“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
What a shame there are so many closed minds about this subject, as evidenced by some of the British public who sent hate mail to the BBC regarding this documentary. What can those people possibly be afraid of? As one book title on my library shelf says, "Talking About Death Won't Kill You." It's hard to know why some don't want to grow in understanding and would rather denounce good-hearted people who are simply trying to share with others their own uplifting experiences. For those who are open to learn, this film is filled with important information from near-death experiencers who are now convinced life continues on after so-called "death." The Day I Died: NDE
From Forbidden Knowledge site: This documentary features in-depth
What to Do in an Emergency: Cardio Cerebral Resuscitation
When a person's heart suddenly stops beating--called cardiac arrest--death can occur very quickly without help right away. A person's best chance to survive cardiac arrest begins at the moment the heart stops beating with a person on the spot who can immediately begin Cardio Cerebral Resuscitation (CCR).
What is CCR?
CCR, or Cardio Cerebral Resuscitation, is similar to CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation), in that it involves chest compressions to keep the heart beating. It is different from CPR because there is no mouth-to-mouth breathing to inflate the victim's lungs. Studies have shown that victims of cardiac arrest have better rates of survival with chest compressions alone. CCR does a better job than CPR of keeping blood and oxygen flowing to the brain and other vital organs.
A bystander assisting a cardiac arrest victim should first begin chest compressions and continue for at least 2 minutes, then call 911. If someone else is available to help, have them call 911 and look for an automatic external defibrillator (AED). AEDs are now present in many public places. To perform chest compressions, lock your hands together one on top of the other, put the heel of the lower hand in the center of the victim's chest, and push hard and fast, 100 times per minute. If you have access to an AED, attach it to the victim and follow the commands.
The chest has to be depressed about two inches, so don't worry about pressing too hard. Even if you break a rib, you'll still be doing more good than harm. Doing compressions to the beat of the song "Staying Alive" will give you close to the correct number of compressions per minute.
Don't stop chest compressions unless you have to use a defibrillator or someone arrives to relieve you. If you do stop, make it as brief as possible.
What if I'm Having Chest Pain?
If you think you are having a heart attack, don't let more than five minutes pass before calling 911. To be most effective, life-saving treatments must be given within one hour after symptoms begin. Do not drive yourself to the ER. Emergency medical personnel can start treating you immediately, even before you get to the hospital. According to a recent study in the American Journal of Cardiology, heart attack patients had a 16 percent greater risk of impaired heart function for every hour they delayed getting to the hospital.
Signs of a heart attack include:
Discomfort or pain in the center of the chest that lasts for several minutes or comes and goes.
Pain or discomfort in the jaw, arms, back, stomach, or neck.
Some people-especially women-may experience other symptoms, such as shortness of breath, lightheadedness, nausea, vomiting, or a cold sweat.
I well remember the Dark Alliance series written by Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News. It was an eye-opener to me about the great lengths our government will go to achieve their dirty ends. I saved the articles because I was impressed that the series was so well written and documented--it screamed of truth. At first it was hailed as a journalistic coup. But then came the fallout -- the CIA needing to cover up their dirty deeds, using their power against Gary Webb and the truth he was revealing about those dirty deeds to the world. No need to guess who won. The CIA enlisted the mainstream media to carry their water and damn Webb and the articles. Webb was drummed out of the journalistic corps, humiliated and disgraced.
Dishonored and turned against by fellow journalists and unable to find work in his profession, Webb finally killed himself. A new movie "Kill the Messenger" is coming out October 10, telling the story of Gary Webb and his excoriating betrayal by the major media, orchestrated by the CIA to cover up the truth. As the author of the following article asks, Now, with the imminent release of a major Hollywood movie about Webb’s ordeal, the next question is whether the major newspapers will finally admit their longstanding complicity in the Contra-cocaine cover-up or whether they will simply join the CIA’s press office in another counterattack. What's your best guess? I know what mine is.
The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up
Exclusive: With Hollywood set to release a movie about the Contra-cocaine scandal and the destruction of journalist Gary Webb, an internal CIA report has surfaced showing how the spy agency manipulated the mainstream media’s coverage to disparage Webb and contain the scandal.
