Black Ops Jungle

The Academy of Military-Industrial-Complex Studies

"....Now add a new kind of program to the list: homeland security high. In late August, Maryland's Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.

The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the "new reality," though they hasten to add that the school isn't focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it's no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely...."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2007/09/black-ops-jungle.html

Alien Life Forms More Alien Than Assumed?

"....Indeed, the ancient Gnostics also warned of the existence of such inorganic entities that were observed to be jealous of humanity, and in the process, sought to use their technologies to manipulate, control, and enslave humanity.

Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks. Life on Earth is organic. It is composed of organic molecules, which are simply the compounds of carbon, excluding carbonates and carbon dioxide. The idea that particles of inorganic dust may take on a life of their own is in itself, nothing short of alien, and goes beyond the silicon-based life forms favoured by some science fiction stories.

Now, an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself...."

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/09/14/01776.html

The Devil's Box

....This is "soft" brainwashing, even more effective because its victims go about their lives unaware of what is being done to them. Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates the basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you.

It works on a principle of tension and release. Create tension, in a controlled environment, increasing the level of stress. Then provide a series of choices that provide release from the tension. As long as the victim believes that the choices presented are the only choices available, even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless, ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices. Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment, such choice-making is not a ``rational'' experience. It does not involve the use of man's creative mental powers; instead man is conditioned, like an animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release.

The key to the success of this brainwashing process is the regulation of both the tension and the perceived choices. As long as both are controlled, then the range of outcomes is also controlled. The victim is induced to walk down one of several pathways acceptable for his controllers. The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment "social turbulence." The last decades have been full of such social turbulence--economic collapse, regional wars, population disasters, ecological and biological catastrophes. Social turbulence creates crises in perceptions, causing people to lose their bearings.

Adrift and confused, people seek release from the tension, following paths that appear to lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life. There is no time in such a process for rational consideration of complicated problems. Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension and the choices. It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up simple answers. Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of escape from reality, is itself the single most important release from our tension-wracked existence. Eight hours a day, every day, through its programming, you are being programmed.....

 

 http://www.jimmarrs.com/news.php?recordnumber=507

"It's Time for We the People to Put the 'Decider' Through the Decider Mill"

Swami Beyondananda Calls for Impeachment

by Swami Beyondananda

As a devout FUNdamentalist (accent on "fun") dedicated to bringing about
Nonjudgment Day, I try to avoid judging and blame. In fact, I think people
who judge are terrible, and those who blame are the cause of all the world's
problems. And as a Swami -- even a fake one -- I feel obliged to be above
politics. But no matter how high I try to rise above it on my magic carpet,
the smell is unavoidable. The perpetrations of this Administration stink to
high heaven.

Now we know the whole idea of impeachment is tinged with partisanship,
particularly in the light of the Bill Clinton affair. Indeed, Clinton
publicly lied about a private matter and the Republicans gleefully made his
privates public. But now even Republicans must face the sad truth that
America has traded one lie-about for another who will lie about anything and
everything. Not to excuse cheating on Hillary, but our current lie-about
has been unfaithful to the Constitution and the rule of law. Bush and
Cheney have been cheating on all of us. (And yes, both must be impeached.
If we want justice to be done, we have to go right up the
Cheney-of-command.)

In addition to producing and directing The Iraqi Horror Picture Show --
and using G-rated trailers to hide X-rated content -- the Bush-Cheney
Administration has instituted a disturbing policy of "ethic cleansing."
This cleansing of ethical people from positions of power not only has caused
our entire moral compass to go south, but has allowed "psychopathogens"
(opportunistic organisms with a poisonality disorder) to infect the body
politic, and the political discourse. Meanwhile, the "fear-gnomes" --
little gnomes of gnawing fear -- the Administration injected into the
mainstream lowered our resistance to Mad Cowboy Disease, an affliction we're
still suffering from.

