This comes from a posting a baseball fantasy league from someone in the league. I thought it was right on the mark, so I will post it here.

Ever since this whole Tom Cruise fiasco I became interested in what scientology was all about.

Apparently this fucked up "religon" is based on some story about an alien named Xenu who ruled a group of over-populated planets. In order to cut down the population of earth, or teegeean as it was once called, he gathered all the aliens around the base of a volcano and placed a nuclear bomb inside killing them all. Once the body was killed it released the soul which Xenu captured and forced into a theater to watch movies about God and Jesus, therefore creating belief in christianty. All of the aliens souls wandered the earth attaching themselves to humans.

Now what scientology supposedly does is rid your body of all these extra souls, or tethans as they are called and allow you to live a happier life. It is said to even get this information you have to pay thousands of dollars for ridiculous seminars. To complete the program you have to pay upwards of $400,000. L. Ron Hubbard, who created the program, was a science fiction writer and appearently a real piece of shit who truly considered himself the lord of darkness. Most who try to leave the church either wind up dead or in serious legal troubles.

This is one fucked up, wacky-ass cult with a bunch of ignorant retards following. I think they all need to drink the kool-aid and just get it over with.

The idea of laissez-faire, free-market driven economic democracy is founded upon two assumptions : that the workers and middle class majority will have and use surplus funds, and that the use of the surplus funds of the very wealthy will not exacerbate or diminish over time the surplus funds of the majority.

Where there is a revenue stream, there is a potential for an entrepreneur to come up with a way to divert some of these funds into an attempt at profit. Simply put, if you have access to a large amount of people or businesses who will spend some of their surplus or operating funds, you will have a potential to profit off of these funds. This can be a service-based or a merchant-based operation. A hairstylist who sets up shop in an area with no other competition will probably do well. A supermarket chain with minimal competition will be able to do the same. This supermarket may have access to many or few wholesalers. The wholesalers are themselves in contact with the many different suppliers : farmers, canned-goods companies, and manufacturing. Each of these suppliers themselves make purchases, involving further other anonymous wholesalers, distributers, and manufacturers in a complex interaction of circles. Everyone is a consumer AND part of a larger network of market and societal forces at the same time.

Large aggregations of this process form the local economy of a region or nation. In a very large nation (such as the United States) there can be many local economies within the rubric of the national economy. Thus a very large nation will have a tendency to divergent local economies underneath the roof top of the nation that can simmer and possibly even erupt into large-scale civil strife, because sometimes the interests of one or groups of local economies will get a better representation in the halls of the government that is meant to discuss the interests of the nation.

However, the networks of economic linkage have become shrunken and concentrated by large corporate forms of monetary accumulation. They are not the profuse diffusion of numerous entrepreneurial enterprises that the theory insists. There are instances of non-corporate wealth and no dampening of entrepreneurial spirit in the land, however the shrinkage is extant nevertheless. Large corporate forms thus become the main agents of profit-accumulation on the economic revenue stream. In this way the creation of a supra-aristocracy is less visible, because the family trusts that own small percentages of the stock of hundreds of companies is not as obvious as the family that runs Walmart -- the family which is itself also accumulating portfolio's of stock ownership.

This division of society into 2 classes gets created because the uses of surplus funds by the upper versus lower classes are very different. A very wealthy individual or corporate form can accumulate more of the available funds at an accelerating rate, whereas for most of the middle to lower class, the rate is barely above constant because the scale of funds is not large enough to see the exponential growth in 30 or 40 years. This is just simple mathematics.

Here goes. A man saves 10,000 a year for 40 years and gets a 5% increase per year. Using the sum of a geometric sequence with a 1.05 growth factor 10,000 x (1.05^40 - 1)/.05 = 1,207,997.742, which 1.2 million dollars. Now that is very nice assuming the person spends 10,000 for the entire 40 years and also gets the 5% increase every year. More likely the increase of 3% is more reasonable, which would yield a smaller 452,407.55. This is only a 52,407.55 increase over the 10,000 x 40 ( The larger 1.2 million would be an 800,000 yield.)

Now an institution or individual that has 10,000,000 a year for 40 years would accrue @ 3% , 452,407,550 which is a difference of 52 million dollars.

A difference of 52 thousand versus 52 million dollars indicates the inherent imbalance in capital accumulation. If the pool of capital formation is a constant or barely increasing, this ratio of 52 million versus 52 thousand means 100 times more, or more accurately eventually 1% of the entire wealth of the country will be owned by the 90% of the country which has only 10,000 surplus funds per year with which to accumulate capital.

