Jon Hellevig: Time And the Incredible Shrinking Brain

In its latest edition the US magazine Time did its own bit of pre-election ranting about Russia and Putin with its cover story "Russia's Incredible Shrinking Prime Minister." The message is in the subhead which reads: "His grip on power is shakier than ever. That makes the world a more dangerous place." Intrigued by this caption, I signed on to Time's website to get the whole story, but there was none. In vain I searched the whole site over and over again, but all I found about Putin and Russia was a story by Simon Shuster under the heading "See Putin Run: How the Prime Minister is Relying on Russia's Heartland." After all this must be it. I thought. Begrudgingly I read the stuff a couple of times hoping to detect the analysis by which Time motivated its bombastic claims. But all I found was an insipid diatribe focusing on Putin's campaign trip to Kurgan, one of the provincial towns of Russia with a population of 300 thousand people. It turns out that either Mr. Shuster wrote the wrong story, or the editor in charge of the front cover did not read Shuster's story. Whatever, but in the article nothing much about Putin's "shrinking support," and why the world would be a "more dangerous place" for that. Shuster's article is written in the evergreen style of American exploring journalism. In this genre the gallant and unrelenting journalist is placed in a setting of ordinary people whose sentiments the journalist with his keen and receptive mind catches as his material goes about their everyday life. This style is eminently well suited for propaganda, because here you can ignore all the facts. No analysis will be needed for you are supposedly just reporting what you observe, and being an "independent journalist" representing the "free press" you are a trusted source. And this precisely overcomes the problem that the anti-Putin propaganda otherwise bumps into: it is so difficult to bend the facts to suit the story line as Russia's achievements under Putin are so truly remarkable.      

Adam Hochschild: "The Story of the War Horse"

Well in advance of the 2010 centennial of the beginning of "the war to end all Wars," the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg's War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it's based on is still packing in crowds in New York, and a second production is being readied to tour the country. In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downtown Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss. In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulk's novel Birdsong, from an NBC-backed production company. In truth, there's nothing new to this. Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale, and there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely. After all, it was responsible for the deaths of some nine million soldiers and an even larger number of civilians. It helped ignite the Armenian genocide and the Russian Revolution, left large swaths of Europe in smoldering ruins, and remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way, above all, by laying the groundwork for a second and even more deadly, even more global war.   

theufochronicles: Unraveling the Age of the Pyramids and Sphinx:

Today with the use of computers and software its possible to track the stars of the heavens back thousands of years to determine their location on particular ancient dates. Many of those locations do in fact align with certain structures in Egypt, such as the three Pyramids of Giza being in the same alignment as the 3 stars of Orion's belt, the fact that the Sphinx faces directly toward the eastern sunrise at certain times of the year, and that the shafts of the Kings and Queens chamber align perfectly with certain stars, and other astronomical occurrences in the sky. As an example, during the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, at Giza the sub rises about 28 degrees south of due east and 28 degrees north during those two times of the year, thus being an equinoctial marker when the Sphinx faces perfectly to the east at sunrise during the spring equinox. The technology side of how the Pyramids were built is to me, some of the most amazing information to come forward thus far. Fourteenth century Arab commentators tell us the Great Pyramid and the second one were both covered with smoothly-polished Tura limestone that glowed in the Egyptian sun, and were shaken loose by an earth quake in 1301 AD, and most then used to build mosques and temples. Only the second Pyramid still has any of the limestone casing stones at the top. Those casing stones consisted of an estimated 22 acres of 8-foot thick blocks, each weighing about 16 tons, and so closely joined that they appeared to be a single slab from top to bottom. As determined in 1881 by Sir W M Flinders Petrie, the mean thickness of the joints is 0.020 of an inch, giving a variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and a true square but 0.01 of an inch on a length of 75 inches up to the face.

PRESSTV: Holocaust Blackest Lie!

Arthur Jones, who hopes to challenge Democrat Dan Lipinski in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District, noted that the claim of killing millions of Jews and other people by Nazis during World War II "is nothing more than international extortion racket by the Jews," Huffington Post reported. "It's the blackest lie in history. Millions of dollars are being made by Jews telling this tale of woe and misfortune in books, movies, plays and TV," he said. "The more survivors, the more lies that are told," the 64-year-old candidate said. Jones said he hopes to win the Republican primary nomination and move on to challenge Democrat Dan Lipinski next November. He also questioned Lipinski's strange affiliation with powerful pro-Israeli lobby group in the US-American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Jones underlined that the pro-Israeli lobby "was bragging on their website" on how Lipinski is "spearheading an effort in the US House of Representatives with a Jewish Congressman from Virginia named Frank Wolf to get tough with Iran, including closing off any oil exports to China that could lead to World War III." Jones, a Vietnam veteran, also compared current conditions in the US to the situation in Germany following the end of World War 1 and insisted that "our country is falling apart economically, politically, culturally, militarily." "We are going down," he noted angrily. "These war-mongering fools in congress like Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, we can't let Iran have one nuclear weapon but we let Israel have all the nuclear weapons they want," Jones said. "This is ridiculous." Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called on a number of occasions for a historical examination of 'the Holocaust' in an effort to uncover realities of the much publicized World War II event. His remarks, however, have sparked outrage among pro-Israeli Western powers, labeling him as a "holocaust denier." 

