About the time Barack Obama ordered the drone strike that killed Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old American kid Facebooked his second-rate choice of hip-hop favorites. I say “second-rate,” because Abdul was my son’s age almost exactly, so I know the kind of crap they listen to.

Soldiers with the 25th Mechanised Brigade near the front lines in Zinjibar, Yemen. (Photo courtesy of Richard Rowley and Big Noise Films).

Every Tuesday, President Obama personally checks off the names of people he wants killed.  George Bush, a bit more squeamish than Obama, never did that; but Mr. Obama felt those decisions were the president’s responsibility: he want[s] to keep his own finger on the trigger,” according to one report.  A tidy, scheduled man, the President only picks his victims once a week, now called “Terror Tuesday.”

On October 14, 2011, in Shabwah province, Yemen, Abdul, went out with his cousins and friends for a good old US-style barbecue, when Obama’s drone fired a rocket, blowing the teenager to pieces.  Or I should say “piece.”  All that was left of Abdul was a piece of skull with long curly hair that allowed his relatives to identify this hunk of his head by his US-type haircut.

Obama didn’t order the killings (Abdul’s friends and cousins died too) as a random act of crazy.  No-Drama Obama doesn’t believe in random. Abdul’s problem was that his father was Anwar al-Awlaki.  Obama killed Abdul’s dad as well.  Daddy al-Awlaki, an American imam who voted for George Bush, had gone over to the side of the bad guys, and after leaving the USA, broadcast pro-terrorism radio reports from Arabia.

We can argue until the cows come home about whether Daddy al-Awlaki was a legitimate kill target.  It is, after all,  right there in the US Constitution that the penalty for treason is death.  I suppose that, before executing him, a jury trial would have been nice. But nice was not going to happen.  So, OK, Barack, we’ll let that one go.

But what about the 16-year-old?  Obama didn’t even pretend that the kid was a terrorist, or terrorist in-the-making, nor adopting in any way his father’s crazed kill-Americans crusade.

What could justify execution of Abdul?  When asked, then-White House press spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father”

I guess he should have.

Obama’s minions tried to cover up the hit on the teenagers.  Attorney General Eric Holder informed Congress of the killings by writing that U.S. drones had blown up Anwar al-Awlaki, the crazy cleric and three other Americans who “were not specifically targeted.”

Holder’s comment makes it seem that Awlaki’s son was blown up with him—a sad case of ‘collateral damage.’

But are you ready for this?  The teenager—along with his cousin and friends—was killed two weeks after and hundreds of miles away from the site where rockets killed his father.

Dirty Wars – Official Trailer (HD) Documentary, Thriller

Obama’s Seal Team Sick

I was straightened out on the facts by Richard Rowley, America’s most courageous investigative reporter. Rowley filmed, directed and edited the brilliant, horrific and brilliantly horrific documentary Dirty Wars, previewing this week in the US.

The film centres on Rowley’s reporting partner, the indefatigable Jeremy Scahill, whom Rowley follows from the scene of a massacre at a wedding party in Afghanistan to an interview with a warlord in Mogadishu (while under sniper fire).

You might know Rowley as Ricardo, the pathologically calm cameraman portrayed in my book Vultures’ Picnic. In Iraq, Rowley covered the US Army assault on Fallujah “embedded” with the assaulted, the insurgents. That was insane. Insane but brilliant. (Our producer at the BBC warned Ricardo that he was one lucky cat, but he’d already used up seven of his nine lives.)

In Dirty Wars, Rowley and Scahill reveal that drones are just one toy in our Presidents’ murderous toy-chest. And the kill list is far larger than even a smart dude like Obama can tick off on a Tuesday. Scahill calculates that the targeted kills in Afghanistan and Pakistan now total more than 17,000!

Keep reading.

The post The Drone Ranger: Obama’s Dirty Wars appeared first on disinformation.

What is going on in this country? It is one thing to provide your nation’s tax agency with the legal tools necessary to collect debts owed, and another thing altogether to enforce those powers with the precise kinds of assault weapons some members of Congress had wanted to ban earlier this year.

