A victory in the war against profiteering-"War is a racket,"

Not stating anything we do not already know but!
Military contract whistleblower Bunny Greenhouse's legal win is welcome, but US taxpayers are out $5tn for Bush's wars
Amy Goodman
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 July 2011

"War is a racket," wrote retired US Marine Major General Smedley D Butler, in 1935. That statement, which is also the title of his short book on war profiteering, rings true today.

One courageous civil servant just won a battle to hold war profiteers accountable. Her name is Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse. She blew the whistle when her employer, the US Army Corps of Engineers, gave a no-bid $7bn contract to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) as the US was about to invade Iraq. She was doing her job, trying to ensure a competitive bidding process would save the US government money. For that, she was forced out of her senior position, demoted and harassed.

Just this week, after waging a legal battle for more than half a decade, Bunny Greenhouse won. The US Army Corps of Engineers settled with Greenhouse for $970,000, representing full restitution for lost wages, compensatory damages and attorneys' fees.

Her "offence" was to challenge the KBR contract. It was weeks before the expected invasion of Iraq, in 2003, and Bush military planners predicted Saddam Hussein would blow up Iraqi oilfields, as happened with the US invasion in 1991. The project, dubbed "Restore Iraqi Oil", or RIO, was created so that oilfield fires would be extinguished. KBR was owned then by Halliburton, whose CEO until 2000 was none other than then Vice President Dick Cheney. KBR was the only company invited to bid.

Bunny Greenhouse told her superiors that the process was illegal. She was overridden. She said the decision to grant the contract to KBR came from the office of the secretary of defence, run by VP Cheney's close friend, Donald Rumsfeld. As Bunny Greenhouse told a congressional committee:

"I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."

The oilfields were not set ablaze. Nevertheless, KBR was allowed to retool its $7bn no-bid contract, to provide gasoline and other logistical support to the occupation forces. The contract was so-called "cost-plus", which means KBR was not on the hook to provide services at a set price. Rather, it could charge its cost, plus a fixed percentage as profit. The more KBR charged, the more profit it made.

As the chief procurement officer, Greenhouse's signature was required on all contracts valued at more than $10m. Soon after testifying about the egregious RIO contract, she was demoted, stripped of her top secret clearance and began receiving the lowest performance ratings. Before blowing the whistle, she had received the highest ratings. Ultimately, she left work, facing an unbearably hostile workplace.

After years of litigation, attorney Michael Kohn, president of the National Whistleblowers Centre, brought the case to a settlement. He said:

"Bunny Greenhouse risked her job and career when she objected to the gross waste of federal taxpayer dollars and illegal contracting practices at the Army Corps of Engineers. She had the courage to stand alone and challenge powerful special interests. She exposed a corrupt contracting environment where casual and clubby contracting practices were the norm. Her courage led to sweeping legal reforms that will forever halt the gross abuse she had the courage to expose."

The National Whistleblowers Centre's executive director, Stephen Kohn (brother of Michael Kohn), told me:

"Federal employees have a very, very hard time blowing the whistle … I hope it's a turning point. The case was hard-fought. It should never have had to been filed. Bunny did the right thing."

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone will exceed $5tn. With a cost like this, why isn't war central to the debate over the national debt?

Two-time congressional medal of honour winner Maj Gen Smedley Butler had it right, 75 years ago, when he said of war:

"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious [racket] … It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives … It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many."

As President Barack Obama and Congress claim it is Medicare, Medicaid and social security that are breaking the budget, people should demand that they stop paying for war.

• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column
© 2011 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate

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Japanese Government "Not Sure if People have a RIGHT to Live Healthy Lives"

Go to this blog for the rest of the article she speaks of truth

Japanese Government "Not Sure if People have a RIGHT to Live Healthy Lives" When Responding to Fukushima Nuclear Disaster!
This is one of those moments where clarity comes through in how Governments around the world think of their citizens! Governments do not do things for their people, they do things for themselves and their controllers (banks, corporations).

On July 19th the Japanese Government had a little get together with the people of Fukushima City. The Japanese government has refused to help those who live near the Fukushima Nuclear Plant to evacuate.

Someone asked the Japanese government official: "Don't we have a Right to live healthy lives"? The official answered "I don't know if you have that right"!

I have to say, the Japanese government has come right out and said they are not protecting their citizens, where as all the other governments pretend they are looking out for their citizens when they are actually doing the opposite.

Watch the full video. But I warn you, tears will/may come to your eyes with the full realization of what the Japanese people are going through.

I have not been putting lots of what is happening in Japan on my blog. The reason is.... when something is so upsetting and yet there is absolutely nothing I or anyone who reads this can do about it, it is depressing to me and I read about it but don't want to post over and over again how sad it is!

BUT for the Japanese government not giving a SH*$ about their people and it is all about protecting themselves and TEPCO just makes me super MAD and Upset! They are willing to sacrifice their people for money and covering their own asses and their controllers (banks, corporations asses).

This video brought tears to my eyes especially at the end when the man is crying pleading with the official to take the urine of children brought to the meeting and test it. He tries to block them from leaving and blocks the elevator button in desperation, the officials ignore him. It is so sad and so hard to comprehend that government officials really don't give a care about their people! But this video proves it!

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Dr Who Fans - Preview

Comet Elenin: NASA Preview

Another view point

You may have heard the news: Comet Elenin is coming to the inner-solar system this fall. Comet Elenin (also known by its astronomical name C/2010 X1), was first detected on Dec. 10, 2010 by Leonid Elenin, an observer in Lyubertsy, Russia, who made the discovery "remotely" using the ISON-NM observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico. At the time of the discovery, the comet was about 647 million kilometers (401 million miles) from Earth. Over the past four-and-a-half months, the comet has – as comets do – closed the distance to Earth's vicinity as it makes its way closer to perihelion (its closest point to the sun). As of May 4, Elenin's distance is about 274 million kilometers (170 million miles).

"That is what happens with these long-period comets that come in from way outside our planetary system," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They make these long, majestic, speedy arcs through our solar system, and sometimes they put on a great show. But not Elenin. Right now that comet looks kind of wimpy."

How does a NASA scientist define cometary wimpiness?
Finish Reading:

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If you haven't already read this from the other day and have an interest.

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Paul Craig Roberts US Debt Are We Being Had?

By Paul Craig Roberts

July 26, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- In my last column (above) I suggested that an unintended outcome of the debt ceiling impasse could be Congress’ loss of the power of the purse. In this column I suggest an intended outcome that the ongoing political theater might be designed to produce.

President Obama has said that he will not resort to the various powers open to him to keep the government running should Congress fail to deliver a debt ceiling increase. This is a suspicious statement, as it is not credible that a president would leave troops at war unpaid and without supplies, Social Security checks unsent and stand aside while the US dollar collapses and the credit rating of the US government is destroyed.

There are national security directives and executive orders already on the books, as well as the 14th Amendment, that Obama can invoke to set aside the debt ceiling. Congress would sigh with relief that Obama had prevented the lawmakers from destroying the country.

So what might be going on?

One possibility is that the political theater is operating to bring about otherwise politically impossible cuts in the social safety net. If the drama continues to the absolute deadline without a deal, Obama, who perhaps favors cutting the safety net as much as do the Republicans, would have to accept the Republican package in order that the troops are not cut off from supplies, Social Security checks can continue to go out, and the dollar be saved. Having opposed the Republicans to the last minute, Obama can say that he had no other recourse.

What American wants the troops deserted on the field of battle and the elderly without groceries? Who other than the rich can stand the higher prices from dollar devaluation?
It would be a perfectly orchestrated scenario for getting rid of the New Deal and the Great Society that use up money that could be spent on wars and bailouts and tax cuts for the rich.

If the American public is not sufficiently softened up by August 2, the political theater can continue with temporary debt ceiling increases until things really begin to crack. On July 15 S&P put all AAA-rated insurance companies on CreditWatch citing ties to the US sovereign credit rating. On July 25, the US dollar fell to a new low against the Swiss franc, and gold reached a new high. Some more of this, and the public will see benefit cuts as preferable to economic armageddon.

If Bush and Cheney were still in office, they would use the debt ceiling impasse to seize more power from Congress. Obama, however, might be so well aligned with financial interests that the opportunity he sees is to cut Social Security, Medicare and education loose from the federal budget. Then Wall Street can privatize them.

