Robalini's Week 9 NFL Picks - Thursday Special

Here's my results for Week 8
W-L-T record: 5-7
Season record: 43-46-2

Halloween Thursday Night Football:
Cincinnati Bengals (-2 1/2) over Miami Dolphins
The Bengals at 6-2 are exceeding expectations, and the Dolphins are winless in October.  Look for the trend to continue tonight..

More games coming Saturday or early Sunday...

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 8 NFL Picks

Robalini's Week 8 NFL Picks
Here's my results for Week 7
W-L-T record: 6-6
Season record: 38-39-2

Carolina Panthers (-6) over Tampa Bay Buccaneers
I'm planning to bet against the Bucs for awhile.

Jacksonville Jaguars (+17) over San Francisco 49ers
As bad as the Jags are, 17 points is too much for their future division opponent in San Francisco (when the Jags move to Los Angeles.)

Dallas Cowboys (+3 1/2) over Detroit Lions
Tony Romo and the Cowboys still don't get enough credit.  Look at them to cover in Motown.

New York Giants (+6 1/2) over Philadelphia Eagles
The Giants may not win in Philly, but expect them to keep it close in an ugly game.

Kansas City Chiefs (-7) over Cleveland Browns
A lot of experts believe the Chiefs have no business being the only undefeated team in the NFL.  They will stay undefeated another week.

New Orleans Saints (-11) over Buffalo Bills
Are 11 points a lot?  Yes.  But the Saints score a lot, and the Bills don't.

Miami Dolphins (+7) over New England Patriots
News flash: Tom Brady has only 1 TD pass in the last 3 games (albeit a great one.)  The Pats should win, but expect a close game.

New York Jets (+6 1/2) over Cincinnati Bengals
The Jets and Geno Smith are better than they are getting credit for.  Take the points.

Washington Redskins (+13) over Denver Broncos
I'm returning to my "Denver shouldn't be giving so many points in spread bets no matter how amazing Peyton Manning is" stance and betting on the Skins to keep it close.

Atlanta Falcons (+2 1/2) over Arizona Cardinals
Wait, the Falcons are the dogs here?  Really?

Green Bay Packers (-9) over Minnesota Vikings
Oddly, this game is getting a tighter spread despite how bad Minnesota played Monday night.  Whatever the spread, the Packs are my pick here.

Seattle Seahawks (-10 1/2) over St. Louis Rams
The spread is high, but the Seahawks are amazing and Sam Bradford is out.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 7 NFL Picks - Sunday

Back at .500, here's my picks:

San Diego Chargers (-7 1/2) over Jacksonville Jaguars
Some people think the Jaguars may keep this one close.  They're wrong.

Kansas City Chiefs (-6) over Houston Texans
The Chiefs should clobber the Texans without Matt Schaub, even if he can't throw a interception returned for a touchdown.

Detroit Lions (-2 1/2) over Cincinnati Bengals
The Lions giving less than a FG at home against the Bengals?  I'll bite!

Miami Dolphins (-7) over Buffalo Bills
A TD is a lot of points, but the Bills are a troubled team.

Chicago Bears (+1 1/2) over Washington Redskins
I know the Skins are at home, but making the Bears a dog earlier this week was a Vegas goof, and I jumped on it.

Dallas Cowboys (+3) over Philadelphia Eagles
Never mind the haters, Romo.  The Cowboys will settle they are the class of the NFC East in Philly.

St. Louis Rams (+7) over Carolina Panthers
A TD is too huge in a game involving two underperforming teams.

Atlanta Falcons (-6) over Tampa Bay Buccaneers
The Bucs are good to bet against, so this is a good game for Atlanta to start recovering this season.

San Francisco 49ers (-3 1/2) over Tennessee Titans
Where's the respect for the Niners?  This spread is too low!

Green Bay Packers (-9) over Cleveland Browns
Nine points are a lot, but this is the Packers, and they are facing the Browns.

Denver Broncos (-6 1/2) over Indianapolis Colts

I almost don't care about the point spread here.  Peyton Manning will taste his revenge.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 7 NFL Picks - Thursday Special

Here's my results for Week 6
W-L-T record: 7-4
Season record: 32-33-2

Thursday Night Football:
Seattle Seahawks (-6) over Arizona Cardinals
The Seahawks should dominate the Cards.  Give the points.

More games coming Saturday or early Sunday...

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 6 NFL Picks

Here's my results for Week 5
W-L-T record: 6-7
Season record: 25-29-2

Philadelphia Eagles (-1) over Tampa Bay BUccaneers
Whatever the problems with the Eagles right now (and there are many) they got nothing on the Bucs.  This looks like an easy win.

Green Bay Packers (-3) over Baltimore Ravens
I got this as a +100 payout and that's still available in multiple casinos.  The Pack has struggled, but thanks to Aaron Rodgers, they're still a fundamentally sound team.

Detroit Lions (-2 1/2) over Cleveland Browns
I'm still not buying the Browns.  With Reggie Bush back, I am buying the Lions.

St. Louis Rams (+7 1/2) over Houston Texans
The Rams are better than their record suggests, and the Texans (led by Pick-Six Schaub) are worse.  Look for St. Louis to at least keep it close.

New York Jets (-2 1/2) over Pittsburgh Steelers
The Jets are silently looking good under Geno Smith: look for them to prove it against the Steelers.

Cincinnati Bengals (-6) over Buffalo Bills
When this fell below a TD yesterday, I bit.  Yes, it's still a lot of points, but the Bills are not the same team without EJ Emanuel.

Tennessee Titans (+13 1/2) over Seattle Seahawks
The Titans aren't as good as their record suggests, but this line is complete disrespect.  Take the points.

Jacksonville Jaguars (+27 1/2) over Denver Broncos
This is solely about the point spread.  As good as Peyton Manning (who probably will be Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year) and the Broncos are and as bad as the soon-to-be Los Angeles Jaguars are, I have to take the points.

San Francisco 49ers (-10 1/2) over Arizona Cardinals
Expect the Niners to romp.

New Orleans Saints (+2 1/2) over New England Patriots
The Patriots armor chink was exposed last week.  Look for Drew Brees and the Saints to exploit a team that shouldn't be 4-1.

San Diego Chargers (+1 1/2) over Indianapolis Colts
I'm still not buying the Colts and Andrew Luck this year.  Take the Chargers at home.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 5 NFL Picks

Here's my results for Week 4
W-L-T record: 3-5
Season record: 19-22-2

Ouch...

Kansas City Chiefs (-2 1/2) over Tennessee Titans
The Chiefs are living up to the hype as most improved team.  Watch them continue against the Titans.

Miami Dolphins (-2 1/2) over Baltimore Ravens
Look for the Dolphins to rebound against the Ravens at home after being beaten up by the Saints.

St. Louis Rams (-11) over Jacksonville Jaguars
I don't care if it's eleven points.  It's the Jaguars we're talking about.

New England Patriots (+2 1/2) over Cincinnati Bengals
The Patriots (at 4-0) a dog against the Bengals?  That was the spread earlier this week.  I take.

Seattle Seahawks (-2 1/2) over Indianapolis Colts
The Colts aren't as good as their record suggests, and they'll learn that against Seattle.

Green Bay Packers (-6 1/2) over Detroit Lions
Look for Aaron Rodgers to start dominating this week.

New Orleans Saints (+1) over Chicago Bears
When I saw the Saints were dogs on Tuesday, I took it while I could.

Philadelphia Eagles (+2 1/2) over New York Giants
The Giants, at 0-4, still have too much love.

Carolina Panthers (-2) over Arizona Cardinals
Call me stubborn, but I still find the Panthers to be a highly undervalued team.

San Diego Chargers (-4) over Oakland Raiders
The Raiders are doing better than expected, but so are the Chargers, who should dominate.

Denver Broncos (-6 1/2) over Dallas Cowboys
Wynn had it under a TD on Sunday, so I bit early.  Even at eight, this is a great bet.

San Francisco 49ers (-6) over Houston Texans
The spread has already dropped, but I'm happy giving less than a touchdown with the 49ers.

Atlanta Falcons (-8 1/2) over New York Jets
The Falcons will punish the Jets in revenge for their loss against the Pats.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 4 NFL Picks

Here's my results for Week 3
W-L-T record: 6-8
Season record: 16-17-2

San Francisco 49ers (-3) over St. Louis Rams
Look for the 49ers to rebound after two humiliating losses with a drubbing of the Rams.

Cincinnati Bengals (-4) over Cleveland Browns
The Browns looked good last week, but it's a fluke.

Indianapolis Colts (-7 1/2) over Jacksonville Jaguars
The Jags are looking as bad as everyone thought.  Maybe they'll be better when they're the Los Angeles Jaguars.

Seattle Seahawks (-2 1/2) over Houston Texans
The Texans appear to be a paper tiger, and the Seahawks are the team that will prove it.

Chicago Bears (+3) over Detroit Lions
The Lions look like they're cursed for bad luck another year.

New York Jets (+4 1/2) over Tennessee Titans
The Jets, with Geno Smith as QB, look much better than expected.  Even when they lose, they lose with style.  Expect at least another close loss.

Philadelphia Eagles (+11) over Denver Broncos
Call me a masochist, but there's no way Peyton Manning can keep covering these ridiculous point spreads.  Right?

Atlanta Falcons (-1) over New England Patriots
Believe it or not, this game had even points at one time, because of pro-Patriot bias (deserved) among bettors.  But the 2013 Patriots are (despite their 3-0 start) clearly not the Pats we know, and the Falcons will prove that at home.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 3 NFL Picks Addendum

Miami Dolphins (-2) over Atlanta Falcons
I usually don't add picks after making my final postings, but at -2 and an even payout, I can't resist picking the Dolphins...

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 3 NFL Picks

Here's my results for Week 2
W-L-T record: 5-5-1
Season record: 10-9-2

Kansas City Chiefs (+3 1/2) over Philadelphia Eagles
Look for Andy Reid to at least keep it within a field goal (if not outright win) in his return to Philly.

