Ever since the release of his book Juiced, The Konformist has been a champion of Jose Canseco’s tales of steroids in baseball, tales that have been proven to be pretty much 100 percent correct. The interest we've had on the issues of steroids was based on one assumption: that steroids are not only dangerous to the athletes who take them, they create a climate where other athletes are pressured to take steroids to remain competitive, thus risking the health of others. Certainly this is the case in the two cryptosports of bodybuilding and professional wrestling: it is alleged that Vince McMahon pressured wrestlers to roid up under fear of economic punishment.
There is another view on the issue of PEDs (performance enhanced drugs) that isn't commonly presented and isn't politically correct, but has its advocates. That view is athletes are adults, they control their own bodies, and they should be allowed to put whatever they want into them. If others feel pressured to take PEDs to compete, that's their problem, athletic competition is tough business.
Given the general political bent of The Konformist, such a view should have been given more support than it has in the past. And it appears there is a surprisingly high percentage of the public that agrees with it. Indeed, there seems to be some acceptance of doping in the NFL by the public. Perhaps that is because, considering the violent state of professional football, the feigned concerned over the dangers of PEDs by NFL officials seems as unconvincing and hypocritical as their supposed sudden passion over violent hits. In any case, now that the shock of the Steroid Era of baseball has worn off, perhaps it is time to take seriously what may turn out to be not only the natural evolution of the debate, but the more mature viewpoint: athletes dope up, deal with it.
A recent news story gives some strong support for this viewpoint: the shocking revelations that many NFL players (including future first ballot Hall of Famer Ray Lewis) have been breaking the NFL drug testing rules by taking a supplement that contains deer antler. The story was broken January 19th by Yahoo-owned ThePostGame.com, but there's a pretty good chance that even the most obsessed sports fan missed this report. For once, the most cynical explanation isn't the truth: the story wasn't buried by the korporate sports media over profits during the NFL's gold rush to the Super Bowl. The real reason the story has been underreported is because nobody really cares.
The lack of concern over the deer antler non-scandal is due to the fact users were not attempting to break NFL doping rules. In fact, the opposite appears to be true: the usage of “The Ultimate Spray” was inspired by attempts to avoid taking steroids and other illegal muscle builders. The maker of the antler spray even named itself Sports With Alternatives To Steroids (S.W.A.T.S.) emphasizing this concept. Their spray is not only 100% legal in the USA, it requires no doctor's prescription. When interviewed by ThePostGame.com, Oakland Raiders head coach Hue Jackson and Cincinnati Bengals safety Roy Williams seemed unaware of any drug violations involved with the product. When asked, Williams bluntly declared: “I use the spray all the time. Two to three times a day. My body felt good after using it. I did feel a difference.”
Unfortunately, deer antler contains IGF-1, a protein similar to HGH, and it's listed as a banned substance by both the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) and the NFL. This despite ThePostGame.com noting: "Deer velvet antler has been a staple of Chinese medicine for 2,000 years and is known in Eastern cultures for improving everything from overall health to sleep to athletic performance to sexual energy..." Mitch Ross, owner of S.W.A.T.S., declared: “It’s not synthetic. You have to understand it’s coming from a God-made animal. No athlete has tested positive for IGF-1 from my spray.”
(Ross' claim of no positive drug tests caused by their spray is in dispute. David Vobora, a St. Louis Rams linebacker who failed a 2009 test, alleges "The Ultimate Spray" is the true culprit in a lawsuit. While claims of doping violations caused by OTC supplements should be met with the skepticism that "My dog ate my homework" induces, it certainly seems like a plausible explanation in this case.)
The response of the WADA is dismissive of this defense. Jonathan Danaceau, director of the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Lab, pronounced the establishment line: “It’s considered performance-enhancing. It’s similar to HGH in that it aids in recovery. It helps build tissue, and strengthen tissue – more than you can ever do by training alone. Any preparation that is not naturally occurring is banned. Taking IGF-1 through deer antler is banned as well.”
So both sides are in complete agreement: deer antler is a powerful supplement for athletic training. ThePostGame.com even cites a study that provides ample evidence on how powerful it is:
The author of the study, Craig Broeder, former head of the Exercise Science program at East Tennessee State University, said it is under review by the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. Broeder tested the effects of velvet antler supplements on aerobic, anaerobic, and strength performance. He included 32 men who had a history of at least four years of strength training. Subjects were divided into two groups in a double-blinded, placebo-controlled study where they performed high intensity resistance training over 10 weeks. Half of the subjects were given 3,000mg of deer antler per day, with the other half receiving a sugar pill.
The results of the study showed several health benefits, including a reduction of body fat, an increase in body strength relative to body weight, and improvements in aerobic capacity. Most surprisingly, Broeder said, the athletes improved their cardiovascular performance without doing any cardiovascular activity.
“These aren’t the guys that want to get up on the treadmill and run,” Broeder said. “They’re big guys. Yet, they significantly increased their aerobic capacity on deer antler velvet.”
This isn't a completely new story: before they became baseball pariahs, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both admitted to taking the then OTC steroid-like supplement androstenedione, a controversy that was a mere blip in 1998's summer of baseball love. What is unusual about the deer antler controversy is that WADA doesn't even try to argue (as was done with andro) it's a dangerous substance, instead that being a performance enhancer is bad enough, with or without any negative effects.
That being the case, it appears a cynical view to the sports doping hysteria is pretty accurate, that the goal is really to control athletes with threats and punishment, rather than to protect them. The fact that all drug-testing policies have pretty much been brought from the top down rather than initiated by the athletes themselves is consistent with that view.
Should athletes be allowed to dope their bodies however they want? Or perhaps should they be allowed to use without punishment any drug or supplement that is OTC, with federally regulated drugs okay under a doctor's supervision? As politically correct as it is to point out, there are many benefits to the usage of steroids, HGH and other PEDs in controlled doses, which is why they continue to have legal legitimate uses. Certainly abuses will continue, but there's nothing new here. At least with a doctor who has a license to lose there would be some form of accountability. Again, bodybuilding and pro wrestling make strong cases against laissez-faire athletic drug policies, but perhaps it is time to at least include such views in the frame of the debate.
NFL Orders Raiders Head Coach Hue Jackson To End Ties With Company Linked To Banned Substance
Wednesday, January 19 2011
Eric Adelson
http://www.thepostgame.com/features/201101/tpg-exclusive-nfl-orders-raiders-head-coach-hue-jackson-end-ties-company-linked-bann
DeerVelvetInformation.org
SWATSTeam.com
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
We Will Oppose Obama As Long As He Supports War
http://warisacrime.org/primary
We Will Oppose Obama As Long As He Supports War
We the undersigned share with nearly two-thirds of our fellow Americans the conviction that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced. This has been our position for years and will continue to be, and we take it seriously. We vow not to support President Barack Obama for renomination for another term in office, and to actively seek to impede his war policies unless and until he reverses them.
Since he became president, Obama has had three opportunities to work with Congress to reduce military spending, but instead has championed increases in that spending each time, despite the fact that this spending represents a clear threat to the economic future of our country. He has continued as well to try to hide the true costs of the wars by funding them with off-the-books supplemental spending bills, despite the fact that he campaigned against this very practice.
The President has escalated a war on Afghanistan in which rising civilian deaths and atrocities have become routine.
He has given the CIA even greater freedom of action to launch lethal drone strikes against civilian houses in Pakistan on mere assumption of some connection with Taliban or other organizations, despite the warning from the U.S. Ambassador in late 2009 -- revealed in a Wikileaks cable -- that such attacks could "destabilize" the Pakistani government, despite many reports that civilians, including children, are disproportionately victims, and despite the contention of the United Nations and many U.S. allies that this practice is illegal.
Obama has approved an increase in covert operations by CIA-controlled Afghan troops into Pakistan, and his administration has remained silent while the U.S. command in Afghanistan leaked to the New York Times plans for new Special Operations Forces raids into Pakistan aimed at Afghan Taliban targets.
The President has expanded the use of Special Operations Forces (SOF), operating in virtually total secrecy and without any accountability to Congress, in one country after another. SOF troops are presently in some 75 nations -- 15 more than when Obama took office.
President Obama has, on a later schedule than he campaigned on, finally reduced U.S. troop presence in Iraq. But he has not fully withdrawn U.S. combat forces from Iraq or ended U.S. combat there, his claims to have done so notwithstanding. His vice president has suggested, without correction by the President, the possibility of a U.S. military presence in the country even after the deadline for withdrawal under the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement, if only through the use of military contractors.
The Obama administration has announced plans to form an army of mercenary troops from private military contractors in Iraq which is to have its own air force and its own fleet of mine-resistant military vehicles. The plan includes continued contracts with the company formerly called Blackwater, despite the knowledge that it was guilty of atrocities against civilians in that country, and despite the openly declared opposition of the Iraqi government to such a continued role.
Obama has overseen increased weapons sales to foreign nations, and assisting in those sales has been a major function of his State Department. He has approved increased funding for work on nuclear weapons, even while supporting an arms control treaty. He has established a policy of potential nuclear first strike against Iran or North Korea.
President Obama has argued for the justness of war-making in widely watched speeches from the Oval Office and in Oslo, Norway, where he was accepting a Nobel Peace Prize. He has, in his Oval Office speech last August, defended false statements that took our nation into the current wars and false statements that have prolonged them.
The President has supported sanctions against Iran and Syria that punish the people, especially children, and not the leadership, of those countries. He has sent ships and missiles to Iran's border. He has risked hostilities with North Korea through the ongoing construction of new military bases in South Korea and provocative war games exercises. His administration has helped a military coup succeed in Honduras.
President Obama has sought to allow more Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. He has protected Israel's killing of activists on a humanitarian aid ship, not even protesting at the murder of an unarmed American youth. He issued a presidential memorandum on October 25, 2010, giving U.S. approval for the use of child soldiers by Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Yemen. He has backed Indonesian armed forces that assassinated civilian activists in late 2009. He has expanded the U.S. military presence in Colombia, Costa Rica, Haiti, Guam, Italy, and Diego Garcia, as well as overseeing an enormous military base construction project in Afghanistan.
President Obama has not closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay and continues to maintain a network of detention facilities in Afghanistan through which prisoners, according to the most recent information available, are still being subjected to harsh treatment. He has claimed the right to imprison people, including American citizens, indefinitely without charge or trial, thus further cementing in place the elimination of the rights of prisoners of war and the elimination of the right of habeas corpus for anyone, as well as the rights found in the Fourth through Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The President has claimed the power of rendition. His CIA Director Leon Panetta and his senior advisor David Axelrod have asserted, without correction by the President, that the President maintains the power to torture. In the recent case of Gulet Mohamed, the Obama administration, for a time, claimed the power to forbid an American to reenter the country, absent any conviction or even any charge of a crime, and apparently collaborated with Kuwait to torture that American. The President has also openly claimed the power to order the assassination of Americans abroad. In Iraq, the U.S. military has continued to work with and protect from accountability an Iraqi military that is known to regularly use torture.
The President has expanded the use of warrantless spying. Under his leadership, the FBI has infiltrated peace groups and raided the homes of peace activists. It has set up and entrapped in terrorism charges people whose training and motivation came largely or even entirely from the FBI. He has supported the re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act, which strips away Americans' civil liberties.
President Obama, in direct violation of the Nuremberg Charter, a U.S. treaty commitment, has publicly instructed his Attorney General not to prosecute individuals responsible for crimes, including torture. His administration has worked hard to provide retroactive immunity to corporations engaged in warrantless spying and individuals engaged in sanctioning torture. He has kept secret a vast trove of documents, photos, and videos pertaining to prisoner abuse. He has advanced unprecedented claims of secrecy powers in defending the crimes of his predecessor. President Obama's White House has put great pressure on European states not to investigate or prosecute U.S. war crimes.
This president has restricted the release of the names of White House visitors and has pursued the prosecution and punishment of government whistleblowers more aggressively than any previous president. His administration is responsible for the cruel and unusual lengthy confinement in a 6' by 12' cell, prior to any trial, of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning. His vice president, Joe Biden, has publicly labeled an Australian journalist, Julian Assange, a "terrorist." President Obama has used a private propaganda firm that had been exposed planting lies in Iraqi media, to screen potential embedded reporters for coverage of the U.S. military. He has used the military to restrict reporting by American journalists on an oil spill in American waters.
Perhaps most perilously, President Obama has claimed the right to engage in many of these activities without the authorization of Congress. He has even claimed the power first developed by his predecessor to rewrite new laws through the extra-Constitutional use of presidential signing statements. Expanded powers that are not opposed now will be far more difficult to oppose later with another president able to claim past precedent.
The President's own deficit commission recommended cuts of $100 billion to the military budget. The United States spends about $1 trillion each year on the military, through a variety of departments, and has spent over $1 trillion already on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Over half of every U.S. dollar of income tax is going to war making. The Department of Defense budget alone is larger than the military expenditures of the next largest 16 militaries in the world combined. That budget could be cut by 85% and still be the largest in the world. In addition to the lessening of hostility toward our country that would result from a significant decrease in U.S. military presence around the world, by shifting our financial resources we could create jobs, green energy, top quality free education, public transportation and infrastructure. We could also end all talk of reducing our Social Security or health coverage. We intend to support public servants who put our money where it serves the public.
We are not concerned with whether President Obama is acting enthusiastically or reluctantly in pursuing a militaristic policy abroad and more repression of dissent at home. It matters little whether he is submitting to powerful forces or freely following his preferred course. We do not elect his soldiers or spies, his advisors, his campaign funders, or the owners of our major media outlets. We elect the president. We will not support his nomination for another term, and we believe that a large proportion of Americans who voted for him in 2008 will not do so again unless he reverses the most egregious policies to which we have referred -- especially by taking decisive steps to end the war on Afghanistan and to make deep cuts in the military and war budgets.
