"IDF: ‘Cowardly’ tunnel attack shows why Gaza op must go on"

Video of Hamas killing five soldiers demonstrates that ‘such attacks can happen anytime, anywhere,’ officer says

Read more: IDF: 'Cowardly' tunnel attack shows why Gaza op must go on | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-cowardly-tunnel-attack-shows-why-gaza-op-must-go-on/#ixzz39051tiuH

A video showing Hamas gunmen emerging from a tunnel, infiltrating an Israeli army base and killing five soldiers, demonstrates that Israel is faced with a cruel and unforgiving enemy and must continue Operation Protective Edge until all remaining tunnels are destroyed, Israeli officials said Wednesday.

Here's the video:

How many weird things can we say about this?

First, how is attacking an Army outpost cowardly?
Second, why the hell is there no guard?
Third, why the hell is the "soldier" just standing there when the enemy is clearly standing at the gate?
Fourth, would Hamas really go to the trouble of making this video and blacking out their faces?

It's just bizarre! Either it's really dumb Israeli propaganda, or Israel is really lame and whiny.

The Problems with the Sandy Hook Hoax Being Part of a Gun Control Plot

As has been alleged by Fetzer, Halbig, Smallstorm and their allies, the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax was a plot, run by the Obama administration (masterminded by Atty General Eric Holder) to enact a strict gun control agenda.

Though I admit that the Sandy Hook shootings do look like a hoax, I have long had issues with this gun control idea, for several reasons:

1) why aren't the Republicans, who have been uniformly against gun control, going after the Obama administration on this most obvious, traitorious and nefarious of plots? Particularly this is confusing since they have gone after him on so many other conspiracies (birth certificate, Benghazi, etc).

2) where is the NRA? They have no problem with wild accusations and conspiracy theories, and you think they'd be all over this one.

3) why did the Obama administration only try to promote the mildest of gun control legislation (mandatory background checks) after the shootings, if they set up this massively sympathetic argument for major gun control?

4) where is the evidence that any national politician is trying to take away guns in any serious way (banning one type of gun does not count)

Any good rebuttals to these points? I'm open to any logical arguments.

NATO Exercise "Rapid Trident" in Ukraine Coincided with MH-17 Shoot-down

Of course it did.

Note the "3" motif in "Trident".

Also--
Was it Ukrainian military who shot down the plane? Might make more sense, particularly if this was a false flag deal.

And of course, we have John Kerry's ridiculous "rush to judgement" about the incident-- eerily similar to his certainty about who fired poison gas in Syria.

33 of the Day: Ebola Edition

DAKAR (Reuters) – A 33-year-old American doctor working for a relief organization in Liberia’s capital has tested positive for the tropical disease Ebola, according to a statement from Samaritan’s Purse.

Dr. Kent Brantly, medical director at one of the country’s two treatment centers run by the organization, recognized his own symptoms and confined himself to an isolation ward.

It was not immediately clear how he caught Ebola. The relief group’s Melissa Strickland said that he had followed strict safety protocols when treating patients.
“It’s too early to try to explain it. We will have an intensive and thorough investigation,” she said.

Across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, at least 660 people have died from the illness, according to the World Health Organisation, as poor, ill-equipped African governments have struggled to cope with the virus.

This is nuts:

A woman who tested positive for the deadly Ebola virus is now on the loose in a Sierra Leone city with a population of around 1 million people. The woman had been quarantined in a hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when she was “forcibly” removed by her family, according to Reuters.

Officials are appealing to the residents of Freetown to locate this woman. Since February, the Ebola virus has been responsible for the death of 660 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. The virus has a 90 percent death rate, according to the World Health Organization, however, this particular outbreak seems to have a 60 percent mortality rate.

This is nuts too:

Health workers here say they are now battling two enemies: the unprecedented Ebola epidemic, which has killed more than 660 people in four countries since it was first detected in March, and fear, which has produced growing hostility toward outside help. On Friday alone, health authorities in Guinea confirmed 14 new cases of the disease.

Workers and officials, blamed by panicked populations for spreading the virus, have been threatened with knives, stones and machetes, their vehicles sometimes surrounded by hostile mobs. Log barriers across narrow dirt roads block medical teams from reaching villages where the virus is suspected. Sick and dead villagers, cut off from help, are infecting others.

