Monday, February 9, 2009

Apollo Group Profiting from Bankruptcy

In an article in Yahoo! Finance I noticed that the Apollo Group is behind 3 of the significant bankruptcies mentioned.

Are they bad at business or do they know what they're doing? I don't know enough about business to say how one might go about sinking a business and profiting from it, but I'm sure it can be done.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

tracing Israel controls stupid Americans article

My normally pleasant morning cruise through the intertubes was disrupted by a disturbing feature on Truthed. I don't know much about the site. I'd never been there before. I'd only happened upon it because a Twitter friend posted a link from Truthed to a video of a woman who was beaten by a police officer. I clicked to the home page and was immediately irked by the first image of their feature marquee (or whatever it's called). It showed an Israeli flag and said, "Israeli Spokesman Says We Control Stupid Americans".

The image linked to a forum post by one of the forum moderators. The post was a quote of an article from a site called Pakistan Daily. As it appeared this morning, Thursday, February 5, at around 6:30 AM Central time, the article's byline says "WRITTEN BY WWW.DAILY.PK". It's dated Sunday, 01 February 2009. In the article, it says:

You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize Israel.


There's no context for the quote. Was it from a press conference? An interview? The source is someone named Tzipora Menache, allegedly an "Israeli spokeswoman". We'll see what we can find out about her later.

My first thought, after being disgusted, was wondering what the Twitterverse had to say about the article. I did a Twitter search and found that the article was older than claimed on Pakistan Daily. The Twitter search led me to a post on Uruknet.info, which is subtitled "information from occupied iraq". That article was very similar to the one on Pakistan Daily. In fact, the only difference is that some of the paragraphs were shuffled. The article on Uruknet.info clearly links to the original at thepeoplesvoice.org. The original article is titled "How to Kill a Palestinian" and is written by Dr. Elias Akleh.

My point here isn't about whether Israel's Gaza attacks are right and wrong. My main beef is with Truthed.com. Their post is followed by a post from the Truthed administrator which attempts to disclaims the anti-Israel, the Jews control stupid Americans article by stating:

Pakistan Daily, so take it with a grain of salt. Everyone has an agenda.


Apparently Truthed.com has an agenda, too. A forum moderator posted a dubious anti-Israel article and the SITE ADMIN said to ignore it...BUT THEY FEATURED IT ON THEIR FRONT PAGE.

WTF?

A site apparently dedicated to truth FEATURED an article which apparently has little to do with truth and everything to do with inciting people with vaporous claims meant to slant Americans and the world in general against Israel and the Jews.