Whatever emerges from the debt ceiling impasse, it will not be in the interest of the American people.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch. He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution. He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

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Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Maize Fields

Bravo Hungary - now if the rest of the World Nations can follow

In an effort to rid the country of Monsanto's GMO products, Hungary has stepped up the pace. This looks like its going to be another slap in the face for Monsanto. A new regulation was introduced this March which stipulates that seeds are supposed to be checked for GMO before they are introduced to the market. Unfortunately, some GMO seeds made it to the farmers without them knowing it.

Almost 1000 acres of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said. The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added.

Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary. The checks will continue despite the fact that seed traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.

During their investigation, controllers have found Pioneer and Monsanto products among the seeds planted.

The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary but they will check where the goods can be found, Bognar said. Regional public radio reported that the two biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and GMO seeds could have been sown on up to thousands of hectares in the country.

Most of the local farmers have complained since they just discovered they were using GMO seeds. With season already under way, it is too late to sow new seeds, so this years harvest has been lost.

And to make things even worse for the farmers, the company that distributed the seeds in Baranya county is under liquidation. Therefore, if any compensation is paid by the international seed producers, the money will be paid primarily to that company's creditors, rather than the farmers.

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New Order of Knights Templar

I do not like posting but information of the dark forces must be open and faced by us all, Be careful of how you read this sort of material please.

New Order of the Knights Templar
and
The Daughters of Tsion - The Ladies Templar

Our Order of Knights Templar is a new Order...
We have access to and study the so-called "direct lineage" stretching back to the days when the Templars were an exoteric force in Europe and the Holy Land, but we believe a newness is needed for the Templars in this Third Millennium. So our Order changed its name in 1998 to the New Order of Knights Templar. Other Templar Orders are really branches of freemasonry and some others use the title too freely, not truly reconstructing the actual mission and practices of the original Templars, as we attempt to do. Men (and women) today can still take up the sword and lance and become a Knight of Solomon's Temple, fighting the same battles and more, but on an esoteric level. Our Knights fight in tandem with the Ladies Templar, known officially as the Daughters of Tsion. (Male members of the Daughters of Tsion are called Clerics of Tsion, they are non-combatants). It is a balanced partnership of incredible power, both astrally and physically.

"Then everyone shall be rescued who calls on the name of the LORD; For on Mount Zion there shall be a remnant, as the LORD has said, And in Jerusalem survivors whom the LORD shall call." Joel 3:5 Hebrew Bible & Catholic Bible, different numbering for Protestant Bibles

What are the Daughters of Tsion? Who were they a thousand years ago and who are they today? They are the ladies and clerics who share in the exact mission of the Knight's Templar complementing the Knights, bringing crucial gender balance to that famous army of rightworkers*. Both groups are really the Knights Templar; the sub-title of the Daughters of Tsion is "The Ladies Templar." Both groups take the same lessons, meet astrally each day or each week to perfom the same power-prayers, contemplation exercises, or to recite a certain powerful affirmation or mantram. We all come together for sorties (combat missions), which are often at odd times of the day or week.

*Rightwork and right-workers are terms that are supposed to convey the biblical concept of "doing righteous works."

The differences between the Daughters of Tsion and the Knights of the Temple are purely gender oriented, although there are female combatants in our Order called Dames or Knightresses, and males in the Daughters of Tsion, called Clerics of Tsion. The Mystery School tries not to be too sexist about it, but the fact is that warrior knights going into bloody battle on horseback are indeed different from the ladies who stay on the battlefield's edge (or in the safety of a fortress) and support the combatants with their "feminine" magiks. The women (and clerics) provide this crucial support through prayer-songs, combat-prayer, blessing the weapons, wine and armor of the Knights, and by spiritually sheilding their chosen warrior.

The Knights/Knightresses in our order must become adept with the SPIRITUAL equivalents of the sword or bow. Most Knights, whether archers or swordsmen, have a physical example of their weapon to be consecrated regularly and used in athletic workouts with targets. The Daughters of Tsion and Clerics of Tsion non-combative individuals who work in tandem with the warriors, backing them up when they go off to defend against enemies.

Of course our enemies in the modern day are more spiritual than physical. Our New Knights Templar do spiritual (sometimes called astral) battle, and many of them "go out" on a nightly basis.

In our Order all "fighting" is spiritual only, though the Knights do practice the martial arts and spar together whenever possible. [We encourage them to take real live Fencing and Archery lessons. Many practice old fighting arts in organizations like the SCA or Amtgard.]

Our focus is on the spiritual battles of the world. As every adult and most children know, there are dark forces out there. Our Knights go into battle to deal with them, hopefully beating them back. "Occult wars," they used to call this. The Knights of the Temple couldn't function however if not for their Ladies, the Daughters of Tsion. These women provide the wind beneath their wings, so to speak. While the Knights are out "battling", the specially trained and very powerful Ladies/Clerics are behind in the "fortress" locked in power-prayer / combat support prayer mode. A primary difference in study focus is that the Ladies don't get into martial arts and warrior kick-ass-ness as much as they study supporting warrior activity and backing up a chosen Knight.

DAUGHTERS OF TSION

Historically, the Daughters of Tsion (besides being a very well kept secret) were made up of the following kinds of women: sisters, mothers and spouses---even daughters of the Knights, and sometimes girlfriends or just a female friend with whom they had a purely platonic relationship. During most of their public history the Knights were forbidden to marry and celibacy was required, the latter never seriously enforced. As the Order grew in the mid 1100's the Knights went along with the semblance of celibacy in order to appease the Catholic Church whose endorsement they needed to survive in dark age politics. If the all-powerful church didn't approve of your work, you were a heretical order and were burned at the stake. And besides, you couldn't survive economically, either! They were ostensibly a monastic order and did indeed live in preceptories (monasteries) all over Europe. Yet according to historians and Templar experts the first Grand Master, Hugh de Payens was married to a mysterious and beautiful heiress of the Saint Clair (Scottish Sinclair) family. See Dafoe and Butler's book, The Knights Templar Revealed, formerly titled the Templar Continuum, and required reading for our advanced Templar initiates. The existence of "Templar nuns" was an historical fact, one is pictured below left.

All of the rituals, practices and even daily services of the Knights Templar were performed in secret. This was highly unusual for monastic orders and is the source for all the mystery surrounding the Knights Templar as well as the source for their condemnation. Because of all the secrecy, they were easily accused of heresy. They no doubt were heretical, especially in their belief in the Sacred Feminine and reverence for God-the-Mother. The Knights had to keep such teachings secret because they knew it could get them arrested, tortured and burned at the stake.

This of course was the eventual fate of the Templar Knights. On Friday the 13th, 1307 those French Templars that hadn't slipped thru the net were arrested because the French King Philip IV and his hand-picked Pope decided to seize the Templar wealth. Templars were tortured, "tried" and 54 who refused to admit to the lies of demon-worship and spitting on the cross, were eventually burned alive. Friday the 13th has since been considered a horrid day, unlucky in the extreme, to all people of European descent.

What is little known is that the Knights took on female partners to help balance their work, to assist in their secret esoteric practices which included revering the Goddess. Whether these women were girlfriends, secret wives, or in some cases hired prostitutes, they were an integral part of the Templar mission, providing a necessary complement to the efforts of each male initiate. Interestingly, they didn't always become lovers with their partner. Many Knights had been married before joining the Order and some therefore had daughters suitable for this task. There is one legend of a 13-year old maiden, daughter of a Knight, who knew every one of the combat-prayer songs sung by the Daughters of Tsion while their men were in battle. When her father sadly fell in combat, her expertise was not wasted because a young Templar (perhaps in shining armor?) asked her to make the special alliance with him.

In our order some members come to us already as a couple, whether married or in a committed relationship. But many more members are singles, some with spouses in the "real" world who don't want to participate. Our singles perform the missions and the same work as everyone else and in some cases get to know a member of the opposite group and pair up. We encourage this pairing up and it is a requirement for the more advanced stages of the work so that members can practice the ancient magik and sacred balance of male-female energy complementing and working together. It is NOT matchmaking, and no romance is implied. If you can't get your significant other to sign up for this part of your study, don't worry. You will learn things from this platonic male-female harmony that you can take home and use in your relationship. This is serious light-working and right-working. Most paired-up members never meet face to face, though hopefully they develop a good email correspondence with their partner and we know some of them exchange phone numbers, naughty naughty. Okay, yes, one couple did meet here and end up getting married. Three years later they're still together so it must have been a good thing.

