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nikola1tesla
"That money's got blood on it man." "Ever see any that didn't?" -Judgement Night
 
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'Magnetic electricity' discovered ... In the Loop
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8307804.stm

From BBC News....

'Magnetic electricity' discovered
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones.

The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice.

Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a "magnetic current" like electricity.

The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity", could be used in magnetic storage or in computing.

Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charges.

Although there are protons and electrons with net positive and negative electric charges, there were no particles in existence which carry magnetic charges. Rather, every magnet has a "north" and "south" pole.

Current event

In September this year, two research groups independently reported the existence of monopoles - "particles" which carry an overall magnetic charge. But they exist only in the spin ice crystals.

These crystals are made up of pyramids of charged atoms, or ions, arranged in such a way that when cooled to exceptionally low temperatures, the materials show tiny, discrete packets of magnetic charge.

Now one of those teams has gone on to show that these "quasi-particles" of magnetic charge can move together, forming a magnetic current just like the electric current formed by moving electrons.

They did so by using sub-atomic particles called muons, created at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) ISIS neutron and muon source near Oxford.

The muons decay millionths of a second after their production into other sub-atomic particles. But the direction in which these resulting particles fly off is an indicator of the magnetic field in a tiny region around the muons.

The team, led by Stephen Bramwell, from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, implanted these muons into spin ice to demonstrate how the magnetic monopoles moved around.

They showed that when the spin ice was placed in a magnetic field, the monopoles piled up on one side - just like electrons would pile up when placed in an electric field.

Professor Bramwell told BBC News that the development is unlikely to catch on as a means of providing energy, not least because the particles travel only inside spin ices.

"We're not going to be seeing a magnetic light bulb or anything like that," he said.

But by engineering different spin ice materials to modify the ways monopoles move through them, the materials might in future be used in "magnetic memory" storage devices or in spintronics - a field which could boost future computing power.

 
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Mumbai Massacre Torah Code Bible Code Reprint
Mumbai Massacre
A systematic Torah code exploration must proceed with some understanding of what are the components of an event and how these components relate to the Torah code exploration methodology. The components of the event are its structure. The way the event components relate to Torah codes is through the component combinations that are used for table categories and the Hebrew key word choices that are associated with each of the event components.

Event Structure
In general, an event has a topic and who, what, where, when, and how components. The topic component usually coincides with one or more of the who, what, where when and how components. Each simple table is constructed using one or more key words from the topic component combined with one or more key words from one of the who, what, where, when, and how components not involved in the topic. More complex tables are constructed using key words from the topic component combined with key words from more than one of the who, what, where, when and how components.

To decide for any particular event exactly what these components are requires subjective choice, choices sometimes not even fully consciously recognized by the experimenter. Here we will be as complete and explicit about our a priori choices as possible.

The what component of this event is Massacre, Terror, or Massacre Terror. The where component of this event is Mumbai or Bombay, India. The when component of this event is the evening November 26, 2008. The when component has a subcomponent as the date, November 26, and a subcomponent as the year, 2008. The how component of an event is the enabling means or instrument through which the event happens. For this event the means is terrorists and killers, Islam and Muslims. The who components are the places where the slaughters took place. These are the Taj Mahal, the Oberoi, Nariman House or Chabad House, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. We will treat each of these who components with a separate set of tables as the massacres took place at each. We choose the topic component to be the what and where components as these can be found in many newpaper articles whose headlines or topic sentences include Mumbai Massacre or Mumbai Terror.

Event Component Combination
The event components and their combinations give us a set of categories by which to explore tables associated with the Mumbai Massacre event. Each table must have one of the possible key words of the topic: what and where. The topic is combined with each of the other event components. Therefore, for this event we can construct the 15 possible categories of tables. These are listed in the table below. Each of these categories will have some key word set combination yielding a best table. That best table will have a p-value. It is this p-value that we will record.

Because each p-value that is recorded is the best one of a number of sub-experiments that have been performed, the collection of p-values cannot be used by themselves to construct a summary p-value for the total complex experiment done. For this we must use the methodology of Torah code networks, a methodology whose computer programs we are working on now. In the near future, we will describe the methodology and evaluate the complete set of the Mumbai Massacre experiments with a proper p-value, whose meaning will be the probability that what we have observed would happen by chance.

The blank table below shows the form of the results we will obtain by the Torah code experiments we perform. After we show the individual Torah code tables for each of the Mumbai Massacre event categories, the last webpage of this study will fill the blank spaces with their respective p-values.

Empty P-value Table To Be Filled In By Monte Carlo Experiments

What Where
1 Who
2 When Date
3 When Year
4 How
5 Who When Date
6 Who When Year
7 Who How
8 When Date Year
9 When Date How
10 When Year How
11 Who When Date Year
12 Who When Date How
13 Who When Year How
14 When Date Year How
15 Who When Date Year How

Hebrew Key Word Choices
In this section we give the associations of the Hebrew word choices with each event component. Key words must have at least four letters unless it is a three letter key word having the infrequently occuring letter Tet or Gimmel.
What
The What component is Massacre or Terror. For the Hebrew we use the terms טבח, Massacre; הטבח, The Massacre; טרור, Terror; הטרור, The Terror; the phrase טבח טרור, spelled with a Vav, Massacre Terror; and the phrase טבח טרר, spelled without the Vav, Massacre Terror. There are no ELSs of טבח טרור so it is excluded from the key word choices.

Who
The Who component are the places partially destroyed by the terror attacks. These are the טאג מהאל, Taj Mahal; אוברוי, Oberoi; נארימן, Nariman, or בית נארימן, Nariman House or בית חבד, Chabad House; and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus for which we have no hope of having an ELS for the Hebrew transliteration and is so omitted.

Where
The Where component is Mumbai or the older name Bombay, India or in Mumbai or in Bombay, India. Mumbai has multiple Hebrew spellings. We use the most common two spellings. מומבאי, Mumbai; and מומביי, Mumbai; במומבאי, in Mumbai; במומביי, in Mumbai. For Bombay we use בומבי, Bombay; and בבומבי, in Bombay. For India we use הודו, India.

When
The massacre began a little after 9:00PM, Mumbai time, November 26, 2008. Since this is after sunset, by the Jewish calender the date of the event is Cheshvon 29 and the year is 5769. Therefore our Hebrew key words for the date are כט חשון, Cheshvon 29; כט בחשון, the 29th of Cheshvon; and בכט חשון, On Cheshvon 29. There are no ELSs for the key word כט בחשון so it is excluded from the key word set.

The year is 5769. Therefore our Hebrew key words for the year are התשסט l 5769; בהתשסט in 5769; תשסט l (5)769; בתשסט in (5)769;

How
The how component of the event is that which enables or is the instrument through which the event occurs. For this we choose the words Killers, Terrorists, Islam, and Muslims. The corresponding Hebrew words are רוצחים, Killers; רצחים, Killers; מחבלים Terrorists. Islam has two spellings איסלם, Islam; and אסלם, Islam. Finally, for Muslims we use מוסלמים, Muslims.



For the rest of this story, Go to http://torahcode.us/torah_codes/mumbai/mumbai_2.shtml

The "Bible Code" is also in another 2 documentaries on the History Channel
No Gotchas - What's up?
 
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New York Times "Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears" June 24 2009
BASEL, Switzerland — Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties, have already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a less geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock officials said that they chose the spot in part because the history of mostly small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited.

Like the effort in Basel, the new project will tap geothermal energy by fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep to extract its heat. AltaRock, founded by Susan Petty, a veteran geothermal researcher, has secured more than $36 million from the Energy Department, several large venture-capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Google. AltaRock maintains that it will steer clear of large faults and that it can operate safely.

But in a report on seismic impact that AltaRock was required to file, the company failed to mention that the Basel program was shut down because of the earthquake it caused. AltaRock claimed it was uncertain that the project had caused the quake, even though Swiss government seismologists and officials on the Basel project agreed that it did. Nor did AltaRock mention the thousands of smaller earthquakes induced by the Basel project that continued for months after it shut down.

The California project is the first of dozens that could be operating in the United States in the next several years, driven by a push to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and the Obama administration’s support for renewable energy.

Geothermal’s potential as a clean energy source has raised huge hopes, and its advocates believe it could put a significant dent in American dependence on fossil fuels — potentially supplying roughly 15 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2030, according to one estimate by Google. The earth’s heat is always there waiting to be tapped, unlike wind and solar power, which are intermittent and thus more fickle. According to a 2007 geothermal report financed by the Energy Department, advanced geothermal power could in theory produce as much as 60,000 times the nation’s annual energy usage. President Obama, in a news conference Tuesday, cited geothermal power as part of the “clean energy transformation” that a climate bill now before Congress could bring about.

Dan W. Reicher, an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration who is now director of climate change and energy at Google’s investment and philanthropic arm, said geothermal energy had “the potential to deliver vast amounts of power almost anywhere in the world, 24/7.”

Power companies have long produced limited amounts of geothermal energy by tapping shallow steam beds, often beneath geysers or vents called fumaroles. Even those projects can induce earthquakes, although most are small. But for geothermal energy to be used more widely, engineers need to find a way to draw on the heat at deeper levels percolating in the earth’s core.

Some geothermal advocates believe the method used in Basel, and to be tried in California, could be that breakthrough. But because large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor.

Even so, there is no shortage of money for testing the idea. Mr. Reicher has overseen a $6.25 million investment by Google in AltaRock, and with more than $200 million in new federal money for geothermal, the Energy Department has already approved financing for related projects in Idaho by the University of Utah; in Nevada by Ormat Technologies; and in California by Calpine, just a few miles from AltaRock’s project.

Steven E. Koonin, the under secretary for science at the Energy Department, said the earthquake issue was new to him, but added, “We’re committed to doing things in a factual and rigorous way, and if there is a problem, we will attend to it.”

The tone is more urgent in Europe. “This was my main question to the experts: Can you exclude that there is a major earthquake triggered by this man-made activity?” said Rudolf Braun, chairman of the project team that the City of Basel created to study the risks of resuming the project.

“I was quite surprised that all of them said: ‘No, we can’t. We can’t exclude it,’ “ said Mr. Braun, whose study is due this year.

“It would be just unfortunate if, in the United States, you rush ahead and don’t take into account what happened here,” he said.

Basel’s Big Shock

By the time people were getting off work amid rain squalls in Basel on Dec. 8, 2006, Mr. Häring’s problems had already begun. His incision into the ground was setting off small earthquakes that people were starting to feel around the city.

Mr. Häring knew that by its very nature, the technique created earthquakes because it requires injecting water at great pressure down drilled holes to fracture the deep bedrock. The opening of each fracture is, literally, a tiny earthquake in which subterranean stresses rip apart a weak vein, crack or fault in the rock. The high-pressure water can be thought of loosely as a lubricant that makes it easier for those forces to slide the earth along the weak points, creating a web or network of fractures.

Mr. Häring planned to use that network as the ultimate teapot, circulating water through the fractures and hoping it emerged as steam. But what surprised him that afternoon was the intensity of the quakes because advocates of the method believe they can pull off a delicate balancing act, tearing the rock without creating larger earthquakes.

Alarmed, Mr. Häring and other company officials decided to release all pressure in the well to try to halt the fracturing. But as they stood a few miles from the drill site, giving the orders by speakerphone to workers atop the hole, a much bigger jolt shook the room.

“I think that was us,” said one stunned official.

Analysis of seismic data proved him correct. The quake measured 3.4 — modest in some parts of the world. But triggered quakes tend to be shallower than natural ones, and residents generally describe them as a single, explosive bang or jolt — often out of proportion to the magnitude — rather than a rumble.

Triggered quakes are also frequently accompanied by an “air shock,” a loud tearing or roaring noise.

The noise “made me feel it was some sort of supersonic aircraft going overhead,” said Heinrich Schwendener, who, as president of Geopower Basel, the consortium that includes Geothermal Explorers and the utility companies, was standing next to the borehole.

“It took me maybe half a minute to realize, hey, this is not a supersonic plane, this is my well,” Mr. Schwendener said.

By that time, much of the city was in an uproar. In the newsroom of the city’s main paper, Basler Zeitung, reporters dived under tables and desks, some refusing to move until a veteran editor barked at them to go get the story, said Philipp Loser, 28, a reporter there.

Aysel Mermer, 25, a waitress at the Restaurant Schiff near the Rhine River, said she thought a bomb had gone off.

Eveline Meyer, 44, a receptionist at a maritime exhibition, was on the phone with a friend and thought that her washing machine had, all by itself, started clattering with an unbalanced load. “I was saying to my friend, ‘Am I now completely nuts?’ “ Ms. Meyer recalled. Then, she said, the line went dead.

Mr. Häring was rushed to police headquarters in a squad car so he could explain what had happened. By the time word slipped out that the project had set off the earthquake, Mr. Loser said, outrage was sweeping the city. The earthquakes, including three more above magnitude 3, rattled on for about a year — more than 3,500 in all, according to the company’s sensors.

Although no serious injuries were reported, Geothermal Explorers’ insurance company ultimately paid more than $8 million in mostly minor damage claims to the owners of thousands of houses in Switzerland and in neighboring Germany and France.

Optimism and Opportunity

In the United States, where the Basel earthquakes received little news coverage, the fortunes of geothermal energy were already on a dizzying rise. The optimistic conclusions of the Energy Department’s geothermal report began driving interest from investors, as word trickled out before its official release.

In fall 2006, after some of the findings were presented at a trade meeting, Trae Vassallo, a partner at the firm Kleiner Perkins, phoned Ms. Petty, the geothermal researcher who was one of 18 authors on the report, according to e-mail messages from both women. That call eventually led Ms. Petty to found AltaRock and bring in, by Ms. Petty’s tally, another six of the authors as consultants to the company or in other roles.

J. David Rogers, a professor and geological engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the report, said such overlap of research and commercial interests was common in science and engineering but added that it might be perceived as a conflict of interest. “It’s very, very satisfying to see something go from theory to application to actually making money and being accepted by society,” Professor Rogers said. “It’s what every scientist dreams of.”

Ms. Petty said that her first “serious discussions” with Ms. Vassallo about forming a company did not come until the report was officially released in late January 2007. That June, Ms. Petty founded AltaRock with $4 million from Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, an investment firm based in California.

The Basel earthquake hit more than a month before the Energy Department’s report came out, but no reference to it was included in the report’s spare and reassuring references to earthquake risks. Ms. Petty said the document had already been at the printer by the fall, “so there was no way we could have included the Basel event in the report.”

Officials at AltaRock, with offices in Sausalito, Calif., and Seattle, insist that the company has learned the lessons of Basel and that its own studies indicate the project can be carried out safely. James T. Turner, AltaRock’s senior vice president for operations, said the company had applied for roughly 20 patents on ways to improve the method.

Mr. Turner also asserted in a visit to the project site last month that AltaRock’s monitoring and fail-safe systems were superior to those used in Basel.

“We think it’s going to be pretty neat,” Mr. Turner said as he stood next to a rig where the company plans to drill a hole almost two and a half miles deep. “And when it’s successful, we’ll have a good-news story that says we can extend geothermal energy.”

AltaRock, in its seismic activity report, included the Basel earthquake in a list of temblors near geothermal projects, but the company denied that it had left out crucial details of the quake in seeking approval for the project in California. So far, the company has received its permit from the federal Bureau of Land Management to drill its first hole on land leased to the Northern California Power Agency, but still awaits a second permit to fracture rock.

“We did discuss Basel, in particular, the 3.4 event, with the B.L.M. early in the project,” Mr. Turner said in an e-mail response to questions after the visit.

But Richard Estabrook, a petroleum engineer in the Ukiah, Calif., field office of the land agency who has a lead role in granting the necessary federal permits, gave a different account when asked if he knew that the Basel project had shut down because of earthquakes or that it had induced more than 3,500 quakes.

“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I didn’t know that.”

Mr. Estabrook said he was still leaning toward giving approval if the company agreed to controls that could stop the work if it set off earthquakes above a certain intensity. But, he said, speaking of the Basel project’s shutdown, “I wish that had been disclosed.”

Bracing for Tremors

There was a time when Anderson Springs, about two miles from the project site, had few earthquakes — no more than anywhere else in the hills of Northern California. Over cookies and tea in the cabin his family has owned since 1958, Tom Grant and his sister Cynthia Lora reminisced with their spouses over visiting the town, once famous for its mineral baths, in the 1940s and ’50s. “I never felt an earthquake up here,” Mr. Grant said .

Then came a frenzy of drilling for underground steam just to the west at The Geysers, a roughly 30-square-mile patch of wooded hills threaded with huge, curving tubes and squat power plants. The Geysers is the nation’s largest producer of traditional geothermal energy. Government seismologists confirm that earthquakes were far less frequent in the past and that the geothermal project produces as many as 1,000 small earthquakes a year as the ground expands and contracts like an enormous sponge with the extraction of steam and the injection of water to replace it.

These days, Anderson Springs is a mixed community of working class and retired residents, affluent professionals and a smattering of artists. Everyone has a story about earthquakes. There are cats that suddenly leap in terror, guests who have to be warned about tremors, thousands of dollars of repairs to walls and cabinets that just do not want to stay together.

Residents have been fighting for years with California power companies over the earthquakes, occasionally winning modest financial compensation. But the obscure nature of earthquakes always gives the companies an out, says Douglas Bartlett, who works in marketing at Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco, and with his wife, Susan, owns a bungalow in town.

“If they were creating tornadoes, they would be shut down immediately,” Mr. Bartlett said. “But because it’s under the ground, where you can’t see it, and somewhat conjectural, they keep doing it.”

