The Phil Schneider Story

The Phil Schneider Story

Dean Warwick

Dean Warwick

Whistleblower dies in suspicious circumstances on stage at UFO conference

Whistleblower dies in suspicious circumstances on stage at UFO conference

Planks and Ropes

Pfizer to pay $142M for drug fraud -- Signs of the Times News

Pfizer to pay $142M for drug fraud -- Signs of the Times News: "http://www.sott.net/articles/show/205694-Pfizer-to-pay-142M-for-drug-fraud"

Ultra-terrestrials and 9-11 -- Signs of the Times News

Ultra-terrestrials and 9-11 -- Signs of the Times News: "http://www.sott.net/articles/show/139903-Ultra-terrestrials+and+9-11"

Pitchfork: Articles: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton

Pitchfork: Articles: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton

Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation

Note: The first rule and last five (or six, depending on situation) rules are generally not directly within the ability of the traditional disinfo artist to apply. These rules are generally used more directly by those at the leadership, key players, or planning level of the criminal conspiracy or conspiracy to cover up.

1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don't discuss it -- especially if you are a public figure, news anchor, etc. If it's not reported, it didn't happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.

2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the "How dare you!" gambit.

3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method works especially well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such "arguable rumors". If you can associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a "wild rumor" which can have no basis in fact.

4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.

5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary attack the messenger ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as "kooks", "right-wing", "liberal", "left-wing", "terrorists", "conspiracy buffs", "radicals", "militia", "racists", "religious fanatics", "sexual deviates", and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.

6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet and letters-to-the-editor environments where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism reasoning -- simply make an accusation or other attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent's viewpoint.

7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could so taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.

8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough "jargon" and "minutiae" to illustrate you are "one who knows", and simply say it isn't so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely why or citing sources.

9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues with denial they have any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for maximum effect.

10. Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility, someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with. Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can usually them be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues -- so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source.

11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions. Using a minor matter or element of the facts, take the "high road" and "confess" with candor that some innocent mistake, in hindsight, was made -- but that opponents have seized on the opportunity to blow it all out of proportion and imply greater criminalities which, "just isn't so." Others can reinforce this on your behalf, later. Done properly, this can garner sympathy and respect for "coming clean" and "owning up" to your mistakes without addressing more serious issues.

12. Enigmas have no solution. Drawing upon the overall umbrella of events surrounding the crime and the multitude of players and events, paint the entire affair as too complex to solve. This causes those otherwise following the matter to begin to loose interest more quickly without having to address the actual issues.

13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards with an apparent deductive logic in a way that forbears any actual material fact.

14. Demand complete solutions. Avoid the issues by requiring opponents to solve the crime at hand completely, a ploy which works best for items qualifying for rule 10.

15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions in place.

16. Vanishing evidence and witnesses. If it does not exist, it is not fact, and you won't have to address the issue.

17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well with companions who can "argue" with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more key issues.

18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how "sensitive they are to criticism".

19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the "play dumb" rule. Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed or withheld, such as a murder weapon). In order to completely avoid discussing issues may require you to categorically deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.

20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications.

21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful evidence and that the evidence is sealed an unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict (usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim) is achieved, the matter can be considered officially closed.

22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.

23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes.

24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction of their character by release of blackmail information, or merely by proper intimidation with blackmail or other threats.

25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen.

Cheers and Jeers: Thursday

Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 06:01:52 AM PDT

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...


New York Times columnist Frank Rich Sunday:

If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.

Tomorrow marks the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq---aka "The 2,557 Day and Counting War." That's twice as long as our involvement in World War II.

Back in 2004 and 2005, when Al Franken was hosting his radio show on Air America, he would often go into his dead-on Dick Cheney impression and growl this quote from seven months before the bombs fell over Baghdad:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

And then he would let out a heavy sigh of frustration and say (paraphrasing), "Words matter, Mr. Vice President. When you say 'There is no doubt', that means something. 'No doubt' means no doubt. You lied to the American people." (Franken, it should be noted, originally and reluctantly supported the invasion---His words: "I believed Colin Powell"---until it became clear that the justification for it was bogus.)

As the war's architects and cheerleaders try to rehabilitate their images by crapping out error-riddled books sprinked with revisionist fairy dust (Karl Rove's is the latest---Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's are due soon), let's remember what they and their media enablers really said before and after it all went down. Things like this:

"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
---Cheney (3/16/03)
-
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
---Condoleezza Rice (9/8/02)
-
"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof---the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
---George W. Bush (10/7/02)
-
My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
---Colin Powell, United Nations Speech (2/5/03)
-
On Sept. 7, 2002, [Judith Miller] and fellow New York Times reporter Michael Gordon reported that Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb." As proof, she cited unnamed "American intelligence experts" and unnamed "Bush administration officials." Subsequently, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld all pointed to Miller’s story as justification for war. On April 22, 2003, she told PBS’s Newshour that WMD had already been found in Iraq: "Well, I think they found something more than a ’smoking gun.’"
---Think Progress (Miller now works for Fox News)
-
"[T]he area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
---Donald Rumsfeld (3/30/03)
-
"We found the weapons of mass destruction."
---Bush (5/29/03)
-
Ted Koppel: [Y]ou’re not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is going to be done for $1.7 billion?
Andrew Natsios [Agency for International Development]: Well, in terms of the American taxpayer's contribution, I do. This is it for the U.S.
---Nightline (4/23/03 Funny how the tea party crowd never uttered a peep as Bush funded his war with borrowed, off-the-books money that added a couple trillion dollars to the national debt.)

Words matter. "No doubt" means no doubt. "We know where they are" means we know where they are. "Facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" means facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. Write as many books as you want, guys. You'll never sweep your bullshit under the Persian rug.

As we eagerly anticipate the summer withdrawal of our amazing and resilient combat troops from Iraq seven and a half years after they went in, the con artists want you---and everyone---to forget why they were sent there in the first place.

All I can say is: fat chance.

Government Warned 911 Commission "Not To Cross Line"

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Documents recently obtained by the ACLU show that the government warned the 9/11 Commission against getting to the bottom of the September 11 terror attacks in a letter signed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet.

In a letter dated January 6, 2004, the Commission was refused permission to question terrorist detainees, with inquiry leaders Hamilton and Kean being told there was “A line that the Commission should not cross,” in the course of its investigation.

A PDF of the letter (page 26) can be read here.

The government urged the Commission, “Not to further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees,” according to the letter, citing the need to “Safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks.”

The warning was just one example of how the Bush administration fiercely struggled to prevent the 9/11 Commission from conducting a deeper probe into the attacks. Bush and Cheney refused to appear before the Commission separately and both refused to testify under oath, instead meeting with panel members informally and in private, with no recordings of the meeting allowed.

“It appears that David Addington took the lead on refusing the 9/11 Commission’s request,” writes the FireDogLake blog. “It appears Addington got the draft of the letter from 9/11 Commission–which was addressed to Rummy and George Tenet. Tenet and Addington clearly had a conversation about how to respond. But it seems that Addington drafted the response, got Condi, Andy Card, and Alberto Gonzales to review it, and then sent it to Tenet (and, presumably, Rummy) to okay and sign the letter.”

As FireDogLake rightly points out, this was part of an attempt to cover-up the systematic torture of detainees which did not fully come to light until the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed in April 2004.

