New York actor Michael Brea - who appeared in an episode of the hit TV show Ugly Betty and was a one-time spokesmodel for the Coca-Cola energy drink Full Throttle - apparently chopped off his mother's head using a "samurai sword" he claims he was given during a ceremony at a Masonic Lodge. Adding intrigue to insanity, the victim in this horrific case used to work at... wait for it... wait for it... the World Trade Center Marriott! That's right. Yannick Brea was a survivor of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And now she's dead.
According to authorities, it seems Brea believed his mother was possessed by Satan, thus necessitating the application of his admittedly extreme yet crudely effective exorcism technique.
An official representative for the Masons has claimed that Brea was not a Brother. "There are groups out there in Brooklyn and elsewhere that call themselves Freemasons but they are not recognized by the Grand Lodge of the State of New York," explained the unnamed rep. "Anyone who knows the rituals can go and say 'I’m going to form a Lodge.' But they are not recognized. They are called clandestine."
Traumatized witnesses claim they could hear Yannick screaming and pleading for her life as her son shouted: "Repent, sinner! Repent! You never accepted Jesus!" They also claim that police present at the scene inexplicably refused to break down the door and stop Brea's attack until Mom's screams had ceased, and it was obviously too late to save her.
Why did police stand by and let this woman be hacked to death? NYPD officials claim "protocol", that the officers who arrived on scene had instructions to wait for S.W.A.T., who showed up an hour later. I've sniffed around the underweb and have found no evidence that Yannick Brea had ever made claims of a conspiratorial nature about the events of 9/11, or even that she had ever been involved in the "9/11 Truth" movement, but my search was by no means exhaustive.
If anyone out there reading this has any further information about this case, please post it in the comments section. In the meantime, I'll keep sniffing, and I'll keep you posted.
It all started in August of 2004, when Grammy-winning composer and classical pianist Roger Davidson discovered a virus on his computer. Fearing it might wipe out decades' worth of compositions and recordings, Davidson dropped his computer off at a Westchester computer and specialty IT services store called Datalink, owned and operated by Indian immigrant Vikram Bedi and his Icelandic girlfriend, Helga Invarsdottir.
When Davidson returned to pick up his de-bugged computer, Bedi told him that he had never before encountered such a vicious and difficult piece of malware. According to Bedi, Davidson's computer was so badly infected, so incredibly contagious, that simply plugging it in had led to every other computer at Datalink being infected! Furthermore, Bedi said he'd researched the origins of the virus and he'd tracked it to a hacker enclave in Hondouras. Fortunately for Davidson, Bedi had an uncle in Indian intelligence who was willing to travel to Honduras and investigate... for a substantial fee, of course.
Davidson was intrigued. Why had he been targeted? He also had money to burn, being the heir to a multi-million dollar trust fund set up by his great-grandfather, the founder of Schlumberger, a Fortune 500 oil-field services company. He agreed to fund a hands-on investigation, if only to get some answers.
Those answers came, but Davidson wasn't going to like them. According to Bedi, the virus attack was only the beginning. It turns out Davidson had been targeted for assassination by Opus Dei, a hard-core Roman Catholic secret society.
Not pausing to wonder why an order of right-wing priests should be out to get him - perhaps he assumed they didn't approve of the ecumenical nature of his Society for Universal Sacred Music - Davidson immediately went into panic mode. Fortunately, Bedi was well equipped to calm his fears, because aside from being a computer security specialist, he also happened to be an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency! Even better, he was also currently involved in a Top Secret CIA "op" to keep Opus Dei from infiltrating the highest levels of American government!
What an incredibly fortuitous coincidence! Davidson jumped at the chance to have his computers, himself, and his entire family protected from Opus Dei by this real live agent from the CIA!
Of course, round-the-clock protection doesn't come cheap. Bedi charged Davidson $160,000 each and every month for his services. This went on for just under six years. When added to the amount Davidson paid for the initial Honduras investigation and other incidental fees - for instance, the tuxedo Bedi wore while hulking behind Davidson in full-on "pretend bodyguard" mode in the video, below - investigators figure Bedi ultimately took Davidson for roughly 20 MILLION dollars.