The partnering process doesn't occur until some weeks into the training. At first new members all work as a group, get acquainted, do some workings all together and then the members that have made it that far can study some partner methods by pairing up---if they want. We're certainly not going to force anyone to do this higher form of Knights Templar / Tsion great-working. Those who prefer being solitaire will have plenty to do, but still should learn the partner techniques. They just won't be able to try them out with a "real" person. Keep in mind that partnering is like dancing. It is not sex. You work together to create beautiful movement that while you're at it, gets you in shape and creates harmonious patterns with the music and with any observers. Dance and partner-magik are very similar metaphorically.

The Daughters of Tsion were a secret order of women who supported the work of the supposedly celibate all-male Knight's Templar. These men and women were ahead of their time. They knew that gender balance is important and makes for powerful rightworkings (righteous works). The Knights would go out of their fortresses and fight to the death in skirmishes and battles, putting their very lives at risk almost daily. Yet they seemed invincible, Templars seemed never to die or even get wounded. Wounds back then usually meant death, even simple wounds, because of infection. You got a scratch, you could die. It was quite expected for everyone who lived by the sword to die by it. As for the Templar secret invincibilty, you can guess the cause. It was due, of course, to the fact that they had this army of women, the Daughters of Tsion, backing them up, supporting them spiritually and yes, physically. The physical work of the Tsion women (and clerics) consisted of feeding the Knights and themselves, making and mending all garments and medicines. Spiritual duties consisted of praying over the Knights' food and wine, making special amulets and talismans for them to wear into battle, praying and singing powerful hex-songs whenever the men were engaged in combat.

There are so many ways in which we adapt this same team-warfare concept to today's battles, which as we stated repeatedly, are spiritual battles only. Ironically, these spiritual / astral battles are often more dangerous. You can't always The unkempt, neglected Dome of the Rock as it appeared for decades before 1948."see" the enemy or even name it. The enemy takes forms such as subtle perversion, rampant greed, modern slavery, evil corporations, commercialism in schools, not to mention hunger, women and boys bought and sold as sex slaves, group hatred---a negative cloud of consciousness in a group of people (say a terrorist group full of hate directed at Christians or Jews), racism, misogyny, child abuse, spouse abuse. Many of these evils can be traced to some group of people who has set themselves up as a harmful "army" against the enlightened. They even join forces at times when they sense the presence of the light-warrior groups such as the KT. We are not shy and will go into spiritual battle, via prayer and astral travel, not to mention letter writing and phone-calling if we have to! We pick a cause and fight it. And continue to fight it. One battle doesn't win a war, goes the saying.

Several of us have been working together for years, but not via email and internet. It's very hard to convert everything over to email, get the lessons written and on line, make sure people are trained enough to go into battle or in the case of the non-combative orders, ready to go into higher levels of astral work and magikal workings. It doesn't take too much training actually, it's really a screening process. We have to make sure that each new member of each order is what they seem. It's dangerous to work with someone who is unbalanced psychologically---(The cynic asks, aren't we all unbalanced, though?) And we definitely have to weed out megolomaniac (god-complex) types, or anyone who has a secret agenda, is habitually dishonest, has joined us for all the wrong reasons, etc.

COMBINING THE ANCIENT & NEW RELIGION

A student once asked "Why all the Holy Land Mediterranean names? Temple? Zion? They are Hebrew words and places. Aren't most of us English-speakers of European descent?" Yes, that's a crucial point. Most of us are indeed of European descent, at least partially. Our souls, though in modern trappings, resonate with the ways of our ancestors. But long ago the Europeans embraced the Judaic culture when they embraced Christianity, and this merging should not be viewed as a bad thing. It did cause many a crisis of conscience however, as countless Europeans feared they were betraying their ancestors' deities by accepting the Eastern God and his Father.

Like us, the Templars were Europeans living in a middle-eastern (Judeo-Christian-Islam) religious and political culture. Remember that Christianity itself was originally just an offshoot of Judaism and took 400 years to make its way to France and Germany, Spain and the rest of Europe. Scandinavia and parts of the British Isles didn't surrender their pagan gods to the christian sword until barely a thousand years ago in the 1100's. This is all historical fact. Our European ancestors were not middle-easterners but accepted a desert religion, many of them doing so under duress. But most Europeans, and many Scandinavians, saw similarities between their ancestral faiths and the New Religion of Rome, and didn't mind the merger which brought economic and political benefits to their regions.

However, they made sure they didn't lose all their pagan gods and customs. We still have the birthday of the Light-of-the-World near the winter Solstice, we still have tree symbols at Christmastime, fertility symbols as Easter, the Celtic Goddess Brighid in the form of "St. Bridget" and a thousand other pagan elements..... Christianity is what came out of this blending of faiths and is really a European pagan form of a desert religion. And how beautiful it is, this pagan Christianity with its solemn candlelit rituals and colorful ceremony, incense and altar "sacrifice".

The Order of the Knights Templar was born in Europe during what historians call the Dual Faith period. They were burned as heretics 200 years later when their paganistic elements supposedly outnumbered their christian practices. Pagan beliefs, the ways of their pre-christian foremothers and fathers, now called devil worship and heresy is what supposedly did them in. At least that's the excuse the Church authorities used so they could seize the incredible wealth of the Templars. Because of their unique position -- standing between two religious worlds, the old and the new each with cultural and spiritual value -- the Templars are the perfect embodiment of Pagan Christianity, exemplifying the dual faith. What they practiced could also be called Judeo-Christian Paganism, but we like to call it Esoteric Christianity or Alternative Christianity.

How did the Templars get so wealthy and powerful? The Templars were not racists who slaughtered Jews and Arabs. No, they made friends with them and learned banking from the Jews and Math and Science from the Arabs. If you recall your history class you'll remember that medicine and mathematics were dominated by the Arabic world up until around 1400 when a few backward but powerful Muslim clerics unfortunately convinced the Sultans to stop encouraging math and science. Sadly, the Sultans stuck their heads in the sand and religious fundamentalism created yet another crop of suppressive regimes. This watershed event put an end to a bright-minded Islamic culture that had taken the Arabic world hundreds of years to produce. The Arabic mind had given birth to the number zero and created for the world the set of Arabic Numerals we use today. (Some scholars now dispute this, claiming the Zero and the Arabic numerals originated in India). The Dual Faith period was a violent one, but also a time when Arabic was the language of science and math and Arab courts like Baghdad were centers of technology... and nobody tried to convert the whole world over to their religion.

The Templars learned banking (and Kabbalah) from the Jews. It was the Jews who started banking -- the lending of money and charging interest, once called usury and "un-Christian." The Templars learned banking and commerce from them and became shrewd businessmen as well as spiritually advanced for their time. They studied the Jewish banking methods, and set up a string of banks all over Europe and all along the road to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem stood their symbolic headquarters, Solomon's Temple---or we should say there it lay, for it was in ruins. But not as bad a ruin as today. Parts of the stables and the ancient women's quarters were still standing, though slowly crumbling away.
The Templars asked a number Jews to help them manage their new banks. After hours, the Templars learned Kabbalah from the bankers' wise Jewish elders and rabbis.

CASTLES IN THE HOLY LAND

When he was very young, barely twenty, Lawrence of Arabia went to the Arabian lands and Palestine for the first time in order to catalog the many Templar fortresses and castles. Then called Thomas Lawrence, he travelled to each Templar (and Crusader) ruined castle along the ancient caravan routes from Jerusalem through Syria up to Turkey. Most of the ruins he visited and photographed are still there.

Evidence of a small but significant Templar presence in Jerusalem is easily seen today.

Jerusalem has a few examples of Templar architecture and structural work. The most famous is the black wrought-iron fence built indoors around the holy rock of the Al-Aqsa shrine. According to Muslims the Al-Aqsa is not actually a mosque, but a shrine, "the dome of the Rock". It was built on the Temple Mount by a conquering Muslim who wanted to copy but out-do the most outstanding building in Jerusalem at the time -- the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He also wanted to occupy that holy ground so revered by the Hebrew people.

The Templars took control of the Dome during their stay in Jerusalem and converted it into a Christian church which it remained for over a hundred years. The Templar ironwork is still there to this day and the Muslim tour-guides point it out and explain how the Knights Templar installed it.