By Robert Parry
In 1996 – as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it – the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media’s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report.
Entitled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the six-page report describes the CIA’s damage control after Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.
Journalist Gary Webb holding a copy of his Contra-cocaine article in the San Jose Mercury-News.
Although the CIA’s inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administration’s cover-up, the mainstream media’s counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.
In fall 1998, when the CIA inspector general’s extraordinary findings were released, the major U.S. news media largely ignored them, leaving Webb a “disgraced” journalist who – unable to find a decent-paying job in his profession – committed suicide in 2004, a dark tale that will be revisited in a new movie, “Kill the Messenger,” starring Jeremy Renner and scheduled to reach theaters on Oct. 10.
The “Managing a Nightmare” report offers something of the CIA’s back story for how the spy agency’s PR team exploited relationships with mainstream journalists who then essentially did the CIA’s work for it, mounting a devastating counterattack against Webb that marginalized him and painted the Contra-cocaine trafficking story as some baseless conspiracy theory.
Crucial to that success, the report credits “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists and an effective response by the Director of Central Intelligence’s Public Affairs Staff [that] helped prevent this story from becoming an unmitigated disaster.
“This success has to be viewed in relative terms. In the world of public relations, as in war, avoiding a rout in the face of hostile multitudes can be considered a success. … By anyone’s definition, the emergence of this story posed a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency.” [As approved for release by the CIA last July 29, the report’s author was redacted as classified, however, Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept identified the writer as former Directorate of Intelligence staffer Nicholas Dujmovic.]
According to the CIA report, the public affairs staff convinced some journalists who followed up Webb’s exposé by calling the CIA that “this series represented no real news, in that similar charges were made in the 1980s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance. Reporters were encouraged to read the ‘Dark Alliance’ series closely and with a critical eye to what allegations could actually be backed with evidence. Early in the life of this story, one major news affiliate, after speaking with a CIA media spokesman, decided not to run the story.”
Of course, the CIA’s assertion that the Contra-cocaine charges had been disproved in the 1980s was false. In fact, after Brian Barger and I wrote the first article about the Contra-cocaine scandal for the Associated Press in December 1985, a Senate investigation headed by Sen. John Kerry confirmed that many of the Contra forces were linked to cocaine traffickers and that the Reagan administration had even contracted with drug-connected airlines to fly supplies to the Contras who were fighting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
However, in the late 1980s, the Reagan administration and the CIA had considerable success steering the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets away from the politically devastating reality that President Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras were tied up with cocaine traffickers. Kerry’s groundbreaking report – when issued in 1989 – was largely ignored or mocked by the mainstream media.
That earlier media response left the CIA’s PR office free to cite the established “group think” – rather than the truth — when beating back Webb’s resurfacing of the scandal in 1996.
A ‘Firestorm’ of Attacks
The initial attacks on Webb’s series came from the right-wing media, such as the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, but the CIA’s report identified the key turning point as coming when the Washington Post pummeled Webb in two influential articles.
The CIA’s PR experts quickly exploited that opening. The CIA’s internal report said: “Public Affairs made sure that reporters and news directors calling for information – as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media – received copies of these more balanced stories. Because of the Post’s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury-News.”
The CIA’s report then noted the happy news that Webb’s editors at the Mercury-News began scurrying for cover, “conceding the paper might have done some things differently.” The retreat soon became a rout with some mainstream journalists essentially begging the CIA for forgiveness for ever doubting its innocence.
“One reporter of a major regional newspaper told [CIA] Public Affairs that, because it had reprinted the Mercury-News stories in their entirety, his paper now had ‘egg on its face,’ in light of what other newspapers were saying,” the CIA’s report noted, as its PR team kept track of the successful counterattack.
“By the end of September [1996], the number of observed stories in the print media that indicated skepticism of the Mercury-News series surpassed that of the negative coverage, which had already peaked,” the report said. “The observed number of skeptical treatments of the alleged CIA connection grew until it more than tripled the coverage that gave credibility to that connection. The growth in balanced reporting was largely due to the criticisms of the San Jose Mercury-News by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and especially The Los Angeles Times.”
