwise taunt in person?
Do I have to pick just one? I secretly dream of picking Kenny G up by the ankles and beating Michael Bolton to death with him. It’d be the perfect crime: no murder weapon and no jury in the world would convict me.
5 -- John, Paul, George or Ringo. Choose and explain.
Ringo by a mile. Talk about a lucky guy — right place, right time, zero talent. If Ringo can be a famous godzillionaire, there really is hope for the rest of us shmucks.
6 — what do you fear most about old age?
Not reaching it.
7 -- year in your life that you’d like to have had a rewind or erase button for?
None that I can think of, really. I’m old enough to have forgotten all the early ones and the recent ones have been pretty good. Wait… maybe the year in high school when I had a perm and wore bell-bottoms. Still haven’t forgotten that…
8 -- Rum, Vodka, tequila, whiskey or gin?
Tequila — not the cheap stuff, but a good quality sippin’ tequila does the trick. It’s practically guaranteed that I’ll wake up in a strange place with no pants on.
9 -- what is your single most treasured personal possession?
As geeky as it sounds, my MacBook — I couldn’t do what I do without it. After nearly a year on the road, it’s filthy but I’m afraid to clean it. I think the dirt is what’s holding it together.
10 -- Fill in the blank: I will go see any movie that _______ is in.
Keanu Reeves, because I actually like crappy movies. (Interviewer insertion: popular answer. Nomadic Chick and The Road Forks agree, as do I.)
11 -- Most overrated writer.
Dan Brown. I hear he’s working on a biography of Ringo Starr.
12 -- what is your favorite sports team?
I don’t really have one. I’m a very fair-weather sports fan. When the playoffs roll around for just about any sport, I’ll tune in. Usually I’ll root against whichever team has the biggest jerk for a coach or whichever team everyone else is cheering for.
13 -- what is your biggest pet peeve? (meaning something small enough to be a bit embarrassing it bugs you)
Travelers who wear their money belt on the outside just make me crazy. They walk around with their passports, cash and credit cards hanging from their body by a thin piece of elastic. I tried to explain to a woman once that it was supposed to be worn under her clothes and she replied “But then it’s a pain to get to.” Umm… yeah, that’s kind of the point. Touron.
Interview with Wes Nations of Johnny Vagabond: Lucky 13 Questions
February 2011
Wes is one of my favorite travel bloggers out there on the road right now. No one seems to get into more unusual and entertaining situations than him. Go read his post on getting into a poker scam in Vietnam for example. His photography is also becoming truly spectacular — check out his Ganges River photos and tell me you disagree — he is an amazing talent.
Where do you go see these things? Why at Johnny Vagabond, of course. Why isn’t his blog Wes Vagabond? Who the hell knows, buy him a beer and ask him. Right now, he’s in Southeast Asia with the rest of the Chiang Mai mafia. He went back to SE Asia after a few months in India, where he really wrote some great material (and took some great pictures). Go check out his website, follow him on Twitter, and in the meantime, enjoy his Lucky 13:
1 — best foreign curse?
It’s not really a curse but I met a young Irish woman once who always exclaimed “Well, f*ck me running!” which always puzzled me. It’s physically possible, I suppose, but what’s the hurry? People don’t take the time to do things properly anymore.
2 — most annoying nationality of travelers you have run across?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. While I think we’re all equally annoying, I’ve been feeling the need to have someone to pick on — a comic foil of a sorts. I considered the French, of course, but everyone picks on them and I actually kind of like the snooty buggers. So, after considerable thought, I’ve decided to make fun of Lithuanians for a couple of reasons. First, it’s just a funny name — I think whoever named the country had a lisp. And second, though I’ve never met one, I suspect they all wear funny little mustaches. Even the women.
3 — what is the superpower you most want?
I’d like to be able to cross my eyes, mutter a few ancient words and magically add three zeroes to my bank balance so I can keep traveling. A flying motorcycle would be cool, too.
4 -- celebrity that you’d most want to slap or otherwise taunt in person?
Do I have to pick just one? I secretly dream of picking Kenny G up by the ankles and beating Michael Bolton to death with him. It’d be the perfect crime: no murder weapon and no jury in the world would convict me.
5 -- John, Paul, George or Ringo. Choose and explain.
Ringo by a mile. Talk about a lucky guy — right place, right time, zero talent. If Ringo can be a famous godzillionaire, there really is hope for the rest of us shmucks.
6 — what do you fear most about old age?
Not reaching it.
7 -- year in your life that you’d like to have had a rewind or erase button for?
None that I can think of, really. I’m old enough to have forgotten all the early ones and the recent ones have been pretty good. Wait… maybe the year in high school when I had a perm and wore bell-bottoms. Still haven’t forgotten that…
8 -- Rum, Vodka, tequila, whiskey or gin?
Tequila — not the cheap stuff, but a good quality sippin’ tequila does the trick. It’s practically guaranteed that I’ll wake up in a strange place with no pants on.
9 -- what is your single most treasured personal possession?
As geeky as it sounds, my MacBook — I couldn’t do what I do without it. After nearly a year on the road, it’s filthy but I’m afraid to clean it. I think the dirt is what’s holding it together.
10 -- Fill in the blank: I will go see any movie that _______ is in.
Keanu Reeves, because I actually like crappy movies. (Interviewer insertion: popular answer. Nomadic Chick and The Road Forks agree, as do I.)
11 -- Most overrated writer.
Dan Brown. I hear he’s working on a biography of Ringo Starr.
12 -- what is your favorite sports team?
I don’t really have one. I’m a very fair-weather sports fan. When the playoffs roll around for just about any sport, I’ll tune in. Usually I’ll root against whichever team has the biggest jerk for a coach or whichever team everyone else is cheering for.
13 -- what is your biggest pet peeve? (meaning something small enough to be a bit embarrassing it bugs you)
Travelers who wear their money belt on the outside just make me crazy. They walk around with their passports, cash and credit cards hanging from their body by a thin piece of elastic. I tried to explain to a woman once that it was supposed to be worn under her clothes and she replied “But then it’s a pain to get to.” Umm… yeah, that’s kind of the point. Touron.
Movieball
The Metrics-Tested Way to Box-Office and Oscar Glory
Bruce Feirstein
March 2011
Vanity Fair
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2011/03/movieball-flowchart-201103
RIP: Three Women of the Sexual Revolution
Farewell to Maria Schneider, best known for her sexy performance opposite Marlon Brando in The Last Tango in Paris, Lena Nyman, best known for her performance in I Am Curious (Yellow). and Tura Santana, best known for her ass-kicking role in Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Three sexy, powerful women in movies that challenged their audience, back in the days before political correctness caused a rift between feminism and sexual liberation...
Awesome Film Quotes: The Other Guys
Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg): No, I don't like you. I think you're a fake cop. The sound of your piss hitting the urinal, it sounds feminine. If you were in the wild, I would attack you, even if you weren't in my food chain. I would go out of my way to attack you. If I were a lion and you were a tuna, I would swim out in the middle of the ocean and freaking eat you and then I'd bang your tuna girlfriend.
Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell): OK, first off: a lion, swimming in the ocean. Lions don't like water. If you placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that make sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, 20 foot wave, I'm assuming off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown 800 pound tuna with his 20 or 30 friends, you lose that battle, you lose that battle 9 times out of 10. And guess what, you've wandered into our school of tuna and we now have a taste of lion. We've talked to ourselves. We've communicated and said 'You know what, lion tastes good, let's go get some more lion'. We've developed a system to establish a beach-head and aggressively hunt you and your family and we will corner your pride, your children, your offspring.
Terry Hoitz: How you gonna do that?
