Terror War Cheerleader Gets Reality Check On Underwear Bomber Facts Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com Tuesday, February 21, 2012 C-Span callers hammer home U.S. government’s role in aiding Abdulmutallab A proponent of the war on terror was left with egg on his face during a recent C-Span appearance when caller after caller hammered home the fact that the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was allowed to board Delta flight 253 by the U.S. government. C-SPAN Callers School Terror War Profiteers Cheerleader On Underwear Bomber Fairy Tale http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuyYiWv4xkY The victim of this ‘truth bomb’ was Mickey McCarter, 1. a prominent mouthpiece for the military-industrial complex that relies heavily on the manufactured ‘war on terror’ to the tune of billions of dollars every year. McCarter is a journalist specializing in “homeland security matters” and has also worked for government agencies like the US Navy’s Bureau of Naval Personnel and the Defense Contract Management Agency. After discussing the recent conviction of the underwear bomber with no mention of the fact that he boarded the plane only with the aid of the U.S. government, McCarter faced a barrage of callers who set him straight. The first caller immediately drew attention to Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell, an attorney who witnessed a well dressed Indian man force airport officials to let Abdulmutallab board the plane despite the fact that he had no passport and was on a terror watchlist. “Why would a CIA agent….get that guy on the plane,” the caller asked, to which McCarter responded by claiming, “I am not familiar with the story,” before erroneously claiming that Abdulmutallab “raised no alarm”. In reality, the State Department was ordered not to revoke Abdulmutallab’s visa by “federal
counterterrorism officials” even though the accused bomber had known terrorist ties, in addition to the fact that his own father had warned U.S. intelligence officials of the threat posed by Abdulmutallab a month before the attempted attack. After initially claiming otherwise, the FBI finally had to admit that Kurt Haskell’s testimony was true. When Abdulmutallab signaled he wanted to call Haskell as a defense witness, it threatened to blow the whole case wide open. However, within 48 hours he mysteriously withdrew the call and admitted all eight counts of guilt. The notion that McCarter, who bills himself as a terror expert, has no idea about Kurt Haskell’s testimony, FBI confirmation of the fact, in addition to media reports concerning how AbdulMutallab was helped on the plane by a well-dressed man, over two years after it was initially revealed, is dubious to say the least. After a second caller again references Haskell’s testimony and makes the connection between the underwear bomber plot and the TSA’s invasive groping policy, he is cut off, before a third caller discusses how the event created the perfect pretext for the introduction of naked body scanners, which just happened to make a lot of money for security officials like Michael Chertoff who were heavily invested in them at the time. The final caller again hits on the fact that Abdulmutallab was allowed to board the airplane, noting that Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy told a hearing that the bomber was let on the plane because he was being tracked by intelligence agencies who ordered the State Department “not to deny a visa”. This episode again underscores the fact that – as Hillary Clinton bemoaned last year – we are winning the infowar. Informed Americans in growing numbers are successfully waking up their fellow citizens to the fact that the war on terror is a manufactured hoax wherein intelligence agencies recruit patsies and dupes to carry out attacks which are then used to advance the agenda of the military-industrial complex.
