The Raw Story

Thursday, 22 January 2015

Expectation is important: Seeing is not always remembering

People may have to "turn on" their memories in order to remember even the simplest details of an experience, according to Penn State psychologists. This finding, which has been named "attribute amnesia," indicates that memory is far more selective than previously thought.

"It is commonly believed that you will remember specific details about the things you're attending to, but our experiments show that this is not necessarily true," said Brad Wyble, assistant professor of psychology. "We found that in some cases, people have trouble remembering even very simple pieces of information when they do not expect to have to remember them."

Wyble and Hui Chen, postdoctoral fellow in psychology, tested the memories of 100 undergraduate students, divided into several groups. Each group performed a variation of the experiment in order to replicate the results for different kinds of information, such as numbers, letters or colors.

In each trial participants were shown four characters on a screen arranged in a square -- for example three numbers and one letter -- and were told that they would need to report which corner the letter was in. After a set amount of time, the characters disappeared from the screen and the participants reported where they remembered the letter had been. This part of the task was expected to be easy -- participants rarely made an error.

After repeating this simple task numerous times, the participant was asked an unexpected question in order to probe the memory for the very information used to find the letter's location. Four letters appeared on the screen and the participant was asked to identify which one had appeared on the previous screen. Only 25 percent of the participants identified the correct letter -- the same percentage as would be expected to randomly guess it.

Similar results were obtained when participants were asked to locate odd numbers, even numbers and colors.

"This result is surprising because traditional theories of attention assume that when a specific piece of information is attended, that information is also stored in memory and therefore participants should have done better on the surprise memory test," said Wyble.

Chen and Wyble have called the phenomenon they observed attribute amnesia, as they reported in an article recently published online in the journal . Attribute amnesia occurs when a person uses a piece of information to perform a task, but is then unable to report specifically what that information was as little as one second later.

"The information we asked them about in the surprise question was important, because we had just asked them to use it," said Chen. "It was not irrelevant to the task they were given."

After the surprise trial, the same question was repeated on the next trial, however it was no longer a surprise. Participants did dramatically better with the average of correct answers between 65 and 95 percent across the different experiments.

The researchers point out that this result suggests that people's expectations play an important role in determining what they remember, even for information they are specifically using.

"It seems like memory is sort of like a camcorder," said Wyble. "If you don't hit the 'record' button on the camcorder, it's not going to 'remember' what the lens is pointed at. But if you do hit the 'record' button -- in this case, you know what you're going to be asked to remember -- then the information is stored."

Wyble and Chen argue that this selective memory storage might be a useful adaptation because it prevents the brain from remembering information that is probably not important. The researchers plan to continue this line of research as they study whether people are aware of their own lack of memory.

Journal Reference:

H. Chen, B. Wyble. Amnesia for Object Attributes: Failure to Report Attended Information That Had Just Reached Conscious Awareness. , 2015; DOI: 10.1177/0956797614560648

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://bit.ly/1xcsdoI.

Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel, have you seen the movie "Interstellar?") and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable." This is the hypothesis put forward in a study published in and conducted with the participation of SISSA in Trieste. The paper, the result of a collaboration between Indian, Italian and North American researchers, prompts scientists to re-think dark matter.

"If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But there's more," explains Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste and a dark matter expert. "We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Just like the one we've all seen in the recent film 'Interstellar'." Salucci is among the authors of the paper recently published in

Although space-time tunnels (or wormholes or Einstein-Penrose bridges) have only recently gained great popularity among the public thanks to Christopher Nolan's sci-fi film, they have been the focus of astrophysicists' attention for many years. "What we tried to do in our study was to solve the very equation that the astrophysicist 'Murph' was working on. Clearly we did it long before the film came out" jokes Salucci. "It is, in fact, an extremely interesting problem for dark matter studies."

"Obviously we're not claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility." Can it ever be tested experimentally? "In principle, we could test it by comparing two galaxies -- our galaxy and another, very close one like, for example, the Magellanic Cloud, but we are still very far from any actual possibility of making such a comparison."

To reach their conclusions the astrophysicists combined the equations of general relativity with an extremely detailed map of the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way: "the map was one we obtained in a study we carried out in 2013," explains Salucci. "Beyond the sci-fi hypothesis, our research is interesting because it proposes a more complex reflection on dark matter."

