by Eric Larsen Ph.D.

What a complete, unmitigated disaster 9/11 and the ten awful years following it have been—ten years of murder, crime, lawlessness, deceit, stupidity, and blindness that are only now meliorated, at long last, by the publication of Dr. Judy Wood’s unique, revelatory, and unequivocally welcome book, Where Did the Towers Go? The Evidence of Directed Free-Energy Technology on 9/11.

Allow me to make full disclosure now, so that those (and, believe me, there are many) who will choose not to read further can quit right away and save time.

I, me, Eric Larsen, wrote the Foreword to Dr. Wood’s book. I wrote it partly because I have known for many years about Dr. Wood’s research; partly because I have followed the website that Dr. Wood has maintained (http://www.drjudywood.com/); and partly because I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to write that Foreword.

It wasn’t just an opportunity but a high honor. To give an idea of how great an honor it was, here is the first line of what I wrote:

The book you now hold in your hands is the most important book of the twenty-first century.

Let me go further and quote the two sentences also , since the same obligation pertains now as did when I wrote them—the obligation for me to explain why I said so unqualified a thing and what I meant by it. Here’s what I meant, and still do:

Where Did the Towers Go? is a work, assuming that its content and message are properly and fairly heeded, that offers a starting point from which those who genuinely want to do it can begin, first, to rein in and then, perhaps, even end the wanton criminality and destructiveness of a set of American policies that took as their justification and starting point the horrific events of September 11, 2001.

As everyone knows, 9/11 has been “the justification and starting point” for all manner of destruction, loss, crime, and horror. Without 9/11, there would have been no “Patriot Act,” no abuse of FISA and stripping away of privacy rights, no Military Commissions Act of 2006 with its setting aside of Habeas Corpus, no implementation of Northcom and deployment of our own military forces on domestic American soil (for use against who, you might ask?), and no trashing of Bill of Rights and Constitutional guarantees, no programmatic and precedent-setting weakening and eliminating of right and guarantees so that the very concepts of “citizenship” and “freedom” have been emptied out to the point where setting up concentration camps inside the U.S. is now legal and not a one of us would have any recourse whatsoever if it were decided that we should be thrown into a cell in one of them and forgotten forever.[1]

Without 9/11, there would never have been any fake and opportunistic “Global War on Terror,” would never have been Guantanamo as we know it now, never have been official programs of torture or fake demonizing of Islam in order to justify wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, or to justify overt plans for the murder of U.S. citizens living in places like, say, Yemen.

There’s more, much more. The complete list of atrocities, crimes, and inhumanities triggered by or justified by 9/11 could fill whole chapters, even books. By using 9/11 as propaganda—by using it as trigger, excuse, justification, or catalyst—the U.S. has betrayed itself, its principles, and its people, and has made itself the world’s most dangerous enemy of all mankind and also of Earth herself.

How can it conceivably be, given these facts, that we, a nation of people who presumably have minds of our own—how can it be that we have done nothing to stop this hideous parade of monstrosities and horrors? In the Foreword to Dr. Wood’s book, I wrote:

It is now almost a decade since 9/11 took place, and in all that time no unassailable, permanent, or, in pragmatic terms, politically influential progress has been made in determining exactly and irrefutably what took place on that day—or what did not take place.

We—that is, we the potential resistance or opposition to U.S. criminal policy—have been spinning our wheels for a complete decade. There are a lot of reasons for this wheel-spinning, including various programs of very skillful and extraordinarily devious cover-up after cover-up after cover-up of the central question of what did happen on 9/11. For, as long as that central question remains unanswered, or for as long as that question can be caused to remain obfuscated, blurred, muddled-up, in doubt—as long as that situation continues, the wheels will continue to spin and people won’t quite know what to do. Dr. Wood is very well aware of this fact. Her own way of putting it is that before accusing someone of a crime, you’ve got to know what crime they committed. In her Author’s Preface, she writes:

You cannot convict someone of a crime if you don’t even know what crime to charge them with. If you accuse someone of murder using a gun, you’d better be sure the body has a bullet hole in it.

The single issue that keeps recurring in the articles is whether Israel has been intentionally pursuing the genocidal destruction of Palestinians. The word "genocide" actually occurs in the titles of eight of the articles (one quarter of the total), and the flood of information contained therein--as well as most of the rest of the articles--suggests the choice of the word is in fact reasonable, not hyperbolic. Cook recounts how Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide" in 1944 by linking the Greek word "genos," referring to a tribe or race, with the Latin suffix "cide," meaning to kill. Cook also quotes Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonasson's more expansive definition of the word to suggest the destruction of culture, language, religion, political and social institutions as aspects of genocide that may fall short of total annihilation. And in fact the reference to "genocide" throughout the text is not limited to total annihilation but includes other modes of extreme repression, and appropriately so. It seems obvious by now that Zionists do not exactly seek to exterminate Palestinians, merely to get rid of them--i.e., either to "transfer" them to nearby Muslim nations or to sequester them in "cantons" (Ariel Sharon's word) equivalent to American Indian reservations minus the gambling casinos. In the words of Steven Lendman, "slow-motion genocide" would be involved, something presumably better and more "humane" than the Nazi gas chambers, but nevertheless despicable.

by Joel S. Hirschhorn

 

You want to read The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century, edited by Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, if you meet these criteria: you welcome information and analysis about critically important issues that come from great thinkers outside the mainstream media and publishing world; you can handle brain pain from detailed and brutally honest revelations; you are willing and able to challenge your own biases and preconceptions to let in new explanations of how the world really functions.