Some of those who have signed:
Nic Abramson, U.S. Boat to Gaza
Meredith Aby, MN Anti-War Committee
Elliott Adams, president, Veterans For Peace
Will Allen, author, The War on Bugs
Maria Allwine, Pledge of Resistance Baltimore
Vicki Andrews, Peace Circle - Grand Rapids MN
Jean Athey, coordinator of Peace Action Montgomery (MD)* and national board member, Peace Action*
Nellie Hester Bailey, Harlem Tenants Council & Black Agenda Report
Anna Baltzer, activist
Missy Beattie, activist and writer
Mark Bebawi, producer/host, The Monitor, KPFT
Medea Benjamin, cofounder, Code Pink*
Frida Berrigan, War Resisters League*
Toby Blome, activist, Bay Area Code Pink
William Blum, author of books on U.S. foreign policy
Leah Bolger, CDR, USN (Ret), Vice-President, Veterans For Peace
Roy Bourgeois, founder, School of the Americas Watch
Linda Boyd, activist
Lenni Brenner, author, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
Jean Hay Bright, Maine's 2006 Democratic US Senate candidate
Elaine Brower, military mom, World Can't Wait
Mike Byerly, Alachua County Commissioner, Gainesville, Fla.
Scott Camil, President, Gainesville Florida Chapter, Veterans For Peace
Patty Casazza, 9/11 widow, former 9/11 Commission Family Steering Committee Member
Oskar Castro, board member, War Resisters League
Zach Choate, operation recovery field organizer, Iraq Veterans Against the War
David Cobb, Move To Amend coalition*
Jeff Cohen, author/media critic
William John Cox, Voters Evolt!
Catarina Correia, video editor, coordinating committee member, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Bud Courtney, New York Catholic Worker
David Culver, publisher, Evergreene Digest
Ronnie Cummins, national director, Organic Consumers Association
Matthew W. Daloisio, Witness Against Torture*
Nicolas J S Davies, author, Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
Elena Day, People's Alliance for Clean Energy
Laurie Dobson, director, EndUSWars.org
Frank Dorrel, publisher, Addicted To War
Jane Swift Dugdale, Main Line Peace Action
Sibel Edmonds, founder & director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
Cherie Eichholz, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Roy Eidelson, past president, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Pat Elder, Coordinating Committee, National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth*
Daniel Ellsberg, former State and Defense Dept. official, whistleblower of Pentagon Papers
Samuel S. Epstein, professor
Desiree Fairooz, Northern Virginians for Peace and Justice
Mike Ferner, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Joy First, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Robert Fitrakis, professor, editor
Lisa Fithian, convenor, United for Peace and Justice
Margaret Flowers, M.D., Physicians for a National Health Program*
Glen Ford, executive editor, Black Agenda Report*
George Friday, Independent Progressive Politics Network
Sarah Fuhro, board member, Military Families Speak Out*
James Clay Fuller, retired newspaper editor
Monica Gabrielle, 9/11 widow, former 9/11 Commission Family Steering Committee Member
Bruce K. Gagnon, coordinator, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space*
Lila Garrett, radio host
Nate Goldshlag, national board member and treasurer, Veterans For Peace
Michelle Gross, president, Communities United Against Police Brutality
Thomas John Gumbleton, retired Roman Catholic Bishop
DeeDee Halleck, founder, Paper Tiger Tv, Deep Dish Network, emerita professor, UCSD
Connie Hammond, Progressive Peace Coalition, Columbus, Ohio
Kathy Hass, activist, Central Florida Code Pink
Bill Habedank, Veterans for Peace
Jim Haber, coordinator, Nevada Desert Experience
Susan Harman, Progressive Democrats of America*, Code Pink*
David Harris, Veterans for Peace
David Harris, draft resister, author
Leslie Harris, activist, Code Pink Greater Dallas*
Bob Heberle, former national board member, Veterans for Peace
Chris Hedges, author, Death of the Liberal Class
Dud Hendrick, Maine chapter president, Veterans for Peace
Steve Hendricks, author, A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial
Martha Hennessy, Catholic Worker
John Heuer, chair and national board member, NC Peace Action
Herbert J. Hoffman, vice president, Maine Veterans for Peace
Connie Hogarth, Cofounder WESPAC (Westchester Peoples Action Coalition)*
Will Hopkins, executive director, NH Peace Action, national board member, Veterans for Peace, member, IVAW
Lydia Howell, writer and host, "Catalyst", KFAI Radio
Sam Husseini, activist
Hugh Iglarsh, writer/editor
Rick Jahnkow, Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft*
Dahr Jamail, journalist/author
Mark C. Johnson, executive director, Fellowship of Reconciliation
Larry Kalb, former Democratic congressional candidate
Tarak Kauff, Veterans For Peace
Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence*
Nada Khader, WESPAC Foundation
Joey King, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Howie Klein, publisher, DownWithTyranny.com
Michael Knox, professor and clinical psychologist
Georg Koszulinski, filmmaker
Joel Kovel, author, The Enemy of Nature, Overcoming Zionism
Andrew Kolin, author, State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W Bush
Steve Lane, activist
Jesse Lemisch, Historian, Emeritus Prof, John Jay Coll of Criminal Justice, CUNY
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives
Linda LeTendre, LMSW Christian Peace Witness
Dave Lindorff, editor, Thiscantbehappening.net
Erik Lobo, Veteran For Peace
Ralph Lopez, JobsForAfghans.org
David MacMichael, Ph.D., former CIA analyst
Karen Malpede, playwrite
Sarah Martin, subpoenaed antiwar and international solidarity activist
Gene Marx, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Ethan McCord, IVAW, VFP, former army specialist from "collateral murder" video
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst
Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Nominee for U.S. President
David McReynolds, Socialist Party USA*
Bob Meola, War Resisters League National Committee* and Courage to Resist Organizing Collective*
Michael T. McPhearson, co-convenor United For Peace and Justice, former executive director of Veterans For Peace
Camilo E. Mejia, activist, resister
Linda Milazzo, activist, writer
Dede Miller, activist
Mark Crispin Miller, author, professor
Nick Mottern, Consumers for Peace
Gael Murphy, co-chair, Legislative Working Group, United for Peace and Justice*, co-founder, Code Pink*
Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy*
Tom Neilson, folk musician
Bruce Nestor, past president, National Lawyers Guild
Brad Newsham, activist
Georgianne Nienaber, activist and author
Stirling Newberry, former military contractor
Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center
Jeanne Olson, veteran, activist
Paul Ortiz, Veterans for Peace, author
Michael Parenti, author and activist
Cynthia Papermaster, director, National Accountability Action Network*
Judith Mahoney Pasternak, War Resisters League*
Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist
Marc Pilisuk, author, Who Benefits from Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System
Lewis Pitts, Legal Aid of NC
Gareth Porter, author and journalist
Bill Quigley, Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law, Loyola University New Orleans*
Jesselyn Radack, former Department of Justice legal adviser
Garett Reppenhagen, chair of the board of directors, Iraq Veterans Against the War
Ward Reilly, advisory committee member, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace, VVAW
Jill Richardson, author
Katie Robbins, national organizer, Healthcare-NOW!
David Rovics, singer/song writer
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent, one of TIME's 2002 Persons of the Year
Richard E. Rubenstein, author, Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War
Stephanie Rugoff, project coordinator, War Criminals Watch
A.F. Saidy, M.D., Coalition for Peace in M.E. in L.A.
Nicole Sandler, radio host
Lisa Savage, Code Pink Maine*
Linda Schade, WikiLeaksisDemocracy.org
Bill Scheurer, PeaceMajority Report
Sue Serpa, coordinator, JobsForAfghans.org
Jamilla El-Shafei, Peace Action Maine, Code Pink
Joanne Sheehan, coordinator, War Resisters League New England
Robert Shetterly, artist, Americans Who Tell the Truth
Gar Smith, Environmentalists Against War
Michael Steven Smith, Law and Disorder Radio; board member, Center for Constitutional Rights*
Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Democracy Unlimited
Jeffrey St Clair, CounterPunch
John Stauber, author, Weapons of Mass Deception
Josh Stieber, conscientious objector
John Stockwell, former intelligence officer, author
David Swanson, WarIsACrime.org
Rev. James L. Swarts, professor, Veterans For Peace, Progressives In Action Peace Committee Chair
Dennis Trainor, Jr., NoCureForThat.org
Diane Turco, Cape Codders for Peace and Justice
Sue Udry, Defending Dissent Foundation*
Elizabeth De La Vega, former assistant U.S. attorney, author
Robert C. Walter, Peace Action Maine, associate member of Veterans for Peace
Harvey Wasserman, author
Janet Weil, military family member
Alison Weir, president, Council for the National Interest
Beverley Whipple, Fla. chapter leader, Military Families Speak Out
Paki Wieland, activist
S. Brian Willson, Viet Nam Veteran, activist
Diane Wilson, shrimper, activist, author, Veterans for Peace
Marcy Winograd, former Democratic congressional candidate
Ann Wright, US Army Reserve Colonel and former US diplomat
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, pastor, St Peter's Episcopal Church - Detroit
Dan Yaseen, Peace Fresno
Charles M. Young, contributing editor, Thiscantbehappening.net
Kevin Zeese, Voters For Peace
Maggie Zhou, Climate SOS
We Will Oppose Obama As Long As He Supports War
We the undersigned share with nearly two-thirds of our fellow Americans the conviction that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced. This has been our position for years and will continue to be, and we take it seriously. We vow not to support President Barack Obama for renomination for another term in office, and to actively seek to impede his war policies unless and until he reverses them.
Since he became president, Obama has had three opportunities to work with Congress to reduce military spending, but instead has championed increases in that spending each time, despite the fact that this spending represents a clear threat to the economic future of our country. He has continued as well to try to hide the true costs of the wars by funding them with off-the-books supplemental spending bills, despite the fact that he campaigned against this very practice.
The President has escalated a war on Afghanistan in which rising civilian deaths and atrocities have become routine.
He has given the CIA even greater freedom of action to launch lethal drone strikes against civilian houses in Pakistan on mere assumption of some connection with Taliban or other organizations, despite the warning from the U.S. Ambassador in late 2009 -- revealed in a Wikileaks cable -- that such attacks could "destabilize" the Pakistani government, despite many reports that civilians, including children, are disproportionately victims, and despite the contention of the United Nations and many U.S. allies that this practice is illegal.
Obama has approved an increase in covert operations by CIA-controlled Afghan troops into Pakistan, and his administration has remained silent while the U.S. command in Afghanistan leaked to the New York Times plans for new Special Operations Forces raids into Pakistan aimed at Afghan Taliban targets.
The President has expanded the use of Special Operations Forces (SOF), operating in virtually total secrecy and without any accountability to Congress, in one country after another. SOF troops are presently in some 75 nations -- 15 more than when Obama took office.
President Obama has, on a later schedule than he campaigned on, finally reduced U.S. troop presence in Iraq. But he has not fully withdrawn U.S. combat forces from Iraq or ended U.S. combat there, his claims to have done so notwithstanding. His vice president has suggested, without correction by the President, the possibility of a U.S. military presence in the country even after the deadline for withdrawal under the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement, if only through the use of military contractors.
The Obama administration has announced plans to form an army of mercenary troops from private military contractors in Iraq which is to have its own air force and its own fleet of mine-resistant military vehicles. The plan includes continued contracts with the company formerly called Blackwater, despite the knowledge that it was guilty of atrocities against civilians in that country, and despite the openly declared opposition of the Iraqi government to such a continued role.
Obama has overseen increased weapons sales to foreign nations, and assisting in those sales has been a major function of his State Department. He has approved increased funding for work on nuclear weapons, even while supporting an arms control treaty. He has established a policy of potential nuclear first strike against Iran or North Korea.
President Obama has argued for the justness of war-making in widely watched speeches from the Oval Office and in Oslo, Norway, where he was accepting a Nobel Peace Prize. He has, in his Oval Office speech last August, defended false statements that took our nation into the current wars and false statements that have prolonged them.
The President has supported sanctions against Iran and Syria that punish the people, especially children, and not the leadership, of those countries. He has sent ships and missiles to Iran's border. He has risked hostilities with North Korea through the ongoing construction of new military bases in South Korea and provocative war games exercises. His administration has helped a military coup succeed in Honduras.
President Obama has sought to allow more Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. He has protected Israel's killing of activists on a humanitarian aid ship, not even protesting at the murder of an unarmed American youth. He issued a presidential memorandum on October 25, 2010, giving U.S. approval for the use of child soldiers by Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Yemen. He has backed Indonesian armed forces that assassinated civilian activists in late 2009. He has expanded the U.S. military presence in Colombia, Costa Rica, Haiti, Guam, Italy, and Diego Garcia, as well as overseeing an enormous military base construction project in Afghanistan.
President Obama has not closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay and continues to maintain a network of detention facilities in Afghanistan through which prisoners, according to the most recent information available, are still being subjected to harsh treatment. He has claimed the right to imprison people, including American citizens, indefinitely without charge or trial, thus further cementing in place the elimination of the rights of prisoners of war and the elimination of the right of habeas corpus for anyone, as well as the rights found in the Fourth through Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The President has claimed the power of rendition. His CIA Director Leon Panetta and his senior advisor David Axelrod have asserted, without correction by the President, that the President maintains the power to torture. In the recent case of Gulet Mohamed, the Obama administration, for a time, claimed the power to forbid an American to reenter the country, absent any conviction or even any charge of a crime, and apparently collaborated with Kuwait to torture that American. The President has also openly claimed the power to order the assassination of Americans abroad. In Iraq, the U.S. military has continued to work with and protect from accountability an Iraqi military that is known to regularly use torture.
The President has expanded the use of warrantless spying. Under his leadership, the FBI has infiltrated peace groups and raided the homes of peace activists. It has set up and entrapped in terrorism charges people whose training and motivation came largely or even entirely from the FBI. He has supported the re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act, which strips away Americans' civil liberties.
President Obama, in direct violation of the Nuremberg Charter, a U.S. treaty commitment, has publicly instructed his Attorney General not to prosecute individuals responsible for crimes, including torture. His administration has worked hard to provide retroactive immunity to corporations engaged in warrantless spying and individuals engaged in sanctioning torture. He has kept secret a vast trove of documents, photos, and videos pertaining to prisoner abuse. He has advanced unprecedented claims of secrecy powers in defending the crimes of his predecessor. President Obama's White House has put great pressure on European states not to investigate or prosecute U.S. war crimes.