However, the refusal to allow access to detainees was also undoubtedly so that the Commission members couldn’t later blow the whistle on the fact that the men were nothing more than patsies and goat herders who had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

As we have constantly emphasized in the face of establishment media spin that has demonized the mere act of questioning the official 9/11 story, the majority of the 9/11 Commission members themselves have all gone on record to publicly slam the official story as untrue.
The senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission – John Farmer – said that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11, echoing the assertions of fellow 9/11 Commission members who concluded that the Pentagon was engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack.
Senator Max Cleland, who resigned from the 9/11 Commission after calling it a “national scandal”, stated in a 2003 PBS interview,
“I’m saying that’s deliberate. I am saying that the delay in relating this information to the American public out of a hearing… series of hearings, that several members of Congress knew eight or ten months ago, including Bob Graham and others, that was deliberately slow walked… the 9/11 Commission was deliberately slow walked, because the Administration’s policy was, and its priority was, we’re gonna take Saddam Hussein out.”
Cleland, speaking with Democracy Now, said,
“One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up”.
In 2006 the Washington Post reported that several members of the 9/11 Commission suspected deception on part of the Pentagon. As reported,
“Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.”
9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerry also has unanswered questions. As reported by Salon, he believes that there are legitimate reasons to believe an alternative version to the official story.
“There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version,” Kerry said. The commission had limited time and limited resources to pursue its investigation, and its access to key documents and witnesses was fettered by the administration.
Commissioner Tim Roemer, speaking to CNN, stated that Commission members were considering a criminal probe of false statements. As quoted,
“We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting,” Roemer told CNN. “We were not sure of the intent, whether it was to deceive the commission or merely part of the fumbling bureaucracy.”
Despite the fact that the majority of 9/11 Commission members have openly attacked the official story, the corporate media still frames any suspicion surrounding 9/11 as baseless conspiracy fodder at best, and at worst – terrorist and extremist propaganda.
H/T: Daniel Taylor/Old Thinker News – 9/11 Commission Members Doubt Official Story

Richard Gage

The Architecture of Destruction Commercial architect Richard Gage (founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth)

Kabuki Play

by digby

Michael Isikoff and Michael Hirsh are on to something here, when they call Liz Cheney "Palin with a pedigree." I hadn't thought about it that way, but Cheney is also a somewhat youthful mother of five who sells herself as a living example of traditional family values from a position of powerful and famous political celebrity. It's a trick only the right wing could possibly get away with, but their history is filled with such hypocritical women.

But this I find even more interesting:


It's telling that no one at the Palazzo seemed very concerned that Liz, daughter of Dick, had just four days earlier appalled many in her own party's establishment. Her conservative advocacy group, Keep America Safe, had launched a nasty assault on seven Justice Department lawyers who had defended Guantánamo detainees. The ad branded the Justice lawyers "the Al Qaeda Seven" and asked, in ominous tones, "Whose values do they share?" To many critics within and outside the GOP, the attack smacked of McCarthyism for seeming to impugn the loyalty of lawyers who—like all members of their profession—sometimes represent unpopular (and guilty) clients. Nineteen conservative lawyers later issued a statement denouncing the ad. Among them were Ken Starr and top officials who had served in the George W. Bush administration. "I was horrified," says John Bellinger, Condoleezza Rice's former chief counsel.

Like father, like daughter, it seems. Much as Dick Cheney staked out the far right wing of the Bush administration, winning the respect and gratitude of GOP hawks despite his low popularity nationwide, Liz seems eager to make her reputation by unnerving her party's moderates. In another era—one less driven by ideological extremes—the vicious attack ad might have sunk her political career. But now it may have only turbocharged it. Cheney's aides could barely contain their glee last week at the ruckus they had stirred up. "For $1,000, we've driven the debate for over a week," said one political adviser, who asked not to be identified because the group, co-led by conservative commentator Bill Kristol, wanted to speak only through official statements. Or as one of Liz Cheney's biggest fans, Rush Limbaugh, put it on his radio show: "It sure as hell got everybody's attention, didn't it?" (Cheney herself did not respond to a request for comment.)


It was not a mistake. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Bill Kristol was, you'll recall, the man who wrote the memo back in 1994 urging total obstruction of Clinton's health care bill. He is a master at moving the debate to the right. Similarly, the Cheneys have been on the attack since the day Obama was elected and have been extremely successful at forcing them off their position and re-normalizing the neocon position in the mainstream media.

Everyone on the left feels very smug about having all those right wing lawyers brush Cheney and Kristol back. But they shouldn't. Cheney's charge about the Obama Justice Department lawyers is "out there" and according to Cokie's law that means it's no longer beyond the pale. And from the sound of this article, the conservative establishment understands that very well.

Rove Falsely Claims Bush Administration Never Said Iraqi Oil Revenue Would Help Pay For War

via think progress

In his new book and in recent media appearances promoting it, former top Bush aide Karl Rove has been revising the history of the Iraq war, particularly regarding the issue of Saddam Hussien’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rove continued with his Iraq war history revision campaign. Noting that the Bush administration had mishandled the management of the war, host Tom Brokaw mentioned that “the cost of the war skyrocketed almost from the beginning. There was not a sharing of the oil revenue that a lot of people had promised.” But Rove flatly denied that the Bush administration said Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for the war:

ROVE: No, no. Tom with all due respect that was not the policy of our government that we were going to go into Iraq and take their resources in order to pay for the cost of the war. … [T]he suggestion that somehow or another the administration had as its policy, “We’re going to go in to Iraq and take their resource and pay for the war” is not accurate.



Rove’s claim is simply not true. In fact, days after the U.S. invasion, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional panel that Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for reconstructing the country, i.e. a cost of the war. “The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We’re dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,” he said.

One month before the war, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Iraq “is a rather wealthy country. … And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction costs.

The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality


By FRANK RICH
Published: March 13, 2010
THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)


Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.

Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.

But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.

There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce.

Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”

Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.

This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.

In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.

What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors.

Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond — and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.

The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidies until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.

Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.

If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.

I call bullshit

STUNNING! Maddow interviews Pelosi on Bush War Crimes, impeachment and "Looking forward"
by MinistryOfTruth


Sat Mar 13, 2010 at 06:25:46 AM PDT

I give you the finest journalist America has to offer today, Rachel Maddow, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.




MinistryOfTruth's diary :: ::
Brought to you by PeanutButterPAC.org

Maddow: But let me also ask you about something that I think is very dear to the hearts of American liberals. And it doesn‘t get a lot of traction across the political board right now. And that‘s the issue of accountability for things that happened during the Bush administration. Torture, warrantless wiretapping, the hijacking of the Justice Department for partisan political purposes, lies being told to the American people about what the intelligence that we had as a country indicated about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

So on all of those issues, while we can talk comfortably about them and they‘re not in the heart of political discourse in the country right now, there is a sense in which nobody was ever held accountable for any of those things. Does that trouble you? And should we ever expect as a country that people will be held accountable for those crimes?

PELOSI: Well, the president has wanted to go forward, to move on and go forward. There are those of us who supported a commission to review some of those activities but the president has decided to move on. All of the things that you name are important. The issue that - you said does it - that bothers me the most is the issue of the Iraq War.

There‘s so much evidence that there was no reason for us to go into that war at that time or go into it, period. But to think that thousands of lives have been lost, lives affected to the tune of hundreds of thousands, the cost in terms of our military readiness - it has not made our military stronger.

In terms of dollars to the Treasury but, again, most of all loss of lives, our precious treasure, on this war and there was really no price to pay for it. So when you ask what bothers me about it, yes, all of those things do. But I think that the record has to be straight about what a serious mistake the Iraq War was.