The overall tone of the CIA’s internal assessment is one of almost amazement at how its PR team could, with a deft touch, help convince mainstream U.S. journalists to trash a fellow reporter on a story that put the CIA in a negative light.
“What CIA media spokesmen can do, as this case demonstrates, is to work with journalists who are already disposed toward writing a balanced story,” the report said. “What gives this limited influence a ‘multiplier effect’ is something that surprised me about the media: that the journalistic profession has the will and the ability to hold its own members to certain standards.”
The report then praises the neoconservative American Journalism Review for largely sealing Webb’s fate with a harsh critique entitled “The Web That Gary Spun,” with AJR’s editor adding that the Mercury-News “deserved all the heat leveled at it for ‘Dark Alliance.’”
The report also cites with some pleasure the judgment of the Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz who reacted to Webb’s observation that the war was a business to some Contra leaders with the snide comment: “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail.”
Neither Kurtz nor the CIA writer apparently was aware of the disclosure — among Iran-Contra documents — of a March 17, 1986 message about the Contra leadership from White House aide Oliver North’s emissary to the Contras, Robert Owen, who complained to North: “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement . . . really care about the boys in the field. … THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Emphasis in original.]
Misguided Group Think
Yet, faced with this mainstream “group think” – as misguided as it was – Webb’s Mercury-News editors surrendered to the pressure, apologizing for the series, shutting down the newspaper’s continuing investigation into the Contra-cocaine scandal and forcing Webb to resign in disgrace.
But Webb’s painful experience provided an important gift to American history, at least for those who aren’t enamored of superficial “conventional wisdom.” CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz ultimately produced a fairly honest and comprehensive report that not only confirmed many of the longstanding allegations about Contra-cocaine trafficking but revealed that the CIA and the Reagan administration knew much more about the criminal activity than any of us outsiders did.
Hitz completed his investigation in mid-1998 and the second volume of his two-volume investigation was published on Oct. 8, 1998. In the report, Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s.
According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its Contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The earliest Contra force, called the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen “to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981 draft of a CIA field report.
According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981. ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermúdez and other early Contras who would later direct the major Contra army, the CIA-organized FDN. Throughout the war, Bermúdez remained the top Contra military commander.
The CIA corroborated the allegations about ADREN’s cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Bermúdez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States that went ahead nonetheless. The truth about Bermúdez’s supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear.
According to Hitz’s Volume One, Bermúdez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler and a key figure in Webb’s series, to raise money and buy supplies for the Contras. Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Blandón, who told Hitz’s investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermúdez in 1982. At the time, Meneses’s criminal activities were well-known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But Bermúdez told these cocaine smugglers that “the ends justify the means” in raising money for the Contras.
After the Bermúdez meeting, Contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandón get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Blandón and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.
There were other indications of Bermúdez’s drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Bermúdez of participation in narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz’s report. After the Contra war ended, Bermúdez returned to Managua, Nicaragua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved. [For more details on Hitz’s report and the Contra-cocaine scandal, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
Shrinking Fig Leaf
By the time that Hitz’s Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the Contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.
Besides tracing the evidence of Contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long Contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the Contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. . . . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the Contras hid evidence of Contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analysts.
Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of Contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and to major news organizations — serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his “Dark Alliance” series in 1996.
Although Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it went almost unnoticed by major U.S. news outlets. By fall 1998, the U.S. mainstream media was obsessed with President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. So, few readers of major U.S. newspapers saw much about the CIA’s inspector general admitting that America’s premier spy agency had collaborated with and protected cocaine traffickers.
On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz’s Volume Two was posted on the CIA’s Web site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the Contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times, which had assigned a huge team of 17 reporters to tear down Webb’s work, never published a story on the release of Hitz’s Volume Two.
In 2000, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee grudgingly acknowledged that the stories about Reagan’s CIA protecting Contra drug traffickers were true. The committee released a report citing classified testimony from CIA Inspector General Britt Snider (Hitz’s successor) admitting that the spy agency had turned a blind eye to evidence of Contra-drug smuggling and generally treated drug smuggling through Central America as a low priority.
“In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,” Snider said, adding that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in “a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”
The House committee still downplayed the significance of the Contra-cocaine scandal, but the panel acknowledged, deep inside its report, that in some cases, “CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.”
