Could it be that the Large Hadron Collider is being clock-blocked?

Written by Aoife Crowley

Following a series of delays, some physicists have begun to ask if the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is being sabotaged by the future. Aoife Crowley investigates this strange hypothesis to see if God really does hate Higgs Bosen particles. 

Picture the scene. In an unspecified but not too distant future, we are doomed. A giant blackhole has opened up in the centre of the universe, and it’s only a matter of time before the entire cosmos is swallowed. The remnants of mankind have turned feral, eking out an existence in caves, or perhaps on islands made out of rubbish, like that film Waterworld.
Who knew that a simple flick of a switch way back in 2010 could set in motion the chain of events that led to such disaster? Luckily, due to that very same machine that caused our downfall, wormholes and wrinkles in time are now abundant. Our only hope is to send something back to change the past. And so, the human race entrusts the future of the universe to a bird, carrying a chunk of baguette. As the noble bird soars through the wormhole, a species holds its breath. But we’ll return to that later.
The alternative explanation for the series of unfortunate events that have befallen the LHC is hardly less bizarre. Two otherwise respected physicists are now claiming that the much hypothesized Higgs Boson particle might have a “backward causation” effect to stop itself being discovered. In other words, the particle does not wish to be created, or its creation would have such cataclysmic results that the actual universe itself does not wish for it to be created. Thus, at the moment that it is created in the future, forces travel back in time to sabotage the collider before it gets the chance to be made. In pop culture terms, this is basically what happens in Back to the Future, when Marty McFly travels back in time and accidentally erases his future self by stopping his parents from falling in love.
But before we go any further, it would possibly be beneficial to explain what the LHC and the Higgs Boson particle actually are. The LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, is the most expensive and massive science experiment in history. The 27 kilometre circuit track, buried nearly 200 metres below the Franco-Swiss border, has so far cost over $9 billion. CERN scientists are hoping that by smashing proton beams together on this track, they will be able to recreate the conditions that existed during the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
At this point in history, it is believed that the universe was still evolving out of endless potential into the forces and particles that make up our reality today. One of the main hypotheses that they hope to prove is the existence of the Higgs Boson particle. This particle, if it exists, is what imbues other elementary particles with mass. Proving its existence would prove the Standard Model, which rules almost all of physics.
The only problem is that the future has cursed the project.
The hypothesis seems so bizarre as to be laughable, but for the fact that it is supported by two leading physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. They have postulated this idea over the last two years, publishing it in a series of scientific papers with titles such as “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal”.
The most interesting aspect of this is that Nielsen and Ninomiya began pushing their theory that all Higgs producing machines would be cursed by bad luck before the LHC’s string of setbacks and problems started to occur.
But surely on a project of this scale, setbacks and problems are to be expected? Naturally that is the case, but the regularity and the nature of these setbacks have led some naysayers to wonder if Nielsen and Ninomiya might be on to something.
The first main issue occurred in March 2007, when a magnet support broke during a pressure test. Fermilab and KEK had provided the magnet. Director of Fermilab, Pier Oddone, stated that they were “dumbfounded” as to how they had missed “some very simple balances of forces”. The fault which caused the collapse had been present in the original designs and gone unnoticed in four engineering reviews over the subsequent years. This setback caused delays to the LHC’s planned startup date.
The next major problem happened on 19 September 2008. A rupture leaked six tonnes of liquid helium, again delaying operations for several months. Two further vacuum leaks were identified in July 2009, and the start up date was again pushed back to November 2009.
During the lead up to November, a short hiatus was necessitated again after one of the particle physicists working on the collider was arrested on suspicion of conspiring with Al Qaeda.
But November 2009 was when things really started to get a bit meta. Once again, scientists noticed something was going wrong. An inspection of their cooling system found that one of the high voltage installations was being jammed. What was causing the obstruction? None other then that chunk of baguette we mentioned earlier, which had become wedged in the wiring.
According to CERN, “nobody knows how it got there”. Using her loaf, a spokeswoman speculated that “the best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing airplane.”
After repairs, the collider was started up for some tests briefly in December, setting world records for most energetic particle collisions ever achieved in a lab. It was then shut down for the Christmas season, and the current plan is for it to begin doing “real physics” in early March. Whether the future will again intervene to cause delays is not yet known.
But perhaps we should not mock these theories. After all, Einstein himself wrote, “for those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion”. Perhaps the LHC really is being clock-blocked. We’ll just have to wait until March to find out.

Atom Smasher Exposes Hole in Earth’s Defenses

I have been espousing these views for several years, now that a conservative media center has come around, maybe more people will wake and realize that there are certain areas we should leave alone. We have enough problems now without possible creating more through arrogance.  Of course, in this area, as in so many others, it is probably too late.

Take care of the people.

Commentary by Kevin Hassett

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) — The largest machine in the history of the world has gradually begun to operate in a small town outside Geneva. The policy questions that the endeavor raises are bigger than the machine.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most ambitious physics experiment ever. Buried in deep underground tunnels and covering a loop of about 16.5 miles, it consumes about the same amount of energy as a large city.

The LHC will explore the most important unresolved questions in physics. In particular, it could provide evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, a hypothesized particle that has become known as the God particle. If it is found to exist, it could complete our understanding of the basic laws of the universe.

Accelerators such as the LHC work by bashing energetic beams of particles together, then studying the detritus. The high-energy LHC is like a telescope with an extra-powerful lens. It will allow scientists to see things they have never seen before, because its energy is about seven times greater than that of the most powerful accelerator to date.

That high energy has caused significant controversy. Some have warned that the collider’s energy could induce a catastrophic event. A brilliant review of the risks associated with the experiment by University of North Dakota law professor Eric Johnson has made me think twice about an experiment I have always favored.

There are many things that theoretically could go terribly wrong, some of them quite exotic. The chief threat is that the LHC’s high-energy collisions might create a microscopic black hole that would, perhaps over a few years, swallow the Earth.

Raised Before

As Johnson documents, the issue was raised in the late 1990s when some questioned whether a smaller experiment at the physics laboratory in Brookhaven, New York, might create a black hole — an area of space with such a strong pull of gravity that not even light can escape. That experiment was allowed to proceed because a safety study concluded that the energy levels of the experiment were far too small to cause a hazard.