MADDOW: Do you regret having taken the issue of impeachment off the table in terms of talking about the president the way the president communicated about that issue to the country?

PELOSI: No. I think the - I believe that the - if there was evidence, if we could have the evidence to impeach the president, then that could come forward. Just because I say it‘s off doesn‘t mean if the evidence is there, that something wouldn‘t go forward.

It‘s not a question of not knowing where the culpability is. It‘s what you can demonstrate and what you can prove. But I do think that those who had a hand in perpetrating not only going to war but the misrepresentations to the American people. Every piece of evidence that we have points to the fact that there was no reason in terms of weapons of mass destruction to go into Iraq.

MADDOW: Even though we were told that there was?

PELOSI: Even though we were told that there was - that there were. But it is - that there were weapons there. It is one of the great tragedies.





I'm sorry, but with all due respect to Speaker Pelosi, I call bullshit on this.

And I find this level of bullshit to be simply stunning.

I am reminded of this piece published by Glenn Greenwald: 'This is what the Democratic Party Does; it is who they are'
(hat/tip to Kossack Rossl)

So Impeachment is off the table
War crimes accountability is off the table
Single Payer is off the table
The public option is off the table

You might as well just take Democracy off the table too.

These are just some examples of the spineless and corrupt folding that the Democratic party has become so famous/infamous for, and though I don't want to lay the blame for all of the Democratic parties problems and capitulations at the feet of Speaker Pelosi, I really want to know how our democracy is supposed to work when ACCOUNTABILITY is off the table.

Seriously, if anybody has an answer to that one, I would be thrilled to hear it.

I consider the idea that there wasn't enough evidence of Bush/Cheney war crimes to push for accountability a stunning pile of bullshit. I consider the fact that this administration sought to "move forward" instead of pursuing justice simply appalling. This is my honest opinion. Differ if you like, but the fact remains . . .

If Dick Cheney is above the law you are beneath it and him. If we do not have a rule of law that is applied equally to everyone in America no matter there position of wealth and power then there are no rukes, there might as well be no laws, there is no justice, and we are less than citizens with equal rights. If the crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration are not punished we are guaranteed that they will repeat, and since I highly doubt that Republicans would ever give a Democrat such a pass it makes the kabuki look that much more pathetic.

So what will the legacy of the Obama Administration be? Will we choose the easy path and "look forward"? Or will we take the harder road and pursue justice and the truth no matter where it takes us? More importantly, what are the consequences that future Americans will face if we fail to uphold the rule of law?

I applaud Rachel Maddow for asking the tough questions. If only there were someone in a position of power with the courage to give the correct answers and to act and pursue justice.

Because if america does "look forward" on these crimes we should be ashamed of ourselves, and history will never forgive us.

In a sane, less corrupt world, this would not just be a picture.

There was no "worldwide consensus"

There was no "worldwide consensus"
by Charles in AL


Sun Mar 14, 2010 at 05:07:47 AM PDT

Last week, in an exclusive interview with TODAY’s Matt Lauer, former Bush adviser Karl Rove said:

"It [was] a worldwide consensus. You can go back and try and rewrite history, but at that moment we as a nation were faced with the belief that [Saddam Hussein] had WMD."

-- http://today.msnbc.msn.com/...

If you'll pardon the expression, that's revisionist bullshit. It's an outright lie.

More ...

Charles in AL's diary :: ::
The truth is that many people did know before the invasion of Iraq, or wisely suspect, that the White House and Pentagon were telling us things that could not be proven and which turned out to be complete fabrications.

I know, because I was one of them. We were right. We were 100% right. Don't let anyone ever rob you of that; we were right; and they were wrong. Who stood on the high ground then, and stands on it now?

Never believe the lie that support for this misbegotten war was virtually universal before the invasion. It is a lie that "Everyone believed Saddam Hussein had WMD that made him a threat to the United States."

Because there was no "worldwide consensus" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that an unprovoked invasion of that country was justified ... in fact the leaders of three nations spoke up and said so, Jean Chrétien of Canada, Jacques Chirac of France, and Gerhard Schröder of Germany, all of who were 100% right to do so.

Here's what actually and factually happened: After the tragedy of 9/11, claiming "national security" as the reason, President George W. Bush concentrated power in his office. He broke both domestic and international laws, invented reasons for invading Iraq and a totally imaginary threat from that tiny defenseless country, he renamed prisoners "enemy combatants" to deprive them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions; condoned the torture and secret prisons around the world into which men who were never charged with a crime, and of whose "guilt" no evidence was ever produced, disappeared.

That's what happened. And Karl Rove is a serial liar. I'm not concerned about Karl Rove, though, and you shouldn't be either. The choice is each of ours, personally, individually, to make. It's always a personal choice.

Ground Zero workers to receive 9/11 payouts

Ground Zero workers to receive 9/11 payouts

Reuters

Ground Zero Workers
The deadly calm after the storm. Dust lies on the skeletal remains of the twin towers as rescue workers look on.
New York has agreed to a $657m compensation package for the hero 9/11 workers who are suffering from health problems in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

Emergency personnel leapt into action as all hell broke loose on September 11. Fire fighters did not hesitate as they set off to help victims at Ground Zero.

And the mountain of rubble which was left by the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings had to be removed later.

It was work which put many people's health at risk - through smoke, ash and toxic fumes which rose from the destroyed buildings.

And the workers are now being compensated for it. Insurer WTC Captive has stated that over 10,000 people will receive a payout - up to a total of $657 million (around €480 million).

Some 2,752 people were killed when two hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center twin towers in Manhattan.

Many volunteers worked tirelessly alongside the emergency services in the days and weeks after the attack.

Their compensation will be considered depending on the degree and severity of their health problems.

To receive payments they have to provide evidence that they were on site offering assistance in the days after 9/11. They also have to submit medical reports and records concerning their health issues.

New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg has welcomed the settlement, calling it "fair and reasonable".

The compensation will be provided for by federal funds.

Those affected only have 90 days to apply.
Print

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google
By Bruce Schneier, Special to CNN


* Google says hackers from China got into its Gmail system
* Bruce Schneier says hackers exploited feature put into system at behest of U.S. government
* When governments get access to private communications, they invite abuse, he says
* Government surveillance and control of Internet are flourishing, he says

Editor's note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World." Read more of his writing at http://www.schneier.com/

(CNN) -- Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already -- it's that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

Google's system isn't unique. Democratic governments around the world -- in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example -- are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Many are also passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain information on their customers. In the U.S., the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems with the help of those phone companies.

Systems like these invite misuse: criminal appropriation, government abuse and stretching by everyone possible to apply to situations that are applicable only by the most tortuous logic. The FBI illegally wiretapped the phones of Americans, often falsely invoking terrorism emergencies, 3,500 times between 2002 and 2006 without a warrant. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.
Video: China-Google battle heats up
RELATED TOPICS

* Google Inc.
* China
* Internet

Official misuses are bad enough, but it's the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't.

China's hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders. Why does anyone think criminals won't be able to use the same system to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks or turn it into a massive spam-sending network? Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement can mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?

These risks are not merely theoretical. After September 11, the NSA built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the U.S. Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn't match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and notables such as President Clinton.

But that's not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government: the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.

Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone's products and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn't one of those governments, but someone still unknown -- A rival political party? Organized crime? Foreign intelligence? -- figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

And surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens and Nokia built Iran's surveillance. U.S. companies helped build China's electronic police state. Just last year, Twitter's anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents, anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

In the aftermath of Google's announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don't understand that their own government is on the list.

