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Is the Obama administration as corrupt
as Bush-Cheney, or only almost?

      ♦  President Obama has won a victory at the Supreme Court, which has ruled that under a new law specially crafted for the Obama administration, photo documentation of the Bush-Cheney administration's torture can continue to be suppressed. Yup, it's a major success for the Obama administration, and for the forces of secrecy, torture, and totalitarianism everywhere.

      ♦  In an unrelated matter, a new report concludes that the Bush-Cheney administration quashed investigations into civil rights violations, and of course, nobody from the Obama administration will do anything about it.
from recent readers' comments

From recent readers' comments


      ♦  And in another unrelated matter, evidence suggests that the Bush-Cheney administration ordered the CIA to destroy tape recordings of its torture. And again, nobody at the Obama administration's Justice Department will show the slightest interest, and nobody will be investigated or prosecuted.

      ♦  In still another unrelated matter, once again Obama's Justice Department has turned its back on criminality and come to the rescue of the criminal Bush-Cheney administration, this time redoubling its support for torture architect John Yoo.
      During the Bush-Cheney administration, whenever I read or typed the words "Justice Department" I prefaced it with the word "corrupt" by habit. We haven't yet seen any reason to break that habit for Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration.

      ♦  Attorney General Holder promised that the Justice Department's report on torture would be out at the end of November. It wasn't, and still isn't.

      ♦  The Electronic Freedom Foundation (donate) is suing the Obama administration for refusing to release information about how they are using social networks in surveillance and investigations.

      ♦  Federal Judge Dickinson Debevoise (appointed by Carter in 1978) has put a kibosh on the Republican Party's hopes for more election chicanery.

      ♦  Dan Savage, a beloved (by me) newspaper columnist, has something to say about Obama's cowardice on gay rights issues. In fairness to the President, though, there's no other issue that he hasn't shown cowardice on.

      ♦  The D.C. Council has voted to extend marriage rights to gays and lesbians.

      ♦  And lawmakers in New York have made the opposite decision, that gays and lesbians must settle for fewer rights.

      ♦  Rick Warren, the anti-gay evangelist whose televised prayer raised hackles at Barack Obama's inauguration, now can't muster an opinion, pro or con, on whether gays should be killed.

      ♦  A guy in California is pushing an initiative to ban divorce, as a satirical response to last year's initiative that banned gay marriage.

      ♦  In a New York Times column, historian David Reynolds argues that 150 years after his attack on Harpers Ferry, John Brown deserves a posthumous pardon.
      Um, no he doesn't. Brown ought to be talked about more than he is, taught in more detail in schools and considered as a lesson in the blurred lines at the edges of right and wrong, morality and sanity. He merits a place in history and all the respect and revulsion he's inspired ever since his attack on a US armory, but among the things he doesn't deserve is a posthumous pardon. The guy killed Americans, people who had broken no law, and it strikes me as a very bad idea to be granting posthumous pardons to such folks.

      ♦  On the orders of FBI Chief J Edgar Hoover, Fred Hampton was killed by Chicago Police forty years ago. And everyone involved literally got away with murder.

      ♦  Adam Stoddard, the deputy who works for Arizona's crazy Sheriff Joe Arpaiao and was caught stealing documents in court, is refusing his chance to apologize and get off the hook. As Radley Balko says, the judge was foolish to give this cop such an easy out. Forcing him to state something he doesn't believe ("I'm sorry") is constitutionally questionable, and it might eventually mean that this criminal cop can't be properly punished.

      ♦  In his testimony seeking re-appointment before the Senate Banking Committee, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has called for cuts to Medicare and Social Security, all while stonewalling any possible audit of the Fed. In a curiously honest choice of words, Bernanke even seemed to refer to what he's doing and proposing as the robbery it is.
      But wait, there's more. Here's Bernanke poo-pooing the idea of additional stimulus for the struggling economy.
      He's Obama's Fed Chairman, in the same disastrous sense that Afghanistan is now Obama's war. It's a bit breathtaking, actually — billions for Bernanke's buddies in banking, no auditing the agency he runs, and screw the sick, the poor, and the elderly. In a sane society, his renomination would be yanked and he'd be fired or resign in disgrace.

