Picture of the Day

©2004 Pierre-Paul Feyte

We speak often about "objectivity" on the Signs page and the need to incorporate it into our daily lives. We understand, from continuing personal experience, that objectivity is not easy to accomplish. It requires continued and persistent efforts, and is invariably characterised by repeated failures before any measure of success is achieved. At present, society is structured in such a way as to preclude objective observation at every turn. Courtesy of the mass media, our minds are continually treated to diversionary "brain candy". In an effort to help our readers with the difficult task of objective observation of our environment, we present here an overview of the nature of life on earth from a purely objective standpoint.

Imagine that you are observing the Earth with a high powered telescope from a point out in space. This telescope gives you detailed close-ups of any point on the planet, but you cannot hear anything. You can only see. Forget everything you think you know about the "principles of biological life." Forget that you think you know anything about what living things are or how they are "supposed" to behave. Now, what do you see?

The first thing you notice is that the surface of the planet is teeming with activity. This includes areas under the soil and deep within the ocean. The activity on the surface of the planet consists of an immense number of different shapes and sizes of "living things" going about in circles eating each other.

Further, you notice that there is a whole class of these living things that are, essentially, immobile; incapable of escaping being eaten. In fact, they don't seem to object being eaten at all. Maybe if they COULD run away, they would, but they can't, so it may only seem that they don't object. But, the fact of the matter is that these immobile beings, (call them "plants") use this fact of being eaten to their advantage. By being eaten, they are often able to propagate themselves in far distant places that they would otherwise be unable to populate on their own.

However, all the other living things clearly resent being eaten. They very often make strenuous efforts to NOT be eaten.

By now, you have probably decided that this planet is a monstrous environment, and hideously dangerous to boot! We are already learning from nature.

Nevertheless, if you begin to examine the situation in another way, you begin to notice that many of the living things have fundamental similarities in shape and behavior and this leads you to think that maybe they ALL have something in common. After a bit of reflection, you come to the idea that this thing they all have in common is the "faculty of assimilating a food and transmuting it." This process of transmutation of food seems to be directed at reproduction and increase. When the living being achieves this aim, the organism begins to deteriorate and die. But this death is not an extinguishing of life in all the "component" parts of the being, because they are assimilated by other forms and recycled into new life whether animal or vegetable.

But, in considering the matter even more deeply, we discover that even those things that are not considered to be capable of assimilating and transmuting food, are still part of the cycle. Such things as minerals become part of the cycle and therefore do partake of the process through various chemical reactions.

So, perhaps we are looking for an even deeper principle: that of the faculty of reaction. The vital phenomenon is that of reacting.

But, to have reaction, or life, there must be action and resistance to action.

Action + Resistance = Reaction/Life. We have learned something else from Nature. There are TWO fundamental forces which result in a third.

So, we begin to think that all of these many living beings we are observing have a common, structurally very simple, origin. We begin to think that they are all not only manifestations of a single source, but that they have all been changing their shapes over an immense period of time. And we now come to the critical questions as to HOW and WHY this endless process of change has been occurring.

Of course, we can easily comprehend the first question in a general sense: the How of all the changes occurs is via reproduction. These creatures we are observing, not having eternal life, begin to reproduce themselves as early in their life cycle as possible.

Now, in a static and stable environment, it might be expected that all of the creatures would be exactly alike. They would reproduce copies of themselves that would be the same from the beginning to the end. But there is something else to consider. The planet is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays of various sorts that affect the "blueprints" that determine the offspring's likeness to the parent. Sometimes, these "blueprints," or genetic codes get changed in one way or another. Many of these altered copies do not survive - in fact, most of them don't. But every once in awhile, one of them does and reproduces. And sometimes the altered copies have some feature which actually makes them better than the original. These individuals not only reproduce, they thrive.

So, we see a certain pattern emerging here: the variations of biological systems have to do with whether or not one variety of creature can survive the competition in the terrifying planetary game of life and death. It is clear that danger is omnipresent and only the most vigorous and adaptable survive. To adapt to an environment, careful observation of that environment is necessary. This is another important rule that Nature teaches us.

This terrible vista is what we see when we look at nature. So, what are we to think? Is it mindless cruelty, or purposeful activity governed by some force or law? If it is purposeful activity what exactly might this purpose be? Once we are able to objectively see the "consuming" nature of our world we are in a position to choose what our personal reaction to such a reality will be. Indeed, we are perhaps in a position to choose to continue to interact in the "feeding frenzy" of life, or direct our energies towards finding a possible alternative.

Ground Zero

Chris Floyd – Moscow Times January 31, 2004

A man in Lawrence, Kansas walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice.

