Saturday, March 31, 2012

Baraka Obama aka Barry Soetro Jr. and his hidden past

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Doctor Nightmare's Medicine Time

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He used to call himself BARAKA Hussein Obama. Baraka... Heard that before somewhere... (Isildur's Bane moment)

Satanic Symbolism

 Lightning bolt: [LIGHTNING BOLT] Represents Satan, as found in Luke 10:18, "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan AS LIGHTNING fall from heaven." Also referred to as the "Satanic S", found on many rock albums such as KISS, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC. This symbol is unique to Satanism. StumbleUpon

More on Art Bell's Area 51 "Outage"


More on Art Bell's Area 51 "Outage"


More on Art Bell's Area 51 "Outage"

From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas)
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 1997 16:33:47 -0800
IUFO Mailing List via skygypsy@vegasnet.net
From: Kent Steadman <phikent@aol.com>
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 00:10:46 -0700
Subject: Re: PULSED! Signal crashes transcripts, analysis

Kevin_Thomas@slc.co.uk wrote:

> ->  SearchNet's   IUFO   Mailing List
>
> From: Kevin Thomas@SLC_NOTES on 09/12/97 03:53 PM
>
> >It's really worth grabbing the free plugin at:
> >http://www.realaudio.com
> >You need to hear the inflection of voice and Art's reaction.
> >Also with Real Audio you can listen to the whole show which I recommend
> Meanwhile >maybe a transcipt will come up soon.
> <snip>
>
> >Kent
>
> Okay, Okay sceptiscism is building up big time here....Just give us the
> info....web access is an issue to some of us!!
>
> Regards,
> K.

Sorry, this morning I didn't have transcripts.  Now thanks to Wes and others
here's the meat:

GE-1 HIT WITH APPARENT E.M.P. DURING "AREA-51" CONFESSION

Art Bell hosts "Coast-to-Coast AM," a nightly talk show from Pahrump,
Nevada, a small town near "Area 51" (an airbase which the U.S. government
officially denies the existence of, despite the massive size of the
complex.  UFO's are frequently seen near this site.)  Art's radio program
is relayed from the studio in Pahrump to the network headquarters by
satellite GE-1.  At about 1AM EST, Friday, September 12, 1997, he
designated one phone line for Area 51 employees to call in and "spill the
beans."  Several interesting and convincing callers took the bait.  Then
came one bizarre call from an obviously distraught and terrified man who
claimed to be a former Area 51 employee recently discharged for "medical"
reasons.  He cited malevolent extraterrestrials at Area 51 and an impending
disaster that the government knew would take out "major population
centers."  Midway through this call (according to GE engineers) the
satellite's "Earth sensor lost lock" and the craft rolled into an attitude
where it no longer pointed at the uplinks, causing 50 channels to go
off-air for about 30 minutes.  Shortly after the outage began, the live
internet video feed from Art's studio was lost as well.

Unaware of these events, Bell continued talking to the caller for another
minute during the outage until he heard a scream and the phone went dead.
 A reporter from Penthouse visiting the studio to gather information for a
story about the program witnessed the event and furiously took notes.
 Minutes later, Bell received a call from his network on a conventional
analog "hotline" saying that he was "off the air."  He checked the uplink
transmitter and saw that it had suffered complete loss of communication
with GE-1.  At this point they resumed transmission on a 56k digital phone
line and went back on the air.  Then the analog "hotline" to the network
cut out and Art was unable to speak to network engineers.

One of the first callers after the outage was someone who claimed to be
from Area-51 "security."  He said that his job was to "close gaps," the
network had been "pulsed" and that we "would not hear from the caller
again."  (An ElectroMagnetic Pulse is a method of overloading electronic
equipment in a target area; EMP generators were funded under the original
SDI research.  The phenomenon was discovered by accident during the 1960's
when the phone network in Hawaii was disabled by a nuclear test 800 miles
distant.)  Speculation about an EMP continued as this was "verified" by
several callers:

A man from Kingston (also near area 51) said he was on hold waiting to go
on the air, and both his home telephone lines went dead.  Another caller,
an RF engineer employed at Hughes AeroSpace in Tucson (and an expert on EMP
shielding), stated that he had suffered "cloud bounce" from the pulse and
his personal computer and digital watch were wiped clean.

A third caller reminded the audience that author Nick Begich stated in his
book "Angels don't Play this HAARP" that a military antenna array in Alaska
has the capability to remove individual satellites from service and
generate such pulses.  (Incidentally, the HAARP design bears a great
similarity to the work of Nikola Tesla, who publicly made claims about the
potential of his inventions to generate EMP anywhere on the planet.)
 Finally, another caller reminded the audience of an event several months
prior where it was confirmed that a number of employees at the Cheyenne
Mountain nuclear-hardened underground base convinced as many friends and
family as they could to move immediately to a remote location in South
America.

Art closed the show by speculating on whether (in the mind of the
government) the "enemy" of National Security had now become the American
people.

(c)1997, STA intelligence advisor
All rights reserved.  Forwarding is authorized.
Reprint on web site or journal with permission please
sta@usa.net

************************************************************
TRANSCRIPT:


The following is a verbatim transcript from last night's Art Bell Show at
approximately 1:45 A.M. Friday Sept. 12, 1997 (2:35:42 RealAudio elapsed
time, http://ww2.audionet.com/artbell/archive.html#sept97):

Art: On my Area 51 line, you're on the air, hello.

Male caller: Hello, Art?

Art: Yes

Caller [sounds frightened]: I don't have a whole lot of time.

Art: Well, look, let's begin by finding out if you're using this line
properly or not.

Caller: OK, in Area 51?

Art: Yes. Are you an employee or are you now?

Caller: I'm a former employee. I, I was let go on a medical
discharge about a week ago and, and... [chokes] I kind of been running
across the country. Damn, I don't know where to start, they're, they're
gonna, they'll triangulate on this position really soon.

Art: So you can't spend a lot of time on the phone, so give us something
quick.

Caller [voice breaking up with apparent suppressed crying]: OK, um, um, OK,
what we're thinking of as aliens, Art, they're extradimensional beings,
that, an earlier precursor of the space program they made contact with.
They are not what they claim to be. They've infiltrated a lot of aspects
of, of, of the military establishment, particularly the Area 51.

The disasters that are coming, they, the military, I'm sorry, the
government knows about them. And there's a lot of safe areas in this world
that they could begin moving the population to now, Art.

Art: So they're not doing, not doing anything.

Caller: They are not. They want those major population centers wiped out so
that the few that are left will be more easily controllable...."

Art [fragment]: ...discharged...

Caller [sobbing, then fragment]: I say we g ....

[Dead air for 25 seconds, followed by theme song and repeat of Mark Fuhrman
interview talking about marijuana busts]

[2:29:43 elapsed time] Art: We are now on a backup system....The entire
transmitting system went down...

Art's radio network engineer later reported that the network's
communication satellite lost 50 channels (including Art's feed) at that
moment, possibly due to a "lost earth sensor" (so it no longer pointed to
the earth station).

Art reported that the telephone conversation continued off the air for
about a minute, when the caller "screamed" and "screeched" and the
telephone connection went dead. Art also reported that his Web site
registered 5 million hits just after the outage.

Later, a Tucson caller who he said worked for Hughes (which Art said
supplies microwave systems to Area 51) reported that his computer memory
and electronic watch were zapped at the same time that the broadcast went
dead, and suggested both events may have been caused by a cloud-reflected
EMP (electromagnetic pulse, which are created by nuclear explosions or by
special EMP generator).

A caller claiming he was with Area 51 security said: "[We're] Professional
cleaners, you know they dig a lot of holes in the desert...I use a lot of
acid....We worked with satellite operations in the Gulf War when we cut
down certain transmissions...." He predicted the caller would not be
calling in again.

