Friday, August 29, 2008

Back Issue "High Weirdness by E-Mail [vol. 2 #6]"

I will post the rest after I get them cleaned up a bit. My spelling is terrible.

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"The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television." - Prof. Brian O'Blivion, Videodrome

Private For-Profit Prisons are pretty fucked up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackenhut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Attempts_to_limit_privatization_and_increase_oversight
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_America
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEO_Group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Companies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_4_Falck#Critical_Observations

No conspiracy here per se, only something that is rather more than a little fucked up. The state (read: gov'ment) is paying private companies to house and take care of criminals. Private Prisons. Just let that concept simmer in your brain. Private. Prisons. Private companies having custodial rights over American citizens for the duration of their incarceration. Its a little weird.

Is there anything we won't outsource anymore? I suppose they should thank their lucky stars we don't outsource this particular job to India as well.

Of course, there are some elements that might make most people a little bit anxious about this prospect, beyond that there are private prisons. Like offering cash incentives for local law enforcement to round up more perps. Or the fact that like publicly funded jails these have work shops where prisoners are required to put in 40 hours a week. Making things. Things these companies are contracted to make for other companies. Things they sell. For money. While the prisoners get the state minimum pay for prison work, about $15 a month seems like the average.

Does this whole prison angle sound like a publicly acceptable veneer for slavery? It would certainly lean in that direction.

Working while paying your debt to society is one thing. Public works is fine by me. Making license plates, clearing roads of litter, substitute teaching, whatever. However these prisoners are working manufacturing jobs for the private sector, for slave wages.

If you are generally unsympathetic to the plight of criminals, that is fine, look at it this way. The illegal immigrant workforce everyone is so against this election cycle steals jobs nobody wants (the ass-end of the aggro biz)*, but these prisoners are being forced to work what would otherwise be honest, high paying manufacturing jobs. The sorts of jobs that "left for overseas" and ruined most of middle America's economy. Midwestern ghost towns dot the land in places where "the factory closed" and took the population and economy with it. Now those jobs are coming back. These prisons open in depressed areas and offer a temporary boon to the local population with construction and support jobs. Once its built maybe a few hundred jobs at best for guards and admin staff. Then 20,000 manufacturing jobs staffed exclusively by slave labor, making money that nobody but the company owning the prison will see.

You want a good job Middle America? One of those well-paying, medically insured, retirement package having, unionized factory jobs that damned company gave to those dirty Chinamen? It’s easy, just go to jail.

Behind door number 3 is.... The Partnership for a Drug Free America!
http://www.drugfree.org/
http://www.druglibrary.org/SCHAFFER/library/pdfa1.htm
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Partnership_for_a_Drug_Free_America
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_a_Drug-Free_America
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wood_Johnson_Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_%26_Johnson
http://www.healthandsocietyscholars.org/
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1DC1430F937A3575BC0A961948260&sec=&spon=
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/

When you send your kids to school, theoretically, you meet their teachers at some point. After all, its nice to know who is going to be the major force in shaping their young, impressionable minds (other than you, and the teevee). Get to know the teacher, sit'em down for a friendly chat, discuss grades, juniors ability to relate to other kids, etc... Good policy I say.

Here's the problem. There are some people that aim to educate your children, and you, about all kinds of things and you generally have no clue whatsoever who they are. This is a bad thing.

Have no fear loyal reader; Old Saucy James has done the work for you this time! Well, for this one topic and one group, but it is kind of a big one.

You see my intrepid friends there is a group known as much by its name as its idiotic public service announcements. The Partnership for a Drug Free America.

This non-profit group was started in 1986 (2 years after the "Crack Epidemic" started, and then quickly spread out from, LA) by Richard O'Rielly of the AAAA (American Association of Advertising Agencies) as well as being the marketing genius behind Reagan's media campaign. Mr. O'Rielly, seeing opportunity and having the government contacts to do something with it, formed TPFADFA post-haste.

Soon the airwaves were filled with Nancy Reagan telling you about the dangers of trench-coated thugs on playgrounds pushing dope to your young (fortunately just saying No seems to get them off your back), while George HW Bush gave America a detailed description of the effects of Crack (as well as its cost, where to find it, and showing us what it looked like). All of this thanks to TPFADFA.

