Archive for December, 2010
Laser Attacks On Planes Rising
Warning for laser beam, symbol D-W010 according to DIN 4844-2
Years ago pilots were developing the symptoms that indicated laser attack (retina damage, seizures etc, vision loss) and were dismissed as unrelated medical issues. Now there is too much evidence to ignore, and too many incidents to brush them aside. Marnie Hunter for CNN:
A spike in the incidence of people pointing lasers into the cockpits of planes has the Federal Aviation Administration worried and encouraging public vigilance.
“It sounds silly, but this is a serious problem,” wrote FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt on Wednesday in a Department of Transportation blog post highlighting the agency’s concerns.
“Why is this dangerous? Lasers can distract pilots or temporarily blind a pilot while he or she is taking off or landing an aircraft,” Babbitt said.
This year, 2,200 instances have been reported nationwide. In 2005, there were 283 reports of people pointing lasers at planes…
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Stockholm Terrorist Bombs May Have Been Allowed To Explode
Drottninggatan, Stockholm
Sweden’s English-language newspaper The Local is reporting what could perhaps be a False Flag-type of event intended to bolster fading public support for far-away wars in Muslim countries that no one wants to pay for any longer:
A Swedish Armed Forces (Försvarsmakten) employee warned an acquaintance to stay clear of an area in central Stockholm on Saturday where, several hours later, two explosions went off in what is being called a terrorist attack.
“If you can, avoid Drottninggatan today. A lot can happen there…just so you know,” the message said, according to the TT news agency.
Armed Forces spokesperson Jonas Svensson told TT on Sunday he was unaware of the message. “I haven’t heard about this at all. Now I’m going to check out the information,” he told TT when confronted with the news. Later the Swedish military said it was now “preparing how the issue will be dealt with”.
“The Swedish Armed Forces…
Neil Armstrong Tells What Really Happened On The Moon
Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11 mission
All you space bloggers out there, take note: Neil Armstrong reads blogs and just might respond to you, as he did to Robert Krulwich on his NPR blog:
Well, this doesn’t happen every day.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander?
Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons:
- It was really, really hot on the moon, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We needed protection.
- We were wearing new-fangled, water-cooled uniforms and didn’t know how long the coolant would last.
- We didn’t know how far we could go in our space suits.
- NASA wanted us to conduct our experiments in front of a fixed camera.
- We [meaning Neil] cheated just a little, and very briefly bounded off to take pictures of some…
Ron Paul, Suddenly In The Mainstream
When Republican Congressman Ron Paul, tagged ‘Dr.No’ inside the Beltway in reference to his consistent “No” votes to any legislation he deems unconstitutional, is the subject of a fawning front page profile in the New York Times, you know that the political mood of America has changed direction:
As virtually all of Washington was declaring WikiLeaks’s disclosures of secret diplomatic cables an act of treason, Representative Ron Paul was applauding the organization for exposing the United States’ “delusional foreign policy.”
For this, the conservative blog RedState dubbed him “Al Qaeda’s favorite member of Congress.”
It was hardly the first time that Mr. Paul had marched to his own beat. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he was best remembered for declaring in a debate that the 9/11 attacks were the Muslim world’s response to American military intervention around the globe. A fellow candidate, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of…
Vatican Bank Investigated For Money Laundering – Again.
I wonder which banking official will suddenly die during this investigation? Victor L. Simpson and Nicole Winfield report for AP:
VATICAN CITY – This is no ordinary bank: The ATMs are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall.
Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it’s under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize euro23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the “Vatican Bank” has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal.
The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.” The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that…
“They Are Our Government, Our Leaders—They Cannot Be Crazy”
Regions of the brain associated with stress and posttraumatic stress disorder.
Are the Israelis repeating Holocaust traumas upon the Palestinians? From the July 1992 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:
Dr. Jan Bastiaans, a Dutch psychiatrist, is an authority on the Holocaust syndrome, and has treated many survivors. In 1973 he wrote, “In recent years the Ka-tzet (concentration camp) syndrome has suddenly received general recognition…This concept is concerned with…pathological processes that occurred after the war in former concentration camp prisoners…The Ka-tzet syndrome is the expression of a permanent, chronic obstruction of sound human relationships. The victims are not free from the concentration camp…Behind their adaptation facade continues to live the child or adult of [that time] in all fear, in all misery, in all powerlessness.”
Dr. Haim Dasberg, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Hebrew University and medical director of the Ezrat Nashim Jerusalem Mental Health Center, has written extensively…
Planned Protest Results In Detainment – Of 12-Year-Old Boy
British Prime Minister David Cameron
The gloves have been off for awhile, but does anyone need a clearer reminder that activism and peaceful protest have been categorized as terrorism? From the UK’s Daily Mirror:
A schoolboy trying to save his youth club was hauled from class after his plan to protest outside David Cameron’s constituency office was spotted — by anti-terror police.
In an astonishing over-reaction, 12-year-old Nicky Wishart was warned he faced ARREST.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “The policeman asked me lots of questions about why we were having a protest and who would be there. I said it was simply because we didn’t want our youth centre to close — it’s a fantastic place to go and there isn’t much else for us to do round here.”
