Recommended daily allowance of insanity, under-reported news and uncensored opinion dismantling the propaganda matrix.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Petrochemicals: The Cathedrals of the Desert
Greece 1981
Directors: Stathis Katsaros - Giorgos Sifianos
Photography: Giorgos Katsadimos
Music Editor: Rinio Papanikola
Production: Neohori Agricultural Society
Awarded Best Film at 1981 Thessaloniki Film Festival
A documentary about the victorious struggle of residents of Neohori, Etolokarnania, opposing the planned installation of a petrochemical plant in their region.
The Legal 'Raping' of President Katsav
According to (an anti-Catholic tirade by) Barry Chamish:
Unlike the "experts" who say the conviction of ex-Pres. Katsav was a "victory" for Israeli justice, I actually looked at the notes from his trial. It is what is missing that stands out:
There are no rape kits.
There is no semen or DNA proof.
There are no professionals like doctors or police sex crimes experts.
There are no rape victims testifying in open court. Those prosecution witnesses testifying in closed court are not identified.
There is no physical evidence such as Katsav's hair or clothing.
There was no lie detector test of Katsav.
No victim went to the police after being raped. The police opened an investigation years after the alleged crimes allegedly took place.
All, I mean all, that convicted Katsav were the testimonies of the victims and they were full of holes, often, in fact, not believable. One "victim" claims to have been raped in Katsav's office. Having, apparently, enjoyed the experience, she was raped long after, in Katsav's hotel room.
Katsav claimed he was being framed and turned down a simple way out of jail. He would resign the Presidency after confessing to some minor charges. He rejected the deal and chose to be exonerated in court. No one guilty would take this route.
All signs point to Katsav being railroaded because the Israeli justice system is "victoriously" handpicked to be a rigged joke.
If you accept any or even, all, of my observations, then you must ask, who wanted Katsav out of the Presidency?
**
AND if you are reluctant to change your point of view, stop here and delete the rest. If you want, at least, to see the background of Katsav's railroading, keep reading even if you won't believe it.
**
Katsav was the second President in a row to resign in scandal. Recall that before the last Presidential election, the President, Ezer Weizmann, was forced to resign because of gift-taking from the Geneva millionaire, Edouard Seroussi. I noted that Shimon Peres was about the only politician who knew European shenanigans. And I added, Peres WOULD run for President. I was right about that. Where I blew it is that Peres would lose the vote to Moshe Katzav. In any SECRET vote, Peres' enemies will express themselves. A third of his Labor Party allies voted against him. And thus, Katzav became the secret and sworn enemy of Shimon Peres. He doomed himself.
But Peres first concentrated on a new challenge, becoming the Labor Party leader. In November '05, Peres lost again when Amir Peretz defeated him to become the Labor leader. Peres was again rejected by his own party. Peres now had two enemies to bring down to further his ambitions. And he got them both when the Lebanon War of '06 broke out on July 12.
Incredibly, the next day's first headlines were not of the new war, they were of rumors concerning Katsav's alleged rapes. For 33 days, Defense Minister Amir Peretz's unspeakable mishandling of the war pushed Katsav off the front page. This is not the place to discuss IDF C-O-S Dan Halutuz working with Peretz to keep infantry out of the war and thus prevent any chance of victory. Someday we'll discuss who Halutz was really taking his orders from.
On August 25, Israel agreed to ceasefire talks in Rome which led to an 85% Catholic force called UNIFIL, keeping the peace between Israel and Hizbullah. On the same day, Israel Police opened its investigation of Moshe Katsav for serious sexual crimes.
~ more... ~
Unlike the "experts" who say the conviction of ex-Pres. Katsav was a "victory" for Israeli justice, I actually looked at the notes from his trial. It is what is missing that stands out:
There are no rape kits.
There is no semen or DNA proof.
There are no professionals like doctors or police sex crimes experts.
There are no rape victims testifying in open court. Those prosecution witnesses testifying in closed court are not identified.
There is no physical evidence such as Katsav's hair or clothing.
There was no lie detector test of Katsav.
No victim went to the police after being raped. The police opened an investigation years after the alleged crimes allegedly took place.
All, I mean all, that convicted Katsav were the testimonies of the victims and they were full of holes, often, in fact, not believable. One "victim" claims to have been raped in Katsav's office. Having, apparently, enjoyed the experience, she was raped long after, in Katsav's hotel room.
Katsav claimed he was being framed and turned down a simple way out of jail. He would resign the Presidency after confessing to some minor charges. He rejected the deal and chose to be exonerated in court. No one guilty would take this route.
All signs point to Katsav being railroaded because the Israeli justice system is "victoriously" handpicked to be a rigged joke.
If you accept any or even, all, of my observations, then you must ask, who wanted Katsav out of the Presidency?
**
AND if you are reluctant to change your point of view, stop here and delete the rest. If you want, at least, to see the background of Katsav's railroading, keep reading even if you won't believe it.