      ♦  Obama's stimulus package was, like everything he's done as President, half-assed and way too weenie, but it's ludicrous for Republicans to claim that the stimulus was a flop or failure. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the stimulus saved or created 1.6-million jobs and boosted the gross domestic product (GDP) by more than 3%.

      ♦  Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is making a valiant if probably doomed effort to get Bernanke's incompetent rear out of the Fed.

      ♦  The Washington Post has noticed that millions and millions of Americans who can't afford banks are forced to deal with scumbag check-cashing and payday-loan outfits that charge what ought to be criminal rates. This, of course, has been the situation for at least, criminy, fifteen years? Twenty?

fascism  :  a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
      ♦  Mitt Romney, who for reasons I can't fathom is still a front-runner among Republican Presidential candidates, has offered his economic advice to President Obama in a USA Today article that's just stunning in its stupidity. Romney's ten-point plan wholeheartedly embraces every failed Republican strategy and talking point, from tax cuts for millionaires to program cuts for poor folks, avoiding any financial regulations, freezing all non-military spending, and of course killing climate change legislation, killing health care reform, etc.
      Obama was our "anybody by McCain" choice, and he's a daily disappointment, but by comparison to leading Republicans Obama still looks ... well, better than he otherwise would.

      ♦  An ex-insider describes how Bank of America screws its customers.

      ♦  Comcast is in the process of taking over NBC Universal. One out of four American households have a Comcast cable hook-up — a market dominance which should've been broken up long ago. But instead Comcast's empire will expand to include Universal Studios, CNBC, Hulu, MSNBC, Telemundo, USA Network, the Weather Channel, and 27 television stations. It's another blatant violation of anti-trust law, and if Barack Obama's administration is in any meaningful sense a "change" from the Bush-Cheney era it won't be allowed.

      ♦  Insert a momentary pause here, and consider the subject sort of changed, because the question of whether Comcast is competently managed is really irrelevant to its unfathomable hugeness. But I have to mention that I've heard nothing but bad things about Comcast for as long as I've known that the company exists. For all its market dominance, does Comcast have a satisfied customer somewhere?

      ♦  Under pressure from a class-action lawsuit in Massachusetts, Wal-Mart has agreed to pay employees $40,000,000 as partial restitution for stolen wages. The Boston Globe mentions in its first paragraph that it's the largest such settlement in state history, but a settlement means a compromise, of course, so the stolen wages were probably far in excess of $40-million. Yet nobody at Wal-Mart apologizes, admits wrongdoing, or goes to jail.

      ♦  Google's search results are now "personalized", based on the last six months of your searches, and that's regardless of whether you're logged in or logged out, unless you've gone to the extra trouble of opting out.

'The Thinker' statueIt made me stop and thinkStop and think

      "Let us never forget just what's at stake in the war in Afghanistan: nothing less than the success of the war in Afghanistan. This war may be a mistake, a blood-soaked blunder, an unholy charnel house mindlessly consuming the bodies and souls of untold thousands, an open sore on the pockmarked face of history and an abomination before the sight of God and men, but it is first and foremost a war, and wars must be won. If the United States doesn't win this war, then will it not lose it? And if the United States loses this war, then won't the Unites States have lost it? And if the United States has lost this war, will that not then make the United States a kind of thing that loses wars? And then where would we be?"

      "I don’t know what the 30,000 additional troops are going to do when they get to Afghanistan. I don’t know what our new objectives are. I don’t know how U.S. troops will begin withdrawing in July 2011 — just a year after additional troops arrive — or what can reasonably be accomplished over the preceding 12 months. I don’t know how we’ll pay for the escalation. I don’t know if we’ll meet benchmarks, or if the benchmarks actually exist. I don’t know how the administration can pressure the Afghan government, or how it will respond. I don’t know if the Karzai government can be trusted, or whether it will ever have the confidence of the Afghan people.
      "Other than that, the whole situation is as clear as day."