As Salucci points out, scientists have long tried to explain dark matter by hypothesizing the existence of a particular particle, the neutralino, which, however, has never been identified at CERN or observed in the universe. But alternative theories also exist that don't rely on the particle, "and perhaps it's time for scientists to take this issue 'seriously'," concludes Salucci. "Dark matter may be 'another dimension', perhaps even a major galactic transport system. In any case, we really need to start asking ourselves what it is."

In addition to Salucci, the other scientists who took part in the study included Farook Rahaman (first author), from Jadavpur University in India, and a group of Indian and North American researchers.

Watch wormhole simulation on youtube: http://goo.gl/g9aawX

Journal Reference:

Farook Rahaman, P. Salucci, P.K.F. Kuhfittig, Saibal Ray, Mosiur Rahaman.Possible existence of wormholes in the central regions of halos. , 2014; 350: 561 DOI: 10.1016/j.aop.2014.08.003

One of the reasons I criticize academics has been my experience in their suppression of knowledge. I use to fund important archaeological excavations that could further our knowledge of history. The First Gulf War bombing uncovered a ancient city nobody had known about in the desert of Iraq. Ancient cities contained libraries where everything was stored including court cases and disputes. Over the years, I was a known collector of ancient economic texts. Thousands of these clay tablets appeared on the black market. I was naturally contacted. I bid on the find. I then learned that my only competitor was Martin Schøyen, a Norwegian collector of manuscripts. This find was a collection containing over 13,000 documents. Martin's collection was the finest in the world among which was an original Magna Carta.

Academics hated people like the two of us for they think only they should have such finds to play with. Of course they have no money and go begging hat-in-hand to governments for taxpayer's to buy their toys. Because of their academic greed, they have done far more harm to the advancement of knowledge than anyone.

That discovery in the desert of Iraq uncovered the Legal Code of Ur-Nammu (ca. 2100BC) which is the oldest known written law code that predates Hammurabi's law code by about 300 years. I went to dinner with Martin in Zurich. We reached an agreement - I would back out of the bidding in return for access to the economic text. He was the greater specialist in collecting all documents and I viewed that his collection would be the proper place. The translation of this find was provided entirely by Martin Schøyen. His private efforts have contributed greatly to our knowledge base when government funding for translation is lacking. When the Legal Code of Hammurabi (1792-1750BC) was first discovered in 1901, his laws were heralded as the earliest known examples. Subsequent to that discovery, older collections of legal codes have been unearthed.

The academics have black-listed Martin Schøyen's efforts refusing to allow it to appear on tour in museums because it was purchased on the black market. These people are fools and are highly dangerous. I would never donate 10 cents to anything they do. The archive like this is not discovered by academics. It was on the black market. The question then becomes - does someone step up to preserve it, or ignore it because it was found by non-professionals? They think these types of people will just hand it over intact for no money. If they do not get something, they are more likely to destroy it. They only care about money. Academics are just greedy fools in this respect. The goal is to preserve it. We are all mortal. Such collections are often donated upon death anyway.

I was also asked to step forward and fund the excavation of a remaining 2,800 m² that remain buried in the Villa Suburbana also known as the Villa of the Papyri. This was the most luxurious Villa in the resort town of Herculaneum located on the slopes of Vesuvius. Beneath the excavated area, new excavations in the 1990s revealed two previously undiscovered floors to the villa, which was built in a series of terraces overlooking the sea. I was asked to fund this because the academics had no money as usual. The Italian government had no spare change to excavate the greatest collection of ancient books to have ever survived. I was considering this project when the Government seized Princeton Economics. Nothing as been done since.

The Villa of the Papyri is a private house in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum that was buried with the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in 79AD. This was the home of an ancient book collector. The villa was perhaps owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. When the eruption of Vesuvius covered all of Herculaneum with some 30 meters of volcanic ash, it strangely preserved the only ancient library known to have survived.

The Villa of the Papyri was first excavated in the years between 1750 and 1765 by Karl Weber by means of underground tunnels. Its name derives from the discovery of a library in the house containing 1,785 carbonized papyrus scrolls, the "Herculaneum papyri".

The owner of the house, most likely Calpurnius Piso, created a library of a mainly philosophical character. It is believed that the library was assembled by the Epicurean Philodemus of Gàdara, who was a friend. Followers of Epicurus studied the teachings of this moral and natural philosopher. This philosophy taught that man is mortal, that the cosmos is the result of accident, that there is no providential god, and that the criterion of a good life is pleasure and temperance. Philodemus taught young students of Greek literature and philosophy who gathered around him at Herculaneum and Naples. Much of his work was discovered in about a thousand papyrus rolls in the philosophical library recovered at Herculaneum. Philodemus succeeded in influencing the most learned and distinguished Romans of his age.