Minority Report-Style Advertising Rolled Out In London Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Face-scanning technology labeled “creepy” High-definition face-scanning cameras have been installed at a bus stop in Oxford Street, London as part of a new invasive advertising campaign that uses Minority Report-style technology to deliver gender-specific targeted ad content. “With a 90 percent accuracy rating, the computer built into the placement analyzes and guesses gender based on specific facial attributes of the jawline, cheekbones, nose and eyes. Based on the current guess of a pedestrian’s gender, the digital placement shows an advertisement targeted at a man or a woman. As this technology continues to be applied to the field of advertising, the computer could also make a judgement about a person’s age, race or body type,” 1. reports Digital Trends. The $60,000 dollar ad, displayed on a screen that is a cross between an iPad and an XBox Kinect, plays a 40 second video message when a female’s face is scanned but only a brief message if a man walks past. “We’re not giving men and boys the choice to see the full ad on this occasion – so they get a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away,” said Marie Staunton, chief executive of Plan UK, the organization featured in the ad. The technology itself was developed by Clear Channel UK and 3D Exposure, who assert that while concerns about people being subjected to Minority Report-style invasive advertising have been voiced, what they are working on for future projects “may soon surpass what we’ve seen at the cinema.” Privacy watchdog The Open Rights Group labeled the idea “creepy”. The 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise depicted Cruise’s character walking through a subway station while sensors that scan his eyes address him by name and bombard him with personalized ads. Another clip shows people boarding a train also having their irises scanned for approval. The
movie was based on a dystopian short story by Philip K. Dick which warned of how such technology would be used in the future to crush privacy and civil liberties. Clear Channel are by no means the only major company to be working on the new wave of invasive advertising. Last year, IBM announced that they are planning to scan “RFID technology that people are carrying around with them” in order to tailor ads to specific consumer tastes. We have previously covered the fact that private industry and eventually government are set to implement plans to use microphones and cameras in the computers and TiVo style boxes of hundreds of millions of Americans to monitor their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles, which will be used for invasive advertising and data mining. In 2006, Google announced that they would use in-built microphones to listen in on user’s background noise, be it television, music or radio – and then direct advertising at them based on their preferences. “The idea is to use the existing PC microphone to listen to whatever is heard in the background, be it music, your phone going off or the TV turned down. The PC then identifies it, using fingerprinting, and then shows you relevant content, whether that’s adverts or search results, or a chat room on the subject,” reported the Register. The expiration of a key technology patent is paving the way for a scramble amongst scores of biometrics research and development companies, all desperate to make their own brand of iris scanning technology commonplace, effectively creating a real life Minority Report society, where everyone is linked into an identification database. As detailed by Bloomberg News , the patent for recording the unique characteristics of the Iris as a form of identification was granted to two eye doctors in 1987, who then approached a Cambridge University professor to develop a way of automating iris identification. That further patent was granted in 1994, but it expired last year, opening the door for the new wave of invasive advertising technology to be implemented. Leading marketing companies believe that within the next five years, iris recognition technology will create over $2 billion in revenue by becoming a routine part of everyday life. London’s innumerable bus stops have often been used as testing ground for Big Brother-style initiatives. In 2002, Transport For London displayed a billboard to promote their CCTV surveillance technology which depicted Orwellian irises in the skies of London beneath the words “Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes”. Minority Report Mall Scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBaiKsYUdvg
Private Property vs. ‘Your Stuff’ Paul Bonneau 1. Strike the Root February 21, 2012 I don’t know what it is about the word “property.” Every time I think about it, the thought seems to include such state baggage as titles, and places to record those titles like county courthouses, and arguments in court over who owns it, and state regulations on transferring it, and even taxes! The latest big fuss over “intellectual property” does nothing to change this impression; rather, it is reinforced. Is property such a great deal after all? What, really, is it? The Wikipedia article contains lots of descriptions and theories about it, many of them conflicting. Apparently, people have many different ideas about it; that is, its meaning is not a settled thing. (No, I have not read the direct sources outside of a few like Bastiat, nor do I have much incentive to do so. I’m glad to have such resources as the Internet and Wikipedia to condense this information; but any pointers to good references will be appreciated.) One point that sounded pretty solid was this notion of Bastiat’s: In a radical departure from traditional property theory, he defines property not as a physical object, but rather as a relationship between people with respect to an object. Clearly if there are no other people but yourself, then the whole idea of property becomes pointless. Still though, with all these theories over what it is, it’s strange there is not more actual conflict over it. There must be some overriding consideration that is not mentioned within these theories. Here’s my guess at what that is: Property is the stuff you can prevent others from taking from you. What do these various property theories say about a mugging? If someone sticks a gun in your face and takes your wallet, is the money in it still your property? How about when he uses it to pay for a prostitute; is it still
your money then? How about when she uses it to pay the rent; is it still your money then? How about when her landlord uses it to buy flowers for his wife; still your money then? It seems to me that if someone has grabbed your stuff, it becomes silly to think of it as your property anymore. It’s no longer your stuff. It’s gone. Yeah, in theory it can be recovered. In fact, that is one of the benefits a state advertises that it can do for you. Strangely though, for the state to be able to recover your property, you must surrender more property to the state, to keep it available to do so. Anyone see something wrong with this picture? What with eminent domain, civil forfeiture, taxes on everything and regulatory takings, it doesn’t take great perspicacity to detect that the state is the biggest thief in the world, a “cure” far worse than the original disease. A more realistic view of recovery is that if you catch the thief and take the stuff he took from you, it really was his property for the period he had it, and you are just grabbing it back again. But recovery is pretty theoretical, after all. It doesn’t happen much. Getting back to my homegrown theory, let’s see how it operates in the natural (no government) world. Two scenarios: 1) You have a garden. A little girl comes along and picks a flower. You get your rifle out and put her in the crosshairs. 2) You have a small plot of land and a cow that you have fed and raised. You intend to use it for meat to feed your family; without it, they will starve. One night, someone comes and tries to lead it away, but you catch him at it. You get your rifle out and put him in the crosshairs. Are these two cases identical? All the fancy theories (to my knowledge, which of course is limited) seem to treat them so. But what happens in the natural world, the world without government? If you pull the trigger in scenario 2, most people would say “good riddance” and be happy there is one less thief to steal their stuff. You’d be popular. If you pull the trigger in scenario 1, most people would consider you a monster. You’d be a pariah in the community and no one would deal with you–if they didn’t actually come over and string you up from the nearest tree over it.
