1.  “The final lesson from 2008:

We can’t count on the people who rule us to have learned a darned thing from past history. “Those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it,” said the famous Harvard philosopher George Santayana.

Of course, that’s a cliche by now and has been for decades. But it is true of Henry Paulson, our pitiful Secretary of the Treasury and, very, very sadly, of Ben Bernanke, our Fed chairman.

Paulson is simply an ignorant, bullying fraud. I never expected much from him. But Bernanke is a scholar, or so I thought, and should’ve known better than to destroy confidence by allowing Lehman to fail. That was a mistake that no real student of the Great Depression, as Bernanke is, should’ve made. I would never have thought it could happen, but it did.

It makes me wonder what other mistakes and foolishness our rulers have in mind, and it scares me plenty.“

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/yourlife/130751

2.  “Hans Blix Would Testify Against Bush-Cheney War Crimes
…

In an interview with Aljazeera today, former Chief of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq told the TV that he and the Head of the IAEA “Mohamed Al-Baradei” were subjected to direct threats from Dick Cheney before the war.

Blix said that Cheney threatened to defame both men’s reputations if they didn’t came with the “required” answers.

It’s the same story from everyone else – Bush and Cheney demanded pro-war lies under one threat or another – being defamed, getting fired, and even outing covert CIA operatives. The Bush Administration was nothing more than a mafia operation.

But here’s the good part:

Blix also added that he is ready to be a witness on the United States’ false allegations before an International tribunal.“

http://www.911blogger.com/node/18894

3.  So, just like so many other wars, government lies preceded WWI, also:

“Secret of the Lusitania: Arms find challenges Allied claims it was solely a passenger ship

Her sinking with the loss of almost 1,200 lives caused such outrage that it propelled the U.S. into the First World War.

But now divers have revealed a dark secret about the cargo carried by the Lusitania on its final journey in May 1915.

Munitions they found in the hold suggest that the Germans had been right all along in claiming the ship was carrying war materials and was a legitimate military target.

…

Maintaining that the Lusitania was solely a passenger vessel, the British quickly accused the ‘Pirate Hun’ of
slaughtering civilians.

The disaster was used to whip up anti-German anger, especially in the U.S., where 128 of the 1,198 victims came from.

A hundred of the dead were children, many of them under two.

Robert Lansing, the U.S. secretary of state, later wrote that the sinking gave him the ‘conviction we would ultimately become the ally of Britain’.

Americans were even told, falsely, that German children were given a day off school to celebrate the sinking of the Lusitania.

…

The diving team estimates that around four million rounds of U.S.-manufactured Remington .303 bullets lie in the Lusitania’s hold at a depth of 300ft.

The Germans had insisted the Lusitania  -  the fastest liner in the North Atlantic  -  was being used as a weapons ship to break the blockade Berlin had been trying to impose around Britain since the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914.

Winston Churchill, who was first Lord of the Admiralty and has long been suspected of knowing more about the circumstances of the attack than he let on in public, wrote in a confidential letter shortly before the sinking that some German submarine attacks were to be welcomed.

He said: ‘It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the U.S. with Germany.

‘For our part we want the traffic  -  the more the better and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.’

Hampton Sides, a writer with Men’s Vogue in the U.S., witnessed the divers’ discovery.

He said: ‘They are bullets that were expressly manufactured to kill Germans in World War I  -  bullets that British officials in Whitehall, and American officials in Washington, have long denied were aboard the Lusitania.’

The discovery may help explain why the 787ft Lusitania sank within 18 minutes of a single German torpedo slamming into its hull.