San Diego Chargers (+3 1/2) over Tennessee Titans
The Chargers may indeed be much better now the curse of Norv Turner is removed.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers (+7 1/2) over New England Patriots
The Bucs are better than their record suggest, and the Patriots are worse.

Houston Texans (-2 1/2) over Baltimore Ravens
The Ravens rebounded in Week Two, but will fall back against the Texans.

Dallas Cowboys (-3 1/2) over St. Louis Rams
Look for the Cowboys to dominate at home this week.

Washington Redskins (-1 1/2) over Detroit Lions
The Lions are already beat up, and RGIII should return with a roar at home.

Green Bay Packers (-2) over Cincinnati Bengals
I'll take Aaron Rodgers if you take less than a field goal.

Carolina Panthers (-1) over New York Giants
I still think the Panthers are undervalued this year and expect Cam Newton to prove it at home.

Indianapolis Colts (+10 1/2) over San Francisco 49ers
Look for Andrew Luck to keep it close in his return to the Bay Area.

Jacksonville Jaguars (+20) over Seattle Seahawks
I don't care how bad the Jags are: give me 20 points in an NFL game and I'll take it.

Buffalo Bills (+2 1/2) over New York Jets
I think the Bills looks vastly improved this year, and they will deliver against the Jets.

Chicago Bears (-2 1/2) over Pittsburgh Steelers
The Bears offensive line has improved, and their defense has maintained quality.  Neither is true about Pittsburgh.

Oakland Raiders (+15 1/2) over Denver Broncos
The Raiders are competitive this year.  15 1/2 points?  Great bet, even with the Peyton Manning factor.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 2 NFL Picks

Here's my results for Week 1
W-L-T record: 5-4-1

New York Jets (+13) over New England Patriots
Thirteen points?  That was the line Monday night, and I jumped on it.  For all their problems, the Jets deserve more credit than that, and the Pats don't look quite so dominating this year either.

San Diego Chargers (+8) over Philadelphia Eagles
Another too high spread.  The Charger are a good bet.

Tennessee Titans (+9) over Houston Texans
Dog number 3.  Nine points are too much.

Carolina Panthers (-3) over Buffalo Bills
I got this on even pay rather -110 at the Station Casino.  Cam Newton and the Panthers are oddly overlooked so far this year.

St. Louis Rams (+7) over Atlanta Falcons
Dog number 4.  The Falcons should win, but expect a close game.

Washington Redskins (+7 1/2) over Green Bay Packers
Dog number 5.  Expect the Skins to at least cover.

Kansas City Chiefs (-2 1/2) over Dallas Cowboys
The Chiefs, everyone's team to watch, is still worth watching.

Minnesota Vikings (+6 1/2) over Chicago Bears
Dog number 6.  Expect the Vikings to at least keep it close.

New Orleans Saints (-3) over Tampa Bay Buccaneers
I'm riding the Saints this year.

Detroit Lions (-1) over Arizona Cardinals
The Lions are the superior team here.

Denver Broncos (-4 1/2) over New York Giants
Expect Manning to crush in the battle of the Mannings.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's Week 1 NFL Picks

New Orleans Saints (-3) over Atlanta Falcons
Look for the Saints revenge year to start great at home against the Falcons.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers (-3) over New York Jets
The Bucs are a lot better than they're getting credit for.  The Jets are as bad as they say.

Kansas City Chiefs (-3.5) over Jacksonville Jaguars
A good warmup game for the up and coming Chiefs.

Cincinnati Bengals (+3) over Chicago Bears
I expect the Bengals to rise in 2013 and the Bears to fall, so this is a good test game to see how right I am.

Oakland Raiders (+10.5) over Indianapolis Colts
I passed on this game last Sunday, but the point spread kept rising and now is too tempting.  Luck will have a sophomore slump of sorts, and though they should win, it will be close.

Arizona Cardinals (+5) over St. Louis Rams
The Cards have the same defense plus Carson Palmer, so they are a good bet with 5 points.

Green Bay Packers (+5) over San Francisco 49ers
Give Aaron Rodgers five points?  I'll take that!

Dallas Cowboys (-3) over New York Giants
I'm putting my money where my mouth is on backing Tony Romo and the Cowboys to win the NFC East.

Houston Texans (-4) over San Diego Chargers
Whatever problems the Texans have are nothing compared to the Chargers.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Robalini's 2013 NFL Football Predictions (Plus Opening Game Pick)

NFC

NFC North

The Bears will regret firing Lovie Smith.  The Vikings made the playoffs thanks to a ridiculous performance by Adrian Peterson which should not be repeated: even with Christian Ponder improving, expect them to go down.  Yes, the Lions were undisciplined and underperforming in 2012, but they made perhaps the best acquisition of the year with Reggie Bush at running back.  In any case, the Packers, led by Aaron Rodgers, should dominate this division.

NFC South

The Bucs would be competing in nearly every other division, but it the NFC South, expect them to go last.  The Falcons were a play away from the Super Bowl last year, but rather than motivating improvement, expect them to have the choker label stuck in their head.  Cam Newton may not have had the Fantasy Football points last year like he did in 2011, but he's quietly developing into a smart QB with talent, and expect the Panthers to get a wild card.  That leaves the Saints, who have the 2013 MVP at QB in Drew Brees, the return of the best coach in football with Sean Payton, and a talented team with a chip on its shoulder for feeling screwed by the NFL last year.

NFC West

The Cardinals now have Carson Palmer, which should improve them, but they are still in a really tough division.  The Rams have great coaching, great defense and an offense that is conservative but smart, but that won't be enough this year in the division either.  In the end, I'll pick both the Seahawks and the 49ers to make the playoffs, with Seattle winning the division simply because Colin Kaepernick may not be so injury free playing his style over 16 games.

NFC East

These teams are pretty much all the same: talented but not talented enough to be champions.  This will be a learning year for the Eagles under a new system, while the Giants have done little to improve themselves.  The team with the best upside is the Redskins, but as that upside is tied to RGIII and his health, I have my doubts this year.  So I'm going with the Cowboys, simply because Tony Romo will be the most consistent in a mediocre division.

Division Winners:
Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints, Seattle Seahawks, Dallas Cowboys

Wild Cards: San Francisco 49ers, Carolina Panthers

NFC Championship:
New Orleans Saints over Green Bay Packers

*

AFC

AFC North

In theory, the Browns should eventually improve, but not this year.  The Steelers are too old and too beat down to make another run.  The Ravens will miss two of the greatest defensive players ever leaving their team.  That leaves, by default, the quietly consistent Bengals as division winners.

AFC South

The Jags and Titans: nope.  The Colts and Andrew Luck should not be so lucky this year with a tougher schedule, though they could be a wild card given the overall weakness of the AFC.  That leaves, by default, the talented but underperforming Texans.

AFC West

This is one division which may be stronger than given credit.  The Chargers, sadly, have fired Norv Turner way too late, and now their once immense talent has been sucked away.  The Raiders may be a surprise this year, especially if Terrelle Pryor delivers.  The Chiefs would be the surprise team to look for if every NFL expert wasn't declaring them to be the surprise team to look for.  Still, the Broncos should be the class of the division under Peyton Manning once again.

AFC East

Bills, Dolphins, Jets: moving on.  For all the problems facing the Patriots, they still should coast in this division.

Division Winners

Cincinnati Bengals, Houston Texans, Denver Broncos, New England Patriots

Wild Cards
Kansas City Chiefs, Indianapolis Colts

AFC Championship:
Denver Broncos over Kansas City Chiefs

Super Bowl

New Orleans Saints over Denver Broncos

Bonus Pick: NFL Kickoff Opener

Baltimore Ravens (+9) over Denver Broncos

I just predicted the Ravens to miss the playoffs and the Broncos to make the Super Bowl, but nine points is still nine points.  That's how much the Ravens were getting Sunday when I placed my bet, and though the spread has dropped to eight, it's still a good bet for Baltimore to at least keep it close.

To check Las Vegas odds, The Konformist recommends VegasInsider.com:

http://www.vegasinsider.com

Suspicious death of two FBI agents creates controversy

Mon May 27, 2013
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/27/305627/death-of-fbi-agents-creates-controversy/

Two well-trained Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents who were involved in the killing of a Boston bombing suspect have suspiciously died.

The FBI said in a statement that 41-year-old Christopher Lorek and 40-year-old Stephen Shaw were killed on May 17 as they fell out of a helicopter into water during a training mission off the coast of Virginia Beach.

US officials have blamed bad weather for the tragedy but some have questioned the credibility of the official account, considering it a cover-up.

They say the agents’ death adds to the suspicious death of a friend of the Boston bombing suspect, Ibragim Todashev, who was killed in his own apartment by an FBI agent.

Lorek and Shaw were part of the bureau's Critical Incident Response Group and were both members of the team investigating the Boston Marathon bombings in mid-April.

“You could always take it as one of an endless group of coincidences. We have so many [of them], when you look at the Boston investigation that these two individuals were involved in, everything had the stamp of CIA and FBI on it, from the first steps,” Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, told Press TV.

“What we have in the US is that we don’t report, we don’t have the least free press here. There are powerful dissident elements within our military, intelligence services and government that are under the control of... I’ll call them organized crime on a worldwide basis. If you refer to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of narcotics and trillions of dollars worth of financial crimes, it is simply organized crime, it is the understatement of all time,” he added.

The incident has reminded many of the dramatic death of top US commandos in Afghanistan, who lost their lives three months after their involvement in the alleged killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.

On August 6, 2011, the helicopter of the Navy SEAL Team VI was shot down in Afghanistan.

The families of Navy SEAL members have blamed the government for the tragedy, saying the shooting down of the helicopter and the subsequent cover-up was planned by the government.

They said that US President Barack Obama turned the SEALs group into a Taliban target after the administration revealed they had conducted the bin Laden raid.

The families also claimed Taliban militants had received leaked information from the US government regarding the landing site of the commandos’ helicopter.

Moreover, the SEAL Team VI members were reportedly flown to the landing site with a Vietnam-era Chinook helicopter rather than with their customary Special Forces choppers.