It also recently came out that the IRS spent more than $50 million on conferences between 2010 and 2012. The frugality of these conferences has been called into question. See my take on this above.

The post IRS ‘Training’ Agents With AR-15 Assault Rifles Congress Wanted To Ban appeared first on disinformation.

This information page gives an overview of Kenneth Smith, links to many resources, and posts scans of his classic run of TCJ columns. The scans contain his most essential writing, but there is a Tumblr blog and a Gaim library that provide quotes from longer pieces. Here are some choice fragments.

via Gaiam:

Art or culture or philosophy must ply its genius today against this most prodigious opponent in all of history-human self-obliviousness, man’s deific powers of denial and delusion, the nescience buried in the heart of science. Art must keen its scalpel for one sure incision, it must razor the bladder of an inflationary corpus of hypertrophic beliefs so deftly that the violence is only felt after the fact. Delusion must be lanced like a boil bloated to purple distension: art is not the play of pretty illusions – entertainment is that whoring pastime – but rather righteous and wise disillusion, judicious severing of a malignancy. Art is far from amoral; it is in crusade against lying and trivializing conventional morality and must transcend that snake pit of corruption, certainly; but amoral it is not, in no way is it free to be neutral and objective. Art is either the lancet of a higher truth, a law superior to any of man’s pleasant and flattering rhetorical reasonings, or else it has no authority, no right to command anyone’s attention. Art traffics with the divine, that is, the hidden or occult, the mythic, which is after all of the very essence of man, the stuff his character and even his life are ultimately woven from. A wise society knows to have contempt for egomaniacal poseurs playing onanistically with art supplies, and a foolish society imagines that “art is whatever artists may do.”

Learning to free up or liberate one’s mind to capture precisely the most essential points in anything is an athletic exercise in which, for the first time, we discover just what the actual cash-value of our “culture” truly is: has our culture contributed to making our minds more acute, clearer, more nimble and elastic? Has it given us a richer vocabulary of essences or concepts to facilitate our rational and moral digestion of issues? Or is our “culture” really no enzymatic culture at all, but merely a scheme of encumbrances, of intellectual and rational impediments that have been compounded out of endless Pavlovian conditionings, by which we came to accept fallacies and equivocations and deceptive connotations and lying rhetoric etc. as if they were the gospel truth? The premier value of reading the ancient thinkers lies in their aristocratic culture’s determination to put an absolute premium on the development of acuity, directness, economy or essentiality of characterizations, etc. To be competent as an aristos (one committed absolutely to the cultivation of excellence or arete in its superlative degree), an individual was expected to keen his insights and judgment as much in the domain of intuition (being sensitive to the subtleties of the evidence, the realities) as in the domain of intellection (mustering the most apt tools of expression to characterize, conceptualize and evaluate these realities). Moderns have only the feeblest grasp of both of these processes.

How infinitely happier and more grateful is the whole personality or spirit when it finds something nourishing in art or writing or thinking, than the mere mind or intellect is: the kinship you celebrate in these personalities is your own dismembered Orpheus stumbling across another fine organ to rejoin to itself. I put it this way: aristic psyche loves itself enough to chasten itself, to put itself through boot camp for the sake of being competent for life, alive to life.

Nietzsche’s realization was astute that modernity had abolished the very prospect of humanity as ancient culture grasped it as aristeia or nobility, or even as medieval Christianity grasped it in the form of spirituality. Modernity has, from generation to generation and from century to century, an ever-lowering ceiling of minimalist “humanity,” an arrant folly of setting up the democratist “human, all too human” as if it could in any way serve as some sort of norm or standard. It is nothing but a quivering, quavering mass of pathos, a gross form of moral and spiritual and philosophical bankruptcy: it is one great complex of fault-lines across the superficial plaque of a veneer-culture, a mere mask of humanity over bestiality. That is what our programmatic war against aristeia ultimately means, the systematic abolition of “man” as well considered as an honorific or value-laden concept.

