MindFilter

Moving On...

2011-10-29T21:29:00.002-05:00

This is my last post on this blog. The eBook is written, and I've created a new website to host it and to post news and views I find important. It will be updated daily. The time for politics is past. I realize you will probably cling to it but it is really too left-brained for where we're ultimately headed. I have no problem being ahead of my time in that respect. I will try to prepare as best I can for what's coming - physically, mentally, and, most importantly, spiritually. Politics isn't going to stop what's coming. Voting the bums out, for the N^th time won't stop what's coming. You either believe that or you don't. Godspeed.

The website:

Conscious Resonance

The eBook:

Transit: A Journey Out of Darkness

Namaste.

Vaccines: Pre-Industrial Age Quackery Posing As Modern Science

2011-10-06T13:34:00.002-05:00

It's that time of year again, and the individual can hardly drive half a block without passing a pharmacy or doctor's office offering flu shots, usually in a presentation that makes it seem like vaccines are hard to come by and, boy, aren't you lucky we've got them! Hurry up and get jabbed before they disappear forever!

The notion, which I am quite happy to propagate, that vaccines do nothing to cure or prevent illnesses, and are utterly worthless except for dumbing people down and wrecking their immune systems, really gets the flock into a tizzy. The American indoctrination process includes a heavy dose of authority worship, and when it comes to your health and well-being, the man or woman in the white coat is God.

But when one does their own digging, and applies their own intelligence and common sense - if it hasn't been chemically-lobotomized out of you - one sees that things are not what they seem when it comes to "modern" medical "science".

For myself, the road to discovery regarding vaccines traveled via sodium fluoride. This is instrumental in how I view what comes out of the establishment, so indulge me a moment while I explain the correlation between fluoride and vaccines.

Water fluoridation is one of the most heinous crimes against humanity of all time, and it is being championed by the American government. When the government tells you fluoride is needed in water and in toothpaste for dental health, keep in mind that it was Stalin who first introduced sodium fluoride into the water in the gulags, and later Hitler in his death camps. It is irrefutable historic fact that this was done so prisoners would become placid and dumbed down, and lack the will to resist.

Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual’s power to resist domination, by slowly poisoning and narcotizing a certain area of the brain, thus making him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him. [A convenient light lobotomy]

The real reason behind water fluoridation is not to benefit children’s teeth. If this were the real reason there are many ways in which it could be done that are much easier, cheaper, and far more effective. The real purpose behind water fluoridation is to reduce the resistance of the masses to domination and control and loss of liberty. - Charles Perkins

Sodium fluoride is also the main active toxin in rat poisons and pesticides. It is now known to cause lower IQ, leukemia, osteosarcoma, and sterilization. It damages the thyroid gland, causing cardiac disease, high cholesterol, depression and, in pregnant women, decreased intelligence in their children. It attacks the pineal gland, altering melatonin production effecting sexual maturation, calcium metabolism, parathyroid function, postmenopausal osteoporosis, cancer, and psychiatric disease. It is a compulsory medication, found in drinking water, toothpaste, vitamins, and liquid cold medications; Scientific American reported in January 2008 that it is literally impossible not to over-medicate yourself on it.

Sodium fluoride is a carcinogenic industrial waste product, mainly from aluminum, steel, cement, phosphate fertilizer, and nuclear weapons manufacturing. Rather than improve dental health, fluoride weakens and stains our teeth. It is a grotesque substance that no living being should ingest, and certainly should not be forced to ingest by having our water contaminated by it. If fluoride is good for us, why is there a warning on your toothpaste to call the poison control center if you swallow even a small amount of it? Nearly all of Western Europe has banned water fluoridation, and their toothpastes have half the level of fluoride American products do, yet their dental health is markedly superior to Americans.

It is from this frame of reference that I present to you the vaccine fraud. Vaccines today are a sacred (cash) cow, a modern medical "miracle" without which we'd all be crippled, dead, or worse. Anyone who suggests they might be the cause of autism, ADD, ADHD, Alzheimer's, and a plethora of auto-immune disorders is annihilated by the establishment.

At this point you may be trying to rationalize the whole thing, something along the lines of, just because they dump fluoride in our water doesn't mean the vaccines are bad. No, of course not. But if they'd dump sodium fluoride in our water, it shouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility that they've completely lied about the vaccines. And lie they have.

Vaccine ingredients contain what can reasonably be described as a Nazi experiment, including mercury, aluminum, ethylene glycol (anti-freeze), chemical detergents, formaldehyde, foreign recombinant RNA including aborted fetal retinal tissue and cancer cells from monkeys, and poly-sorbate 80, or preen 80, a known sterilant – all entering your body in an unnatural fashion (injection) for which your body has little ability to defend against. If this seems absurd to you, compare this list to any vaccine insert, if you can convince a pharmacist to actually let you look at one.

Particularly in children, who have weakened blood-brain barriers, these toxic substances, including violent neurotoxins (which, in the case of mercury, have recently been declared by establishment medicine, reported by establishment media, as beneficial to children with developing brains), wreak havoc on the brain, and often overheat the immune system causing violent autoimmune responses (such as vaccine induced encephalitis (“shaken baby syndrome”)) and immune disorders that make them pharma clients for life.

The whole concept of vaccination was developed by Edward Jenner, an 18th century English doctor who based his entire theory on an old wives' tale that people who came down with cowpox were somehow immune to smallpox. Testing this theory in May of 1796, he removed fluid from a woman's cowpox lesion and injected it into the arm of a healthy 8 year old boy. Jenner then later injected the boy with smallpox. When the boy did not get smallpox, Jenner concluded, "The cowpox protects the human constitution from the infection of smallpox." That's it. That's what the entire science is based on - this wholly unscientific test.

Common sense tells us that not everyone who ever came into contact with smallpox became symptomatic, else the overwhelming majority of humanity would've been afflicted. Jenner's finding was published in 6 languages and, again, is the basis for an entire industry of vaccine producing pharmaceutical companies who reap in billions off it.

Is it not, therefore, rather strange, Mr. President, that vaccination should be reported as so utterly harmless in the distant Philippines, where we can not easily get at the records, when we know it is so deadly in the nearby England and America, where the accessible records show that it causes, frequently, more deaths than smallpox, as I have already proved? For example: the great English Commission on Vaccination found that deaths from vaccination were sometimes as high as seventy deaths per million vaccinated. This is twice as high as the mortality from smallpox in the United States, which for five years, from 1901 to 1905, including our last great epidemic period of 1901 and 1902, averaged only thirty-four deaths per million population! - Charles M Higgins

However, even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day, so could it be possible that Jenner stumbled onto a concept that, with further scientific research and technological tweaking, developed into a viable medical procedure? Of course. Is that the case? No. Some more history to put this into context.

Smallpox made its appearance in the midst of the collapse of Greek and Roman civilization, with their high standards of health, hygiene, and sanitation: public baths, municipal water supply, drainage, toilets, garbage disposal, spacious, well-aired, sun-drenched living quarters, and a simple, un-spoiled diet. These factors prevented smallpox from ravaging their populations at the same time it devastated Africa and Asia. How?

During the Dark Ages in Europe, sanitation, diet, and hygiene were frightfully inadequate. Noted hygienist and dietician Doctor Herbert Shelton describes the conditions:

According to Montgomery’s English History, the streets of London and other cities were rarely more than twelve to fifteen feet wide were neither paved nor lighted. Pools of stagnant water accumulated everywhere, heaps of garbage abounded and were only removed when it began to obstruct the traffic. There was no sewage and dead dogs, cats, rubbish, rotten vegetable and fruit refuse, human and animal excreta, and slops from the kitchen were all thrown into the streets. Surrounded by high walls, cities could not expand and people were forced to live in a slum-like manner. Holes served as windows, with little or no ventilation, whole families slept in one room often in one bed, and hundreds of persons lived in one building crowded in from the sub-celler to the attic. They rarely ever washed, had no bath tubs, no underwear and wore the same clothes day and night. They lived in utmost poverty, slaved long hours, even the children worked, drank heavily of alcohol, ate like hogs of spoiled, unnatural food and suffered from malnutrition

So we see two cultural contrasts where disease was non-existant in one and rampant in the other. Did vaccines exist in Greece and Rome? But without them, how were they spared the ravages of this disease? Certainly the Roman Empire, which controlled vast portions of Africa and Asia, was not quarantined from the rest of the world. There was one simple factor involved: standard of living.

Examination of almost all statistical data regarding diseases and vaccination show that the vaccine had little to no measurable effect on reducing illness, and in some cases actually contributed to an increase of deaths from the disease - in other words, people were killed by the very disease they were vaccinated against, and they contracted the disease from the vaccination. The most glaring example can be seen below, as documented by Dr. Raymond Obomsawin, president of the Circle of Nations Institute of Life Sciences and Sustainable Development:

We are told that among the greater miracles of science and in vaccination is Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. Yet over fifty years later, in August of this year, we find that the vaccine is only effective at infecting people with the very virus they are told the vaccine would protect them from. What, exactly, do people expect when they're given a live polio virus? Further, even if Salk's vaccine were effective in eradicating polio in the United States, a cancer-causing monkey virus, SV40, found in polio vaccines prior to 1963, is now known to have caused non-Hodkings lymphoma in millions of people. Why was this separate virus found in the vaccine? Well, that's an entirely separate, albeit entirely relevant subject.

What about measles, mumps, rubella, and all these other diseases we vaccinate our children against? I present the following charts documenting not only that vaccines did not eradicate disease, but have contributed to high infant mortality, mental disorders, SIDS, and shaken baby syndrome, among other conditions. Click each chart to enlarge and be sure to note the sources.

Examining these statistics, I state that it is obvious vaccines do not prevent disease on any measurable level. But if vaccines don't prevent disease, what effects are they having on our children?

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so

Bertrand Russell

, The Impact of Science on Society

p50, 1953

Let's for a moment forget there are people out there who are "experts" and that you're supposedly not one of them, and apply our own common sense. Mercury is one of the most powerful neurotoxins known to man. It literally obliterates neurons. The label of thimerisol - the mercury-based "preservative" found in vaccines - has a skull and crossbones on it, and says it is "very toxic".

Our bodies have defense mechanisms for filtering out toxins that we ingest naturally - either through breathing, eating and drinking, or absorption through our pores. Some of them will seep into the bloodstream; some of it will be released through our urine or feces. The body has little to defend itself against toxins injected directly into the bloodstream, as this method of entry is completely unnatural.

These toxins - and thimerisol/mercury is not the only toxin contained in vaccines - are pumped directly into our soft tissue and blood stream, and there is nothing to stop them from ending up in our brain and other vital organs. It has a cumulative effect on these organs - in the case of neurological disorders, the brain - meaning it collects in the brain and continues to do damage for periods of time after it is injected.

How can anyone seriously say, with a straight face, that injecting a vicious and potent neurotoxin directly into the blood of children with developing brains will not seriously damage their nervous system? Just how stupid do they believe we are? Extremely, apparently. Particularly since a lobotomy effect is a primary purpose of vaccines in general and mercury in particular.

Despite all of the obvious implications mercury in vaccines have on our brains, particularly children's but also adults, the government continues to insist that it is safe. In fact they tell us it's beneficial to pregnant women and children with developing brains. If you believe that, you deserve to be lobotomized.

This is the true horror of vaccines: not only are they extraordinarily harmful to our minds and our immune systems, but they are entirely unnecessary. Ask yourself: how do you know vaccines are beneficial? Because your doctor tells you so? Well how does he/she know? Who told them? I submit to you that, as corporatism wraps its tentacles around every essential institution of our society, that, in the case of modern medicine, those who practice in it unwittingly serve the corporate interests which control it. Who owns and funds the medical societies and journals who define what's "cutting edge"? The curricula at most medical schools are written by pharmaceutical giants; your doctor is almost certainly nothing more than a low-level drug pusher for pharma kingpins.

It should never be far from your mind when considering a doctor's advice that it is the law that only an FDA-approved substance can cure or treat any disease. So it is therefore illegal for your doctor to, for instance, advise you to take Vitamin D3 to boost your immune system, which would make vaccines unnecessary. Why are we less apt to get sick in the summer? Is it because we don't come into contact with viruses? No. It's because the sun is more dominant than in winter months, our skin is more exposed to it as we bask in its warmth, and our bodies use sunlight to create Vitamin D3, which it further uses to create anti-microbial peptides which annihilate invasive viruses and bacteria. This is also why they obsess over exposure to sunlight. Sunlight = health = no profitability for the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

The entire medical industry is based on people's desperation to find a counterbalance for their grotesquely unhealthy lifestyles. They want to be able to eat McDonalds five times a week and take a pill or a shot to keep that non-food from devastating their bodies. It is the personification of sloth and gluttony. Your body is armed by 4 billion years of evolution against the worst nature has to offer. If you eat properly, drink enough water, get enough sleep, and avoid, as often as possible, exposure to harmful electromagnetic fields, industrial chemicals, detergents, and soaps, etc - or, in other words, everything that we've come to rely on that our ancestors, who almost never died of cancer, didn't have - there is hardly a need for "medicine" and certainly no need for vaccines, even if they did work, even if they didn't wreck your immune system and damage your brain.

Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food

Your body, and your children's health, are your responsibility alone. It is up to you not to proxy out your health to people who may not have the best intentions or the proper training, despite the fact they are so exalted and despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars and years in school they spent learning nothing of real use except to corporate interests.

This responsibility, of course, if you are so moved, also includes making sure everything you've just read isn't disinformation. You've got to do your own thinking, and rely on your own intelligence, to make the right decisions. The ultimate purpose of this essay is to put you on a path to discovery, as opposed to miring in blind faith. And if you do so and find my research and conclusions wanting, that is your prerogative. I think nothing less of you. Godspeed.

Obama Administration to Ban Asthma Inhalers Over Environmental Concerns

2011-09-23T15:38:00.002-05:00

Eco-fascism and insanity stoops to new lows. This is just another example of the cost of freedom. Or slave training. Whichever. This will be a major financial windfall for the pharma industrial complex, but you in no way infer this was among the reasons. Suck it up. Pun intended.

MSNBC

Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government's latest attempt to protect the Earth's atmosphere.

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products.

The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps block harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun.

But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.

The FDA finalized plans to phase out the products in 2008 and currently only Armstrong Pharmaceutical's Primatene mist is available in the U.S. Other manufacturers have switched to an environmentally-friendly propellant called hydrofluoroalkane. Both types of inhalers offer quick-relief to symptoms like shortness of breath and chest tightness, but the environmentally-friendly inhalers are only available via prescription.

"If you rely on an over-the-counter inhaler to relieve your asthma symptoms, it is important that you contact a health care professional to talk about switching to a different medicine to treat your asthma," said Badrul Chowdhury, FDA's director of pulmonary drug division.

Chowdhury told reporters and doctors via teleconference that "in the worst case scenario we are looking at 1 to 2 million people using" Primatene, adding that most of those patients likely use multiple medications to treat their asthma.

Society continues to crumble during Greatest Depression

2011-09-23T11:46:00.003-05:00

so·ci·e·ty

səˈsīətē

This won't be like the Great Depression, when Americans still had some sense of communal responsibility, not to mention a general responsibility and willingness to be at least somewhat self-sufficient. Today's "society" lacks all these things. And you're seeing the result.

Spike In Violent Crime In Denver

CBS News Denver

Murders in Denver are up 138.5 percent for the first eight months of this year, armed assaults have risen 9.1 percent compared to the same time last year and simple assaults have risen 6.7 percent in the first eight months of 2011, according to the Denver Police Department’s statistics for 2011.

“So yeah, we believe it’s a problem and we’re working on it but it’s nothing to alarm people and make them believe they live in an unsafe city,” said Denver Police spokesperson Lt. Matt Murray.

Subway Crime Up Nearly 17 Percent: NYPD

NBC News New York

A recent string of subway attacks in New York City, including the robbery and attempted rape of a woman on the F train Wednesday, are part of a citywide crime spike underground, according to officials.

Crime in the subways is up 16.6 percent over the same period last year, according to the NYPD.

Much of the rise in crime is being attributed to grand larcenies, but women who travel on the trains late at night or early in the morning say they are also concerned bout attacks.

"It's definitely less safe," said Emmaly Salazar, who rides the subway from her Brooklyn home late at night to get to work. "The F train is empty and I don't see any police around here."

In that attack at about 2:25 a.m. Wednesday, a man cornered a woman on the F train at the station in Windsor Terrace, put his hand around her throat, brandished a knife and demanded her possessions.

He then forced her to take off her underwear and fled. Police Thursday released a surveillance video (below) and a sketch of the suspect (at right).

Also Wednesday, a woman in Brooklyn reported being followed by a man from the Prospect Avenue subway station, who then groped her in what's now being probed as the 11th sexual assault in the area since March.

Wednesday morning, police announced they were searching for a woman who had slashed two other young women in the face on the 4 train in the Bronx.

Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI profiler and NBC News crime analyst, believes some criminals are emboldened by others committing similar crimes and getting away with it.

"I think that you've probably got copycats out there, and I think this could continue," Van Zandt told NBC New York. "Law enforcement need to redouble their efforts and work as quickly as possible to make an arrest."

Police pointed out that while overall crime has risen, felony assaults were actually down 6.9 percent since this time last year.

And crime rates are nowhere near the levels of the 1980s, when violence was so rampant New Yorkers avoided using trains.

Credit stress "reaches pre-Lehman danger levels"

2011-09-23T11:10:00.002-05:00

I haven't forgotten how bad the Lehman disaster was. It's what put me on the path to where I am here, now, and where I'm going. It's the reason this blog exists, it's the reason behind practically everything I've written on here.

I know it all began before Lehman, that Lehman and the continued, compounding crisis which will - will - end in collapse began at least a century ago with the planned collapse of the banking system which was used as a segue to the Federal Reserve, but Lehman is what scared me into realizing the whole house of cards that I thought was stability and prosperity in America, a future with children and college and grandbabies and retirement was about to crash under its own weight. How's that for a run-on sentence?

But what frightened me the most, what really put the zap in me, was that Lehman was nothing compared to what's about to happen. Especially considering the government and the Fed's reaction to the crisis, which now I realize was as predictable as the tides, and many people - Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, et al - did predict it, not only made recovery impossible, but guaranteed - guaranteed - the worst case scenario. In fact, a replay of the Great Depression would be the best case scenio, if you can actually fathom that. Prepare yourselves, with all of your energy and resources and intelligence. We're stand on the precipice, one foot off the cliff.

London Telegraph -

Key indicators of credit stress have reached the danger levels seen before the Lehman Brothers failure three years ago, with Markit's iTraxx Crossover index – or "fear gauge" – of corporate bonds surging 56 basis points to 857 on Thursday.

Societe Generale led a further rout of bank shares, crashing 9pc in Paris on concern that it might need recapitalisation to cope with losses on Italian and Spanish debt.

The yield spread between Italian 10-year bonds and Bunds reached a fresh record of 408 basis points before the European Central Bank (ECB) intervened in late trading. It is near the level at which LCH.Clearnet raises margin requirements, the trigger that forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland to request bail-outs.

Global investors appear shaken by the refusal of the US Federal Reserve to come to the rescue yet again with quantitative easing (QE3) even though it was never likely the bank would launch fresh stimulus with core inflation running near 2pc or in the face of protests from Capitol Hill.

Isn't it funny how "investors" are shaken by the Fed's refusal to print money to buy up the banks' toxic assets? These people have no real clue about economics. It's all short term to them. If they had any economic sanity in them at all, the thought of QE3 would send them into a hysterical panic.

The global flight from risk has hit Europe hardest. Peter Possing Andersen from Danske Bank said Europe’s authorities are running out of time. “The financial markets have lost faith in the current policies and the economy is on the verge of a recession. Radical action is needed to short-circuit the negative spiral,” he said.

“Segments of the financial markets are dysfunctional and access to credit is being shut down. European policymakers must take imminent and bold measures. Until this happens, the market will grind slowly but surely towards disaster. The current policy of austerity risks killing the already-fragile recovery and is making a bad situation worse in terms of debt dynamics,” he said.

Mr Andersen said Greece needs greater debt relief to break the “vicious circle”, while the ECB should step in with “unlimited” bond purchases from countries such as Italy that are essentially solvent.

Andrew Roberts, credit chief at RBS, said recent weeks’ grim economic data have rendered Europe’s “muddle through” policy unworkable, pushing weaker states towards the brink. The latest PMI data show that export orders for manufacturing tumbled to 44.8 in September, the lowest since mid-2009.

Ominously, the PMI data for China is flashing contraction warnings for the third month, dropping further than it did during the depths of the Great Contraction, suggesting the loan curbs are starting to bite.

“We are in a fresh cyclical downturn within a structural slump/depression. We need global co-ordinated monetary action and the ECB must cut rates by 50 points. It made a terrible mistake by raising rates in July,” Mr Roberts said.

The IMF has slashed its growth forecast for Italy to a stall speed of just 0.3pc in 2012, a level that risks havoc with debt dynamics. The country must raise €260bn by late next year. Each 100-point rise in borrowing costs increases the budget deficit by €2.5bn.

The IMF warned that emerging markets are nearing the buffers of credit growth and are losing their fiscal room for manoeuvre. It said China’s domestic loans have risen to 173pc of GDP, “well above” the safety level.

The IMF fears “significant” losses on $1.7 trillion of local government debt, raising the risk Beijing may need to rescue the system. “The consequences could be a substantial worsening of China’s public debt metrics and a narrower scope for future fiscal stimulus,” it said. China cannot safely respond to a second global shock by opening the floodgates of cheap credit again.

Professor Giuseppe Ragusa from Luiss Guido University in Rome said the ECB has the power to halt the eurozone’s escalating crisis by pledging to buy up €2 trillion of bonds. “They would not have to buy the debt. The promise would be enough,” he said.

Such bold action appears unlikely. The ECB has intervened hesitantly over the past six weeks, without the overwhelming force needed to convince markets that it will back-stop Italy’s €1.8 trillion debt – the world’s third largest.

The bank is constrained since the policy is vehemently opposed by the Bundesbank and by German president Christian Wulff, who has accused the ECB of breaching the EU treaty law.

David Owen from Jefferies Fixed Income said the Bundesbank increased its balance sheet by €50bn in August alone to help shore up the Eurosystem. It has lifted its liquidity provision eightfold to €421bn since the crisis began, almost as much as the ECB itself.

On Thursday IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said the ECB must continue to provide “solid, reliable” funding for euro-area banks and economies as parliaments in the region pass measures into law to fight the region’s debt crisis.

The ECB “plays and can play and I hope will continue to play a critical role,” she said.

There are clearly limits to how far this policy can be pushed without a treaty change. Otherwise it amounts to fiscal union by the back door. The task of purchasing bonds and recapitalising banks must fall to the EU’s bail-out fund, but it will not be ready until ratified by all national parliaments later this year. Europe faces a tense Autumn.

Michael Moore Threatens The Rich: Let's "Deal With It Nonviolently Now"

2011-09-23T11:01:00.002-05:00

Here it comes: the final, climactic battle between the "rich" and the poor. They will all tear each other to shreds, while the real perpetrators of both the economic collapse and the brewing class war stay above the fray and drink cognac and smoke cigars on their yachts.

If you live in major population centers, which includes but is not limited to practically all lands east of the Mississippi River, if you value your lives, if you wish to continue living, if you don't want to be torn to shreds by hordes of barbarians, just get out. Set a six month timetable from right now and start putting the plan in action. Because you do not want to be around when the collapse really takes hold.

Real Clear Politics

"The smart rich know they can only build the gate so high. And, and, sooner or later history proves that people when they've had enough aren’t going to take it anymore. And much better to deal with it nonviolently now, through the political system, than what could possibly happen in the future, which nobody wants to see," Michael Moore said on Current TV's "Countdown" program.

Moore was alluding to riots, which he was discussing with "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann prior to his comment to deal with things nonviolently now.

Video at link.

Is crude oil still gushing in the Gulf? New ten-mile oil slick spotted near Deepwater Horizon

2011-09-22T09:45:00.002-05:00

Fire up the Coast Guard and get that corexit pumpin again. And be sure to eat the Gulf seafood!

Natural News

Roughly a year and a half after the BP oil disaster left the Gulf of Mexico saturated with crude oil and toxic Corexit chemicals, new evidence has surfaced showing what appears to be more crude oil spewing into the ocean. Raw Story explains that Dr. Bonny Schumaker, founder of OnWingsOfCare.org, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting and preserving wildlife and the environment, recently spotted a ten-mile-long oil slick near the BP Macondo oil well that was supposedly capped shut.

Dr. Schumaker's video of the oil slick, which was uploaded to YouTube on August 30, 2011, can be viewed here:
http://youtu.be/mlWKptW74CY

On September 18, 2010, The Washington Post reported that the BP Macondo oil well was officially dead, adding the US government's declaration that the well was "physically incapable of leaking another drop (of oil)" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...). But Dr. Schumaker's stunning flyover suggests otherwise, revealing what appears to be endless, wispy streams of oil continuing to trail through Gulf waters.

Dr. Schumaker was not the only one to spot the oil, either. Two men from Louisiana State University (LSU) last week took a boat out to the area near the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and they, too, spotted oil slicks all around their boat. They also saw numerous oil "blooms" rising to the top of the water, which indicate perpetual leaks coming from somewhere on the ocean floor.

You can view their video here:
http://video-embed.al.com/services/...

BP, of course, denies that the oil leaks are connected to the Macondo well. If it is later determined, however, that the well is still leaking, or that BP's drilling operations have caused fissures elsewhere that are now producing the leaks, the company may incur further liability, particularly from suits that were previously dismissed on the assumption that the well had been capped and that cleanup was already in progress (http://www.myweathertech.com/2011/0...).

Sources for this story include:

http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2...

