Mark Mitchell - 07 October 2009

As should be clear from the contents of Deep Capture, the world of illegal naked short selling is a weird one, populated by sociopathic billionaires, slick lobbyists, famous felons, bent regulators, crooked law firms, corporate spies, message board maniacs, sinister banks, shifty private investigators, mendacious professors, professional dissemblers, propagandists, grifters, thugs, liars, and the Mafia.

Things become all the more weird when you consider that regulators and law enforcement do almost nothing to stop naked short selling, even though a growing number of prominent people – everyone from U.S. Senators to George Soros – insist that criminal naked short sellers helped take down Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the American financial system. Then there’s the weird fact that anybody who tries to shed light on this weird state of affairs is quickly subjected to smear campaigns that are…weird.

Anyway, message to Matt Taibbi: Welcome to our world.

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Science chief argued for population control to limit ‘global cooling’

Jerome R. Corsi - October 06, 2009

What is clear from the record going back over nearly four decades is that White House science czar John Holdren is a climate alarmist, even if he can’t make up his mind whether the crisis is the Earth warming up or cooling down.

But long before Holdren was the global warming Cassandra he is today, he was a global cooling alarmist predicting a new ice age.

The only consistency seems to be that Holdren has always utilized climate hysteria to argue that government must mandate public policy measures to prevent imminent and otherwise unavoidable climate catastrophes.

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Michael Garfield - September 29, 2009

Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process. And yet, the future being as slippery as it is, there are as many visions for how this might occur as there are visionaries to guess at it. Computer scientists tend to have one transhumanism; genetic engineers, another. However, coherent themes emerge for those who have taken it upon themselves to make a sweeping survey of human inquiry, integrating a keen reading of the vectors of our technology with postmodern insight into the nature of mind.

Some of these thinkers have been catalyzed by the psychedelic experience — in a way, the most informative window into a world beyond the human that we have yet discovered. They understand the message of psychedelics and the message of technology to converge on the horizon of a deeper reading of reality that recognizes mind and matter as dimensions of the same truth — a truth for which language has ill-prepared us.

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Stephen Lendman - October 3, 2009

For 33 years, Sonoma State University’s (SSU) Project Censored (PC) has engaged in pioneering research on, and advocacy for, First Amendment issues. Founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, it’s now headed by Professor Ben Frymer. On July 1, he took over from Professor Peter Phillips who stepped down after 13 years of distinguished service as Director.

PC works cooperatively “with numerous independent (US) media groups,” primarily to train SSU students “in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States.”

For over three decades, it’s “trained over 1,500 students in investigative research” and continues doing it through “a partnership of faculty, students, and the community,” cooperatively engaged in “research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media.”

Each year, it ranks the top 25 and publishes them in its yearbook, “Censored: Media Democracy in Action.” The latest “Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008 - 09″ just out is the subject of this review. The book may now be purchased locally, online, and most easily at projectcensored.org/store.

The current edition is larger than even, and includes the year’s honorable mention choices as well as additional chapters covered below.

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Tom Kington - 1 October 2009

The mafia’s formidable grip on Italy has been starkly illustrated by a new report claiming 13 million Italians live in areas where the mob exerts influence over everyday life.

Commissioned by Italy’s parliamentary anti-mafia commission, the report by research institute Censis used crime statistics to find the number of urban and rural districts where clans are active in the Italian south.

The Italians living in the 610 districts identified, even if law abiding and not members of clans, “are in some way conditioned by a presence that draws its strength from the ability to exert a capillary control in the area”, the report stated.

Giuseppe Pisanu, head of the anti-mafia commission, said the Italian mafia was now “silently prospering, moving on from spectacular crimes and massacres to business and politics, with a prudent dose of intimidation and violence in a bid to take over the fundamental role of the state”.

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A fine introduction to DTCC, Gary Weiss and the incredible investigative reporting at Deep Capture.

Stephen Hand - October 3, 2009

Goodbye Ireland. Irish perform political U-turn in second referendum on EU reform plan as opponents call for British vote

In a dramatic political U-turn, Ireland has voted decisively in favour of the Lisbon treaty just 16 months after it first rejected the European Union reform plan.

With counting continuing this evening it was expected that 64% of those who voted in Friday’s referendum would have backed the treaty.

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MAUREEN DOWD - September 30, 2009

It’s not so much the barbarous machinations of the villain, another one-dimensional, self-mortifying hulk, that sends chills down your spine. Or the plot, which is an Oedipal MacGuffin.

No, the terrifying thing about “The Lost Symbol” is that Brown — who did not flinch when the Vatican both condemned the “The Da Vinci Code” and curtailed the filming of “Angels & Demons” in Rome — clearly got spooked by that other powerful, secretive ancient sect, the Masons.