Unfortunately, subsequent research by physicists at the University of California-Santa Barbara, Stanford University and Brown University showed that it was theoretically possible that much lower energy levels could create black holes. One paper even suggested that something with the energy level of the LHC might generate one black hole per second.

With its initial safety argument under assault, the physics community turned to an alternative. Even if a black hole were created, this new argument went, it would be tiny and would evaporate harmlessly. This was consistent with a theory of physicist Stephen Hawking. The evaporation argument was widely viewed as sound, and the LHC continued on track.

Assurance Evaporates

But later, some top scholars began to publish papers questioning the evaporation hypothesis. The issue is far from decided.

So the physics community retreated to what originally seemed like a terrific point: High-energy cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth and collide with particles in the atmosphere. If those collisions were going to create a black hole, then Earth would already be gone.

It turns out that this argument, too, is a loser.

When a cosmic ray rocketing toward Earth collides with a particle, the result of the collision would most likely be blasted into space. That means a black hole created by such a collision might be well beyond our galaxy before it is large enough to harm anything. In the LHC, by contrast, the result of collisions between two particle beams might stay put and cause significant trouble.

Thus, the safety arguments that have justified turning on the LHC are each a little less decisive than was originally believed. Oxford University’s Toby Ord, a philosopher by training, adds one last concern. It may be that the models that we use to make predictions about the possibility of catastrophe are themselves flawed.

One in 1,000

Adjusting for this possibility, Ord estimates that the odds of the LHC producing a disaster are between one in 1,000 and one in 1 million.

Whatever the likely benefits from this experiment, it is impossible that they would be significant enough to justify accepting a cost that includes a real risk of the Earth’s destruction. If Ord’s numbers are correct, and they may not be, then the LHC is the biggest policy error of all time.

As science progresses, the possibility climbs ever higher that the fondest dreams of scientists might entail risks of planetary destruction — whether it’s the next physics experiment at even-higher energy or a genetic experiment that might unleash the perfect disease. The best science explores things far from our understanding. How can we know that things we do not understand will not kill us?

Worldwide Void

Right now, the world’s governments have no mechanism to coordinate rational thinking about these risks. If the U.S. wanted to stop the LHC experiment, it would have no recourse short of military action.

Early in his term, President George W. Bush appointed a bioethics panel to consider the weighty questions that scientific advances presented. A successor panel named by President Barack Obama has a lamentably narrow focus. It is urgent that a panel be assembled to explore policy in the presence of catastrophic scientific risks.

The alternative is to continue to bet the future of our planet on a process that keeps producing safety assurances that are subsequently refuted.

To contact the writer of this column: Kevin Hassett at +1-202-862-7157 or khassett@bloomberg.net

It will come back to haunt them

Have Americans Traded Freedom For Security? | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet

With stunning insouciance, Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed. In short, the American people support tyranny. And that’s where they are headed.

OBAMA Profile in Courage? Probably Not…

By Ray McGovern

“It took a lot of courage on Kennedy’s part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military—and do the right thing,” said Col. Larry Wilkerson, USA (ret.), according to Robert Dreyfuss in his recent Rolling Stone article “The Generals’ Revolt.” [http://tinyurl.com/yanspve]

Wilkerson, who was chief of staff at the State Department (2002-2005) and now teaches at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity, was alluding to President John F. Kennedy’s courage in 1962, when he faced down his top generals and refused to bomb Cuba and risk nuclear war. That was as close as we came to nuclear calamity during the entire Cold War.

Despite the urgency of the threat posed by the Russian military buildup in Cuba (we now know the Russians had already placed nuclear weapons on the island), Kennedy’s deliberate decision-making style allowed enough time for cooler heads to prevail and yielded a peaceful solution.

A hallmark trait of John Kennedy was his ability to listen and learn. At the same time, he did not hesitate to challenge conventional wisdom.

Call that “dithering,” if you wish. I, for one, applaud President Barack Obama for following Kennedy’s calm, deliberative style, as Obama faces similar pressure from the military to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

Kennedy: Out of Vietnam

The Cuban crisis was not the only time JFK found himself at loggerheads with generals who thought they knew better and who verged on the insubordinate. Kennedy’s sustained arm wrestling with his senior generals over whether to send more troops to Vietnam was just as tense, and much more sustained.

In the end, he concluded that they had it wrong and he decided against them. In short, he opted to behave like a president—a “decider” (pardon the odd word). His overruling of the U.S. military brass on Vietnam had huge implications, both short- and long-term. This “real history” is highly relevant today.

The 46th anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination passed by last Sunday virtually unnoticed. The unfortunate thing is this: his legacy on Vietnam is so widely misunderstood that it is easy to miss the relevance of his decision making in the early Sixties to the dilemma faced by President Barack Obama today as he decides whether to stand up to—or cave in to—the Pentagon’s plans for escalating another misbegotten war in Afghanistan.

Faux history has it that President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s infusion of hundreds of thousands, up to 536,000, combat troops into Vietnam was a straight-line continuation of a buildup started by his slain predecessor. Kennedy did raise the U.S. troop level there from about 1,000 to 16,500 “advisers”—a significant increase.

But as he studied the options, cost, and likely outcomes, Kennedy came to see U.S. intervention in Vietnam as a fool’s errand. Few Americans are aware that, just before he was assassinated, Kennedy had decided to pull all troops out of Vietnam by 1965.

The Pentagon was hell bent on thwarting such plans, and Defense Secretary McNamara found it an uphill struggle to enforce the President’s will on the top brass. Senior military officers were experts at “slowrolling” politicians who favored a course that the Pentagon didn’t like. When in May 1962 Kennedy ordered up a contingency troop-withdrawal plan, it took more than a year for the military brass to draw one up.

As the President encountered continuing resistance, he paid increasing attention to more levelheaded military and civilian advisers as well as to his own intuition and instincts. Kennedy asked the Marine Commandant, Gen. David M. Shoup, “to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him.” Shoup told the President:

“Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control.”

Kennedy concluded that there was no responsible course other than to press ahead for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.

