Dedicated to fighting authoritarianism, bigotry, greed, corruption, climate change denial, white supremacy, racism, stupidity and general evil, as well as the exploration of interesting ideas and conspiracy theories including 9/11, UFOs, ET's, the paranormal and the general unknown.
War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit (war profiteering) from warfare.
(snip)
In War Is A Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidised by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering.
The work is divided into five chapters:
It contains this key summary:
- War is a racket
- Who makes the profits?
- Who pays the bills?
- How to smash this racket!
- To hell with war!
The book has significance historically as Butler points out in 1935 that the US is engaging in military war games in the Pacific that are bound to provoke the Japanese.
- "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
Privacy advocates said the N.S.A. could use the changed language to demand records for an entire ZIP code, state or region. Administration officials say they don’t intend to do that, but their record of exploiting legal loopholes doesn’t provide much confidence. “If we leave any ambiguity at all,” said Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, “we have learned that the intelligence community will drive a truck through that ambiguity.” The bill, she said, will not actually end bulk collection.
GENEVA (AP) — A record 33.3 million people worldwide were displaced by conflict and violence inside their own nations in 2013, U.N. and Norwegian officials said Wednesday.
The increase of 4.5 million above the 2012 total was driven largely by Syria's civil war, now in its fourth year, which activists estimate has killed 150,000 people.The 33.3 fits of course, since 33 is the number for the evil PTB, who are the ones who drive these senseless, terrible wars. (thanks to J for the tip)
The heads of the U.N. refugee agency and Norwegian Refugee Council reported that 8.2 million fled their homes in the last year, including about 3.5 million in Syria alone. The other two-thirds of the 33.3 million displaced by war worldwide had fled in previous years.
There are mysteries that are so eerie and strange that they boggle the mind for days on end. The case of Elisa Lam is one of them. In February 2013, this 21-year-old student from Vancouver, Canada, was found dead inside the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank in Los Angeles. The L.A. County Department of Coroner ruled the death “accidental due to drowning” and said no traces of drugs or alcohol were found during the autopsy. However, there is much more to the story than what is implied by police reports. The first piece of evidence that needs to be considered is an elevator surveillance tape that recorded Elisa’s behavior only a few moments before she lost her life.
The four-minute video posted on YouTube shows Elisa pressing all of the elevator buttons and waiting for it to move. Seeing that the elevator doors are not closing, starts behaving extremely bizarrely. Here’s the video.
THE PROGRESSIVE COLLAPSE MECHANICS OF ZDENEK BAZANT
The vague nature of the NIST reports when describing the collapse progression mechanisms of the twin towers has led to a long series of misrepresentations of the WTC collapses in ASCE publications and elsewhere that continues to this day. An excellent example of what lies at the heart of these misrepresentations is a series of papers appearing in the Journal of engineering mechanics by Zdenek Bazant.
Dr Bazant wrote 5 papers on the WTC collapses which appear in ASCE journals. The first paper, published in 2002, is based on a simple argument that can be stated in a single sentence. In his own words: "The analysis shows that if prolonged heating caused the majority of columns of a single floor to lose their load carrying capacity, the whole tower was doomed."
He wrote 3 more papers in succession in 2007-8 in which he develops a general one dimensional mechanical model of the motion of the progressive collapse of a building and applies the model to the Twin Towers.
It is quite fascinating to observe how this model, based on the mechanics of interacting blocks and gross assumptions, had gone from being a simple 1-D formulation to something that has been taken quite literally. The block mechanics first derived in these papers is now often portrayed as the most realistic description of the collapse progressions of the Twin Towers to date. This has occurred even though it is easy to show that block mechanics grossly contradicts what is observable and verifiable within the visual record of the events themselves. Block mechanics is taken to represent the history of the towers so completely that overwhelming visual evidence that the real collapse modes were quite different goes virtually unmentioned in pretty much all professional and government literature. Even stranger, many groups and individuals that argue contrary to Bazant have adopted the same block mechanics formulation to express their own understanding of the collapse progression modes of the Twin Towers, as will be demonstrated in sections 3.6 and 3.7.
