Press**Watch Pneumonia Warning

Press**Watch for 1-7-2010

The media corporations decide which of our stories are important, and which stories may dwindle or disappear.  We all know, for example, that the three thousand or so who died from airline crashes and mysterious explosions in 2001 are important, and in fact they have been elevated to martyrs with their own annually commemorated day.  The ten thousand US citizens who died from swine flu and attendant complications from April to December of last year are not so important.  They are so insignificant that their extinction is passed off as a mere annual ritual.  Yet flu season rarely kills more than a few people prior to December, so this reassurance is false.  Compare the number of dead children from that period of time in 2008, for example, and you will find that the flu killed exactly none.  In 2009 it killed eleven hundred kids.  Eleven hundred families are devastated, eleven hundred lives cut short forever, and the impact of the story, underreported, is less than that of football statistics.  It’s as if those people never existed.

This is more than a slight, more than another twisted aspect of a mind control apparatus disguised as a news reporting system; it is a threat to your existence.  I just recovered from swine flu and subsequent pneumonia, and like most, I found it more than just a nuisance.  It is painful and at times even frightening.  Thanks to the constant pooh-poohing of the half-baked corporate commentators, you may not be aware that you could be killed by influenza and pneumonia at some time in the next few months.

In my case, the swine flu seemed fairly mild--an annoyance, as much from its persistence and reoccurrence as from its symptoms.  We all know the symptoms of flu by now--fever, muscle aches, weakness, et cetera.  But this flu is very targeted to the lungs, and even as I seemed to be shrugging it off over the weeks, it was tearing up my lung tissue, preparing the way for pneumonia.  Pneumonia struck as a sudden hard shaking chill.  My first thought was that I was having another outbreak of influenza symptoms, but what was really happening was that my damaged lungs were being colonized by bacteria.  I began to feel a strong fluid pressure in the center of my chest, just behind the sternum.  Strange gurgling and wheezing noises--rales--accompanied every breath.  I lay in bed shaking, racked with pain, hallucinating with fever.

I have a good doctor and good health insurance.  I was, therefore, diagnosed and treated in a timely fashion with powerful antibiotics.  That was less than a week ago.  If I had been one of the more than forty million Americans without such access, I can assure you I would be hospitalized or dead.

But it wouldn’t be news. 


This influenza is different.  It has a different mode of attack.  I don’t know the science well enough to explain it exactly, but it depends partly on its ability to swarm with overwhelming numbers of virus, and its focus on lung tissue makes it a real threat for pneumonia.  It can thus reinfect those who have already suffered it.  It may fade away over the next few months, but I doubt it.  It is far more likely that the annually hard months for influenza, that is, the next few months, will kill more thousands.  Just don’t expect corporate media to explain the danger.

........................................................
You may recall the news last week of the Christmas underwear bomber.  The coverage and commentary since has been centered on how to prevent such an incident re-occurring.  We are directed to focus on new airport search rituals or on body scans.  However, as Wayne Madsen points out (waynemadsenreport.com), all that may be necessary is the removal of Israel-based false flag operators from airport management.  His website lists an article from a Michigan paper that innocently recounts the story of a couple who had been on vacation in Africa, and who had sat just a few aisles from the Fruit of the Boom on that nearly-doomed flight.  The interesting part of their story comes well before that, however, as they describe how the man boarded the plane without a passport yet with the assistance of a man working for the airport management company. 

“An Indian man who "looked wealthy and was dressed in a nice suit" approached the ticket counter with a young man.
"They looked like an odd couple because the Indian man was dressed so nice and the person, who I thought was a teen, was a scraggly dressed black guy," Mr. Haskell said. "... The Indian man said he needed to get (the Nigerian man) on the plane, but he had no passport."
Mr. Haskell, 38, said the Indian man told the woman at the ticket counter that "the man was from Sudan and that it was typical (to let him on the plane without a passport)."
The young man was sent down the hall to talk with a manager. A few minutes later, passengers boarded the plane bound for Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “

The young man who was passed along by the manager was, as you have guessed, the butt bomber.  Wayne Madsen’s intent in passing along this little tale is to point out how convenient it is for Israel, which desperately wants to blow up Iran with US support, to have another terrorist incident directed at US air travelers during the Christmas travel season.

...................................................................

As long as I’m complaining about Israeli militarism, I may as well pass on this latest story on the theft of human organs.  It’s one of those things that is scarcely comprehensible, sort of like American torture dungeons, you know what I mean; I wish it would just go away.  I also wish that some persons who pass on this sort of news while pretending that such aggression is somehow unique to Jews would also go away, but well, the world is as it is.  The story is from a Knesset member and is reported in the Iranian media:

A member of Israel's parliament (Knesset) says the regime still continues to steal organs from the bodies of Palestinians.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Knesset member, told the Knesset on Wednesday that he had evidence that the practice was still taking place despite the regime's insistence that organ trafficking was no longer happening.