Now, the residents are bracing for more. As David Oppenheimer, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., explains it, The Geysers is heated by magma welling up from deep in the earth. Above the magma is a layer of granite-like rock called felsite, which transmits heat to a thick layer of sandstone-like material called graywacke, riddled with fractures and filled with steam.

The steam is what originally drew the power companies here. But the AltaRock project will, for the first time, drill deep into the felsite. Mr. Turner said that AltaRock, which will drill on federal land leased by the Northern California Power Agency, had calculated that the number of earthquakes felt by residents in Anderson Springs and local communities would not noticeably increase.

But many residents are skeptical.

“It’s terrifying,” said Susan Bartlett, who works as a new patient coordinator at the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco. “What’s happening to all these rocks that they’re busting into a million pieces?”
No Gotchas - What's up?
 
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QuakeFinder Detects Quake: Pre-Quake Signatures Detected by QuakeFinder and NASA


QuakeFinder Detects Quake: Pre-Quake Signatures Detected by QuakeFinder and NASA

By: Marketwire .
Jun. 19, 2009 04:14 PM





PALO ALTO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/19/09 -- QuakeFinder, the Humanitarian R&D division of Stellar Solutions, Inc. has analyzed data gathered from the Alum Rock earthquake in October 2007. QuakeFinder has one of their specialized ground sensors located approximately 2 miles from the epicenter of the Alum Rock earthquake. The Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Science journal recently accepted a paper by QuakeFinder which details both satellite and ground sensors detection of three independent electromagnetic signals two weeks prior to the October 30, 2007 Alum Rock M5.4 earthquake. QuakeFinder detected ultra low frequency magnetic pulsations and large changes in air conductivity near the ground during the two weeks prior to the quake. In addition, collaborators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory detected nighttime infra-red signatures in the same area simultaneously from the GOES-West weather satellite. These three signatures were compared with normal signals collected over the previous two years, and it was noted that the changes followed a similar timeline (two weeks) which occurred prior to the 1989 Loma Prieta M7.0 earthquake. The Alum Rock earthquake analysis has been discussed in California Space Authority's Winter issue of SpaceBound! ( http://www.californiaspaceauthority.org/spacebound-08-v25) and covered by NBC's Bay Area News(http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Bay_Area_Centers_in_on_Earthquake_ Prediction_Bay_Area.html). QuakeFinder currently has 55 ground sensors in the CA area, and plans to increase the network in California and internationally, allowing the capture and analysis of more earthquake data, thereby providing additional corroboration earthquakes could be forecast by monitoring electromagnetic changes around fault zones.

For additional information on Earthquake findings by QuakeFinder, contact Tom Bleier, VP of Humanitarian R&D at Stellar Solutions, or visit www.quakefinder.com.

QuakeFinder conducts pioneering research in the area of earthquake forecasting and is the Humanitarian R&D division of Stellar Solutions, an award winning aerospace engineering services company located in Palo Alto, CA. The initial goal to develop a monitoring network (CalMagNet) has progressed into a broader vision -- to save lives by conducting research with the aim of making global forecasts of major seismic activity a reality within the next decade.

About Stellar Solutions, Inc.

Stellar Solutions distinguishes itself by satisfying customers' critical engineering services needs on diverse projects such as defense-related intelligence programs, international telecommunications satellites, commercial imagery satellites, and NASA's planetary and earth science missions. Stellar Solutions' high-caliber team of aerospace professionals has decades of applied mission experience and provide high impact technical solutions to programmatic challenges. Stellar Solutions' offices are located in all major space development and operational hubs in the US: California, Colorado and the Washington, DC area, and our international affiliate, Stellar Solutions Aerospace Ltd., is based in London, England.

CONTACT:
Tom Bleier
Stellar Solutions
Phone: (650) 473-9872
Fax: (650) 473-9867
Email Contact
http://www.QuakeFinder.com



Published Jun. 19, 2009
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.


Home > Breaking News > World > Story
June 20, 2009
Quake jolts California

LOS ANGELES- A 4.6-MAGNITUDE earthquake jolted central California shortly before dawn Saturday, the latest in a series of quakes that have rattled the most populous US state, the US Geological Survey reported.
The temblor struck at 5.32 am local time (8.32 pm Singapore time) about halfway between the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and 22 kilometres east of the town of San Simeon, site of the historic Hearst Castle built by media magnate William Randolph Hearst.

The quake registered at a depth of six kilometers.

A 4.7-magnitude earthquake shook the region May 23, less than a week after a pair of similar temblors rattled the highly populated southern part of the state.

Geologists say an earthquake capable of causing widespread destruction is 99 percent certain of hitting California within the next 30 years. -- AFP


The following text written as an open letter to president Obama by three prominent German physicians provides details on the adverse health effects of digital broadcasting.

OPEN LETTER Bamberg, February 12, 2009

To the President of the United States of America

To the Citizens of the United States of America
To the Members of the House of Representatives
To the Members of the Senate

Warning Against Adverse Health Effects from the Operation of Digital Broadcast Television Stations (DVB-T)

Dear President Obama:

Dear Members of the House of Representatives:
Dear Members of the Senate:
Dear Citizens of the United States of America:

In the US, digital broadcast television is scheduled to start operating on February 17, 2009. We write to you today because we wish to save you from the significant negative health consequences that have occurred here in Germany. In Germany, analog broadcast television stations have gradually been switching to digital broadcast signals since 2003. This switch over first took place in metropolitan areas. In those areas, however, the RF exposures in public places as well as at home continued to increase at the same time. As a result, the continuing declining health status of children, adolescents, and adults in urban areas could not be attributed to any single cause. On May 20, 2006, two digital broadcast television stations went on the air in the Hessian Rhoen area (Heidelstein, Kreuzberg), which until recently had enjoyed rather low mobile phone radiation exposure levels. Within a radius of more than 20 km, the following symptoms that occurred abruptly were reported: constant headaches, pressure in the head, drowsiness, sleep problems, inability to think clearly, forgetfulness, nervous tensions, irritability, tightness in the chest, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, depressive mood, total apathy, loss of empathy, burning skin, inner burning, leg weakness, pain in the limbs, stabbing pain in various organs, weight increase.

Birds had fled the area. Cats had turned phlegmatic and hardly ever went into the garden. One child committed suicide; a second child tried doing it. Over time the same unbearable symptoms showed up in other locations—most recently in Bamberg and Aschaffenburg on November 25, 2008. Physicians accompanied affected people to areas where there was no DVB-T reception (valleys, behind mountain ranges) and witnessed how these people became symptom-free only after a short period of time.

The respective agencies responsible in Germany were approached for help, but they declined to follow up on the strongly suggestive evidence in the actual locations. The behavior of the government agencies disregards the fundamental rights of affected people guaranteed in the German Constitution.

In Germany, DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting Terrestrial) uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Modulation. The fundamental principle of this type of modulation works by spreading the information across several thousand carrier frequencies directly adjacent to each other. A channel is 7.8 MHz wide. The amplitude also changes constantly. The WHO, the German Radiation Protection Commission, and the German Federal Ministry of the Environment rely on the Guidelines for Limiting Exposure to Time-varying Electric, Magnetic, and Electromagnetic Fields (up to 300 GHz), (Health Physics 74 (4): 494-522; 1998) published by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). In this document, it says: p. 495: "These guidelines will be periodically revised and updated as advances are made in identifying the adverse health effects of time-varying electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic fields." p. 507: "Interpretation of several observed biological effects of AM electromagnetic fields is further complicated by the apparent existence of "windows" of response in both the power density and frequency domains. There are no accepted models that adequately explain this phenomenon, which challenges the traditional concept of a monotonic relationship between the field intensity and the severity of the resulting biological effects." Why are the German agencies in charge not willing to help identify the adverse health effects? Since immediately, after digital broadcast television stations had started transmitting, adverse health effects have occurred, the review of the Guidelines announced by the ICNIRP is imperative. Obviously, there are response windows contained within the broad frequency bands with their several thousand frequencies that change constantly and whose amplitude also changes constantly. The ICNIRP had already pointed out this possibility.

In 1992, Dipl.-Ing. Rüdiger Matthes, member of ICNIRP and of the Geman Radiation Protection Agency (BfS), emphasized the preliminary status of the exposure limits in a hearing on the health risks of electromagnetic radiation: "…They (electromagnetic exposure levels) are several orders of magnitude higher than the natural background radiation levels of nontechnical sources…In parallel to this development, findings of scientific studies according to which long-term exposure to such fields may trigger adverse health effects keep accumulating.…In this context, it is also important to recognize that there are large differences in exposure levels within a given population. A small child, for example, absorbs much more RF energy than an adult person…There are several findings on low-level exposures, which are considered scientifically validated because they have been reproduced often but which are rather difficult to interpret.

The impact of mostly pulsed or ELF modulated RF radiation on cell metabolism, for example, counts among them. It has been observed that the efflux of certain ions (e.g. calcium) from a cell increases during exposure to such fields. The occurrence of this effect is described almost completely independent of the actual field strength. It can be found at extremely low absorption levels.…With all the currently available scientific findings, there remain some crucial questions unanswered. …There are gaps in the so-called body of evidence. That means that the biological effects, for example, have only been investigated for individual frequencies. Data (e.g. effect thresholds) on the various biological effects across the entire frequency spectrum are not available.

The exposure limits, therefore, are based on an approach that greatly simplifies the very complex reality whose details are unfathomable. It should also be noted that concrete data on possible effects of long-term exposures are mostly lacking." Real life teaches us that it was wrong to simplify. In Germany, we see strong evidence of a direct temporal association between the start-up of terrestrial digital broadcast television and the occurrence of severe health symptoms. Dr.-Ing. W. Volkrodt, former R&D engineer at Siemens, recognized the danger of electromagnetic fields for humans, animals, and plants. He pinned his hopes on policymakers who would listen to reason when he wrote in 1987: "Future historians will refer to the RF dilemma during the period from around 1975 to 1990 as a short, time-limited ‘technical incident.' Owing to the introduction of fiber optic technology, this incident could be remediated quickly and effectively." Satellites and cable provide the US population with television services. By contrast, the risk associated with terrestrial digital broadcast television transmitters is unacceptable.

We, therefore, ask you, dear Mr. President, who has the wellbeing of his citizens at heart, to stop the scheduled introduction of this new technology in the United States of America and to save the people from the negative health consequences that have occurred in our country.

Dr. med. Cornelia Waldmann-Selsam

Dr. med. Christine Aschermann

Dr. med. Markus Kern

http://d.scribd.com/docs/1a34bitqwcergnuko29s.txt

Dr. med. Cornelia Waldmann-Selsam Founding Member of the Bamberg Appeal

Dr. med. Christine Aschermann Neurologist-Psychotherapy Founding Member of the Freiburg Appeal Dr. med. Markus Kern

Psychosomatic Medizin Founding Member of the Physicians Appeal Allgäu-Bodensee-Oberschwaben

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12596

See Article posted by GnoseBob on Rumor Mill News:
More Evidence that Mandatory HD TV Conversion is a Set Up for Mind Control Psychotronics

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=146317




No Gotchas - What's up?
 
#
Hang one, warn a thousand
Mike Brown, Urijah Faber, Jose Aldo, Seth Dikun earn $10K "fight night" bonuses at WEC 41
by MMAjunkie.com Staff on Jun 08, 2009 at 1:00 am ET
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Mike Brown, Urijah Faber, Jose Aldo and Seth Dikun each earned $10,000 "fight night" bonuses for their performances at "WEC 41: Brown vs. Faber II."

WEC 41 took place Sunday night at the ARCO Arena in Sacramento, Calif., and aired live on VERSUS. The bonus amounts were on par with the $10,000 bonuses that were given out at WEC 40 in April.

MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) confirmed the amounts and winners following the event.

Despite the vocal support of Faber's hometown crowd, a broken right hand suffered early in the fight – coupled with a relentless attack by the champion – left "The California Kid" unable to reclaim the belt he lost in November 2008.

The effort was valiant, and much closer than the score indicated, but Brown successfully defended his title for the second time. The five-round affair, the WEC's second such title fight in as many cards, earned Brown and Faber the evening's "Fight of the Night" – wrestling that honor away from Antonio Banuelos and Scott Jorgensen, who went toe-to-toe in a close split decision on the evening's preliminary card.

In the bout prior to the main event, Aldo shocked the crowd in attendance – not to mention opponent Cub Swanson – by opening the bout with a stellar flying knee. The blow dropped Swanson, opened a massive wound over his left eye, and left him unable to continue the bout just eight seconds after the opening bell. The impressive attack also earned Aldo the evening's "Knockout of the Night."

The winner of the "Submission of the Night" was determined quickly, as Dikun claimed the honors in the first fight of the 10-bout affair. Dikun pulled off a slick flying triangle choke at the mid-point of the opening round in his bout with Rolando Perez The win was Dikun's first in the WEC after dropping a decision to Charlie Valencia in Januray.

For complete coverage of WEC 41, check out the MMA Events section of MMAjunkie.com.

(Pictured: Mike Brown and Urijah Faber)

No Gotchas - What's up?
 
#
Reposted
Path of One
Don't know where you got all this new information
This nation' a siccness so witness this playstation
version of tossing up words kicking knowledge I spot sh!t
From Officer Tenpenny promising favors to ravers and gangsters with razors
who lick on his dick. That ain't me, best believe I ain't dropping my gats
kissing ass for some freaks or some feds
dealing tweak off their meds smoking crack with your son
I run with cats who still got guns but don't show no one
like Project X my work's undone our time has come
I'm sexual healing I got no time for drug dealing
when perved off this liquor, phuck, the tempo gets quicker,
what I gotta do to keep up? Throw down the cup
Don't blink or you'll miss this stink
gotta wash your ass sooner or later
Now I'm gone I'm ditching those haters
Who latch on my hitching post scratching like hatching ghosts on my mattress
What's that sh!t you ask? I don't know. I'm an ass. That's my flow.
It just goes & it it goes like cocaine up your nose,
turning tricks like young hoes 69ing my ass while massaging my toes
I can handle whatever fools throwing my way
On the real I adapt to whatever you say
I catch it and learn ir then toss it on back
If I learned it from you then you can't say it's wack
Without hating yourself and the *beep* that you taught
With your lyrical mastery flows that I brought
Iam up out the box and Iam out like Pandora
Creating my own rhymes with fauna and flora
Iam one of a kind like that last unicorn
Coming like Gabriel blowing God's horn
Matching the speed of superman's flight
Evading the haters here night after night
Ferocious like lions you just couldn't tame me
My identities false so don't think you can name me
Iam one on one with the spiritual masters
From the kids in the park breaking with ghetto blasters
Theres nothing I ain't seen killing me yet
If you think you can bring me down come place your bet.
There's nothing can break me or take me or keep
My mastery from reaching the goals that I seek
I can't quit my path there's no stopping me now
I'll never stop going, I wouldn't know how
The natural oder of things calls me home
And if that's a path of one sure Iam alone.
Now there's nightmares infesting my brain with a siccness
I ain't splattering guts on the pavement so witnesses
Testify claiming that sins of omission
Are any part of my eternal soul's vision
Predict infidelity, weakness or shame
There's nobody deep as me up in this game
Started before most ya'll even been born
The sins of my father blow Gabriel's horn
Not angel nor devil cuz it all comes to pain
When broken to elements one and the same
All fibers and filaments ground into dust
Rebuilding this empire up from the rust
And ashes from cycles of wars never ending
These nuclear particles splitting then mending
My thermodynamic verbosity flaming
Blowing through hurricanes well beyond naming
The fabric of life partly real part a shadow
I still live MY life with or without your battle.
Iam coming up roses Iam coming up steel
Pressed coal into diamonds still rough to the feel
I been through the swastikas, been through your noose
I been down your chimneys and out your caboose
Medieval reactors brand chemical burns
Indelible engrams eat diets of worms
Canonical lyrics bring darkness to light
You monks and you druids can't bait me to fight
With broadcasted psychospeak lethal as pistols
Transmissions revolving through radio crystals
GPS satellite's microchips hidden
Under your skin and please don't think I'm kiddin
The woof, wave, and warp of the weave of my conscience
Has nothing to do with your static long gone since
That shaking and quakin quit testing my nerves
Got bored with that drama, there's no point it serves
Ain't nothing I can't face ain't nothing not done
If you think you'll find better you can't be my one
Got wolves howling nightly and sharks cutting teeth
Got enemies hiding from what lies beneath
That splinter cell fingerprints too much to bear
Like DNA evidence sprung from nowhere
Got nothing to gain here cuz nothing's for sale
I ain't got no business in telling this tale
I'm up late at night thinking bout days long past
And talking myself out of whipping some ass
Cuz the lessons I've learned are what still prolly saves me
And I thank all my homies who took time to raise me.
Str8 thru your brain
with these psychotic fits
aint no Ritalin kid
here can't miss what I spit
we be skipping on classes
dyslexic
reacting to asses
in phramacy companies
keepin our taxes up
building those prisons for
our Moms and our Dads
its a shame
in this game
that our nations war class
is against Californians
trucked to Steinbeck's Orange fields
orange syringes litter the doorhinge
stuck back in smoked out dust bowl Oklahoma
Oakie's ol' home now we're homies long gone staying strong moving on
North toward Oakland
we are trailing these tears
through Depressions
these years of deception
infection
castration
this nation's a siccness
so witness the
shadows you've made
in the shade of dimensions
beyond your grasp
burn sweetgrass
cedar smoke
dreams don't choke
slipping past graves
our warriors camoflaged
entourage
ancestors fogging
our eniemies sight
with midnight invasions
creating a dense
facination with hallucinations
we slip past
this cast of fools
fakin a leaderless leadership
smothered with stifling lies
through our apocalypse eyes.
I noticed that mountain you mentioned
above in your post, & it caught my attention,
I wonder what mountain you meant there the most--
there's plenty more places with faces I dream of
like Rushmore was like at the video store
when they had Team America in it & dam, it was funny as hell
when the world police scared themslves sh!tless
Michael Moore tried to bust down their door
pretending to protest how Bush goes to war.
Or there's that place in Nevada without a face
with traces of nuclear chemical waste
you're freebasin free radicals just like eraserhead
it can't be erased there's no rest for the dead
depleted uranium frying your cranium
chnaging these changelings, toxic wasteland crackheads
Yucca Mountain's the fountain of Frankenstein
turpentine, shining, asinine death on the vine
of rampage and wrath now this nation's alive
with genetic mutation in this age of sages & wisdom
the wizards who sold out our ecological system
have killed off our Gods with these pulleys & pistons
then wonder why nobody stops by to listen
My mission is horrible don't know what war is for
none of this sh*t is even worth dying for
but better be sure it's not me on the floor
just a cold blooded killa my mind's on my scrilla
I crack skulls like Godzilla I'm a pitbull
ignoring the roar of your engines while clenching my jaws
on the last thing you mentioned whoops forgot what that was
my muzzle got loose now it's lost & the fuzz is Peruvian
can't stop I'm losing them can't stop confusing them
can't stop like Eminem now I see many men
running like Superman hopped up on vitamins,
raging like Saladin, fighting like Vietnam dying like Viet Cong
Redemption's the key when I pray I don't sin again,
A law from Allah is a lot so please fill me in
cuz I'm true to my nature & for that I'll kill again
willing & able for food on the table
defending the one thing religion got twisted
there's no Christian or Muslim who truly would wish this
for money & power & oil are spoils
of all of these conflicks it makes my blood boil
not one thing goes right on American soil, for convicts
it grows like a cancer, a test with no answer,
a quest for the question, a cage with no hamster
a dangerous gangster guilt-ridden, well hidden
the mark of the beast in aluminum foil
Demonic technology spawned Tesla coils
it's all just a swahsbuckling renegade maverick hattrick
a microwave crappy assed matchstick
a meteor shower that's fuel for the fire
tsunami's, tornados, volcanos Earth's pyre
Rainier & St Helens are Washington's felons
announcing the hour this strange situation gone sour
the nation's alive with genetic mutation,
pathetic magnetic Monsanto creations
Raidiation and crop dusting cracking your melon
it rots with this siccness so witness the sh!t I spit
before I retire peace to your Rottweiler.
No Gotchas - What's up?
 