**
Katsav was the second President in a row to resign in scandal. Recall that before the last Presidential election, the President, Ezer Weizmann, was forced to resign because of gift-taking from the Geneva millionaire, Edouard Seroussi. I noted that Shimon Peres was about the only politician who knew European shenanigans. And I added, Peres WOULD run for President. I was right about that. Where I blew it is that Peres would lose the vote to Moshe Katzav. In any SECRET vote, Peres' enemies will express themselves. A third of his Labor Party allies voted against him. And thus, Katzav became the secret and sworn enemy of Shimon Peres. He doomed himself.
But Peres first concentrated on a new challenge, becoming the Labor Party leader. In November '05, Peres lost again when Amir Peretz defeated him to become the Labor leader. Peres was again rejected by his own party. Peres now had two enemies to bring down to further his ambitions. And he got them both when the Lebanon War of '06 broke out on July 12.
Incredibly, the next day's first headlines were not of the new war, they were of rumors concerning Katsav's alleged rapes. For 33 days, Defense Minister Amir Peretz's unspeakable mishandling of the war pushed Katsav off the front page. This is not the place to discuss IDF C-O-S Dan Halutuz working with Peretz to keep infantry out of the war and thus prevent any chance of victory. Someday we'll discuss who Halutz was really taking his orders from.
On August 25, Israel agreed to ceasefire talks in Rome which led to an 85% Catholic force called UNIFIL, keeping the peace between Israel and Hizbullah. On the same day, Israel Police opened its investigation of Moshe Katsav for serious sexual crimes.
~ more... ~
Tobias Churton - The True Story of the Rosicrucians
The Rosicrucians are a legendary esoteric Order first publicly documented in the early 17th century. They are said to have the power to heal the sick, work miracles and even possess the secret of immortality. Join us on a journey of discovery into the secret world of magic, heresy and alchemy to discover the true secrets of Rosicrusianism. As Tobias Churton takes you in to the mysterious world of the Rosicrucian; what were their aims and teachings and what was the new heaven and a new earth that made them so feared by the Christian church as to be tortured and sold into slavery for their beliefs?
The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Our Military Machines Too Much Power?
By Ben Austen, Popsci
Last August, U.S. Navy operators on the ground lost all contact with a Fire Scout helicopter flying over Maryland. They had programmed the unmanned aerial vehicle to return to its launch point if ground communications failed, but instead the machine took off on a north-by-northwest route toward the nation's capital. Over the next 30 minutes, military officials alerted the Federal Aviation Administration and North American Aerospace Defense Command and readied F-16 fighters to intercept the pilotless craft. Finally, with the Fire Scout just miles shy of the White House, the Navy regained control and commanded it to come home. "Renegade Unmanned Drone Wandered Skies Near Nation's Capital," warned one news headline in the following days. "UAV Resists Its Human Oppressors, Joyrides over Washington, D.C.," declared another.
The Fire Scout was unarmed, and in any case hardly a machine with the degree of intelligence or autonomy necessary to wise up and rise up, as science fiction tells us the robots inevitably will do. But the world's biggest military is rapidly remaking itself into a fighting force consisting largely of machines, and it is working hard to make those machines much smarter and much more independent. In March, noting that "unprecedented, perhaps unimagined, degrees of autonomy can be introduced into current and future military systems," Ashton Carter, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, called for the formation of a task force on autonomy to ensure that the service branches take "maximum practical advantage of advances in this area."
In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops have been joined on the ground and in the air by some 20,000 robots and remotely operated vehicles. The CIA regularly slips drones into Pakistan to blast suspected Al Qaeda operatives and other targets. Congress has called for at least a third of all military ground vehicles to be unmanned by 2015, and the Air Force is already training more UAV operators every year than fighter and bomber pilots combined. According to "Technology Horizons," a recent Air Force report detailing the branch's science aims, military machines will attain "levels of autonomous functionality far greater than is possible today" and "reliably make wide- ranging autonomous decisions at cyber speeds." One senior Air Force engineer told me, "You can envision unmanned systems doing just about any mission we do today." Or as Colonel Christopher Carlile, the former director of the Army's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center of Excellence, has said, "The difference between science fiction and science is timing."
We are surprisingly far along in this radical reordering of the military's ranks, yet neither the U.S. nor any other country has fashioned anything like a robot doctrine or even a clear policy on military machines. As quickly as countries build these systems, they want to deploy them, says Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield in England: "There's been absolutely no international discussion. It's all going forward without anyone talking to one another." In his recent book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, Brookings Institution fellow P.W. Singer argues that robots and remotely operated weapons are transforming wars and the wider world in much the way gunpowder, mechanization and the atomic bomb did in previous generations. But Singer sees significant differences as well. "We're experiencing Moore's Law," he told me, citing the axiom that computer processing power will double every two years, "but we haven't got past Murphy's Law." Robots will come to possess far greater intelligence, with more ability to reason and self- adapt, and they will also of course acquire ever greater destructive power. So what does it mean when whatever can go wrong with these military machines, just might?