He pulls out the gun and shoots a little boy in the head, leaving his face a mass of bone-flecked goo. Then he fires into the chest of the girl in the next chair; she dies still clutching the stuffed rabbit she brings with her every day. Another boy is hit while running for the door. The man is using special bullets, tipped with depleted uranium; the shot explodes the boy's shoulder in a spray of red mist and sends his gangly body hurtling down the concrete stairwell.

A day-care worker grabs the man, tries to wrestle him down. He turns, jams the gun barrel against her womb and fires. She dies, eviscerated, clinging to his shoulders. The other children have run away screaming, except for one little girl who's fallen in the slick of blood. She tries to scramble to her feet, slips again, can't find her footing, claws at the floor in a wild panic. The man fires into her back, obliterating her spine, the heavy bullet drilling through the polished wood below.

The room is filled with smoke and the sharp tang of freshly gutted meat. The man takes a desultory look around, shrugs his shoulders, then sits down on the snack table. When the police come and ask him why he did it, he answers forthrightly, without a shred of guilt or unease, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

"Somebody said the guy who runs this place might attack me someday. I had questions that needed to be answered: Did he have a gun or a knife -- or nothing? We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary."

The cops roll their eyes -- another nutball. "So," says an officer, humoring him, "did he have any weapons?"

The killer shakes his head. "Nah, don't look like it. But he could have had some. What's the difference? -- Say, you fellas aren't going to lock me up, are you? It was an honest mistake. I just got bad advice, that's all."

This fable is the precise moral equivalent of the Bush Regime's murderous misadventure in Iraq. Last week, the Regime's own duly-appointed, CIA-paid weapons hunter, David Kay, finally coughed up a dinosaur-sized bone and admitted, openly, publicly, what the sane world has long known: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war -- and in fact hadn't had any since George Bush Senior stopped supplying Saddam Hussein with the money and material to make them many years ago.

The existence of Iraqi WMD and the dire threat it posed to America and the world was the publicly stated cause for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The utter falsity of this claim has now been established beyond rational dispute. Likewise, it is impossible for a rational person to believe that, in the absence of any real weapons, a substantial body of credible "evidence" for this phantom stockpile could have been amassed by the Anglo-American intelligence services. You can't have real evidence of something that isn't there.

Thus we come to this unavoidable conclusion: The Bush Regime launched a war of aggression on the basis of evidence that had to be, by its very nature, insubstantial, insufficient, false. That's the only kind of evidence they could have had. What does this mean? It means they have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of children -- blown them to pieces, shot them, crushed them, terrorized them, rendered them into hunks of rotting meat -- in an act of moral insanity no different than that of a nutball in Lawrence, Kansas, shooting up a day-care center to "protect" himself from imaginary threats.

And they've reacted to the consequences of their crime with the same kind of moral nullity. Colin Powell -- the "moderate" Bushist, we're told -- simply shrugged his shoulders at Kay's revelations. "We had questions that needed to be answered," he said, while flying to Moscow to tell the Russians they must resolve all their problems peacefully, within the strict rule of law. "What was it [Saddam had]?" mused Powell. "One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons" of WMD? "Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing?"

Nothing, as it turns out. All those children -- each one of them an individual human being, each one a unique and irreplaceable vessel of consciousness, a single coalescence of the blind, churning forces of nature into a star-point of awareness, brief but incandescent, worthy beyond measure, and every bit as valuable as any mother's tow-headed darling in Lawrence, Kansas or Crawford, Texas -- killed, eliminated, snuffed out ... for nothing. For zero.

Yet Powell dismissed these pointless killings, echoing George W. Bush's Solomonic declaration on the question of existing weapons versus hypothetical ones as a basis of war: "What's the difference?" Powell said the decision to kill the children was "based on the best intelligence we had at the time" -- intelligence that, as we've seen, could not possibly have been substantial or convincing. But who cares? We heard rumors. "We had questions." We killed children. We found nothing. We're not guilty. It was bad advice, an honest mistake.

That's all they have left as a public defense: the ravings of a man who killed for no reason, who sits in the ghoulish mire he's created and calls himself good.

Bush orders protections for food supply

EPA, 3 Cabinet departments told to develop procedures

The Associated Press
Feb. 03, 2004

WASHINGTON - President Bush is ordering three Cabinet departments and the Environmental Protection Agency to develop new procedures to protect the nation’s food supply from terror attack.

An executive order released Tuesday involved the departments of agriculture, health and human services and homeland security, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, in the response to potentially calamitous agricultural terrorism.

“It’s from farm to fork,” said Jeremy Stump, USDA’s director of homeland security. “It’s a protective shield around the whole sector.”