GLENN GREENWALD: One of the things that he told me was like a turning point for him was he had an NSA job in Japan, where—and this was the job right before Dell—that he said he was able to watch the real-time surveillance being fed by drones, in which you could see an entire village in a place where America is not at war, like Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan. And you could see literally little dots of people and what they were doing, and then you would have intelligence about who they were and who they were calling and this vast picture that was able to be created of them by not even physically being in the country. And the invasiveness and the extent of that surveillance, he said, was something even he, working inside this community, had no idea even existed. And—AMY GOODMAN: He was watching a village before it was struck by a drone?GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, these were surveillance drones, typically. And so, it wasn’t even necessarily that the drones were killing people, though a lot of times they did. That was the reason for putting these villages under surveillance, was to decide who to kill. But he could watch just how much the U.S. government covertly could put entire populations under a microscope. And the fact that this had been done without any democratic debate or without his fellow citizens knowing about it was extremely alarming to him. And the more he came to see just how ubiquitous this system of suspicionless surveillance was, the more compelled he felt not to keep it a secret.AMY GOODMAN: And not only the drone surveillance, but watching people type every letter—explain what that was.GLENN GREENWALD: There is a certain kind of what the NSA calls "malware," which is essentially a virus that enters your computer. And there’s all kinds of ways they can get that virus onto your computer. They can induce you to click on a link by sending it to your email, that once you click on it will inject that virus into your system. They can send you a file that, once you open, by calling it "urgent banking notice," you open—or "tax notice," you open the file, and the opening of that file injects this virus. Or they can physically access your computer and put it in that way. And once that virus is there, they, as they call it, own your computer, which means that they can literally see every keystroke that you enter. And one of the documents we published said that they had done this to 50,000 machines. The New York Times thereafter reported that it was 100,000. And then we, just about a month and a half ago, at The Intercept reported that it was millions of machines they’re preparing to do this to. And so, he would be able to watch the outcome of this malware, where people, without any idea that their machines had been infected, were having every keystroke that they entered, every Google search, every website they clicked on, every email they sent or opened or read, every chat in which they engaged, read by an analyst thousands of miles away. And he found that deeply disturbing.
Well, don't tell Israel-loving Christian conservatives about this! They might rethink their great support of Israel.Israel's best kwn [sic] writer, Amos Oz, says that Israelis behind a wave of hate crimes against Muslims and Christians are "Hebrew neo-Nazis," Haaretz newspaper reported on its website Saturday.It quoted the award-winning author as saying terms such as "price tag," widely used to describe attacks on Palestinians and others by Jewish extremists, are sanitised euphemisms.They are "sweet names for a monster that needs to be called what it is: Hebrew neo-Nazi groups," Haaretz quoted Oz as telling guests Friday at an event marking his 75th birthday.He said there was a difference between perpetrators of such events in the Jewish state and elsewhere."Our neo-Nazi groups enjoy the support of numerous nationalist or even racist legislators, as well as rabbis who give them what is in my view pseudo-religious justification," Haaretz quoted him as saying.Earlier Friday, vandals spray-painted anti-Christian graffiti on a Jerusalem church, despite police stepping up security around religious sites ahead of a visit by Pope Francis later this month."Price tag... King David for the Jews... Jesus is garbage" was written in Hebrew on the wall of St George's Romanian Orthodox church near an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood.Police also said "Death to Arabs" was found written on a house in the Old City in east Jerusalem, and swastikas were scrawled on the wall of a west Jerusalem apartment.After Hebrew graffiti reading "Death to Arabs and Christians and to everyone who hates Israel" was daubed on its Notre Dame complex in Jerusalem on Monday, the Roman Catholic church demanded Israeli action.
MYSTIC, Conn. (CBSNewYork/AP) — A 50-pound vinyl peace sign was stolen from a Mystic playground built in memory of one of the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre.