How To Do It

My Irish grandmother called Kennedy “a clever lad” and she was right.

Realizing that he had to exercise the utmost care in navigating choppy military and political waters, Kennedy employed the artifice of sending Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor on a “fact-finding” trip to Saigon. At the end of the trip they would “recommend” the course the President had already chosen.

Stopping in Hawaii en route back to Washington, McNamara and Taylor were given “their” report, which had been written by John and Robert Kennedy. It was instantly named the “McNamara-Taylor report” and the two travelers presented it to the President on the morning of Oct. 2, 1963. Wasting no time, the President convened a National Security Council meeting that evening to discuss the report.

The senior military saw through the subterfuge and strongly opposed the key recommendations of the report. In his memoir, In Retrospect, McNamara wrote that the NSC meeting saw “heated debate about our recommendation that the Defense Department announce plans to withdraw U.S. military forces by the end of 1965, starting with the withdrawal of 1,000 men by the end of the year.” In McNamara’s words, there was “a total lack of consensus.”

However, there is only one “decider” on the National Security Council—the President. Kennedy stepped up to the plate and decided, bypassing the majority opposed.

Thirty-two years later in a Sept. 12, 1995 letter to the New York Times, McNamara took strong issue with a charge in an earlier op-ed that “the groundwork was being laid for our tragic escalation of the war” before President Kennedy was killed. McNamara described the President’s reasoning in deciding to go ahead, despite the lack of consensus:

“The President nonetheless authorized the beginning of withdrawal, believing that either our training and logistical support led to the progress claimed or, if it had not, additional training would not change the situation and, in either case, we should plan to withdraw.”

His decision made, Kennedy wasted no time in acting, well, like a President. He told McNamara to announce it immediately in order to “set it in concrete,” according to McNamara. As the defense secretary was leaving the NSC meeting to tell White House reporters, the President called to him, “And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too,” according to Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers in their book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.

Action Memorandum

The President’s policy was formalized nine days later in his National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 of October 11, 1963. That document put into effect the McNamara-Taylor recommendations, which provided that:

“A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time”.[and] the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.”

Whether Kennedy truly believed that the U.S. training program would succeed in helping the South Vietnamese prevail is doubtful. Clearly, he wanted out. He carried around in his conscience, and from time to time spoke of, the number of American troops already killed. (Eight died under Eisenhower; about 170 during Kennedy’s tenure.)

Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, to whom fell the task of announcing President Kennedy’s death on Nov. 22, 1963, told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy’s mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before. Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:

“I’ve just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We’re losing too damned many people over there. It’s time for us to get out. The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We’re the ones who are doing the fighting.

After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”

A month before, during his last visit to HyannisPort, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, “I’m going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we’re not going to find ourselves in a war it’s impossible to win.”

Kennedy understood that decisions on Vietnam were far too important to be left to myopic generals. They were still chafing at what they considered Kennedy’s failure in 1962 to seize the moment and obliterate Cuba—and perhaps also the U.S.S.R., while we were at it. Add Kennedy’s clear desire to work closely (often secretly) with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a priority effort to prevent another Cuba-type crisis, and then letting generic “Communists” take over Vietnam—with dominoes likely to fall all over the place—and the military brass became convinced they needed to strongly oppose such “appeasement.”

“Best and Brightest”

And it was not only the generals. Far from it. The “best and the brightest,” first and foremost McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, were also strongly opposed to Kennedy’s decision to pull troops out of Vietnam. Bundy disagreed with the recommendations in the McNamara-Taylor report. He also resisted Kennedy’s frequently expressed doubts that foreign troops, even in large numbers, could prevail in guerrilla war, and Kennedy’s determination never to send combat troops to Vietnam.

Bundy thought he knew better, refusing to believe that the President would ever “let South Vietnam go.” Years later, Bundy’s memoirs defended his views and advice to Kennedy on Vietnam.

However, after McNamara published In Retrospect in 1995, in which he concluded that “we were wrong, terribly wrong” on Vietnam, Bundy went back to the drawing board to rethink his assessment.

Bundy hired a man half his age, Gordon Goldstein, as research assistant to help him in what turned out to be Bundy’s personal quest to discover the roots of his own mistakes which, for the most part, were the result of hubris, pure and simple.

Early this year, author William Pfaff reviewed what started out as the Bundy Memoir Part II (McGeorge Bundy died in 1996), but ended up as Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Goldstein. In his review, Pfaff highlights Bundy’s pedigree: tops at Groton, professor of government at Harvard and youngest dean of faculty; his mother a Boston Brahmin, his father a diplomat. Pfaff is ruthlessly on point in describing Bundy’s attitude:

“American had to ‘win’ in Vietnam because America always wins. America knows better than everyone else because of that intellectual firepower deployed at Harvard and other elite universities. America does not have to know about other people because other people are not worth knowing.

“Goldstein’s decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident. He found a note written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising about the war. He answered, ‘the endurance of the enemy.’ Goldstein writes: ‘He didn’t understand the enemy ‘because, frankly, he didn’t think they warranted his attention.’”

The good news for today comes from press reporting that top officials of the Obama administration, including the President, have read Goldstein’s book. Drawing a connection between Kennedy’s challenge on Vietnam and Obama’s on Afghanistan, a Wall Street Journal report of Oct. 7 noted, “For opponents of a major troop increase ” ‘Lessons in Disaster’ encapsulates their concerns about accepting military advice unchallenged.”

Obama Must Decide

There are hints that Obama is more Chicago than Harvard—and that, like Kennedy, he carries casualty figures around in his conscience. His late-night, early-morning appearance at Dover Air Force Base a few weeks ago to salute what the Washington Post called “transfer cases” coming home from the war is, I believe, a telling sign. Obama knows they are not just “transfer cases.”

This young President, too, is a “clever lad;” he is also a politician. Intellectually, he is surely equipped to understand the March of Folly that would be involved, were he to send substantial additional forces to Afghanistan. And he is surely aware that the majority of Americans are no longer deceived by the pundits at Fox News. Recent polls show broader and broader popular opposition to sending more troops.