“This is very unusual, that we are not trusted,” said Marc Poncin, the emergency coordinator in Guinea for Doctors Without Borders, the main group fighting the disease here. “We’re not stopping the epidemic.”

Efforts to monitor it are grinding to a halt because of “intimidation,” he said. People appear to have more confidence in witch doctors.

 20 x 33 = 660

The Slaughter of Gaza

It's really hard to know whether this is my particular media bubble, or something wider, but I see a lot of people calling out Israel for their war crimes in Gaza... and there is a sense people are more receptive to the idea that Israel has gone way too far.

I must say that Democracy Now! (even though they suck on certain topics), has done a tremendous job of reporting from Gaza in the past two weeks, and showing the Palestinian side. For instance, the latest report today is typical of what they have been doing lately. Focusing on Gaza like no other news agency I've seen. It's upsetting how most "liberal" blogs are totally ignoring the Gaza situation. Particularly pathetic is Talking Points Memo, which has completely ignored it, and probably no coincidence the owner of the site is Jewish.

Back to Democracy Now!-- this report on the protest at "Friends of the IDF" was very moving to me. The fact that there is an organization in the US that raises $ for the Israeli Defense Forces, is just sick. I'm glad to see decent people were protesting these assholes.

Once more with feeling-- Fuck Israel!
And that does not mean I support Hamas.

No ceasefire without justice for Gaza

MH370 to MH17

I must say I like the "kooky konspiracy theory" that the "shotdown" flight MH17 was really flight MH370, and all the bodies were dead for some time before the crash.  There was actually an early report that the rebels that found the wreckage said the bodies were already decomposed when they got to them right after the crash. Why make up something so crazy? But the other thing is it's just a perfect plot, so crazy it just could be true, that flight 370 was hijacked an held at some secret base, for the opportune time to be crashed in Ukraine, as part of a false-flag operation to 1) distract from the Israel razing of Gaza, and 2) spark further tensions with Russia.

The more mundane conspiracy explanation is that it really was MH370 and purposefully diverted into the rebel area, in the hope it would be shot down by stupid rebels, or was shot down by Ukrainians themselves.

Report: Federal Agents Involved in Most Top U.S. Terrorism Plots

A new report by Human Rights Watch finds federal agents or their informants have played a direct role in almost every major domestic terrorism case since 9/11. Deputy Washington Director Andrea Prasow described the targeting of Muslim Americans in sting operations.

Andrea Prasow: "If law enforcement has a reason to suspect that someone has a propensity towards violence, has expressed an interest in engaging in violence or other criminal activity, of course they should investigate, and they should use all the lawful resources they have at their disposal. But in some cases, they were doing more than that. They were expecting that people would be terrorists and doing everything they could to help them become terrorists."

Just SINCE 9/11... yeah, that's the ticket....

Classic Recipe for War-- Israel's Gaza Attack Is Like a Mini-Iraq Invasion

First-- make sure you control the major media
easy for any intelligence agency

Second-- create your own enemy and demonize them
US-- al Qaeda
Israel-- Hamas

Second-- set up and run a false flag attack
US-- 9/11 with fake hijackers and fake planes
Israel-- July 2014 with fake Hamas missiles and real Iron Dome missiles

Third-- invade a terribly weak country
US-- Afghanistan and Iraq
Israel-- Gaza

Fourth-- enjoy the fruits of victory!

It works great, as long as you have no conscience.

Gaza's "Terror Tunnels"

These tunnel complexes fill with weapons are ever so reminiscent of Osama bin Laden's massive cave complex in Afghanistan, which was of course a huge lie.

Israel claims that had to invade Gaza because of these tunnels and some "terrorists" they found sneaking out of Gaza via tunnels who were going to attack them.  As if no one would try to escape from the world's biggest concentration camp, because they wanted to be free and escape the constant bombardment from Israel.

This whole sick episode is a replay of the sick Gaza invasion in 2009, Operation Cast Lead, which was incredibly fucked up. It's unreal what a racist Nazi state that Israel has turned into.

Let's not forget that Israel also helped to create Hamas-- so much like the US helped create al-Qaeda (al-CIA-duh).

More on Hamas Rockets and the "Iron Dome" Defense-- Video Fakery and False Flag Rolled into One

This article explains a lot more than the piece I saw before, and it makes so much more sense now.