In both cases you are simply protecting property; but something inside tells you to shoot in one case, and not in the other case. That something has to do with your relationship with your fellow human beings. You care what they think, even if that care is connected to selfpreservation. Despite all the statist fuss around the concept of property, and all the fancy theories, I think it is pretty simple. If you can keep people from taking it from you, it is your property. That may take the form of personal defensive violence against thieves, or it may be that you simply take care to live where people don’t much steal, or where there are voluntary organizations such as vigilance committees that help you keep your stuff. And that’s all it is, your stuff. You may have inherited it, or worked to get it, or traded for it–doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether you can keep others from stealing it from you–and this is leavened by the fact that whatever course you take, your actions still have to seem reasonable to the others you live among. This “theory,” by the way, is something that avoids the extremes of the other theories. At least some communists and others like them think there is no property at all. It would be unpleasant to live in a society where you can’t even count on your own toothbrush. On the other hand, some theories have no problem at all with a single individual owning vast amounts of wealth or land while his neighbors starve. Sounds like a great recipe for revolution. I think in the natural world, people will own some plot of land, jointly or individually, and be able to produce from it. The larger that plot is, or the less often the owner is there to keep his eye on things, the more likely he will have a hard time keeping his hands on all of it, as squatters will move in, and neighbors won’t bother to help you evict them. Aspenization will probably be a lot more rare. I’m also a bit doubtful of the libertarian dogma that goes like this: “It’s not great wealth that is wrong, but the use of government by some wealthy to protect their businesses from competition, or other such aggressive actions, that are wrong.” This would seem to imply that in a natural world, there will be examples of great wealth that are not supported by government. But this seems to beg the question, how really does government form? Is it just a group of bandits that moves into a community and takes over? Or instead, is it created by an association of wealthy who then hire agents to protect that wealth, and who later notice that everybody else is getting a “free ride” in
this protection and therefore ought to be taxed to pay for it? I think it very likely that it is great wealth that creates government (just think of the founding of the Federal Reserve as an example). No, in a natural society, people may accumulate a fair amount of wealth; but it will be self-limiting, because great wealth attracts thieves and squatters to harvest it, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing if it stops the creation of a state. How much wealth does a person need, anyway? Great wealth also carries great costs in retaining it, and we need to avoid the tendency to socialize those costs. The time to stop the state is in the very first hints of aggression, and it should be stopped “with extreme prejudice.” What about intellectual property in the natural world? There will be some, as people naturally seek to control that which they create, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just that without a state, it will be hard to keep others from stealing from you; and once it is stolen, it is simply no longer your property. Perhaps some technical or contractual arrangements will be available to prevent this outcome, but that is about it. Again, we will have moderation, not the extremes we see now. The concept of property probably does not need a PhD in political philosophy any more than the concept of liberty does. I doubt all the fancy and convoluted theories are that helpful, or reflect reality very well. In fact, to reduce the confusion entangling the notion of property with the state, it might make sense to stop thinking of it as “your property,” and start thinking of it in more humble terms as “your stuff.” FIND THE TRUTH ON LINK BELOW
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