U.S. gold futures rise to record $1,013/oz

TOKYO (Reuters) - Gold futures in New York rose to a record high of $1,013 in electronic trading on Monday, on deepening worries about financial markets.
At 2335 GMT, the active gold contract for April delivery on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange was at $1,011.5 compared to the New York close of $999.50, after hitting a record high of $1,009.

J.P. Morgan to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. said Sunday evening that it is buying battered broker Bear Stearns for $2 a share, or $236 million, in a Federal Reserve-backed bailout unprecedented in scope and execution.

Dollar caught in Fed, ECB cross-fire

Economic news seems to take priority here at The Internet Post. We will post any relevant news as it happens..

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve is poised to cut interest rates again this week while the European Central Bank remains on hold for a while, leaving the beleaguered U.S. dollar caught in the cross-fire.

The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now
Our Decrepit Food Factories
By MICHAEL POLLAN

The word "sustainability" has gotten such a workout lately that the
whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of
inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever "it" means.
On a recent visit to a land-grant university's spanking-new
sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school's
faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out
asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that
rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice
surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in
agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of
endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability?
When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the
term, you have to wonder if we haven't succeeded in defining
sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if
it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like
"natural" or "green" or "nice."

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the
world, we had best start with the "rectification of the names." The
corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their
proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the
reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what
about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an
objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of
environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or
process can't go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very
conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used
to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will
lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial
agriculture as "unsustainable" in precisely these terms, though what
form the "breakdown" might take or when it might happen has never
been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop
working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been
predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is
unsustainable - if its workings offend the rules of nature - the
cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected
times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on
their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let
alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way
we're growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant
strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans
each year than AIDS - 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in
2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical
Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been
a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create
resistant strains of bacteria. It's Evolution 101: the drugs kill off
all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance
mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught;
these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant
superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in
hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly
patients. But a new and even more virulent strain - called
"community-acquired MRSA" - is now killing young and otherwise
healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet
sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently
different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers
looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the
heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal
new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent
of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on
factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in
close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the
routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of
infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals'
growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the
crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production
practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could
not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this
situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or
later, the profligate use of these antibiotics - in many cases the
very same ones we depend on when we're sick - would lead to the
evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower.
It appears that "sooner or later" may be now. Recent studies in
Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become
reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig
farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs
(compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs
antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention published a study showing that a strain of "MRSA from an
animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now
responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the
Netherlands." Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not.
According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45
percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of
the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being
infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and
the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we
just haven't looked yet.

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA
presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given
the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these
farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes
have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health
authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August,
the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug
Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in
livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though,
the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with
the C.D.C.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can't
study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry,
which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these
researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap
meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people?
There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this
country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical
industries or their respective regulatory "watchdogs" - the
Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. - are in any rush to see happen.

he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own
mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was
first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that
his bees were disappearing - going out on foraging expeditions in the
morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were
reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees,
in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify
the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides
and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops
or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But
whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many
entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the
lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out
and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on
factory farms, they've become vulnerable to whatever new infectious
agent happens to come along.

You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to
understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in
the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into
such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated
one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for
pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today
are grown in such vast monocultures - 80 percent of the world's crop
comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California's Central
Valley - that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every
February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate
all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where
there's absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that
the almond trees aren't in bloom? So every February the almond
growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central
Valley - more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees
in all.

They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New
England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America
are on the move to California every February, for what has been
called the world's greatest "pollination event." (Be there!) Bees
that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken
up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to
travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom,
their keepers ply them with "pollen patties" - which often include
ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported
from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee
population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a
box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry
of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago.
Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping
bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since
almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)

In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped
supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from
Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the
Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers -
and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one
beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle,
California's almond orchards have become "one big brothel" - a place
where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over
the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever
pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure
to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an
epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published
a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in
Colony Collapse Disorder - a virus that was found in some of the bees
from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the
study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as
early as 2002.)

"We're placing so many demands on bees we're forgetting that they're
a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle," Marla
Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told
The Chronicle. "We're wanting them to function as a machine. . . .
We're expecting them to get off the truck and be fine."