      "There have been a few prosecutorial misconduct cases before the Supreme Court over the last few years, and what's really striking when you read through the briefs is just how rarely prosecutors are sanctioned in any way, even for egregious misconduct. Not by courts, not by bar associations, not by state attorneys general. The Innocence Project estimates that prosecutorial misconduct factored into about a fourth of the wrongful convictions that organization has helped expose. None of the prosecutors in those cases faced any serious sanction. It's impossible to sue a prosecutor, even if he intentionally withholds exculpatory evidence that sends an innocent person to prison. The Supreme Court will rule this spring if prosecutors who manufacture evidence that sends an innocent person to prison can be sued. I think a lot of people would be rather shocked to hear that such a notion would even be open to debate."

      "We do not need a mandate that would require some people to buy commercial health insurance. Forcing people to buy a commercial product stinks to high heaven as an idea. Politically, of course, it's suicidal, but if you think people don't like paying taxes, wait 'til you see how they react to being taxed by the insurance companies."

      "What do you mean, you’ve never read On the Origin of Species? Surely you jest! Really? You really haven’t read On the Origin of Species? Trust me, it’s not that hard. OK, so maybe it isn’t exactly a page-turner, but we’re talking about one of the great revolutionary books here — and it’s written in plain English, for ordinary mortals like you and me. You certainly can’t say that about Newton’s Principia. In fact, I’m struggling to think of another revolutionary scientific text you can say that about."


      ♦  Google will institute a new policy on news searches, and begin blocking access to subscription-based news sources when the same user — that's you &mdash has visited the same website more than five times in a day. Sounds painful but not terribly unreasonable, and it's being spun as a victory for Rupert Murdoch, but it sounds to me more like a victory for other news search engines, where folks who surpass Google's limit will go.

      ♦  Here's a list of major corporations ranked by political contributions, with the most Democratic-supportive companies at the top (Aveda, Working Assets, Burt's Bees) and the most Republican-supportive companies at the bottom (which I can't see, due to a programmers' layout mistake).

      ♦  It's been 25 years since a chemical leak at a Dow Chemical (then Union Carbide) plant killed thousands of people and blinded many thousands more in India. Dow paid an outrageously small settlement that amounted to about $2,000 per victim and never looked back. The poisoned environment is, of course, still killing people.

      ♦  Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (aka Xe), says he's quitting the company 'cuz he's been treated so unfairly. He also says he is or used to be a CIA asset, and it would be quite surprising if it isn't true.

      ♦  The staggeringly corrupt Monsanto Corporation will be investigated by the Justice Department, not for their criminal actions but for being bigger than Jesus and in violation of anti-trust laws.
      My fingers are crossed but for a long list of reasons (see top of page) the present Justice Department is not exactly confidence-inspiring.

      ♦  The Salvation Army was requiring Social Security cards for destitute families to sign up to receive Christmas charity, until protests made the church/charity change its position.
      Imagine that — all it took was some bad press and big protests to make the Salvation Army stop screwing over poor kids at Christmas. This makes a nice matched set with the Salvation Army's well-known discrimination against gays, and reminds me why I never, ever give the Salvation Army a dime. If you're feeling charitable as the holidays approach, there are myriad better alternatives than giving money to the Salvation Army's ever-present bell-ringers.

      ♦  Sprint Nextel gave law enforcement data on customers' whereabouts eight million times in the last year.
      You're probably thinking golly jeepers, but that's the cumulative total for all "pings" on the company's 48,000,000 customers, and in the context of America's surveillance-mad government and privacy-gobbling corporations it's probably a smaller number than I would have guessed.