That ought to destroy the myth that the ideas alone of a laissez-faire, free- market create economic democracy. The voices which pronounce these ideas as the sole bearer of democratic individualism are thinking in a vacuum, rather than a historical continuum. Because after the new economic frontiers get swamped, the concentration into larger formations of wealth occurs. The only events that have inhibited or ceased this inevitable concentration were revolutions, formation of community social institutions(church, unions, non-profit hospitals,...) and wise government involvement.

These myths have gotten a voice because there are short-sighted extremely- wealthy individuals who permit and promote its dispersal. There are speakers who attend conferences that are funded by corporate institutions. There are lobbyist and legal organizations dedicated to the publishing of pamplets, press releases, and books.

Go here and read a well-organized, easy to understand, complete and utter refutation of all the lies that have come from those who think that Social Security is in trouble and that private accounts are better for workers than the Social Security system.

The study comes from the Directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (or CEPR). These are statisticians and economic researchers who analyze and crunch data to provide accurate financial assessments of government policy and economic trends. They are well-respected by everyone because they know what they are doing and can be relied upon for the straight facts.

You expect your sportscaster to give you the straight talk about the game or the seasonal stats. The same is true about economic data and cost-benefit analysis. This is the service the CEPR provides for entrepreneurs, government policy analysts, and businesses in general who need the hard facts without the political hyperbole.

What is news? Is it the front pages of the local newspaper? Is it the events that are discussed on the television during the anointed time that we decide to pay attention?

According to my favorite abridged dictionary, American Heritage, news is "1. Recent events and happenings. 2. Written or broadcast information about recent events. 3. Newsworthy material." Newsworthy by the way means "Interesting or signifigant enough to be included in a news report."

In other words, if we want to tell it to you we will, but don't expect to be informed because we intend to tell it in a perspective we consider the most beneficial, using whatever standard we deem to be proper.

Don't listen to Donald Rumsfeld. [source]

Rumsfeld Obscures Facts About Gitmo

At yesterday’s press briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used selective memory to retell the story of how combatant status review tribunals in Gitmo came about and just how “appropriate” such hearings are.

Rumsfeld’s claim: After deciding that the enemy combatants were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, the administration “established procedures that would provide appropriate legal process” to enemy combatants. These included combatant status review tribunals.

The full story: Actually, after September 11th President Bush tried to hold combatants indefinitely, without giving them access to court systems where they could challenge their detention. In Rasul v Bush, the Supreme Court rebuffed the administration: “both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals seized as potential terrorists can challenge their treatment in U.S. courts.” The ruling forced the administration to create “procedures that would provide appropriate legal process” to enemy combatants. But, instead of using already established and internationally recognized legal procedures for detained persons – the Article 5 hearings of the Geneva Convention – the administration stubbornly created combatant status review tribunals.

Rumsfeld’s claim: The procedures, which include the combatant status review tribunals, “go beyond what is required even under the Geneva Conventions.”

The full story: The tribunals are an illegal and unconstitutional alternative to the process which the Supreme Court determined detainees are entitled. Earlier this year, federal Judge Joyce Hens Green echoed the Supreme Court ruling by declaring that “the Bush administration must allow [Guantanamo] prisoners…to contest their detention in U.S. courts.” Green was forced to return to the issue because the special tribunals established by the Pentagon as an alternative were “illegal” and unconstitutional. Far from going “beyond what is required even under the Geneva Conventions,” the hearings had denied detainees the “most basic fundamental rights.”

Well, I may be gullible sometimes Meister Bush, but I am not weak-minded. Your time will come.

THE HEADLINE:    Schiavo's Brain Was Severely Deteriorated, Autopsy Says
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS 3:04 PM ET

"The autopsy found that no treatment could have reversed the damage to her brain, which weighed half of what it should have."

"...During a televised news conference in Largo, Fla., the Piniellas-Pasco Medical Examiner, Jon Thogmartin, also said the autopsy showed that Ms. Schiavo's condition was 'consistent' with a person in a persistent vegetative state. That point had become a key issue in the debate over whether to prolong Ms. Schiavo's life and whether she had a chance to recover normal brain function.

Dr. Thogmartin said that recovery was not possible because of the massive brain damage that occurred after Ms. Schiavo collapsed in 1990. Her brain weighed 615 grams at the time of her death on March 31.

'This damage was irreversible,' said Dr. Thogmartin. 'No amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.' "

"...The autopsy ... showed that physical abuse or poison did not play a role in her collapse , he said. Ms. Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had accused their daughter's husband, Michael Schiavo, of abusing her, which he has steadfastly denied. Dr. Thogmartin also said there was no evidence she had had an eating disorder before she collapsed, although a disorder was widely suspected because she had diminished levels of potassium in her blood. "

How many hours of prime-time television were spent by the ministers of lies debating this story? For more than how many weeks was this sad private affair treated as the number one news item?

