The Nightly Quill

The information highlight of the symposium was undoubtedly the Sunday morning panel discussion. The panel was a who’s who of the most credentialed 9/11 skeptics ever impaneled. It was moderated by Alex Jones who set the stage and pushed the envelope from his first statement; this seemed to energize the crowd as well as the panel members. The fact that C-Span had agreed to film this event had the panel chomping at the bit to hit bullet point after bullet point.

 Paul Grignon’s 47-minute animated presentation of “Money as Debt” tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it all is being created. It is an entertaining way to get the message out. The Cowichan Citizens Coalition and its “Duncan Initiative” received high praise from those who previewed it. I recommend it as a painless but hard-hitting educational tool and encourage the widest distribution and use by all groups concerned with the present unsustainable monetary system in Canada and the United States.

While the number of the world’s billionaires grew from 793 in 2006 to 946 this year, major mass uprisings became commonplace occurrences in China and India.

In India, which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion USD, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to ‘India’s security’ were the Maoist led guerrilla armies and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion USD net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold, and increased spending for the rural poor by $10 billion USD in the hopes of lessening the monstrous class inequalities and heading off a mass upheaval.

The total wealth of this global ruling class grew 35% year to year topping $3.5 trillion USD, while income levels for the lower 55% of the world’s 6-billion-strong population declined or stagnated. Put another way, one hundred millionth of the world’s population (1/100,000,000) owns more than over 3 billion people. Over half of the current billionaires (523) came from just 3 countries: the US (415), Germany (55) and Russia (53). The 35% increase in wealth mostly came from speculation on equity markets, real estate and commodity trading, rather than from technical innovations, investments in job-creating industries or social services.

Among the newest, youngest and fastest-growing group of billionaires, the Russian oligarchy stands out for its most rapacious beginnings. Over two-thirds (67%) of the current Russian billionaire oligarchs began their concentration of wealth in their mid to early twenties. During the infamous decade of the 1990’s under the quasi-dictatorial rule of Boris Yeltsin and his US-directed economic advisers, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar the entire Russian economy was put up for sale for a ‘political price’, which was far below its real value. Without exception, the transfers of property were achieved through gangster tactics – assassinations, massive theft, and seizure of state resources, illicit stock manipulation and buyouts. The future billionaires stripped the Russian state of over a trillion dollars worth of factories, transport, oil, gas, iron, coal and other formerly state-owned resources.

Contrary to European and US publicists, on the Right and Left, very few of the top former Communist leaders are found among the current Russian billionaire oligarchy. Secondly, contrary to the spin-masters’ claims of ‘communist inefficiencies’, the former Soviet Union developed mines, factories, energy enterprises were profitable and competitive, before they were taken over by the new oligarchs. This is evident in the massive private wealth that was accumulated in less than a decade by these gangster-businessmen.

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The Royal Canadian Mint unveiled a welcome addition to any piggy bank on Thursday — a monster gold coin with a face value of C$1 million (455,000 pounds) that it says is the world’s biggest, purest and highest denomination coin.

Weighing in at 100 kilograms (220.5 pounds), the limited edition coin easily dwarfs its closest rival, the 31 kg (68 pound) “Big Phil”, which was made to honour the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and has a face value of a mere 100,000 euros (C$150,000).

The Canadian mint introduced the mega-coin, which is the size of an extra-large pizza, alongside the one-ounce gold bullion coins it is mass producing at its Ottawa plant.

Originally designed to promote the new one-ounce coins, the colossal 100 kg coins will be produced in a very limited quantity. A U.S. precious metals distributor has ordered three and there is interest in Asia and Europe, the mint said.

At 53 centimetres (21 inches) in diameter and over 3 cm (1.2 inches) thick, the massive coins need a high level of hand crafting.

While it has a C$1 million face value, the coin is worth more than twice that amount given the current gold price of $683.30 an ounce.

The new coins are both adorned with a maple leaf and boast 99.999 percent purity, a notch above previous purity peaks of 99.99 percent.

