More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad.
The cash—packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes—is declared and legal to move. But U.S. and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and the murkiness of their origins.
Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and U.S., European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about $14 billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say.
The amount declared as it leaves the airport is vast in a nation where the gross domestic product last year totaled $13.5 billion. More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide. "It's not like they grow money on trees here," said a U.S. official investigating corruption and Taliban financing. "A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course."
Most of the funds passing through the airport are being moved by often-secretive outfits called "hawalas," private money transfer businesses with roots in the Muslim world stretching back centuries, officials say.
The officials believe hawala customers who have sent millions of dollars of their money abroad include high-ranking officials and their associates in President Hamid Karzai's administration, including Vice President Mohammed Fahim, and one of the president's brothers, Mahmood Karzai, an influential businessmen.
Where they allegedly get the money is one of the questions under investigation.
~ more... ~
Recommended daily allowance of insanity, under-reported news and uncensored opinion dismantling the propaganda matrix.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Fluoride – the next tobacco?
What do cigarettes and fluoridation have in common? Much more than meets the eye according to Fluoride Action Network NZ (FANNZ), the non-profit health-focussed community organisation campaigning against fluoridation.
Dr Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco industry whistle-blower made famous in the movie "The Insider" details the tactics used by Big Tobacco to push their cause and profits.
These include destroying careers, lying about alleged safety, commissioning bogus 'research' to 'prove' their claims, and a huge PR campaign, orchestrated by the father of public relations, Edward Bernays - all in the pursuit of profit.
Similarly, fluoridation began because big corporations were being sued for damage from fluoride waste, facing hugely expensive disposal problems as well as law suits. They had their own "insider", Oscar Ewing, appointed to the US Government, to implement fluoridation as a 'containment' strategy. A 1983 US EPA memo called water fluoridation "an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem."
They also used Bernays for their PR strategy. His advice: get doctors and dentists to believe in and promote fluoridation. People will believe them no matter how ill-informed.
A 1991 US Senate investigation documented that government scientists had been coerced to change their findings and portray fluoride more favourably
They also destroy the careers of those who expose fluoridation as ineffective and a health hazard. In NZ, Dr John Colquhoun, formally head of the Government's fluoridation implementation committee, was forced into early retirement when he blew the whistle
In the USA, any doctor or dentist who opposes fluoridation runs the risk of losing their license to practice medicine or dentistry.
EPA scientist Dr William Marcus was fired on trumped up charges, and later reinstated following a wrongful dismissal case.
Dr Phyllis Mullinex had her career and laboratory destroyed when her research showed fluoride was neurotoxic, causing ADD/ADHD in new-born laboratory rats. She successfully sued the Dental School for wrongful dismissal.
On the legal front "it is predicted that lawsuits over fluoridation will make the tobacco lawsuits look like child's play' " confirms Mark Atkin from FANNZ Lawsuits are already in early stages of preparation in the USA and Australia.
“With tobacco, people had a choice to smoke or not, and juries had little sympathy for claimants. But fluoride is put in your water without your consent, and promoted as safe by Governments (in the English-speaking world)” points out.
“The world should be grateful to whistleblowers like Dr Wigand and others. It is a pity it seems to take 50 years for these deceptions to finally be acted on, just like asbestos and lead in petrol. Fluoride’s 50 years is just about up” says Mr Atkin.
~ Press Release: Fluoride Action Network ~
Dr Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco industry whistle-blower made famous in the movie "The Insider" details the tactics used by Big Tobacco to push their cause and profits.
These include destroying careers, lying about alleged safety, commissioning bogus 'research' to 'prove' their claims, and a huge PR campaign, orchestrated by the father of public relations, Edward Bernays - all in the pursuit of profit.
Similarly, fluoridation began because big corporations were being sued for damage from fluoride waste, facing hugely expensive disposal problems as well as law suits. They had their own "insider", Oscar Ewing, appointed to the US Government, to implement fluoridation as a 'containment' strategy. A 1983 US EPA memo called water fluoridation "an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem."
They also used Bernays for their PR strategy. His advice: get doctors and dentists to believe in and promote fluoridation. People will believe them no matter how ill-informed.
A 1991 US Senate investigation documented that government scientists had been coerced to change their findings and portray fluoride more favourably
They also destroy the careers of those who expose fluoridation as ineffective and a health hazard. In NZ, Dr John Colquhoun, formally head of the Government's fluoridation implementation committee, was forced into early retirement when he blew the whistle
In the USA, any doctor or dentist who opposes fluoridation runs the risk of losing their license to practice medicine or dentistry.
EPA scientist Dr William Marcus was fired on trumped up charges, and later reinstated following a wrongful dismissal case.
Dr Phyllis Mullinex had her career and laboratory destroyed when her research showed fluoride was neurotoxic, causing ADD/ADHD in new-born laboratory rats. She successfully sued the Dental School for wrongful dismissal.