The sign at the entrance to the Grace McDonnell playground was taken Tuesday.
William Lavin, who’s “Where Angels Play Foundation,” has been building playgrounds to honor all 26 victims, told The Day of New London McDonnell’s mother Lynn found out about the theft when the man who apparently took the sign called her.
The thief reportedly told McDonnell he stole the sign because he believes the shooting at the school was a hoax.
Interesting that initially there were no complaints about this, and it only upset people once it got in the news.
Word that Rialto Unified School District had assigned middle school students an essay on whether the Holocaust occurred or was “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain” brought swift reaction Monday, even as the district reversed course and acknowledged the assignment was inappropriate.
Throughout the day Monday, the district fielded angry calls from parents, a death threat and a flurry of media inquiries over the assignment, which district officials initially defended as an effort to teach students to think critically. Ultimately, however, administrators acknowledged the assignment was in poor taste and promised it would not be given again.
“Our interim superintendent will be talking with our Educational Services Department to assure that any references to the Holocaust ‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future Argumentative Research projects,” district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri said in a prepared statement late Sunday.
The assignment was given to Rialto Unified’s approximately 2,000 eighth-grade students in April, requiring them to cite sources for their point of view.
“When tragic events occur in history, there is often debate about their actual existence,” the assignment reads. “For example, some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual historical event, but instead is a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain. Based upon your research on this issue, write an argumentative essay, utilizing cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain. Remember to address counterclaims (rebuttals) to your stated claim. You are also required to use parenthetical (internal) citations and to provide a Works Cited page.”
Historians estimate 6 million Jews — about two of every three in Europe — were killed by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945 in a pogrom targeting “undesirables,” which also included communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), socialists and others. While the atrocities have been well-documented, there has been some controversy over claims that the Holocaust did not really happen, Those claims have been thoroughly debunked, and in some European countries, Germany included, Holocaust denial is a crime for which one can be jailed.
The assignment was developed by a small group of eighth grade teachers in December, Jafri said Monday afternoon. It was distributed to middle school sites in February and teachers were asked for comment.
“If there were complaints, we never heard about it at the district office,” Jafri said.
That wasn’t the case on Monday, where the district’s receptionist was busy fielding calls about the assignment and handling the flotilla of television news vans outside the district offices and middle schools much of the day.
And it also generated another phone call: a death threat, phoned in around 9 a.m. to Jafri, threatening both her life and that of interim superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam.
Local police took the threat seriously.
The threats “meet the elements of a terrorist threat and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Rialto Police Captain Randy DeAnda said Monday afternoon.
While Rialto Unified administrators defended the assignment on Friday, explaining that the intent was to challenge students to think critically, by Sunday, the district had change course.
A new and terrifying 9/11 conspiracy has hit the news. We are now confronted, not only with startling proof that 9/11 was a “nuclear event,” but that there have been thousands of unreported deaths in New York, radiation cancers and nearly 70,000 being kept alive with experimental stem cell therapy and physically devastating “chemo.”One of the biggest medical cover-ups in history was exposed this week when Wall Street brokers suffering from cancer after 9/11 made the news. While telling their story, the New York Post revealed that 70,000 New Yorkers have applied for 9/11 victim compensation, most for cancers that can only be attributed to direct exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons. [can't find this NY Post piece based on this info, and this sentence is very misleading]
Officials would not give a breakdown of cancer victims, but 10,800 downtown workers make up the second-largest group of registered claimants after 39,500 Ground Zero responders. There are another 16,600 in smaller categories such as residents, students, child-care and health-care workers. [ok, using these numbers, was able to pull up the NY Post piece, which has very little info like what Duff says. So Duff is greatly embellishing here about the cancer]
Finance workers engulfed in dust and debris from the Twin Towers’ collapse say the attacks — and returning to Wall Street a week later, when officials insisted it was safe — triggered their diseases.”
