Beyond The Broken Spectrum

A German woman fearing that Earth would be sucked into oblivion in a black hole failed on Tuesday in her court attempt to halt the world’s most powerful atom-smasher. The Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.” Read More

It is people like this that have let their close mindedness and false superstitions based on no real evidence deprive the world of so many technological advances. These people and their way of thinking are a detriment to society.

Nearly three-quarters of all Americans think Tibet should be an independent country, according to a new national poll.

However, the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday also indicates that most Americans think it is more important to maintain good relations with China than to take a stand on Tibet.

The poll’s release came as President Obama was to meet with the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, at the White House.

The Dalai Lama is popular with Americans, according to the survey, with 56 percent holding a favorable view of him and only 18 percent having an unfavorable impression. Read More

— The study also found many Americans to be hypocritical as they support Tibet’s secession from China, but balk at the notion of allowing a state to secede from the US. Talk about double standards.

Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.

The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property. Read More

THE OREGON WILDERNESS—Frustrated by the widely held assumption that he unequivocally endorses the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a bald eagle said Monday that his thoughts on the conflicts were far more nuanced than many Americans might expect.

Speaking to reporters from his nest in the upper branches of a 175-foot ponderosa pine tree, the eagle explained that each member of his species was different and none should be taken for granted as a lockstep supporter of American military policy.

“I think World War II was justified, and I got behind the first Gulf War [in 1990],” said the bird, who has served as the national symbol of the United States since 1782. “But the recent war in Iraq, with its shifting rationale and poor planning, was clearly a huge mistake. Personally, I believe that these crucial, life-and-death matters deserve more honest and less politicized discussion than they get.”

“I’m not a hawk or a dove,” he added. “I’m an eagle.”

The majestic bird of prey, who said he is not registered with any political party, admitted to having some ambivalence about the current mission in Afghanistan, lamenting that any argument one could make seemed to prompt an equally valid counterpoint.

Drug companies manipulated the World Health Organization into downgrading its definition of a pandemic so they could cash in on a swine flu outbreak, it is claimed.

An inquiry heard yesterday that the WHO allegedly softened its criteria for declaring a H1N1 flu pandemic last spring – just weeks before announcing there was a worldwide outbreak.

Critics said the decision was driven by pharmaceutical companies desperate to recoup the billions of pounds they had invested in researching and developing pandemic vaccines after the bird flu scares in 2006 and 2007.

Read more: Daily Mail

Widely believed to be dead, there is now supposedly a new tape released by Bin Laden claiming responsibility for the Christmas day attempt to blow up a plane headed to Michigan.

Research the evidence and find out for yourself, but I am now counting myself in the category of people that believe the CIA and/or other government/special interest entities are  behind these tapes and videos in an effort to sustain our disastrous foreign policy and the “war on terrorism.”  For them, war is good for business, as budgets are inflated and there is plenty of contract money to be had. All of this goes away when a war ends, which is one of the main reasons why it has taken so long for the failed and costly war on drugs to wind down.

Call me what you want, crazy, conspiracy theorist, whatever. However there is little doubt in my mind that the American people are intentionally being lied to so that more and more of our money can be taken from us to benefit the war mongers in Washington and all of their special interest buddies.

The Obama administration this month awarded a $25 million federal contract for work in Afghanistan to a company owned by a prominent Democratic campaign contributor without entertaining competitive bids, Fox News has learned.

For nearly $4.5 million a year, the State Department assigned a 16-person security detail to protect six U.S. contractors in Iraq who already had a team of hired guards they didn’t really need.

The expensive miscue is one of many described in an audit issued Monday of a $2.5 billion State Department contract with DynCorp International for training Iraq’s police force.

The department repeatedly failed to oversee the contract properly, according to the audit by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The findings also suggest the department remains ill-equipped to watch over the vast amount of U.S. money flowing into Afghanistan. Read the article at Fox News

The World Health Organization (WHO) is considering a plan to ask governments to impose a global consumer tax on such things as Internet activity or everyday financial transactions like paying bills online.

Such a scheme could raise “tens of billions of dollars” on behalf of the United Nations’ public health arm from a broad base of consumers, which would then be used to transfer drug-making research, development and manufacturing capabilities, among other things, to the developing world.

