On-air awakening

It is not often you get to hear someone wake up ON AIR to the complete puppet show that is our political system. But this is a delightful example. Talk show host Mark Larsen interviews Mitt Romney and blows a fuse. It's beautiful.

Final score: Romney 0, Paul 1

BBC documentary on the attempted US coup, 1930s

It was plotted by a number of powerful American industrialists. And guess who was in the group? Prescott Bush, Dubya's grandfather. Hmm.... They were going to install an openly fascist regime after deposing FDR. Unfuckingbelievable. This is not fringe stuff, this is real history.

Part One:

Here is the rest of the documentary: Part Two | Part Three

Hacking Democracy

Here's a jaw-dropping HBO documentary on the problems with electronic voting machines.

Lakota Sioux declare themselves a sovereign nation

This is one of the most amazing things I've ever read. The Sioux have renounced their ties with the US and declared themselves an independent nation. They are also promising that anyone may come and live tax free on their land. My profound admiration and best wishes go to these brave, brave people. If only the rest of us were so courageous...

Ron Paul is kicking ASS despite attempts to hide him

Ron Paul's fans raised an amazing $6 million in a single day, December 16. That's a record amount, and a great deal more than his last fund drive which raised $4 million. All told he has about $16 million dollars saved for his campaign, which makes it one of the most well-funded of the bunch. And this is despite the mainstream media trying to ignore him when it isn't busy making fun of him.

Here's proof they're trying to find ways to cut Ron Paul people out of the polls:

A good source for up-to-the-minute Ron Paul news is the Lew Rockwell blog.

Facism

Actually, if you pay attention to the news, it kinda *is* that obvious.

Naomi Wolf's 10 Steps to Fascism vs. Stephen Colbert

This is some great stuff.

Empty Walls

A couple of friends (and former coworkers) did vfx for this video. Even though I can't really abide most music videos, I like this one.

"Clergy Response Teams" employed by US government to quell martial law unrest

This article has to be one of the most insane things I've ever read.

The US Government will employ "Clergy Response Teams" trained to quell unrest in the event of martial law.

What.
The.
Fuck.

Wake up, people!

Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest if Martial Law Ever Declared

Could martial law ever become a reality in America? Some fear any nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. soil might trigger just that. KSLA News 12 has discovered that the clergy would help the government with potentially their biggest problem: Us.
Charleton Heston's now-famous speech before the National Rifle Association at a convention back in 2000 will forever be remembered as a stirring moment for all 2nd Amendment advocates. At the end of his remarks, Heston held up his antique rifle and told the crowd in his Moses-like voice, "over my cold, dead hands."
While Heston, then serving as the NRA President, made those remarks in response to calls for more gun control laws at the time, those words live on. Heston's declaration captured a truly American value: An over-arching desire to protect our freedoms.
But gun confiscation is exactly what happened during the state of emergency following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, along with forced relocation. U.S. Troops also arrived, something far easier to do now, thanks to last year's elimination of the 1878 Posse Comitatus act, which had forbid regular U.S. Army troops from policing on American soil.
If martial law were enacted here at home, like depicted in the movie "The Siege", easing public fears and quelling dissent would be critical. And that's exactly what the 'Clergy Response Team' helped accomplish in the wake of Katrina.
Dr. Durell Tuberville serves as chaplain for the Shreveport Fire Department and the Caddo Sheriff's Office. Tuberville said of the clergy team's mission, "the primary thing that we say to anybody is, 'let's cooperate and get this thing over with and then we'll settle the differences once the crisis is over.'"
Such clergy response teams would walk a tight-rope during martial law between the demands of the government on the one side, versus the wishes of the public on the other. "In a lot of cases, these clergy would already be known in the neighborhoods in which they're helping to diffuse that situation," assured Sandy Davis. He serves as the director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
For the clergy team, one of the biggest tools that they will have in helping calm the public down or to obey the law is the bible itself, specifically Romans 13. Dr. Tuberville elaborated, "because the government's established by the Lord, you know. And, that's what we believe in the Christian faith. That's what's stated in the scripture."
Civil rights advocates believe the amount of public cooperation during such a time of unrest may ultimately depend on how long they expect a suspension of rights might last.