There is no other established cause, not “toxic soup” or irradiated drywall. In fact, the 70,000 victims represent the largest cancer cluster in history, even more victims than survivors of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, the only other similar “spike” of multiple myeloma cases. [possibly, but no source is given and this is not in the NY Post piece]
Of the 70,000 victims, over 90% say they were exposed within a one-square-mile area. Yet the cover-up has been so thorough that only one death has been “officially reported” and only a small number of victims have been paid compensation due to a “system” ripe with denial, disinformation and corruption. [no idea where Duff is getting this from]
NUKES, NOT PLANES AND PANCAKES
The official cause of the collapse of the three towers at the World Trade Center was a terror attack involving two airplanes. We are told that the towers simply collapsed because they were built without a central core and heat had weakened the steel on the poorly designed structure.
Studies by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, however, tell a different story, that of the most powerful buildings on earth with massive steel cores and a design capable of withstanding aircraft crashes, earthquakes or fires without significant structural damage.
The third tower, Building 7,”simply fell for no apparent reason. No answers were given and when questions were asked, the answer was “Building what?”
The “official report” simply made it all up, junk science and perjured testimony. For the cancer victims of 9/11, the lying is still going on.
Were one or more of the three towers destroyed on 9/11, the victim of “nuclear demolitions?” An article in the New York Post outlining the largest “cancer cluster” in history may well do exactly that. [why the hell bring in the limited hangout Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth when they push the thermite disinfo and never say anything about nukes???]
WHERE THE “NUKE” CLAIMS COME FROM
Recently, stories attributing the destruction of the World Trade Center to “nano-thermite” were spread across the news. They originated from “Gawker,” a website for New York-based media insiders. [BULLSHIT!!!]
The first time nuclear weapons were mentioned involving 9/11 was when former Soviet nuclear intelligence officer, Dimitri Khalezov, wrote of being briefed by his government that nuclear demolitions had been planted under the World Trade Center. [First time? BULLSHIT!!! Where the fuck does he get this from???]
Khalezov told of a September 12, 2001 meeting with Mossad operations chief Mike Harari and other Israeli intelligence specialists including Harari’s son.
At a celebratory brunch in Bangkok, according to Khalezov, the Israelis took credit for the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks. Khalezov presented proof, including a copy of Harari’s passport, issued under a false identity but with a clearly recognizable photo.
In 2007, a team of FBI agents flew to Bangkok to interview Khalezov. Their investigation was of specially built aircraft they said crashed into the twin towers, each containing, according to the FBI, a small nuclear weapon.
They also interviewed Khalezov about the Pentagon attack and his belief that a stolen Granit missile had been used. [Just can't really trust Khalezov, since he talks about only large nukes in the basement and he seems too much like disinfo]
According to authoritative sources, “Lord of War,” Victor Bout, the CIA gun runner portrayed by Nicholas Cage in the film, Lord of War,” was extradited to the United States where he is imprisoned, not for the charges the public is told of, but for supplying the missile used to attack the Pentagon.
No mention is made of who Bout’s co-conspirators were.
In 2010, sources within the Defense Intelligence Agency began working with an operational hypothesis that the twin towers were destroyed with advanced “neutron-like” weapons that left no radiation signature. They believe that multiple weapons were used, not only in the towers themselves but in the subbasement as well.
Reports by investigative journalist Jeff Prager outlining underground fires lasting months along with the almost total lack of wreckage is seen by many as a very strong confirmation of the DIA hypothesis. [Really??? 1) Prager ripped off this blog about nukes, and 2) he actually did a lot more to show nukes than talk about underground fires]
THE CONTINUING COVERUP
After 9/11, tens of thousands of Americans developed cancer. Many died but no one will ever know how many. That number is, for some reason “classified.”
By 2006, the Village Voice had begun to write about the cancer epidemic and Dr. Larry Norton of Sloan Kettering Memorial Medical Center cited that something in the dust may have caused the cancer outbreak. Norton demanded a detailed study be funded, but no study followed.
In fact, there was never any evidence that the “toxic dust” was, in fact, any different than what New Yorkers had been breathing for decades. Why should it have been?