This problem isn't going away. Every year brings more Internet censorship and control, not just in countries like China and Iran but in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and other free countries, egged on by both law enforcement trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals and by media companies trying to stop file sharers.

The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bruce Schneier.

Texas Board of Education cuts Thomas Jefferson out of its textbooks.

via thinkprogress today

The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:

– To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”

– The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

– The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

– The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”

As the nation’s second-largest textbook market, Texas has enormous leverage over publishers, who often “craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers.” Indeed, as The Washington Monthly has reported, “when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas.”

Update Following repeated failed attempts to add figures in Hispanic history to the textbooks, one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, stormed "out of the meeting late Thursday night, saying, 'They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.'"

THE SOURCE OF ALL MY GOOD

The source of all my good
Is my kind Lama, my Lord;
Bless me first to see
That taking myself to him
In the proper way
Is the very root
Of the path, and grant me then
To serve and follow him
With all my strength and reverence.


—2—
Bless me first to realize
That the excellent life
Of leisure I’ve found
Just this once
Is ever so hard to find
And ever so valuable;
Grant me then
To wish, and never stop to wish,
That I could take
Its essence night and day.


—3—
My body and the life in it
Are fleeting as the bubbles
In the sea froth of a wave.
Bless me first thus to recall
The death that will destroy me soon;
And help me find sure knowledge
That after I have died
The things I’ve done, the white or black,
And what these deeds will bring to me,
Follow always close behind,
As certain as my shadow.


—4—
Grant me then
Ever to be careful,
To stop the slightest
Wrongs of many wrongs we do,
And try to carry out instead
Each and every good
Of the many that we may.


—5—
Bless me to perceive
All that’s wrong
With the seemingly good things
Of this life.
I can never get enough of them.
They cannot be trusted.
They are the door
To every pain I have.
Grant me then
To strive instead
For the happiness of freedom.


-6-
And to recall
What I should be doing,
Grant me to give
The greatest care
To make the vows of morality
The essence of my practice;
They are
The root of the Buddha’s teaching.


—7—
I have slipped and fallen
Into the sea
Of suffering life;
Bless me to see
That every living being,
Everyone my own mother,
Has fallen in too.
Grant me then
To practice this highest
Wish for enlightenment,
To take on myself
The task of freeing them all.



—8—
Bless me to see clearly
That the Wish itself
Is not enough,
For if I’m not well trained
In the three moralities,
I cannot become a Buddha.
Grant me then
A fierce resolve
To master the vows
For children of the Victors.


—9—
Grant that I may quickly gain
The path where quietude
And insight join together;
One which quiets
My mind from being
Distracted to wrong objects,
The other which analyzes
The perfect meaning
In the correct way.


—10—
Grant that once I’ve practiced well
The paths shared and become
A vessel that is worthy,
I enter with perfect ease
The way of the Diamond,
Highest of all ways,
Holiest door to come inside
For the fortunate and the good.



—11—
Bless me to know
With genuine certainty
That when I’ve entered thus,
The cause that gives me
Both the attainments
Is keeping my pledges
And vows most pure.
Grant me then
To always keep them
Even if it costs my life.



—12—
Bless me next
To realize precisely
The crucial points
Of both the stages,
The essence of
The secret ways.
Grant me then
To practice as
The Holy One has spoken,
Putting all my effort in
And never leaving off
The Practice of the Four Times,
Highest that there is.


—13—
Bless me, grant me that
The spiritual Guide
Who shows me this good road,
And all my true
Companions in this quest
Live long and fruitful lives.
Bless and grant me that
The rain of obstacles,
Things within me
Or outside me
That could stop me now,
Stop and end forever.



—14—
In all my lives
May I never live
Apart from my perfect Lamas,
May I bask
In the glory
Of the Dharma.
May I fulfill
Perfectly
Every good quality
Of every level and path,
And reach then quickly
The place where I
Become myself
The Keeper of the Diamond.

Grant that these pure thoughts
May lead me to be watchful

Debunking Debunking

Laura Knight-Jadzyk

In "Zen And the Art of Debunkery," thinker and writer, Daniel Drasin describes the goals of true science, exposes the pseudo-scientific opposition to scientific advancement, then reveals some of the absurdities one must rely on to be a "natural" at COINTELPRO - whether one is receiving pay from the alphabet soup guys or not. A few of the items in his list are:

Cultivate a condescending air that suggests that your personal opinions are backed by the full faith and credit of God. Employ vague, subjective, dismissive terms such as "ridiculous" or "trivial" in a manner that suggests they have the full force of scientific authority. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Portray science not as an open-ended process of discovery but as a holy war against unruly hordes of quackery- worshipping infidels. Since in war the ends justify the means, you may fudge, stretch or violate the scientific method, or even omit it entirely, in the name of defending the scientific method.

Keep your arguments as abstract and theoretical as possible. This will "send the message" that accepted theory overrides any actual evidence that might challenge it--and that therefore no such evidence is worth examining.

Reinforce the popular misconception that certain subjects are inherently unscientific. In other words, deliberately confuse the *process* of science with the *content* of science. (Someone may, of course, object that since science is a universal approach to truth-seeking it must be neutral to subject matter; hence, only the investigative *process* can be scientifically responsible or irresponsible. If that happens, dismiss such objections using a method employed successfully by generations of politicians: simply reassure everyone that "there is no contradiction here!")

Arrange to have your message echoed by persons of authority. The degree to which you can stretch the truth is directly proportional to the prestige of your mouthpiece.

Always refer to unorthodox statements as "claims," which are "touted," and to your own assertions as "facts," which are "stated."

Avoid examining the actual evidence. This allows you to say with impunity, "I have seen absolutely no evidence to support such ridiculous claims!" (Note that this technique has withstood the test of time, and dates back at least to the age of Galileo. By simply refusing to look through his telescope, the ecclesiastical authorities bought the Church over three centuries' worth of denial free and clear!)

If examining the evidence becomes unavoidable, report back that "there is nothing new here!" If confronted by a watertight body of evidence that has survived the most rigorous tests, simply dismiss it as being "too pat."

Equate the necessary skeptical component of science with *all* of science. Emphasize the narrow, stringent, rigorous and critical elements of science to the exclusion of intuition, inspiration, exploration and integration. If anyone objects, accuse them of viewing science in exclusively fuzzy, subjective or metaphysical terms. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Insist that the progress of science depends on explaining the unknown in terms of the known. In other words, science equals reductionism. You can apply the reductionist approach in any situation by discarding more and more and more evidence until what little is left can finally be explained entirely in terms of established knowledge. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

At every opportunity reinforce the notion that what is familiar is necessarily rational. The unfamiliar is therefore irrational, and consequently inadmissible as evidence. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

State categorically that the unconventional may be dismissed as, at best, an honest misinterpretation of the conventional. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Characterize your opponents as "uncritical believers." Summarily dismiss the notion that debunkery itself betrays uncritical belief, albeit in the status quo. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Maintain the idea that a single flaw invalidates the whole. In conventional contexts, however, you may sagely remind the world that, "after all, situations are complex and human beings are imperfect." [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Since the public tends to be unclear about the distinction between evidence and proof, do your best to help maintain this murkiness. If absolute proof is lacking, state categorically that "there is no evidence!"

If sufficient evidence has been presented to warrant further investigation, argue that "evidence alone proves nothing!" Ignore the fact that preliminary evidence is not supposed to prove *any*thing.

