Revolution 101

Want to overthrow the government? Please remember this tip: Anyone who is actively agitating for violent revolution is probably working for the government.

But anyone who points out that anyone who is actively agitating for violent revolution is probably working for the government is almost certainly also working for the government.

And anyone who points out that anyone who who points out that anyone who is actively agitating for violent revolution is probably working for the government is almost certainly also working for the government is definitely working for the government.

As such, it might be a good idea to let the "revolution" happen on its own, and sit back with the hookers and donuts until the government realizes it's just spent 100 trillion dollars to shoot itself in the back.

Then the meek shall truly inherit the Earth.

New Paper Proves "Cookie Monster" Shot JFK

"Tell me, who are the assassins in your neighborhood?" Did a conspiracy researcher just solve the most perplexing conspiracy of our time (other than that pesky 9/11 thing)? Tim Foil blows the lid off the JFK assassination by pointing a long, accusing finger at a certain street.

Full story at Op Ed News, here.

Warren Ellis - now at Wired UK

The genius behind some of the best Graphic Novels and comic book runs in recent history (Transmetropolitan, Black Summer, Planetary, Thunderbolts, Doktor Sleepless) is now writing a column for Wired UK.

This is the problem with writing fiction in the early 21st century: the real world outdoes you for madness every day. You’d be overdoing it, as a fiction writer, if you had Congolese bushfighters eating their enemies’ flesh during an ebola outbreak... except that it’s happening as I write.

It’s a serious problem. ... Sometimes I suspect the real function of communications technology is to illustrate, frostily and nakedly, just how frightening the details of life on Earth are.

This man is writing your future, and he's scared. You should be, too. Read it or else, starting here.

Tea Parties Gone Wild

Obviously, this was cut and pasted... and I'm sure there's any number of sane, rational responses to their questions that were left on the cutting room floor. I wasn't there so I can't attest to the total veracity, or true percentage of intelligent people versus teh dumB.

But I find it interesting how the people interviewed at this Tea Party were unwilling to admit that, yes, Obama was born in the United States. Some of their answers are rather comical.

Also amusing - the unwillingness to admit that maybe, just maybe, Republicans helped get us into this mess. Obviously Democrats did too, but this seems a strictly one-sided blame game, here.

(courtesy of Blogger Interrupted, by way of Crooks and Liars)

Somali Pirates: Fighting Against Nuclear Waste and over-fishing?

Are some, or most, of the Somali Pirates acting to protect themselves from the dumping of nuclear waste and over-fishing of their seafood?

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

...

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

As the author says, there's no excuse for the excesses of these "pirates." And we should remember that people are always willing to come up with a legitimate-sounding excuse for illegal behaviors or social ills.

(Example: remember when we were told about the South African belief that having sex with a virgin cures AIDS, and that this was the reason for that country's baby rape problem? A South African co-worker told me that not many people in South Africa really believe that virgin sex cures AIDS. But the superstition makes a handy excuse when foreigners ask why anyone would want to force themselves on a baby. The tale of mystery waste dumpers and fish trawlers could be a similar excuse. )

But if there's truth to these allegations, then perhaps we should be looking into those mysterious waste ships and illegal trawlers instead of sending in gunboats to clear the waters of pirates.

Maybe we should also be asking if our seafood is safe, having been trawled from waters where nuclear waste barrels lay leaking.

9/11 Truther Question: Why do a CD at all?

While there are a number of theories that surround the central 9/11 “Truther” mythology – namely, that the American government was involved in making 9/11 happen – one of the more widespread ones is the claim that the WTC was brought down with explosives. The theory goes that a plane crash couldn’t bring down one of the towers, and that additional explosives had to have been set and used in order to create the collapse that we saw.

Not being a Truther, I reject this theory. There’s ample evidence to back me up, which has, of course, been “debunked” by the Truthers, and their debunking has been counter-debunked, then counter-counter debunked, and so on. The net-net at the end of the day is a lot of people arguing over the internet about what “is” means, invoking Godwin and Poe, and reminding us about that very insensitive joke about the Special Olympics.

But here’s a question I’d like answered, because I think it gets to the heart of the matter: if 9/11 was an inside job from start to finish, why did they bother to put explosives in the WTC at all?

Think about it: the central thesis is that 9/11 was launched in order to whip up an excuse to go to war in order to achieve a battery of goals that satisfied a number of secret, ulterior motives. Now whether these motives were getting oil, protecting Israel, ushering in a reign of evil fascist mind control or some combination of the above depends on which stripe of Trutherism you belong to (anti-corporate, anti-Zionist/anti-Semite, anti-reality). But the basic kernel of “truth” is that the American government faked a terrorist attack, or greased the wheels to let it happen, in order to give us a war, and thereby make those hidden desires a reality.

Why, then, did they have to go to so much trouble?

I mean, come on: a terrorist outfit to blame it on is all ready to go, you have a cover story ready, a convenient fiction, and all the people in place to nod, go “yessir” and start bombing Afghanistan, and then start blaming Saddam Hussein and start making ready to bomb Iraq. You just have to make the terrorist attack happen.

So why, why, why bother to line the WTC with explosives? Isn’t crashing a plane into each tower, the Pentagon and the Capitol* (though it never got there, thankfully) enough of a casus belli? Why go to the extraordinary step to ensure the towers came down at all?

This is part of what sounds so weird about the whole Truther mindset: the towers couldn’t have come down by themselves, like that, so therefore it had to have been an inside job and the Government did it for X reason. But wouldn’t it have just been so much simpler to just have their Al-Qaeda proxy agents ram the planes into unadulterated towers?

I mean, if they came down or stayed up, what’s the difference? Either way, we got attacked by terrorists. And it’s not like they were going to get any incriminating evidence from what was left of either plane, were they?

So yeah, we can argue back and forth about whether Dr. Jones found thermite in the debris, as is once more being claimed. But that doesn’t explain why the government would have gone to the extraordinary lengths it would have taken to have used it effectively to bring down the WTC, when all they really needed to do for a war was crash the planes into them.



* this is, of course, not taking the “no planes” theory into account, which has it that a missile hit the Pentagon and there was no plane that hit in Pennsylvania. But it further adds into the complication problem: why go to the trouble to send a missile into the Pentagon and claim a plane hit Shanksville if a plane apiece into the WTC towers would have been enough?