"Messages From The Future For Those In The Know"

By Darryl Mason

Whoever, or whatever, is creating crop circles in the England countryside this year has taken this beautiful art into the realms of the majestic.

A Mayan-inspired work that appeared yesterday :



The rising phoenix of the week before :





What are they?

Who makes them, and why?

I still can't find any videos on YouTube that show people making crop circles of this scale and detail, overnight, sometimes in only a few hours, but obviously they're man-made.

I don't particularly care who is making them, I just think they're a greatly unrecognised art form and I look forward every year to seeing what designs will appear next.

But my favourite science-fiction drenched story about who creates crop circles and why comes from an old man I met in a small Somerset, England, pub back in 1997. He said he'd been told by a farmer friend, from Wiltshire, in whose field crop circles had appeared three or four times through the early '90s, that a visitor to one crop circle had told him, the farmer, that time travellers created the crop circles to leave messages for "those in the know".

The old man said he'd spent a lot of hours working on his own farm thinking about that explanation. He said after the farmer had told him that story, he found himself staying up later and later, looking out at his fields, and the night sky, first cynically "keepim' wotch", then wishing his fields would get a crop circle, just once, then being pissed off that his farm was being ignored by whoever was creating the crop circles that appeared, like magic, in the fields of his farmer friends.

He said all those hours, after midnight, staring at the stars, at the slightest movement in his fields, led him to figure, not believe, but theorize, that because crop circles were already part of our history, our timeline, and they didn't get a lot of media attention, mostly, anyway, that it didn't matter so much what design appeared. If time travellers wanted to leave messages, or warnings, for people in our time to take heed of, or to learn from, they could leave them disguised as crop circles without causing any great chaos in our timeline. That meant people from, say, 2089, could come back here, visit, interfere in our history but without causing too much great calamity in their own. Something like that. The old bloke was hammered, and I wasn't far behind him.

I don't think the old man really believed that explanation for crop circles, but he obviously enjoyed thinking about it, and talking it out, for the fun of it, to test my and his own gullibility, over four pints of a particularly deadly local cider. There was no loud, pounding music in this tiny village pub, no Sky Sports blaring away, just the crackle of a warm fire, an occasional wheeze and cough from some of the other locals, and a barman who thought he'd heard it all but still had to stop and listen to this wild, fantastic story, no doubt not for the first time, from one of his regulars.

The walk back home that night was along a dark, winding lane, the stars like diamonds on velvet, and all quiet in the fields I passed. I stopped and waited, for a while, at a barley field that looked like a prime canvas for crop circle art. I was disappointed nothing happened, and no great art work appeared while I stood there.

But I would have been thoroughly disappointed if I'd seen a bunch of young blokes pull up in a van and haul out the planks-on-strings and grass rollers and go to work on their latest design.

Seeing how the illusion is done always kills the magic, even if you are wiser to the truth once exposed.

Murdoch Media Could Pay Billions In Damages For Illegally Hacking Phones Of Politicians, Celebrities, Sports Stars

Police Now Investigating Murdoch UK Tabloids For Spying On UK Deputy Prime Minister, Thousands More

By Darryl Mason

I already know that this is going to be my favourite story of 2009, no matter how it turns out. More to come, obviously, but for now this taster of what could prove to be the biggest media scandal in years, and one that could fell a media empire :

Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun will be investigated by the Metropolitan Police in London over claims they obtained personal information through deception.

The Guardian newspaper reported yesterday that Murdoch’s News Corp. paid more than 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) to settle lawsuits claiming journalists used private investigators to illegally obtain information on politicians, sports stars and entertainers. The report throws a spotlight on the news- gathering methods of the competitive U.K. newspaper industry.

“Following a court order in 2008 we made available a copy of some information from our investigation into the buying and selling of personal information, to lawyers” involved in a related case, Mick Gorrill, assistant information commissioner, said in the statement. “This included material that showed that 31 journalists working for The News of the World and The Sun had acquired people’s personal information through blagging.”

News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch said yesterday that he wasn’t aware of any payments made to settle legal cases in which the company’s newspaper reporters may have been involved in criminal activity.

“If that had happened, I would know about it,” Murdoch said in an interview at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

According to the Guardian, the out-of-court settlements secured secrecy about three cases that may have shown evidence of journalists using private investigators who allegedly hacked into the mobile-phone messages of public figures and gained access to confidential personal data illegally, the report said.