But, as the saying goes, the truth shall upset you free. George Bush
has been an enlightening rod to enlighten and awaken a slumbering body
politic to an issue that is bigger than politics -- the rule of law vs. the
overrule of law. And now after being abused by the abuse of power, the
American people are starting to disabuse themselves. They are waking up and
wising up, and that's good because we could use a good upwising in this
country. Despite a massive media impropaganda machine that feeds the public
"babblum" (strained B.S. made digestible for a simple child's mind), more
and more Americans are reading between the lyin's and peering behind the
Irony Curtain.

We are awakening to realize that we the people are the "deciders," and
ultimately we get to decide who our Decider will be ... and who to put
through the decider mill. And the issue is bigger than Democrats vs.
Republicans. The real issue is "buy-partisan." Parties in both parties are
being bought, and our public servants are serving up huge chunks of the
commonwealth to help gold collar criminals become uncommonly wealthy.

The good news is, we don't need a revolution in this country. We
already had one. Now we need an American Evolution to reconstitute the
Constitution from the grassroots up and reestablish the dream of our
Founding Fathers -- government of the people, by the people and for the
people where the government does our bidding not the bidding of the highest
bidder.

How do we start the evolution? By firing the first big shots.

It's time for left and right to come front and center to stand for our
highest values instead of falling for the lowest common dominator. It's
time to impeach the entire impeachable system where the rule of gold has
overruled the Golden Rule. And the time to act is now. Why? Because it is
too late to do it sooner.

I have a dream. Imagine going to the voting booth and casting your vote
for ... the greater of two goods. Oh, and impeachment has another benefit.
If we are successful, we will have a woman President -- without having to
elect Hillary.

http://www.wakeuplaughing.com/news.html

I Do - 'Til The Time Limit Do Us Part

The seven-year solution

A German politician has proposed a time limit on marriage. Is this a practical solution, or an attention-grabbing stunt?

Ever since the departure of Joschka Fischer from the stage, German politics has been in need of a colourful character. It seems to have found one in the shape of Gabriele Pauli, a red-haired motorcyclist who is hoping to take over the leadership of Bavaria's Christian Social Union at the end of the month.

The CSU - in what is after all the Pope's homeland - is the most conservative force in Germany, so it is no wonder that Ms Pauli has created such a stir within the party - and beyond - with her solution to one of life's givens - the seven-year itch.

Her answer? The seven-year marriage.

"My proposal is for a marriage to run out after seven years," said Pauli, a twice-divorced 50-year old, as she outlined her leadership programme in Munich earlier this week.

The suggestion has shocked her colleagues even more so than her decision to pose in latex and a wig earlier this year for the society magazine Park Avenue. The CSU's leader Edmund Stoiber said with views so "diametrically opposed" to those of the CSU, she should look for another party. "Even the Greens", he said, had failed to come up with something so preposterous.

In short, according to Ms Pauli, marriage would be entered into only on an expiration basis, and partners would then have to say "yes" to an extension.

"Marriage is not there to offer security, rather as a demonstration of love," she argues.

The Berliner Zeitung has said of her idea: "It has something kamikaze-like in nature." ... [more]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/kate_connolly/2007/09/the_seven_year_solution.html

A Call for Systemic Change

"....Preparing for this speech, I wondered whether such  inquiries were happening in our Ceramic Engineering schools?  Were our ceramics majors engaged in the quest?  Were they being exposed to nature’s far better way?  And I answered my wondering:  Probably not, because I read that these pursuits are happening in biology laboratories with shoestring funding, while our universities remain locked in their traditional mind-set and curricula, teaching fossil fuel powered heat, beat, treat technologies - the very ones that industry is using to destroy the biosphere.

A similarly fascinating story follows the abalone’s.  It is the spider’s production of its silk web, yielding a fiber that is five times stronger, pound for pound, than the aramide Kevlar®, the toughest man-made fiber yet developed by Dupont’s heat, beat, treat technology which employs sulfuric acid at boiling temperatures.  Kevlar is strong enough to stop a bullet, but a weakling compared with spider’s silk, made from bugs at body temperature.  And I wondered again whether our textile and chemistry students were learning nature’s better way by studying spider’s silk.  I answered my wondering again:  Probably not, because I read that these studies are happening in biology laboratories with shoestring funding, while our universities remain locked in their traditional mind-set and curricula, teaching heat, beat, treat technologies - the very ones that industry is using to destroy the biosphere.