Within months of their first encounter at Datalink, Bedi and his girlfriend, Helga, had insinuated themselves into every aspect of Davidson's life. Davidson put the duo in charge of his Universal Sacred Music Society. He also made Bedi a co-trustee of his 60 million dollar fortune, believing that someone so tied in to the mechanics of America's intelligence power elite would surely make wise investment decisions.
As you can probably guess, that was the beginning of the end. Within a few years, Bedi had managed to lose nearly $13 million of Davidson's fortune on bad investments. By August of 2010, the local police got involved when new neighbors of Davidson's complained that someone had planted GPS tracking devices on their family vehicles. It turns out Bedi had told Davidson the family was actually a group of Opus Dei assassins, the latest twist in their nefarious plot to end his life. A doubtful Davidson told the police he had planted the GPS devices himself in a misguided attempt to confirm or debunk Bedi's assertions.
As soon as the police cracked a window into Bedi's byzantine conspiracy construct, the whole thing came tumbling down like a kooky house of cards. Police swooped in on Bedi and Invarsdottir just as they were about to high-tail it to Iceland, where Helga's pop is a prominent businessman. At the time of their arrest, the dastardly duo had almost $8 million in the bank, several expensive cars, the deeds to many of Davidson's properties, and $150,000 in cash stuffed under the bed in the master bedroom of their gorgeous Westchester home.
Bedi, of course, offers an alternate explanation. According to him, HE is the victim in all this, and all that conspiracy hoo-hah was Davidson's creation. The TRUTH is that Davidson - who also, according to Bedi, had amassed tons of pornography on his hard-drive - was trying to surreptitiously sneak $400 million into the country from a Liechtenstein bank without paying any taxes on it. He was also under the impression that the French and US governments were spying on his computers in an effort to get back 60 years worth of unpaid taxes. That's why he hired Bedi. Topping it all off, Bedi claims Davidson made repeated sexual advances on Invarsdottir, claiming it was his natural right as a "high-born" person. All that money? It was just what Davidson felt Bedi was owed for recovering 30 years' worth of music from a damaged hard-drive. Oh, and there was also a $2 million gift that Davidson had given the couple, just because Davidson was "generous" and he "liked" them.
Of course, elsewhere, Bedi has also claimed that he "invented the world's first Pentium-based computer laptop", and that he's best buds with both George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. So, you know... caveat emptor and all that jazz.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald's old truism goes, "the rich are different than you and me." That's why yer old pal Jerky assumes that Davidson was far more upset by Bedi and Invarsdottir's betrayal of his trust than he was by their pillaging of his loot. Regardless, all you trust-fund billionaires out there reading this should take Davidson's lesson to heart: Just because you're worth a bunch of money, that doesn't necessarily mean Opus Dei is out to get you. M'kay?
A $20,000 donation to the Democratic Party doesn't get you what it used to!
Who - or what - is targeting the world's on-air TV personalities? Is this some emerging syndrome? Something we might call Broadcast Babbling Breakdown? Or is something more sinister afoot? Like, for instance, are we perhaps witnessing the results of some shadowy, behind-the-scenes Dark Agents being naughty by testing out their mind control technologies on live TV?
In recent weeks, a strange phenomenon has been spreading across our television screens. In a variety of different, seemingly unconnected markets, veteran media presenters have gone on the air and dissolved into puddles of bizarre, nonsensical and occasionally disturbing babbling.
The first victim was Serene Branson, a CBS presenter reporting live from the Grammy Awards show. Her descent into gibberish has all the hallmarks of involuntary glossolalia - otherwise known as "Speaking in Tongues." Watch the video of her melt-down and ask yourself if it seems like she's being "slain by the Spirit" to you...
Quite odd, isn't it? According to CBS, Serene has had a history of medical problems that could spark blackouts and seizures, and as far as her doctor is concerned, the above nonsense was simply the result of nothing more exotic than a "migraine with aura". Actually, that sounds pretty exotic to me - and kind of New Age-y, to boot - but I'm no doctor, so what do I know?