This president has restricted the release of the names of White House visitors and has pursued the prosecution and punishment of government whistleblowers more aggressively than any previous president. His administration is responsible for the cruel and unusual lengthy confinement in a 6' by 12' cell, prior to any trial, of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning. His vice president, Joe Biden, has publicly labeled an Australian journalist, Julian Assange, a "terrorist." President Obama has used a private propaganda firm that had been exposed planting lies in Iraqi media, to screen potential embedded reporters for coverage of the U.S. military. He has used the military to restrict reporting by American journalists on an oil spill in American waters.
Perhaps most perilously, President Obama has claimed the right to engage in many of these activities without the authorization of Congress. He has even claimed the power first developed by his predecessor to rewrite new laws through the extra-Constitutional use of presidential signing statements. Expanded powers that are not opposed now will be far more difficult to oppose later with another president able to claim past precedent.
The President's own deficit commission recommended cuts of $100 billion to the military budget. The United States spends about $1 trillion each year on the military, through a variety of departments, and has spent over $1 trillion already on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Over half of every U.S. dollar of income tax is going to war making. The Department of Defense budget alone is larger than the military expenditures of the next largest 16 militaries in the world combined. That budget could be cut by 85% and still be the largest in the world. In addition to the lessening of hostility toward our country that would result from a significant decrease in U.S. military presence around the world, by shifting our financial resources we could create jobs, green energy, top quality free education, public transportation and infrastructure. We could also end all talk of reducing our Social Security or health coverage. We intend to support public servants who put our money where it serves the public.
We are not concerned with whether President Obama is acting enthusiastically or reluctantly in pursuing a militaristic policy abroad and more repression of dissent at home. It matters little whether he is submitting to powerful forces or freely following his preferred course. We do not elect his soldiers or spies, his advisors, his campaign funders, or the owners of our major media outlets. We elect the president. We will not support his nomination for another term, and we believe that a large proportion of Americans who voted for him in 2008 will not do so again unless he reverses the most egregious policies to which we have referred -- especially by taking decisive steps to end the war on Afghanistan and to make deep cuts in the military and war budgets.
Some of those who have signed:
Nic Abramson, U.S. Boat to Gaza
Meredith Aby, MN Anti-War Committee
Elliott Adams, president, Veterans For Peace
Will Allen, author, The War on Bugs
Maria Allwine, Pledge of Resistance Baltimore
Vicki Andrews, Peace Circle - Grand Rapids MN
Jean Athey, coordinator of Peace Action Montgomery (MD)* and national board member, Peace Action*
Nellie Hester Bailey, Harlem Tenants Council & Black Agenda Report
Anna Baltzer, activist
Missy Beattie, activist and writer
Mark Bebawi, producer/host, The Monitor, KPFT
Medea Benjamin, cofounder, Code Pink*
Frida Berrigan, War Resisters League*
Toby Blome, activist, Bay Area Code Pink
William Blum, author of books on U.S. foreign policy
Leah Bolger, CDR, USN (Ret), Vice-President, Veterans For Peace
Roy Bourgeois, founder, School of the Americas Watch
Linda Boyd, activist
Lenni Brenner, author, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
Jean Hay Bright, Maine's 2006 Democratic US Senate candidate
Elaine Brower, military mom, World Can't Wait
Mike Byerly, Alachua County Commissioner, Gainesville, Fla.
Scott Camil, President, Gainesville Florida Chapter, Veterans For Peace
Patty Casazza, 9/11 widow, former 9/11 Commission Family Steering Committee Member
Oskar Castro, board member, War Resisters League
Zach Choate, operation recovery field organizer, Iraq Veterans Against the War
David Cobb, Move To Amend coalition*
Jeff Cohen, author/media critic
William John Cox, Voters Evolt!
Catarina Correia, video editor, coordinating committee member, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Bud Courtney, New York Catholic Worker
David Culver, publisher, Evergreene Digest
Ronnie Cummins, national director, Organic Consumers Association
Matthew W. Daloisio, Witness Against Torture*
Nicolas J S Davies, author, Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
Elena Day, People's Alliance for Clean Energy
Laurie Dobson, director, EndUSWars.org
Frank Dorrel, publisher, Addicted To War
Jane Swift Dugdale, Main Line Peace Action
Sibel Edmonds, founder & director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
Cherie Eichholz, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Roy Eidelson, past president, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Pat Elder, Coordinating Committee, National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth*
Daniel Ellsberg, former State and Defense Dept. official, whistleblower of Pentagon Papers
Samuel S. Epstein, professor
Desiree Fairooz, Northern Virginians for Peace and Justice
Mike Ferner, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Joy First, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Robert Fitrakis, professor, editor
Lisa Fithian, convenor, United for Peace and Justice
Margaret Flowers, M.D., Physicians for a National Health Program*
Glen Ford, executive editor, Black Agenda Report*
George Friday, Independent Progressive Politics Network
Sarah Fuhro, board member, Military Families Speak Out*
James Clay Fuller, retired newspaper editor
Monica Gabrielle, 9/11 widow, former 9/11 Commission Family Steering Committee Member
Bruce K. Gagnon, coordinator, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space*
Lila Garrett, radio host
Nate Goldshlag, national board member and treasurer, Veterans For Peace
Michelle Gross, president, Communities United Against Police Brutality
Thomas John Gumbleton, retired Roman Catholic Bishop
DeeDee Halleck, founder, Paper Tiger Tv, Deep Dish Network, emerita professor, UCSD
Connie Hammond, Progressive Peace Coalition, Columbus, Ohio
Kathy Hass, activist, Central Florida Code Pink
Bill Habedank, Veterans for Peace
Jim Haber, coordinator, Nevada Desert Experience
Susan Harman, Progressive Democrats of America*, Code Pink*
David Harris, Veterans for Peace
David Harris, draft resister, author
Leslie Harris, activist, Code Pink Greater Dallas*
Bob Heberle, former national board member, Veterans for Peace
Chris Hedges, author, Death of the Liberal Class
Dud Hendrick, Maine chapter president, Veterans for Peace
Steve Hendricks, author, A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial
Martha Hennessy, Catholic Worker
John Heuer, chair and national board member, NC Peace Action
Herbert J. Hoffman, vice president, Maine Veterans for Peace
Connie Hogarth, Cofounder WESPAC (Westchester Peoples Action Coalition)*
Will Hopkins, executive director, NH Peace Action, national board member, Veterans for Peace, member, IVAW
Lydia Howell, writer and host, "Catalyst", KFAI Radio
Sam Husseini, activist
Hugh Iglarsh, writer/editor
Rick Jahnkow, Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft*
Dahr Jamail, journalist/author
Mark C. Johnson, executive director, Fellowship of Reconciliation
Larry Kalb, former Democratic congressional candidate
Tarak Kauff, Veterans For Peace
Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence*
Nada Khader, WESPAC Foundation
Joey King, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Howie Klein, publisher, DownWithTyranny.com
Michael Knox, professor and clinical psychologist
Georg Koszulinski, filmmaker
Joel Kovel, author, The Enemy of Nature, Overcoming Zionism
Andrew Kolin, author, State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W Bush
Steve Lane, activist
Jesse Lemisch, Historian, Emeritus Prof, John Jay Coll of Criminal Justice, CUNY
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives
Linda LeTendre, LMSW Christian Peace Witness
Dave Lindorff, editor, Thiscantbehappening.net
Erik Lobo, Veteran For Peace
Ralph Lopez, JobsForAfghans.org
David MacMichael, Ph.D., former CIA analyst
Karen Malpede, playwrite
Sarah Martin, subpoenaed antiwar and international solidarity activist
Gene Marx, national board member, Veterans for Peace
Ethan McCord, IVAW, VFP, former army specialist from "collateral murder" video
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst
Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Nominee for U.S. President
David McReynolds, Socialist Party USA*
Bob Meola, War Resisters League National Committee* and Courage to Resist Organizing Collective*
Michael T. McPhearson, co-convenor United For Peace and Justice, former executive director of Veterans For Peace
Camilo E. Mejia, activist, resister
Linda Milazzo, activist, writer
Dede Miller, activist
Mark Crispin Miller, author, professor
Nick Mottern, Consumers for Peace
Gael Murphy, co-chair, Legislative Working Group, United for Peace and Justice*, co-founder, Code Pink*
Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy*
Tom Neilson, folk musician
Bruce Nestor, past president, National Lawyers Guild
Brad Newsham, activist
Georgianne Nienaber, activist and author
Stirling Newberry, former military contractor
Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center
Jeanne Olson, veteran, activist
Paul Ortiz, Veterans for Peace, author
Michael Parenti, author and activist
Cynthia Papermaster, director, National Accountability Action Network*
Judith Mahoney Pasternak, War Resisters League*
Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist
Marc Pilisuk, author, Who Benefits from Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System
Lewis Pitts, Legal Aid of NC
Gareth Porter, author and journalist
Bill Quigley, Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law, Loyola University New Orleans*
Jesselyn Radack, former Department of Justice legal adviser
Garett Reppenhagen, chair of the board of directors, Iraq Veterans Against the War
Ward Reilly, advisory committee member, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace, VVAW
Jill Richardson, author
Katie Robbins, national organizer, Healthcare-NOW!
David Rovics, singer/song writer
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent, one of TIME's 2002 Persons of the Year
Richard E. Rubenstein, author, Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War
Stephanie Rugoff, project coordinator, War Criminals Watch
A.F. Saidy, M.D., Coalition for Peace in M.E. in L.A.
Nicole Sandler, radio host
Lisa Savage, Code Pink Maine*
Linda Schade, WikiLeaksisDemocracy.org
Bill Scheurer, PeaceMajority Report
Sue Serpa, coordinator, JobsForAfghans.org
Jamilla El-Shafei, Peace Action Maine, Code Pink
Joanne Sheehan, coordinator, War Resisters League New England
Robert Shetterly, artist, Americans Who Tell the Truth
Gar Smith, Environmentalists Against War
Michael Steven Smith, Law and Disorder Radio; board member, Center for Constitutional Rights*
Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Democracy Unlimited
Jeffrey St Clair, CounterPunch
John Stauber, author, Weapons of Mass Deception
Josh Stieber, conscientious objector
John Stockwell, former intelligence officer, author
David Swanson, WarIsACrime.org
Rev. James L. Swarts, professor, Veterans For Peace, Progressives In Action Peace Committee Chair
Dennis Trainor, Jr., NoCureForThat.org
Diane Turco, Cape Codders for Peace and Justice
Sue Udry, Defending Dissent Foundation*
Elizabeth De La Vega, former assistant U.S. attorney, author
Robert C. Walter, Peace Action Maine, associate member of Veterans for Peace
Harvey Wasserman, author
Janet Weil, military family member
Alison Weir, president, Council for the National Interest
Beverley Whipple, Fla. chapter leader, Military Families Speak Out
Paki Wieland, activist
S. Brian Willson, Viet Nam Veteran, activist
Diane Wilson, shrimper, activist, author, Veterans for Peace
Marcy Winograd, former Democratic congressional candidate
Ann Wright, US Army Reserve Colonel and former US diplomat
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, pastor, St Peter's Episcopal Church - Detroit
Dan Yaseen, Peace Fresno
Charles M. Young, contributing editor, Thiscantbehappening.net
Kevin Zeese, Voters For Peace
Maggie Zhou, Climate SOS
Obamanomics
One Blog that doesn't get the credit it deserves is Washington's Blog, found at http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/. A collection of articles that focus on economic issues written by authors with pen names, the general argument is that the economics embraced by our political and media establishment "represent the interests of the people as opposed to the big banks, major corporations, and the military-industrial complex." Hard to argue with that.
In a January 13th post, Washington made the strong case against what The Konformist has warned is really a plot to destroy public worker unions:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments strapped with big municipal debt burdens, saying the Fed had limited legal authority to help and little will to use that authority.
"We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states, he said later, "should not expect loans from the Fed."
Congress has also discontinued the Build American Bond program, which was significant in temporarily financing California and other states' budgets...
That's unfortunate, given that many states and big cities are in a dire financial situation, and given that Keynesian economists say that aid to the states is one of the best forms of stimulus...
Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate below, virtually the entire government economic policy is to throw trillions of dollars at the biggest banks.
GW then blasts the Wall Street Bailouts (starting with TARP) in a deserved dismissive tone:
The $700 billion dollar TARP bailout was a massive bait-and-switch. The government said it was doing it to soak up toxic assets, and then switched to saying it was needed to free up lending. It didn't do that either. Indeed, the Fed doesn't want the banks to lend.
As I wrote in March 2009:
The bailout money is just going to line the pockets of the wealthy, instead of helping to stabilize the economy or even the companies receiving the bailouts:
* Bailout money is being used to subsidize companies run by horrible business men, allowing the bankers to receive fat bonuses, to redecorate their offices, and to buy gold toilets and prostitutes
* A lot of the bailout money is going to the failing companies' shareholders
* Indeed, a leading progressive economist says that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives"
* The Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry (this has caused a lot of companies to bite off more than they can chew, destabilizing the acquiring companies)
* And as the New York Times notes, "Tens of billions of [bailout] dollars have merely passed through A.I.G. to its derivatives trading partners".
The Blog then notes: "But the TARP bailout is peanuts compared to the numerous other bailouts the government has given to the giant banks.
Government Says No to Helping States and Main Street, While Continuing to Throw Trillions at the Giant Banks
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/01/government-says-no-to-helping-states.html
For what it's worth, here's the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the budget problems on the state and local levels:
A spate of recent articles regarding the fiscal situation of states and localities have lumped together their current fiscal problems, stemming largely from the recession, with longer-term issues relating to debt, pension obligations, and retiree health costs, to create the mistaken impression that drastic and immediate measures are needed to avoid an imminent fiscal meltdown.