The Guardian cited an unidentified person with London’s Metropolitan Police as saying there was evidence that News Group employees used private investigators to hack into thousands of mobile phones.

The above is from Bloomberg, the financial media, who used this headline :

Murdoch Newspapers to Be Investigated Over ‘Blagging’ Claims

That's a real bad look for Rupert Murdoch, particularly as most of his worldwide media operation is going down the shitter, as paying readers and ad revenue disappear.

Police investigations are never, or rarely, good news for the share price.

Brokers are reading that story in Bloomberg, and are learning that Rupert Murdoch's UK operation paid out hundred thousand dollars each to a few people that his reporters illegally spied on, and they are calculating how much Murdoch may have to pay out if all the 2000 to 3000 people that Murdoch hacks spied also demand hefty payouts the size of the out of court settlements that have already been paid.

Rupert Murdoch's media empire could be sued for a $US2-3 billion, or more, if everyone who was spied on decided to go hard for as much money as they could get for having their privacy violated.

On a late night news program in Australia, all this was the last story of the show, but it was mentioned that when Murdoch execs were contacted for a reply to the allegations, all they offered was "No Comment."

No comment.

This is going to be so much fun to watch unfold. Journos love to report on other journos, and the media that they work for. They love to bitch about each other, and if the Murdoch media empire looks to be on the ropes, as it most certainly does already, non-Murdoch journos will go hard, they will be relentless. Unless they, too, engage in such activities to get their headlines.

The Old Media Will Eat Itself.


UPDATE : A great interview here with UK Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, who broke the Murdoch Spying Scandal story (excerpts) :

What we've uncovered is systematic activity by Rupert Murdoch's journalists on the Sunday newspaper here the News of the World, using illegal techniques of one kind or another to uncover information.

One bunch of illegal techniques is to do with using private investigators to do what's called "blagging" - that's conning their way into confidential databases, things like your bank statements, credit card statements, itemised telephone bills, tax records, all that kind of stuff.

That's all illegal and they've been doing it. And the second kind of illegal activity is using private investigators to do what's called "phone hacking", which just means that they can get into other people's mobile telephone networks and hear messages which have been left on the target's mobile phone.

....there was clear evidence of News of the World journalists, including a middle ranking executive, handling the raw material that was coming through from these intercepts.

....my understanding is that that paperwork shows us that the News of the World were hacking the phones of 2,000 or 3,000 public figures of one kind or another.

(the police) didn't pursue charges against the Murdoch journalists. And I don't know the answers to these questions, but it raises the worrying possibility - and it's only a possibility at this stage - that the police at New Scotland Yard didn't want to get into a fight with powerful Rupert Murdoch....he's politically very powerful.

....you begin to get this alarming picture of the newspaper groups drifting beyond the reach of the law because they're just too powerful.

You can hear the whole interview with Nick Davies here. He sounds very excited. He knows how huge this story will become.

At the Michael Jackson memorial in Los Angeles today, Stevie Wonder performed 'Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer'. An extraordinary performance, soaring, exhilerating, spine-chilling :

Social Media As The New Punk Rock

I wouldn't say I agree 100% with all that is claimed in the following video, but it's full of great ideas and some excellent animation. Social media is shattering the restrictions that have for so long been tightly wrapped around the free flow of information and opinion. The gatekeepers cannot control what we learn and see and hear as easily as they once did. This is a reality in a state of flux, volcanoing creativity and inspiration and it's only just beginning.

There might be a lot of crap in Social Media, but was it so vastly different in the bookshops and newsagents of the 20th century?

How To Hang An Elephant



The year was 1916, the location was Tennessee and the reason why was to try and smooth over some bad publicity from a circus animal that killed a human :

The circus owner, Charlie Sparks, reluctantly decided that the only way to quickly resolve the potentially ruinous situation was to kill the elephant in public.

On the following day, a foggy and rainy September 13, 1916, she was transported by rail to Erwin, Tennessee where a crowd of over 2,500 people (including most of the town's children) assembled in the Clinchfield railroad yard.

The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane.

Not surprisingly, children ran screaming.

Robama

At least Lincoln looks interested in what Obama The Robot has to say :

World Health Organisation Admits Defeat On Pandemic Spread, Only Weeks In

And so, it begins?

The United Nations' top health official says the worldwide spread of swine flu is now unstoppable.