The directive calls for creation of systems to contain any outbreaks of plant or animal disease that result from terror attack and to prevent or cure the diseases themselves. [...]

The Bellicose Curve

Faulty intelligence has catapulted the United States into war all too many times before.

Intelligence chief's bombshell: 'We were overruled on dossier'

By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
The Independent
04 February 2004

The intelligence official whose revelations stunned the Hutton inquiry has suggested that not a single defence intelligence expert backed Tony Blair's most contentious claims on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. [...]

Dr Jones, who is expected to be a key witness at the new inquiry, says: "In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities." [...]

Dr Jones was the man whose decision to give evidence electrified the Hutton inquiry as he disclosed that he had formally complained about the dossier. The Government attempted to dismiss his complaints as part of the normal process of "debate" within the DIS and claimed that other sections of the intelligence community were better qualified to assess the 45-minute and chemical production claims.

But today Dr Jones makes clear that he was not alone and declares that the whole of the Defence Intelligence Staff, Britain's best qualified analysts on WMD, agreed that the claims should have been "carefully caveated". Furthermore, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which allowed the contentious claims to go into the dossier, lacked the expertise to make a competent judgement on them. [...]

The Lie Factory

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
Mother Jones
January/February 2004 Issue

[...] Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones , based on dozens of interviews—some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity—exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion. [...]

Comment: With accompanying graphics. Link thanks to Dacha.

Vote Fraud!

Radio 4 goes ahead with Hutton satire but cuts 'liar Blair'

By Matt Born
04/02/2004

The BBC yesterday performed a humiliating U-turn after the Telegraph revealed that a radio satire about the Hutton inquiry had been shelved amid fears that it would "upset Downing Street".

Bosses at Radio 4 said Thursday's episode of Absolute Power, starring Stephen Fry and John Bird as nefarious spin doctors, would now go ahead as scheduled.

However, the corporation admitted that a key reference to Tony Blair being a liar had been edited out.

The climbdown has done little to allay fears about a new found political timidity following the Hutton inquiry.

Mark Tavener, the writer of Absolute Power, said he was alarmed by the BBC's cautiousness. "If they're getting this anxious about a little comedy, what are they going to be like about things that are far more serious," he said.

The Telegraph has learned that a Radio 5 Live programme about Alastair Campbell has also been postponed. The Real Alastair Campbell was due to be transmitted "on or near the date" of the publication of the Hutton report. But the station's bosses have now delayed it, saying it needs "updating" to reflect the fact that Lord Hutton cleared the former Downing Street spin doctor of any wrongdoing.

Radio 4 was in full damage limitation mode yesterday after the decision to pull Absolute Power sparked accusations of "editorial cowardice".

In a letter to The Telegraph, Helen Boaden, Radio 4's controller, said the comedy, which was written and recorded last year, had been "overtaken by events".

Comment: The event that has overtaken the scheduled airing of the comedy would appear to be the institution of overt censorship of the press in the increasingly totalitarian United Kingdom.

The billionaire who is stalking George Bush

January 31, 2004

George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund management speaks during the Riding the Next Democratic Wave conference.

He is one of the world's wealthiest men. America made George Soros, but now he's digging deep to topple the 'truth machine', he tells Peter Fray.

George Soros is one of the world's wealthiest men, a self-created financial genius who has amassed a fortune by exploiting the foibles of the market and human nature. He is also a zealous philanthropist and supporter of both small and big "d" democrats. In short, he's a player.

But if you didn't know any of that or had somehow missed the entire Bush presidency, he might come across as more of a leftie sociology lecturer, the type who wears a leather-patched corduroy jacket and steadfastly clings to an equally faded world view. Come the revolution, brothers . . .

With Soros, it's not his dress sense, which is traditional business, but the patter. Within minutes of meeting the Herald at his plush west London abode, he complains about George Bush's "Orwellian truth machine" and its use of "doublespeak".

He believes that ending this presidency's "supremacist ideology" has become a "matter of life and death" for the planet's future. It's like meeting his compatriot Michael Moore in a posh suit and tie. "This Orwellian truth machine really does remind you of the conditions that Orwell was drawing from, mainly the Nazi and Soviet truth machines, with one tremendously significant difference - that in the Soviet and Nazi case, the state party apparatus absolutely controlled the media and all the sources of information totally. "In the United States today you do have a pluralistic, free media. Neverthe-less, the truth machine is capable of manufacturing truth, so that the majority of people in America continue to believe that Saddam was somehow connected to September 11, when all the evidence points to the opposite.

"It raises the question, how is this possible?"

