Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Monday, February 24, 2014
Chris Hedges: Edward Snowden's Moral Courage
His team won the debate. I agree with everything he says below--Edward Snowden IS a hero:
Last Thursday Chris Hedges opened a team debate at the Oxford Union at Oxford University with this speech arguing in favor of the proposition “This house would call Edward Snowden a hero.” The others on the Hedges team, which won the debate by an audience vote of 212 to 171, were William E. Binney, a former National Security Agency official and a whistle-blower; Chris Huhne, a former member of the British Parliament; and Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer for the United Kingdom. The opposing team was made up of Philip J. Crowley, a former U.S. State Department officer; Stewart A. Baker, a former chief counsel for the National Security Agency; Jeffrey Toobin, an American television and print commentator; and Oxford student Charles Vaughn.
I have been to war. I have seen physical courage. But this kind of courage is not moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warriors have moral courage. For moral courage means to defy the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle. And with moral courage comes persecution.
The American Army pilot Hugh Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of U.S. soldiers and 10 terrified Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre. He ordered his gunner to fire his M60 machine gun on the advancing U.S. soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers. And for this act of moral courage, Thompson, like Snowden, was hounded and reviled. Moral courage always looks like this. It is always defined by the state as treason—the Army attempted to cover up the massacre and court-martial Thompson. It is the courage to act and to speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsberg had it. Martin Luther King had it. What those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.
“My country, right or wrong” is the moral equivalent of “my mother, drunk or sober,” G.K. Chesterton reminded us.So let me speak to you about those drunk with the power to sweep up all your email correspondence, your tweets, your Web searches, your phone records, your file transfers, your live chats, your financial data, your medical data, your criminal and civil court records and your movements, those who are awash in billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars, those who have banks of sophisticated computer systems, along with biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies and miniature drones, those who have obliterated your anonymity, your privacy and, yes, your liberty.
There is no free press without the ability of the reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. Those few individuals inside government who dared to speak out about the system of mass surveillance have been charged as spies or hounded into exile. An omnipresent surveillance state—and I covered the East German Stasi state—creates a climate of paranoia and fear. It makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full-spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state. It does not matter if it does not use this capacity today; it will use it, history has shown, should it feel threatened or seek greater control. The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt wrote, is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.
Those who wield this unchecked power become delusional. Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, hired a Hollywood set designer to turn his command center at Fort Meade into a replica of the bridge of the starship Enterprise so he could sit in the captain’s chair and pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had the audacity to lie under oath to Congress. This spectacle was a rare glimpse into the absurdist theater that now characterizes American political life. A congressional oversight committee holds public hearings. It is lied to. It knows it is being lied to. The person who lies knows the committee members know he is lying. And the committee, to protect their security clearances, says and does nothing.
These voyeurs listen to everyone and everything. They bugged the conclave that elected the new pope. They bugged the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They bugged most of the leaders of Europe. They intercepted the talking points of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ahead of a meeting with President Obama. Perhaps the esteemed opposition can enlighten us as to the security threats posed by the conclave of Catholic cardinals, the German chancellor and the U.N. secretary-general. They bugged business like the Brazilian oil company Petrobras and American law firms engaged in trade deals with Indochina for shrimp and clove cigarettes. They carried out a major eavesdropping effort focused on the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali in 2007. They bugged their ex-lovers, their wives and their girlfriends. And the NSA stores our data in perpetuity.
I was a plaintiff before the Supreme Court in a case that challenged the warrantless wiretapping, a case dismissed because the court believed the government’s assertion that our concern about surveillance was “speculation.” We had, the court said, no standing ... no right to bring the case. And we had no way to challenge this assertion—which we now know to be a lie—until Snowden.
In the United States the Fourth Amendment limits the state’s ability to search and seize to a specific place, time and event approved by a magistrate. And it is impossible to square the bluntness of the Fourth Amendment with the arbitrary search and seizure of all our personal communications. Former Vice President Al Gore said, correctly, that Snowden disclosed evidence of crimes against the United States Constitution.