Welcome to the Suburban Depression

2011-09-21T23:07:00.003-05:00

CNBC

eBook: Transit: A Journey Out of Darkness

2011-09-19T15:45:00.006-05:00

The eBook for all intents and purposes is finished and is tentatively titled Transit: A Journey Out of Darkness. I've decided to purchase a domain so that I can upload the book to be downloaded (.pdf) and to do things that I am presently limited or unable to do using blogspot. When the site is finished and the eBook is uploaded, this blog will come to an end. I won't kill it - my previous posts will remain - but my new website will be where I continue to provide information that points to truth and freedom. The chapters and sections of the book are, tentatively, as follows:

Preface: Knowing
Part One: Everybody Wants to Rule the World
- Chapter One: Mind Control
  - Media
  - Education
  - Groupthink and Ego
    - The Conspiracy Theorist
  - Fat, Stupid, Lazy and Weak
    - Sodium Fluoride
    - Vaccines
    - Prescription Drugs
    - High Fructose Corn Syrup
    - MSG
    - Genetically Modified Foods
    - Aspartame
    - A Fascist Umbrella
- Chapter Two: Population Control
Part II: All the World's a Stage
- Chapter Three: Past is Prologue
  - The Lusitania
  - Pearl Harbor
  - AJAX and Gladio
  - Gulf of Tonkin
  - Northwoods
  - History is a Weapon
- Chapter Four: The Lie That Defines the Times
  - The Three Towers?
    - Impossible Physics
    - Gravity, Resistance
    - Bombs
    - Security
    - Evacuation
    - Building What?
  - Missing Planes
  - Planted Evidence
  - "Terrorists"
    - Bin Laden
    - Funding
    - Hijackers
  - NORAD
    - War Games
Part Three: Evolution
- Chapter Five: Empowerment
- Chapter Six: Religion, Secret Societies, and The Occult
  - The Secret Society
    - Freemasonry
  - Symbolism and Myth
    - Good vs Evil
  - The Society With Secrets
    - The 33rd Degree
- Chapter Seven: The Revolution of Consciousness

PS...it's freaking epic.

Poverty In America: A Special Report

2011-09-14T08:21:00.001-05:00

Poverty is related to income, but you can transcend your income and still be wealthy. You just have to resolve that life will no longer be lazy, convenient, and full of mindless distraction. Can you live that way? Can you handle being truly free?

The Economic Collapse

America is getting poorer. The U.S. government has just released a bunch of new statistics about poverty in America, and once again this year the news is not good. According to a special report from the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.2 million Americans are now living in poverty. The number of those living in poverty in America has grown by 2.6 million in just the last 12 months, and that is the largest increase that we have ever seen since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959. Not only that, median household income has also fallen once again. In case you are keeping track, that makes three years in a row. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States dropped 2.3% in 2010 after accounting for inflation. Overall, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation since December 2007. So should we be excited that our incomes are going down and that a record number of Americans slipped into poverty last year? Should we be thrilled that the economic pie is shrinking and that our debt levels are exploding? All of those that claimed that the U.S. economy was recovering and that everything was going to be just fine have some explaining to do.

Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty. Today, 15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty. The last time the poverty level was this high was back in 1993.

However, it is important to keep in mind that the government definition of poverty rises based on the rate of inflation. If inflation was still calculated the way that it was 30 or 40 years ago, the poverty line would be much, much higher and millions more Americans would be considered to be living in poverty.

So why is poverty in America exploding? Who is getting hurt the most? How is America being changed by this? What is the future going to look like if we remain on the current path?

Let's take a closer look at poverty in America....

The Shrinking Number Of Jobs

Unemployment is rampant and the number of good jobs continues to shrink. Once upon a time in America, if you really wanted a job you could go out and get one. Today, competition for even the lowest paying jobs has become absolutely brutal. There simply are not enough chairs at the "economic table", and not being able to get a good job is pushing large numbers of Americans into poverty.....

*There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million people to the population since then.

*Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job. In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.

*If you gathered together all of the unemployed people in the United States, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

*According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if you factored in all of the short-term discouraged workers, all of the long-term discouraged workers and all of those working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment, the real unemployment rate right now would be approximately 23 percent.

*If you have been unemployed for at least one year, there is a 91 percent chance that you will not find a new job within the next month.

The Working Poor

The number of low income jobs is rising while the number of high income jobs is falling. This has created a situation where the number of "the working poor" in America is absolutely skyrocketing. Millions of Americans are working as hard as they can and yet they still cannot afford to lead a middle class lifestyle.

*Since the year 2000, we have lost approximately 10% of our middle class jobs. In the year 2000 there were about 72 million middle class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs.

*Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

*Between 1969 and 2009, the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.

*According to a report released in February from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries are accounting for 40 percent of the job losses in America but only 14 percent of the job growth. Lower wage industries are accounting for just 23 percent of the job losses but 49 percent of the job growth.

*Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

*Last year, 19.7% of all U.S. working adults had jobs that would not have been enough to push a family of four over the poverty line even if they had worked full-time hours for the entire year.

*The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006.

Unprecedented Dependence On The Government

Because they cannot get good jobs that will enable them to support themselves and their families, millions of Americans that used to be hard working contributors to society are now dependent on government handouts. Nearly every single measure of government dependence is at a record high, and there are no signs that things are going to turn around any time soon.

*One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program.

*Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment benefits. That number is almost four times larger than it was back in 2007.

*More than 45 million Americans are now on food stamps. The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.

*Approximately one-third of the entire population of Alabama is now on food stamps.

*More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid.

*Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

*In 1980, just 11.7% of all personal income came from government transfer payments. Today, 18.4% of all personal income comes from government transfer payments.

The Suffocating Cost Of Health Care

Millions of American families are being financially crippled by health care costs. The U.S. health care system is deeply, deeply broken and Obamacare is going to make things even worse. Health care is one of the top reasons why American families get pushed into poverty. Most of us are just one major illness or disease from becoming financially wrecked. Just ask anyone that has gone through it. The health insurance companies do not care about you and they will try to wiggle out of their obligations at the time when you need them the most. If you talk to people that have been through bankruptcy, most of them will tell you that medical bills were at least partially responsible.

*In America today, there are 49.9 million Americans that do not have any health insurance. One single medical bill could easily wipe out the finances of most of those people.

*Only 56 percent of Americans are currently covered by employer-provided health insurance.

*According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.

*According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3%.

More Children Living In Poverty

The United States has a child poverty rate that is more than twice as high as many European nations. We like to think that we have "the greatest economy on earth", but the reality is that we have one of the highest child poverty rates and it increased once again last year.

*The poverty rate for children living in the United States increased to 22% in 2010. That means that tonight more than one out of every five U.S. children is living in poverty.

*The poverty rate for U.S. adults is only 13.7%.

*Households that are led by a single mother have a 31.6% poverty rate.

*Today, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

*It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives before they reach the age of 18.

*There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity.

*More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.

*It is estimated that up to half a million children may currently be homeless in the United States.

The Plight Of The Elderly

The elderly are also falling into poverty in staggering numbers. They may not be out protesting in the streets, but that does not mean that they are not deeply, deeply suffering.

*One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line.

*Between 1991 and 2007 the number of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 that filed for bankruptcy rose by a staggering 178 percent.

*The Baby Boomers have only just begun to retire, and already our social programs for seniors are starting to fall apart. In 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers. According to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are now only 1.75 full-time private sector workers for each person that is receiving Social Security benefits in the United States.

Squeezed By Inflation

Rising inflation is squeezing the budgets of average American families like never before. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke claims that inflation is still low, but either he is delusional or he has not been to a supermarket lately.

Personally, I do a lot of grocery shopping at a number of different stores, and without a doubt prices are absolutely soaring. Many of the new "sale prices" are exactly what the old "regular prices" were just a few weeks ago.

Some companies have tried to hide these price increases by shrinking package sizes. But there is no hiding the pain on the old wallet once you fill up your cart with what you need to feed your family.

*Over the past year, the global price of food has risen by 37 percent and this has pushed approximately 44 million more people around the world into poverty.

*U.S. consumers will spend approximately $491 billion on gas this year. That is going to be a brand new all-time record.

*Right now, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is $3.649. That is 94 cents higher than 12 months earlier and it is a brand new record for this time of the year.

A Smaller Share Of The Pie

The size of the "economic pie" in America is shrinking, and the share of the pie for those that are poor is shrinking a lot faster than the share of the pie for those that are wealthy.

*According to the Washington Post, the average yearly income of the bottom 90 percent of all U.S. income earners is now just $31,244.

*When you look at the ratio of employee compensation to GDP, it is now the lowest that is has been in about 50 years.

*At this point, the poorest 50% of all Americans now control just 2.5% of all of the wealth in this country.

*Big corporations are even recognizing the change that is happening to America. Just consider the following example from a recent article in the Huffington Post....

Manufacturers like Procter & Gamble, the household-goods giant responsible for everything from Charmin and Old Spice to Tide, are concentrating their efforts on luxury and bargain items, putting less emphasis on products aimed at the middle class, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Conclusion

America is fundamentally changing. We were a nation that had the largest middle class in the history of the globe, but now we are becoming a nation that is deeply divided between the haves and the have nots.

Perhaps you are still doing fine. But don't think that economic disaster cannot strike you. Every single day, thousands more Americans will lose their jobs or will discover a major health problem. Every single day, thousands more Americans will lose their homes or will be forced to take a pay cut.

If you still have a warm, comfortable home to sleep in, you should be thankful. Poverty is a very sneaky enemy and it can strike at any time. If you are not careful, you might be the next American to end up sleeping in your car or living in a tent city.

It is easy to disregard a couple of statistics, but can you really ignore the vast amount of evidence presented above?

It is undeniable that America is getting poorer. Poverty is spreading and hopelessness and despair are rising. There is a reason why the economy is the number one political issue right now. Millions upon millions of Americans are in deep pain and they want some solutions.

Unfortunately, it appears quite unlikely that either major political party is going to offer any real solutions any time soon. So things are going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.

Should we just keep doing the same things that we have been doing over and over and over and yet keep expecting different results?

What we are doing right now is not working. We are in the midst of a long-term economic decline. Both major political parties have been fundamentally wrong about the economy. It is time to admit that.

If we continue on this path, poverty in America is going to continue to get a lot worse. Millions of families will be torn apart and millions of lives will be destroyed.

America please wake up.

Time is running out.

Passenger: Was cuffed, searched over 'appearance'

2011-09-14T08:16:00.005-05:00

Take that, Moos'lim! Get out of Amurr'ca ya filthy animal! Freedom is only for who we say it's for, and we don't like your kind around here! What's that? You're half Jewish? Oh...uhhh...that's just the cost of being vigilant and free, baby. Suck it up.

Associated Press

A U.S. woman said Tuesday that she endured nearly four hours in police custody that included being forced off an airplane in handcuffs, strip-searched and interrogated at Detroit's airport on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks — all, she believes, because of her Middle Eastern appearance.

Shoshana Hebshi, 35, told The Associated Press she was one of three people removed from a Denver-to-Detroit Frontier Airlines flight after landing Sunday afternoon. Authorities say fighter jets escorted the plane after its crew reported that two people were spending a long time in a bathroom — the two men sitting next to Hebshi in the 12th row.

Hebshi said she didn't notice how many times the men went to the bathroom. "I wasn't keeping track," she said.

"I really wasn't paying attention," said Hebshi, a freelance writer, editor and stay-at-home mother of twin six-year-old boys who lives in a suburb of Toledo, Ohio. "I was minding my own business — sleeping, reading, playing on my phone."

The FBI has said the three didn't know each other. One man felt ill and got up to use the restroom and another man in the same row also left his seat to go to the bathroom. The FBI said they never were inside together.

Hebshi has written extensively on her blog about the incident, saying she felt "violated, humiliated and sure that I was being taken from the plane simply because of my appearance."

Hebshi, who describes herself as half-Arabic, half-Jewish with a dark complexion, told the AP after they landed, she noticed police first surrounding, then storming the plane. She said she was surprised when they stopped at her row and ordered her and the men to get up.

Her Twitter posts from Sunday bear that out. At one point, she wrote: "A little concerned about this situation. Plane moved away from terminal surrounded by cops. Crew is mum. Passengers can't get up."

Later she wrote, "I see stairs coming our way...yay!" Her last post said, "Majorly armed cops coming aboard."

It's then than she says the officers ordered her and the men, whom she described as Indian, to get up.

She said she was patted down and taken by car to a holding cell. A uniformed female officer eventually came in and told Hebshi to take off her clothes.

After the strip search, another officer who identified herself as a Homeland Security agent led Hebshi to another room, Hebshi said. There, a man who identified himself as an FBI agent asked her a series of questions while a female agent took notes, Hebshi said.

Hebshi said that when she asked what was going on, the male agent told her someone on the plane reported that she and the men on her row were "conducting suspicious activity."

FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said the three passengers were questioned but not arrested before the FBI determined there was no reason to suspect or hold them. She also said FBI agents who questioned the passengers were not involved in any strip searches.

"We received a report of suspicious activity on that particular plane," Berchtold said. "We did not arrest ... these passengers. ... We didn't direct anybody to arrest them."

Airport police are under the supervision of the Wayne County Airport Authority, which operates Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

In an email to the AP, agency spokesman Scott Wintner said airport police "responded appropriately by following protocol and treating everyone involved with respect and dignity. "

Wintner said the decision on how to respond was a call made by the Airport Authority's CEO, who he said is Arab-American.

Hebshi said that finally, after being fingerprinted and allowed to call her husband, she was told she and the men were being released and that nothing suspicious was found on the plane. She said an official apologized and thanked her for understanding and cooperating.

Hebshi said she received another call of apology from an FBI agent Monday, before she wrote her blog post.

"I can understand they were just doing their job," she told the AP. "My beef is with these laws and regulations that are so hypersensitive. ... Even if you're an innocent bystander, you have no rights."

AP left email and phone messages seeking comment Tuesday night with Frontier.

The flight was one of two for which fighter jets were scrambled Sunday after crews reported suspicious activity on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, officials said. In both cases, it involved bathroom use. In neither case did authorities find anything to substantiate the suspicions.

On American Airlines flight 34 from Los Angeles, three passengers who made repeated trips to the bathroom were cleared after the plane safely landed at New York's Kennedy Airport.

Also Sunday, a GoJet Airlines flight bound for Washington was still on the runway in St. Louis when the pilot returned the aircraft to the gate and requested all passengers be re-screened after crew found paper towels stuffed in a toilet, according to a United Airlines spokesman. GoJet is a regional carrier for United.

U.S. Scrambles to Avert Palestinian Vote at U.N.

2011-09-14T08:10:00.002-05:00

How ironic, isn't it? What, you don't see the irony that a country that gained its freedom by declaring statehood and removing the boot on its neck now opposes other countries when they desire the same? But...the Palestinians are bloodthirsty savages! What? The British said the same thing about us? Uhhhh...guess I'm just anti-Semetic.

New York Times

The United States faced increasing pressure on Tuesday as the Palestinian quest for statehood gained support from Turkey and other countries, even as the Obama administration sought an 11th-hour compromise that would avoid a confrontation at the United Nations next week.

With only days to go before world leaders gather in New York, the maneuvering became an exercise in brinkmanship as the administration wrestles with roiling tensions in the region, including a sharp deterioration of relations between three of its closest allies in the region: Egypt, Israel and Turkey.

Nabil el-Araby, secretary general of the Arab League, said after meeting with the Palestinians that “it is obvious that the Palestinian Authority and the Arab countries are leaning towards going to the General Assembly,” where a successful vote could elevate the status of the Palestinian Authority from nonvoting “observer entity” to “observer state,” a status equal to that of the Holy See.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey ratcheted up pressure on the United States and Israel by telling Arab League ministers that recognition of a Palestinian state was “not a choice but an obligation.”

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that American negotiators would return to the region on Wednesday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in a final effort to avert a vote on the matter.

The administration, working with the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and Tony Blair, who serves as a special envoy to the region, continued to seek international support for what Mrs. Clinton described as “a sustainable platform for negotiations” between the Israelis and the Palestinians to create a Palestinian state.

She did not elaborate, but the administration hopes that a negotiated agreement on a prospective deal could avert a vote at the United Nations — or even be submitted for approval by the Security Council or the General Assembly in lieu of a Palestinian request for either membership or status as an observer state, administration officials said.

“We all know that no matter what happens or doesn’t happen at the U.N., the next day is not going to result in the kind of changes that the United States wishes to see that will move us toward the two-state solution that we strongly support,” Mrs. Clinton said Tuesday. “The only way of getting a lasting solution is through direct negotiations between the parties, and the route to that lies in Jerusalem and Ramallah, not in New York.”

The administration has spent months trying to avoid casting its veto in the Security Council to block membership of a Palestinian state. It also hopes to avert a vote for the more symbolic change in status in the General Assembly, which senior officials, echoing the Israelis, have warned would be harmful to Israeli-Palestinian peace and could foment violence.

But with negotiations long stalled, the Palestinians and their allies say that such a vote would preserve the idea of a two-state solution.

The timing of the confrontation has created a diplomatic quandary for President Obama, putting him in the position of opposing Palestinian aspirations for self-determination even as his administration has championed Arabs who have overthrown leaders in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya or who seek to in Syria. At the same time, he faces pressure from Israel’s vocal supporters in Congress to block the vote or cut off military and economic assistance the United States has given to the Palestinians.

Internationally, however, the United States and Israel appeared increasingly isolated, with even some European nations, from Russia to France, signaling support for at least a General Assembly vote for the Palestinians.

The support for the Palestinians from the Turkish prime minister was not a surprise, but the commanding tone of his endorsement — coupled with Turkey’s souring relations with Israel, once a close ally — underscored the growing sympathy for Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty and statehood.

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Reality

2011-09-13T13:23:00.004-05:00

Some pretty startling and sobering data was revealed today on the measure of poverty in the United States. It probably won't shock anyone out of their materialistic, distraction-induced stupors, but for those who have eyes to see, it is further reminder that the gilded age is over, and increasingly hard times lay ahead.

In 2010 the number of poor rose for a third straight year, hitting a record 46 million, or, 15.1% or one in six Americans. Twenty two percent of children lived in poverty in 2010. The official poverty rate is $22,314 for a family of four. The median — or midpoint — household income was $49,445, down 2.3 percent from 2009. This deterioration is certain to be further reflected in 2011. “Families are struggling to put food on the table, and they don’t have the purchasing power to help the economy recover,” said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

It should always be noted that government statistics are almost always skewed to reflect more positively on the economy - for instance, the official unemployment rate is nearly one-third the actual unemployment rate, which is well over 20%. Therefore we can reasonably assume the actual number of impoverished in America is a great deal higher. This is speculative, however.

It is time for those of us willing to face reality to understand that the decline is irreversible. We cannot, therefore, sit on our hands waiting for the "good" times to return. They will not. It has become increasingly apparent that untold suffering awaits those who hide their heads in the sand and hold to the beliefs that only paranoid, delusions kooks prepare for hard times. We must create a new paradigm for ourselves, or we will die. The preppers shall inherit the Earth.

Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/census-us-poverty-rate-swells-nearly-1-6-142639972.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/13/us-usa-economy-poverty-idUSTRE78C3YV20110913

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-13/poverty-in-u-s-climbed-to-17-year-high-in-2010-as-household-income-fell.html

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/22-percent-american-children-lived-poverty-last-142535015.html

These past 10 years have shown that America does not give in to fear

2011-09-11T21:02:00.007-05:00

Whatever you say, Obama.

9-11 Flights of Fancy Lead to Moments of Fear

ABC News -

Fighter planes were scrambled, bomb squads were called, FBI command centers went on alert and police teams raced to airports today, but in the end two separate airline incidents were caused by apparently innocent bathroom breaks and a little "making out," federal officials said.

In the first incident, a pair of fighter jets were scrambled to escort an American Airlines jet into New York's JFK airport after the pilot became spooked by passengers' frequent trips to and from the restroom.

The precaution turned out to be unnecessary as federal air marshals aboard flight 34 from Los Angeles to JFK were able to resolve the situation when the passengers complied with their instructions, police officials said. The pilot then radioed that the situation was under control and the plane landed safely. Three male passengers were questioned upon arrival, but no charges were filed against them, authorities said.

The incident occurred around the same time that a second pair of fighter jets hit the skies to monitor another plane – this one a Frontier Airlines flight from Denver to Detroit – after two passengers aboard that plane were "allegedly behaving suspiciously," according to the FBI spokesperson in Denver, Dave Joly. The plane was met in the Detroit airport by law enforcement and taken to a remote area for a security screening, but no explosives were found, Joly said.

Instead, the "suspicious behavior" was two people "making out" in the bathroom mid-flight, law enforcement sources told ABC News. Three people were taken into custody for questioning, Frontier Airlines said in a statement, but no arrests have been made in that case either.

The incidents come as the nation observes the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in which four passenger planes were hijacked. Nearly 3,000 Americans perished in that attack.

9/11: The Lie That Defines the Times

2011-09-11T12:35:00.007-05:00

Note: The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming eBook, on the attacks of 9-11 and the circumstances surrounding it. It is, to say the least, a rough draft, and in my opinion totally inadequate as something I would eventually like to have considered a go-to authority on what really happened that day. The evidence is, literally, endless, and every time I felt I was close to completion, I was reminded of another event or circumstance that was just too important to leave out.

Edit: I feel like I may actually have completed my entire narrative on the events of the day. It is likely some other key piece of evidence will be reminded to me, and I will revise yet again. But for all intents and purposes, this is it. I will at a later date provide a resource page for this chapter and the rest of my book, so that critics and skeptics might look into the validity of these claims. If you find this useful as a tool to educated the uninformed and the willfully ignorant, please spread this to anyone willing to listen...

America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.

[…]

Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. – Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, September 1998

At the time of this writing, which is near the time I'll finish this treatise and send it out into the universe, the ten year anniversary of the 9-11 attacks is less than a week away. Having read the last chapter, you can easily imagine where this is going: The 9-11 attacks were a false flag black op perpetrated by criminal elements of the United States and likely the Israeli governments.

Let us first delve into the context of my use of the word “government” in this case. People, in their groupthink/ego identities, believe that “government” and “country” are one and the same. They are not. Your country is the society, the culture, the geography, the people; your government is a select group of elites with enormous power and therefore, if you believe in Lord Acton's maxim, inherently and inescapably corrupt. Associating government with country brings about an aggressive, often violent defensive reaction, because your patriotism is who you are at your core, and to say that your country – your government – could kill 3,000 of its “own” people is a monstrous blasphemy.

For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as internationalists and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. – David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002

And yet even among the criminal elements of our government responsible for this crime – and keep in mind this was criminal elements, not the entire government top to bottom – these criminals are not Americans the way you might think of them as Americans. They may have been born in a geographical area with imaginary borders commonly referred to as The United States of America, but they do not consider themselves Americans. Their explicit goal is to destroy America, and all other sovereign nations, to bring about a global government under the control of the banking elite. You are not their brethren; they do not look at you any differently than they do the people from Russia, China, India, Africa, the Middle East, etc. You are pawns on the grand chessboard, and they have been quarantined from the vile masses for so long that they feel no empathy, no compassion, no sense of connection to any of you. Their hearts are black, and they have no soul.

Examine the pictures of slaughtered Afghan children, or the birth deformities caused by our depleted uranium contamination of Iraq for proof of this. They won't show these on the news, because if they did, the humanity, the empathy, these black-hearted monsters have tried to stamp out of you might be awoken. It is essential for you to continue to believe these wars are as sanitary as possible, and that the enemy is seen as inhuman as possible, so that no matter what happens you really don't mind it very much. I digress.

The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. - J. Edgar Hoover

As we begin to examine the evidence that 9-11 was a staged, self-inflicted wound, I beckon you back to the preface and humbly ask you keep in mind that, while there are certain aspects of the conspiracy we can be sure about, I do not, nor is it likely that I or anyone else not involved in the highest levels of the conspiracy will ever know exactly what happened on that Tuesday morning. What can be almost fully deduced is what did not happen, particularly what could not have happened within the framework of the official narrative, which is one of the most grotesque lies ever perpetrated on mankind. Once what could not have happened, as well as the fact that a cover-up took place, is established, the question then becomes, who had the motive to lie about it, and qui bono – who benefited?

This doesn't involve theories. You can take the facts and do with them as you please, but this isn't the paranoid delusions of whackjobs who hate their government. If anyone is mentally deranged, it's the people who, having examined all the facts with an open mind, while perhaps not being sold on the fact that 19 Islamic radicals with box cutters could not possibly carried out the attack, see nothing amiss about the way the official narrative formed and was forced down our throats, the way evidence and events that contradict the official narrative were deliberately swept under the rug; the way we willfully filtered them out of our minds. If you consider the two World Wars and Vietnam alone (there were other wars based on false pretenses as well), their lies have collectively killed upwards of 600,000 Americans alone. Take this into consideration if you think “our” government wouldn't murder 3,000 of its “own people”.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor. – A Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses, page 63, September 2000

The Three Towers?

Impossible Physics

Sky scrapers are not built to collapse. For one, they are always built in high population areas, designed to hold thousands of people, and surrounded by many other buildings that would be damaged were they to collapse. Before we could be confident in building such structures, we had to know with a degree of certainty that they wouldn't just fall to pieces one day. Indeed, from the bottom to the top, each floor must be designed to support the enormous weight of all floors above it against the force of gravity. Considering the massive amount of weight so much steel, concrete, office furniture and people exert, in 110-story buildings, the strength of the building's structure must be significant.

The official conspiracy theory revolves around the enormous damage done by the two jumbo jets – the combined catastrophe of the planes slamming into the buildings at 500mph and 9,000 pounds of jet fuel exploding and burning. But as catastrophic as these compounding events may seem, the buildings were actually built to withstand them.

By some strange coincidence, less than nine months before the attack and 30 years after the buildings were constructed, Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, gave an interview in which he was asked how well the towers could withstand an impact from a jumbo jet. He answered,

The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door -- this intense grid -- and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.

Demartini is believed to have died in the attacks, as he remained in the building to assist with the evacuation, surely content with the knowledge that an airline impact could not cause the building to collapse.

Further, it is widely assumed that the jet fuel burned at enormous temperatures for what we believe was an extended period of time, causing either melting or weakening of the steel columns holding the building up. But even if jet fuel could melt steel – it can't – we know the jet fuel had already burned off – that massive explosion upon Flight 75 (the second plane) slamming into the South Tower. Jet fuel is essentially kerosene, and anyone who's had a kerosene heater in their home knows it does not burn particularly hot. Anyone with a wood burning stove knows that you can burn it for days or even weeks on end without it melting.

Thus you might consider it miraculous that firefighters had actually reached the crash zone of the South tower before it collapsed – evidence, in the form of a tape recording of firefighters reporting they had reached the 78th floor sky lobby, which was where the plane impacted, has been deliberately withheld by the Department of Justice and was only obtained after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Close-up photos were taken of the impact site which featured human beings, alive and well, waving for help. Moreover, for a considerable amount of time before the towers collapsed, thick, black smoke vomited from the towers, indicating not a raging inferno, but a dying, oxygen-starved fire.

Despite claims to the contrary by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), there is no real evidence that any of the core columns had at any point reached temperatures of even 428°F. How can there be? Every cubic centimeter of the collapsed buildings was hastily disposed of before any kind of investigation of physical evidence was conducted. All of NIST's investigations of the towers must, therefore, be based upon conjecture alone. More on this in a moment. Even if the columns were heated to the extreme temperatures NIST, without evidence, claims they were, steel has incredible thermal conductivity, and, given the interconnectedness of the Towers' steel framed structure, the heat would've been drawn away from the impact zone and distributed it throughout the entire building. Considering the relatively weak intensity of the heat present, there is no reason to believe the steel was weakened at all. Indeed, to “prove” their theory, NIST conducted heat transfer tests on isolated steel elements. The entire collapse theory is based on blatantly bad and faulty science, but since you're not a scientist, much less a physicist, they expect you to swallow their story without question. And we do.