The emerging field of work, endeavoring to answer the question "How does nature do it?" in material sciences and a growing number of other fields, is "Biomimicry" - nature as model, nature as measure, nature as mentor. Biomimicry is in the early days of inspiring and helping define our sustainable future, not only in materials science, but also in food production (polycultural rather than monocultural, perennial rather than annual, crops); easier on the land, especially vanishing topsoil; in energy production (as scientists probe the mysteries of the complex physics and chemistry of nature’s exclusive process of  photosynthesis - easier on the atmosphere and climate); in medicine, e.g., pharmaceuticals that are identified by watching animals in the wild cure themselves naturally; in storing and retrieving knowledge (through studying shape-based computing, learned from how our own cells process information); in architecture (as we learn from termite mounds); and even in industry, as we begin to look to natural systems to teach us more intelligent organizing principles for production that does not consume and destroy nature.  Abundance through waste-free processes: that is nature’s way.  And we are light years behind in our feeble efforts thus far to emulate nature.

So I ask you who are shaping curricular and academic research:  Why are our universities not teaching Biomimicry?  Perhaps it is thought to be too new - and outrageous.  Nature, 3.8 billion years old, is too new?  Given the 50,000 year history of educating homo sapiens to live with nature, perhaps it is latter day ideas for destroying nature that are too new, and truly outrageous.  The overpowering consideration that prompts the question about Biomimicry is the increasingly obvious destruction of the biosphere, being wrought by the industrial system that is being taught in our universities.  The mind-set that grips the entire industrial system, of which our educational institutions are integral parts, takes nature for granted as if a finite Earth were infinite, both as a source of stuff and as a sink for the system’s waste - yours, mine, everybody’s.  The universities, in their academic programs, credit requirements, curricula, course design, campus design, and campus operations, perpetuate this flawed mind-set from generation to generation, with scarcely a pang of conscience, much less a serious re-examination of the universities’ roles in the destruction of the biosphere.  Obsolete curricula are clear symptoms of this obsolete, flawed mind-set.  And the clear evidence of the flaw is all around us in the form of declining natural systems upon which all else depends...."

http://www.ncseonline.org/NCSEconference/2003conference/page.cfm?FID=2504

Labour tries to block new BAE inquiry

Request from US investigators is ignored by home secretary

David Leigh and Rob Evans
Friday September 21, 2007

British ministers are refusing to cooperate with the US criminal investigation into allegations of corruption against BAE, Britain's biggest arms company, the Guardian can disclose.

More than two months after an official request for mutual legal assistance (MLA) was received from Washington, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, has not yet allowed it to be acted upon. The US investigators believe the British are being obstructive.

But legal sources said yesterday that the inquiry team had not been deterred by the UK government's hostile attitude. Some have already begun taking statements from key British witnesses.

The formal request for assistance came from the US department of justice earlier in the summer, but Ms Smith has refused to pass it on to the Serious Fraud Office for processing in the normal way.

This is unusual behaviour towards a major ally, with whom legal cooperation is normally automatic. Last night, the Home Office said its failure to pass on the request was "not unprecedented", but could not give any example of similar behaviour.

The SFO possesses important files on BAE gained from its own major inquiry into £1bn of payments to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia and other Swiss bank accounts linked to the Saudi royal family. But SFO investigators are not allowed to speak to US authorities until Home Office officials forward the paperwork.

The agency was forced to halt a criminal investigation earlier this year by the then prime minister Tony Blair, who said it threatened the national interest and was upsetting the Saudi regime.

The Home Office's refusal to cooperate with the US followed a similar attempt earlier this year to conceal the payments to Prince Bandar from the international bribery watchdog, the Paris-based OECD, which says it fears Britain is breaching a worldwide anti-bribery treaty to which it is supposedly a signatory.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat frontbencher, said last night: "There is no justification for delay. This information should be handed over immediately. Again, one is left with the suspicion that by refusing to cooperate, the government is more interested in securing arms deals than in the pursuit of justice.

