GALLERY Pages

Saturday, August 31, 2013

The Napoles Conspiracy

So Janet Lim Napoles and husband surrendered. But why do I feel something is wrong here....Scripted? You may want to read this article (Click to read) how this surrender to Pres. Noynoy happened. 


   Perhaps the President was pressured by the Million March in Luneta? Nope, he could easily ignore the people cries like he used to (Remember Sabah folks?)...but why Noynoy offered 10M for the capture of JLN earlier? By the way, who get the reward pot? 
   Anyways, Everything adds up from the VIP treatment at MalacaƱang Palace to the Planned EDSA march which was discoverd to be another yellow propaganda with the help of ABS CBN media prowess.
   Noynoy can actually manipulate both the Senate and the lower house with his new found weapon in Napoles scam. 
   One thing more this issue could actually cover-up the real isssue about PDAF.
   Let's wait and see...but I smell something fishy... 

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Countering Conspiracy Theory Online

Advocate of Secret Infiltration, Cass Sunstein, on Obama’s “Committee To Make Us Trust the Dragnet”

ABC reports that, along with former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, former Homeland Security Czar Richard Clarke, and former Obama special assistant for economic policy Peter Swire, the White House (or James Clapper — who knows at this point) has picked Cass Sunstein for its Review Committee on NSA programs.
Frankly, a lot of people are investing misplaced confidence that Richard Clarke will make this committee useful. While he’s good on a lot of issues, he’s as hawkish on cybersecurity as anyone else in this country. And as I keep pointing out, these programs are really about cybersecurity. Richard Clarke is not going to do a damned thing to rein in a program that increasingly serves to surveil US Internet data to protect against cyberthreats.
But Sunstein? Really?
As Glenn Greenwald (yeah — that Glenn; did they really think no one would raise this point?) reported back in 2010, Sunstein wrote a paper in 2008 advocating very creepy stealth measures against “conspiracy theories.”
In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.
Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”
And remember, a big mandate for this committee is not to review the programs to see if we can make them more privacy-protective, but simply to increase our trust in them. Which goes to the core of what Sunstein was talking about in his paper: using covert government propaganda to, in this case, better sell covert government spying.
Well, if Obama and Clapper’s rollout hadn’t already discredited this committee, Sunstein’s selection sure does.
Update: Adding some quotes from Sunstein’s paper.
The importance of undermining conspiracy theories is especially important with terrorism.
Our main though far from exclusive focus – our running example – involves conspiracy theories relating to terrorism, especially theories that arise from and post-date the 9/11 attacks. These theories exist within the United States and, even more virulently, in foreign countries, especially Muslim countries. The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be. Terrorism-related theories are thus a crucial testing ground for the significance, causes, and policy implications of widespread conspiracy theorizing.
True conspiracy theories shouldn’t be undermined.
Of course some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true. The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of “mind control.” Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by high-level officials (though the plan never went into effect).13 In 1947, space aliens did, in fact, land in Roswell, New Mexico, and the government covered it all up. (Well, maybe not.) Our focus throughout is on false conspiracy theories, not true ones. Our ultimate goal is to explore how public officials might undermine such theories, and as a general rule, true accounts should not be undermined. [my emphasis]
- See more at: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/22/advocate-of-secret-infiltration-cass-sunstein-on-obamas-committee-to-make-us-trust-the-dragnet/#sthash.qdwHA6jw.dpuf