Adrian Salbuchi: The Russian Wall!

As a foreign observer writing from Argentina, we too are awaiting with keen expectations the results of the Russian Elections. As happens with all elections when observed from far away, save for the incumbent and maybe one or two other names, the rest are often a bewildering series of unknowns and the local issues are also unfamiliar to us. I am not Russian. I do not live in Russia. I do not speak Russian, and I must confess that I have a patchy knowledge about Russia. But I can tell you this. As a Geopolitical analyst I know that Russia is crucially important to Mankind at the crossroads we find ourselves in these very dark times. Politics are never black or white, good guy versus bad guy. In politics "truth" always lies in some subtle shade of grey. What political opponents normally fight, argue and bicker about is that "correct" shade of grey. Of course, they never reach any agreement. Why? Because there is no "correct" shade of grey. It's like beauty, always in the eyes of the beholder. In addition, just as the fundamental rationale of Economics its bottom line or acid test, so to speak lies in distinguishing between "profitable" and "not profitable" and that is what will drive a final decision in the economic sphere, and just as the fundamental rationale of Morals lies in distinguishing between absolute Good and absolute Bad, so the fundamental rationale of Politics its absolute "bottom line" lies in distinguishing between Friend and Enemy. While neither the US nor the UK nor Europe are in anyway 'the Enemy' of mankind, the private Global Power Masters who have hijacked those nations and embedded themselves deep into their private and public power structures are!   

Jim Kirwan: Crossing The Threshhold!

Today the world crossed over into the free-fire-zone that has been created to finish off this place and change-the-world from a place into a permanent prison for any who will survive the coming days and weeks. The congress of the USA has been moving at light-speed to create so many different new pieces of new legislation that are aimed at making ordinary Americans into SUSPECTS and or actual Enemy Combatants inside their own country. This unceasing flood of Anti-American legislation that are aimed at making ordinary Americans into SUSPECTS and or actual Enemy Combatants inside their own country. This unceasing flood of Anti-American legislation is all the more remarkable for the fact that nothing which this country needs is being met by the congress, the courts or the Tarnished House. Yet bill after bill is passed with no discussion or debate and the public only discovers what has happened to us after the critical votes are taken. Americans are the most highly taxed nation on the planet, and yet we derive no benefit from all that money for ourselves. Instead, every one of those entities that are looting this country are handsomely rewarded, well beyond any criminal's wildest dreams of booty and unearned wealth, yet the public remains completely cut off from the government that we are paying through the nose to maintain, on the one hand, and on the other we are being ripped apart anew each and every week by this series of criminally inspired bits of legislation that are fired into our faces as if we were all just a bunch of paper-targets to be destroyed at will by the armies of traitors that were created by this latest rash of unimaginable legislation.

Stephen Lendman: Daily Israeli State Terror!

Major media scoundrels suppress reports about the daily Israeli state terror. Most Americans, and many others, can't imagine what Palestinians endure. Every imaginable depravity's included. Torture and murder are state policy. So are forced dispossessions, violence as a weapon of choice, collective punishment, apartheid worse than South Africa's, isolation, home demolitions, land theft, mass arrests, economic strangulation, and much more. Rule of law principles are systematically spurned. Rogue state policies ignore them. Even Jews face risks. However, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs live under constant threats, especially besieged Gazans facing slow-motion genocide. Except for death camps, Israel treats Arabs like Nazis treated Jews. Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer was outspoken, saying: "The Israelis try to dehumanize the Palestinians, just like the Nazis did to me. Nobody should dehumanize any others, and those who do it are not human." "It may be that Israel is not the most cruel country of the world, but one thing I know for sure is that it's the world champion in pretending to be civilized and cultured." He also said: "Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is someone who is hated by Jews." He added that criticizing Israel isn't denigrating Jews. A German native, Meyer survived 10 months at Auschwitz. His parents weren't so fortunate. He fled, went into hiding, but was caught and imprisoned. Post-war, he because a physicist, political activist, and wrote three books on Judaism, the Holocaust, and Zionism. He now lives in the Netherlands, is a member of the Dutch Green Left and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, and supports the global BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) Movement for Freedom, Justice and Equality.