"It makes a mockery of the government's assertion that they are robustly tackling corruption."

A fresh front against BAE was opened yesterday, when shareholders in the US launched a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the company's directors accusing them of corruption. A spokesman for BAE, which is 50% owned by US shareholders and holds lucrative contracts with the Pentagon, said : "The company intends to vigorously defend any such proceedings."

Prince Bandar, who is also named as a defendant, has not denied receiving cash and a free gift of an aeroplane, but he says it was for legitimate purposes.

Other defendants named in the US suit include former Conservative defence secretary Michael Portillo, who was given a post on BAE's board after helping negotiate an arms deal with Qatar; Sir Nigel Rudd, who recently joined BAE's board as a non-executive director; and Sir Dick Evans, the original architect of the £43bn al-Yamamah arms deal at the centre of the allegations.

The Washington claim has been made in the name of a small pension fund, the City of Harper Woods employees' retirement system, which only holds the equivalent of 14,000 BAE shares, less than 1% of the company's stock. But it is intended that other US shareholders will join in.

The suit claims that BAE's directors have wrecked the company's reputation and exposed it to heavy fines and penalties, by conniving at "improper and/or illegal bribes, kickbacks and other payments", while claiming all the while in public that BAE was a "highly ethical, law-abiding corporation".

They say these "imprudent and unlawful actions have had an inevitable damaging impact and a very negative one indeed for BAE's long-term future". The San Diego law firm won $7bn (£3.5bn) for investors in Enron after its collapse. Last year, it started a lawsuit against the board of BP, on behalf of shareholders, claiming that executives had been negligent in their handling of safety problems.

Evidence published by the Guardian shows that BAE and its corporate predecessors have been making secret payments to Saudi royals, with covert British government support from both major parties, for arms deals stretching back more than 30 years.

Last week, Saudi Arabia signed a fresh arms deal with Gordon Brown's administration worth up to £20bn for BAE's Typhoon aircraft.

The Saudis had been threatening to withdraw from the contract. King Abdullah has also been invited on a state visit to Britain next month.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2173947,00.html

U.S. Secret Air War Pulverizes Afghanistan and Iraq

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on September 14, 2007

According to the residents of Datta Khel, a town in Pakistan's North Waziristan, three missiles streaked out of Afghanistan's Pakitka Province and slammed into a Madrassa, or Islamic school, this past June. When the smoke cleared, the Asia Times reported, 30 people were dead.

The killers were robots, General Atomics MQ-1 Predators. The AGM-114 Hellfire missiles they used in the attack were directed from a base deep in the southern Nevada desert.

It was not the first time Predators had struck. The previous year a CIA Predator took a shot at al-Qaeda's number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but missed. The missile, however, killed 18 people. According to the Asia Times piece, at least one other suspected al-Qaeda member was assassinated by a Predator in Pakistan's northern frontier area, and in 2002 a Predator killed six "suspected al-Qaeda" members in Yemen.

These assaults are part of what may be the best kept secret of the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts: an enormous intensification of US bombardments in these and other countries in the region, the increasing number of civilian casualties such a strategy entails, and the growing role of pilot-less killers in the conflict.

According to Associated Press, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of bombs dropped on Iraq during the first six months of 2007 over the same period in 2006. More than 30 tons of those have been cluster weapons, which take an especially heavy toll on civilians.

The U.S. Navy has added an aircraft carrier to its Persian Gulf force, and the Air Force has moved F-16s into Balad air base north of Baghdad.

Balad, which currently conducts 10,000 air operations a week, is strengthening runways to handle the increase in air activity. Col. David Reynolds told the AP, "We would like to get to be a field like Langley, if you will." The Langley field in Virginia is one of the Air Force's biggest and most sophisticated airfields.

The Air Force certainly appears to be settling in for a long war. "Until we can determine that the Iraqis have got their air force to significant capability," says Lt Gen. Gary North, the regional air commander, "I think the coalition will be here to support that effort."