“There is absolutely nothing that is credible about that; this is not a mission they would have been on, this is not a helicopter they would have been on,” Duff pointed out.

FBI Spiked Chechen Jihadi Investigation

Palast reports from Kazakhstan
Greg Palast from Vice.com
Friday, 3. May 2013

[Astana, Kazakhstan]  Following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, I received documents marked “SECRET” from the files of the FBI’s Washington field office. The information in those files will make you sick.

When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into joining me.  [Rocco, no fool, won’t let me print his full name.]

After we landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and, yesterday, charged with hiding evidence of the bombers’ guilt.

Here in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, televisions everywhere run endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.

And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably couldn’t find on a map?

The second question: How did America’s trillion-dollar intelligence apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber’s connections to the Chechen militants?

The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra:  it’s amazing what you don’t see when you don’t look.

And that’s related to the how young Muslim-Americans came to kill other young Americans over Chechnya.

According to the secret memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11 attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America’s Muslim teenagers.

No, we shouldn’t be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, “that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden”.

Hey, it was a family affair.  Camp Jihad was run by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called “ABL” – Abdullah Binladden, Osama’s brother.

When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were arrested, I went back to that “SECRET” memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just two months after that “compassionate young man” Osama killed thousands in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center).

Why would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?

My producer at BBC Television called the FBI.  They did not deny the authenticity of the secret documents.  Well, then, if the US government has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya (as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings?

The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself.  The spokesman told us at BBC:

"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."?
Well, what else are we not supposed to know?

We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a “clean” phone. The spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.

Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing the US government’s half-assed—and half-illegal—support for these terrorists.

Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians grief in Chechnya.

The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to roost.  As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who provided crucial help to our investigation, told me, “It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.”

It’s utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it’s more than likely the elder brother’s connections here in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past.

The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch. There’s surprisingly little official scrutiny of the media’s new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers’ uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan’s “I LOVE AMERICA” schtick, noted,

“[Ruslan’s] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message of ‘promise and hope’ sent by Tsarni.”

I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge, first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard Ruslan’s messages given Ruslan’s founding the Congress of Chechen International Organizations and his lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID contractor and oil industry lawyer.

There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that “no one else ought to know” about our government plays footsie with terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in Boston.

Greg Palast investigated terror attacks on the US for BBC TV.

Readers can download Bush Family Fortunes, Palast’s BBC documentary, without charge, at www.gregpalast.com/bffdownload/

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Was Boston Bombers ‘Uncle Ruslan’ with the CIA?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Daniel Hopsicker
http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/04/22/was-boston-bombers-uncle-ruslan-with-the-cia/

The uncle of the two men who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, who struck the only grace note in an otherwise horrific week, worked as a “consultant” for the Agency for International Development (USAID) a U.S. Government Agency often used for cover by agents of the CIA, in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan during the “Wild West” days of the early 1990’s, when anything that wasn’t nailed down in that country was up for grabs.

“Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni of Montgomery Village Md., whose name was the top trending topic worldwide on Twitter last Friday for his plain-spoken condemnation of his two nephews, has had a checkered business career, that began well before he graduated (as Ruslan Z Tsarnaev) from Duke Law School in 1998.

Tsarni, a well-connected oil executive,  is currently involved in an international criminal investigation into a Kazakh billionaire banker-turned-fugitive alleged to have absconded with $6 billion from Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank.

The story begins with The London Sunday Times on May 8, 2011, which reported the sale of the personal home of England’s Prince Andrew to billionaire Kazakh Oligarch Timur Kulibayev, who “controls that country’s oil industry and happens to be married to the daughter of its autocratic President Nursultan Nazarbayev.”

What does that have to do with "Uncle Ruslan?" Let's take a look.

"Can't tell your Oligarchs without a scorecard"

Headlined "Prince's home in 'laundered cash' inquiry," the story raised several red flags.

One was that the President-for-Life’s son-in-law had paid $5 million over the asking price to purchase Prince Andrew’s home, which raised eyebrows.

Red flags and eyebrows were raised still further, in these times of global near-depression, at the conspicuous oligarchic consumption (read: bad taste) exhibited when the Kazakh President-for-Life’s daughter-for-life Goga Ashkenazi celebrated her 30th birthday with a lavish party before the scandal hit.

Goga, who made her appearance in a Swarovski crystal-encrusted, backless lace dress, attended by Prince-for-Life Andrew, was  entertained by fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos.

There was even a woman suspended in a bird cage (true) who was there to direct guests to strategically-placed vomitoriums (alas, not true) strewn about the mansion grounds.

Enter "Uncle Ruslan"

But the biggest red flag, the one pertinent to murder in Boston, was Oligarch Kukibayev's use of money laundered through a network of offshore companies to attempt to hide his purchase of Prince Andrew's crib, which emerged during a legal battle between another billionaire Kazakh oligarch, Mukhtar Ablyazov, and BTA Bank, from which Kazakhstan claims Ablyazov embezzled a very cool $6 billion dollars.

And this is where “Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni comes in.

The purchase of the Prince's estate was put together, according to prosecutors in Italy and Switzerland, by a group of oil executives who comprise “a network of personal and business relationships” allegedly used for “international corruption," reported  The London Telegraph.

Tsarni, called “a US lawyer who has had dealings in Kazakh business affairs,” by the Sunday Times, clearly appears to be a member of that network.

The Sunday Times reported, “A statement by Ruslan Zaindi Tsarni was given in the High Court in December, claiming that Kulibayev bought Sunninghill and properties in Mayfair with $96 million derived from a complex series of deals intended to disguise money laundering.”

“Tsarni alleged that the money came from the takeover of a western company, which had been used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh state.”

A Big Big Sky's the Limit

The “western company” used to launder the money which the Sunday Times referred to is Big Sky Energy Corporation, where Ruslan Tsarni was a top executive.

Big Sky, which used to be known as China Energy Ventures Corp, is a now-bankrupt US oil company run by S.A. (Al) Sehsuvaroglu, a long-time executive of Halliburton, which had oil leases in Kakakhstan’s Caspian Basin.

Tsarni was Big Sky’s Corporate Secretary and Vice President for Business Development. He joined Big Sky in 2005.

A press release announcing his appointment stated:

“Mr. Ruslan Tsarni, a U.S. citizen, has over 10 years of professional experience in oil and gas legislation and corporate law. Previously, Mr. Tsarni served as Corporate Counsel of Nelson Resources Limited Group as well as Managing Director of several of its operating subsidiaries.

“From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Tsarni worked as Head of Legal Affairs of Golden Eagle Partners LLC.

Big Sky was on somebody's watch list

“From 1994 to 1996, Mr. Tsarni served as a consultant contracted by USAID for projects aimed to develop securities markets in Central Asia, where he trained corporate governance and corporate finance principals in state and private companies.”

According to a source who worked for many years as a journalist at Platts Oilgram News, a respected oil industry trade publication, good corporate governance was not a Big Sky priority.

“Nelson, Big Sky, Ablyazov, Kulibayev and the rest were all on my watch list for intelligence connections and pay-offs of various kinds at Platts,” stated the source, who requested anonymity.

The news corroborates other reports beginning to emerge about the family and its abundant connections.

A "connected" family?

Before the Tsarnaev family moved to the United States a decade ago, they lived in the northern Kyrgyz town of Tokmok, near the border with Kazakhstan, which is home of the country's largest ethnic Chechen community.

The day after the massive manhunt in the Boston area that led to the death of Tamerlan and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Radio Free Europe and Kyrgyz Service correspondent Timur Toktonaliev traveled to Tokmok.

From there, he reported that the extended Tsarnaev family is well-known there, even beyond their local community.

“It is not known if there was anything more than a personal connection,” the story reported, “but organized crime boss Aziz Batukaev, who is also an ethnic Chechen, lived next door to the Tsarnaevs. Batukaev grew up and lived in Tokmok, but is now in Chechnya.

Halliburton executives, suspected CIA assets, Chechnyan crime bosses, oligarchs stealing billions from banks and laundering money with seeming impunity,  fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos…

If there hadn't been two of them, the investigation would already be pointing to a single misfit, a lone nut bomber.

Those of you who read the stories published here know their value better than I can describe.

The investigative reporting on the impact of drug money on US political life and our economy found here are taboo subjects in the mainstream media. Without your help the effort cannot continue.

Order our books and documentaries, and donate what you can!

About Daniel Hopsicker

Daniel Hopsicker is an investigative journalist dubious about the self-serving assertion of U.S. officials that there are no American Drug Lords.

The Boston Bombing & The KGB

Robert Sterling, Konformist.com

Almost immediately after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, many people on the Internet (most notably Alex Jones of Infowars.com ) proclaimed the event to be a "False Flag" operation masterminded by US intelligence.  This is certainly a plausible scenario, if one examines history.  Still, if you ask "Cui bono?" to the events in Boston, the idea that the bombing was a KGB operation to justify a deeper push in Chechnya seems plausible as well.  And if you dig a little deeper, the ulterior motive would appear to be oil.

Here is an article from National Journal titled "What You Need to Know About Chechnya":

http://www.nationaljournal.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-chechnya-20130419

The most important sentence of this entire report: "Today, Russia continues to maintain a vital interest in the region for economic reasons: Access routes from Russia to the Black Sea and Caspian Sea go through Chechnya, as do oil and gas pipelines connecting Russia with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan."

This was a pretty important story from March that didn't get the coverage it deserved:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/03/21/russias-rosneft-surpasses-exxonmobil-to-become-worlds-biggest-oil-co/

Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil company, became the biggest oil company in the world (exceeding ExxonMobil) after their latest huge acquisition of TNK-BP. The CEO of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, is a "former" KGB spy.

This Atlantic article doesn't conclude conspiracy (probably because, according to establishment thought, conspiracies by powerful organizations don't happen) but it does show all the dots that need to be connected:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/what-you-should-know-about-chechnya-as-the-boston-story-unfolds/275156/

Here's the most important quote:

"To allow the Boston attacks to cast all Chechens as violent religious zealots is exactly what Putin needs. That will allow him to keep his deadly arrangement going. The supreme irony of Putin's PR strategy is that most Chechens share the democratic values of a Western civilization that completely disregards, and misunderstands, their struggle."