The Dome of the Rock sits on Mount Moriah, called the Temple Mount by the Jews because it is the place where Solomon built the first Temple and Herod built the Second. Islam reveres the spot as a sacred rock from which Mohammed sprung heavenward one night on a white horse. The rock is still there, visible to worshippers, but the Jews say it is holy not because of Mohammed but because it's the rock where Abraham was stopped by an angel from sacrificing his son to the God Yahweh, who was testing his faith. That holy rock and the "mount" which is really a nice big hill, was chosen later by David for the Temple spot. David's son Solomon did the building.
Across from this famous hill is another one almost the same height but having a smaller surface at the top. It is Mount Zion, spelled in Hebrew alliteration, Mount Tsion. Here the Knights Hospitaller (which absorbed many Templar properties after the Templars were suppressed in 1314) built a big hospital and monastery building full of long cavernous hallways with rounded gothic ceilings and some of the famous black wrought-iron bars and gate-work. This monastery still stands today and is now the modern Mount Zion Hotel. Our group stayed there in 1994, and if peace comes again to Jerusalem, we hope to stay there again with some of you, our fellow Templars. You can feel the military order's presence -- sort of echoing. You are surrounded by fortress-style thick stone walls and the sunlight sneaks in thru iron grills making shadows and ghostly images seem to appear. See photos of the interior showing the awesome view of the City of David from the top of this famous hill.

'Vive Dieu Saint Amour'
("Long Live God's Holy Love!" - one of the popular battle-cries of the Knights Templar)

You should join us if:

You want to "fight the good fight" and make a difference in both the spiritual world and physical world, not just talk
You want to become a modern Knight, Knightress, Dame, Cleric or Lady -- modern but ever mindful of our heritage
If you want to earn a real Certificate of Knighthood and become an ordained Templar priest / minister (Templars were also members of the priesthood, and female Templars were called nuns).

To join our New Order of the Knights Templar and the Daughters of Tsion, simply fill out a Mystery School application and get started on the lessons.

Is the Warrior Path a "male combat myth"?
As walkers on the warrior path, we have been accused of "falling into the trap of violence," into the "male combat myth." We don't see it that way, since we are truly helping defend the innocent and forgotten rather than ignoring conflict and hoping it will go away. Our swords are never used to shed blood(!), or "commit atrocities" as one critic blasted us with. What an absurd misunderstanding of spiritual warfare. Here is how we see our spiritual weapon, the sword:

The Sword: On the metaphysical level the sword is symbolic of discrimination; the penetrating power of the intellect; spiritual decision; the inviolability of the sacred. It is also wielded by the cosmic or solar Hero, conqueror of dragons and demonic powers. -- From "An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols" by JC Cooper.

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Be careful of how you read this sort of material please.

Japan monitoring Fukushima radiation news

Japan Passes The Computer Network Monitoring Law To Cleanse The Internet Of “Bad” Fukushima News

Japan has passed a law that will enable the police and contractors to monitor internet activity without restriction to “cleanse” the Internet of any “bad” Fukushima radiation news.

As I previous reported, Japan has officially ordered the censorship of any reporting of the truth about the Fukushima nuclear radiation fallout by ordering telecommunications companies and web masters to scrub any stories negative stories from the about the disaster.

Japan Officially Orders Censorship Of Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster

The government of Japan has issued an official order to telecommunications companies and web masters to censor reports which contradict the state media reports that the Fukushima nuclear radiation disaster is over.
Japan Government Officially Censors Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster

Japan Government Officially Censors Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster

The supposedly free democratic nation of Japan, which supposedly values and promotes freedom of speech, has officially issued orders to telecommunication companies and webmasters to remove content from websites that counter the official government position that the disaster is over and there is no more threat from the radiation.

The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send “letters of request” to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they “take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information. ”The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality.

Source: Asia Pacific Journal

Note: I saw the executive order issued by Japan a week or two ago but could not find it in an English version anywhere but didn’t report on it because the Japanese to English translated versions of the order did not provide clear enough meaning. What I gathered from the order was that Japan ordered telecommunication companies to provide notices to websites and webmasters to remove messages from internet bulletin boards and websites that conflicted with the Government reported version of events. If the websites and webmasters did not comply the telecommunication companies are to shut down offending websites as this is considered a national security issue which is affecting public safety and contributing to public unrest. It was also ordered that email communications be monitored to prevent the spread of false rumors. If you can find the original executive order, please send me a tip with the link.

[...]

When Tanaka requested the names of the media executives hosted by TEPCO in China, Katsumata retorted, “I cannot reveal their names since this is private information.” But it is precisely such collusive relations between mainstream media, the government and TEPCO, that results in the censorship of information concerning nuclear problems.

Now the Japanese government has moved to crack down on independent reportage and criticism of the government’s policies in the wake of the disaster by deciding what citizens may or may not talk about in public. A new project team has been created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the National Police Agency, and METI to combat “rumors” deemed harmful to Japanese security in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send “letters of request” to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they “take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information. ”The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality.

Source

[...]

Worried About Comet Elenin?

Astronomer and blogger Ian Musgrave from South Australia has been active in debunking the misinformation and nonsense that is being disseminated about Comet Elenin. He has written several wonderful posts featuring the actual realities of this long-period lump of dirty ice that has, for some reason, attracted the attention of doomsdayers, 2012ers, and end-of-the-world scaremongers. Earlier this week, Ian’s Elenin posts on his Astroblog were taken down by the web host, as someone filed a claim for alleged violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). “Given that there is no copyrighted material on these pages, with either material generated entirely by me or links to and citation of publicly available material, I believe this was just a frivolous attack on people countering Elenin nonsense” Ian said. Astroblog was not the only site that was targeted, and thankfully, Ian’s web host agreed that the claim was without merit, and the posts are back online. In the interim, however, Universe Today offered to publish Ian’s excellent “Comet Elenin, a FAQ for the Worried” post, and even though the original is now available again, Ian and I decided to still post this on UT so that more people with questions about Comet Elenin would have the chance to have their worries allayed. Have your questions answered below.

Will Comet Elenin Hit Earth?: Read More

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Who is Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch Humor in Shame

The Murdoch Circus. It was the biggest show in town, and queues formed hours early outside the London parliamentary building to watch media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Hang your head in SHAME, Dirty Little Digger.

So The Puppet Master strings are fraying:

and the Truth will come out - there is no more room for deceit and lies.

The Fox News Fear Factory

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory
The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network
by: Tim Dickinson
At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

This article appears in the June 9, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive now.

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

Photo Gallery: Roger Ailes, GOP Mastermind

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news­gathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”

Slideshow: An hour-by-hour look at how Fox disguises GOP talking points as journalism

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. "Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all," says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. "People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News."

Read about the GOP's dirty war against Obama

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. "You know Roger is crazy," Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. "He really believes that stuff."

To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-­October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. "He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo."

In the fable Ailes tells about his own life, he made a clean break with his dirty political past long before 1996, when he joined forces with Murdoch to launch Fox News. "I quit politics," he has claimed, "because I hated it." But an examination of his career reveals that Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The result is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that plays a leading role in defining Republican talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right. Fox News tilted the electoral balance to George W. Bush in 2000, prematurely declaring him president in a move that prompted every other network to follow suit. It helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing U.S. senators. Fox News turbocharged the Republican takeover of the House last fall, and even helped elect former Fox News host John Kasich as the union-busting governor of Ohio – with the help of $1.26 million in campaign contributions from News Corp. And by incubating a host of potential GOP contenders on the Fox News payroll– including Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – Ailes seems determined to add a fifth presidential notch to his belt in 2012. "Everything Roger wanted to do when he started out in politics, he’s now doing 24/7 with his network," says a former News Corp. executive. "It’s come full circle."

Take it from Rush Limbaugh, a "dear friend" of Ailes. "One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it," Limbaugh once declared. "Roger Ailes is not on the air. Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera. And yet everybody who does is a reflection of him."

The 71-year-old Ailes presents the classic figure of a cinematic villain: bald and obese, with dainty hands, Hitchcockian jowls and a lumbering gait. Friends describe him as loyal, generous and "slap your mama funny." But Ailes is also, by turns, a tyrant: "I only understand friendship or scorched earth," he has said. One former deputy pegs him as a cross between Don Rickles and Don Corleone. "What’s fun for Roger is the destruction," says Dan Cooper, a key member of the team that founded Fox News. "When the light bulb goes on and he’s got the trick to outmaneuver the enemy – that’s his passion." Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

Ailes was born in 1940 in Warren, Ohio, a manufacturing outpost near Youngstown. His father worked at the Packard plant producing wiring for GM cars, and Roger grew up resenting the abuse his father had to take from the "college boys" who managed the line. Ailes has called his father a "Taft Republican," and the description is instructive: Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio led a GOP uprising to block the expansion of the New Deal in the late 1930s, and spearheaded passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which beat back the power of labor unions.

