Nigerian airplane bomb

I seem to be in hot water anyway ... I read the following account
in the comments section of The Washington Post
signed by a pseudonym, and decided that it was worth repeating ... if not
protecting from deletion ...

"We the people are not getting the full story on the underwear bomber.

Detroit attorney Kurt Haskell dropped bombshell revelations concerning his eyewitness experience of the Flight 253 attack and how the FBI detained a second man after dogs detected a bomb in his luggage on The Alex Jones Show today. The FBI has not only ignored Haskell’s story, but they have launched a cover-up by refusing to even acknowledge the existence of another man who filmed the entire flight, including the aborted attack, as well as the well-dressed man who aided the bomber to board the plane even though he had no passport and was on a terror watch list.

After being allowed to disembark from the plane by officials, passengers were detained in customs with their carry-on luggage for six hours while they waited to be interrogated by the FBI, according to Haskell.

At this point a bomb-sniffing dog pointed at carry-on luggage in the possession of a man Haskell described as Indian around 30 years old. Officials led the man away to an interrogation room. Haskell said he was concerned because the bomb-sniffing dog had flagged the man, indicating he may have had explosives in his carry-on luggage. The Indian man was subsequently led away in handcuffs.

Following this incident the FBI moved the passengers to another location. “You’re being moved,” the FBI told them, “it is not safe here. I’m sure you all saw what happened and can read between the lines and why you’re being moved.”

Haskell said the corporate media refuses to cover this aspect of his story. He has repeated it to “countless” news agencies and they uniformly have not included it to his knowledge.

Mr. Haskell questioned why officials have not released the Amsterdam airport security video that will undoubtedly reveal crucial information about the “sharp-dressed man” who escorted a disheveled Mutallab to the boarding area. Haskell described the suspected terrorist as appearing to be a “poor black teenager.”

The well-dressed Indian man did all the talking. He insisted Mutallab be boarded on the plane without a passport and when an airport employee refused to do so Mutallab and the Indian man went to talk with a supervisor. The Indian man tried to pass off Mutallab as a Sudanese refugee and have him boarded despite the fact doing so would be in violation of regulations concerning refugees. In general, documentation must be provided by an embassy in order for refugees to board international flights.

Mr. Haskell did not see Mutallab again until the botched terror bombing inside the plane on the approach to Detroit. He did not know how Mutallab finally boarded the aircraft.

The FBI conducted a follow-up interview earlier today in Michigan. Haskell asked them why he was not shown a full body shot of the suspect. Haskell was eight rows back from the suspect. The FBI agents did not answer and were displeased with the question. He also asked the FBI agents if it would be more appropriate to bring the surveillance video from the Amsterdam airport instead of still photos. “I don’t think they liked that comment from me,” Haskell added. The FBI said they did not have the videotape. They also made a point to tell Haskell they were asking the questions and not him.

See the interview here:
http://www.infowars.com/bombshell-eyewitness-revelations-confirmed-fbi-cover-up-of-flight-253-attack/

Healthcare

Healthcare: A Right or a Privilege? the headline read.

That's easy.
Back in the day, we all used to say "God heals the sick and the physician sends the bill."
God's healing is a right.
Paying the doctor's bill, however, is a privilege.

"Fear" as an Institution

Now I am the kind of guy who, when he sees a fence,
understands that it was put there precisely
for him to find a way over, under, around or through.

I think that the "black swan" event in the USA was the assasination of JFK ...
followed by his brother, and MLK,
and then finally, just in case anyone did not get the message,
John Lennon.

All hope was killed in this society.
The only thing left for anyone to do was to take care of himself as best he could
and screw everybody else.
Well, we did.

Many people have said that the current "crisis" is a credit crisis,
caused by too much borrowing and too loose money.
I disagree.
Although those conditions certainly contributed, loans, sometimes very large,
have been a social tradition since ancient times.
However, what I have seen rise from nothing to the point of dominance
is a practice that had no historical precedent
but has now permeated everybody's thinking.

Insurance.
"Managing risk".

Just think about how much time and money everybody, and I mean everybody,
spends playing with futures contracts.
The first ones were automobile insurance, health insurance, and life insurance,
and the hoi polloi are still struggling with those.
But over top of them grew commodities futures and options contracts.
what we call derivatives. And the structures just continue to get more and more complex and large.

Now just look at one life insurance contract.
Basically it is a bet between you and your insurance company.
You are putting your money down to say that you are going to die before they expect you to -- if you are right, you win the bet and your family gets paid off. The insurance company is betting that you will live longer than you expect to, and keep on paying them premiums. They plan on raising and raising the premiums while lowering and lowering the final payoff. There's different rules and versions of the bet, but for the most part, the insurance company has stacked the odds considerably in their favor.
Out of this concept grew a whole new class of mathematicians,
actuarial calculators, statistics.
Soon afterward, we got a whole class of managers learning how to fudge the numbers by lying about the basic assumptions. (from which cometh the global warming debate, among other ills). The critics all go back over the mathematical equations and
they find that the arithmetic has been done correctly, so they conclude that the results are correct but they are not because the basic problem was stated wrong.