Nietzsche recognized the prodigious accomplishment of the Greeks in at least two seismic insights: (1) that man was somehow capable of being cultured to become more than just another heteronomous “phenomenon” within nature, society or history, i.e. he could in the most exemplary or extraordinary of cases stand in some sort of parity with the ultimate principles that shape and drive and organize existence (which is as much as to say: the gulf between aristoi and douloi is as abysmal as the chasm between cosmos and chaos, between arche and hyle or principle and matter); and (2) that in man nature—in actuality culture—had managed to produce a true prodigy of timebinding self-mastery, “an animal that dared to promise” and to make itself live up to its promised responsibility. Modern behaviorism and economism and scientism have undereaten the foundations of all these normative accomplishments. All the spiritual and rational and cultural and philosophical achievements of premodern civilization had long ago become nothing more than a treasury of rhetoric for moderns to pillage and deplete. Culturally considered, modern “culture” is de facto a form of entropy or self-parasitism, a thieving or vampiric world-order that accomplishes nothing whatsoever in the domain of norms; on the contrary it bleeds this domain down to nothing, to pathos.

Kenneth Smith information page.

The post Kenneth Smith: Cultural Critic of the Modern Era appeared first on disinformation.

The Inquisition Tribunal as illustrated by Francisco de Goya.

Via orwellwasright:

Someone recently asked: “Should the oppressive content of monotheistic religions be respected and left alone or challenged and questioned?” It’s a loaded question which, needless to say, provoked a lively debate on the nature of religion as a force for oppression and negativity in the world today. As one person expressed it: “Christianity is a restrictive, damaging, violent, oppressive, totalitarian, hypocritical, patriarchal cult that has caused 2000 years of pain, suffering and misery to countless millions.”

It’s not hard to see why so many people think this way – religious wars and persecution have, over the centuries, killed untold millions; the tenets of Holy scriptures used as a justification for a litany of crimes against humanity, from the Crusades in the Near East and the conquest of the New World and subsequent genocide of the indiginous population, to the horrific Inquisition and the frequent slaughter of heathens “in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ”.

Today, religious institutions continue to come under intense criticism, often completely justified, as is the case with the ongoing scandals of child abuse and corruption or encouragement of violent extremism (something fundamentalist Christians are as guilty of as their fundamentalist Islamic counterparts). Judaism, too, is often deliberately equated with Zionism, in order to absolve the state of Israel any culpability for its crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian people and other Arab neighbours.

The considerable atheist backlash against religious organizations and their impact on the development of the species is understandable – and yet, ironically, sometimes these reactions betray another type of close-minded dogmatism, one which seeks to deny that religion has any form of value whatsoever and should be entirely discarded in favour of a new ideology; a kind of “militant atheism” whose adherents set out to attack religion whilst propagating their own perceived certainties. It is an irony which is perhaps best summed up by the foundation of the first “atheist church” in London earlier this year; while calls to stamp out religion altogether resound with Evangelical zeal.

A legitimate response to the view that religion is a destructive force in the world is that the institution has perverted decent and right-thinking tenets for its own nefarious ends; that Holy scriptures intended to enlighten and liberate have become warped into dogma and orthodoxy – tools of control to manipulate the masses. The ambiguous nature of these texts – the allegories and parables loaded with hidden meaning and symbolism – are, by their nature, open to misinterpretation and abuse.

But while this may be true, to suggest that this quality makes them somehow inherently flawed on account of their institutional manipulation and therefore ultimately worthless is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Christianity, for instance, has a rich and diverse history which denies simplistic characterization. Compare the Christian Gnostics or Neoplatonists with the early Roman Christians where Greco-Roman pantheism still played a role, to the Catholic church and the huge schisms of the Protestant Reformation, and it is clear how impossible it is to define Christianity as any one thing. There are probably more Christian denominations scattered around the globe today than at any other point in history, with an influence as equally varied.

Few would deny that the current economic system is one of the most destructive forces in the world today, exacerbating poverty as the divide between rich and poor continues to grow exponentially. Loans made with excessive and abusive interest rates plunge millions into debt, an immoral practice known as usury. All the main religions, from Judaism and Christianity to Islam and Buddhism, have condemned this practice, with numerous references found throughout the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Qur’an and even the ancient Indian Vedas. Few would disagree that the world would be a significantly better place without the unscrupulous practices of modern day moneylenders.

