US: HR 2749: Controlling the global food supply

This kind of ties in to a topic we were talking about recently. A pretty serious piece of legislation has passed the House of Representatives in America which is HR 2749, which, as I understand it from what I've read, amongst a host of other thing mandates that anyone producing food has to register with the FDA and pay a fee to do so.

I really don't how this sort of legislation even gets on the table in America, if politicians actually care about their country. This legislation obviously suits big corporations working hand in glove with government.

So much for Obama's 'change', it's just more of the same of course, under a leftist slant, and sadly it is possible, that the Obama administration could represent to the U.S what the UK went through in 1997. And I just saw the other day John Pilger laying into Obama.

The food thing, seems to be part of a wider agenda to create a centralised government control over the food supply, and an implementation of this mysterious global doctrine called Codex Alimenatarious for mandating food 'standards', that has a lot of extremely serious implications.

I mean all this stuff is horror film bullshit, and it's going on across the world under the nonsense of 'health' and 'consumer protection' and so on, but of course it's trying to take the world backwards through the backdoor.

And nobody should be prepared to tolerate a situation where people are dictated what kinds of foods they can and can't eat.

CIA interrogations report

KSN: WASHINGTON (AP) — "We're going to kill your children."

With those words, a CIA interrogator tried to squeeze intelligence information from accused terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

On Monday, the threat was revealed in a newly declassified report on alleged detainee abuse as President Barack Obama's Justice Department launched a criminal probe of "unauthorized ... inhumane" tactics during George W. Bush's war on terrorism.

The five-year-old report by the CIA's inspector general, released under a federal court's orders, described harsh tactics used by interrogators on terror suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Seeking information about possible further attacks, interrogators threatened one detainee with a gun and a power drill, told another he would have to watch his mother sexually assaulted and tried to frighten a third with a mock execution of still another prisoner"

CCTV Boom ‘Failing In Fight Against Crime’

From Prison Planet: (Sky News)

"An internal police report has raised serious concerns about whether CCTV is being used effectively in the fight against crime.

The document reveals that CCTV footage was used to solve less than one crime for every 1,000 cameras in London.

Obtained from Scotland Yard using the Freedom of Information Act, the report recommends an overhaul of the way CCTV is handled across the UK.

The criticisms in the study make uncomfortable reading for both senior police officers and politicians alike"

But if you read the article what it's actually saying is CCTV isn't effective enough, and we need more of it.

L.A Times: food scare propaganda...

This is a new subject for this blog here, but I was just flicking through the news and came across this headline from the Los Angeles Times, which immediately stood out as suspicious and low and behold when you read the story it is quite curious:

L.A. officials warn of cheeses that could contain harmful bacteria

And what the story basically is, is that the authorities in L.A are really kicking up a fuss about unpasteurized or raw milk that's been used in some cheese products, and as far as this story goes, that's being injected into the very real issue to do with immigration in the US.

I'm not quite an expert on this specific topic, but what some people may not know, is that there is an absolute terror towards raw milk consumption by the authorities, that's been going on for quite some time, that's possibly not consistent with any particular health concerns.

From the story:

"L.A. health officials have warned the public about eating Latin American-style cheese from unlicensed makers, whose products could be contaminated."

"It's unclear how many cases of illness have been attributed to these tainted cheeses. According to the county, "unpasteurized milk and unpasteurized cheese contain raw milk that has not been heated enough during processing to kill harmful bacteria. These bacteria, such as Listeria, Salmonella, E. coli, bovine Tuberculosis, and Brucella, can cause miscarriage, illness to unborn babies, diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps, swollen neck glands, and/or blood stream infection."

"It's unclear how many cases of illness have been attributed to these tainted cheeses". You really have to wonder who comes up with this stuff.