At the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, the valuable library was packed in cases ready to be moved to safety when it was overtaken by pyroclastic flow; the eruption eventually deposited some 20 - 25 m of volcanic ash over the site, charring the scrolls but preserving them. This is the only surviving library of Antiquity.

On what was excavated previously, now there is some hope that the scrolls can be read. Researchers from the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, now say that for the first time, they can read letters inside the scrolls without unrolling them using a laserlike beam of X-rays. Of course, the other rooms discovered remain un-excavated. They are obviously in danger of another eruption. Government are hunting money - not spending it, The remaining rooms may have the lost works of Aristotle, Plato, and others.

Amidst all the brouhaha related to the allegedly "false" portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson in the movie caused by the LBJ Library's director, Mark Updegrove, it is noteworthy to call to the public's attention how the "LBJ defenders" have attempted to absolve President Johnson from involvement with that sordid chapter in American history. Updegrove's article was quickly followed by one from Joseph Califano, printed in the Washington Post, that even claimed the Selma march was Lyndon Johnson's idea. All of it was quite opposite of the truth, and no amount of "LBJ revisionism" will make it fact.

From the time that Martin Luther King Jr.'s name came to national prominence in December, 1955, J. Edgar Hoover began monitoring his activities, even as King and his closest associates mistakenly presumed, according to Andrew Young, that "we thought of the FBI as our friends, the only hope we had."[1] By 1959, Hoover had decided, on his own and without higher authorization, to order his agents to burglarize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices to obtain personal information about Dr. King and install telephone wire taps as well as "bugs" to record non-telephonic conversations and assorted other noises. This brazenly illegal activity, of which there were many other cases in addition to King's, continued into the Kennedy administration. By 1961, the freedom rides that had begun that year revealed which side the FBI was really on, and it was not King's. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had attempted to bring the wiretapping under control, however by that time the SCLC and King had begun fighting back, culminating in a special report attacking the FBI on January 8, 1962. By then, the FBI had obtained evidence that two people in King's entourage, Stanley Levison and Jack O'Dell, had ties to the American Communist Party, making it difficult for the Kennedys to cooperate with King until that issue was dealt with or, conversely, for them to end the surveillance under the continuing pressure wielded by Hoover.[2]

During the five years of Hoover's sleuthing before JFK was sworn in, Hoover had become obsessed with destroying King, and in 1961 he called on his Special Agents in Charge (SACs) of his field offices to cull their files for all the "subversive" information they could gather and send it to the "SOG" (as he called himself, the "Seat of Government"). Hoover's assistant, Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, was put in charge of compiling this assortment of innuendo, half-truths and whole lies, sprinkled with sufficient "facts" to make it salable.[3] By October, 1963, six weeks before JFK's assassination, Robert F. Kennedy, under pressure from Hoover,approved the FBI wiretap of King for a 30 day period ending on November 21, 1963. His tenuous relationship with Hoover had, at that point in time, been seriously compromised by his need to solicit the FBI's help in protecting his brother JFK's own secrets regarding his involvement with a stunning woman named Ellen Rometsch , who was suspected of being an East German Spy,who had been procured on his behalf by none other than Bobby Baker, all as choreographed by Lyndon B. Johnson. RFK needed Hoover's help to get her out of the country lest her liaison with JFK leak .This required RFK to delicately "deal with" not just one "devil" but three, simultaneously: Hoover, Johnson and Baker. He had no choice but to approve those temporary wiretaps but he fully expected to review, and possibly end, that surveillance, at the end of the 30 days, but his brother's assassination ended his control over that process; there was no review until 1965 because Hoover ignored RFK's condition and the "King wiretapping went on and on,"[4] to Lyndon Johnson's personal pleasure.

After JFK's assassination, RFK became ineffectual in his position, cut off from above by Johnson and from below by Hoover, both of whom liked to play the recordings of King's sexual trysts for their own amusement or at cocktail parties for others as well. LBJ played them for long time crony, a long-time Texas pal of Johnson's, then Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, who described it in his memoir. There are numerous reports about how these recordings were delivered to President Johnson, who took great delight in listening to them, especially King's sexual exploits. One such account was a 2011 article in the magazine, which stated: "He listened to the tapes that even had the noises of the bedsprings," correspondent Hugh Sidey reported in 1975. Johnson would say to anyone having nice things to say about MLK, "Goddammit, if you could only hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually."[5] Lyndon Johnson's description of King was the same in 1967 as it had been three years earlier, despite how they had "collaborated" on the passage of the legislation in between. This is because Johnson used King to help accomplish his own personal goals in 1964-65, yet, despite Johnson's own legendary womanizing, he had the temerity to call Dr. King "hypocritical."