Speculations:

1. Test of radio network and public response to an EMP pulse disabling the
late-night national radio talk show that people are most likely to listen
to in event of a disaster.

2. Psyop media manipulation to achieve a specific public effect, perhaps
related to a planned bioterrorist or other attack (or simulated attack) in
certain cities. Caller sounded convincing but may have, of course, been
subjected to electrical shock or other duress in a controlled environment
during the call.

Questions:

1. Did anyone else note an EMP-like effect (malfunctions or damage to
computers, calculators, watches, VCRs, modems, and other electronic
devices) at approximately 1:45 A.M. Friday morning? If so, what was the
damage and what is your location?

2. How unusual is this type of communications satellite outage?

                                 SearchNet's IUFO Mailing List

-----End Forward From IUFO-----
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The Hidden Roots of the European Union



In the words of the EUrocrats themselves- the gospel truth, pun intended:

1. a BLANK booklet was signed in 1957- no treaty, just a title and a signing page

2. 12 stars from ancient babylon and blood cults of tyre

3. europeans and british are to be converted into a "European-Negroid" mixed race "similar to Ancient Egyptians", ruled over by an elite forming a new Holy Roman Empire / Hapsburg royalty

4. UK is to be terminated as being out of step with the new order in Europe

5. there is no limit to EU power because no treaty terms were ever agreed. NONE!

6. sovereign military order of malta to be the enforcement arm of the EUSSR.

7. real socialism and communism is NOT opposed to monopoly capitalism. FORGET all the false left-right dichotomy.

8. all local culture is to be destroyed.

WAKE THE FUCK UP.

Something very similar will be coming to a region near you, real soon! StumbleUpon

Kid Celephais page 2


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After putting the Left to sleep, the Brotherhood moves | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

After putting the Left to sleep, the Brotherhood moves | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

 And before Bolt jumps in to say how much he loves Waleed Aly has a lot of time for the guy and all the rest of the circus, let's just remember that Aly is a taqiyya practitioner from way back, pretends to be a moderate muslim (there is no such thing) and has a highly observant household complete with obligatory covered up enslaved and platitude spouting wife.

He also unsuccessfully ran as an ALP candidate. Surprise surprise. But early days- we can all pay for him to camp out at Their ABC until his next swing at perpetual welfare. Although as an "academic" and ABC pavlovian conditioner he's 99% of the way there already.

Aly is EVERYTHING that is wrong with multiculturalism, the ALPBC and the current immigration and non-assimilation possibility.

It's time for all the wolves in sheep's clothing to be sent packing. StumbleUpon

Boy Tells Of Chaining By Cultists

Charles Manson and the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.

In August 1969, Charles Manson's 'Family' committed their 'notorious' murders; at the same time the Solar Lodge was at the centre of a scandal. Here's a newspaper-clipping from the 'Washington Post' for October 31 1969:
    Boy Tells Of Chaining By Cultists
                  INDO, Calif, Oct. 30 (UPI)
                - Anthony Saul Gibbons, 6, sitting on a pillow
                on the witness stand so he could be seen, tes-
                tified Wednesday he was burned with matches and
                imprisoned in a packing crate at a desert com-
                mune for starting a fire.
                  The small boy was barely audible as he relatd
                the events that led to his being chained inside
                the sweltering box for 56 days during the sum-
                mer on the farm commune operated by a cult called
                Ordi Templar Orientialis.
                  Eleven members of the commune, including the
                child's mother, are on trial for felony child
                abuse.
                  Anthony, now a ward of the court, said his
                fingers were burned with matches after he started
                the fire which destroyed a house and injured a
                group of goats June 20.
                  He testified he was placed in the packing crate
                with his legs chained and let out only to do his
                "chores."
                  The boy was questioned repeatedly before he took
                the oath as Defence Attorney Keith Blazer attempted
                to establish if the boy knew what a lie was. The
                boy said he understood that he would be punished if
                he told a lie.
                  After Anthony testified, the prosecution rested
                its case.
     


Sounds like one of the news reports about the finders... How odd. StumbleUpon

Charles Manson and the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.

Charles Manson and the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.

 Although Charles Manson was never a member of any of the many O.T.O. groups, the tabloid press often rehashes the story of his brief contact with Georgina Brayton's 1960's 'Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.' The 'Caliphate' (the new American O.T.O. founded in 1977) has frequently described this earlier O.T.O. lodge 'irregular', but Phyllis Seckler, one of the 'Caliphate's' main protagonists (she was the wife of its founder, Grady L. McMurtry) has recently admitted that the 'Solar Lodge' was a genuine O.T.O. body. To exaggerate a little, one could say that without Manson the 'Caliphate' would not exist at all. Let's unfold a bit of the history. StumbleUpon

Signs and Symbols main page

Signs and Symbols main page


Signs and Symbols of the
New World Order
Visit Government Propaganda for New World Order Info

Some images on this page were compiled by Billy Bissell. Info about him is on the next page. 
Inverted Pentagram  Used in witchcraft and occult rituals to conjure up evil spirits. Satanists use it 2 points up and pagans use it one point up. Any way it is used symbolizes evil. It matters not if two points are up or one. It matters not if it has a circle around it. It still is a symbol of Satan.
Baphomet  Unique to Satanism. A demonic deity and symbolic of Satan. Can be seen as jewelry It is also now being used by the masons. It can be seen on their buildings and the emblems the put on their vehicles to identify each other.
Another symbol of Baphomet Aleister Crowley wore this symbol as well as the 33rd degree founder Albert Pike of the Masons
Pentagram  Symbol used in Witchcraft. Represents the elements, earth, wind, fire and water with the spirit surrounding them.
Hexagram  It is one of the most  potent symbols used in the working of the powers of darkness. Used to work magic. Check this site for info on a six pointed star of any kind.
Freemason Watch
Udjat or all seeing eye.  one of few symbols referring to Lucifer (king of  hell), whom it is though will pass judgment. Below the eye is a tear  because he mourns for those outside his influence.
All seeing Eye  Believed to be the eye of Lucifer and those who  claim control of it have control of world finances. Used in divination.  Hexes, curses, psychic control and all corruption are worked through this  emblem. This one is a symbol of the Illuminati. Look at U.S. currency. This one is the basis of the New World Order. See Government Propaganda for more info.
Logo of Time Warner/ AOL!  Notice how it resembles the Udjat and is akin to the all seeing eye! Time Warner has a major monopoly on communications in the world. They control what you see and hear. They suppress the truth. Want to see a High Priestess who is wearing the symbol leading a ritual? Watch this film Mystery Babylon as they cast spells at Bohemian Grove in Calif.
Tau Cross   Symbol of the god Mathras of the Persians and the  Aryans of India. To them, Mathras was an "angel of light" or the "heavenly  light". It is used in modern Masonry under the symbol of the T square
Italian Horn  Other names....Unicorn horn and Leprechaun staff. Introduced by the Lord Druids of Scotland and Ireland. It is associated  with good luck and good fortune. It is also used to ward off "Maluka" or the  "Evil Eye". It also means satan will take care of your finances.
Ankh  Symbolizes fertility rites and the building up of lust within a  person. A spirit of Lust is the power of this union of male /female  representations. Also called the Long Life Seal.
Upside Down Cross  Symbolizes mockery and rejection of Jesus. Necklaces are worn by many satanist's. It can be seen on Rock singers and their album covers.
Zodiac  Used in satanic and occult worship. Practitioners are  acknowledging their god as Baal or Lucifer. Horoscope signs are included 
Goat Head  The horned goat, goat of mendes, Baphomet, god of the  witches, the scapegoat. It's a Satanists way of mocking Jesus as the  "Lamb" who died for our sins.
Cross of Nero - Or Peace sign. Another sign that mocks the cross of  Jesus. Also know as "The Dead Man Rune". It appears on the tombstones of some of Hitler's SS troops.
Yin-Yang  In Chinese philosophy, two great opposite principles or  forces on whose interplay everything depends. Yang is male, light and  positive, Yin is female , dark and negative.
Scarab Beetle  The dung beetle which is the Egyptian symbol of  reincarnation. It is also a symbol of of Beelzebub, Lord of the flies (satan). Worn by occultists to show that they have power and is a source of protection. 
Satanic "S"  Represents a lightning bolt that means "Destroyer".  In mythology, It  was the weapon of Zeus. Worn to have power over others. Also was worn  by the feared SS of Nazi Germany.
Satanic Cross  Upside down question mark that questions the Deity of God. Within the occult it is the representation of the three crown princes;  Satan, Belial and leviathan. Symbolizes complete power under Lucifer.
Star and Crescent   Represents the moon goddess Dianna and the "son of the morning", the name of Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12.
Witchcraft uses it the way shown and Satanism turns it in the opposite direction.
Anarchy  Means to abolish all laws. In other words "do what thou wilt"  the law of Satanists. Used by Punk rockers and Heavy Metal followers.
Horned God  Represents the horned god of witchcraft. Pan or Cernunnos. Note the thumb under the fingers and given by the right hand.
Horned Hand   The sign of recognition between those in the Occult. When pointed at someone  it is meant to place a curse. Note the thumb over the fingers and given by the left hand.
Witch Sign  or Moon Sign  Used to salute the rising moon. Also used by surfers and football teams. This is the sign that the furor should be using to indicate the "Hook Um" horns, Not the 2 above
666  The number of man. The mark of the Beast. Revelation 13:18
Swastika or Sun Wheel   An ancient religious symbol used long  before Hitler came to power. It was used in Buddhist inscriptions, Celtic  monuments and Greek coins. In sun god worship, it is supposed to  represent the sun's course in the heavens.
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College fires cartoonist over Trayvon 'colored boy' drawing - msnNOW