We're asking a lot of our bees. We're asking a lot of our pigs too.
That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize
production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural
systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as
efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up - when
bees or pigs remind us they are not machines - the system can be
ingenious in finding "solutions," whether in the form of antibiotics
to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds.
But this year's solutions have a way of becoming next year's
problems. That is to say, they aren't "sustainable."

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the
story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables
about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to
rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory,
whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond
trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in
biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this
brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do,
we'll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as
something more than a nice word.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, "In Defense of
Food: An Eater's Manifesto,"

Timely Quote

"He who casts the votes decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything."-Josef Stalin

911, The Myth and the Reality

—We Must Have A New And Completely Independent Investigation Into The Events Of 9/11


Table of Contents:

The Myth

Prove It

The Result

The Truth

Dueling Conspiracy Theories

Who Do You Believe?



The Myth:

19 hijackers of Middle Eastern descent and radical Islamic persuasion, commandeer 4 airliners and expertly pilot 3 of the 4 airliners into targets, those being, the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon. The towers collapse due to jet fuel fires. Confusion on the part of NORAD and the FAA allows the planes to reach their targets, while one plane, Flight 93, is brought down by passenger revolt and crashes into a field in Pennsylvania. Pre-warnings of the attack are bungled by the intelligence agencies’ lack of communication and cooperation.



Show me proof, so that I may believe.—9/11 truth activist



Prove It:

Show us the passenger lists with the 19 alleged hijackers names.

Show us the remains of the 4 airliners.

Show us the autopsies of the 19 alleged hijackers and the passengers of the planes.

Show us a peer reviewed study that corroborates the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) report explaining the WTC collapses.

Show us samples of the steel from the towers.

Show us the confiscated surveillance videos that captured the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon.

Show us the personnel that were punished, reprimanded, demoted or fired as a result of the massive incompetence that allowed the attack to succeed.

Show us the case against Bin Laden. The FBI does not list him as being wanted for the 9/11 attack, because ‘there is no hard evidence’.

Show us proof as to how WTC Building 7 fell at close to free fall speed into its own footprint, even though, it was not hit by a plane.

Show us the backgrounds of the alleged hijackers and their alleged Islamic extremism.

Now that Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the lead authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, have written that NORAD lied to them; why should we accept, at face value, any of the government’s assertions?

This was a brutal, criminal attack on America. Why did it take 14 months to start a commission to do an investigation into the details? After all, if one person is found murdered, an investigation starts immediately, does it not?





The Result:

War with Afghanistan.

War with Iraq.

The Patriot Act 1, The Patriot Act 2.

The Department of Homeland Security

Wiretaps on Americans.

Prisoners held without charges or representation indefinitely.

Torture of prisoners.

750 signing statements that allow the President to ignore Constitutional laws and protections.

Implementation of a national ID card.

Free speech zones.

Increased police presence.

Militarization of the police

Increased camera surveillance.

Illegal search and seizure.

Jailing and harassment of journalists.

$1.6 billion spent by the government to provide fake news.

Billions made by the establishment on anti-terror businesses.

Billions made by the oil and oil support corporations.

Billions made by military contractors.

Billions shifted into defense and away from social programs.

Thousands of our sons and daughters killed in Iraq and Afghanistan

Thousands and thousands more of our sons and daughters maimed physically and mentally.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed and wounded, including women and children and babies, as well as soldiers.



It is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information. It’s an unfortunate reality that the issuance of incomplete information and even misinformation by government may sometimes be perceived as necessary to protect vital interests.—Solicitor General Theodore Olson (whose wife Barbara was killed in the attack on 9/11)



The Reality:

America was attacked on 9/11, but not by Islamic extremists, directed from a cave in Afghanistan. Planes flew into buildings, but, they were not flown by unskilled Cessna pilots. Buildings collapsed, but not because of jet fuel fires. The Pentagon was hit by something. Flight 93 allegedly vaporized upon impact in Pennsylvania, but left a debris field eight miles long. Multiple war games and terror drills were running which diluted the air defense capabilities and confused the FAA. There was even a drill running with a hijacked plane hitting a building. What are the odds? How did Bin Laden know about the war games and terror drills?