The next case that captured the world's attention happened at the Canadian independent Global News channel. Here we see respected political reporter Mark McAllister seemingly running down a list of words he spotted floating in his morning bowl of Alphabits...
Okay, so, after watching this a few times, I can almost see how some might argue that this particular case involves McAllister making one minor mistake while reading the teleprompter, followed by another small mistake, and then another, and another, until the whole damn thing snowballs, cascading into an absolutely catastrophic loss of composure. We all get scrambled brains on occasion, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this is what happened here.
However, when you stop and compare the behavior exhibited by McAllister and Branson with the popular descriptions of how microwave mind control technology is alleged to function - by invasively forcing unwanted images, words and concepts into your consciousness, crowding out your rational thoughts and replacing them with static and garbage - it gives one pause.
Which brings us to another week, in another country, and another on-air breakdown. What are we to make of this video, featuring a German weather-woman who starts laughing, and then seems totally incapable of pulling herself together? Watch...
What the hell was so funny, lady? Have you seen that guy naked before and there's something you're dying to tell us about him? I mean, we've all had laughing jags, but come on! Once again, this behavior seems exaggerated beyond all sense of proportion, perhaps even... enhanced?
What's this? Hold on a minute, ladies and gentlemen... I'm being handed a breaking story... oh, wow.
This just in, folks: They got Judge Judy! Sadly, this is one case that didn't happen on live TV, so we don't have any video of the incident... not yet, anyway. Which is probably just as well, because the sound of that screeching harridan's voice is often all it takes to send yer old pal Jerky into spastic fits of uncontrolled hysteria, himself.
Summing up, is it too early to be alarmed by this? Or are those whom we deride as paranoid conspiracy nuts actually on to something when they bring up the possibility of mind control technologies being involved? After all, the Nazi/US government program known as MK-Ultra was eventually proven to be 100 percent fact, after decades of being mocked as the worst kind of goofiness. So, what'll it be? Should we consider making tinfoil hats the next big fashion trend? Or are those of us who find something odd about this new phenomenon just malingering fatuous blizzard in the toothy septuagenarian ishkabibble snow-cone Beelzebub C'thulhu R'lyeh F'taghn?
You be the judge, dear reader... you be the judge.
Damnit! I wanted to write a story about the rash of on-air gibberish melt-downs that have taken place over the last couple months, and now I see that frickin' asshat Drudge has linked to a story about it. I could have beat these bastards to the punch and had a scoop! Maybe Drudge even would have linked to Useless Eater! Or even just linked to a story that linked to UEB. Ah, I guess there's no point getting upset over spilled scoop... I'll have more on this story later, regardless.
I don't know about you guys, but when I was a kid flipping channels and I came across claymation, I stopped and watched, no matter what the subject. There's just something about the process of claymation that seems magical and otherworldly... almost Biblical, really. After all, what are we if not God's Golems; shaped clay with the magical spark of life inside of us? Anyway, I find it amusing that this claymation adaptation of an unfinishedMark Twain story addresses that very point, in very effective and extremely creepy fashion. Some might find it distasteful that such disturbing subject matter was deemed appropriate for children. Personally, I think it's fine, and well worth watching. So I share it with all of you. As always, comments are welcome!
Okay, hold on to your hats, folks, because this one is a doozy.
In an "exclusive" interview with some fellow who answers to the highly suspicious moniker Alfred Lambremont Webre, "independent scientist" - I think that means she's not a scientist - Leuren Moret has stated that Japan has pulled the wasabi over all our big round eyes.
You see, it only seems as though the earthquake-and-tsunami-prone nation of Japan has recently endured a horrific double-catastrophe involving a monster earthquake that spawned a monster tsunami, killing thousands and leaving much of their eastern seaboard a shambles. The reality of the situation is far more sinister. Because what's really going on here is the secret Freemason/Rockefeller/Rothschild rulers of Japan used a super-secret combination of their HAARP earthquake-triggering and chemtrail weather control technologies to wage a clandestine, surreptitious nuclear war against the west coasts of the USA, Canada and Mexico - "the major food producing areas for North America" - in order to "attack the health and genome of the North American population" in accordance with their long-term goal to "depopulate North America, and to make future humans less healthy and less resistant to takeover by a global New World Order."