Robert Sherrill, the author of writing contemporaneously in 1967, said that Bill Moyers "expressly approved" circulating within the executive branch a secret FBI report intended to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King.[6] An entire section of this report was devoted to the details of King's personal life and sexuality preferences, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report in 1976. Moyers admitted under questioning that he understood that the FBI reports dealt with personal information, that he never questioned the propriety of it, that he never considered it inappropriate, and that neither did anyone else in the White House. As the later reported, "Johnson found gossip about other men's weaknesses a delicious hiatus from work."[7] It is interesting that a decade later, Moyers admitted that some of the taping the FBI did on behalf of Johnson was excessive, but it took even longer for him to admit that they were "constitutional violations."[8] He has never been held to account for his own actions, nor was Johnson ever held to account for his abuse of illegal bugs and wiretapping, as eventually happened to Richard Nixon under much less egregious circumstances.

In the three years following the assassination, though King used public outrage to pressure Johnson into pushing the 1965 Voting rights Act. Everything changed after King's speech of April 4, 1967. at Riverside Church in New York City at which he came out strongly against the Vietnam War and Johnson's methods in creating the war. In his book, Hampton Sides summarized the situation that King had found himself in six months before his assassination. By 1967, the thirty-eight-year-old King had been working almost non stop for twelve years, while getting little exercise and smoking and drinking in excess, he had become extremely stressed; he had been receiving death threats and his marriage was teetering toward failure.

With his opposition to the Vietnam War King became a moral force LBJ had to deal with. His outspoken criticisms of the Vietnam War caused Lyndon Johnson to turn against him completely:

Certainly he was no longer welcome at the White House. Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson had made history together - collaborating on the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 - but now Johnson wouldn't even talk to King.

On June 20, 1997, in a article headlined "Son of Dr. King Asserts L.B.J. Role in Plot" by Kevin Sack, the King family admitted that they had suspected all along that President Lyndon Baines Johnson was behind the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King:

Three months ago, Dexter Scott King . . . asserted that President Lyndon B. Johnson must have been part of a military and governmental conspiracy to kill Dr. King. "Based on the evidence that I've been shown, I would think that it would be very difficult for something of that magnitude tooccur on his watch and he [LBJ] not be privy to it,'' Mr. King said on the ABC News program .

Another of Johnson's sycophants, his attorney general, Ramsey Clark, in 1968 had a vocal malfunction when he declared there was no conspiracy involved, even before the "investigation" was complete, not to mention the trial. In this case, AG Clark was speaking on behalf of President Johnson in pronouncing the accused guilty.

The efforts of LBJ's defenders, then as now, have served to hide Johnson's deceit and nefarious maneuvers, thus his most secret and criminal actions throughout his presidency. The time has come for those crimes and treasons to be brought out of the closets to which they have been hidden for five decades and exposed to the light of truth. The nation has been seriously harmed, and the public's right to know has been denied, for far too long. The public's trust in the federal government is at an all-time low as a direct result of the hidden lies and the buried crimes. The LBJ "legend" can no longer stand the "truth" test and it is therefore imperative that it must be corrected, and the sooner the better.

[1] Gentry, Curt, New York: W.W. Norton, 1991, p. 500

[2] Ibid., p. 501

[3] Ibid., p. 505

[4] Theoharis, Athan, , Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1991, p. 99.

[5] Meroney, John. "What Really Happened Between J. Edgar Hoover and MLK Jr."

November 11, 2011

[6] Sherrill, Robert, , New York: Pyramid Publication, Inc. 1968, p. 42

[7] Lasky, Victor, New York: The Dial Press, 1977, pp. 196-198

[8] Ibid.

While the Western world was watching and grieving over the slaughter in Paris last week, and my colleagues in the media were fomenting a meaningless debate about whether President Obama should have gone to Paris to participate in a televised parade, the feds took advantage of that diversion to reveal even more incursions into our liberties than we had known about.

We already knew that the NSA, our 60,000 domestic spies, has captured and retained the contents of nearly all emails, text messages, telephone calls, bank statements, utility bills and credit card bills of all Americans since 2009. We already knew that Obama has used CIA drones to kill Americans overseas and claims that he somehow can do so legally and secretly notwithstanding the express prohibitions in the Constitution.