Allen Gamble: We will construct a series of breathing apparatus with kelp. We will be able to trap certain amounts of oxygen. It's not gonna be days at a time. An hour? Hour forty-five? No problem. That will give us enough time to figure out where you live, go back to the sea, get some more oxygen, and stalk you. You just lost at your own game. You're outgunned and out-manned. [pause] Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? Nope.
Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell): OK, first off: a lion, swimming in the ocean. Lions don't like water. If you placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that make sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, 20 foot wave, I'm assuming off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown 800 pound tuna with his 20 or 30 friends, you lose that battle, you lose that battle 9 times out of 10. And guess what, you've wandered into our school of tuna and we now have a taste of lion. We've talked to ourselves. We've communicated and said 'You know what, lion tastes good, let's go get some more lion'. We've developed a system to establish a beach-head and aggressively hunt you and your family and we will corner your pride, your children, your offspring.
Terry Hoitz: How you gonna do that?
Allen Gamble: We will construct a series of breathing apparatus with kelp. We will be able to trap certain amounts of oxygen. It's not gonna be days at a time. An hour? Hour forty-five? No problem. That will give us enough time to figure out where you live, go back to the sea, get some more oxygen, and stalk you. You just lost at your own game. You're outgunned and out-manned. [pause] Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? Nope.
LA Media Reform Summit 2011
Anjuli Kronheim
AKronheim@CommonCause.org
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
SAVE THE DATE: LA Media Reform Summit 2011
Are you concerned about hate speech on cable news? Do you have an issue you are passionate about that doesn't get air time in the mainstream media? Do you want to learn how to create and disseminate your own media?
Join us for a day full of hands-on workshops and informative speakers at:
Just Media: the 4th Annual LA Media Reform Summit
Saturday, February 26th, 2011
@ Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
10 am to 4:30 PM (Registration opens at 9:30am)
Established in 2007, the LA Media Reform Group has enjoyed a history of producing three successful annual Regional Reform Summits with hands-on training towards the goal of facilitating an understanding of today's electronic media, how to effectively access and utilize it for outreach, public education, social justice and development. Past speakers have included Bree Walker, FCC Chairman Jonathon Adelstein, Hilda Solis, Brad Friedman and Mario Solis Marich.
This year we will hear from the Courage Campaign’s Executive Director, Rick Jacobs, and Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center and research professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Full Schedule available here.
More information at: http://lamediareform.org/mediasummit. Register today!
This event is co-sponsored by California Common Cause, the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute, the LA Progressive and Aquifer Media.
Best,
Anjuli Kronheim
California Common Cause LA Organizer
Southern California Democracy Matters Coordinator
Holding Power Accountable
213-252-4552
3303 Wilshire Blvd, Suite #310
Los Angeles, CA 90010
http://www.commoncause.org/ca
AKronheim@CommonCause.org
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
SAVE THE DATE: LA Media Reform Summit 2011
Are you concerned about hate speech on cable news? Do you have an issue you are passionate about that doesn't get air time in the mainstream media? Do you want to learn how to create and disseminate your own media?
Join us for a day full of hands-on workshops and informative speakers at:
Just Media: the 4th Annual LA Media Reform Summit
Saturday, February 26th, 2011
@ Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
10 am to 4:30 PM (Registration opens at 9:30am)
Established in 2007, the LA Media Reform Group has enjoyed a history of producing three successful annual Regional Reform Summits with hands-on training towards the goal of facilitating an understanding of today's electronic media, how to effectively access and utilize it for outreach, public education, social justice and development. Past speakers have included Bree Walker, FCC Chairman Jonathon Adelstein, Hilda Solis, Brad Friedman and Mario Solis Marich.
This year we will hear from the Courage Campaign’s Executive Director, Rick Jacobs, and Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center and research professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Full Schedule available here.
More information at: http://lamediareform.org/mediasummit. Register today!
This event is co-sponsored by California Common Cause, the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute, the LA Progressive and Aquifer Media.
Best,
Anjuli Kronheim
California Common Cause LA Organizer
Southern California Democracy Matters Coordinator
Holding Power Accountable
213-252-4552
3303 Wilshire Blvd, Suite #310
Los Angeles, CA 90010
http://www.commoncause.org/ca
Great Quotes: Robert Anton Wilson & Philip K. Dick
"Don't adjust your mind - it's reality that is malfunctioning." Robert Anton Wilson
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Philip K. Dick
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Philip K. Dick
Konformist Book Club: Andrew Tully On Everything
Kirby the Konspiracy Boy's latest pick is a collection of articles by Andrew Tully, the late grandpa of Konformist editor Robert Sterling...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451549873/thekonformist
Andrew Tully On Everything: A Selection of 100 Syndicated Columns Over 25 Years
Molly Wood Tully, Editor
Price: $10.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
A selection of 100 syndicated columns by Andrew Tully 1962-1987
Uncle Fats' commentary:
My Mom worked hard all year collecting, editing and publishing this collection of my Dad's columns about, well, everything. He was a great writer who thought about and wrote about just about anything. These are the columns that transcend time, and have to do with subjects more timeless than his usual fare of Washington goings-on. He also wrote about what it was like to grow up Irish Catholic in a small mill town!!!
Paperback: 284 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace (January 26, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451549873
ISBN-13: 978-1451549874
The Grande Hotel of Mozambique
From CNN:
Once one of the most luxurious hotels in southern Africa, the Grande Hotel, in Beira, Mozambique, was abandoned by its original owners five decades ago.
It's now home to between 2,000 and 3,000 people who live in squalid conditions, without running water or electricity. Yet for these people the crumbling building is a self-contained community where they sleep, eat and work.
The once-luxurious lodging is the subject of a movie by Belgian filmmaker Lotte Stoops, which has just had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Stoops stayed near the Grande Hotel during a month-long trip to Mozambique six years ago and was fascinated by what she saw.
"It was like a village within a village," she said. "It looked like the perfect social housing project."
Stoops returned to Beira two years ago to begin making her first documentary-length film, titled "Grande Hotel."
Officially opened in 1955, when Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony, the Grande closed its doors as a working hotel in the mid 60s.
By 1992, when the country's 16-year civil war ended, the building was accommodating refugees from all over Mozambique.
There were originally 110 guest rooms, but Stoops says every bit of space in the building is now used as a living area...
Former luxury hotel home to thousands of squatters
Amy Fallon and Mark Tutton
February 7, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/07/grande.hotel.mozambique
Once one of the most luxurious hotels in southern Africa, the Grande Hotel, in Beira, Mozambique, was abandoned by its original owners five decades ago.
It's now home to between 2,000 and 3,000 people who live in squalid conditions, without running water or electricity. Yet for these people the crumbling building is a self-contained community where they sleep, eat and work.
The once-luxurious lodging is the subject of a movie by Belgian filmmaker Lotte Stoops, which has just had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Stoops stayed near the Grande Hotel during a month-long trip to Mozambique six years ago and was fascinated by what she saw.
"It was like a village within a village," she said. "It looked like the perfect social housing project."
Stoops returned to Beira two years ago to begin making her first documentary-length film, titled "Grande Hotel."
Officially opened in 1955, when Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony, the Grande closed its doors as a working hotel in the mid 60s.
By 1992, when the country's 16-year civil war ended, the building was accommodating refugees from all over Mozambique.
There were originally 110 guest rooms, but Stoops says every bit of space in the building is now used as a living area...