Oh, and apparently, it also has something to do with finally getting construction started on that long-rumored NAFTA highway, too. According to Ms Moret: “The New World Order... will get North American Unification, the North American Union and their new drug delivery route. The NAFTA highway is their drug route from Mexico through the U.S. to Canada. Waco is on the NAFTA highway. Waco is the Texas Headquarters for the Scottish Rite Masons. Waco, Texas, a key spot on the NAFTA highway, is a big drug depot."
Well, sure! That all makes perfect sense. But is there more to this frightening scenario? Yes, there is. Moret fleshes things out even further: "In Arkansas the Masonic Headquarters is very close to the NAFTA freeway. The bridge collapse in Minneapolis was because they needed to build a bigger bridge for the NAFTA highway. They used imminent domain for the land grab to build the bigger bridge. The NAFTA highway ends at Winnipeg, Manitoba, whose Provincial Legislature is a Masonic capital of Canada. The result of the radiation war against the United States, Canada, Mexico and Hawaii and the weakening of the population here is that... the New World Order gets the North American Unification of Canada, the United States and Mexico."
You may be asking yourself, BUT WHY?! Lucky for you, Ms Moret lays it all out in stark, simple English: "This provides more efficient drug delivery routes, destruction of democracy, and enslavement of the North American populations. The covert nuclear war has already hit. If you didn't prepare, sorry... In this dynamic environment the large amount of radiation released from Fukushima will be mixed in the global atmosphere in one year. Radiation respects no borders, no socio-economic class and no religion. It is an equal opportunity killer... There is nowhere to hide.”
The implications of Ms. Moret's revelations are so bone-chilling, so mind-boggling, so utterly and unmitigatedly flabbergasting that, upon hearing her words, one is left with chilled bones, a boggled mind and completely gasted flabbers. In fact, Ms Moret's words left Monsieur Lambremont-Webre so completely discombobulated that the only response his brain was able to fart up was this delightful bowlful of alphabet soup:
"Well... is, is... uh... Wow. That's quite a... uh... so... this is a way, the... they, uh... the Japan... tectonic warfare using the HAARP, aerosol, chemtrail atmospheric plasma weapon system has now created, in effect, a multiple-Chernobyl in Fukushima. And... and... and, a-as I understand it, um... that Chernobyl is just getting started... right?"
Well, DUH, Monsieur Lambremont-Webre... what do YOU think?
[Kindly watch video in the post directly beneath this one to put the above story in its proper context! - YOPJ]
Exclusive 60-minute interview with "Doctor" (ahem) Leuren Moret about the TRUTH (ahem) behind Japan's earthquake/tsunami/meltdown trifecta of disaster:
For the time being, at least. Let's see how long this connection holds up.
In the meantime, don't go anywhere! I'll have some new posts up within the hour, and I fully expect the comments sections to EXPLODE with... um... comments.
Thanks for your patience during this trying time. Now, I'm off to gobble up a chicken Pad Thai and some crispy calamari rings with sweet chili sauce, because I deserve it, goldangit!
In case you haven't noticed, the Useless Eater Blog and her sister blog, the Daily Dirt Diaspora, have been in a state of non-regular-updatification over the last few days. This is not due to any laziness on my part, nor to any lack of stories to run. Instead, these blogs are currently "stalled" because my Internet inexplicably went down on Friday, and my ISP - an independent, not-for-profit outfit that I chose to go with out of what is beginning to seem like misguided idealism - has been passing the buck, blaming the "big guys" who own the pipeline over which my ISP delivers my connectivity service. Needless to say, this situation is beginning to induce an extreme amount of "miff" in me. I mean, Jesus Fucking Nailholes! It's not like I've been leeching my connection off some poor schlub down the hall from me who failed to password-protect his wireless connection! What the fuck?!