In any case, imply that proof precedes evidence. This will eliminate the possibility of initiating any meaningful process of investigation--particularly if no criteria of proof have yet been established for the phenomenon in question.

Practice debunkery-by-association. In this way you can indiscriminately drag material across disciplinary lines or from one case to another to support your views as needed. For example, if a claim having some superficial similarity to the one at hand has been (or is popularly assumed to have been) exposed as fraudulent, cite it as if it were an appropriate example. Then put on a gloating smile, lean back in your armchair and just say "I rest my case."

Use the word "imagination" as an epithet that applies only to seeing what's *not* there, and not to denying what *is* there.

Ridicule, ridicule, ridicule. It is far and away the single most chillingly effective weapon in the war against discovery and innovation. Ridicule has the unique power to make people of virtually any persuasion go completely unconscious in a twinkling. It fails to sway only those few who are of sufficiently independent mind not to buy into the kind of emotional consensus that ridicule provides. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Use "smoke and mirrors," i.e., obfuscation and illusion. Never forget that a slippery mixture of fact, opinion, innuendo, out-of-context information and outright lies will fool most of the people most of the time. As little as one part fact to ten parts B.S. will usually do the trick. (Some veteran debunkers use homeopathic dilutions of fact with remarkable success!) Cultivate the art of slipping back and forth between fact and fiction so undetectably that the flimsiest foundation of truth will always appear to firmly support your entire edifice of opinion. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Employ "TCP": Technically Correct Pseudo-refutation. Example: if someone remarks that all great truths began as blasphemies, respond immediately that not all blasphemies have become great truths. Because your response was technically correct, no one will notice that it did not really refute the original remark.

Trivialize the case by trivializing the entire field in question. Characterize the orthodox approach as deep and time-consuming, while deeming that of the unorthodox approach as so insubstantial as to demand nothing more than a scan of the tabloids. If pressed on this, simply say "but there's nothing there to study!" Characterize any unorthodox scientist as a "buff" or "freak," or as "self-styled"-- the media's favorite code-word for "bogus." [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Remember that most people do not have sufficient time or expertise for careful discrimination, and tend to accept or reject the whole of an unfamiliar situation. So discredit the whole story by attempting to discredit *part* of the story. Here's how: a) take one element of a case completely out of context; b) find something prosaic that hypothetically could explain it; c) declare that therefore that one element has been explained; d) call a press conference and announce to the world that the entire case has been explained!

Label any poorly-understood research "occult," "fringe," "paranormal," "metaphysical," "mystical," "supernatural," or "new-age." This will get most mainstream scientists off the case immediately on purely emotional grounds. If you're lucky, this may delay any responsible investigation of such phenomena by decades or even centuries! [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Remember that you can easily appear to refute anyone's claims by building "straw men" to demolish. One way to do this is to misquote them while preserving that convincing grain of truth; for example, by acting as if they have intended the extreme of any position they've taken. Another effective strategy with a long history of success is simply to mis- replicate their experiments--or to avoid replicating them at all on grounds that "to do so would be ridiculous or fruitless." To make the whole process even easier, respond not to their actual claims but to their claims as reported by the media, or as propagated in popular myth.

Hold claimants responsible for the production values and editorial policies of any media or press that reports their claim. If an unusual or inexplicable event is reported in a sensationalized manner, hold this as proof that the event itself must have been without substance or worth.

When a witness or claimant states something in a manner that is scientifically imperfect, treat this as if it were not scientific at all. If the claimant is not a credentialed scientist, argue that his or her perceptions cannot possibly be objective. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

If you're unable to attack the facts of the case, attack the participants--or the journalists who reported the case. *Ad- hominem* arguments, or personality attacks, are among the most powerful ways of swaying the public and avoiding the issue. For example, if investigators of the unorthodox have profited financially from activities connected with their research, accuse them of "profiting financially from activities connected with their research!" If their research, publishing, speaking tours and so forth, constitute their normal line of work or sole means of support, hold that fact as "conclusive proof that income is being realized from such activities!" If they have labored to achieve public recognition for their work, you may safely characterize them as "publicity seekers."

Fabricate supportive expertise as needed by quoting the opinions of those in fields popularly assumed to include the necessary knowledge.

Fabricate sources of disinformation. Claim that you've "found the person who started the rumor that such a phenomenon exists!" · Fabricate entire research projects. Declare that "these claims have been thoroughly discredited by the top experts in the field!" Do this whether or not such experts have ever actually studied the claims, or, for that matter, even exist.

Why is it so that scientists - most particularly physicists and mathematicians of a good and honest disposition - seem to be the ones who most actively resist the very idea that their profession MAY have been taken over and "vectored" by conspirators who do not have humanity's best interests at heart?

Why do scientists - those to whom the power elite MUST look for solutions to their "power problems" - think for one instant that their profession is exempt from conspiratorial manipulation and management?

That just isn't logical, is it?

In the physical sciences, very often machines and instruments are utilized to "take measurements." In order to achieve accuracy with even the most accurately tooled device, certain tests are undertaken to establish the "reading error" of the gadget. What we would like to suggest is that the "official culture" that establishes what may or may not be taken "seriously" is a planned and deliberate "reading error" built into the "machine" of science - our very thinking - the suggestions of the "hypnotist."

William March wrote in The Bad Seed:

[G]ood people are rarely suspicious: they cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing…

Without a historical context of science, there is little possibility that a sincere scientist - who is generally not much interested in history, based on my own experience - will ever be able to establish the "reading error" of his machine - his thinking.

There are only so many hours in the day, only so many days in the year, and only so many years in the life of a scientist. The amount of study that is necessary to discover the threads of "conspiracy," where they lead to and what they lead away from, is actually overwhelming. I know: I've spent about 30 years doing it. What's more, I began my research from a skeptical point of view that "conspiracy" was paranoid thinking and I was determined to find the way to demonstrate that there was NO conspiracy. Unfortunately, not only did my plan fail - my hypothesis was utterly demolished by the hard facts.

But what I did learn was that finding those "hard facts" was very difficult and time-consuming. And that is deliberate. After all, how good a conspiracy is it if it is so easily discovered? And it is clear that in such a high stakes arena as the Global Control agenda now being overtly pursued by the Bush Reich - after years and years of the "secret science" - whatever conspiracies exist, will be managed with all the resources and power of those elitists who wish to retain control. That is a formidable obstacle.

I would also like to mention the fact that, even though I am the one who has collected and sorted data, my husband, a mathematical physicist, HAS assisted me in analyzing it. At first he did it to humor me. And then, as he applied his knowledge of mathematics to the various problems I brought to him, he began to realize that science CAN be applied to these problems, and once that is done, it strips away the denial mechanism and one is left with the inescapable conclusion that nothing is as it seems and never has been. We live in an ocean of lies, disinformation, manipulation, propaganda, and smokescreens.

Too bad more competent scientists do not bring their skills to the solving of these problems. But that is precisely what the "Secret Cult" does NOT want to happen. And that is precisely WHY the most subtle and far-reaching of the "COINTELPRO" operations have been run on scientists themselves.

The possibility that COINTELPRO is in operation in regards to certain ideas that are being associated with the Bogdanov twins ought not to be taken lightly. Physics and mathematics are the numero uno professions that have been used - historically speaking - to support the power elite. It is logically evident that "they" have a vested interest in making sure that the money goes only to projects that 1) will augment their control; in which case such projects will be buried and no one will know about them; or 2) projects that do not threaten their control, in which case we may assume that they are funding research in the public domain that leads AWAY from the "important" issues.