We who have been fighting against mass state surveillance for years—including my friend Bill Binney within the NSA—made no headway by appealing to the traditional centers of power. It was only after Snowden methodically leaked documents that disclosed crimes committed by the state that genuine public debate began. Elected officials, for the first time, promised reform. The president, who had previously dismissed our questions about the extent of state surveillance by insisting there was strict congressional and judicial oversight, appointed a panel to review intelligence. Three judges have, since the Snowden revelations, ruled on the mass surveillance, with two saying the NSA spying was unconstitutional and the third backing it. None of this would have happened—none of it—without Snowden.
Snowden had access to the full roster of everyone working at the NSA. He could have made public the entire intelligence community and undercover assets worldwide. He could have exposed the locations of every clandestine station and their missions. He could have shut down the surveillance system, as he has said, “in an afternoon.” But this was never his intention. He wanted only to halt the wholesale surveillance, which until he documented it was being carried out without our consent or knowledge.No doubt we will hear from the opposition tonight all the ways Snowden should have made his grievances heard, but I can tell you from personal experience, as can Bill, that this argument is as cogent as the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea Party in “Alice in Wonderland.”
“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.
“I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.
“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.
The untold story of the world's most famous photo
Audio interview of vastly important information
One hour long -- chock full of world-changing information that everyone should hear: http://2012thebigpicture.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/bob-dean-natos-assessment-of-alien-life-and-the-impact-of-disclosure-video/
Imperative information for all of us Earth inhabitants to know. We are being prepared for major changes on our planet and in our belief systems.
I think, as you listen to him, you will feel the honesty of this former military man who is telling the truth about what he learned in a high position he served during his military years--and in succeeding years through the "old boys" military network. I have met Bob Dean several times and can vouch for his truth-telling sincerity. The information he is sharing across the planet, I believe, is preparatory for the mass acceptance of life-and-planet-altering changes now taking place even as I write this. You can find more of his interviews and presentations on youtube if you find this audio important, informative and worthwhile to be shared with others. Please have an open mind as you listen to his story, much of which has been confirmed and verified by other military and government sources, many in high places, including astronauts Gordon Cooper, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and many others: See: http://www.syti.net/UFOSightings.html
Here is Gordon Cooper's statement:
One of the original Mercury Astronauts and the last American to fly in space alone. On May 15, 1963 he shot into space in a Mercury capsule for a 22 orbit journey around the world. During the final orbit, Major Gordon Cooper told the tracking station at Muchea (near Perth Australia) that he could see a glowing, greenish object ahead of him quickly approaching his capsule. The UFO was real and solid, because it was picked up by Muchea's tracking radar. Cooper's sighting was reported by the National Broadcast Company, which was covering the flight step by step; but when Cooper landed, reporters were told that they would not be allowed to question him about the UFO sighting.
Major Cooper was a firm believer in UFOs. Ten years earlier, in 1951 he had sighted a UFO while piloting an F-86 Sabrejet over Western Germany. They were metallic, saucer-shaped discs at considerable altitude and could out-maneuver all American fighter planes. Major Cooper also testified before the United Nations: "I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets... Most astronauts were reluctant to discuss UFOs." "I did have occasion in 1951 to have two days of observation of many flights of them, of different sizes, flying in fighter formation, generally from east to west over Europe."
And according to a taped interview by J. L. Ferrando, Major Cooper said: "For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means."
"I was furthermore a witness to an extraordinary phenomenon, here on this planet Earth. It happened a few months ago in Florida. There I saw with my own eyes a defined area of ground being consumed by flames, with four indentations left by a flying object which had descended in the middle of a field. Beings had left the craft (there were other traces to prove this). They seemed to have studied topography, they had collected soil samples and, eventually, they returned to where they had come from, disappearing at enormous speed... I happen to know that authority did just about everything to keep this incident from the press and TV, in fear of a panicky reaction from the public."