We already knew that President George W. Bush authorized the illegal torture of a hundred-plus people, about 20 percent by "mistake," and now we know that because he refuses to prosecute the torturers, Obama is as culpable for the torture as Bush is.

Last week, however, the Department of Justice revealed that since the 1990s, the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose job is to interdict controlled dangerous substances before they enter our borders and to do so consistent with the Constitution, has been monitoring the phone calls of selected Americans. Prior to 2001, the DEA intimidated, coerced and bribed telecom providers into making their telephone lines available to its agents. Since 2001, it has no doubt taken advantage of the provisions of the so-called Patriot Act that permit federal agents to write their own search warrants to custodians of records, in direct contravention of the Constitution, which requires warrants from judges.

Last week, the Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the NSA, known as GCHQ, acknowledged that it has been reading the domestic emails of U.S. journalists since 2008. This can only be done (a) by stealth illegally, or (b) if the NSA has given this data illegally to the GCHQ, or (c) on the odd chance that an American domestic email or cellphone call has been routed through Canada or Britain. The GCHQ boasted of its ability to download 70,000 American emails in 10 minutes! Did you hear Obama condemn this?

As if all this were not enough to make one ask what is going on with our privacy, also last week, former federal agents revealed that more than 50 American law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, possess a new handheld radar device that sends sound waves through walls and receives back images on a screen of persons on the other side of the walls.

This permits cops on the street to view an image of you in the privacy of your home without your knowledge or consent and without a search warrant. For the past 13 years, the Supreme Court has refused to permit evidence from similar heat-seeking devices to be used in criminal prosecutions, and the cops have reacted by using a more high-tech version, ostensibly to see whether "anyone is home."

None of these flagrant violations of privacy, dignity and basic American constitutional values was enacted by a majority vote of any representative body of lawmakers - and yet none has been stopped by those lawmakers. That's because we have a deep state system in American government, whereby certain law enforcement, military, intelligence and diplomatic personnel can do as they wish, no matter which party controls the legislative and executive branches and in hair-splitting defiance of the courts.

That hair-splitting defiance argues that the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of privacy in the "persons, houses, papers and effects" of all in America only pertains to criminal prosecutions; thus, the government, this argument goes, can invade all the privacy it wants so long as it is for some other - non-criminal - purpose. Supreme Court decisions recognizing privacy as a personal natural right, as well as American constitutional history (the Fourth Amendment was written largely in reaction to British soldiers invading privacy by looking for items in the colonists' homes to tax), profoundly reject that argument.

How does the government get away with this? If you peered into your neighbor's bedroom with a high-tech device, you'd be prosecuted or sued. Yet when the government does this, most folks are supine enough to be grateful for the safety it produces. That's what Big Brother wants you to believe. What safety? Who will keep us safe from the government? Who will keep our personal liberties safe? What representative government splits hairs in order to defy the Constitution, rather than complying with its oath to protect it?

In effect, the government argues that it cannot keep us safe unless it violates the rights of the known innocent. If you buy that argument and surrender your own privacy, good luck - but don't try to surrender anyone else's. Freedom is natural and personal and cannot be surrendered by others. If you think the present federal government will keep you safe because you let it take your freedoms, what will protect you from a future federal government when all your freedoms have been surrendered?

Et tu Poland? Putin excluded from Holocaust commemoration

Glancing at the headlines one might believe Russian President Vladimir Putin had inappropriately decided not to attend Holocaust commemorations in Poland.

In one breathtaking display of misinformation, Reuters would report in its article Putin will not attend Holocaust commemorations in Poland that,

In reality, The Russian leader was never invited by Poland, the nation hosting the commemorations.

The geopolitical thrust and accompanying misinformation is designed to reinforce the perception that Russia is now a hegemonic threat, on par with Nazi Germany during World War II. Reality could not contradict this contrived narrative more.

On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa was launched. Three massive German armies moved at lightning speed into the Soviet Union as part of a long anticipated Nazi attempt to conquer Russia. The invasion would quickly overwhelm unprepared Russian forces bringing German armies up to the gates of several major Russian cities, Moscow included.

Along their way, Nazi forces would carry out mass arrests and executions of Eastern European Jews, Slavs, and Russians. The Russian people and their allies fought bitterly at the cost of millions of lives to first slow then stop the invasion, then turn it back before finally reaching the gates of Berlin themselves.