Roger spent much of his youth in convalescence. A sickly child – hemophilia forced him to sit out recess at school – he had to learn to walk again after getting hit by a car at age eight. His mother worked out of the house, so he was raised in equal measure by his grandmother and TV. "Television and I grew up together," he later wrote.

A teenage booze hound – "I was hammered all the time" – Ailes said he "went to state school because they told me I could drink." There was another reason: His father kicked him out of the house when he graduated from high school. During his stint at Ohio University, where he studied radio and television, his parents divorced and left the house where he had spent so much of his childhood recovering from illness and injury. "I went back, the house was sold, all my stuff was gone," he recalled. "I never found my shit!" The shock seems to have left him with an almost pathological nostalgia for the trappings of small-town America.

In college, Ailes tried to join the Air Force ROTC but was rejected because of his health. So he became a drama geek, acting in a bevy of collegiate productions. The thespian streak never left Ailes: His first job out of college was as a gofer on The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated daytime variety show that featured aging stars like Jack Benny and Pearl Bailey in a world swooning for Elvis and the Beatles. In many ways, Ailes remains a creature of that earlier era. His 1950s manners, martini-dry ripostes and unreconstructed sexism give the feeling, says one intimate, "like you’re talking to someone who’s been under a rock for a couple of decades."

Ailes found his calling in television. He proved to be a TV wunderkind, charting a meteoric rise from gofer to executive producer by the age of 25. Ailes had an uncanny feel for stagecraft and how to make conversational performances pop on live television. But it was behind the scenes at Mike Douglas in 1967 that Ailes met the man who would set him on his path as the greatest political operative of his generation: Richard Milhous Nixon. The former vice president – whose stilted and sweaty debate performance against John F. Kennedy had helped doom his presidential bid in 1960 – was on a media tour to rehabilitate his image. Waiting with Nixon in his office before the show, Ailes needled his powerful guest. "The camera doesn’t like you," he said. Nixon wasn’t pleased. "It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected," he grumbled. "Television is not a gimmick," Ailes said. “And if you think it is, you’ll lose again."

The exchange was a defining moment for both men. Nixon became convinced that he had met a boy genius who could market him to the American public. Ailes had fallen hard for his first candidate. He soon abandoned his high-powered job producing Westinghouse’s biggest hit and signed on as Nixon’s "executive producer for television." For Ailes, the infatuation was personal – and it is telling that the man who got him into politics would prove to be one of he most paranoid and dirty campaigners in the history of American politics. "I don’t know anyone else around that I would have done it for," Ailes has said, "other than Nixon."

It was while working for Nixon that Ailes first experimented with blurring the distinction between journalism and politics, developing a knack for manipulating political imagery that would find its ultimate expression in Fox News. He knew his candidate was a disaster on TV. "You put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away," Ailes told reporter Joe McGinniss in The Selling of the President 1968. "He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight, and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, 'I want to be president.' "But the real problem, as Ailes saw it, was a media establishment that he viewed as hostile to Republicans. The "only hope," he recalled, "was to go around the press and go directly to the people" – letting the campaign itself shape the candidate’s image for the average voter, "without it being interpreted for him by a middleman."

To bypass journalists, Ailes made Nixon the star of his own traveling roadshow – a series of contrived, newslike events that the campaign paid to broadcast in local markets across the country. Nixon would appear on camera in theaters packed with GOP partisans – "an applause machine," Ailes said, "that’s all that they are." Then he would field questions from six voters, hand-­selected by the campaign, who could be counted on to lob softball queries that played to Nixon’s talking points. At the time, Nixon was consciously stoking the anger of white voters aggrieved by the advances of the civil rights movement, and Ailes proved eager to play the race card. To balance an obligatory "Negro" on a panel in Philadelphia, Ailes dreamed of adding a "good, mean Wallacite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'"

Ailes had essentially replaced professional journalists with every­day voters he could manipulate at will. "The events were not staged, they were fixed," says Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. "People were supposed to ask tough questions. But asking a tough question – let alone knowing how to follow up – is a skill. Taking that task out of the hands of reporters and putting it into the hands of inexperienced amateurs was brilliant in itself."

As for actual journalists? "Fuck 'em," Ailes said. "It’s not a press conference – it’s a television show. Our television show. And the press has no business on the set." The young producer forced reporters to watch the events backstage on a TV monitor – just like the rest of America. "Ailes figured out a way to bring reporters to heel," Perlstein says.

After Nixon was elected, Ailes was soon fired by the White House. He had brazenly insulted his boss in the McGinniss book while playing up his own talent as an image-maker, and Nixon, as always, took the snub personally. "In the television field, we have made the move that we should have made long ago," the president sniffed to his chief of staff in a memo uncovered by Rolling Stone, adding that Ailes was not among "the first-rate men that we could have in this field."

Finish reading at the Source

News of the World histleblower found dead

Death of Sean Hoare – who was first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson knew of hacking – not being treated as suspicious
Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead .

Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, was said to have been found at his Watford home.

Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: "At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

"The death is currently being treated as unexplained but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing."

Hoare, who was in his mid-forties, first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World.

He told the newspaper that not only did Coulson know of the phone hacking, but that he actively encouraged his staff to intercept the phone calls of celebrities in the pursuit of exclusives.

In a subsequent interview with the BBC he alleged that he was personally asked by his editor at the time, Coulson, to tap into phones. In an interview with the PM programme he said Coulson's insistence that he didn't know about the practice was "a lie, it is simply a lie".

At the time a Downing Street spokeswoman said Coulson totally and utterly denied the allegations and said he had "never condoned the use of phone hacking and nor do I have any recollection of incidences where phone hacking took place".

Hoare, who said he was once a close friend of Coulson's, told the New York Times the two first worked together at the Sun, where, Hoare said, he played tape recordings of hacked messages for Coulson. At the News of the World, Hoare said, he continued to inform Coulson of his activities. Coulson "actively encouraged me to do it", Hoare said.

In September last year he was interviewed under caution by police over his claims that the former Tory communications chief asked him to hack into phones when he was editor of the paper, but declined to make any comment.

Hoare returned to the spotlight last week, after he told the New York Times that reporters at the News of the World were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals in exchange for payments to police officers.

He said journalists were able to use a technique called "pinging" which measured the distance between mobile handsets and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location.

Hoare gave further details about the use of "pinging" to the Guardian last week. He described how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: "Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say 'right that's where they are.'"

He said: "You'd just go to the news desk and they'd just come back to you. You don't ask any questions. You'd consider it a job done. The chain of command is one of absolute discipline and that's why I never bought into it, like with Andy saying he wasn't aware of it and all that. That's bollocks."

He said he would stand by everything he had told the New York Times about "pinging". "I don't know how often it happened. That would be wrong of me. But if I had access as a humble reporter … "

He admitted he had had problems with drink and drugs and had been in rehab. "But that's irrelevant," he said. "There's more to come. This is not going to go away."

Hoare named a private investigator who he said had links with the News of the World, adding: "He may want to talk now because I think what you'll find now is a lot of people are going to want to cover their arse."

Speaking to another Guardian journalist last week, Hoare repeatedly expressed the hope that the hacking scandal would lead to journalism in general being cleaned up and said he had decided to blow the whistle on the activities of some of his former News of the World colleagues with that aim in mind.

He also said he had been injured the previous weekend while taking down a marquee erected for a children's party. He said he had broken his nose and badly injured his foot when a relative accidentally struck him with a heavy pole from the marquee.

Hoare also emphasised that he was not making any money from telling his story. Hoare, who has been treated for drug and alcohol problems, reminisced about partying with former pop stars and said he missed the days when he was able to go out on the town.

On Monday evening the curtains were drawn at his home, a first-floor apartment in a new-build block of flats.

A neighbour, Nicky Dormer, who lives opposite, said three police cars and two ambulances arrived at the property at 11am.

Police left at about 3pm, shortly after a man and a woman, believed to be grieving relatives, arrived at the premises.

She and another neighbour described Hoare as a jovial man who would often sit on his balcony, overlooking the entrance to the block, and talk to residents.

They said he lived in the block with his partner, a woman called Jo, who they believed had been away on holiday.

Neither had seen Hoare for a few days.

Paul Pritchard, 30, another neighbour, said Sean Hoare was "the most sociable" resident, and they would regularly see him watering the communal front lawn or clearing out the bin shed.