Like the release of Hitz’s report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000 — except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com.
Killing the Messenger
Because of this abuse of power by the Big Three newspapers — choosing to conceal their own journalistic negligence on the Contra-cocaine scandal and to protect the Reagan administration’s image — Webb’s reputation was never rehabilitated.
After his original “Dark Alliance” series was published in 1996, Webb had been inundated with attractive book offers from major publishing houses, but once the vilification began, the interest evaporated. Webb’s agent contacted an independent publishing house, Seven Stories Press, which had a reputation for publishing books that had been censored, and it took on the project.
After Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion was published in 1998, I joined Webb in a few speaking appearances on the West Coast, including one packed book talk at the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, California. For a time, Webb was treated as a celebrity on the American Left, but that gradually faded.
In our interactions during these joint appearances, I found Webb to be a regular guy who seemed to be holding up fairly well under the terrible pressure. He had landed an investigative job with a California state legislative committee. He also felt some measure of vindication when CIA Inspector General Hitz’s reports came out.
However, Webb never could overcome the pain caused by his betrayal at the hands of his journalistic colleagues, his peers. In the years that followed, Webb was unable to find decent-paying work in his profession — the conventional wisdom remained that he had somehow been exposed as a journalistic fraud. His state job ended; his marriage fell apart; he struggled to pay bills; and he was faced with a forced move out of a just-sold house near Sacramento, California, and in with his mother.
On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers — who were coming the next morning — to instead call 911. Webb then took out his father’s pistol and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.
Even with Webb’s death, the big newspapers that had played key roles in his destruction couldn’t bring themselves to show Webb any mercy. After Webb’s body was found, I received a call from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who knew that I was one of Webb’s few journalistic colleagues who had defended him and his work.
I told the reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I added that the Los Angeles Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had not published a single word on the contents of Hitz’s final report, which had largely vindicated Webb.
To my disappointment but not my surprise, I was correct. The Los Angeles Times ran a mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of either my defense of Webb or the CIA’s admissions in 1998. The obituary – more fitting for a deceased mob boss than a fellow journalist – was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.
In effect, Webb’s suicide enabled senior editors at the Big Three newspapers to breathe a little easier — one of the few people who understood the ugly story of the Reagan administration’s cover-up of the Contra-cocaine scandal and the U.S. media’s complicity was now silenced.
No Accountability
To this day, none of the journalists or media critics who participated in the destruction of Gary Webb has paid a price for their actions. None has faced the sort of humiliation that Webb had to endure. None had to experience that special pain of standing up for what is best in the profession of journalism — taking on a difficult story that seeks to hold powerful people accountable for serious crimes — and then being vilified by your own colleagues, the people that you expected to understand and appreciate what you had done.
In May 2013, one of the Los Angeles Times reporters who had joined in the orchestrated destruction of Webb’s career acknowledged that the newspaper’s assault was a “tawdry exercise” amounting to “overkill,” which later contributed to Webb’s suicide. This limited apology by former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesse Katz was made during a radio interview and came as filming was about to start on “Kill the Messenger,” based on a book by the same name by Nick Schou.
On KPCC-FM 89.3′s AirTalk With Larry Mantle, Katz was pressed by callers to address his role in the destruction of Webb. Katz offered what could be viewed as a limited apology.
“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope,” Katz said. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
Katz added, “We really didn’t do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of a tawdry exercise. … And it ruined that reporter’s career.”
Now, with the imminent release of a major Hollywood movie about Webb’s ordeal, the next question is whether the major newspapers will finally admit their longstanding complicity in the Contra-cocaine cover-up or whether they will simply join the CIA’s press office in another counterattack.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
3 minute video -- important to view, especially for those who live in the Tea Party Bubble -- but they will probably not watch it--and if they do, they won't believe it. It's a sad tragedy to have so many ignorant of what is happening on our planet. The rest of us, who are informed, have to keep moving toward solutions, dragging the right wing behind us kicking and screaming all the way. Sigh.
