All posts by Ken Cole

Connecting The Dots, News

“No Easy Day” Ex-Navy SEAL Behind Osama Bin Laden Book Faces Threats, Investigation

By Andrea Shalal-Esa and Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (Reuters) – The former U.S. Navy SEAL who authored a soon-to-be-published book about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden is now facing threats against his life in addition to possible criminal prosecution.

An official al Qaeda website on Friday posted a photograph and the name of the former Navy commando responsible for the book, calling him “the dog who murdered the martyr Sheikh Osama bin Laden.”

The head of U.S. Special Operations Command told current and former troops that the military would take legal action against anyone found to have exposed sensitive information that could cause harm to fellow forces.

“We will pursue every option available to hold members accountable, including criminal prosecution where appropriate,” Admiral Bill McRaven wrote in an open, unclassified letter emailed to the active-duty special operations community, and obtained by Reuters on Friday.

“As current or former members of our special operations community, authors have a moral obligation, and a legal duty, to submit their works for pre-publication security review,” the admiral wrote.

Fox News made public on Thursday what it said was the real name of the former SEAL who, with a journalist co-author, wrote “No Easy Day,” using the pseudonym Mark Owen. The book is due to be released next month on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

By early on Friday, the man’s name, photograph and age had been posted on the “the Al-Fidaa Islamic Network” online forum, one of two websites officially endorsed by al Qaeda, according to Evan Kohlmann, founder of the New York-based security firm Flashpoint Global Partners.

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Connecting The Dots, Conspiracy Theory, Corruption, Education, Random Events, Free Will or Something Darker?, Religion

Oregon gunman singles out Christians, shoots them in the head

The gunman who opened fire at an Oregon community college was forcing people to stand up and state their religion before he began blasting away at them, survivors said Thursday.

A woman who claimed to have a grandmother inside a writing class in Snyder Hall, where a portion the massacre unfolded, described the scene in a tweet.

“The shooter was lining people up and asking if they were Christian,” she wrote. “If they said yes, then they were shot in the head. If they said no, or didn’t answer, they were shot in the legs. My grandma just got to my house, and she was in the room. She wasn’t shot, but she is very upset.

Moments after hearing a bullet come flying through a window, she said the 20-year-old shooter made his way inside and targeted their teacher, pumping a single round into their head.

As the young man ordered people to the ground, Moore laid patiently with her classmates and waited, according to the News Review.

Once they all got down, she said the gunman began asking people to rise and say what their religion was. After they stood and gave their answer, he started shooting.

As the chaos continued, students began scrambling “like ants,” according to Brady Winder, a 23-year-old student from Portland who was in the room next door.

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Connecting The Dots, Conspiracy Theory, Corruption

US government hack stole fingerprints of 5.6 million federal employees

Office of Personnel Management hack, which US believes China is responsible for, originally thought to have compromised prints of only 1.1 million workers

The Obama administration has not publicly blamed China or taken any public action in retaliation for the hack.

The number of people applying for or receiving security clearances whose fingerprint images were stolen in one of the worst government data breaches is now believed to be 5.6 million, not 1.1 million as first thought, the Office of Personnel Management announced on Wednesday.

The agency was the victim of what the US believes was a Chinese espionage operation that affected an estimated 21.5 million current and former federal employees or job applicants. The theft could give Chinese intelligence a huge leg up in recruiting informants inside the US government, experts believe. It also could help the Chinese identify US spies abroad, according to American officials.

The White House has said it’s going to discuss cybersecurity with Chinese president Xi Jinping when he visits Barack Obama later this week.

The Obama administration has not publicly blamed China or taken any public action in retaliation for the hack. Intelligence officials have called the data a fair intelligence target, one the US would pursue if it had the chance.