Leaders and experts from across the world gathered in Cancun to see what lessons could be learnt so far, but the advice is still the same.

The best way to avoid catching the virus is simple - wash your hands and avoid coughing and sneezing in public.

The World Health Organisation also promised that poor countries in the Americas would receive enough vaccine to fight the swine flu outbreak.

They got nothing. The swine flu virus, which we used to be told was a mix of Human, Bird and Pig influenza viruses, is already mutating. This is a living entity that can produce three generations inside one minute. Will it spread through our pets as well? They don't know. Will it kill more children than elderly people? They don't know. If you get it this season, will you be immune next season? They don't know.

This virus is smarter than us. More highly evolved. It can already beat Tamiflu, and other anti-virals. We don't have a big arsenal to defend ourselves from constantly mutating influenza viruses, we mostly try and deal with the results.

Hastily created vaccines do not seem likely to be the miracle cure. There probably won't be one.

The talk of such vaccines being effective before testing even begins seems mostly to placate the public, and to market the brand.

The World Health Organisation, and most large nations, have their Level 6 : Pandemic operations already underway.

A worst case scenario, where nothing can be done and the virus is mostly left to do whatever it will do to humanity, killing many times the number of people who annually die from influenza, certainly sounds like what our state and federal governments are preparing for.

In the briefings where media isn't present, is the World Health Organisation talking a two year, three pandemic wave, scenario an with expected death toll of 10 million? Or 100 million?

The higher death tolls are expected to come during the second wave of pandemic influenza, when it is stronger, more evolved, more lethal and well traveled. Next year.

The Most Incredible Air Disaster Survival Story You Will Ever Read

I heard this story a lot when I was a kid. It'd come round once a year or so, "this girl fell out of an exploding plane once and lived!" It excited the mind, even if you hadn't been on an aircraft and none of us had back then, you'd still see them flying over and wonder : what would it be like to fall from one of those, fall through all the air and space, and live? It was a subject worthy of a few lunchtime discussions once or twice a year - she clung the wing, all the way down. No, she was still strapped into her seat, and that landed on a big piece of wing and she sailed all the way down to Earth. Something like that. It changed from year to year.

But the real story was never in the newspapers, and no books in the school library mentioned it, so it became one of those 'Did That Really Happen?' stories of childhood. Like a myth.

The story is real. It happened to Juliane Koepcke on Chrismas Eve, 1971. She was flying into the Amazon rainforest on an airliner with family members. The jet exploded and fell from the sky :

"We were headed straight down. Christmas presents were flying around the cabin and I could hear people screaming."

"Suddenly there was this amazing silence. The plane was gone. I must have been unconscious and then came to in midair. I was flying, spinning through the air and I could see the forest spinning beneath me."

She fell three kilometres and landed in the rainforest. She had minor cuts. She was still strapped into the row of airliner seats.

"(the row of seats) was rotating much like the helicopter and that might have slowed the fall. Also, the place I landed had very thick foliage and that might have lessened the impact."

Her dramatic survival story doesn't end there. She spent days and nights in the rainforest, following a creek to a stream to a river where she hoped she would be found. Maggots infested one of her wounds :

"Later, after I was rescued it was treated and more than 50 maggots were found inside. I still wonder how so many maggots could have fitted into that little hole...."

She became known, and rightly so, as The Miracle Girl.

Her thoughts on the recent air disasters?

"It just horrifies me. I only hope it all went quickly for those on board."

There's much more to this story, well worth reading.

The War On Iraq In One Baghdad Neighbourhood

The pullout of American forces from Iraq begins, bases are dismantled or handed over to the Iraqis, who spend days joyfully celebrating the news that the American occupation of their country will soon be history.

But this New York Times portrait of a fractured, tense Sunni/Shiite neighbourhood hints at what may follow the American pullout :

...the Shiite government believes many of the Sunni militias are little more than cover for insurgents.

“I don’t want to assign any of them to be in my force,” said Capt. Ishan Falah Hassan of the National Police. “In my opinion, and this is not the government opinion, many of them should be arrested.”

He said the American strategy of paying (the Sunnis) for doing little more than stopping their attacks on them was clever, but it was time for the whole system to end.

Still, he worries there are networks of extremists waiting to attack.

“The terrorism cells were sleeping and they are ready to attack...”

You Want To Know Who Really Owns America?