“Since the Royal Canadian Mint upped the ante on the rest of the world in 1982, by raising the purity of gold bullion to four nines pure (99.99 percent) other nations have come on the scene … Austria, the United States, and Australia being the case in point,” said mint spokesman Alex Reeves.

“We compete for market share with all of these countries and we decided that the time was right to do something to stand out from the crowd once again.”

Bullion and refinery services generated almost C$281 million in revenue in 2006, more than half the mint’s total sales of almost C$494 million.

The Big Brother State is an educational film about what politicians claim to be protection of our freedom but what ends up being repressive legislation. Since terrorism has become a global threat, governments all over the world have started enforcing laws which, so the governments say, should increase national security. These laws obviously aim at another goal: the states gaining more and more control of their citizens at the cost of our privacy and freedom.

A new twist on a political ad:

When Washington’s power elite convene for the president’s annual State of the Union address, there’s always a cabinet member missing:

• 2007: Alberto Gonzales, attorney general
• 2006: Jim Nicholson, secretary of veterans affairs
• 2005: Donald Evans, secretary of commerce
• 2004: Donald Evans, secretary of commerce
• 2003: John Ashcroft, attorney general
• 2002: Gale Norton, secretary of the interior
• 2001: Anthony Principi, secretary of veterans affairs
• 2000: Bill Richardson, secretary of energy

That member stays at a remote location in case some catastrophe strikes the Capitol.

He’s called the designated survivor.

This ad has mysteriously surfaced on the video channels. NO political party has claimed responsibility for it as of yet…

Excellent documentary on why there is NO legal footing for the “income tax”, but WHAT can the American people do about this travesty??

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher at a middle school in Norwich, Conn., said she had simply wanted to e-mail her husband. The authorities contend that she was — purposely or, perhaps, carelessly — exposing 11- and 12-year-old students to pornography rather than teaching them English.

Last month, Ms. Amero was convicted in Norwich Superior Court of four counts of risking injury to a child and faces up to 40 years in prison at a sentencing hearing scheduled for March 2. She has insisted on her innocence, refusing to accept a plea bargain that would have allowed her to walk free. She portrays herself as a hapless technophobe too clueless to unplug a wayward computer.

Ms. Amero, 40, a longtime substitute, contends that when she arrived that day in October 2004, she asked the regular seventh-grade language arts teacher at Kelly Middle School if she could use his computer to e-mail her husband. But first, she says, she went to the bathroom, and when she returned, the teacher was gone and students were gathered around the screen, watching a hairstyle Web site.

When she tried to close the site, what she got was an endless barrage of pop-up ads for pornography sites. The images continued all day, since “I absolutely have no clue about computers,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Amero plans to appeal, and she says lawyers have offered to handle the appeal free. Read the rest of this entry »

The NSA has the ability to eavesdrop on your communications, landlines, cell phones, e-mails, BlackBerry messages, Internet searches, and more with ease. What happens when the technology of espionage outstrips the laws ability to protect ordinary citizens from it?

On the first Saturday in April of 2002, the temperature in Washington, D.C., had taken a dive. Tourists were bundled up against the cold, and the cherry trees along the Tidal Basin were fast losing their blossoms to the biting winds. But a few miles to the south, in the Dowden Terrace neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, the chilly weather was not deterring Royce C. Lamberth, a bald and burly Texan, from mowing his lawn. He stopped only when four cars filled with FBI agents suddenly pulled up in front of his house. The agents were there not to arrest him but to request an emergency court hearing to obtain seven top-secret warrants to eavesdrop on Americans.

As the presiding justice of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, Lamberth had become accustomed to holding the secret hearings in his living room. My wife, Janis has to go upstairs because she doesn’t have a top-secret clearance, he noted in a speech to a group of Texas lawyers. My beloved cocker spaniel, Taffy, however, remains at my side on the assumption that the surveillance targets cannot make her talk. The FBI knows Taffy well. They frequently play with her while I read some of those voluminous tomes at home. FBI agents will even knock on the judges door in the middle of the night. On the night of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, I started the first emergency hearings in my living room at 3:00 a.m., recalled Lamberth. From the outset, the FBI suspected bin Laden, and the surveillances I approved that night and in the ensuing days and weeks all ended up being critical evidence at the trial in New York.