College fires cartoonist over Trayvon 'colored boy' drawing - msnNOW


Cartoon about Trayvon Martin (© Stephanie Eisner/The Daily Texan; http://aka.ms/houstonpress)

College fires cartoonist over Trayvon 'colored boy' drawing

1 day ago
The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas, has booted cartoonist Stephanie Eisner two days after her eyebrow-raising illustration of Trayvon Martin created all kinds of controversy. Eisner's cartoon depicted a mother reading a book about Martin to a kid with an unfortunate 'sex-doll' appearance. Anyway, the mom describes Martin as "the handsome, sweet innocent COLORED BOY," a C-word that led to widespread C-riticism of Eisner, the Texan and its staff. "The decision to run the cartoon showed a failure in judgment," the Texan's editorial board wrote. "We sincerely apologize for publishing the cartoon and for the harm that decision caused."
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A Tangled Web » Blog Archive » NETHERGATE…

A Tangled Web » Blog Archive » NETHERGATE…

 Labour ministers deliberately encouraged mass immigration to diversify Britain over the past decade, a former Downing Street adviser has claimed. Andrew Neather said the mass influx of migrant workers seen in recent years was not the result of a mistake or miscalculation but rather a policy the party preferred not to reveal to its core voters. He said the strategy was intended to fill gaps in the labour market and make the UK more multicultural, at the same time as scoring political points against the Opposition.

***

Lucky to have seats in parliament? Socialists are lucky they aren't hanging from fucking lamp posts. StumbleUpon

Operation Trojan Horse: John Keel called it early and was 100% correct.

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mego Dr. Who Action Figures

mego Dr. Who Action Figures

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EUtopian Soviet States of Europe.

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Patient attacked by rat in hospital bed - Telegraph

Patient attacked by rat in hospital bed - Telegraph


A patient was bitten more than a dozen times across his back and neck by a rat as he lay sedated in hospital, his parents have claimed.

Patient attacked by rat in hospital bed StumbleUpon

The Riches of Oz

riches-of-oz.pdf (application/pdf Object) StumbleUpon

The experts agree

"The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed."

-Adolf Hitler
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Cruising to stardom: Doctor Who's new assistant

Cruising to stardom: A role in Titanic, and Doctor Who¿s new assistant - it¿s a long way from Emmerdale, says Jenna-Louise Coleman | Mail Online StumbleUpon

The Aged P » Blog Archive » I Want A Government That Does Only A Few Things – And Does Them Well….

The Aged P » Blog Archive » I Want A Government That Does Only A Few Things – And Does Them Well….


I really don’t care about the “human rights” of a terrorist or one who advocates terror.
I can think of better ways of improving our transport infrastructure than spending billions on a high speed rail system that won’t be fully operational until 2032
I don’t see why my gas and electricity bill should be higher in order to pay for wind farms that blight the landscape and are so unreliable they have to be backed up with alternative energies when the weather is calm
If I were in government “gay marriage” would not be top of my agenda. In fact it wouldn’t be item 999 on my agenda
I do not expect a “conservative” government to be taking money out of the pockets of poor people in Britain so that it can end up in the Swiss bank accounts of rich people from third world countries
Neither do I want a “conservative” government to waste time and money on “initiatives” to tell me what to eat and drink and how to be a jolly good chap
I am not impressed by plump faced, well heeled privately educated politicians from Oxbridge who have never held down a real job pretending to be “right on” while prancing around in shirt sleeves for silly photo ops StumbleUpon

Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh ups anchor to maintain her wage | Latest Queensland state election 2012 coverage from The Courier-Mail | The Courier-Mail

Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh ups anchor to maintain her wage | Latest Queensland state election 2012 coverage from The Courier-Mail | The Courier-Mail StumbleUpon

Earth Hour 2012 – A dissent and poll | Watts Up With That?

Earth Hour 2012 – A dissent and poll | Watts Up With That?


Earth Hour: A Dissent

by Ross McKitrick
Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, Univer...
Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Image via Wikipedia
In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.
Here is my response.
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.
Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.
Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity.
Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.
I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply.
If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations.
No thanks.
I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph StumbleUpon

Friday, March 30, 2012

Ed Staite blog: How a Sunday Times sting operation works

Ed Staite blog: How a Sunday Times sting operation works


How a Sunday Times sting operation works

On February 8th I met with two individuals who, I believed at the time, to be executives of a wealth fund who were looking to begin investing in the UK. Specifically they outlined how they were interested in purchasing government assets. The reason for my meeting with ‘Global Zenith’ was, at their request, to discuss support I could provide on issues and crisis management. 

The meeting occurred in a luxury penthouse suite on the fringes of Bloomsbury/Islington with sweeping views across London. For various reasons I will get into later I thought the meeting bizarre. However, as requested, I subsequently provided ‘Global Zenith’ with a summary of the kind of crisis communication work and training I offer my clients. I never heard another word from them. 

Earlier this afternoon I received a call from Heidi Blake, Deputy Insight Editor of the Sunday Times (who was known to me as Hayley from Global Zenith – her picture is below) saying they were about to email me regarding our meeting in February.



  For complete transparency see below for the e-mail I received from Ms. Blake at 13:17 this afternoon:
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Say “Yes,” Tim! « The Tizona Group

Say “Yes,” Tim! « The Tizona Group StumbleUpon

He wins metaphor for the modern police state forever.

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Flying Tiger Comics: Eloi and Morlocks

Flying Tiger Comics: Eloi and Morlocks StumbleUpon

It's just how you feel when you know it's for real. Apparently.