Finally, most assume that the plane's impact must have caused some kind of structural damage to the building, but, added to Demartini's testimony above, NIST concluded that the most significant effect the planes' impact had on the towers was the dislodging of fire-proofing material from the steel columns (steel catches fire?). Consider this in tandem with the lack of evidence fires exceeded 428°F and you start to see the official conspiracy theory is far more delusional than what is presented here.

Gravity, Resistance

We can wax philosophical about the possibility that the impacts and fire did in fact cause the buildings to collapse, but all measures of common sense, not to mention the laws of physics, must be abandoned when explaining the manner in which they collapsed once the collapse initiated.

According to Newton's law of gravity, a billiard ball dropped from the top of one of the towers would hit the ground in 9.2 seconds. According to NIST, the 9-11 Commission Report and corroborated by seismic measurements of the collapse, the South and North Towers collapsed in 11 and 9 seconds, respectively.

Again, take a moment to imagine the physics of a skyscraper: hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and concrete structured to push upwards, supporting the weight of everything above it, resisting the pull of gravity. And yet the top of the collapse reached the ground as if nothing below it were present to slow its rate of descent – it was as if it were a free-fall collapse, even though both buildings collapsed, in exactly the same fashion, directly into the path of greatest resistance.

Even if a global collapse occurred in a natural, physically possible manner, even at one floor per second it would taken 90 seconds to collapse. A ten second collapse of 110 story buildings is only possible if there were explosives moving the mass of concrete and steel below the collapse out of the way, allowing the cascading destruction to move downwards at free-fall speed.

Careful examination of either tower collapsing shows explosive squibs ejecting from the building just below the collapse point and as many as 20 floors below the collapse. Massive blocks of concrete and steel girders weighing several hundred thousand pounds are shown being explosively ejected outwards and were found as far as two football fields away, some embedded into nearby buildings. The horizontal speed of some of these girders has been clocked at 70 miles per hour. What could hurl such gigantic masses of steel and concrete at such speeds with such force? Certainly not gravity, which as common sense, not to mention physical law, tells us would pull matter toward the center of the Earth.

And finally, after the collapse, the core columns can be seen cut, as if with a welding torch, at about a 45 degree angle. Standard demolitions employ the same method – angled inward to push the building in on itself; molten steel can be seen around the edges of the cut. This cannot have been a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Nor could the molten metal found in the basement areas of the towers, as well as building 7 (building what?), which was found for up to five weeks after the collapse. Fire fighters described seeing the molten metal as if they were in a foundry, or like watching lava flow from a volcano. This is significant on several levels. First, we know that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel – steel melts at over 2000°; satellite thermal imaging recorded temperatures upwards of 2600° at least five days after the collapse. Finally, fires are known to have burned underground for months after the attacks, not being brought to an end until late December 2001. This despite an unimaginable amount of water being showered upon them, from the firefighters themselves and from several subsequent severe thunderstorms.

You couldn't even begin to imagine how much water was pumped in there. It was like you were creating a giant lake. – Tom Manley, Uniformed Firefighters Association, NYC's largest fire department union

There could have been no jet fuel in the WTC7 collapse, and yet molten steel and incredibly hot temperatures were observed there as well. The only acceptable explanation for this has been offered by Brigham Young physicist Steven Jones, who presented compelling evidence of the existence of explosive nano thermite in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Thermite itself burns so hot it will cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. Thermate contains an additive which not only makes it burn incredibly hot, but makes it explosive as well.

If the debris field were allowed to be examined, as any other crime scene would have, evidence of explosives inside the building – both from the thermate residue found in the rubble and the wreckage exhibiting evidence of having been damaged by explosive – may have been discovered. We could also tell how much damage the planes caused at the point of impact, and how much the steel melted or warped to cause a collapse, per the official conspiracy theory.

Thus, the wreckage was speedily and secretly carted away, with little regard to the remains of the victims it contained, to a landfill in Staten Island, where it was subsequently processed and sold to China, made into souvenir keepsakes, and implemented into the construction of a Navy warship. Dump trucks carrying the wreckage were fitted with GPS devices, and one driver who took too long on his lunch break was fired on the spot. If this had occurred at any place and time other than the World Trade Center (and the Pentagon) on 9-11, we would, without hesitation, call it by its appropriate name: a cover-up.

Bombs

I’m on the basement—the basement has six levels of basement; B1 to B6. On the B1 level were all of the support companies that dealt with the World Trade Center … I was talking to a supervisor at 8:46 am and all of a sudden we hear a very loud “BOOM!” – an explosion so hard that it pushed us upwards! … [I]t came from the basement between the B2 level, and the B3 level.

[…]

At that moment everyone started screaming—the explosion was so hard that the walls cracked—the ceiling fell on top of us. The sprinkler system got activated. When I was about to say out loud “it was the generator” we hear “BOOM!” – the impact of the plane on the top of the building.

Two different events. Two different times.

Now when this happened … screams everywhere … a person comes running into the office and starts yelling “explosion, explosion, explosion!” His hands were extended and his skin was pulled from under his armpit... all the way to the top of his fingerprints… and it was hanging on both hands. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a piece of clothing. And then I realized it was his skin and I said, “What happened? What happened?” …and when I looked at his face, I could see that he was missing pieces of his face. – William Rodriguez, janitor, North Tower

Liz, this was a terrorist attack. I can hear explosions below me. – Edmund McNally, 97^th floor, South Tower

Shortly after 9 o'clock … Chief Albert Turi (Chief of Safety for the New York Fire Department) … received word of the possibility of a secondary device, that is another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said there was another explosion which took place, and then an hour after the first hit – the first crash that took place – he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here, so obviously according to his theory he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. – Pat Dawson, NBC News, September 11, 2001

We first assembled on West Street, where we saw someone burnt beyond recognition. We were like “What is going on here?” … [The lobby of the North Tower] looked like a bomb went off, and we started making our way up the stairs to rescue as many people as we could. … The elevators just blew right out. We couldn’t believe it. The plane hits 80 floors up but the elevators explode at least five minutes later? It was unreal. – John Schroeder, FDNY Engine Company 10

"Tommy Hetzel was with me and everybody else also gets out of the elevator when it stops on the 24th floor. There was a huge amount of smoke. Tommy and I had to go back down the elevator for tools and no sooner did the elevators close behind us, we heard this huge explosion that sounded like a bomb. It was such a loud noise, it knocked off the lights and stalled the elevator.

Luckily, we weren't caught between floors and were able to pry open the doors. People were going crazy, yelling and screaming. And all the time, I am crawling low and making my way in the dark with a flashlight to the staircase and thinking Tommy is right behind me. … I somehow got into the stairwell and there were more people there. When I began to try and direct down, another huge explosion like the first one hits. This one hits about two minutes later, although it's hard to tell, but I'm thinking, “Oh. My God, these bastards put bombs in here like they did in 1993!” – Lou Cacchioli, FDNY Engine Company 47, September 11, 2001

There was another big, big explosion. In the other tower, flames coming out and this billowing grey smoke. People still not panicking, people not quite understanding what was going on. Then somebody said that they saw an airliner go into one of those towers. Then, I don't know how later than that, we had that big explosion from much, much lower. I don't know what on earth caused that. – Stephen Evans, BBC North American Business correspondent, September 11, 2001

I guess about three minutes later you just heard explosions coming from building two, the south tower. It seemed like it took forever, but there were about ten explosions. – Craig Carlsen, FDNY Ladder 8

At 10:30 I tried to leave the building, but as I got outside I heard a second explosion, and another rumble, and more smoke, and more dust. I ran inside the building, the chandeliers shook, and again, black smoke filled the air. Within another five minutes we were covered again with more silt, and more dust. And then a fire marshal came in and said we had to leave, because if there was a third explosion this building might not last. – Ann Thomson, MSNBC, September 11, 2001

… that would put us a block and a half away from the site of where the explosion was. That area has just been evacuated because police have found what they describe as a suspicious device and they fear that it might be something that could lead to another explosion. Obviously there's a real sense of caution here on the part of police. I spoke with some police officials moments ago, Chris, and they told me they have reason to believe that one of the explosions at the World Trade Center aside from the ones that may have been caused by the impact of the plane with the building, may have been caused by a van that was parked in the building that may have had some type of explosive device in it, so their fear is that there may have been explosive devices planted either in the building, or in the adjacent area and that's why they are being so cautious – Rick Sanchez, MSNBC, September 11, 2001

I believe, from what I understand the fireman said, that the street collapsed on the outside of the building and when the street collapsed, there was an explosion which threw me. And it must've threw me across the room and I ended up going unconscious. – Sam Esposito, CBS Channel 2 News NY

As my officer and I were looking at the south tower, it just gave. It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit, because we originally had thought there was like an internal detonation explosives because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down. – Edward Cachia, FDNY Engine Company 53

Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound, and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building.

I went inside and I told everybody that the other building or there was an explosion occurring up there and I said I think we have another major explosion.

[…]

So here these explosions are getting bigger and louder and bigger and louder and I told everybody if this building totally explodes, still unaware that the other building had collapsed, I'm going in the water. – Karin Deshore, Fire Captain, FDNY Battalion 6

I don't know how valid this is with everything that was going on at that particular point in time, but for some reason I thought that when I looked in the direction of the Trade Center before it came down, before No. 2 came down, that I saw low-level flashes. In my conversation with Lieutenant Evangelista, never mentioning this to him, he questioned me and asked me if I saw low-level flashes in front of the building, and I agreed with him because I thought -- at that time I didn't know what it was. I mean, it could have been as a result of the building collapsing, things exploding, but I saw a flash flash flash and then it looked like the building came down.

[…]

You know like when they demolish a building, how when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw. And I didn't broach the topic to him, but he asked me. He said I don't know if I'm crazy, but I just wanted to ask you because you were standing right next to me. He said did you see anything by the building? And I said what do you mean by see anything? He said did you see any flashes? I said, yes, well, I thought it was just me. He said no, I saw them, too. – Stephen Gregory, Commissioner, Bureau of Communications

The flashlight led us into Borders bookstore, up an escalator and out to Church Street. There were explosions going off everywhere. I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons. I was afraid to go down Church Street toward Broadway, but I had to do it. I ended up on Vesey Street. There was another explosion. And another. I didn't know where to run. – Theresa Veliz, 47^th Floor, North Tower

As we were getting our gear on and making our way to the stairway, there was a heavy duty explosion. – interview with unknown fireman, September 11, 2001

We were trying to get some of the people out, but then there was secondary explosions and then subsequent collapses. – interview with unknown fireman, September 11, 2001

Battalion 3 to dispatch, we've just had another explosion.

Battalion 3 to dispatch, we've had additional explosion.

Dispatcher: Received battalion command. Additional explosion. – Jersey City Battalion 3

Fireman 1: We made it at least 2 blocks.

Fireman 2: 2 blocks.

Fireman 1: and we started runnin'

Fireman 2: pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop

Fireman 1: Floor by floor it started poppin' out ..

Fireman 2: It was as if as if they had detonated, det …

Fireman 1: yea detonated yea

Fireman 2: as if they had planned to take down a building, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom …

Fireman 1: All the way down, I was watchin it, and runnin'

And then all of a sudden it started like … it sounded like gunfire … you know, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and then all of a sudden three big explosions. – Interview with unknown injured witness, September 11, 2001

And on and on it goes; eye witness after eye witness testifying to the presence of bombs in the buildings, bombs in the basement, bombs collapsing the street around the towers. And in the final report for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (more commonly known as the 9-11 Commission), what is their conclusion about what caused these explosions?

They never mention them in the first place.

Common sense demands that, as an aspect of the terrorist attacks which wounded and likely killed many people, these explosions would receive the same scrutiny as any other aspect of the attack, like how 19 men armed with box cutters defeated a trillion dollar mega-defense system that kept the Soviet Union at bay for 50 years. But not a mention was made about it. Why?

Perhaps because it was simply a can of worms they could not open. If they admit there were bombs in the buildings, and secondary explosions going off, witnessed and documented by countless people, then the next obvious train of inquiry becomes, how did the bombs get in the building? The American people would be equally as skeptical at the assertion that 19 al Qaeda clowns not only infiltrated four commercial aircraft and flew them into buildings but, in addition, managed to covertly wire the towers with massive bombs, as they would at the assertion that the bombs were planted by the American government. Otherwise the government would be forced to postulate a much wider, more involved al Qaeda conspiracy, involving a much greater number of people, which, one would think, would not be a problem except for one small item: such a conspiracy simply did not exist.

And so faced with this inconvenient circumstance, they simply threw the whole story down the memory hole, and even though these countless testimonies are still on the web, from pedestrians to EMTs to firemen to police to journalists, the media, and thus the collective American mind, consciously or unconsciously swept it under the rug. These events officially do not exist; they never happened. And anyone who brings them up is laughed at. It is one of the most poignant examples of media-induced amnesia you'll ever find.

Security

How could they let this happen? They knew this building was a target. Over the past few weeks we'd been evacuated a number of times, which is unusual. I think they had an inkling something was going on. – Ben Fountain, financial analyst, 47^th floor South Tower

Surely the question most on our minds when considering such astounding accusations is, how could they have pulled all this off? How could they have rigged three (three?) skyscrapers for demolition without any of the many thousands of people working there knowing about it? How could such an operation be kept secret?

Meet Marvin Bush, the youngest brother of then-President George W. Bush. Marvin was a principal in a company called Securacom, which provided security for the World Trade Center, United Airlines, and Dulles International Airport. The company was backed by KuwAm, a Kuwaiti-American investment firm on whose board Marvin Bush also served.

According to its present CEO, Barry McDaniel, the company had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center “up to the day the buildings fell down.” The company lists as government clients “the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S Air force, and the Department of Justice,” in projects that “often require state-of-the-art security solutions for classified or high-risk government sites.”

New York Newsday reported that a heightened security alert was lifted five days before the attack. Daria Coard, a guard at Tower One, said the security detail had been working 12-hour shifts for the past two weeks because of numerous phone threats. But on September 6, bomb-sniffing dogs were abruptly removed.

On the weekend before September 11, there was a 'power down' condition in the South Tower, leaving the building without electrical supply for approximately 36 hours from the 50^th floor up. According to Scott Forbes of Fiduciary Trust, 97^th floor South Tower, “Of course without power there were no security cameras, no security locks on doors and many, many 'engineers' coming in and out of the tower.”

Evacuation

[A] few minutes later we heard the radio announcer say that a second plane was heading straight for 2 WTC. A few seconds later our building once again swayed back and forth as the as result of the second plane crashing into 2 WTC. I hear now that it was 18 minutes between crashes. In those 18 minutes we heard no sirens, only the ones in the building when there's a fire, there was not one announcement from authorities at the WTC alerting us that there was an emergency situation and that we should evacuate, nothing. If we hadn't turned the radio on, we would not have known what the hell had happened. I was in such a rage. – Sabrina (last name withheld), 89^th floor North Tower

Immediately after the North Tower was struck by Flight 11, the first plane to strike the WTC, towers 6 and 7 were evacuated. However, those in the North Tower were strongly advised to remain at their desks. Dan Baumbach, a software engineer from Merrick in the North Tower, was stunned to hear officials telling those trying to evacuate to return to their offices. “The reason we got out was because we didn't listen,” he said.

All of a sudden you heard, “Shhh!” Everyone was quiet. That's when they made that announcement: “Building 1 is in a state of emergency. Building 2 is secure. You're fine, you can return to your workstations.” – Nancy Cassidy, 80^th floor, South Tower

An announcement came over the speaker system that we were not in imminent danger and that we should return to our offices. – Tiffany Keeling, 61^st floor, South Tower

As soon as we reached the concourse level, the security guard stopped us and said, “Where are you going?” (the North Tower is on fire) “Oh, that was just an accident. Two World Trade is secured. Go back to your office.” – Stanley Praimnath, 82^nd floor, South Tower

It can reasonably be dismissed that workers were told to remain in their offices after the North Tower was struck. After all, we know that the buildings were designed to withstand a jumbo jet impact. And, at the time, no one knew exactly what had hit the tower – early reports described a small plane – or thought that it might be part of a terrorist attack still in progress.

But as the above survivors testify to, even after the second plane had struck the towers, and it had become apparent that this was a purposeful attack, not a tragic accident, workers were still told to remain in their buildings. This after just eight years prior al Qaeda terrorists (with the help of the FBI) detonated a massive bomb in the North Tower with the intent of causing it to topple over into the South Tower, killing seven people and injuring over a thousand. During this attack there was no hesitation to evacuate the survivors.

I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the Head of Emergency Management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us. – Rudolph Giuliani, interview with Peter Jennings, September 11, 2001 (Giuliani later denied making this comment)

Why were survivors encouraged to stay in their offices during an apparent terrorist attack? How many would've survived if they hadn't been told to stay? The greater the death toll, the more horrifying the carnage, the greater the collective fury of the American people could be harnessed to support the underlying objective of the event, which, ten years on, is apparent. Nobody has benefited more from the attacks than the United States government, with its vicious and unceasing assault on our liberties and dignity (been to an airport lately?); the banksters who not only loaned, at interest, our government the trillions necessary to carry out our “vengeance”, but also have seen record profits from drug money laundered through their banks after the opium trade was restarted following our invasion of Afghanistan, which I'll delve more into in a moment; and finally, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, General Electric, Halliburton and its subsidiaries, etc – the military industrial complex – and all who've profited from this inhuman war racketeering scheme.

Building What?

On September, 2001 three large office buildings – 110, 110, and 47 floors – burned for 56 minutes, 85 minutes, and 6 hours, respectively. In the history of steel-framed sky scrapers, they are the only ones to have collapsed from fire. Ever. Before or after 9-11. Are there examples to compare these to?

In May 1988 a fire at the 62-story Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles destroyed four floors and damaged a fifth floor. The fire burned for four hours, but did not collapse. In February 1991 a fire destroyed eight floors of the 38-story One Meridian Plaza building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The fire burned for 18 hours, but the building did not collapse. In October 2004 in Caracas, Venezuela, a fire in a 56-story office tower burned for more than 17 hours and spread over 26 floors. It did not collapse. In February 2005 the 32-story Windsor Building in Madrid, Spain caught fire and burned for two days. The building was completely engulfed in flames, yet it did not collapse.

Building 7, or World Trade Center 7, contained several government offices, including the IRS, CIA, Department of Defense, Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Secret Service, among others. It was not struck by a plane, but was only moderately damaged, supposedly due to the collapse of the towers. It had small, sporadic fires randomly dispersed on only a few floors.

Yet the building collapsed, again, at the rate of free fall, again, into its own footprint, in a perfectly neat and symmetrical fashion, causing minimal damage to the adjacent buildings. In order for this to occur, all (approximately) 80 of the building's core columns would have had to fail simultaneously; the fires that did exist were found randomly throughout the building, and there were no more than 4 or 5 fires, total, in the whole building.

Adding to the obvious is Larry Silverstein, who owned buildings 1, 2, and 7 – coincidentally the only 3 buildings that “collapsed” – and who, weeks before the attack, took out multi-billion dollar insurance policies on the buildings. He later went on PBS and admitted that WTC7 was “pulled” by his own suggestion. To “pull” a building is to demolish it. And watching the building collapse, that it was demolished is patently obvious. It starts with the central core columns being blown out, so that none of the building collapses outward and damages other buildings. Then charges are seen blowing up the windows in a wave from the low floors to the top. Finally the entire building collapses all at once, perfectly symmetrical, and lands in the neatest pile of debris you've ever seen. Watch any footage of a controlled demolition and you will see the exact same thing.

In their denial, I've actually had people accept that the building was demolished, but that it was reasonable to demolish the building because of the damage the fires caused – text book collective rationalization. It is lost on them how in only a few hours they wired a 47 story building to be demolished, in the middle of a terrorist attack, with multiple floors on fire – it typically takes weeks for a skilled demolition team to wire a building for controlled demolition. Again, using your own God-give common sense, how possible is all of this? It is not possible at all.

Mainstream news video exists of firefighters and emergency responders warning news crews to get away from the building, or to keep an eye on it because it was going to come down. How could anyone know this, especially, again, regarding a building that suffered only moderate damage? They knew because this was a planned event.

Most people do not remember Building 7 because, as the years progressed, it was wiped from Americans' collective memory by simple omission. Each year, we remember the collapse of the towers, but no mention is made for the loss of Building 7. On the 8^th anniversary of the attacks I visited Ground Zero in New York City and saw first hand that the pit that once was the twin towers was still just that – a pit. But Building 7 was already fully rebuilt and completely operational, as if it had been there all along. Surrounded by the hated, the despised, the frightening group of crazy people known as 9-11 Truthers, when I inquired where Building 7 was I had it pointed out to me that Building 7 was rebuilt with haste so that attention would not be drawn to it; so that people would forget it ever happened. And they have, to the great delight of the perpetrators: Building 7 is the smoking gun evidence that proves 9-11 was a pre-planned staged event, as it was obviously brought down by controlled demolition. Pay attention to their ceremonies, to their commentaries, to all of their talk about the events of that day, and notice that Building 7 is never mentioned.

Missing Planes

In the case of the Pentagon and Shanksville, one need only to examine the “wreckage” to know something is amiss - amiss in that there was no wreckage. We are led to believe that two jumbo jets were completely obliterated by the jet fuel explosion – the first time in the history of air travel this has ever happened. It is, I suppose, remotely feasible that the passengers, luggage, and fuselage were destroyed, but not one of the four Rolls Royce engines, made of steel and titanium alloy, weighing six tons each, were recovered. Amazingly, even though these impacts and explosions managed to obliterate tempered steel and titanium, human remains were found and identified at the Pentagon site (belonging to those who were in the Pentagon when the plane crashed).

From my close-up inspection, there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. The only site, is the actual side of the building that's crashed in. And as I said, the only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage, nothing like that anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon and then caused the side to collapse. Even though if you look at the pictures of the Pentagon you see that the floors have all collapsed, that didn't happen immediately. It wasn't until almost about 45 minutes later that the structure was weakened enough that all of the floors collapsed. – Jamie McIntyre, CNN, September 11, 2001

We are left to wonder, if you were even aware of this fact before I tell you, why every security/surveillance camera that would've shown a 757 hitting the Pentagon – and there were several cameras that would've shown this – were confiscated by the FBI during the 24 hours after the crash, and the limited footage from these videos released to the public do not show an airplane hitting the building. Aren't there surveillance cameras covering every square inch of the Pentagon's perimeter? Indeed there are. For some reason we are left to speculate – was it a 757? Was it a cruise missile? If it was, after all, a passenger jet that crashed into the Pentagon, all the government has to do is release the videos. To this day, all requests have been denied. One thing that cannot be denied, when reason and common sense are applied, is that the Pentagon could not have been struck by Flight 77 piloted by Hani Hanjour. I will explain this shortly.

Further, like the World Trade Center, this crime scene was scrubbed and cleaned so that any evidence was immediately removed, not to mention contaminated. The FBI, along with Pentagon employees and civilians, combed the lawn, picking up any evidence, and carting it away. None of the pieces have ever been verified as being part of Flight 77 or a Boeing 757. It was just assumed that anything found must've been from the plane. And then, finally, after the evidence had been cleared, after the surveillance tapes had been confiscated, they literally covered up the crime scene, by unloading gravel onto the entire lawn in front of the west wing of the Pentagon. Meanwhile, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania …

I can just remember seeing very small bits of debris everywhere. There really wasn't any large sections of debris or aircraft. … It just looked like somebody just dropped a bunch of metal out of the sky. … It looked like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped trash into it. – Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller

It didn't look like a plane crash because there was nothing that looked like a plane. I never seen anything like it. Just like a big pile of charcoal. – Homer Barron, first responder, Shanksville, PA

We (were) literally surrounded by debris, and there's a very strong odor of scorched earth. It doesn't smell like jet fuel, it smells like … How do you describe it? Burned earth. It smells like burned earth. – Jim Parsons, WTAE-TV

Looking at the crash site itself is a sobering experience. It is difficult to believe that a large Boeing 757 aircraft plunged into the ground with such force that the plane literally disintegrated and created a still smoldering crater. – Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, September 12, 2001

FOX News reporter: I wanna get quickly to Chris Konicki … he's a photographer with the Pittsburgh affiliate, a Fox affiliate. He was back there just a couple minutes ago and Chris, I've seen the pictures, it looks like there's nothing there, except for a hole in the ground.

Photographer Chris Konicki: Ah, basically that's right. The only thing you can see from where we where, ah, was a big gouge in the earth and some broken trees. We could see some people working, walking around in the area, but from where we could see it, there wasn't much left.

Reporter: Any large pieces of debris at all?

Konicki: Nah, there was nothing, nothing that you could distinguish that a plane had crashed there.

Reporter: Smoke? Fire?

Konicki: Nothing. It was absolutely quite. It was, uh, actually very quiet. Um, nothing going on down there. No smoke. No fire. Just a couple of people walking around. They looked like part of the NTSB crew walking around, looking at the pieces.

At 11:43am on September 11, 2001, the Associated Press reported that an airplane had made an emergency landing at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport due to fears there was a bomb on board; it was taken to a secure location and its passengers were evacuated. United Airlines identified the plane as Flight 93. The article and subsequent investigations do not explain how this could be possible, nor what happened to Flight 93 after it landed in Cleveland and had its passengers evacuated. The story was simply revised, and then ultimately forgotten.

But something happened in Shanksville. At the crash site, very little resembling a jumbo jet could be found. Except of course, miraculously, the personal effects of the hijackers. More on that in a moment. But more astounding, there were secondary debris fields up to eight miles away, where residents reported burning debris falling from the sky. Finally, there is the photograph taken by a resident in Shanksville showing the mushroom cloud from the impact of what we assume to be United 93. But the explosion looks more like military ordinance than an airplane crash, when comparison photographs are examined. Considering that, we are told, the jet fuel from the two planes that struck the World Trade Center burned long enough and hot enough to bring both buildings down, one would expect that the jet fuel from United 93 would've burned for some time after the crash took place. As the eyewitness accounts above testify to, there was no burning jet fuel at all. In fact, not much of anything was on fire.

Beckoning you back to the beginning of this chapter, it is important to keep in mind that there are aspects to the conspiracy that may never be known. Did the military just drop an L-RAD or a missile in an open field in Shanksville? Or did a fighter pilot disobey Cheney's stand-down order (which I'll delve into momentarily) and shoot down United 93? The massive debris field and eyewitness testimonies suggest this may have happened. But what happened in Cleveland?