The large operating deficits that most states are projecting for the 2012 fiscal year, which they have to close before the fiscal year begins (on July 1 in most states), are caused largely by the weak economy. State revenues have stabilized after record losses but remain 12 percent below pre-recession levels, and localities also are experiencing diminished revenues. At the same time that revenues have declined, the need for public services has increased due to the rise in poverty and unemployment. Over the past three years, states and localities have used a combination of reserve funds and federal stimulus funds, along with budget cuts and tax increases, to close these recession-induced deficits. While these deficits have caused severe problems and states and localities are struggling to maintain needed services, this is a cyclical problem that ultimately will ease as the economy recovers.
Unlike the projected operating deficits for fiscal year 2012, which require near-term solutions to meet states’ and localities’ balanced-budget requirements, longer-term issues related to bond indebtedness, pension obligations, and retiree health insurance — discussed more fully below — can be addressed over the next several decades. It is not appropriate to add these longer-term costs to projected operating deficits. Nor should the size and implications of these longer-term costs be exaggerated, as some recent discussions have done. Such mistakes can lead to inappropriate policy prescriptions.
Misunderstandings Regarding State Debt, Pensions, and Retiree Health Costs Create Unnecessary Alarm
Misconceptions Also Divert Attention from Needed Structural Reforms
Iris J. Lav and Elizabeth McNichol
January 20, 2011
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3372
In September 2009, the Washington's Blog pointed out the strategy of pouring money to lenders (i.e. banks) is decidedly inferior to helping out borrowers (i.e. businesses and consumers):
Following the advice of neoclassical economists, Obama has got not a bang but a whimper out of the many bucks he has thrown at the financial system.
In explaining his recovery program in April, President Obama noted that:
“there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks – ‘where’s our bailout?,’ they ask”.
He justified giving the money to the lenders, rather than to the debtors, on the basis of “the multiplier effect” from bank lending:
the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth. (page 3 of the speech)
This argument comes straight out of the neoclassical economics textbook. Fortunately, due to the clear manner in which Obama enunciates it, the flaw in this textbook argument is vividly apparent in his speech.
This “multiplier effect” will only work if American families and businesses are willing to take on yet more debt: “a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans”.
So the only way the roughly US$1 trillion of money that the Federal Reserve has injected into the banks will result in additional spending is if American families and businesses take out another US$8-10 trillion in loans.
What are the odds that this will happen, when they already owe more than they have ever owed in the history of America? ...
If the money multiplier was going to “ride to the rescue”, private debt would need to rise from its current level of US$41.5 trillion to about US$50 trillion, and this ratio would rise to about 375%—more than twice the level that ushered in the Great Depression...
Steve Keen Out-Thinks Larry Summers
Saturday, September 19, 2009
http://www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/09/steve-keen-out-thinks-larry-summers.html
Dave Dayen of FireDogLake.com does a great analysis of the payroll tax cut deal made by Team Obama, pointing out the ignored fact that the payroll tax replaces Making Work Pay:
Making Work Pay was a flat $400 for every worker, but the benefit phased out for workers making over roughly $95,000 a year. That meant it was targeted directly to people who would spend it and offered a pretty nice benefit. By contrast, the payroll tax cut applies to every worker in America, as Geithner says. Bill Gates will get a payroll tax cut. Alex Rodriguez will get a payroll tax cut. Paris Hilton will get a payroll tax cut. Because the payroll tax itself caps out currently at $106,800, the tax cut for Gates, Rodriguez, Hilton and anyone else making that number is $2,136. But that’s $2,136 more than they got under Making Work Pay. I’ll leave it toy you to determine whether that’s something they need, and something which will work to stimulate the economy.
By contrast, at the low end of the scale, the “benefit” from the payroll tax cut ends up worse than the benefit from Making Work Pay. Making Work Pay was a flat benefit of $400; with the payroll tax cut it’s a percentage of income. So any individual making under $20,000 a year or family making under $40,000 a year will see less of a benefit under the payroll tax cut. That comes out to roughly 50 million workers, or close to 1 in 3, using Geithner’s numbers.
So you have this crazy circumstance where the payroll tax cut ends up a worse deal for low-income workers, who would spend the money, and a better deal for high-income workers, who probably won’t.
It’s true that the payroll tax cut comes out to $110 billion in tax relief for 2011, roughly $50 million more than Making Work Pay on an annual basis. But it’s woefully targeted. And the phony use of “average tax cut” promulgated by Geithner belies the fact that it’s a worse deal for 1 in 3 workers.
And this critique is besides the concern the payroll tax cut may be a Trojan horse to destroy social security...
Sin of Omission by Geithner in Chest-Thumping over Tax Cut Deal
David Dayen
Saturday January 15, 2011
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/01/15/sin-of-omission-by-geithner-in-chest-thumping-over-tax-cut-deal
Matt Stoller, former Senior Policy Advisor for Alan Grayson, puts this in a context of the last 40 years at NakedCapitalism.com:
Since the 1970s, Democratic elites have focused on breaking public sector unions and financializing the economy. Carter, not Reagan, started the defense build-up. Carter, not Reagan, lifted usury caps. Carter, not Reagan, first cut capital gains taxes. Clinton, not Bush, passed NAFTA. It isn’t the base of the Democratic party that did this, but then, voters in America have never had a lot of power because they are too disorganized. And there wasn’t a substantial grassroots movement to challenge this, either.
Obama continues this trend. It isn’t that he’s not fighting, he fights like hell for what he wants. He whipped incredibly aggressively for TARP, he has passed emergency war funding (breaking a campaign promise) several times, and nearly broke the arms of feckless liberals in the process. I mean, when Bernie Sanders did the filiBernie, Obama flirted with Bernie’s potential 2012 GOP challenger. Obama just wants policies that cement the status of a aristocratic class, with crumbs for everyone else (Republican elites disagree in that they hate anyone but elites getting crumbs). And he will fight for them.
There is simply no basis for arguing that Democratic elites are pursuing poor strategy anymore. They are achieving an enormous amount of leverage within the party. Consider the following. Despite Obama violating every core tenet of what might have been considered the Democratic Party platform, from supporting foreclosures to destroying civil liberties to torturing political dissidents to wrecking unions, Obama has no viable primary challenger. Moreover, no Senate Democratic incumbent lost a primary challenge in 2010, despite a horrible governing posture. Now THAT is a successful strategy, it minimized the losses of the Democratic elite and kept them firmly in control of the party. Thus, the political debate remains confined to what neoliberals want to talk about. It’s a good strategy, it’s just you are the one the strategy is being played on.
Understanding the Strategy of the Democratic Power Class
Matt Stoller
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/01/matt-stoller-understanding-the-strategy-of-the-democratic-power-class.html
Of course, criticisms of Carter and Clinton are completely deserved, but there are some major differences here. One, when Obama was elected, he was facing the worst economic crisis in the USA since the Great Depression, and thus a more left wing policy of helping the poor, the working class and the middle class not only was the correct economic remedy, it was a politically popular one winnable if Obama cared to fight for it. Two, the economic betrayals made by Obama put his economic policy decidedly to the right of Ronald Reagan, no matter what the GOP mouthpieces may scream, and has arguably radically shifted the frame of debate even further than George W. Bush could have ever dreamed. This was my major concern over Obama during the 2008 election, that he was backed by Wall Streeters who hoped his cult of narcissism would be substitute for a real New Deal II. As the battle to bankrupt states and destroy public unions heats up, it would be fair to say "Mission Accomplished"...
In a January 13th post, Washington made the strong case against what The Konformist has warned is really a plot to destroy public worker unions:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments strapped with big municipal debt burdens, saying the Fed had limited legal authority to help and little will to use that authority.
"We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states, he said later, "should not expect loans from the Fed."
Congress has also discontinued the Build American Bond program, which was significant in temporarily financing California and other states' budgets...
That's unfortunate, given that many states and big cities are in a dire financial situation, and given that Keynesian economists say that aid to the states is one of the best forms of stimulus...
Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate below, virtually the entire government economic policy is to throw trillions of dollars at the biggest banks.
GW then blasts the Wall Street Bailouts (starting with TARP) in a deserved dismissive tone:
The $700 billion dollar TARP bailout was a massive bait-and-switch. The government said it was doing it to soak up toxic assets, and then switched to saying it was needed to free up lending. It didn't do that either. Indeed, the Fed doesn't want the banks to lend.
As I wrote in March 2009:
The bailout money is just going to line the pockets of the wealthy, instead of helping to stabilize the economy or even the companies receiving the bailouts:
* Bailout money is being used to subsidize companies run by horrible business men, allowing the bankers to receive fat bonuses, to redecorate their offices, and to buy gold toilets and prostitutes
* A lot of the bailout money is going to the failing companies' shareholders
* Indeed, a leading progressive economist says that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives"
* The Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry (this has caused a lot of companies to bite off more than they can chew, destabilizing the acquiring companies)
* And as the New York Times notes, "Tens of billions of [bailout] dollars have merely passed through A.I.G. to its derivatives trading partners".
The Blog then notes: "But the TARP bailout is peanuts compared to the numerous other bailouts the government has given to the giant banks.
Government Says No to Helping States and Main Street, While Continuing to Throw Trillions at the Giant Banks
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/01/government-says-no-to-helping-states.html
For what it's worth, here's the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the budget problems on the state and local levels:
A spate of recent articles regarding the fiscal situation of states and localities have lumped together their current fiscal problems, stemming largely from the recession, with longer-term issues relating to debt, pension obligations, and retiree health costs, to create the mistaken impression that drastic and immediate measures are needed to avoid an imminent fiscal meltdown.
The large operating deficits that most states are projecting for the 2012 fiscal year, which they have to close before the fiscal year begins (on July 1 in most states), are caused largely by the weak economy. State revenues have stabilized after record losses but remain 12 percent below pre-recession levels, and localities also are experiencing diminished revenues. At the same time that revenues have declined, the need for public services has increased due to the rise in poverty and unemployment. Over the past three years, states and localities have used a combination of reserve funds and federal stimulus funds, along with budget cuts and tax increases, to close these recession-induced deficits. While these deficits have caused severe problems and states and localities are struggling to maintain needed services, this is a cyclical problem that ultimately will ease as the economy recovers.
Unlike the projected operating deficits for fiscal year 2012, which require near-term solutions to meet states’ and localities’ balanced-budget requirements, longer-term issues related to bond indebtedness, pension obligations, and retiree health insurance — discussed more fully below — can be addressed over the next several decades. It is not appropriate to add these longer-term costs to projected operating deficits. Nor should the size and implications of these longer-term costs be exaggerated, as some recent discussions have done. Such mistakes can lead to inappropriate policy prescriptions.
Misunderstandings Regarding State Debt, Pensions, and Retiree Health Costs Create Unnecessary Alarm
Misconceptions Also Divert Attention from Needed Structural Reforms
Iris J. Lav and Elizabeth McNichol
January 20, 2011
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3372
In September 2009, the Washington's Blog pointed out the strategy of pouring money to lenders (i.e. banks) is decidedly inferior to helping out borrowers (i.e. businesses and consumers):
Following the advice of neoclassical economists, Obama has got not a bang but a whimper out of the many bucks he has thrown at the financial system.
In explaining his recovery program in April, President Obama noted that:
“there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks – ‘where’s our bailout?,’ they ask”.
He justified giving the money to the lenders, rather than to the debtors, on the basis of “the multiplier effect” from bank lending:
the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth. (page 3 of the speech)
This argument comes straight out of the neoclassical economics textbook. Fortunately, due to the clear manner in which Obama enunciates it, the flaw in this textbook argument is vividly apparent in his speech.
This “multiplier effect” will only work if American families and businesses are willing to take on yet more debt: “a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans”.
So the only way the roughly US$1 trillion of money that the Federal Reserve has injected into the banks will result in additional spending is if American families and businesses take out another US$8-10 trillion in loans.
What are the odds that this will happen, when they already owe more than they have ever owed in the history of America? ...
If the money multiplier was going to “ride to the rescue”, private debt would need to rise from its current level of US$41.5 trillion to about US$50 trillion, and this ratio would rise to about 375%—more than twice the level that ushered in the Great Depression...
Steve Keen Out-Thinks Larry Summers
Saturday, September 19, 2009
http://www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/09/steve-keen-out-thinks-larry-summers.html
Dave Dayen of FireDogLake.com does a great analysis of the payroll tax cut deal made by Team Obama, pointing out the ignored fact that the payroll tax replaces Making Work Pay:
Making Work Pay was a flat $400 for every worker, but the benefit phased out for workers making over roughly $95,000 a year. That meant it was targeted directly to people who would spend it and offered a pretty nice benefit. By contrast, the payroll tax cut applies to every worker in America, as Geithner says. Bill Gates will get a payroll tax cut. Alex Rodriguez will get a payroll tax cut. Paris Hilton will get a payroll tax cut. Because the payroll tax itself caps out currently at $106,800, the tax cut for Gates, Rodriguez, Hilton and anyone else making that number is $2,136. But that’s $2,136 more than they got under Making Work Pay. I’ll leave it toy you to determine whether that’s something they need, and something which will work to stimulate the economy.
By contrast, at the low end of the scale, the “benefit” from the payroll tax cut ends up worse than the benefit from Making Work Pay. Making Work Pay was a flat benefit of $400; with the payroll tax cut it’s a percentage of income. So any individual making under $20,000 a year or family making under $40,000 a year will see less of a benefit under the payroll tax cut. That comes out to roughly 50 million workers, or close to 1 in 3, using Geithner’s numbers.
So you have this crazy circumstance where the payroll tax cut ends up a worse deal for low-income workers, who would spend the money, and a better deal for high-income workers, who probably won’t.
It’s true that the payroll tax cut comes out to $110 billion in tax relief for 2011, roughly $50 million more than Making Work Pay on an annual basis. But it’s woefully targeted. And the phony use of “average tax cut” promulgated by Geithner belies the fact that it’s a worse deal for 1 in 3 workers.
And this critique is besides the concern the payroll tax cut may be a Trojan horse to destroy social security...