Prize-winning Israeli defense expert says numbers inflated by as much as 90%, Israel says Hamas makes sophisticated long-range rockets in Gaza. A winner of the Israel Defense Prize, Dr. Moti Shefer, has said that Israel is inserting "virtual" incoming Hamas rockets into operators' radar screens in order to claim higher than warranted success rates. Dr. Shefer, who does work in exotic areas of defense and holds a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from Stanford, said in an interview on Israel's Radio 103 last a week: "We're shooting at ourselves, mainly virtually. The virtual rocket was invented in order to increase the vagueness surrounding Iron Dome. Assume that a real rocket arrives. What does the command and control system do? It creates nine more virtual rockets, and transmits their paths on computer graphics to the rocket launcher operators. The launcher operators see 10 rockets and launch 10 Iron Dome interceptors. People hear 10 booms, one rocket enters, and you get a 90% success rate.""

The remark was reported in Israel's popular Globes "Israel's Business Arena" website.
Dr. Shefer said: "There is no missile in the world today able to intercept missiles or rockets. Iron Dome is a sound and light show that is intercepting only Israeli public opinion, and itself, of course. Actually, all the explosions you see in the sky are self explosions. No Iron Dome missile has ever collided with a single rocket..."

The death toll in Gaza today reached 194 Palestinians killed. One Israeli civilian has been killed by the rocket attacks, in an attack near the Gaza border. The Palestinian Health Ministry says that half of the dead and wounded are women and children. Gaza has one of the youngest demographics in the world, with 45 percent of the population being under the age of 14.

Dr. Shefer's comments came as Israel claims that Hamas now has the capacity to build long-range, unguided rockets with ranges of up to 60 miles, capable of reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Reuters reported yesterday:
"Palestinian Hamas fighters once tried in vain to copy Israel's iconic submachine gun, the Uzi. Twenty years on, their homemade rockets streak more than 100 km (60 miles) from Gaza toward the northern Israeli city of Haifa." Such rockets are about 20 feet long, weigh tons, and require complex, precision parts such as gyroscopes and accelerometers to maintain flight stability. In unguided, long-range projectiles, onboard, microprocessor-level electronics are required to transmit flight corrections to control surfaces, such as fins, in millisecond realtime. Building hundreds of such rockets would also require many highly skilled machinists and technicians operating, and maintaining, heavy, expensive machine tools, and thousands of hours of testing, including test launches. Hamas in Gaza has been under severe naval, air, and land blockade since 2007.

Israel says hundreds of long-range rockets are being launched from Gaza at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The missile attacks attributed to Hamas on these cities would require such massive, complex rockets. Tel Aviv is about 50 miles from Gaza. With Gaza hemmed in by Israel on all sides except a ten-mile stretch of border with Egypt, it is unlikely that this volume of long-range rockets could be smuggled into Gaza. A US intelligence official said of one of the long-range rockets which Israel says Hamas possesses, the 18-foot, Syrian-made M-302: "You look at those things and it's obvious they couldn't have been slipped into Gaza," The official added that the M-302 was not given to disassembly into smaller pieces.

The territory of Gaza is 139 square miles, about the size of the city of Boston. It is covered by among the heaviest aerial and satellite surveillance in the world. It has been under continuous air, land, and sea blockade since 2007. Residents have long complained that medicines and vital supplies have not been allowed in.

Egypt destroyed the tunnels between it and Gaza in 2007, when Hamas took power. The M-302 has a weight of a little over a half-ton.

The large missiles required to traverse the roughly 50 miles between Gaza and Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem, require specialized launch vehicles which are large and slow-moving.

What this implies, of course, it that what Israelis doing is particularly evil-- manufacturing attacks against itself in order to justify their brutal slaughter of Palestinians.

World Gone Mad, Day 2

I'm sure Israel just loves how the MH17 plane shootdown is taking headlines away from their Gaza invasion and war crimes.

What exactly happened with the MH17 shootdown? Both sides are blaming each other and of course the situation has dire possibilities for starting a major war.

Very bizarre:

While there are various questions that have already emerged from what was supposed to be Ukraine's "slam dunk" proof confirming Russian rebel involvement in today's MH-17 tragedy, perhaps one just as gaping question emerges when one looks at what is clearly an outlier flight path in today's final, and tragic, departure of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777.

Perhaps the best visualization of what the issue is, comes from Vagelis Karmiros who has collated all the recent MH-17 flight paths as tracked by Flightaware and shows that while all ten most recent paths pass safely well south of the Donetsk region, and cross the zone above the Sea of Azov, it was only today's tragic flight that passed straight overhead Donetsk.