And the effect with this story is very simple, you galvanize people against what appears to be a public health issue, by keying into people's frustrations about the very real issue of immigration in the U.S, and you can see that in this comment by a reader to the L.A Times' article,

"Public health authorities shiver in their shoes about calling for enforcement of public health laws for fear of not appearing "politically correct". It's time that Los Angeles undergo a serious reality check. If people are breaking the law causing others to become ill they need to be arrested and put out of business. Yes, law enforcement does involve stepping on toes sometimes as well it should if need be. Common criminals, which these vendors are, have no interest in following the laws and that's why we have law enforcement agencies."

As I understand it from people who are in touch with this, raw milk and its products are a great health food and have certain properties pasteurized milk doesn't have, yet in various states in America (and I'm repeating what I've heard others say here) and in Canada itself it's actually a pretty serious crime to sell unpasteurized milk, with stories of SWAT teams descending on family run farms.

I don't know what the situation is in the UK or Europe, but it makes you wonder what's actually going on there, and I don't think there's too much doubt in this case, some effort has been made to whip up a storm around this by attaching it to the very real immigration issue in the U.S.

It makes you wonder if the L.A Times understands what it's publishing.

The Michael Jackson Story: Part 2

We're going to touch on one of the issues that the media brought up in the immediate hours, even minutes following the death of Michael Jackson. And this is a very difficult topic to write about, difficult as it seeps into other fraught areas of the history of music. Suffice to say it's not really a topic about Michael Jackson himself, more to do with some of the media noise.

And right from the get go of the coverage the media made it an issue, where I really don't think it was an overt issue before that.

And that is the controversial theme of race. Needless to say, I suppose generally this theme has been excited by Michael's changing appearance over the years.

Some time back US President Barrack Obama is asked by a reporter why he didn't say more about Michael's passing, as this has caused 'concern in the black community'. Interesting isn't it ? It's been decided that it isn't even an issue that it may have caused concern or be noticed by anyone else.

(As it went, Jackson's image must have became strained enough for Obama to distance himself as far as possible from this even being a serious proposition. In a politically astute way, Obama goes to some lengths to annotate, or rather funnel his tribute to Jackson through a great wariness about his' tragic and sad personal life', and he's 'glad to see that he's primarily being remembered for his entertaining and great gifts'.)

But perhaps some of the race theme is best encapsulated in a CBS interview with director Spike Lee:

Like Obama, Lee says that incredible talent and gifts are accompanied by other idiosyncrasies. That's absolutely correct, and it is very important people understand that. You can't judge certain kinds of people; gifted people, creative people etc through the same lens as you tend to judge everyone else. That's not to say people should be exonerated from anything and everything but at the same time it is simply naive to expect to hold them to the same criteria as everyone else. And I want to come back to this topic later on.

But Lee, injects that in a film he made he has a white guy list his heroes who are all black but goes on to say they are 'more than black'. This is a source of great amusement for Lee, who thinks he's discovered something really cool.

Lee, frankly at least partly at the media goading/fawning of interviewer Katie Couric goes on to suggest that Jackson's 'provenance' is such a sensitive issue and he even has no qualms about recounting some story of some guy getting attacked because he didn't sufficiently acknowledge Jackson's heritage.

Yet in a world where we are constantly asked to be colour blind when that angle suits, or even told that there is no such thing as race, the media's clear determination to revise the death of Michael Jackson into a narrative about racial group identity, rather than a narrative about a great man with a tremendous reach becomes a little conspicuous.

I'm sure some will disagree, and I don't wish to sound like I'm criticising whatever genuine feelings people may have, but clearly at times his death was also being shifted into some other statement, and this was happening immediately.

And this has specific effects, and one of those is that we end up looking at race rather than individuals, and although I understand it in one way, I also find this a slightly distorting emphasis to be placed on anyone, and it also puts something of a fence around the legacy of Michael Jackson.

Repeatedly it has been said in the coverage, that Michael Jackson opened the door to a lot of black artists, and that Michael Jackson broke into MTV where black artists were not generally encouraged previously.

The New York Times quoting Al Sharpton said, "“Before Michael we were limited and ghettoized,” Mr. Sharpton told the mostly black crowd. “But Michael put on a cutaway military jacket, pulled his pants leg up, put on a white glove and smashed the barriers of segregated music."