The choice, in my view, is between courage and cowardice cloaked as politics of the possible. Let me guess what you’re thinking—“But that’s asking too much of the young President; “cowardice” is too strong a word; Obama cannot possibly face down the entire military establishment.”

Yes He Can

John Kennedy did. So the question is whether Barack Obama is “no Jack Kennedy,” or whether he will summon the courage to stand up to the misguided military brass of today. We are talking, after all, about thousands more being killed—and for what?

I would suggest to the President that he give another close read to Goldstein’s “Lessons in Disaster” and then ponder the lessons that leap out of Barbara Tuchman’s The March to Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Obama may also wish to ponder the words of W.E.B. Dubois:

“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow”.”

* * *

Note: In his book JFK and the Unspeakable, James Douglass has arrayed—and documented—his narrative with such care, that it has been all too easy for me to plagiarize from it. Actually, the book takes the JFK story much further, to include a thorough discussion of what—and who—Douglass believes killed the President. I recommend the book highly.

Author’s Bio: Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Ugly Truth about Federal Reserve

Americans Must Learn About the Federal Reserve. This Agency is Not Connected With the Federal Government. Their Sole Purpose is to Economically Enslave Americans.

The truth about the Federal Reserve is it is a private institution, owned by a criminal group of industrial and financial leaders. The Fed provides its owners with control over the people of the United States, along with a good portion of the nation’s wealth.

It has taken many decades for Americans to get a sense of the reality that the government, including the elected representatives, is powerless when compared to the Fed. No matter what the politicians say, the government gets into deeper debt to the Fed. Income rises as state services decline, and it becomes harder every year for ordinary Americans to live and look after their families.

The financial crisis that started to bloom in 2008 has Americans really upset.

That’s because the government has come up with the silliest solution you could ever think of; they were able to convince the Fed to print trillions of worthless dollars to get the affected businesses out of debt.

The taxpayers know instinctively that they themselves will pay the bill. They just don’t know exactly how this is going to happen. What you need to know about the Federal Reserve is that it is the only body in the United States that is allowed to print currency, the U.S. dollar.

You should also know that it is a privately owned bank, which is owned in turn by 12 regional central banks and some other state banks. Who exactly owns these banks, the shareholders do not know.

The proceedings of the Federal Reserve Board for public consumption, and even the decisions made at these meetings, are kept secret, with the scantiest of information reluctantly released weeks after taking place.

The Fed operates in order for its owners to make money, nothing more and nothing less. It has the power to print money, but it does not use the money itself.

Instead, it accumulates over a trillion dollars a year, completely tax free. The revenue comes from its willing slaves, the U.S. taxpayers.

The way it works is this: the vast bulk of money owed to the Fed is owed by the U.S. government. There is no question of the government paying back the principal, which runs into trillions of spurious dollars. Instead, it has signed over all the income tax paid by Americans to the Federal Reserve Bank.

That, at least, has some kind of intrinsic value (the hard labor of those who earned it) and these tax dollars comprise the Fed’s profit. Its owners then pour money into real assets like real estate, gold, silver and resources.

They also pour dollars into media businesses so that they control all you hear about the Federal Reserve–media businesses including ABC, NBC, CBS, BET, Turner, and CNN.

The unpalatable truth about the Federal Reserve is that it has caused the economy to run on empty for the past forty years, and Americans are only waking up to the fact now.

CONGRESS PLAYS ALONG

Congressmen and Senators have tried to stop the abuses of this small and secret group of people who dominate the U.S. financial system, but they have not succeeded. Some of these elected representatives, notably Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Texas), who is an outspoken critic of the Fed, have spent decades into trying to get it abolished, without success.

He called for the Federal Reserve to be audited (it has never been audited, neither has it ever paid taxes), and he called for the Federal Reserve Board meetings to be held in public.

The then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, and the then President Bill Clinton, both argued against it. Nothing has changed.

TRUTH ABOUT THE FEDERAL RESERVE

With every day that passes, the beneficiaries of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (the shareholders, in other words) grow richer than it is possible to imagine. Do not for a single second think that these people have any respect for the dollar. They are not dollar billionaires because they know the dollar is worthless.

Instead, they convert their wealth rapidly into tangible, real goods that will never decline in value–wealth such as real estate, valuable finite resources, shares in companies that deal in real estate and such resources, and easily portable goods such as gold, silver, platinum, and diamonds.

Only poor dupes, like the mass of American citizens, still believe in the dollar. The people of America need to rise up and refuse to use dollars that are printed by the Fed.

DISREGARD FOR AMERICA

These people do not care what happens to the United States. They don’t care if it booms or busts. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about anyone, anywhere, and they don’t care about the planet.

They care about power and profits and real wealth. Remember that all their wealth is of the sort that is unaffected by banknotes and coins. They are above the law, above the people and above the government.

Useless Lot

by Chris Hedges

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Chris Hedges, author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” will speak with other anti-war activists at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 in a rally calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Failure to Embrace Power; Obama’s, Democrats’ Betrayal

By Rob Kall

“Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger…! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.”
Brooks, Phillips

There are so many things that people can do that they never try, never do. There are possibilities which are never made realities.

There are many things YOU can do that you have not yet done or tried.

These potentialities require self awareness, determination, motivation and courage.

“True contentment is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it.”
G.K. Chesterson

There are times when you acquire or are given great power. That power is, like a burning fire, something which only becomes truly meaningful when it is used, not when it is merely observed or kept lit. All fires burn out unless fed. The power consumes its source of energy and dies out– unless the power is used to do work, which includes keeping the source of energy for the power.

Leadership plays a major role in tapping and applying power so it is kept not only alive, but vibrant.

When the people bestow power upon a leader or a government or party, it is the highest honor they can bestow. It signifies trust, respect and faith that the empowered will wield the strength and power they have been given with wisdom, efficacy, timeliness and courage. It is the utmost responsibility of the empowered to honor that trust and to swiftly engage in employing the power to do the jobs made possible by the power.

When a person who has potential, inner strengths, powers and resources, fails to exercise those powers, it is a tragic story of a person.

When a leader or a group of leaders are given power and then fail to exercise that power, it is betrayal, bad faith, a failure to live up to the trust the people have given.