Certainly, there is every reason to be suspicious of this plane incident-- given that it could be a spark for major war, it may well be a false-flag deliberate provocation.

Flight 93 Crash Still Fake

The MH17 shootdown and massive debris field with body parts all over, once again shows us what a real plane crash looks like.

33 of the Day

Flight MH17 was flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters [33,000 feet]. 

Apparently shot down by a missile, not clear who did it. This could spark a major escalation of the Ukraine conflict.

Weirdest part is this happens on the same day TWA800 went down in 1996-- July 17th-- almost certainly by a missile shot by a Navy ship during an exercise.
(fuck Twitchy, btw, just was a useful link to show the same date, and clearly the missile explanation is still the best)

7/17/14 Is a Bad Day

All hell is breaking loose now...
Plane shoot down in Ukraine, 295 dead
Israel invades Gaza

on the heels of Israel purposefully bombing 4 boys on beach in Gaza

Round-Up of Random Crap

Outrageous and disturbing--
Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws. 
Like we really need heavily militarized privatized police who are even more unaccountable than regular police...


How much fucking money is wasted on people coming up with these nonsense code names? Jesus.

The latest round of documents from Edward Snowden reveal how the British spy agency GCHQ has developed a range of secret tools to manipulate the Internet by disseminating propaganda, rigging online polls, inflating page views, conducting mass delivery of emails, and monitoring Skype users in real time. The news website The Intercept published the document, which reads like a menu of covert tools with code names like "ANGRY PIRATE," "CONCRETE DONKEY," "STEALTH MOOSE" and "IMPERIAL BARGE," a term that refers to the ability to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call. The revelations come as the British Parliament is set to begin debate on a fast-tracked bill to expand government spying powers.

More crazy NSA/GCHQ code names here. Other obnoxious disruptions of internet activity by the NSA/GCHQ here.

Oy:

One week after revelations of how over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers cavalierly disposed of the bodies of nearly 800 babies and toddlers on a site that held a septic tank, new reports are leveling a whole different set of charges about what happened to the children of those Irish homes.In harrowing new information revealed this weekend, the Daily Mail has uncovered medical records that suggest 2,051 children across several Irish care homes were given a diphtheria vaccine from pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome in a suspected illegal drug trial that ran from 1930 to 1936.

The FBI heavily harass and monitor environmental activists, treat them often as terrorists.

Was the 1989 Tianamen Square massacre mostly western propaganda?

A last random bit of info-- 1950-1960s' modern art was funded by the CIA as a pro-American scheme to show off freedom, but also to turn Americans away from art? Complex psyop, for sure.  Not unlike the idea of the US intel agencies funding the 60s music scene, notably the Laurel Canyon hippies.

Facebook Memes

I have been spending a fair amount of time on Facebook, discussing politics and so forth, and I've noticed some funny and contradictory themes/memes popping up with my "friends".

Friend 1-- "Live for the moment, enjoy life, be spiritual" and also "all the political parties are the same, bankers are the problem, one world government/UN Agenda 21, they're trying to get our guns, Obama is evil, Obamacare is fascism, 9/11 was an inside job, etc"

Friend 2-- "all the political parties are the same, they're trying to get our guns, Obama is evil, Michelle is a tranny, 9/11/Sandy Hook was an inside job, etc". However, if all the parties are the same, why do Republicans consistently block any gun control legislation?

Friends 3 to 5-- typical right-wingers who love FoxNews, think Obama is evil and a Marxist, think the problem with the world is too much welfare and immigration plus Obamacare!/Benghazi!/IRS!/border crisis! and gun control is tantamount to fascism. These people are just completely incapable of any rational debate.

Friends 6 to 9-- "all the political parties are the same" versus "Republicans are dumb, evil, horrible, ruining the country, etc"

Friends 10 to 20--  "Dems and Obama are great and Republicans are the source of all evil"

Interspersed among most of these groups (except the right-wingers) are the typical memes of "GMOs and Monsanto are evil", "eat healthy food", "food is medicine", "go vegetarian", "cops abuse their power", "fracking is bad"

The one meme that every group has in common is that "abuse of pet animals is the worst thing ever"  and that saving animals is akin to holiness.

Right-wingers don't care much about vegetarianism and about brown people.

