Saturday, October 30, 2010

First evidence Yemen bomb scare was false flag op

With the eyes of the world on Yemen and officials pointing the finger squarely at the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) group based in the nation’s south, Yemen’s government is cautioning against jumping to conclusions, and denying that the bomb plot packages came from Yemen at all.
No UPS or DHL cargo packages heading to Chicago through Yemen took place in the last 48 hours,” insisted Yemenia Airways’ Air Cargo Director Mohammed Shaibah. Officials with the nation’s Civil Aviation Authority insisted that ono US cargo aircrafts left the nation at all in the past 48 hours.
All reports have indicated that the packages were marked as having come from Yemen. It is unclear exactly how to reconcile this with the Yemeni government’s claims that they couldn’t possibly have originated there.

Read full story from Antiwar.com

Share/Bookmark

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Obama going solar on White House...again

America's most famous home, already growing organic vegetables, is going greener with rooftop solar panels.

The Obama administration announced Tuesday that the White House will have solar panels to generate electricity and a solar water heater atop the living quarters by spring 2011.

"President Obama has said the federal government has to lead by example in creating opportunity and jobs in clean energy," said Nancy Sutley, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The Department of Energy will begin a competitive bid process to select a company to do the work.

Obama, who has promoted renewable energy, has come under pressure from environmentalists and the solar industry to install photovolotaic roof panels at the White House. President Jimmy Carter did so in 1979, but the panels were removed during the Reagan administration.

Read full story from USA Today.

Share/Bookmark

Nobel Prize for strongest, thinnest man-made material

By MALCOLM RITTER and KARL RITTER
Associated Press Writers

NEW YORK (AP) -- It is the thinnest and strongest material known to mankind - no thicker than a single atom and 100 times tougher than steel. Could graphene be the next plastic? Maybe so, says one of two scientists who won a Nobel Prize on Tuesday for isolating and studying it.

Faster computers, lighter airplanes, transparent touch screens - the list of potential uses runs on. Some scientists say we can't even imagine what kinds of products might be possible with the substance, which hides in ordinary pencil lead and first was extracted using a piece of Scotch tape.

Two Russian-born researchers shared the physics Nobel for their groundbreaking experiments with graphene, which is a sheet of carbon atoms joined together in a pattern that resembles chicken wire.

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in England used Scotch tape to rip off flakes of graphene from a chunk of graphite, the stuff of pencil leads. That achievement, reported just six years ago, opened the door to studying what scientists say should be a versatile building block for electronics and strong materials.

"It has all the potential to change your life in the same way that plastics did," Geim, 51, a Dutch citizen, told The Associated Press. "It is really exciting."

Read full story from Associated Press.

Share/Bookmark

Redditor finds FBI tracking device on friend's car

Want to know if the government is really tracking you? If you find one of these tucked underneath your car, you can start freaking out.

A routine visit to the mechanic by a Redditor and his friend turned up this ominous-looking device nestled right next to the exhaust on his friend’s car.

After promptly ruling out a bomb, other Redditors helped correctly identify the black device as a Guardian ST820 – a GPS-tracking unit made by Cobham and used exclusively by the army and law enforcement. According to the poster, the friend’s (now dead) father had ties to the Muslim religious community and was the subject of quite a bit of FBI interest. That interest also extended to the son, who has supposedly been on an FBI watchlist since last year.

“Why my friend is being tracked is anyone’s guess, but the only thing I think it could be is his connection to his father,” he says. “The FBI tried to get in touch with my friend a few months ago and he referred them to his lawyer and hasn’t heard from them since.” Redditors have thus far suggested sending the unit to France, Uganda, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Yemen, Oceania, United Kingdom, Fiji, Estonia, Denmark and Somalia (in that order), the Chilean mine and Ron Paul’s car.

Read full story from Gizmodo.

Share/Bookmark

Buffett: Cut taxes for all but rich

Buffett, the billionaire investor who runs Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), said Tuesday at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington that the nation's tax code "has gotten distorted to a huge extent," by levying higher taxes on secretaries and janitors than on CEOs and private equity whiners.

He called, as he has in the past, for policymakers to redress that iniquity by raising taxes on the rich. Buffett said taxes will have to rise in general in coming years if we want to dig our way out of a giant budget deficit.

"We are not taking in enough money at the federal government level," he said. He said tax collections (see chart, right) will have to rise back into the 18-20% range from below 15% lately.

Read full story from CNN Money.

Share/Bookmark

Friday, October 1, 2010

Fox helped Hitler create propaganda

In 1932, the German newsreel subsidiary of Fox News Channel’s corporate ancestor, Fox Films, intervened in national elections in Germany.

The candidate Fox supported was Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The basic facts are available in German historian Hans Mommsen’s authoritative study entitled The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, which is translated into English and widely available in over five hundred libraries in this country. Mommsen, one of the most distinguished postwar German historians, is now Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Bochum. In Mommsen’s account of Nazi propaganda techniques, we find the following: “There was nothing that escaped the ingenuity of Nazi propagandists. A case in point was the use of film. Under Goebbels’ influence the party had begun to exploit the potential of the political propaganda film to an unprecedented extent as early as 1930. Such films were shown mostly in places where Hitler and other prominent party leaders were not able to appear as speakers. For the manufacture of outdoor sound film, the NSDAP turned to an American company, Twentieth Century Fox.“1

Scholar William G. Chrystal confirms this account and provides further important details in his 1975 article on “Nazi Party Election Films, 1927-1938.” Chrystal writes: “Support for two additional 1932 election films, Der Führer (The Leader), and Hitlers Kampf um Deutschland (Hitler’s Struggle for Germany) came from the German-based subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Tönende Wochenschau (Fox Weekly Sound Newsreel [i.e., Fox Movietone News]). In addition, they also supplied some mobile sound film vans to be used during the campaign. Thus at least part of Hitler’s support in that critical time was the result of Fox’s help. The background for this assistance is unknown since Fox Tönende Wochenschau records were destroyed during the war,” according to a July 9, 1974 letter to Chrystal from Joseph Bellfort, who was at that time the vice president of the Twentieth Century Fox International Film Corporation.

The last Fox Movietone newsreels appeared in the United States in 1963. According to the Wikipedia article on Movietone News, parts of the Fox Movietone newsreel collection are still “owned and managed by the Fox Film Corporation’s corporate successor (and namesake), Fox News Channel. The majority of the collection is stored in New Jersey, mostly unseen since the newsreels were originally shown in theatres.

Read full story from Tarpley.net


Share/Bookmark

FOX News ratings drop 21% year-to-year

Fox News dominated the cable news landscape in third quarter of 2010 and had the top 11 programs in cable news for the month of September, though the network was down -21% in Total Viewers and down -26% in younger viewers compared to Sept. 2009 (Total Day, Mon-Sun)


Total Day (Mon-Sun): 1.016m total/267k A25-54

Prime (Mon-Sun): 1.831m total/443k A25-54


“The O’Reilly Factor” was the top program in cable news, averaging more than 2.8 million Total Viewers and 680,000 A250-54 demo viewers, but the show was down -12% (Total Viewers) and -21% (demo) compared to Sept. 09. “Hannity,” “Glenn Beck,” ”Special Report” and “On the Record” rounded out the top five — but all shows were also down double digits compared to Sept. ’09.

Read full story from TV Newser.

Share/Bookmark