When power is given and the empowered fails to embrace and exercise that power, the empowered deserve to lose their power. They should lose their power. It is that simple. They are failures who deserve an ignoble place in history. When the empowered fail to embrace and exercise their power, but try to pretend that they are exercising it and paint false pictures, they are even worse. They are liars and frauds. The people have every reason to either throw them out of power or to just stay home and let their power expire. The latest polls show that 40% of Democrats intend to do just that– stay home– for the next election.

“Power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the People.”
Benjamin Disraeli

The Democrats– Obama and the Democratic congress– were given incredible power. So far, they have thrown it away.

It started after the 2006 elections, when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid refused to do the right thing by investigating corruption and crimes by the Bush and Cheney administration. They said they needed to wait, to hold back, so they could win more elections– get more power. The Democracts controlled the House of Representatives and they failed to block more funds for the war in Iraq, which could have taken control of the war out of the hands of Cheney Bush and their sycophant generals.

Now, we see the Democrats failing the unions, failing the environment, failing the American people on health care. Don’t listen to what they say, which is to claim they are doing historic things. Look at what their legislation is actually doing– diluting real change, in reality serving the mega-corporations that funded their campaigns– not helping the American people.

There are exceptions, a handful. Perhaps the big mistake was that the leaders in congress–Pelosi and Reid– were chosen when Democrats were in the minority. Perhaps new, stronger, bolder, more courageous leaders should have been chosen when we the people handed real power to the Democrats.

“As important as having strength is being known to have it.”
McGeorge Bundy; In Foreign Affairs

Unfortunately, some of the leaders in congress didn’t trust we the people. Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid– conservative, right wing Democrats sabotaged the campaigns of real, liberal Democrats and funded Blue Dog conservatives with figure grants in primaries. Now, the congressional democrats have been hobbled, their power drastically decreased, made impotent, by right wing faux Democrats who actually serve the other side.

“All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Lord Acton

Or perhaps the failed leaders– Reid and Pelosi– just use those bluedogs as an excuse. The next election will decide. If Obama and the congressional Democrats don’t fully embrace their power, and that includes using all the parlaimentary tactics they can, including tactics that enrage the right, that cause FOx News and Republican leaders to scream bloody murder, then they will have failed to do their job.

“As important as having strength is being known to have it.”
McGeorge Bundy; In Foreign Affairs

Let me repeat that. If Obama and the congressional Democrats don’t enrage the Republicans and their propaganda organ, Fox News, they will have failed to fully use the power the American people gave them. They will have betrayed the people who voted them into office and they will deserve to lose that power. “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
Margaret Thatcher It is not too late. It is clear that Reid and Pelosi have failed to understand their potential, failed to call forth the courage to exercise the power they were given. The Democratic congress could and should replace them with leaders who will act more boldly, with greater strength, determination and courage to get the things accomplished which we the people elected them to do.

“We have more power than will; and it is often to excuse ourselves to ourselves, that we fancy things impossible to be effected.”
La Rochefoucauld

The same is true for Obama, so far. He has hired weak, compromising people who are too allied with the wrong forces and sides. His attempt to imitate Lincoln is failing him. His appointment of right wingers has led to backstabbing and wholesale betrayal of main street and our troops. It is time for Obama to fire his first team and replace them, courageously, with people who will send Glen Beck and his fans into paroxysms of paranoiac fantasy.

“When your shoe is on your foot, tread upon the thorns.”
Hebrew Proverb

Americans gave Obama and Congress incredible power. So far they have miserably failed to exercise it. That is a treacherous, sad betrayal that will hand the Whitehouse and congress to the Republicans by 2012. They can turn it around, but it will require bold, courageous leadership we have not yet seen. That leadership must come from within the Democratic party– from within the congress, from within the Obama White House. If members of congress and Obama’s closest advisors fail to see the failure that’s fulminating so far, Obama and the Democratic party are doomed to failure.

“It is generally the fate of a double dealer, to lose his power and keep his enemies.”
Johnson, Life of Swift

It is not too late. But it is getting later and later.

Author’s Bio:

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com
With his experience as architect and founder of a technorati top 200 blog, he is also a new media / social media consultant and trainer for corporations, non-profits, entrepreneurs and authors.

Rob is a frequent Speaker on the bottom up revolution, politics, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero’s journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates, and optimizing tapping the power of new media. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.

To learn more about me and OpEdNews.com, check out this article.

and there are Rob’s quotes, here. To Watch me on youtube, having a lively conversation with John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here Now, wouldn’t you like to see me on the political news shows, representing progressives. If so, tell your favorite shows to bring me on and refer them to this youtube video

My radio show, The Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, runs 9-10 PM EST Wednesday evenings, on AM 1360, WNJC and is archived on www.whiterosesociety.org Or listen to it streaming, live at www.wnjc1360.com or download older shows at here.

Or check the archived interviews at: whiterosesociety.org

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A few declarations. -While I’m registered as a Democrat, I consider myself to be a dynamic critic of the Democratic party, just as, well, not quite as much, but almost as much as I am a critic of republicans. -My articles express my personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

NBC News the Masterminds of 911

NBC News-The Masterminds of 911 are going to be tried in New York City. Imagine that? Osama Bin Linden must of have been captured right? After all, isn’t he the mastermind of 911, wasn’t that what we were told and wasn’t that the reason we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Wait, no, we’re not talking about Bin Linden, we’re talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four conspirators allegedly involved in 911!

But let’s forget about this deception, because this absolutely is more important, if it is a real trial, and not another orchestrated event for public consumption, then there is a possibility for the truth to come out. That is why most of the Republican Party and those Democrats, who have also turned traitor to this country, do not want any such occurrence, because they are all involved in the biggest cover up since John Kennedy’s assassination. War tribunal’s accounts are easier to manipulate and keep hidden and that is why there is so many wanting to continue with the Bush secret agenda involved in invading the Middle East.