ABC News Watch: Murray Gate 3 The Response, the debate


The following correspondence with Media Watch producer Lin Buckfield, Richard Kingsford, Jennifer Marohasy and Peter Ridd is published in the public interest. We look forward to seeing the proposed debate between Jennifer Marohasy and Richard Kingsford telecast, (but we won't be holding our breath). We still await responses to follow up questions from Richard Kingsford and Lin Buckfield over ABC's misrepresentation of comments made by Peter Ridd. Their silence is deafening.

 ...there are two much wider problems here which I tried to get across in my phone conversation with Media Watch.  The first is the manipulation of the media by the large government organisations, and the second is the lack of a mechanism in science where we can guarantee that the science behind the big environmental issues of our time have been properly scrutinized (not merely peer reviewed).
Peter Ridd


It seems Media Watch are interested in telling the story they want to tell, and anyone who does not play by its rules are treated accordingly.
ABC NEWS WATCH StumbleUpon

Kill Zimmerman | Twitter | Trayvon Martin | The Daily Caller

Kill Zimmerman | Twitter | Trayvon Martin | The Daily Caller

 “We don’t comment on specific users or the status of accounts for privacy reasons,” Twitter spokesperson Rachael Horwitz told The Daily Caller. She did not indicate whether Twitter intends to take action to suspend the account, but provided TheDC with a Web address where users can report “an abusive user.”
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Illegal immigrant floodgates open, ALP thinks it's on to a winner. Look into the future.

Gates of Vienna

 It is rather amusing to see Labour lose as the result of Muslims voting instead of hanging on to their easy lifestyle.

The puzzle has always been that those who championed Islam and the immigration of Muslims to our country never appeared to realise that once enough Muslims gathered together in one spot they’d vote for who they really wanted in power — not for the Labour numpties who let them in here.

A thank you vote? I don’t think so. George Galloway is a transitional politician — a step away from the Labour traitors who let Muslims get a foothold to politicians who act openly in support of Islamic causes.

But he’s only a transitional figure — one day he’ll have served his purpose too.

Then we’ll all be in real trouble. StumbleUpon

» Climate Change Skepticism a Sickness That Must be “Treated,” Says Professor Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

» Climate Change Skepticism a Sickness That Must be “Treated,” Says Professor Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!


Global warming alarmist equates climate denial with racism
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, March 30, 2012

Comparing skepticism of man-made global warming to racist beliefs, an Oregon-based professor of sociology and environmental studies has labeled doubts about anthropogenic climate change a “sickness” for which individuals need to be “treated”.

Professor Kari Norgaard, who is currently appearing at the ‘Planet Under Pressure’ conference in London, has presented a paper in which she argues that “cultural resistance” to accepting the premise that humans are responsible for climate change “must be recognized and treated” as an aberrant sociological behavior.

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Jew or Not Jew: John D. Rockefeller

Jew or Not Jew: John D. Rockefeller

Hilarious, True and not in any way Insane. StumbleUpon

DEATH TO THE UNIVERSE: Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (1)

DEATH TO THE UNIVERSE: Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (1) StumbleUpon

Does this troubled age end in 2027?

Outline Timetable of the Age (No. 272)

As Nostradamus himself predicted, his fame and the fascination with his predictions ended in 1999 when APPARENTLY he was so wrong about the "King of Terror".

However he provided a dating system based on an early Christian Council during the Roman Empire, and using that dating we expect to see a major world war between Islam and European Civilisation begin this decade and rage up to the 2020s.

This timeline seems to agree with the timeline of the Christian Churches of God. Go figure.

By the way, the King of Terror quatrain is almost universally mistranslated. What it actually says is that the Paymaster King will revive the Great King of the Mongols in July 1999. And he did. Bill Clinton, bribed up to his corrupt eyeballs by the Chinese, finagled them into the world economic groupings, despite their fascistic corruption and incompetence. In the process of course he empowered them to be the new trash manufacturers and Wall Street puppets, and executed his own nation. StumbleUpon

Excluded Middle News: BBC News - Synthetic drug fentanyl causes overdose boom in Estonia

BBC News - Synthetic drug fentanyl causes overdose boom in Estonia


Synthetic drug fentanyl causes overdose boom in Estonia

Used syringes brought to a Tallinn needle exchange
Everyone knows someone who has died. In the circles of Estonian friends who use "china white", death is a constant possibility.
They know that. But that does not mean they can stop.
"It's so addictive," says Marko, who has lost two friends to overdoses, and survived two himself.
In Estonia, the drug - whose proper name is fentanyl - is taking a heavy toll of young people. Nationally, drug overdoses now kill more people than road accidents.
Marko, an Estonian fentanyl addict, at a treatment centre in Tallinn Marko believes his only hope is to leave Estonia for good
Fentanyl is a synthetic form of heroin, produced in clandestine laboratories across the border in Russia. It has almost completely replaced heroin on the Estonian market, and is much more deadly.

***

 As is pretty much universal in lapdog media reports, it's what is omitted that is significant.

In the case of fentanyl, it is the following datapoints:

1. fentanyl is a nerve gas used by Russian security forces. That is how it began life.

2. it is also a powerful anaesthetic.

3. fentanyl was pumped into aircraft after pressurisation to keep the passengers docile. There is no proof this activity has ever stopped. StumbleUpon

Thursday, March 29, 2012

A question of cybernetics

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 

'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 

'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.'

'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?'


 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974
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A new theory on Mothman and friends

Morpheus (mythology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 Morpheus (play /ˈmɔrfiəs/ or /ˈmɔrfjuːs/; Greek: Μορφεύς, Morpheus, or Μορφέας, Morpheas, "shaper [of dreams]") in Greek mythology is the god of dreams, leader of the Oneiroi. Morpheus has the ability to take any human form and appear in dreams. His true semblance is that of a winged daemon, imagery shared with many of his siblings.

***

The classical description of the daemons, in particular Sleep, Shaper, Frightener and Seemer, are of jet black bat winged entities with incurving horned featureless heads. StumbleUpon

Iranian female ninjas suing Reuters over report: state TV | GlobalPost

Iranian female ninjas suing Reuters over report: state TV | GlobalPost

 Iranian female ninjas suing Reuters over report: state TV

Iran's female martial artists want to showcase their fighting skills — in court.

Iran ninjas 2 2012 03 29
Martial arts has become popular among Iranian women in recent years as more than 3,000 women train in Ninjutsu in private clubs under the supervision of the Islamic republic's Martial Arts Federation.
( Atta Kenare / AFP/Getty Images )

The Iranian government today revoked press credentials for Reuters staff in Tehran after a group of Iranian female martial artists protested a Reuters report that described them as "assassins."
The Iranian women vowed to sue Reuters for defamation over the incident, Iran's state television reported on Wednesday.
Reuters today said it had corrected the story's original headline, which said, "Thousands of female Ninjas train as Iran's assassins" to read "Three thousand women Ninjas train in Iran." StumbleUpon

Gillard in strife in the polls? NBN a total waste of money? Queensland election demonstrating ALP's bullshit? TIME FOR A CIRCUITBREAKER!

Lead story for the lapdog media: some random and innocuous comment made by Tony Abbott, backed up by the baseless myth that he has an issue with final* female voters.

Federal socialism will face the same annihilation it faced in Queensland, despite the bolshie media spin.