Of all the vacations President Bush has spent at his fake ranch in Crawford -- remember he bought that ranch in 1999 so he could play the role he and Karl Rove had planned -- of the 60% of the time he has been on vacation or on money-raising events, the only time he interrupted a vacation was to come back to the White House to support the rumblings by the Re-thuglican Congress to get a bill passed to "save Terri Shiavo."

He didn't interrupt his vacation in August 2001 when apparently CIA director George Tenet had a conference video session with Mr. Bush about the "terrorist chatter" and the August PDB memo that was titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in the United States." John Ashcroft cancelled his public air travel in August 2001. Cheney had plenty of meetings with Texas Oil and energy conglomerates that spring and summer, but not one meeting was held to discuss the issue of "terrorism." Not one.

But a map from those Energy meetings with Cheney shows Iraq parcelled out into sections and estimates of what various different oil companies could own. Why was this map at those meetings?

To see these maps for yourself go here. Judicial Watch sued the government for these documents of the Cheney meetings.

What were Cheney and a bunch of oil-energy conglomerate exec's doing looking at these in Spring 2001? Was this why they refused to admit any environmentalist groups to what were supposed to be "public" meetings -- which is why Judicial Watch was successful in its lawsuit.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are (xxx)..a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54

From The Artic Beacon, an Alaskan outfit.
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Former Bush Team Member Says WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled Demolition And 'Inside Job'

Highly recognized former chief economist in Labor Department now doubts official 9/11 story, claiming suspicious facts and evidence of cover-up indicate government foul play and possible criminal implications.
June 12, 2005 By Greg Szymanski

A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.

"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause (s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds this week from his offices at Texas A&M. "If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.

"More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right."

However, Reynolds said "getting it right in today's security state' remains challenging because he claims explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.

Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed to address the major evidence contradicting the official version of 9/11.

Some facts demonstrating the flaws in the government jet fuel theory include:

Photos showing people walking around in the hole in the North Tower where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel supposedly was burning..

When the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower's flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes, making it relatively easy to contain and control without a total collapse.

The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating, indicating without added explosive devices the firs could have been easily controlled.

FDNY fire fighters still remain under a tight government gag order to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a similar 9/11 gag order.

Even the flawed 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible."

Fire had never before caused steel- frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.

The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were relatively small.

WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.

WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams.

In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder, told the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 that. "may be the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.

It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.

Despite the numerous holes in the government story, the Bush administration has brushed aside or basically ignored any and all critics. Mainstream experts, speaking for the administration, offer a theory essentially arguing that an airplane impact weakened each structure and an intense fire thermally weakened structural components, causing buckling failures while allowing the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below.

One who supports the official account is Thomas Eager, professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT. He argues that the collapse occurred by the extreme heat from the fires, causing the loss of loading- bearing capacity on the structural frame.

Eagar points out the steel in the towers could have collapsed only if heated to the point where it "lost 80 percent of its strength," or around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Critics claim his theory is flawed since the fires did not appear to be intense and widespread enough to reach such high temperatures.

Other experts supporting the official story claim the impact of the airplanes, not the heat, weakened the entire structural system of the towers, but critics contend the beams on floors 94-98 did not appear severely weakened, much less the entire structural system.

Further complicating the matter, hard evidence to fully substantiate either theory since evidence is lacking due to FEMA's quick removal of the structural steel before it could be analyzed. Even though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis, FEMA had it destroyed or shipped overseas before a serious investigation could take place.

And even more doubt is cast over why FEMA acted so swiftly since coincidentally officials had arrived the day before the 9/11 attacks at New York's Pier 29 to conduct a war game exercise, named "Tripod II."

Besides FEMA's quick removal of the debris, authorities considered the steel quite valuable as New York City officials had every debris truck tracked on GPS and even fired one truck driver who took an unauthorized lunch break.

In a detailed analysis just released supporting the controlled demolition theory, Reynolds presents a compelling case.

"First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not," said Reynolds. "These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened.

"On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia's Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that 'beams and girders sagged and twisted, but despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage.' Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC."

After considering both sides of the 9/11 debate and after thoroughly sifting through all the available material, Reynolds concludes the government story regarding all four plane crashes on 9/11 remains highly suspect.