Former luxury hotel home to thousands of squatters
Amy Fallon and Mark Tutton
February 7, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/07/grande.hotel.mozambique
Jim Webb Won't Seek Reelection
The Democratic Party's job in 2012 just got more difficult, as Virginia Senator Jim Webb announced he wouldn't seek another six years. The loss to the Democrats is less than the loss in political integrity: Webb, though conventionally viewed as a conservative Democrat, was a harsh critic of the Iraq War (which inspired his run for office) and one of the few politicians to talk about growing economic injustice. As noted in November in Salon:
Webb's one of the last FDR Democrats. An economic populist. Liberals also admire the populist Webb. The same cannot be said for the Democratic establishment. Webb has pushed for a onetime windfall profits tax on Wall Street's record bonuses. He talks about the "unusual circumstances of the bailout," that the bonuses wouldn't be there without the bailout.
"I couldn't even get a vote," Webb says. "And it wasn't because of the Republicans. I mean they obviously weren't going to vote for it. But I got so much froth from Democrats saying that any vote like that was going to screw up fundraising.
"People look up say, what's the difference between these two parties? Neither of them is really going to take on Wall Street. If they don't have the guts to take them on, and they've got all these other programs that exclude me, well to hell with them. I'm going to vote for the other people who can at least satisfy me on other issues, like abortion. Screw you guys. I understand that mindset."
With Jim Webb retiring, 2012 Senate prospects get harder for Democrats
Linda Feldmann
February 9, 2011
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/Senate/2011/0209/With-Jim-Webb-retiring-2012-Senate-prospects-get-harder-for-Democrats
Jim Webb on Democrats and Wall Street
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Nov 9, 2010
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/09/webb/index.html
Webb's one of the last FDR Democrats. An economic populist. Liberals also admire the populist Webb. The same cannot be said for the Democratic establishment. Webb has pushed for a onetime windfall profits tax on Wall Street's record bonuses. He talks about the "unusual circumstances of the bailout," that the bonuses wouldn't be there without the bailout.
"I couldn't even get a vote," Webb says. "And it wasn't because of the Republicans. I mean they obviously weren't going to vote for it. But I got so much froth from Democrats saying that any vote like that was going to screw up fundraising.
"People look up say, what's the difference between these two parties? Neither of them is really going to take on Wall Street. If they don't have the guts to take them on, and they've got all these other programs that exclude me, well to hell with them. I'm going to vote for the other people who can at least satisfy me on other issues, like abortion. Screw you guys. I understand that mindset."
With Jim Webb retiring, 2012 Senate prospects get harder for Democrats
Linda Feldmann
February 9, 2011
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/Senate/2011/0209/With-Jim-Webb-retiring-2012-Senate-prospects-get-harder-for-Democrats
Jim Webb on Democrats and Wall Street
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Nov 9, 2010
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/09/webb/index.html
TSA: Trust Us, Our Machines Are Safe
From USA Today:
The Transportation Security Administration has told members of Congress that more than 15 million passengers received full-body scans at airports without any malfunctions that put travelers at risk of an excessive radiation dose.
Despite the reassurance, however, the TSA has yet to release radiation inspection reports for its X-ray equipment — two months after lawmakers called for them to be made public following USA TODAY's requests to review the reports.
TSA spokesman Kristin Lee says that the agency is still trying to ensure that the reports don't contain any "sensitive security or privacy-protected information" and that she expects they will be released "within the next few weeks."
The chairman of a House oversight committee on homeland defense calls the delays "inexcusable."
"The public has a right to know, and there isn't something so sensitive that requires holding it back," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. Chaffetz has sponsored legislation to limit the use of full-body scans.
The TSA's increased use of full-body X-ray scanners sparked traveler concerns last fall about radiation safety. The TSA says the radiation dose is tiny — equivalent to what a person receives during two minutes inside an airplane at cruising altitude.
Fueling concerns about the potential for scanner malfunctions and the TSA's ability to identify problems: a 2008 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found the TSA and its contractors had failed in the past to detect when some baggage X-ray machines were emitting excessive levels of radiation or had safety features that were missing or disabled...
'Inexcusable' delay on TSA body-scanner safety reports
Alison Young
2-9-11
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2011-02-09-tsa09_ST_N.htm
The Transportation Security Administration has told members of Congress that more than 15 million passengers received full-body scans at airports without any malfunctions that put travelers at risk of an excessive radiation dose.
Despite the reassurance, however, the TSA has yet to release radiation inspection reports for its X-ray equipment — two months after lawmakers called for them to be made public following USA TODAY's requests to review the reports.
TSA spokesman Kristin Lee says that the agency is still trying to ensure that the reports don't contain any "sensitive security or privacy-protected information" and that she expects they will be released "within the next few weeks."
The chairman of a House oversight committee on homeland defense calls the delays "inexcusable."
"The public has a right to know, and there isn't something so sensitive that requires holding it back," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. Chaffetz has sponsored legislation to limit the use of full-body scans.
The TSA's increased use of full-body X-ray scanners sparked traveler concerns last fall about radiation safety. The TSA says the radiation dose is tiny — equivalent to what a person receives during two minutes inside an airplane at cruising altitude.
Fueling concerns about the potential for scanner malfunctions and the TSA's ability to identify problems: a 2008 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found the TSA and its contractors had failed in the past to detect when some baggage X-ray machines were emitting excessive levels of radiation or had safety features that were missing or disabled...
'Inexcusable' delay on TSA body-scanner safety reports
Alison Young
2-9-11
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2011-02-09-tsa09_ST_N.htm
Musharraf Murdered Benazir Bhutto?
"An anti-terrorism court in Pakistan has issued a warrant for the arrest of the country's former president, General Pervez Musharraf in connection with the 2007 killing of the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, in a move that potentially reopens a bitter chapter from the country's troubled political history.
Musharraf, a close ally of former U.S. President George W Bush, has lived in exile since 2008, dividing his time between the U.K. and Dubai, after he resigned to avoid a parliamentary impeachment by newly-elected politicians.
Bhutto, a westernized liberal politician, was killed in a 2007 gun and grenade attack, right after she emerged from a high profile political rally in Rawalpindi, the main suburb of Islamabad, ahead of the country's national elections.
Mohammad Ali Saif, a Pakistani barrister and a member of Musharraf's All Pakistan Muslim League (APML,) confirmed the arrest warrant to CBS News, and said that it appeared to be built on a political vendetta launched by President Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's husband, and Pakistan's prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani..."
Arrest Warrant for Pakistan's Ex-President
Farhan Bokhari
February 12, 2011
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20031636-503543.html
Musharraf, a close ally of former U.S. President George W Bush, has lived in exile since 2008, dividing his time between the U.K. and Dubai, after he resigned to avoid a parliamentary impeachment by newly-elected politicians.
Bhutto, a westernized liberal politician, was killed in a 2007 gun and grenade attack, right after she emerged from a high profile political rally in Rawalpindi, the main suburb of Islamabad, ahead of the country's national elections.
Mohammad Ali Saif, a Pakistani barrister and a member of Musharraf's All Pakistan Muslim League (APML,) confirmed the arrest warrant to CBS News, and said that it appeared to be built on a political vendetta launched by President Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's husband, and Pakistan's prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani..."
Arrest Warrant for Pakistan's Ex-President
Farhan Bokhari
February 12, 2011
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20031636-503543.html
AOL & Huffington Post: BFF
AOL has paid $315 million to buy the Huffington Post. I know this because there's hundreds of posts on HuffPo linking to real news articles reporting the fact.
The yuppie-friendly liberal blog was snapped up, in a strategy similar to the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Arianna Huffington will be named editor-in-chief of the merged company's media group. Maybe this one will work out better than AOL's last great combo.
How will this change journalism? As noted by Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times, "To grasp the Huffington Post's business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates." In other words, not much.
What will AOL-Huffington Post merger mean?
