I Met the Walrus – the song remains the same

The Breakdown of Globalization

Special thanks to Mo for sending the link to this incredible lecture

Deafening silence on RCMP scandal

April 3 2008 | www.thestar.com

Ottawa- If there’s any consensus here, it’s that the still unexplained RCMP income trust intervention was the turning point in a 2006 election that sent Liberals packing and brought Conservatives to power. So why is there near silence about one scandal that changed everything and so much noise about another, the Chuck Cadman affair, that changed nothing?

It’s a question that touches democracy’s sustaining legitimacy and needs to be answered before voters again exercise the sovereign right to choose who leads them through what increasingly looks like a rough patch. Sadly, fear of political embarrassment and the search for partisan advantage are stifling curiosity and the need to know.

As David Herle wisely argued this week, every political party as well as every citizen shares an interest in exposing Giuliano Zaccardelli’s shadowy actions to full daylight. Paul Martin’s campaign co-chair put it this way: If the federal force can defeat one government, it can defeat them all.

The problem is the parties also have reasons to perpetuate ignorance. In effect, if not necessarily by intent, they are holding broad national concerns hostage to their narrow worries. Instead of obsessing over what or wasn’t offered for Cadman’s vote, they should be demanding that the defrocked commissioner fully explain his motivation for ensuring an RCMP criminal investigation became public in the heat of the winter campaign.

Zaccardelli’s revealing refusal to co-operate with this week’s public complaints report can’t be left unchallenged. By not clarifying what happened and why, Zaccardelli is further eroding public trust in a crumbling icon while fuelling speculation that the force was settling old Liberal scores while making like-minded Conservatives come-from-behind winners.

Even by Ottawa standards, those theories are unusually toxic. They suggest Liberals, Conservatives and NDP prefer not to draw public attention to abuses more typical of Third World dictatorships than First World democracies.

Here’s what’s germinating in the space left by Zaccardelli’s missing evidence. Liberals who lost the most are so fearful of picking scabs off old internal wounds that they prefer not to revisit events that can’t be reversed. Conservatives who won the most don’t want to raise the spectre of a victory that might not have been quite fair or square. And the left-tilting NDP wants to forget its role in bringing to power the most ideologically right-leaning party in our history.

Two threads bind those theories. One is that Zaccardelli, a Jean Chrétien appointment, seized the moment to skewer Martin for ordering inquiries into the Quebec sponsorship scheme and the Maher Arar affair that his Liberal predecessor resisted and badly damaged the RCMP. The other, strengthened by Stephen Harper’s post-election visit to RCMP headquarters and budget generosity, holds that the force did what it could to elect a law-and-order government.

No self-respecting democracy can leave those hypotheses untested. If either is even partly true, Canada faces the threat of a politicized police force and the challenge of reforming a vital institution rotting from the top.

Urgency is added by a rapidly approaching election and by the risky Conservative decision to appoint a bureaucrat with old Tory ties to lead the RCMP. Canadians need quick and convincing proof the federal police force isn’t so partisan that it can’t be trusted to stay out of federal elections.

James Travers’ national affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

Harper announces 20-year, $30B plan to beef up military

May 12, 2008 | www.cbc.ca

The Tory government announced a 20-year, multibillion-dollar plan to strengthen Canada’s military, which includes the purchase of new aircraft, armoured vehicles, ships and helicopters, and a goal to expand the Forces to 100,000.

Referring to it as the “Canada First Defence Strategy,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the long-term investments in the military could reach costs of up to $30 billion.

“If a country wants to be taken seriously in the world, it must have the capacity to act. It’s that simple,” Harper said Monday at the Halifax Armoury, joined by Defence Minister Peter MacKay. “Otherwise, you forfeit your right to be a player. You’re the one chattering on the sideline that everyone smiles at, but no one listens to.”

Much of what was announced on Monday has been revealed before by the government.

“The newest thing about this announcement is that it is a long-term plan,” Harper said when asked by a reporter.