Anyway, I'm hoping this will get fixed by TOMORROW, so don't take us off your list of sites to visit daily just yet, okay? I appreciate your continued viewership, and ask you to trust me when I say that I've got loads and loads of interesting news reports, opinion pieces, book and movie reviews, videos, info-graphics and other stuff to share with you. So hold on tight, and I promise this blog will start living up to its potential very, very soon.
Thank you for your patience and co-operation! YOPJ
This news story from today offers a troubling glimpse into the mindset of certain right-wing activist elements in government:
An Indiana prosecutor and Republican activist has resigned after emails show he suggested Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stage a fake attack on himself to discredit unions protesting his budget repair bill.
The Republican governor signed a bill on March 11 that eliminates most union rights for public employees.
In an email from February 19, Indiana deputy prosecutor Carlos F. Lam told Walker the situation presented "a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation."
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism discovered the email among tens of thousands released to the public last week following a lawsuit by the Isthmus and the Associated Press.
"If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions," Lam said in his email.
"Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest," he continued. "Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions."
Lam resigned from his position after the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism published an article about his email.
There's more at the link.
In any case, nice work, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism!
Sadly, as the political climate continues to heat up in coming years, I imagine we can expect more and more revelations of this sort to emerge.
Two American-built, NASA-launched satellites, both designed by the same private company with the goal of surveying key factors in our global environment - 2009's "Orbiting Carbon Observatory" and 2011's "Glory", which was to study the impact of aerosols on the climate - have both ended up at the bottom of the Pacific instead of up in the sky where they belong. What are the frickin' odds?! And, more importantly, what are the implications?
Yer old pal Jerky couldn't help but be suspicious. So he he strapped on his brain-boosting electro-helmet, swallowed a fistful of Adderalls, and set about applying a heaping helping of rigorous intuition to this topic. I am now prepared to say that it seems to me as though there are two possible scenarios playing out, here.
1. The global environmental situation is so dire, the planet's outlook so grim, that The Powers That Be - or some rogue faction thereof - are purposely sabotaging the tools that could be used by the scientific community to discover the true magnitude of the problem. This, because if any of these eggheads' findings were to work their way down to us Useless Eaters, it might spark a planet-wide panic-fueled mega-riot.
2. There really is no scientific basis for the belief that the Earth is facing an unprecedented complex of man-made ecological and climate crises. And perhaps The Powers That Be - or some rogue faction thereof - are attempting to prevent the scientific community from being able to prove this, because without an imaginary "crisis" to deal with, they would have no plausible excuse to implement the genocidal de-population programs they've been itching to kick-start since Malthus first put pen to paper.
Of course there are other possible explanations - everything from hostile alien intervention to mere coincidence to spontaneously-sentient Artificial Intelligences taking over both satellites and plunging them into the ocean in a case of double-cyber-suicide - but we do ourselves no favors by ignoring the obvious, here: Barack Obama was NOT born in this country, God-damnit!!!
If you don't already know about Anonymous - or if you think you do, but aren't really sure - then you should probably read the excellent Wikipedia article about this multifaceted participatory online movement's origins, achievements, scandals and goals.
Although it originally spawned from a number of unrelated Internet message boards and humor sites - 4chan, Ebaum's World, Encyclopedia Dramatica and others - almost ten years ago, Anonymous today is far more than just a loose affiliation of hacker/trolls who occasionally venture out of their mothers' basements to smear pubic hair and petroleum jelly on unsuspecting Scientologists. It is a genuine phenomenon that is evolving into an important - some would have us believe dangerous - social movement.
Pinning down Anonymous isn't easy. Anyone can call themselves a representative and claim to be initiating an action on the group's behalf. Self-declared members are free to join in on these actions, or not. Some Anonymous campaigns - such as their anti-Scientology crusade, their international anti-censorship activities and their campaigns in support of WikiLeaks - enjoy broad-based support and substantial approval. Other stunts - such as bombarding epileptic support group websites with flashing videos designed to trigger seizures in the photo-sensitive - not so much. However, since Anonymous has no leaders, collects no dues and maintains no headquarters, it is difficult, if not impossible, to bestow credit or lay blame.