Christ drives the Usurers out of the Temple, a woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder in ‘Passionary of Christ and Antichrist’

The luminous poetry of William Blake – a religious man hugely critical of the church – may well be one of the finest examples of the reconciliation of the rebellious nature against religious orthodoxy existing paradoxically within the framework of faith in God; a man who understood that “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” and sought equality and liberty for all. Heavily influenced by the Gnostics, Blake has been described by some as a visionary anarchist.

Other historical religious groups have spearheaded radical political movements: the 17th century Diggers were a group of Protestants who sought to reform the social order and create a system of small rural communities based on egalitarian principles – they were to influence the San Francisco Diggers of the 1960s, the community anarchists and radical activists of Haight-Ashbury. Their influence was felt again in the revival of anarchism and the anti-road movements in the UK in 2011. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s views on anarchism were pacified by his devotion to Christianity. In his 1900 essay “On Anarchy”, Tolstoy wrote: “The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution.”

William Blake is one who recognised how the profound spiritual truths of religious texts were sunk into obscurity by the institution of the Church. He condemned the sophistry of theological thought, which endorsed individual repression where “sin” bound men’s desires, while at the same time excusing acts of evil and injustice. These criticisms still stand today, not least in the manner in which religious institutions often deny that any kind of spiritual understanding can come from within. The Gnostics and many others were persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church after the Council of Nicea in 325, and the Church ended up becoming self-proclaimed arbiters of “spiritual enlightenment” whereby the average person could only encounter the divine through the medium of the priest.  The pulpit often stands as an emblem for the spreading of dogmatic ignorance in the form of false wisdoms, subverting Christ’s teachings with skillful sophistry to protect its own wealth and authority.

As the mainstream monotheistic religious institutions continued to dominate and expand their global influence, “dissenting” groups such as the Gnostics were forced underground where they would become part of a rich Western tradition of esoteric wisdom and hidden knowledge, incorporating the occult teachings of the ages, from Hermeticism and the Kabbalah through to alchemy and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Isaac Newton, a founding father of the modern scientific method, was profoundly influenced by the occult and was described by John Maynard Keynes in 1942 as “not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians”. As well as being a practicing alchemist, he believed he was specially chosen by God for the task of understanding Biblical scripture. These characteristics certainly cast a new light on a man who is often thought of as the archetypal materialist scientist. Newton ushered in an era dominated by the mechanistic view of the universe which went on to exclude the alchemical and religious views that Newton himself considered of vital importance.

William Blake’s “Newton”

Newton’s broad-ranging study of the occult coupled with his profound influence on shaping modern scientific thought exemplifies the way in which freedom from ideological restrictions of any description encourages thinking with the potential to create new paradigms. Dogmatism which inhibits these paradigm shifts can be scientific as well as religious, as has become increasingly apparent in the recent developments into the study of consciousness. Graham Hancock’s TEDx talk The War on Consciousness, in which he discussed the role  of ancient and sacred visionary plants and shamanism in our understanding of the mind, is a prime example of the negative impact of such scientific dogmatism.

After only a short time available to the public on the TED YouTube channel the organization removed the video, claiming the presentation “contained serious factual errors that undermine TED’s commitment to good science” and accusing Hancock of “pseudoscience”. After failing to qualify these accusations with any supporting evidence and facing an intense backlash from the public, TED was forced to backtrack and retract their initial statement. The video was uploaded in an obscure location on their blog, with TED maintaining that Hancock’s views were well outside “orthodox scientific thinking”.