But you ask, James, how did TPFADFA America get to do all this? Surely Nancy Reagan and the fucking VICE President don't come cheap? That is true, they did it with money! Some of it was even your tax dollars! That however was a fairly small percentage of the funding.

The rest came from drugs.

You see, the partnership that is spoken of is one between legal purveyors of drugs, advertisers and the government. The money (always, always follow the money) came from alcohol (Anheuser-Busch), tobacco (American Brands, RJ Reynolds, Philip-Morris), pharmaceuticals (Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, Hoffmann-LaRoche, Johnson & Johnson, CIBA-GEIGY/Pharmaceuticals Division, Dow Chemical), private prison builders/government contractors (Bechtel Group, Halliburton), banking giants (Citibank, Bear-Sterns, The Fuji Bank and Trust Company) and advertising agencies (Proctor & Gamble, beyond them it was founded by the chair of the AAAA and had its backing from day one).

As an aside the PFADFA is funded by pharmacutical giant Johnson & Johnson from three different sources. From corporate HQ (Johnson & Johnson), from the founders personal charitable organization (J. Seward Johnson Sr. Charitable Trusts), and from a former CEO's charitable trust (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).

So, with all of that, I wonder how objective and altruistic their goals of turning the children against the horrors of illegal drugs really are.

It should be noted that currently no tobacco or alcohol firms directly fund the group, but charities that they fund in turn give to TPFADFA. Also it should be noted for Ken's information that among the food and drink interests that provide funding RJ Nabisco is on the list. I wonder what their interest in drugs is...**

Danny Casolaro, PROMIS, and The Octopus [Part 1]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNdW2V5V8W4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3O7u9JYVgs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Casolaro
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id901/pg1/
http://www.constitution.org/col/octocaso.htm
http://www.projectcensored.org/static/1991/1991-story11.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw
http://www.rense.com/general17/maf.htm

Before we delve into the life of this man, lets look at how he died, shall we?

He was found in a bathtub full of blood in a hotel, his wrists and arms were slashed 6 times each (a grand total of 12), the cuts were deep enough on most to hit bone, his room was empty of personal items save some clothes and a suicide note saying he was sorry for something terrible he did (not specified, just that it was terrible) and that god would forgive him.

This sounds tragic indeed, but not overly weird. However...

He was afraid of blood, especially his own. He often refused simple medical procedures if they involved any kind of blood draw. His wrists were slashed to the bone and twelve times at that, also the wounds indicated the razor was pulled away from his body, not in the direction of it. He always carried a large accordion file and several notebooks containing information for a book he was writing, those were never found. His suicide note wasn't in his handwriting, it wasn't signed, it mentioned no family by name, and it mentioned looking forward to forgiveness from god (he was a staunch atheist).

So yeah, apart from that it seems like a pretty open and shut suicide, right?

The subject of his book? Something he called "The Octopus". A conspiracy involving a handful of top government and military officials up to some very bad shit. Books like this are written all the time, no biggie.

Danny's problem came when he actually started getting close to this group, which apparently does or at least did exist. He found the best, quickest, most provable way to track their dirty deeds back to them; the IRS. Danny found a contact highly placed in the Internal Revenue Service who had hard information of the dealings of this group via their financial records, personal and work-related, and this guy wanted to talk. He talked alright, he talked and then Danny went to meet another contact in West Virginia, a mysterious fellow whom he had never met before. Some of his shadowy military and intelligence contacts put him onto. Some of the same men who had gone from feeding Danny information to warning him he was too close to something really big, and his life was in danger.

One of the last things he said to his brother was "If something happens to me in West Virginia, it will not be an accident.". A journey that started out with an investigation into the Pentagon stealing software from a small company ended with a mans death. If he wasn't onto something else, then that is a lot of trouble to go to just to avoid paying to renew your software license.

CIA Drug Connection 2, or, How I learned to stop worrying about poor inner city minorities and love Crack Cocaine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2RpNkeu1YA [Part 1 of "Dark Alliance", the rest is there too]
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/race_relations/july-dec96/cia_11-18.html
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/9712/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Ross_(drug_trafficker)
http://freewayenterprise.blogspot.com/
http://www.streetgangs.com/magazine/freewayrick.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic

Did some of that unaccounted for cocaine that the CIA pumped into America in the early to mid-eighties start the crack epidemic? Survey says, yeah, probably. At least according to this crazy, left-wing, non-mainstream conspiracy group called the Department of Justice (with their crazed, uninformed, barking at the moon appointed leader, the Attorney General).