Which makes the fact that they've published an "Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America" not only odd, but downright baffling. It raises all sorts of questions. For instance, if Anonymous has no leadership, who wrote this? Is it a hoax? And, if so, how would anyone ever know? If Anonymous attempts to deny authorship of this (or any other) document, that denial would be equally unverifiable, and thus suspect.
A quick perusal of this Open Letter reveals three things:
First, Anonymous could use a good copy editor. The text of this document contains spelling mistakes, dangling participles and mixed metaphors galore.
Second, despite a few nods to "fair taxation" and "states' rights", it appears as though Anonymous is planting its flag firmly on the left side of America's political playing field. Ending corporate personhood, making healthcare a human right, ensuring clean air, water and food, enacting prison reform and decriminalizing marijuana... their list of demands reads more like a High Times editorial than a revolutionary manifesto.
Finally, make no mistake about it, Anonymous wants YOU. They are recruiting. And this, despite the fact that, in a number of important ways, "they" don't even exist.
Personally, I'm still up in the air about Anonymous. I certainly approve of their anti-Scientology activities, and find their efforts to support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to be commendable, even noble. On the other hand, some of their goofier, more mean-spirited pursuits - the "lulz" element of their shenanigans - leave a bad taste in my mouth. But that's just me.
After the page break, below, I will publish the full text of Anonymous' Open Letter for y'all to peruse at your leisure. It's being published all over the place, but I figure we might as well warehouse a copy here, as part of the Useless Eater Blog's efforts at archiving potentially important parapolitical documents. Where possible, I have retained the spelling and grammatical errors. Enjoy!
Is it "funny cuz it's true"? This "hilarious" report by the satirical Onion News Network claims that the CIA's invention of Facebook has "saved the government millions of dollars" by having people willingly divulge all sorts of intimate details about their beliefs, lives, interpersonal connections and behaviors. While watching this, I didn't know whether to laugh or erase my own Facebook profile.
That's the title given to this Youtube video of a December 2010 Jamaican TV news report, which has a pretty low view count considering the subject matter and what happens in it. This is interesting on a number of levels:
Might this article from 2006 - in which University of Alberta geologist Patrick Wu says the loss of polar ice volume will lead to increased global earthquake activity - qualify as a secular prophecy of sorts? Did Wu foretell, in a roundabout way, the disastrous, deadly, monstrous quakes that have hit Haiti, Chile, New Zealand and Japan? These four major quakes have all hit in the last 2 years - an unprecedented "close clustering" for events of this magnitude.
In the article, Wu is quoted as saying:
"What happens is the weight of this thick ice puts a lot of stress on the earth. The weight sort of suppresses the earthquakes, but when you melt the ice the earthquakes get triggered."
Now, I am fully aware that there is a robust and thriving skeptic community working hard to deny the prevailing wisdom / scientific consensus about Global Warming - especially as concerns the issue of "Anthropogenic Global Warming", the idea that human behaviors are to blame. Some in the parapolitical and conspiracy communities suspect that "AGW" is nothing more than an elaborate hoax perpetrated by genocidal elites, that it is nothing more or less than the laying of groundwork for the future implementation of horrific depopulation schemes to weed out the riffraff, the great unwashed, we "useless eaters".
As the name of this blog implies, I am certainly not prepared to dismiss out of hand the idea that there are very powerful forces working behind the scenes that would dearly love to dump a bunch of herbicide all over the Great Human Garden. This does not mean, however, that I - or anyone else - should automatically subscribe to any theory that fits into the gestalt of that particular suspicion. That would simply be a variation on the age-old logical fallacy known as "confirmation bias", and any serious student of parapolitics needs to be ever-vigilant not to fall prey to its powerful lure.