Afghanistan
♦  In President Obama's stupendously misguided and misguiding speech announcing his war plans for Afghanistan, there wasn't a bright spot. His rhetoric was flat, flimsy, and far from convincing, and his plan amounts to sending 30,000 more American troops into a futile meat-grinder. But you already know that. Our readers are intelligent and need no educating from me to recognize how extraordinarily foolhardy is this war and Obama's escalation of it.
      About the speech I'll say that the most memorable moment was the President's insertion of his trademarked false hope, with a promise that Americans will begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011. "Begin" is a slippery word — maybe it means half a dozen soldiers a month will head for home, starting in a year and a half. If it's supposed to mean an actual withdrawal from Afghanistan, then Obama is either lying or a fool. Hard to imagine that the quagmire will be de-quagged so quickly, and the political pressure for war isn't going to go down between now and then. I've got $25 that says July 2011 will come and go with no meaningful withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Any takers?

      ♦  And half an hour after I typed the above, we receive word that General Stanley McChrystal, who says the July 2011 target date shouldn't be taken seriously.
      McChrystal, you might recall, said he "suspected" but suppressed information about the cover-up of the true circumstances of Pat Tillman's death. He was aware of torture at Camp Nama. He was aware that Red Cross was illegally blocked from access to that torture facility. That's our man McChrystal — he belongs in prison, but instead he's overseeing the American war on Afghanistan.

      ♦  I've seen about a dozen articles, largely from the Left, giving kudos to Obama for at least thinking through his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. As in, at least he didn't just make a snap decision like Bush-Cheney did. At least he seems to be aware of the cost in human lives. At least it's given him a heavy heart.
      To which I can only say, gag me with an AK-47. Why should any of us believe it was a difficult decision, and more to the point why should we care whether it was a difficult decision? What does that matter? He's made the wrong decision, condemning many thousands more children to be orphaned, maimed, killed. Would you cut the Commander in Chief slack after he kills your father and maims your sister? He gets no slack from us.

Honduras
♦  Gazillionaire and coup plotter Porfirio Lobo won the severely tainted Presidential election in Honduras.

      ♦  The Honduran Congress has rejected what would have been the false but still sort of fairy tale-esque solution of having toppled President Manuel Zelaya take a figurehead role as President again for a few weeks, until his Lobo is sworn in.

Pakistan
♦  President Obama has authorized increasing the policy of ongoing drone attacks inside Pakistan, which is bad news for wedding planners and all the ordinary people going about their business who'll continue being blown to bits at random and unpredictable intervals.

United Kingdom
♦  Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to help America conquer Iraq, eleven months before it happened.
      Dang me, that is one well-trained poodle.

Take care of Mother Earth
♦  We're closing the warmest decade on Earth since records have been kept, and global climate change remains a real and growing problem. But after years of endless lies from very well-funded global climate change deniers, many millions of Americans have been psychologically conditioned to suspect it's all a "hoax", and the well-orchestrated recent theft and release of embarrassing emails just adds to that pre-fab doubt, as it's intended to.
      Furthering the denial agenda, The Wall Street Journal says "science is dying", the London Telegraph says it's "the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'", and key Republicans demand that the EPA effectively renounce its position on global climate change. La di da, la di da.
      For the deniers, an editorial in the latest Nature or New Scientist won't help, because all the scientific journals are in on the hoax, right? Sigh. "This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails."

      ♦  America doesn't have enough nuclear waste of its own, so Republicans favor importing foreign nuclear waste to be stockpiled in the US.

Health care hell in America
health care sucks in America

      ♦  Health care reform without a public option is worthless, says ex-Governor Howard Dean. "If we don’t have a choice, this bill is worthless and should be defeated". Amen.

      ♦  Again, shake hands with the joke of "health care reform" that Democrats will be inexplicably bragging about. Until 2014, insurance companies could continue to deny coverage or charge higher premiums based on people's medical history. Another highly touted reform -- banning annual and lifetime limits on coverage -- would take effect in 2010, but it would permit significant exceptions. Even with those rules in place, "there's no power to really hold the insurance companies accountable," said consumer advocate Betty Ahrens, executive director of the Iowa Citizen Action Network. "It's toothless."

      ♦  It remains an open question whether "health care reform" will include the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, an explicitly flipped middle finger to women, effectively barring poor women from having insurance that covers abortion.