Article at Fox News

The Rev. Pat Robertson turned heads with his appearance on The 700 Club on Wednesday when he blamed Haitian history for Tuesday’s devastating earthquake. In short, Robertson claimed that the quake was divine retribution for a pact with the devil that was sworn long ago, a statement he was audacious enough to make while the 800 number for disaster relief scrolled at the bottom of the broadcast. Here’s the clip:

Google said Tuesday the company and at least 20 others were victims of a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” originating in China in mid-December, evidently to gain access to the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

“Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective,” according to a statement by David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer for Google, operator of the most popular Internet search engine.

Drummond said that as a result of the attacks, Google has decided it is no longer willing to consider censorship of its Google site in China and may have to shut down its site and its offices in that nation. Article continued at CNN

To better understand why Osama bin Laden is so far winning his struggle to oust the western powers from the Muslim world, let us go back to 1986, when I was covering the anti-Soviet war in then almost unknown Afghanistan.

I called on the grandly titled “Afghan Information Center” in Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar was a wild and dangerous place. I called it, “Dodge City meets the Arabian Nights” in my book on Afghanistan, War at the Top of the World.

The information center turned out to be a drab little office filled with mimeographed pamphlets and piles of dusty books.

The director was a short, thin man in a torn sweater named Abdullah Azzam. We spoke at length of the anti-Soviet jihad (struggle) in Afghanistan being waged by Afghan and Arab mujahidin.

Then, Azzam told me, “when we have driven the Communist imperialists from Afghanistan, we will go on and drive the American imperialists from Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world.”

I was absolutely floored. Except for Communists, a notorious bunch of liars, I had never heard anyone call my beloved America an imperialist power. In those days, the US appeared the acme of good – in large part because its rival, the Soviet Union, looked so wicked. Article continues at LewRockwell.com

A United Arab Emirates sheikh was acquitted Sunday of charges connected to the videotaped beating and torture of an Afghan grain dealer.

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the emirates’ ruling family, was charged with rape, endangering life and causing bodily harm in connection with the nearly three-hour long tape shot in 2004 in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf region.

Article at CNN

The woman, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, was celebrating her engagement to her 44-year-old boyfriend, and was allegedly attacked when she passed out in a hotel lavatory.

Despite approaching police about the attack, she was arrested after admitting to “illegal drinking” outside licensed premises as well as having sexual intercourse outside marriage. Her fiancé was also charged with the same offences.

Article at Telegraph

Thanks to Jeff for the link.

Perhaps my favorite part of the Christmas season is receiving cards or messages from old friends. For me this includes news from my favorite bars in the different cities I have lived: The Green Room in Durham, NC, Porters’ Pub in Easton, PA, The Old Hack Pub in Brussels, Belgium, and The Bombay Bicycle Club in San Antonio, TX. The BBC is a great place, located in Brackenridge Park near the zoo, especially to meet a truly wide range of people. I used to frequent there when I was teaching at the nearby university. I recently received news of the regulars from the owner Bill, who also asked me the following question:

When do you think Israel will bomb Iran? I want to buy some oil futures as a hedge against high gas prices. Your thoughts

What follows is my response to Bill.

Dear Bill,

As you well know my academic background you cannot expect a simple answer to any question. So first I must digress to consider economic theory and history. The vast majority of people who call themselves economists are actually educated and paid to serve the interests of particular elite groups; i.e., the state or those who control the state. This has happened to other kept professional classes, exemplified by the long history of court historians, and more recently by climatologists. The elite class that makes up the state has, through many modes, but most successfully in the modern era through monetary inflation, parasitically lived off of the general population. It has been the task of the economists to make the people believe that this robbery has been for their own good. Economics is thought to be more complicated and mathematical because the purpose of so-called economics is to obfuscate, not to explain truth.

There is one school of economics, the Austrian, that does search for truth, as exemplified by its great champion, Ludwig von Mises (Anna’s middle name Louisa is in honor of Ludwig). One of the fundamental premises developed by Mises (and others in the Austrian school) is that the business cycle, the boom followed by the bust, is generated by excess credit in its many forms. Put simply, the government creates credit (or money directly) to maintain power for itself or to enrich its cronies; think military industrial complex, Wall Street, medical industrial complex, big agriculture (e.g., the Texas mohair interest), etc. The new money creates bubbles in various parts of the economy that must eventually collapse because they are not based on the reality of scarce resources. This process of boom and bust based on the false information for the economy in general enriches the connected elite and impoverishes the people. At the end of the process the currency collapses (most recently Zimbabwe), taking much of the distribution of labor in the economy with it. Mises called this late stage the crack-up boom. (more…)