#
If You Don't Limp, You Ain't Been Shot

KOREAN UNDERGROUND NUKES= QUAKES ALONG LATITUDE/LONGITUDE LINES

 

Quote:

 

North Korea  has tested a bomb that Russian officials said was
comparable in power to those dropped on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II
Unquote

As only the True Geology is able to understand it, a major
underground
nuke operates along the hydraulic principles  fixed by French Genius
Pascal in his well known experiment of the 400l water cask, blown by
the addition of a single glass of water.  The True Geology conceived
by a French Genius as well, is based on a system called the UPL or
Universal Pressure Law & hence the Pascalian experimentations &
conclusions apply fully to the present situation. Let say in resume
that the True Geology is articulated on the UPL & its approach to
both
the creation of planets out of a point of saturation in simple term
or
surface tension critical point in other more involved terms leads out
of Mother Star, our Sun, to the calving of all planets in turn
followed by their satellites in application of that superior level of
understanding....then the irreversible drift away through all phases
of pre-Cambrian ( in fraudulent Geology terms) solution forming,
crytallization,  erosion by HCl & NaOH,HNO3 acid rains reducing all
rock forming minerals to their most simple expression to start again
the line in metamorphic bodies while the Planet is drifting indeed
within an Anisobaric & Anisotropic Cosmic Density Atmosphere.

This as an introduction to the conclusions of importance following as
working gestures of survival !!!

Hence as the Cretins masquerading as Geologists the world over are
unable to warn population world wide of the RED ALERT STATE till 10
am
Saturday ( La Rochelle time), I have the duty to give leads to
intelligent people aware of the shortcoming of a massive dribbling
ignorant sci000nce of Geology peddled urbi et orbi by Universities
Imbeciles , so as to avoid being caught & crashed, yours and your
dear
ones,  in falling buildings & washed to sea in consecutive Tsunamis
resulting from indeed  AN IMMEDIATE EARTH LOCAL  EXPANSION ...the
real
cause, as the ANU, Oxford, MIT etc Bougredanes ignore, of all
Earthquakes

Consecutive to the North Korean underground nuke and in application
of
confidential knowledge held by the True Geology,  here is what I have
to impart to you in a most pressing & urgent fashion ! This is
despite
of the most likely insults resulting from that communication from the
hard nailed Mining & Political Criminals in Australia, putting upon
that Convict Scum the whole responsibility of tampering with that
compassionate move aiming at saving 1 000s of people from certain
death !

Two steps taken and please read carefully from now on :

A) Here below are the most likely cities going to be struck by the
North Korean artificial over-pressure upon the Mantle & Nucleus
indeed :

1) Black sea region  (closing  this time on Ankara & Zagreb)
2) San Francisco (again)
3) Sydney (again since the 3.2 quake during the SOG was a stern
warning indeed)
4) Tangshan again as 12th May 1976

.. as all will notice it follows latitude & longitude lines just like
the Tangshan quake of 1976 set by US Nevada underground nukes, Mexico
quake of 1985 by the French Pacific underground nuke,  Leninakan
quake , Armenia 24 Dec 1988 set by Russia underground nuke program
( this  understanding is of course beyond the scope of brainwashed
Universities fools )

B) Here below are the steps to be taken to protect your own and your
dear ones lives, without relying indeed on those official announcement
which are only able in fact to give aftermath account of the deaths &
the lost. Hence never believe Officials & Governments agencies since
they are working on agenda trying to induce trust while are quick turn
back indicates they don't hesitate to lie especially in the case of
Major Cover up as the Port Arthur & 9/11 mass Murders indeed

1) Thermic imagery done at night with personal camera equipped with
infra red film on noted faults ( marked on geo maps) will give you an
notable appreciation of analogic progression of Earth strees
2) Monitoring wells levels... if it rise even just a bit be very
cautious and take evasive actions
3) Last but not least : Monitoring animals behaviour with another sub-
listing below. As those crude  Universities Cretins are unable to
understand it,  the animal "Millieu intérieur"  has a high proportion
of fluids by ex over 90 % in a new born baby. Hence the PHYSICAL
variations of the environment have direct resonance responses SIMPLY
SINCE THE CELL IS RESONANT CIRCUIT INDEED COMPOSED OF A CHONDRIOME &
CHROMOSOME  the equivalent in Electronic terms of a self &
capacitor !  Hence the closer are the animals to the low frequency
generating transmitters the more they are sensible to signal emitted
by the constrained rocks reaching critical point !
( I am not going to elaborate here on the real natural causes of
Quakes due to Planetary expansion since this is something I will not
disclose now in regard to all those Mining & Political Criminals ready
to grab & run away without even a thanks)

List of animals from the more sensible to the least sensible to be
used as warning
a) 3 days : snakes
3) 2 days : rats & major wild animals like elephants seeking high
ground
4) 1 day : dogs & red fishes  ...howling the first & the second trying
to jump out
5)  1/ 2 day : cat leave the house
6) 1 hour before : all birds fly away & there is then an eery silence
falling on the doomed area ... just time to take cover in "Turcaud
Survival Module" of which I have  decided to give the plans as service
to the good people of China, Japan, the US, Turkey and the
Balkans ! ...the others might grab it as usual and run without a
thanks ...I do not care indeed !

Also ;  Sparking  high intensity lighting discharges & electrostatic
build up with some poeple getting burned or electrocuted but such
warning is just too late since in phase with the major commotion !

RED WARNING ISSUED AS SERVICE TO HUMANITY AT LARGE

With best regards

Sir Jean-Paul Turcaud
Australia Mining Pioneer
#Discoverer & Legal Owner of Telfer Mine ( Australia largest Copper &
Gold MIne)
Nifty (Cu) & Kintyre (U, Th) Mines, all in the Great Sandy Desert
#Discoverer recently of 4 subsea deposits of Gold amounting to 100
millions tons
Exploration Geologist & Offshore Consultant (bus ph : +33 6 50 17 14
64)

 

 

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

SYLVIA BROWN PREDICTIONS> NORTH KOREA

 

The question I am asked the most on a daily basis is, "Sylvia, what are your predictions for 2008 and 2009?"

 

I predict so many new and interesting things are coming for us within the next two years. Some are positive changes that will affect the world at large. Others are changes that may affect only a certain group of people and will improve their lives. Here are my Sylvia Browne predictions for 2008 & 2009!

 


Around 2009 to 2010, I predict Americans will start working on what I like to call our "buts." There are problems that we are aware of that make the global community smaller. We have liked to say, "Our system works"..but...

 

...Children are not properly fed, clothed, educated, protected or given adequate medical care.

 

...Many in our population do not have a place to call home.

 

...Some of our youth get more attention from gangs and drug dealers than they do positive role models.

 

...People who are ready, willing and able to work cannot find decent jobs.

 

...Our elderly are not cared for properly either financially or medically.

 

...Some death row inmates are innocent.

 

...Some elected officials and large corporations do not think of the welfare of the people as a high priority - they'd rather just increase their bank accounts.

 

I predict we'll develop strong resolve and resources to address these problems and come up with some good solutions.

 

 

 


 

More of my Sylvia Browne predictions...

 

I predict a great rise in skin cancer in children until 2010. There is a lot of media coverage about the UV rays and many products to protect people against them. But people are still often careless when it comes to the sun. Then again, people could pay attention - and reverse this prediction right out from under me. I would certainly be all for that!

 

I predict the President elected sometime between 2008 and 2020 will die in office from a heart attack. The Vice President who will finish their term will have an unpopular and mistaken intention to declare war on North Korea. By that time, North Korea will have weapons of mass destruction. In the middle of efforts to declare war, I predict the Vice President will be assassinated.

 

There will be a worldwide investigation into the Vice President's death with both pleasant and unpleasant surprises. A lot of attention will be paid to one of the investigative congressional committees and serious accusations will be made regarding missing funds. Finally, it will be revealed that their accusations are part of a conspiracy to damage the American people's faith in their government, with the media manipulated to "fan the flames," and the committee will be vindicated in the end.

 

In 2008, I predict doctor's offices will have a high-tech "aura scanner" for patients that come to see them. This will be a highly developed version of an MRI. A patient will stand on a rotating disc and an infrared light will scan the body looking at their aura.

 

I predict we can truly say "goodbye" to the common cold in 2009 or 2010. The solution to the common cold involves heat. Keep in mind that the body's first response when we develop a cold is to come down with a fever. Many doctors today no longer rush to push patients to take temperature reducing medications when they come down with a fever, unless the fever is dangerous. They feel the immune system is the patient's best medicine and should be given a chance to fight back. So as the immune system fights a cold with heat, the cure for the common cold certainly may lie in this first signal to heal.

 

I predict that a small cubicle will become available in doctor's offices sometime in 2009 and it will be heated to a very precise temperature. There may be a special vapor placed into the cubicle. Patients will stand in the cubicle for approximately five minutes and the rhinitis germ will be destroyed.

 

Another wonderful bit of good news on the health front with this discovery - since this cubicle can easily take on the rhinitis germ, many people that have breathing problems with allergies and asthma complications will find some breakthroughs as well. We will see this cubicle discovery used for healing for those with breathing disorders. The cubicle will become available in 2009 or 2010.

 

I predict yoga and martial arts will remain just as popular, but a new form of exercise will be introduced in 2008. It is a passive form of exercise using machines to exercise the muscles. It will be a very effective form of exercise.

 

I predict hypnotic past-life regression will become available through a group of trained psychologists on both the east and west coasts of the U.S.A. in 2009. It will prove to be quite a success and will be widely practiced by 2011

No Gotchas - What's up?
 
#
Nice spot

Civilization Watch

First Appeared in print in The Rhinocerous Times, Greensboro, NC 

 

 

By Orson Scott Card

October 8, 2006

Groupthink and the Intellectual Elite

One of the most amusing things about the movement to force immigrants to speak only English is that we have a much more serious language problem on our hands -- and it's centered in the universities.

There are whole departments where English has been effectively banned and replaced with "Theoretics," a language designed so that the speaker can make the listener feel stupid without the speaker actually having to be smart.

I will give you a genuine example taken from a course description at a real university in the United States. Keep in mind that this is designed to be read by the public -- by the students who are deciding whether to take the course.

And please, don't be disturbed if you can't understand anything being said. Your noncomprehension is the purpose of Theoretics. If you understand any part of this, it means that the writer failed.

I will offer a translation afterward. So when you get confused, just skim until you start recognizing the language as English. That will be me talking again.

A Passage in "Theoretics"

"Narratives of Race

"This course takes as its central object the idea of race. Race is understood as a social construct that designates relations of structural difference and disparity. How race is treated is a crucial issue in this course. It is in this question of "the how" that the term narrative becomes salient. The term narrative intentionally focuses attention on the material practices through which we have come to define race as a social construct. This terminology, "narratives of race," spotlights an interest in investigating the historical events and visual and verbal images employed in the linking, patterning, sequencing, and relaying our ways of knowing race and its social relations. Implicated in the construction of race is its production and deployment of the moral and intellectual values that our academic disciplines bear. In considering such values as part of the investigation, this course includes careful comparative analyses of the ways in which the disciplinary systems of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and politics are used in the making and remaking of the academic and social grammars of race. Thus the analysis necessarily includes an intertextualization of the several academic disciplines engaging the question of race."

Here is the translation: "This is a course about what we mean by 'race,' particularly at the university." All the rest is smoke, endlessly paraphrasing this slender meaning.

Why didn't they just say that? Because the unreadable language is a code that reveals the hidden message:

"In this class, there will be no content. You will not have to understand anything about the real world. You just have to have all the correct opinions -- which you already know -- and then learn to speak Theoretics fluently and parrot back to the teacher the same empty language that you see here in this course description. Anyone who thinks for himself or disagrees with the teacher will be abused and ridiculed. When you have achieved complete incomprehensibility, with the right attitude, you will pass the course."

I am being sarcastic, of course -- but I am not being inaccurate. The American intellectual elite has been almost completely overwhelmed by a revolution that requires our smartest people to turn off their brains, accept the received opinions, and do nothing to disturb the ruling class.

Do you think I'm exaggerating?

It's Worse Than We Thought

It used to be that this sort of nonsense only ruled the English departments and the ideological "studies" departments -- you know, Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, where you are not educated but indoctrinated. The language of Theoretics allowed the professors in these areas to reject such concepts as "fact" and even "text" (though the word is always used) so that they could sound really smart without ever having to check their ideas against the real world.

They seized control of these departments quite simply: Since university faculties get to decide who gets tenure, they merely blackballed anybody who wasn't fluent in Theoretics. They ended up, therefore, with a faculty almost entirely composed of true believers (or expert fakers) in the vast airy nothings that they "teach."

But we could always soothe ourselves with the knowledge that there were departments where such nonsense could not possibly succeed. Engineering. Mathematics. Physics.

Especially Physics. Because physics is the field of Newton and Einstein. Physics describes the real universe, at its smallest and largest scales -- from quarks to quasars.

Everything in physics is predicted through mathematics, and then checked against the real world. It is the purest of sciences.

But something happened in the past two decades. Groupthink took over physics as well.

Lee Smolin is a physicist, involved in the thick of some of the knottiest problems in the field. He is also involved in the social world of physicists, which is where the problems arose.

Smolin's brilliant book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next is the best-written overview of the current state of physics I seen. It is worth reading merely to get up to speed on what the issues in physics are, from someone who knows what he's talking about.

Not that you will understand everything he talks about. Let's face it -- few of us have the math skills to do any of this science. But Smolin's explanations are clear enough that even if you have to skim here and there, you can trust him to come back to earth within a paragraph or so and make it clear enough for you to understand what it all means, in English.

In short, this book is the opposite of Theoretics. Smolin has set aside the legitimate jargon of his field and written in plain English, and anybody who has remained alert to contemporary science will be able to understand most or all of this book.

But along with the overview of the current state of the field, Smolin has also created a critical memoir of the way one interesting theory -- String Theory -- became an ideology and then a virtual religion, until it now dominates the field of physics so thoroughly that it is only just barely possible to point out that it is not proven and probably is not true.

String Theory

I'm not going to try to duplicate Smolin's brilliant achievement by trying to summarize what String Theory is -- honestly, you need to read this book for the science alone.

Instead, I'm going to talk about how the social group of String Theorists took over the physics world.

Originally, it was just a handful of scientists working on the cutting edge of a strange approach to the Grand Unified Theory -- the attempt to discover how gravity relates to the other three Forces of physics (electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear).

These guys were legitimate scientific heroes -- that is, they pursued their ideas despite the fact that they were getting little or no funding. Because of the way science works in the American university, the lack of prospects for grant money meant that they couldn't even get tenure. They sacrificed in order to follow up on a very, very promising line of inquiry.

Then, all of a sudden -- Smolin isolates the six-month period in which it happened -- a few leading professors suddenly declared that String Theory, instead of being a weird backwater, was Where It's At.

Overnight, those untenured recluses were the most important guys in the field.

Well, fads come and go in every discipline. But this time something strange and different happened. String Theory very quickly became, not the hottest field, but the Only Game In Town.

Smolin charts it very carefully. Within a very short time, the only young graduate students who were getting prestigious job offers were the ones working on String Theory. It was harder and harder to get any papers published in the peer reviewed journals unless you were working on String Theory.