Europe's Jews, imprisoned and mass murdered by the millions, owe their eventual liberation to the heroic sacrifices of the Russian people who fought the majority of the war in Europe against Germany, years before American boots landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944.

Thus, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a representative of the nation and the peoples who formed the vanguard against the Nazi scourge and ended the threat of fascism in Europe. While American soldiers were shocked to find Hitler's death camps upon the conclusion of the war, the Russian people had been living the nightmare of Germany's systematic regional genocide for years, firsthand. Putin's exclusion from Holocaust commemorations is more than mere politics, it is a warning sign that an old enemy once again stirs in its dark lair.

Upon the conclusion of World War II, the Americans along with their newly formed NATO alliance, quickly made use of Nazis who surrendered to them rather than face "justice" at the hands of the Soviets for their serial crimes against humanity. The Americans integrated them into some more noble causes such as space exploration, but also among darker networks including intelligence, propaganda and even domestic terror networks (later to be known notoriously as Operation Gladio).

Former Nazis and their ideological allies in Soviet territory like the Ukraine, were continuously backed by NATO at the end of the World War to resist Soviet rule. These networks have survived, continuously, and manifest themselves even today in the form of the current regime in Kiev, which violently overthrew the elected government of Ukraine between late 2013 and early 2014.

Fully backed by NATO, these successors of Nazi collaborators who literally served Adolf Hitler's catastrophically tragic bid at global domination and assisted in the genocide that accompanied that bid, are carrying out similar dark deeds in eastern Ukraine, albeit on a smaller but no less tragic scale. In true form reflecting the obscenely dishonest narratives woven by Nazi propagandists like Joseph Goebbels, the Western world has sidestepped these historic and current realities and instead insist Russia, not literal fascists carrying Nazi flags, represent the resurgence of a fascist threat in Europe today.

President Putin's exclusion from Holocaust commemorations is a direct part of forming and reinforcing this narrative. No greater insult could be given to the victims, survivors and heroes who suffered and eventually overcame the Nazi scourge than to twist and intentionally distort history, propping up the successors of villains and condemning those representing the millions of Russian lives lost to confront such villains and a people who are once again ready to confront them again.

Europe once again approaches precariously the precipice of self-inflicted tragedy. Fascism both old and new is festering and spreading in all directions as European leaders and the special interests that direct them seek a familiar ploy used when all else fails to unite and regiment their peoples. Once again Russia seems to be standing alone in the face of this growing menace along their border, and once again the Russian people are quietly preparing to make sacrifices befitting the heroic deeds of their fore-bearers.

Must it come to this? What if people saw and pointed to the gross hypocrisy and betrayal of Poland and the forces of fascism once again festering within that dealt the nation such a tragic blow during the last World War? What if people realized, regardless of their feelings toward Russia, that the path they are on leads only to self-ruination? Could Europeans as a whole realize there is a middle path between the extremes being presented before them? The coming weeks and months will yield these answers. For those who have keenly kept one eye on history, and one on current events today, they must try to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, remembering the lessons World War II has taught them, even if such lessons seem to be lost on everyone else.

New Eastern Outlook".

Nearly 10,000 Russian troops are in Ukraine according to Ukraine's president, and yet there hasn't been a single reliable independent confirmation of this incredible claim

Ukrainian chocolate sultan Petro Poroshenko told the World Economic Forum this afternoon that there are currently 9,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, according to a breaking news report from Reuters.

Speaking in Switzerland, Poroshenko added that the sneaky Russian invaders were backed by a range of heavy weapons including tanks and artillery systems. Poroshenko provided no evidence to back up his claims: no photographs, satellite images, radio interceptions or even twitter messages.

"If this is not aggression, what is aggression?" Poroshenko asked the Forum attendees.

A baseless lie designed to garner sympathy with the international community? Or maybe Russia stole Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, stretched it out 10 km, and is marching an entire army under its invisible magic? Both hypotheses seem plausible.

The Raw Story

Focused on providing independent journalism.

Kiev orders crackdown on Russian TV channels

What I did after police killed my son

Emerging solar plants scorch birds in mid-air

Thursday, 22 January 2015

Expectation is important: Seeing is not always remembering

Milky Way could in theory be a galactic worm hole transport system

The suppression of knowledge by establishment academia

From bad, to worse, to murder: The harassing of MLK by J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon B. Johnson

What safety: Who will keep us safe from government?

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Et tu Poland? Putin excluded from Holocaust commemoration

Poroshenko says 9,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, high-tech invisibility cloaks prevent detection

Search

Recent Posts

Popular