Some of the 764 survivors reported a second explosion which might have been munitions going off.“

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1098904/Secret-Lusitania-Arms-challenges-Allied-claims-solely-passenger-ship.html?ITO=1490

4.  “Lebanese are Phoenicians After All; And so Are Many of the Rest of US

A team of biologists at Lebanese American University estimates that 1 in 17 persons around the Mediterranean carries genetic markers distinctive to the ancient Phoenician people who resided in what is now Lebanon. The Phoenicians spread out in a trade diaspora two millennia ago, establishing colonies from Spain to Cyprus. The team also found that one third of Lebanese have the markers for Phoenician descent, and that these are spread evenly through the population, among both Christians and Muslims. In fact, all Lebanese have broadly similar sets of genetic markers. The lead researcher commented, “Whether you take a Christian village in the north of Lebanon or a Muslim village in the south, the DNA make-up of its residents is likely to be identical . . .”

In a Lebanese context these findings are politically explosive. There is a longstanding conflict among Lebanese as to whether they are Arabs or Phoenicians, with adherents of the Phoenician identity predominantly Christian. This sort of identity politics fed into the civil wars. In fact, Arabic is a language, not a race, and Phoenician descent is a heritage of all humankind by now.
…
On the other hand, any finding that might convince the Lebanese that they are all one family would be all to the good. Many Lebanese Muslims reject the idea that they are descendants of converts to Islam from Christianity and prefer to trace their ancestry to Arabia.”

http://www.juancole.com/

5.  Same type of thing happened this past Spring:

“Breaking news: something’s happening to the internet, right now. We’re just not quite sure what.

Interoute, the internet networks company, reports that three of the four internet sub-cables that run from Asia to North America have been damaged.

These carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America. It’s hard to gather what this actually means – is it that the internet is down or (more likely) significantly slower than usual between the Middle East and America? (If you’re reading this, let’s face it, the internet has not shut down altogether)“

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11468

6.  Odd some people still think that, if a story starts on blogs, it is somehow not serious:

“Also embedded throughout this narrative — not just on Fox but in all of these reports — are the sneering references to “bloggers” and “blogs.”  Given that virtually every establishment media outlet now regularly writes in this format, I’m really not sure — nor is anyone else — what distinguishes a “journalist” from a “blogger” these days.  The terms have no real definition and no real purpose other than to allow the former some instrument for demonizing, sneering at, and feeling superior to the latter. So while these terms have long ago lost their definitional clarity, their true purpose means they’re unlikely to disappear any time soon.
…

As I pointed out, it’s unlikely in the extreme that the Brennan withdrawal happened due exclusively to opposition on blogs (far more likely is that the anti-Brennan evidence marshaled on blogs signaled that it could easily grow into a larger controversy).  Nonetheless, the audience size for some political blogs is larger than some cable news shows, and thus, it’s foolish to to ignore what is said on blogs and only pay attention to what cable news shows discuss, particularly since blog commentary often foreshadows what will eventually occur in the wider discourse.

Just compare the daily visitor count at Daily Kos with the most recent Total Viewership Numbers (in thousands) for the various cable shows in Brit Hume’s time slot and in the hour before and after:

…

The number of visitors to Kos is roughly equal to the viewership of the prime-time CNN shows, greater than the MSNBC shows for this time period, and roughly half of the viewership for the Fox shows. It’s true that total blog visitors (which can count multiple same-day visits as unique visitors) and Nielsen TV viewer statistics aren’t the same, and Kos is the largest of the liberal blogs by a fairly sizable margin.  But the point is still clear:  the number of people who read blogs — and who, in particular, are exposed to a story when (as was the case with Brennan) many large blogs discuss it and thus amplify each other’s coverage and multiply the numbers who are exposed — is in the same general range as those who are exposed to a story covered by cable news.

A story covered extensively on large blogs is going to reach (at least) hundreds of thousands of high-information, highly engaged political consumers, as well as most opinion-makers in politics and the media — still almost certainly a lesser quantitative reach than cable news shows currently have, but only by degree, not by level.  It’s simply a myth that if a story appears only on “blogs,” it’s reaching only a small, fringe audience as compared to what happens if it’s discussed on cable news.  And whatever mild disparity does still exist is diminishing by the day.“

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/