Sin of Omission by Geithner in Chest-Thumping over Tax Cut Deal
David Dayen
Saturday January 15, 2011
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/01/15/sin-of-omission-by-geithner-in-chest-thumping-over-tax-cut-deal
Matt Stoller, former Senior Policy Advisor for Alan Grayson, puts this in a context of the last 40 years at NakedCapitalism.com:
Since the 1970s, Democratic elites have focused on breaking public sector unions and financializing the economy. Carter, not Reagan, started the defense build-up. Carter, not Reagan, lifted usury caps. Carter, not Reagan, first cut capital gains taxes. Clinton, not Bush, passed NAFTA. It isn’t the base of the Democratic party that did this, but then, voters in America have never had a lot of power because they are too disorganized. And there wasn’t a substantial grassroots movement to challenge this, either.
Obama continues this trend. It isn’t that he’s not fighting, he fights like hell for what he wants. He whipped incredibly aggressively for TARP, he has passed emergency war funding (breaking a campaign promise) several times, and nearly broke the arms of feckless liberals in the process. I mean, when Bernie Sanders did the filiBernie, Obama flirted with Bernie’s potential 2012 GOP challenger. Obama just wants policies that cement the status of a aristocratic class, with crumbs for everyone else (Republican elites disagree in that they hate anyone but elites getting crumbs). And he will fight for them.
There is simply no basis for arguing that Democratic elites are pursuing poor strategy anymore. They are achieving an enormous amount of leverage within the party. Consider the following. Despite Obama violating every core tenet of what might have been considered the Democratic Party platform, from supporting foreclosures to destroying civil liberties to torturing political dissidents to wrecking unions, Obama has no viable primary challenger. Moreover, no Senate Democratic incumbent lost a primary challenge in 2010, despite a horrible governing posture. Now THAT is a successful strategy, it minimized the losses of the Democratic elite and kept them firmly in control of the party. Thus, the political debate remains confined to what neoliberals want to talk about. It’s a good strategy, it’s just you are the one the strategy is being played on.
Understanding the Strategy of the Democratic Power Class
Matt Stoller
Thursday, January 13, 2011
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/01/matt-stoller-understanding-the-strategy-of-the-democratic-power-class.html
Of course, criticisms of Carter and Clinton are completely deserved, but there are some major differences here. One, when Obama was elected, he was facing the worst economic crisis in the USA since the Great Depression, and thus a more left wing policy of helping the poor, the working class and the middle class not only was the correct economic remedy, it was a politically popular one winnable if Obama cared to fight for it. Two, the economic betrayals made by Obama put his economic policy decidedly to the right of Ronald Reagan, no matter what the GOP mouthpieces may scream, and has arguably radically shifted the frame of debate even further than George W. Bush could have ever dreamed. This was my major concern over Obama during the 2008 election, that he was backed by Wall Streeters who hoped his cult of narcissism would be substitute for a real New Deal II. As the battle to bankrupt states and destroy public unions heats up, it would be fair to say "Mission Accomplished"...
It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps
http://blog.lavacocktail.com/2011/01/26/its-a-mans-world-mens-adventure-magazines-the-postwar-pulps-hardcover.aspx
It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps
book review
Jaye Beldo
1-26-11
After exploring the lurid confines of It's a Man's World ,the latest/boldest offering from Feral House on the post war adventure magazines, I immediately flashed an idea for a cover of the next issue of Ms. Gloria Steinem would appear, campily cartooned along with CIA operative Clay Felkner, the Esquire editor that brought her to feminist fame in the early 70's.
Picture it if you can: a Bowie knife wielding, Green Beret uniformed Felkner trying to liberate a skimpily dressed Steinem who is entwined to a United Nations flag pole by some giant viper with the face of Henry Kissinger (who she actually dated in the 1980's). Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who, by the way, planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route, looks on with smug satisfaction, bull whip in hand, wearing a moth eaten Gestapo uniform. Or maybe Rosie O' Donnell could be garishly depicted on the cover of, let's say, Misandrist Monthly , a potential pulp alternative to her now ailing 'zine, held in similar serpentine bondage by her very own CIA backed publisher,begging for sweet release. (I can't think of anyone who would want to rescue her however....maybe Andrea Dworkin dressed up like a Navy Seal.)
What I'm struggling to say, via these unlikely to be seen in the mainstream images, is that we are currently suffering from a kind of mass polarity reversal. It is now the castrating fantasies, Will to Power drives and other hormonally imbalanced Überfrau desires of today's corporate woman that are beckoning to be scrutinized in comic book fashion. However, these burgeoning fantasies are kept just beyond the margins of acceptable consensuality, veiled behind carefully crafted PC ideologies that will ensure that the heterosexual white male will forever remain the perennial scapegoat. I suggest that these estrogenated day dreams, on the verge of rising above the subconscious horizon, be as graphically and overtly rendered as the images depicted in It's a Man's World. It very well may prevent something truly horrible from happening.
The cover illustrations within It's a Man's World seem to beg for us to breathe life into them so the soldiers, hunters, cowboys, criminals and jungle adventurers can animate their way into the very crux of our psyches and conquer whatever needs to be conquered and plunder what needs to be plundered . I can confidently say that buying this book, fetishizing it, whether you are a man or a woman, will be profoundly therapeutic and even cathartic because nothing like the art depicted within It's a Man's World exists on the newstands any longer and probably never will again. The images within this garish but intriguing testament to the American male of a bygone era, some how give a kind of unadulterated power to the very things within ourselves that we try to repress and then project upon one another.
With this kind of power in mind, now is the time to try and convince the men's magazine illustrators of the 50's ,60's and 70's to come out of retirement, ignore the PC police and translate these current fantasy modes such as described above to the covers of noxious feminist tabloids, T.V. Guide, Playgirl and maybe even Newsweek. I'm confident that many of the evolution retarding, sexual/political conflicts we now distract ourselves with would instantly be resolved.
It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps
Adam Parfrey (Editor), Mort Kunstler (Contributor), Josh Alan Friedman (Contributor), David Saunders (Contributor), Bruce Jay Friedman (Contributor), Bill Devine (Contributor), Hedi El Kholti (Designer)
http://www.amazon.com/Its-Mans-World-Adventure-Magazines/dp/0922915814/thekonformist
Biocentrism
Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
Robert Lanza, Bob Berman
Kindle Edition $8.12
Hardcover $15.69
Paperback $9.02
Audible Audio Edition, Unabridged $17.95 or Free with Audible 30-day free trial
"What makes this book both interesting and worth the effort of reading it; is the unique perspective Lanza brings to the subject matter as a physician....From the way he chooses to present his arguments, it's clear he has a solid grasp of esoteric disciplines like quantum theory, special relativity and particle physics. And what makes his presentation more compelling than other efforts I've encountered is his ability and willingness to weave personal experience into the thoughts and ideas presented. His style is conversational and warm which tends to pull you along through the exposition gently. And his sense of wonder and befuddlement at shop worn enigmas like the double slit experiment, Bell's theorem, non-locality and Schrödinger's cat is as infectious as it is delightful...I very much like what Lanza has to say in Biocentrism."
-- Midwest Book Review
Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world — a US News &World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe.
Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, toward doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universe’s genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.
In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of life--time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.
The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.
From the Back Cover
Praise for Robert Lanza's essay "A New Theory of the Universe," on which Biocentrism is based:
"Like A Brief History of Time, it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole.... The book will appeal to an audience of many different disciplines because it is a new way of looking at the old problem of our existence. Most importantly, it makes you think."
E. Donnall Thomas, 1990 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine
"It is genuinely an exciting piece of work.... The idea that consciousness creates reality has quantum support ... and also coheres with some of the things biology and neuroscience are telling us about the structures of our being. Just as we now know that the sun doesn't really move but we do (we are the active agents), so [it is] suggesting that we are the entities that give meaning to the particular configuration of all possible outcomes we call reality."
Ronald Green, director of Dartmouth College's Ethics Institute
"Robert Lanza, a world-renowned scientist who has spanned many fields from drug delivery to stem cells to preventing animal extinction, and clearly one of the most brilliant minds of our times, has done it again. `A New Theory of the Universe' takes into account all the knowledge we have gained over the last few centuries ... placing in perspective our biologic limitations that have impeded our understanding of greater truths surrounding our existence and the universe around us. This new theory is certain to revolutionize our concepts of the laws of nature for centuries to come."
Anthony Atala, internationally recognized scientist and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: BenBella Books (April 14, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933771690
ISBN-13: 978-1933771694
Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher: BenBella Books; 1 edition (May 18, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1935251740
ISBN-13: 978-1935251743
Hardcover:
http://www.amazon.com/Biocentrism-Consciousness-Understanding-Nature-Universe/dp/1933771690/thekonformist
Paperback:
http://www.amazon.com/Biocentrism-Consciousness-Understanding-Nature-Universe/dp/1935251740/thekonformist
Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Biocentrism-Consciousness-Understanding-Universe-ebook/dp/B0028N63XA/thekonformist
Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer
http://eventsfinal.blogspot.com/2011/01/round-trip-to-hell-in-flying-saucer.html
Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer
Nick Redfern
Monday, January 24, 2011
If you read my Final Events book, this is a new book you'll definitely want to get hold of: Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer, for which I was extensively interviewed on the data contained in Final Events.
Published and edited by Tim Green Beckley, the book delves deep into the occult, satanic and paranormal aspects of Ufology. Here's the product info on the book:
DOES SATAN DRIVE A FLYING SAUCER?
ARE DEMONS KIDNAPPING HUMANS AND PERFORMING SADISTIC EXPERIMENTS ON THEM?
IS THERE A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BLOOD SACRIFICES AND ANIMALS AS WELL AS HUMAN MUTILATIONS ATTRIBUTED TO EXTRATERRESTRIALS?
CAN ALIEN LIFE FORMS SHAPE SHIFT, TURNING INTO HUMANS, GROWING ORBS, FIREBALLS, OR EVEN MANIFEST THEMSELVES AS PHYSICAL 'HARDWARE' TO FOOL US INTO BELIEVING THEY ARE MECHANICAL DEVICES?
It's the dirty little secret of UFOlogy -- something that only a few insiders dare discuss amongst themselves. For example, Lord Hill-Norton, the late five-star Admiral and the former head of the British Ministry of Defence, believed strongly in the existence of UFOs. But he did not see them in a positive light, professing instead in his privately printed UFO Concern Report: "UFOs are essentially a religious matter rather than a military threat and furthermore there is certainly a degree of psychic involvement in almost every case. Quite often, however, such experiences are definitely antithetical to orthodox Christian beliefs."
Journalist and author of "The Mothrman Prophecies" (made into a film starring Richard Gere) John A. Keel was adamant when he stated: "... The UFOs do not seem to exist as tangible manufactured objects. They do not conform to the accepted natural laws of our environment... The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon."
Other researchers of supernatural phenomena have noted that...The casting of magical spells, the performance of occult rituals and a ceremony to conjure up spirits are sometimes attempted by witnesses prior to a UFO appearing in their proximity.
PLUS -- THE JINN -- NAZI FOO FIGHTERS -- ALEISTER CROWLEY
From Amazon:
Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer: UFO Parasites - Alien Soul Suckers - Invaders From Demonic Realms
Timothy Beckley and Sean Casteel
With: Adam Gorightly - Allen Greenfield - Scott Corrales - Tim Swartz - Kenn Thomas - Brent Raynes - Nick Redfern
Price: $24.00 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
"This is without a doubt one of the most important books on demonology and mind control... though it deals with the topics relationship to aliens and other off-world and interdimensional realms. Here is proof positive that all entities encountered are NOT your friendly Space Brother type often reported, but have for decades been able to put a spin on their own relationship to unknown negative cosmic forces."
-- Commander X - Conspiracy Journal columnist
Perfect Paperback: 220 pages
Publisher: Conspiracy Journal/Global Communications (November 16, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1606110918
ISBN-13: 978-1606110911
http://www.amazon.com/Round-Trip-Hell-Flying-Saucer/dp/product-description/1606110918/thekonformist
THE HOLOCAUST MEMOIR OF RABBI SAMUEL CYWIAK
Barry Chamish
BarryChamish.com
I went through a youthful period when I read histories of the Holocaust. Now, I just can't read how primitive and awful are our enemies. I made an exception when my own Rabbi, Samuel Cywiak released his Holocaust memoir just two weeks ago. It was painful yet fulfilling to read the story of my 89 year old rabbi being a 19 year old youth outsmarting and outrunning the Nazis. I had underestimated the man. He had the guile, savvy and strength to survive, when, frankly, I may not have.
My city of Saint Augustine has 3 synagogues. The Reform and Chabad attract a younger crowd but I was most comfortable in Rabbi Cywiak's Conservative synagogue with its older worshipers. If I may add, my synagogue must own the world record for the oldest bar mitzvah boy when 93 year old Benjamin Rosenfel, "became a man."
Rabbi Cywiak's book is called Flight From Fear and was written with the good help of Jeff Swesky. Without this book I would never have known of my rabbi's privileged lineage. His father was one of the founders of a serious political movement to this day, Agudat Yisrael, while his cousin was the revered Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren. The book's horrors are balanced by humor and optimism, yes, apparently you could find an occasional funny and optimistic side of the Holocaust, and that makes this memoir special.
We'll let the Rabbi tell us how he was the sole survivor of a Nazi massacre, after his father shoved him into the death pit a second before the machine guns started blasting:
"Can anyone hear me? Anyone? Anyone at all?" Out of sixty or so Jews marched into the woods by the Germans, I was the only survivor. I was surrounded by death; the senseless murdering of Jews. What kind of evil does these things? "Oh dear G-d, why is this happening to us?" I cried out to the silent night.
He fled to a nearby city and found the burnt remains of the synagogue.
Inside the charred destroyed building were hundreds and hundreds of burnt bodies, skeletons. The Nazis to get rid of many Jews in one shot, packed them into the synagogue, barricaded them inside, and set fire to the building, burning the inhabitants alive.
The horrors of his journey never ended. He entered another city:
There were maybe fifty or more Jewish men, women and children piled in a gutter with their throats slit from ear to ear.
Rabbi Cywiak shows far more compassion to the gentiles of his country than to their religious leaders who prepared the ground for the slaughter.
