Operation Falcon - Oh My! How Did This Happen?

While we weren’t looking the “Unitary Executive” has stolen away our rights and organized a budding police state. Homeland Security, Patriot I and II, Military Commissions Act, all add up to …what?

The Bush administration has carried out three massive sweeps in the last two years, rolling up more than 30,000 minor crooks and criminals, without as much as a whimper of protest from the public.

Operation Falcon is the clearest indication yet that the Bush administration is fine-tuning its shock-troops so it can roll up tens of thousands of people at a moment’s notice and toss them into the newly-built Halliburton detention centers. This should be a red flag for anyone who cares at all about human rights, civil liberties, or simply saving his own skin.

Operation Falcon was allegedly the brainchild of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his counterpart in the US Marshal's office, (Director) Ben Reyna. (Ed. aside, I don't think so ... I think Gonzales got the whole package from ...). But its roots go much deeper into the nexus of right-wing Washington think tanks where fantasies of autocratic government have a long history. The name, Falcon, is an acronym for “Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally.” It relates to the more than 960 state, local and federal agencies which are directly involved in the administration’s expansive criminal dragnets.

Read on...

Using Your Head

McKelvey in Astronaut Farmer

My good friend George McKelvey has a part in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie, "The Astronaut Farmer". Watch for the Dunkin' Donuts guy. Way to go George!

Whippin' Ass

I just had to pass this along. Sounds like the next viral internet office-worker classic. Click here to listen to 'Whippin' Ass'

I guess I was a little late to the party, as I just found that ZeFrank has a variety of versions of this little ditty.

U.S. Sponsored Terrorism

The brouhaha surrounding the "Iranian weapons" found in Iraq is a classic. The exhibit apparently has been around for a while. Note that the date in the second picture is US style mm-dd-yyyy. Is this going to be the reason we bomb Iran?

U.S. made weapons can be found in almost every corner of the earth. Being the largest manufacturer of such weapons for years has its consequences. Thousands of these weapons are lying about cocked and ready to go off. Unexploded cluster bomblets kill and maim thousands each year. With our name on them.

And now read on to learn that we are sponsoring anti-Iranian terrorists inside of Iran. As we usually do...

CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran's border regions.
The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime.

continued..

Gen. Wesley Clark

Read what Gen. Wesley Clark is saying now. Do what you can.

Understanding The Cosmos - The Electric Universe

As you may have noticed, I am interested in cosmology, the study of the cosmos; everything that is out there.

Over the years, the “standard model”, based largely on mathematics way beyond my comprehension, has gotten very weird. Black holes, for example, have led to a controversy as to whether or not matter can be destroyed. Steven Hawking has contended for thirty years that matter sucked into black holes can disappear when the black holes themselves eventually disappear. Recently, he reversed himself (sort of, by claiming that there are probably other universes without black holes so across all universes matter is conserved), but the question still remains as to where the matter goes when it is sucked into a black hole.

The “standard model” is fundamentally based on gravitational force (electrical and magnetic forces are pretty much left out) and the existence of red shift. Red shift is a kind of Doppler effect for light instead of sound. Starlight from stars further away and traveling faster is shifted toward the red end of the visible light spectrum. This “fact” is very basic to our current “understanding” of the universe. Unfortunately, there are many examples (120+ anomalies - identified by Halton Arp) of stars with higher red shift values connected to stars with lower values. There are also stars with higher values in front of stars with lower values. Ooops. Doesn’t fit the “standard model”.

Add in “dark matter” and “dark energy”, made-up concepts to account for all of the “missing” matter in the gravitational model, and it starts to sound like untestable fantasy.

In addition, satellites sent out to measure the magnetic field around the earth, which protects us from injurious cosmic particles, have found magnetic fields far out in space beyond the earth's field. In fact recently, the standard physicists have been surprised to find that “empty” outer space is actually crammed with plasma, the fourth and most abundant form of matter. This plasma seems to flow in very interesting ways between stars and galaxies.

In my internet wanderings, I ran across an alternative theory, the Plasma Universe. The work of David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill really grabbed me. I wanted to write about it here but couldn’t quite motivate myself to do the work required to get it all down. Now that problem is solved with their new DVD. The first part of this work is available on Google Video here, or just search on Thunderbolts of the Gods. Also check related sites here, and here where you can buy the books or DVDs.

I’ll warn you that if you get into this like I did, it will take you 4 or 5 hours to start to get your head around it. Have a nice trip.

The Other Kind of Intelligence

The 16 agencies which comprise the Intelligence Community.

Air Force Intelligence
Army Intelligence
Central Intelligence Agency
Coast Guard Intelligence
Defense Intelligence Agency
Department of Energy
Department of Homeland Security
Department of State
Department of the Treasury
Drug Enforcement Administration
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Marine Corps Intelligence
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
National Reconnaissance Office
National Security Agency
Navy Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Finally Arrives

Click on the title and then on Silvia's face.

Defeated at Our Own (Capitalistic) Game

Futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler (of Future Shock and Third Wave fame) recently make the point that current wars are still being fought with industrial era tools (hurling pieces of lead and dynamite at each other, albeit with increasing sophistication), and that soon war will move into a “Third Wave” with laser, microwave, and mind control weapons.

My theory is that China has been quietly developing the “Fourth Wave” of warfare, and we have already lost. Using our own dollars gathered in their enormous trade surplus (now over one trillion dollars) provided by Wal-Mart shoppers and U.S. Treasury notes (interest - $329 billion per year), they are foresightedly locking in the world’s mineral wealth and raw materials in Canada, South America, and now Africa. Read and weep...

Our reaction? Military bases, that we won’t be able to maintain due to lack of raw materials and very long supply lines. China is also now building 50 submarines, just in case they need to hurl something at us.

America's phony Superpower "total dominance" doctrine is based on brute force. How 20th century.

Fly Me to the Moon

Have you ever wanted to change the orbits of planets and moons to see what effects gravity will have on their orbits? Ever heard of the three-body problem? Check this out - click on title.

The "Missing" Black Boxes

Like the Kennedy assassination, the truth about 9/11 is probably now unknowable. However, uncomfortable information keeps flowing in, and some keep paying attention.

Did the Bush Administration Lie to Congress and the 9/11 Commission?

9/11: Missing Black Boxes in World Trade Center Attacks Found by Firefighters, Analyzed by NTSB, Concealed by FBI

By DAVE LINDORFF

One of the more puzzling mysteries of 9-11 is what ever happened to the flight recorders of the two planes that hit the World Trade Center towers. Now it appears that they may not be missing at all. Read more...

Here are some FAA endurance regulations for "black boxes":
• an impact of 3,400 G's. This is equivalent to going 400 miles an hour, slamming on the brakes, and stopping within 18 inches.
• flames at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (hotter than molten rock) for 30 minutes.
• pinging a sound a second for 30 days so the box can be located.

Ex-national security adviser warns that Bush is seeking a pretext to attack Iran

Zbigniew Brzezinski

I remember this guy from the Carter Administration and he's not a bull shitter. He just testified to Congress that he thinks Bush may provoke Iran into war. Apparently Congress didn't respond much.

Most stunning and disturbing was his description of a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” [Emphasis added].

This was an unmistakable warning to the US Congress, replete with quotation marks to discount the “defensive” nature of such military action, that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext for an attack on Iran. Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war.

That a man such as Brzezinski, with decades of experience in the top echelons of the US foreign policy establishment, a man who has the closest links to the military and to intelligence agencies, should issue such a warning at an open hearing of the US Senate has immense and grave significance.