*quite the Freudian slip. StumbleUpon

The Watchers - About Geomagnetic reversal and Poleshift

The Watchers - About Geomagnetic reversal and Poleshift


A growing number of scientists are starting to worry that it is the magnetic pole shift that seems to be underway that is the real culprit behind climate change. Not man made air pollution, not the sun, not the underground volcanic activity heating up the oceans, but the slow beginning of a pole shift that has been thought to destroy entire civilizations in the past and be one major factor in mass extinctions. NASA recently discovered and released information about a major breach in the earth’s magnetic field.
This breach in the earth/s magnetic field alone, in that it is allowing solar winds to enter the earths atmosphere, is sufficient to really mess up the weather. Not only is this accelerating magnetic pole shift messing up the weather it is having major effects on geopolitics. These magnetic shifts are not only capable of causing massive global super storms, but can cause certain societies, cultures and whole countries to collapse, even go to war with one another.
All yet remains to be seen, but the magnetic reversal of the earth’s poles seems to be rapidly increasing and IS affecting world weather patterns. The real question is how bad will things get before it all settles backdown to a “new normal?” At one time in history it was thought the North Pole was in the area that is now known as Hudson Bay. If the Hudson Bay area was the last locatoin of the North Pole, where will it go next? And how bad will global super storms and climate change get before it is over? And can we stop blaming each other for causing this and work together to survive it and keep civilization in tact? (Suite101)


Graph of annual magnetic north pole shift during the past 420 years
Since 1860, the magnetic pole shift has more than doubled every 50 years. That is pretty significant. During the past 150 years, the pole shift has been in the same direction. During the past 10 years, the magnetic north pole has shifted nearly half of the total distance of the past 50 years! In other words, the pole shift has apparently sped up substantially. It is not known if the shift will speed up or slow down in the years ahead. Some say that a pole reversal is overdue, and this phenomenon may be indicators of the beginnings of that process. (ModernSurvivalist) StumbleUpon

ROSWELL I-BEAM HIEROGLYPHS: UFO Alien Hieroglyphic Writing?

ROSWELL I-BEAM HIEROGLYPHS: UFO Alien Hieroglyphic Writing? StumbleUpon

The Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts and 1991 VG

The Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts and 1991 VG


The approach taken in this paper is to investigate the different probabilities regarding the nature of the near-earth pass of the object designated 1991 VG. Three distinct possibilities are apparent. The first is that it was a natural asteroid, to which we assign a probability P(n), that is, Probability natural. The second is that it was a man-made spacecraft, probability P(s), or Probability spacecraft. The third is that it was an alien artifact, probability P(a), Probability artifact. If we assume that there are no other possible explanations then the three taken together and written in formula P(n) + P(s) + P(a) = 1. The scepticism of a scientist (myself included) leads one to assume that P(a) = 0, but that assumption, it will be seen, is not supported by our knowledge of 1991 VG and its discovery circumstances. I show below that these indicate both P(n) and P(s) to be small, implying that P(a) , Probability artifact, is significant.
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Shawnna's Truth Behind Serpo - page 4

Shawnna's Truth Behind Serpo - page 4


"Make no mistake: psychological warfare planners and disinformation specialists within the official world fully understand the very ridiculous ego-driven attitudes that certain players in the UFO field have, and they exploit this to the absolute hilt. They make the researcher feel important; they stress that it is the researcher, and the researcher alone, who can help in "getting the truth out."
And what happens? The same researcher is plunged into a strange environment full of clandestine meetings, shadowy informants, questionable documents, and where nothing is quite as it appears to be. And the outcome is very often the same: the relationship between researcher and "government agent" eventually comes to an end with nothing definitive having been supplied by the official world; yet for his or her part, the researcher has often been manipulated and milked for data to an extreme level."
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Serpo_Pilot_Program_for_Patchwork

Serpo_Pilot_Program_for_Patchwork


For newcomers to the ‘SERPO’ soap-opera, the first thing they should know about this hoax is that the very name – ‘SERPO’ – is an acronym for Operation RESearch.  OP-RES.  OPRES.  Reversed; SERPO.  An operation centered around a fictional story the purpose of which was to determine who in UFOology (you-fool-ogy) would be gullible enough to accept the fiction as fact, and float it as such.  For as long as there have been flying saucer stories, there has been disinformation programs by the Coverup artists to explain them away, and the recent regurgitation of the SERPO hoax is particularly pertinent in this regard because of the actual facts surrounding it.

Some years ago, an ‘Operation Patchwork’ was decided upon at the highest levels, and approved of by Majestic 12 (MJ-12).  First, though, a little background before we enter the twilight zone of duplicity at the highest levels. 

Just as the true state of affairs between the human authorities and their extraterrestrial treaty partners has been a closely-held secret at the very pinnacle of power, hidden behind the question-us-not wall known as “National Security”, the Coverup has had to constantly deal with threats of exposure.  To deal with this threat, from the very beginning they infiltrated and cultivated certain civilian groups ostensibly concerned with transparency in matters involving the UFO and alien subjects.  For example, well-read readers of this subject matter will recall how Adm. Hillenkoetter (allegedly the first MJ-1 and first DCI – Director, Central Intelligence) joined NICAP (National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena) in 1957 after his public retirement.  This top-echelon Coverup artist was so good at acting the double-agent that he became less known for his actions hiding the alien presence than he did for his quote "Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense."  A modern-day equivalent would be a GOP political figure who built his reputation on moral rectitude, say Newt Gingrich, who while excoriating Pres. Clinton for his “immoral behavior” with his intern and demanding he resign his office, was at the same time having an adulterous affair with a member of his own staff.
The infamous “MJ-12 documents” are another case in point.  If you are in danger of facing exposure and need to maintain the self-governing mechanism of ridicule, what to do?  Some of the most cunning minds in the intelligence community arrived at a most convincing and fail-safe approach; use the real name of the group – MJ-12 – and manufacture a number of bogus documents that dealt with the subject matter, or enough of it to appear convincing, and launch them into the public sphere via ‘experts’ in UFO-ology.  Include among your list of recipients one man who had validated at least one legitimate MJ-12 document previously that had seen the light of day (that man being Stanton Friedman).  Stan and the rest of the “Class of ‘85”, as I call them, came no closer to furthering Disclosure than anyone before or since, although most of them have written or co-written a number of fine books while furthering their own interests by becoming mainstays of the ‘ufer’ speaking circuit.  You can rest assured the real MJ-12 has been quite happy with this state of affairs, with the most recent named MJ-1 allegedly raising a toast to them as “our [MJ-12’s] best asset in helping to keep the public from being disturbed by some uncomfortable truths” (slightly paraphrased; I wasn’t at the meeting).

Another example would be the 1996-1997 television series “Dark Skies”, a fictional depiction of MJ-12 and featuring actors actually playing the roles of Adm. Hillenkoetter, Harry Truman, The Beatles, Robert Kennedy, and other famous figures in the 1960s.  The “greys” are depicted as clones and enslaved to an evil alien race (the Hive, which might represent the J-Rod society from Zeta Reticuli) bent on the take-over of Earth.  As with most fictional depictions, aliens are either good and benevolent (Spielberg’s E.T., for instance) or more likely, evil and something to be feared (Independence Day as well as this particular series).

A more contemporary analogy would be the ongoing ABC mini-series “Impact”, in which a fictional Earth-destroying Catastrophe has many of the actual elements in what this civilization is facing in its near-term, but jumbled enough and presented of course as “fiction”, the better to muddle the message for the average viewer who is intended to view it with the idea that “it’s only TV”.  Super special-effects for the “oooh!!!!s and aaah!!!!s” (people, buildings, trains, cars, ships, up and floating skyward), measured for just-so-many heart palpitations, followed by huge chunks of string music and glycerine tears as loved ones argue, separate, and re-unite, and naturally the obligatory happy ending.  What is most interesting is the jumble of elements here:  a “brown dwarf” is the catalyst (check) for the Catastrophe.  It impacts the Moon, causing the moon to assume an “elliptical orbit” (check).  The orbit causes the Moon to draw closer to Earth, appearing as a “menacing object in the skies” (check).  Various scientists are rushed to Washington, and anyone connected with them is to hide behind “national security” as they lie regarding their purpose (check).  The same old time-worn solution is hauled out; nuke it.  Salvation in destruction.  In this case, it’s the Moon.  Blow it up.  Break it in half.  Done.  Earth saved.  (Check; NASA just recently announced plans to blow a hole in the lunar south pole…..to find WATER.  The real answer in a later installment.)   In the final moments, the Moon is shown hovering hugely in the sky like the 2 halves of Humpty Dumpty.  All’s well that ends well, or so we’re led to believe.