"You said that it was ended in the '90s. But Fadul Ordul Shaheen who was from Gaza passed away. He died of diabetes this year. When his body was given back to his family, his eyes were bleeding and there was a deep cut through his body," Al-Jazeera quoted Tibi as saying.

He added Shaheen's family say both of his corneas and kidneys were stolen.

The remarks were made during a hearing about the issue held on Wednesday.

Tibi said he would continue to ask the Israeli health ministry to provide the victims' families with an explanation.

Israeli lawmakers began the hearing three days after the regime admitted that it had harvested organs from dead Palestinians without permission from their next of kin in the 1990s.

The admission followed the publication of an interview conducted in 2000 with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss who revealed that forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinian bodies in the 1990s.

Palestinian Authority officials have also said that they will bring the case to international bodies.

.................................................................

Speaking of international law:

Washington, January 6 (RHC)-- A federal appeals court has ruled that the U.S. government can bypass international law to imprison any suspect it can link to al-Qaeda, the Taliban and similar groups.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel upheld a lower court decision affirming the imprisonment of a Yemeni citizen who has admitted to being to be a cook for an al-Qaeda linked group. The prisoner, Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, has been jailed at Guantánamo since 2002.

In related news, the cook has been restricted to a cage within a cage as punishment as it was discovered that he has been secretly cooking stolen rice for Al Qaeda cells, then shipping the rice overseas by means of a cleverly constructed miniature submarine powered by rats on treadmills. 

Okay, I made that last part up.

I’d like to ask how it affects you, however, when you hear news of another secret CIA torture dungeon, or the endless detention of a former teenager at Guantanamo, or the slaughter of another wedding party by high-powered machine guns wielded by some jockey firing from a harness in a C-131, I mean, how is that sort of thing different from hearing that the Great Leader has, say, had his special police force castor oil into some opponent until he dies?  Or how is that different from slaughtering an entire French village for supporting the resistance?  Or sending dissidents off to the Gulag archipelago?  Don’t we harbor harsh questions for persons who witnessed such things and said little or nothing?   Do we accept their claims that they were powerless?  How do you feel knowing that the health denial industry, by paying our so-called representatives to betray us, will kill 400 people today?         ...503-231-8187... 

........................................................................
Did you know that Humboldt County, California, passed a measure called “Measure T” that challenged corporate personhood?  The measure was passed in 2006 “prohibiting any non-local entity including non-local corporations, unions, and non-profits from making contributions to Humboldt County Elections.”  The corporations raged against it because it meant that, as persons under the law, they could be taxed without representation, and with that argument, they have overturned it.  But the result is that they were forced to publicly argue that they deserved personhood--a ridiculous idea on its face, and one that was legitimized behind closed doors by a nineteenth-century court clerk.  The idea of corporate personhood is the legal fiction behind corporate rule, so I’d like to suggest a new Measure T right here in River City.  Let the measure say that  no non-local union or corporation may contribute to Portland City elections.    Then let’s do it again for Multnomah County.  Then let’s do it again for the State of Oregon, and again and again in every local jurisdiction until a national debate emerges as to why exactly a corporation should have constitutional rights like a living person.

And let the fur fly.

..........................................................................


Andy Birkey, writing in the Minnesota Independent, announces a first-of-its-kind appointment by the Obama Administration:

In a move that is being hailed by LGBT advocates and derided by the religious right, President Obama made his first appointment of a transgender person to a federal post this week. Amanda Simpson will be the new Senior Technical Advisor to the Department of Commerce where she will oversee weapons technology.  [Oh joy--Theresa]

Simpson, a former test pilot who has worked in the defense and aerospace industries for 30 years, has downplayed the role her gender identity plays in her new job.

“Being the first sucks,” she told ABC News.com. “I’d rather not be the first but someone has to be first, or among the first. I think I’m experienced and very well qualified to deal with anything that might show up because I’ve broken barriers at lots of other places and I always win people over with who I am and what I can do.”

Religious right leaders, are not looking at Simpson’s qualifications, however, and are instead targeting her appointment on political grounds.

“This isn’t like appointing an African-American in order to try to provide diversity and right some kind of discriminatory wrong,” Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth, a group that opposes homosexuality, told a conservative website. “This is about political correctness. President Obama, before he was inaugurated, told the world that he had signed off on every single demand of the homosexual-activist lobby.”

Focus on the Family released a statement criticizing the appointment. Focus’ spokesperson Monica Schleicher said, “Efforts to promote ‘transgenderism’ in public policy deconstruct one of the most fundamental concepts known to mankind… In doing so, activists like Simpson are asking the rest of society to radically reorder the ways in which the culture makes reasonable and rational accommodation for the two genders.”  ...more...

..............................................................................