"In fact, the government has failed to produce significant wreckage from any of the four alleged airliners that fateful day. The familiar photo of the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania shows no fuselage, engine or anything recognizable as a plane, just a smoking hole in the ground," said Reynolds. "Photographers reportedly were not allowed near the hole. Neither the FBI nor the National Transportation Safety Board have investigated or produced any report on the alleged airliner crashes."

For more informative articles, go to www.arcticbeacon.com.

Greg Szymanski

There has to be a symbiotic relationship between people and the television programs they chose to watch everyday. We exist in our true sense during every moment underwhich we have freedom of choice. Those actions that result from choices that we have made by ourselves are indicative of fundamental human emotions and behaviors. To name a few: desire, love, and fear.

If we desire something, we find a way to either achieve or feel some sense of achievement towards the desired goal or end result. The urges within us touch our deepest sense of satisfaction.

Love is that non-thinking wholesome sense of peace and endearment as regards another person, usually someone special in our own eyes. Fear is something that pokes at us constantly, and is usually the result of a long evolved insecurity which has obtained the fuel of desire.

This triad of deep human emotions are inter-related, thereby creating hybrids of different human internalization packages. There can for instance be a desire for love that is somehow entangled by a fear that no-one will love thee. Or the love that you have for someone causes you to desire them even more. Or you might fear love, and your actions thereby are the various subtle forms of the desire to have escape-routes from long-term relationships.

There are 3 others, and these are the more deranged hybrids -- loving fear causes one's desire for who knows what(yikes!!!), desiring fear causes one to love/form relationships that enable this desire of fear (yikes!!!), and fear of desire causes one to love/form relationships only when this fear is not addressed.

These are the three essential emotions for all movies and television programs -- and all plays and human modes of relating larger than life issues to one another.

This being said, what does it mean when people regularly watch television shows like "Survivor" which pretends to be real, but is only real insofar as you see what people will do in a ridiculous situation knowing the cameras are filming, and also knowing that they will be alive one to three months henceforth. Have we become Roman to the extent that we are watching fake "survival" attempts -- in lieu of our being able to survive on our own for the hour that it is on the television that night.

Some (if not most, or nearly all) of the "shows" on TV need the laugh tracks and the dramatic music to remind us when to laugh and when to be afraid -- and when to start feeling that thrilling life-changing moment that is being dramatized with the faces of tele-thespians and the melodies of hip music.

More often it would probably be better if you spent the hour or so pondering and experiencing these life-changing moments yourself, but my largest criticism is that these life-changing moments are "crafted" and "focused" only upon what we are viewing when we experience them through the television. We are experiencing the life change without actually engaging in the moment, in that the events do not come from our life's own real events. That we are reminded of those events is not relevant, because we did not get there from our own experiences but through the massaging of the TV programs and the television advertising.

Television obfuscates the relationship of the three emotions either by putting them into unreal contexts, or by having to resort to a small fraction of underlying events in order to a create the motion picture event. There is no way one can hope that a 2 hour program can achieve an exactitude or resemblance to the experience of an entire life, or the experience of a couple months or years.

The point here is not to play the role of he Luddite. There is no realistic hope that all of those TV sets and television stations out there are going to suddenly desolve. However, we must understand that the TV is not just a mild form of leisure activity. I am at odds with myself to suggest what should be done because I would severely limit most television programming except sporting events -- but not the internet or home DVD viewing. At the very least, I would ban advertizing, because the number one culprit of subliminal stupidity comes from the commercials.

This is where my thinking gets muddled. If the advertizing is banned, this means that the television has 2 alternatives: 1) becoming cable-service, fee- based, or 2) becoming owned by the federal government which then licenses the right of the company to do business.

Hup, wait a minute, the government already has the authority of #2, so why aren't advertizers banned from television except public service announcements. I mean are we really benefitted by slanderous political advertizing? But then I ponder what other form of mass media is there like television. Mass mailing? Billboards? Newsprint ads? Magazine ads? Radio ad spots? If you needed to get the message out to the masses, where would you go that you couldn't go to already -- and would those other mediums be effective?

Considering that television as mass medium was not a reality until maybe the later 1950s, you have to wonder. The rise of the "talkies" in the motion picture industry led to the "weekly movie" phenomenom. People would also get the weekly "news" in the process, because of the spots that would be played before the main movie was shown -- just like the advertisements and endless "previews" they show now for 15 minutes before they show every movie.

If television was banned, and only internet and DVD home-viewing were left, the internet and DVD market would explode with independents everywhere. The news media already presume themselves to be the bearers of the "national pulse." Would the national pulse just disappear, or would there arise other more potent forms that are more representative of the people's pulse? -- simply because there would be other options.