      ♦  Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) says he'll filibuster health care reform if it's not sufficiently hostile to women's rights.
      They say laughter is the best medicine, and it looks like laughing at Senator Nelson is the only health care we're going to get.

      ♦  AETNA — the company that insured my family when I was a kid — will squeeze 650,000 too-expensive customers off its coverage next year, because killing people to make profits is what health insurance companies do. And President Obama's "health care reform" will only add to the killers' bottom line.


      ♦  In one of the rare recent signs that anybody in the Obama administration has a clue about anything, White House chief headknocker Rahm Emanuel has apparently instructed everyone to stop referring to the bloated environmental compromise legislation as "cap and trade", a phrase which means nothing to most people's ears, and instead start calling it “energy independence legislation”, which definitely sounds better.

      ♦  Greenpeace (donate) has hung a fleet of billboards at Copenhagen's main airport, where all the big-wigs attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference will unavoidably see them. The billboards feature photos of conference attendees like Barack Obama, aged and speaking from the near future to say, "I'm sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change... We didn't."
      Sounds like a brilliant strategy if world leaders like Obama possess a conscience, but that's a mighty large 'if'.

      ♦  Insect repellent causes penis and urinary problems for boys.

      ♦  If the abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit can be saved that would be a good thing for the city and the country. Yeah, I have a soft spot for stupendous old architecture like this, the kind of building nobody's building any more.

      ♦  Little Green Footballs is one of the biggest right-wing blogs, and over the past several years, as "right-wing" has increasingly become a synonym for insane, LGF has been one of the few right-wing sites I've occasionally read without feeling the need to immediately shower. If you would've asked me which right-winger might be the first to throw up his or her hands and walk away from what the right-wing has become, I might have guessed it would be Little Green Footballs, but I wouldn't have expected an about-face this thorough and exhilarating: "The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff. I won't be going over the cliff with them."
      Of course, the response from the right has been a mountain of hate mail.
      A sincere hug to LGF, which I've added to my surf cycle. I don't expect 'em to become enthusiastic left-wingers, but I'm hoping for something I haven't seen in years — an honest and intelligent perspective from the other side of the aisle.

      ♦  Here's a good unpacking of an article on Politico, about how Republicans in the Senate are distraught over being painted as rape-sympathizers when they tried to block redress for a gang-rape victim.
      I quibble only over the Whiskey Fire blog's assertion that it's "the stupidest and most contemptible Politico story ever". That's doubtful. Politico's steady output of stupid and contemptible work hasn't been analyzed well enough to pick such a winner. It's just another echo of the Republican Party, a bit less blatant in its bull than Fox News but clearly of the same ilk and really not worth reading.

      ♦  Section editors at the Dallas Morning News now report directly to advertising sales managers.
      Seems increasingly evident to me that the death of newspapers is largely by suicide.

      ♦  TV teletard Chris Matthews says that President Obama's speech at West Point was at "maybe the enemy camp".

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      ♦  Ads for medical marijuana outlets are very good news for the Denver Post.

      ♦  Presented solely as a break from my grousing, here's a guy who thinks the Obama administration is a smashing success already. And yes, he's serious.

      ♦  Max Baucus (D-Montana) nominated his girlfriend to be US Attorney for Montana. With a little luck, this will be enough to drum him out of office, though in Montana it's hard to imagine that his replacement would be anything but even worse.

      ♦  Senator Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire), the cro magnon Republican who was inexplicably nominated by Obama to be Secretary of Commerce and then declined, has written up a manual for Congressional obstructionism.
      Optimists think this will discredit Gregg or Republicans in general, but we're not optimists, and we're pretty sure that most people already know Republicans have been practicing concrete obstructionism since the day they lost the White House.

      ♦  The point of Republican policies, for decades now, has been to eliminate the concept of the American middle class. Republicans want two classes of Americans — rich and powerful, and poor and powerless, with the former telling the latter how to think, what to buy, and how to vote. Middle class people are a monkey wrench in the system, because they're comfortable and secure enough to read newspapers and be at least nominally aware and involved in politics — and Republicans don't want that.