The Truth:

The truth is that only the highest up in the chain of conspirators knows the complete truth. What we have available to us are many, many little truths that comprise the evidence and circumstantial evidence that clearly and loudly screams to all patriotic Americans; We Must Have A New, Completely Independent Investigation Into The Attack Of 9/11.

The truth is that buildings do not fall at almost freefall speed unless supports have been removed with precision timing, so that no resistance to the fall exists. This can only be achieved through carefully controlled demolition. Dr. Steven Jones tested several samples of steel from the towers and has conclusively found the cutter charge, thermate (thermite and sulfer; used by controlled demolition to cut steel like a hot knife through butter). This is being peer reviewed. http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/thermite_id_culprit_wtc_collapse.htm

The truth is that evidence was quickly removed from all 3 crime scenes. The list of that evidence includes; the steel and concrete dust from the WTC site, the airplanes from all three sites, the surveillance tapes from businesses around the Pentagon, the black boxes from the planes, the molten steel found in the debris of all three of the collapsed buildings 5 weeks after 9/11, the front lawn of the Pentagon being covered with dirt on September 12, fire fighters’ communications with dispatch being unavailable for a year after the attack, FAA tapes being destroyed and, I assure you, the list goes on and on.

The truth is that evidence was planted, such as a passport that landed on top of the rubble, even though titanium engines and black boxes made of the most impervious metal known to man, vaporized. A single piece of luggage was left behind by one of the alleged hijackers that contained, not only a will, but, a ‘terrorist manual’ and the names of the other hijackers. Who carries a will along with them on a suicide mission where it will be destroyed? And, most damningly, the Bin Laden confession video, that clearly shows a right-handed man, with a gold ring and a much smaller nose, is clearly, a fake.

The truth is that NORAD lied to the 9/11 Commission about the timeline of events and responses and this leaves the Commission Report flawed.

The truth is that none of the 19 alleged hijackers’ names appear on the passenger lists of the 4 flights.

The truth is that there was clear foreknowledge of the plot. Examples include; extraordinary buying of puts on United Airlines (4 x the normal amount), American Airlines (11 x the normal amount) and on Boeing stock (5 x the normal amount), 11 countries warning the US of intelligence and chatter, FBI agents stifled in investigations that would have exposed the threat, important people, like Mayor Willie Brown, warned not to fly on 9/11 by Condi Rice, and a Presidential brief entitled, ‘Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US’, which was ignored.

The truth is that Bin Laden is not listed on the FBI’s most wanted list for the attack of 9/11, because ‘there is no hard evidence’. http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html

The truth is that the administration fought for 14 months before granting an investigation to be lead by handpicked members who were subsequently lied to and prevented from attaining information through the use of ‘state secrets’ excuses. In addition, it was under-funded and completely dependent on a flawed NIST report.

The truth is that the NIST report has not been peer reviewed because their real world tests did not prove the theory, so they instead, relied on a computer model with doctored numbers.

The truth is that Bush and Cheney would not answer questions under oath. In fact, Bush and Cheney would only ‘agree’ to be questioned together at the White House.

The truth is that in spite of all of these facts, the mainstream media will not ask any questions.

The truth is that the media of the United States repeats again and again and again, a myth that sells a collective fear of the dark and hateful. It is designed to propagandize’ terror’ in order to condition the citizenry to unquestioningly support the myth of the benevolent goodness of the US government and to ensure the profits of its corporate owners.

The truth is that we are being lied to on a massive scale.







Dueling Conspiracy Theories:

A conspiracy theory is simply a theory that a conspiracy exists. If that theory is supported by even one fact, the theory becomes a possibility. If that theory is supported by fact after fact after fact after fact; it becomes a probability.



