First, if you didn't already see, the update is in place. I'm going to now go and start compiling the leaderboards, so expect those to be posted later today, both here and on the site. The one on the site is accurate and up to date, but I'll make a “more precise and verbose” one.
More than ten years ago now, when I was still living at home, my mother, aided by inept and inexperienced small-town doctors and police, managed to have me labelled as dangerously schizophrenic due to my “bizarre behaviour” (stretched ears, the decision to enter fine arts rather than science at university, etc.). I was put on large doses of dopamine-level altering psychotropic drugs, my piercings were removed, and I became a medicated zombie. Not long afterwards I was locked up in a psychiatric institute that took me about half a hear to de-tox and escape from, and years to emotionally recover from.
Because of the drugged lock-down period, I missed Christmas and most of the winter. Not only that, but by the time I had recovered, my parents had thrown themselves into a bitter and violent divorce and my father had nearly died of cancer (so he visually aged twenty years overnight as far as I was concerned). That is, go away for one Christmas, and your whole childhood foundation, as cracked as it may have been, is absolutely shattered.
So ever since I've never really enjoyed Christmas. There are a lot of other reasons (commercialism, the forced nature of scheduled mass gift-giving, the religious overtones and conflicts it encompasses, and so on) too, but that's the gist of it. It's hard because most people don't feel this way, so if Christmas hurts, one becomes a real pariah during the season.
News update time perhaps?
By the way, I strongly encourage others to write these news updates too. It's really eye opening, and it helps you develop your world view. Even if you come to different conclusions, it's both good mental exercise, and it lets you in on secrets — from the connections between overlapping stories — that “they” don't want you to see.
As you know, Bush has promised that there will be a missile defence system by 2004 — considering that it costs $100 million per test (failed) flight per missile, I can't imagine how much Americans are going to be conned into paying for it. It's ludicrous. You might be able to get a space-based high-power laser system to knock missiles out of the sky, but that comes with its own problems. In any case, a physical missile based defence system simply won't work.
Looks like there'll be 50,000 more US troops and 30,000 UK troops fighting in Iraq soon. While inexperienced chickenhawks like Rumsfield are claiming that the Iraqi government will collapse in fear as soon as the tanks roll, the experienced military leaders call the plan risky.
Time to tell another story, this one from Gulf War Episode I. I'll simply quote it:
[The Gulf War was just about as easy as a video game]. We'd bombed the daylights out of them for months, then shelled them for more than 24 hours. We barely had to show up for those guys to throw down their guns and beg us to take them captive. I wish we could have...
After so many thousands of prisoners, the order came down that it was endangering our men to capture any more. There were so many at once — it seemed like a trick. So we called in the bulldozers.
I had to give the order; order men who drove the earth-movers to just cover up the trenches. To bury those poor bastards alive.
Not that anyone cares — that particular story has been in the news for ten years now, and is not denied by the Pentagon. I'm actually impressed that the churches are playing a strong anti-war role. Let's hope it's for ethical reasons not some larger long-game plan that I'm not seeing.
More good news: Twenty US cities, including Flagstaff, Oakland, Denver, Boulder, Eugene, Sata Fe, and Santa Cruz, have passed laws banning city employees from aiding the feds in undermining the rights of the people. Of course, Georgia et al tried that back in the 1800s, and look where it got the South. Along the same story, so far two respected teaching hospitals have refused to go along with Bush's moronic smallpox vaccination plan (a plan in which Americans would be innoculated using a two-decade out-of-date vaccine known for its dangerous side-effects).
In an interesting turn of events, the IAO has deleted both it's freaky illuminati logo and it's “knowledge is power” slogan from their web page… Like I said a few days ago, modern history is defined by what's on the TV today, not by what was on the TV yesterday. Along those lines, do you remember where to find weapons of mass destruction? That said, given how much pressure reporters are under to lie, don't expect to hear it loudly in the US media.
It's interesting to watch McDonald's lately. They've obviously come under massive pressure from environmental groups and crotch-coffee-spilling litigious freaks, and are expected to post their first quarterly loss in their entire history. Anyway, I found this article on how McDonalds uses anti-American propaganda to market itself to fools in France, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries that have strained relations with the homeland.
Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com points out shocking statements made by Sen. Bob Graham including the fact that the 9/11 attacks were launched by a foreign government, and that none of that aspect is being investigated, and that Israel hid foreknowledge of the attack specifics. In other quick news:
- Seymour Hersh says that if we don't stop this current wave of US aggressive and imperialism that we will find ourselves unstoppably buried in a hundred-year long war (which will end when America ceases to exist as the country it is now).
- Former Prez Clinton says that not only is Lott a racist, but the entire Republican party is built on racism and systematic holding back of minorities.
- Chiefs of the US ground forces say that the US war plan is inaccurate and will not go as planned.
- If the US invades, Iraq has plans to initiate an apocalyptic “scorched earth” scenario… Exactly what Ashcroft and Rumsfield are looking for.
Finally, unless you've been living under an absolutely enormous rock, you know all about the Enron scandals (involving massive fraud, financial manipulation, and even causing the California energy crisis). Anyway, in 1997, Enron held a going-away party for former Enron Prez Kinder which included skits performed by other execs and big-names, including both Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. The skits included jokes about “hypothetical future value accounting” and the rest of the fraud they later claimed they didn't know about.
Again, not that anyone in America cares. I mean, Cheney et al wrote a year before the 9/11 attacks that “for America to retain its place as a world leader, it needs a catacylsmic attack, a 'new Pearl Harbor', to rally its people behind the flag”. Hmm… Then we see that, even ignoring the larger conspiracies, at a minimum the FBI et al did everything they could to stop agents from stopping 9/11. But again, not that anyone cares — at least not enough to do anything about it? Revolution now!
America hates democracy.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it people will eventually come to believe it.
- Joseph Goebbels
Let me ask you a simple question: Does the American government consistently do what is best for the American people, or does it consistently do what is best for small but powerful subsectors of the corporate landscape? Unless you can say that it consistently does what's best for the American people (it's a simple question), then you absolutely know that America — at least on a federal level — is not a democracy, and has in fact been seized by force by a corporate dictatorship.
Fuck them up.
PS. There's also a lot more to these stories that I've uncovered but I can't safely print it online because of how I got the information. However, if you're at the Tweed New Year's BME BBQ, feel free to ask me about it.