EXCERPT: Since 2012, when worshipers began showing up for daily prayers, overall year-to-date crime has dropped by 82 percent. Robbery reports went from 14 to three, aggravated assaults from five to zero, burglaries from eight to four, narcotics from three to none, and prostitution from three to none. "I can't say what to attribute it to, but these are the numbers," a police statistician
As we prepared to open 60 Minutes' 47th year, we got to thinking about the topics and people who preoccupied us during that first season, in 1968.
It was an election year and a time of turmoil for a nation tired of war abroad and repelled by violence at home. No figure dominated that autumn like candidate Richard Milhous Nixon. He appeared on 60 Minutes twice that fall, and told Mike Wallace style and charisma aren't what make a good president.
Richard Nixon: Some public men are destined to be loved and other public men are destined to be disliked, but the most important thing about a public man is not whether he's loved or disliked, but whether he's respected. And I hope to restore respect to the presidency.
Nixon went on to win the presidency that November, only to leave it in disgrace six years later.
Domestic abuse is finally making headlines in the sports world and bringing attention to this long overlooked criminal treatment of women. For all the years preceding, millions of women have suffered and endured violent physical and emotional abuse from the husbands who promised to love and cherish them at their weddings, but soon forgot those vows. That kind of abuse was given a wink and a nod in the past and, unfortunately, is still often being looked at that way in our patriarchal society.
But here's one for the books: A federal judge in Alabama assaulted his wife and he faces no jail time for it. He's even set to return to the bench! I am outraged about this, and I hope you will be, too! A domestic abuser should have no place deciding justice for others. That's why I signed a petition demanding his resignation. Will you join me? http://act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/Fuller/ Thanks! Eileen
She is a champion for the middle class -- the only champion for us that I see in the entire political field. Watch this video -- and when it ends, stay tuned for another video following it that gives a report on an event that was entirely neglected by the mainstream media yesterday: the huge march in NYC demanding action on climate change--the most important topic EVER needing to be addressed in the world today--and yet...it is completely ignored by the leaders of this greed-driven society.(sob). Our planet's ecological system is dying -- and taking us with it. Did you ever hear the story of the rich man on the sinking ship who refused to throw away his bags of gold coins? He kept them with him--and drowned with them when he could have saved his life by letting them go. Sigh.We are that man.
This is a powerfully-presented and well-documented and convincing talk about geoengineering and numerous cataclysmic ramifications that will leave you bolted to the screen.
=== Statement by Geoengineering Expert, Dane Wigington:
"The western US is under an all-out climate engineering assault, California most of all.
"The Weather Makers can shut the hydrological cycle off from the once "golden state" for as long as they wish.
"Satellite images and NOAA maps shown in this presentation are shocking and revealing to say the least. Whatever one wishes to consider as the agenda of those in power, one conclusion is certain, the drought in California is a direct result of the ongoing climate engineering insanity. Weather warfare is now being waged on the American population."
Plus, spraying something into the air...yikes. Just what we don't need--more spraying besides chemtrails into the air we breathe, and this time God knows what it was...
While Bay Area residents saw the strange light around 6 a.m. Friday, the phenomenon was also reported in Oregon and Nevada. ... the morning skies, there has still been no explanation, CBS San Francisco reported. ... there are several reports of a large bright object falling through the sky," Bing Quock of ...
MYSTERIOUS LIGHT SEEN BY THOUSANDS IN SF BAY AREA, OREGON AND NEVADA
Americans in the West are still buzzing about a mysterious light that flashed across the sky early Friday, with no confirmed explanation yet for the phenomenon. The light was seen in the early morning hours in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as in Oregon and Nevada.
“I am used to seeing planes early in the morning with lights, but this was different,” one witness told Claycord.com. “This had something coming out of it, it wasn’t just the light. I could see it spraying something.”
Another witness echoed the comment about the object emitting something: “This morning when I was leaving for work, before I got into my car I noticed that there was some type of object in the air with a type of floodlight on, and white fog/smoke was billowing out of it – as if something was being sprayed into the air. I tried to take a photo with my iPhone but it didn’t come out. This was at 5:58am – I live in Kirkwood – and the object appeared to be just over the area of Clayton Valley Shopping Center at Clayton/Kirker Pass … could this be fogging for mosquitoes? I was a bit concerned because the object was clearly spraying some substance into the air … with the floodlight on. Then the light went off, and I couldn’t see or hear the sounds from a plane or anything, it was very strange.”