Indeed. How is it possible that Mr Soros, at 73 and with a reported fortune of about $US7 billion ($9.1 billion), gives a hoot about Mr Bush; or why, when he himself has obviously lived the American dream to its fullest, has he devoted this year to unseating the man whom many Americans still believe is the living embodiment of that dream? Isn't this biting the system that feeds?

Soros, a Hungarian emigre to the US, concedes that he is open to such accusations. "I can be seen as a traitor to my class and my adopted country, but I am proud to take that role. I think there are values which transcend class and country. I think my country can be wrong and that's the value of an open society and that is the value which has made America great.

"I do think the open society and democracy is now in danger because the ultimate guarantor of an open society is a well-informed electorate that has a commitment to or values the truth.

"We now have a largely or partially misinformed electorate. But more to the point is that people are not concerned about the truth. In America, success counts more than the truth.

"You can see it in the [most recent] stockmarket bubble where entrepreneurs and various professionals used whatever means were needed to be successful. It got off the rails there, but that bubble did burst and you now have a lot of new regulations about corporate disclosure. But in the political area it reigns unconstrained and hasn't burst."

To assist in the bursting, Soros has written his eighth book, The Bubble of American Supremacy. It is a savage critique of Mr Bush's war on terrorism and the way in which it is being used to impose US views and interests "on the rest of the world by the use of military force".

He sees Mr Bush as a classic "victim-turned-perpetrator" and, as such, an ideal frontman for neo-conservative ideologues such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, in his Administration.

"It suits his personality because he's a born-again. He is a former substance abuser [alcohol] who has personal acquaintance with the devil because he has experienced it inside himself and then he has been reinforced by a devil [al-Qaeda] which tried to destroy him by attacking him in the White House."

The book offers a post-Bush vision in which the US rejoins the international community to foster democracy with financial incentives ("carrots") in much the same way as Mr Soros's philanthropic organisations in more than 50 countries.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq these incentives don't violate sovereignty. "If you had more carrots then you would have an additional stick, which is the withdrawal of carrots. So carrots and withdrawal of carrots would play a much bigger role because they don't violate sovereignty."

As an example, he cites the European Union's present carrot approach to assisting full democracy in Turkey.

Mr Soros knows a lot about carrots. He has given more than $US5 billion in the past 25 years to promote democracy in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet bloc. But now he wants to rekindle democracy in his adopted land.

So far, he has spent $US12.5 million supporting two Democrat-linked organisations - America Coming Together, which hopes to mobilise voters in 17 key states, and a web-based organisation, MoveOn.org.

Under strict campaign financing rules, he is restricted to directly giving individual candidates no more than $US2000. But he has organised fund-raisers for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, and would gladly do one for John Kerry.

Mr Soros probably won't endorse any one candidate. It's a case of whoever has the best chance of unseating Mr Bush. But he knows General Clark well because of his own involvement in helping restore the Balkans, and Senator Kerry is a neighbour in Sun Valley, Idaho.

"I think Kerry has a vision of the world that I find very acceptable because his formative experience was in Vietnam. I think he is very sensitive to the falseness of the Bush approach. I am not endorsing Kerry but I am very much encouraged by a possible Kerry-[John] Edwards combination."

Mr Soros's high profile in the campaign has made him a target for the Bush "truth machine". The Republican national committee has claimed he had "purchased the Democratic Party", a charge he denies, and the Wall Street Journal recently recalled his support for cannabis reform as a way of questioning his motives. "Mr Soros has every right to play in this sandbox, but the rest of us also have a right to wonder how much his view will follow his cash in influencing Democratic policy."

But the hardest mud to remove has been the false claim that he called Mr Bush a Nazi. For Mr Soros, whose experience of growing up a Jew in wartime Hungary gave him first-hand experience of the Nazis, it was a galling slur.

"I've said that when Bush says those who are not with us are with the terrorists it reminds me of the Germans. This has been distorted to my calling Bush a Nazi, which I didn't and wouldn't exactly because I know that system and I know the difference.

"But if you took a public opinion sample in so far that people have heard of me, they've heard of me as the man who called Bush a Nazi, not as a man who has a foundation devoted to fostering open society." But the attack hasn't put Mr Soros off his quest to remove Mr Bush.

The outstanding question is how much is he prepared to spend to achieve it. He would like to stop contributing now, but if the funding gap between the Republicans and Democrats becomes "too great then I'll try to do something to keep it within manageable proportions. Because the Bush machine has three or four times as much money available, which is OK, but there has to be a critical mass on the other side".

"I do consider myself in a privileged position and that I why I stick my neck out and I can afford to do it . . ."

As has been noted before, George Soros is probably the only American citizen with his own foreign policy.