For many, the expression “orthodox scientific thinking” lay at the heart of the decision to remove Graham Hancock’s talk from their channel – the attacks on his credibility and the petty, unprofessional accusations, unsupported by any kind of rigorous analysis of specific details which he could refute, were little more than masks to hide what was fundamentally an ideological issue. TED demonstrated that they represent precisely the kind of materialist scientific thinking which Hancock explicitly stated in his talk was incapable of dealing with the difficult questions of consciousness. A paradigm which precludes even the possibility of the experiential validity of shamanic altered states of consciousness and refuses to question the position that consciousness resides entirely in the brain inevitably greets such ideas with automatic ridicule and rejection.

Yet progress is only ever made when orthodox thinking is challenged – the scientific method itself involves proposing hypotheses as explanations of phenomena not fully understood. In taking the position of the rigid sceptic in dealing with Hancock’s approach to consciousness, TED, whose slogan is “Ideas Worth Sharing”, demonstrated that conformity to established doctrines takes precedence over radical new ideas truly worth sharing.

Just as the “oppressive content” of monotheistic religions should be rigorously challenged, so too should we challenge scientific materialism when it seeks to deny explorations into new avenues of inquiry which contradict its ideological position, as well as atheism when it calls for the abolition of religion and everything associated with it. But we should also recognise the positive aspects of different beliefs and integrate them in order to gain a broader understanding with the potential to surpass “conventional wisdom” (which, as history shows us, more often than not turns out to be untrue). As Einstein said (and Newton appeared to understand), “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

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Dave Brown writes:

Working with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) for the past four years as their guest editor has been an extremely exciting and tremendously fruitful endeavor for me. It’s a great joy to see how MDMA can help people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), how LSD can help advanced-stage cancer patients come to peace with the dying process, and how ibogaine can help opiate addicts overcome their addiction. There appears to be enormous potential for the development of psychedelic drugs into effective treatments for a whole range of difficult-to-treat psychiatric disorders.

However, as thrilled as I am by all the new clinical studies exploring the medical potential of psychedelic drugs, I still long for the day when our best minds and resources can be applied to the study of these extraordinary substances with an eye that looks beyond their medical applications, toward their ability to enhance human potential and explore new realities.

This article explores these possibilities. But first, let’s take a look at how we got to be where we are.

Keep reading.

The post Transcending the Medical Frontiers: Exploring the Future of Psychedelic Drug Research appeared first on disinformation.

Since H.G. Wells (1895/1991), the advantages of time travel for investors have been clear. But would time travellers come to our time, making our markets look like theirs? This paper presents a solution to the problem of bilking behaviour of time travellers.

For a time traveller, all investments are risk-free since she will have perfect knowledge of prices throughout time. Reinganum (1986) claims time travellers will run around time, buying “underpriced” securities and selling (or shorting) “overpriced.” Because of the strange temporal nature of time travel, the adjustment in prices due to the trading activity of time travellers would be instantaneous, as seen by the time-bound. Time travellers from all time would be present en masse attempting to realize their arbitrage profits: the very first time traveller would meet multitudes from her future (and even multiple copies of herself) trying to engage in the same transactions she is trying to complete.

Financial markets in a time travel world would look far different from what we see. We don’t see zero rates of return, zero inflation, and unchanging security prices. Instead we see lots of volatility in financial markets. Reinganum (1986) concludes that this means that time travel must be impossible.

The actions of the time traveller, in acting like the time bound (i.e., in wealth maximizing), are in themselves self-defeating. The time traveller, in looking at the past, sees changing prices and picks the best moment to buy. But all time travellers from all time are looking at the same data and are making the same decisions. Because the last trade registered (by the time-bound) is at an advantageous price for the time traveller, when she attempts to trade, she finds herself beside a multitude of time travellers, also trying to trade. But demand (for underpriced securities) then is infinite for any price below the time travel equilibrium price. Thus any time traveller, in attempting to enter into a transaction will find that the prices at which she can transact are not the prices she sees in her data, but are instead the time-travel equilibrium prices (i.e., the unchanging prices).

The time traveller, facing the time travel equilibrium prices, refuses to transact because she sees no arbitrage profits – she will not even time travel since she is time travelling only to realize arbitrage profits. Successfully transacting kills the incentive to transact, thereby making the transaction impossible, just as successfully killing one’s infant self (the philosophers’ favourite example of a paradox) makes it impossible to time travel to do so. Rational time travellers, who are even more homogeneous than ordinary investors, will anticipate the actions of other time travellers, and will realize there is no point in attempting to use time travel to invest.