On the legal front "it is predicted that lawsuits over fluoridation will make the tobacco lawsuits look like child's play' " confirms Mark Atkin from FANNZ Lawsuits are already in early stages of preparation in the USA and Australia.
“With tobacco, people had a choice to smoke or not, and juries had little sympathy for claimants. But fluoride is put in your water without your consent, and promoted as safe by Governments (in the English-speaking world)” points out.
“The world should be grateful to whistleblowers like Dr Wigand and others. It is a pity it seems to take 50 years for these deceptions to finally be acted on, just like asbestos and lead in petrol. Fluoride’s 50 years is just about up” says Mr Atkin.
~ Press Release: Fluoride Action Network ~
Policing for profit
"...Officers take more than just cash.
According to Oklahoma City Police records, officers have seized cars, computers, guns, televisions, stereos, appliances and vacuums.
Police often suspect these items were paid for with drug money; that is why they are seized.
In 2009, OCPD seized 450 cases of cash, 160 vehicles, 3 computers, 10 televisions and 8 sets of wheels and tires.
However, critics, like defense attorney Scott Adams, report seing more and more cases of asset forfeiture that do not involve any illegal drugs.
Adams says, "These people have no narcotics on them at all and no drug past whatsoever. They're having their money taken from them and who it's really affecting are the minorities."
According to a national study, the asset forfeiture fund at the Department of Justice is as high as it has ever been; it topped $1 billion for the first time in 2008.
The proplem many critics point out is that in approximately 80 percent of those federal cases, the so-called suspect was never even charged with a crime.
Some prosecutors say that's because small fish are turned lose to help catch the big fish.
In Oklahoma City, the asset forfeiture fund is close to $5 million.
Chief Citty says, "The primary goal is to get drug dealers off the street. The primary goal is to discourage drug dealing."
With civil forfeiture cases, if no one attempts to claim the seized property or if the court awards it to the state, that money goes directly into police coffers.
In Oklahoma City, the police department gets approximately 80 percent of asset forfeiture profits. The district attorney's office gets about 20 percent.
Critics say police officers have all the motivation in the World to seize large amounts of expensive property. ..."
~ more... ~
'We should have listened to Nikola Tesla when we had the chance'
From Nikola Tesla's Renewable Energy Vision:
At the height of his popularity as the key inventor who pioneered commercial electricity, Tesla cautioned the world of the inefficiencies of burning substances to generate energy, especially coal, the predominate fuel source of the day.
Not only did the burning process waste most the potential energy of coal, Nikola Tesla argued, but it was a nonrenewable resource that we would eventually run out of. The same arguments could easily be made about oil.
“Whatever our resources of primary energy may be in the future,” Tesla wrote in Century Magazine in 1900, “we must, to be rational, obtain it without consumption of any material.”
Tesla reminded us that a windmill is one of the most efficient energy devices ever devised, and suspected we'd eventually be able to harness the sun's rays in an efficient way. He also advocated utilizing the heat “in the earth, the water, or the air.”
He proposed, essentially, geothermal energy plants, one capturing the heat of the earth, the other floating on the ocean, using the temperature differential between the surface water temperature and the deeper water temperatures to drive turbines to generate electricity.
One of Tesla's designs for a floating geothermal plant was published in the pages of the New York Times, complete with pictures and diagrams, in the 1930s. But by the 1930s, oil was being found all over the world in such quantities and with such relatively little output of energy that no one cared much about producing power in other ways.
It wasn't until the oil shortage in the 1970s that people started taking a serious look at alternative ways of producing energy on a large scale.
Who was Nikola Tesla?
Today, on the 154th anniversary of Tesla's birth, you could ask Europeans who Nikola Tesla was and their eyes will light up as they comment on his remarkable inventions. Over 100 years ago, Nikola Tesla proved the energy establishment wrong by creating something the establishment believed was impossible: a motor driven by alternating current.
Ask most Americans, however, who Tesla was, and you'll often get a blank stare. Recently, Tesla has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in visibility, thanks to David Bowie's portrayal of a highly fictionalized version of him in the film “The Prestige,” as well as through the Tesla Motors company, which markets an ultra-sexy fully electric sports car.
~ more... ~
At the height of his popularity as the key inventor who pioneered commercial electricity, Tesla cautioned the world of the inefficiencies of burning substances to generate energy, especially coal, the predominate fuel source of the day.
Not only did the burning process waste most the potential energy of coal, Nikola Tesla argued, but it was a nonrenewable resource that we would eventually run out of. The same arguments could easily be made about oil.
“Whatever our resources of primary energy may be in the future,” Tesla wrote in Century Magazine in 1900, “we must, to be rational, obtain it without consumption of any material.”