So here's the general model: Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil giant, has just become the world's biggest oil company through mass acquisitions. The end goal of the acquisitions is the big prize, the oil in the Caspian Sea, which Russia (like the US, Europe & China) wants to dominate. The problem, of course, is that Chechnya stands in the way of the oil. In order to get it, they must crush Chechnya. To stop any PR defense of Chechnyans, the bombing turns Chechnya into an officially sanctioned demon. Look for Putin to declare sympathy for America and support of the War on Terror, then launch an even bloodier offensive of Chechnya. Then look for Rosneft to make even huger and bigger deals over the Caspian oil.

Stoner Cooking 4-22-13

Ten Soda
http://www.tengetboth.com

Can't decide if you want a soda sweetened by obesity-causing high fructose corn syrup or poisonous Nutrasweet?  Well, now with the Ten soda label, you don't have to choose!!!  It's the best of both worlds!!!

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Pizza Hut Debuts 'Crazy Cheesy Crust'
Niki Achitoff-Gray
APR 3, 2013
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2013/04/pizza-hut-introduces-crazy-cheesy-crust.html

Remember how jealous you were when Pizza Hut Middle East launched the Cheeseburger Crown Crust? Or when a photo from China, of the Hot dog-encrusted shrimp tempura pizza, began to circulate earlier this year? Well, worry not! America just got one step closer to crazy pizza land, with Pizza Hut's latest stuffed crust invention.

The limited release Crazy Cheesy Crust ($12.99 with 1 topping) features 16 detachable "pockets" of bread filled with a five-cheese blend. Disappointed? Execs sure hope so! Spokesman Doug Terfehr explains that "by not making it an over-the-top indulgence... people would buy the pies repeatedly rather than just trying them once as a novelty." Needless to say, we'll be Chain Reacting all over this thing.

Pizza Hut introduced its first stuffed crust back in 1995, and they've been riffing off it ever since. There was the Stuffed Crust Pan Pizza of 2009, followed just a couple of years later by the release of The Ultimate Stuffed Crust.

So, if you've ever wondered what ontological category comes after "Ultimate," lesson learned. It's "Crazy Cheesy," of course!

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Even the NY Times is now rejecting Monsanto GMO science
Jon Rappoport
April 9, 2013
NoMoreFakeNews.com
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/even-the-ny-times-is-now-rejecting-monsanto-gmo-science

This isn’t a leak. It isn’t a timid flow. It’s a flood.

I’m talking about about the criticism of Monsanto’s so-called science of genetically-engineered food.

For the past 20 years, independent researchers have been attacking Monsanto science in various ways, and finally the NY Times has joined the crowd.

But it’s the way Mark Bittman, lead food columnist for the Times magazine, does it that really crashes the whole GMO delusion. Writing in his April 2 column, “Why Do G.M.O.’s Need Protection?”, Bittman leads with this:

“Genetic engineering in agriculture has disappointed many people who once had hopes for it.”

As in: the party’s over, turn out the lights.

Bittman explains: “…genetic engineering, or, more properly, transgenic engineering – in which a gene, usually from another species of plant, bacterium or animal, is inserted into a plant in the hope of positively changing its nature – has been disappointing.”

As if this weren’t enough, Bittman spells it out more specifically: “In the nearly 20 years of applied use of G.E. in agriculture there have been two notable ‘successes,’ along with a few less notable ones. These are crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (Monsanto develops both the seeds and the herbicide to which they’re resistant) and crops that contain their own insecticide. The first have already failed, as so-called superweeds have developed resistance to Roundup, and the second are showing signs of failing, as insects are able to develop resistance to the inserted Bt toxin — originally a bacterial toxin — faster than new crop variations can be generated.”

Bittman goes on to write that superweed resistance was a foregone conclusion; scientists understood, from the earliest days of GMOs, that spraying generations of these weeds with Roundup would give us exactly what we have today: failure of the technology to prevent what it was designed to prevent. The weeds wouldn’t die out. They would retool and thrive.

“The result is that the biggest crisis in monocrop agriculture – something like 90 percent of all soybeans and 70 percent of corn is grown using Roundup Ready seed – lies in glyphosate’s inability to any longer provide total or even predictable control, because around a dozen weed species have developed resistance to it.” Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup.

Just as the weeds developed resistance and immunity to the herbicide, insects that were supposed to be killed by the toxin engineered into Monsanto’s BT crops are also surviving.

Five years ago, it would have been unthinkable that the NY Times would print such a complete rejection of GMO plant technology. Now, it’s “well, everybody knows.”

The Times sees no point in holding back any longer.

Of course, if it were a newspaper with any real courage, it would launch a whole series of front-page pieces on this enormous failure, and the gigantic fraud that lies behind it. Then the Times might actually see its readership improve.

Momentum is something its editors understand well enough. You set your hounds loose on a story, you send them out with a mandate to expose failure, fraud, and crime down to their roots, and you know that, in the ensuing months, formerly reticent researchers and corporate employees and government officials will appear out of the woodwork confessing their insider knowledge.

The story will deepen. It will take on new branches. The revelations will indict the corporation (Monsanto), its government partners, and the scientists who falsified and hid data.

In this case, the FDA and the USDA will come in for major hits. They will backtrack and lie and mis-explain, for a while, and then, like buds in the spring, agency employees will emerge and admit the truth. These agencies were co-conspirators.

And once the story unravels far enough, the human health hazards and destruction wreaked by GMOs will take center stage. All the bland pronouncements about “nobody has gotten sick from GMOs” will evaporate in the wind.

It won’t simply be, “Well, we never tested health dangers adequately,” it’ll be, “We knew there was trouble from the get-go.”

Yes, the Times could make all this happen. But it won’t. There are two basic reasons. First, it considers Big Ag too big to fail. There is now so much acreage in America tied up in GMO crops that to reject the whole show would cause titanic eruptions on many levels.

And second, the Times is part of the very establishment that views the GMO industry as a way of bringing Globalism to fruition for the whole planet.

Centralizing the food supply in a few hands means the population of the world, in the near future, will eat or not eat according to the dictates of a few unelected men. Redistribution of basic resources to the people of Earth, from such a control point, is what Globalism is all about:

“Naturally, we love you all, but decisions must be made. You people over here will live well, you people over there will live not so well, and you people back there will live not at all.

“This is our best judgment. Don’t worry, be happy.”

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at:

http://www.nomorefakenews.com

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Beef Stew with Bacon and Butternut Squash

3 pounds beef chuck
Kosher salt and black pepper
Olive or vegetable oil
6 slices good quality, lean, smoky bacon, chopped 1-inch pieces
2 carrots, chopped
2 to 3 ribs celery, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
3 to 4 cloves garlic, sliced or chopped
1 tablespoon fresh marjoram or 1 teaspoon dried
3 tablespoons fresh thyme, chopped, divided
2 fresh bay leaves
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 12-ounce bottle hard cider or 1 cup sweet vermouth
2 fat strips orange rind
1 quart beef stock
1 medium-large butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1 1/2-inch chunks
A little freshly grated nutmeg
About 2 tablespoons honey or maple syrup
About 2 tablespoons grainy Dijon mustard
Warm crusty bread and butter, to pass at table

Yields: 6

Bring meat to room temperature and pat dry. Cut into 2-inch pieces. Just before cooking, season with Kosher salt and black pepper.

Preheat oven to 325°F.

Heat oil, 2 turns of the pan, over medium-high heat in a large Dutch oven. Add the bacon and stir until crisp; remove to a plate. Cook meat in batches, caramelizing on all sides. Remove to a plate and repeat with remaining meat, adding additional oil if necessary.
To meat drippings, add chopped carrot, celery, onion, sliced garlic, marjoram, half the thyme, bay leaves, salt and pepper. Partially cover pot and cook 5-7 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in tomato paste, cook for 1 minute, then stir in hard cider or vermouth and a few fat strips of orange rind; deglaze and reduce liquid by half. Add stock then slide meat and bacon back into the pot, bring to bubble, cover and transfer to oven. Roast 2 1/2 hours.

Remove the stew and let it stand, covered, while you roast squash.

Raise heat to 425°F. Coat squash with oil and toss with remaining thyme, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Roast 30-35 minutes, turning once, until brown at edges.

Once the squash is done, remove bay leaf and orange rind from the stew. Skim fat with a spoon or paper towels.
Place meat in a large shallow bowl or serving dish and stir honey and mustard into sauce. Stir in squash and serve in bowls. Pass crusty bread at table for mopping.

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Strawberry Honey Butter

1 pint strawberries, hulled
3 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice, or to taste
1 1/2 sticks (3/4 cup) unsalted butter, softened

In a food processor purée the strawberries and force the purée through a fine sieve into a saucepan. Add the honey and the lemon juice and boil the mixture, stirring, for 3 minutes, or until it is thickened. Let the strawberry mixture cool to room temperature. In a bowl cream together the butter and the strawberry mixture. Let the butter stand, covered, in a cool place for 1 hour to allow the flavors to develop.
This butter is delicious, especially on whole grain bagels!

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Baked Eggs in Avocados
http://www.bbbseed.com/

1 Avocado cut in half, pitted
2 eggs
Salt and pepper, to taste
Topping of choice (some suggestions: parmesan, chili flakes, balsamic, oregano, basil, turkey bacon, etc.)

Preheat oven to 375°F. Using a small piece of aluminum foil, create a 'bowl' or 'boat' in which to bake your Egg in avocado. Scoop out a small amount of the avocado to create a larger hollow. This will prevent your egg from overflowing completely (a small amount of overflow is normal). Place avocado in your foil 'bowl' and crack the egg into the hollow. Top egg with salt and pepper, and add toppings of your choice. Bake until egg reaches desired doneness (about 15 minutes should give you a tender yolk without runny whites). Serve warm.