I think Al Sharpton has said some really wonderful things about Michael Jackson, some of them are said from a certain perspective, but they are poignant, moving and powerful. In one of these speeches says something like "You are Bad Michael Now, you are the Baddest". It was a great line I wish I could remember it properly or find the clip.

But how times change.

If Michael Jackson had a hand opening the door to presumably what came out, and the media are now telling us this is important, it just happens to be Michael Jackson also represented a set of things that like them or not, that I think were rather different.

At times you almost see Michael Jackson, and I don't mean to sound rude, but relegated to history as foot in the door for race-first self-esteem, with his own career as an artist something on the side.

You could almost be forgiven for thinking that's what it was all about if you knew nothing about Michael Jackson and just listened to some of the coverage of his death alone.

As far as Michael Jackson was concerned anything that even smelt like a bellicose 'dose of race' or any kind of specified racial delimiter publicly came much later on when his career was in trouble and I think it also needs to be seen in a certain context which gets even more controversial, because as far I'm aware this never had significant painstaking attention given to it in the music itself before that.

Songs like Black or White, which although I personally didn't care for at all, I generally understood as the opposite to the above, possibly the other extreme of racial comment. As a side note I think Michael was inadvertently playing into the hands of other trends when he made that song, but I believe it was genuine and well intentioned, and I know it has fans.

Michael Jackson is someone who brought light, hope, dazzle, joy and inspiration, instead of nonsense, despair, anger and confusion, and he had a tremendous global following and like a lot of great figures is difficult to categorize.

In his prime he was detached from the atmosphere of political correctness and group banner waving that's applauding him now. He was himself, an incredibly gifted person and it's that that makes someone a 'problem'.

Indeed, it's difficult to disagree with Michael's friend actress Elizabeth Taylor about the real reason at least for some of Michael's difficulties, where she said in 1993 in the interview with Oprah Winfrey, "He is larger than life and some people just cannot accept that" (1:14)

Part 3 Next...

Jade Goody was "sacrificial offering"

The other story from the Guardian, is not a new story but is at least a retrospectively bizarre piece of video with the publicist Max Clifford talking about Jade Goody, it's about a month or so before she died, where he says "Jade was a sacrificial offering". I think he's supposed to be talking about something that happened on the Big Brother show, but it's just very spooky.

Local Council workers digging into core ID card database

A couple of stories from the Guardian I wanted to mention briefly. One of them this story I saw on Henry Porter's Blog:

"The government must be quietly grateful to the distractions of August. Only Computer Weekly noticed that nine local authority workers have been sacked for accessing the personal records of celebrities, and their acquaintances held on the core database of the government's ID scheme.

This is a significant story because government ministers have always dismissed campaigners' claims that once all personal information is stored in a single database it will become vulnerable to abuse by those with access to the system. Ministers have repeatedly insisted that security will be absolute and that severe penalties will deter anyone tempted to read files illegally.

Not true. The magazine's website reported that the nine fired were among 34 people who illegally accessed information. Some were reprimanded, some resigned and some were sacked but none was prosecuted. Using a freedom of information request, Computer Weekly found that Cardiff and Glasgow Councils sacked people who had looked up celebrities in the customer information system (CIS) which is run by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and contains 90 million records. Various other councils sacked people for looking up their friends, their own details and in one instance, a girlfriends."

As I said on Henry's blog this is just the tip of the iceberg of this kind of thing unfortunately, but it's important to remember there is no such thing as 'right hands' and the 'wrong hands'. All of this stuff is just wrong in principle.

The Michael Jackson Story: part 1

Ok we've been a bit sporadic recently, and although time has passed, and there's a lot of other issues I want to talk about, I actually wanted to write a bit more about Michael Jackson than we did before, and although it's not traditionally what this blog is about, there is a reason I would occasionally like to talk about stories that may seem not directly political, or important in that way at first.

For sure, I don't want to chase every little negative piece of gossip-mongering some gutter hack writes about this celebrity or that, but I do want to write some more about those stories that I see as important.