Tesla reminded us that a windmill is one of the most efficient energy devices ever devised, and suspected we'd eventually be able to harness the sun's rays in an efficient way. He also advocated utilizing the heat “in the earth, the water, or the air.”
He proposed, essentially, geothermal energy plants, one capturing the heat of the earth, the other floating on the ocean, using the temperature differential between the surface water temperature and the deeper water temperatures to drive turbines to generate electricity.
One of Tesla's designs for a floating geothermal plant was published in the pages of the New York Times, complete with pictures and diagrams, in the 1930s. But by the 1930s, oil was being found all over the world in such quantities and with such relatively little output of energy that no one cared much about producing power in other ways.
It wasn't until the oil shortage in the 1970s that people started taking a serious look at alternative ways of producing energy on a large scale.
Who was Nikola Tesla?
Today, on the 154th anniversary of Tesla's birth, you could ask Europeans who Nikola Tesla was and their eyes will light up as they comment on his remarkable inventions. Over 100 years ago, Nikola Tesla proved the energy establishment wrong by creating something the establishment believed was impossible: a motor driven by alternating current.
Ask most Americans, however, who Tesla was, and you'll often get a blank stare. Recently, Tesla has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in visibility, thanks to David Bowie's portrayal of a highly fictionalized version of him in the film “The Prestige,” as well as through the Tesla Motors company, which markets an ultra-sexy fully electric sports car.
~ more... ~
"The Practice of the Wild" Trailer
'The Practice of the Wild' is a film profile of the poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. Snyder has been a creative force in all the major cultural changes that have created the modern world. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he was a central figure of the Beat generation. He helped bring Zen Buddhism into the America scene, was an active participant in the anti-war movement and an inspiration for the quest for human potential. All along he was a founding intellect, essayist and leader of the new environmental awareness that supports legislation and preservation without losing sight of direct wild experience -- local people, animals, plants, watersheds and food sources.
This film, borrowing its name from one of Snyder's most eloquent non-fiction books, revolves around a life-long conversation between Snyder and his fellow poet and novelist Jim Harrison. These two old friends and venerated men of American letters converse while taking a wilderness trek along the central California coast in an area that has been untouched for centuries. They debate the pros and cons of everything from Google to Zen koans. The discussions are punctuated by archival materials and commentaries from Snyder friends, observers, and intimates who take us through the 'Beat' years, the years of Zen study in Japan up to the present -- where Snyder continues to be a powerful spokesperson for ecological sanity and bio-regionalism.
From Chuck Jaffee: ‘The Practice of the Wild' — Upcoming film showing
What's the big deal about Gary Snyder? You may as well ask what's the big deal about trees, rocks, streams, and birds.
The word “appreciation” comes to mind when thinking about one of the most iconic residents of Nevada County. The poet, essayist, and activist intones a “pledge of allegiance,” in his book “Turtle Island.” He refers to “one ecosystem / in diversity / under the sun / with joyful interpenetration for all.” When he speaks “For the Children,” also in that Pulitzer Prize winning book, he flows to the words “learn the flowers / go light.”
The film “The Practice of the Wild” builds around a conversation with Gary Snyder. The documentary includes some poetry reading by Snyder as well as enough biography to weave an appreciation for this appreciater of our shared world.
Snyder's celebrity has endured since his initial prominence in the “Beat” era of the 1950s with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Much more than his celebrity, more than decades of published work, Snyder might prefer being appreciated for continuing, at age 80, to do hard physical work.
“The Practice of the Wild” is a low-key, casual hour. It addresses a range of ideas, though it never travels far from the Zen sensibilities that Snyder helped enliven in the United States. Hear what the Zen knife cuts. Hear what Snyder thinks about reincarnation. Hear how he refers to nature, to simplicity, to thinking (and learning) locally.
From 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival
“The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.” So writes legendary Beat poet Gary Snyder in his influential 1990 collection from which this celebratory documentary takes its name and finds its restoring rhythms of nature, image and word. Occupying a hallowed yet humble position within the realms of poetry, academia, ecological activism and spiritual practice, Snyder has distinguished himself among peers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac by becoming both a countercultural hero and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Director John J. Healey skillfully intertwines the many fascinating aspects of Snyder’s journey through nature and across the page, sagely pairing the poet with his cantankerous compadre and fellow scribe Jim Harrison. Together, the two old friends roam the verdant hills of the central California coast, musing eloquently and with hard-won wisdom and earthy humor on Bay Area bohemia, Zen Buddhism and the morally charged interdependence of all living things. Whether reminiscing about a camping trip with Kerouac, recalling the writing of his seminal Turtle Island or being held by his ankles and dangled over a cliff in Japan as a test of truth-telling, Snyder is a warm and captivating presence. “Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight,” the poet tells us, and true to his ageless inquisitiveness, The Practice of the Wild seeks out and finds so much more.