There were plenty of good Polish people along my travels who wanted to help, who truly felt bad about what was happening to the Jews. They felt sorry, even cried at times. Some went out of their way to help. They had good hearts. Sometimes I felt sorry for them! They were so openly broken up; they showed their emotions.
*
Who used to start these rumors of us killing Christ and drinking the blood of Christian children? A handful of Christian priests and bishops with an agenda. That's who. These religious leaders were responsible for creating the environment that made it possible for Hitler to attempt his Master Plan.
*
Too much religion can be as dangerous as too little religion. The best example I can give is the blind faith the Hasidic rebbes had that G-d would not allow Hitler and the Nazis to do all the horrible things that they threatened to do. They believed the Messiah would come and save us all. Of course, that did not happen. The Hasidic rebbes were wrong!
Several times a year, Rabbi Cywiak lectures to Christian audiences about his Holocaust experiences. One asked, Did you ever wish you were a Christian so you wouldn't have had to experience the Holocaust. His answer is succinct and logical, far moreso than the query.
"What if I was born in a family of Nazis? I could have ended up killing Jewish children. Could I possibly wish for something like this?" The girl opened her mouth but didn't say anything. Not a word.
Rabbi Cywiak is eventually told that his family was shipped to Auschwitz.
My heart sunk. The glimmer of hope I held that they had found safety disappeared. Instead my worst fears had come true. Mom, Nechama, my three young brothers, were all murdered in Auschwitz.
In their honor, the survivor of the family, now my rabbi, prints a poem by another victim of the Nazis, Erwin Kirshbaum, called AUSCHWITZ. Its last two lines read:
The surprise is not that so many died,
The true surprise is that any survived.
*
Rabbi Cywiak's book is currently not available except through him. That means I will buy the books for my readers BUT you are asked to send payment before I purchase your copy.
I will keep the price at $28. for American addresses, including postage and a gift copy of my DVD/CD, Shabtai Tzvi, Labor Zionism And The Holocaust. Postage costs raise the price to $30 for outside the US.
For Flight From Fear or just to contribute:
Barry Chamish
POB 840157
Saint Augustine, FL 32080 USA
Paypal: chamishba@gmail.com
Listen to my radio show:
http://wwfar.com/mp3s/BarryChamish/
BE SURE TO LISTEN TO BARRY CHAMISH
Live TUESDAYS at 3PM PT / 6PM ET ON:
http://www.firstamendmentradio.com/
My new book, THE conPROMISED LAND can be ordered direct from the publisher http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback_book/the_conpromised_land/6398777
To sort out conspiracy baloney from a worse truth, join my paid newsgroup. A dozen articles a week by everyone but me. Write chamish@netvision.net.il to join in the fun.
*
And now a passage from Flight From Fear with me providing a visual explanation:
Rabbi Cywiak escapes the Nazis by sneaking into Russia. He than tries to escape the Communists by cutting a border fence into Afghanistan, the first stop on a long journey to Israel, but is caught. He is confronted by a Russian guard:
"What have you got here? Take it off."
He found the black boxes of my tefillin. He opened the boxes and removed the parchment. He tried to read it, but could not since it was in Hebrew. He said, "What is this? It must be secret spy code. He called another guard over and they escorted me to the office, each guard holding one of my arms.In the office, they started asking questions.
I told them, "This is used to pray."
"Pray? You're lying. It looks to me like secret code. What is the language?"
"Hebrew."
"Yah, Hebrew, right, This must be secret code. And for that, you get," and drew his finger across his throat.
I said, "Wait! Don't you have someone here who can read this?"
The other guard said, "Yeah, maybe Boris can. Call in Boris."
Someone asked for Boris. A big Russian guard and took the parchment with the Hebrew written on it...
"What are you talking about? Spies. Codes. These are prayers." He put the parchments back in the boxes. "This is teffilin. The Jews pray with this every day."
"Huh? How do you know this?"
He looked me in the eyes and didn't respond right away."My father used the exact same thing when he was alive. He prayed with one of these things every day, so let's forget about this. Let the man go."
I realized why he had been reluctant. In Russia it was against the law to practice religion. He could have been severely reprimanded for his admission. G-d bless him. That Russian officer saved my life.
BarryChamish.com
I went through a youthful period when I read histories of the Holocaust. Now, I just can't read how primitive and awful are our enemies. I made an exception when my own Rabbi, Samuel Cywiak released his Holocaust memoir just two weeks ago. It was painful yet fulfilling to read the story of my 89 year old rabbi being a 19 year old youth outsmarting and outrunning the Nazis. I had underestimated the man. He had the guile, savvy and strength to survive, when, frankly, I may not have.
My city of Saint Augustine has 3 synagogues. The Reform and Chabad attract a younger crowd but I was most comfortable in Rabbi Cywiak's Conservative synagogue with its older worshipers. If I may add, my synagogue must own the world record for the oldest bar mitzvah boy when 93 year old Benjamin Rosenfel, "became a man."
Rabbi Cywiak's book is called Flight From Fear and was written with the good help of Jeff Swesky. Without this book I would never have known of my rabbi's privileged lineage. His father was one of the founders of a serious political movement to this day, Agudat Yisrael, while his cousin was the revered Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren. The book's horrors are balanced by humor and optimism, yes, apparently you could find an occasional funny and optimistic side of the Holocaust, and that makes this memoir special.
We'll let the Rabbi tell us how he was the sole survivor of a Nazi massacre, after his father shoved him into the death pit a second before the machine guns started blasting:
"Can anyone hear me? Anyone? Anyone at all?" Out of sixty or so Jews marched into the woods by the Germans, I was the only survivor. I was surrounded by death; the senseless murdering of Jews. What kind of evil does these things? "Oh dear G-d, why is this happening to us?" I cried out to the silent night.
He fled to a nearby city and found the burnt remains of the synagogue.
Inside the charred destroyed building were hundreds and hundreds of burnt bodies, skeletons. The Nazis to get rid of many Jews in one shot, packed them into the synagogue, barricaded them inside, and set fire to the building, burning the inhabitants alive.
The horrors of his journey never ended. He entered another city:
There were maybe fifty or more Jewish men, women and children piled in a gutter with their throats slit from ear to ear.
Rabbi Cywiak shows far more compassion to the gentiles of his country than to their religious leaders who prepared the ground for the slaughter.
There were plenty of good Polish people along my travels who wanted to help, who truly felt bad about what was happening to the Jews. They felt sorry, even cried at times. Some went out of their way to help. They had good hearts. Sometimes I felt sorry for them! They were so openly broken up; they showed their emotions.
*
Who used to start these rumors of us killing Christ and drinking the blood of Christian children? A handful of Christian priests and bishops with an agenda. That's who. These religious leaders were responsible for creating the environment that made it possible for Hitler to attempt his Master Plan.
*
Too much religion can be as dangerous as too little religion. The best example I can give is the blind faith the Hasidic rebbes had that G-d would not allow Hitler and the Nazis to do all the horrible things that they threatened to do. They believed the Messiah would come and save us all. Of course, that did not happen. The Hasidic rebbes were wrong!
Several times a year, Rabbi Cywiak lectures to Christian audiences about his Holocaust experiences. One asked, Did you ever wish you were a Christian so you wouldn't have had to experience the Holocaust. His answer is succinct and logical, far moreso than the query.
"What if I was born in a family of Nazis? I could have ended up killing Jewish children. Could I possibly wish for something like this?" The girl opened her mouth but didn't say anything. Not a word.
Rabbi Cywiak is eventually told that his family was shipped to Auschwitz.
My heart sunk. The glimmer of hope I held that they had found safety disappeared. Instead my worst fears had come true. Mom, Nechama, my three young brothers, were all murdered in Auschwitz.
In their honor, the survivor of the family, now my rabbi, prints a poem by another victim of the Nazis, Erwin Kirshbaum, called AUSCHWITZ. Its last two lines read:
The surprise is not that so many died,
The true surprise is that any survived.
*
Rabbi Cywiak's book is currently not available except through him. That means I will buy the books for my readers BUT you are asked to send payment before I purchase your copy.
I will keep the price at $28. for American addresses, including postage and a gift copy of my DVD/CD, Shabtai Tzvi, Labor Zionism And The Holocaust. Postage costs raise the price to $30 for outside the US.
For Flight From Fear or just to contribute:
Barry Chamish
POB 840157
Saint Augustine, FL 32080 USA
Paypal: chamishba@gmail.com
Listen to my radio show:
http://wwfar.com/mp3s/BarryChamish/
BE SURE TO LISTEN TO BARRY CHAMISH
Live TUESDAYS at 3PM PT / 6PM ET ON:
http://www.firstamendmentradio.com/
My new book, THE conPROMISED LAND can be ordered direct from the publisher http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback_book/the_conpromised_land/6398777
To sort out conspiracy baloney from a worse truth, join my paid newsgroup. A dozen articles a week by everyone but me. Write chamish@netvision.net.il to join in the fun.
*
And now a passage from Flight From Fear with me providing a visual explanation:
Rabbi Cywiak escapes the Nazis by sneaking into Russia. He than tries to escape the Communists by cutting a border fence into Afghanistan, the first stop on a long journey to Israel, but is caught. He is confronted by a Russian guard:
"What have you got here? Take it off."
He found the black boxes of my tefillin. He opened the boxes and removed the parchment. He tried to read it, but could not since it was in Hebrew. He said, "What is this? It must be secret spy code. He called another guard over and they escorted me to the office, each guard holding one of my arms.In the office, they started asking questions.
I told them, "This is used to pray."
"Pray? You're lying. It looks to me like secret code. What is the language?"
"Hebrew."
"Yah, Hebrew, right, This must be secret code. And for that, you get," and drew his finger across his throat.
I said, "Wait! Don't you have someone here who can read this?"
The other guard said, "Yeah, maybe Boris can. Call in Boris."
Someone asked for Boris. A big Russian guard and took the parchment with the Hebrew written on it...
"What are you talking about? Spies. Codes. These are prayers." He put the parchments back in the boxes. "This is teffilin. The Jews pray with this every day."
"Huh? How do you know this?"
He looked me in the eyes and didn't respond right away."My father used the exact same thing when he was alive. He prayed with one of these things every day, so let's forget about this. Let the man go."
I realized why he had been reluctant. In Russia it was against the law to practice religion. He could have been severely reprimanded for his admission. G-d bless him. That Russian officer saved my life.
RIP Charlie Callas
Charlie Callas, the rubber-faced comedian from Brooklyn who was a cut-up on talk and variety shows by the likes of Johnny Carson, Jackie Gleason, Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan, Andy Williams and Flip Wilson. He also had a role in the Robert Wagner & Eddie Albert detective show Switch, and appeared in the Mel Brooks films Silent Movie, High Anxiety and History of the World: Part I.
China Hearts Colonel Sanders
Yum! Brands (owners of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) is the most American of korporate food giants this side of a Big Mac. Which makes it interesting that Yum! now makes more dollars in China than the USA.
The spread in quarter three last year: 41.5 percent of Yum! sales came in the Asian giant versus 33.9 from the United States, and the spread in profits was greater, 46.3 vs. 29.1 percent.
The money in China is overwhelmingly KFC: of the 3,664 restaurants they own in the country, 83 percent are the Sanders brand. The rest are Pizza Huts, as Taco Bell was a flop that left the nation in 2008. But perhaps the chicken craze will lead to a reintroduction of Mexican food in China by combining the brands. Mexican food, like pizza, is not a hard sell when given the chance...
Colonel Sanders: China's favorite import
Paul R. La Monica
January 19, 2011
http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/19/news/companies/thebuzz/index.htm
Sarah Palin Steampunk Comic
A comic book starring Sarah Palin in a futuristic universe has been released, and whether you love her or hate her, it looks like a hoot.
In Steampunk Palin, Sarah proposes to use steam energy as a replacement for oil and nuclear power. The nuke and oil industries respond by blowing her up. Fortunately, she survives thanks to cyborg technology, which apparently includes silicon in her already awesome boobs. Armed with hi-tech weaponry and massive jugs, the half-robot Palin battles the evil mastermind behind the oil-nuke conglomerate (spoil alert) Al Gore. As Gore puts it: "Who were you expecting, Sarah, George Bush? It should have been obvious from the start that it would come to this... After winning the Academy Award and Nobel Peace Prize, I found out I love money, I love having power and influence over people, and all those alternative energy sources I kept touting are PATHETIC!"
The story is only fifteen pages long, but fortunately they also include eight pages of pin-up fantasy drawings. If they ever adapt this to film, I nominate Eva Angelina to play her...
'Steampunk Palin' Comic More Insane Than You Imagined
Jan 20th 2011
Chris Murphy
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/01/20/steampunk-palin-comic
Anne Hathaway Is Catwoman
In what may be the best casting decision by Christopher Nolan since picking Heath Ledger as The Joker, Anne Hathaway has been chosen to play Selina Kyle AKA Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. Now at least we know what Batman is rising over.
Hathaway beat out Keira Knightley, Rachel Weisz, Blake Lively and Natalie Portman for the role, all who would've been great choices in their own right. Tom Hardy has also been picked to play Bane...
Anne Hathaway to Play Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises
Sara Hammel
Wednesday January 19, 2011
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20458850,00.html
Hathaway beat out Keira Knightley, Rachel Weisz, Blake Lively and Natalie Portman for the role, all who would've been great choices in their own right. Tom Hardy has also been picked to play Bane...
Anne Hathaway to Play Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises
Sara Hammel
Wednesday January 19, 2011
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20458850,00.html
Stoner Cooking: Girl Scout Tagalongs
http://blogs.babble.com/family-kitchen/2011/01/07/homemade-girl-scout-cookies-tagalongs
Posted by Jaime on January 7th, 2011
What’s not to love about the Girl Scout cookies Tagalongs? They first came out when I was a Brownie and are basically a round Peanut Butter Twix bar. What’s better, Girl Scouts have never stopped selling them since they first came out—that’s more than we can say for Peanut Butter Twix.
To make your own at home, you simply need to start by baking small round cookies, then place a sweet peanut butter concoction on top, and then cover in chocolate.