Harper said this strategy will focus on replacing some of the military’s core equipment fleets, including destroyers, frigates and different types of aircraft that will end their operational life over the next 20 years.

The plan will also seek to boost the strength of the regular Forces from 65,000 to 70,000 and the reserves from 24,000 to 30,000.

“Renewal of the Canadian Forces is the most pressing priority,” Harper said, adding the average age in the military is rising.

Harper said the plan will also improve surveillance of land and coastal borders, bolster support for civilian authority in the event of natural disasters, and provide security to major national events like the 2010 Olympics.

Harper said having a long-term plan for stable funding will create jobs and opportunities for tens of thousands of Canadians who work in the defence industry and communities with military bases.

Burma asks for aid as cyclone death toll tops 10,000

CBC News April 12

Extra U.S. aid conditional

The Burmese government was in talks with international agencies to discuss aid requirements and how to get help to the worst-affected areas, Horsey said. The UN has been invited to send aid and expert help, news agency reports from Rangoon say.

Speaking in Washington, Laura Bush, President George W. Bush’s wife and the White House’s chief voice on human rights and political conditions in Burma, said the U.S. embassy in the Southeast Asian nation is providing an immediate $250,000 US in aid from an existing emergency fund to humanitarian organizations working on the ground.

Cyclone Nargis hits Burma at the Irrawaddy River delta around Rangoon. Cyclone Nargis hits Burma at the Irrawaddy River delta around Rangoon. (NASA/Modis)

The U.S. is prepared to send additional aid, but that is conditional on Burma allowing a U.S. disaster response team into the country to assess the needs, she said. The State Department said permission was denied.

Bush also criticized the ruling junta for deciding to go ahead with a May 10 constitutional referendum, describing it as a sham, and questioned why leaders didn’t warn citizens earlier about the storm.

“We know already that they are very inept,” she said.

Robotic vigilante hits street as homemade ‘Bum Bot’ patrols in Atlanta

Greg Bluestein, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATLANTA – Cars passing O’Terrill’s pub screech to a halt at the sight of a 136 kilogram, waist-high robot marked “SECURITY” rolling through downtown long after dark.
The regulars hardly glance outside. They’ve seen bar owner Rufus Terrill’s invention on patrol before – its bright red lights and even brighter spot light blazing, infrared video camera filming and water cannon at the ready in the spinning turret on top.

“You’re trespassing. That’s private property,” Terrill scolds an older man through the robot’s loudspeaker. The man is sitting at the edge of the driveway to a child care centre down the street. “Go on.”

The man’s hands go up and he shuffles into the shadows. Almost immediately, a group of men behind him scatters too.

The Bum Bot’s reputation, it seems, has preceded it.

The electronic vigilante – on the beat since September – has enraged neighbourhood activists, who have threatened protests. Street people say it’s intimidating. And homeless advocates question the intentions of its inventor, who uses the Bum Bot as a marketing tool and a political prop.

Free Energy? That’s Absurd

The term perpetual motion, taken literally, refers to movement that goes on forever. However, perpetual motion usually refers to a device or system that delivers more energy than was put into it. Such a device or system would be in violation of the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can never be created or destroyed, and is therefore deemed impossible by the laws of physics. The most conventional type of perpetual motion machine is a mechanical system which (supposedly) sustains motion while inevitably losing energy to friction, and air resistance. -www.wikipedia.org

News Flash: The ‘laws’ that define physical reality and reality itself have changed…

In physics, quantum mechanics is the study of the relationship between quanta and elementary particles. Among other relationships the valence shell electrons and photons are quantized. Quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of physics with wide applications in both experimental and theoretical physics. Quantum theory generalizes all classical theories, including mechanics, electromagnetism (except general relativity), and provides accurate descriptions for many previously unexplained phenomena such as black body radiation and stable electron orbits. The effects of quantum mechanics are typically not observable on macroscopic scales, but become evident at the atomic and subatomic level. -www.wikipedia.org

Who would benefit from free energy? Every human being on earth and the earth itself.