Friday, February 21, 2014
Short 8-minute video re health impact on us, in our skies
Another important message to be aware of...not being discussed on mainstream media. Please pass along if you find it valuable.
4-minute video about our planet Earth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_dRTlUc7cw&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6_dRTlUc7cw&has_verified=1
Beautifully done video -- with a very important message.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Moose are dying off in Minnesota
One more reason to view Dane Wigington's video talk at:
Collapse of Civilization
An e-mail I just sent to a friend who is concerned and frightened about geoengineering
Regarding geoengineering and weather manipulation: It is hard to assimilate information like this that flies in the face of all we have believed about our government, our country and its leaders and their motives. It's like lifting a big rock on which is painted the American flag and a picture of mother and apple pie, which we have been sold as the truth about our country by our so-called "leaders" over so many years --- and finding thousands of poisonous snakes and spiders scurrying out from under it. The best we can do at this point is to inform others about the geoengineering/weather manipulation and hope for enough people to believe it, so an outcry of NO! can be heard all the way across the globe. Most of the people I have known over the years who have been aware of these things--and who have marched, as I have, in many protests, think that a general outcry of NO! is probably not going to happen. There are just not enough aware people at this point. We can't even get people to acknowledge chemtrails in the skies above them, even when they are staring right at them. Many still think they are just aircraft "contrails." Sigh. But at least we must try to inform as many as we can.
We are heading into very turbulent times on the planet, with upheavals and population decimations caused by the few against the many. Be prepared for people not to believe this if you try to tell them. Because of fear, far more will run from the information than toward it. The best hope we have are for voices like Helen Caldicott's and Dane Wigington's and perhaps the new journalism funded by the eBay founder to become more and more what the public will turn to for true information. But you have to realize that those who trust our major media for their "news" are not going to hear this true information. Ever. The major media is owned by the very ones who are perpetrating the evil upon us--the military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about in his presidential leave-taking speech.
I don't know if you watched Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night -- she had on a segment about the loud explosions being heard by Oklahomans -- called minor earthquakes that are causing cracks in homes -- hundreds of these earthquakes are occurring there. Rachel thinks they are being caused by fracking. Possibly. Another possibility is that HAARP is capable of causing earthquakes, too. There are thousands of reports of loud booming noises being heard all over our country and in other countries, too. Booms that come out of nowhere, are untraceable to a source and that rattle the ground (and the people). You can see and hear many of these on youtube. There are also strange cloud formations, never before seen in our skies -- and strange lights in the skies that are unaccountable for by natural means. These, it is suspected, are also caused by HAARP. Once you start looking into this kind of thing -- and attend conferences as I have where you hear truth-telling, whistle-blowing government and military people and scientists trying to get their stories out, you become aware of a dark world of greed and power beyond the cover-up world we have been trained to believe in all our lives. You begin to realize that our leaders, including Obama, are all lying to us -- and can't be trusted. At this point, I still trust Elizabeth Warren -- but if she stays truthful and gathers a great following, you can be sure she will be relegated to the trash heap, one way or another. Hillary and Bill Clinton are part of the cabal that rules this planet -- they have become multi-multi-millionaires while selling us out and engaging in all kinds of subterfuge while appearing as liberals who care about the people. If either she or Jeb Bush is our next president, it will be six of one or half a dozen of the other. They are two sides of the same coin, and Obama is in the same league, as we who supported him so enthusiastically have all since discovered.
This is a lot to digest for someone who has believed we are living in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. That hasn't been true since the elite took over way back in the late 1800s...and possibly even before that. Politics has always been a dirty business -- but it has become far worse since Reagan when regulations were taken off the corporations and taxes were reduced on the rich. That's when the middle class began to disappear -- and it's practically gone now. The middle class was the mainstay of our capitalistic type of government, but no longer. Reagan convinced us that the money would "trickle down" from the rich to the rest of us. Well, now we can see what really happened.