As the election moves into another gear, he will find out if that policy is worth anything to anybody else - or whether it's just about a wealthy old bloke exercising his democratic rights.

Bush team defends his military service

Wed Feb 4, 1:24 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House mounted a rare, election-year counterattack at opposition Democrats accusing US President George W. Bush of skirting National Guard duty during the Vietnam War.

"It is outrageous and baseless. I think it represents the worst of election-year politics, and everyone should condemn this baseless attack," Bush spokesman Scott McClellan declared. [...]

Bush, 57, avoided combat in Vietnam by serving as a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard, but some Democrats seeking his ouster have revived questions about his attendance record.

The issue drew media scrutiny in 2000, when a Boston Globe investigation found no evidence Bush performed Guard duties between May 1972 and October 1973, when he received an honorable discharge from service.

But renewed charges by Bush opponents that the president was either a "deserter" or at least "absent without leave" (AWOL) forced the White House to abandon its official policy of staying out of the Democratic fray. [...]

"The president was honorably discharged from the National Guard. He served his time," Gillespie told CNN television. "And he fought -- he served in a very dangerous area, which is fighter jets." [...]

Bush's Republican rival in the 2000 election, Senator John McCain, also defended the president, saying Bush "has a record of honorable service during the Vietnam War in the National Guard where he also went through pilot training and flew a rather difficult airplane to fly and did well."

"Everything I know is that President Bush served honorably in the National Guard, and if you're going to make an allegation that somebody didn't, you better have some pretty good proof besides just throwing it out there," McCain told MSNBC.

Comment: Bush served in a dangerous area - figher jets. That's the best the White House could do? What about the Boston Globe investigation that showed he never served, and yet he was honorably discharged anyway? Finally, we have good old John McCain defending the president. McCain says that if one makes an allegation against another, one must have some proof. In other words, the burden of proof is on the accuser. We wonder why this same policy is not used when the US accuses, say, Iraq of having WMDs...

Powell says invasion justified by Iraqi "intent"

Tuesday February 3, 09:30 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Regardless of whether Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons, Washington would probably have decided to invade Iraq anyway because of its "intent" and its weapons-making ability, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell says.

"I think it was clear that this was a regime with intent, capability and it was a risk the president felt strongly we could not take and it was something we all agreed to and would probably agree to it again under any other set of circumstances," Powell told reporters on Tuesday. [...]

Comment: The US used intelligence to assess the threat posed by Iraq. It is now obvious that this information was, at best, flat out wrong. Worst case, it was all a lie. We are not quite sure how one can assess the intent of another country or leader if one does not have accurate information. Even then, there is arguably a vast gap between intending to do something, and actually doing it. If Iraq can be invaded because it might hurt the US, then no country is safe from the New American Empire.

Meanwhile, US troops in Iraq are dying at the rate of over one soldier per day. For a list of those US soldiers killed supporting Gulf War II, see Faces of Valor. In an update to the story run yesterday regarding Halliburton overcharging for meals at a US military base in Kuwait, it seems Cheney's old company will be refunding $27 million, not $16 million. And just in case you aren't yet sick of hearing about problems with the US economy and the Bush budget: the White House is seeking to give the UN a loan of $1.2 billion for renovations.

Angry trucker may have sent toxic ricin to Senate, White House

It sounds scary, but ricin's used daily

Ashcroft Says Militants Victimize Muslim Nations

By Dan Eaton and Achmad Sukarsono
Wed Feb 4, 4:43 AM ET

BALI, Indonesia (Reuters) - Militants are victimizing Muslim nations more readily than others, the United States said on Wednesday as ally Australia warned more attacks are inevitable in Southeast Asia, a region scarred by a string of bombings.

At a security summit on the Indonesian island of Bali, where bombs killed 202 people in 2002, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Southeast Asia was a key focus for the U.S.-led war on terror.

"This is a very important area. First of all this nation has been victimized significantly, both in Jakarta and here in Bali," Ashcroft told reporters at a news conference on the sidelines of the gathering of his Asia-Pacific counterparts.

"It signifies that terrorists strike Muslim nations readily, if not more readily than they strike other nations and that our war is not a war against any religion," he said. [...]

'Islam will invade Europe and America'

Muslim leader declares faith in ultimate triumph, collapse of U.S.

February 4, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
WorldNetDaily.com

Responding to France's ban on the Islamic veil, the new head of the Muslim Brotherhood asserted Islam ultimately will triumph over the United States and Europe. [...]

Zionist Extremists Terrorize Rense.com Advertisers, Again

Rense.com
2-2-4

Once again, net fascists and terrorists are trying to take away your rights. These new Brown Shirts are ready to burn your books, and ours, and to financially destroy anyone who gets in the way of their plans for total domination and thought control...for they are absolutely petrified of the truth.