Smolin recognizes -- because this is not just a brilliant book, but a profoundly honest one -- that his own reticence to get involved with String Theory was more a matter of personality than judgment. He simply isn't the kind of person who gets on the bandwagon. If everybody is flocking here, then he'll be over there.

But as he began hearing that the String Theorists had proven that they could get non-infinite results in their math (one vital test of a physics theory is that your answers are finite numbers), he began to get excited about the possibilities that String Theory offered to the area he was working on. And for a time, he dabbled in it.

Until, with a shock, he came up against a strangely unmentioned fact.

No one had actually done the math.

They were doing math, of course, all the time -- pages and pages of it, equations so long that students were writing them in tiny lettering on artists' notebook paper just so they could fit. But the key mathematics, the reality check, had only been done to the "first approximation," which meant that nobody had any idea whether any of this stuff actually described the real world.

It wasn't until relatively late in the game that somebody announced they had proven it to the second approximation -- but even with this, it was only a small subset of String Theory that had been worked out this far, and not the most productive part.

This came as a shock to Smolin -- and everyone else who noticed it -- because nobody had pointed out that String Theorists had not done their homework.

Everybody was so enthusiastic about playing in the String Theory sandbox that everybody took it for granted that its utility had already been proven. But it hadn't. It still hasn't. In fact, every indication right now is that it probably never will be.

Because as far as anyone can tell, all the talk of 23 dimensions (or maybe only ten -- or is it eleven?) tidily folded in on themselves (which is why we can't detect them) refers to nothing in the real universe.

Faith Factor

Here's what was happening: Every time String Theory looked like it might be predicting something that could be tested in the real world, it turned out that the particles it predicted didn't exist. So the String Theorists simply changed the assumptions about the sizes of the particles to put them in the range that is undetectable by any of the existing machines.

In other words, it was functioning like a millennialist religion that is desperately trying to explain why the Second Coming didn't happen on the appointed day. The day keeps getting pushed back, farther and farther, until finally everybody realizes that this isn't a revelation, it isn't truth, it's a wish. A hope.

In real science, if your theory is only able to stand up against the evidence by constantly inventing new reasons why the evidence can't be seen, you've got a problem.

Furthermore, if you have a theory which, by just changing this or that, can describe any one of millions of different universes, you have basically given up on science and moved into a different camp -- the tent meeting of faith.

Nothing against tent meetings or faith. They just aren't science.

We even have leading String Theorists saying, in effect, "Because String Theory gives us no way to describe why the universe functions as it does, we can only conclude that the universe we live in is a random event. We happen to live in the universe that happened to produce physicists, and so all we're studying is the accidental rules of this universe, when there could just as easily have been any of a million -- or an infinite number of -- different rule sets that were just as valid."

As Smolin points out, that is a declaration that science is over. Because if the rules could be anything, then there's no point in trying to discover what they are; in effect, there are no rules. Calling it "random" is just the atheist's way of saying "The universe is this way because God made it so, only there is no God." There's simply no room for science in that picture.

Groupthink

How did this happen to physicists? Remember, these are the people with the sharpest mathematical minds. The no-nonsense guys who don't put up with any ideas that can't be tested. How did the whole field become dominated by a theoretical approach that has resulted in very nearly (though not entirely -- Smolin bends over backward to be fair) nothing?

It's as if the entire world of physics -- and it's the world, not just America -- went on sabbatical for two decades. Only on the fringes of the field has anything been happening -- and it's been happening with very little grant money, because everything was getting sucked into the maw of String Theory.

You couldn't get tenure if you weren't a String Theorist. You couldn't get grant money. You couldn't get published. You couldn't get a doctorate -- except at the fringes of the field.

So the real work has been done by scientists living in poverty, working virtually alone, or funded by their own money. Only recently have some of them began getting attention for work that may actually describe the real world. It's a shameful thing when one ideology becomes so dominant that it effectively shuts the door to any other approach.

It happened because of groupthink. It's the same phenomenon that happened among pro-Communist leftists in America during the 1930s and 1940s, that allowed them to swallow Stalin's flip-flops about Hitler (now we hate him, now he's our buddy, now we hate him again), while still considering themselves to be intellectuals.

It's the same phenomenon that I watched sweeping through English departments at universities, first in the form of Deconstructionism, and then expanding to include Multiculturalism until it finally became "Literary Theory." I was appalled when that last change happened, because the meaning of "literary theory" used to embrace all the different approaches to literature -- but now it means only one particular theory, and it's perhaps the most useless one ever to exist, since its central tenet is that literature is nothing but the culture talking to itself, in which case, one might wonder, what's the point of talking about it?

I'll quote the same Oregon State University definition of Groupthink that Smolin quoted:

Groupthink members see themselves as part of an in-group working against an outgroup opposed to their goals. You can tell if a group suffers from groupthink if it:

1. Overestimates its invulnerability or high moral stance,

2. Collectively rationalizes the decisions it makes,

3. Demonizes or stereotypes outgroups and their leaders,

4. Has a culture of uniformity where individuals censor themselves and others so that the facade of group unanimity is maintained, and

5. Contains members who take it upon themselves to protect the group leader by keeping information, theirs or other group members', from the leader.

As Smolin says, "This does not match up one-to-one with my characterization of the culture of string theory, but it's close enough to be worrying" (p.287).

What worries me is that it matches up very, very closely with department after department in the American university, including the creative arts and the soft sciences, and with our media elites, and with both political parties.

We still talk about "American individuality" but when I look around me, I can see how in my lifetime the very people who claimed to be revolting against "the Establishment" have become a far, far more rigid Establishment themselves. And now they bring all the fervor of a witch hunt to destroy their enemies -- the "outgroups" that they demonize.

In Guilford County, we see it on both sides of the ludicrous "race issue" where the white racists see every action by black county commissioners as racism, and the black racists see every action by white county commissioners as racism, without anybody being able to recognize that sometimes the people who oppose you aren't necessarily the devil.

We see it in national politics, where the critics of the Bush administration froth at the mouth as they attack everything that Bush does -- and everything he doesn't do. He's the worst president ever because he didn't "do what it took" to stop North Korea and Iran from getting nukes, and he's the worst president every because he did do what it took to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

But the right wing is just as bad -- everyone who thinks abortion should be legal is a baby-killer; everybody who thinks assault weapons should be banned and concealed weapons are a danger is an enemy of freedom. The slightest deviation from the party line is punished.

There Is Hope for Science

Smolin's book is actually quite optimistic. He points out several very promising avenues of post-String Theory research. He is generous to those whose careers have been subsumed in the String Theory groupthink and welcomes them to begin branching out and exploring other approaches. He holds out hope primarily because physics is a science, and the kind of people who become physicists won't be content to keep going around in circles forever.

They will recognize the reality check, and soon. The facade of perfect unity is crumbling.

People are point out that physicists who dress themselves in String Theory are, in fact, pretty darn near naked.

But what about the other disciplines?

Students who read course descriptions like the ones I quoted at the beginning of this essay are becoming cynical. They recognize when somebody's blowing smoke in their faces. More and more, the smartest students are simply turning away from these disciplines. They are becoming the refuge of the frightened incompetent -- the students who are desperately afraid that somebody will find out that they are not really very smart at all. If they can just master the language of Theoretics, then regular folks won't understand them, so they'll have to believe they're smart!

What do you do then, when you find your department filling up with the weakest, most timid students at the university? How long before the emptiness of your own rhetoric disgusts even you, and you throw it all against the wall and start speaking English again, and checking your ideas against the real world?

In physics, it has only taken twenty years -- in another ten, String Theory will almost certainly be behind us, a nearly-forgotten and slightly-embarrassing episode on the way to real post-quantum physics. That's because even when they were doing something ultimately useless, everybody doing String Theory was actually brilliant.

It will take longer for Theoretics to die, because most of the people getting on the bandwagon now aren't all that bright, relatively speaking; then again, when most of the genuinely smart people aren't in your group, eventually it's going to collapse.

Kind of the way Communism did in Russia in 1989. Poof -- and the monster is gone.

But look at all the corpses it made while we still thought it was real.

There is such a thing as reality. Even in English Departments, and Women's Studies, and African-American Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies, there is a real world, and eventually, if your descriptions of it don't match up with that real world, you will wind up like millennarian prophets whose messiah never showed up -- without followers, except for the most rabid true believers who never make reality checks at all.

Eventually, the thousands of dissertations and "scholarly" papers written in Theoretics will be looked at as a historical curiosity, like Piltdown Man and Aether and the Philosopher's Stone. Tourists -- only a few -- will look at the artifacts and say, "People actually believed this? They took it seriously?" And the docent will smile benignly and say, "Not just anybody -- it was the most educated who were most deceived."

What Can We Do?

To paraphrase a great country song: Parents, don't let your children grow up to be college students.

But if you must let them get their meal ticket punched, then before you let them go to the university, inoculate them. Show them passages written in Theoretics. Decode them together. Point out how ridiculous they are. Prepare them so that whenever someone starts speaking to them in this kind of obfuscatory language, they'll laugh.

Ridicule is the only answer to intellectual pretension. Since, over time, the participants in Groupthink invariably end up being only the most frightened and insecure, ridicule makes them panic. As long as they feel their group around them, they still act like a mob -- so that many a student and many a dissident professor still feels the pain of the witch hunt. But when the scorn becomes pervasive enough, the mob evaporates, and all its former members pretend that they never belonged, they never believed.

We ordinary citizens need to make them irrelevant and treat them with the scorn they deserve. They are not, in fact, smarter than we are -- the reverse is more likely to be true. They have been educated in falsehood, which makes them more ignorant than the uneducated.

Who Are the Real Intellectuals?

If you're really smart -- a genuine intellectual -- then you will be able to communicate effectively, especially with people who disagree with you. (In physics, the language used is mathematics; but in most fields, it is the native tongue of the people.)

That's not a very lofty test, is it? But Smolin passes it, brilliantly. While a vast number of people who pride themselves on how smart they are fail it every single day.

We have school administrators who lost their hold on English long ago, and simply can't speak in language that ordinary citizens can understand. Yet these people decide how our children will be taught -- why aren't we laughing at their obvious, self-demonstrated incompetence?

We have university professors, art critics, artists, political theorists, economists, psychologists, people of high repute in almost every field, who have retreated into Groupthink so far that they literally can no longer test their ideas against reality. Yet people still act as if their opinions and predictions matter.

But after decades of dominance by the Groupthinkers, the first light of dawn is now visible on the horizon. A new generation is simply uninterested in joining their club.

The best writers aren't writing to please their professors.

The best artists aren't taking their classes or applying for their grants.

The best young office-seekers are sickened by the Groupthink and desperate to find sensible real-world solutions to real problems instead of joining either of the two teams of semi-insane people called "parties."

The best teachers let the words of the education theorists pour over them like rain and then get on with their work in the real world.

Real Science

Here's how Smolin describes the ethics that promote real science:

1. If an issue can be decided by people of good faith, applying rational argument to publicly available evidence, then it must be regarded as so decided.

2. If, on the other hand, rational argument from the publicly available evidence does not succeed in bringing people of good faith to agreement on an issue, society must allow and even encourage people to draw diverse conclusions (p. 301).

I don't know how that sounds to you, but to me, it comes like a breath of fresh air. I want to print up cards with those two statements on them, and hand them out to people who are ranting about how those who disagree with them are evil and have the worst possible motives and should be fired from their jobs.

Let's have another go at how we recognize true intellectuals:

They read widely and constantly, especially in subjects they did not study in school.

They enjoy civilized discussion with people whose ideas are not identical to their own and they change their minds when presented with better ideas.

They turn away from pretension and judge other people's intellectual ability, not by the conclusions they believe in, but by the thought processes by which they reached those conclusions.

Intellectuals like this really do exist. I personally know seven -- no, eight -- no, nine of them who are currently teaching at American universities. And I've read the publications of perhaps a dozen more.

Of course, I have met hundreds of professors and read the publications and speeches of many more than that. The percentage of intellectuals is not high in academia, but it's also not non-existent.

I also know dozens of genuine, first-rate intellectuals who are not in academia, most of whom do not have advanced degrees, some of whom never went to college at all. But they pass the test. They are a joy to be with. I learn from them all the time. I hope that sometimes they learn from me.

Meanwhile, when you see them speaking or writing in Theoretics, laugh -- but remember that they're only doing it because they used to be admired for it. The fashion is passing and they haven't realized it yet, like fifty-year-olds who are still strutting in clothes that were in vogue back when they were in their twenties. You still wear that? Oh, how ... nice.

Just make sure that we're not falling for a new intellectual fashion just as blindly as they did.


Lee Smolin. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.) 392 pp., $26.00.

 

No Gotchas - What's up?
 
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Local Couple Hit Snag in Adoption in Thailand

The trip to Thailand was supposed to be simple. Instead, a local couple's quest to bring their adopted daughter home became caught up in red tape. The road certainly started out bumpy for Baby Fiona. But we're happy to tell you that smoother sailing is ahead. WFMZ's Bo Koltnow has the story. 

[ FAMILY'S YOUTUBE VIDEO #1 ]  [ FAMILY'S YOUTUBE VIDEO #2 ]  [ FAMILY'S YOUTUBE VIDEO #3 ]
  
>> We'd like to introduce you for the first time to baby Fiona.

>> REPORTER: This Youtube video marks the beginning of the new Freimuth family. 

>> Youtube Random Tickling 

>> REPORTER: But for parents Kurtis and Andrea Freimuth of Allentown... adopting baby Fiona has been anything but a laughing matter. 

>> KURTIS:  The Department of homeland security denied us at first. 

>> REPORTER: By phone from Bangkok.. Thailand.. Kurtis told us in order to get Fiona back to the States.. Homeland Security demanded the biological father's signature on the birth certificate. 

>> KURTIS:  On birth certificate says our daughter has no father and no father is listed. 

>> REPORTER A crushing blow to the couple who had traveled half a world away to meet their new daughter. Kurtis says he and Andrea were cleared by the Thai government to take Fiona home. But Homeland Security at the U.S. Embassy weren't so easy. They warned them it could be another two months before they bring little Fiona home to Allentown. Kurtis says even his adoption agency was flabbergasted. 

>> KURTIS:  He said this is the first time they had ever requested a document for the father. 

>> BO: With frustration no doubt mounting in Thailand Kurtis and Andrea reached out to everyone they could think of here in the U.S. Including their pastor here at the Concordia Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. He then got in touch with Senator Arlen Specter. The Freimuths were told Senator Specter's office contacted both the Thai government and the Department of Homeland Security. They don't know for sure if that did the trick.. but less than a day later they were rushed through the adoption process. 

>> LATEST YOUTUBE: We're finally able to say as of today Fiona has been cleared to be a U.S. citizen. 

>> REPORTER: The Freimuths are now free of the red tape... They'll be flying back to Allentown this weekend with their little Fiona.. A little girl who's too young to know the hurdles her parents had to jump..to bring her to her new home.



View article and or watch video clip at this address: http://www.wfmz.com/view/?id=719218 | article printed: 2009-04-20

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No Gotchas - What's up?
 
#
Snag for drilling plans

Snag for drilling plans

By PAUL GORMAN - The Press
Last updated 05:00 28/03/2009

 

Environmental concerns may hinder a plan to drill into the dangerous Alpine Fault.

Sixty-five of the world's top earthquake scientists have been in Franz Josef this week planning a highly ambitious project.

They say it will enable them to better understand the Alpine Fault and when it might rupture next, generating a devastating earthquake of around 8 on the Richter scale.

A final decision on the location where researchers want to drill more than one kilometre into the Earth's crust has yet to be made.

But they appear to be honing in on the central West Coast section of the fault, somewhere between Harihari and just south of Fox Glacier.

This fault section is where the Southern Alps' highest rates of uplift are found and is on the western margin of many of the country's highest mountains, including peaks in the Aoraki-Mount Cook area.

However, workshop organiser John Townend , of Victoria University, said while the broad location appeared to be the best scientifically, there would be environmental issues associated with getting permission to drill close to or within national parks and the South Westland World Heritage Area.

"National park permissibility is something we are well aware of. Drilling is not just a visual distraction it's very noisy while drilling is going on, and there's the associated road traffic. National parks are a very difficult proposition," Townend said.

The Alpine Fault marks the boundary between the Pacific and the Australian crustal plates, is visible from space and runs more than 650km along the western edge of the Alps from Marlborough to south of Fiordland.

Previous research suggests it ruptures every 250 to 300 years and that the last major magnitude 8 earthquake was in 1717, which effectively moved much of Westland eight metres further north.

Townend said the drilling project would cost millions of dollars and financial support would be needed from scientific agencies around the world. Initial drilling was still more than a year away.

Harold Tobin, a United States geophysicist involved in an undersea drilling project into faultlines off the south coast of Japan, said the importance of such research justified the price tag.

( reprinted from Stuff.co.nz/environment)

 

 

Phillies leather the competition

 

Click to enlarge

TAMPA, Fla. – Every Phillies fan remembers the Shane Victorino’s grand salami off CC Sabathia and the Matt Stairs moon shot in Chavez Ravine.

They have total recall when they think of Brad Lidge and Cole Hamels mowing down the Rays in Game 5 of the World Series.

But don’t forget the defense.

From the quick, clutch 6-4-3 double play that helped the team escape trouble and clinch the division on the second to last day of the regular season, to Victorino bouncing off the center field wall against the Brewers, to Chase Utley’s heads-up, fake throw to first, real throw to home in Game 5, the team’s glove work also played a part in winning.