The Iraqi air force is virtually non-existent. It has no combat aircraft and only a handful of transports.

Improving the runways has allowed the Air Force to move B1-B bombers from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Balad, where the big aircraft have been carrying out daily strikes. A B1-B can carry up to 24 tons of bombs.

The step-up in air attacks is partly a reflection of how beaten up and overextended U.S. ground troops are. While Army units put in 15-month tours, Air Force deployments are only four months, with some only half that. And Iraqi and Afghani insurgents have virtually no ability to inflict casualties on aircraft flying at 20,000 feet and using laser and satellite-guided weapons, in contrast to the serious damage they are doing to US ground troops.

Besides increasing the number of F-16s, B1-Bs, and A-10 attack planes, Predator flight hours over both countries have doubled from 2005. "The Predator is coming into its own as a no-kidding weapon verses a reconnaissance-only platform," brags Maj. Jon Dagley, commander of the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.

The Air Force is also deploying a bigger, faster and more muscular version of the Predator, the MQ-9 "Reaper" -- as in grim -- a robot capable of carrying four Hellfire missiles, plus two 500 lb. bombs.

The Predators and the Reapers have several advantages, the most obvious being they don't need pilots. "With more Reapers I could send manned airplanes home," says North.

At $8.5 million an aircraft -- the smaller Predator comes in at $4.5 million apiece -- they are also considerably cheaper than the F-16 ($19 million) the B1-B ($200+ million) and even the A-10 ($9.8 million).

The Air Force plans to deploy 170 Predators and 70 Reapers over the next three years. "It is possible that in our lifetime we will be able to run a war without ever leaving the US," Lt Col David Branham told the New York Times.

The result of the stepped up air war, according to the London-based organization Iraq Body Count, is an increase in civilian casualties. A Lancet study of "excess deaths" caused by the Iraq war found that air attacks were responsible for 13% of the deaths -- 76,000 as of June 2006 -- and that 50% of the deaths of children under 15 were caused by air strikes.

The number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from air strikes has created a rift between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States.

"A senior British commander," according to the New York Times, has pressed U.S. Special Forces (SF) to leave southern Afghanistan because their use of air power was alienating the local people. SFs work in small teams and are dependent on air power for support.

SFs called in an air strike last November near Kandahar that killed 31 nomads. This past April, a similar air strike in Western Afghanistan killed 57 villagers, half of them women and children. Coalition forces are now killing more Afghan civilians than the Taliban are. The escalating death toll has thrown the government of Hamid Karzai into a crisis and the NATO governments into turmoil. "We need to understand that preventing civilian casualties is crucially important in sustaining the support of the population," British Defense Minister Des Browne told the Financial Times.

It has also opened up the allies to the charge of war crimes. In a recent air attack in southern Afghanistan that killed 25 civilians, NATO spokesman Lt. Col Mike Smith said the Taliban were responsible because they were hiding among the civilian population.

But Article 48 of the Geneva Conventions clearly states: "The Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants."  Article 50 dictates that "The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilian does not deprive the population of its civilian character." 

The stepped-up air war in both countries has less to do with a strategic military decision than the reality that the occupations are coming apart at the seams.

For all intents and purposes, the U.S. Army in Iraq is broken, the victim of multiple tours, inadequate forces, and the kind of war Iraq has become: a conflict of shadows, low-tech but highly effective roadside bombs, and a population which is either hostile to the occupation or at least sympathetic to the resistance.

It is much the same in Afghanistan. Lord Inge, the former British chief of staff, recently said, "The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognize...it is much more serious that people want to recognize." A well-placed military source told the Observer, "If you talk privately to the generals, they are very worried." Faced with defeat or bloody stalemate on the ground, the allies have turned to air power, much as the U.S. did in Vietnam. But, as in Vietnam, the terrible toll bombing inflicts on civilians all but guarantees long-term failure.

"Far from bringing about the intended softening up of the opposition," Phillip Gordon, a Brookings Institute Fellow, told the Asia Times, "bombing tends to rally people behind their leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland."

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

http://www.alternet.org/story/62511/