I asked that question of Werner Dahm, the chief scientist of the Air Force and the lead author on "Technology Horizons." He dismissed as fanciful the kind of Hollywood-bred fears that informed news stories about the Navy Fire Scout incident. "The biggest danger is not the Terminator scenario everyone imagines, the machines taking over—that's not how things fail," Dahm said. His real fear was that we would build powerful military systems that would "take over the large key functions that are done exclusively by humans" and then discover too late that the machines simply aren't up to the task. "We blink," he said, "and 10 years later we find out the technology wasn't far enough along."
Dahm's vision, however, suggests another "Terminator scenario," one more plausible and not without menace. Over the course of dozens of interviews with military officials, robot designers and technology ethicists, I came to understand that we are at work on not one but two major projects, the first to give machines ever greater intelligence and autonomy, and the second to maintain control of those machines. Dahm was worried about the success of the former, but we should be at least as concerned about the failure of the latter. If we make smart machines without equally smart control systems, we face a scenario in which some day, by way of a thousand well-intentioned decisions, each one seemingly sound, the machines do in fact take over all the "key functions" that once were our domain. Then "we blink" and find that the world is one we no longer are able to comprehend or control.
~ more... ~
Last August, U.S. Navy operators on the ground lost all contact with a Fire Scout helicopter flying over Maryland. They had programmed the unmanned aerial vehicle to return to its launch point if ground communications failed, but instead the machine took off on a north-by-northwest route toward the nation's capital. Over the next 30 minutes, military officials alerted the Federal Aviation Administration and North American Aerospace Defense Command and readied F-16 fighters to intercept the pilotless craft. Finally, with the Fire Scout just miles shy of the White House, the Navy regained control and commanded it to come home. "Renegade Unmanned Drone Wandered Skies Near Nation's Capital," warned one news headline in the following days. "UAV Resists Its Human Oppressors, Joyrides over Washington, D.C.," declared another.
The Fire Scout was unarmed, and in any case hardly a machine with the degree of intelligence or autonomy necessary to wise up and rise up, as science fiction tells us the robots inevitably will do. But the world's biggest military is rapidly remaking itself into a fighting force consisting largely of machines, and it is working hard to make those machines much smarter and much more independent. In March, noting that "unprecedented, perhaps unimagined, degrees of autonomy can be introduced into current and future military systems," Ashton Carter, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, called for the formation of a task force on autonomy to ensure that the service branches take "maximum practical advantage of advances in this area."
In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops have been joined on the ground and in the air by some 20,000 robots and remotely operated vehicles. The CIA regularly slips drones into Pakistan to blast suspected Al Qaeda operatives and other targets. Congress has called for at least a third of all military ground vehicles to be unmanned by 2015, and the Air Force is already training more UAV operators every year than fighter and bomber pilots combined. According to "Technology Horizons," a recent Air Force report detailing the branch's science aims, military machines will attain "levels of autonomous functionality far greater than is possible today" and "reliably make wide- ranging autonomous decisions at cyber speeds." One senior Air Force engineer told me, "You can envision unmanned systems doing just about any mission we do today." Or as Colonel Christopher Carlile, the former director of the Army's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center of Excellence, has said, "The difference between science fiction and science is timing."
We are surprisingly far along in this radical reordering of the military's ranks, yet neither the U.S. nor any other country has fashioned anything like a robot doctrine or even a clear policy on military machines. As quickly as countries build these systems, they want to deploy them, says Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield in England: "There's been absolutely no international discussion. It's all going forward without anyone talking to one another." In his recent book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, Brookings Institution fellow P.W. Singer argues that robots and remotely operated weapons are transforming wars and the wider world in much the way gunpowder, mechanization and the atomic bomb did in previous generations. But Singer sees significant differences as well. "We're experiencing Moore's Law," he told me, citing the axiom that computer processing power will double every two years, "but we haven't got past Murphy's Law." Robots will come to possess far greater intelligence, with more ability to reason and self- adapt, and they will also of course acquire ever greater destructive power. So what does it mean when whatever can go wrong with these military machines, just might?
I asked that question of Werner Dahm, the chief scientist of the Air Force and the lead author on "Technology Horizons." He dismissed as fanciful the kind of Hollywood-bred fears that informed news stories about the Navy Fire Scout incident. "The biggest danger is not the Terminator scenario everyone imagines, the machines taking over—that's not how things fail," Dahm said. His real fear was that we would build powerful military systems that would "take over the large key functions that are done exclusively by humans" and then discover too late that the machines simply aren't up to the task. "We blink," he said, "and 10 years later we find out the technology wasn't far enough along."
Dahm's vision, however, suggests another "Terminator scenario," one more plausible and not without menace. Over the course of dozens of interviews with military officials, robot designers and technology ethicists, I came to understand that we are at work on not one but two major projects, the first to give machines ever greater intelligence and autonomy, and the second to maintain control of those machines. Dahm was worried about the success of the former, but we should be at least as concerned about the failure of the latter. If we make smart machines without equally smart control systems, we face a scenario in which some day, by way of a thousand well-intentioned decisions, each one seemingly sound, the machines do in fact take over all the "key functions" that once were our domain. Then "we blink" and find that the world is one we no longer are able to comprehend or control.
~ more... ~