“It’s probably the most important,” Jimmy Rollins said of the importance of defense in a team’s ability to win. “We can win games by stopping teams from scoring runs and (us) scoring a few more often than we can score eight or nine runs and out-hit teams – which we can do, too. But, hey, I’ll take 4-1 every night.

“Great defense (wins). When the Mariners won 116 games or whatever it was, they were winning on pitching and defense. They’d score three runs, it was like, ‘We’re in trouble tonight.’”

Rollins’ memory is right on. In 2001, when Seattle won 116 games, they committed 83 errors, the fewest in baseball that season.

In the seven years since, every World Championship-winning team, with the exception of Boston in 2004, has finished in the top half of their respective leagues in fewest errors. The ’02 Angels, ’03 Marlins and ’07 Red Sox all finished with the third fewest in baseball.

Last season, the Phillies tied with the American League champion Tampa Bay Rays with 90 errors – only eight teams made fewer errors.

“No questions asked it’s an important part of the game that gets overlooked,” said Victorino, who won his first Gold Glove last year. “You look a lot of the Gold Glove winners and sometimes it’s not about good defense, it’s guys who had good offensive years that have a reputation of being good players. A lot of times, defensive guys get overlooked if they’re not a recognizable name.”

Victorino, who made the transition from right to center field last year with the departure of Aaron Rowand, said he was surprised when he received the phone call regarding the Gold Glove.

“I didn’t expect it,” said Victorino, who dropped a ball in the first inning of an 8-5 loss to the Yankees Wednesday, but made up for it later with a mad-dash, over-the-shoulder-Willie Mays-like snag. “There are so many guys out there with bigger, more recognizable names.”

But winning a Gold Glove or having your picture on the cover of the latest edition of the sabermetrician fielding doctrine comes with a catch, too. Rollins, who went under the radar for his defensive abilities early in his career, has won two straight Gold Gloves and has his image emblazoned on the front of ‘The Fielding Bible, Volume II.’

With a building reputation comes an increase in the amount of eyeballs watching your every move on the diamond.

“Yeah … but that’s a good thing,” Rollins said. “People expect you to make the routine plays. They also expect the great plays. So you go into a game looking forward, looking for that type of play to happen.

“Before it was, ‘It would be nice if I could make that type of play,’ and now it’s, ‘There’s a play I better make – they’re expecting it.’ But I’m expecting it first. If I don’t expect it, it doesn’t matter.”

In “The Fielding Bible’s” annual awards, selected by SABR Godfather Bill James and the people at Baseball Info Solutions, Rollins was rated the best shortstop in baseball in 2008. Chase Utley was voted the third best second baseman, and Victorino and third baseman Pedro Feliz both finished eighth at their positions.

The Phillies also feature above-average defenders in right field (Jayson Werth) and at catcher (Carlos Ruiz). In left, Raul Ibanez is replacing Pat Burrell (which is at the very least an upgrade in speed) and, at first, Ryan Howard arrived in camp early to improve on his defense after making a major-league high 19 errors last season.

“If Ryan keeps progressing like he has this spring, that’s one heck of an infield when you think about it,” Rollins said. “We take pride in not letting the balls get through.”

Rollins, the second half of the Phillies’ Gold Glove-winning tandem with Victorino, said he had to grow into being a dependable defender when he arrived in the big leagues in 2000. Rather than trying to make the eye-opening, highlight-reel plays, Rollins was told by former long-time coach John Vukovich to focus on making the routine grounders look routine.

“You’ll make the play for ESPN when they present it presents itself,” Rollins recalls ‘Vuk’ telling him.

Rollins believes he’s grown into becoming one of the major league’s top defensive shortstops. Despite his dependability for the better part of the last decade, he said developing a reputation league-wide “is something you earn.”

Victorino earned that acclaim last year for the first time. Entering 2009, the goal is to keep it – or, better yet, improve.

“It’s not that I go out there and think I have to do this or that, and hold onto the Gold Glove,” Victorino said. “I definitely want to stay at that level and I want to get better. I think that’s the thing – every year I want to get better, I don’t want to stop now because I got to a certain point. I want to get better, because if I get better, I help the team get better. Other guys feel the same way.”

For more Phillies news, notes and observations, visit Ryan’s Phillies blog at delcotimes.com/blogs

 

 

When the going gets tough, the tough can bail

Friday, April 17, 2009


Traveling is an art, not a science, and part of the gig is rolling with the punches. But if there's a chance to take a bad situation and make it better, I say go for it.

When we made our honeymoon plans for Kauai, having never visited Hawaii before, we decided to check out three parts of the island during our 10-day stay. We would start on the east side, to be pampered at the famed Coco Palms Hotel, stay a few days in the wetter north, in a condo on Hanalei Bay, then finish up in the dry south in a cottage at Poipu Beach.

Everything was going smoothly until we got to the cottage. Being late July, it was especially hot and humid and the cottage had only one pitiful electric fan, which did nothing to relieve the sweltering heat or disturb the incessant insects feasting on our haole flesh. We had booked it for two nights, but after one sleepless one, we bailed. We ate the cost of night two and fled back to the Coco Palms and for a final taste of luxury.

We didn't know it then, but this was the first in a long history of bailing.

(And we had mixed feelings when the cottage complex was obliterated by Hurricane Iwa the following year.)

In the early days of our marriage we weren't always assertive in our travels. When we checked into the Dinesen Hotel on our first trip to Rome, just off the Via Veneto, we had high hopes for a romantic stay in the city where my husband had spent part of his childhood.

The hotel was named after Danish "Out of Africa" author Isak Dinesen, who had studied art in Rome. But we would remember it as the dinge-esen, for its gloomy dark hallways. That wasn't the worst of it. Our room was located on a courtyard that smelled distinctly of rat poison. We called the front desk and asked to be moved but were told they were fully booked so that would not be possible. We shrugged, closed the window and tried not to spend too much time in the room during our visit.

We were young. We were forgiving. But we learned.

The more we traveled, the firmer we got in our resolve not to tolerate a bad booking if we could change it. Unlike Richard Nixon, we think there is no shame in quitting. Our family philosophy became: When in doubt, bail.

On a trip to the South of France, we booked a room for three days at a small, elegant hotel in Arles near the cafe pictured in Vincent van Gogh's "Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum." As soon as we stepped inside it we noticed the pungent odor of cleaning fluid, a smell of such intensity it made our eyes burn.

We called the man at the front desk, who assured us it would dissipate. "Go to dinner," monsieur suggested, "and it will be gone by the time you get back."

But when we returned, we found the chemical smog in our room unabated and undiminished. And the odiferous haze was not the only offense to our eyes. The walls and ceiling were covered in the most hideous wallpaper we'd ever seen: ornate brown curlicues on a bright yellow background. Perhaps we could tolerate one or the other, but accepting both was beyond our capability.

In the morning, the man at the front desk kindly let us pay for just the one night, and we headed for the country. Just a few kilometers outside Arles we found a spacious, attractive room at a hotel in the small town of Fontvieille - with a pool! - for half the price of our Arles accommodations. We recommend that hotel, La Peiriero, to people on their way to Provence, and often think of how we might never have discovered it if we hadn't had the strength to bail.

We have since bailed on hotel rooms that smelled of cigarettes, insisted on switching a rental car when we couldn't stand the color of the interior, and waited for a couple of hours at a car rental in Geneva for a proper car seat for our toddler rather than take the unsafe big-kid's seat they tried to foist on us.

One time we refused a room at the exquisite Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles when they assigned us former servant's quarters on the attic level. We had reserved well in advance, but they insisted this was all they had available.

We said, "No, merci," and found humbler digs in the heart of the city: a room with a sagging trundle bed that left us separated like two kids at a sleepover. But we had a great dinner at a hole in the wall with a superb flamenco guitarist, so bailing still turned out to be the right choice.

It's not easy going through life with a princess-and-the-pea sensibility. But if you hit a snag and bail, it can save you a world of heartache.

Regan McMahon is an Oakland writer. E-mail comments about this story to travel@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page G - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/17/TRH015PTRB.DTL

 

 

 

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Scientist:: "My quake prediction was ignored" CNN Italy Quake
 

L'AQUILA, Italy (CNN) -- A researcher says he predicted Monday's devastating earthquake that killed dozens of people and left tens of thousands homeless in central Italy, but authorities dismissed him as a scaremonger.

Giacchino Giuliani says he wants an apology from officials who he says ignored his warnings.

Giacchino Giuliani says he wants an apology from officials who he says ignored his warnings.

Gioacchino Giuliani, an employee at a physics institute at Gran Sasso, near the badly-hit city of L'Aquila, has demanded an official apology for what he says was an unforgivable failure to act on his predictions.

"There are people who must apologize to me, and they must have the weight of what occurred on their conscience," Giuliani said after the quake hit, according to local news site Ilcapoluogo.com.

Last month, vans with loudspeakers drove around the area broadcasting Giuliani's warning after he claimed his method of predicting seismic events by radon gas emissions had forecast an imminent quake.

The scientist was reported to police for spreading false alarms and was made to remove his findings from the Internet. "They called me an imbecile," he said.

According IlCapoluogo, Giuliani gave an interview as recently as March 24 in which he repeated his claims.

Local authorities have insisted Monday's 6.3-magnitude event was part of a sequence of tremors in a quake-prone area and neither the size nor the timing was possible to predict.

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Giuliani said he was monitoring radon concentrations ahead of Monday's quake, but knew the authorities would press charges against him if he repeated his warning.

"last night I did not know who to talk to. I could see the situation was deteriorating and there was nothing I could do," he said, according to IlCapoluogo.

 

-- CNN's Barry Neild and Gisella Deputato contributed to this report

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What Would Nostradmaus Do? Looks Good On Paper, Anyway

What Would Nostradamus Do?

 

UFO Fireball Over Austin Texas

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=roqm1ofUFko&feature=related

 

Austin marathon runners running, with mysterious fireball streaking above.....

 

 

WWND?

 

Mabus may be tapped as next Navy secretary

Ana Radelat • Clarion-Ledger Washington Bureau • February 4, 2009

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Reading International Chicken Little Taking Up Millions of Acid Buttons Not Well

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burning debris from satellites spotted over several US cities

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

Jump to: navigation, search

Sunday, February 15, 2009

On Tuesday, February 10, the American civilian communications satellite Iridium 33, launched in 1997, and the defunct Russian military communications satellite Kosmos-2251, launched in 1993, collided over Siberia. Five days after the collision, reports have surfaced that burning debris from the collision has been spotted over several U.S. cities from New Mexico to Kentucky.

Calls to 9-1-1 began to come in to Williamson County, Texas sheriff's office around 12:30 p.m. (Central time) that burning debris and fireballs were seen falling from the sky onto parts of Austin, Houston. Waco and San Antonio. Residents reported their homes and windows shaking and large explosions. After a search of several areas, the Williamson county sheriff's office reported that no debris or impact sites were found. Earlier unconfirmed reports had said the debris could have been the result of a small plane exploding.

Iridium satellite.
Image: ideonexus.

Steve Thornton, a resident in Austin told KEYE-TV that he "saw something burn up in the atmosphere going east to west at 40 degrees in the horizon looking north" which was "about the size of a half moon and as bright as a welders torch". Other residents reported to KEYE-TV that they saw an "egg-shape with an orange center and bluish outer aura; a silvery-white tail." Some report the incident lasting about 10 minutes.

On February 13, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued an alert following reports of "explosions and earthquakes" along with "flashes in the sky" in Jackson and Louisville, Kentucky. There were no injures and authorities could not locate any damage.

"The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported to local law enforcement on Friday that these events are being caused by falling satellite debris. These pieces of debris have been causing sonic booms, resulting in vibrations felt by some residents, as well as flashes of light across the sky," said the NOAA in a public information statement on February 13. The FAA also warns that the debris could cause damage to aircraft in areas reporting falling debris.

"Aircraft are advised that a potential hazard may occur due to reentry of satellite debris into the Earth's atmosphere. It is critical that all pilots/crew members report any observed falling space debris," said the FAA on February 13. Both the NOAA and FAA alerts are in place until further notice and cover an area from New Mexico to Kentucky.

However, Dr. Marco Ciocca, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University told WKYT in Kentucky it would "be months" before any of the satellite wreckage enters the earth's atmosphere. "The debris doesn't simply fall out of its orbit. It will either vaporize or stay in orbit for some time before falling into earth's atmosphere."

The satellites, both of which weighed in excess of 1,000 pounds, and traveling at approximately 17,500 miles per hour, collided 491 miles above the earth. Scientists say the explosion caused by the collision was massive. They are still trying to determine just how large the crash was and how the earth will be affected. The United States Strategic Command of the U.S. Department of Defense office is tracking the debris. The result of plotting analysis will be posted to a public website.


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Beyonce Knowles will be singing "At Last" for Barack and Michelle's 1st Dance
  • Beyonce Knowles revealed she will be singing "At Last" for Barack and Michelle Obama's first dance after the inauguration tomorrow night. — Entertainment Tonight
  •  
     
     

    Kelly Osbourne arrested; George Clooney makes Ellen DeGeneres appearance; Joaquin Phoenix makes hip-hop debut

     

    Kelly Osbourne Arrested

    AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

    Kelly Osbourne has been released on bail after she was arrested for allegedly slapping a woman who insulted her fiance Luke Worral.

    The daughter of rocker Ozzy Osbourne is accused of confronting Sunday Mirror journalist Zoe Griffin at London nightclub Punk in August over an article in which the gossip columnist teased model Worrall over not knowing how an earthquake is caused.

    Griffin wrote in her column shortly after the incident, "She (Kelly) shouted loudly in my ear: 'I have an issue with you. My boyfriend knows what an earthquake is and everyone has been laughing at him and he's upset.'

    "(Then) I felt a hard slap to my right cheekbone. I put my hand to my face while my friends looked on aghast.

    "Soon Kelly came rampaging back over with a female friend jabbing a finger in the air, telling me that I'd have to watch my back if I shared my story with readers of this column. Well sorry Kelly, I won't be silenced by bullies."

    Griffin called in cops over the incident and the matter is now under investigation.

    Osbourne went with her lawyers to a central London police station and handed herself over voluntarily earlier this month.

    A Metropolitan Police spokesman says, "We can confirm a 24-year-old woman attended a central London police (station) by appointment on January 2. She was arrested for common assault relating to an alleged incident in Soho in the early hours of August 29, 2008."

    Osbourne has been released on bail until March.

    No Gotchas - What's up?
     
    #
    An Earthquake Predication Essay From Zhonghao Shou

     

     

     



    EARTHQUAKE CLOUDS AND
    SHORT TERM PREDICTION

    A serious social problem helps devastating earthquakes

    -(renew) August 23, 2008 -

     

    An M7.9 earthquake happened at 31.10N and 103.28E in Wen-Chuan, Sichuan, China at 6:28 (UTC) on May 12, 2008 [1] and killed 87,652 people and injured 247,645.  I would like to express my great sadness and condolence to those victims and their relatives. Many people wrote me. I thank them for their strong belief in and notice of my work. I would like to also express the bitterness I can’t help, but feel regarding a social problem that inadvertently contributes to the devastating effects of the earthquake.  It involves an earthquake cloud that was observed prior to the quake.  I offer this as an open response.

     

    Although the United Nations published my paper “Bam Earthquake Prediction & Space Technology” into its yearbook [2] and shared the book with all its members during the 42nd Session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee in Vienna from 21 Feb. 2005 to 4 Mar., the serious satellite data problems and the large earthquake data problems I mentioned have not been resolved. I was eager to walk up the society to solve those problems, so all large earthquakes would be able to be predicted exactly in a circle of 20 km and a magnitude error +/- 0.2. However, due to a social problem, my effort has not been successful. Moreover, I have health problems and have to take care of my little grandson, Thus, I have stopped predicting earthquakes as of Sept. 27, 2007[3]. Now, let me explain the social problem.

    In Sept. 2004, the National Geographic organized a film competition in Singapore. One week before the competition, the Indian Miditech TV Company wrote me asking for a 4-minute-tape of my work in hurry. I did it. As a result, the company won a fund for a one-hour film called "Chase Earthquake". I was very happy and prepared a 73-page PowerPoint for it to educate governments as to my methods and alert them to the critical need for this work.  However, the company had a plan to shoot various predictors in American, India and China, and gave me only about 4 minutes in the film. I could not, in good faith, accept this limitation. I told them that the Nature Debates in 1999 had denied the other widely studied precursors. I also explained that could not show my work in so little time, but they insisted on having it their way. Therefore, I had to reject the shoot [4].

    In Apr. 2006, I was invited to introduce my work to the scientists of the Disaster Prediction Committee of China, the Analysis and Predicting Center of the Chinese Seismological Bureau, and the Geological Institute of the Chinese Seismological Bureau in Beijing, and received great comments. The 73-page PowerPoint was widely admired.  Chinese Scientific Academe Member Jing Ma, who was misunderstood as the most picky scientist against any predictor, nodded and admired, “Right”, “Right”, “Right” continuously. The PowerPoint was copied by many scientists of the institute. After I came back to my hometown Hangzhou, Senior Seismologist Zuji Qiang of the institute called me to explain that he had been in a hospital just during my lecture. He heard about my exciting lecture from many his colleagues, and he was going to come to visit me home. Later, he really came and high admired my work. By the PowerPoint, I suggested governments using 0.01% of their earthquake budgets to solve satellite data problems and earthquake data problems, so all large earthquakes would be able to pinpoint out in a circle of a radius of 20 km even less and a magnitude error of +/- 0.2. I also wrote the director of the Chinese Seismological Bureau with my paper “Bam Earthquake Prediction & Space Technology” and requested him to solve those data problems to save people. However, he ignored my request. I also publish my suggestion and posted it in our web site [5], but no one noticed it. 