Bryony Jones
February 7, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/02/07/huffington.post.aol.merger
AOL Hearts HuffPo. The loser? Journalism
Tim Rutten
February 9, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten-column-huffington-aol-20110209,0,2992862.column
The yuppie-friendly liberal blog was snapped up, in a strategy similar to the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Arianna Huffington will be named editor-in-chief of the merged company's media group. Maybe this one will work out better than AOL's last great combo.
How will this change journalism? As noted by Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times, "To grasp the Huffington Post's business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates." In other words, not much.
What will AOL-Huffington Post merger mean?
Bryony Jones
February 7, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/02/07/huffington.post.aol.merger
AOL Hearts HuffPo. The loser? Journalism
Tim Rutten
February 9, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten-column-huffington-aol-20110209,0,2992862.column
Hi-Tech Team: Nokia & Microsoft
Nokia may be the biggest cellphone maker (with 31 percent share of the market in the last quarter of 2010) its chunk of the market is dropping. Even more important, it only has 3 percent of the all important smart phone market in North America.
So its plan to team up with Microsoft may be a brilliant move. Or maybe it's just two dying leaders clinging together in desperation. Either way, it's worth taking notice. Nokia will use Windows 7 in its smart phones, in hopes to compete with Apple's iPhone, the Blackberry and industry leader Google's Android...
Nokia, Microsoft in pact to take on Apple, Google
MATTI HUUHTANEN
Friday, Feb 11, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/02/11/nokia_microsoft_iphone_android_google/index.html
So its plan to team up with Microsoft may be a brilliant move. Or maybe it's just two dying leaders clinging together in desperation. Either way, it's worth taking notice. Nokia will use Windows 7 in its smart phones, in hopes to compete with Apple's iPhone, the Blackberry and industry leader Google's Android...
Nokia, Microsoft in pact to take on Apple, Google
MATTI HUUHTANEN
Friday, Feb 11, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/02/11/nokia_microsoft_iphone_android_google/index.html
Cyborg Utopia
From Time:
On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.
On the show, the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.
Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.
But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.
That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away..."
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
Lev Grossman
Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2048138,00.html
On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.
On the show, the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.
Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.
But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.
That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away..."
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
Lev Grossman
Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2048138,00.html
Reagan: Killer, Coward, Con-man
The Observer London
Greg Palast
Monday, February 7, 2011
You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone's got to.
On the 100th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, as we suffer a week of Reagan-kitcheria and pukey peons, let us remember:
Reagan was a con-man. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.
In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis.
People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big-hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua because he didn't like the government that the people there had elected.
Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young woman's lungs filled up and she stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while they buried the mother of three.
And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered hundreds of American marines in their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a whipped dog - then turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med war was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning down Cubans building an airport.
I remember Nancy, a skull and crossbones prancing around in designer dresses, some of the "gifts" that flowed to the Reagans - from hats to million-dollar homes - from cronies well compensated with government loot. It used to be called bribery.
And all the while, Grandpa grinned, the grandfather who bleated on about "family values" but didn't bother to see his own grandchildren.
The New York Times, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, "faith in small town America" and "old-time values."
"Values" my ass. It was union-busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million.
"Small town" values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.
And all the while, in the White House basement, as his brain boiled away, Reagan's last conscious act was to condone a coup d'état against our elected Congress. Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper the Ghost Weinberger with the crazed Colonel, Ollie North, plotted to give guns to the Monster of the Mideast, Ayatolla Khomeini.
Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatollah. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini, pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.
Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah - no kidding - in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.
Then the Reagan roaches mixed their cowardice with crime: taking cash from the hostage-takers to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners of Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.
I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby orders this demonstration to disperse" - and then came the teargas and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the Gipper.
In Chaguitillo, all night long, the farmers stayed awake to guard their kids from attack from Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't even Sandinistas, those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President told us were 'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they want with Texas, anyway?
Nevertheless, the farmers, and their families, were Ronnie's targets.
In the deserted darkness of Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was that third-rate gangster movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.
Well, mis amigos, your kids can sleep easy tonight. The Rat is dead.
All week you're going to hear about how Reagan restored America's sense of patriotism - as if heartless slaughter, Club Med wars and making racism respectable are patriotic . (When they said "small town values" you know the color of the town, don't you?).
I wonder if the Reaganauts can recognize any of the weapons they sold the mullahs when they see students gunned down in Teheran.
I do plan a memorial, for the victims, not the victimizer.
Please join me in commemorating the ill star that brought us a celluloid cowboy on his movie-set horsey by lighting a candle for a mom from Chaguitillo.
*
This obituary was originally published in The London Observer on Reagan's death in 2004.
The author received close to 150 death threats and suggestions for acrobatic acts of intercourse with beasts and relatives.
Therefore, we have reserved a special email, deaththreat@gregpalast.com just for your next threats.
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Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His reports can be seen on BBC Newsnight.
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Everybody Loves Reagan
If Ronald Reagan was still alive, he would've turned 100 on Super Bowl Sunday. Actually, as far as the GOP is concerned, he IS still alive. And while their obsession with deifying Ronbo may continue, the hatred he inspires among liberal types has waned. This may be due to the last two guys who occupied the White House. George W. Bush, with his epic failures, has replaced Reagan as the ultimate right wing bogeyman of US politics. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has adopted positions so far to the right, he is easily more reactionary than Reagan ever was. The continued Bonzo-worship of him by the right and the collapse of criticism of him by the left is a case study of the Overton window framing him as more popular now than any time during his presidency.
The reframing of Reagan ignores history. Reagan was a divisive figure, with almost no support in the African-American community. Meanwhile, historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited The Reagan Diaries, told CNN The Gipper wanted to roll back the "excesses of the 'Great Society' domestically, not abolish them. He was never talking about doing away with Medicaid, Medicare, or abolishing HUD. It had more to do with trimming the federal budget." That actually sounds pretty reasonable and mainstream in 2011. Lou Cannon also explained that when it came to the Soviets, "he really wanted to negotiate and thought he had learned the art of doing so by bargaining with movie producers when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild." Hard to argue with that: after dealing with Hollywood producers, communist dictators would be a piece of cake. So maybe he deserves much of the credit given to him over the fall of communism.
Maybe you would expect more contempt and outrage over St. Ronald from The Konformist, but at this point, it seems any continued fixation on Ronald Reagan as the Anti-Christ would be an obtuse and unproductive obsession. There's bigger fish to fry out there.
In any case, one guy who has had a lot to do with enhancing the image of Ronald Reagan is Ron Reagan, his son. While Ron is an unabashed liberal, the genuine warmth apparent when he describes his father has helped humanize the once controversial figure. So for what it's worth, Ron Jr. pretty much dismisses Sarah Palin, who is trying to exploit the Reagan mantle for her own purposes: "Sarah Palin is a soap opera, basically. She's doing mostly what she does to make money and keep her name in the news. She is not a serious candidate for president and never has been,"
Reagan's myth has grown over time
Ed Hornick
February 5, 2011
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/04/reagan.legacy
Reagan's 100th birthday: 10 defining moments
Aaron Couch
2-5-11
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0205/Reagan-s-100th-birthday-10-defining-moments/President-of-the-Screen-Actors-Guild-1954-1962
Palin: America Out Of Step With Reagan's Values
February 5, 2011
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=133494625
Unemployment Drops, but Where's the Jobs?
The good news: for the second straight month, unemployment dropped by 0.4 percent, to 9.0 percent in January. The bad news: only 36,000 jobs were created during the month.
One explanation for this bipolar employment message is a statistical glitch. Job creation and unemployment come from two different reports, and unemployment figures tend to be the more consistently accurate report.