GROW, ENJOY, SHARE.... the beauty and the bounty

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Breakfast Delight
http://www.sargento.com/recipes/1231/grandma-macks-breakfast-delight/

1 tube (8 oz.) refrigerated crescent rolls
2 cups (1 lb.) cubed ham
2 cups frozen hash brown potatoes, thawed
5 eggs
1/2 cup milk
Dash of salt and pepper
1-1/2 cups Sargento Shredded Cheddar Jack Cheese

Arrange rolls on bottom of 9 x 13-inch baking dish. Top rolls with ham and potatoes. Beat together eggs, milk, salt and pepper in medium bowl. Pour egg mixture over potatoes. Top with cheese. Bake in preheated 375°F oven 30 minutes or until eggs are set.

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Italian Grilled Cube Steak Sandwich
http://relish.com/recipes/italian-grilled-cube-steak-sandwich

Yield 2 servings

1 pound Black Angus Cube Steak
1/2 cup Italian Salad Dressing
4 slices Fresh Sourdough Bread
2 dashes Worcester Sauce
2 pieces Swiss Cheese

Place cube steaks in a large sandwich bag along with the Italian Dressing and allow to marinate for at least one hour. Four hours would be best.
Grill steaks about  4-5 minutes on one side, 2-3 minutes on the other.
Place between two slices of fresh buttered sourdough bread. Add cheese (optional). Slather with worcester sauce for extra spice (optional).

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Potato, Asparagus & Mushroom Hash
WebMD Recipe from EatingWell.com
Made with asparagus, roasted red pepper and mushrooms, this hash has a fresh and light, springtime taste. Serve with hearty whole-grain toast and an egg or two on top.

Prep: 40 minutes | Total Time: 40 minutes

1 pound new or baby potatoes, scrubbed, halved if large
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
1 bunch asparagus, (about 1 pound), trimmed and cut in 1/2-inch pieces
4 ounces shiitake mushroom caps, or other mushrooms, sliced
1 shallot, minced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small onion, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup chopped jarred roasted red peppers, rinsed
1 tablespoon minced fresh sage
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Fresh chives, for garnish

Place a steamer basket in a large saucepan, add 1 inch of water and bring to a boil. Put potatoes in the basket and steam until barely tender when pierced with a skewer, 12 to 15 minutes, depending on size. When cool enough to handle, chop into 1/2-inch pieces.

Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large (not nonstick) skillet over medium heat. Add asparagus, mushrooms, shallot and garlic and cook, stirring often, until beginning to brown, 5 to 7 minutes. Remove to a plate.

Add the remaining 2 tablespoons oil to the pan. Add onion and the potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally and scraping up the browned bits with a metal spatula, until the potatoes are browned, 4 to 8 minutes. Return the asparagus mixture to the pan along with roasted red pepper, sage, salt and pepper; cook, stirring, until heated through, about 1 minute more. Serve sprinkled with chives, if desired.

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CREAM CHEESE CHICKEN ENCHILADAS

5 oz. reduced fat cream cheese, softened

1/4 cup light sour cream

10 oz. can of enchilada sauce

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese, divided

1 cup shredded monterey jack cheese, divided

2 cups cooked shredded chicken

1 cup frozen corn kernels, thawed (canned corn works just fine, but drain it first)

4 oz. can diced green chiles

1/2 tsp chili powder

1/4 tsp cumin

Salt and pepper

4 scallions, thinly sliced

8 (8-inch) whole wheat tortillas

1.Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Spray a 9×13 dish with cooking spray.

2.In the bowl of your mixer cream together the cream cheese, sour cream, and 1/2 of the enchilada sauce. Stir in 1/2 cup of each type of cheese.

3.In a second bowl toss together the chicken, corn, cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper, green chiles, and half of the scallions. Add the chicken mixture to the cheese mixture and combine well.

4.Spread about half of the remaining enchilada sauce in the bottom of the baking dish.

5.Spoon the filling into each tortilla, roll the tortilla up, and place in the baking dish with the seam down. Pour the remaining enchilada sauce over the top of the filled tortillas and sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until hot and bubbly. Sprinkle with the remaining scallions and serve.

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Vietnamese Noodle Soup
http://www.miraclenoodle.com/t-vietnamese-noodle-soup.aspx

Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Total Time: 20 minutes

3 cups organic reduced sodium chicken stock.
1 clove garlic, minced.
1 tsp minced ginger.
1/4 tsp cardamom.
1- 7oz bag of Miracle Noodle Angel Hair Noodles.
1 boneless, skinless chicken breast sliced crosswise into 1/8 slices.
1 cup bean sprouts.
2 scallions, sliced into 1/4 inch pieces.
1 tsp chili sauce(optional).
1/2 lime, cut in half.
1/4 cup chopped cilantro.
1/3 cup of mushrooms-any variety (optional).
1 thinly slice chili pepper with seeds removed (optional).

In a 3 quart saucepan, bring chicken stock to a boil over medium-high heat. Add garlic, ginger and cardamom and let simmer for 10 minutes.
In a colander rinse noodles with warm water for a couple of minutes, pat dry with a small hand towel or paper towel to remove excess water. Divide noodles into two bowls.
Add chicken to stock and let cook for 5 minutes(until completely cooked)
Pour soup into bowls over the noodles. Divide bean sprouts between 2 soup bowls then top each serving with half the scallions and chili sauce. Garnish bowls with a slice of lime and pieces of cilantro.
I could swear I was at the Vietnamese restaurant, but without the calories!

Nutritional Info: 2 Servings
Calories 180
Total Fat 3.6g
Saturated Fat 1.0g
Cholesterol 73mg
Total Carbohydrates 6.2g
Dietary Fiber 1.7g
Protein 31.1g

*

McBitty's Bean Burgers
Originally published with Eat: Recipes for the Semi-Vegan
MARK BITTMAN, April 7, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/recipes/12221/McBittys-Bean-Burgers.html

TOTAL TIME 35 to 45 minutes with cooked beans

1/4 cup dried stemless porcini mushrooms
2 cups cooked or drained canned black beans
1 teaspoon roughly chopped garlic
3/4 cup rolled oats, or more if needed
2 teaspoons smoked paprika or chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Salt and black pepper
Bean-cooking liquid, porcini soaking liquid or water
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons olive oil

Soak the mushrooms in hot water for 5 to 10 minutes; roughly chop.

Put the mushrooms, beans, garlic, oats, spices and soy sauce in a food processor with a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Let the machine run until the mixture is combined, not puréed, about 30 seconds. (Or use a potato masher.) Add oats to thicken, or liquid to thin, as needed.

Stir in the cilantro, and let sit for 5 minutes.

Shape into 4 large or 8 small patties; let them sit for 5 minutes.

Put the oil in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Cook until crisp on one side, about 5 minutes. Flip and cook until the burgers are crisp on the other side, another 5 minutes or so. Serve with the usual fixings.

YIELD 8 small burgers, 4 supersize

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Chicken Chipotle Burger
http://angsarap.net/2013/04/02/chicken-chipotle-burger

These burgers are a good alternative to your usual beef burgers as this uses chicken dressed in creamy chipotle sauce which gives this dish a different dimension in terms of taste. If you love things spicy then this is for you, a simple chicken burger with tomatoes, cheese and chopped lettuce infused by smoked Mexican chillies.

Ingredients (Chicken Cutlet Patties)

2 pcs large chicken breasts
2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
1 cup flour
1/2 cup corn starch
1 1/2 cups bread crumbs
salt
freshly ground black pepper
oil

Ingredients (Chipotle Sauce)

1 cup mayonnaise
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
4 tsp pureed chipotle chilli in adobo
juice from 1/2 lime
1 clove garlic, minced
salt

Ingredients (Others)

8 burger buns
1/2 head lettuce, chopped
1 large white onion chopped
2 large tomatoes, sliced
8 slices smoked cheddar cheese

Method (Chicken Cutlet Patties)

1. Cut chicken breast into two then thinly slice each side into 2 pieces yielding 4 pieces for each breast. Using a meat pounder, lightly pound each piece until they are flat. Place in a container that can be covered then set aside.
2. Season chicken breast with salt and pepper chicken breasts then set aside.
3. Mix together flour and corn starch, place in a flat container.
4. Place eggs in another container.
5. Place bread crumbs in another flat container.
6. Lightly dip chicken pieces into the flour mixture, then dip it on the beaten eggs then into the bread crumbs. Set aside and do it with the remaining chicken breast.
7. Prepare a deep fryer or a wok with enough oil for deep frying, heat oil until hot but not smoking (ideally 180C) then deep fry each chicken piece until golden brown, this will take around 5 minutes.
8. Once cooked place in a dripping container to remove excess oil.

Method (Chipotle Sauce)

1. Combine all ingredients then place in the refrigerator, chill before using.

Method

1. Place chicken, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, onions and a generous amount of Chipotle in between your burger buns then serve.

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Cheeseburger Macaroni and Cheese
J. Kenji López-Alt
APR 4, 2013
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/04/cheeseburger-macaroni-and-cheese-recipe.html

Note: Ro*Tel tomatoes can be found in most supermarkets in the tomato section, or ordered online from Amazon. If you can't find them, substitute 1 (14-ounce) can of diced tomatoes and 1 (3 1/2-ounce) can of diced chilies.

Every recipe we publish is tested, tasted, and Serious Eats-approved by our staff. Never miss a recipe again by following @SeriousRecipes on Twitter!

serves 4
ACTIVE TIME:
30 minutes
TOTAL TIME:
30 minutes

2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 (12-ounce) can evaporated milk
2 eggs
Kosher salt
1 tablespoon vegetable or canola oil
1 pound ground chuck
4 scallions, finely sliced, whites and greens reserved separately
1 (14-ounce) can Ro*Tel tomatoes (see note above)
Freshly ground black pepper
Half pound dry elbow macaroni
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 ounces grated American cheese
8 ounces grated cheddar cheese

Combine cornstarch, evaporated milk, and eggs in a small bowl and whisk until homogenous. Set aside.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Meanwhile, heat oil in a large skillet over high heat until shimmering. Add beef and cook, breaking it up, until no longer pink, about 8 minutes. Add scallion whites and cook, stirring, until softened, about 1 minute. Add Ro*Tel tomaotes, stir to combine, season to taste with salt and pepper, and set aside.