In short, we should always, all of us, seek out the very best information possible. And currently, as far as my research has shown me, the Global Warming Skeptics community just isn't cutting the mustard. The majority of them are brain-whores (thought-stitutes?) whose work on the subject - mostly op-eds, hardly ever peer-reviewed - is bought and paid for by the very industry lobbies and corporations that either a) are major contributers to the problem, or b) depend on continued government inaction to maintain their profitability.
And so, until someone comes along and convincingly debunks this excellent and thorough debunking of the Global Warming "debunkers", I'm going to stick with the eggheads on this one.
Whistleblowing WikiLeaks website founder Julian Assange has been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prizeby Norwegian parliamentarian Snorre Valen, 24, a member of Norway's Socialist Left Party. In his words: "Wikileaks have contributed to the struggle for those very values globally, by exposing (among many other things) corruption, war crimes and torture - sometimes even conducted by allies of Norway. Most recently, by disclosing the economic arrangements by the presidential family in Tunisia, Wikileaks have made a small contribution to bringing down a 24-year-lasting dictatorship."
Being nominated for the prize poses a bit of a conundrum for Assange. He is currently holed up in the UK, waiting on an extradition appeal and trying to avoid being sent to Sweden to face "rape" charges - and we will go into greater detail about this bogus accusation in a later post. In any case, Canadian editorialist Paul Sullivan describes Assange's surreal situation thusly:
"In a strange twist of what can only be called fate, Assange could either be incarcerated in Scandinavia as the lowest of the low, a sex criminal, or exalted in Scandinavia as the highest of the high, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, alongside Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela."
The Astonishing Link between the JFK Assassination and the deposing of Nixon
Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond
by Carl Oglesby
A few years back, a friend loaned me his copy of Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War, and after reading it I was stunned that I had previously neither read it nor even heard about it. I found it both moving and profoundly impressive. In his masterful dissection of the mid-70's American political milieu, Oglesby gives us nothing less than an absolutely convincing operating model of the forces clashing behind the scenes in post-World War II America, as well as a detailed diagnosis of exactly where and why things went terribly wrong. He presents valuable ideas that have found their way into the works of later authors, most notably Sidney Blumenthal, whose 1986 best-seller The Rise of the Counter-Establishment reads almost like a sequel.
I believe The Yankee Cowboy War is essential reading for anyone searching for honest answers about the origins of our current condition. Unfortunately, the book is long out of print. I also understand that most of you reading this are busy people who don't have time to read every worthy book that there is to read. Therefore, I have decided to use this space to publish my "reading notes", taken during my second reading, so that interested parties can get the gist of the book's main theses, the numerous topics it covers, as well as the individuals and events discussed in it.
I will be posting these reading notes periodically over the next few days. Obviously, this is a poor substitute for reading the book, itself, but it's a decent primer, and for the researcher in a hurry, it should do in a pinch. Watch for further installments, coming soon!
PART ONE: THE CLANDESTINE ELITES
· Watergate and the JFK assassination were not isolated incidents, but linked parts of a secret war between two American Elites: the Yankees (Eastern Establishment) and the Cowboys (Sunbelt, New Money, Counter-Establishment).
· A hidden drama of coup and counter-coup, intrinsically linked conspiracies, inner oligarchic power sphere, invisible gov’t, above the law, beyond moral rule… a clandestine American state, embryonic police state.
A 21-year-old Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area is demanding $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge. Aaron Tobey claims in a civil rights lawsuit that in December he was handcuffed and held for about 90 minutes by the Transportation Security Administration at the Richmond International Airport after he began removing his clothing to display on his chest a magic-marker protest of airport security measures.
"Is piracy really sending the entertainment industry broke or are the claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses and thousands of job cuts just a load of hogwash? The industry is constantly warning of an impending piracy apocalypse but continues to notch up healthy revenues and record box office takings. ... With the industry reeling after repeatedly failing to use the courts to force internet providers to penalise illegal downloaders, it is now trying to persuade the government to implement new legislation that would crack down on internet users. But critics say the industry isn't playing fair and should refresh its business model for the digital age instead of stretching the truth in order to scare the government into implementing knee-jerk legislation."