What we can deduce from what we do know with a degree of certainty is that what happened in Shanksville did not occur the way the official conspiracy theory tells us it did. United 93 was not brought down by an act of heroism, though it is pleasing and comforting to believe it was. “Let's Roll” has become the battle cry of a vengeful, blindly furious American public. It was all a lie.

Planted Evidence

It is not entirely true to say that both planes and everything in them were obliterated. In Shanksville, several of the hijackers IDs, drivers licenses, and/or passports were found, mostly intact, at the site, as well as a red bandanna in Shanksville, supposedly worn by one of them. It is ridiculous to say that the explosion destroyed the entire plane, including indestructible engines, yet these incriminating items were miraculously found at the scene. How convenient for them. Similar documents were found at the Pentagon, and, perhaps most miraculous of all, the passport of Satam Al Suqami, one of the hijackers, flew out of his pocket at the point of impact, survived the massive collision and jet fuel explosion that we are led to believe collapsed the entire 110-story skyscraper, and then survived the collapse, which annihilated the entire building and practically everything in it, and was found in near pristine condition in the rubble. The media reported this without batting an eyelash as to how absurd the whole thing was. And why not? Only the kooks and nutjobs who believe our government could/would do such a thing noticed.

“Terrorists”

As if you haven't already had your fill of absurdities and impossible coincidences, we delve into the nineteen jihadist kamikazes who supposedly orchestrated the entire convoluted plot, brought an entire nation to its knees, and subverted the laws of physics, perhaps through their unwavering faith in Allah. As much as the official account of how the buildings collapsed is insulting to intelligent people, the ludicrous story behind the “terrorists” involved rivals it.

Bin Laden

We begin at the top, with the globalists' very own incarnation of Emmanuel Goldstein. With his apparent death in early 2011, the CIA's go-to man was finally cast aside; we await his inevitable successor, who will undoubtedly terrorize a new generation of Americans who will demand ever more measures be taken to assure their safety as they grow fat and stupid and obsess themselves with reality TV, shopping and other trivium while our best and brightest slaughter the bogeymen on the other side of the world, defending freedom. Indeed, as I've written this account, we've been informed to be frightened of a new threat: a 9-11 anniversary attack, which involved Bin Laden's successor, whoever he is. And no one bothers to ask how utterly idiotic it would be for al Qaeda to try to replicate the 9-11 attacks on the ten year anniversary, as if, with the implementation of the total surveillance state in the years hence, terrorists sit on the toilet without the spooks knowing about it. You must never be allowed to forget to be afraid, that you need to have your liberties stamped out in order to protect you. I digress again.

It is not debatable that Bin Laden denied involvement in the attacks three times in the months subsequent September 11. In the run-up to the Afghanistan campaign, the Taliban have just one simple request for America before we unleash our fury upon their already long-suffering people: show them the evidence that Bin Laden was behind the attack, and they will arrest him and turn him over to an international tribunal. The peace-seeking American government naturally refuses this simple request, which could've averted the longest running war in American history, at the time of this writing now near ten years long, with no end in sight or intended. Besides, Americans wanted blood, carnage, destruction. They wanted to sit and watch what was left of Kabul bombed into the stone age. A simple solution such as this would not do at all.

Meanwhile, two weeks after 9-11, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell promises, “in the near future … a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking [bin Laden] to this attack.” The next day, then-Press Secretary Ari Fleischer officially retracts that remark, assuring us all that we are happy to be patient as they decide which information is suitable for us to disseminate. And we were. Ten years on however, the case has never been made. Surely you believe the case is rock-solid, but I assure you, if you were to put on your thinking caps, you won't be able to remember an instance or instances where actual evidence was given to you. Perhaps this is because, as is apparent by viewing bin Laden's FBI Most Wanted web page, they lack the evidence to tie bin Laden to 9-11, being that 9-11 is not listed among the crimes he was wanted for.

Nor was such evidence ever necessary: the incessant media caricature of Bin Laden as the world's sole master of terror made certain that as soon as the second plane slammed into the building, our minds shut off and all we could “think” of was al Qaeda, bin Laden, al Qaeda, bin Laden…

Sadly I was guilty of this as well, and for a whole seven years after.

Eventually, after the debacle at Tora Bora that allowed – and when I say “allowed”, I mean allowed – Bin Laden to escape, “evidence” was conveniently found in the compound in the form of a video of Bin Laden palling around with fellow jihadists, explaining the intricacies of the attack and his involvement in it. It was a sickening example of how we are capable of willfully submitting ourselves to a collective hallucination, as the man in the video is obviously and insultingly not Osama bin Laden. Again, count me among the guilty.

Perhaps the most astounding fact about Bin Laden and his role as the world's most dangerous terrorist, at least formerly, is the case of his stay at an American hospital in Dubai in July, 2001. The London Guarding reported in November, 2001, that Bin Laden stayed for ten days in the hospital, was treated for kidney disease by an American doctor, and was paid a visit by at least two CIA agents and prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi Intelligence. It goes without saying that he was not arrested on the spot.

The question that arises from this is obvious: how could the world's most wanted criminal stay in an American hospital, be treated by an American doctor, and be visited by the CIA and the head of Saudi intelligence, only to be allowed to leave of his own recognizance to return, presumably, to Afghanistan, where we would be led to believe he saw through the final preparations for the 9-11 attacks? It is beyond the scope of this book to go into the history and true identity and purpose of “Osama bin Laden”, which to anyone who's read Orwell's novel 1984 must appear to be the contemporary version of Emmanuel Goldstein. Suffice it to say that he was not a rogue terrorist criminal wanted: dead or alive by our government; he was a CIA asset, with an actual code-name: Tim Osman, which he traveled under when visiting the United States and US military bases abroad. He was a hired jackal, a fictitious bogeyman who, along with his mercenary database known as al Qaeda, was sent out to wreak havoc on the world in the interests of his masters in the US government.

Funding

To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance. Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding. If a particular funding source had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily tapped a different source or diverted funds from another project to fund an operation that cost $400,000-$500,000 over nearly two years. – 9-11 Commission Report, chapter 5.4

You may or may not find it astounding that the source of the funding of the most heinous terrorist attack ever to be perpetrated on the United States, or the entire world, has no real practical value to the 9-11 Commission. I suppose it didn't matter to me when the report was released. This, they claim, is because the whole operation was carried out over a two year period on the cheap – a measly $166 per murder – with the transfer of funds made in small amounts. Even if the amounts were small, I'm sure more than a few people, perhaps the family members, who were treated like rodents by the Commission, would still like to know who paid for it all. Regardless, there was at least one major source of funding, the Commission knew about it, and it was no small amount.

On the morning of September 11, the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence – ISI, the Pakistani equivalent to the CIA – was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, along with other members of the House Intelligence Committee. Upon hearing of the attack, according to Bob Graham, Pakistan's top spy was, “very empathetic, sympathetic to the people of the United States.” Why was he in America the morning of September 11^th?

As to September 11th, federal authorities have told ABC News they have now tracked more than $100,000 from banks in Pakistan, to two banks in Florida, to accounts held by suspected hijack ring leader, Mohammed Atta. – Brian Ross, ABC News, September 30, 2001

The source of that $100,000 transfer to Muhammed Atta was General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani ISI. Was it an intelligence failure to give red carpet treatment to the money man behind the 9-11 attacks? Or can we just heap this onto the pile of absurdities and coincidences already documented (and I'm not nearly done)?

This, like many essential aspects of the attacks of that day, was reported by multiple mainstream news outlets – CNN, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal. It was submitted to the commission by members of the victims' families, and thus it was irrefutably known to the 9-11 Commission. But since it couldn't be twisted to fit into the official conspiracy theory, which is insulting on its face, it, like many other events and circumstances of the day, officially never happened:

Well, I'm not aware of the $100,000 wired to Muhammed Atta. But, um, Pakistan, I think, is the most dangerous country in the world. – 9-11 Commission co-chair Thomas Kean

Hijackers

Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists’ identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, “Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase.” – Seymour Hersh, What Went Wrong, New Yorker Magazine, October 2001

Finally, we arrive at The Nineteen: the kamikaze jihadists who supposedly brought a nation to its knees. What evidence do we have of their involvement? The evidence of their involvement is so extensive, so patently obvious, investigators must've thought they'd died and went to CSI heaven.

Aside from the miraculously recovered and incriminating identification documents found at the various crash scenes, Marwan Alshehhi's rental car was discovered at Boston's Logan airport. In it were found an Arabic flight manual, an airport Restricted Area pass, and documents from Huffman Aviation. Nawaf Alhazmi's rental car was discovered at Washington, DC Dulles International Airport. Inside were found instructions from Muhammed Atta, a check made out to a flight school in Phoenix, Arizona, four drawings of a 757 cockpit, a knife, and maps of Washington, DC and New York City. On September 10, Muhammed Atta hitched a flight with fellow 'jacker Abdulaziz al-Omari to Portland, Maine. The reason for this trip is never elaborated. Considering the close proximity to the day of their martyrdom, it must've been significant. Indeed, because their flight from Portland to Boston was delayed – would that their flight to Boston were delayed just a few more minutes! – a piece of Atta's luggage remained in Portland. This suitcase was a treasure trove of damning evidence, including airline uniforms, flight manuals, instructions to his fellow hijackers, and, strangly, Atta's last will and testament. We are led to believe, if we bother to think about it, that a man smart enough to outwit the most advanced defense mechanism in the history of humankind was dumb enough to bring his own will onto a plane doomed to be annihilated in a massive explosion. But then again, Satam Alsuqami's passport made it through it all, so perhaps Atta was onto something.

Known as “the cradle of US Navy Aviation”, the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida was, according to drivers' licenses and car registrations, the home of Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmad Alnami (both from United Airlines 93), and Ahmed Alghamdi (United Airlines 175) - 10 Radford Boulevard, to be exact – a base roadway on which residences for foreign-military flight trainees are located. Muhammad Atta graduated from the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Abdulaziz Alomari attended Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas. And Saeed Alghamdi attended the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterrey, California, a US Army installation and the Department of Defense's primary foreign language school.

Could it be possible that five 9-11 hijackers lived at and/or trained at US military bases, and this is just another insignificant coincidence? Of course, if you follow the media's lead, then yes, absolutely. All the Department of Defense had to do is tell them, “We are probably not talking about the same people,” and, even though the bulk of the above information originated from a Newsweek article, it was immediately relegated to cuckoo conspiracy status.

Though you are not supposed to think too deeply into this – in fact don't think about it at all – there is no confusion of identity in the case of Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi (both from American Airlines Flight 77). Their last known residence before they “martyred” themselves was near San Diego, where they were roommates with an FBI informant. What a coincidence. But it gets more absurd: at least six 9/11 hijackers, including all who were supposedly on Flight 77 – Hani Hanjour, Majed Moqed, Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf Alhazmi, and Salem Alhazmi, were living in Laurel, Maryland through August, 2001. NSA expert James Bamford later tells us why this is significant:

The terrorist cell that eventually took over the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon ended up living, working, planning and developing all their activities in Laurel, Maryland, which happens to be the home of the NSA. So they were actually living alongside NSA employees as they were plotting all these things.

So not only are 9-11 hijackers living at US military bases, not only do they attend US military schools, not only do they room with the FBI, but they live among the National Security Agency.

Let us for a moment refrain from thinking about the absurdity of this going on under our nose without our intelligence gathering and military institutions knowing it. That's absurd enough on its face. What is truly insulting is the idea that al Qaeda would be stupid enough to plot the most complex, devastating terrorist plot in the history of the world while planting its operatives where they would be most likely to be discovered. I ask you, who is the whackjob: me, or people who actually believe this nonsense?

The absurdities compound. We are told that three commercial jumbo aircraft were flown into their targets with expert precision, yet we know that all of the pilots received minimal flight training. Easily the worst of the lot was Hani Hanjour, Flight 77, which (allegedly) crashed into the Pentagon. Hanjour was so inept at piloting it cannot even be said he was an amateur. In fact, he couldn't even drive an automobile adeptly enough to pass his driving test, much less fly a sophisticated, state-of-the-art commercial jumbo jet. And yet Hanjour's flight performance was the most difficult. Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, said that it would have been “totally impossible for an amateur who couldn't even fly a Cessna to maneuver the jetliner in such a highly professional manner.” Former Navy and Pan-American Airlines pilot Ted Muga said, “I just can't imagine an amateur even being able to come close to performing a maneuver of that nature.” And former 757 pilot Ralph Omholt tells us, “The idea that an unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory is simply too ridiculous to consider.”

[Hanjour was] a weak student who was wasting our resources. … He didn't do his homework, didn't attend on time and he would sort of come and go. … He was not able to fly solo in a small plane, which is equivalent to getting out of a parking space [in a car] and stopping. … We didn’t want him back at our school because he was not serious about becoming a good pilot. – Duncan Hastie, Cockpit Resource Management

[Hanjour had] only the barest understanding what the instruments were there to do. – Wes Fults, flight simulator manager, Sawyer Aviation, Phoenix, Arizona, which, according to the Washington Post, was “known locally as a flight school of last resort.”

Federal Aviation Administration records show he obtained a commercial pilot's license in April 1999, but how and where he did so remains a lingering question that FAA officials refuse to discuss. His limited flying abilities do afford an insight into one feature of the attacks: The conspiracy apparently did not include a surplus of skilled pilots. – Amy Goldstein, Lena H. Sun and George Lardner Jr. (of The Washington Post), Hanjour an Unlikely Terrorist, The Cape Cod Times, October 21, 2001

Hani Hanjour, who investigators contend piloted airliner that crashed into Pentagon on Sept 11, was reported to Federal Aviation Administration in Feb 2001 after instructors at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Phoenix found his piloting skills so shoddy and his grasp of English so inadequate that they questioned whether his pilot's license was genuine. – Jim Yardley, A Trainee Noted for Incompetence, New York Times, May 4, 2002

There was no suspicion as far as evildoing. It was more of a very typical instructional concern that “you really shouldn't be in the air.” – Marilyn Ladner, vice president, Pan Am International Flight Academy

I'm still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all. – unnamed ex-Pan Am International Flight Academy employee, quoted in Jim Yardley's A Trainee Noted for Incompetence, New York Times, May 4, 2002

Months before Hani Hanjour is believed to have flown an American Airlines jet into the Pentagon, managers at an Arizona flight school reported him at least five times to the FAA … They reported him not because they feared he was a terrorist, but because his English and flying skills were so bad, they told the Associated Press, they didn't think he should keep his pilot's license. – Vincent Gonzales, CBS News, May 5, 2002

I couldn't believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had. – Peggy Chevrette, manager for the now-defunct JetTech flight school in Phoenix, Arizona

[W]hen Baxter and fellow instructor Ben Conner took the slender, soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs during the second week of August, they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a federal pilot's license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons. – Thomas Frank, New York Newsday, Tracing Trail of Hijackers, September 23, 2001

The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe. … And it was just a countdown. Ten miles west. Nine miles west. Our supervisor picked up our line to the White House and started relaying to them the information, [that] we have an unidentified very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, 8 miles west. … And it went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three, and all of a sudden the plane turned away. In the room, it was almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second. – Danielle O'Brien, air traffic controller, Dulles International Airport

According to the official conspiracy theory, Hanjour takes Flight 77 on a direct path to the Pentagon. At this point, it would be easiest, and inflict the most damage and casualties, if he were to simply continue on this path and crash the plane into the building. Instead, he performs an aerobatic, nearly impossible 270-degree downward spiral, and maneuvers the plane head-on fifty feet above the ground at over 400 knots (over 460mph) to strike the one side of the building that had be renovated and reinforced to bolster it against an attack. Had the plane struck anywhere else, the death toll would've been in the thousands, including some of the top Pentagon and military brass, and possibly our friend, Secretary of State, Donald “Aspartame” Rumsfeld; instead it killed 125. What a coincidence.

The adversary is closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. … In fact it could be said that it's a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American's. … According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. – Donald Rumsfeld, September 10, 2001

Not only being the sole side of the Pentagon with walls reinforced against an attack, the destruction of this section of the Pentagon forever erased, except from Youtube and the minds of quack conspiracy theorists everywhere, the case of the missing $2.3 trillion. Which is why you've likely never heard of it.

What does the 9-11 Commission have to say about this miraculous, reckless and unnecessary performance by Hanjour? It claims that that Hanjour was “perhaps the most experienced and highly trained of all the 9/11 pilots.” This despite the fact that Saeed Alghamdi, who is still alive, was (is) an airline pilot in Saudi Arabia. This might explain why, though Alghamdi, a seasoned commercial jet pilot, was allegedly among the group who hijacked United flight 93, the 9-11 Commission lists amateur Ziad Jarrah as its pilot.

Further, Flight 77 was described as unusually light in passengers that day. On what was originally to be a trans-continental flight, from Dulles International in Washington, DC, to Los Angeles International Airport, Flight 77 – with all four hijacked planes filled to similar light capacity on trans-continental flights – only 64 out of 188 seats are filled. Anyone who flies knows this occurs about as often as seeing a unicorn grazing on your grass in your backyard.

Moreover, the passengers who were on the two-thirds empty Boeing 757 included Barbara Olsen, the wife of Solicitor General Ted Olsen, and employees and representatives from Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, the Department of Defense, the Navy, the Army, and American Airlines. That's quite a list of military, government, and military industrial complex luminaries on one sparsely populated flight, which just happened to be the one supposedly hijacked and flown into the Pentagon. Added to this list is Charles Burlingame, the pilot, who was an aeronautical engineer and a graduate of the Naval Academy and “Top Gun” fighter pilot school. He also worked with the Pentagon developing anti-terrorism strategies, before retiring from the Navy in 1989. And yet we are told that Hanjour and his cohorts were able, armed with box cutters, to hijack Burlingame's plane and crash it into the Pentagon without incident. Is that even remotely believable? Not if you expend the necessary energy to contemplate it, which is more than most people are willing to do.

At this point, the hard-core skeptic is having a really difficult time with this alternative view. If Flight 77 didn't hit the Pentagon, what did? What happened to the passengers and crew, who have families who all, we assume, believe they were killed that day? What about the eyewitnesses who testified to seeing a commercial jet strike the Pentagon? There are those who are sure it was a cruise missile or a bomb, and they claim to have all the proof necessary. I, personally, have not seen smoking gun evidence that proves beyond rational doubt that the Pentagon was struck by either a plane, a missile, or a bomb. It was obviously struck by something, but I won't say what it was. This is one of those instances which, so long as the government withholds relevant evidence that would show what happened there – in particular the confiscated surveillance tapes – this conspiracy “theory” would be laid to rest, one way or the other. What the above evidence does show is that it is impossible for Flight 77, piloted by Hani Hanjour, to have struck the Pentagon. Was there another pilot on board we are not aware of? Not among the hijackers: Hanjour was the only one on board known to have any training, however inept he was. Was the plane commandeered by remote control? It is absolutely possible, as it is possible it was a missile or a bomb. For now, what didn't happen will have to suffice minus relevant evidence.

Moving on, the official narrative tells us that the 9-11 hijackers were devout fundamentalist Muslims progressively living their lives toward one final destination – their deaths in a fiery cataclysm, and the entrance into paradise, married to the black-eyed, the 72 virgins that await those who die a martyr's death. The 9-11 Commission Report echoes this, reporting that the hijackers were a “trained cadre of operatives willing to die,” and that Atta in particular had become “fanatically” religious. Their behavior during their “final” days tells a different story.

Three guys cavorting with lap dancers at the Pink Pony Nude Theater.

Two others knocking back glasses of Stolichnaya and rum and Coke at a fish joint in Hollywood the weekend before committing suicide and mass murder.

That might describe the behavior of several men who are suspects in Tuesday’s terrorist attack, but it is not a picture of devout Muslims, experts say. Let alone that of religious zealots in their final days on Earth. – Jody A. Benjamin, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, September 16, 2001

According to a girlfriend of Muhammed Atta's, a Florida restaurant manager named Amanda Knox, he loved pork chops, drank heavily, and snorted cocaine. In February, 2001, Atta, Knox and another women went on a three day drug and booze bender – “a continuous party” – in the Florida Keys. Authorities would later threaten Knox not to say anything more about Atta. “I can't really discuss anything. I'm afraid I'll get in trouble.” Knox would later retract her story.

Five days before the attack, Atta and his cousin visited a bar in Hollywood, Florida, already drunk, where they continued to drink themselves into a stupor, and refused to pay for their bill, despite bragging about being American Airlines pilots. Waleed M. Alshehri and Wail Alshehri spent September 9, 2001 with a high-priced hooker in a Boston hotel room - twice. In late Winter, 2001, hijacker Ziad Jarrah lives in Jacksonville, Florida, where he is known to frequent strip clubs. According to the FBI, Hamza Alghamdi and Marwan Alshehhi make two purchases of “pornographic video and sex toys” from a Florida store. They spend $252.17 on videos and toys at Video Outlet in Deerfield Beach on July 4, then return on July 27 and spend another $183.22. They are also reported to have attended strip shows, watched porn, and use an escort service.

Five days after 9-11, the UK Daily Mail ran the following report:

At the Palm Beach bar Sunrise 251, Atta and al Shehhi spent $1,000 in 45 minutes on Krug and Perrier-Jouet champagne … Atta was with a 6 foot busty brunette in her late twenties; the other man was with a shortish blonde. Both women were known locally as regular companions of high-rollers.

In October, 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on our jihadists' getaway in Vegas. In a story titled Agents of Terror Leave Their Mark on Sin City, reported:

The self-styled warriors for Allah -- who believed their hijackings would earn them eager virgins in heaven -- engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of prohibited pleasures in America's reputed capital of moral corrosion.

This included frequenting a strip joint on a dreary stretch of the old downtown known mainly for $10 street hookers and easy heroin, where they were known to receive lap dances (and tip poorly for them). The official narrative tells us the purpose of their (multiple – at least six) meetings is unknown – the FBI actually knocked on doors looking for a Vegas connection to the 9-11 attack. This belays the obvious: the hijackers came here – there were countless other places they could've met that would've been less conspicuous – because they were pigs who enjoyed some of the most forbidden behaviors allowed for in Islam: drugs, alcohol, eating pork, gambling, and prostitution. There are of course those who justify this by claiming they were just trying not to act too devout, lest they draw attention to themselves, but it is clear they indulged just a bit too enthusiastically.

Finally, amazingly, as I've hinted at throughout, several of the 9-11 hijackers – as many as seven of them: Waleed Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Mohand Alshehri, Salem Alhazmi, Saeed Alghamdi, and Ahmed Alnami – have been confirmed by mainstream media, particularly BBC, as being alive and well. But as happened in the case of the hijackers training and living in US military bases, the BBC story was dismissed with the claim that Arabs often have very similar sounding names. You might be tempted to accept this explanation, without bothering to match the photographs of those BBC claims are still alive with the official government photographs of the 9-11 hijackers. If you did you'd discover these are not different people.

NORAD

On October 25, 1999, a lear jet carrying champion golfer Payne Stewart loses pressure at high altitude, rendering the pilot and passengers unconscious as it traveled on autopilot. After air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane, it was tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), assisted by several Air Force and Air National Guard fighters and an AWACS radar control plane, up until it crashed.

Air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane at 9:44am; NORAD’s Southeast Air Defense Sector was notified of the emergency at 9:55am. Pentagon officials said the military began its pursuit of the rogue jet at 10:08am, following it for much of the four hours it flew, its windows frosted over, until it ran out of fuel and crashed in an uninhabited area of South Dakota. Some years later, the 9-11 Commission would compare the military's response to this incident with its performance on September 11, 2001, and found, ridiculously, that “There is no significant difference in NORAD’s reaction to the two incidents.”

This claim is difficult to gauge because there are, officially, three explanations for NORAD's utter lack of any kind of defense of this country on that day. Days after the attack, we were told that no warplanes were in the air until after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon at 9:38am. This despite the fact that, it was reported, the hijacking of Flight 11 had been known since 8:15am. This means that for approximately 83 minutes – as opposed to the 13 or so minutes it took them to track the Payne Stewart jet – the military sat on its hands while our nation was supposedly under massive terrorist attack.

Days later a second story was released, indicating that the military had scrambled jets, but, because the FAA had supposedly delayed in notifying them, they could not intercept the hijacked planes in time. In mid-September, 2001, NORAD made this narrative official, providing a timeline which indicated contrasted when the FAA notified NORAD with when fighter jets were sent airborne. This new timeline indicated the FAA had notified NORAD that Flight 175 had been hijacked a full 20 minutes before it struck the South Tower. We can reasonably assume that, while perhaps not much could've been done to stop Flight 175 from striking the South Tower, there was more than enough time to muster a response, particularly given that there was no way to know if more planes might be headed for New York City and Washington.

The second explanation being woefully inadequate, the 9-11 Commission simply claimed that NORAD's timeline, which had stood as the official narrative for nearly three years, was “incorrect”, and put out a third story, as if no one would notice – and who in fact did notice, except the kooks and conspiracy theorists – completely rewriting NORAD's timeline. According to this new timeline, the FAA did not even notify NORAD about Flight 175 or Flight 77 until after they had struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, respectively. No indication was given as to how or why the Pentagon's second story could stand for so long, only to be shown wrong by the 9-11 Commission. They were either incompetent or they were lying.

Within the FAA, it is standard operating procedure for the an air traffic controller to notify a superior immediately if any indication is given of a hijacking. If the issue is not resolved immediately, the superior is to contact NORAD, which will then scramble fighter jets to intercept and determine the seriousness of the situation. According to the United States Air Force website, F-15s can go from "scramble order" to 29,000 feet in only two and a half minutes; F-15s fly at over 1800 miles per hour.

Corroborating this is Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD, who stated that after the FAA senses that something is wrong, “it takes about one minute” for it to contact NORAD, after which NORAD can scramble fighter jets “within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States.” These are post-9-11 statements, so we might assume they reflect a change in policy after the attacks, however, according to an Air Traffic Control document sent out in 1998,

The U.S. military has their own network of radars looking over the U.S. borders, and out over the ocean (NORAD). They are tied into the FAA computer to be able to get information on incoming flights from overseas, but if they see a target over international waters headed toward the U.S., without flight plan information, they will call on the "shout" line to the appropriate Center sector for an ID. Sector 66 might get a call to ID a radar target, and if 66 has no datablock or other information on it, the military will usually scramble an intercept flight. Essentially always they turn out to be private pilots ("VFR") not talking to anybody, who stray too far outside the boundary, then get picked up on their way back in. But, procedures are procedures, and they will likely find two F-18's on their tail within 10 or so minutes.