We're being told now by whistle blowers that there are many underground cities (reports over the years of loud explosions and "hums" under the earth confirm that these underground places were being created for decades--and probably still are being created). Go into youtube and just plug in words like "loud booming noises" or "strange cloud formations" and see what comes up. There are dozens and dozens of videos to watch that will convince you we are living in a world far different from the one we thought. Whistleblowers have been coming out of the woodwork but are ridiculed and/or killed or threatened to silence them. Many of these whistleblowers are in their 80s now and are approaching the last years of their lives, so are determined to tell their stories before they leave the earth. Dozens of these people, both government and military, have told their stories in the Disclosure Project, which is all about the coverup of UFOs and the alien presence on earth. Our leaders know all about this -- but info is being kept from the public as much as possible. The Disclosure Project has even had press conferences for the mainstream press in Washington, D.C. , which very few mainstream journalists attended, although all were invited. Those who did attend were either afraid to report it or commanded not to report on it -- or at the very least to ridicule it. And so the public stays uninformed and dumbed down. Type in Majestic 12 in google and see what you come up with as to what has been kept from us.
For more information of what our government has been capable of in harming its citizens, go to Google and type in MKUltra. Or just look at the list of human guinea pig experiments conducted on U.S. citizens without their knowledge or approval at: http://www.wanttoknow.info/humanguineapigs It's time now for this information to become widespread, but the government will do all it can to keep that from happening -- by ridicule and disinformation pieces put out on mainstream news and in the Internet.
And so it goes.... My own feeling is that the world will go on as it has, with deception and lies and greed and power having the upper hand in the leadership for now--with all the consequences that may bring upon us. For us (we, the people) the best thing we can do is to grow spiritually -- to try to understand what life is really about and who/what we really are. Maybe all this worldly dream and its dark appearance is to wake us up to our true nature. We are not just physical bodies -- we are spiritual beings appearing in physical form for a short earth life. When the bodies die, we don't die. That is a good start for anyone to learn, because fear of death is the strongest fear, keeping us imprisoned in our own minds and confining us to such a small existence belief. Fear is what keeps us under control of the elite "leaders" of our time. The truth is we are so much more than separate individuals with short life spans, but most of us don't realize our true nature and potential. Unless we become curious and start to investigate what quantum physicists and spiritual sages tell us, we will remain frightened and small, never realizing our real identity--which is eternal and deathless.
It's best not to be fooled by the appearance of the world, which is created by our own thoughts, the same as our night-time dream world. When you awake from a night-time dream, no matter how frightening it might have been -- or how wonderful -- you realize it was just a dream. The wise spiritual sages tell us this life is exactly the same. It is just a dream...a long dream, one we are meant to awaken from at some point, simply by hearing this truth about it. Does this ring within you as truth? If it does, you are on your way to being free of fear. It helps that quantum physicists are discovering the same thing and they are marveling that ancient sages and non-dual spiritual teachings have been telling this truth about our existence for centuries. To be "in the world but not of it" is the thrust of their message.
If you are interested in knowing more about the scientific and spiritual teachings that can take fear away and bring peace of mind even during these days of dire events on the planet, there are many good books and videos you can access online about quantum mechanics and non-duality. You may have noticed by now in life that everyone is seeking happiness in everything they do -- but happiness, real happiness, continues to elude everyone. The rich try to get it by becoming richer, the powerful try to get it by becoming more powerful, and the "little people" try to get it by buying a new car or trying to find the perfect partner. Even if the seekers get exactly what they want, it is never enough, and it doesn't last. So, on and on they go, looking for the next "high" -- Once you notice this going on around you in the world and in yourself, that is the beginning of the spiritual search.
Have you ever noticed that even the little song we sang as kids is telling the truth, but we never noticed? "Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream, Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream" (~.~)
Monday, February 17, 2014
Chris Hedges: Our Sinister Dual State
EXCERPT from article below: Totalitarian states always invert the moral order. It is the wicked who rule. It is the just who are damned.