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Connecting The Dots, Conspiracy Theory, Random Events, Free Will or Something Darker?, Religion, Science And Technology, Spirituality & Health

The facts about the CERN Large Collider you need to know

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2. Deity of destruction as corporate mascot
Although most corporations shun any connection with religion and the spiritual world, CERN has chosen as its mascot a Hindu goddess. But not just any Hindu goddess. Just outside of its headquarters building sits an ancient statue to Shiva, ancient Apollyon, the goddess of destruction. Strange?

5. CERN’s curious choice of geographic location
Now on top of all the speculation as to what CERN scientists are really attempting to do with their Large Hadron Collider, many observers could not help but notice that the town in France where CERN is partially situated is called “Saint-Genus-Poilly.” The name Pouilly comes from the Latin “Appolliacum” and it is believed that in Roman times a temple existed in honor of Apollo, and the people who lived there believed that it is a gateway to the underworld. It is interesting to note that CERN is built on the same spot.

Religious leaders – always suspicious of the aims of the scientific world – drew a connection to a verse straight out of Revelations (9:1-2, 11), which makes reference to the name ‘Apollyon.’ The verse states: “To him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit… And they had a kind over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.”

6. Opening the door to other dimensions
One year after CERN’s grand opening, Sergio Bertolucci, former Director for Research and Scientific Computing of the facility, grabbed headlines when he told a British tabloid the super collider could open otherworldly doors to another dimension for “a very tiny lapse of time,” mere fractions of a second. However, that may be just enough time “to peer into this open door, either by getting something out of it or sending something into it.”

“Of course,” added Bertolucci, “after this tiny moment the door would again shut; bringing us back to our ‘normal’ four-dimensional world … It would be a major leap in our vision of nature… And of course [there would be] no risk to the stability of our world.”

Naturally, this comment has triggered fears that the CERN collider could unwittingly invite unwanted visitors from other time-space dimensions. Anybody for dinosaurs strolling along the Champs-Élysées, or alien life forms seizing the entire planet? Such scenarios – at least for some scientists – are no longer confined to the fictional world of Isaac Asimov novels; with the ongoing work at CERN, there is even talk of opening up a portal for time travel.

Simply postulating such futuristic scenarios shows how far mankind has traveled in a relatively short expanse of time, and our dystopic future predicted in books like “Brave New World” and “1984” may already be here. Will man be able to control the technology he has created, or will the technology destroy him, his works, and with it the entire planet?

Now try telling a spiritual leader that the Bible is conspiracy theory.

7. But Stephen Hawking is worried
Although it may require some mental gymnastics to wrap one’s brain around exactly what the CERN scientists are attempting to achieve in their underground lab, the average layman may instinctively understand that such an experiment may be wrought with unforeseeable pitfalls. Stephen Hawking, the eminent physicist, seems to agree.

“The God particle found by CERN could destroy the universe,” Hawking wrote in the preface to a book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists. The Higgs Boson could become unstable at very high energy levels and have the potential to trigger a “catastrophic vacuum decay which would cause space and time to collapse and… we would not have any warning to the dangers,” he continued.

Hawking is not the only voice in the scientific wilderness predicting possible catastrophe if CERN continues in the atomic fast lane. Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson told Eugene Mirman on his Star Talk radio program that the experiment could literally cause the planet to “explode.”

“Ask yourself: How much energy is keeping it together? Then you put more than that amount of energy into the object.” Tyson was confident of the result: “It will explode.”

In late 2008, when CERN was first firing up the engines on its atom-smashing machine, Otto Rossler, a German professor at the University of Tubingen, filed a lawsuit against CERN with the European Court of Human Rights, on the grounds that the facility could trigger a mini black hole that could get out of control and annihilate the planet. The Court tossed out Rossler’s request, but he nevertheless succeeded in generating heated discussion on the possible dark side of the experiment.

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Connecting The Dots, Conspiracy Theory, FYI, News

Young boys exploited by their managers, agents and casting directors forms the explosive subject matter of Amy Berg’s nonsensationalist Hollywood documentary.