Homemade Tagalongs
for the cookies:
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together butter and sugar. Beat until smooth. Add in egg and beat until well incorporated, scraping down the bowl, if necessary. Add in vanilla. Beat until smooth. With mixer on low, add in salt and flour. Mix until completely incorporated and dough is uniform. Shape dough into a cylinder with a diameter of about 2-3 inches. Wrap in parchment paper and freeze for at least 25 minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice dough into 1/8 inch disks and place on baking sheets, about a half inch apart. Once you have made 30 cookies, wrap up the cookie dough, freeze, and save for another time. Bake for 8 minutes. Place on a cooling rack and let cool completely.
3. Mix together peanut butter and powdered sugar. Form into small disks and press onto cookies. Melt chocolate in a microwave safe bowl for 30 second intervals, and mix well after each interval. Coat cookies completely in chocolate and lift out with a fork. Place on a parchment lined baking sheet and let set, or freeze to speed up the process.
Silent Movie Classics
Salon.com has a great piece on a restoration release of the classic 1926 Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin directed by Sergei Eisenstein. What makes this analysis unique is that it points out the greatest influence of this movie is on directors such as auteur Michael Bay:
Anybody who thinks that Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" is an "art film" either hasn't seen the movie at all or had it ruined for them by some combination of a butchered print and a tedious film-history professor. As a remarkable new restoration of the 1925 Soviet silent classic makes clear, "Battleship Potemkin" is first and foremost an action drama, a work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension. This taut, 71-minute picture is stitched together from more than 1,300 shots, very few of them lasting more than three or four seconds. For better or worse, this film's true revolutionary legacy is not art cinema but Hollywood; it's got a lot more in common with Tony Scott's "Unstoppable" than it does with Andrei Tarkovsky.
I'm not being willful or contrarian or anything -- it's just true. Of course Eisenstein was a fervent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, who hoped his story about a fabled 1905 uprising by sailors in the Tsarist navy would inspire the oppressed of the earth to throw off their chains and hoist the red flag (hand-tinted in this version, as at the Moscow premiere). But that context was a lot less important than he assumed at the time, and "Potemkin's" immense cultural impact has almost nothing to do with its purported politics. (The young Joseph Goebbels, whose ideology ran in a different direction, praised the film extravagantly.)
Like other Marxist thinkers and artists of his time, Eisenstein believed that political revolution demanded a revolutionary aesthetics and a revolutionary cinema. He thought his radical innovations in camerawork, composition and (most of all) the quick-cut editing he called "montage" were part of a global shift in mass consciousness, and he was right about that part. Presumably he never imagined that his aesthetic revolution would conquer the world, divorced from the ideology that had inspired it, while the Soviet experiment in social reinvention would become a cruel and miserable failure.
According to film historian Bruce Bennett, "Battleship Potemkin" was personally imported to the United States by silent star Douglas Fairbanks and screened privately for film-industry luminaries on both coasts during the summer and fall of 1926, beginning with a bedsheet projection at Gloria Swanson's house in New York. "Nobody went Bolshevik," quipped a columnist for Photoplay magazine at the time, "but a lot of people left with some revolutionary ideas of filmmaking." It's safe to say this was one of those collisions that changed the course of cultural history. Has there been a year since the late '20s when Hollywood didn't produce multiple imitations of "Battleship Potemkin"?
How "Battleship Potemkin" reshaped Hollywood
Andrew O'Hehir
Tuesday, Jan 11, 2011
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/01/11/potemkin/index.html
Meanwhile, OpenCulture.com has a great piece on A Trip to the Moon:
"A year before the Wright brothers launched the first airplane flight in 1903, Georges Méliès, a French filmmaker with already 400 films to his credit, directed a film that visualized a much bigger human ambition – landing a spacecraft on the moon. Loosely based on works by Jules Vernes (From the Earth to the Moon) and H. G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon), A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) invented one of our favorite cinematic genres – the science fiction film. Today, many film critics consider Méliès’ short film an enduring classic. The Village Voice ranked it #84 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century, and you’ll almost certainly recognize the iconic shot at the 4:44 mark.
Méliès’s body of work, which goes well beyond this landmark film, has been recently collected into a new box set. Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) puts 173 rare and rediscovered films onto 5 discs."
To see the film online, or even better, to download it:
A Trip to the Moon: Where Sci Fi Movies Began
January 19th, 2011
Dan Colman
http://www.openculture.com/2011/01/a_trip_to_the_moon_where_sci_fi_movies_began.html
Anybody who thinks that Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" is an "art film" either hasn't seen the movie at all or had it ruined for them by some combination of a butchered print and a tedious film-history professor. As a remarkable new restoration of the 1925 Soviet silent classic makes clear, "Battleship Potemkin" is first and foremost an action drama, a work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension. This taut, 71-minute picture is stitched together from more than 1,300 shots, very few of them lasting more than three or four seconds. For better or worse, this film's true revolutionary legacy is not art cinema but Hollywood; it's got a lot more in common with Tony Scott's "Unstoppable" than it does with Andrei Tarkovsky.
I'm not being willful or contrarian or anything -- it's just true. Of course Eisenstein was a fervent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, who hoped his story about a fabled 1905 uprising by sailors in the Tsarist navy would inspire the oppressed of the earth to throw off their chains and hoist the red flag (hand-tinted in this version, as at the Moscow premiere). But that context was a lot less important than he assumed at the time, and "Potemkin's" immense cultural impact has almost nothing to do with its purported politics. (The young Joseph Goebbels, whose ideology ran in a different direction, praised the film extravagantly.)
Like other Marxist thinkers and artists of his time, Eisenstein believed that political revolution demanded a revolutionary aesthetics and a revolutionary cinema. He thought his radical innovations in camerawork, composition and (most of all) the quick-cut editing he called "montage" were part of a global shift in mass consciousness, and he was right about that part. Presumably he never imagined that his aesthetic revolution would conquer the world, divorced from the ideology that had inspired it, while the Soviet experiment in social reinvention would become a cruel and miserable failure.
According to film historian Bruce Bennett, "Battleship Potemkin" was personally imported to the United States by silent star Douglas Fairbanks and screened privately for film-industry luminaries on both coasts during the summer and fall of 1926, beginning with a bedsheet projection at Gloria Swanson's house in New York. "Nobody went Bolshevik," quipped a columnist for Photoplay magazine at the time, "but a lot of people left with some revolutionary ideas of filmmaking." It's safe to say this was one of those collisions that changed the course of cultural history. Has there been a year since the late '20s when Hollywood didn't produce multiple imitations of "Battleship Potemkin"?
How "Battleship Potemkin" reshaped Hollywood
Andrew O'Hehir
Tuesday, Jan 11, 2011
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/01/11/potemkin/index.html
Meanwhile, OpenCulture.com has a great piece on A Trip to the Moon:
"A year before the Wright brothers launched the first airplane flight in 1903, Georges Méliès, a French filmmaker with already 400 films to his credit, directed a film that visualized a much bigger human ambition – landing a spacecraft on the moon. Loosely based on works by Jules Vernes (From the Earth to the Moon) and H. G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon), A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) invented one of our favorite cinematic genres – the science fiction film. Today, many film critics consider Méliès’ short film an enduring classic. The Village Voice ranked it #84 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century, and you’ll almost certainly recognize the iconic shot at the 4:44 mark.
Méliès’s body of work, which goes well beyond this landmark film, has been recently collected into a new box set. Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) puts 173 rare and rediscovered films onto 5 discs."
To see the film online, or even better, to download it:
A Trip to the Moon: Where Sci Fi Movies Began
January 19th, 2011
Dan Colman
http://www.openculture.com/2011/01/a_trip_to_the_moon_where_sci_fi_movies_began.html
T. Casey Brennan Interview
Speaking of MK-Ultra:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGzIEhEYvcc
Conversation With T. Casey Brennan Starring Ashlee Lori WIll
January 18, 2011
A conversation with T. Casey Brennan, comic book writer, band member and alleged JFK figure. Starring Ashlee Will.
Includes insight on his role as an alleged JFK figure, his writing career in the comic book industry, and what his comics have to do with the things he's experienced.
This is a series I intend to tell his story through a series of conversations. And I am also provoking him. Because sometimes he needs to be.
Ashlee Lori Will
ashleeloriwill.tumblr.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGzIEhEYvcc
Conversation With T. Casey Brennan Starring Ashlee Lori WIll
January 18, 2011
A conversation with T. Casey Brennan, comic book writer, band member and alleged JFK figure. Starring Ashlee Will.
Includes insight on his role as an alleged JFK figure, his writing career in the comic book industry, and what his comics have to do with the things he's experienced.
This is a series I intend to tell his story through a series of conversations. And I am also provoking him. Because sometimes he needs to be.
Ashlee Lori Will
ashleeloriwill.tumblr.com
Kurt Cobain & Natalie Portman: CIA Slaves?
Henry Makow also recently had an interesting review on his website of Black Swan, linking the film to the occult and Satanism. Like the popular web screed "Lady Gaga: The Illuminati Puppet" it is a piece that seems ripe to be passed around the Internet due to its shocking claims and the popularity of its target.
This leads to two articles I stumbled onto recently, which are both part of that curious "Blank is a CIA mind control victim" form of literature where Blank is the name of a famous celebrity. Indeed, the Lady Gaga-Illuminati connection is merely the most famous of these tales. There is a Mad Libs quality to these stories, but the best written of them at least note the occult symbolism in the celebrities work that makes these tales at least eerily plausible.
On celebrity linked to the CIA MK Ultra program is Natalie Portman, star of Black Swan. The article, found on PseudocCultMedia.blogspot.com, has an interesting analysis of her films and her roles from the perspective that she is a brainwashed CIA slave. If nothing else, there's a lot of hot pictures of Portman as a teenager in the article, which is reason enough to check it out.
The other article is on Kurt Cobain, and this theory is even more expansive:
A more believable theory about Cobain's death suggests he was the victim of a CIA mind control experiment. An individual claiming to represent 'a private network of researchers' contacted me about this and arranged a meeting in the Temple Church on Fleet Street. Once I'd settled in a pew, a very nervous young man seated himself beside me. According to my contact, the CIA is deeply concerned about the subversive influence of popular music on young people, that's why 'they murdered Brian Jones, John Lennon and Jim Morrison'.
What's been worrying the spooks lately is the sway black radicalism has gained over the minds of white teenagers, to counter this 'they've been pushing Nation of Islam style separatism among rappers'. Likewise, the white Grunge movement spearheaded by Nirvana was backed by the CIA because 'they wanted to divide youngsters on racial lines, if black and white kids linked up, they'd pose a serious threat to the system. The whole point of Grunge is to instill in teenagers a sense of hopelessness, to fill them with self-hate and prevent them from changing the world.'
Apparently, the CIA got hold of Cobain when he was still unknown, then using drugs, hypnosis and medical torture, they broke his will and rebuilt his personality. 'Most of the time he'd act relatively normal,' I was told, 'but all it took was a few key words spoken over the phone and Cobain would carry out the deeds he'd been programmed to enact.' My contact was convinced that the singer had been brainwashed into committing suicide at the peak of his success because the CIA figured this would reduce his potentially rebellious fans to complete despair.
Let me be clear here: by mentioning these articles, I'm not endorsing them, but I'm not dismissing them either. In any case, by looking at these conspiracy theories or urban legends, maybe it will lead you to questioning some assumptions of our culture...
"Black Swan"-- Hollywood Preaches Satanism
January 16, 2011
http://www.henrymakow.com/black_swan.html
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Natalie Portman Kabbalistic Kitten
http://pseudoccultmedia.blogspot.com/2009/11/natalie-portman-kabbalistic-kitten.html
NO MORE ROCK 'N' ROLL
Stewart Home
http://www.altx.com/interzones2/london/rock.n.roll.html
This leads to two articles I stumbled onto recently, which are both part of that curious "Blank is a CIA mind control victim" form of literature where Blank is the name of a famous celebrity. Indeed, the Lady Gaga-Illuminati connection is merely the most famous of these tales. There is a Mad Libs quality to these stories, but the best written of them at least note the occult symbolism in the celebrities work that makes these tales at least eerily plausible.
On celebrity linked to the CIA MK Ultra program is Natalie Portman, star of Black Swan. The article, found on PseudocCultMedia.blogspot.com, has an interesting analysis of her films and her roles from the perspective that she is a brainwashed CIA slave. If nothing else, there's a lot of hot pictures of Portman as a teenager in the article, which is reason enough to check it out.
The other article is on Kurt Cobain, and this theory is even more expansive:
A more believable theory about Cobain's death suggests he was the victim of a CIA mind control experiment. An individual claiming to represent 'a private network of researchers' contacted me about this and arranged a meeting in the Temple Church on Fleet Street. Once I'd settled in a pew, a very nervous young man seated himself beside me. According to my contact, the CIA is deeply concerned about the subversive influence of popular music on young people, that's why 'they murdered Brian Jones, John Lennon and Jim Morrison'.
What's been worrying the spooks lately is the sway black radicalism has gained over the minds of white teenagers, to counter this 'they've been pushing Nation of Islam style separatism among rappers'. Likewise, the white Grunge movement spearheaded by Nirvana was backed by the CIA because 'they wanted to divide youngsters on racial lines, if black and white kids linked up, they'd pose a serious threat to the system. The whole point of Grunge is to instill in teenagers a sense of hopelessness, to fill them with self-hate and prevent them from changing the world.'
Apparently, the CIA got hold of Cobain when he was still unknown, then using drugs, hypnosis and medical torture, they broke his will and rebuilt his personality. 'Most of the time he'd act relatively normal,' I was told, 'but all it took was a few key words spoken over the phone and Cobain would carry out the deeds he'd been programmed to enact.' My contact was convinced that the singer had been brainwashed into committing suicide at the peak of his success because the CIA figured this would reduce his potentially rebellious fans to complete despair.
Let me be clear here: by mentioning these articles, I'm not endorsing them, but I'm not dismissing them either. In any case, by looking at these conspiracy theories or urban legends, maybe it will lead you to questioning some assumptions of our culture...