Our country’s war footing is all based on deceit and lies. These lies have allowed Corporate America’s Military-Industrial Complex, along with their associated companies, to rape and pillage our resources leaving us in the worst recession since the Great Depression. A multi-billion dollar military-industrial complex must have an excuse to be maintained and that is hard to do when there is no formidable enemy out there today, so when one does not exist, let’s create one! In the same manner that Project Northwood existed during the Kennedy Administration (a project that Kennedy discontinued when he discovered it), a plan where “stage” American aircraft were to be high jacked by phony Cubans and shot down with U.S. citizens aboard, giving the United States an excuse to invade Cuba.

There are a lot of scenarios that might happen to halt these trials from taking place in the United States, anything from assassination to another alleged terrorist plot. I do not think there is much chance for these trials to actually take place. The traitors are many and the consequences are grave. How to keep a cover-up covered up will be too daunting for the criminals just to hang loose.

What really happen on Sept 11, 2001, how did the so-called “airliners” actually bring down the towers and Building # 7? Millions know the truth; will you be one of them?

 

I’m A Democrat, And I’m A Republican (Medicare For All #1)

I’m A Democrat, And I’m A Republican (Medicare For All #1)

Being dupe is just too easy.

The LOST SYMBOL

I finished reading Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol. It is in the familiar style of The Da Vinci Code with the decoding of various clues to lead to the Lost Symbol. It was great with Robert Landon leading you through the well known and the less known streets of Washington D.C. and all the secrets they hold. With a hard look at the Freemason’s and all of their secrets, I came to the conclusion that they are not the as bad as the conspiracy throngs would have you believe. Ultimately, the more the manipulators of our society and government can point you at different benign organizations, the less likelihood you’ll discover the true conspirators of our shadow government. As always Dan Brown wraps an excellent story around historical locations and events, which in my opinion is the essence of a good book. With so many of our founding fathers being Freemasons it is an interesting journey on how our Nation was built with the Free Masons beliefs and designs in mind. Was the original Capital built with a Crypt that had an eternal flame that was kept lit for over fifty years at the beginning of our Nation? Was George Washington deified into a God? Was the United States founded upon Christianity? These are just a small sample of the questions that are raised during the telling of this tale! Dan Brown delves into all the religions and the underlying essence that each possess and into the Noetic Science arena and the power of thought. The self-castrated villain, Malakh is looking for the Lost Symbol of the Free Masons which he believes will give him almost “God” like powers! Does he find it? And how does the C.I.A. get involved in this search? It’s a roller coaster ride tailing off a little at the end but still leaving you wanting more. ENJOY….

SOWING OUR OATS

I guess the American people get what they deserve, they always complain about the greed and the crooked politicians but these politicians are simply the reflection of most Americans. We like to pat ourselves on the back, especially during the holidays, to make us feel good, yet during the rest of the year we could care less about our fellow man. So when we complain about the system we must remember that we are the ones who perpetuate that system. We do not go after the people who have committed atrocities against us, they are allowed to walk around with praise being heaped upon them, these criminals who have murdered so many, we don’t want to investigate crimes of this magnitude, yet our “reality show” sensibilities make us spend hundreds of millions on a blow job investigation. Remember, we reap what we sow!

Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican

Thom Hartmann revealing radio broadcast.

 

Bernie Sanders

October 23, 2009

Unfiltered: Health Care Reform

By Bernie Sanders

“Bernie’s straight forward, simple English, is an inspiration to what People representative government should be about. Listen to the video and get a clear understanding of what needs to be done with health care in this country.” Dave Gregory

Senator Sanders Unfiltered is a weekly web program produced by Brave New Films.

Stay up-to-date with “Unfiltered” on Facebook. Follow Bernie on Twitter.

One of the reasons that I am a strong proponent of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all proposal is that it is much less complicated than what we are going to end up with in Congress. A single-payer approach saves hundreds of billions of dollars a year because you don’t end up with thousands of different health insurance programs appealing to all different kinds of people and costing a fortune to administer. I am going to continue the fight for single-payer. I am cautiously optimistic that we may end up with legislation that will allow states to go forward with single-payer if they want to.

Stay up-to-date with the goings on in the Senate by signing up for the Bernie Buzz newsletter and joining his Facebook page today.

Take our most recent web poll here

Author’s Website: www.sanders.senate.gov/buzz

Author’s Bio: Bernie Sanders is the independent U.S. Senator from Vermont. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. He is a member of the Senate’s Budget, Veterans, Environment, Energy, and H.E.L.P. (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) committees.

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

By DENNIS OVERBYE

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Qaeda.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Sirens of Titan,” all of human history turns out to be reduced to delivering a piece of metal roughly the size and shape of a beer-can opener to an alien marooned on Saturn’s moon so he can repair his spaceship and go home.

Whether the collider has such a noble or humble fate — or any fate at all — remains to be seen. As a Red Sox fan my entire adult life, I feel I know something about jinxes.

TV SHAMS: balloon boy

By FRAZIER MOORE

 

The Associated Press
Monday, October 19, 2009; 7:49 AM

 

NEW YORK — When 6-year-old Falcon Heene threw up twice while being interviewed about his role in last week’s balloon ordeal, he summed things up for millions of onlookers.

Sickening.

Viewers had been riveted Thursday by the sight of a flyaway helium balloon feared to be carrying the child. The media wrung the story for all its suspense and tragic possibilities.

Then it turned out to be a happy mistake. Falcon was pronounced safe at home the whole time.

Then it turned out to be what authorities have called a hoax. On Sunday, days after Falcon turned to his dad during a CNN interview and declared “you said we did this for a show,” authorities said Richard and Mayumi Heene had cooked up the stunt to land themselves a TV reality series.

Sickening.

But somehow inevitable. It’s endemic of the more and more seductive urge to dismiss truth, responsibility and other traditional values in favor of hustling for fame on the genre that continues to be labeled, with less and less cause, “reality TV.”

Until last week, the most recent breakout star in “reality TV” may have been former Illinois First Lady Patti Blagojevich, who competed last June in the Costa Rican jungle as a surrogate for her husband on NBC’s reality TV series “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!”

Though she didn’t prevail as Queen of the Jungle, her appearance was successful by other measures: She made some money, had a TV platform for defending her disgraced husband, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich (who has pleaded not guilty to wide-ranging federal charges), and emerged with more dignity than many of her fellow contestants.