"It is just such a shock. About a month ago he said he felt unwell and he said he went to the doctors for a checkup. Then I saw him again and he seemed well."

Source

Japan Tsunami: Debris From Disaster Heading to U.S. West Coast

Millions of tons of debris washed out to sea from north-east Japan by the March 11 tsunami has embarked on a 10-year circuit of the Pacific, endangering shipping and wildlife.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo

7:00AM BST 23 Jun 2011

The French environmental group Robin des Bois estimates that a large percentage of the 25 million tons of debris created by the magnitude 9 earthquake and the tsunami that it triggered has been sucked out to sea.

After being caught in the swirling currents for a number of years, it will congregate into two floating "garbage patches," one in the east and the other in the west of the Pacific.

The debris includes damaged fishing boats, cars, shipping containers and the contents of thousands of houses, including refrigerators, along with plastics, wood, rubber and items made of PVC.

Many of the vehicles will discharge their oil and fuel, creating numerous spills, while containers from industrial facilities will leak pesticides, chemicals and a wide range of other pollutants, the organisation said.

The waste will move at a speed of between 5 and 10 miles a day, catching the North Pacific Current and crossing the ocean in as little as 12 months.
Off the coast of California, debris is expected to circulate either north or south, taking either the Alaskan or North Equatorial currents back to the western reaches of the ocean.

Much is predicted to end up caught in the vortex of the Eastern Garbage Patch, which is estimated to measure between 270,000 square miles and 5.8 million square miles.

"Over time plastic debris eventually fragments into tiny particles creating 'plastic plankton' or 'microplastic,' which is a serious long-term concern, particularly for marine food webs." the organisation said.

Murdoch’s Watergate?

His anything-goes approach has spread through journalism like a contagion. Now it threatens to undermine the influence he so covets.
by Carl BernsteinJuly 11, 2011

The hacking scandal currently shaking Rupert Murdoch’s empire will surprise only those who have willfully blinded themselves to that empire’s pernicious influence on journalism in the English-speaking world. Too many of us have winked in amusement at the salaciousness without considering the larger corruption of journalism and politics promulgated by Murdoch Culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

The facts of the case are astonishing in their scope. Thousands of private phone messages hacked, presumably by people affiliated with the Murdoch-owned News of the World newspaper, with the violated parties ranging from Prince William and actor Hugh Grant to murder victims and families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The arrest of Andy Coulson, former press chief to Prime Minister David Cameron, for his role in the scandal during his tenure as the paper’s editor. The arrest (for the second time) of Clive Goodman, the paper’s former royals editor. The shocking July 7 announcement that the paper would cease publication three days later, putting hundreds of employees out of work. Murdoch’s bid to acquire full control of cable-news company BSkyB placed in jeopardy. Allegations of bribery, wiretapping, and other forms of lawbreaking—not to mention the charge that emails were deleted by the millions in order to thwart Scotland Yard’s investigation.

All of this surrounding a man and a media empire with no serious rivals for political influence in Britain—especially, but not exclusively, among the conservative Tories who currently run the country. Almost every prime minister since the Harold Wilson era of the 1960s and ’70s has paid obeisance to Murdoch and his unmatched power. When Murdoch threw his annual London summer party for the United Kingdom’s political, journalistic, and social elite at the Orangery in Kensington Gardens on June 16, Prime Minister Cameron and his wife, Sam, were there, as were Labour leader Ed Miliband and assorted other cabinet ministers.

Murdoch associates, present and former—and his biographers—have said that one of his greatest long-term ambitions has been to replicate that political and cultural power in the United States. For a long time his vehicle was the New York Post—not profitable, but useful for increasing his eminence and working a wholesale change not only in American journalism but in the broader culture as well. Page Six, emblematic in its carelessness about accuracy or truth or context—but oh-so-readable—became the model for the gossipization of an American press previously resistant to even considering publishing its like. (Murdoch accomplished a similar debasement of the airwaves in the 1990s with the—tame by today’s far-lower standards—tabloid television show A Current Affair.)

Then came the unfair and imbalanced politicized “news” of the Fox News Channel—showing (again) Murdoch’s genius at building an empire on the basis of an ever-descending lowest journalistic denominator. It, too, rests on a foundation that has little or nothing to do with the best traditions and values of real reporting and responsible journalism: the best obtainable version of the truth. In place of this journalistic ideal, the enduring Murdoch ethic substitutes gossip, sensationalism, and manufactured controversy.

And finally, in 2007 The Wall Street Journal’s squabbling family owners succumbed to his acumen, willpower, and money, fulfilling Murdoch’s dream of owning an American newspaper to match the influence and prestige of his U.K. holding, The Times of London—one that really mattered, at the topmost tier of journalism.

Between the Post, Fox News, and the Journal, it’s hard to think of any other individual who has had a greater impact on American political and media culture in the past half century.

But now the empire is shaking, and there’s no telling when it will stop. My conversations with British journalists and politicians—all of them insistent on speaking anonymously to protect themselves from retribution by the still-enormously powerful mogul—make evident that the shuttering of News of the World, and the official inquiries announced by the British government, are the beginning, not the end, of the seismic event.

News International, the British arm of Murdoch’s media empire, “has always worked on the principle of omertà: ‘Do not say anything to anybody outside the family, and we will look after you,’ ” notes a former Murdoch editor who knows the system well. “Now they are hanging people out to dry. The moment you do that, the omertà is gone, and people are going to talk. It looks like a circular firing squad.”

News of the World was always Murdoch’s “baby,” one of the largest newspapers in the English-speaking world, with 2.6 million readers. As anyone in the business will tell you, the standards and culture of a journalistic institution are set from the top down, by its owner, publisher, and top editors. Reporters and editors do not routinely break the law, bribe policemen, wiretap, and generally conduct themselves like thugs unless it is a matter of recognized and understood policy. Private detectives and phone hackers do not become the primary sources of a newspaper’s information without the tacit knowledge and approval of the people at the top, all the more so in the case of newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, according to those who know him best.

As one of his former top executives—once a close aide—told me, “This scandal and all its implications could not have happened anywhere else. Only in Murdoch’s orbit. The hacking at News of the World was done on an industrial scale. More than anyone, Murdoch invented and established this culture in the newsroom, where you do whatever it takes to get the story, take no prisoners, destroy the competition, and the end will justify the means.”

“In the end, what you sow is what you reap,” said this same executive. “Now Murdoch is a victim of the culture that he created. It is a logical conclusion, and it is his people at the top who encouraged lawbreaking and hacking phones and condoned it.”

Could Murdoch eventually be criminally charged? He has always surrounded himself with trusted subordinates and family members, so perhaps it is unlikely. Though Murdoch has strenuously denied any knowledge at all of the hacking and bribery, it’s hard to believe that his top deputies at the paper didn’t think they had a green light from him to use such untraditional reportorial methods. Investigators are already assembling voluminous records that demonstrate the systemic lawbreaking at News of the World, and Scotland Yard seems to believe what was happening in the newsroom was endemic at the highest levels at the paper and evident within the corporate structure. Checks have been found showing tens of thousands of dollars of payments at a time.

For this reporter, it is impossible not to consider these facts through the prism of Watergate. When Bob Woodward and I came up against difficult ethical questions, such as whether to approach grand jurors for information (which we did, and perhaps shouldn’t have), we sought executive editor Ben Bradlee’s counsel, and he in turn called in the company lawyers, who gave the go-ahead and outlined the legal issues in full. Publisher Katharine Graham was informed. Likewise, Bradlee was aware when I obtained private telephone and credit-card records of one of the Watergate figures.

All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees—famously in recent years at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the three original TV networks. But can anyone who knows and understands the journalistic process imagine the kind of tactics regularly employed by the Murdoch press, especially at News of the World, being condoned at the Post or the Times?

And then there’s the other inevitable Watergate comparison. The circumstances of the alleged lawbreaking within News Corp. suggest more than a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon presiding over a criminal conspiracy in which he insulated himself from specific knowledge of numerous individual criminal acts while being himself responsible for and authorizing general policies that routinely resulted in lawbreaking and unconstitutional conduct. Not to mention his role in the cover-up. It will remain for British authorities and, presumably, disgusted and/or legally squeezed News Corp. executives and editors to reveal exactly where the rot came from at News of the World, and whether Rupert Murdoch enabled, approved, or opposed the obvious corruption that infected his underlings.