“An Open Secret,” Amy Berg’s nonsensationalist expose of the sexual abuse of young male actors by those with the power to make or break them, recasts an old Hollywood story, substituting boys for starlets and hot tubs for casting couches. Though clearly championing the cause of the ex-child thesps who candidly recount their ordeals, Berg’s crusade advances on eggshells, dodging the potential lawsuits looming at every name named. This caution somewhat fudges the film’s throughline, but if Berg can find a distrib willing to brave the forces that have silenced this open secret for decades, the documentary should find avid auds worldwide.

The film incorporates the testimony of several ex-child performers, interpolating their interviews throughout, sometimes merely as quick corroboration of another’s story and sometimes in great detail, complete with clips from commercials and TV shows in which they appeared. Segments with several parents, expressing their horror and/or justifying or lamenting their blindness in retrospect, intensify the emotional impact of their children’s testimonies.

In contrast to the victims’ well-composed and skillfully lit widescreen interviews, the “predators,” as they are designated, show up in grainy homemovies, TV newscasts and newspaper photographs. Berg structures her stories for maximum shock effect: The ultimate fate of Mark R., whose graphic deposition is tearfully read aloud by his father, is often hinted at but not revealed until almost the end of the film, where it comes as a surprise.

Evan H.’s vivid account of his abuse by his manager, Marty Weiss, is backed by a clandestine audio tape that unspools on camera, broadcasting Weiss’ self-justifying admission of guilt. But it is the copious homemovie footage of Weiss at Evan’s house on multiple occasions, where he is accepted as a genial presence and an integral part of the family, that resonates most tellingly in hindsight.

If Weiss incarnates the fun-loving, family-friendly predator, slowly grooming his victim to accept his advances as normal, Marc Collins-Rector embodies a more corporate, violent form of pedophilia, his hyphenate name, heavy-lidded eyes and supercilious look straight out of central casting. Together with Chad Shackley and Brock Pierce, he founded DEN, an early digital entertainment network, and threw sybaritic celebrity-studded parties where they seduced underage aspiring actors with promises of plum parts and threats of industry blackballing. When high-pressure persuasion didn’t work, according to one victim, they resorted to drugs and rape.

One of Berg’s biggest rug-pullers involves sexagenarian Michael Harrah, introduced as head of the Screen Actors Guild’s Young Performers Committee, and interviewed in the widescreen, well-lit mode of the doc’s victims and spokespersons. It only gradually becomes evident that Harrah is one of the bad guys, his confused, waffling denials suddenly ringing hollow after a cell-phone confession to one of his former proteges.

But the most shocking aspect of Berg’s documentary is what it presents as the abusers’ utter lack of accountability. The widely reported lawsuits brought against Bryan Singer and other notables by Michael Egan III (identified here as Mike E.) were dropped, ostensibly for inconsistencies in the victim’s account, proving Berg’s point but skewing what one supposes was her intended structure for the film (Singer’s name is still loosely bandied about in connection to the pool parties). An in-depth examination into DEN’s questionable practices by an investigative reporter was summarily axed by the magazine that commissioned it.

Even when convicted of sex crimes, offenders receive light sentences and can calmly resume their careers in the industry, the case of Brian Peck at Nickelodeon and other kidvid venues being a prime but by no means lone example. When menaced by a hefty sentence, Collins-Rector simply relocated his operations to Europe.

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Education, History

Christopher Nolan Shares DIY Shooting Tricks of His No-Budget First Film, ‘Following’

Director Christopher Nolan is best known for The Dark Knight trilogy of blockbusters, and a film with a sound so powerful it’s been replicated in many a trailer since: Inception. Prior to these films Nolan directed the mind-bending thriller Memento, but his career began even earlier with an ultra-low budget feature called Following.

An exercise in efficient, effective filmmaking, Following is a film noir gem — and one impressively made on a shoestring. Nolan recently sat down with VICE and the Criterion Collection to talk about the making of the film. Outlining DIY tips and tricks he used to get the film made with very limited resources, Nolan also explains how some of the methods he learned making Following still influence him to this day — even when shooting IMAX.