All of which brings us to ‘Operation Patchwork’.  As its name implies, this deceptive attempt at ‘Disclosure’ is based on a patchwork of paradigms, which neatly mirror the black-box compartments that have governed the entire Coverup since the beginning.  Since these compartments were first constructed with the idea in mind that no one compartment need know what any other compartment might be working on, lest they figure out the ‘Big Picture’, those ‘insiders’ from one compartment often clashed with those from others.  A hierarchy based on a ‘need to know’ also aided the development of contradictory paradigms.  Mid-level employees were told y and z, but never (planet) x.  Many in the higher levels were shown a, b, and c, but again, never (planet) x, y, or z.  In such a culture, with the left (wing) never knowing what the right (wing) was really up to, rumors would grow.  And grow.  Bean-box (as black compartments were often known by their occupants) “A” might discover a crop-circle they thought was directed at them, never knowing that Bean-box “D” had actually created it.  Bean-box “F” might be told that a certain website had been established as a bogus “foil”, to keep the too-nosy truthseekers fearful and distraught, not knowing that Bean-box “Z” had been tasked with ensuring that said website wasn’t hacked or taken off-line. 
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America: first country in history to have more male rapes than female

n+1: Raise the Crime Rate

 As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.

The media mostly honors the government’s preference for leaving prisoners in the shadows. The nation’s prisons now contain more inhabitants than any American city save New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And yet there is no “prison correspondent” at any of the nation’s major newspapers. This isn’t entirely the papers’ fault. Even if reporters were sent to the prisons, they could be denied entry: the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not prevent prison authorities from barring the press.

It’s impossible to tell the story of American incarceration without also telling the story of American racism. Unlike most leftwing stories about racism, though, this one isn’t about the South, and it isn’t even really about American conservatism. After slavery and Jim Crow came the Great Migration, urban riots, and the war on drugs. The history of the prison crisis is largely a story about progressive politicians—liberal Republicans and centrist Democrats—supporting “tough on crime” policies to protect their right flank, both for self-preservation and to propel other progressive priorities. The prison crisis was something that we ourselves created, law by law, decision by decision, state by state.

One of the original flash points was Detroit. In 1967, riots broke out after city police arrested eighty-four revelers at a party given for a pair of African American veterans who had just returned from Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson sent in an army division to pacify the city, resulting in forty-three deaths and the destruction of 2,000 buildings. In the following months, tens of thousands of residents from the city’s Caucasian enclaves hurtled across 8 Mile Road to the suburbs; they never came back. The following year, as the war in Vietnam escalated, Johnson declared he would not seek reelection, throwing the Democratic nomination to the cheerful but ineffectual Hubert Humphrey. That November, after a bitter campaign fueled by racial antagonism, the country elected Richard Nixon. For the first time in history, the Democratic candidate had failed to secure a majority of votes from the old Confederacy.

There followed a thirty-five-year period of “tough” crime laws. They began in New York State, with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberalish governor who, having failed three times to secure the Republican presidential nomination, decided he would make drug policy his peace offering to the party’s right wing. Previously an advocate of treatment programs and community supervision, Rockefeller abruptly changed course in 1973, innovating harsh mandatory minimum sentences for both the sale and possession of illegal drugs. In the next thirty years, New York’s prison population sextupled, climbing from 13,400 prisoners in 1973 to 71,500 prisoners in 2000.

The pattern soon repeated itself across the country. As whites abandoned the cities, their governors and legislatures enacted increasingly tough sentencing laws for the minorities left behind. In 1978, in what he would later call the biggest mistake of his life, Michigan’s governor, William Milliken, an embattled moderate Republican from the state’s desolate north, signed the 650-lifer law, a Rockefeller-inspired provision mandating life sentences for anyone caught in possession of 650 or more grams of cocaine or heroin. Only 200 people have served the life term, apparently because most big cases get transferred to federal court. (It’s still terrible, though: 85 percent of those sentenced under the provision had no prior criminal record.)

The new sentencing policies did little to discourage criminals. The same summer that Milliken signed his life-sentence law, an ambitious group of teenagers met on the playground of Birney Elementary, on Detroit’s west side, and founded Young Boys Inc., the first professionalized multicity drug-dealing ring in the United States. Within two years, YBI was pulling in $300,000 a day selling heroin in Detroit and other cities. Many of their clients were Vietnam veterans, tens of thousands of whom had become addicted to opium overseas. YBI’s crucial innovation was to distribute their product through a network of hard-to-prosecute juveniles, “corner boys” as young as 12 years old. They were also among the first to use limitless violence to terrorize and execute rivals. As the auto industry collapsed, the market for heroin grew more and more robust. By the mid-’80s, police activity had loosened the grip of YBI’s founders; by that time, though, the corner-boy and murder-the-competition model had spread to every major city in the United States.

And then came crack. Crack democratized the consumption of cocaine by providing a cheap and easy delivery system—smoking—for a highly addictive, high-demand product. Economists have labeled crack a “technological shock,” comparing the dislocations it triggered to the impact of computer chips, or mechanized agriculture. Unlike computer chips and mechanized agriculture, however, crack’s impact was entirely negative. This was not so much because crack was physically harmful—though it was—but more because it was illegal, and highly profitable. Within years of its introduction, the homicide rate for young black males had doubled. The inner city experienced a spike in weapons arrests, fetal deaths, low-birth-weight babies, and children in foster care. Between 1984 and 1994, the death rate for young black males reached 1 percent—double the rate of soldiers fighting in Iraq. A small part of this was caused by crack overdoses. A very large part was caused by a homicidal dialectic of black-market violence and state-sponsored reprisal, a dynamic sustained by popular hysteria and irresponsible media.

The media had never met a story they liked as much as crack, which involved gangs, guns, scary minorities, urban poverty, addiction, and, crucially, babies. Fetuses incubated in crack-exposed wombs were supposed to furnish a generation of “superpredators”—brain-damaged reprobates who wouldn’t be able to tell right from wrong. Although we now know the “crack baby” is a mythical creature—children of crack addicts do not exhibit developmental problems above and beyond those normally experienced by children whose fathers are dead or in prison—the image set off a moral panic in the 1980s, leading the country to begin the unusual practice of incarcerating large numbers of women. In 1986, two months after college basketball star and number two NBA draft pick Len Bias died of an ordinary cocaine overdose erroneously pinned on crack, Newsweek declared crack the biggest story since Watergate and Vietnam. Nancy Reagan was interested in crack, too, and the White House spent $2 billion on equipment and personnel to fight the epidemic, including staff hired to amp up anxiety about the drug among the press.

In the 1990s, the action shifted to the states, twenty-four of which enacted some version of a “habitual offender law,” more colloquially known as a “three strikes” provision. Even more than mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, three strikes laws have been responsible for geometric growth in the prison population. Though details vary depending on where you look, the vengeful theory underpinning the laws is universal: repeat offenders need to be removed from society. As a result, defendants have been given life sentences, which cost taxpayers as much as $1 million, for crimes as minor as stealing golf clubs from a sporting goods store or videotapes from Walmart. By 2003, 127,677 Americans were serving life sentences, an 83 percent jump in eleven years.