Friday, August 23, 2013

The Significance of August 21 for Filipinos

Days of Shame: August 21, 1971 and 1983

By RIGOBERTO TIGLAO
The Manila Times
August 21 is the most significant date in our post-war history, when two historic, connected events happened, the consequences of which make up our messy present.
First: The Plaza Miranda bombing on August 21, 1971. Four grenades were hurled at the stage of the Liberal Party’ grand miting de avance, killing nine and wounding 95 others. Many of the Party’s leaders and senatorial candidates were seriously injured.
The bombing was blamed on President Ferdinand Marcos, and public opinion believed so. As a result, most of his senatorial and congressional candidates lost in the elections that year, drastically weakening his political strength.
Kept secret for decades, but now believed to be true by most in the Communist Party, the bombing was ordered by its chairman then, Jose Ma. Sison, and executed by his most inner circle, called the party’s Executive Committee of the Political Bureau (See, among other accounts, Gregg Jones’ “Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement” and the more recent “Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions by Mario Miclat”).
The motive: In the words used by communist party documents at that time, “to intensify the split within the ruling class” in order to create another “revolutionary flow.” In ordinary language, the bombing would push the opposition Liberal Party and their ruling-class supporters to strike back, even violently, at Marcos. The country would plunge into civil war in which the communist party as a very organized and armed force could take advantage of to capture power.
August 21: Left in 1971, right before the grenade attack; right in 1983, right after a soldier shot Ninoy point -blank in the head.
August 21: Left in 1971, right before the grenade attack; right in 1983, right after a soldier shot Ninoy point -blank in the head.
Few believed the most commonsensical question then: Why would Marcos, whom even his enemies credited as a brilliant strategist, undertake such an attack which obviously would be blamed on him?
Second, the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr. on August 21, 1983. The political instability triggered by that event combined with the economic downturn at that time, due to the global debt crisis, led to the country’s worst recession ever. With GDP contracting by seven percent each for 1984 and 1985, Marcos’ political death in 1986 became well neigh inevitable, although it was obviously the aborted coup attempt against him and the massing of a hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at EDSA to defend the military rebels that plunged the dagger into the regime’s heart.
One event on August 21, 1971 triggered events that led to the imposition of martial law and the start of Marcos 13-year dictatorship. Another, on the same date twelve years later in 1983 triggered events that led to the fall of that dictatorship.
Why did the Plaza Miranda bombing lead to martial law?
Marcos believed that Aquino himself planned or at least was involved, in conspiracy with the communists, in the Plaza Miranda attack. With such a brazen use of violence, Marcos could but conclude that he would be killed, outrightly or through a death sentence by a court for that alleged deed, when he steps down from power in 1973. Imposing martial law and becoming a dictator, was his survival plan—with the perks of course of absolute power and unlimited wealth.
Marcos had good reasons to suspect Aquino. The opposition leader Aquino had supported the then rag-tag New People’s Arm, by giving them refuge and supplies in the vast Hacienda Luisita owned by this wife’s family.
Most importantly, Aquino— the unrivaled star of the Liberal Party—wasn’t at Plaza Miranda when it was attacked. He claimed later, according to one report that he was with the Laurels in a nearby restaurant who were having a birthday celebration. He said he was delayed in going to Plaza Miranda since he was waiting for Cocoy Laurel’s singing number to end.
There have been rumors though that NPA Commander Pusa, a Tarlac-based hit man known to be close to Aquino, warned him to delay his arrival at Plaza Miranda for reasons the guerilla however did not disclose. A leftist leader at that time, now US-based Fluellen Ortigas, reportedly was with Aquino just before the attack. He allegedly had told his close friends that he always wondered why Aquino seemed to be dally-dallying on the way to the most important political event of the year.
It was Plaza Miranda that prodded Marcos to declare the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus a month after the attack. It was the timid response of the elite to this suspension of civil liberties that convinced Marcos that he could pull off martial law a year later.
Sison calculated that the Plaza Miranda bombing blamed on Marcos would intensify the split within the ruling class and therefore bring about a revolutionary flow. He miscalculated. The attack helped Marcos to set up his dictatorship, which would nearly decimate the NPA and the party in the mid-70s that Sison himself was captured in 1977 —to be released by Corazon Aquino in 1986.
Except for a tiny faction of the elite that Marcos cleverly limited his attack on, mainly the politico-economic elite clan of the Lopezes, the Philippine ruling class either believed that the Plaza Miranda bombing was the communists and Aquino’s plot, or that whoever was responsible, it created an unstable political situation that risked a communist take-over.
Who wouldn’t fear a communist take-over at that time when right after the grenade attack the communists tried to smuggle into the Isabela hinterlands 2,000 M-14s, courtesy of Mao Tse Tsung himself? Former ranking communists would later claim that the two events were connected. Sison estimated that without the “revolutionary flow” the bombing would create, there wouldn’t be enough activists to recruit into the NPA to use those rifles.
Why wouldn’t the ruling class support Marcos’ dictatorship? In 1973, right after martial was declared, GDP surged to 8.9 percent, the highest growth rate ever recorded for our country, and from 1972 to 1979, it averaged a high 6 percent yearly.
But August 21, 1971 is a day of the shame for the party supposedly of the poor.
Because of the Plaza Miranda bombing its leadership ordered, the communist party had lost its moral grounding, exposed to be as ruthless and Machiavellian as Stalinist and Maoist parties are all over the world. It fooled thousands of our idealistic young men and women to devote and even sacrifice their lives to fight a dictatorship which the communist leadership in effect helped install by bombing Plaza Miranda.
August 21, 1971 is a day of shame for one party of the ruling class. The Liberal Party, the target of the attack, opportunistically joined the frenzy of communist-led propaganda that it was Marcos who was its brains—just to win the 1971 elections.
Even after the dictator’s fall, the Liberal Party didn’t bother to find out who really was responsible for the single most important event in its history. Shamelessly, it even distanced itself from the conviction of Jovito Salonga, one of its revered leaders whose wounds from the attack disfigured his face and severely weakened his health: that it wasn’t Marcos who ordered the attack but the communists under Sison.
With the suspicion that Aquino was part of the Plaza Miranda plot, or at least didn’t warn his colleagues of the attack, his wife President Corazon Aquino and his family with their vast power and wealth could have left no stone unturned to settle who was responsible for this key event in our history.
They didn’t bother, since that would weaken the image they wanted of Marcos—evil personified.
A similar nonchalance also makes August 21, 1983 a day of shame for our nation.
Despite their vast political and economic powers, especially when Corazon Aquino was president 1986 to 1992, the Aquinos and Cojuangcos didn’t bother to unmask the murder’s brains. Some 16 officers and soldiers were convicted by the Sandiganbayan for the murder and given life sentences in 1990. All of the assassination’s details have been uncovered, except who the mastermind was. (The full text of the decision posted at manilatimes.net.)
Why didn’t then President Cory Aquino offer them pardon —and maybe even money to live in security abroad—in exchange for identifying the brains of the murder that shaped our history?
There is another question that bothers me a lot. Was it just sheer coincidence that two historic events occurred on the same date?
I wonder. In what would be his death voyage, Aquino arrived in Taipei August 19, 1983. But he booked his flight to Manila August 21. Was the date of his return to the country a secret message to the dictator, one that only he and Marcos would understand?
tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
www.rigobertotiglao.com and www. trigger.ph