Another explanation, more cynical in outlook, is that unemployment is merely dropping because workers have given up looking due to the bad job outlook. This view is echoed by the poster with the clever pen-name of Tyler Durden for ZeroHedge.com: "Probably the last chart to bury any doubt about just how truly horrible today's employment data was, comes from a little observed data metric: that showing the number of people who are not in the labor force, but who want a job now. The number just hit 6,643K, a jump of 431K from December, and the highest number in history. These are people that would send the unemployment rate to about 12.8% if they were in the labor force (and, as indicated, looking for a job). Nothing else needs to be said."
Of course, even if the unemployment reports show a phantom drop, psychologically, it doesn't hurt. It's definitely a plus for Team Obama, as they no longer have to hear about unemployment stuck around double digits anymore...
Persons Not In Labor Force Who Want Job Now Jumps To All Time Record; Real Unemployment Rate At 12.8%
Tyler Durden
02/04/2011
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/persons-not-labor-force-who-want-job-now-jumps-all-time-record
One explanation for this bipolar employment message is a statistical glitch. Job creation and unemployment come from two different reports, and unemployment figures tend to be the more consistently accurate report.
Another explanation, more cynical in outlook, is that unemployment is merely dropping because workers have given up looking due to the bad job outlook. This view is echoed by the poster with the clever pen-name of Tyler Durden for ZeroHedge.com: "Probably the last chart to bury any doubt about just how truly horrible today's employment data was, comes from a little observed data metric: that showing the number of people who are not in the labor force, but who want a job now. The number just hit 6,643K, a jump of 431K from December, and the highest number in history. These are people that would send the unemployment rate to about 12.8% if they were in the labor force (and, as indicated, looking for a job). Nothing else needs to be said."
Of course, even if the unemployment reports show a phantom drop, psychologically, it doesn't hurt. It's definitely a plus for Team Obama, as they no longer have to hear about unemployment stuck around double digits anymore...
Persons Not In Labor Force Who Want Job Now Jumps To All Time Record; Real Unemployment Rate At 12.8%
Tyler Durden
02/04/2011
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/persons-not-labor-force-who-want-job-now-jumps-all-time-record
Credit Card Rates Rocket Up
From the Website New Deal 2.0:
This week’s credit check: Average credit card APR is 14.72%. Interest rate for banks borrowing from the Fed is 0-.25%
The latest news from the credit card industry: interest rates are soaring. Wait — didn’t the CARD act put a stop to all that abusive behavior? Turns out they’ve found some ways to bend the rules.
It’s true that the bill put a cap on how and when companies could jack up interest rates after a card is signed. But rates are now reaching record highs before accounts are opened, at an average of 14.72% APR. If your credit is really bad, you could end up with a rate as high as 59.9%. And just as banks protest that the rates are high in order to balance out risk, like addicts who can’t kick the habit they’re ramping up lending to risky borrowers again. Yes, they’re being more cautious — this time credit scores alone are no longer enough for their screening purposes. They’re now scrutinizing other behavior, such as registering on a job site (something that millions of unemployed Americans are probably doing). They’ve got a new classification system worked out too: “strategic defaulters,” whose scores took a hit when they walked away from an underwater mortgage; “first-time defaulters,” who once had a strong score but hit financial trouble because of the recession; “sloppy payers,” who only pay some bills on time; “abusers,” who are defiant about paying; and “distressed borrowers,” who just can’t pay. Those last three categories are the ones they’re trying to weed out; they’re focused on wooing defaulters who theoretically would have a good score if the crisis hadn’t happened. But when 14.5 million are out of a job, more and more people may find themselves simply unable to pay. Not to mention that they may also start to feel defiant.
How do you fight the banker ripoffs? Here's one solution:
You might remember the debtor’s revolution, started by one someone who definitely qualifies as an “abuser.” Ann Minch told Bank of America to “stick it” in a YouTube address before she would pay a cent on an account whose rate had been jacked up to 30% — and for no good reason. Her media wave finally led to the bank trying to get her to accept a lower rate: 16.99%. Did she take it? Nope. She told the customer service rep, “Because you guys are getting your money from the Fed at 0% interest, or at the most .25, that 12.99% is more than a generous profit margin for you guys.” And he finally agreed to her terms. It’s a good reminder — banks are borrowing their money at the lowest interest rate the Fed can possibly offer, despite reneging on so many loans that they had to be bailed out (and caused the global economy to collapse). If they’re not risky borrowers, who are? Yet they see fit to charge their risky customers excessive interest rates.
Credit Card Interest Rates Near 60% as Banks Return to Risky Borrowers
Bryce Covert
Wednesday, 02/2/2011
http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/02/02/credit-card-interest-rates-near-60-as-banks-return-to-risky-borrowers-34523
This week’s credit check: Average credit card APR is 14.72%. Interest rate for banks borrowing from the Fed is 0-.25%
The latest news from the credit card industry: interest rates are soaring. Wait — didn’t the CARD act put a stop to all that abusive behavior? Turns out they’ve found some ways to bend the rules.
It’s true that the bill put a cap on how and when companies could jack up interest rates after a card is signed. But rates are now reaching record highs before accounts are opened, at an average of 14.72% APR. If your credit is really bad, you could end up with a rate as high as 59.9%. And just as banks protest that the rates are high in order to balance out risk, like addicts who can’t kick the habit they’re ramping up lending to risky borrowers again. Yes, they’re being more cautious — this time credit scores alone are no longer enough for their screening purposes. They’re now scrutinizing other behavior, such as registering on a job site (something that millions of unemployed Americans are probably doing). They’ve got a new classification system worked out too: “strategic defaulters,” whose scores took a hit when they walked away from an underwater mortgage; “first-time defaulters,” who once had a strong score but hit financial trouble because of the recession; “sloppy payers,” who only pay some bills on time; “abusers,” who are defiant about paying; and “distressed borrowers,” who just can’t pay. Those last three categories are the ones they’re trying to weed out; they’re focused on wooing defaulters who theoretically would have a good score if the crisis hadn’t happened. But when 14.5 million are out of a job, more and more people may find themselves simply unable to pay. Not to mention that they may also start to feel defiant.
How do you fight the banker ripoffs? Here's one solution:
You might remember the debtor’s revolution, started by one someone who definitely qualifies as an “abuser.” Ann Minch told Bank of America to “stick it” in a YouTube address before she would pay a cent on an account whose rate had been jacked up to 30% — and for no good reason. Her media wave finally led to the bank trying to get her to accept a lower rate: 16.99%. Did she take it? Nope. She told the customer service rep, “Because you guys are getting your money from the Fed at 0% interest, or at the most .25, that 12.99% is more than a generous profit margin for you guys.” And he finally agreed to her terms. It’s a good reminder — banks are borrowing their money at the lowest interest rate the Fed can possibly offer, despite reneging on so many loans that they had to be bailed out (and caused the global economy to collapse). If they’re not risky borrowers, who are? Yet they see fit to charge their risky customers excessive interest rates.
Credit Card Interest Rates Near 60% as Banks Return to Risky Borrowers
Bryce Covert
Wednesday, 02/2/2011
http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/02/02/credit-card-interest-rates-near-60-as-banks-return-to-risky-borrowers-34523
Mubarak Got Bling
Hosni Mubarak is out of office in Egypt, but don't feel too bad for the dude. According to the London Guardian, his family fortune could be $70 billion...