In short, if it's popular, gets funded, is allowed out in the open, you can almost guarantee that it is smart but useless.

You can take that to the bank.

Here is where we come back to the context. If we take it as an operating hypothesis that there does exist a powerful elite whose interests are served by science, and who have a vested interest in public science never approaching the "secret science," we have adjusted our "machine tolerances" and can look at the problem in a different way.

First of all we might wish to ask: who benefits if one or the other proposition about the Bogdanov affaire proves to be the "right one?" If they have infiltrated the scientific community with a "fraud," what might be the result? If, on the other hand, they have brought up subjects that are truly interesting - even if they haven't got a clue about what to do with those subjects - what might be the result if they are ridiculed, flamed, and generally discredited?

"The main threat to Democracy comes not from the extreme left but from the extreme right, which is able to buy huge sections of the press and radio, and wages a constant campaign to smear and discredit every progressive and humanitarian measure." - George Seldes

"There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself." Daniel K. Inouye U.S. Senator

This timeline, prepared by a researcher of our Quantum Future School, [JH] with many linked sources, barely scratches the surface. It is our hope that readers will do additional research, and provide us with more links and connections to this spider web of Cosmic COINTELPRO that has blanketed the Earth with Lies, deception, confusion and tricks and traps - the magnets of Impending Global Destruction. See also: Star of Sorcerer's for additional connections.

We will continue to work on the project in hopes that by seeing the various threads together, more people will realize just how it all connects and how totally we have been duped, and how Evil the plans of the Controllers truly are.

"Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." - Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913)
" thinker and writer, Daniel Drasin describes the goals of true science, exposes the pseudo-scientific opposition to scientific advancement, then reveals some of the absurdities one must rely on to be a "natural" at COINTELPRO - whether one is receiving pay from the alphabet soup guys or not. A few of the items in his list are:

Cultivate a condescending air that suggests that your personal opinions are backed by the full faith and credit of God. Employ vague, subjective, dismissive terms such as "ridiculous" or "trivial" in a manner that suggests they have the full force of scientific authority. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Portray science not as an open-ended process of discovery but as a holy war against unruly hordes of quackery- worshipping infidels. Since in war the ends justify the means, you may fudge, stretch or violate the scientific method, or even omit it entirely, in the name of defending the scientific method.

Keep your arguments as abstract and theoretical as possible. This will "send the message" that accepted theory overrides any actual evidence that might challenge it--and that therefore no such evidence is worth examining.

Reinforce the popular misconception that certain subjects are inherently unscientific. In other words, deliberately confuse the *process* of science with the *content* of science. (Someone may, of course, object that since science is a universal approach to truth-seeking it must be neutral to subject matter; hence, only the investigative *process* can be scientifically responsible or irresponsible. If that happens, dismiss such objections using a method employed successfully by generations of politicians: simply reassure everyone that "there is no contradiction here!")

Arrange to have your message echoed by persons of authority. The degree to which you can stretch the truth is directly proportional to the prestige of your mouthpiece.

Always refer to unorthodox statements as "claims," which are "touted," and to your own assertions as "facts," which are "stated."

Avoid examining the actual evidence. This allows you to say with impunity, "I have seen absolutely no evidence to support such ridiculous claims!" (Note that this technique has withstood the test of time, and dates back at least to the age of Galileo. By simply refusing to look through his telescope, the ecclesiastical authorities bought the Church over three centuries' worth of denial free and clear!)

If examining the evidence becomes unavoidable, report back that "there is nothing new here!" If confronted by a watertight body of evidence that has survived the most rigorous tests, simply dismiss it as being "too pat."

Equate the necessary skeptical component of science with *all* of science. Emphasize the narrow, stringent, rigorous and critical elements of science to the exclusion of intuition, inspiration, exploration and integration. If anyone objects, accuse them of viewing science in exclusively fuzzy, subjective or metaphysical terms. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Insist that the progress of science depends on explaining the unknown in terms of the known. In other words, science equals reductionism. You can apply the reductionist approach in any situation by discarding more and more and more evidence until what little is left can finally be explained entirely in terms of established knowledge. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

At every opportunity reinforce the notion that what is familiar is necessarily rational. The unfamiliar is therefore irrational, and consequently inadmissible as evidence. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

State categorically that the unconventional may be dismissed as, at best, an honest misinterpretation of the conventional. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Characterize your opponents as "uncritical believers." Summarily dismiss the notion that debunkery itself betrays uncritical belief, albeit in the status quo. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Maintain the idea that a single flaw invalidates the whole. In conventional contexts, however, you may sagely remind the world that, "after all, situations are complex and human beings are imperfect." [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Since the public tends to be unclear about the distinction between evidence and proof, do your best to help maintain this murkiness. If absolute proof is lacking, state categorically that "there is no evidence!"

If sufficient evidence has been presented to warrant further investigation, argue that "evidence alone proves nothing!" Ignore the fact that preliminary evidence is not supposed to prove *any*thing.

In any case, imply that proof precedes evidence. This will eliminate the possibility of initiating any meaningful process of investigation--particularly if no criteria of proof have yet been established for the phenomenon in question.

Practice debunkery-by-association. In this way you can indiscriminately drag material across disciplinary lines or from one case to another to support your views as needed. For example, if a claim having some superficial similarity to the one at hand has been (or is popularly assumed to have been) exposed as fraudulent, cite it as if it were an appropriate example. Then put on a gloating smile, lean back in your armchair and just say "I rest my case."

Use the word "imagination" as an epithet that applies only to seeing what's *not* there, and not to denying what *is* there.

Ridicule, ridicule, ridicule. It is far and away the single most chillingly effective weapon in the war against discovery and innovation. Ridicule has the unique power to make people of virtually any persuasion go completely unconscious in a twinkling. It fails to sway only those few who are of sufficiently independent mind not to buy into the kind of emotional consensus that ridicule provides. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Use "smoke and mirrors," i.e., obfuscation and illusion. Never forget that a slippery mixture of fact, opinion, innuendo, out-of-context information and outright lies will fool most of the people most of the time. As little as one part fact to ten parts B.S. will usually do the trick. (Some veteran debunkers use homeopathic dilutions of fact with remarkable success!) Cultivate the art of slipping back and forth between fact and fiction so undetectably that the flimsiest foundation of truth will always appear to firmly support your entire edifice of opinion. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Employ "TCP": Technically Correct Pseudo-refutation. Example: if someone remarks that all great truths began as blasphemies, respond immediately that not all blasphemies have become great truths. Because your response was technically correct, no one will notice that it did not really refute the original remark.

Trivialize the case by trivializing the entire field in question. Characterize the orthodox approach as deep and time-consuming, while deeming that of the unorthodox approach as so insubstantial as to demand nothing more than a scan of the tabloids. If pressed on this, simply say "but there's nothing there to study!" Characterize any unorthodox scientist as a "buff" or "freak," or as "self-styled"-- the media's favorite code-word for "bogus." [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Remember that most people do not have sufficient time or expertise for careful discrimination, and tend to accept or reject the whole of an unfamiliar situation. So discredit the whole story by attempting to discredit *part* of the story. Here's how: a) take one element of a case completely out of context; b) find something prosaic that hypothetically could explain it; c) declare that therefore that one element has been explained; d) call a press conference and announce to the world that the entire case has been explained!