The full-scale security operation swung into effect days after Nicky made an innocent request on Facebook to “save our youth centre”.
The surprised boy was…
Going Rogue: What Happens Next to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks?
Via the First Church of Mutterhals:
Just a short time ago many Americans had never heard of Julian Assange or Wikileaks. It’s understandable, this past summer was action packed with quality TV programming and most of us can’t be bothered to pay attention foreign goings on. But now you literally cannot flee news of Assange, a man who is quickly becoming a modern day folk hero for the disenfranchised and fed up.
While liberals argue whether or not Assange is a rapist and conservatives call for his head, the rest of us marvel that someone finally stood up and did something about the shitty state of the world that didn’t involve complaining about injustice on a blog or staging a meaningless protest only serving to garner the organizer some much needed attention. People like Assange and Bradley Manning and those involved in hacking Wikileaks opponents are heroes in the truest sense of…
Flame Retardants Found in Butter
There is currently no way to know how widespread this kind of chemical contamination is in food. Emily Sohn writes in Discovery News:
As part of an ongoing investigation into chemicals in our food supply, scientists found extremely high concentrations of a flame-retardant compound in a supermarket sample of brand-name butter.
It is the first documented case of serious contamination in food in the United States with a class of chemicals known as PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers.
Commonly used in furniture and electronics, among other products, PBDEs are known to disrupt hormone function and have been associated with a range of health concerns, including cancer as well as reproductive, developmental, and neurological problems.
Since no federal agencies currently track levels of chemicals like these in food, there is no way to know how widespread this kind of chemical contamination is in butter or other products. But it clearly happens at least sometimes.
Read More in…
“If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved” (Podcast)
Lloyd deMause: “If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved”
Direct Download • RSS • Website
Are Palestinians sexually abused as children more often than people of other nationalities? Lloyd deMause, director of the Institute for Psychohistory, on Freedomain Radio.
Scientists Find Natural Photovoltaic Cell In Hornet
Oriental Hornet
By Ben Coxworth at www.gizmag.com:
It’s no big mystery why turtles and other reptiles bask in the sun – being cold-blooded animals, they’re gathering heat to warm their bodies, so they can be active. Recently, however, scientists from Israel and the UK discovered that the Oriental hornet has been putting a “high-tech” spin on that model… the outer layers of its body work as a natural photovoltaic cell, converting sunlight to electricity. The scientists then proceeded to create a cell of their own, using the hornet as their inspiration.
The study was led by Dr. Marian Plotkin of Tel-Aviv University. It had been observed that the hornets’ underground nest-digging activity increased with the intensity of the sunlight, whereas most wasps tend to be more active in the early morning. This caused the late Prof. Jacob S. Ishay to suspect that the insects were utilizing solar radiation…
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America: Why R Your Peeps So Dum?
Joe Bageant writes at via Alternet:
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don’t even know we…
UFO’s Are Tesla’s Flying Saucers
Nikola Tesla
Christian Soderberg writing for henrymakow.com:
The Daily Mail recently reported about “flying saucer”projects in Nazi Germany and Hitler’s plans to use these “wonder weapons” to attack England and USA.
The article talks only about jet-propulsion “saucers”, but the Germans were also building real ‘anti-gravity’ saucers based on inventions of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943).
UFOs or “flying saucers” are man-made, not “alien space ships”
Following the wave of “UFO” sightings in early 1950’s, Professor Giuseppe Belluzzo (1875-1952), a scientist-engineer and a former Italian cabinet minister, who apparently personally worked in one of these German-Italian “flying saucer” projects in the 1940’s, was quoted in Italian and American newspapers saying:
“There is nothing supernatural or Martian about flying discs, but they are simply rational application of recent technique. ..some great power is now launching discs to study them.”
You can read more about Professor Belluzzo’s saucer project here and here.
Nikola Tesla’s “flying stove”
…’You should not be at all surprised, if…
Truth Is Contagious: WikiLeaks Copycat in Russia
Rospil.info, the Russian whistleblowing site
It seems that the phenomenon of WikiLeaks is spreading to other countries, and inspiring digital denizons to take on corruption elsewhere. The newest example of this is a Russian political activitst named Alexei Navalny, who is crusading against the rampant corruption that has infected the center of the former Soviet Union. Tired of the Russian oligarchy, mobsters, and generally getting ripped off at every turn, this guy is quite popular with regular folks.
Personally, I’m hoping his actions spawn a counterpart in China next.
This recent development also speaks to the incorrect nature of a central assumption which has been made about this sort of thing by the mainstream old-school press, who still don’t understand “the interwebs”. Borders don’t matter anymore, and shutting down free speech isn’t as easy as eliminating one person anymore. The power of the web is it’s very distributed, decentralized nature. And some people…
The Virgin Mary Appears In A … Condom? (Photo)
Via Riemann’s Cut:
I don’t know if the Condom-Mary is an old idea or not…
Glenn Beck Warns Of Food Riots, Martial Law & Gun Confiscations
Who is this — Glenn Beck or Alex Jones? The message is the same…