Bush is one emergency away from total control of the US

All he needs is a single emergency to declare himself Supreme Commander. Expect such an emergency in the next couple of months, probably fast on the heels of any sudden devaluation of the US dollar.

King Dubya destroys the Fifth Amendment

A recent executive order signed by our Dictator In Chief seems to nullify the Fifth Amendment AND grant him the power to confiscate the possessions of anyone who criticizes the war in Iraq. WTF? This asshole -- and his entire crew -- needs to be thrown in fucking prison and tried for war crimes and treason.

Here's an interesting evaluation of the new executive order.

Ron Paul interviewed by Candidates@Google.com

If you are as yet unaware of Ron Paul's incredible presidential campaign, you can't go wrong watching this 65-minute interview hosted by one of Google's chief executives. This video gets my highest recommendation.

To my mind, Ron Paul is the only politician I have ever heard who spoke absolute truth. Not only doesn't he ever trip my Bullshit Meter, I usually find myself standing and cheering out loud. And a lot of other people feel this way too.

He just might be the last offramp we have on this freeway to Dictatorship.

Zeitgeist: The Movie

Feel the urge to swallow a horse-sized Red Pill? Then watch this movie.

The challenge to the 'industrial gene' paradigm

The technologies we use have consequences, some of which come back to haunt us in dangerous ways. We dive in, thinking we know how deep the water is, but find out later we've waded in beyond our ability to swim. Genetic manipulation is a prime example of this. I'm no Luddite, but this is one technology we'd do well to stop tinkering with.

The New York Times has an article called A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech which hints at the beginnings of an awareness just how deep these waters are. They report,

Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of how genes function. The exhaustive four-year effort was organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world. To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a “tidy collection of independent genes” after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists “to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.”

This idea, called the "industrial gene" theory, operates from an assumption that each protein in the DNA sequence can be associated with a gene, which is then expressed in a deterministic way, called a phenotype. It is a useful assumption if you're planning to do your own sequencing and patent the modification. But it may not have any basis in reality.

I remember reading about how genes store data a few years ago, I think it was in Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life by Jeremy Campbell, and it was stated that the genetic code is infinitely more complex than we'd initially thought. Rather than one gene being read once for a specific function, the same DNA sequences were being read many times, in many different ways, for very different functions. For example the protein pairs might be read "left-to-right, one-by-one" for phenotype A, but also "backwards, skipping every other pair" for an entirely different phenotype B, and so on. It seems very likely the information contained within the DNA is far richer and more complex than we are used to thinking about, like a protein hologram of unimaginable complexity.

I read that years ago, and yet it's mostly been overlooked or purposely ignored because it's not convenient for biotech industries, who prefer the industrial gene model and its legal protections.

In the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office allows genes to be patented on the basis of this uniform effect or function. In fact, it defines a gene in these terms, as an ordered sequence of DNA “that encodes a specific functional product.”

In 2005, a study showed that more than 4,000 human genes had already been patented in the United States alone. And this is but a small fraction of the total number of patented plant, animal and microbial genes.

In the context of the consortium’s findings, this definition now raises some fundamental questions about the defensibility of those patents.

It's not hard to see the dangers posed by uninformed meddling, then. We can create animals with greater resistance to infection, but what other phenotypes are we unwittingly mucking up? One can't mathematically predict what these genes will do because they're only the instructions, not the machinery that acts upon the instructions. You must let the embryos grow and then hope you didn't stomp on anything important in the process.

Such hubris has serious consequences. Have you ever heard of "terminator genes"? Here's an article about it from Time Magazine, called The Suicide Seeds.

This stuff is going to get out of hand.