Label any poorly-understood research "occult," "fringe," "paranormal," "metaphysical," "mystical," "supernatural," or "new-age." This will get most mainstream scientists off the case immediately on purely emotional grounds. If you're lucky, this may delay any responsible investigation of such phenomena by decades or even centuries! [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

Remember that you can easily appear to refute anyone's claims by building "straw men" to demolish. One way to do this is to misquote them while preserving that convincing grain of truth; for example, by acting as if they have intended the extreme of any position they've taken. Another effective strategy with a long history of success is simply to mis- replicate their experiments--or to avoid replicating them at all on grounds that "to do so would be ridiculous or fruitless." To make the whole process even easier, respond not to their actual claims but to their claims as reported by the media, or as propagated in popular myth.

Hold claimants responsible for the production values and editorial policies of any media or press that reports their claim. If an unusual or inexplicable event is reported in a sensationalized manner, hold this as proof that the event itself must have been without substance or worth.

When a witness or claimant states something in a manner that is scientifically imperfect, treat this as if it were not scientific at all. If the claimant is not a credentialed scientist, argue that his or her perceptions cannot possibly be objective. [John Baez: "Jadczyk has some unusual conspiracy theories which affect his interpretation of this case"]

If you're unable to attack the facts of the case, attack the participants--or the journalists who reported the case. *Ad- hominem* arguments, or personality attacks, are among the most powerful ways of swaying the public and avoiding the issue. For example, if investigators of the unorthodox have profited financially from activities connected with their research, accuse them of "profiting financially from activities connected with their research!" If their research, publishing, speaking tours and so forth, constitute their normal line of work or sole means of support, hold that fact as "conclusive proof that income is being realized from such activities!" If they have labored to achieve public recognition for their work, you may safely characterize them as "publicity seekers."

Fabricate supportive expertise as needed by quoting the opinions of those in fields popularly assumed to include the necessary knowledge.

Fabricate sources of disinformation. Claim that you've "found the person who started the rumor that such a phenomenon exists!" · Fabricate entire research projects. Declare that "these claims have been thoroughly discredited by the top experts in the field!" Do this whether or not such experts have ever actually studied the claims, or, for that matter, even exist.

Why is it so that scientists - most particularly physicists and mathematicians of a good and honest disposition - seem to be the ones who most actively resist the very idea that their profession MAY have been taken over and "vectored" by conspirators who do not have humanity's best interests at heart?

Why do scientists - those to whom the power elite MUST look for solutions to their "power problems" - think for one instant that their profession is exempt from conspiratorial manipulation and management?

That just isn't logical, is it?

In the physical sciences, very often machines and instruments are utilized to "take measurements." In order to achieve accuracy with even the most accurately tooled device, certain tests are undertaken to establish the "reading error" of the gadget. What we would like to suggest is that the "official culture" that establishes what may or may not be taken "seriously" is a planned and deliberate "reading error" built into the "machine" of science - our very thinking - the suggestions of the "hypnotist."

William March wrote in The Bad Seed:

[G]ood people are rarely suspicious: they cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing…

Obama Prepping KSM Cave-In

Obama Prepping KSM Cave-In

by Matt Yglesias

Big win for the Cheney family:

President Obama’s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.

I’m not going to attempt to defend this. I’ll merely note that it’s hard enough to have any kind of civil liberties in this country when the opposition party is pushing for them. When what you have is an opposition that’s pressuring incumbent officials to seize more power for themselves the incentive structure is nuts and the constitution is going to be shredded.

As recently as the 1990s, Congressional Republicans liked to stand up for civil liberties against some of the (tame, by post-9/11 standards) power-grabs by the Clinton-era Justice Department. But the dynamics of the Obama Era are toxic, especially because Democrats are so used to losing on national security that they can’t tell when they’re winning. It’s a depressing situation all around. And anyone in the White House who thinks the right-wing can’t just gin up some new “soft on terror” talking point is living in a dream world.

Shameful

Shameful

by digby

They're just asking:

Ten long minutes, spent questioning whether or not lawyers who represented terrorist suspects are too disloyal to work for the government.

CNN --- unless we have officially become a police state, this is not a debate. Really.

Leno's Tonight Show Reality Hacking, adds Laugh Track to Sarah Palin Appearance

Leno's Tonight Show Reality Hacking, adds Laugh Track to Sarah Palin Appearance

by TBTM Julie

Share this on Twitter - Leno's Tonight Show Reality Hacking, adds Laugh Track to Sarah Palin Appearance

Thu Mar 04, 2010 at 07:35:46 PM PST

Posting here on behalf of @Symbolman:
Who needs teleprompters when a studio can simply insert canned laughter?
I've dealt with sound engineering for 30 years, as a film maker, interviewer, musician, working with master reel to reel tapes/decks at EMS Music in Seattle in the 80's as a sound duplication engineer, or setting sound levels for my and other bands in live situations at shows. I won a Hollywood award for animation in 2000. I know sound. And it's my opinion that audio portions of Sarah Palin's March 2nd appearance on Jay Leno's Tonight show were added or amplified, edited before broadcast to make it appear that Sarah Palin was more welcome than she was.
I know. I was there.