“About 6 a.m. this morning, I came out, I was walking down the driveway and I looked up at the sky and saw this little orange ball – above the Redwood trees,” Formslag said. “All of a sudden these lights just came down from that little orange ball.”
The CBS affiliate spoke with Bing Quock of the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, who noted: “Looking at the website of the American Meteor Society, it looks like there are several reports of a large bright object falling through the sky. It’s rather unusual in that this one had a rather large tail following behind it.”
When asked if it’s related to last week’s solar storm, Quock said, “There’s probably no relation between the two.” “We don’t have confirmation as to what it is just yet,” Autumn King, a spokeswoman for the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
As one sane reader wisely commented: "Tickety tick tick....." But I can hear the outraged right-wing comments now: "Poor George Zimmerman. First he was accused of shooting Trayvon Martin and we know he was as innocent as the driven snow in that instance where the kid was asking for it--I mean, walking along so daringly, eating Skittles in Zimmerman's neighborhood!--what was poor George supposed to do? Then they said he threatened his wife and later his girlfriend, with violence, pointing a shotgun at them. How dare they accuse poor George? Just liars--all of them! And now some lying man says poor George was threatening to shoot him. Will this persecution of poor George Zimmerman never stop???!!!!!"Interesting how everyone drops the charges -- out of fear or payoff? Who knows? Of course, the right wing will say it's because Poor George is never at fault...it's always those other lying b-----ds who keep falsely accusing him.
Road-raging George Zimmerman faces no charges after threatening to shoot another driver
The man called 911 to report the threat Tuesday and identified Zimmerman by name, and he called the following day to say the notorious neighborhood watch volunteer was waiting for him at work.
The other man, whose name was not released, said he was worried for his safety but did not want to press charges, so police said Zimmerman was not arrested.
Lake Mary police said they confronted Zimmerman, who admitted to exchanging words with the other man.
The 30-year-old Zimmerman was acquitted of murder last July in the February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Zimmerman has since been charged in September 2013 in a domestic violence incident involving his estranged wife and her family, and then again in November in another domestic violence case involving his girlfriend.
She accused him of pointing a shotgun at her, but she later changed her story and asked for the charges to be dropped.
Police questioned him in July after officers spotted him in a truck parked after-hours outside a gun shop, where he claimed to work as an unpaid security guard.
The store manager denied Zimmerman worked there, but he was not charged in the incident.
Here is a simple way to ensure that the fruit and veggies you eat are as clean as possible:
* Mix a solution of any basic white vinegar with water in a ratio of 1 part vinegar to 3 parts water.
* Pour over your chosen fruit or veggies and allow them to sit for 15 minutes or so.
* Then rinse.
You will be left with clean produce with no lingering aroma of vinegar, and a bowl of dirty looking water showing all the gunk you have removed – the results may surprise you.
Note: Do not use this method on more fragile fruits such as berries as they can become damaged in the process and soak up too much vinegar through their more porous skins.
Known each other since they were little kids. Married 70 years -- just see them glow -- and listen to him tell how beautiful she is and how much he appreciates all she has done through the years. She talks about the commitment she made to him. They are a wonderful couple... If only all marriages could be like this one. Long may they live and enjoy each other's company!
We love our goddamn guns. Many of us love them more than our children, some of whom we are constantly allowing to be killed by guns. Want to see hysterical, bleating maniacs? Just talk about putting some slight restrictions on our ability to take weapons into daycare centers, etc. Instantly, the gun nuts begin foaming at the mouth, screaming about the Second Amendment and spouting made-up statistics about all the lives saved by pistol-toting heroes.
Never mind that all this is nonsense. Those who worship their weapons always have an answer. Yes, some of them actually think Thomas Jefferson and George Washington meant for them to have an AK-47 by their bedside. No wonder guns and ammunition are the best thing their gunpowder-addled brains can imagine. Howell resident Martin Edward Zale seems to have taken his gun everywhere. He also seems to have had a nasty temper. According to various witnesses, the 69-year-old Zale was driving his pickup erratically on Sept. 2 near Howell, where he lived.