When Anonymous Speaks...

Those facts of blowing up buildings, bombing public transport and killing innocent civilians in the process is outrageous. Yes, it is beyond me how they do that. At what cost? --Anonymous

When the Pork Barrel scam hit the News a few weeks ago since its outbreak big time names were drag like Senators, congressmen and yes even TV personalities...Most of us were shocked but it's not really new to us anymore...we were used to these kind of whistleblowing. So what? we've been robbed by the government ever since the world begun. 
   Does an ordaniray Filipino cares? Yes they do, only if someone told them the truth...but Ordinary Pinoys are easily swayed by the course of tide...and I doubt the Big Time News agencies will tackle this issue in the limelight. It's the Filipino version of an Illuminati...and when you speak of conspiracy, it's hard to separate the truth from the fabrication. The payroll list is as deep as the rabbit hole.
   You can talk about it, get angry if you want...or go to Liwasang Bonifacio and cry out loud BUT THE SYSTEM WILL REMAIN.
   Well at least we have the right to know. Information is power...so for the sake of information alone let me re-share Mr. or Ms."Anonymous" expose. He seems to be telling the truth...what he is telling us is obviously an Insider info...probably one of the benefactor of the "The System" itself.  A person who want to remain anonymous usually tell the truth.
   Why he/she is telling all this information, only God knows a person's heart...but anyway thanks that we are given at least a glimpse of how "The system" works. 
    Read this now while Anonymous can still speak...

http://dulzspeaks.blogspot.sg/2013/08/anonymous-speaks-pork-barrel-scam.html?m

   http://momandpopmoments.com/

Now a group of concern Netizen is starting to speak...
Anonymous Incorporated on Facebook Click HERE

Summarized version on Global Balita (Link)