Guys like "Freeway" Ricky Ross made hundreds of millions of dollars in the crack biz, with Ricky arguably one of the most successful. He set up crack houses (for distribution, not for random crackheads to crash at) in poor neighborhoods so people didn't have to drive or bus to get their crack, they could just walk down the street. These houses had little windows on the side where you walked up, handed a man some money, and he handed you some quality rock (made only from the finest imported powder), you walk away a happy customer.

I wonder where Ricky got his business model. Hey man, it works.

Anyways, it seems that Ricky and those like him got the idea for pure, smokable, cheap, and highly addictive cocaine from some guys who did business in Florida and the Caribbean. These guys turned out to be South-American Contras, who turned out to be running the drugs into the states with the approval and help of some guys from the CIA.

The question is, who invented Crack and then unleashed it knowingly on the public. Good question, but it wasn't Ricky like some people like to say. Ricky was a drop out with no knowledge of chemistry. Also, Ricky has never been to "da islands" which is where crack was first discovered by local cops in late 1979. Not in LA, where the media and government will tell you the drug was first cooked and sold. It was in the Bahamas, one of the two routes which the CIA/Contra Cocaine Express was rocking its way into the US by. Funny that.

Finally something not in the Your Government and Big Business are Fucking You genre... Israeli Exoskeleton (that looks amazingly like a Japanese one...) allows a paralyzed man to walk.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1049215/Paralysed-man-walks-thanks-Robocop-style-exoskeleton.html
http://www.argomedtec.com/products.asp
http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/robotsuithal/index.html
http://gizmodo.com/381024/rent-your-own-hal-exoskeleton-for-the-low-low-price-of-1000
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?p=1430762

One step closer to powered armor... one step closer. An exciting time to be, um, paralyzed. Well yeah, I guess its never a good time to be paralyzed. Still though, this is pretty cool. I can't wait until the HAL unit goes up for sale. That will be the DIY hobby project for the next decade. Fuck customizing your motorcycle (that I dislike motorcycles), why do that when you can ad-on and improve your POWERED EXOSKELETON.

Sign me up.

Just wait till Cyberdyne (yeah, they have a real evil robot fixation. The Japanese are so weird) and Argo Tech start feuding over patents, exclusivity contracts, and international distribution rights to their products. In the grim future of biomedical technology there is only war!

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I was going to do a bit about TV mind control rays, but I figured that would shoot my credibility in the dick on this other stuff. Not that I have much credibility, but still, best to save the really crazy stuff for later.

Next time I may include that gem, as well as a collection of weird, work safe, photographs since Chad H asked me to ever so nicely. He likes pictures. He likes... to watch.

/End Transmission.

* Yes, I have friends who have worked those jobs several seasons in a row. White friends. White friends who reported that they saw less than a dozen other white hands picking berries and other assorted produce, in total, the entire time. Its not that they weren't welcome, farms like that never have a "hiring freeze" during the summer, its that the white kids would wuss out after an hour or two in the sun. Seriously. The illegals would work it all day because they needed the money. The whites would give up in disgust, deciding to go back home and find a real job. Yes, illegals have those jobs, but there are still more! There always have been! This whole damned thing is a giant smoke-screen issue! A straw man argument so you won't notice what is actually going on around you! Don't worry about the poison in the water that your government pays companies to put there for your own good, no no! Don't look at how we are openly torturing POW's or arbitrarily declaring who gets what rights and where and oh my god the Geneva conventions are so quaint aren't they? Pay no attention to how corporate America pumps millions of dollars into education so that marketing and advertising students can be instructed on the best ways to keep you asleep and force-feed you and your children mediocrity and fast food, until we are a nation of homogenized, identically dressed, borderline obese, obedient wage-slaves punching a clock instead of griping a slave collar, oh no! The real problem we face is gay people getting married! My god! Panic! The gays are choosing to partner with someone for life out of love, the Mexicans are picking our lettuce! Lettuce that Citizens (Code for: WHITE PEOPLE) should be picking! Panic in the streets!

** I don't think the Nabisco factory was used for the mass manufacture of crack. Ricky Ross alone had dozens of houses that were used exclusively for cooking the crack, so it was an industrial operation, albeit a very decentralized one. Which is the smart way to do it.

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