      ♦  It has come to my attention, very much against my will, that a famous and very wealthy man has been unfaithful to his wife. This is hardly surprising to any person with any knowledge of interpersonal relations, but there has been perpetual coverage of this as if it's news. None of these reports have suggested any way in which this wealthy guy's philandering matters to anyone beyond him and his family, friends, lovers, and agents — because it doesn't. There will of course be further developments in this story and you'll be unable to avoid them, but this paragraph will be the extent of our coverage.

      ♦  We've apparently missed our chance to spend $20 plus popcorn to see Glenn Beck's notion of Christmas spirit.

      ♦  In her curious quest to out-stupid herself, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin now says that the birther loons have raised "a fair question" about President Obama's birthplace.

      ♦  Palin, by the by, will be the keynote speaker at the 2010 convention of the Bowling Proprietors' Association of America (BPAA). The press release brags that "her presence underscores the impact and importance of bowling, one of our country's leading national pastimes and a growing $10 billion industry."

      ♦  Google invites you to tour the ruins of Pompei.

      ♦  Here's an interesting article, if you have any interest in faded celebrity, as Dick Cavett remembers Walter Winchell. I don't know the demographics of our tiny audience, but to the demographics of me, Cavett is about as faded and distant now as Winchell was in Cavett's piece.

      ♦  Please note, "Efforts to reach Christ for comment were unsuccessful."

      ♦  Unknown News is updated once weekly, usually on Mondays. Have a seat and some cheese puffs but please, no smoking. With a tip o' the hat to AK for free quick and efficient software assistance, JR Mooneyham, Cab Drollery, Jonathan Turley, Sherri B., Cassandra, Joseph D., Joe G., Lon Garm, J.S. (not the Watergate felon) Magruder at Why Not Resist?, SirJ, Bill T., Wig, the letter Z, our first home at pitas.com (1999-2003, and still a great place for publishing your blog), and the love of my life (who prefers to remain anonymous).

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If you're new to Unknown News,  here are some answers to frequently asked questions about the site, and answers to questions we wish you'd ask instead. Here's our RSS feed, and here's some unknown news you might have missed. If you'd like to say hello or add a comment, here's our email address. And yes, we do sell bumper stickers and stuff.

We assume our readers are well-
informed before they click here, so we focus on news that's generally unknown or under-reported. We're generally disinterested in such non-news as reports on what politicians might do, may do, or should do, and we don't usually mention the murders, kidnappings, house fires, auto wrecks, celebrity crap, wacky fluff, and other nonsense that's pushed real news right out of the newscasts.


Disclaimer for dummies:  Our front page is free from nudity, but we make no promise on profanity. If your surfing is monitored this site might not be safe for work, and you may be shocked, offended, or in trouble with your boss. A link doesn't imply that we agree with every sentence and every sentiment on every site we link to. We use our noggins, and suggest you use yours.

We always welcome comments from readers, and we're especially interested in hearing and considering different perspectives, so please don't be shy. All we ask is that you conduct yourself sanely and civilly, so consider yourself invited to speak your mind.

You can contact Helen & Harry at <unknownnews at inbox.com>. If that address ever fails, check our contact page for our alternate email addresses.

Anything sent to Unknown News may be published. If you don't want it published, say so plainly. When we publish incoming emails, we usually edit out the sender's last name, email address, or anything else that would tend to identify the author in the real world (if we slip up, please let us know). But if your email is unambiguously intended only to annoy, insult, or threaten us, we'll publish it with all the details and leave it on-line forever.