Back in the day, we used to say that the market boils down to two emotions, fear and greed. We understood that greed makes the market to go up while fear makes it go down.
But it seems to me that in the last fifty years or so,
bit by bit,
people have forgotten that simple fact.
Fear makes the market to go down.
Our society has become more and more obsessed with fears of all kinds, we keep collecting new ones.
Meanwhile, every old one becomes institutionalized,
made permanent in our minds and actions,
through the use of insurance contracts, derivatives, or what have you. As a culture we have collected more and more fears
without ever "solving" any of the old ones. They get built into our social customs
and our laws.
So the burden, and the expense,
just keeps on getting heavier and heavier.

One little example.
As I have said before,
I got rid of my computer virus protection two years ago,
because it was costing me considerable amount of money
and moreover the software was using up to 60% of my machine resources,
which I considered to be obscene and outright theft.
Since everyone else was protected, viruses can no longer work.
In two years my machine has not caught one virus
(but it has picked up an awful lot of new junk,
as the large corporations and advertising mavens relentlessly keep finding new routes
to invade and infect me and steal my time and resources ...
its an ongoing battle as, sooner or later, I find ways to get rid of the new junk
and then they invent still more nefarious methods of stealing from me.)

Anyway, what I am getting at is,
I have known that our culture, our society, is doomed
by this institutionalizing of our fears,
and by the smaller and smaller spaces that we have left
within which to create and grow.
I've known it for decades.
This place is decaying, its headed relentlessly downhill.
There is no escape.
Its not Bernanke's fault, or Greenspans, or Bush's or anybody's,
anymore than Nero was to blame for the fall of Rome.
Its just the way things happen in this world.
cycles.
up and down, up and down,
too hot, then too cold, too bright, then too dark.

just like sex.
(now excuse me. I think I remembered something I have to do this morning ...)
-chiz

Feeding Africa

(credentials: I have traveled to Ethiopia 4 times, eaten, slept, danced and prayed with the people, married one and brought her back to the USA, I also
mingle and socialize freely with Africans here.)

The predominant approach to the societies of sub-saharan Africa by the USA and western European nations has consisted mainly of sending food relief, to a lesser extent sending medicine, and sending a few missionaries who hole out in the local Hilton and force-feed the gospel. The justification for sending food rather than cash is that corrupt governments would steal the cash. Sending food has the dual effect of propping up first world agribusinesses by buying their surpluses, while crushing native farmers by flooding their markets.
For the past decade China has been exerting a greater and greater presence. I hear the same story over and over from my friends and acquaintances. The Chinese build roads, build schools, build hydroelectric dams and steel mills and mines.
They also immigrate in much greater numbers, enough to begin to sway the cultures.

I understand compassion. Children are cute, suffering children are heartbreaking. However, before you lift a finger to act, I strongly recommend the following exercise:

Plan to do this for a whole season. Set aside a time of day when you can buy a loaf of bread and take it to the park, every day. Once there, start to feed the few pigeons (or ducks, or sparrows, or whatever ...). give them bread until they stop begging for it. Then come back the next day.
After just a very few days, you should notice that the birds start to anticipate your arrival, recognize you, and eagerly look forward to their meal. You should also be noticing that they increase in number.
After a couple of weeks, you should be finding that you are now attracting large numbers of birds, quite a few more than you had ever seen in that park before.
You will begin to notice that a few of the other humans using the park may become a bit annoyed. You may notice that the bird droppings are increasing in the area and the odor is definitely deteriorating. In fact, if you continue in your daily routine for very much longer, your activities are very likely to come to the attention of the local constabulary. Depending on your demeanor, they will either politely or less politely find the means to persuade you to cease.
Through all of this, it may be an issue here as to if you have any intelligence and free thought. If that is the case, then it is likely to dawn on you that your efforts to fix a problem, i.e. hunger, have actually been encouraging the birds to be fruitful and multiply, as well as to invite all of their friends and relations. Thus your actions actually have the opposite effect of your original intention.
FEEDING PIGEONS ONLY MAKES MORE PIGEONS!
At least, I would certainly hope so.

black swan

Let me just share this with you ...

"Scientists must stop ignoring the black swan in the room"

The ongoing "climategate" email scandal brings to mind an old axiom of science about a lovely hypothesis being slain by an ugly fact. It refers to the principle that a hypothesis cannot be proven correct; it can only be falsified or proven incorrect. This principle is best illustrated by philosopher Karl Popper's white swan thought experiment. It goes like this:

If you see a large group of white swans, you may be tempted to hypothesize that all swans are white. But you cannot prove this hypothesis. No matter how many white swans you count, there always remains the possibility of a black swan lurking out there. And looking for black swans is a fundamental principle of the scientific method.

In the case of climate science, the emails and other documents make it absolutely clear that the cabal headed by Phil Jones and Michael Mann abrogated their responsibility to science by making no effort to disprove their own hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, they actively sought to prevent others from examining their raw data out of fear that they would find the black swan. They also took extreme steps to marginalize and silence scientists who disagreed with their work and who had the temerity to say, "But here is a black swan."

It is now clear that Messrs. Jones and Mann and their colleagues pressed on counting white swans all the while stumbling over the black ones. Their actions not only discredit the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, but do incalculable damage to the public perception of science and scientists.

William G. Hopkins, professor emeritus, Biology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont.

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2292759

Happy birthday to You

This is just a friendly reminder that the above-titled song
is copyright, the copyright belongs to Warner Chappell,
and technically the song may not legally be performed at any
public gathering without paying royalties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_To_You

If you think that this warning can be safely ignored,
please read this account about the recent arrest and prosecution of
this no-doubt bloodthirsty succubus:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/1916606,twilight-taping-arrest-movie-120209.article