In general, people I know on Facebook don't like to discuss conspiracies in any depth at all, and really avoid the topic of UFOs and aliens.

Now, I am a political liberal and obviously I agree with (or am sympathetic to) many of these left-leaning and life themes and and conspiracy themes. The pure right-wingers are completely wrong and I still think the whole gun control issue is right-wing paranoia run amok, but Obama apologists are wrong too. But the problem to me is the inconsistency in these world-views.  I think all these people are well-meaning, but haven't thought their positions through very well.

Granted, we live in a complicated world, and are surrounded by so much information, and on Facebook in particular, you get bombarded all the time by catchy memes that are easy to pass on. Setting aside the hopelessness of Republicans/conservatives, I guess my biggest pet peeve is people who say both parties are the same, when that is a massive over-simplification. Yes, it is true that the parties are the same on some important issues that I care about such as war and the national security state and investigating intelligence community/military abuses. The problem is these are not the only issues and for many of the issues that affect people every day in a profound way, the parties are very different. So saying they are the same is just counter-productive.

Obviously the biggest issue is the super rich and the elites and the powers that be, and they corrupt everything else and we need to fight that as much as possible. But saying everything is the same is basically just giving up. 

Israel's "Iron Dome" Missile Defense System

Developed in collaboration with the US, supposedly it can block 90% of Hamas "missiles" (the crude missiles that are basically giant bottle rockets). There have been no Israeli deaths so far, despite up to 1000 missiles being fired.

I see two possibilities here.

1) this is serious propaganda, meant to show the Hamas missiles as far more dangerous than they really are, and that the Iron Dome system doesn't really work well at all.

2) this defense system really does work very effectively, and thus the Israelis are basically safe from the Hamas "attacks". This means Israel is murdering Palestinian civilians for no reason except to inflict suffering-- which I guess we knew already. This just makes it a bit worse.

Either way, it's just damn depressing and disgusting. I really hate the Israeli boastfulness about how superior they are in this conflict. Fuck them.

Dawkins-- Militant Atheism

I wish he'd look a little more deeply into 9/11 but otherwise I'm not going to argue with him--

Badass Israel Is So Getting Revenge for the Bottle Rockets that Hamas Keeps Firing into Their Yard

Fucking assholes:

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said on Saturday that overnight it had struck a mosque in central Gaza that held a concealed weapons cache. The move was likely to fan Palestinian outrage during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

In Gaza, health officials said that the death toll from the Israeli airstrikes had reached 120, with hundreds more wounded. Many of those killed and wounded were said to be civilians, including women and children.

Israel’s military said that over five days of fighting it had struck more than 1,160 targets in Gaza, including rocket launchers, weapon manufacturing and storage facilities and private homes that it said had served as command-and-control centers for militants guiding the rocket fire. Overnight, the military said it had targeted 10 “terror operatives,” six of whom it said were directly involved in launching rockets at Israel at the time.

(snip)

Over the last five days, there have been injuries from rocket fire but no fatalities in Israel, although militants in Gaza have launched almost 700 rockets and mortars, often reaching much deeper into Israel than in past rounds of fighting, according to the military. Israeli officials attribute the lack of fatalities largely to the success of the country’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which has intercepted most rockets headed for large population centers, and to the discipline of Israelis who heed instructions and head for protected areas when the sirens go off.

But Iron Dome does not provide total protection. A rocket struck a house in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba on Friday night, destroying it and injuring an elderly woman. A man was severely wounded on Friday and seven others suffered less serious wounds when a rocket hit a gasoline station in Ashdod, an Israeli port city, setting it ablaze.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel was “weighing all possibilities and preparing for all possibilities,” including dispatching ground forces to Gaza.

Hamas’s military wing said it was ready for a long fight, saying on its website that it had “utilized only a little of what it has prepared for the Zionist enemy.” While there was talk about some efforts underway to broker a cease-fire, none appeared imminent.

This actually looks really bad--  like Israel is getting ready to completely decimate the Gazan Palestinians, something they've long wanted. Hamas are being dicks too, and you have to wonder if they are working for the other side in some sick way, but surely what they are doing is trivial compared to what Israel is doing.

