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.

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:

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?

Picture this: A 10-meter wide asteroid hits Earth and explodes in the atmosphere with the energy of a small atomic bomb. Frightened by thunderous sounds and shaking walls, people rush out of their homes, thinking that an earthquake is in progress. All they see is a twisting trail of debris in the mid-day sky.

This really happened on Oct. 8th around 11 am local time in the coastal town of Bone, Indonesia. The Earth-shaking blast received remarkably little coverage in Western press, but meteor scientists have given it their full attention. "The explosion triggered infrasound sensors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) more than 10,000 km away," report researchers Elizabeth Silber and Peter Brown of the Univ. of Western Ontario in an Oct. 19th press release. Their analysis of the infrasound data revealed an explosion at coordinates 4.5S, 120E (close to Bone) with a yield of about 50 kton of TNT. That's two to three times more powerful than World War II-era atomic bombs.

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

The US government's current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.

Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression.

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war's financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

"It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome," said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor Third World peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America's cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy's decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America.

Zahedan, Iran - An Iranian Sunni rebel said on Tuesday the United States had a supporting role in launching terror plots inside Iran.

"After meeting with the U.S. officials in the U.S. embassy in Pakistan four years ago, they (the U.S. officials) promised to help us with everything we needed," Abdolhamid Rigi, the brother of insurgent Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi, told reporters.

"We were deceived by them (the U.S. officials)...We received monetary and armed supports from the United States...We received orders from them" to carry out the terrors inside Iran, Abdolhamid Rigi said.

On Tuesday, Iran's government organized a media tour to Zahedan, the capital city of Iran's southeastern province of Sistan-Balouchestan, where the media attended a confession program of Abdolhamid Rigi.

America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.

In a move that reflects Washington's growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran's border regions.

The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime.

In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.

Eket, Nigeria - The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him - Mount Zion Lighthouse.

A month later, he died.

Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of "witch children" reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.

Why are so many people unaware of the hyper-dimensional phenomenon that is behind global politics, cutting-edge technology, and the future of the planet and ourselves?

Richard Dolan, author of UFOs and The National Security State, explains in depth why it is of utmost importance for each of us to actively seek out information on this issue.

Saturday September 26 2009: Three undercover officers attempt to infiltrate a March Against Police Brutality at the University of Pittsburgh, but fail miserably due to their horrendous disguise attempts. During the march, one of them breaks a photographer's camera. This is just one example of a larger pattern of attempts to silence the media during the G20 protests.