In October, 2001 the Calgary Herald reported that in the year 2000, NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times. Days after 9/11, NORAD spokesman Major Mike Snyder told the Boston Globe that “[NORAD's] fighters routinely intercept aircraft.” This is in stark contrast to NORAD's performance on 9-11.

Even more bizarre is that, despite involving three grossly contradictory stories, the official narrative on NORAD's lack of response is accepted without question. As David Ray Griffin adeptly explains,

Let's say that the police ask Charlie Jones where he was Saturday night. He says he was at the movie theater, but they say, "No, the movie theater has been closed all week." Then Charlie says, "Oh, that's right, I was with my girl friend." But, the police say, "No, we checked with her and she was home with her husband." If at that point Charlie says, "Oh, now I remember, I was home reading my Bible," you are probably not going to believe him.

And yet, that is precisely what the official narrative has told us, and we implicitly trust it and defend it with great vim and verve.

Worse, the third official story is contradicted by considerable evidence, if not common sense. The 9-11 Commission claims NORAD did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed into the South Tower. However, according to a story in the Toronto Star, Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD's headquarters in Colorado, was on the phone with NORAD as he watched Flight 175 strike the South Tower. He then asked, “Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?” NORAD responded, “Yes.”

The Commission's timeline is also contradicted by a memo sent to the Commission by Laura Brown, Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Public Affairs at the FAA. Her memo states,

Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges that included FAA field facilities, the FAA Command Center, FAA headquarters, DOD, the Secret Service, and other government agencies. The US Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately joined the FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD on a separate line. The FAA shared real-time information on the phone bridges about the unfolding events, including information about loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest, including Flight 77.

This indicates that the FAA had been sharing information about Flight 77 even before the formal notification time of 9:24. This memo was read into the Commission record by Commission Ben Veniste on May 23, 2003, but the final report fails to mention this memo.

What we see here is a level of incompetence so great it can only be described as willful. But there is more to the story than just the actions – or lack thereof – of NORAD that day. There is the testimony before the 9-11 commission of the Secretary of Transportation under George W. Bush, Norman Mineta. Conventional wisdom remembers Mineta as the man responsible for grounding all planes in the United States after United 93 allegedly crashed in Shanksville. But his testimony was so explosive, so damning, it is further testimony to the uselessness of our political system and media, that evidence that could have so radically altered the official narrative was presented in the light of day and yet, again, exists only on Youtube and in the minds of conspiracy quacks in their pajamas hiding in their parents' basement.

Not only does it all but implicitly finger at least one of the persons responsible for ordering NORAD to stand down, it is also throws a cog in multiple witnesses' timelines, from Vice President Dick Cheney to the 9-11 Commission itself. But this testimony does not fall into line with the official narrative, which is infallible and sacrosanct, and so Mineta's testimony was scrubbed from the final report and the 9-11 Commission archive. He tells us,

During the time then … the airplane coming in to the Pentagon … there was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant.

This, it would seem, in a sane would, would open up multiple avenues of inquiry and investigation. Who was this unknown young man? We'd like to hear from him. If the Vice President, at the highest level of our government, was aware that Flight 77 was on a collision course with the Pentagon, why weren't evacuation orders issued? Even if it were not known that the west wing of the Pentagon would be struck, rather than any other part of the building which would've caused far greater casualties, at least 125 lives could've been saved. As with the World Trade Center, the more casualties that can be caused, the greater the dramatic impact. And 9-11 was, if anything, designed for maximum dramatic response from the American people.

And finally, the most obvious question raised by Mineta's testimony: what, exactly, were the “orders” the young man inquired about that generated such an annoyed response from Cheney? Clearly the orders were not to shoot Flight 77 down before it struck the Pentagon. Not only is it clear that someone obstructed NORAD from defending the nation during this attack, it is widely believed, and should be assumed, that the Pentagon is defended by retractable surface-to-air missile batteries. Even if this is unfounded, Andrews Air Force Base is only ten miles from the Pentagon.

Consider: it was definitely know by 9:03am – the moment flight 175 struck the South Tower – that this was a massive terrorist attack involving multiple hijacked aircraft. This is a full 34 minutes before Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. It takes a monumental leap of faith to believe, with this knowledge in hand, that this failure was simply the bureaucratic bumblings of a multi-trillion dollar defense mechanism. Richard P Myers, who at the time was in line to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We're pretty good if the threat is coming from outside; we're not so good if it's coming from the inside.” Why is there a difference, what could that difference possibly be, and why did no one press him to elaborate?

War Games

8:37am

Boston Center: Hi, Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS): Is this real-world or exercise?

Boston Center: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

I had not originally intended this chapter to be so involved. Not that I didn't want to cover all aspects of the conspiracy; I realize that not all levels of the conspiracy will be known, but I do know that what is available to us is enough to indict our government for perpetrating the crime, and the 9-11 Commission for aiding and abetting in the coverup. I originally wrote in my blog about 9-11 years ago, but, having expanded on it now in a far more involved manner, I had not realized at the time how woefully inadequate my original piece was. This time, wanting to cover as much of the scope of the conspiracy as I was able, it seemed as though a dozen times I thought I was near completing it, only to be reminded of pieces of the puzzle I'd not covered yet that were just too important to leave out.

That said, I will now attempt to bring this chapter to a close, mercifully with one final impossible coincidence. But this coincidence is actually several coincidences wrapped into one: the war games accuring on 9-11 that mimic, almost to a “T”, the actual terrorist attack going on at the same time.

But first, let's fast forward to the aftermath, where we hear, on multiple occasions, President Bush and members of his administration waxing dramatic about how they could not possibly have envisioned such an attack occurring in the United States; thus this is why our response was so pathetically incompetent.

Never did, in anybody's thought process about how to protect America did we ever think … that, uh …the evildoers … would fly no one, but four commercial aircraft into precious US targets – never. – George W Bush, September 16, 2001

I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center; take another one and slam it into the Pentagon. – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002

Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government could envision flying airplanes into buildings … on such a massive scale. – George W Bush, April 13, 2004

That turns out not to be true. According to an April 18, 2004 piece in USA Today,

In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.

One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say.

NORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred. It said the scenarios outlined were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide exercises.

“Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft," the statement said. "These exercises tested track detection and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures.”

One such exercise, known as Amalgam Virgo, took place in early June, 2001. One scenario simulated involved a commercial aircraft being hijacked and flown into the US Capitol building. The excuse given in this case is that these scenarios involved hijacked planes being flown in from foreign countries, not from within the United States. We must, however, ask: what's the difference? It has already been established that NORAD was aware of the hijackings with enough advanced notice to foment at least some type of response; yet remarkably, we are expected to believe that after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon and the event was all but over, a light bulb went off in their heads and they finally thought, “Hey, aren't we supposed to be defending this nation against this attack? We'd better get some planes in the air!”

To add to the confusion, and to add to plausible deniability, a number of the same types of war games were taking place the exact same morning of the attacks. What a coincidence.

Cynthia McKinney: We had four war games going on on September 11, and the question that I tried to pose before the Secretary (Rumsfeld) had to go to lunch was whether or not the activities of the four war games going on on September 11 actually impaired our ability to respond to the attacks.

Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff:The answer to the question is, no it did not impair our response. In fact … it enhanced our ability to respond.

This is one of those instances where common sense must be hurdled in order to swallow the official narrative. Were there any war games going on during the Payne Stewart incident, or any of the dozens of incidents where NORAD scrambled fighters to intercept wayward private and commercial aircraft? If interceptions of this type are “routine”, and NORAD's response to the attacks of the day was anything but routine, then how could the coinciding war games have actually helped NORAD's response, which was, literally, non-existent?

Vigilant Guardian was the name of Pentagon war game exercises conducted every year until September 11, 2001. In fact, on that date a Vigilant Guardian exercise was in its second day, with one of the scenarios involving hijacked airplanes targeting New York City. Fort Belvoir, located 10 miles south of the Pentagon, ran its own drill that day, intended to test security against a terrorist attack. The National Reconnaissance Office in Virginia ran its own drill beginning at 8:45am, conducted in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency, in which a hijacked plane is crashed into their building.

Meanwhile, under an exercise known as Norther Vigilance, fighter jets are sent to Canada and Alaska to monitor a fleet of Russian MiGs running their own training exercise. As part of Northern Vigilance, inputs, or “phantoms”, were inserted onto military radar screens, indicating errant hijacked aircraft for them to track. Phantoms appear real to those participating in the exercise, so that, on September 11, anyone participating in Northern Vigilance would not be able to tell the difference between the phantoms and the actual hijacked aircraft attacking New York and Washington, DC. Also during that morning, three F-16s out of Andrews AFB, which is about 10 miles from the Pentagon, are ordered to fly over 180 nautical miles away for a training mission in North Carolina.

So to recap, on the morning of September 11, the military and various intelligence agencies just so happen to be simulating drills, which involve, among other things, terrorist attacks, with scenarios including hijacked aircraft going in and out of radar, some which are crashed into buildings in New York and Washington, DC, while fighter jets are diverted away from the Northeast Corridor where the attacks take place. Not only should you not think anything conspiracy-like about all of this, but you are expected to believe this activity actually enhanced the military's response to the attack, not hindered it. Who, exactly, are the quacks here?

The chain of evidence – this mountain of damning facts that point incontrovertibly to a false flag black op – goes on and on, from the “put options” on American and United Airlines bought in massive numbers prior to the attack, to the numerous officials being told not to fly that day (the mayor of Los Angeles was told by none other than Condolisa Rice herself not to fly that day). The official conspiracy theory and those perpetrating it need not trouble themselves with ludicrous, easily disproven facts and assertions; impossible coincidences. Most people cannot distinguish between unofficial and official conspiracy theories; in terms of conspiracy theories, there only exists the unofficial, which they do not consider “unofficial”. It's just crazy, period. They will never examine these facts to discover the validity of the official story, because there is no middle ground between the government's story – historical fact – and the kooks and the quacks – up there with Elvis still being alive, the moon landing being staged, and people being abducted by aliens.

Rational thought does not play a part in the discussion. The very idea that the US government would do such a thing is a blasphemy so horrid that the evidence cannot be intelligently dissected. The sense of guilt one feels in considering such an allegation is an insurmountable obstacle to seeing the truth. The evidence, no matter how compelling, no matter how obvious, is background noise. The ego in its vigorous defense of its identities, particularly with its sense of patriotism, completely tunes them out. It cannot even be admitted that the nutjobs and the kooks actually may actually be onto something here, which, while not proving or suggesting there may have been a government plot involved, presents questions that demand answers. They would find themselves immediately outcast; their friends and family would mock them behind their backs; they would become a figure of fun. In today's world, social standing and prestige is infinitely more important than the truth.

Despite all of this, there exists a rapidly expanding minority in this country that, with the wealth of information available to them in this information age, cannot ignore the truth any longer. With the wars based on lies, with the maniacal assault on our civil liberties, the youth of today – and many of our elders – do not have the same blind patriotic attachment to their government as previous generations. Sooner or later, the truth will permeate our entire society. There are only two types of people: those who know 9-11 was an inside job, and those who will.

47 Shot in Weekend Violence; Teen and 56-Year-Old Bystander Killed

2011-09-06T08:39:00.002-05:00

Things have taken a serious turn towards barbarism this year. Bloomberg wants something done about illegal guns, but not by his administration. Not by his law enforcement. The Feds. But what can be done about guns if they're already illegal? New York has the most draconian gun laws in the whole country. Like anything the government "declares war" against, declaring war on guns only made the problem worse.

NBC New York

Three were shot at a parade in Brooklyn. Bystander killed while daughter looks on

Three people were killed and two police officers were wounded in a shooting a few blocks from the annual West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn, capping a violent holiday weekend in which 47 people were injured by gunfire.

Bullet fragments hit one police officer in the left arm and chest Monday night. He was hospitalized but was expected to survive. Another officer was grazed by a bullet.

Two shooters were killed along with a bystander, 56-year-old Denise Gay, who was shot while sitting on a stoop with her daughter nearby just two doors down from the exchange of gunfire.

Mayor Bloomberg said Gay's death was "a senseless murder, and another painful reminder I think of what happens when elected officials in Washington fail to take the problem of illegal guns seriously."

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the gunman who killed Gay had an extensive criminal history, including criminal possession of a firearm and assault and drug charges.

The gunshots rang out just after 9 p.m. Monday in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood after the hours-long parade, which also was marred by fatal shootings in 2003 and 2005. Post-parade parties are common.

The shootings started as an exchange between two armed men, and when officers who had been assigned to parade duties arrived at the scene, they were fired upon and returned fire, police said.

Witnesses said the shooting went on for at least 30 seconds. Thomas Kaminsky, who lives near where the shootings occurred, said it sounded like machine-gun fire outside his building.

Earlier Monday, as revelers filled the streets in colorful costumes during the parade, separate gun violence brought the festivities to a stop in spots, scattering the panicked crowd. Police said four people were shot and wounded along the parade route and a 15-year-old boy was grazed by a bullet nearby.

A city councilman was briefly detained after getting into a confrontation with police after the parade.

The holiday weekend was particularly violent and included a Sunday shooting in the Bronx in which eight people, including children, were wounded. Four other people were shot in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn early Monday, including a 17-year-old boy who died.

The upcoming 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and holiday weekend violence had put the city "on heightened alert," Kelly said before the parade stepped off.

Police helicopters hovered overhead during the parade, and officers on scooters and on foot patrolled the surrounding blocks.

Officer Omar Medina, 36, was being treated for his arm and chest wounds. Officer Avichaim Dicken, whose arm was grazed, was at a second hospital.

Before the violence Monday, the parade thundered down a Brooklyn thoroughfare with its usual colorful, musical energy.

The annual Labor Day parade celebrates the culture of the Caribbean islands and is one of the city's largest outdoors events. Modeled on traditional Carnival festivities, it features dancers wearing enormous feathered costumes, music and plenty of food.

Labor leader calls for war on Republicans

2011-09-06T08:34:00.002-05:00

This nation is about to tear itself apart. I'll be far away from it all, hopefully finding my own quiet corner of the world where the government and these mindless thugs won't have the time or the care to find me.

Real Clear Politics

Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa had some profane, combative words for Republicans while warming up the crowd for President Obama in Detroit, Michigan on Monday.

"We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They've got a war, they got a war with us and there's only going to be one winner. It's going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We're going to win that war," Jimmy Hoffa said to a heavily union crowd.

"President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong," Hoffa added.

Obama addressed the crowd shortly after Hoffa.

UPDATE: Obama Says He Is "Proud" Of Hoffa After Union Leader's Remarks

The eBook...

2011-09-05T16:31:00.002-05:00

...has 49 pages, 4 chapters and a preface. Moving along smoothly, should be ready in a few weeks. An incomplete table of contents is listed below. This is subject to change of chapter names and/or change of order. I'm basically just writing by the seat of my pants, and I'll organize the chaos later.

Preface: Humility
Chapter One: Everybody Wants to Rule the World
Chapter Two: Mind Control
- Media
- Education
- Fat, Stupid, Lazy and Weak
  - Sodium Fluoride
  - Vaccines
  - Prescription Drugs
  - High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)
  - Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)
  - Aspartame
  - A Fascist Umbrella
- The Ego
  - The Conspiracy Theory
Chapter Three: Eugenics
- Genesis
- Eugenics Evolves
- Climate Change: A Front for Global Population Control
- True Environmental Crimes
  - BP Oil Spill
  - Hydraulic Fracking
  - Genetically Modified Foods
Chapter Four: Dreamworld

I still have to write or compile chapters on the the futility of the political system and our participation in it, economic collapse as a segue to global government, post collapse survival, religions and secret societies, and the revolution of consciousness, and more. I'm really excited about it.

Even Goldman Sachs Secretly Believes That An Economic Collapse Is Coming

2011-09-04T09:28:00.001-05:00

They would know. They were instrumental in bringing it about.

The Economic Collapse

Goldman Sachs is doing it again. Goldman is telling the public that everything is going to be just fine, but meanwhile they are advising their top clients to bet on a huge financial collapse. On August 16th, a 54 page report authored by Goldman strategist Alan Brazil was distributed to institutional clients. The general public was not intended to see this report. Fortunately, some folks over at the Wall Street Journal got their hands on a copy and they have filled us in on some of the details. It turns out that Goldman Sachs secretly believes that an economic collapse is coming, and they have some very interesting ideas about how to make money in the turbulent financial environment that we will soon be entering. In the report, Brazil says that the U.S. debt problem cannot be solved with more debt, that the European sovereign debt crisis is going to get even worse and that there are large numbers of financial institutions in Europe that are on the verge of collapse. If this is what people at the highest levels of the financial world are talking about, perhaps we should all start paying attention.

There is a tremendous amount of fear in the global financial community right now. As I wrote about the other day, the financial world is about to hit the panic button. Things could start falling apart at any time. Most of these big banks will not admit how bad things are publicly, but privately there is a whole lot of freaking out going on.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Brazil believes that "as much as $1 trillion in capital may be needed to shore up European banks; that small businesses in the U.S., a past driver of job production, are still languishing; and that China's growth may not be sustainable."

Perhaps most startling of all is what the report has to say about the debt problems of the United States and Europe.

For example, this following excerpt from the report sounds like it could have come straight from The Economic Collapse Blog....

“Solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. In the US, Treasury debt growth financed the US consumer but has not had enough of an impact on job growth. Can the US continue to depreciate the world’s base currency?”

Remember, this statement was not written by some guy on the Internet. A top Goldman Sachs analyst put it into a report for institutional investors.

The report also goes into great detail about the financial crisis in Europe. Brazil writes about how the euro is headed for trouble and about how dozens of financial institutions in Europe could potentially be in danger of collapse.

But in any environment Goldman Sachs thinks that it can make money. The following is how Business Insider summarized the advice that Brazil gave in the report regarding how to make money off of the impending collapse in Europe....

Buy a six-month put option on the Euro versus the Swiss Franc, thus betting the Euro will drop against the Franc (the Franc being the currency that an official Goldman report recently referred to as the most overvalued in the world)
Buy a five-year credit default swap on an index of European corporate debt—the iTraxx 9. This is a bet that some of these companies will default, and your insurance policy, the CDS, will pay off

This is so typical of Goldman Sachs. They will say one thing publicly and then turn around and do the total opposite privately.

For example, prior to the financial crisis of 2008, Goldman Sachs was putting together mortgage-backed securities that they knew were garbage and marketing them to investors as AAA-rated investments. On top of that, Goldman then often privately bet against those exact same securities.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs has even acknowledged that the investment bank engaged in "improper" behavior during 2006 and 2007.

For much more on the history of all this, please see this article: "How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America In Four Easy Steps".

So will Goldman Sachs ever get into serious trouble for any of this?

No, of course not.

Yeah, they will get a slap on the wrist from time to time, but the reality is that the top levels of the federal government are absolutely littered with ex-employees of Goldman Sachs. Goldman is one of the "too big to fail" banks and they are going to continue to do pretty much whatever they feel like doing.

Sadly, the power of the "too big to fail" banks just continues to grow. At this point, the "big six" U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now possess assets equivalent to approximately 60 percent of America's gross national product.

Goldman Sachs was the second biggest donor to Barack Obama's campaign in 2008, so don't expect Obama to do anything about any of this.

We have a financial system that is deeply, deeply corrupt and all of that corruption is a big reason why things are falling apart.

Sadly, the 54 page report mentioned above is right - we really are facing a global debt meltdown and we really are heading for an economic collapse.

You aren't going to hear the truth from the mainstream media or from our politicians because "keeping people calm" is much more of a priority to them than telling the truth is.

The debt crisis in the United States is unsustainable and the debt crisis in Europe is unsustainable. Right now we are in the calm before the storm, and nobody knows exactly when the storm is going to strike.

But let there be no doubt - it is coming.

The amazing prosperity that we have enjoyed for the last several decades has largely been a debt-fueled illusion. It was a great party while it lasted, but now it is coming to an end and the aftermath of the coming crash is going to be absolutely horrific.

Keep watch and get prepared. We don't know exactly when the collapse is going to happen, but it is definitely on the way and now even Goldman Sachs is admitting that.

Amish farm banned from selling unpasteurised milk after sting operation by Feds

2011-09-02T10:21:00.002-05:00

Tales from a free country. It's not like consumers purchase their milk not knowing whatever risks are involved, even though unpasteurized milk is unquestionably more safe than the crap they sell at the grocery store, laden with genetically modified growth hormones, blood and pus, not to mention devoid of essential nutrients and enzymes, and made all the more toxic through the process of homogenization. No, it's the SWAT team for these Amish terrorists. Meanwhile, the FDA endorses literally countless food toxins, including aspartame, MSG, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, and genetically modified foods.

Daily Mail

An Amish farm in Pennsylvania has been stopped from selling contraband milk after a year-long federal government sting operation.

The Rainbow Acres Farm was found to have been smuggling banned unpasteurised milk to customers in Maryland.

Crack down: An Amish farm in Pennsylvania has been stopped from selling contraband milk after a year-long federal government sting operation

Raw milk drinkers claim that pasteurisation eliminates good bacteria and changes the taste.

But the Food and Drug Administration say unpasteurised milk can carry harmful bacteria such as salmonella, E.coli and listeria.

Sales are illegal in 11 states and the District, with other states having varying restrictions on purchase or consumption.

The FDA began to look into the farm, owned by Dan Allgyer, when an investigator used aliases to sign up to the farm’s internet group and placed orders for raw milk to be delivered to Maryland.

By crossing the state border the milk was breaking the FDA’s ban on interstate sales of raw milk.

The court papers noted that the jugs of milk were also not labelled, which is a violation of FDA regulations.

The agency then raided the farm in a 5am inspection, which found coolers labelled with Maryland town names.

My Allgyer formed a club and had customers become shareholders in an attempt to avoid the ban, but the FDA went to court last week to stop the operation.

Angry customers have insisted that they should have freedom of choice regarding their food.

Karin Edgett, a Washington DC resident, told the Washington Times: ‘I look at this as the FDA is in cahoots with the large milk producers.

‘I don’t want the FDA and my tax dollars to go to shut down a farm that hasn’t had any complaints against it. They’re producing good food, and the consumers are extremely happy with it.’

Security on rise nationwide for 9/11 anniversary

2011-09-02T10:14:00.001-05:00

Don't forget to be afraid of the non-specific threat. Be ever vigilant, citizen!

Associated Press

The federal government is escalating security around the country in preparation for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and conducting confidential briefings with state and local law enforcement organizations. But officials say there is no specific indication that a terror plot against the U.S. is under way.

Americans can expect more security at airports, mass transit stations, U.S. borders, government buildings and major athletic events over the next month, said an intelligence official who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive security matters.

The FBI and Homeland Security Department have been briefing state and local law enforcement agencies on potential terror threats to the U.S. and ways to increase security in their communities. The briefings are routine, and security has been enhanced for other major events in the past decade. But the significance of the 10-year anniversary of the worst terror attacks on U.S. soil is not lost on security officials, who fear that someone with terrorist sympathies might see 9/11 as an opportunity to make a statement.

"It's been a long buildup as we approach the anniversary of 9/11," said Sean Duggan, assistant chief at the Scottsdale, Ariz., Police Department. Duggan said his department gets daily updates from the FBI and Homeland Security Department. But over the past two months, the focus has been on the 10th anniversary of the terror hijackings.

"We know this is a significant date," Duggan said. "Other than taking physical precautions, we have not been briefed on any specific threat other than the obvious - knowing what this date means in our history."

Events are planned around the country to commemorate the nearly 3,000 people killed in the 2001 attacks.

"While there is currently no specific or credible threat, appropriate and prudent security measures are ready to detect and prevent plots against the United States should they emerge," Homeland Security Department spokesman Matt Chandler said.

President Barack Obama said earlier this month that the threat of a plot by a lone terrorist is particularly troublesome.

"The risk that we're especially concerned over right now is the lone-wolf terrorist, somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide-scale massacres of the sort that we saw in Norway recently," Obama said.

In July, 69 people at a youth camp in Norway were shot to death. Authorities said a white supremacist carried out the attack with the purpose of saving Norway and the rest of Europe from Muslims and multiculturalism.

"You know, when you've got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it's a lot harder to trace those lone-wolf operators," Obama said.

Some of the first information gleaned from Osama bin Laden's compound after he was killed in May indicated that, as recently as February 2010, al-Qaida considered plans to attack the U.S. on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But counterterrorism officials said they believe the planning never got beyond the initial phase and had no recent intelligence pointing to an active plot.

One idea outlined in handwritten notes pulled from bin Laden's Pakistani hideout was to tamper with an unspecified U.S. rail track so that a train would fall off the track at a valley or a bridge, according to a joint FBI and Homeland Security Department bulletin to law enforcement officials around the country. The al-Qaida planners noted that if they attacked a train by tilting it, the plan would only succeed once because the tilting would be spotted the next time.

Even before the raid, intelligence officials for years have warned that al-Qaida is interested in attacking major U.S. cities on holidays, anniversaries - including the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks - and other dates that are uniquely American.

White House spokesman Clark Stevens, asked about the briefings, said the president's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has had senior-level meetings over the past four months about threats to the U.S. and appropriate responses leading up to the anniversary.

"These senior-level reviews of our security posture will continue through the 9/11 anniversary and beyond, in order to ensure the federal government remains fully prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to mitigate any potential attacks," Stevens said in a statement.

US Energy Department panel endorses shale fracking

2011-09-02T10:05:00.002-05:00

They say it can help save the environment...by pumping millions of gallons of chemicals into the ground water and aquifers. I don't know about you, but when I can light my tap water on fire, that just screams eco-friendly. Notice that the US Department of Energy, like all government bureaucracies, is stacked with lobbyists for the industry they're tasked to regulate.

Natural News

Hydraulic fracturing, also known as "fracking," for the purpose of extracting natural gas from the earth involves flooding it with millions of gallons of chemical-laden water, a practice that by all estimates is damaging the environment to some extent.

But a US Energy Department (ED) advisory panel, which happens to be padded with members connected to the natural gas industry, insists that fracking is safe, and even contends that it will help to lower the carbon dioxide emissions allegedly responsible for so-called climate change.

A recent report in The Washington Post (WP) explains the ED panel's notion that, despite continual outcry over fracking operations polluting rivers and groundwater supplies, natural gas fracking can safely continue as long as fracking companies agree to be more open about their actions, and comply with monitoring requirements that track environmental impact and make this information publicly available.

But in an industry that is already knowingly hiding the truth about its polluting activities -- and secretly dumping its toxic waste directly into the environment, for instance -- it is naive for ED committee members to purport that simply telling drilling companies to be more forthcoming is going to have a substantially beneficial impact.