Who would suffer? The Machine. (who impose the current system of energy dependence)

Why then are all our resources committed to technologies that destroy and enslaved and not technologies the enrich and liberate? We have arrived to the next step of human evolution with our potential technological capabilities; our social/spiritual evolution just needs to catch up. If you are human you should work towards humanity (ie. your own personal happiness) and by doing so stop this apocalyptic machine. If your not human then you a tool.

~Nims (special thanks to Ocean Kapono for the youtube link)

Global Nuclear Coverup

Leuren Moret claims to be an independent U.S. scientist who works on radiation and public health issues. She claims to have been a staff scientist at two nuclear weapons laboratories. 5 years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,and two years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Inquiry under the California Public Records Act at the Berkeley Laboratory was referred to retired UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Ian Carmichael because Moret was not considered a Laboratory employee during her graduate studies in geology there. These studies were also much less than the claimed 5 years and did not involve radiation or uranium. The Livermore Laboratory stated that Moret was a Senior Scientific Technologist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing and that her employment from 1989 through 1990 was for less than a year. Neither of these positions rises to the claimed level of Staff Scientist.

Education and Training

Ms. Moret earned her Bachelor of Science in Geology at University of California, Davis in 1968, and her Master of Arts in Near Eastern Studies from University of California, Berkeley in 1978. Ms. Moret worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 10 months from 1989-90 as a Senior Scientific Technologist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing. She has stated that atomic testing has resulted in a rise of autism and lowering of SAT test scores, and that depleted uranium use in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world could cause birth defects across the affected area for millions of years.

Ms. Moret is a critic of the US use of depleted uranium. In 2003, she testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held in Japan. She was a presenter at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and at the World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India, in January 2004. She is a Contributing Editor to GLOBAL OUTLOOK, former member of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission for City of Berkeley, and a former president of the Association for Women Geoscientists.

Co-op Radio interview starts about halfway on streaming player.

Part I: http://www.virishi.net/cfro/mp3/t1206992046.mp3

Part II: http://www.virishi.net/cfro/mp3/t1206995646.mp3

It’s Such A Fraud One Can Only Laugh

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.
A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.
Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation,
therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.
We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely
controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world.
No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by
conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by
the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

~Woodrow Wilson

The Dominos are in Place – Concentration Camps

A work colleague said it me with respect to the current state of Corp-ocracy:

“Think of yourself as a Jew in Nazi Germany in 1932. Get out! Some people thought it would never happen… they had jobs… their kids were in school… they didn’t get out…”

There is still an opportunity for the people to take back what’s rightfully theirs and stop this from happening. Nobody would have to go anywhere… except of course for the demons trying to pull this shit off who would go straight to hell. All we need is a collective awareness. If you end up being wrong about these suspicions towards the government that has never given a fuck about you then you’ve lost nothing… but if your right!

Think outside the box they have manufactured you into… it’s a conspiracy theory only b/c you’re inside the box.

~Nims

Wikipedia

Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, was a plan by the United States federal government to test their ability to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of massive civil unrest or national emergency. Exercises similar to Rex 84 happen periodically.^[1] Plans for roundups of persons in the United States in times of crisis are constructed during periods of increased political repression such as the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy Era. For example, from 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the “ADEX” list.^[2]

According to scholar Diana Reynolds:

The Rex-84 Alpha Explan (Readiness Exercise 1984, Exercise Plan), [otherwise known as a continuity of government plan], indicates that FEMA in association with 34 other federal civil departments and agencies conducted a civil readiness exercise during April 5-13, 1984. It was conducted in coordination and simultaneously with a Joint Chiefs exercise, Night Train 84, a worldwide military command post exercise (including Continental U.S. Forces or CONUS) based on multi-emergency scenarios operating both abroad and at home. In the combined exercise, Rex-84 Bravo, FEMA and DOD led the other federal agencies and departments, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, the Treasury, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Veterans Administration through a gaming exercise to test military assistance in civil defense.