Mubarak family fortune could reach $70bn, say experts
Phillip Inman
Friday 4 February 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/04/hosni-mubarak-family-fortune
Mubarak family fortune could reach $70bn, say experts
Phillip Inman
Friday 4 February 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/04/hosni-mubarak-family-fortune
Monday, February 14, 2011
Beast of the Month Update
Though it's been awhile since a Beast of the Month citation has been written, we have continued to award them. We will eventually catch up in writing these citations. In the meantime, here's a list of the 2010 winners:
January 2010: Ben Bernanke
For heading the Federal Reserve, the powerful and notorious quasi-government/private banking institution
February 2010: 2012
For being the most popular (and admittedly, the coolest) doomsday conspiracy theory since Y2K
March 2010: Jay Leno
For hosting The Jay Leno Show, one of the greatest flops in primetime television history, for screwing over Conan O'Brien in his weasley plot to return to The Tonight Show, and, most egregious of all, for not being funny for the last sixteen years
April 2010: Akio Toyoda
As President and CEO of Toyota, leader of the cover-up in the safety dangers of their cars, a coverup that has included smearing their own customers they nearly killed
May 2010: Obamacare
The "health care reform" plan passed by Congressional Democrats and Barack Obama which is a betrayal of the real health reform movement, leading to a plan created by right wing think tanks in the 90s presented falsely as a progressive legislative victory that is deservedly unpopular with the public
June 2010: Russell Pearce
Racist Arizona state senator who wrote AB1070, the law that scapegoats Hispanics in an offensive and unconstitutional manner
July 2010: Tony Hayward
Clueless CEO of British Petroleum, the oil giant whose massive failures have caused an ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
August 2010: Geert Wilders
Muslim-bashing Dutch politician who represents the latest far-right politician to gain political power in Europe thanks to crude race-baiting
September 2010: Ben Roethlisberger
Two-time Super Bowl champion and two-time alleged rapist, the latest example of really bad behavior in professional sports
October 2010: Pamela Geller
Proving Europe isn't alone in scapegoating Muslims, hysterical leader of opposition to the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque"
November 2010: Teabaggers
Huge winners of the 2010 election, a group of fake "populist" politicians who have exploited legitimate economic frustrations in the most repellant of ways
The awards cites 20 people of special note in the Teabagger movement:
Teabagger paymasters:
Charles and David Koch
Teabagger political leaders
Dick Armey
Newt Gingrich
Sarah Palin
Teabagger political hacks
Sharron Angle
Michele Bachmann
Ken Buck
Jim DeMint
Joe Miller
Christine O'Donnell
Carl Paladino
Rand Paul
Marco Rubio
Pat Toomey
Rich Iott (AKA "The Dude Who Dresses Up Like a Nazi")
Teabagger media whores
Andrew Breitbart
Glenn Bec
Rick Santelli
Mark Williams
December 2010: Janet Napolitano
For heading the Department of Homeland Security, the department whose "enhanced patdown" policy at airports via the Transportation Security Agency has led to gross violations of basic civil liberties
And finally, here's the winner for January 2011:
Alan Simpson, who as co-chair of Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, leader of the unsuccessful movement to cut Social Security under the bogus sales job of cutting the deficit
January 2010: Ben Bernanke
For heading the Federal Reserve, the powerful and notorious quasi-government/private banking institution
February 2010: 2012
For being the most popular (and admittedly, the coolest) doomsday conspiracy theory since Y2K
March 2010: Jay Leno
For hosting The Jay Leno Show, one of the greatest flops in primetime television history, for screwing over Conan O'Brien in his weasley plot to return to The Tonight Show, and, most egregious of all, for not being funny for the last sixteen years
April 2010: Akio Toyoda
As President and CEO of Toyota, leader of the cover-up in the safety dangers of their cars, a coverup that has included smearing their own customers they nearly killed
May 2010: Obamacare
The "health care reform" plan passed by Congressional Democrats and Barack Obama which is a betrayal of the real health reform movement, leading to a plan created by right wing think tanks in the 90s presented falsely as a progressive legislative victory that is deservedly unpopular with the public
June 2010: Russell Pearce
Racist Arizona state senator who wrote AB1070, the law that scapegoats Hispanics in an offensive and unconstitutional manner
July 2010: Tony Hayward
Clueless CEO of British Petroleum, the oil giant whose massive failures have caused an ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
August 2010: Geert Wilders
Muslim-bashing Dutch politician who represents the latest far-right politician to gain political power in Europe thanks to crude race-baiting
September 2010: Ben Roethlisberger
Two-time Super Bowl champion and two-time alleged rapist, the latest example of really bad behavior in professional sports
October 2010: Pamela Geller
Proving Europe isn't alone in scapegoating Muslims, hysterical leader of opposition to the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque"
November 2010: Teabaggers
Huge winners of the 2010 election, a group of fake "populist" politicians who have exploited legitimate economic frustrations in the most repellant of ways
The awards cites 20 people of special note in the Teabagger movement:
Teabagger paymasters:
Charles and David Koch
Teabagger political leaders
Dick Armey
Newt Gingrich
Sarah Palin
Teabagger political hacks
Sharron Angle
Michele Bachmann
Ken Buck
Jim DeMint
Joe Miller
Christine O'Donnell
Carl Paladino
Rand Paul
Marco Rubio
Pat Toomey
Rich Iott (AKA "The Dude Who Dresses Up Like a Nazi")
Teabagger media whores
Andrew Breitbart
Glenn Bec
Rick Santelli
Mark Williams
December 2010: Janet Napolitano
For heading the Department of Homeland Security, the department whose "enhanced patdown" policy at airports via the Transportation Security Agency has led to gross violations of basic civil liberties
And finally, here's the winner for January 2011:
Alan Simpson, who as co-chair of Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, leader of the unsuccessful movement to cut Social Security under the bogus sales job of cutting the deficit
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Ghost of Ronald Reagan
Haunted Rancho de Cielo
Since the death of Ronald Reagan, it is rumored that many spooky occurrences are taking place up at the Reagan Ranch. Reagan's Rancho de Cielo (the Spanish word ‘cielo’ means heaven), nestled in the hills above Santa Barbara, was Reagan's ‘favorite place on Earth.’ The hacienda-style ranch (neighbor to Michael Jackson's blighted Neverland) is preserved in the exact condition as when the Reagans lived there, as if they just stepped out and will return at any moment. Even Ronald Reagan's favorite jelly bean jar is still there complete with a few uneaten beans.
During his lifetime, Reagan kept several horses in the stable. He made sure that the Secret Service horses ate from separate hay troughs, as he did want American taxpayers paying to feed his own horses. On the riding trails at the ranch, Reagan rode a white Arabian stallion named El Alamein (meaning ‘two flags’) given to him by Jose' Lopez Portillo, President of Mexico. A white horse is a symbol for conquest on the battlefield, likewise Christ returns on a white horse. Visitors to the ranch now report seeing a peculiar figure on horseback, dressed in a cowboy hat and jeans jacket, galloping near the perimeter of the rugged 688-acre property. When guests ask at the office, who is the historical reenactor is, the baffled ranch staff say ‘There in no one at the ranch matching that description.’ Has the spirit of Reagan (like the equestrian ghost of George Washington at Mt. Vernon) returned to the place on where he found the most peace? Sometimes when the 1500 square foot ranch house is unlocked in the mornings, inexplicably Reagan's leather Bible (given to the president by the Cowboy Chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes) is found next to his bed, opened to chapter six of Revelation, ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’ Could the ‘Gipper’ be sending a message from beyond the grave — a warning that the apocalypse is drawing nigh? It is as though the spirit of Reagan is linked to the Pale Rider of Revelation.