Note-- the world is going according to their plan:

As Canadian freelance writer and journalist Brandon Martinez reminds us: “Fragmenting, weakening and Balkanizing the Middle East has been part and parcel of the Zionist impulse from the very beginnings of the Jewish state. Israeli strategist Oded Yinon candidly outlined this imperialist line of thought in his 1982 paper “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s.” A strong, unified Iraq is Israel’s primary military concern, Yinon stressed” Yinon went on to push for the territorial dissection of Iraq into three state-lets along ethnic and confessional lines. And we may well witness these developments in Iraq. He promoted much the same scenario for Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran and other Arab/Muslim states bordering the Zionist colony.
Martinez further observes, “The Zionists have used deception, subterfuge and cunning to con the world into entering conflicts and conflagrations that have expedited their ominous aims. But Israel’s insatiable avarice for more land and resources will eventually be its downfall, just as every empire in history has sooner or later collapsed under its own weight.”

33 in the News

"House Republicans have requested nearly $3.3 million to operate the select committee investigating Benghazi, which gives the GOP-launched committee a bigger budget than that granted to the committee overseeing the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs."


"And that was but one among dozens of shooting scenes in Chicago over a weekend meant to celebrate this nation's birth. In the roughly 84 hours from 3:10 p.m. Thursday until 3:30 a.m. Monday, gunfire struck 82 people, 14 of them fatally."


The Benghazi 33 is instructive, since it is clearly a synthetic, manufactured number...


UPDATE:
Killer of 6 in Texas is 33 years old. Weird-- kills family execution style... one of victims was 33 years old.

More details on the Texas shooting. Suspect faints in court when details of case read.

HOUSTON (Reuters) – The man accused of killing four children aged 4 to 14 and their parents after entering their suburban Houston home while looking for his former wife collapsed when details of the crime were read aloud in court on Friday.

Ronald Lee Haskell, 33, who is being held without bond, was in court for a hearing after being charged on Thursday with capital murder and multiple murders of his former wife’s relatives.

Haskell, who suffers from mental illness according to his attorney, was expected to face a hearing on his mental capacity and will eventually face a grand jury that will decide whether he will be tried for capital murder, which carries the possibility of the death penalty.

Haskell, wearing orange prison attire, said “Yes, sir” to the judge after his rights were read and then fainted as details of the crime were read. Bailiffs had to pick him up and wheel him out in an office chair.

Haskell is accused of fatally shooting two boys ages 4 and 14, two girls ages 7 and 9, and their parents Stephen Stay, 39, and Katie Stay, 33. Five of them were dead when found and one of the children died after being air-lifted to a hospital for treatment. Cassidy Stay, 15, survived the attack on Wednesday afternoon, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said.

Harris County prosecutor Tammy Thomas told the judge that Haskell methodically executed the family, tying them up and then firing two bullets into each of them, starting with the mother. Haskell, posing as a delivery man, entered the home when Cassidy told him to wait while she got a pen to take down his name and number, Thomas said.

The teen did not recognize her uncle, who had grown a beard in recent months, until after Haskell told her his name, Thomas testified. He then pulled a gun and ordered her to assemble the other children in the living room before tying them up as they lay on the floor, Thomas added.

Their parents were confronted when they returned from a trip to the bank, according to the prosecution. When the family was together in one room, Haskell began to shoot them in a brazen attack that showed elements of planning, said Thomas, who appeared distraught after reading details of the crime to the court.

Was Haskell programmed in some way, or just insane?

Israel Is Being Even More of an Evil Dick Than Normal

Report from Gaza: Israel Launches New Offensive on Besieged Palestinian Territory in Crisis

 Violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories is escalating as Israel bombs the Gaza Strip and threatens a new full-scale assault. On Monday, the Israeli military announced "Operation Protective Edge," which it says aims to stop Palestinian rocket fire into southern Israel. At least nine Palestinians were wounded in Israeli strikes on more than 50 targets in Gaza overnight. Six Hamas members were killed in Israeli strikes on Sunday, the deadliest by Israel since an eight-day assault in late 2012. Palestinian militants have fired dozens of rockets into southern Israel since the weekend, causing no casualties. To prepare for a potential attack, Israel has called up more than 1,500 troops to fortify a contingent already massed along the Gaza border. Hamas says the latest bombings "exceed all red lines" and has vowed to respond with broader rocket fire. If Israel invades Gaza, it would be the third major assault on the coastal territory in six years. The first invasion in 2008 left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead, most of them civilians.