Snowden, we are told, could have reformed from the inside. He could have gone to his superiors or Congress or the courts. But Snowden had numerous examples—including the persecution of the whistle-blower Thomas Drake, who originally tried to go through so-called proper channels—to remind him that working within the system is fatal. He had watched as senior officials including Barack Obama lied to the public about internal surveillance. He knew that the president was dishonest when he assured Americans that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret and hears only from the government, is "transparent." He knew that the president's statement that Congress was "overseeing the entire program" was false. He knew that everything Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the press, the Congress and the public about the surveillance of Americans was a lie. And he knew that if this information was to be made available to the public he would have to do so through a few journalists whose integrity he could trust.
Column: Chris Hedges on Criminal Goverment
"Our Sinister Dual State" -- Edward Snowden's leaks expose a duality in which a government that carries out crimes under our Constitution lies beyond the reach of the law and citizens are rendered legally helpless. We must use his disclosures to purge from power those who have eviscerated our civil liberties.
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Friday, February 14, 2014
Please, PLEASE, PLEASE Watch this video. THANK YOU.
As one reader comments, and I wholly agree with him:
People are trying to understand why this insanity is taking place. There is not a single institution that has not been affected. Whether it be the pharmaceutical, medical, governmental, educational, religious, etc., all are being manipulated and controlled to the detriment of our physical existence. I personally feel this is a wake-up call for people to take back their power for themselves and stop giving it away to external organizations, whether they are governmental or religious belief systems. We are evolving from being merely a physical body with a mind (ego) into a spiritual being only by realizing who we are and what our full potential is. Together we can bring an end to this madness. This is not an accidental event and, as Dane points out in the video, we need to organize at a grassroots level. (By Paul Maupin)
I can understand the position that people are taking, trying to understand why this insanity is taking place. There is not a single institution that has not been affected, whether it be the pharmaceutical, medical, governmental, educational, religious etc., all are being manipulated and controlled to the detriment of our physical existence. I personally feel this is a wake-up call for people to take back their power for themselves and stop giving it away to external organizations, whether they are governmental or religious belief systems. We are evolving from being merely a physical body with a mind ( ego) into a spiritual being only by realizing who we are and what our full potential is. Together we can bring an end to this madness. This is not an accidental event and as Dane pointed out in the video, we need to organize at the grass roots level.
- See more at: http://www.zengardner.com/censored-dane-wigington-geoengineering-interview-pulled-from-youtube/#sthash.cLd7b3zv.dpufI can understand the position that people are taking, trying to understand why this insanity is taking place. There is not a single institution that has not been affected, whether it be the pharmaceutical, medical, governmental, educational, religious etc., all are being manipulated and controlled to the detriment of our physical existence. I personally feel this is a wake-up call for people to take back their power for themselves and stop giving it away to external organizations, whether they are governmental or religious belief systems. We are evolving from being merely a physical body with a mind ( ego) into a spiritual being only by realizing who we are and what our full potential is. Together we can bring an end to this madness. This is not an accidental event and as Dane pointed out in the video, we need to organize at the grass roots level.
- See more at: http://www.zengardner.com/censored-dane-wigington-geoengineering-interview-pulled-from-youtube/#sthash.cLd7b3zv.dpufDane Wigington is, most likely, the
Here are crib notes from this speech:
In this video, Dane Wigington gives
The debate over whether geoengineering
Our skies today are simply not normal.