At the ranch Ronald Reagan's favorite form of relaxation was hard physical outdoor labor like building fences, clearing trails, removing overgrown bush, trimming trees, and chopping wood. Soon after Reagan's death, the ranch foreman reported hearing, in the early morning, the sound of an ax chopping wood. When he goes to check it out — nothing is there. At daybreak he occasionally finds a neat pile of newly split logs (although the ranch’s two fireplaces are no longer in use). Ronald Reagan once said, ‘When the Lord calls me home, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for the future.’ At the ranch, Reagan created a pet cemetery for his favorite dogs and other animals that includes headstones hand-carved by the President himself. Reagan Ranch Visitor Center pr states, ‘Rancho del Cielo conveys the true spirit of Reagan. The very essence of his character is found here at the ranch.’ Reagan often called his Santa Barbara ranch, ‘Heaven itself.’ Could it be that the ghost of Reagan has been drawn back to the place he considered the nearest thing to paradise on Earth? Perhaps for the spirit of Reagan, Rancho de Cielo is truly Heaven.
Reagan Ranch Center
217 State Street
Santa Barbara, California 93101
(877) 797-7325
http://www.reaganranch.org/
Since the death of Ronald Reagan, it is rumored that many spooky occurrences are taking place up at the Reagan Ranch. Reagan's Rancho de Cielo (the Spanish word ‘cielo’ means heaven), nestled in the hills above Santa Barbara, was Reagan's ‘favorite place on Earth.’ The hacienda-style ranch (neighbor to Michael Jackson's blighted Neverland) is preserved in the exact condition as when the Reagans lived there, as if they just stepped out and will return at any moment. Even Ronald Reagan's favorite jelly bean jar is still there complete with a few uneaten beans.
During his lifetime, Reagan kept several horses in the stable. He made sure that the Secret Service horses ate from separate hay troughs, as he did want American taxpayers paying to feed his own horses. On the riding trails at the ranch, Reagan rode a white Arabian stallion named El Alamein (meaning ‘two flags’) given to him by Jose' Lopez Portillo, President of Mexico. A white horse is a symbol for conquest on the battlefield, likewise Christ returns on a white horse. Visitors to the ranch now report seeing a peculiar figure on horseback, dressed in a cowboy hat and jeans jacket, galloping near the perimeter of the rugged 688-acre property. When guests ask at the office, who is the historical reenactor is, the baffled ranch staff say ‘There in no one at the ranch matching that description.’ Has the spirit of Reagan (like the equestrian ghost of George Washington at Mt. Vernon) returned to the place on where he found the most peace? Sometimes when the 1500 square foot ranch house is unlocked in the mornings, inexplicably Reagan's leather Bible (given to the president by the Cowboy Chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes) is found next to his bed, opened to chapter six of Revelation, ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’ Could the ‘Gipper’ be sending a message from beyond the grave — a warning that the apocalypse is drawing nigh? It is as though the spirit of Reagan is linked to the Pale Rider of Revelation.
At the ranch Ronald Reagan's favorite form of relaxation was hard physical outdoor labor like building fences, clearing trails, removing overgrown bush, trimming trees, and chopping wood. Soon after Reagan's death, the ranch foreman reported hearing, in the early morning, the sound of an ax chopping wood. When he goes to check it out — nothing is there. At daybreak he occasionally finds a neat pile of newly split logs (although the ranch’s two fireplaces are no longer in use). Ronald Reagan once said, ‘When the Lord calls me home, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for the future.’ At the ranch, Reagan created a pet cemetery for his favorite dogs and other animals that includes headstones hand-carved by the President himself. Reagan Ranch Visitor Center pr states, ‘Rancho del Cielo conveys the true spirit of Reagan. The very essence of his character is found here at the ranch.’ Reagan often called his Santa Barbara ranch, ‘Heaven itself.’ Could it be that the ghost of Reagan has been drawn back to the place he considered the nearest thing to paradise on Earth? Perhaps for the spirit of Reagan, Rancho de Cielo is truly Heaven.
Reagan Ranch Center
217 State Street
Santa Barbara, California 93101
(877) 797-7325
http://www.reaganranch.org/
LegalSteroids.com
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Kindle Breaks Fifty Percent Barrier
There's a general rule in technological innovations that once something hits the fifty percent market share, the game becomes basically over, and the tech will take over 90 percent plus of the market (at least until the next tech innovation.) If that general rule is correct, books (hardcover and paperbook) will all soon pretty much disappear thanks to Amazon's Kindle:
"Amazon has revealed that it has sold more Kindle ebooks than paperbacks in the US during the final three months of 2010.
A similar pattern has continued during January 2011 with 115 ebooks being sold for every 100 paperbacks.
The figure only relates to the US market and the number of ebooks sold on Amazon’s own e-reader device, the Kindle, which now accounts for 41.5 per cent of the e-reader market. Amazon is expected to sell more than eight million Kindles this year, up from 2.4 million last year, according to Bloomberg."
Amazon Kindle ebooks outsell paperbacks
Emma Barnett
28 Jan 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/amazon/8288204/Amazon-Kindle-ebooks-outsell-paperbacks.html
"Amazon has revealed that it has sold more Kindle ebooks than paperbacks in the US during the final three months of 2010.
A similar pattern has continued during January 2011 with 115 ebooks being sold for every 100 paperbacks.
The figure only relates to the US market and the number of ebooks sold on Amazon’s own e-reader device, the Kindle, which now accounts for 41.5 per cent of the e-reader market. Amazon is expected to sell more than eight million Kindles this year, up from 2.4 million last year, according to Bloomberg."
Amazon Kindle ebooks outsell paperbacks
Emma Barnett
28 Jan 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/amazon/8288204/Amazon-Kindle-ebooks-outsell-paperbacks.html
NaturalNews Health News
Some recent articles on health from NaturalNews.com:
"Butter has been maligned as unhealthy for decades. Fortunately, the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) disagrees. The WAPF was started decades ago by Weston Price, DDS. He and his wife traveled to isolated locations and examined the diets of peoples free from civilization's degenerative diseases...
Why the Negative PR Campaign Succeeded
Diet fads promoted aspartame as well as margarine as healthy choices. The overweight and even not so slim were manipulated into diets with only weight loss in mind . That popular movement had its foundation in medical misinformation, based mostly on saturated fat nonsense. That nonsense was compounded by the cholesterol scare.
Abstaining from the saturated fats was promoted as a healthy choice. Butter, coconut oil, and palm oil were all given bad press. The doctors, uneducated of real nutritional health science, went right along. Yet all three of those saturated fats are actually health promoting.
This trend was accelerated by corporate greed in the processed food industry. They could righteously insert those cheaper trans fatty liquid oils in packaged goods or sell them as healthy cooking oils. And now it turns out that those oils cause long term health damage, including obesity, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, and even cancer..."
You have been lied to about butter
Paul Fassa
Friday, January 14, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/031002_butter_misinformation.html
*
"Arsenic and its related compounds are mostly thought of as killers -- and these natural substances can be just that. Notoriously poisonous to myriad forms of life, arsenic is often used in pesticides. And water supplies in many parts of the world that are contaminated by the natural occurrence of arsenic compounds can cause serious health problems. But despite it's reputation as a dangerous chemical, arsenic has been used in tiny amounts in medicine for over 2,000 years.
Sound crazy? Not any more. Mainstream science has learned that traditional healers were on to something when they treated certain cancers and other difficult-to-treat problems with remedies containing arsenic. It turns out that while a high level of arsenic is known to be carcinogenic, low doses can be an anti-cancer therapy in some cases. For example, a Dutch population study found low levels of arsenic concentrations in drinking water not only didn't increase cancer incidence in people who drank it, but resulted in a decrease in skin cancers..."
