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Best of the Web: Massive Fireball Over Tokyo

Sonotaco.jp
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:31 EST

Several people observed a massive meteor fireball emitting a brighter than usual flash at around 8:30 pm on the 6th of November - it was observed throughout the province. According to a statement from the Toyama Observatory, it was a "massive fireball", a rare phenomenon caused by a large mass of meteorite.

Watch the Sott web exclusive video below

Dr. Russell Blaylock
Dr. Mercola
Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00 EST

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.

- G.W.F. Hegel

I have been following the evolving "pandemic" of H1N1 influenza beginning with the original discovery of the infection in Mexico in March of this year. In the course of this study I have tried to utilize as my sources high-quality, peer-reviewed journals, data from the CDC and accepted textbooks of virology.

As with all such studies one has to integrate and correlate previous experiences with epidemics and pandemics. As you will see, a great deal of my material comes from official sources, such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the New England Journal of Medicine. Thus my distracters cannot claim that I am using material that is not within the mainstream.

Agence France-Presse
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:36 EST

President Hamid Karzai is "corrupt" but NATO has to accept that "he is our guy" in Afghanistan, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said, according to the New York Times on Thursday.

Kouchner also complained that President Barack Obama's US administration was drawing up a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan without consulting its European allies within NATO, leaving them in the dark.

"What is the goal? What is the road? And in the name of what?" Kouchner asked, according to the New York Times report. "Where are the Americans? It begins to be a problem ... We need to talk to each other as allies."

Comment: This remark makes a mockery out of the Afghanistan "election". It also shows the hypocrisy of the Western governments when they cried out over the alleged Iranian election fraud.

Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:51 EST

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.

Stephen Lendman
SteveLendmanBlog
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:00 EST

In April 2009, Chavez presented Obama with the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent which details US aggression in Latin America.

At a time of growing US poverty, hunger, homelessness, and despair, imperial wars without end, and the Obama administration even worse than its predecessor, Venezuela:

-- is a model participatory democracy;

-- holds free, fair and open elections;

-- respects the rule of law, civil liberties, and human rights;

-- doesn't intimidate its neighbors;

-- uses its resources responsibly for the people;

-- provides essential social services for the needy;

-- champions judicial fairness and the rule of law;

-- has a model free and open media;

-- wages no foreign wars;

-- doesn't torture or imprison its adversaries;

-- conducts effective operations to halt illicit drugs trafficking;

-- promotes global peace, solidarity, equality and social justice; and

-- its only threat is its good example that shames its northern neighbor.

Best of the Web: Jon Stewart Eviscerates Fox News (Video)

Verena von Pfetten
Air America
Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:27 EDT

Jon Stewart dedicated more than 11 minutes of Thursday night's show on what he calls the "hyperbolic" war between the White House and Fox News.

Though he certainly gave the White House a few nudges for saying they are "speaking truth to power" by fighting with Fox, Stewart spends the majority of the segment putting together one of the best and biggest takedowns of the network we have ever seen. The meatiest part involves For News Senior Vice President Michael Clemente's claim that Fox's designated "news" hours are from 9AM to 4PM and 6-8PM.

Stewart explains:

For the audience here, let me help you out--because it does get confusing. The three hours you spend in the morning with "Fox & Friends": not news. Your 4 o'clock to 5 o'clock post-tea and crumpets Neil Cavudo break: not news. The 5 o'clock to 6 o'clock emotional whirlwind and national group therapy session that is Glenn Beck: not even close to news.

O'Reilly, Hannity, van Susteren-en-en-en: not news. This is according to Fox News. Those people--the ones featured in promos about how fair and balanced Fox News is--are not news. These people--otherwise known as the only people you ever think of when you think of Fox News--are not news. They are Fox 'opinutainment.'

That's our favorite part. Please watch and tell us what yours is:

Associated Press
Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:10 EST

Washington - Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald famously declared in the Valerie Plame affair that "there is a cloud over the vice president." Last week's release of an FBI interview summary of Dick Cheney's answers in the criminal investigation underscores why Fitzgerald felt that way.

On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy.

The Cheney interview reflects a team of prosecutors and FBI agents trying to find out whether the leaks of Plame's CIA identity were orchestrated at the highest level of the White House and carried out by, among others, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

Best of the Web: Be Prepared for the Worst

Ron Paul
Forbes Magazine
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:50 EST

Any number of pundits claim that we have now passed the worst of the recession. Green shoots of recovery are supposedly popping up all around the country, and the economy is expected to resume growing soon at an annual rate of 3% to 4%. Many of these are the same people who insisted that the economy would continue growing last year, even while it was clear that we were already in the beginning stages of a recession.

A false recovery is under way. I am reminded of the outlook in 1930, when the experts were certain that the worst of the Depression was over and that recovery was just around the corner. The economy and stock market seemed to be recovering, and there was optimism that the recession, like many of those before it, would be over in a year or less. Instead, the interventionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt caused the Depression to worsen, and the Dow Jones industrial average did not recover to 1929 levels until 1954. I fear that our stimulus and bailout programs have already done too much to prevent the economy from recovering in a natural manner and will result in yet another asset bubble.

The Malaysia Star
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:14 EST

A British Muslim detained for three years at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison manned by the United States, revealed that the youngest detainee he knew of was a nine-year-old boy who was also tortured like the rest.

Ruhal Ahmed's story was among more accounts of atrocities committed against the detainees at Guantanamo, told before an open commission hearing which began Friday on the sidelines of an international conference to criminalise war.

The testimonies before the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission Hearings will be submitted to a tribunal in conjunction with the Criminalise War Conference and War Crimes Tribunal 2009 spearheaded by former Malaysian prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Best of the Web: Enjoy the warmth while it lasts

Lawrence Solomon
NationalPost.com
Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:42 EDT

Thank your lucky stars to be alive on Earth at this time. Our planet is usually in a deep freeze. The last million years have cycled through Ice Ages that last about 100,000 years each, with warmer slivers of about 10,000 years in between.

We are in-betweeners, and just barely - we live in (gasp!) year 10,000 or so after the end of the last ice age. But for our good fortune, we might have been born in the next Ice Age.

Our luck is even better than that. Those 10,000-year warm spells aren't all cosy-warm. They include brutal Little Ice Ages such as the 500-year-long Little Ice Age that started about 600 years ago. Fortunately, we weren't around during its fiercest periods when Finland lost one-third of its population, Iceland half, and most of Canada became uninhabitable - even the Inuit fled. While the cold spells within the 10,000 year warm spells aren't as brutal as a Little Ice Age, they can nevertheless make us huddle in gloom, such as the period in history from about 400 AD to 900 AD, which we know as the Dark Ages. We've lucked out twice, escaping the cold spells within the warm spells, making us inbetweeners within the inbetween periods. How good is that?

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty" Adlai E. Stevenson

"There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle." Bill Moyers

"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." Simon Heffer in The Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823

"A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press, must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know.": Murray I. Gurfein

One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they're still free. N.A. Scott