None of this is to deny Murdoch’s competitive genius, his superior understanding of the modern media marketplace, or his dead-on reading of popular culture. He has made occasionally dull newspapers fun to read and TV news broadcasts fun to watch, and few of us would deny there are days when we love it. He’s been at his best when he’s come in from the outside: starting Sky News, which shook up a complacent British broadcasting establishment; contradicting conventional American media wisdom that a fourth TV network (Fox) could never get off the ground; reducing the power of Britain’s printing trade unions that were exercising a stranglehold on the U.K. press.

But Murdoch and his global media empire have a lot to answer for. He has not merely encouraged the metastasis of cutthroat tabloid journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. But perhaps just as troubling, authorities in Britain may respond to popular outrage at the scandal by imposing the kind of regulations that cannot help but undermine a truly free press.

The events of recent days are a watershed for Britain, for the United States, and for Rupert Murdoch. Tabloid journalism—and our tabloid culture—may never be the same.

Bernstein’s most recent book is A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Correction: An earlier version of this article described the weekly News of the World as a daily paper and stated that Murdoch had a role in the TV show Hard Copy. In fact, Murdoch's show was A Current Affair.

Anonymous - Freedom Fighters

ONLY LOVE PREVAILS
Everyone who cares about ending the tyranny on our world, and restoring our
sovereignty and freedom from the oppressors, should watch this Video and pass it
on. We each have the power to peaceably help bring our world back to the
freedoms we want for ourselves and family and the family of humanity.

Monsanto official Beaten

I do not condone violence at all it is a shame the win came through beating someone
Monsanto official Beaten by farmers in India over Failed GMO Bt Cotton Seeds
Salem-News.com
Special thanks to the Vidarbha Times for information in this report.

(NAGPUR ) - We have reported in the past an alarming suicide rate among farmers in India that is connected to the failure of American GMO (genetically modified organism) cotton seeds.

Monsanto, the U.S. company responsible for Agent Orange, a cancer-causing chemical sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam, is now in the GMO food and seed business.

Monsanto stands accused of having an international monopoly of the notorious bio-engineered Bt cotton seeds.

Advocates for the agricultural industry say they never dreamed of the tragedy to come, when a 2005 decision was announced to allow the seeds in India.

Now an agrarian crisis has hit Maharashtra itself thanks to the Monsanto program.

Farmers are buying 11 packets of 450 gm per hectare as per the company’s guide for the recommended “population method” but the sudden demand and ill-managed Indian sub agents have brought the company big trouble as 50% of the Bt cotton seeds failed to germinate even after it’s second sowing.

Now cries are being heard in other part of India too.

The Vidarbha Janandolan Samiti farmers advocacy group has approached the local state Govt. of Maharashtra to arrange a high level probe of all complaints received from farmers of west Vidarbha where more than 10,000 cotton farmers have committed suicide since June 2005 after the introduction of the killer Bt cotton seeds in this region.

Around Rs.10,000 crore has been pumped in by Indian and state Govt. to bailout cotton farmers from the agrarian crisis which is likely to get worse if corrective action are not taken immediately, Kishore Tiwari of Vidarbha Janandolan Samiti said today.

The Monsanto Bt cotton seed crisis heated up in early June when all Bt cotton seeds ordered by Maharashtra dealers sold out it to the adjourning Andhra farmers and there was no seed available to cater to the local market.

Monsanto sub-agents had failed to respond to a state govt. request, and then suddenly Bt cotton seeds were freely available in the market by the third week of June.

A source supply was immediately discovered and Yavatmal police raided the house of Nerendra Indurkar in the very small village of Munjala and reportedly caught him red handed packing local cotton seed in the pockets of branded Bt cotton.

Police have sealed the advanced imported pocket packing machines and thousands of packets of Bt cotton seeds being sold on the premium.

However the alleged culprit, Nerendra Indurkar, was allowed to go without any interrogation.

Officials of the American Bt cotton seeds giant in India were called and facts were shared but they denied any link with this bogus Bt cotton seed supply racket.

When news of a Monsanto senior official's arrival from Mumbai reached the nearby village of Munjala, cotton farmers of the village Karanji, about 140 K.m. from Nagpur located the Monsanto official and took him to their field where a complete failure of ‘Paras Sudarshan’ Bt cotton seed was shown to him.

When the Monsanto representative failed to admit the lapse, he was severely beaten up by the farmers.
It was reported that even a local agriculture officer did not come to his rescue.

This, from accounts in daily papers in Vidarbha and the Marathwada region of Maharashtra where more than 4 million hectares under Bt cotton cultivation are reporting the flood of bogus seed supplied local agents of American cotton seed MNC giant Monsanto.

At this point, although the situation was reported, the administration has failed to take any action of this serious issue.

So, Vidarbha Janandolan Samiti has written to Maharashtra Chief Minister Prathiraj Chavan to order a judicial enquiry into the supply racket of bogus BT. cotton seed in Maharashtra, and also to start criminal action against the culprit, Tiwari added.

Exactly where Monsanto's trail across the globe that has left so many dead and dying begins is not known, nor is the future this model agency of the American military industrial complex known.

The company has never accounted for its role in the deaths of so many Vietnamese and American and Australian Vietnam Veterans who have fought so hard for so government accountability in return.

Agent Orange doesn't just affect the person who comes into contact with it, it goes on to affect their children, and their children's children. I suspect there are a great number of people who cracked a smile when they read this account of a Monsanto official being beaten up in an Indian farm field. Violence is never a good answer, but particularly in light of the horrific, staggering suicide rate, it is understandable why some might embrace it as a last resort.
Monsanto official Beaten by farmers in India over Failed GMO Bt Cotton Seeds
Salem-News.com

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fights extradition to Sweden

By Robert Stevens
13 July 2011

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared at the High Court at London’s Royal Courts of Justice to appeal against his extradition to Sweden on trumped-up allegations of rape. The expected two-day hearing is in response to the February 24 ruling by Judge Howard Riddle at the High Court that Assange can be extradited.

The case against Assange is aimed at silencing WikiLeaks, which has made public thousands of secret US military documents exposing the criminal character of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and US diplomatic cables documenting the filthy conspiracies that have been carried out against the world’s people by Washington and its allies.

Assange’s appeal is being heard by two high court judges, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Ouseley. Assange has enlisted the services of a new legal team for the appeal, including Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer. Among those that Peirce has represented are the Guildford Four, wrongfully convicted for terrorist pub bombings in October 1974, and the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent young Brazilian man shot dead by London police officers in the aftermath of the July 2005 London bombings.

The WikiLeaks editor-in-chief was arrested on December 7 in London on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by the Swedish authorities, alleging sexual misconduct. Two women in Sweden admit having sex with Assange willingly on separate occasions last August. But one alleges that, in one instance, Assange failed to use a condom. The other alleges that on one occasion Assange had sexual intercourse while she was not fully awake. Assange admits consensual sex with each woman, but rejects any wrongdoing.

Despite his arrest, Assange has still yet to be charged with any offence. For nearly seven months he has been placed under house arrest at the Norfolk residence of one of his supporters, Vaughan Smith. According to the extraordinary restrictive bail conditions, he must wear an electronic ankle tag and report to a designated police station each day.

As intended, these conditions have made it almost impossible for WikiLeaks to function normally. Assange’s detention has been compounded by the actions of leading payment networks, including MasterCard and Visa, who have barred any online donations being made to WikiLeaks through their systems. WikiLeaks has estimated that these bans on online donations have cost it around $15 million. The block on financial donations to WikiLeaks has been made at the highest levels of the Obama administration in the United States.

Last week, DataCell, a payment provider based in Iceland, began to process online donations to WikiLeaks, using an alternative-payment gateway to process money sent through MasterCard and Visa Europe. The payments were stopped just hours later by Visa, which stated, “As soon as this came to our attention, action was taken with the suspension of Visa payment acceptance to the site remaining in place.”

DataCell said of the action, “The reason they give is that orders have been given by the international card companies to close down the gateway and that processing donations to WikiLeaks is a violation of general terms between the two parties”.

Written arguments submitted to the high court by Assange’s lawyers described each of the alleged offences against their client and explained how the EAW had distorted the basic facts.

Ben Emmerson QC told the judges that the EAW was “misleading in the extreme” and failed to provide a “fair, accurate and proper” description of the alleged sexual misconduct.

Emmerson said the extradition order is also flawed because it calls for Assange’s return to Sweden “not for prosecution but for the purposes of an investigation” and is “a disproportionate utilisation” of the EAW system.