As of 2005, the last time a census was taken, there were 1,821 prisons in the country. Maine had just seven, while Texas had 132. Of these 1,821 prisons, 347 were maximum security. Most countries don’t have “supermax” prison facilities like we have in the US, where Alcatraz model of remote, nightmare fortress has become increasingly popular with the passage of time. Inmates in maximum security facilities are more vulnerable to rape, which may seem counterintuitive. The risk of rape, though, increases as prisoners lose control over freedom of movement. In minimum security prisons, it’s easier to find protection in a crowd. On the other hand, maximum security prisons are also distinguished by their willingness to put inmates into solitary confinement for extended periods of time, sometimes decades. Many psychologists now believe that such a long period in solitary inevitably leads to insanity. On the plus side, those prisoners will not get raped, or at least not by inmates.

Meanwhile, back on the battlefield of the war on drugs, crack continues to be consumed in nearly the same quantities as in 1990. But a huge price drop destroyed the handsome margins of the crack trade and virtually eliminated the violence associated with it. The crack-crime epidemic is gone, but the incarceration complex it fomented lives on. As a result, one in three black baby boys can expect to spend part of his life in prison.

Once you go to prison, you never really come back. Beyond incarceration’s immediate physical and mental horrors, after being convicted of a felony, your public life is functionally over. In many states, you won’t be able to vote or sit on a jury. You won’t be eligible for public housing or food stamps. You’ll find it very difficult to attend a college, and may find it nearly impossible to get a job—like everyone else, educators and employers discriminate against ex-cons.

Finding a job is a particular problem, not only because criminals often leave prison with a large amount of debt—from court fees, conviction penalties, probation fines, and especially from child support bills, which continue to accumulate while convicts are in prison—but also because steady employment is itself often a condition of parole: a diabolical catch-22. As scholars have noted, the situation calls to mind the “vagrancy” laws passed in the South in the wake of reconstruction, which made it illegal to be unemployed while black vagrantswere arrested and forced back onto plantations, this time as convicts rather than slaves. An ex-con who fails to land a job may end up back in prison for violating parole. Since service-oriented occupations are usually out of the question, ex-cons are often forced to seek industrial and construction jobs far from urban centers. This puts a large number of people in the position of having to take long, expensive taxi rides to show up for low-wage jobs that don’t even cover transportation costs.

The United States now spends some $200 billion on the correctional system each year, a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of twenty-five US states and 140 foreign countries. An ever-increasing share of domestic discretionary spending, it would seem, is devoted to building and staffing earthly hells filled with able-bodied young men who have been removed from the labor force. If we added up all the money federal, state, and local governments invest in the poorest zip codes through credits and transfer payments—food stamps, Medicaid, teacher salaries, et cetera—and balanced that against all the value the government extracts from those zip codes through sin taxes, lotteries, and the incarceration complex, we might well conclude that the disinvestment outweighs the investment. Any apparent gains made in the last thirty years in narrowing the employment and education gap between African Americans and whites vanishes once you include the incarcerated population. Before asking the government to spend a fortune improving student-to-teacher ratios, it may be prudent to first ask the government to stop devoting public resources to ripping the heart out of inner-city economies.

Of course, not everyone has made out badly from the country’s prison-construction binge. Telephone companies run up impressive profits from prisoners forced to call collect. Defense contractors have signed lucrative contracts selling paramilitary equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Rural communities have benefited most of all. Not only does the criminal justice sector employ 2 million people, including more than 500,000 correctional officers, most of them in rural areas, it also helps to inflate the local population of prison zones for the purposes of congressional districting and social spending. Schoolchildren learn that in 1787, slave-holding states reached a compromise with free states that allowed nonvoting slaves to count as three-fifths of a human for the purposes of apportioning congressional seats. Counting a slave as a fraction of a man seems like a vivid manifestation of the way the United States dehumanized Africans. Today, thousands of people are removed from urban districts, where public money is urgently needed, and shipped upstate, where each counts for a full person. In this way, prisoners bolster the voting power of rural districts, while being unable to vote themselves. Perhaps this is the reason why, as criminal justice surveys indicate, rural whites form by far the most punitive demographic.
Certain breeds of urban dwellers benefit, too. In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, for example, steep drops in crime, combined with the virtual depopulation of entire city blocks, has underwritten a real estate boom. In neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, wealthy people with children have reaped the benefits of climbing land values from apartments they never would have bought had it not been for the removal of tens of thousands of locals from adjacent areas. Neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant show the population exchange in its purest form. As African American Brooklynites are exported upstate for involvement in petty drug crimes, twenty-somethings reared in prison towns migrate south and reoccupy the same areas vacated by prisoners. Often, of course, the new inhabitants proceed to consume and sell the very same drugs that got the previous tenants into trouble. Since they’re white, they do so with impunity.

What would it mean to “reform” the prison system? Despite the best efforts of the moneyed elite and its institutional avatar, the Republican Party, the credentialed elite that controls the White House has succeeded in making progress on multiple reformable domains, including credit markets, the health care system, and public education. These are important, high-stakes achievements, and, as we have seen, no good deed goes unpunished. But America’s incarceration crisis is not a reformable problem. It cannot be addressed by a hectoring Rahm Emmanuel, or a priggish Olympia Snowe; it will not be solved by a supercommittee, or a gang of six.

The US prison system doesn’t need reform—it needs to be abolished. Like slavery in the 19th century, and civil rights in the 20th century, prison abolition in the 21st century can only be accomplished by a popular movement as radical and uncompromising as the movement that set up the prison regime in the first place.
We can start by reevaluating our priorities. There’s no use saying that progressive goals aren’t in competition with one another. They very surely are, and criminals have lost that competition again and again, with tragic results. For decades, politicians from Nelson Rockefeller to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama have sold out criminals in order to win concessions on health care, abortion, gay rights, early education, progressive taxation, and any number of other worthy objectives. Prison abolitionists must now perform the reverse procedure—we must be ready to sacrifice the traditional progressive agenda on the altar of criminal justice. Morality, like politics, starts at the edge of Ockham’s razor: the bad can no longer be allowed to obscure the evil.

The movement to abolish the death penalty is venerable and well-funded. Although it wasn’t successful in preventing the execution of Troy Davis, it’s helped a number of inmates get off death row through DNA evidence, and has arguably had decent success in the last fifteen years in shifting public opinion away from state-led killing. Hundreds of highly qualified, well-educated people devote their lives to trying to eradicate an unethical practice and a national embarrassment.

Compared with the horrors of garden variety American incarceration, though, the death penalty can be viewed only as a distraction. An extremely small number of people are executed in the United States—fewer than thirty a year, on average, in the last three decades. But at any given moment, a full 7 million people are under some form of regular surveillance from the correctional system. More African Americans are in prison today than were enslaved in the 1850s. Back in the early ’70s, before things got really bad, the United States had a decently large and energetic prison abolition movement. Why this movement has nearly disappeared—Angela Davis, a University of California professor and former imprisoned Black Panther, is virtually the only abolitionist left—even as the prison crisis has become more severe, is difficult to answer. The timing, though, suggests that the death penalty may have something to do with it—after execution was reinstated in 1976, many activists who might have spent their lives focusing on prisons switched their attention to a narratively vivid but politically minor bugaboo.

And yet the death penalty does offer one interesting benefit, from the point of view of prison abolition, because the first question any prison abolitionist needs to answer is what we’re supposed to do with violent criminals. An important part of that answer has to be that we must simply put up with an increased level of risk in our daily lives. But what about Charles Manson? Surely something must be done to prevent Charles Manson from chopping up celebrities.