The Napoles Story: So the entire Philippines will know

By Alfredo Masigan
Janet Lim Napoles and husband Jaime Napoles
Janet Lim Napoles and husband Jaime Napoles
Janet Lim Napoles has strong ties before with the late Emilia Boncodin, DBM Secretary. Emilia is the one that keep Janet in the loop whenever a budget or SARO is approved and to which senator or congressman.
Gringo Honasan is a dear friend of Janet’s husband, Jimmy Napoles. I was surprised when I read somewhere online when Honasan was interviewed and he said that he doesn’t know the Napoles family.
During the coup in Cory’s time, Jimmy Napoles was driving a tank on the way to Camp Crame when his tank was hit by a mortar. Jimmy was operating the .50 caliber machine gun and the soldier driving the tank died during the blast. Jimmy survived and was jailed along with Honasan. If you can get clear photos of Jimmy Napoles online, you will see that part of his face and his arms show burn marks.
Their wealth started to build up during the late 90’s when they engaged themselves with mayors based in Zamboanga to use them as a front for a Foundation that will implement projects or deliver farm materials. With connections at COA, they were able to arrange completed projects without delivering anything. They established JLN group of companies sometime in 2000 and they moved to their new office from AFPOVAI to Discovery Suites on the 25th floor.
Soon enough, they were able to develop deep connections with more legislators in Congress and numerous senators. What JLN Group Of Companies do and their sub-companie, Jo-Chris Trading (named after their eldest child, Jo-Christine “Neneng” Napoles) – they use their foundations as the implementing agency for the funds of congressmen or senators. You see, congressmen and senators have budget, PDAF or the pork barrel , but these politicians do not have direct access to their funds and they can never touch it. So what they do is the politicians will create a project (common one is fertilizer distribution to farmers) and will ask DBM to set the budget. Then, there will be a public bidding to be held by DAR. The outcome of the bidding is already fixed and it’s Napoles foundation wins. The fund or SARO will be released through Janet’s foundation and the congressmen/senators will ask 70% of the whole amount. So if the project is P10 million, Janet will give 70% of that. Usually Janet’s nephew, John Francisco Lim is the courier of the money, they will meet at Podium or at a parking lot. The money are stored in plastic bags or paper bags.
So, whatever is left from the budget, 30% goes to Janet. They usually cash-in the check they get from DBM at Landbank in Greenhills and the manager there is part of Janet’s payroll. Janet also need to pay the inspectors from COA and whoever is involved in DAR.
This is their workflow. This is what they do for more than a decade. This is how the senators and congressmen make money. This is why theses politicians have so much and working class Filipinos almost have nothing. This is not only Janet’s fault. The greediness of the senators and congressmen are the driving point that keeps this system operating. It is also amazing that if Janet’s family and her company goes into trial, the people who will try them judges, senators, congressmen, are also part of this. I fear for the life of Benhur and Merlina as whistleblowers. Soon enough they will die. The people of the Philippines should protect them. NBI or the witness protection program cannot do anything about it. Because they are keeping the whistleblowers alive for their own use only. Once Janet gives payments to the NBI and once Revilla, Honasan, Arroyo, Pichay, Ducut, Pineda, Lim, Estrada, Soto, Lapid, and almost all the congressmen who were in post for the past decade, step in – there’s nothing Benhur or Merlina can do. They are as good as dead by now.
Please post this on your social media and share it to the world. It is time to stop this madness and remove the pork barrel and protect Benhur and Merlina.
Here's Napoles rubbing elbows with local officials
Photo: Napoles et. al.





Thursday, August 8, 2013

Where Am I?

So I'm not blogging lately...what is happening to me? I want to focus on my artistry..I have already settle myself on the fulfillment of the love itelf. To have a name or even dream of having a One-man show is not any more on my priority list...but I am not closing the door for the possibilities. 
   I would simply create artworks...that is all. To be at peace with my art...to share even for the few.

 Artists never grow up…. Always wondering and always trying new things. They must retain that child-like quality or they’ll end up in an asylum.

   I'll soon be back with regular blogging on this site for now I'll be more active on my Art blog.

See My Latest artworks here: http://realizationism.blogspot.com/