For whatever reason, his driving evidently aggressively menaced 43-year-old Derek Flemming, who was on his way with his wife, Amy, in their Ford Escape to pick up their two children from their first day of school. Witnesses said Zale tailgated them, nearly hit them, and finally passed them on the right. Finally, both cars had to stop for a light. According to an attorney for the Flemming family, Derek got out of his car, walked up to Zale's truck, and asked, perhaps in honest and angry bewilderment, what the guy's problem was. Martin Edward Zale then shot him in the face, killing him instantly. Within a flash, two lives were essentially destroyed and at least three scarred forever. Flemming, who had his own landscaping business, was dead. Zale, who has now been charged with open murder, may well, if convicted, rot in prison for years. Quite possibly, the rest of his life.
Amy Flemming is devastated, and friends say their 5-year-old and 7-year-old keep asking for their daddy. All because the specimen who shot him had his personal murder cannon in the truck with him.
That's the bad news. The good news is that our Second Amendment rights were validated once again! That is, the amendment as interpreted by the current U.S. Supreme Court. In two recent cases (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008; and McDonald v. Chicago, 2010) the court ruled — by a single vote — that the Second Amendment means Americans have the right to keep a handgun in their homes for self-defense.
Ironically, most legal scholarship before this didn't think that's what the amendment meant. There was a time when the National Rifle Association desperately tried to avoid getting their beloved Second Amendment before the highest court. Why? Simple. Many, if not most legal scholars believed the Second Amendment had nothing to do with any mythical right to arm ourselves to the teeth.
"The Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a powerful dissent to the McDonald ruling. The weight of the historical evidence, indeed, indicates it was designed to allow states to form militias as needed, the forerunners of both the army and the national guard.
Don't believe that? Just read it: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
However, this no longer matters; if there's one thing that's certain, it's that the Constitution is our fundamental law, and it means what the U.S. Supreme Court says it means.
And for the time being, it means we have a right to a gun. But there's a little something many of us are overlooking. While the highest court did indeed say there's a right to keep and bear arms, it did not say we couldn't limit those rights.
On the contrary, the majority in McDonald went out of their way to say that we could still legally forbid convicted felons and the mentally ill to carry arms, and more.
"Laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and public buildings," or laws imposing conditions on how they are sold are perfectly legal.
In other words, we could do a lot more. It's by no means clear, at least as I write these words, that Michigan had to give the hothead Martin Zale a concealed carry license. What is clear is that the world, including the wretched Zale himself, would all be better off if he hadn't been allowed to have a gun in his truck.
Yet, thanks to the power and money possessed by the gun nut lobby, nobody tries to do anything anymore.
After all, the president and public outrage failed to get any sensible legislation passed, even after all those tiny children were blown away in Connecticut at Christmas time in 2012.
Yes, we love our guns more than our children. So now Derek Flemming's lovely wife is a widow, and his two children are fatherless, thanks to a hothead's moment of rage.
We'll all get to pay for this financially, by the way. Assume for a moment that Zale (who is, of course, legally innocent until proven guilty) gets convicted. Let's assume he spends seven years in the slam, which is how much time Jack Kevorkian did for killing a dying man who wanted to die. Know how much that will cost taxpayers? At least $252,000.
Let's see ... four ruined lives — five, if you count Zale's wife, reportedly a breast cancer survivor. A dead young father and a quarter of a million lost to the state.
Do we think our mythical worship of guns and our dubious interpretation of the Second Amendment is worth it?
Evidently so.
By the way, wouldn't you hate to live in one of those poor wretched other Western industrial countries that don't have our Second Amendment guarantee of personal weapons uber alles? Take Japan, say, which has a little less than half our population. According the United Nations statistics, in 2007, there were 9,146 gun homicides in the United States of America.
Not suicides, not accidental deaths — homicides.
Japan makes guns hard to get and harder to keep in your home. Nevertheless, they had homicides by gun too. Know how many in that whole year?