Rense.com and its advertisers continue to stand firm in the face of these dual-loyalty thugs and their pernicious and increasing threats to our First Amendment rights, Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Inquiry. We will not cease bringing our visitors the widest range of sometimes controversial information for your personal intellectual consideration. You deserve ALL the facts, all the viewpoints and opinions in order to make your best decisions about the most critical issues of our times. These dark forces dedicated to destroying our individual liberties and freedom of speech have no qualm threatening and harassing our supporters, friends and our brave advertisers.

This newest round of attacks on OUR freedoms are not the first, as our regular visitors know.

The current spate of assaults is the most explicit and outrageous yet. The following is an actual email which was spammed out to several of our advertisers with their individual company names subbed in -- all of whom remain resolute in standing up to terror, or, as one rense.com ad client put it:

"I don't like being threatened by anyone, especially when I'm not guilty. They can go to hell!!!!!"

Unfortunately, attacks by these people do not stop at the keyboard. Staff and individuals at other 'target' net sites have received telephoned death threats...clear and unambiguous civil rights violations. These matters have been turned over to the FBI. [...]

Comments: We at Cassiopaea.org have had our own problems with baseless accusations of anti-Semitism. The most recent attacks apparently came as a result of our interview on the Rense.com radio show, where we discussed our widely circulated article Mossad and Moving Companies: Masterminds of Global Terrorism? For another in-depth examination of these agents of entropy, who attempt to discredit honest research and reporting with accusations of racism, see our article on Rick Ross.

Also, see this recent news article which shows that Israeli intelligence knew that Iraq had no WMD. It makes one wonder what other information of global significance the Israelis have kept to themselves...

US plans to cut troops in Europe by a third

By Judy Dempsey in Brussels
Financial Times
February 3 2004 21:59

The US is preparing to cut the number of troops stationed in Europe by up to a third, diplomats said on Tuesday. This will be one of the biggest reductions since American soldiers were first based there after the second world war.

Washington will not establish new permanent bases in eastern Europe - allaying fears that the Pentagon was preparing to punish some countries of "old Europe" for their opposition to the US-led war against Iraq. [...]

Australia to buy robot aircraft in 38 billion US dollar defence upgrade

SYDNEY (AFP) Feb 04, 2004

Australia announced Wednesday it will spend up to one billion dollars (760 million US) on robot surveillance aircraft as part of a 10-year military upgrade to meet the threat of global terrorism and its responsibility to allies. [...]

Ford attacks claim LBJ plotted to kill Kennedy

IN YOUR FACE

by Michael C. Ruppert
From the Wilderness

[...] FTW has spent 27 months exploring and educating people about all the nuances involved in a world that is running out of hydrocarbon energy. We have looked at its effects on transportation, electricity, economic growth and contraction, political power, civilization and ­ perhaps most importantly ­ food production. The coming showdown over the NEPDG records is probably the single most important battle that can be fought to learn the truth of 9/11 and the one overriding mandate that is now driving human history. I am not optimistic about the outcome.

WHY ACTIVISTS FAIL

There are two reasons why activist efforts to halt the inertia of the Empire have failed and will continue to fail: human nature, and human nature.

Activists all over the political spectrum are flailing about in the post-9/11 world, spinning wheels, and throwing out idea after idea without a unifying principle or a clearly stated goal. As has happened so many times before with the victims of a dozen other instances of government criminality, the new victims ­ like the New Jersey widows of 9/11 who are known for their persistence in challenging government lies ­ make mistakes that have been made before, put their faith in strategies that have been tried before, and discount the wisdom and experience of those who have suffered before. Human nature says that it is wrong to criticize victims. Yet the new ones make a habit of ignoring the old ones, only to be replaced and forgotten when the next, inevitably greater, crime takes place.

Each time a new tragedy strikes, whether it be 9/11, TWA 800 (a Navy shootdown), CIA involvement in drug trafficking, Iran-Contra, Waco, The Savings and Loan Scandal, the Enron shareholders, the Gander crash, or any of a dozen other events in recent history, a new crop of people is instantly and brutally transformed from people who once trusted the system into people who have been betrayed by it. Psychologically and emotionally raped, they rage. They vow to fight. The need to make the system that failed them work as they were “taught” becomes a new imperative for their sanity and emotional stability. They must believe that they can make people listen to them, that they can “fix” it.