To be clear, what we are seeing is not
Our atmosphere is nothing but a massive
http://GeoEngineeringWatch.org
Dane reports, among other things, on:
* Geoengineering related climate disruptions,
* Ozone depletion
* Methane release
* Drastic reduction in arctic sea ice
* Global oxygen content reductions
* Oceans on the brink of collapse
* Massive fish die offs
* 200 species becoming extinct every single day
* A drastic rise in Autism, Alzheimer's, and
* Crisis level forest reductions
* The sterilization of soils making it impossible
Dane Wigington presents hard data, which
Hillary Clinton gets a free pass from the press on women's issues
If it is a contest between a Clinton and a Bush again in 2016, I think I'll skip voting for President. Although Jeb Bush is worse than Hillary Clinton in my opinion, I would MUCH rather see Elizabeth Warren running for President than Hillary Clinton--a thousand times over. The Clintons and Bushes are two sides of the same coin. No matter which way we vote, the voting public always gets the same rotten old thing, over and over and over. Just look at how Obama has disappointed us. The Clintons are neck deep in all kinds of corruption, along with the Bushes. When you lift the rock that covers them both, all kinds of ugly roaches scatter.
Read all about the drug running coverup in Mena, Arkansas and make up your own mind. There is PLENTY about this online ( not just right wing malarkey) and here is just one such site, explaining some of the details:
http://etherzone.com/1998/reich3.html
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Will the real Chris Christie please stand up
Politics is such a dirty business. By the time someone rises to the national stage, they have already sold their soul to the devil many times over.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116601/chris-christies-rise-and-fall
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
REAL truth-telling Journalism coming soon -- from eBay founder!
Edward Snowden, God bless him, has opened the door to a journalism that is not afraid of power and will challenge it with truthful reporting about what is really going on behind government and corporate closed doors (isn't that what the fourth estate was meant to do in the beginning??)!!!! Finally, a new world and consciousness is dawning, where truth actually matters and where protection of the rights of the people is at the top of the list. Chris Hedges, Seymour Hersh, Bill Moyers, Thom Hartmann, please take note! You are no longer standing alone and unprotected. We can only hope that the fanatical fake story tellers at FOX and the like (Rupert Murdoch, Koch brothers) will now at last have some major challengers armed with facts, figures, and financial backing for real, actual, revelatory truth in reporting. Imagine THAT!
EXCERPT from link below: ...the driving force is what Omidyar called his "rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world," a concern fueled by the recent news swirling around Snowden and the NSA. ..."By 'support' Omidyar means many things. The first and most important is really good editors...Also included: strong back-end technology. Powerful publishing tools. Research assistance. And of course a strong legal team, because the kind of journalism [the new venture] intends to practice is the kind that is capable of challenging some of the most powerful people in the world."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57607842-38/spooked-by-nsa-ebay-founder-plans-hard-hitting-news-site/
Take a look at this new site that gives us hope: https://firstlook.org/#/home
Spooked by NSA, eBay founder plans hard-hitting news site
Billionaire Pierre Omidyar is worried that the free press won't be so free after mass surveillance and aggressive policies toward whistle-blowers get through with it. He's decided to take action.
Alarmed at the potential threat to a free press posed by aggressive attitudes toward leakers and by the National Security Agency's seemingly boundless spying powers, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is set to pour at least $250 million into a new kind of journalism outfit.
"I have always been of the opinion that the right kind of journalism is a critical part of our democracy," Omidyar is quoted as saying in a PressThink blog item posted Wednesday by media critic and former NYU journalism chair Jay Rosen.
The eBay founder, who with projects like community news site Civil Beat has previously moved into journalistic territory, has tapped Glenn Greenwald to help build a team of "independent journalists with expertise, and a voice, and a following" who can practice the art of deep-dive investigative reporting.
Greenwald, along with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, is one of the keepers of the keys to the cache of documents purloined by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Greenwald's reports based on those files touched off the current debate about the NSA's massive surveillance apparatus and seemingly unrestricted spying practices.
Greenwald called the new venture a "once-in-a-career journalistic opportunity" yesterday, after news of his departure from the UK's Guardian newspaper had leaked, and before Omidyar's involvement had been revealed.
Rosen, who says Omidyar consulted with him about the yet-to-be-named project, reports that it will resemble what he's previously called "the personal franchise model" in news. "You start with individual journalists who have their own reputations, deep subject matter expertise, clear points of view, an independent and outsider spirit, a dedicated online following, and their own way of working," Rosen writes. "The idea is to attract these people...or find young journalists capable of working in this way, and then support them well."