The FISA court is probably the least-known court in Washington, added Lamberth, who stepped down from it in 2002, at the end of his seven-year term, but it has become one of the most important. Conceived in the aftermath of Watergate, the FISA court traces its origins to the mid-1970s, when the Senates Church Committee investigated the intelligence community and the Nixon White House. The panel, chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank Church, exposed a long pattern of abuse, and its work led to bipartisan legislation aimed at preventing a president from unilaterally directing the National Security Agency or the FBI to spy on American citizens. This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The courts job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by the NSA or the FBI to monitor communications of American citizens and legal residents. The law allows the government up to three days after it starts eavesdropping to ask for a warrant; every violation of FISA carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Between May 18, 1979, when the court opened for business, until the end of 2004, it granted 18,742 NSA and FBI applications; it turned down only four outright. Read the rest of this entry »

The Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built into a mountainside on a remote island near the North Pole.

The vault aims to safeguard the world’s agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change. Construction begins in March, and the seed bank is scheduled to open in 2008. The Norwegian government is paying the $5m (£2.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house three million seed samples.

The collection and maintenance of the collection is being organised by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which has responsibility of ensuring the “conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity”. “We want a safety net because we do not want to take too many chances with crop biodiversity,” said Cary Fowler, the Trust’s executive director. “Can you imagine an effective, efficient, sustainable response to climate change, water shortages, food security issues without what is going to go in the vault - it is the raw material of agriculture.”

The seed vault will be built 120m (364ft) inside a mountain on Spitsbergen, one of four islands that make up Svalbard. Dr Fowler said Svalbard, 1,000km (621 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project. “We looked very far into the future. We looked at radiation levels inside the mountain, and we looked at the area’s geological structure,” he told BBC News. “We also modelled climate change in a drastic form 200 years into future, which included the melting of ice sheets at the North and South Poles, and Greenland, to make sure that this site was above the resulting water level.” By building the vault deep inside the mountain, the surrounding permafrost would continue to provide natural refrigeration if the mechanical system failed, explained Dr Fowler. Read the rest of this entry »

YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s only too real.

Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.

Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldn’t somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitor’s test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you can’t even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property.

This bizarre situation has come to pass because of a mistake by an underfinanced and understaffed government agency. The United States Patent Office misinterpreted previous Supreme Court rulings and some years ago began — to the surprise of everyone, including scientists decoding the genome — to issue patents on genes.

Humans share mostly the same genes. The same genes are found in other animals as well. Our genetic makeup represents the common heritage of all life on earth. You can’t patent snow, eagles or gravity, and you shouldn’t be able to patent genes, either. Yet by now one-fifth of the genes in your body are privately owned.

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Karl Szmolinsky, 67, has been breeding German grey giant bunnies — among the world’s biggest — for more than 40 years.

But he caught the attention of the reclusive communist state last year when he won a competition in his home state of Brandenburg with a rabbit called Robert, weighing in at a hefty 10.5 kilogrammes (23 pounds). Local newspaper coverage of the giant bunny was picked up by a North Korean television crew and the word spread. “A delegation from the North Korean embassy came to the house in November. They were interested in the rabbits and kept repeating in German, ‘kilo, kilo, meat, meat’,” Szmolinsky said.

The rabbits are startlingly big – roughly the size of a small pig. “One adult animal can feed a family of six,” Szmolinsky said.
He struck a generous deal with the North Koreans, who bought 12 rabbits for 80 euros (104 dollars) each compared with the price he charges to German breeders of between 200 and 250 euros. “I was delighted with their offer. I want to help the North Korean people because it’s a very poor country. “I’m doing this for the children and the people who are hungry, because having lived through the war as a child I know what hunger is.” Read the rest of this entry »