Connecting The Dots, News

Chinese Stock Plunge Leaves State Media Speechless

Rising up from the center of Beijing, not far from the Temple of Heaven, is the loudest voice in the wild east of the Chinese stock market.
It’s neither a bank nor a brokerage — it’s the headquarters of Xinhua News Agency, long considered the “throat and tongue” of the Chinese government.
With the heady exuberance over Chinese stocks starting to fade, sowing fears of worse to come, investors are scouring state media for clues to the Communist Party’s thinking.

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Connecting The Dots, Corruption, Education, Entertainment, FYI, History, Humor, Justice, News, Opinion, Politics, Random Events, Free Will or Something Darker?, Religion, Spirituality & Health

Supreme Court Forces Same Sex Marriage on all states and claims the states have been oppressing people illegally for 128 years !

Get ready for;
Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits…

Now we who are gay can sue the states for damages for the past 128 years, we’ll punish them and get rich off the states, in effect bankrupting them thereby punishing the people of the state.

And with that “New” money, continue to create programing and legislation protecting my next fantasy.
You got it, man boy love coming soon to an alter near you. And if you’re not in San Francisco you can stream it live HD being performed right on the streets in front of the San Francisco Justice system who now allows open public nudity and every type of sex acts.  In effect making San Francisco an open air Porn Site. hurray !

Now we who are gay can sue the pastors and the moral objectors for discrimination, we’ll destroy the church and lift God’s hand of blessing off ALL of America, not just California where this all started…

Hmmm…
Is it Climate Change or Judgment? Any Californians thirsty yet?

Meanwhile ISIS continues to attack in France and other countries, shooting 28 people sun bathing at a beach front resort, beheading others in France. Why won’t they just roll over and let us bowl them over with our legislation? What’s wrong with them? Maybe more laws? ? ?

Isis is against the “western” mind set as demonstrated today, once again by the Supreme Court.

So expect more serious attacks in the future… They believe they are fighting Big Brother and the Great Satan after all.

Have a nice day…

Connecting The Dots, Corruption, Politics

REPORT: LOIS LERNER EMAILS SHOW OBAMA’S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ASSISTED IRS TO TARGET CONSERVATIVE GROUPS

After a year and a half of investigating, Congress has finally gotten to see a large number of the “missing” emails form IRS administrator Lois Lerner. Some of these emails seem to show that Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) was involved in the IRS targeting of conservative groups, a Forbes report says.

Despite the government’s refusal to release over 800 pages of Lerner communications, some documents that have been released show that she was discussing the targeting of conservative groups with members of the DOJ two years before the IRS even admitted that its actions were improper.

“Ms. Lerner,” Forbes columnist Robert W. Wood wrote, “met with top officials from the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch in October of 2010. Although Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the DOJ, the DOJ coughed up dirt only on court order. Even then, the DOJ handed over only two pages of heavily redacted emails.”

The documents show that Lerner worked with the DOJ on targeting conservative groups and even show that Lerner sent the DOJ a “1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations” that contained confidential tax records.

On November 22 it was announced that some 30,000 IRS emails that had previously been deemed “unrecoverable” had been “found” by the IRS Inspector General. The emails extend from 2009 to 2011, when Lerner headed the IRS’s exempt-organizations division.

While investigators have yet to comb through this mountain of information, other key documents were finally revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by government watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the documents show that Obama’s DOJ was “up to its neck in the IRS scandal” and remarked in outrage that the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which is supposed to be investigating such abuse of authority, is “now implicated in the IRS crimes.”

“It is shameful how Establishment Washington has let slide by Obama’s abuse of the IRS and the Justice Department,” Fitton said. “Only as a result of Judicial Watch’s independent investigations did the American people learn about the IRS-DOJ prosecution discussions of Obama’s political enemies and how the IRS sent, in violation of law, confidential taxpayer information to the FBI and DOJ in 2010. Richard Nixon was impeached for less.”

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