Cook pasta in a large stock pot in salted water according to package directions. Drain, reserving 1 cup pasta cooking water. Return to stock pot and add cooking water, butter, evaporated milk mixture, and both cheeses. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until cheese is melted and pasta is creamy and smooth. Stir in beef mixture. Transfer to a serving bowl, top with scallion greens, and serve immediately.

*

Mad Men has returned for Season Six. Celebrate the Roger Sterling way: with a Dirty Martini...
http://www.amctv.com/shows/mad-men/cocktail-guide/dirty-martini

2½ oz gin
1½ oz dry vermouth
½ oz olive juice
3-4 green olives stuffed with blue cheese

Add dry vermouth to the martini glass, rinse, and pour out. Pour gin, olive juice and ice into mixing glass and shake until chilled. Strain in the martini glass and drop the 3 to 4 olives as garnish.

Significa 4-22-13

RIP

Comedian Jonathan Winters; Mouseketeer (and Beach Blanket Bingo star) Annette Funicello; UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; Arcosanti founder Paolo Soleri; Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief; Frank Bank, aka Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford; John Madden's most noted broadcasting sidekick Pat Summerall, the Ed McMahon of football announcers; Pink Floyd & Led Zeppelin album artwork designer Storm Thorgerson; USA Today media mogul Al Neuharth; Chrissy Amphlett, Divinyls lead singer best known for the song "I Touch Myself"; folk singer Richie Havens; and character actor Richard LeParmentier, best known for playing an Imperial general in Star Wars who mocks The Force, leading to Darth Vader psychic-choking him, complemented with the authoritative retort: "I find your lack of faith disturbing."

It appears suggesting Matthew Warren may have been gay, and his suicide may have been motivated by his father's relentless gay-bashing, is being cruel and insensitive to his father.  Meanwhile, Rick Warren's promotion of homophobia and gay "conversion" therapy is something to merely gloss over.  But the elephant in the room surrounding Matthew's suicide won't be ignored for long: I suspect the truth will come out sooner rather later, even with all the money and power that the Saddleback Megachurch has.  I'll repeat what I said in 2008 when Warren was quasi-legitimized in the establishment via Barack Obama's craven bootlicking: Rick Warren is Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson with better PR.

And last but not least, Roger Ebert:

Roger Ebert ultimately was all about film.  Here, in alphabetical order, are Ebert's final picks for the best films in history and the directors who made them.
Source:
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130404/chicago-citywide/roger-eberts-final-top-10-films-of-all-time

"Aguirre, Wrath of God" (Werner Herzog): The 1972 story of the travels of a Spanish soldier is "one of the great haunting visions of cinema."
"Apocalypse Now" (Francis Ford Coppola): The 1979 Vietnam War film is "a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking."
"Citizen Kane" (Orson Welles): Said Ebert of the 1941 epic: "Its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made; its depths surpass understanding."
"La Dolce Vita" (Federico Fellini): Made with "boundless energy," the 1960 film about a journalist in Rome was first reviewed by Ebert when he was a student at the University of Illinois.
"The General" (Buster Keaton): This 1927 movie starring Buster Keaton is "an epic of silent comedy."
"Raging Bull" (Martin Scorsese): Released in 1980, the tale of a fighter is "not a film about boxing but about a man with paralyzing jealousy and sexual insecurity."
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick): The 1968 sci-fi flick "is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe."
"Tokyo Story" (Yasujiro Ozu): Released in 1953, the story of an aging couple who travel to visit their grown children is a "as simple and universal as life itself."
"The Tree of Life" (Terrence Malick): The 2011 film, which follows a father, his wife and two sons, is a movie "of vast ambition and deep humility."
"Vertigo" (Alfred Hitchcock): Ebert thought this 1958 movie, about a private investigator hired to follow a woman, was Hitchcock's most confessional.

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‘I Know What The Shining Is Really About’: Inside the Crowded Cult at the Overlook Hotel
Mark Jacobson
Full Article:
http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/the-shining-cult-at-the-overlook-hotel.html

In the ensuing years, more than most movies, The Shining has deeply, inexorably embedded itself into the pop-culture mindscape. No one thinks much about naming a mid-range cop show Redrum, after the film’s backward “murder” riff. The identically dressed murdered little girls who roam the ghostways of the Overlook Hotel have far exceeded the recognizability of the Diane Arbus photo they are based on. Still, I remained in the dark. I had no notion that a DVD-based cult had risen up around The Shining, that the movie was studied by cine-psychonauts with a fine-tooth intensity usually reserved for the Zapruder film. I had no knowledge of the plethora of Internet sites like theoverlookhotel.com, which refers to itself as a clearinghouse for “ephemera related to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of modern horror, The Shining.”

This would change, however, when I happened upon a screening of Room 237, an epic of Shining fixation that critic Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter described as “nutty, arcane, and jaw-dropping … a head-first plunge down the rabbit hole of Kubrickiana from which, for some, there is evidently no return.”

Named for the forbidden Overlook room where the hapless, sexually frustrated Jack Torrance embraces a beautiful naked woman only to have her body decay at his tainted touch, Room 237 presents a compendium of Shining fans and scholars offering various readings on what the film is really “about.” These include: a metaphor for the extermination of the Native Americans; a retelling of the aforementioned Minotaur story channeled through an M. C. Escher–like maze of “impossible” architecture; a meditation on the nature of the Holocaust; as well as an encoded apologia by the director for his alleged role in faking the footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It is to the everlasting credit of Room 237 and its director, Rodney Ascher, that this apparent claptrap soon uncoils in the gray matter like a tapeworm.  

Immediately upon returning home from seeing Room 237, I streamed The Shining. Over the next 36 hours, I streamed the film three more times. Three decades past that desultory Times Square evening, fourteen years after Kubrick’s death in 1999, scales clanked from mine eyes like rain. In 1980, at age 32, The Shining seemed a trifle, made by a fading talent. In 2013, on the verge of Medicare, I saw a completely different movie, a Faustian saga of errant humanity, a sick, sick, sick, black-humored Kafka take on horror-movie conventions, marital relations, and the way synthetic realities tend to drive you crazy.

In other words, The Shining became emblematic of everything I had ever loved in Stanley Kubrick movies, a rewrapped gift from across time and tide from a once wrongly shunned, now thankfully resurrected idol.

It was certainly not unusual for people who disliked The Shining at first to change their mind about the film, said Bill Blakemore as we ate dinner at Cafe Fiorello on Broadway, not far from the offices of ABC News, where Blakemore started working more than four decades ago, covering the Vatican and numerous Middle Eastern wars. In Room 237, Blakemore is the one who believes the thematic subtext of The Shining is the murder of Native Americans by “the genocidal armies, the white men with their ax,” who came to build the Overlook Hotel in 1907.

Blakemore said he was clued to the larger message of the film by the presence of cans of Calumet baking powder on the shelves of the Overlook pantry. “He gives you a little key to the film’s larger meaning. This was how Kubrick worked,” Blakemore said. “He places something that catches your eye” that guides you through the confluence of false leads, misremembered memories, elliptical dialogue.

Asked why the significance of the baking-­powder cans was clear to him but not everyone else, Blakemore said, “I grew up in Chicago, just north of the Calumet Harbor. I knew the word meant peace pipe, the symbol of an honest treaty, but so little of what happens in The Shining is on the level. Still, for me, the cans point a direction. With Kubrick, however long the journey takes, by whatever route you get there, you eventually come face-to-face with the truth.”

The mystery resided in the film’s central image, the repeated sequence of blood cascading from behind the hotel’s elevator doors, Blakemore continued over a plate of Fiorello’s hearty antipasto. “When the Overlook manager, Stuart Ullman, tells Nicholson and Shelley Duvall that the hotel is built on an Indian burial ground, that’s a dead giveaway, because the line isn’t in the Stephen King novel. That elevator shaft drives a stake into the body and soul of a murdered people.”

This was how Blakemore saw it. “For years I’ve covered these terrible events. War after war. Dispossession after dispossession. Murder after murder. Where do you think all that blood comes from?”

What a marvelous semiological scavenger hunt Room 237 was! To accept that Kubrick was a genius, an unerring god of a filmmaker, a man so meticulous and precise that nothing could possibly appear in his frames through unpremeditated accident, opened the floodgates of potential meaning. Geoffrey Cocks, interviewed in the documentary, was positive that the presence of a German-made typewriter and the number 42 on Danny’s sweatshirt signified, among other uses of the number, that the film was a commentary on the Holocaust, “42” referencing 1942. (Danny also says redrum 42 times.) Juli Kearns, a devotee of the Cretan-labyrinth theory, knew instinctively that the window in Ullman’s office was somehow “wrong,” a deliberately placed, architecturally “impossible” portal of doom (suggesting the supernatural lair of the Minotaur), which she refers to as “powerful” and “sinister.” John Fell Ryan, with no specific theory except awe at Kubrick’s infinite, engulfing talent, delighted in running the film forward and backward at the same time to study the synchronicity of the superimpositions, such as when the image of the murdered little girls is overlaid by a headshot of Jack Nicholson, looking “like a clown” with “blood on his lips.” If Susan Sontag feared that “interpretation” had become a matter of dry-rot “hermeneutics” rather than passionate “erotics,” she would find no reason to fret here.

It wasn’t that so much of what was being said about The Shining was so blindingly new. What mattered was the DIY methodology, the way the meme moved, the collectivity. When Bill Blakemore first saw Room 237, he thought, “Well, maybe two of us are sane, and the other three are nuts.” This “40 percent rationality” quotient was irksome, but Blakemore soon came to appreciate director Rodney Ascher’s method. Since there are no talking heads, only voices heard over images from the films of Kubrick and others, the opinions seem to blend together into what Blakemore called “a giant conversation.” The result is “you might always have three people who are crazy, and two people are sane, but who’s who keeps changing.”