The EAW was further invalid, Emmerson said, due to major discrepancies between its allegations of sexual assault and the testimonies of the two women.

Regarding the first alleged offence made by one of the women—known as AA—Assange’s lawyers argued that the information contained in the arrest warrant is not an accurate description of the alleged conduct. The arguments pointed out that “accurately described, the appellant [Assange] held AA during consensual sexual foreplay and, when actually asked to put on a condom, did so.”

Emmerson stated that the second alleged offence of sexual molestation was an “entirely consensual sexual encounter throughout”, and charged that the claims contained in the arrest warrant were “misleading in the extreme” on both these incidents.

Regarding the third alleged offence, this occurred when AA and Assange were “voluntarily sharing a single bed”, said Emmerson.

The fourth alleged offence of “minor rape” against the second woman, SW, was also not accurately described in the arrest warrant as this was an “entirely consensual sexual encounter”, said Emmerson.

Reportedly, the woman had said she found Assange’s behaviour at one point to be “very strange” and had just wanted the sexual intercourse to be “over with”. Emmerson said, “Her words may indicate she was not particularly enjoying what was going on. But they certainly do not go anywhere near what we would regard in this country as lack of consent”.

Emmerson also charged that the allegations against Assange were not extraditable offences. He stated, “What [Swedish prosecutors] must prove beyond reasonable doubt is that if these circumstances as alleged had happened in London, would they have constituted offences? [There are] very serious questions on dual criminality in [three charges]. [There are] very serious questions on whether what happened in charge four could have recognisable as a charge in this [country].”

He added, “The senior district judge [in Sweden] found that those factual allegations would establish dual criminality on the basis that lack of consent, and lack of reasonable belief in consent, may properly be inferred from the conduct described, particularly the references to ‘violence’ and a ‘design’ to ‘violate sexual integrity’. However, that description of conduct is not accurate. The arrest warrant misstates the conduct and is, by that reason alone, an invalid warrant.”

Emmerson also drew attention to the fact that there was evidence that Assange’s lawyers had still not seen, due to the fact that under Swedish law prosecutors are not obliged to reveal it until legal proceedings are at a later stage.

Source

U.K. Court Postpones Decision On Whether To Extradite Julian Assange To Sweden
Sky News is reporting that the February 24th decision to extradite Julian Assange to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual molestation have been deferred.

The court is expected to hand down a written decision on the case in the next 2-3 weeks.

The Assange legal defense is based on the argument that there is no English legal equivalent for the allegations against Assange. If the U.K. court system agrees, Assange cannot be extradited.

Assange's lawyers have also argued that the testimony of the accusers does not support the allegations against him, and that the prosecution is motivated by political considerations in Sweden, not by the victims.

Sweden has not formally charged Assange with any crimes. It wants Assange brought to Sweden to answer questions over the allegations, though the judge pointed out today that he could be interviewed without going through with extradition.

Assange is currently under house arrest in a mansion near England's eastern coast.

Criminal Probe of Bush

HRW urges criminal probe of Bush
Wed Jul 13, 2011 10:47AM
An American human rights organization has called for a criminal investigation of the former US administration officials over their authorization of torture practices against terror suspects.


In a report released on Tuesday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the current US administration and foreign governments to prosecute the former President George W. Bush and some of his top officials over crimes such as the use of torture, abduction and other forms of prisoner mistreatment, The Guardian reported.

"The road to the violations … began within days of the September 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, D.C, when the Bush administration began crafting a new set of policies, procedures, and practices for detainees captured in military and counterterrorism operations outside the United States," the report says, pointing to such examples of torture as waterboarding and secret rendition.

Titled "Getting Away With Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” the document also implicates Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney, the former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the ex-CIA chief George Tenet in illegal practices against detainees.

HRW has stressed the necessity of the probe, saying that prosecutions are required "if the US hopes to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and reaffirm the primacy of the rule of law".

Reed Brody, the report author, has also slammed Obama, and pointed out, "It's become abundantly clear that there is no longer any movement on the part of the Obama administration to live up to its responsibilities to investigate these cases when the evidence just keeps piling up.”

In January 2009, President Barack Obama signed a number of executive orders purporting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and end Bush's abusive practices. However, Guantanamo still remains open and many say Obama's orders still permit inhumane interrogation practices due to its loopholes.

The organization has warned the US government that its failure to scrutinize the Bush-era abuses will amount to violation of the UN Convention against Torture.

Some 27,000 detainees are suspected to have been held by the US in secret prisons around the world, including in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Island of Diego Garcia (Indian Ocean), Jordan and aboard US amphibious assault ships.

Source

MAB/MB

Carbon Tax

This is what it is all about - Banksters, money and profits. Juliar Gillard is a Goldman Sachs puppet. SHAME, shame Watch the video below

Australian banks are eyeing opportunities to cash in on the proposed carbon tax by developing new financial products and services that capitalise on a market seen to be worth billions of dollars annually, according to a report by the Australian Financial Review.

Australian financial firms that have experience in European carbon markets, such as Macquarie Group Ltd, Westpac Banking Corp Ltd and ANZ Banking Group Ltd are particularly keen to establish their presence in the Australian market.

The initial three-year fixed carbon tax period from 2012 will serve as time to prepare for the release of ETS permits by 2015, when opportunities will really open up for banks to capitalise on the carbon market.

ANZ's head of energy trading said the value of the derivatives carbon market would dwarf the $10 billion initially raised by the government, according to the AFR.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Banks-look-to-capitalise-on-carbon-tax-report-pd20110712-JPQRL?OpenDocument&src=mp

Source

In a flagrant and cowardly reversal of policy, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, NOW supports the Goldman Sachs devised Carbon Tax based penalty economy.

After emphatically stating that her government would never implement a carbon tax we now have one of the biggest backflips in Australian political history, equal to, if not greater than, the opposition’s backflip on the ‘never, ever’ GST. What the population learns from these events is that mainstream politicians have NO INTEGRITY WHATSOEVER and should be shunned at all future elections in favour of REPRESENTATIVE INDEPENDENTS.

If any Aussie is surprised by Gillard’s brazen treachery and kowtowing to the Corporations then they deserve to be led by the major parties. One only need hearken back to her attempt to implement the overtly Stalinist policy of allowing Corporate bosses access to the PRIVATE emails and social communications of their employees to appreciate her REAL character! This overt Stasi policy should have alerted all Aussies to Gillard’s true nature and real credentials – that is, to serve her Corporate masters at any cost to the nation and the public.

Trillions of dollars have been extracted from the nation by Transnational Corporations with hardly a return to the people; our essential services, transport, hospitals, dental etc, are in a shambles while bloated Transnational Corporations abscond with ALL the money. Ask yourself, what have the major parties done to correct these horrendous imbalances and injustices? Short answer, ‘sweet f**k all!’

It is NOW OBVIOUS that both major parties serve Corporate interests. Be advised AUSTRALIA, this is not a matter of which traitorous party to elect but a deteriorating social crises with devastating ramifications – AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRACY IS UNDER THREAT from the Liberal AND Labor Parties, both of which are in the pockets of Corporatists!

Regardless of all the flak Gillard receives from the opposition over her spineless new stand, the ‘opposition’ would implement, via stealth, the same policy under another name and form, make no mistake. Oz is undergoing a political crisis as I write and if the people do not take a stand then they deserve their fate.

The REALITY is simple, it is OUR NATION and OUR FUTURE, the prerogative is OURS. Vigorously oppose all inequitable policies and unfair taxes, regulate all the major Corporations and TAX THEM for the damage their have wrought on our environment and the climate – ALL pollution is the result of Corporate activity and can cease if the Corporations are prohibited from directly or indirectly producing polluting substances, FACT!

Install REPRESENTATIVE INDEPENDENTS into office at EVERY LEVEL of government and restore the AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITY.

Most rational people are aware that climate change is a reality BUT there are a number of factors responsible. Solar activity being the MAJOR DRIVER of climate; greenhouse gases and pollution are minor contributors but contributors nevertheless and must be reduced by regulation. Increased carbon levels are a CONSEQUENCE of global warming not the cause, however, Goldman Sachs and BIG Finance, which only recently plunged the entire world into economic crisis, have devised a TAX (Carbon Con) to correct their failing economic model. They wish to shift the globe from a FAILED over-production/consumption model to a PENALTY based economy, while all the while increasing their wealth and maintaining their position as the leading influences of the global economy via tradeable carbon derivatives/swaps/'certificates') – ‘nice rort’ but the informed will have none of it!

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