We're not at all interested in:
•   Area 51
•   the Bilderberg Group
•   the Bohemian Grove
•   the Club of Rome
•   the Council on Foreign Relations
•   denial of the holocaust
•   denial of science (including evolution, global climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, etc.)
•   eyeballs inside pyramids
•   flying saucers
•   FreeMasons
•   Vince Foster's suicide
•   anyone named Gosselin
•   the Illuminati
•   JFK's assassination
•   the New World Order
•   the North American Union or its alleged Amero
•   Planet X
•   President Obama's birthplace or his fascism or communism or whatever other rot they're pushing on Fox News
•   prophecies of the End Times
•   Protocols of the Elders
•   the Rockefellers
•   Rosicrucians
•   Rothchilds
•   Skull & Bones
•   space aliens
•   technologies supposedly suppressed
•   the Trilateral Commission
•   theories you don't really understand about the collapse of the World Trade Center
•   or the latest fake news we've already debunked. Emails about these and similar matters will be chuckled at but quickly deleted.

We never link to 'news' from unreliable sources such as
•   americanfreepress.net
•   BankIndex
•   Art Bell
•   Brasscheck
•   Carolina Journal
•   cloakanddagger.ca
•   Dandelion Books
•   Executive Intelligence Review
•   Tom Flocco
•   Free World Alliance
•   From the Wilderness
•   Stephan Grossman
•   Tom Heneghan
•   David Icke
•   Idaho Observer
•   David Irving
•   Alex Jones
•   Lyndon LaRouche
•   Wayne Madsen
•   Henry Makow
•   Al Martin
•   Leuren Moret
•   "Dr" Richard Morgan
•   Eustace Mullins
•   Newsblaze
•   Newsbusters
•   Prison Planet
•   Michael Ruppert
•   Mary Schneider
•   Ralph Schoenman
•   Michael Shrimpton
•   Sherman Skolnick
•   Edgar Steele
•   Webster Tarpley
•   truthseeker.co.uk
•   or your brother-in-law, and we never knowingly link to sites that find such sources newsworthy. Due to time constraints, if you send links or references to any of the above we'll be unable to take you or your comments seriously.

Please don't email us unless you're sending an original communication that you're not sending to anyone or everyone else. If you add us to your mailing list or chat group without asking us first, or if you send "Dear friend" newsletters, or "link exchange" form letters, or if you send a press release every time you add a post to your blog, you're a spammer and we'll soon block your emails. Also, as a matter of security, we don't open emails from strangers which include attachments or have any kind of programming imbedded, and we recommend a similar policy for others. If you're sending us an email, please send it in plain text only.

Subscribe to our RSS feed
Our RSS feed of Unknown News headlines is updated whenever we update the site. Click the orange button for more information, or just get the feed at   http://unknownnews.org/ RSSfeeds/dailyRSS.xml.
Subscribe to our RSS feed


(Enormous and eternal thanks to Doug at mistersquirrel.net, for setting up our RSS feed.)

Our privacy policy  is that we're in favor of privacy. We make no effort to track or identify anything about visitors to our website. We never share, trade, or sell email addresses. We never send spam. Our site has no pop-up ads. We never send email, except in response to readers' queries. We never send (or open) attachments of any kind, and we delete un-opened any emails received with attachments.

If you see or receive any of the above, it's not from us. It's coming from spyware you picked up elsewhere, or an "exit" pop-up from another site you have visited, or spammers mimicking our email address.

We use a freeware hit-counter, and it plants a harmless short-term cookie so visitors aren't counted again if they go to several different Unknown News pages within a short time. Our feelings won't be hurt if you reject the cookie, and you'll still be able to visit any page you wish. Other than that we don't use cookies.

If you donate or buy something we'll say thank you, and never bother you again. We do not send any reminders to re-donate or buy more stuff. Incoming emails and orders are deleted within 72 hours, and we keep no records of contact information about donors, emailers, or sticker orders.

If you use your credit card to donate or buy something, it's processed by PayPal (their privacy policies are here). We do not file or even see your credit card information.

We try to avoid  linking to sites that require logging in, so if any clicks here ask for registration or a password, please let us know and we'll try to find a not-so-nosey link to similar coverage elsewhere.

Nothing at Unknown News bounces, flashes, flickers, sings or speaks, twinkles, or moves. We try to avoid coding practices that intentionally frustrate or annoy readers.