His book is a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with the Masons, rather than to interpret the bizarre Masonic rites and symbols that illuminate — as in Illuminati! — how the ultimate elite private boys’ club has conspired to shape the nation’s capital and Western civilization ever since George Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol building in a Masonic ritual wearing full Masonic regalia, including a darling little fringed satin apron. If the Masons are more intimidating than the Vatican, if Brown has now become part of their semiotic smoke screen, then all I can say is, God help us all.

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Bret Burquest - September 25, 2009

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, the founder of analytical psychology known as Jungian psychology.

As a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, he explored the psyche through an examination of dreams, mythology, religion and art. He also spent much of his life delving into alchemy, astrology and Eastern philosophy. Some of his notable achievements include the concept of psychological archetypes, synchronicity and the collective unconscious.

Jung emphasized the importance of harmony and balance. The process of “individuation” was the central concept of analytical psychology. For a person to become whole, it requires a psychological process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining conscious independence.

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F. William Engdahl - September 24, 2009

President Obama just made a melodramatic appeal at the United Nations for global measures to dramatically curb what he called “the climate threat,” current euphemism for what is more popularly known as Global Warming, the theory that man-made CO2 emissions from cars, coal plants and other man-made sources are causing the earth to warm to the point the polar icecaps are irreversibly melting and threatening to flood a quarter or more of the earth’s surface. There’s only one thing wrong with Mr. Obama’s dramatic scenario: it is scientifically utterly wrong. Since 2007 the polar icecaps have been growing not melting and the earth has been cooling, not warming.

If the fear of death from a fictitious Swine Flu were not enough, the scare stories on world media such as BBC or CNN, showing melting icebergs are dramatic enough to cause one sleepless nights. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon even made a recent appeal while standing on an Arctic ice-flow, claiming that man-made CO2 emissions were causing “100 billion tons” of polar ice to melt each year, so that in 30 years the Arctic would be “ice-free”. One organization, the WWF, claimed that the Arctic ice was melting so fast that in eighty years sea-levels would rise by 1.2 meters, creating “floods affecting a quarter of the world.” Wow! That’s scary. Goodbye Hamburg, New York, Amsterdam…

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Current Concerns No 17, September 2009

The Lisbon Treaty Allows Death Penalty and Killing of People by the State.

An interview with Professor Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider

Oliver Janich, “Focus-Money”: Professor Schachtschneider, according to your lawsuit against the EU Treaty of Lisbon at the Bundesverfassungsgericht (The German Federal Constitutional Court), the treaty allows the reintroduction of the death penalty and the killing of humanes. This sounds outrageous. What is the base of your argument?
Professor Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider: The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, in its “explanations” and “negative definitions” accompanying the fundamental rights, allows a reintroduction of the death penalty in case of war or imminent war, but also the killing of humans to suppress insurgency or riot. This is in contradiction to the abolishment of the death penalty in Germany (Article 102 of the German Constitution), in Austria and elsewhere which results from the principle of dignity.

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VoltaireNet - 28 Sep 2009

As historical leader of the U.K. Green Party, director of Friends of the Earth and of Forum for the Future, Jonathan Porritt has become the inescapable expert when it comes to media debates on the environment.

In addition to his functions as administrator of a powerful water supply and sewerage utility consortium, Wessex Water, he is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, concerned by the impact of population growth.

As to the ills being experienced by the world population due to the state of the environment, his solution is not to call into question our consumer society, but rather to prescribe a reduction of the population by half.

During his recent interventions, Jonathon Porritt recommended the reduction of the British population from 61 to 30 million people. Not surprisingly, he is intent on promoting birth control, contraception and abortion. He assures us that his grand plan constitutes the least expensive solution to curb global warming.

Jonathon Porritt is chief adviser on environmental matters to Prince Charles and to Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. His theories are equally well received across the political spectrum, including by conservative opposition leader David Cameron. However, there are a number of discordant voices - even within the Green Party itself - in particular that of George Monbiot, environmentalist journalist at the Guardian. While he has no problem with the authoritarian aspect of a population reduction policy (all the more since his personal solution for combating global warming would be to introduce CO2 ration cards), Monbiot strongly opposes a policy that would deal a fatal blow to economic growth and to capitalism.

In the final analysis, global warming is of secondary importance in this debate. The central issue is the revival of malthusianism. Accordingly, and evidently with a view to reducing the British population, Jonathon Porritt recommends a ban on immigration, which has won him the praise of the Labour minister of immigration, Phil Woolas.