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The Entire Run Of Omni Magazine Is Available Online For Free
JAN 2, 2013 | AUTHOR: DAVID WHARTON | CATEGORY: SCI-FI
http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/entire-run-omni-magazine-online-free.html

The age of the internet has been rough on traditional printed publications. Even major magazines such as People and Time have occasionally struggled as they adapted to the digital age that has more and more people absorbing most of their content digitally. While that ongoing transition has seen the demise of many smaller publications, the magazines that have adapted well, like Wired, are better than ever. There’s another nice perk of the online era when it comes to the magazine world: you can preserve publications and make them available to more people with a scanner and some patience. Case in point: the entire run of Omni magazine is online and readable for free:

https://archive.org/details/omni-magazine

Focusing on both science and science fiction, Omni enjoyed a long and venerable run, first published in October 1978. The print version lasted until Winter 1995, and while a digital version continued through 1997, eventually that, too, folded. That’s a damn shame, but what an amazingly cool treat that the entire run of the magazine is available for our perusal at the Internet Archive. Some days I really love the internet...

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Supreme Court On Gay Marriage: 'Sure, Who Cares'
ISSUE 49•13 • Mar 26, 2013
http://www.theonion.com/articles/supreme-court-on-gay-marriage-sure-who-cares,31812/

WASHINGTON — Ten minutes into oral arguments over whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to marry one another, a visibly confounded Supreme Court stopped legal proceedings Tuesday and ruled that gay marriage was “perfectly fine” and that the court could “care less who marries whom.”

“Yeah, of course gay men and women can get married. Who gives a shit?” said Chief Justice John Roberts, who interrupted attorney Charles Cooper’s opening statement defending Proposition 8, which rescinded same-sex couples’ right to marry in California. “Why are we even seriously discussing this?”

“Does anyone else up here care about this?” Roberts added as his eight colleagues began shaking their heads and saying, “No,” “Nah,” and “I also don’t care about this.” “Great. Same-sex marriage is legal in the United States of America. Do we have anything of actual import on the docket, or are we done for the day?”

Before Roberts officially ended proceedings, sources confirmed that all nine justices were reportedly dumbfounded, asking why the case was even coming before them and wondering aloud if some sort of mistake had been made. Calling marriage equality a “no-brainer,” members of the High Court appeared not just confused but irritated when Proposition 8 defenders argued that gay marriage was not a national issue but a state matter.

Moreover, when Attorney Cooper said that gay marriage could harm the moral fabric of the country and hurt the institution of marriage, Associate Justice Sotomayor asked, “What are you even talking about?” while Justice Anthony Kennedy reportedly muttered, “You got to be fucking kidding me,” under his breath.

“I have to interject, Mr. Cooper,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said as the attorney argued that the government has legitimate reasons to discourage same-sex couples from getting married. “Do you honestly care this much about this issue? Because if you do, you’re a real goddamn idiot. Actually, you sound as dumb as dog shit, and you are wasting our time.”

“Should gay marriage be legal?” Ginsburg continued. “Yes. Done. Case closed. Goodbye. Christ, were we seriously scheduled to spend the next few months debating this?”

Even the typically conservative wing of the court maintained that, despite their personal views, it would be “downright silly” for them to rule that same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

“I’m a strict Originalist, Mr. Cooper, and I’m looking at a 14th Amendment that forbids any state from denying any person equal protection of the law,” Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said. “So, unless we are the most uncivilized society on the face of God’s green earth, I think we can all agree that a gay person is in fact a person. So what I’m saying is, who the fuck are we to tell a person who he or she can get married to? This is dumb. Can we talk about a real case now, please?”

Before adjourning the court, Roberts said there would be no official opinion on the case because it’s just “common goddamn sense,” and then addressed gay men and women directly.

“Get married, don’t get married, do whatever you want,” Roberts said. “It’s the opinion of this court that we don’t give two shits what you do.”

“C’mon, let’s go get some food,” added Roberts, as the eight other justices followed him out the door.

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Are “Farmscrapers” the Future of Sustainable Architecture?
Full Article:
http://hyperallergic.com/68025/are-farmscrapers-the-future-of-sustainable-architecture/

One of the advantages of living in a city is that the urban environment is in many ways more sustainable than suburbia — mass transit provides easy access to different areas without cars or highways, and dense planning efficiently fits more people into less space. But the quintessential architectural unit of the city, the skyscraper, isn’t always the greenest method of building. Enter “farmscrapers,” a new creation by the France and Belgium-based firm Vincent Callebaut Architects.

“Farmscraper” is the term they invented for a plan of six skyscrapers, deemed “Asian Cairns,” created for Shenzhen province in China. The towering structures are divided into ovular, blob-like sections that look like rocks smoothed by years in running water. Each blob plays host to a miniature forest of trees and grass, along with wind turbines and solar cells. Each farmscraper measures 1,300 feet high and has 111 floors, reports New York Daily News.

The farmscrapers are designed to act as self-contained ecosystems: The water created and collected by the planted farms will be recycled for use within the building. The farms will not necessarily produce food to sustain the community, but they will improve the city’s legendarily bad air quality. Each pebble unit will also contain a mixture of office, residential, and recreational space. By mingling efficient density with green design strategies, Callebaut is developing an architectural solution for China’s booming urban expansion. “In this context of hyper growth and accelerated urbanism, the Asian Cairns project fights for the construction of an urban multifunctional, multicultural and ecological pole,” the firm explained on World Architecture News.

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Brad Pitt: America's war on drugs is a charade, and a failure
The actor and executive producer of the documentary The House I Live In says US drugs policy needs a radical rethink
The Observer, Saturday 30 March 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/30/brad-pitt-war-drugs-failure

Today, with very little effort, anyone can land in virtually any city in this country, and within a day or two, procure their drug of choice. Since declaring a war on drugs 40 years ago, the United States has spent more than a trillion dollars, arrested more than 45 million people, and racked up the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yet it remains laughably easy to obtain illegal drugs. So why do we continue down this same path? Why do we talk about the drug war as if it's a success? It's a charade.

The drug war continues because it is a system that perpetuates itself. On a local level, any time a bust is made, scarcity drives up prices and, of course, the profit potential. History has taught us that there is no shortage of opportunists willing to fill the void and so the cycle continues and rates of drug use and dealing remain unchanged while incarceration skyrockets.

As long as we concentrate on staunching the supply, we create an artificially inflated market that is appealing enough to outweigh the risks of punishment. But if we focus our efforts on the flipside of the coin, and ask why there seems to be such an insatiable demand for recreational drugs, while investing in education, treatment and harm reduction, we might be able to break that cycle. The United States needs to fix the structures in our society that leave people desperate enough that addiction or drug dealing seems like a viable alternative.

The practical failure of the war on drugs is just part of the problem. The same policies that have had so little effect on the country's drug use have deeply and disparately impacted poor and minority communities in the United States. The burdens of over-incarceration and targeted policing have been borne overwhelmingly by the country's marginalised, making it harder than ever for large swathes of the population to enjoy the American dream. This is not because those communities use narcotics at a greater rate than the rest of us. In fact they don't. They are just more vulnerable to the war on drugs. It has to stop. It's one thing to abide by policies that don't make things better; it's another to continue with those that actually make things worse.

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Wesley Snipes Leaves Pa. Prison After Tax Sentence
April 05, 2013
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=176388576

Wesley Snipes has been released from a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

Snipes was convicted in 2008 on tax charges. He was released Tuesday and placed under home confinement. A Bureau of Corrections spokeswoman said Friday he'll be overseen by the New York Community Corrections Office until July 19.

Snipes has appeared in dozens of films, from "White Men Can't Jump" and "Demolition Man" in the early 1990s to the "Blade" trilogy. He entered the McKean prison in December 2010 to begin a three-year sentence for failure to file income tax returns.

Snipes belonged to a group that challenged the government's right to collect taxes. Prosecutors say he failed to file returns for at least a decade and owed millions of dollars in back taxes.

Snipes had appealed in an Atlanta court, saying he didn't get a fair trial.

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Kool Websites

Spiritual Economics
http://www.spiritual-economics.com

“Spiritual Economics” is a cross-disciplinary study combining psychology, economics and the spiritual science of the Vedas to explain why there is vulture capitalism, cut-throat competition, unending economic hardship, exploitation, inequity, and struggle in this world. Spiritual Economics explains why present economic methods can do nothing to solve these problems, reveals the actual source of our economic problems, and explains the only factual solution that can create an economy that serves everyone. Spiritual Economics also explains the origin and solution of our ecological problems.

There is a link between economic activity and human consciousness. Economics is not a physical science like electromagnetism that works according to natural laws. It is a set of ideas entirely created by human beings. The most important side of the economic equation therefore, is the human side, but this side is totally neglected in all discussions of economics. Since economics is a man-made creation, if we want to understand the economic problem and its solution we must understand how and why human beings act in this world. That will give us the insight needed to properly adjust all of the parameters of the economic calculus to get the desired result.  Employing the spiritual wisdom of the Bhagavad-gita, Spiritual Economics explains the behavior of spiritual beings living in a material world. This has everything to do with economic activity.

Spiritual Economics also traces out, and explains, the historical drift from the gift economy found in many indigenous cultures to the economic exploitation taking place today.

Spiritual Economics analyzes economic behavior as a function of human consciousness, and explains the development of consciousness using concepts from the Vedic worldview. As such it offers a perspective that is entirely absent from all other economic analyses. The serious reader of this website is encouraged to acquaint themselves with the Vedic worldview as a first step to understanding Spiritual Economics.


Silent Furnace
http://www.silentfurnace.com

From the Center of Your Heart, Emanates a Field. It's The Portal To True Power:
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This Toroidal Energetic Field Can Reach As Far As 5 Miles From Your Heart. It's 5,000 Times More Powerful Than the Brain, and Affects Everything In Your Life, There Is a Way To Access It...

Gunther White German Shepherds
http://guntherwgs.sharepoint.com/

Beautiful pure white German shepherd puppies available.  Bred for intelligence and white color, our dogs are highly intelligent and want to learn.  Capable for any purpose  -  police, seeing eye dog, search and rescue.