• TBTM Julie's diary :: ::
• 
  

They added laughter where there was none during uncomfortable portions. Well, there was some laughter. Mine, of derision. During those pregnant pauses in her performance I was laughing long and loud, couldn't help myself as much of what she was saying was utterly surreal, ridiculous, hypocritical - nonsense, spewed platitudes, pushed buttons. I was seriously thinking of leaving as it was getting hysterically unfunny.
After sitting through the taping of the show in the studio I can recount many portions where there was little or no laughter or response, but at the later broadcast they are smoothed over with applause and laughter that WERE NOT THERE at the taping. Groans, hoots, grumbling, or just dead silence - all missing.
Soon after leaving the studio I basically tweeted, "Hey, was in the belly of the beast, attended taping of Palin on Tonight show, she bombed." Retweets abounded, let folks know that they could listen to my jeering laughter during dead spots in the interview, jokes no one laughed at, etc, and many folks cursed me for making them think about watching her on Leno that night. We all had a good chuckle - but I wasn't laughing at the broadcast, because selective miking during a "live edit" or later additions made it appear as if I'd lied nearly as much as Sarah Palin does.
(In the interest of disclosure my wife and I created a parody "Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book" http://goingrouge.net and have sold many copies. It was featured in the Washington Post, AP, The New York Times, Buzzflash, Entertainment Tonight broadcast the cover repeatedly pre-Christmas, and in general it's been happily received. Even right wingers have purchased copies, and loved them.)
But we had never attended a Palin "event", and decided it was time to see her in person, so we flew 6 thousand miles round trip from the east coast to be in the audience as a sort of mellow protest, wave copies of the book to freak her out, hand them out to staff & audience at the Studio. Security waved our copies on through, and folks there were reading it during the show and cracking up at the humor. Even the camera guys.
Well, not the one Security guy during the show who told my wife to sit down, she was dancing and waving our book, and to the shows credit we weren't expelled nor did they confiscate the books. I wouldn't have cared if they did, we've been activists for a long time, and I've been ready on many occasions to go to jail for making folks aware of lies and distortions by media and govt, mostly during the GWBush years, when Takebackthemedia.com was an intregal part of the protest scene. Some folks have credited us with the invention of the online Flash political attack ad. Millions enjoyed my political animations from 2000 on, before the advent of YouTube.
From my seat to the right of the stage, by the band, I could tell that an average of 70% of the audience did not like Sarah Palin. Many literally sat on their hands. This is LA and I wondered when we went in, just how many people would be into Palin here. C'mon, this is LA, man! Make no mistake, the national figure for nutjobs were represented, the same insane 30% of the country that always believe in racism, GWBush, War, Torture, the Libertarians, Teabaggers were there too, and quite vocal. Throw in a shotgun microphone and you've got yourself a laugh riot with these guys.
Before the show they brought out a cheerleader, ginning up the audience, telling jokes, dancing around the stage. Having been a sound engineer I knew that this comedian's secondary use was setting the sound levels for the room ahead of time.
"Okay, now everyone on the right side of the room, let's hear it!!" "Left side of the room, applause! Give it up! Don't let those on the right side of the room beat you!" "Now everyone, squeal like a piggy, WHEEEE - Loud!"
Behind us the sound man was tweaking levels for all manners of amplitude, to reduce murmur, bottom end rumble, they use all sorts of filters to keep out unwanted levels of noise, chatter, etc. Straight to the sound booth, who make sure there's no "crunchy" or overamped audio, no overpowering of VU meters. Set up compression, all the good stuff.
Jay came out to raucous applause, hell, we clapped too, I like the guy, not as much as Letterman or Connan but I'm a comedy fan, and some of the show as funny. Shaun White was way cool, funny, authentic, there multiple ovations, and Adam Lambert ROCKED the house, as the latest and future incarnation of David Bowie. Lots of fun.
But when Jay brought out Sarah Palin, she was completely nerved. Watch the video, check out her breathing, she's Freaked and talks a mile a minute. Both my wife and I agreed - when you actually get close enough, she's just plain Creepy, and those yech vibes filled the room. Nevermind the applause sign - something that's a staple of late night shows. My brother in law used to say, "You know why they add laugh tracks? So you know it's Comedy." Folks did as they were told, hooting, clapping, having a good time, hey, that's why they were there. Me too.
The basic rules for the studio audience were simple: NO Eating, NO drinking and NO shouting anything out. Other than that, knock yourselves out, have a good time. Yet, judging by the Security surrounding the stage where Palin brought the Silly, shouting out, "Hey Sarah, How many wolf puppies have you gassed?!" would have been suicidal.
Nothing in the rules said that Laughing at all the Wrong Times would be a problem, the wrong times in this circumstance were when she was bringing the crazy that no one wanted to touch, or call her out on. And Jay, while he chided her, didn't really put down the hammer. Ratings. Shame.
And while NBC Sold Palin, she sold her body, jiggling, teasing, pushing the cutesy-pie, what we used to call in the military, a "prick tease". She short circuits brains, deflects the fact that most of what she says is nonsense or hateful, as lizard layers of right wing men's brains hum a sexual fantasy tune, and women who have thrown all sense of propriety to the wind, watching her strip, want to be just like her. Rich. Stupid. The sweet "Bite Me" bitch attitude she's honed to an art form. No, she doesn't just "wink" - she uses her whole body to sell the package. Turn off the sound, just watch her body language. I find it whorish, repulsive, and I'm no prude.
At at least four points in the show she was getting so far out in screwball territory, or was just so damned unfunny that I couldn't help but laugh when no others were, at the absurdity of her statements. Literally biting off yards of tongue, because at home I'm ready to throw bricks at my TV when she's on. The TV, not Her, let's be clear.
One: She was so happy to back John McCain's bid for re-election in Arizona, at least for now, left the audience puzzled, confused. I Chortled with great vigor. Not in the broadcast.
Two: During the monologue when she made a crack about No Tomatoes being allowed, even the Teabaggers in the audience didn't want to touch that one. The Sarah Sucks crowd, my people, said nothing. Crickets. The whole audience seemed stunned, and again, I howled. Not in the broadcast. Nothing. Nada. (You may recall that after someone threw a tomatoe at her in a mall, at the following Costco Book signing ALL Tomatoes were removed from the store prior to her entrance.)
I was sitting by the band. They don't mike the BAND? C'mon.
Three: Explaining how it's cool to write on her hand. She lied about what was on there, then sails to pluto with, "my dad, a teacher, used to come home with notes (answers?) written all over his hands..." again, dead air. No ONE was buying it, it was just too bizarre. The answer? Just ADD canned Laughter. A lie.
Four: Was directed at US. (Of course this joke was written long before we were in the audience, and hey, she kills moose, so, it's kind of an obvious one) The Moose Joke. We feature a layout in our book of a whole, cooked moose on a platter surrounded by vegetables as a Palin "recipe". I wrote copy about her getting beauty sleep in a crashed plane, stealing canoes from natives, packing 800 lbs of moose out after plugging it, sitting on its body as it dies, all just to get back and feed her family.
Now, If you watch the video, Palin looks hard Left, right at us, pauses, as we wave our coloring books. Don't look for footage of the coloring books being bandied about like a prize bass, you won't see that. And I'm not saying that was edited out, audience video is very controlled, not everyone gets seen, though they try like hell - but she looked us in the eye. Sarah doesn't like us much. We expose many of her anti-environmental policies in our book, her cruelty to animals, destruction of ecosystems, being in the pocket of the oil companies, all in a humorous way. Don't get me wrong, I've eaten moose myself, lived in Alaska for 12 years. I know Alaska. I've crashed in helicopters in ANWR. She's not the Alaska I know, and doesn't represent those fine people, or their ways.
She's a fraud, and I was beginning to think she knows it, deep down inside, when my wife said, "She's Very Competitive, and she's not about to give up. We may have actually spurred her on with our antics and the book." Oops. We'll spur her on with some more in the next one.
But Sarah Palin is vengeful. She ever gets into office again, she might have us sent to Siberia, or worse, Wasilla.
Hold me.
The real heroes of the night were Shaun White and Adam Lambert - the audience was delighted, all of it, and blew the roof off the place when they were mentioned and appeared. Meanwhile, Leno's show used the ambience to give Palin Cover. They sold her. Her book, her body, her celebrity, her future, all of it. And 70% of an audience weren't buying it, but you can't tell from the broadcast.
I know. I was there.
They should bear some responsibilty for hawking a defective product. This is corporate shilling in the worst way, not only to raise Leno's ratings, but to push Palin on a crowd with fake laughter and applause. The applause sign is one thing, an american institution. But INSERTING Laughter for Sarah Palin? Try to realize that while you may be laughing at the things she says, because she's a train wreck, the corporate powers that be are ADJUSTING the laughter so it appears APPROPRIATE. I worked in a mental institution. The very basic definition of insanity is "inappropriate laughter". WHO decides what's "appropriate"? Apparently, corporations. Not you.
Your reality no longer belongs to you. There is at this time no way of telling if a crowd actually backs a person or not. (Enter Twilight Zone music here, or Outer Limits, your choice.) Because...
Your reality has been hacked.
But not mine. I was there.
I wanted to say that Leno has earned his ratings, that he's funny, and he is at times, and deserves his talk show.
Can't. Not now. Sorry to say, The Tonight Show is a lie, more than ever a corporate shill that's performing a cultural engineering service. Selling garbage, that is literally ruinous to our nation and women's rights. That destroys the fabric of our society. It's real.
I saw it. I was there.
I need a stiff drink.You?
Activist Micheal Stinson aka Symbolman, former Alaskan, Founder of Takebackthemedia.com is an author, satirist, animator (and gonzo tweeter @symbolman) who has appeared on FOX's O'Reilly, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and CNN cable shows, as well as numerous radio shows. His wife, Julie Sigwart, is the brilliant cartoonist behind the hit parody "Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book" http://goingrouge.net
Micheal can be contacted at symbolman@gmail.com