When, therefore, others who have been brutalized before them present themselves with valuable experience and try to explain the lay of the land, the new victims are faced with the awful responsibility of acknowledging that they themselves had not listened or responded when their predecessors cried out for help. They had been just as quick to say “I'm too busy” or “That's a bunch of b.s. It couldn't be that way.” Yet it is. The new victims had once been as deaf as the rest of the world now appears to them. Still they clutch at straws and cling to the illusion that “this time it will be different”. For their own sanity they must ignore the reality of the people who came before them, when to listen and learn might provide a unifying, if terrifying, focus that might ensure success. All it takes is courage and a good map.

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR

But there is a deeper part of human nature which covers the planet in a sickly, light-sweet-crude blanket of denial. It is best exemplified from the closing lines of Sidney Pollack's 1975 Three Days of the Condor, perhaps the best spy movie ever made. As FTW has shown in recent stories ­ using declassified CIA documents ­ the CIA was well aware of Peak Oil in the mid 1970s. Three Days of the Condor took that awful truth and said then, what few in the post-9/11 world have had the courage to say. I can guarantee you that it is the overriding rationale in Dick Cheney's mind, in the mind of every senior member of the Bush administration, and in the mind of whomever it is that will be chosen as the 2004 Democratic Party nominee. Getting rid of Bush will not address the underlying causative factors of energy and money and any solution that does not address those issues will prove futile.

Turner (Robert Redford): "Do we have plans to invade the Middle East ?"

Higgins (Cliff Robertson): "Are you crazy?"

Turner: "Am I?"

Higgins: "Look, Turner…"

Turner: "Do we have plans?"

Higgins: "No. Absolutely not. We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize
a régime? That's what we're paid to do."

Turner: "Go on. So Atwood just took the game too seriously. He was really going to do it, wasn't he?”

Higgins: "It was a renegade operation. Atwood knew 54-12 would never authorize it. There was no way, not with the heat on the Company.”

Turner: "What if there hadn't been any heat? Supposing I hadn't stumbled on a plan? Say nobody had?"

Higgins: "Different ball game. The fact is there was nothing wrong with the plan. Oh, the plan was alright. The plan would have worked."

Turner: "Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"

Higgins: "No. It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In 10 or 15 years - food, Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now what do you think the people are
gonna want us to do then?

Turner: "Ask them."

Higgins: "Not now - then. Ask them when they're running out. Ask them when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who've never known hunger start going hungry. Do you want to know something? They won't want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it for them."

What do you want?

Cyclone returns to Madagascar

ANTANANARIVO (AFP) Feb 03, 2004

Tropical storm Elita hit the Indian Ocean island state of Madagascar early on Tuesday -- returning to the country for the second time in a week -- but there were no initial reports of casualties, weather officials said.

Elita, which left two people dead and 5,000 homeless when it hit the island a first time on January 28, hit the west coast early on Tuesday and was reported to be moving inland.

The cyclone, or tropical storm, brought with it winds of up to 180 kilometres (110 miles) per hour, said Alain Razafimahazo, head of the local weather office. [...]

Comet disaster throws new light on dark age

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
The Telegraph
04/02/2004

A monk's apocalyptic book and Arthurian legend are united by a study that shows how a comet plunged Britain into a dark age in the sixth century.

Studies of tree rings showed the Earth underwent a series of very cold summers around 536-540 AD, a Cardiff University team reports in the journal Astronomy and Geophysics. They believe the chill was caused by a comet exploding in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Historical references from the Dark Ages are sparse, but what records there are tell of crop failures and summer frosts. Gildas Bandonicus, a Celtic monk, in his book Concerning the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) recorded that "the Sun gave forth its light without brightness".

Folklore also suggests that the death of King Arthur - in either 539 or 542 depending on your source - plunged Britain into a dark age. Merlin, Arthur's magician, is depicted in mythology as a "red fiery whooshing dragon flying in the sky" - an account consistent with a comet impact.

Strong undersea earthquake jolts Taiwan

'Ice as far as you can see'

Freeze: Coast Guard cutters are working overtime this winter to keep open the shipping channels of the Chesapeake Bay, and with the forecast, reinforcements are on the way.

[...] "There's ice as far as you can see," said Merrill, whose rank is chief warrant officer. "It's hard to tell if we're in Baltimore or Antarctica." [...]

A Bush Covert Operative Takes Over Al Sharpton's Campaign

Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton. [...]

Science in the Service of War

US Taxpayer Funded Lunacy ...

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. [...]

2 hours 45 minutes after first dose.

Patient tries to climb into activity box, and is generally agitated - responds slowly to the suggestion he might like to draw some more. He has become largely none verbal.

'I am... everything is... changed... they're calling... your face... interwoven... who is...' Patient mumbles inaudibly to a tune (sounds like 'Thanks for the memory). He changes medium to Tempera. [...]