Fracking, no matter how closely monitored, pollutes the environment in devastating ways.

In order to release oil and gas from shale rock deep underground, giant machines must force large amounts of water, sand, chemicals, and radioactive elements deep into the earth's upper crust in order to crack the rock that potentially holds this valuable fuel. But in the process, the resultant radioactive chemical cocktail seeps into water tables, wells, rivers, and lakes, as well as the various drinking water supplies to which these sources are fed.

Even if the fracking industry suddenly decides to be more open and honest about the fact that drilling fluids are severely contaminating soil and water, the only thing that will change is that now everyone will be aware of it.

Thanks to an energy bill passed by Congress back in 2005 that exempts the natural gas drilling industry from having to comply with the US Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), fracking operations are free to pollute as much as they please -- they just might have to disclose this fact at some point in the future.

The Shale Gas Subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SGS) which put out the recent report endorsing fracking does not even address this SDWA exemption. As a result, its recommendations are meaningless in all practical terms, as they will do absolutely nothing to stop the tide of environmental pollution being spewed by the fracking industry.

Current water purification techniques are unable to capture methane and radon, for instance, both of which come from fracking. Consequently, drinking water supplies throughout Pennsylvania, which is a fracking hot spot due to its location in the Marcellus Shale Formation region, are becoming increasingly toxic with no end in sight.

So as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues its ongoing investigation into the environmental impacts of fracking, the SGS committee comes along and makes a few useless recommendations that it says will address the problems with fracking, but that in reality will do absolutely nothing to solve them.

At least six SGS committee members have ties to the natural gas industry

Sources for this story include:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/033464_shale_fracking_environment.html#ixzz1Wo9ptTjn

MTV's Video Music Awards Scores Largest Audience Ever

2011-09-02T10:02:00.003-05:00

I keep hearing people talk about an awakening. I think this is inevitable at some point, but right now, I'm not really seeing it. Unless the numbers of the enlightened and the pathologically stupid that are expanding equally. I'm not even gonna post the link.

Twelve-Year-Old's Green Tea Stand Shut Down in Massachusetts

2011-09-02T08:51:00.003-05:00

Hey, the police are just doing their jobs. Even though they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, not obey local jurisdictions and their fascist edicts designed to train people to be slaves. The Nazis were just following orders too, and everything they did was legal.

Well it’s not exactly lemonade but it’ll do. Christopher Carr’s twelve-year-old stepson had set up a smoothie and green-tea stand near their house when they moved back to the States after the earthquake in Japan. After they’d set up shop, Christopher took his daughter back inside to get some lunch, leaving his son to manage things at the stand.

After my daughter finished eating and as we approached the end of our street where the drink stand was, I could see from afar that the sign was pulled up and put away, the cooler was shut with everything which we had so carefully arranged on the tray table put away, and my stepson was huddled up and sitting on the rail, staring out between his knees at the ocean.

“What happened?” I asked when I got down there. I wondered if he had gotten discouraged that no one was buying his drinks or maybe that no one could understand his accent. Or maybe he was just lonely down there by himself.

“The police told me to pack up and go home,” he said. Or, more accurately I discovered after making a few phone calls, the town police swung by and wished him good luck, and then afterwards, “someone in brown” came by and made my stepson stop selling drinks at the end of our street, because this required a permit, and my stepson did not have a permit to sell drinks.

After hearing a little more from my stepson and talking to the town police, I discovered that it was the Massachusetts State Police that broke up our lemonade stand. After attempting several times to contact the State Police, I reached only answering machines. Apparently, having someone on call on weekends is not in the Massachusetts State Police’s budget (but breaking up lemonade stands is somehow cost-effective).

This may be the first case of state police shutting down a kid’s green-tea stand, but the list of lemonade stands being closed down by various government agencies is long and growing.

Lemonade stand shutdowns may not be the same violation of liberty that no-knock botched SWAT raids or the incarceration of innocent people are, but they reflect the same mentality. It’s the mentality that needs reforming. No simple task.

For a list of lemonade shutdowns go here.

Why TV’s ‘Parks and Recreation’ should tackle the lemonade shutdown issue.

Updates after the leap…

[Update III - earlier updates below]

So a lot of confusion obviously exists around the events described in Christopher’s blog post. This is understandable, but I don’t think it means we’re any closer to any conclusive answers. From what I can tell, trying to parse out the details, here is what happened: Christopher left the stand briefly while his 12-year-old watched it. When he returned the boy told him police shut it down. He mentioned they had a brown (possibly tan) uniform. When Christopher phoned the local police, they told him this:

My stepson said “brown uniform” and “bike”. When I mentioned this to the Hull, Massachusetts town police switchboard operator or whoever I talked to on the phone, she immediately said something like “Oh, that’s the Staties. They have jurisdiction there.” After that, I Googled “Massachusetts State Police”, searched for “contact” on the main page, and got this page: http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eopsutilities&L=1&sid=Eeops&U=ContactUsInfo. I clicked on “State Police” on the lower right and got this: http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eopsutilities&sid=Eeops&U=ContactUsInfo#a16. I called the number in question several times and no one answered.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble, or tarnish the image of one police department over another. I’m just reporting what happened.

So Christopher extrapolated from this they they must be talking about the DCR Rangers (per my update below). It’s possible also that the local switchboard gave him the run-around, or that his son’s description of events were off, or that it was a Ranger on beach patrol over-stepping his authority, or any number of other possibilities.

It does appear that it was not state police, or at least not your typical state police. However, I have no reason to suspect that the events in question did not happen. If someone was going to make up a story about the state police, I’m pretty sure they’d get the uniform right. However, when you’re dealing with kids in a stressful situation, multiple state agencies, etc. there’s bound to be some confusion. The local police definitely told Christopher it was state police, and maybe it was or maybe it was some other state agency in charge of patrolling the beach.

Nobody is trying to paint the cops in a bad light here. Cops and other state agencies across the country really are shutting down lemonade stands and yard sales and so forth. This isn’t an outlandish story by any stretch of the imagination. In these cases, the police are often just doing their job and applying the law – even if it is a bad law, the cops didn’t write it themselves.

If I get any more details I’ll publish them.

P.S. I think it’s also important to note that someone in the government shut down a twelve-year-old kid’s green-tea stand. Whether this was state police, rangers, or the mayor doesn’t really matter. The state is cracking down on kids selling drinks for fun. That’s ridiculous, and I think there are probably plenty of people working in government – cops, politicians, etc. – who would agree that it’s ridiculous.

Preparedness vs fear mongering

2011-08-29T08:20:00.004-05:00

It's not a contradiction that has been lost on me, that I incessantly preach preparedness but mocked the hysteria surrounding Hurricane Irene this weekend. No doubt friends and family thought to themselves, but this is what you talk about all the time ... being prepared. However there is a contradiction lost on most people, that, while preppers like me are paranoid and irrationally worried about the future, when the government overreacts and whips up unwarranted hysteria, they're just looking out for your best interests. Hey, at least they didn't underreact!

Indeed, the ability to bug out should be on top of your preparedness checklist. And hey, if you want to bug out in the face of a relatively weak storm, there's no harm in that and I certainly won't criticize you. If I had still lived in NJ, three blocks from the ocean and only a few miles from where Irene made landfall, I probably would've moved inland, just in case my home got flooded, which my neighborhood was certainly prone to. 75mph winds are, frankly, more of a nuisance than anything.

What I'm talking about is blatant fearmongering from the media and the government. Today, the National Hurricane Center is on the defensive, although I'm not sure why. Sure, they predicted Irene would reach category 4 status, while it never got above 2. This was while the hurricane was still in the Caribbean. But I don't recall them telling anyone this was Katrina in the East, and even as the despicable mayor Bloomberg and Jabba the Hut, governor of NJ, were predicting Armageddon, the worst prediction that was made was that Irene would be a hurricane in name only as it hit New York City - with winds of 75mph, as opposed to 65mph in actuality.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg ordered the forced evacuation of 300,000 people, which I am happy to report, went mostly unheeded. But to force compliance with that evacuation, he ordered mass transit shut down a full 14 hours before Irene struck NY. This action was unprecedented; not even on 9-11 was mass transit shut down. Ditto NJ, where a state of emergency was declared 2 days before the hurricane hit, and mass transit shut down along the same timetable as New York City.

Today, damage control is in full effect, and the media and government spin is still in overdrive. Whereas prior to the hurricane they were hyping the danger, now they must hype the damage, lest the impression be given that they overreacted. While most people are clearing the twigs and leaves from their lawns, and pumping water from their basements, Obama holds press conferences with Napolitano, making sure people are adequately afraid of the hurricane's wrath long after it crossed the Canadian border. Jabba the Hut is claiming damage in his state alone could be in the tens of billions, a ludicrous assertion.

What we have just witnessed is the government and the media, under fire and losing support from the plebs, for good reason, trying to assert themselves to prove to people they are relevant. It was a test balloon set aloft to see how much hysteria could be whipped up over what was, in relative terms, a non-event. Just how much, exactly, are they able to dictate your reality? Can they make you abandon common sense and whip yourself up into hysteria when all indications are it's completely unwarranted?

I lived in NJ the first 36 years of my life, and, while not experiencing hurricanes on the same regularity and intensity as, say, Florida, I've experienced my fair share. My memory may not fully serve me, but, if the storm actually managed to maintain hurricane strength by the time it reached the cooler waters off the mid-Atlantic, only one was higher than category one (Gloria, 1985, category two). During any of these storms, I can't recall even losing power for any extended period. Even during Gloria, the worst hurricane I've seen, if power was lost it was not for more than a few hours; the most extensive damage I can remember was a neighbor's fence being destroyed, and my pool cover blowing off.

While there is always the danger of freak accidents happening, like a tree breaking in half during a particularly strong gust and falling on your house or car, or of course storm surge or flooding in coastal areas, these storms are of no particular concern. There are numerous weather events that occur yearly that can cause similar damage and life threatening situations - a severe thunderstorm, the numerous nor'easters that strike every year - yet by uttering the word hurricane they expect us to be adequately terrified and feign great anger and disdain if you're not.

What's just as maddening as the initial overreaction is the fear being spread that warnings during a more perilous event will then go unheeded. This is to say that people, lacking common sense or any ability to think for themselves, will only have the government and its kept media to rely upon to dictate to them how dangerous any given situation is. As if we won't take serious, on our own account, the approach of a category 4 storm, and then ignore the government's warnings because they overreacted the last time. I suppose for many people, this will be the case. I've actually been scorned by family members for not adequately expressing concern for their well-being, as if their well-being was ever really threatened. There is fantasy and there is reality: the fantasy was that this was a dangerous and perilous storm; the reality is the collective yawn would be palpable if they called it a nor'easter. Kind of dangerous, kind of destructive, but to the overwhelming majority of people, a nuisance. A minor inconvenience. While I wasn't there to witness this storm, I am certain I've experienced nor'easters that were far more perilous than hurricane Irene.

Meanwhile, I experience tornado warnings every two weeks or so, which never make national news, and therefore never prompt worried calls from friends and family. Your typical southern thunderstorm, with its violent lightning, high winds, and deluge rains, not to mention occasional tornado, is far more frightening than a low-end hurricane any day, I assure you.

The truth is, TPTB have spent many generations crafting a society based on fear. There is always something to be afraid of; your life is in constant peril. The more fear and panic they can generate, the more they can control your actions. They want you to look at the normal ebbs and flows of life as if it's a constant struggle to keep from being murdered by terrorists, getting sick from viruses, or being killed by minor weather events, etc. People who don't take these things seriously are castigated; others find your lack of concern, however warranted, insulting. As if it's based on a lack of love or compassion, rather than a refusal to think and feel how others try to make you think and feel. I don't ask, "How high?" when they tell me to jump, and I don't apologize for it. Is that a lack of compassion, or do I just have too much faith in people?

Or, is it that we need to grow a set of balls, and, while preparing for the worst, not make an apocalypse out of nothing?

People, in their hysterics, take severe issue with me calling this a non-event, ignoring everything else I've said. Of course an event occurred, and it cost many people dearly. But rather than treating this like it's the sort of thing that just happens, naturally, every day, somewhere in the world, people insist on relishing the role of victim, demanding the whole world feel guilty for not suffering along with them, or not showering them with empathy as if they were helpless children. Death is a part of life, and anyone who promised you a life free from danger, lied to you. Be prepared, not an hysterical victim.

On Sabbatical

2011-08-27T12:11:00.002-05:00

I will try to post as much as humanly possible, but for the next several weeks or months I'll be writing an eBook, which will mostly be an amalgamation of essays I've written over the last 3 years. This, along with cultivating my fall garden, my job, and my family, will take up the bulk of my time. So keep dropping by, and I'll look forward to getting the book finished as soon as I can. It's going to be epic.

HALF of U.S. population will be obese by 2030 experts predict as the number could swell to 164 million Americans

2011-08-27T11:59:00.002-05:00

You may not be free to do many things here in Amurr'ca, but at least you're free to eat yourself into total dependence on the State, and you'll have legions of morbidly obese slobs to tell you how beautiful you are. It's not about your appearance. It's about your complete lack of self esteem. It's about willfully succumbing to an establishment who wants a society full of fat, weak, and stupid people who can't fight back when they push us around, and wouldn't want to fight back at that. Why bite the hand that feeds you? And feeds you. And feeds you.

By 2030 the number of obese Americans could increase from 99million in 2008 to 164million
In the U.K. expected increase of 15million to 26million
Daily Mail -
About half of both men and women in the U.S. will be obese by 2030 if current trends continue, health experts warned today.

Obesity is fast replacing tobacco as the single most important preventable cause of chronic non-communicable diseases, and will add an extra 7.8million cases of diabetes, 6.8million cases of heart disease and stroke, and 539,000 cases of cancer in the U.S. within the next two decades.

Some 32 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women are now obese in the U.S., according to a research team led by Claire Wang at the Mailman School of Public Health in Columbia University in New York.

Epidemic: Approximately 32 per cent of men and 35 percent of women are now obese in the U.S.
They published their findings in a special series of four papers on obesity in The Lancet.

The findings showed Obesity is most widespread in the UK and the U.S. among the world's leading economies.

In Britain, obesity rates will balloon to between 41-48 per cent for men and 35-43 per cent for women by 2030 from what is now 26 per cent for both sexes, they warned.

'An extra 668,000 cases of diabetes, 461,000 of heart disease and 130,000 cancer cases would result,' they wrote.

Due to overeating and insufficient exercise, obesity is now a growing problem everywhere and experts are warning about its ripple effects on health and healthcare spending.

Obesity raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, various cancers, hypertension, high cholesterol, among others.

Because of obesity, the U.S. can expect to spend an extra 2.6 per cent on its overall healthcare bill, or $66billion per year, while Britain's bill will grow by two per cent, or 2billion per year, Wang and colleagues warned.

Health risks: Obesity raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, various cancers, hypertension and high cholesterol
In Japan and China, one in 20 women is obese, compared with one in 10 in the Netherlands, one in four in Australia and seven in 10 in Tonga, according to another paper led by Boyd Swinburn and Gary Sacks of the WHO Collaborating Center for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

Worldwide, around 1.5billion adults are overweight and a further 0.5billion are obese, with 170million children classified as overweight or obese. Obesity takes up between two to six per cent of healthcare costs in many countries.

'Increased supply of cheap, tasty, energy-dense food, improved food distribution and marketing, and the strong economic forces driving consumption and growth are the key drivers of the obesity epidemic,' Swinburn and Sacks wrote.

The health experts urged governments to lead the fight in reversing the obesity epidemic.

'These include taxes on unhealthy food and drink (such as sugar sweetened beverages) and restrictions on food and beverage TV advertising to children,' wrote a team led by Steven Gortmaker at the Harvard School of Public Health, which published the fourth paper in the series.

Economic Growth Slows to Crawl, GDP Increase at 1%

2011-08-26T09:09:00.002-05:00

Hurray for fake economic numbers that still suck. Save us, Ben Bernanke! Destroy the dollar some more, so everything costs more, and consumer spending continues to plummet, and businesses have to lay more people off to offset rising costs. That's how you fix the economy!

CNBC

The U.S. economy grew much slower than previously thought in the second quarter as business inventories and exports were less robust, a government report showed on Friday, although consumer spending was revised up.

Gross domestic product growth rose at annual rate of 1.0 percent the Commerce Department said, a downward revision of its prior estimate of 1.3 percent. It also said after-tax corporate profits rose at the fastest pace in a year.

Economists had expected output growth to be revised down to 1.1 percent. In the first quarter, the economy advanced just 0.4 percent. The government's second GDP estimate for the quarter confirmed growth almost stalled in the first six months of this year.

The United States is on a recession watch after a massive sell-off in the stock market knocked down consumer and business sentiment. The plunge in share prices followed Standard & Poor's decision to strip the nation of its top notch AAA credit rating and a spreading sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

While sentiment has deteriorated, data such as industrial production, retail sales and employment suggest the economy could avoid an outright contraction.

The GDP report comes as central bankers from around the globe gathered for a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will deliver the keynote address on Friday, which will be watched for any sign a further easing of U.S. monetary policy is on the way to support the ailing economy.

The downward revisions to second-quarter growth came as businesses accumulated less stock than previously estimated. Business inventories increased $40.6 billion instead of $49.6 billion, cutting 0.23 percentage point from GDP growth during the quarter.

However, the slow build-up of inventories means goods are not piling up on shelves, which should support growth in the third quarter. Excluding inventories, the economy grew at a 1.2 percent rate.

Output was also curbed by exports, which grew at a 3.1 percent pace instead of 6.0 percent. Imports increased at a 1.9 percent rate rather than 1.3 percent. That left a slightly wider trade deficit and trade barely contributed to GDP growth. Trade had previously been estimated to have added 0.58 percentage point to overall output.

The drag from business inventories was offset by consumer spending, which was revised up to a 0.4 percent rate from 0.1 percent. The increase in spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, was still the smallest since the fourth quarter of 2009.

Business spending was revised to a 9.9 percent rate of increase from 6.3 percent as investment in nonresidential structures and equipment and software was stronger than previously estimated. But there are fears that the recent stock market rout could make businesses a bit hesitant to spend on capital and hiring.

The report also showed that after-tax corporate profits increased 4.1 percent in the second quarter after edging up 0.1 percent in the first three months of the year. It also showed inflation pressures abating, with the personal consumption expenditures price index rising at a 3.2 percent rate. That compared to 3.9 percent in the first quarter.

The core PCE index closely watched by the Fed advanced at a 2.2 percent rate, the largest increase since the fourth quarter of 2009. It was revised up from 2.1 percent.

Chance of Recession Is as High as 80%: Study

2011-08-26T08:57:00.004-05:00

For the sake of argument, I'll pretend we're not already in a depression. I've literally bet everything I have that the chance of there not being a recession is less than zero. There is about the same chance of there not being a recession (depression, really) as there is a house not burning to the ground if you were to douse it in gasoline and set it on fire. This crisis hasn't even begun.

CNBC

A plunge in recent economic data puts the probability of a double-dip recession above 80 percent, according to modeling by Bank of America Merrill Lynch released Wednesday, reflecting the toll the U.S. debt downgrade, Europe’s woes and stock market volatility has taken on economic activity.

To be sure, the firm’s economic team warned more data is needed for it to raise its overall official prediction of a recession that high. Still, the recent dismal readings from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve and the University of Michigan were enough for Merrill to raise its overall probability of a contraction in the next year to 40 percent from 35 percent at the start of this month.

A survey of manufacturing in the Philadelphia region plunged to its lowest level since March 2009, according to the Fed last week. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level since May 1980, according to a Thomson Reuters/University Michigan survey released on August 12. A revision of this survey will be released Friday.

The Philly Fed puts a recession probability at 85.7 percent, while the consumer survey puts contraction chances at 80 percent, according to Bank of America's probability model, which uses a so-called Bayesian technique that “tests if the economy is in a recession based on the interaction of variables that are associated with turns in the business cycle.”

“More timely consumer and business sentiment indicators dropped in August in response to a range of bad news,” said Michael Hanson, one of the firm’s economists, in the note. “While we concede the risks are rising, a recession is not baked in the cake. If the economy can avoid further shocks, we would expect a modest bounce in growth into the end of the year.”

According to their data, the Philly Fed has accurately forecast four of the last seven recessions. The older Michigan survey has accurately signaled three of the last eight recessions.

“It’s a 100 percent chance,” said Peter Schiff, CEO & Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital. “In fact the recession might have already started.”

The Merrill economics team is less pessimistic than Schiff and is quick to point out that since 1990, the Philly Fed has signaled recessions six times that have never come to fruition. Therefore, a sudden drop of this magnitude is not unusual for this indicator.

Still, the latest economic data raises the stakes for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s speech Friday from the central bank’s Jackson Hole summit. Many investors are hoping the data will push the Fed Chief to signal a new type of stimulus, however others believe Bernanke will simply say that they stand ready to do anything to save the economy, but more data is needed.

Weekly jobless claims released Thursday unexpectedly rose to 417,000, above economists’ estimates and further validating the data from earlier in the month.

Ironically, the most accurate recession indicator that could be used by Bernanke has likely been skewed by the Federal Reserve’s pledge to keep rates at near zero into mid-2013.

An inverted yield curve, when the 3-month Treasury yield rises above the 10-year Treasury rate, has accurately predicted seven of the last eight recessions with just one false positive since 1960, according to Bank of America.

yield curve

Ron Paul: Mobs In Europe A Sign Of Things Coming

2011-08-26T08:55:00.001-05:00

It's going to be barbaric. If you have any means at all to get away from population centers, do so as soon as humanly possible. At the very least, arm yourself, and stockpile - stockpile - plenty of ammo.

Real Clear Politics

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) on the challenges in reining in government spending.

"There’s going to be an inflation tax to hit us and I am just afraid there will be people in the streets when they don’t get what they want," Paul told the FOX Business Network.

C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight

2011-08-26T08:52:00.003-05:00

I shouldn't have to tell you that your reality is totally controlled by other people. Articles like this speak for themselves. But yeah, everything you think you know is complete bullshit.

New York Times

In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.

Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.

Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.

The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”

In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.

He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.”

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.”

She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government.”

A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment.

The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr. Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts.

If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,” Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.”

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NYPD confirms CIA officer works at department

2011-08-26T08:47:00.002-05:00

Your government is at war. With YOU. What other civilian institutions has the CIA infiltrated. Oh, you mean like the media?

Associated Press

New York's police commissioner confirmed Thursday that a CIA officer is working out of police headquarters there, after an Associated Press investigation revealed an unusual partnership with the CIA that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying. But he and the CIA said the spy agency's role at the department is an advisory one.

Speaking to reporters in New York, commissioner Raymond Kelly acknowledged that the CIA trains NYPD officers on "trade craft issues," meaning espionage techniques, and advises police about events happening overseas. Kelly also said he was unaware of any other U.S. police department with a similar relationship with the CIA.

"They are involved in providing us with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas and providing it to us for, you know, just for our purposes," Kelly said.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the agency does not spy inside the United States and also described the relationship with the NYPD as collaborative.

"Our cooperation, in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is exactly what the American people deserve and have come to expect following 9/11," she said.

A months-long investigation by the AP, published Wednesday, revealed that the NYPD has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.

Many of the operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. The mayor on Thursday defended the police department's efforts.

"In the end the NYPD's first job is prevention, and I think they've done a very good job of that," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when asked about the police practices. "The law is pretty clear about what's the requirement, and I think they've followed the law."

Also Thursday, New York City Councilman Brad Lander said the city council should conduct an oversight hearing on the NYPD's programs, but Lander is not in a leadership position to enforce that such hearings take place.

"We must be sure that the NYPD's intelligence gathering does not violate civil liberties, target and profile our city's diverse ethnic and religious communities," Lander said.

City Councilman Peter Vallone, chairman of the panel that oversees the police department, said the council already had scheduled two NYPD oversight hearings during which these issues could be raised.

The disclosures about the NYPD's activities provoked exasperation in the city's Muslim neighborhoods, where government officials have sought to build relationships in Muslim communities and pledged to ensure that Muslims aren't targeted for discrimination.

"The NYPD's credibility is bankrupt in our communities," Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director of the Desis Rising Up & Moving group, said in a statement Thursday. "We need accountability, transparency and an overhaul of tactics and policies."

Government outreach programs have operated in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Washington—all cities with large Muslim communities—even as law enforcement around the country has stepped up investigative efforts to stave off attacks.

But the inherent tensions caused by this duality of missions is perhaps most visible in New York. It is the only U.S. city that al-Qaida has successfully attacked twice and continues to be the target of terror plots. New York also is home to the country's most aggressive local police department investigating counterterrorism.

"It seems to many of the leadership here, there are two kinds of authorities they are playing—one is in the forefront which is very cooperative," said Zaheer Uddin of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York. "And there is another authority, which is playing against Islam and Muslims, going against the First Amendment and the security of this country."

Uddin asked, "Are we partners, or are we a suspicious community?"

On Wednesday, the Justice Department said it will review a request by a Muslim advocacy group to investigate.

"These revelations send the message to American Muslims that they are being viewed as a suspect community and that their constitutional rights may be violated with impunity," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked for the investigation. "The Justice Department must initiate an immediate investigation of the civil rights implications of this spy program and the legality of its links to the CIA."

The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, an umbrella organization of New York Muslim groups, on Thursday also called for an investigation.

In the decade since the September 2001 attacks, government officials in New York also have met with Muslim leaders and exchanged cellphone numbers. They've attended religious services, dinners and teas, and spoken at community meetings. The FBI recently hosted an event for 500 young Muslims in Brooklyn to build trust and get to know federal law enforcement, with a bomb-sniffing dog, scuba boat and helicopter on display.

"I go and visit mosques on a regular basis," Kelly previously told the AP, adding that he also holds question-and-answer sessions and planned to attend several dinners with members of the Muslim community during the holy month of Ramadan this year.

The police department in 2006 hired Sidique Wai, an African immigrant and member of the New York Muslim community, to coordinate the NYPD's citywide community outreach program. He said the interaction and outreach between the community and police is unprecedented.

"The majority of the faith-based—particularly the Muslim leaders throughout the city—are absolutely appreciative of the unprecedented relationship with the police department," Wai said. "I'm not aware of a deliberate effort on the part of NYPD to profile people."

Glenn Greenwald: Obama upheld ‘evisceration of the rule of law for political elites’

2011-08-26T08:41:00.002-05:00

The "rule of law" only applies to the plebs. And even then, there is no rule of law. An unjust law is no law at all. I digress.