Meanwhile, we mustn’t forget (and how could we?) the summer’s depraved personalities who had their brush with reality shows. Like Brian Lee Randone, the self-proclaimed preacher who was once on a show called “America’s Sexiest Bachelor,” who in September was arraigned for allegedly torturing and murdering an ex-porn actress.

And just a few weeks earlier, Ryan Jenkins, known as a sweet-talking, suave contestant on VH1’s “Megan Wants a Millionaire,” was found dead by suicide days after his ex-model wife was discovered killed and mutilated.

Last Thursday the “reality TV” of the so-called balloon boy could have had its own dread conclusion, and the sky-high drama was instantly validated by TV’s most credible voices: news reporters and anchors.

The vision of a shiny, mushroom-shaped balloon swept aloft kept viewers spellbound, breathless and (let’s face it) titillated. On-air commentators and experts kept busy speculating on how fast and far it might fly, when it might come down, and how much damage might result when it did. Meanwhile, voices were raised that maybe the child wasn’t on board after all, raising questions of whether the boy had fallen from the balloon – introducing another potentially tragic set of circumstances.

If the sheriff who wants to charge him is correct about the scheme, Richard Heene must have felt like P.T. Barnum for a few hours, seizing the world’s attention and his position to make the most of it.

Then viewers’ memories were stirred: Wasn’t this a guy who, with his wife and three sons, had appeared on the ABC reality show “Wife Swap”? Turned out he’s a veteran of reality TV!

But then reports began to surface that Heene had approached production companies about launching his own reality series. TLC network said Heene had pitched the network on a show some months ago, but that it passed. Earlier this year, RDF USA, which produces “Wife Swap,” had had a show in development with the Heenes but in a statement Friday said “we are no longer in active development with the family.”

Now facing criminal charges, with his credibility maybe damaged forever, Heene could find to his dismay that his TV career lies in tatters.

But when did deceit or misbehavior give pause to reality TV?

Nearly a decade ago, the Fox special “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” rode bad taste and bad faith to huge ratings. Only later did former Air Force nurse Darva Conger admit she took part in the “Multimillionaire” matchup as a lark, then fibbed her way through her marriage vows, declaring she “was playing a role.”

And Rick Rockwell, the would-be actor-comic whose very status as a multimillionaire was being questioned only days after the broadcast, turned out to have had a restraining order issued against him years earlier after an ex-girlfriend accused him of striking her.

Their marriage was almost instantly annulled. But reality TV was in it for the long haul.

Now, whatever legal woes Richard Heene may face, he’s known around the world. In the hands of the right producer, he’s promotable and marketable. Never mind that the boy in the balloon wasn’t really in the balloon. This alleged scam may have given Heene a boost beyond his wildest dreams.

“I guess with all these examples we can point to the biggest sham of this century, and that is, of course, the attack on the Twin Towers. Supposedly from terrorists, who the majority, came from Saudi Arabia, these Saudis were able to bring down 3 skyscrapers, with one building never being hit by anything! Never mind that in the history of the world there has never been  a skyscraper collapsing from fire! Never mind that the melting temperature of steel is over 2700 degrees and jet fuel maximum burn temperature is 1800! Never mind the witnesses who heard the explosions, the explosions that actually brought down the buildings, were never called to testify before Congress! Never mind that when Bush and Cheney finally agreed to go before the Commission, it had to be together, off the record and behind close doors! Never mind that 99% of the evidence was hauled off to China! Never mind it took over 400 days before the Commission to investigate 911 was set up! Never mind that reporters on the scene, at the Towers and the Pentagon have changed their stories from their original telecasts! Never mind that the Israel Mossaud “assets” were in the city to film and witness the attacks! The list goes on, there is enough evidence of all the different smoking guns to fill volumes, never mind all that!”

“All of the circumstances that resulted from 911 are predicated on falsehoods! All the lives lost, all the continued lost of life are the result from corruption at the highest level of our government and the corporate world whose lackeys do their bid within the government. It’s a overwhelming cancer that has engulfed most of our elected representatives and it’s death grasp is nearly complete.”  Dave Gregory

GOP’S MANTRA OF HATE

Corporate America’s Republican pundits and those Democrats, who have fallen, don’t support our Nation, our People, or our Servicemen. When they deride one of these elements of our Nation, they are deriding the Nation as a whole, totally UNAMERICAN and totally unacceptable. United we stand is an alien term to the GOP. In one breath they scream support our troops, whom they have put in harm’s way by crimes, falsehoods, and with less than adequate equipment, in the next breath they scream our people don’t deserve health-care, at least not as good as the government run health-care that our servicemen, which is the best, get.

So our people suffer because Corporate America would rather have the billions going to fight made up wars, just so their billionaire Military-Industrial Complex friends can continue to rake in the trillions of dollars, with no end in sight and be damned to the people. Can’t you see what’s wrong with this? Who do they think makes up America? It’s the people, it’s the people who fight and die for their military adventures where profit is the only motivation. It’s the people who pay for all their military toys that enrich their friends, through your hard earned incomes.

They hide under this mantra of hate, hoping with enough derisive bemoaning they will avoid the light of truth and be able to continue their lies and scams which has robbed this country of its wealth, its youth, and its heart. Divide and Conquer is their weapon of choice, be damned to the Nation. The good people have silently stood by for years while these scoundrels have raped and pillage our Nation. This can no longer be the case. We have seen what has happened, look at the history, look at the cause and effect, and you will discover that the evil empire has been the United States and how it has been controlled by the Military-Industrial Complex through their paid lackeys and their puppet master, the C.I.A.

They wish the worst for our country. They have demonstrated this on so many occasions, on so many levels. The most recent was celebrating the United States losing the Olympic bid, then they ridicule the President winning the Nobel Peace Prize! A cause to celebrate for any other Nation, yet these fascist corporate goons ridicule this high honor. Make no mistake they celebrate every failure that befalls this country, from losing men on the battle field to the economic depression, the people realized they were one the ones responsible for these catastrophes and voted them out of office yet they cannot understand that their paid representation of fascist corporate ideology will be their ultimate downfall because the people have spoken and their next call casting will be in the courtroom to answer for their crimes. Remember there is no statute of limitations for murder! They are evil and their disguise is disappearing.

