Not buying into Hannity’s attacks, Jesse Ventura plays it cool, despite the fact that he once held a gun that shot down an entire forest in Predator.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says

“America’s Finest News Source” certainly lives up to its name. If you have more time to kill, you should check out their world atlas “Our Big Dumb World” if you haven’t already. It’s scathing satire on just about every country in the world. This week’s featured country is Kenya, which is described as a “natural breeding ground for the world’s top long-distance runners, who learn at a very early age the art of running as far away as they possibly can from Kenya.”

In the midst of what is quickly becoming Puppygate 2008, it is interesting (to me at least) to note that, many of the same internet-dwellers that believe 9/11 was an engineered event meant to shift the will of the general population in favor of a certain socio-political viewpoint, are so quick to vouch for the authenticity of a grainy, unsourced YouTube clip. I’m not saying its NOT real, however, I’m definitely not gonna say it is. As the above video points out, remember not so long ago the whole “bird shitting in the reporters mouth” clip that was a supposed outtake of real news footage? Well it turned out to be fake, after of course, getting a few million views on YouTube and getting linked by Huffington Post along with every other blog, most of whom are probably posting this puppy video as we speak. Like I said, maybe this video is real. Maybe I’m totally off base. But I’d rather be the guy who was wrong about it being some engineered viral meme, than the guy that’s wrong but can’t go back and unpost a United State’s Marine’s mother’s home address, or worse yet, threats of physical violence.

And even if it is real, Who are we to decry the senseless death of one animal, when everyday in every single city in our entire country, who legions of animals are routinely slaughtered, for food, because they’re “pests”, or because they happen to walk onto our roads? Or how about the 3-4 million dogs and cats euthanized each year at United States animal shelters. Where’s the outcry over that? How many hundreds of thousands of puppies do you think that includes? Why is no one storming the gates of these humane societies and demanding justice?

If we want to punish someone for purposely mistreating animals why don’t we start with the people we can at least prove are doing it? Such as the factory farms that produce the majority of America’s meat? Pigs, which are known to be as intelligent, if not more so than dogs are just one of the animals that suffer unimaginable deaths every single day on their way to our sandwiches, tacos, etc:

Pigs are very clean animals who take to the mud primarily to cool off and evade flies. They are just as friendly and gregarious as dogs, and according to Professor Donald Broom at the Cambridge University Veterinary School, “They have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly three-year-olds.” Mother pigs in factory farms in the U.S. live most of their lives in individual crates that are 7 feet long and 2 feet wide. They display signs of extreme boredom and stress, such as biting the bars of their cages and gnashing their teeth. Their piglets are taken away three weeks after birth and packed into pens until they are singled out to be raised for breeding or for meat. Like chickens and turkeys, pigs are genetically manipulated and pumped full of drugs, and many become crippled under their own weight. Although pigs are naturally affable and social animals, the confinement of these crowded pens causes neurotic behaviors such as cannibalism and tail-biting, so farmers use pliers to break off the ends of piglets’ teeth and cut off their tails without any painkillers.

Makes being thrown off a cliff sound pretty humane.

A very compelling article from Seattle’s The Stranger (via Utne) on the 9 / 11 Truth Movement six years after WTC:

It’s inaccurate to refer to Truthers as conspiracy theorists because, as they’re quick to point out, many of them don’t have a theory. They only have questions. Some of them believe that the government is guilty of knowing about the attacks and simply allowing them to happen, others believe that the planes were remote-­controlled and no passengers died in the attacks, and still others believe that the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile and no plane was involved at all. Many Truthers believe that Flight 93 couldn’t have crashed in Pennsylvania since the crash site is only 6 feet wide by 20 feet long. A radical few even claim that no planes struck the Twin Towers. The debate within the movement is intense and not always polite; some Truthers believe that denying that hundreds of air passengers died on September 11 is disrespectful and stupid.

And although a 2006 Scripps poll found that 36% of Americans believe the government was somehow responsible for 9 /11, getting that 36% to agree on exactly what this means has gotten perhaps more difficult than ever. What do you believe?

We live in a very fast paced, numbed out world that sometimes we take for granted.

Please take a moment today and remember the victims of 9/11.

Thank you.

-The Synthesis

So 6 years after 9/11, Osama Bin Laden is still kicking back, serving up hella vidz about how much America sucks and Allah rules. You can check out a transcript of his newest clip here. Alongside the usual rhetoric about wars and Islam and whatever, were a few interesting asides, proving once again how wacky and wild of a guy old Bin Laden really is. These include:

Giving a shout out to Noam Chomsky as “among one of the most capable of those from your own side.”

Referring to “the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes…”

And offering new tactic for marketing Islam, “There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent.” Damn. Maybe Republicans should vote for Bin Laden…