9/11 and Kennedy aside, no event in world history has generated quite so many conspiracy theories than the Apollo moonlandings. But do they stand up? Here are the best reasons why it couldn’t have happened, and the rebuttals. Of course, you may disagree.
Launch the Apollo Hoax Guide at: The Independent
Der Fuehrer’s Face is a 1943 animated cartoon by the Walt Disney Studios, starring Donald Duck. It was directed by Jack Kinney and released on January 1, 1943 as an anti-Nazi propaganda movie for the American war effort. The film won the 1943 Academy Award for Animated Short Film, and was the only Donald Duck cartoon to win an Oscar. In 1994, it was voted #22 of “the 50 Greatest Cartoons” of all time by members of the animation field.
Due to the propagandistic nature of the short, and the depiction of Donald Duck as a Nazi (albeit a reluctant one), Disney kept it out of general circulation after its original release. Der Fuehrer’s Face finally received an official U.S. video release in 2004, when it was included in the Walt Disney Treasures limited edition DVD set Walt Disney: On the Front Lines. It also appeared on another Walt Disney Treasures set:The Chronological Donald Volume Two, released in December 2005
Watch Der Fuehrer’s Face
View Location on Google Maps 31.400535,-24.433594
During a search of Google Maps today I accidentally came upon a very strange thing. As I scanned the Atlantic ocean I came across what appears to be evidence of a huge man made anomaly.
The rectangular object, approximately 100 miles by 80 miles, is off the coast of Africa about 1000 miles straight west of Essaouira, Morocco.
Nothing I know of in nature can produce such an anomaly. It sure looks like the evidence of a massive city-state based on a system of canals.
Source: Cryptogon.com
During his recent TED talk, Bill Gates said that the world population is headed to 9 billion people. Then he said, “Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services—we could lower that perhaps ten or fifteen percent.”
I’m not sure what the nothing-to-see-here explanation is for Bill Gates’ theory that “new vaccines” can help lower the population of the world, but I thought about the incidents from the 1990s where the World Health Organization was providing a “tetanus vaccine” to poor girls and women (and just poor girls and women) that contained human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG). For those who don’t want to delve into that, in short, it was a World Health Organization experiment; a test of a vaccine against pregnancy.
Bill Gates on population control vaccines (mp3)
Watch the vid at: TED
Two ex-Blackwater Worldwide employees allege the company charged the government for a prostitute and strippers and kept incompetent personnel for financial reasons, part of what they call a systematic pattern to defraud authorities.
The accusations come in a lawsuit filed by Brad and Melan Davis — who said the fraudulent activity, such as double billing and submitting false invoices, occurred while the security firm, now known as Xe, carried out its work in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.
Melan Davis, who was involved in record-keeping, said Blackwater billed the government for prostitution services in Afghanistan from a Filipino female, whose name was on Blackwater’s payroll roster under a category called “Morale Welfare Recreation.”
She said Blackwater billed the woman’s plane tickets and monthly salary to the United States.
Read more at: Suit: Prostitute, strippers part of Blackwater fraud (CNN)
Former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, a hard-partying Democrat who played a key role in the United States’ covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, has died. He was 76.
Wilson was taken to Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin after he started having difficulty breathing while attending a meeting in the eastern Texas town where he lived, said hospital spokeswoman Yana Ogletree.
Wilson, who had a heart transplant in 2007 in Houston, was pronounced dead on arrival, and the preliminary cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, Ogletree said. Houston doctors had told Wilson, who suffered from cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes an enlarged and weakened heart, that he would likely die without a transplant.
Former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson dead at 76 (chron.com)
Charlie Wilson on Iraq and Afghanistan
Charlie Wilson’s War at Amazon.com
How many spies have CIA polygraph tests exposed?
According to a CBS News account of the suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan, “The double agent was brought onto the base without first being given a polygraph test, one of the basic tools in establishing a spy’s trustworthiness.”
Really?
Aldrich Ames, the master Soviet spy who was a high-ranking CIA analyst, routinely passed polygraph exams, even as he passed information to the Soviets.
Nor did the polygraph expose Larry Wu- Tai Chin a Chinese language translator working for the CIA who sold information to China, or Robert Hanssen of the FBI.
For the ancient Greeks, fire was a potent symbol of purity. In the modern world, where antique pagan symbols generally don’t have much staying power, the flame still has the ability to purify: Witness the Olympic torch relay, now making its patient, painstaking way from the ruined temples of ancient Greece to the stunning Winter Games facilities of Vancouver 2010.
The torch relay represents the Olympics’ human side, the part that retains faith in the uncorrupted virtues global sport is meant to bring together every two years.
Through the hand-to-hand transmission of the eternal flame between both ordinary and extraordinary people, Games organizers ask us to see peace and friendship, hope and understanding, personal contact with the Olympic movement’s universal values and an unbroken continuity with the sporting purity of the ancient Greeks.
So, please, don’t mention the Nazis.
The torch relay in all its elaborate rituals and feel-good sponsorship opportunities turns out to be a creation of the people who are the byword for modern evil. Without the propaganda artists who staged the 1936 Berlin Olympics in all its triumphant glory, lovingly recorded in Leni Riefenstahl’s mesmerizing documentary film Olympia, we wouldn’t have the government-supported cross-country relay that is bringing the flame to Vancouver.
“The torch relay is a total fabrication,” says Ira B. Nadel of the University of British Columbia, who has studied the techniques Riefenstahl used to aestheticize the Nazi cause. “The Germans invented it for the 1936 Olympics. There was nothing like it in the ancient Olympics.”
You don’t need to know the details of German history to be skeptical of the idealistic claims made for the modern torch relay. As recently as 2008, the organizers of the Beijing Games showed how easily the Olympic ceremonials could be used to bolster the aspirations of an autocratic state by controversially routing the relay through Tibet and taking the ever-burning flame to the summit of Mount Everest.
Golden Gate Bridge
The most documented suicide spot on Earth is the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. There are have been over 1500 documented suicides at the iconic landmark.
There are signs posted on the bridge urging people contemplating taking their own lives to use the special phone provided to contact a crisis hotline.
Suicides tarnish the Golden Gate USA Today
Film captures suicides on Golden Gate Bridge SF Gate
Aokigahara Forest
Known as “the perfect place to die,” the Aokigahara forest has become a popular place for Japanese businessmen to take their own lives. More than 500 of them have killed themselves in this enchanted forest since the 1950s. The rate of suicide has been increasing, with a record 78 bodies in 2002.
Japanese spiritualists believe that the suicides committed in the forest have permeated Aokigahara’s trees, generating paranormal activity and preventing many who enter from escaping the forest’s depths.
Desperate Japanese head to ‘suicide forest’ CNN
A Danish Documentory about Aokigahara Forest. Part 1 (Part 2)
In 1953 the CIA approached John Mulholland to write a new manual for its agents. Mulholland, a celebrated magician, was to create a how-to guide to help teach US spies become slight-of -hand experts.
Mulholland quit his job of 23 years as Editor of The Sphinx – America’s preeminent magic publication. He went to work showing secret agents how to use magic to deceive their Cold War enemies.
It was thought that all copies of the manual were destroyed in 1973. But is 1997, through a Freedom of Information Act request, a declassified copy was unearthed.
The manual has been just been republished as The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.
See some sketches of some of the techniques at The Boston Globe.