The ‘official’ conspiracy theory asks you to believe that buildings collapse at freefall speed, because briefly burning, relatively cool fires can, indeed, weaken and melt steel tested to sustain much higher temperatures and for much longer periods of time. Never before has any steel framed building fallen due to fire and yet three fell on 9/11. The ‘official’ conspiracy theory also asks you to believe that 19 alleged hijackers were able to carry out a mission, even though the US air defense system is built and maintained to the tune of $500,000,000,000 per year and is second to none. The ‘official’ conspiracy theory also asks you to believe, that the US intelligence services, which are the most heavily funded and highly advanced and powerful in the world, were made to look like The Keystone Cops by 19 extremists and their leader, who was living in a cave in Afghanistan. The ‘official’ conspiracy theory once again asks you to believe that two jet airliners vaporized upon impact, even though this has never happened in the history of aviation. The ‘official’ conspiracy theory was edited of all conflicting evidence, such as the firemen, the police, the news reporters and the victims who said there were secondary explosions at the WTC and the Pentagon and that there was no sign of the wreckage of jet airliners at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.



I stopped being a coroner after about twenty minutes, because there were no bodies there. I have not to this day seen a single drop of blood.--Wally Miller, Somerset County Coroner, referencing the crime scene in Shanksville, Pa.



The alternative to the ‘official’ conspiracy theory is what I call the reality theory or the conspiracy probability. Even though evidence was destroyed and removed by the government, the visual and audio clips, documented paper trails, eyewitness testimony and logical connections, paint a powerful and convincing case for an ‘inside job’. WTC 7 was brought down by pre-planted explosives. There is simply no other rational explanation, so the ‘official’ conspiracy theory simply left it out. The WTC towers pancaked down, floor upon floor, and yet they fell, with no resistance and left no pancakes (only concrete dust and severed steel). This defies the laws of physics. We must face the science and simply ask; how could this have happened? Visual evidence at the Pentagon contradicts the ‘official’ conspiracy theory that a 757, flown by a below average Cessna pilot, slammed into the building and vaporized, leaving a 16 foot hole, but no wings, tail section or engines behind. Something hit the building, probably a radio controlled Global Hawk or an A 3 Sky Warrior, but this could be easily ascertained if the FBI would simply release the surveillance videos that were confiscated, literally stolen, within minutes of the crash, from the Virginia Department of Transportation and The Sheraton Hotel. Flight 93 or something else was either shot down or it exploded in mid air, but it did not crash into the ground and leave debris for eight miles. The last three minutes of the flight recorder from flight 93 is ‘unaccounted for’. That last three minutes would be quite valuable now, wouldn’t it? The conspiracy probability produces questions that demand answers. Those answers remain locked within an ‘official’ vault of ‘state secrets’. The vault is additionally protected by a lapdog media and a naïve public, largely blinded by propaganda and unable to discern the difference between patriotic duty to country and misguided allegiance to government. The alternative conspiracy probability is an intellectually based, factually grounded, citizen organized questioning of an all powerful ruling entity, that has proven both historically and through recent actions, to be quite capable of lying to its people. (Watch Terror Storm for a brief history on proven false flag, state sponsored terror and provocation http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7048572757566726569 )



Let us not tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories.—George W. Bush

Who Do You Believe?
The ‘official’ conspiracy theory was presented to you by a government capable of sanctioning the torture of prisoners, wiretapping its citizens, lying about the reasons for starting a brutal war of aggression against a sovereign country, outing a CIA agent out of spite and as a threat to everyone else, spending billions of tax payer money on propaganda sold as news to the media and then arrogantly, coldly and purposefully mishandling the rescue, protection and rebuilding of the south during and after Katrina.



The conspiracy probability was researched and handed to you by several visionaries, who inspired several others, who inspired theologians, who inspired scholars, who inspired activists, who inspired celebrities, who inspired thousands more, who inspired thousands more. Each patriot who has taken up the mantle of 911 truth does so at his/her own peril. Each citizen who has seen the truth must spread the truth and will be in turn derided, insulted and abused by the mainstream press, by fellow citizens and by any and all members of the establishment. The citizen/patriot has everything to lose and yet, when faced with the reality of the lie, there is but one course and that is truth. Who are you going to believe?

Presidential Election 2008

The national media tends to "anoint" presidential contenders based on who has the most money in the bank, not on who is most "beloved" (read that as the least obnoxious) by the voters of America.

But history has proven the highest pile of money theory as a bad barometer of who will ultimately win. Click on the link below to find the candidates position on gun ownership.


Where 08 Candidates Stand