If, in the popular imagination, the primary purpose of prisons is to keep us safe from (the vanishingly small number of) people like Charles Manson, then we should simply kill Charles Manson. Prison abolitionists should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward. A prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo. (Interestingly, unlike rape, homicide has one of the lowest recidivism rates of any crime—you can only murder your wife once—suggesting that death row inmates may pose less of a security risk than other categories of offenders.)
Gun control is another area where progressive energies have been wasteful and counterproductive. “Centrists” of any persuasion will try to tell you that most people don’t actually want their fellow citizens running around with guns, but gun control appears to be one area that really has cost the Democratic Party a large number of one-issue voters over the years. In any case, you’ll have a hard time convincing anybody that we should abolish prisons and take away the community’s ability to defend itself. Even on its own terms, gun control is not a straightforwardly progressive matter. The war on guns bears important similarities to the war on drugs—both are used as pretexts for searching, arresting, and imprisoning ethnic minorities. Gun control, like drug control, doesn’t do much to restrict supply—instead, it creates a black market for the product regulated through violence. In many states, obtaining a gun license is expensive and complex: we’ve essentially made it legal to own a gun if you’re wealthy and white, and illegal to own a gun if you’re poor and black. Years are added onto criminal sentences because unregistered guns are spotted on the premises, even if the guns have never been used. The only way to sustainably curb the supply of guns is to reduce demand for guns, and the easiest way to do that would be to legalize narcotics.

On May 23, 2011—the same day the morning papers rejoiced over another year of crime reduction—the Supreme Court ordered the State of California to release 45,000 prisoners. In a 5-to-4 decision written by Anthony Kennedy, the Court declared that overcrowding in the state’s penitentiaries had become so severe that simply existing in the system violated a prisoner’s Eighth Amendment right of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

As a news story, the ruling generated surprisingly little attention—a good deal less than the Court’s 2008 decision banning the death penalty for child rapists— but in legal circles it caused a panic. Antonin Scalia, in a fiery dissent, called it “the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Samuel Alito predicted the ruling would generate a “grim roster of victims,” anxiously noting that the quantity of prisoners mandated for release added up to “two army battalions.” In the early ’90s, Alito pointed out, a similar order issued by a federal judge in Philadelphia liberated some 10,000 prisoners: within 18 months, 2,748 of the prisoners had been rearrested for theft, 2,215 for drugs, 1,113 for assault, 959 for robbery, 751 for burglary, 90 for rape, and 79 for murder. California, Alito suggested, should gear up for an enemy invasion.

As the prison population has expanded, the ex-prisoner population has expanded, too, rising from 1.8 million in 1980 to 4.3 million in the year 2000. Every year, 650,000 prisoners are released from American prisons. Just as new prisoners tend to come from poor, urban neighborhoods—in New York, 75 percent of inmates come from just seven neighborhoods: Harlem, Brownsville, East New York, South Bronx, South Jamaica, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side—released prisoners cluster in a limited set of urban enclaves. This isn’t to say that everyone goes back to where they came from—many ex-cons, especially those who lack supportive families, specifically avoid their home neighborhoods. According to surveys, many believe they’ll be less likely to engage in renewed criminal activity with a change of scenery.

Within three years, 70 percent of released prisoners are rearrested, and half are back in prison. A large portion of these “recidivists” haven’t committed new felonies—they’ve simply violated the terms of their parole. California, which is especially adept at throwing parole violators back in prison, ends up reincarcerating two thirds of released prisoners within three years.

Of course, many released prisoners do commit new felonies, and the evidence is clear that releasing prisoners raises the crime rate, just as imprisoning criminals lowers it. The impact in both directions is relatively small, though. One study showed that during any given year in the ’90s, the net increase in the number of ex-offenders circulating in the general population accounted for 2 percent of property crimes and 2.5 percent of violent crimes. The effect was higher for murder and robbery, though. Fourteen percent of murders and 7 percent of robberies were attributable to prisoner releases in 1994. And that’s only the new releases—the fraction of murders committed by the entire ex-offender population was much higher. On the other hand, released prisoners are subject to considerably more state surveillance than most people, and while it’s safe to assume that ex-cons commit crimes at a higher rate than those who have never seen the inside of a prison, they are also more likely to be investigated and rearrested than someone who was never on the police’s radar to begin with. Released prisoners also have fewer noncrime options: getting a job without family or social connections is virtually impossible for them.

The prospects for California’s released prisoners, therefore, are not good. Neither are the prospects for the state. The likelihood is high that most of these released prisoners will be back in jail within three years, and California may very well be back in court for overcrowding its prisons. (The state is hoping to preempt the issue by transferring inmates to county jails in lieu of early release, but it isn’t clear that crowded jails are any more likely to survive judicial scrutiny than crowded prisons.) To reduce its prison population, California will have to do more than release prisoners—it will have to stop creating new ones.

When evaluating the impact of the war on drugs on the country’s incarceration crisis, it helps to keep in mind a statistical nuance: a large fraction of prison sentences are for nonviolent drug offenses, but a small fraction of the prison population is in for a nonviolent drug crime. This is because, despite the harshness of mandatory minimum sentences, drug criminals don’t spend nearly as much time in prison as other kinds of criminals.

It’s tempting to believe that we could free most of the prison population simply by liberating nonviolent drug offenders. Nonviolent drug offenders are “innocent”; they haven’t hurt anybody. Advocating on behalf of criminals is much easier when they haven’t committed any violent crime. And yet this misses the point of the prison crisis: you cannot relieve the suffering of the prison population without increasing safety risks for the rest of us.

And increasing those risks, from a moral standpoint, is the right thing to do.
What would happen to California’s criminal community, once freed from the ping-pong of prison and parole? They would continue being criminals, in all likelihood, breaking and entering, stealing cars, selling drugs, and—very occasionally—taking lives. This would be difficult and painful, both on the individual level for the victims and on a social level more broadly; economic and cultural shocks accompany any kind of population exchange, and a massive jailbreak will likely result in a period of strain and disorganization for inner cities. Over time, though, things will settle. There will be more fathers around, and more state money for things like education and health care.

The incarceration complex, like a civil war or foreign occupation, institutionalizes economic dislocation, making chaos and uncertainty a defining feature of the life cycle. Crime, on the other hand, causes disruptions that are smaller and more manageable. Despite the near-infinite capacity of the human spirit to deal with routine desperation, the residents of East Harlem will never “adapt” to a community life structured around prisons, because uprooting communities is the very function and purpose of incarceration. The capacity of New York residents to absorb higher levels of crime in daily life, on the other hand, is nowhere near its limit.

In all likelihood, dismantling or sharply contracting America’s prison system would make the country feel more like the United Kingdom. In the UK, only 3 percent of crimes result in a prison sentence. In the United States, the figure is closer to 18 percent. London is a more dangerous city than New York. Your likelihood of getting robbed or assaulted is higher there. For educated, middle-class whites unlikely to get in trouble with the police, London is, in some ways, a tougher place to raise children.
On the other hand, life spans are longer in the UK; social mobility is more fluid; racial disparities are smaller; the AIDS crisis is better-controlled; and neighborhoods are more cohesive. Despite some slippage in the last decade, the UK never had the prison boom we experienced in the US—Margaret Thatcher didn’t allow it. Confronted with a crime and drug abuse rate that is high by European standards, London attacked the problem on the front end, installing thousands of CCTV security cameras and hiring thousands of bobbies to discourage lawbreaking. Compared to the United States, they do little in the way of punishment.

Abolishing prisons and releasing all the prisoners would amount to a deregulation of criminal punishment. It would mean letting the private sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed. In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster; for petty crime, it would be a boon.

If ever there were a time to launch a coordinated assault on the prison-industrial complex, the time is now. Budgets are strained, voters are angry, and crime is low. The Tea Party is in the midst of convincing everyone that government is the enemy— and so it is, in the field of criminal justice.

Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn’t be denied or pooh-poohed— it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends. The prison crisis was created by centrists. Limited reforms and immoral moderation will not end the crisis. Prisoners and ex-cons, the most abused population in United States, will have to rely on political extremists, on both the left and the right, to turn the page on what will one day be recalled as one of American history’s darkest chapters.
Image: Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), Florence, Colorado.


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