               In the USA, Dr. Alan Jones put his “Fair Review” out to attack me under many witnesses, but failed after my defense in 2007 [6].  Three doctors urge the editor of the Seismological Research Letter to publish my paper. Unfortunately, she was not the editor anymore. As a result, my effort to solve those data problems by publishing the paper failed. Moreover, Gerstenberger, M.C. et al. claim, “Despite a lack of reliable deterministic earthquake precursors” without evidence to deny my work in Nature and boasted “Real-time forecasts of tomorrow’s earthquakes in California”. Their paper is wrong for it has neither a model to explain essential earthquake phenomena e.g. the Bam cloud in theory, nor statistical significant predictions to demonstrate its reliability in practice. Moreover, terms of foreshock and aftershock do not have scientific definitions [7]. Their paper confuses people and is publication pollution. 

               In 1994, I applied a fund from the USA, but failed. One reason was no donation. Therefore, I appealed people for donation in our web site in 2002. A little people did it. A few people even insulted me. This fact implies that people seem not really to worry about earthquakes. It makes me feel ironic because I gave up a right to receive $2,000 I deserved for transforming my patent and a good opportunity for a technical consultant in 1994. I had separated with my dear wife for 12 years for my dream. I spent pity scholarship of my older daughter for living in the USA to do my research.  What did I receive? The above facts shows that a serious social problem helps devastating earthquakes

         Now, let me discuss the cloud people are interested in. After seeing the data of the USGS in the evening on May 12, I checked the cloud immediately, and found it from May 2 to 12. On May 14, a man claimed his earthquake cloud photos taken a month ago, but I declined. Later, a friend told me earthquake cloud photos on TV, taken by man from Shandong two days before the earthquake. I found the photos from a web site [8]. They have correct shapes and time with those I found from satellite image, so they are right. A prediction of M6 and above within two days by those clouds is correct, too, which proves earthquake clouds’ reliability, again. The following satellite image shows the exact epicenter [9] that makes me fell very sorry and upset because in this especial case, if governments had supported me a little fund to maintain my web site, I would have predicted this killer exactly to save many people.

               Finally, I would like to thank three Chinese people: Chen Xiao-Kun, Zhao Juan-Juan and Ye Shui-Zhen for their willingness to donate me thousand dollars each in 2006, but I did not accept it because those money might have been accumulated in their all lives, but to solve those problems needs much more money. 

     

     

     

    References

    1. The Sichuan earthquake map by the USGS
    2. Darrell Harrington & Zhonghao Shou Bam Earthquake Prediction & Space Technology Seminars of the United Nations Programme on Space Applications16, 39-63 (2005).
    3. Note This website will take a long break Sept. 27, 2007
    4. Essay Trip in China (renew)* July 29, 2006
    5. Zhonghao Shou Precursor of the Largest Earthquake in the Last Forty Years New Concepts in Global Tectonics 41, 6-15 (2006).
    6. Essay Alan Jones’ “Fair Review”  August 21, 2007
    7. Gerstenberger, M.C., Wiemer, S, Jones, L.M., & Reasenberg, P.A., Real-time forecasts of tomorrow’s earthquakes in California. Nature 435, 328-331 (2005).
    8. Link of cloud photo http://pinewooddesign.co.uk/2008/05/12/earthquake-cloud-prediction/
    9. The cloud in satellite image

     


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    Updated: May 18, 2008 | Webmaster

     

    From http://www.earthquakesignals.com/zhonghao296/A080520a.html

     

     

     

    From Wikipedia.... Zhongao Shou.....  

    Since 1994, Zhonghao Shou, a retired Chinese chemist living in Pasadena, New York and Seattle by elapsing, has made thousands earthquake predictions based on cloud patterns in satellite images with an accuracy more than 70%. Fifty of them, are verified by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). “Peer on” this set i.e. assuming earthquake data of the USGS without error and an earthquake at a point without radius, 34 predictions or 68% are correct in time, area and magnitude. Analyzing the 16 mistakes shows each cause from a satellite data problem, an earthquake data problem, or an experience problem of Shout as a pioneer. Even if blaming all the 16 mistakes from the clouds, this set is still on statistic significance, demonstrated by Monte Carlo Simulation with a 1 in 5,000 chance and by Brelsford- Jones Score Method with a 1 in 16,000 chance for a random guesser to successfully simulate this set.

     

     

    Also From Wikipedia.......  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_to_No_One

     

    Unknown to No One

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  

    Jump to: navigation, search
    UTN1
    Origin Iraq
    Genre(s) Pop
    Years active 1999
    Website http://www.utn1.com
    Members
    Shant Gharabedian, Artin Haroutounian

    Unknown to No One or UTN1 is an emerging boy band from Iraq formed in 1999 by founding members Shant Gharabedian and Artin Haroutounian who are of Armenian descent. The group is notable for being Iraq's pioneering pop group and because they formed under Saddam Hussein's regime.


    Contents

    [hide]

    [edit] Pre-2003 Invasion

    The brainchild of Art (Artin) and Shant, the group was originally formed in 1999, during the last years of Saddam Hussein's presidency. The duo dared to form a pop band where few had the courage to do so. They found the resources to produce their first demo song, with limited sound engineering devices. They eventually advertised for vocalists and recruited the other three members into the band - Hassan sent them a letter to the mail box they put in the advertisement the played on the local radio (V.O.Y) then Hassan's cousin Akhlad and their friend Nadeem joined and formed Unknown to No One or UTN1.

    They used to compose music on a keyboard, which they left in the trunk of their Volkswagen Passat. The vehicle was also their rehearsal stage beside some other members houses , where they used to sing, especially when there was no one from the secret police following their actions. Promoting an English-singing band under such a regime was a risky thing. The group could not get any of their songs to air on Iraqi radio unless they sang for Saddam Hussein. So Art Haroutounian wrote a piece praising Saddam on his birthday. The song was aired for many times on the Voice of Youth radio program, but their original hit piece was aired only once. then they released the 1st single ( fancy girl ) which was their 1st love song

    Later a music record store owner ( Alan Enwia ) offered them to produce an album. Depending on their own capability ties and without having any professional support they managed, with limited budget, to have eight songs recorded. Young people started buying their simple piece of work which was in display at the music record store and they sold more than 2000 copies in 2002 . then after the war the boys had a big media interest and they did many interview with ( bbc´cnn´ruiters ´ap´and many more becos of that interest they were contacted by some english producers becos they had some potential hits in the demo album they did in 2002 ( hey girl ). However, that Western media interest brought some toubles also as after an American journalsit had interviewed Alan Enwia, Enwia was taken to intorrogation by Saddam's Secret Police. Then a British journalist found his way to one of the band members', Hassan, house and interviewed him. The next day, Saddam's Police paid Hassan's parents a visit and terrified them.


    for more info try www.myspace.com/utn1 www.utn1.com and also try to catch them on the facebook page ( utn1 fanclub)

    [edit] Post-2003 Invasion

    After the war broke out, the boys lost momentum at home but soon were featured in Western news programs achieving some stardom. A British talent searcher, Peter Whitehead, promised to promote their music, but he failed to secure a visa for the group to travel to England. The boys experienced bitter disappointment. But with the old regime gone, new hope emerged for the pop group as people became more and more interested with Iraq's only boy band.

    In 2004 the boys lost the hope of producing some new music so they were disconnected for a while until they met with ( LCI) company who signed the band and moved them to Jordan and then London where they recorded (While We Can ) their first international song, which talks about the situation in Iraq. In 2006 they went to Lebanon to start a career in the middle east. They prepared and recorded their new English album in 2007 and they recorded the first Arabic hit ( Jamila ), which was one of the most popular songs in the Lebanese charts in late 2007

    They are currently working on the second hit and also for the release of the English album.

    [edit] Discography

    [edit] Singles

    • While We Can ( طالما نقدر )
    • Jamila ( جميلة Beautiful )
    • Loughat El Ayn ( لغة العين Language of the Eye )

    [edit] Band Members

    For a country torn into sectarian strife, Unknown to No One perhaps represents the opposite. The group band members consist of different ethnic and religious groups.

    • Artin Haroutiounian is an Armenian Christian, vocals and keyboards.
    • Shant Garabedian is also Armenian Christian, vocals and drums.
    • Nadeem Hamid is an Iraqi Shiite, vocals.
    • Hassan Ali Al-Falluji is an Iraqi Shiite, vocals and guitar.
    • Akhlad Raof is an Iraqi Shiite, vocals and joza.

    Former Member: Diyar Dullari, Sunni Kurd, vocals and guitar

    [edit] See also

    [edit] References

     

    No Gotchas - What's up?
     
    #
    When Assault Becomes Murder - An Analysis of the Oscar Grant Shooting . Repost

    Sunday, January 11, 2009

    When Assault Becomes Murder - An Analysis of the Oscar Grant Shooting

    The videotaped shooting death of Oscar Grant by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle has stirred angry demands for criminal charges from the public as BART officials and the Alameda County District Attorney have dragged their feet.

    Officials claim that they need more time to investigate what the public has already seen... a police officer shooting an unarmed man who posed no threat in the back, in cold blood.

    The BART police department, transit authority, and District Attorney, Tom Orloff, have all made it clear that they are desperately seeking evidence to absolve the officer by floating speculation that it was an accident of some sort or that there was some justification for the shooting that wasn't captured on the three different videos that have been released to the public... videos that all show the same thing... an unjustified killing.

    Fellow police officers have also tried to do the same by floating the theory of "taser confusion" as cause for this killing, suggesting that it's easy to confuse a brightly colored device that is lighter than, has a different grip than, and is supposed to be carried on the opposite side than a service weapon.

    Even if we accept this dubious possibility the death is still a criminal matter by way of shear negligence. But there's another disturbing aspect to this death which makes it a crime of intent. it is an aspect that has been entirely missed so far, but was ultimately the series of actions that needlessly put Oscar Grant in harm's way that night.

    To understand what caused the arrest of Oscar Grant to spiral downward into murder we need to examine the actions of the other officer, not just Mehserle's. It was this officer who escalated the arrest of an unarmed and cooperative suspect into a use of force situation without any apparent reason whatsoever, and it was this officer who did it in such a way as to deprive Oscar Grant of any choice but to struggle in order to try to follow a command that he could never comply with... a situation that he couldn't control, but which ultimately cost him his life.

    The Analysis
    Note: the following images are clips from different videos but keyed to the timestamps of this third video from KTVU shot from the train by a cell phone camera.


    An analysis of this video shows that, at mark 00:10 an unidentified bald officer walks up and punched Oscar Grant and then leaves after a few seconds.


    At 01:23, after the bald officer returns and appears to order the detainees arrest, Mehserle pulls Grant's arms behind him while Grant is in a kneeling position and there is no sign of resistance.


    However, at 01:26 Mehserle pushes Grant face first to the ground while the bald officer plants his knee on Grant's neck, which causes Grant to involuntarily squirm due to the pain of that maneuver. Up to this point there appeared to be no threat posed by Grant to justify the use of this tactic.


    At 01:28 Mehserle makes a furtive grab for his service weapon, but then stops.


    At 01:45 Grant grabs at his service weapon again, this time he continues to try to pull it from the holster for at least 2 full seconds, ample time to have figured out that this was not a taser which is held in a different type of holster and has a different feel. Four seconds later, at 01:49, the bald officer shifts his stance to the other side of Grant to put himself out of the line of fire, but resumes his pain compliance hold with his knee on Grant's neck while Mehserle pulls his service weapon from the holster.


    At 01:51 Mehserle gets into his stance and aims his weapon at Grant while the bald officer maintains his hold. If this was in prep for the application of a taser the bald officer would have moved away now to avoid getting shocked.


    At 01:52 Mehserle fires a shot into Grant's back as the bald officer continues to hold him face down on the floor of the station. It's only one second later, at 01:53, that the bald officer finally stands up and steps away from the mortally injured Grant.


    The Conclusion
    The actions of the unnamed bald officer's aggressive use of force, both when he punches Grant in the face at the beginning of the video and when he needlessly employed a pain compliance move on a suspect that was otherwise cooperative, are what ultimately led to Grant's death. It is why there must be criminal charges in this case, a case of assault that resulted in the death of an unarmed person...

    To understand this, consider that the unnamed officer is seen "taking a knee" on Oscar Grant's neck. This police tactic is relatively new and used often as a pain compliance move that both immobilizes a suspect and causes severe pain in order to, supposedly, force dangerous suspects to comply with orders that would allow for restraints to be applied when they otherwise wouldn't.

    Clip taken from the arrest of Mike Ladd at an anti-war march in Seattle on 03/2007. Charges against Ladd for resisting arrest were later dropped when this video proved the application of the officer's pain compliance holds prevented Ladd from following commands to put his hands behind his back.

    The problem with this hold is that it does such a good job of immobilizing a suspect that it often renders them incapable of following commands to put their arms behind them so cuffs can be applied, especially if the person held has tried to catch their fall when thrown to the ground and ends up with an arm trapped underneath them when the hold is applied.

    More than this, the hold causes so much pain that most people can't help but kick their legs and squirm in pain as a reflexive response to that pain, which often causes officers to use even more force to enact an arrest, including the use of another pain compliance tool called a taser.

    The last image recorded on AP photojournalist Matthew Rourke's before he was arrested in St. Paul as documented here. It shows how suspects will often react involuntarily to the application of this painful move.


    This problem with the "taking a knee" on a suspect's neck has been documented before and has resulted in suspect being cleared of resisting arrest charges upon review of video evidence before, yet the tactic remains a favorite of police officers everywhere. As seen numerous times in St. Paul during the RNC protests.

    It was the other officer's rush to use force to enact the arrest of the otherwise non-threatening Oscar Grant and that officers rush to needlessly use a pain compliance hold on a person who presented no threat that set into motion the series of events which cost Oscar Grant his life on New Years morning... irregardless as to whether the bullet that tore through his back was fired accidentally or on purpose.

    In other words, the two officers involved with detaining Oscar Grant intended to hurt him without justification that night, and that's considered a crime called assault. And when the crime of assault results in a death, that's considered murder, even if the death was the ultimate intent of the two officers involved or not.
     
     
    From:
     
    http://injusticeinseattle.blogspot.com/2009/01/when-assault-becomes-murder-analysis-of.html
     
     
     
    Earlier Report From KTVU
     
    Return To Oakland Streets

    Thursday, January 8, 2009 – updated: 7:45 am PST January 9, 2009

    A small but vocal group of protesters took to the streets of Oakland Thursday night, raising tensions 24 hours after a similar demonstration over the fatal shooting of an unarmed man by a BART police officer erupted in violence.

    Police in riot gear shut down Broadway and other surrounding streets for a time after about 50 protesters tried to stop cars, threw trash cans into the street and lit several small fires while protesting the fatal New Year's Day shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by transit officer Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitvale BART station.

    Officers in riot gear moved in to disperse the crowd and detained or arrested several people.

    But the protests were calmer than the previous night when some 120 people were arrested following a rampage that damaged about 300 businesses and numerous cars.

    Earlier Thursday, the Oakland Police Department launched its own investigation into the fatal New Year’s Day incident.

    During a press conference at City Hall, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums that a major reason a protest about the shooting death of Grant at the hands of a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer erupted into violence is that people lost faith in the investigation into the incident.

    Dellums said the community grew frustrated because of "a lack of communication" by BART and the Alameda County District Attorney's office, which are the two agencies that have been investigating Grant's death at the Fruitvale station in Oakland early on Jan. 1.

    City Council President Jane Brunner agreed, saying, "Protests go from being peaceful to violent when there is a feeling of not being listened to. It's important to communicate with youth."

    Dellums brought District Attorney Tom Orloff, BART Police Chief Gary Gee, Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker and other community leaders together for a 75-minute-long news conference at City Hall, calling it "a first opportunity to bring the players forward so the communication can begin."

    The mayor said the Oakland Police Department has now joined the investigation, saying Grant's death "should be treated like any other homicide in Oakland."

    Gee welcomed the Oakland Police Department's participation, saying, "I fully support this partnership."

    District Attorney Tom Orloff drew groans from the many non-reporters who attended the packed news conference when he said the investigation probably will take two more weeks.

    Orloff said, "I know people are not happy about that and there's a large degree of anger and emotion in the community, but people need to be re-interviewed and a criminal case is not a simple as people think."

    He said he wants to conduct "a thorough, thoughtful and objective investigation" and have a case that's ready to go to court.

    Orloff refuted a published report that his office hadn't contacted the attorney for former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle, who shot Grant after he and other officers stopped a train at the Fruitvale station after receiving a report that two groups of people were fighting on the train.

    Mehserle resigned on Wednesday so that he wouldn't have to talk to BART officials as part of their investigation.

    Orloff said his office has asked for a statement from Mehserle on two occasions and has been refused both times.

    Orloff said Mehserle won't be arrested until the point where charges are filed against him, a complaint is filed and an arrest warrant is issued.

    Although BART officials say Mehserle has moved twice for security reasons because his life has been threatened, Orloff said, "I know where he lives" and doesn't have any concerns about Mehserle fleeing the area.

    As Dellums was beginning his news conference, BART directors were finishing a five-hour public hearing at which elected officials, such as Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson and Oakland City Councilwoman Desley Brooks, and community members criticized the transit agency for doing a poor job of responding to the public's anger about Grant's death.

    Nedir Bey, a former member of Your Black Muslim Bakery, accused BART directors of being "servants of the devil" and said he thinks the protesters who became violent in downtown Oakland Wednesday night were justified.

    "I'm not here for peace," Bey said.

    He said, "If they (the protesters) want to riot and tear things up, God bless them. I love what the people did last night."

