Sometime in 2005 I made a journey to New Zealand. Most of the details of this trip are very irrelevant to the purpose of this post, so don’t mind as I skip to a certain story.

Me and a friend I was traveling with were hitch-hiking from Nelson Creek NZ (after visiting the Nelson Creek Skateboard factory) to a remote town also on the South Island of New Zealand. It was raining, damn hard and freaking cold. A kind, yet eccentric man pulled over and offered us a well-recieved ride. His car was packed, he could barely fit our bags, let alone us and our damp fabrics. He strongly expressed that he would normally never pick up a hitch-hiker, but that this time he had some sort of hunch that we were American.

It didn’t take me long to label him as your run-of-the-mill conspiracy nut, filled with facts, fears and rationalizations about the government. But as time went on intellect and genius began to peak through his fact-less arguments. He talked heavily about the health care scam, false prophecies, the world bankers’ scam and New Orleans (which had happened 5-6 weeks earlier). He explained how humans were to be sorted into categories once martial law took place; green for the fully impressioned (zombies), yellow for those who needed further conditioning (the sell-outs) and red, those who would be a ‘danger’ to society and would need to be terminated (the revolutionaries). After that bit I was sure the guy was crazy, and nothing really sunk in until he made a certain direct prophecy, one that stuck with me all these years.

He predicted that the United States was going to ‘kill’ a spy satellite, and this event would somehow cause a conflict with Russia, thus starting a major conflict, such as a nuclear war. He also said this would happen Early 2008.

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The Olympic torch relay is at present, struggling it’s way down an alternate route in Downtown San Francisco after protesters scared organizers away from the original planned route:

The procession of the Olympic torch through San Francisco descended into farce today when the flame-holders ran only a few yards before disappearing into a warehouse, then re-emerging on a bus.

After furious clashes throughout the morning between ‘Free Tibet’ protestors and pro-China demonstrators, the authorities seemed to panic, and by 1.20pm, local time - 20 minutes after the published start time - even the TV news helicopters were confused. Then, for a few seconds, the runners were glimpsed, but within seconds they had disappeared from the starting point at McCovey Cove and disappeared into a nearby Pier 48 warehouse. Finally, there were reports of the procession leaving the warehouse on a bus.

However, the protesters are starting to catch up. Keep up with the latest news in pissed hippies and even more pissed cops and Chinese government officials on SFGate’s Torch Page.

As the Olympic Torch is scheduled to make its way through San Francisco on Wednesday, protestors are already gearing up for their message of peace and freedom for Tibet. Today, three people scaled the suspension cords of the Golden Gate bridge with huge banners that read, “One World. One Dream. Free Tibet.” Four others were arrested. Protestors in Paris caused such a disruption that they had to cancel part of the torch’s route. More are expected in the coming days as it passes through SF.

“We want it to be peaceful. But it will be large,” said Dasang, 22, during a phone interview in which he said he was near the bridge. “I heard from Tibetans that now live all over the U.S. and even abroad who are coming here.”

Be careful out there, brave protestors.

The recent conviction of Chi Mak, a Chinese-born engineer working for a US Defense contractor who “slept” for 20 years before being activated in order to swipe sensitive military documents, is bringing to light what US Intelligence insiders have long known, that the Chinese government has a vast network of agents already at work in the US:

The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an “intellectual vacuum cleaner,” has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said. Some are trained in modern electronic techniques for snooping on wireless computer transactions. Others, such as Mak, are technical experts who have been in place for years and have blended into their communities.

“Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets,” Joel Brenner, the head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview. “It speaks of deep patience,” he said, and is part of a pattern.

Peeking duck indeed.

The forthcoming Beijing Olympics will be the greatest spectacle in mankind’s history. Not only has it been surrounded by heaps of social and political controversy, but in order to prove to the world how much of a bad ass super power they are, China’s pulling out all the stops.

China has prepared a three-stage program to ensure that rain will not fall on their 91,000 seat, open air Olympic stadium. The plan is pretty fucking insane. First, regional weather will be monitored via planes, satellites, radar and an IBM supercomputer “that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second.”

Secondly, aircraft and an array of 20 artillery and missile launch sites arranged around Beijing will be on-call to “shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.”

Lastly, something referred to locally as “The Bird’s Nest” will stand as the final line of defense. Heavy rain clouds passing to close to the stadium will be “seeded” with chemicals from the Bird’s Nest in order to shrink rain droplets. According to Zhang Qian, head of Beijing’s Weather Modification Office:

“We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced.”

Currently, the Beijing summer games are just over 130 days away. The ceremonial torch has already been lit and will be in Greece for a while before it’s handed off in Beijing. The torch will make it to US soil on April 9th in San Francisco en route to Buenos Aires. The games run from August 8th through 24th.

Tibet riot video…