"Black Swan"-- Hollywood Preaches Satanism
January 16, 2011
http://www.henrymakow.com/black_swan.html
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Natalie Portman Kabbalistic Kitten
http://pseudoccultmedia.blogspot.com/2009/11/natalie-portman-kabbalistic-kitten.html
NO MORE ROCK 'N' ROLL
Stewart Home
http://www.altx.com/interzones2/london/rock.n.roll.html
Porn: The Illuminati Plot
Henry Makow is an interesting, if controversial, guy. The creator of the popular home game Scruples, he now runs the Website SaveTheMales.ca, which is dedicated to his hobby horses: in particular, warning the promotion of feminism, homosexuality and pornography is part of an Illuminati plot to destroy Western civilization. That he links this diabolical conspiracy to the Protocols of Zion would make him an easy target as anti-Semite, if it wasn't for the fact he's a descendant of Nazi Holocaust survivors. In any case, Makow is often dismissed as an anti-woman, anti-gay moral prude, and though the truth is a bit more nuanced than that, these reductions of his writings are not made out of thin air. Furthermore, whatever his own particular views may be, his work is popular among rabid anti-Semites, white supremacists and extreme right-wing Christians that all endorse a very ugly, reactionary politic agenda. If you judge a tree by their fruits, Makow would be a good tree to avoid at all costs.
It would then be real easy for me dismiss Makow and his works as the paranoid scribblings of a man suffering a major persecution complex that any Freudian could write a thesis over. It would be easy to dismiss him, but unfortunately, I can't, even if I don't share the same philosophy as he does. The reason I can't dismiss him is that his writings prove to be way too stunningly accurate.
Take a recent piece by him on the effects of pornography on Japanese society. In Japan, porn is far more prevalent and depraved than it is in the USA, and the results aren't pretty:
"Normally teenage boys are obsessed with sex. So you know something is very wrong when more than a third of Japanese youths say they don't want it!
According to a government survey, 35 per cent of Japanese males aged 16-19 are averse to sex, more than double the 17.5 percent of men in the previous study in 2008."
This little stat underscores one of his main points: that American society's obsession with sex is paradoxically anti-sexual in nature. Seeing what happens in a trailblazer nation on porn such as Japan is a sign of things to come. As Makow states:
"Pornography is a sexual turn-off. This is why the Illuminati have made it ubiquitous.
People get sick of whatever they have too much of. There's too much sex out there. The challenge and mystery are gone. Most males are jaded. They look at porn to see if there is any woman left who can turn them on.
Porn makes available women seem inadequate. It becomes a substitute for sex with a real woman."
Let it be noted that I am strongly in favor of free speech extended to pornography. I am also someone who doesn't hide his appreciation of porn. That said, I have to admit that everything Makow says in the paragraphs above is completely true. And I doubt any friends of mine who are porn appreciators would disagree with me on this.
I'm sure I haven't done Makow justice here, and a writer this unusual can't be given justice in such small of space. So instead let me recommend you his work at SaveTheMales.ca and HenryMakow.com where, even if if you don't completely embrace his premises, you may learn something from his often controversial writings.
Is Porn Killing Sex in Japan?
January 14, 2011
Henry Makow
http://www.henrymakow.com/is_porn_killing_sex.html
It would then be real easy for me dismiss Makow and his works as the paranoid scribblings of a man suffering a major persecution complex that any Freudian could write a thesis over. It would be easy to dismiss him, but unfortunately, I can't, even if I don't share the same philosophy as he does. The reason I can't dismiss him is that his writings prove to be way too stunningly accurate.
Take a recent piece by him on the effects of pornography on Japanese society. In Japan, porn is far more prevalent and depraved than it is in the USA, and the results aren't pretty:
"Normally teenage boys are obsessed with sex. So you know something is very wrong when more than a third of Japanese youths say they don't want it!
According to a government survey, 35 per cent of Japanese males aged 16-19 are averse to sex, more than double the 17.5 percent of men in the previous study in 2008."
This little stat underscores one of his main points: that American society's obsession with sex is paradoxically anti-sexual in nature. Seeing what happens in a trailblazer nation on porn such as Japan is a sign of things to come. As Makow states:
"Pornography is a sexual turn-off. This is why the Illuminati have made it ubiquitous.
People get sick of whatever they have too much of. There's too much sex out there. The challenge and mystery are gone. Most males are jaded. They look at porn to see if there is any woman left who can turn them on.
Porn makes available women seem inadequate. It becomes a substitute for sex with a real woman."
Let it be noted that I am strongly in favor of free speech extended to pornography. I am also someone who doesn't hide his appreciation of porn. That said, I have to admit that everything Makow says in the paragraphs above is completely true. And I doubt any friends of mine who are porn appreciators would disagree with me on this.
I'm sure I haven't done Makow justice here, and a writer this unusual can't be given justice in such small of space. So instead let me recommend you his work at SaveTheMales.ca and HenryMakow.com where, even if if you don't completely embrace his premises, you may learn something from his often controversial writings.
Is Porn Killing Sex in Japan?
January 14, 2011
Henry Makow
http://www.henrymakow.com/is_porn_killing_sex.html
BabeWatch: Golden Globes Edition
Sofia Vergara
Eva Longoria
January Jones
Hayden Panettiere
Anne Hathaway
Angelina Jolie
And last, but not least, Natalie Portman
"I'm a Negro who speak up”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/157712/im-negro-who-speak-up%E2%80%9D-remembering-football-great-cookie-gilchrist
"I'm a Negro who speak up”: Remembering Football Great Cookie Gilchrist
Dave Zirin
With the passage of time, there are two establishment responses to the great political rebels in sports. You either see them commodified and defanged – think Muhammad Ali – or they are simply erased from history. Count Carlton Chester “Cookie” Gilchrist among the erased. Gilchrist, a former Buffalo Bills running back, died of cancer on January 10th at the age of 75. His legacy as both a player and athletic rebel are well worth restoring.
Gilchrist, the 1962 American Football League MVP, died the day before a remarkable anniversary not exactly celebrated by the world of Professional football. On January 11th 1965, Gilchrist led an African American boycott of the AFL All Star game, which was to be played in New Orleans. In 1965, an informal Jim Crow system ruled the Crescent city and African American players talked openly among themselves about their inability to get cabs, be served in restaurants, or stay at certain hotels. Gilchrist organized all 22 African American All-Pros to approach AFL commissioner Joe Foss and make clear that unless the game was moved, they wouldn’t be playing. White players also announced that they would stand in support of their Black teammates. Foss acceded to their demands, and moved the game to Houston's Jeppesen Stadium.
The actions of Gilchrist and his fellow All-Pros inspired Dr. Harry Edwards, Tommie Smith and Lee Evans to launch the Olympic Project for Human Rights, calling for an African American boycott of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Gilchrist’s courageous organizing also echoes today as Latino baseball stars like Adrian Gonzalez and Yovani Gallardo have indicated that they won’t play at the 2011 All-Star Game in Phoenix because of the harsh anti-immigration legislation signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer.
Gilchrist later said that his role leading the boycott was "better than anything I did playing football." That’s quite the statement because we are talking about one of the great players to ever put on cleats.
Gilchrist was signed, in violation of NFL rules, by Cleveland Browns owner Paul Brown, right out of high school. The NFL voided the signing, and Gilchrist, who was now also ineligible to play in college, had to trek up north and ply his trade in the Canadian Football League. In Canada, starting as a teenager. Gilchrist made six consecutive all-pro teams before moving to the AFL. There he dominated, becoming the first 1,000-yard rusher in league history, and setting the record for rushing touchdowns in a season. In one 1963 game against the New York Jets, Gilchrist rushed for 243 yards and five touchdowns.
For someone named Cookie, there was no sweetness to his game. As teammate Paul Maguire remembered to writer Tim Graham on ESPN.com, "On the football field, he was one of the nastiest sons a b------ I ever met in my life. There was absolutely no fear in that man."
Before one critical playoff game, as Maguire remembered, “Cookie stood up 'I'm going to tell you something. If we don't win this game, I'm going to beat the s--- out of everybody in this locker room.' " Then Cookie pointed at coach Lou Saban. “'And I'm going to start with you, Coach. I'm going to kick your ass first.' I just sat back in my locker. I knew he meant it.’"
But Cookie wasn’t seen as a leader just because he could play. He was outspoken He was loud. He was unapologetic.
As he said to Sports Illustrated in 1964, "People think I'm an oddball because I'm a Negro who speak up. But I have a lot on my mind. It's an internal disease, and it'll eat me alive if I don't get it out of my system what I think about things."
Cookie took his anti-racist tenacity and applied them to his dealings with management. He sent an open letter to the club owner Ralph Wilson before one season that read, "Gentlemen, it unfortunately becomes necessary again for me to formally request that you make efforts to trade me to some other football club." He received his raise. But he wanted more.
As he said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "I wanted a percentage of the hot dog sales, the popcorn, the parking and the ticket sales," Gilchrist said. "[Coach Saban] said that would make me part owner of the team. I was a marked man after that."
Gilchrist spent his retirement utterly unapologetic about his outspoken ways. He was offered enshrinement in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, and Gilchrist became the first person to simply say no. He said that the racism and financial exploitation he suffered in the CFL could not simply be forgotten. He also for years refused induction in the Bills Ring of Honor because of his life-long conflict with Ralph Wilson, still the Bills owner today at age 87.
But late in life Gilchrist softened his stance, after receiving an outpouring of love from Buffalo when the news being public that he was battling cancer. Even Ralph Wilson wanted to reconcile and spoke to Cookie the weekend before his death. "I have a whole box of cards and letters," Gilchrist said. "I was surprised; it brought tears to my eyes. I thought Buffalo was mad at me." They weren’t mad Cookie. They just didn’t know what they had until it was gone.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
"I'm a Negro who speak up”: Remembering Football Great Cookie Gilchrist
Dave Zirin
With the passage of time, there are two establishment responses to the great political rebels in sports. You either see them commodified and defanged – think Muhammad Ali – or they are simply erased from history. Count Carlton Chester “Cookie” Gilchrist among the erased. Gilchrist, a former Buffalo Bills running back, died of cancer on January 10th at the age of 75. His legacy as both a player and athletic rebel are well worth restoring.
Gilchrist, the 1962 American Football League MVP, died the day before a remarkable anniversary not exactly celebrated by the world of Professional football. On January 11th 1965, Gilchrist led an African American boycott of the AFL All Star game, which was to be played in New Orleans. In 1965, an informal Jim Crow system ruled the Crescent city and African American players talked openly among themselves about their inability to get cabs, be served in restaurants, or stay at certain hotels. Gilchrist organized all 22 African American All-Pros to approach AFL commissioner Joe Foss and make clear that unless the game was moved, they wouldn’t be playing. White players also announced that they would stand in support of their Black teammates. Foss acceded to their demands, and moved the game to Houston's Jeppesen Stadium.
The actions of Gilchrist and his fellow All-Pros inspired Dr. Harry Edwards, Tommie Smith and Lee Evans to launch the Olympic Project for Human Rights, calling for an African American boycott of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Gilchrist’s courageous organizing also echoes today as Latino baseball stars like Adrian Gonzalez and Yovani Gallardo have indicated that they won’t play at the 2011 All-Star Game in Phoenix because of the harsh anti-immigration legislation signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer.
Gilchrist later said that his role leading the boycott was "better than anything I did playing football." That’s quite the statement because we are talking about one of the great players to ever put on cleats.
Gilchrist was signed, in violation of NFL rules, by Cleveland Browns owner Paul Brown, right out of high school. The NFL voided the signing, and Gilchrist, who was now also ineligible to play in college, had to trek up north and ply his trade in the Canadian Football League. In Canada, starting as a teenager. Gilchrist made six consecutive all-pro teams before moving to the AFL. There he dominated, becoming the first 1,000-yard rusher in league history, and setting the record for rushing touchdowns in a season. In one 1963 game against the New York Jets, Gilchrist rushed for 243 yards and five touchdowns.
For someone named Cookie, there was no sweetness to his game. As teammate Paul Maguire remembered to writer Tim Graham on ESPN.com, "On the football field, he was one of the nastiest sons a b------ I ever met in my life. There was absolutely no fear in that man."
Before one critical playoff game, as Maguire remembered, “Cookie stood up 'I'm going to tell you something. If we don't win this game, I'm going to beat the s--- out of everybody in this locker room.' " Then Cookie pointed at coach Lou Saban. “'And I'm going to start with you, Coach. I'm going to kick your ass first.' I just sat back in my locker. I knew he meant it.’"
But Cookie wasn’t seen as a leader just because he could play. He was outspoken He was loud. He was unapologetic.
As he said to Sports Illustrated in 1964, "People think I'm an oddball because I'm a Negro who speak up. But I have a lot on my mind. It's an internal disease, and it'll eat me alive if I don't get it out of my system what I think about things."
Cookie took his anti-racist tenacity and applied them to his dealings with management. He sent an open letter to the club owner Ralph Wilson before one season that read, "Gentlemen, it unfortunately becomes necessary again for me to formally request that you make efforts to trade me to some other football club." He received his raise. But he wanted more.
As he said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "I wanted a percentage of the hot dog sales, the popcorn, the parking and the ticket sales," Gilchrist said. "[Coach Saban] said that would make me part owner of the team. I was a marked man after that."
Gilchrist spent his retirement utterly unapologetic about his outspoken ways. He was offered enshrinement in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, and Gilchrist became the first person to simply say no. He said that the racism and financial exploitation he suffered in the CFL could not simply be forgotten. He also for years refused induction in the Bills Ring of Honor because of his life-long conflict with Ralph Wilson, still the Bills owner today at age 87.
But late in life Gilchrist softened his stance, after receiving an outpouring of love from Buffalo when the news being public that he was battling cancer. Even Ralph Wilson wanted to reconcile and spoke to Cookie the weekend before his death. "I have a whole box of cards and letters," Gilchrist said. "I was surprised; it brought tears to my eyes. I thought Buffalo was mad at me." They weren’t mad Cookie. They just didn’t know what they had until it was gone.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
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