George Carlin speaks The Truth. The uncomfortable Truth :



Carlin is gone now, but where are those who will fill the void he left? Where are the comedians who need to do little more than report facts about the way a government runs the country to get laughs?

There are TV comedians, and satirists, like The Daily Show, but it's not the same as going to a theatre and hear someone speak like Carlin did for 90 minutes.

Philip K Dick, 1972 :

"...a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities."

Murdoch CEO : We Don't Need Google

News Limited, Australia, CEO John Hartigan claims the Murdoch media empire has plans to remove its stories from Google News, and forge their own path :

"We from this day own our own material and are going to go about getting it to the masses through our own sources without going through businesses like Google."

This will be fun to watch.

Rupert Murdoch, and his CEOs, are particularly narky about bloggers and independent news sites using "our content" for free in writing commentary or opinion about the power and influence and mistakes and major failings of the world's biggest media empire, which includes the obsessively, dementedly, pro-war Fox News.

Murdoch CEO Labels Bloggers "Political Extremists"

Osama Bin Laden In America

An account by Osama Bin Laden's wife confirms a New Yorker journalist's own investigations that Osama Bin Laden once visited the United States. Bin Laden and his wife flew into Indiana, and stayed in the US for two weeks. Osama Bin Laden left his wife for one full week to hold meetings in Los Angeles, also visiting Chicago :

One evening he [Osama] arrived home with a surprise announcement: ’Najwa, We are going to travel to the United States. Our boys are going with us.’

I was shocked, to tell you the truth…Pregnant, and busy with two babies, I remember few details of our travel, other than we passed through London before flying to a place I had never heard of, a state in America called Indiana. Osama told me that he was meeting with a man by the name of Abdullah Azzam. Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions.

…I am sometimes questioned about my personal opinion of the country and its people. This is surprisingly difficult to answer. We were there for only two weeks, and for one of those weeks, Osama was away in Los Angeles to meet with some men in that city. The boys and I were left behind in Indiana with a girlfriend whom I would rather not name.

You can fit a lot of interesting meetings into a week in LA.

A few years later, Osama Bin Laden, with the militiant training resources of the CIA behind him, helped raise an army of mujahadeen and went to war against Russia in Afghanistan. This action inspired United States president, Ronald Reagan, to hail Bin Laden's Islamist warriors as "freedom fighters."

Fox News : The Only Thing That Can Save America Now Is For Al Qaeda To Nuke Our Cities

This Is Insane. Pure Treason. But understandable.

When tragedy and disaster strikes, people run to their TVs. Fox News pulled more than 10 million viewers on 9/11 and for a week or two after. They nearly hit those same ratings highs when Rupert Murdoch's droogs fermented from fantasy into reality an unprovoked War On Iraq.



Imagine how many people would watch Fox News if American cities started getting blown apart by "major weapons"?

It'd be the mecca of ratings.

2027 : We Cannot Allow Moon Colonists To Have The Capacity To Build Nuclear Weapons

By Darryl Mason


The Moon : one day, we may have to bomb the shit out of it

In a couple of decades, when the various Moon-based colonies of Russia, the North American Union, China and Japan have joined together in their Earth-deprived isolation, and vow to never bring their families back to Terra, they will demand the right to build nuclear power plants, using Moon uranium. Of course, what they will really want is not cheap plentiful power, but the opportunity to build nuclear weapons.

Once the Moonalists get nuclear weapons, no-one on Earth will be safe.

A team of scientists has found the first conclusive signature for the presence of uranium on the lunar surface, an element not seen in previous Moon-mapping efforts.

In addition to uranium, the Kaguya GRS data also is showing clear signatures for thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron.

Powering autonomous space craft out of the solar system on nuclear explosions will become more attractive to Earth-based humans if we could mine uranium on the Moon, and never have to send it up from Terran mines.

The less we need to send to the Moon from Earth to build colonies and industry on the Moon, the first permanent residents would presumably be robots, the less expensive such a project will become and the more likely then it is turn from science fiction into reality within the next two to three decades.

The more mineral wealth the Moon holds, the more likely it is that children born this decade will be able to take a retirement years trip to the outer planets of our solar system. A shuttle stopover at The Moon to do some sight-seeing, before boarding a nuclear-fueled space liner, constructed where needed from the most useful mineral elements of The Moon, for an unimaginable voyage from The Moon to Saturn and back in two months.

The trip of a lifetime.