The exercise anticipated civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity of government and/or resource mobilization. To fight subversive activities, there was authorization for the military to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial rule.^[3]

Existence of a master military contingency plan, “Garden Plot” and a similar earlier exercise, “Lantern Spike” were originally revealed by journalist Ron Ridenhour, who summarized his findings in “Garden Plot and the New Action Army.”^[4]

Rex 84 was mentioned during the Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987, and subsequently reported on by the Miami Herald on July 5th, 1987. ^[5]A number of websites and alternative publications that span the political spectrum have hypothesized upon the basic material about Rex 84, and in many cases hyperbolized it into a form of urban legend or conspiracy theory. Rex 84 is sometimes cited as an extension of the King Alfred Plan, a strategy to detain African Americans. Nonetheless, the basic facts about Rex 84 and other contingency planning readiness exercises–and the potential threat they pose to civil liberties if fully implemented in a real operation–are taken seriously by scholars and civil liberties activists.^[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84

AboveTopSecret.com

There over 600 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States.

The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a mass exodus of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose. Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.

The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/camps.html

Save the Internet

Big phone and cable companies are trying to get rid of Network Neutrality, the fundamental principle that prevents them from discriminating against your favorite Web sites and services.

Our broad coalition wants to keep the Internet free and open for everyone.

 

http://savetheinternet.com/

The Story of Stuff

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

The Low Road

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

The Infinite End

If one pursues anything within the realm of Evil as an end in and of itself they will be damned in the emptiness of infinity; however, if one uses the Evil and its devices as a means to the greater end they will be rewarded with the fulfillment of infinity.

Macolm X read by Mos Def

Mos Def introduced by Howard Zinn…

Malcolm X, in Detroit, Michigan, 1963–2 years before his assassination.

West, Cornell. Race Matters . New York: Vintage, 1994: 149-51

THE CONTEMPORARY FOCUS on Malcolm X, especially among black youth, can be understood as both the open articulation of black rage (as in film videos and on tapes targeted at whites, Jews, Koreans, black women, black men, and others) and as a desperate attempt to channel this rage into something more than a marketable commodity for the culture industry. The young black generation are up against forces of death, destruction, and disease unprecedented in the everyday life of black urban people. The raw reality of drugs and guns, despair and decrepitude, generates a raw rage that, among past black spokespersons, only Malcolm X’s speech approximates. Yet the issue of psychic conversion, cultural hybridity, black supremacy, authoritarian organization, borders and boundaries in sexuality, and other matters all loom large at present-the same issues Malcolm X left dangling at the end of his short life spent articulating black rage and affirming black humanity.

If we are to build on the best of Malcolm X, we must preserve and expand his notion of psychic conversion that cements networks and groups in which black community, humanity, love, care, and concern can take root and grow (the work of bell hooks is the best example). These spaces-beyond the best of black music and black religion-reject Manichean ideologies and authoritarian arrangements in the name of moral visions, subtle analyses of wealth and power, and concrete strategies of principled coalitions and democratic alliances. These visions, analyses, and strategies never lose sight of black rage, yet they focus this rage where it belongs: on any form of racism, sexism, homophobia, or economic in justice that impedes the opportunities of “everyday people” (to use the memorable phrase of Sly and the Family Stone and Arrested Development) to live lives of dignity and decency. For example, poverty can be as much a target of rage as degraded identity.

An inherent Goodness?

This is an interesting study referring to human socialization, morals, values and the Goodness. Does this study show that we have an inherent value system that is passed on to us just like DNA… some kind of guiding energy perhaps that is ingrained in the human experience?

The Consequences

Evil is the Goodness. Neither is right or wrong they just are. They are apart of our experience. We can only accept that it is the way it is, we cannot judge or resist it. They are in balance like everything else in Nature working together in a systematic process of evolution towards some equilibrium, towards some end.