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All of our puppies are UKCI registered as purebred German shepherds and come with registration app., are vet checked, and are guaranteed as strong, healthy pups.

All they want is to be with you and to please you, this is the nature of the pack.  You will have a constant companion who will connect with you, and be your sure friend and consort.

How “kill the pigs” became “only the police should have guns”

Jon Rappoport
March 30, 2013
NoMoreFakeNews.com
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/how-kill-the-pigs-became-only-the-police-should-have-guns/

In the fabled 1960s, the cops were called pigs, and anybody on the political Left who wanted a ticket to the show knew that and mouthed it often.

At rallies, protests, and riots, people said: are the pigs here yet? I heard they were three blocks away. Wonder how many pigs they’re sending today? There! There they are! The pigs!

Now, on the Left, that tradition has morphed into: repeal the 2nd Amendment; turn in your guns; citizens with guns are satanic; the police will protect us; a private citizen with a gun is a killer and needs psychiatric lockdown; suspend that five-year old with the gun screen-saver.

What happened?

In 1968, if you asked a leftie college student whether a black man living in the inner city had a right to own a gun to protect himself against the cops, the answer, ten out of ten times, would have been yes.

Now, that leftie kid will be talking about the insanity of anybody owning a gun. Except for the cops.

Well, three things have happened since the 1960s. The end of the military draft, and the end of anybody caring who smokes pot or who has sex with who. Those changes melted away the whole “movement.”

A professor friend taught at UCLA during the turbulent 60s and early 70s. He told me as soon as the Vietnam war was over, the campus transformed in a flash. Students were suddenly all about finding a niche in the job market after graduation. Boom. Switch on, switch off.

The titanic idealism was put away in a drawer and filed under “crazy shit I did.”

The one remaining piece from the 60s that has endured is hatred of big corporations. But gradually, a parallel mindset has developed. First, grudging acceptance of big government; then toleration; then admiration.

Now, the Left is all about big government and the “positive changes” it can make.

And when I say the Left, I also mean the center, and a great deal of the right, because they’ve come along for the ride, too. They are the Left now.

In 1968, a big-time liberal presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, was the target of riots, by the Left, at the Democratic National Convention. Those riots tore apart half the city. Two years earlier, a march, by the Left, on the Century Plaza Hotel in LA, where Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was staying, sealed his fate. It was the last stone. Johnson, who had presided over the war on poverty and the creation of “The Great Society,” the biggest federal program since FDR’s New Deal, was mangled into oblivion.

Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for office again in 1968.

If Pelosi, Reid, Frank, and Obama had been around then, they would have been hammered in the same way by the Left. If they were for the war in Vietnam.

That was the big key, the war. Or to be precise, the military draft.

“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?!”

Meaning: “I won’t risk my neck going to Nam!”

The elite Left has become the personification of the soccer mom now. Worries about everything. Danger everywhere. Needs more helmets. Schedules more play dates. Wants more state surveillance. “If you’re against intrusion on your privacy, maybe you have something to hide.” “Keep the poor bottled up in inner cities, give them anything they want, just don’t let them into my neighborhood.”

The Left has also become the promise of a vague fairyland new age. “We’re all in this together.” “We can raise up the lowest among us (by printing more money).”

And the police are part of that fantasy. They’re the centurions at the gate. “Arm them to the teeth.” “Render the rest of us powerless.” That’s the grand solution to all our social ills. Naked, hairless, unarmed, watched around the clock, we’ll be beautifully safe, under the machine of a national police force.

You think I’m attacking a straw man here? You think I’m devising a distorted picture of the collectivist Left and their allies? You think there’s some still-powerful rebellion, on the political Left, against the State, that can put a million people on the street to protest a specific fascist program of that big power? Where is it?

What was it, really, even in 1968? If the Vietnam war had been fought with no draft, with a volunteer army, a large part of the 1960s wouldn’t have happened at all.

As the 1970s droned on into the 80s, a rapprochement was achieved between the citizens and the police. More and more, the Left came to believe the whole idea of rebellion against the State was an old delusion. It was something people like Camus and Sartre had written about. It was really a European thing, an abstract philosophical pose.

Once the dust and the smelly underwear of the 1960s had been cleared away, the real State Op came into being. Encourage, in every way possible, crime and criminals; and then come in behind that with an answer to the horrific threat: cops.

Irresistible. On the streets, in the newspapers, on television, enact crime after crime after crime…and then promote the only answer: cops. More cops. More cops with bigger and better weapons.

Disarm everybody and leave the police and the FBI and the military and numerous other government agencies with the only guns.

Does this excuse the actual perpetrators of street crimes? No, of course not. In fact, it makes them more guilty, because they’re aiding and abetting a much larger plan. I’m not here to excuse a man who picks up a gun and shoots somebody. I’m spelling out context:

Seed the whole country with violence-inducing toxic psychiatric drugs and you will get plenty of crime. Which is exactly what has happened. All the way from Ritalin (cheep speed) to the SSRI antidepressants, to the brain-hammer anti-psychotics, the drug companies and their allied psychiatrists have been creating killings.

Allow American street gangs to work for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, while providing those cartels with US government protection as they sell tons of heroin and cocaine and crack all over the country, and you will get plenty of crime.

Pour billions of dollars into “rehabilitating” inner cities and stand by while the money disappears and is stolen, dedicate funds to programs that have no chance of working, stop genuine grass roots movements to build vast urban farms and provide free food and a sense of community, and you will get plenty of crime.

These and other strategies are the actions of a war to expand crime, to necessitate massive intervention by the State. This is an Op.

Our current leader, after similar mouthpieces like Bush and Clinton, is the one man who couldn’t possibly be on board with the Op. Barack Obama. He couldn’t possibly be doing his part to destabilize the whole society. He couldn’t. Which is exactly why he is the president of the United States now. Because he seems to stand for something better. But he doesn’t. He is definitely part of the Op.

But if he really did stand for something better, he could do several things, by executive order, that would detonate a real revolution in this country. Three crazy wild out-of-left field things, just for starters.

Declare and wage an all-out war on drug cartels and their sub-contracted domestic gangs.

Kick off a huge—and I mean huge—genuine urban farming program in every city in America. Free, clean, non-GMO food for the poor, grown by the poor, shared by the poor. The ramifications of such a program, carried out swiftly, would be astonishing on every level.

And attack, with a vengeance, Big Pharma and their psychiatric drugs.

What???

Huh???

The baffled response to such a program illustrates just how deep the brainwashing in this country goes.

And some people would say, “If Obama stood up and did those things, he’d be killed tomorrow.”

That’s getting us closer to the truth. But it would be senseless to stand up alone. He would need allies. Lots of them. Where would he find them? (Assuming he would launch this three-pronged program…a ludicrous assumption.)

Would he meet with Pelosi, Frank, Reid, Hillary, Boehner, Paul Ryan, Rubio, Rachel Maddow, Rush Limbaugh….

Where in the familiar circles of power would any president find allies to turn things around?

Nowhere.

And that’s exactly why rebellion against the State isn’t just some old crusty abstract idea.

That’s why decentralization of power in America, at all levels, is THE counter-agenda. Intentional communities, nullification of unconstitutional federal laws, boycotts against corporations like Monsanto, alternative news sources, growing your own food, local parents threatening school boards to back off forcing psychiatric drugs down the throats of their children, home schooling, etc., etc.

Rendering every citizen weaponless, while at the same time giving the police every possible weapon and surveillance tool, is a solution in the same way that closing your eyes and jumping into a big barrel and pulling down the lid over your head is a solution.

300 million barrels with TV sets and smart phones is exactly what the State Corporatists are pushing.

The political Left promoted rebellion against the State as long as they saw themselves outside in the cold. But when they began to realize that they were, in fact, becoming the State, with all the power of the federal government, they dropped the idea of genuine rebellion like a hot potato. They praised big government, they assured everybody it was the solution, not the problem.

They shed bottom-up revolution because they were top-down.

There are lots of old Lefties who have been working to stop GMOs. When Obama signed the Monsanto Protection Act the other day, they paused and pondered. They began to realize they’ve been caught in a squeeze play. Their man, the president, isn’t who they thought he was. Not at all.

This disaffection is a familiar theme: outsiders feel solidarity in their revolution; then their leaders become insiders; then the ideals vanish, leaving the foot soldiers in the lurch.

Down through history, this scenario has played out countless times, in every conceivable organization that became big, bigger, and biggest. But history isn’t our strong suit. If a teacher really wanted to educate his college students, he’d put together a course on this very subject: The Carrot and the Stick.

The promise of something better, announced from a perch or pulpit of leadership; and what eventually happened to that promise.

What happens is a grand reversal. The very force that is being fought against eventually becomes the “guardian of the Good” and the supreme ruler.

The cadre who once railed against the rise of the police state is now dealing, not pot, but the surveillance of every phone call, email, text, computer keystroke, and purchase in this country. They’re dealing the TSA and the war in Afghanistan. They’re dealing covert ops in the Middle East and executing regime change, using thugs and terrorists. They’re bailing out mega-corporations and banks. They’re buying billions of rounds of ammo. They’re appointing people to hold the door open for Monsanto. They’re using psychiatry to drug the population. They’re spraying heavy metals in the sky. They’re presiding over and sustaining the economic disaster. They’re funding the transhuman future.

They’re doing all this while continuing to mouth the ideals they once swore to uphold.

In the words of the 1960s, they’re working for the Man.

The Man is the group of elite Globalists who have always followed the same plan: put the management of the planet under one roof.

To accomplish this Globalist aim, every honest cop and effective cop and idealistic cop and indifferent cop and corrupt cop will have to be turned into a faceless pig with a weapon pointed against his own people.

These “former rebels” who now rule the roost are saying, “Today, the pigs work for us. We tell them what to do. Just love the pigs and everything will be okay. You don’t need to own a gun. It’s all good. Just keep your eyes straight ahead and march into the future.”

Who would have thought rebels of bygone days would be staging their own version of neocon glory?

Anyone with a grain of sense.

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at:

http://www.nomorefakenews.com