    Yvette Felarca, a University of California, Berkeley graduate student and student senator who is the Northern California coordinator for By Any Means Necessary, said, "I couldn't be any prouder" of the violence Wednesday night.

    Felarca told BART directors, "The liability is on you. You should get the bill for every busted-up car."

    At the City Hall news conference, Dellums said the violence was "no different than picking up a gun and blowing somebody's brains out" and asked, "what does that have to do with justice?"

    The mayor also noted that Grant's family members spoke out against the violence at a news conference today.

    "The family said they don't want their grief to be an excuse for violence in the community," Dellums said.

    Growing emotional, Dellums said he's now 73 and came back to Oakland from Washington, D.C., "for one reason - not to make friends but to do things right."

    Dellums said there were riots in the streets 40 years ago "and here we are, still smashing cars."

    Saying that he's still hopeful that America will have a more promising future after Barack Obama is sworn in as president later this month, Dellums said, "Don't let these last few weeks rip up everything. My message is cool it out there, folks."

    Tucker said about 120 people were arrested Wednesday night.

    He said, "People have a right to peacefully protest but we won't tolerate setting fires, breaking windows and carrying guns."

    Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason said most of the people who were arrested were from outside of Oakland.

    He said most of those arrested have been cited and released but 21 people remain in jail, mostly on warrants for other cases.

    Tucker said there were no reports of civil unrest or disobedience during the day and promised that "we're prepared" if any more violence breaks out.
     
     
    No Gotchas - What's up?
     
    #
    The Universe is Expanding

    The Galaxy Song 

    Monty Python

     

    Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown,
    And things seem hard or tough.
    And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
    And you feel that you've had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff!
    Just - re-member that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
    and revolving at 900 miles an hour,
    It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
    the sun that is the source of all our power.
    The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
    are moving at a million miles a day,
    In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
    of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
    Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
    it's 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
    It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick,
    but out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide.
    We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,
    we go round every 200 million years,
    And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
    in this amazing and expanding universe.
    The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
    in all of the directions it can whizz,
    As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
    twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
    So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
    how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
    And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
    because there's bugger all down here on Earth.

     

     

    No Gotchas - What's up?
     
    #
    Timing is Everything / Timing is Nothing CFR NWO

    The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and The New World Order

    - By William Blase

    For those who may be confused by the controversies surrounding the "New World Order", a One-World-Government, and American concern over giving the UN more power; those unaware of the issues involved; and those wishing more background, I offer the following.

    Originally presented for an Honors Class, "Dilemmas of War and Peace," at New Mexico State University, the paper was ridiculed and characterized by Dr. Yosef Lapid, (an acknowledged and locally quoted "expert" on Terrorism and Middle Eastern affairs) as "paranoid... possibly a symptom of mental illness." You may judge for yourself.

    Citing source data is the "scientific method," but does not seem to apply to "Conspiracy Theories." A thousand sources may be quoted, yet will not convince the "skeptics," the "realists." It seems to me the "symptoms of mental illness" are on their side, if they refuse to look at evidence ("There are none so blind as those who WILL not see"); or perhaps something more sinister is at work, such as a knowledge of the truth, that does not want YOU to know.

    To be paranoid means to believe in delusions of danger and persecution. If the danger is real, and the evidence credible, then it cannot be delusional. To ignore the evidence, and hope that it CANNOT be true, is more an evidence of mental illness.

    The issue involves much more than a difference of philosophy, or political viewpoint. Growing up in the midst of the "Cold War," our generation were taught that those who attempted to abolish our national sovereignty and overthrow our Constitutional government were committing acts of treason. Please judge for yourself if the group discussed is guilty of such.

    If one group is effectively in control of national governments and multinational corporations; promotes world government through control of media, foundation grants, and education; and controls and guides the issues of the day; then they control most options available. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the financial powers behind it, have done all these things, and promote the "New World Order", as they have for over seventy years.

    The CFR is the promotional arm of the Ruling Elite in the United States of America. Most influential politicians, academics and media personalities are members, and it uses its influence to infiltrate the New World Order into American life. Its' "experts" write scholarly pieces to be used in decision making, the academics expound on the wisdom of a united world, and the media members disseminate the message.

    To understand how the most influential people in America came to be members of an organization working purposefully for the overthrow of the Constitution and American sovereignty, we have to go back at least to the early 1900's, though the story begins much earlier (depending on your viewpoint and beliefs).

    That a ruling power elite does indeed control the U.S. government behind the scenes has been attested to by many americans in a position to know. Felix Frankfurter, Justice of the Supreme Court (1939-1962), said: "The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." In a letter to an associate dated November 21, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote, "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." February 23, 1954,

    Senator William Jenner warned in a speech: "Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government, a bureaucratic elite which believes our Constitution is outmoded."

    Baron M.A. Rothschild wrote, "Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws."

    All that is needed to effectively control a government is to have control over the nation's money: a central bank with a monopoly over the supply of money and credit. This had been done in Western Europe, with the creation of privately owned central banks such as the Bank of England.

    Georgetown professor Dr. Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton's mentor while at Georgetown) wrote about the goals of the investment bankers who control central banks: "... nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole... controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

    The Bank of the United States (1816-36), an early attempt at an American central bank, was abolished by President Andrew Jackson, who believed that it threatened the nation. He wrote: "The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government, the distress it had wantonly produced...are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."

    Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution...if the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

    Does that not describe the situation in America today?

    The U.S. managed to do without a central bank until early in this century, when, according to Congressman Charles Lindbergh, Sr., "The Money Trust caused the 1907 panic, and thereby forced Congress to create a National Monetary Commission." Headed by Senator Nelson Aldrich, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Commission recommended creation of a central bank.

    Though unconstitutional, as only "The Congress shall have Power...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof..." (Article I, Section 8, U.S. Constitution) the Federal Reserve Act was passed in December 1913; ostensibly to stabilize the economy and prevent further panics, but as Lindberg warned Congress: "This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth...the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust investigation, will be legalized." The Great Depression and numerous recessions later, it is obvious the Federal Reserve produces inflation and federal debt whenever it desires, but not stability.

    Congressman Louis McFadden, House Committee on Banking and Currency Chairman (1920-31), stated: "When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government."

    Although called "Federal," the Federal Reserve system is privately owned by member banks, makes its own policies, and is not subject to oversight by Congress or the President. As the overseer and supplier of reserves, the Fed gave banks access to public funds, which enhanced their lending capacity.

    Peter Kershaw, in "Economic Solutions" lists the ten major shareholders of the Federal Reserve Bank System as: Rothschild: London and Berlin; Lazard Bros: Paris; Israel Seiff: Italy; Kuhn- Loeb Company: Germany; Warburg: Hamburg and Amsterdam; Lehman Bros: New York; Goldman and Sachs: New York; Rockefeller: New York. (That most, if not all of these families just happen to be Jewish, you may judge the significance of yourself). The balance of stock is owned by major commercial member banks.

    According to Devvy Kidd, "Why A Bankrupt America?" The Federal Reserve pays the Bureau of Engraving & Printing approximately $23 for each 1,000 notes printed. 10,000 $100 notes (one million dollars) would thus cost the Federal Reserve $230. They then secure a pledge of collateral equal to the face value from the U.S. government. The collateral is our land, labor, and assets... collected by their agents, the IRS. By authorizing the Fed to regulate and create money (and thus inflation), Congress gave private banks power to create profits at will.

    As Lindberg put it: "The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only a few years removed." That day came in 1929, with the Stock Market crash and Great Depression.

    One of the most important powers given to the Fed was the right to buy and sell government securities, and provide loans to member banks so they might also purchase them. This provided another built-in mechanism for profit to the banks, if government debt was increased. All that was needed was a method to pay off the debt. This was accomplished through the passage of the income tax in 1913.

    A national income tax was declared unconstitutional in 1895 by the Supreme Court, so a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress by none other than ...Senator Nelson Aldrich. As presented to the American people it seemed reasonable enough: income tax on only one percent of income under $20,000, with the assurance that it would never increase.

    Since it was graduated, the tax would "soak the rich", ...but the rich had other plans, already devising a method of protecting wealth. As described by Gary Allen in his 1976 book "The Rockefeller File," "By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax."

    Exchanging ownership for control of wealth, foundations are also a handy means for promoting interests that benefit the wealthy. Millions of foundation dollars have been "donated" to causes such as promoting the use of drugs, while degrading preventive medicine. Since many drugs are made from coal tar derivatives, both oil companies and drug manufacturing concerns (many Rockefeller owned or controlled) are the main beneficiaries.

    With the means to loan enormous sums to the government (the Federal Reserve), a method to repay the debt (income tax), and an escape from taxation for the wealthy, (foundations), all that remained was an excuse to borrow money. By some happy "coincidence," in 1914 World War I began, and after American participation national debt rose from $1 billion to $25 billion.

    Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1913, beating incumbent William Howard Taft, who had vowed to veto legislation establishing a central bank. To divide the Republican vote and elect the relatively unknown Wilson, J.P. Morgan and Co. poured money into the candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive Party.

    According to an eyewitness, Wilson was brought to Democratic Party headquarters in 1912 by Bernard Baruch, a wealthy banker. He received an "indoctrination course" from those he met, and in return agreed, if elected: to support the projected Federal Reserve and the income tax, and "listen" to advice in case of war in Europe and on the composition of his cabinet.

    Wilson's top advisor during his two terms was a man named Colonel Edward M. House. House's biographer, Charles Seymour, called him the "unseen guardian angel" of the Federal Reserve Act, helping to guide it through Congress. Another biographer wrote that House believed: "...the Constitution, product of eighteenth-century minds...was thoroughly outdated; that the country would be better off if the Constitution could be scrapped and rewritten..." House wrote a book entitled "Philip Dru: Administrator," published anonymously in 1912. The hero, Philip Dru, rules America and introduces radical changes, such as a graduated income tax, a central bank, and a "league of nations."

    World War I produced both a large national debt, and huge profits for those who had backed Wilson. Baruch was appointed head of the War Industries Board, where he exercised dictatorial power over the national economy. He and the Rockefellers were reported to have earned over $200 million during the war. Wilson backer Cleveland Dodge sold munitions to the allies, while J.P. Morgan loaned them hundreds of millions, with the protection of U.S. entry into the war.

    While profit was certainly a motive, the war was also useful to justify the notion of world government. William Hoar reveals in "Architects of Conspiracy" that during the 1950s, government investigators examining the records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a long- time promoter of globalism, found that several years before the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie trustees were planning to involve the U.S. in a general war, to set the stage for world government.

    The main obstacle was that Americans did not want any involvement in European wars. Some kind of incident, such as the explosion of the battleship Main, which provoked the Spanish - American war, would have to be provided as provocation. This occurred when the Lusitania, carrying 128 Americans on board, was sunk by a German submarine, and anti-German sentiment was aroused. When war was declared, U.S. propaganda portrayed all Germans as Huns and fanged serpents, and all Americans opposing the war as traitors.

    What was not revealed at the time, however, was that the Lusitania was transporting war munitions to England, making it a legitimate target for the Germans. Even so, they had taken out large ads in the New York papers, asking that Americans not take passage on the ship.

    The evidence seems to point to a deliberate plan to have the ship sunk by the Germans. Colin Simpson, author of "The Lusitania," wrote that Winston Churchill, head of the British Admiralty during the war, had ordered a report to predict the political impact if a passenger ship carrying Americans was sunk. German naval codes had been broken by the British, who knew approximately where all U-boats near the British Isles were located.

    According to Simpson, Commander Joseph Kenworthy, of British Naval Intelligence, stated: "The Lusitania was deliberately sent at considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting...escorts withdrawn." Thus, even though Wilson had been reelected in 1916 with the slogan "He kept us out of war," America soon found itself fighting a European war. Actually, Colonel House had already negotiated a secret agreement with England, committing the U.S. to the conflict. It seems the American public had little say in the matter.

    With the end of the war and the Versailles Treaty, which required severe war reparations from Germany, the way was paved for a leader in Germany such as Hitler. Wilson brought to the Paris Peace Conference his famous "fourteen points," with point fourteen being a proposal for a "general association of nations," which was to be the first step towards the goal of One World Government-the League of Nations.

    Wilson's official biographer, Ray Stannard Baker, revealed that the League was not Wilson's idea. "...not a single idea--in the Covenant of the League was original with the President." Colonel House was the author of the Covenant, and Wilson had merely rewritten it to conform to his own phraseology.

    The League of Nations was established, but it, and the plan for world government eventually failed because the U.S. Senate would not ratify the Versailles Treaty.

    Pat Robertson, in "The New World Order," states that Colonel House, along with other internationalists, realized that America would not join any scheme for world government without a change in public opinion.

    After a series of meetings, it was decided that an "Institute of International Affairs", with two branches, in the United States and England, would be formed.

    The British branch became known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, with leadership provided by members of the Round Table. Begun in the late 1800's by Cecil Rhodes, the Round Table aimed to federate the English speaking peoples of the world, and bring it under their rule.

    The Council on Foreign Relations was incorporated as the American branch in New York on July 29, 1921. Founding members included Colonel House, and "...such potentates of international banking as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Otto Kahn, and Jacob Schiff...the same clique which had engineered the establishment of the Federal Reserve System," according to Gary Allen in the October 1972 issue of "AMERICAN OPINION."

    The founding president of the CFR was John W. Davis, J.P. Morgan's personal attorney, while the vice-president was Paul Cravath, also representing the Morgan interests. Professor Carroll Quigley characterized the CFR as "...a front group for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group." Over time Morgan influence was lost to the Rockefellers, who found that one world government fit their philosophy of business well. As John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had said: "Competition is a sin," and global monopoly fit their needs as they grew internationally.

    Antony Sutton, a research fellow for the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, wrote of this philosophy: "While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to 'go political' and make society go to work for the monopolists-- under the name of the public good and the public interest."

    Frederick C. Howe revealed the strategy of using government in a 1906 book, "Confessions of a Monopolist": "These are the rules of big business...Get a monopoly; let society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics..."

    As corporations went international, national monopolies could no longer protect their interests. What was needed was a one world system of government controlled from behind the scenes. This had been the plan since the time of Colonel House, and to implement it, it was necessary to weaken the U.S. politically and economically.

    During the 1920's, America enjoyed a decade of prosperity, fueled by the easy availability of credit. Between 1923 and 1929 the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by sixty-two percent. When the stock market crashed, many small investors were ruined, but not "insiders." In March of 1929 Paul Warburg issued a tip the Crash was coming, and the largest investors got out of the market, according to Allen and Abraham in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy."

    With their fortunes intact, they were able to buy companies for a fraction of their worth. Shares that had sold for a dollar might now cost a nickel, and the buying power, and wealth, of the rich increased enormously.

    Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking Committee declared: "It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence...The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."

    Curtis Dall, son-in-law of FDR and a syndicate manager for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm, was on the N.Y. Stock Exchange floor the day of the crash. In "FDR: My Exploited Father-In-Law," he states: "...it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market."

    The Crash paved the way for the man Wall Street had groomed for the presidency, FDR. Portrayed as a "man of the little people", the reality was that Roosevelt's family had been involved in New York banking since the eighteenth century.

    Frederic Delano, FDR's uncle, served on the original Federal Reserve Board. FDR attended Groton and Harvard, and in the 1920's worked on Wall Street, sitting on the board of directors of eleven different corporations.

    Dall wrote of his father-in-law: "...Most of his thoughts, his political 'ammunition,'...were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World Money group. Brilliantly... he exploded that prepared 'ammunition' in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people--and thus paid off and retained his internationalist political support."

    Taking America off the gold standard in 1934, FDR opened the way to unrestrained money supply expansion, decades of inflation--and credit revenues for banks. Raising gold prices from $20 an ounce to $35, FDR and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (son of a founding CFR member), gave international bankers huge profits.

    FDR's most remembered program, the New Deal, could only be financed through heavy borrowing. In effect, those who had caused the Depression loaned America the money to recover from it. Then, through the National Recovery Administration, proposed by Bernard Baruch in 1930, they were put in charge of regulating the economy. FDR appointed Baruch disciple Hugh Johnson to run the NRA, assisted by CFR member Gerard Swope. With broad powers to regulate wages, prices, and working conditions, it was, as Herbert Hoover wrote in his memoirs: "...pure fascism;...merely a remaking of Mussolini's 'corporate state'..." The Supreme Court eventually ruled the NRA unconstitutional.

    During the FDR years, the Council on Foreign Relations captured the political life of the U.S. Besides Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, other CFR members included Secretary of State Edward Stettinus, War Secretary Henry Stimson, and Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles.

    Since 1934 almost every United States Secretary of State has been a CFR member; and ALL Secretaries of War or Defense, from Henry L. Stimson through Richard Cheney.

    The CIA has been under CFR control almost continuously since its creation, starting with Allen Dulles, founding member of the CFR and brother of Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles had been at the Paris Peace Conference, joined the CFR in 1926, and later became its president.

    John Foster Dulles had been one of Woodrow Wilson's young proteges at the Paris Peace Conference. A founding member of the CFR...he was an in-law of the Rockefellers, Chairman of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Board Chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

    In 1940 FDR defeated internationalist Wendell Willkie, who wrote a book entitled "One World," and later became a CFR member. Congressman Usher Burdick protested at the time on the floor of the House that Willkie was being financed by J.P. Morgan and the New York utility bankers. Polls showed few Republicans favored him, yet the media portrayed him as THE Republican candidate.

    Since that time nearly ALL presidential candidates have been CFR members. President Truman, who was not a member, was advised by a group of "wise men," all six of whom were CFR members, according to Gary Allen. In 1952 and 1956, CFR Adlai Stevenson challenged CFR Eisenhower.