I am thinking that some of these kids who are hit so hard by the enterovirus have had their systems weakened by many years' inhalation of barium/aluminum/strontium particles from chemtrails. Some immune systems can adapt better than others. The kids who are having to be hospitalized and put in intensive care may have weakened immune systems. One thing is certain: breathing in heavy metals added to our air can NOT be a good thing--for any of us! We have to become curious and ask ourselves why the asthma rate has skyrocketed in the last few years (since chemtrails appeared in our skies). The numbers of the curious among us must increase. We can't remain like zombies forever, allowing the governments of the world to do whatever they please, whenever they please, without the consent of the governed. Unless we are constantly vigilant in protecting our rights and the rights of our children to basics like clean air and clean water, we will have to pay a terrible price. It appears that price is being exacted now in the state of our health and the health of our children.
This article by Dr. Ilya Perlingueri was first published on the Global Research site in May 2010
For decades, we have known that heavy metals and chemicals can cause grave physical harm. Going back to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” we have known and been amply warned of the serious consequences of using or being exposed to these poisons in our daily activities. Thousands of these are well-documented carcinogens.
Building on Carson’s ground-breaking research, we also know that certain kinds of chemicals can and do disrupt human [and other animals’] entire immune system. Going back 30 years, researchers were investigating what became known as endocrine [hormone] disrupting chemicals and how they were affecting frogs [who sometimes had five legs or hermaphroditic characteristics], other aquatic animals, and mammals. These animals were the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. In another pioneering book, “Our Stolen Future,” authors Dr. Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers clearly demonstrate that 1 + 1 hormone-disrupting chemicals did not equal 2.
Rather, in a nightmare of mathematical proportions, these poisons acted synergistically; and 1+1 could equal up to 1,600 times the original dose. We are also exposed to more than 100,000 chemicals regularly. Most of them have never been tested for human safety. So, almost nothing has been done to reduce human exposure to a myriad of hazardous chemicals.
...Now, however, there is another far more insidious layer of toxicity that is not being addressed at all in any mainstream, corporate-controlled news, and it is affecting our very survival. It is, however, being addressed more and more by independent researchers who have supporting evidence to back up their Internet reports.
For more than a decade, first the United States and then Canada’s citizens have been subjected to a 24/7/365 day aerosol assault over our heads made of a toxic brew of poisonous heavy metals, chemicals, and other dangerous ingredients.None of this was reported by any mainstream media. The US Department of Defense [DOD] and military have been systematically blanketing all our skies with what are known as Chemtrails (also known as Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering).(2) These differ vastly from the usual plane contrails that evaporate rather quickly in the sky. Chemtrails do not dissipate. Rather, planes (fitted with special nozzles) release aerosols “lines” in the sky that do not evaporate. Multiple planes are deployed, flying parallel (or often “checkerboard” patterns) overhead; and soon the sky is blanketed with many grayish-white lines [miles and miles long, although this is changing]. At first, these lines are thin; but soon they expand and, in a short time, merge together. Our once-blue sky has vanished and has been replaced by a grayish-white toxic haze that blots out and greatly diminishes our usual sunshine.
Military and commercial planes are involved in more than 60 secret operations. Last year, when I flew across the country, I saw a United Airlines jet (flying below us at about 37,000 feet) spraying a black aerosol that went for miles and miles across the sky. This clandestine program now includes aerosol-spraying planes in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand [all NATO countries]. Hundreds (if not thousands) of people have called and written their public officials to get answers. Replies from US and Canadian officials are not forthcoming; or, if they do reply, queries are dismissed. This remains an ongoing, deliberate cover-up. No one is held accountable, while we continued to be poisoned daily.
...Numerous tests have been done to verify that these poisons are off the scale in their toxicity. They are documented in our water, in our soil, and in our air. For more than 10 years, researcher Clifford Carnicom has been valiantly and systematically reporting on the various detrimental aspects of these aerosols –and what they are doing to our entire environment, as well as our blood.(6) Various “sky watch” groups also have been carefully documenting and diligently reporting about these daily assaults.(7) With all these poisons surrounding our every breath, it is not surprising to see a dramatic increase in illnesses. There are numerous reports of the increase in cardiac deaths and upper respiratory illnesses (asthma, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer, and often multiple chronic illnesses). Chemtrails toxicity has already dramatically affected our deteriorating “collective health.” The significant increase in heart disease and various upper respiratory illnesses has been linked to a vast increase in “particulate matter” in our air.
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