I would like to break this into a series of sections and we'll try get some other news in in between.

It's been interesting to see what the press come up with day to day since the death of Michael Jackson of course.

Everyone and their dog, including so called 'close friends' suddenly have a story that is 'really important' they must tell. Everyone from Michael Jackson's dermatologist to the shocking spectacle a couple of weeks ago with Uri Geller who would pull out his own granny's gold teeth if she died in front of him, it's something of a free-for-all.

I see the News of the World today have a story about some dude called Mark Lester who was apparently another one of these 'friends' of Jackson, who claims to be the father of at least one of his children.

I'm not going to get into that topic, but I just wonder how much the News of The World paid Lester for this story. Some friend.

Lester says that he wants, coincidentally, all the same usual 'reasons' poured out in a specific way that the media always construct around this kind of thing, i.e how he 'wants the best for those kids'. Yeah sure he does.

For what it's worth, frankly very little, I don't think any of Lester's own reasons are compelling which makes the whole thing even more wanton, I also think the story is flawed for a number of reasons which if anyone is really interested I can go into, but it's a great example he is setting to his own children and these and as puppet, a tool, and just another anything-for-a-buck hapless maggot trying to make a few pounds out of the death of someone who trusted him as his friend. If he was a friend in any significant way that is.

But this is all de rigueur of course and to be expected. These are the norms that the News of the World encourage, and that sad creatures and hangers on espouse. It's not easy to see a difference between Lester and the family of Gavin Arvizo, who falsely claimed Jackson molested him. Actually there is a difference, Arvizo didn't go to the News of the World. Although I tend to view the kinds of stories appearing now with considerable doubt anyway.

Meanwhile in the Mail on Sunday, Mr Ian Halperin is back again with a 'timeline of death', which internet-troll like includes repeated assertions about Jackson's mental state as 'breaking down', 'on the edge' , 'paranoid'. Whether any of that is true or just a description of Mr Halperin's own problems in this case I don't know but those things are pretty normal fare in a certain way for creatives, artists, creative performers and so on, which a working class hack like Halperin possibly wouldn't understand, hence he reports it as an 'issue'.

It's interesting that Halperin basically picks up the side of the story made by Michael's father, Joe Jackson, exactly as he made it with Larry King on CNN. I wonder if that's where some of the material for this article came from.

Halperin also goes on to claim that Jackson was being threatened "physically and financially" by people around him, presumably to do these shows, and being kept away from his family. If that's true it would explain a lot. But Halperin consistently puts this stuff together and then either simply isn't able to see or deliberately scurries away from the appropriate conclusion that doesn't fit what he or the publisher wants to peddle.

He also claims Jackson was in pain. Pain from what exactly ? You see the way this is written is almost to suggest that Jackson was in pain the way Darth Vader was in pain, as a kind of punishment of being attached to the dark side of the Force.

Again where truth may seep out accidentally from Halperin's poison pen is that Jackson felt he was being coerced into performing these shows, or at least the number or some aspect of the arrangements and that has something of a ring of truth about it, and has been hinted at elsewhere.

Anyway the story seems to subtly change from day to day but generally the story seems to be over the last few weeks, that this Doctor Conrad Murray was administering the general anesthetic drug Diprivan aka propofol as a sleeping aid to Jackson. It is claimed in some reports that Jackson may have been taking this for some time and that various figures around Jackson were aware of this.

And they had been getting away with this for a while, but on this occasion something went wrong, and the problem with this drug, like so many is that there appears to be a relatively narrow window between effective dose and lethal dose. We don't know, but it has been postulated in the press at different stages that terrifyingly Murray wasn't paying sufficient attention and Michael stopped breathing, which is a known result that can occur from this drug. Later reports suggest other drugs were involved as well.

At various points over the last few weeks Murray has become the focus of the affair, with talk of manslaughter or homicide charges, and possibly other people administering drugs as well.

At least this is the official line.

If that's correct, it's a tremendous and insane tragedy of course that Michael Jackson had become reliant on such an extreme drug just to get to sleep.

Part 2 next...