    In 1960, CFR Kennedy (who was probably killed because he had the courage NOT to go along with all their plans) CFR Nixon. In 1964 the GOP stunned the Establishment by nominating its candidate over Nelson Rockefeller.

    Rockefeller and the CFR wing proceeded to picture Barry Goldwater as a dangerous radical. In 1968 CFR Nixon ran against CFR Humphrey. The 1972 "contest" featured CFR Nixon vs. CFR McGovern.

    CFR candidates for president include George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Edmund Muskie, John Anderson, and Lloyd Bentsen. In 1976 we had Jimmy Carter, who is a member of the Trilateral Commission, created by David Rockefeller and CFR member Zbigniew Brzezinski with the goal of economic linkage between Japan, Europe, and the United States, and: "...managing the world economy...a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system." We have also had (though his name strangely disappears from the membership list in 1979) CFR director (1977-79) George Bush, and last but not least, CFR member Bill Clinton.

    They have all promoted the "New World Order," controlled by the United Nations. The problem is that "...the present United Nations organization is actually the creation of the CFR and is housed on land in Manhattan donated to it by the family of current CFR chairman David Rockefeller," as Pat Robertson describes it.

    The original concept for the UN was the outcome of the Informal Agenda Group, formed in 1943 by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. All except Hull were CFR members, and Isaiah Bowman, a founding member of the CFR, originated the idea.

    The American delegation to the San Francisco meeting that drafted the charter of the United Nations in 1949 included CFR members Nelson Rockefeller, John Foster Dulles, John McCloy, and CFR members who were communist agents--Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, and the Secretary-General of the conference, Alger Hiss. In all, the Council sent forty-seven of its members in the United States delegation, effectively controlling the outcome.

    Since that time the CFR and its friends in the mass media (largely controlled by CFR members such as Katherine Graham of the "Washington Post" and Henry Luce of" Time, Life"), foundations, and political groups have lobbied consistently to grant the United Nations more authority and power. Bush and the Gulf War were but one of the latest calls for a "New World Order."

    Admiral Chester Ward, a member of the CFR for over a decade, became one of its harshest critics, revealing its inner workings in a 1975 book, "Kissinger ON THE COUCH." In it he states "The most powerful cliques in these elitist groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and national independence of the United States."

    Most members are one-world-government ideologists whose long- term goals were officially summed up in September 1961 State Department Document 7277, adopted by the Nixon Administration: "...elimination of all armed forces and armaments except those needed to maintain internal order within states and to furnish the United Nations with peace forces...by the time it (UN global government) would be so strong no nation could challenge it."

    Within the CFR there exists a "much smaller group but more powerful...made up of Wall Street international bankers and their key agents. Primarily, they want the world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in control of the global government ...This CFR faction is headed by the Rockefeller brothers," according to Ward.

    What must be remembered is that this is not some lunatic- fringe group...these are members of one of the most powerful private organizations in the world: the people who determine and control American economic, social, political, and military policy. Members' influence and control extends to "leaders in academia, public service, business, and the media," according to the CFR 1993 "Annual Report."

    Their founding they describe as: "American Participants in the Paris Peace Conference decided that it was time for more private Americans to become familiar with the increasing responsibilities and obligations of the United States...there was a need for an organization able to provide for the continuous study of U.S. foreign police for the BENEFIT OF ITS MEMBERS (emphasis mine) and a wider audience of interested Americans."

    They sponsor hundreds of programs, where members "exchange views with American and foreign officials and policy experts... discuss foreign policy issues...consider international issues of concern to the business community" (Corporate business), and "...affiliated groups of community leaders throughout the United states...meet with decision makers."

    The CFR states that it is "host to many views, advocate of none," and it "has no affiliation with the U.S. government." No, no affiliation at all, if you don't count: "A Council member was elected president of the United States...Dozens of other Council colleagues were called to serve in cabinet and sub-cabinet positions," as they describe it in "Foreign Affairs," along with many members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, the Federal Reserve, and many other Federal bureaucrats.

    They are not AFFILIATED with government, they ARE the government, in effect.

    One re-occurring view was stated in the 50th anniversary issue of "Foreign Affairs," the official publication of the CFR. In an article by Kingman Brewster, Jr. entitled "Reflections on Our National Purpose." Our purpose should be, according to him, to do away with our nationality, to "take some risks in order to invite others to pool their sovereignty with ours..."

    These "risks" include disarming to the point where we would be helpless against the "peace-keeping" forces of a global UN government. We should happily surrender our sovereignty to the world government in the interests of the "world community."

    Today we have the spectacle of Spc. 4 Michael New, a U.S. soldier in Germany who refuses to wear the uniform of the UN, facing an "administrative discharge." He states rightly that he swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, not the United Nations. Many other Americans have taken that same oath, such as myself, and believe it is our sworn duty still to defend the Constitution, since an oath sworn before God must be fulfilled. (Why else do we swear to tell the truth in our courts, or when taking public office?) Is it a crime these days to actually BELIEVE in God and the oath that was taken?

    Meanwhile, others who attempt to destroy the Constitution and our sovereignty are given honors and position...At least they are not hypocrites...only supremely arrogant.

    "In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old fashioned assault..." in the opinion of Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State in "Foreign Affairs," April 1974.

    James Warburg, son of CFR founder Paul Warburg, and a member of FDR's "brain trust," testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1950, "We shall have world government whether or not you like it--by conquest or consent."

    Is this an AMERICAN speaking, or a dangerous lunatic? Who is this "We" who threatens to CONQUER us?

    They are a group that actually has the power to do it, and is doing it every day, bit by bit.

    CFR Members in the mass media, education, and entertainment push their propaganda of "humanism" and world brotherhood. We should all live in peace under a world government, and forget about such selfish things as nationalities and patriotism. We can solve our own problems. We don't need God, or morals, or values: it's all relative, anyway, right?...Because if we actually had some moral character and values, we might be able to discern that these people are actually EVIL.

    The Bible says that the LOVE of money is the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10). These people are evil because they love money and power, and greed drives them to do anything to achieve their goals. They have lost all morality and conscience, and believe such concepts, as well as our Constitution, "outdated".

    THAT is insanity--to have more wealth than can be spent, and still it is never enough. They have to control governments, start wars, conspire to rule the world; least the "common people" wake up to how they have gained their wealth, take it away from them, and demand that they pay the price for their crimes.

    That is why they constantly pit us one against the other, with "Diversity," Affirmative Action, and other programs,...black against white, men against women, rural against urban, ranchers against environmentalists, and on and on...least we look in their direction.

    We The People are held to a much higher standard. If we threaten the President or a public official, we are charged with a crime...yet the One-World-Gang can threaten the Constitution and the liberties of We The People, the sovereign rulers of this nation, and nothing is said or done.

    Perhaps they do not fear what Man can do to them... they believe they have arranged everything, and their power and wealth will prevail in this world. However, those among them who have sworn an oath before God to uphold and defend the Constitution: the President, members of Congress, and the military; may find one day that they do indeed have something to fear.

    List of CFR Members

    Colonel House, the fallen angel, still has relatives controlling the CFR. Karen Elliot House is Chairman of the Membership Committee, and a member of the Nominating Committee, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick. David Rockefeller is now "Honorary Chairman of the Board", after serving as Chairman 1970-1985; and "Director Emeritus," after serving as a Director 1949-1985. Peter G. Peterson is Chairman, Admiral B. R. Inman is Vice Chairman, while Thomas Foley and Jeane Kirkpatrick are Directors serving on the Executive Committee.

    These "private citizens" have access to government officials and policy makers as often as they wish, yet the results of their meetings can only be given to other government officials, corporate officers, or law partners. Participants are forbidden to transmit an attributed statement to any public medium, such as newspapers or TV, where there is "risk that it will promptly be widely circulated or published," as the "Annual Report" puts it.

    Should not OUR public officials be forbidden to meet in secret with private groups? Public officials should only be allowed to discuss public business and policy in a public forum. The Public...remember US?

    There is much more to say about this group and their plans for America. Gary Allen, in "The Rockefeller File," states that they are behind the many regional government plans, which would abolish city, county, and state lines, leaving us at the mercy of federal bureaucrats; and behind the push for "land use" controls. They want "federal control of everything. Since they intend to control the federal government..."

    There are also the many allegations of involvement in gun running, drug smuggling, prostitution and sex slaves; and the many mysterious assassinations and "suicides" of witnesses and others who get too close to the truth...but that is another story.

    REFERENCES

    This document may be freely distributed or quoted in any medium, provided credit is given to the author and The Courier. Copyright 1995

    web@zianet.com

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    #
    Not the first time?

    Commodore Sloat First Grade Class in 1950. Alum Margie Whitnah, “Students in the 1950s will never forget the time all students were called in from recess by the Vice Principal, Mr. Schneider, because it was believed that a lion or tiger had escaped from Fleishhacker Zoo (Now called The San Francisco Zoo). It was a false alarm, but we went to our classes and later were told why lunch recess was cut short.” (Courtesy Corinne Bryan.)

     

    http://mtdavidson.org/balboa_terrace

     

    Black and Blue Magic

     

    http://www.thesilvercord.com/hu/books/blackblue.html

     

    Black & Blue Magic by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

    He began to spiral up and up until he was almost out of breath. At last he leveled out and drifted in a great circle high above Twin Peaks. Below him the whole bay area lay spread out in patterns of golden haze, midnight blue, and velvety black. Glittering streams of light bordered the darker patches, or laced in and out among them, like velvet embroidered with diamonds. To the west, the Pacific Ocean framed the white beach with an even whiter border of surf.
       As Harry's slowly circling flight turned his face eastward, he could see the entire bay, stretching its dark arms far to the north and south, crossed only by the bridges in three thin bracelets of light. Directly across the bay, crowds of tiny lights climbed the lower slopes of the Berkeley hills, whose dark crests made a black border for the eastern sky.
       It was just about the most beautiful sight Harry had ever seen. Below him lay San Francisco, the city that people said was the most beautiful place in the world, spread out like a gigantic living map. As he circled slowly he kept picking out familiar places. Some of them he recognized immediately, even though he generally saw them from a very different angle.
    Others were puzzling at first, and didn't seem to be quite where they belonged.
       The Embarcadero with its fringe of piers was unmistakable, and so was the Ferry Building, Market Street and the huge glowing dome of City Hall. But Coit Tower seemed a lot nearer the bay than he would have expected, and the Golden Gate Bridge seemed farther to the west.
       If he hadn't already made other plans, Harry could have stayed up there for hours. But the zoo ought to be great, too, so he finally turned toward the south and west and slanted into a long downward glide. As he passed over the dark treetops of Stern Grove, he was flying fairly low again, and it was only a few minutes later that he skimmed silently above the empty parking strip and the high fence that surrounded the zoo.
       It had been quite a long flight for a beginner, and his wings were feeling a little tired. He was just thinking about finding a nice safe landing-spot. it wouldn't do to land in the lions' grotto, for instance, when, just ahead of him, he saw a familiar sight: Monkey Island.
       Monkey Island had always been one of Harry's

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    favorite places at Fleishhacker Zoo. There are no bars at all around the island, only a small moat. There is a big hill of artificial boulders, with a waterfall coming down one side, and lots of nooks and crannies for sleeping and shelter. At one end of the island there is a good sandy beach where the monkey families sit around and sun themselves on nice days and the. little babies play tag and scoot around on their stomachs in the sand, just like real kids. Near the beach, at the edge of the moat, there is a dead tree. It isn't much more than a slender trunk going straight up like a telephone pole, but the monkeys like to play on it.
       Anyway, the island was one of the places that Harry liked most, and that was probably the reason he did what he did. If there had been time to stop and think it over, he might have had better sense, but there wasn't any time at all. He was on the island almost before he knew what was happening.
       It was one of his best landings. His scooping wings caught the ocean breeze, and he came down beautifully, feet first, right on top of the little hill. There he was, standing right at the top of Monkey Island's hill, with the little waterfall trickling down from just
    below his feet. Everything was very quiet and peaceful, and although it was darker than up in the open sky, there was plenty of light for him to see his way around. Harry was just thinking that the monkeys were probably asleep in the little caves and crannies and wondering if he'd get to see them at all when, suddenly, the little hill erupted like a monkey volcano.
       In a split second the whole island was jumping with shrieking monkeys, and more seemed to be oozing out of every crack in the hill. The screeching and chattering was so unnerving that Harry couldn't think what to do. It seems like anybody would know that there's not much point in arguing with a bunch of hysterical monkeys, but for a minute all Harry could think to do was say, "Shhh! Be quiet! I'm not going to hurt anything. Hush up, won't you? Oh, for Pete Squeaks shut up!"
       It was just about then that a particularly loud noise from right behind him made Harry look back over his shoulder. A great big monkey was dashing up the hill yelling like crazy, in an especially nasty tone of voice. He was heading right for Harry's ankles. Instantly Harry decided not to wait to see if a

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    monkey could bite clear through Levis, gym socks and drapery fringe. He took off straight ahead, without even fanning his wings first to warm up.
       Everything might have been fine if Harry's mind had been on his flying, but it's pretty hard to concentrate with a screaming monkey hanging on to the tail of your drapery. And that's exactly what the monkey was doing. The crazy monkey had gotten himself so worked up over being a hero for all the lady monkeys, by chasing off the intruder, that when Harry took off, the monkey jumped after him and grabbed him by the robe. He was still hanging there and yelling when Harry ran into the dead tree.
       In the excitement and semi-darkness, Harry didn't even see the tree until he was almost on it. He just had time to throw out his hands to ward off a head-on collision. As his hands grabbed hold of the narrow trunk, worn smooth by many monkey hands, his momentum carried the rest of him on around the tree, like, well, like a monkey on a string. Only, in this case, it was more like two monkeys, Harry and the real one, who was still hanging on to the other end of Harry.
       Whatever happened next was so quick and
    confused that Harry never did remember it very clearly. He did recall a couple of jarring thumps, and a sudden coldness, and the next thing he knew he was sitting in the middle of the moat and a wet monkey was sitting right beside him.
       The monkey wasn't yelling any more. The cold water must have shocked all the hero business right out of him, because he scrambled for the island side of the moat almost as fast as Harry scrambled for the other. Harry was just trailing his wet wing-tips over the railing, when through the yelling of the monkeys, he heard something else. It was the sound of running feet and a human voice shouting something. Harry glanced around frantically and scurried for the nearest bushes. There wasn't time to take off and even if there had been, he was sure he couldn't get two feet off the ground, with his wings all wet and his drapes heavy with water.
       He had barely crouched down under the bushes, when a man appeared, running down the walk with a flashlight in his hand. When the watchman reached the moat, he stood at the railing for a long time, shining his light around on the island, where the monkeys were beginning to quiet down. Meanwhile

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    Harry crouched under the bushes, dripping and shivering. He had just about decided that he really was going to freeze clear to death, when he saw something that scared him so much he forgot all about the cold.
       The watchman had started to walk slowly around the island shining his flashlight from side to side as he went. And it was just at that moment that Harry noticed the trail of water that led from the edge of the moat directly to his hiding place. As a matter of fact, there were three trails, a big wide one in the middle and a little narrow one on each side where the water had run off the tips of his wings. In just a minute, the watchman would reach those trails, and when that happened, Harry knew he had better be somewhere else.
       As quickly and quietly as he could, he began to move away from his hiding place. By making use of a tree, a trash can, and a bench, he had scurried and ducked part way around the island by the time the watchman came to the place where the trail of water left the moat.
       Peeking out from behind the bench, Harry saw the watchman stop as his flashlight beam hit the trail of
    dribbled water, and saw him follow the trail backward to the edge of the moat. Near the railing he stopped and seemed to be picking something up off the ground.
       As the watchman held his find under the beam of the flashlight to examine it, Harry was able to see it, too. He wasn't positive, but it looked a lot like a feather, a great big white feather.
       The watchman turned and followed the trail of water to the bushes, where Harry had just been hiding. He tramped around in the underbrush for a moment, and then came out carrying another feather. For a while, he just stood there, looking at the feathers, and then he began to shine his light up into the branches of the nearby trees.
       As the watchman moved slowly back the way he had come, this time searching the treetops, Harry scooted away from the bench and down the path that led to the flamingo pond. On the hill above the pond he found a hidden place where there was enough room to flutter his wings hard, to shake the water out of them. At first they felt heavy and awkward, and water flew in every direction, but after a few minutes of fluttering they seemed to be back to normal

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    just before he took off, Harry wrung out the tail ends of his drapes and emptied out his gym shoes.
       There was still enough water in his drapes and wings to make the take-off more difficult than usual. He just barely managed to clear the treetops, but then he was off and away, on the long cold flight home. And was it ever cold! The cold ocean wind flapped his soggy drapes, and plastered his wet Levis against his legs. Harry didn't do any sight-seeing or fancy flying on that trip. All he could think about was flying hard and fast toward a warm dry bed.
       It wasn't until he was home and had been in bed long enough to stop shivering, that he realized what had saved him from being caught. The watchman must have stopped searching the bushes and started in on the treetops because he thought Harry was a bird. He'd found the feather by the moat, and maybe he figured that some bid white bird had landed in the water and scared the monkeys. Then he'd found the place where Harry had sat under the bushes. There must have been a puddle of water there and some more feathers. The watchman probably thought that the bird had rested there for a while before it flew off.
       It occurred to Harry that there had been a lot of leaves under the bushes, so it wasn't likely that he'd left any footprints. Lucky for him that it hadn't been soft mud or sand. Lucky for Harry, and come to think of it, lucky for the watchman, too. After all, the zoo directors might be a little suspicious of a night watchman who reported a big white bird wearing gym shoes.

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