OBAMA’S FORBIDDEN Health Care Video

Do not open this FORBIDDEN HEALTH CARE VIDEO, it is not to be seen, do not forward it, do not speak about it. Under no circumstances should the truth be let out on Obama’s Health Care proposals! They are out to get you if you do!

America’s Awakening Part 3 Video by Wanted: Patriots, anyone left out there? – MySpace Video

America’s Awakening Part 3, revealing the traitors who put the money changers plans into operation.

more about “America’s Awakening Part 3 Video by W…“, posted with vodpod

Remember?

I’m sure those of you my age, I’m a baby boomer, born in 1950, can remember some of the politics of our youth. The first President I distinctly remember was Dwight Eisenhower; in fact, I remember several, “Weekly Readers” at school, having articles about the President of our Nation. Then, of course, I remember John Kennedy and the bright future that that young man brought to our Nation and how cowardly it was removed from our grasp. I remember the politicians could disagree with each other but still possessed a modicum of respect for their political rival. That has totally disappeared in our society today and there are many reasons that have come together to move our culture and the rest of the world into the Dark Ages of the 21st Century.

As soon as this Great Experiment emerge from the Revolutionary War it was attacked, much like a new born baby that emerges from its mother womb soon to be assaulted from many sides from disease and viruses. This new baby, this Democratic Republic was assailed from the beginning by those seeking to grasp control of the new infant. The baby put up a valiant fight, but in much like the spread of Cancer, its days are numbered. Two hundred thirty three years is a relatively young age for a Nation, but we all know of someone who has died in their youth, never to have realized their full potential, and this would seem to be the course for the United States. So it will not be just the passing of a Nation that never realized its potential but also that of a people, a people that have been blinded by the dreaded disease of Cancer and do not even realize they have it, until ultimately, it will be too late.

But why would this new experiment of granting ordinary men freedom, the rights to choose the way they live their lives, why would this be opposed or at least, blunted to such an extent to ultimately vanquish their freedoms? One reason is that the manipulators, the ultra rich, do not believe that ordinary people can govern themselves, they are not educated enough, they lack the proper grooming; they are just not their equals. Yet even with these beliefs, do they try to do anything that would make them, in their eyes, more acceptable to govern themselves? No, just the opposite is true, which reveals their underlying belief that no one is their equal and their goal is to make the bottom line, their bottom line, in whatever particular corporate enterprise they are concerned with, the most profitable it can possible be, regardless, of safety, health, or even life and deaths concerns. Be damn to you and the earth, our moment is now to enjoy and prosper from, to run amok among the Gods, we are the Gods, just look how we have manipulated world events and people’s minds, certainly they can never be our equal!

The corruption that came about in government was not born of the men who had the high ideals to form and serve this Nation, programs that were passed, to help people, became corrupt when corporations and banks got their hands into it and basically tried to screw the government out of every dime they could get from us (toilet seats $200, hammers $100, etc). Then these same individuals, managed to persuade the masses, the ordinary people that the problem was with government and not them. The masses were duped into taking government out of the equation and letting private enterprise run our business, these same people, the foxes, who had been wining, dining, and corrupting our political leaders in the first place, were then put in charge of the hen house.

The greatest way to achieve total control is by remaining in the background, remaining relatively unseen, but controlling events and media to get the desired effects. They acquired knowledge by trial and error; they experimented and became the wizards of perception manipulation.  They became so good at it, they kill a President in front of thousands, then years later, they brought down the twin towers on TV.

The actual processes are demonstrated through Ivan Pavlov experiments with dogs and with B.F. Skinner experiments with rats in the realm of behavioral modification and his well known, Skinner’s box experiments, it is important to note, that the era I am referring to is the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The knowledge, although in its infancy, was there for the 3rd successful attempt at gaining control of our government, during the 1913 Christmas holidays, the money trusts from around the world culminated their efforts in forming the FEDERAL RESERVE. Their own Banking Cartel that would control the fundamental policies of the United States, irrespective of which political party that happened to be in power. Although their Skinner’s box of the time was not as powerful as their omnipotent media control of today, it was this Cancer that would take away our Freedoms while laying the blame on the poorer sectors of our Nation. What better way to hide blame than to create scapegoats who could be blamed for all the problems within the Nation while you robbed the country blind.

Divide and conquer a lesson learned from history that has been successfully employed for over 100 years, disintegrating our culture as a whole. It is evident everyday in the newspapers, the TV shows, the movies, and in the displays of acrimony between our political representatives. With all these examples of how society should operate is it any wonder why there is such decadence within?

Because the ultra elite learned the processes of behavioral conditioning or modification so well, which Pavlov and Skinner experiments demonstrate, behavioral modification has occurred to the masses over many, many, years, it is the same conditions that occur in a cult, but on a much smaller scale, there have been rescued cult members who have been deprogrammed and brought back to reality. It is a monumental challenge for deprogramming cult members and it is next to impossible to deprogram the masses that have fallen within Corporate America “Skinner’s Box”, today’s media!

The answer is, of course, to join together, unite to face those who manipulate and control, Remember our forefathers who had it right, get rid of the tyrants of the Federal Reserve and the Reserve itself. If peace would break out around the world these war mongers would lose everything and the billions being spent on warfare could be spent on actually taking care of people. All the terrorists out there, wake up, stop being played by the war machine, let peace break out world-wide. I know the machine will do things to try and prevent this, but the resolve you show in creating carnage needs to be shown with peace, then the people of the world would know who is pulling all the strings. The war machine has sponsored both sides at one time or another throughout modern times, their aim is world conflict. The most harm that could be done them is peace. Peace with your fellow man, doesn’t have to be religiously motivated, just has to be implemented in order to preserve the human race. Because one day, we will have to face a much bigger and more ominous threat, a threat much greater than anything this world can pose.

Angel Food Ministries

In these trying times this is a good organization to help you meet you food costs, click on the picture above and you’ll be taken to their site. Angel Food Ministries is nearly nationwide, when you get to their site just put in your zip code and find the nearest outlet to pick up your food.