"Incitement Starts at the Top": After Arab Teen’s Murder, Israeli Gov’t Accused of Fueling Hatred

...there is unprecedented—and I would even say genocidal—incitement against Palestinians. For example, the statement from the up-and-coming political star in Israel, Ayelet Shaked of the Jewish Home party, which is in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, who actually issued a call for genocide of the Palestinian people on June 30th. She declared that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy. And she justifies their destruction, including, quote, "its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure." And she said that Israel would be justified to slaughter Palestinian mothers because they give birth to little snakes. I wish I could say that that was an extreme or outlying expression of opinion in Israel, but she got something like 5,000 likes for that statement on Facebook. 

So No False Flags Yesterday?

even though it was 7/7/14...

I was also surprised they didn't do anything on 11/11/11, and other such dates. Always hard to predict the PTB.

Laurel Canyon and Me

One reason the whole Laurel Canyon book (reviewed in the post below) resonated with me was my own personal association with Laurel Canyon.

I grew up in Studio City, very near the north mouth of Laurel Canyon. In fact, the street I lived on was "Laurel Grove"! I used to hike in those of hills around the canyon all the time when I was a teenager, and I drove through Laurel Canyon a couple of hundred times over my lifetime.

My first memory of Laurel Canyon was when my mom would take me to her work in the summer time in downtown LA, and we would drive through Laurel Canyon every day. This was about 1967 to 1969 -- around the peak of the music scene there. I remember at one point I was learning to read bigger books and I read "Bambi" to my mom as we drove down the canyon.

The canyon always seemed kind of creepy to me. It is a deep and curvy canyon, you drove at the bottom of the canyon for some time, and it is not a trivial route. The canyon always seemed dark and kind of mysterious. The highlight was always seeing the ruins of the Houdini mansion, and early on I heard weird stories of the place. There were stairs that went up the hillside and disappeared (see pic).

I always wanted to explore that place, but it was closed off.  I also remember how along the side of the road, just like doors in the side of the hill, where apparently you took stairs up to a house. This sort of thing:

Also, in the canyon itself, the houses were not that nice, and it always seemed like an unpleasant place to live. Little sunlight, constant traffic, and just a weird vibe.

The houses in the hills above the canyon were quite nice, of course. I didn't spend too much time there, though for a couple of years, my mom taught at Wonderland Avenue Elementary, which serves a very ritzy neighborhood in the canyon.

I knew a couple of kids from school, who lived in the canyon. One guy was of German origin, who lived in an extremely rich house in Laurel Canyon. I can only imagine what his German father, might have been up to. Though I don't think the father was old to enough to be a WWII-era Nazi.

Anyway, it's a fascinating place that I've moved away from long ago. But I can't wait to go back and have some time to explore.

"Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon"

So I read McGowan's book. It's a pretty good read, the book flows easily and has a good pace.

But he really toned down the conspiracy angle. Most disappointingly is that he made no effort to put the story together at the end, to do any synthesis. The end of the book was interesting about the Alcala trials, but it was largely off topic and mostly seemed to be there as a plug for one of his older books. So, I'm not sure why he didn't try to paint a more complete picture of the conspiracy.

I had put down some thoughts on his premise here, which was based on some interviews I'd heard with him, and based on his writings. Basically, the idea is that the 1960s Laurel Canyon hippie scene was a miliary psy-op, to discredit the anti-war movement. I tried to put it together how the Laurel Canyon location got selected for the psyop, and one big question I had was how much McGowan addressed this.

In one of the early chapters, he did the most exploration of the conspiracy angle, and he did address why they set up in Laurel Canyon (the old military connection). As far as the musicians, he actually seemed to say that some of the artists were witting covert military intelligence operators, such as Steven Stills, David Crosby and Frank Zappa. I got the impression that McGowan ascribes a lot to the mind control program of the CIA, and that many of the musicians were programmed agents, run by creepy, nefarious, mysterious, bohemian handlers.

I suppose since many of these people are still alive, like Stills and Crosby, McGowan had to be careful what sort of accusations he could lay on them. I suppose...

So, the big picture is that the weird Laurel Canyon music and film scene was likely part of a military/CIA plot with several goals:
1) to start a movement of distraction away from the Vietnam war
2) to discredit the anti-war movement
3) to deal drugs and promote drug use
4) a center of occult activity 

But the book primarily deals with the strange origins of many of the musicians and the many deaths and odd turns of fate of people who were associated with Laurel Canyon in the 1960s. And there was a wide reach of connections, to Elvis Presley, to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

The Doors were always one of my favorite bands, and I wish McGowan had written more on them. While he hinted that Morrison's (and even Presley's) death was faked, he never explored those topics, much to my disappointment.