Time travellers coming from societies far different from our own may not even be able to understand what financial markets are or how they work. Most of our fellow citizens have no understanding of markets, so how would someone from a culture of the distant future? And even if time travellers were to come to understand what a financial security was, they may have no interest in money: they may not value what we value. Their society may be too rich to worry about some dollars from the past, or they might be more interested in love or in truth and beauty, or they might be concerned with saving their eternal souls and feel that wealth would get in the way. They may be fundamentally different from us in motivation: i.e., they may not be wealth maximizers or they may have a different view of what constitutes wealth.

Time travellers may have difficulty trading in our time due to our laws. While we don’t specifically forbid investment by time travellers, unless time travel is invented in the next few years, any time traveller we encounter would be an illegal alien, or an underage minor, not authorized to sign contracts. If, say, time travel is invented in 2020 by someone born in 1990, that person would be eight years old today (in 1998) according to his birth certificate, regardless of his apparent physical age.

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On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin goes over how Walmart is swallowing up the world, citing examples of sexual discrimination, environmental pollution, disregard for workers’ safety, and costing tax-payers millions of dollars.

The post Shocking Truths about Walmart appeared first on disinformation.

Good thing there aren’t traces of Prozac in the water we drin– oh, wait. ABC News reports:

Fish swimming in water with a trace of the anti-depressant Prozac became edgy, aggressive and some even killed their mates.

The fish were subjected to traces of the drug by a research group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that examined how environmental exposure to the medication altered the behavior of fathead minnows. Lead researcher Rebecca Klapper says that this experimental setup could actually be a reflection of the fishes’ reality.

The human body does not absorb medications 100 percent, so a trace amount is excreted in urine. Water treatment centers are unable to completely filter out all of those contaminant and can trickle down and affect the wildlife.

Klapper sees the minnows as a way to gauge the long-term effects of Prozac in humans. “It’s not just an environmental question but a human question as well,” she tells ABC News.

Changes in the minnows’ reproductive behavior were seen in as low concentrations as 1 microgram per liter, equal to a single dose of Prozac dissolved in over 5,000 gallons of water.

The post Traces Of Prozac In Water Make Fish “Antisocial, Aggressive And Even Homicidal” appeared first on disinformation.

Amid growing fears of a massive electromagnetic pulse hit from either a solar flare or a terrorist nuclear bomb, House Republicans on Tuesday will unveil a plan to save the nation’s electric grid from an attack that could mean lights out for 300 million Americans.

Dubbed the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act, the legislation would push the federal government to install grid-saving devices such as surge protectors to protect against an attack.

“It is critical that we protect our major transformers from cascading destruction. The Shield Act encourages industry to develop standards necessary to protect our electric infrastructure against both natural and man-made EMP events,” said Rep. Trent Franks, the Arizona Republican who is offering up the bipartisan bill.

Electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, has come into focus because of fears the sun is pushing out unusually big solar flares that can disrupt the electric grid. Defense officials are also worried about a terrorist attack, possibly in the form of a small nuclear bomb exploded overhead.

“This is serious stuff,” said former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, who heads the Center for Security Policy…

[continues at the Washington Examiner]

The post U.S. Plans To Survive An EMP Attack appeared first on disinformation.

Mass protests continued throughout Brazil on Monday, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators converging in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, the capital of Brasilia and other cities.

Protests initially began last week following a government announcement of an increase in public transportation costs, which brought out students and young workers and led to more than 250 arrests.

In a sign that public dissatisfaction was still simmering, soccer fans booed president Dilma Rousseff on Monday during the opening of a two-week tournament at a stadium in the capital Brasilia. The heckling only intensified when the president of the global soccer body, FIFA, reprimanded the crowed for failing to show the president “respect.”

The post Largest Protests In Decades Fill Major Cities Of Brazil appeared first on disinformation.