Omidyar told Rosen that the idea for the venture gathered steam after he spoke with Greenwald and learned that he and Poitras, along with The Nation's Jeremy Scahill, had themselves been thinking of launching some sort of independent journalism enterprise.
A recent profile of Poitras in The New York Times Magazine captures the independent spirit embodied by her and Greenwald:
Poitras and Greenwald are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting looks like in 2013. They do not work in a newsroom, and they personally want to be in control of what gets published and when. When The Guardian didn't move as quickly as they wanted with the first article on Verizon [and the NSA's collection of Americans' phone-call data], Greenwald discussed taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another publication. He also considered creating a Web site on which they would publish everything, which he planned to call NSADisclosures. In the end, The Guardian moved ahead with their articles. But Poitras and Greenwald have created their own publishing network as well, placing articles with other outlets in Germany and Brazil and planning more for the future. They have not shared the full set of documents with anyone...
Unlike many reporters at major news outlets, they do not attempt to maintain a facade of political indifference. Greenwald has been outspoken for years; on Twitter, he recently replied to one critic by writing: "You are a complete idiot. You know that, right?"
Omidyar, whose net worth has been estimated at $8.5 billion, told Rosen that his time with eBay and in the tech world would be put into play with the new venture: "Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement," Omidyar said, mentioning Netflix and adding that the project will serve users in a personalized way. It'll also be a for-profit company, not a charity, though Rosen didn't speak of a money-making strategy.
"It brings together some of my interests in civic engagement and building conversations and of course technology, but in a very creative way," Omidyar told Rosen.
Omidyar isn't the only tech heavyweight set to make a mark on the world of news. The $250 million that he's ready to put toward his new venture is the money he'd earmarked to purchase The Washington Post -- which, of course, was bought instead by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
Omidyar told Rosen that he wants the new venture to bring hard-hitting journalism to a general readership. Toward that end it will also feature sports, entertainment, and tech reporting, and it will find, as Rosen puts it, "the proper midpoint between voicey blogging and traditional journalism, in which the best of both are combined."
But the driving force is what Omidyar called his "rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world," a concern fueled by the recent news swirling around Snowden and the NSA.
A recent study by a former executive editor at the Post, which examined the Obama administration's aggressive policies toward leakers such as Snowden, as well as the administration's dealings with the press, found that sources for stories involving national security are far less likely to talk to reporters now that mass spying by the NSA has come to light.
And reporters too are feeling the heat. Indeed, as outlined in the Times profile, Poitras herself, who'll be working on video for the Omidyar venture, has been burdened by airport questionings and the like many times. And Greenwald recently saw his partner, David Miranda, detained at a UK airport for nine hours.
Omidyar, with his new venture's support of independently minded journalists, hopes to provide a counterbalance. And he's apparently aware of what that might entail. As Rosen writes:
"By 'support' Omidyar means many things. The first and most important is really good editors...Also included: strong back-end technology. Powerful publishing tools. Research assistance. And of course a strong legal team, because the kind of journalism [the new venture] intends to practice is the kind that is capable of challenging some of the most powerful people in the world."