—Steven Jenkins
Revelation Of The Method: The Predictive Programming
The Revelation Of The Method: The Predictive Programming http://thealienproject.blogspot.com/
by Andre Heath
"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?" - Morpheus, The Matrix.
The Revelation of the Method works within the framework of the dialectic to advance a process of accelerated social change along an exponential curve (The "Quickening") - Michael Hoffman II
ABC's reboot and re-imagining of the 1980s television miniseries V, is a clear symbolic and ritualistic manifestation of the Revelation of the Method used in popular culture by the global ruling elite. V stands for the extraterrestrial visitors that arrives on Earth in large spacecrafts hovering over the main cities around the world, fixing mankind's problems with high technology with ostensibly honorable intentions, only to slowly reveal their true nature later.
V presents a ghostly sub-textual narrative of partial concealment and potential revelations. The bipolar orientation. The double-talk. The double-mind. The whole underlay of meanings which network beneath the narrative structure. The actual meaning underlying the apparent surface meaning. The emotion, thought or intent underneath the overt words and actions, resounding and resonating into the subconscious. A mechanism used to further the psychological warfare on the populace. Cloaked revelations designed to eventually demoralize and dis-empower the masses into a passive existence. Archetypal signs and mythological symbols percolating into the psyche of the dreaming mind, facilitating the ultimate covert operation. The crytocratic zeitgeist of the pervasive convergence towards a New World Order of the Ages.
"The purpose behind the 'Revelation of the Method' is the implied consent of the populace. If no resistance is raised when they reveal the truth, the cryptocracy is free to continue to follow the satanic precept. 'DO WHAT THOU WILT IS THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.' In other words, when the cryptocracy reveals their evil manipulations and the MAJORITY of the people dont care, its checkmate." - Michael A. Hoffman II
"It's not what you look at that matters. It's what you see." - Henry David Thoreau.
WikiLeaks founder drops 'mass spying' hint
WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has given his strongest indication yet about the next big leak from his whistleblower organisation.
There has been rampant speculation about WikiLeaks' next revelation following its recent release of a top secret military video showing an attack in Baghdad which killed more than a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.
Bradley Manning, a US military intelligence officer based in Iraq, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking the video but it is also claimed that Manning bragged online that he had handed WikiLeaks 260,000 secret US State Department cables.
In an interview with the ABC's Foreign Correspondent, Mr Assange said cryptically of WikiLeaks' current project:
"I can give an analogy. If there had been mass spying that had affected many, many people and organisations and the details of that mass spying were released then that is something that would reveal that the interests of many people had been abused."
He agreed it would be of the "calibre" of publishing information about the way the top secret Echelon system - the US-UK electronic spying network which eavesdrops on worldwide communications traffic - had been used.
Mr Assange also confirmed that WikiLeaks has a copy of a video showing a US military bombing of a western Afghan township which killed dozens of people, including children.
He noted, though, it was a very intricate case "substantially more complex" than the Iraq material WikiLeaks had released - referring to the gunship video.
European news media are reporting that Mr Assange has "surfaced from almost a month in hiding", speaking at a freedom of information seminar at the European parliament in Brussels.
But during the course of the past month, Mr Assange has been talking to Foreign Correspondent for a program examining the efficacy of the WikiLeaks model.
"What we want to create is a system where there is guaranteed free press across the world, the entire world, that every individual in the world has the ability to publish materials that is meaningful," he said.
~ more... ~
There has been rampant speculation about WikiLeaks' next revelation following its recent release of a top secret military video showing an attack in Baghdad which killed more than a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.
Bradley Manning, a US military intelligence officer based in Iraq, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking the video but it is also claimed that Manning bragged online that he had handed WikiLeaks 260,000 secret US State Department cables.
In an interview with the ABC's Foreign Correspondent, Mr Assange said cryptically of WikiLeaks' current project:
"I can give an analogy. If there had been mass spying that had affected many, many people and organisations and the details of that mass spying were released then that is something that would reveal that the interests of many people had been abused."
He agreed it would be of the "calibre" of publishing information about the way the top secret Echelon system - the US-UK electronic spying network which eavesdrops on worldwide communications traffic - had been used.
Mr Assange also confirmed that WikiLeaks has a copy of a video showing a US military bombing of a western Afghan township which killed dozens of people, including children.
He noted, though, it was a very intricate case "substantially more complex" than the Iraq material WikiLeaks had released - referring to the gunship video.
European news media are reporting that Mr Assange has "surfaced from almost a month in hiding", speaking at a freedom of information seminar at the European parliament in Brussels.
But during the course of the past month, Mr Assange has been talking to Foreign Correspondent for a program examining the efficacy of the WikiLeaks model.
"What we want to create is a system where there is guaranteed free press across the world, the entire world, that every individual in the world has the ability to publish materials that is meaningful," he said.
~ more... ~