They had been demolishing buildings in Manhattan for a century. Then the reports became more bizarre.
Stories were circulated that the World Trade Center was built with Chinese drywall containing radioactive phosphor-gypsum. However, no “Chinese drywall” had been imported to New York at that time nor was any used in the World Trade Center construction.
Then again, there is no evidence that small amounts of radiation could have caused the massive spike in cancers, with up to 70% of the tens of thousands of first responders suffering according to Dr. Norton. [This sounds right, but some linked sources would really help]
THE “NUCLEAR TEST” CANCER
The cancer is multiple myeloma. Victims are told they got it from breathing “toxic soup” from 9/11, mostly drywall dust. The number of victims who have thus far applied for benefits from the 2.7-billion-dollar 9/11 fund, as reported in the New York Post story, that number is 69,900.
There is one known direct cause for this disease, exposure to a nuclear explosion. Multiple myeloma is also known as “the Hiroshima disease.”
Studies at both Los Alamos and Livermore Labs show little increase, no more than 4%, for minor radiation exposure. There are no other established factors, no “toxic soup” that can cause this disease.
From Cancer Compass:
“Some research suggests that there are certain multiple myeloma risk factors increase a person's chance of getting multiple myeloma. Farmers and petroleum workers exposed to certain chemicals also seem to have a higher-than-average chance of getting multiple myeloma. In addition, people exposed to large amounts of radiation (such as survivors of the atomic bomb explosions in Japan) have an increased risk for this disease.”In 1988, Congress established (Radiation Exposed Veterans Compensation Act Pub. L. 100-321) those diseased attributed to ionizing radiation from nuclear explosions. Listed as “Number 2” under leukemia is multiple myeloma. [yes, the MM is an important clue here]
WE’VE SEEN IT BEFORE
After the Vietnam War, veterans began dying of a series of diseases, including cancers typically tied to dioxin exposure. However, the government denied that it had used any form of chemical that could have been responsible.
After a series of commissions, lawsuits and investigations, it wasn’t until 1991 when the US government admitted that Agent Orange had already killed as many as 100,000 veterans. Were they diagnosed and treated using information the government withheld, many if not most would be alive today. [yeah, I'm pretty sure using fucking nukes on American civilians on 9/11 is not comparable to the Agent Orange scandal, as bad as that was]
Gulf War Syndrome is an almost identical abuse with over 10,000 deaths and a government that waited 20 years to admit a problem existed, as before, only after most of those who could have been diagnosed and treated successfully using withheld information were already dead. [yeah, I'm pretty sure using fucking nukes on American civilians on 9/11 is not comparable to the Agent Orange scandal, as bad as that was]
An identical situation exists in New York. [identical???? Using fucking NUKES????] Perhaps the most insidious part is the obfuscation regarding non-specific “toxic dust” as a causation. [The most insidious part? REALLY???????] Withheld information has led to over a decade of purposeful misdiagnoses with medical professionals fearful of being charged as “conspiracy theorists” if they develop and treat patients in accordance with established procedures involving radiation exposure.
Instead, tens of thousands have developed statistically impossible diseases with the vast majority misdiagnosed for years.
Today, 70,000 survivors of 9/11 have cancer. There is no official cause other than “toxic soup,” a term any medical researcher would cringe upon hearing. [Wow, how about closing with some fucking outrage over the nuking of American citizens, you fucking disinfo freak???]
I blog about politics, interesting ideas and conspiracy theories. Many or most of the official stories for key events are lies. For instance, the 9/11 plane hijackings and crashes appear to be clever hoaxes. The WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 towers were brought down by demolition, and there is evidence for the use of small nuclear bombs in the demolition of WTC1 and 2. It seems that 9/11 was an evil hoax foisted upon the world, done in order to spark the obscene "war on terror", to cover up financial fraud and to further the ends of the global elite. However, 9/11 was only part of the fraud and evil committed by the evil powers that be (PTB).