Saturday, February 08, 2014
Established FACTS about Woody Allen's abuse of Dylan Farrow
So good to know it's all an illusion (~.~)
And I mean that sincerely! This paper on quantum mechanics puts things into an ultimately perfect perspective. (~.~)
http://www.integralscience.org/materialism/materialism.html
EXCERPT: Although it might be easy for a modern Westerner, raised in a materialistic culture, to dismiss the radical claims of the mystics, it is not so easy to dismiss the most eminent of our physicists, who make claims remarkably similar to those of the mystics. Consider, for example, the words of Werner Heisenberg, the inventor of quantum mechanics:The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct "actuality" of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.4The Buddha, speaking about the true nature of reality, makes the following very similar claim:There is that which does not belong to materialism and which is not reached by the knowledge of philosophers who...fail to see that, fundamentally, there is no reality in external objects.5If we dismiss the Buddha and other mystics, shall we also dismiss Heisenberg and Bohr? These eminent physicists won Nobel prizes for their fundamental contributions to quantum theory. Perhaps no other physicists have thought more deeply about the nature of quantum physics than Heisenberg and Bohr. And they are talking about quantum mechanics, the most precise and far-reaching physical theory ever devised. It explains how the sun shines, how molecules bond together, how iron is magnetized, and why various materials are solid, liquid, or gas. It is quantum mechanics that gives us computer chips, lasers, and atomic energy. So if we dismiss quantum mechanics, we throw out the cornerstone of modern physics and the theory that provides the essential foundation for all these scientific marvels. It seems that we had better think twice before dismissing what Bohr and Heisenberg have to say about the nature of the physical world.Put simply, they say that the objective world is an illusion. The biggest problem with this claim is that our experience, for the most part, is quite compatible with the idea that there really is an independently existing objective world. There seems to be no contradiction at all between our normal day-to-day experience and our assumption that the objects we encounter during the day are objectively real. So the problem is, if this idea of an objective world is wrong, then why does it seem so right? To shed some light on this problem and its solution, let me digress for a moment with the following thought experiment.
Imagine going back in a time machine 3000 years and encountering some people who are convinced that the world is flat.... (read rest of this fascinating article at):
http://www.integralscience.org/materialism/materialism.html
MOST IMPORTANT! Perfect Sense about 9/11 and who really did it!!!
http://www.forbiddenknowledgetv.com/videos/the-3rd-rail-totally-forbidden/bbc-correspondent-says-mossad-did-911-and-iran-doesnt-want-nukes.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OE3Adu4l0g
These two audio/videos, each only a little over 10 minutes long, should be heard/viewed by everyone on the planet. They bring together, in perfect sense, all the dangling strings of questions and doubts re. the attacks/take-down of the World Trade Towers and the attack on the Pentagon, telling exactly who did it -- and why.
The truth in these 2 videos rings clearly. It all makes sense now. Please watch and listen to the interview of the BBC correspondent that was made in 2010 and, from the viewpoint of the 4 years that have passed since then, feel the truth of the correspondent's words hitting home, lighting up the light bulb in your head. In hearing it, I felt like shouting out, "OF COURSE! IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!" All the evil elements that were brought together on 9/11/01 to accomplish the darkest of deeds are now exposed. But will people believe it? I certainly do.
Remember World Trade Center Building 7? Remember how it was taken down in its own footprint later in the day of 9/11, when there was absolutely no danger of it collapsing, since it had not been badly damaged in any way? Remember how Larry Silverstein, lease-holder of the entire WTC, made multi-billions in insurance money on all the WTC buildings, having "luckily" taken out that insurance only a few weeks before 9/11? And how he was overheard saying, "Pull it" a while before WTC #7 thundered to the ground, collapsing in its own footprint at 5:15 p.m. on 9/11? And how, just by a providential "piece of good luck" he was not at the WTC that particular day, eating breakfast and having meetings at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of WTC, where he usually spent every day at that time? Nor were his children, who worked in the WTC, at work that day (just by providence also, I guess)? Wow, what a lucky family!---OR, more probably, as these 2 video links reveal, Silverstein knew all the WTC buildings were going to be "pulled" that day and made sure he and his family were out of harm's way.
The second link tells all about Larry Silverstein and his connection to 9/11 (not mentioning his possible--now suspiciously "probable" to me--connection to Mossad). Watch his interview with Charley Rose and see for yourself what your "truth quotient" tells you about his answers to Charley's questions.
If you, like me, want truth rather than tripe (and can recognize tripe when you hear it), you will want to click on these links. I think you may be relieved to finally recognize 9/11 truth when you hear it.
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