US Military Funded Facebook Study on Manipulating Emotions-- Apparently

Was there a cover-up surrounding the Pentagon’s direct funding of Facebook’s notorious mass psychological study in order to conceal the fact that the experiment’s true purpose was part of preparations to manipulate public opinion in times of civil unrest?

It now appears as though information indicating that the Department of Defense bankrolled the experiment was scrubbed from an online press release by Cornell University in order to hide the connection.

Here’s what we know for a fact to be true. Facebook’s mass psychological study, which proved that altering a user’s timeline feed was a successful method of causing emotional “contagion” to spread through the social network, was conducted in part by Cornell University’s Jeffrey T. Hancock, who was listed as one of the study’s authors.

Hancock is also involved with the Pentagon’s Minerva Initiative, which recently hit the headlines for its role in bankrolling a program which provides “funding to universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.”

However, an even more creepy connection between the Facebook experiment and the Pentagon has emerged after it was revealed that the original press release from Cornell highlighting the study included a passage at the bottom which read, “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.”

According to the Army Research Office’s official website, “Basic research proposals from educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and private industry are competitively selected and funded,” as part of the Pentagon’s mission of “combating terrorism and new emerging threats.”

However, the text indicating the Facebook study was bankrolled by the Pentagon was later scrubbed from the website, with Cornell claiming it had made a mistake, an explanation that Jay Rosen, Journalism Professor at NYU, finds highly dubious.

“Why do I call this strange? Any time my work has been featured in an NYU press release, the PR officers involved show me drafts and coordinate closely with me, for the simple reason that they don’t want to mischaracterize scholarly work,” writes Rosen.

“So now we have to believe that Cornell’s Professor of Communication and Information Science, Jeffrey Hancock, wasn’t shown or didn’t read the press release in which he is quoted about the study’s results (weird) or he did read it but somehow failed to notice that it said his study was funded by the Army when it actually wasn’t (weirder).”

“I think I would notice if my university was falsely telling the world that my research was partially funded by the Pentagon… but, hey, maybe there’s an innocent and boring explanation that I am overlooking.”

The Pentagon’s involvement with a Facebook study which would have given the DoD a revealing insight into how to manipulate public dissatisfaction via social media during potential civil unrest would not be a surprising move given the Army’s obsession with anticipating domestic disorder.

As creepy as the study is, it makes perfect sense that 1) the military would be interested in this topic, and 2) they would want to cover up their involvement.

Oh, to live in a world where the PTB were more interested in social and political justice than trying to manipulate the masses.

So Pharmaceutical Companies Make a Lot of Money on Vaccines After All

Well, so much for the old line that they would never push unneeded vaccines because they don't make money from them.

Childhood immunizations are so vital to public health that the Affordable Care Act mandates their coverage at no out-of-pocket cost and they are generally required for school entry. Once a loss leader for manufacturers, because they are often more expensive to produce than conventional drugs, vaccines now can be very profitable.

Old vaccines have been reformulated with higher costs. New ones have entered the market at once-unthinkable prices. Together, since 1986, they have pushed up the average cost to fully vaccinate a child with private insurance to the age of 18 to $2,192 from $100, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even with deep discounts, the costs for the federal government, which buys half of all vaccines for the nation’s children, have increased 15-fold during that period. The most expensive shot for young children in Dr. Irvin’s refrigerator is Prevnar 13, which prevents diseases caused by pneumococcal bacteria, from ear infections to pneumonia.

Like many vaccines, Prevnar requires multiple jabs. Each shot is priced at $136, and every child in the United States is required to get four doses before entering school. Pfizer, the sole manufacturer, had revenues of nearly $4 billion from its Prevnar vaccine line last year, about double what it made from high-profile drugs like Lipitor and Viagra, which now face generic competitors.

I love the 33 embedded here:

It is not clear how much Pfizer is profiting from Prevnar in the United States. But one measure is to look at the price at which Pfizer sells Prevnar for use in the poorest countries through a World Health Organization initiative: $3.30 a dose. Even at those prices, “I do not think pharmaceutical manufacturers are losing money,” said Dr. Hinman, the former C.D.C. official.