I remember watching CNN or some establishment media outlet on my break at work, and the commentators compared the rule of law we have in America, because - get this - Strauss-Khan, an elite white establishment whore, had his rape charges dropped, while in Gaddafi's Libya, there is the law of rule. I literally laughed my ass off.

The Raw Replay

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald on Thursday blasted President Barack Obama’s mantra that the nation should “look forward, not backward” regarding alleged crimes committed by the Bush administration.

“Imagine if, for example, we decided to announce tomorrow that we were no longer going to prosecute murder or rape or child abductions because we didn’t want to ‘keep looking backwards,’” he said on MSNBC’s The Last Word. “What do you think would happen? Obviously there would be a lot more people engaging in murder, rape, and child abduction.”

Greenwald added that American political culture had “decided our highest political officials are free to break the law without consequences” and Obama had continued the “evisceration of the rule of law for political elites.”

“So political elites like Dick Cheney know that they can commit crimes with total impunity, and that is why he goes around proudly boasting about the crimes he has committed.”

3, 2, 1: Global Debt Meltdown

2011-08-24T21:14:00.000-05:00

The Economic Collapse

We are steamrolling toward a massive global debt meltdown, and at this point world leaders seem to be all out of solutions. Over the last 30 years or so, the greatest debt bubble in the history of the planet has produced unprecedented prosperity in the western world. But now that debt bubble is starting to burst and the bills are coming due. Many believe that "ground zero" for the coming global debt meltdown will be in Europe. Unlike the U.S. and Japan, the nations of the EU can't just print more money to cover their debts. Nations such as Greece, Portugal and Italy must repay their debts in euros, and those nations are rapidly getting to the point where their debts are going to overwhelm them. Unfortunately, major banks all over Europe are very highly leveraged and are also very heavily invested in the sovereign debt of nations such as Greece, Portugal and Italy. If even one EU nation defaults it will start tipping over financial dominoes. If more than one EU nation defaults it could cause a cataclysmic wave of bank failures all over Europe.

But Germany and the other more financially stable countries of the EU cannot bail out nations like Greece, Portugal and Italy indefinitely. Pouring money into Greece is like pouring money into a black hole. When you take money from financially stable countries and pour it into hopeless messes, you may stabilize things for a little while, but you also cause the financial condition of the financially stable nations to start deteriorating.

Right now, the yield on 2 year Greek bonds is up to 44%. Basically, the market is screaming that these are horrible investments and that they will almost certainly default.

Greece cannot fire up the printing presses and print more money, so they are now totally dependent on others to bail them out.

Just how desperate have things become in Greece? Just consider the following excerpt from a recent article by Puru Saxena....

In Greece, government debt now represents almost 160% of GDP and the average yield on Greek debt is around 15%. Thus, if Greece’s debt is rolled over without restructuring, its interest costs alone will amount to approximately 24% of GDP. In other words, if debt pardoning does not occur, nearly a quarter of Greece’s economic output will be gobbled up by interest repayments!

Can you imagine?

No nation on earth can afford to pay out nearly a quarter of GDP just on interest on government debt.

So just how did Greece get into this position? Well, it turns out that big U.S. banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase played a big role. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Andrew Gavin Marshall....

In the same way that homeowners take out a second mortgage to pay off their credit card debt, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and other U.S. banks helped push government debt far into the future through the derivatives market. This was done in Greece, Italy, and likely several other euro-zone countries as well. In several dozen deals in Europe, “banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books.” Because the deals are not listed as loans, they are not listed as debt (liabilities), and so the true debt of Greece and other euro-zone countries was and likely to a large degree remains hidden. Greece effectively mortgaged its airports and highways to the major banks in order to get cash up-front and keep the loans off the books, classifying them as transactions.

All over the world, politicians love to "kick the can down the road", and big Wall Street banks love to find creative ways to help them do that.

But now Greece is about to collapse, and the people that helped them get into this mess will probably never be held accountable.

If Greece does default, it is going to have dramatic consequences all over Europe. For a chilling look at what could potentially happen when Greece defaults, just check out this article by John Mauldin.

Sadly, Greece is far from the only problem in Europe. Portugal, Ireland and Italy also have debt to GDP ratios that are above 100%.

The biggest potential problem, at least in the near-term, is Italy.

Italy is the fourth largest economy in the EU, and lately the financial problems of the Italian government and Italian banks have been making headlines all over the globe.

Italy is a far, far larger potential problem than Greece is.

The EU can handle bailing out Greece, at least for now.

If Italy gets to the point where it needs large bailouts, that is going to bring down the whole system. The EU simply does not have enough money to perform an extensive financial rescue of Italy.

As you can see from this chart, the exposure that European banks have to Italian debt is absolutely massive. If Italian debt goes bad, it is going to take down a whole bunch of banks.

Not only that, but many believe that the European Central Bank itself is now in some very dangerous territory.

It is estimated that the European Central Bank is now holding somewhere in the neighborhood of 444 billion euros worth of debt from the governments of Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Spain.

The financial consequences of a default by one or more of those nations could potentially be catastrophic.

According to London-based think tank Open Europe, the European Central Bank is massively overleveraged....

"Should the ECB see its assets fall by just 4.23pc in value . . . its entire capital base would be wiped out."

That doesn't sound good.

Surely the European Central Bank would be recapitalized somehow, but this is just another example that shows just how dangerous huge amounts of leverage can be.

As I wrote about in a recent article about the sovereign debt crisis, if the dominoes begin to tumble in Europe it is going to take everybody down.

The big banks in Europe are leveraged to the hilt, and they are massively exposed to government debt.

If you don't think that this is a problem, just remember what happened back in 2008.

Back then, Lehman Brothers was leveraged 31 to 1. When things turned bad, Lehman was wiped out very rapidly.

Today, major German banks are leveraged 32 to 1, and those banks are currently holding a massive amount of European sovereign debt.

Yes, things could become really nightmarish if the dominoes start to fall.

Already we are seeing huge signs of trouble at major banks all over Europe.

Major European banks UBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse, RBS, and HSBC have all announced layoffs recently. In fact, when you add them all up, the total number of layoffs announced by these banks just this month is over 40,000. Overall, the grand total of layoffs by European banks so far this year is now up to 67,000.

The mood in the financial sector over in Europe is very dark right now. Just consider the following excerpt from a recent Bloomberg article....

“It’s a bloodbath, and I expect things to get worse before they get better,” said Jonathan Evans, chairman of executive- search firm Sammons Associates in London. “I cannot see a lot of those who have lost their jobs getting re-employed. Regardless of how good someone is, no one wants to talk about hiring. Life will be very difficult for two or three years.”

Just like back in 2008 with U.S. banks, we are seeing European banks getting absolutely pummeled right now. A recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald documented some of the carnage....

The 46-member Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index has fallen 31 per cent this year. RBS tumbled 49 per cent, Barclays 44 per cent and France’s Societe Generale 48 per cent.

Credit Suisse and UBS both reported a 71 per cent drop in investment-banking earnings in the second quarter. Revenue at Edinburgh-based RBS’s securities unit dropped 35 per cent in the period, while London-based Barclays Capital posted a 27 per cent decline in pretax profit.

Things in Europe continue to get worse and worse and worse.

Do not take your eyes off of Europe. This crisis is just getting started.

Not that there aren't huge debt problems around the rest of the globe as well.

Japan has a national debt that is now over 200 percent of GDP, and they are really struggling to recover from the recent disasters that devastated that nation.

Moody's has just downgraded Japanese government debt one notch to Aa3, and more downgrades could be coming. For now Japan is still able to borrow huge piles of money very, very cheaply but if that changes Japan could be wiped out very quickly.

Of course the nation with the biggest debt of all is the United States.

At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $14,649,289,670,347.85.

Fortunately, the U.S. is also able to borrow massive amounts of money very, very cheaply right now. But when that changes it is going to be absolutely cataclysmic for our economy.

Sadly, our politicians continue to act as if this debt binge can go on forever.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the budget deficit for the federal government will be about 1.28 trillion dollars this year. This will be the third year in a row that we have had a budget deficit of over a trillion dollars.

To put that in perspective, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan the U.S. government racked up a grand total of about one trillion dollars of debt. But this year alone we will go 1.28 trillion dollars more into debt.

At the moment, the U.S. national debt is expanding by about 2 and a half million dollars every single minute. It is hard to put into words how absolutely foolish that is.

As I wrote about yesterday, someone needs to wake up America. Our debt is exploding and our economy is dying.

We haven't even solved the problems caused by the last financial crisis. The real estate market is still a gigantic mess. Purchases of both new and previously existing homes in the United States continue to fall.

But there will never be a housing recovery until there is a jobs recovery, and our politicians continue to stand by and watch as millions of our jobs are shipped overseas.

Unemployment is rampant, and even many of those that do have jobs are barely able to survive.

Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

That is not a good trend.

Sadly, it looks like things are not going to get much better any time soon.

Right now, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that unemployment in the U.S. will remain above 8% until 2014.

That should really scare you, because government numbers are almost always way too optimistic. The folks in the federal government hardly ever project that unemployment will actually go up.

So if they are saying that unemployment will remain above 8 percent until 2014, the truth is that things will probably be worse than that.

We have entered very frightening times. We are on the verge of a massive global debt meltdown, and nobody is sure what is going to happen next.

Let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.

'Very Muted Growth' Coming for Next 10 Years: Faber

2011-08-24T19:55:00.002-05:00

He's optimistic. Just wait until they break out the term negative growth. I love that one.

CNBC

Both the U.S. and Europe are facing a decade of slow growth brought on primarily by the blunders of central banks, noted doomsayer Marc Faber said.

Investors should protect themselves by buying plenty of physical gold and putting it in a secure location, preferably outside the U.S., the author of the Gloom, Boom and Doom newsletter told CNBC.

"If I look at the politicians both in Europe and the U.S., I don't think that prospect (for growth) is very good," he said. "If I also look at the entitlement system and the government expenditures and the fiscal deficits and the debt overhang, I think for the next 10 years we'll have very muted growth in the Western world and standards of living for the average household will continue to decline."

In other words, he said, the next 10 years are likely to be much like the previous decade.

"I think we never really came out of the recession in many different sectors of the economy," Faber said. "If you look back to say 1999 to today, the U.S. as an economy, macroeconomically speaking, is of course much worse off than in 1999—courtesy of the Federal Reserve I may add."

Many prominent economists have joined Faber's dour outlook for the U.S. economy, at least in the short term.

Goldman Sachs has cut its forecast for growth to 1.5 percent for the year, and other parts of the world are experiencing slowdowns, as well.

In such a slow-growth environment, Faber prescribed a diversified mix for portfolios—25 percent to 30 percent in stocks, 20 percent to 30 percent in physical gold—"in a safe deposit box ideally outside the U.S. in various locations" because "I don't trust anyone"—some cash, and up to 30 percent in real estate, particularly in Asia.

Amid the turmoil surrounding markets, including the Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. debt , gridlock in Washington and burgeoning European debt problems, Faber predicted more investors would pull back positions in the capital markets.

"Investors, kind of worldwide, trusted the regulators, they trusted the system and they were enthusiastic about owning equities," he said. "Over the last 10 years, the mood has changed a lot. Investors and individual investors in particular, they don't trust management anymore. They are upset about executive compensation, they're upset about regulators. They think the markets are rigged and they're upset about the ratings agencies.

"A lot of individuals will not came back to the (stock) market and on rebound they will have reduced their positions."

Drought-Baked Fields in U.S. Dimming 2012 Wheat Outlook as Prices Rebound

2011-08-24T19:51:00.002-05:00

We really shouldn't be eating wheat anyway, but this is yet another factor that is driving food prices up. They're not going to stop rising until long after they've surpassed your ability to pay for them.

Bloomberg

A yearlong drought from Kansas to Texas has created the driest conditions on record for farmers preparing to plant winter wheat, dimming crop prospects for a second straight year in the U.S., the world’s largest exporter.

Dry weather already has cut output of hard, red winter wheat, the most common U.S. variety, by 22 percent from 2010, government data show. If drought persists into the planting months of September and October, next year’s harvest will be even smaller, and prices on the Kansas City Board of Trade may jump 50 percent to $13 a bushel, said Dan Manternach, a wheat economist with researcher Doane Advisory Services in St. Louis.

In Texas, where agriculture losses from the drought were a record $5.2 billion, soil moisture is so depleted that plants may not emerge from the ground without more rain, Texas A&M University said in a report yesterday. Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma were the biggest growers of winter wheat in 2010 and supplied 28 percent of all wheat varieties produced in the U.S.

“Most of us are gamblers enough that we will plant a wheat crop,” said John Goodknight, who farms 3,500 acres in Chattanooga, Oklahoma, and saw his wheat output drop by a third this year. “We just live and work in the conditions we have. It’s exceedingly hard to make it work with drought.”

While global supplies are rising as exporters in Russia and Eastern Europe recover from a drought in 2010, Kansas City wheat futures that closed yesterday at $8.6525 a bushel may jump to $10 by the end of September, Doane’s Manternach said. If drought spurs farmers to plant fewer acres than last year in the Great Plains, the largest U.S. growing region, or a winter freeze damages crops, prices may reach $13 by March, the highest price since 2008, he said.

‘Extreme Price-Rationing’

“For hard, red winter wheat in particular, we’re already down to very tight stocks because of this year’s drought,” Manternach said in a telephone interview. “A second year in a row of poor yields in the southern Plains would be cause for extreme price-rationing.”

Kansas City futures, which track the price of hard, red winter wheat, have surged 20 percent in the past year, topping the 9.8 percent gain for wheat on the Chicago Board of Trade, where the contract reflects primarily soft wheat grown in the Midwest.

Wheat futures for December delivery slipped 6.25 cents, or 0.7 percent, to settle at $8.59 today on the Kansas City Board of Trade, after earlier touching $8.69, the highest since June 14. The price dropped to a nine-month low on July 12, and has rebounded 24 percent since then.

Planting Delay

Winter-wheat planting can be delayed until November, especially in southern growing areas in Texas where winters are milder. Hard, red winter wheat, used to make bread, goes dormant until about March, and is harvested in May and June. The crop accounted for 46 percent of U.S. wheat output in 2010, while other winter varieties supplied 21 percent.

There is still time for crops to get enough moisture to allow plants to emerge from the soil before winter dormancy, and if rains return in the spring of 2012, yields might return to normal, said Jim Shroyer, an extension agronomist at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

Wheat planted in dry soil has a higher likelihood of being damaged by winter freezes, Shroyer said in a telephone interview. Areas of Kansas may need 6 inches (15 centimeters) to 10 inches of rain to break the drought and rebuild subsoil moisture, he said.

“As long as the surface is moist and we get good germination and emergence, we can kind of limp along with moisture here and there until we get the soil profile full,” Shroyer said.

‘Critical Time’

Southwest and south-central Kansas, a region that includes Sumner County, the biggest wheat producer, had the least precipitation on record in the first seven months of this year, said Mary Knapp, the state climatologist. July was also the hottest on record for the region, she said.

Only about 4.3 inches of rain fell in southwest counties from Jan. 1 to July 31, Knapp said by telephone from Manhattan, Kansas. The region needs about 9.4 inches of rain to break the drought and rebuild subsoil moisture, she said.

“We’re getting into the critical time period for winter- wheat planting and canola planting,” Knapp said. “We have a narrow time frame to get sufficient rainfall to moisten not only the top four inches or so of soil, to get the canola or wheat up, but also to have a continuation of water down into the soil profile, so you get some root development.”

Most-Severe Drought

In Texas, the biggest winter-wheat grower after Kansas last year, 99.9 percent of the state is suffering from drought, according to the University of Nebraska Lincoln’s U.S. Drought Monitor. The one-year drought is the most severe on records going back to 1895, according to a report from state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.

After losing non-irrigated crops this year, including cotton and corn, farmers “have good reason to worry that they won’t make a winter-wheat crop either” in 2012, Texas A&M’s AgriLife Extension Service said in a report yesterday.

Oklahoma has had the driest 10-month period on record, and July was the hottest ever for the state, according to the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

“We are in a situation where we have been extremely dry for coming close to a year,” said Mike Schulte, the executive director of the Oklahoma Wheat Commission in Oklahoma City. “If we get ourselves into a situation where we don’t receive rain even by October, then we will have problems.”

This year’s winter-wheat harvest was 94 percent complete, as of Aug. 21, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency estimates production of the hard, red winter variety at 794.4 million bushels, down from 1.018 billion in 2010.

Crop ‘At Risk’

This fall, 16 percent of U.S. output of the variety may be “at risk” of being sown late or not planted at all because of the drought, Mike Tannura, the president of forecaster T-Storm Weather LLC in Chicago, said in telephone interview.

If rain doesn’t come, some farmers may opt to leave fields fallow, waiting until spring to sow other crops including sorghum or cotton, said Darrell Holaday, the president of Advanced Market Concepts in Wamego, Kansas.

The drought may “cut acreage again quite significantly,” Holaday said in a telephone interview. “If it doesn’t rain, I think they’ll just let it set, fallow it all out.”

The most recent La Nina weather pattern, which lasted from late 2010 to early 2011, contributed to the drought, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. The agency issued a “La Nina Watch” on Aug. 4, indicating that the weather pattern, a period of cooling equatorial waters of the Pacific Ocean, may redevelop.

Another La Nina

La Nina may cause drought to persist in Texas and southern Oklahoma through November, while northern Oklahoma and Kansas may see some improvement, the National Weather Service said.

“The current outlook looks like development of another La Nina system, which is not positive,” Mark Welch, an extension economist at Texas A&M in College Station who specializes in grain markets, said in a telephone interview. “The outlook is for another drier-than-normal winter with above-normal temperatures. We just hope we can get a crop in and enough of a storm pattern to get it going.”

21 Signs That The New Reality For Many Baby Boomers Will Be To Work As Wage Slaves Until They Drop Dead

2011-08-23T09:16:00.000-05:00

The Economic Collapse

All over America tonight, millions of elderly Americans are wondering if their money is going to run out before it is time for them to die. Those that are now past retirement age are not going to be rioting in the streets, but that doesn't mean that large numbers of them are not deeply suffering. There are millions of elderly Americans that are leading lives of "quiet desperation" as they try to get by on meager fixed incomes. Many are surviving on Ramen noodles, oatmeal, peanut butter or whatever other cheap food they can find in the stores. There are some that are so short on cash that they will not turn on the heat in their homes until things get really desperate. As health care costs soar, millions of elderly Americans find themselves deep in debt and facing huge medical bills that they cannot possibly pay. A lot of older Americans would go back to work if they could, but jobs are scarce and very few companies seem to even want to consider hiring them. Right now caring for all of the Americans that have already retired is turning out to be an overwhelming challenge, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. On January 1st, 2011 the very first Baby Boomers turned 65. A massive tsunami of retirees is coming, and America is not ready for it.

Sadly, most retirees have not adequately prepared for retirement. For many, the recent economic downturn absolutely devastated their retirement plans. Many were counting on the equity in their homes, but the recent housing crash crushed those dreams. Others had their 401ks shredded by the stock market.

Meanwhile, corporate pension plans all across America are vastly underfunded. Many state and local government pension programs are absolute disasters. The federal government has already begun to pay out significantly more in Social Security benefits than they are taking in, and the years ahead are projected to be downright apocalyptic for the Social Security program.

So needless to say, things do not look good for the Baby Boomers that are now approaching retirement age.

The following are 21 signs that the new reality for many Baby Boomers will be to work as wage slaves until they drop dead....

#1 According to a shocking AARP survey of Baby Boomers that are still in the workforce, 40 percent of them plan to work "until they drop".

#2 A recent survey of American workers that included all age groups found that 54 percent of them planned to keep working when they retire and 39 percent of them plan to either work past age 70 or never retire at all.

#3 A poll conducted by CESI Debt Solutions found that 56 percent of American retirees still had outstanding debts when they retired.

#4 A recent study by a law professor from the University of Michigan found that Americans that are 55 years of age or older now account for 20 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States. Back in 2001, they only accounted for 12 percent of all bankruptcies.

#5 Between 1991 and 2007 the number of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 that filed for bankruptcy rose by a staggering 178 percent.

#6 Most of the bankruptcies among the elderly are caused by our deeply corrupt health care system. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.

#7 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run dry five years faster than they were projecting just last year.

#8 Starting on January 1st, 2011 the Baby Boomers began to hit retirement age. From now on, every single day more than 10,000 Baby Boomers will reach the age of 65. That is going to keep happening every single day for the next 19 years.

#9 Over 30 percent of all U.S. investors currently in their sixties have more than 80 percent of their 401k retirement plans invested in equities. So what happens if the stock market crashes again?

#10 All over the United States predatory lenders are coldly and cruelly foreclosing on elderly homeowners. You can read what one lender is doing to a 70-year-old woman and her terminally ill husband right here.

#11 Medical bills are absolutely devastating large number of elderly Americans right now. Many are going to great lengths to try to pay their bills. An elderly woman that lives in the Salem, Oregon area that is fighting terminal bone cancer tried to raise some money for her medical bills by holding a few garage sales on the weekends. However, a neighbor ratted her out, and so now the police are shutting her garage sales down.

#12 Social Security's disability program has already been pushed to the brink of insolvency and wave after wave of new applications continue to pour in.

#13 Approximately 3 out of every 4 Americans start claiming Social Security benefits the moment they are eligible at age 62. Most are doing this out of necessity. However, by claiming Social Security early they get locked in at a much lower amount than if they would have waited.

#14 According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system paid out more in benefits than it received in payroll taxes in 2010. That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016. Sadly, in the years ahead these "Social Security deficits" are scheduled to become absolutely nightmarish as hordes of Baby Boomers retire.

#15 In 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers. In 2010, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by approximately 3.3 U.S. workers. By 2025, it is projected that there will be approximately two U.S. workers for each retiree. How in the world can the system possibly continue to function properly with numbers like that?

#16 According to a shocking U.S. government report, soaring interest costs on the U.S. national debt plus rapidly escalating spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every single dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. That is before a single dollar is spent on anything else.

#17 Most states have huge pension liabilities that are woefully underfunded. For example, pension consultant Girard Miller recently told California's Little Hoover Commission that state and local government bodies in the state of California have $325 billion in combined unfunded pension liabilities. When you break that down, it comes to $22,000 for every single working adult in the state of California.

#18 Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management recently calculated the combined pension liability for all 50 U.S. states. What they found was that the 50 states are collectively facing $5.17 trillion in pension obligations, but they only have $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds. That is a difference of 3.2 trillion dollars. So where in the world is all of that extra money going to come from? Most of the states are already completely broke and on the verge of bankruptcy.

#19 According to one recent survey, 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything at all to retirement savings.

#20 According to another recent survey, 24 percent of all U.S. workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age at least once during the past year.

#21 Even though prices for necessities such as food and gas have been exploding, those receiving Social Security benefits have not received a cost of living increase for two years in a row. Many elderly Americans that are living on fixed incomes are being squeezed like they have never been squeezed before.

There are millions of Americans out there that have done everything "right" all of their lives, but that now find the system letting them down in their golden years.

So how badly are some people hurting? Well, a reader identified as "Anna44" recently shared with us what some of her family members have been going through in this economy....

My B-I-L was a dealership owner/manager who worked long hours over 38 years and had to close his doors when Saturn was dissolved. When his dealership went under, 72 others lost their job. That’s 72 families who took a hit. He lost his home, everything. A few of his former employees lost their homes as well eventually. They were not lazy or WORTHLESS. It took him a year and a half to finally find something, but now he lives in a hotel unable to qualify for a house or apartment. This is an educated man who competed nationwide for top dog and got it more then once. His biggest fault? He’s almost 60, young enough to need the work, but too old to be hired.

As for my husband- 26 years AF officer, handling millions & billions on International & National levels has just entered his 7th month of unemployment. Two tours abroad- lazy he is NOT. He doesn’t qualify for unemployment, nor is he counted because he gets a retirement check. He wants and needs to work- yet there is little out there. If he doesn’t find something soon, we too will lose the home we sunk every cent into after 20 years of saving for it!

These are Americans that should be getting ready to enjoy their golden years, but that are now fighting just to survive.

Today you will find a disturbingly large number of elderly Americans flipping burgers or welcoming people to Wal-Mart. But most of them are not doing it because they are bored with retirement. Rather, most of them are working as wage slaves because that is what they have to do in order to survive.

Sadly, there are a whole lot of companies out there that do not want to hire people that are past a certain age. If you are older than 50, there are a lot of jobs that you should just basically forget about applying for.

Instead of valuing the experience and wisdom of our elders, our society openly makes fun of them and treats them as undesirables.

If you are afraid of getting old, you are not being irrational. Getting old is indeed something to fear in this society. We tend to treat elderly Americans like garbage.

Abuse of the elderly is rampant. For example, a report from a couple of years ago found that 94 percent of all nursing homes in the United States had committed violations of federal health and safety standards.

As the U.S. economy continues to crumble, the way we treat the elderly is probably going to get even worse.

Right now there is tons of bad news about the economy, and another major economic downturn would put even more pressure on federal, state and local government budgets.

The truth is that there is simply no way that we can keep all of the financial promises that we have made to elderly Americans even if the most optimistic projections for our economy play out.

If the worst happens, we are going to see a lot more elderly Americans eating out of trash cans and freezing to death in their own homes.

The United States is facing a retirement crisis of unprecedented magnitude. A comfortable, happy retirement is rapidly going to become a luxury that only the wealthy will enjoy.

For most of the rest of us, our golden years are going to mean a whole lot of pain and suffering.

That may not be pleasant to hear, but that is the truth.

Bernanke May Have to Go for 'Shock and Awe': Strategist

2011-08-23T08:38:00.002-05:00

He's in large degree responsible for the sudden collapse underway. What other choice does he have than to accelerate the decline?

CNBC

As global markets await hints of further stimulus in Fed Chief Ben Bernanke's annual speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this week, one strategist says the U.S. central bank may be forced to take extreme measures to prop up the U.S. economy.

"If the Fed really is going to go down the route of another round of unconventional policy making, I think they've got to go in for, what I called, shock and awe," Russell Jones, Global Head of Fixed Income Strategy at Westpac Institutional Bank told CNBC on Monday.

"The problem from Bernanke's point of view is that, really, he is beholden to price action in equity markets, which is not something really where any central bank wants to be."

Jones believes the pressure on Bernanke to respond with a policy move will be "absolutely overwhelming" if the U.S. stock market sees further selloff. He thinks the trigger point would be a decline of a further 10 percent from the current levels. The recent stock market rout has already wiped out more than 10 percent from major indices.

"If we really are in trouble at the end of the week, I think they'll have to respond," Jones said.

Pressure has been mounting for the Fed to take to take action - possibly a third round of stimulus or quantitative easing 3 (QE3) – after recent data, particularly the Philly Fed manufacturing index and weekly jobless claims, pointed to continued economic weakness.