If millions of Americans read this book, we would probably see a far stronger uprising against the political establishment that has refused to severely punish the countless guilty people in the financial, banking and mortgage sectors that brought down the US and global economic system.

This book ties together a large number of factors in twenty chapters that reveal just how corrupt the world has become because of the power of plutocratic, wealthy and corporate interests.  From Wall Street corporate boardrooms to the Federal Reserve and other central banks to the US military and NATO, a multitude of threads get woven into a disturbing tapestry of crimes against society that still have not been prosecuted.

by Jim Miles

The Chosen Peoples - America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election. Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibowtiz. Simon & Schuster. 2010.

A work on studying chosen peoples needs to be approached with some kind of trepidation when one knows that they themselves are not chosen. If for nothing else, it is impossible to rationally argue against faith in biblical ‘chosenness.’ However, if one accepts the underlying premise that other people believe in their being chosen then the idea of chosenness can be worked with. This appears to be what the authors of this new book “The Chosen Peoples” attempt to examine.

In an historical sense, looking at the way the idea of being chosen affected the decisions and events around the people claiming to be chosen, the authors did a reasonable job. It is much more of an historical overview than a psychological examination of the ramifications that assuming and advocating “divine election” would create. The material covered does provide a slim overview of historical events.

In the Jewish case the mythological biblical events concern the original ‘nation’ of Israel - nation being a term that has several meanings according to its context - and how it develops through the diaspora and on into Zionism and the current problems of Israel/Palestine. In the case of the United States, the historical review starts with the first colonial settlers and their attitudes and actions in relation with the indigenous populations, and then carries forward through several presidencies to the current support of the state of Israel by the U.S. government.

by Eileen Fleming

The Fed is proposing another round of “quantitative easing,” although the first round failed to reverse deflation. It failed because the money went into the coffers of banks, which failed to lend it on. To reverse deflation, the money needs to be funneled directly to state and local economies.

In 2002, in a speech that earned him the nickname “Helicopter Ben,” then-Fed Governor Bernanke famously said that the government could easily reverse a deflation, just by printing money and dropping it from helicopters. “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent),” he said, “that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” Later in the speech he discussed “a money-financed tax cut,” which he said was “essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.” You could cure a deflation, said Professor Friedman, simply by dropping money from helicopters.

It seems logical enough. If there is insufficient money in the money supply (deflation), the solution is to put more money into it. But if deflation is so easy to fix, then why has the Fed’s massive attempts to date failed to do the job? At the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole summit on August 27, Chairman Bernanke said he would fight deflation with his whole arsenal, including “quantitative easing” (QE) – purchasing longterm securities with money created on a computer. Yet since 2008, the Fed has added more than $1.2 trillion to “base money” doing just that, and the economy is still in a serious deflationary spiral. In the first quarter of this year, the money supply actually shrank at a record annual rate of 9.6%.

Cullen Roche at The Pragmatic Capitalist has an answer to that puzzle.  He says that as currently practiced, quantitative easing (QE) is not really a money drop.  It is just an asset swap:

“[T]he Fed doesn’t actually ‘print’ anything when it initiates its QE policy.  The Fed simply electronically swaps an asset with the private sector.  In most cases it swaps deposits with an interest bearing asset.”

by Jim Miles

Vltchek wanders across the entire region - slowly as it were - using the highly constrained and schedules and authoritarian rules of the few airlines that service the area. The airlines are predominantly foreign controlled, and that foreign control is what leads to the majority of the problems in the region. Most of the island groups are nominally independent countries, yet have become ‘re-colonized’ through a variety of modern connivances and rules and regulations imposed from outside, often supported by elites and their cronies within. The themes and ideas covered in the book are familiar to anyone following current world events, but in an area where so much is focussed on such a small land base, the litany of negative events and actions appear almost overwhelming.

Paradise lost (almost)

As I made notes reading through this book, they quickly veered from straight line sequenced notes to a web of interactions wherein one event or rule or regulation affected not only one small area, but interacted with other events and rules creating a spider web of reinforcing - and controlling - intentions. Those intentions, in their simplest expression, is to control the resources of the area (fishing, mining, agriculture), to control the geopolitical access and rights of the region (the political machinations of the China/Taiwan game, UN voting preferences on international issues, western countries that support various elite groups), and to control information concerning the region and the subjugation it suffers from these foreign and elitist groups.

Environmental disasters

Generally I place all current events under three very general headings, all of which are necessarily related and intertwined with each other: the environment, the economy, and the military /political.

The environment in the region is generally known as an idyllic tropical get-away, with some concern about the rising ocean waters that affect Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati, with the former receiving the most media attention. As if losing three nations and their distinct indigenous cultures is not enough, environmental concerns arise in all of the islands for similar and other reasons.

Vltchek discusses logging on the larger islands and the resulting chemical contamination of fresh and salt waters. That necessarily ties over into the economy as the logs are exported, leaving the concerned area with a devastated forest, little in the way of economic development as the earnings go to the elites but mostly to the overseas corporations that operate in the area. The economy then has an impact on the human economy as crime, prostitution, disease, tend to become norms in an area in which the indigenous culture no longer offers a valid means in which to maintain a living.