Arsenic shows promise as treatment for deadly brain tumors
S. L. Baker
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/030994_arsenic_tumors.html
*
"Rye is more than a flavorful ingredient in baking; research shows that this humble grain packs a serious nutritional punch. Contributing to cardiovascular health, cancer prevention, and management of diabetes, rye is an important addition to the diet. Not only is this grain healthy, but it also has been found to promote weight control and digestive health when consumed as dark rye bread..."
Consumption of rye linked to weight control and vigorous health
Carolanne Wright
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/030988_rye_body_weight.html
*
"Regular breads use yeast to rapidly expand the dough mixed for bread. The yeast creates a gas that expands rapidly. So baking with a yeast base is faster. Consider the word yeast and all it implies.
Sourdough is a fermented culture combining friendly yeast and bacteria. This becomes the starter culture for making sourdough bread. The process of fermenting the culture makes the baking process slower than yeast based baking.
Fermented foods are often healthier than their unfermented versions. For example, all the health problems caused by soy products are removed in tempeh, which is fermented soy. The cultures for yogurt and kefir are created by a fermentation process.
Health Benefits of Sourdough
Sourdough breaks down gluten, allowing some wheat sensitive consumers to enjoy bread that tastes good and is not too expensive. But many researchers consider sourdough rye to contain even more nutrition than sourdough wheat breads.
Research has shown that using the sourdough culture for making bread increases the bread`s nutritional impact beyond yeast produced bread. The sourdough process makes starches more digestible by predigesting them, and it lowers insulin resistance while increasing glucose tolerance.
The most controversial benefit is phytic acid or phytate reduction. Phytates are salts derived from phytic acid contained in grains, legumes, and nuts. These phytates bind with several different minerals, including magnesium, and inhibit mineral absorption into the body.
There are two points of view on phytates. Some say we need all the minerals we can get. Anything that inhibits mineral absorption should be at least reduced. Others say phytates have antioxidant and cancer fighting benefits and inhibit excess iron. But even this camp seems to agree that the mineral blocking aspect of phytates can adversely affect those who are mineral deficient.
And who is not mineral deficient? Magnesium, the most important essential mineral for human health, is deficient among most of the civilized population. Magnesium is essential for over 300 different metabolic events in the body. So the phytate factor is a mixed bag nutritionally.
Completely eliminating phytates may not be wise or even possible. Well, the cultured sourdough process does not completely eliminate phytates. It reduces them. Since most of us tend to be mineral deficient, reducing phytates can allow us to have our bread and eat it too.
Sprouted Grains
All sprouted grains, seeds, and legumes have one thing in common: Higher nutrient density. Sprouting converts a starchy food into a virtual vegetable, easier to digest and more nutritious than its source. So why bring this up?
Combining a sourdough culture with sprouted organic grain flour looks like an extremely healthy choice for bread. It`s a little more pricey, but not out of range for most who are health conscious..."
Superfood breads are realistic
Paul Fassa
Saturday, January 22, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/031078_superfood_breads.html
"Butter has been maligned as unhealthy for decades. Fortunately, the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) disagrees. The WAPF was started decades ago by Weston Price, DDS. He and his wife traveled to isolated locations and examined the diets of peoples free from civilization's degenerative diseases...
Why the Negative PR Campaign Succeeded
Diet fads promoted aspartame as well as margarine as healthy choices. The overweight and even not so slim were manipulated into diets with only weight loss in mind . That popular movement had its foundation in medical misinformation, based mostly on saturated fat nonsense. That nonsense was compounded by the cholesterol scare.
Abstaining from the saturated fats was promoted as a healthy choice. Butter, coconut oil, and palm oil were all given bad press. The doctors, uneducated of real nutritional health science, went right along. Yet all three of those saturated fats are actually health promoting.
This trend was accelerated by corporate greed in the processed food industry. They could righteously insert those cheaper trans fatty liquid oils in packaged goods or sell them as healthy cooking oils. And now it turns out that those oils cause long term health damage, including obesity, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, and even cancer..."
You have been lied to about butter
Paul Fassa
Friday, January 14, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/031002_butter_misinformation.html
*
"Arsenic and its related compounds are mostly thought of as killers -- and these natural substances can be just that. Notoriously poisonous to myriad forms of life, arsenic is often used in pesticides. And water supplies in many parts of the world that are contaminated by the natural occurrence of arsenic compounds can cause serious health problems. But despite it's reputation as a dangerous chemical, arsenic has been used in tiny amounts in medicine for over 2,000 years.
Sound crazy? Not any more. Mainstream science has learned that traditional healers were on to something when they treated certain cancers and other difficult-to-treat problems with remedies containing arsenic. It turns out that while a high level of arsenic is known to be carcinogenic, low doses can be an anti-cancer therapy in some cases. For example, a Dutch population study found low levels of arsenic concentrations in drinking water not only didn't increase cancer incidence in people who drank it, but resulted in a decrease in skin cancers..."
Arsenic shows promise as treatment for deadly brain tumors
S. L. Baker
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/030994_arsenic_tumors.html
*
"Rye is more than a flavorful ingredient in baking; research shows that this humble grain packs a serious nutritional punch. Contributing to cardiovascular health, cancer prevention, and management of diabetes, rye is an important addition to the diet. Not only is this grain healthy, but it also has been found to promote weight control and digestive health when consumed as dark rye bread..."
Consumption of rye linked to weight control and vigorous health
Carolanne Wright
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/030988_rye_body_weight.html
*
"Regular breads use yeast to rapidly expand the dough mixed for bread. The yeast creates a gas that expands rapidly. So baking with a yeast base is faster. Consider the word yeast and all it implies.
Sourdough is a fermented culture combining friendly yeast and bacteria. This becomes the starter culture for making sourdough bread. The process of fermenting the culture makes the baking process slower than yeast based baking.
Fermented foods are often healthier than their unfermented versions. For example, all the health problems caused by soy products are removed in tempeh, which is fermented soy. The cultures for yogurt and kefir are created by a fermentation process.
Health Benefits of Sourdough
Sourdough breaks down gluten, allowing some wheat sensitive consumers to enjoy bread that tastes good and is not too expensive. But many researchers consider sourdough rye to contain even more nutrition than sourdough wheat breads.
Research has shown that using the sourdough culture for making bread increases the bread`s nutritional impact beyond yeast produced bread. The sourdough process makes starches more digestible by predigesting them, and it lowers insulin resistance while increasing glucose tolerance.
The most controversial benefit is phytic acid or phytate reduction. Phytates are salts derived from phytic acid contained in grains, legumes, and nuts. These phytates bind with several different minerals, including magnesium, and inhibit mineral absorption into the body.
There are two points of view on phytates. Some say we need all the minerals we can get. Anything that inhibits mineral absorption should be at least reduced. Others say phytates have antioxidant and cancer fighting benefits and inhibit excess iron. But even this camp seems to agree that the mineral blocking aspect of phytates can adversely affect those who are mineral deficient.
And who is not mineral deficient? Magnesium, the most important essential mineral for human health, is deficient among most of the civilized population. Magnesium is essential for over 300 different metabolic events in the body. So the phytate factor is a mixed bag nutritionally.
Completely eliminating phytates may not be wise or even possible. Well, the cultured sourdough process does not completely eliminate phytates. It reduces them. Since most of us tend to be mineral deficient, reducing phytates can allow us to have our bread and eat it too.
Sprouted Grains
All sprouted grains, seeds, and legumes have one thing in common: Higher nutrient density. Sprouting converts a starchy food into a virtual vegetable, easier to digest and more nutritious than its source. So why bring this up?
Combining a sourdough culture with sprouted organic grain flour looks like an extremely healthy choice for bread. It`s a little more pricey, but not out of range for most who are health conscious..."
Superfood breads are realistic
Paul Fassa
Saturday, January 22, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/031078_superfood_breads.html
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