Still, higher inflation and the Fed's already pledging to keep interest rates low till 2013 have many thinking there may not be anything new at Jackson Hole later this week.

But Jones thinks otherwise.

He believes there may be some effort by the Fed to extend the maturity of its balance sheet, though this would only be an incremental policy move.

For more impact, Jones says the Fed should launch a much bigger quantitative easing program than the previous two rounds, including formally targeting longer term interest rates such as setting the 10-year Treasury at 2 percent or lower for an extended period and allowing the balance sheet to expand to whatever level is necessary to achieve that aim.

"That would certainly be shock and awe, and I think that might generate a more positive response in stock markets."

What they won't admit about measles outbreaks: Most children who catch measles were already vaccinated

2011-08-23T08:31:00.003-05:00

Man, do they gnash their teeth at the vaccine refusers. There are so many idiotically obvious reasons why mandatory vaccines are useless, not the least of which is they obviously do not work. Another being, what "threat" are my unvaccinated kids to your vaccinated kids if the vaccines are supposedly effective? That's one question that never gets answered, yet they demand we keep our unvaccinated diseased children away from their vaccinated healthy children. It's pretty sickening to watch.

Regardless, the establishment's solution to this obvious contradiction is: vaccinate them again! Because, you know, it worked so well the first time.

Natural News

Big Pharma, the CDC and other public health organizations tell the mainstream media (MSM) what to report about outbreaks and epidemics. So you may have the impression that recent measles outbreaks are occurring because of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination refusals.

According to official public health documents kept from public attention, the opposite is true. Many stricken with measles have had the full array of three MMR vaccinations.

Measles and MMR Vaccinations

If you're old enough, you may remember that measles and mumps were common childhood diseases that came and went. The incidence of death or permanent damage was very small. Once you recovered from measles, you were immunized for life.

The rate of measles outbreaks began declining during the 1970s. This may be attributed to increased immunity by those who had measles and recovered, or a decline in the virulence of measles.

But of course, the medical establishment wants you to believe all infectious disease declines are from vaccines. The opposite is usually factual. It has been documented and graphed that measles had diminished greatly before vaccinations were administered. (7)

The three in one MMR shot was developed during that decade for convenience. Prior to that, there was one vaccination for every disease. But the three in one MMR is inoculated on three separate occasions within a few months, usually before 15 months of age. Preteens and teenagers are often subjected to this risky business as well if they missed the early schedule.

Measles Breakouts Among the Vaccinated

There have been many, and the various public health organizations, including the CDC, are well aware of them. Yet, pediatricians convince and school boards coerce parents into making sure their children get three MMR vaccinations in short succession. Obviously, not enough know of measles breakouts among the vaccinated.

Medical authorities eager to vaccinate maintain it takes a population vaccination rate of 90% to ensure an "immunized" disease will not break out within that community. This high percentage was contrived as necessary for "herd immunity," which would prevent any outbreak from occurring.

That has been proven false. Basic logic begs the question: Why do so many have to be vaccinated if those who are vaccinated are immune? Could it be that the vaccinated are not really immune. One thing is for certain, vaccinating 90% of all populations creates more revenue.

In 1984, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMRW) of the CDC reported a late 1983 early 1984 Illinois high school/junior high measles outbreak. The total student population was around 400, and ALL of them (100%) had complied with Illinois State Law requiring the complete MMR schedule. (1)

In 1987, Pub Med Central reported another public school measles outbreak among a 98% MMR vaccinated population. This happened in another high school, this one in Massachusetts early in 1984. Another population with over 90% vaccinated again. (2)

University of Helsinki Department of Public Health reported an "explosive outbreak" of measles in a rural community during 1989. Most of the infected had been vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. Those vaccinated who became infected anyway also managed to spread the measles to their siblings. So much for herd protection. (4)

The WHO (World Health Organization) reported an outbreak of measles with thousands of EU citizens of all ages throughout 2010. Most of them occurred in France. Here's what Copenhagen WHO official Rebecca Martin said, "There's been a buildup of children who have not been immunized over the years. It's almost like a threshold. When you have enough people who have not been immunized (sic), then outbreaks can occur." (5)

Apparently Rebecca is not aware of those earlier reports of outbreaks among populations with over 90% vaccinated. Nor is she aware of any graphs that show the enormous decline in measles episodes occurred before measles vaccinations appeared on the scene. But she did invoke the 90% rule. (7)

Those who have been scared away from using dangerous vaccinations with horrendous side effects just to prevent a short term mild disease, from which recovery confers real immunity, are blamed.

What Is Scaring Away Vaccination Prospects

Could it have something to do with over six times as many MMR vaccine adverse events reported than cases of measles so far in 2011? Keep in mind that all adverse events are not reported. Most are so indoctrinated with the sanctity of vaccines they don't make the connection to their child's turning blue and becoming paralyzed or dead after a series of vaccinations. Even former FDA commissioner David Kessler wrote "only one percent of serious adverse events are reported to the FDA." (6)

More and more parents are witnessing tragic consequences of MMRs and other vaccines, which include neurological damage, autism, paralysis, chronic illness, extreme colitis, and death occurring shortly after or during a scheduled series of inoculations. And they are reporting their tragic stories to vaccine safety group sites, blogs, or chat rooms. (7)

Some even start their own vaccination warning sites. Yeah, that might have something to do with more parents holding their children back from being jabbed with toxic vaccines. Especially with a vaccine that doesn't work on a diminished childhood disease that is usually minor. And especially after being lied to about Thimerosal (mercury) being removed from childhood vaccinations. (8)

By the way, there was a very large mumps outbreak among teens and preteens, during early 2010 in the New York/New Jersey area. Almost 80% of them had their MMRs too. (9)

Sources for this article

(1) http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmw...

(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...

(3) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...

(4) http://www.vaccines.me/articles/jfd...

(5) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...

(6) http://therefusers.com/refusers-new...

(7) http://www.thinktwice.com/mmr.htm

(8) http://healthmaven.blogspot.com/201...

(9) http://www.naturalnews.com/028142_m...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/033399_vaccines_measles.html#ixzz1VrJVSQhj

In Texas schools, a criminal response to misbehavior

2011-08-23T08:25:00.002-05:00

This isn't about discipline, and you'll see that as authorities drop the hammer and implement draconian responses to what was once normal childhood behavior, the behavior will increase. That's how it always works with government intervention.

Washington Post

In a small courtroom north of Houston, a fourth-grader walked up to the bench with his mother. Too short to see the judge, he stood on a stool. He was dressed in a polo shirt and dark slacks on a sweltering summer morning.

“Guilty,” the boy’s mother heard him say.

He had been part of a scuffle on a school bus.

In another generation, he might have received only a scolding from the principal or a period of detention. But an array of get-tough policies in U.S. schools in the past two decades has brought many students into contact with police and courts — part of a trend some experts call the criminalization of student discipline.

Now, such practices are under scrutiny nationally. Federal officials want to limit punishments that push students from the classroom to courtroom, and a growing number of state and local leaders are raising similar concerns.

In Texas, the specter of harsh discipline has been especially clear.

Here, police issue tickets: Class C misdemeanor citations for offensive language, class disruption, schoolyard fights. Thousands of students land in court, with fines of up to $500. Students with outstanding tickets may be arrested after age 17.

Texas also stands out for opening up millions of student records to a landmark study of discipline, released in July . The study shows that 6 in 10 students were suspended or expelled at least once from seventh grade on. After their first suspension, they were nearly three times more likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system the next year, compared with students with no such disciplinary referrals.

Citing the Texas research, federal officials announced last month an initiative to break what many call the “school-to-prison pipeline.” S uspensions, expulsions and arrests are used too often to enforce school order, officials said.

“That is something that clearly has to stop,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington alongside Education Secretary Arne Duncan .

This month, Duncan recounted that in his old job as Chicago schools chief, he was stunned to learn that so many arrests occurred in schools. The first response to student misbehavior, he said, “can’t be to pick up the phone and call 911.”

The federal focus comes amid other change. In Colorado, a legislative task force is examining discipline practices including law enforcement referrals and school ticketing. Los Angeles police recently agreed to cut back on ticketing tardy students en route to school.

Connecticut officials have begun screening cases after students wound up in court on violations such as for having soda , running in the hall and dressing improperly. “It’s not that we don’t think these things should be handled,” said William Carbone, the state’s executive director of court support services. “We just think they should be handled in the school rather than the court.”

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans at Lowest Rates

2011-08-23T08:02:00.002-05:00

Henry Ford once said, "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." That may have been true in his day, when most Americans weren't chemically lobotomized, but today, you can hear the collective yawn. Sure, the banks are stealing trillions of dollars, and destroying the currency, but they haven't taken away the TV yet.

Bloomberg

Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.

By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.

“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”

(View the Bloomberg interactive graphic to chart the Fed’s financial bailout.)

Foreign Borrowers

It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.

The largest borrowers also included Dexia SA (DEXB), Belgium’s biggest bank by assets, and Societe Generale SA, based in Paris, whose bond-insurance prices have surged in the past month as investors speculated that the spreading sovereign debt crisis in Europe might increase their chances of default.

The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 -- the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg -- was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Peak Balance

The balance was more than 25 times the Fed’s pre-crisis lending peak of $46 billion on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Denominated in $1 bills, the $1.2 trillion would fill 539 Olympic-size swimming pools.

The Fed has said it had “no credit losses” on any of the emergency programs, and a report by Federal Reserve Bank of New York staffers in February said the central bank netted $13 billion in interest and fee income from the programs from August 2007 through December 2009.

“We designed our broad-based emergency programs to both effectively stem the crisis and minimize the financial risks to the U.S. taxpayer,” said James Clouse, deputy director of the Fed’s division of monetary affairs in Washington. “Nearly all of our emergency-lending programs have been closed. We have incurred no losses and expect no losses.”

While the 18-month U.S. recession that ended in June 2009 after a 5.1 percent contraction in gross domestic product was nowhere near the four-year, 27 percent decline between August 1929 and March 1933, banks and the economy remain stressed.

Odds of Recession

The odds of another recession have climbed during the past six months, according to five of nine economists on the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an academic panel that dates recessions.

Bank of America’s bond-insurance prices last week surged to a rate of $342,040 a year for coverage on $10 million of debt, above where Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ)’s bond insurance was priced at the start of the week before the firm collapsed. Citigroup’s shares are trading below the split-adjusted price of $28 that they hit on the day the bank’s Fed loans peaked in January 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate was at 9.1 percent in July, compared with 4.7 percent in November 2007, before the recession began.

Homeowners are more than 30 days past due on their mortgage payments on 4.38 million properties in the U.S., and 2.16 million more properties are in foreclosure, representing a combined $1.27 trillion of unpaid principal, estimates Jacksonville, Florida-based Lender Processing Services Inc.

Liquidity Requirements

“Why in hell does the Federal Reserve seem to be able to find the way to help these entities that are gigantic?” U.S. Representative Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, said at a June 1 congressional hearing in Washington on Fed lending disclosure. “They get help when the average businessperson down in eastern North Carolina, and probably across America, they can’t even go to a bank they’ve been banking with for 15 or 20 years and get a loan.”

The sheer size of the Fed loans bolsters the case for minimum liquidity requirements that global regulators last year agreed to impose on banks for the first time, said Litan, now a vice president at the Kansas City, Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation, which supports entrepreneurship research. Liquidity refers to the daily funds a bank needs to operate, including cash to cover depositor withdrawals.

The rules, which mandate that banks keep enough cash and easily liquidated assets on hand to survive a 30-day crisis, don’t take effect until 2015. Another proposed requirement for lenders to keep “stable funding” for a one-year horizon was postponed until at least 2018 after banks showed they’d have to raise as much as $6 trillion in new long-term debt to comply.

‘Stark Illustration’

Regulators are “not going to go far enough to prevent this from happening again,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now an economics professor at Harvard University.

Reforms undertaken since the crisis might not insulate U.S. markets and financial institutions from the sovereign budget and debt crises facing Greece, Ireland and Portugal, according to the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council, a 10-member body created by the Dodd-Frank Act and led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

“The recent financial crisis provides a stark illustration of how quickly confidence can erode and financial contagion can spread,” the council said in its July 26 report.

21,000 Transactions

Any new rescues by the U.S. central bank would be governed by transparency laws adopted in 2010 that require the Fed to disclose borrowers after two years.

Fed officials argued for more than two years that releasing the identities of borrowers and the terms of their loans would stigmatize banks, damaging stock prices or leading to depositor runs. A group of the biggest commercial banks last year asked the U.S. Supreme Court to keep at least some Fed borrowings secret. In March, the high court declined to hear that appeal, and the central bank made an unprecedented release of records.

Data gleaned from 29,346 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and from other Fed databases of more than 21,000 transactions make clear for the first time how deeply the world’s largest banks depended on the U.S. central bank to stave off cash shortfalls. Even as the firms asserted in news releases or earnings calls that they had ample cash, they drew Fed funding in secret, avoiding the stigma of weakness.

Morgan Stanley Borrowing

Two weeks after Lehman’s bankruptcy in September 2008, Morgan Stanley countered concerns that it might be next to go by announcing it had “strong capital and liquidity positions.” The statement, in a Sept. 29, 2008, press release about a $9 billion investment from Tokyo-based Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., said nothing about Morgan Stanley’s Fed loans.

That was the same day as the firm’s $107.3 billion peak in borrowing from the central bank, which was the source of almost all of Morgan Stanley’s available cash, according to the lending data and documents released more than two years later by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The amount was almost three times the company’s total profits over the past decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Mark Lake, a spokesman for New York-based Morgan Stanley, said the crisis caused the industry to “fundamentally re- evaluate” the way it manages its cash.

“We have taken the lessons we learned from that period and applied them to our liquidity-management program to protect both our franchise and our clients going forward,” Lake said. He declined to say what changes the bank had made.

Acceptable Collateral

In most cases, the Fed demanded collateral for its loans -- Treasuries or corporate bonds and mortgage bonds that could be seized and sold if the money wasn’t repaid. That meant the central bank’s main risk was that collateral pledged by banks that collapsed would be worth less than the amount borrowed.

As the crisis deepened, the Fed relaxed its standards for acceptable collateral. Typically, the central bank accepts only bonds with the highest credit grades, such as U.S. Treasuries. By late 2008, it was accepting “junk” bonds, those rated below investment grade. It even took stocks, which are first to get wiped out in a liquidation.

Morgan Stanley borrowed $61.3 billion from one Fed program in September 2008, pledging a total of $66.5 billion of collateral, according to Fed documents. Securities pledged included $21.5 billion of stocks, $6.68 billion of bonds with a junk credit rating and $19.5 billion of assets with an “unknown rating,” according to the documents. About 25 percent of the collateral was foreign-denominated.

‘Willingness to Lend’

“What you’re looking at is a willingness to lend against just about anything,” said Robert Eisenbeis, a former research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and now chief monetary economist in Atlanta for Sarasota, Florida-based Cumberland Advisors Inc.

The lack of private-market alternatives for lending shows how skeptical trading partners and depositors were about the value of the banks’ capital and collateral, Eisenbeis said.

“The markets were just plain shut,” said Tanya Azarchs, former head of bank research at Standard & Poor’s and now an independent consultant in Briarcliff Manor, New York. “If you needed liquidity, there was only one place to go.”

Even banks that survived the crisis without government capital injections tapped the Fed through programs that promised confidentiality. London-based Barclays Plc (BARC) borrowed $64.9 billion and Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) got $66 billion. Sarah MacDonald, a spokeswoman for Barclays, and John Gallagher, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, declined to comment.

Below-Market Rates

While the Fed’s last-resort lending programs generally charge above-market interest rates to deter routine borrowing, that practice sometimes flipped during the crisis. On Oct. 20, 2008, for example, the central bank agreed to make $113.3 billion of 28-day loans through its Term Auction Facility at a rate of 1.1 percent, according to a press release at the time.

The rate was less than a third of the 3.8 percent that banks were charging each other to make one-month loans on that day. Bank of America and Wachovia Corp. each got $15 billion of the 1.1 percent TAF loans, followed by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Citizens NA unit with $10 billion, Fed data show.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the New York-based lender that touted its “fortress balance sheet” at least 16 times in press releases and conference calls from October 2007 through February 2010, took as much as $48 billion in February 2009 from TAF. The facility, set up in December 2007, was a temporary alternative to the discount window, the central bank’s 97-year-old primary lending program to help banks in a cash squeeze.

‘Larger Than TARP’

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which in 2007 was the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, borrowed $69 billion from the Fed on Dec. 31, 2008. Among the programs New York-based Goldman Sachs tapped after the Lehman bankruptcy was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF, designed to lend money to brokerage firms ineligible for the Fed’s bank-lending programs.

Michael Duvally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.

The Fed’s liquidity lifelines may increase the chances that banks engage in excessive risk-taking with borrowed money, Rogoff said. Such a phenomenon, known as moral hazard, occurs if banks assume the Fed will be there when they need it, he said. The size of bank borrowings “certainly shows the Fed bailout was in many ways much larger than TARP,” Rogoff said.

TARP is the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, a $700 billion bank-bailout fund that provided capital injections of $45 billion each to Citigroup and Bank of America, and $10 billion to Morgan Stanley. Because most of the Treasury’s investments were made in the form of preferred stock, they were considered riskier than the Fed’s loans, a type of senior debt.

Dodd-Frank Requirement

In December, in response to the Dodd-Frank Act, the Fed released 18 databases detailing its temporary emergency-lending programs.

Congress required the disclosure after the Fed rejected requests in 2008 from the late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman and other media companies that sought details of its loans under the Freedom of Information Act. After fighting to keep the data secret, the central bank released unprecedented information about its discount window and other programs under court order in March 2011.

Bloomberg News combined Fed databases made available in December and July with the discount-window records released in March to produce daily totals for banks across all the programs, including the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, Commercial Paper Funding Facility, discount window, PDCF, TAF, Term Securities Lending Facility and single-tranche open market operations. The programs supplied loans from August 2007 through April 2010.

Rolling Crisis

The result is a timeline illustrating how the credit crisis rolled from one bank to another as financial contagion spread.

Fed borrowings by Societe Generale (GLE), France’s second-biggest bank, peaked at $17.4 billion in May 2008, four months after the Paris-based lender announced a record 4.9 billion-euro ($7.2 billion) loss on unauthorized stock-index futures bets by former trader Jerome Kerviel.

Morgan Stanley’s top borrowing came four months later, after Lehman’s bankruptcy. Citigroup crested in January 2009, as did 43 other banks, the largest number of peak borrowings for any month during the crisis. Bank of America’s heaviest borrowings came two months after that.

Sixteen banks, including Plano, Texas-based Beal Financial Corp. and Jacksonville, Florida-based EverBank Financial Corp., didn’t hit their peaks until February or March 2010.

Using Subsidiaries

“At no point was there a material risk to the Fed or the taxpayer, as the loan required collateralization,” said Reshma Fernandes, a spokeswoman for EverBank, which borrowed as much as $250 million.

Banks maximized their borrowings by using subsidiaries to tap Fed programs at the same time. In March 2009, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America drew $78 billion from one facility through two banking units and $11.8 billion more from two other programs through its broker-dealer, Bank of America Securities LLC.

Banks also shifted balances among Fed programs. Many preferred the TAF because it carried less of the stigma associated with the discount window, often seen as the last resort for lenders in distress, according to a January 2011 paper by researchers at the New York Fed.

After the Lehman bankruptcy, hedge funds began pulling their cash out of Morgan Stanley, fearing it might be the next to collapse, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission said in a January report, citing interviews with former Chief Executive Officer John Mack and then-Treasurer David Wong.

Borrowings Surge

Morgan Stanley’s borrowings from the PDCF surged to $61.3 billion on Sept. 29 from zero on Sept. 14. At the same time, its loans from the Term Securities Lending Facility, or TSLF, rose to $36 billion from $3.5 billion. Morgan Stanley treasury reports released by the FCIC show the firm had $99.8 billion of liquidity on Sept. 29, a figure that included Fed borrowings.

“The cash flow was all drying up,” said Roger Lister, a former Fed economist who’s now head of financial-institutions coverage at credit-rating firm DBRS Inc. in New York. “Did they have enough resources to cope with it? The answer would be yes, but they needed the Fed.”

While Morgan Stanley’s Fed demands were the most acute, Citigroup was the most chronic borrower among the largest U.S. banks. The New York-based company borrowed $10 million from the TAF on the program’s first day in December 2007 and had more than $25 billion outstanding under all programs by May 2008, according to Bloomberg data.

Tapping Six Programs

By Nov. 21, when Citigroup began talks with the government to get a $20 billion capital injection on top of the $25 billion received a month earlier, its Fed borrowings had doubled to about $50 billion.

Over the next two months the amount almost doubled again. On Jan. 20, as the stock sank below $3 for the first time in 16 years amid investor concerns that the lender’s capital cushion might be inadequate, Citigroup was tapping six Fed programs at once. Its total borrowings amounted to more than twice the federal Department of Education’s 2011 budget.

Citigroup was in debt to the Fed on seven out of every 10 days from August 2007 through April 2010, the most frequent U.S. borrower among the 100 biggest publicly traded firms by pre- crisis market valuation. On average, the bank had a daily balance at the Fed of almost $20 billion.

‘Help Motivate Others’

“Citibank basically was sustained by the Fed for a very long time,” said Richard Herring, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who has studied financial crises.

Jon Diat, a Citigroup spokesman, said the bank made use of programs that “achieved the goal of instilling confidence in the markets.”

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a letter to shareholders last year that his bank avoided many government programs. It did use TAF, Dimon said in the letter, “but this was done at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.”

The bank, the second-largest in the U.S. by assets, first tapped the TAF in May 2008, six months after the program debuted, and then zeroed out its borrowings in September 2008. The next month, it started using TAF again.

On Feb. 26, 2009, more than a year after TAF’s creation, JPMorgan’s borrowings under the program climbed to $48 billion. On that day, the overall TAF balance for all banks hit its peak, $493.2 billion. Two weeks later, the figure began declining.

“Our prior comment is accurate,” said Howard Opinsky, a spokesman for JPMorgan.

‘The Cheapest Source’

Herring, the University of Pennsylvania professor, said some banks may have used the program to maximize profits by borrowing “from the cheapest source, because this was supposed to be secret and never revealed.”

Whether banks needed the Fed’s money for survival or used it because it offered advantageous rates, the central bank’s lender-of-last-resort role amounts to a free insurance policy for banks guaranteeing the arrival of funds in a disaster, Herring said.

An IMF report last October said regulators should consider charging banks for the right to access central bank funds.

“The extent of official intervention is clear evidence that systemic liquidity risks were under-recognized and mispriced by both the private and public sectors,” the IMF said in a separate report in April.

Access to Fed backup support “leads you to subject yourself to greater risks,” Herring said. “If it’s not there, you’re not going to take the risks that would put you in trouble and require you to have access to that kind of funding.”

Children defy police in Washington, purchase illegal lemonade

2011-08-23T07:53:00.002-05:00

This is how you win: non-violent, passive non-cooperation. We refuse to obey their fascist edicts, and force them to inflict their cruelty on us, for the whole world to see. Watch the female cop just seethe with hate for people exercising their rights, for not respecting her authoritah. She would break out her baton and start smashing skulls if she thought she could get away with it.

In a sane world, cops would be turning their badges in en masse. But they purposely recruit the type of people who have the IQ of a field mouse and get off on pushing people around. They also love war vets, most of which suffer from PTSD and are trained to destroy an enemy, not serve and protect people. Our citizens are an insurgency, and they are armed occupiers.

U.S. places $40 million chicken order

2011-08-21T14:52:00.003-05:00

You're not buying enough chicken, so the United States government will buy it for you. Just don't expect it to be delivered to your front door. Meanwhile, production costs for chicken farmers is going up in large part due to the Fed's monetary destruction. People are buying less chicken because chicken costs more, due to the Fed's monetary destruction. People will continue to buy less chicken as prices continue to rise.

CNN

The United States is stepping in to help bail out another American industry -- chicken farmers and meat processors.

The nation's chicken industry is having a difficult year. Chicken producers are struggling with higher costs of running their business at the same time that consumers are buying less meat.

This has created a glut of chicken products in the market.

Total chicken production in the first half of 2011 rose 4% compared to the same period a year ago, while demand for chicken has cooled, according to the National Chicken Council.

Consequently, retail prices for chicken product have dipped.

The Department of Agriculture, keenly aware of these issues, announced Monday that it will make a special purchase of up to $40 million of chicken products, which the government will then donate to federal food assistance programs such as soup kitchens and its national Feeding America programs.

The USDA steps in occasionally to buy up food products that are in surplus supply in the market. By doing this, it helps shrink the glut of product, raise retail prices and support producers that are struggling to cover their cost of production.

With Monday's chicken order, the USDA said it hoped the move would also provide support to the broiler industry and many small poultry [producers]. Broilers are chickens grown for meat as opposed to egg laying.

"Broiler producers have already cut production substantially and this purchase will help them bring supply in line with demand," the agency said.

The government made a similar move with a $30 million purchases of chicken products last year and a $42 million purchase of chicken products on 2008 with the intention of stabilizing retail prices.

The USDA said funding for the special purchases comes from customs receipts.

For its part, the National Chicken Council welcomed the bail out.

"At a time when the industry is under great stress due to the high cost of feed ingredients and the general economic slowdown, we appreciate USDA's willingness to step forward," the group said in a statement.

Bill Roenigk, economist with the National Chicken Council, said chicken producers have been hit with a double whammy.

First, high grain prices have significantly raised production costs for producers. Second, a difficult economy has changed how people shop for food and also what groceries they buy.

Many budget-conscious household aren't buying chicken even though an excess supply of chicken products is keeping retail prices for chicken below last year's levels, he said.

In June, the average store price for a pound of boneless chicken legs was $1.45, down 2.6% from last year, and $3.12 for a pound of boneless chicken breast, also down 5.9% from a year ago, according to government data.

"Many of our producers are selling whole chickens at wholesale prices that don't even cover their cost of production," Roenigk said. "We've lost three or four companies already this year because of it."

Every year, the industry sells about $45 billion worth of poultry meat. "We're expecting that total to be down 5% to 6% this year," he said.

The USDA's July report on poultry outlook seems to support Roenigk's assessment.

The agency, blaming higher grain prices and a difficult economy, expects broiler meat production in the second-half of 2011 to fall below last year's level and also anticipates broiler meat production to slow down in 2012.

Roenigk hopes the latest government assistance quickly stabilizes prices for poultry producers.

While that would be a good thing for producers, it could happen at the expense of consumers since reducing supply tends to raise retail prices for the product.