Comment: The US government's "dalliance" was significantly more serious than having some poor guy paint under the influence. See The Frank Olson Legacy Project and our COINTELPRO timeline.

Priest Fakes Abduction and Sneaks off to the Casino

UFO's Seen by Aviation Experts

Alfonso Salazar and Salvador Guerrero, aviation technicians in Mexico, say they shot videos of eight UFOs as they flew over Mexico City's International airport on Saturday. Since they work with planes, they knew these were not ordinary aircraft. And something was seen crashing into the ocean in Nigeria— but no airplane was found.

Scott Corales translated an article from the Mexico press, telling about the UFO videos. Salazar and Guerrero shot three separate videos on the same day. In the first one, they saw 6 UFOs flying in an inverted "J" shape. Later, they spotted a cigar-shaped UFO and later a round one. They say, "We were in the hangar area and suddenly saw the first six UFOs in the sky, and we recorded until the last one appeared…The speed they used to disappear was immediate, and more or less all of them were at an altitude of 12,00 feet."

Airport conditions in Nigeria are bad and crashes are not uncommon. However, rescue workers there could find no trace of an aircraft that witnesses reported seeing crash into the ocean on Friday.

Emmanuel Ijewere, of the Nigerian Red Cross Search operations, says, "We are tired of looking at water. We are now convinced that there was no plane crash." The Nigeria Aviation Safety Initiative (NASI) has classified the craft as an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).

NASI's Jerry Agbeyegbe says, "Certainly an object was sighted crashing into the ocean, we have termed it for now as a UFO. We have advised government to intensify (the) search until we are absolutely sure that it was not a plane." (AFP)

The Growing Case for Water on Mars

Comment: NASA is slowly making the case that Mars' topography was formed by water, others are making the case for goat skulls on mars.

Trots in Space

[...] We think of UFO cults, typically, as being naïve, fancy-dress Californian affairs, scary religious Doomsday sects, or even neo-Nazi groups convinced that flying saucers operate from a secret Antarctic base. But there was one UFO cult at the opposite end of the political spectrum: a Trotskyite UFO cult. [...]

Teen hacker triggered nuclear terrorism alert

February 4, 2004

A British teenager has narrowly escaped jail after sparking a nuclear panic by hacking into a top secret United States weapons laboratory.

Joseph McElroy, 18, who on Monday was ordered to serve a 200-hour community punishment order, bypassed the facility's electronic security systems with sophisticated software he had developed and nicknamed Deathserv.

McElroy wanted to use the advanced network's power to download and store films and music from the internet.
London's Southwark Crown Court heard that in June 2002, he used a special password to protect his collection and cover up his "parasitic" invasion.

But so many of his fellow hackers also accessed the system at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois that it began to slow down. Technicians discovered the breach and "pressed the panic button". Fearing a terrorist attack, the computer was closed down for three days and the US Department of Energy sounded a full-scale alert. [...]

Mystery as saplings appear in 100 gardens

Ananova.com
08:45 Wednesday 4th February 2004

Residents of a suburban street in Pembury, Kent, have been mystified by the appearance of a sapling in each of their gardens.

Someone has painstakingly dug six-inch holes in the borders of as many as 100 gardens and planted the 2ft 6in ash saplings. The Daily Mirrorsays police have been notified, but the only clue so far has been a single muddy footprint.

Resident Mary Roe said: "As I walked out the front door I saw the sapling. It would have taken them hours to do all the trees and the weather overnight was awful. I have not got a clue who would want to do this."

Council official Daniel Docker said: "It's refreshing to see someone planting trees rather than what we all too often see, which is people wanting to take them out."

Police say they have no idea where the saplings have come from. The Woodland Trust says it will find new homes for any of the trees that are unwanted.

Mandela jokes about life after death

Wednesday February 4, 12:41 PM

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - International icon and former freedom fighter Nelson Mandela is not worried about his health, but he has an idea on how he will approach death.

The 85-year-old former South African president, whose health has been a source of concerns for several years, told reporters at his home in Cape Town he was not sure his name would be on the list when he finally knocked on the doors to heaven. [...]

"I'm sure as that day comes I will go and knock at the door of heaven and I know what they will say, they will look at their list and say 'your name is not there, can you try next door'. [...]

The Virtual Amateur Astronomer

 The images of nebulae, galaxies, the planets and other astrophysical objects in an amateur telescope cannot complete with the high quality images now available on the Internet. All one needs is a broad-band connection and a guide to the best astronomical photos on the Web. You need to obtain the former, but Jupiter Scientific, through its Virtual Amateur Astronomer® websubsite, provides the latter. Explore the Universe virtually through the power of the Internet!

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