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+ Join me on FACEBOOK - Or you're missing out on all my best posts lately + www.TedsBook.com

2009-10-20T17:35:00.001-07:00

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Sub-audible frequency generation techniques (REDUX)

Just for my own reference (again)... But you can play too, if you like...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ2nF1w5opU

http://www.rotarywoofer.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_speaker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_woofer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_frequency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-bass

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subwoofer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_test

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-frequency_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_transducer

http://www.nutshellhifi.com/library/speaker-design1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surround_sound

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_speaker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmaphone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

+ Welcome to QUEEN CALIFIA-ORNIA - The Legendary Black Death Warrior Goddess Who Builds Cities by the Sea +

2009-08-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

+ Welcome to QUEEN CALIFIA-ORNIA - The Legendary Black Death Warrior Goddess Who Builds Cities by the Sea +

Watch out - She's a hottie, rrrrr...

Califia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Califia (aka Calafia) is the name of a legendary Black Amazon warrior queen, associated with the mythical Island of California. The US state of California is thought by some to be named after Queen Califia (see Origin of the name California).

The legend of Queen Califia appears to date back to the novel Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), written around 1510 by the Spanish writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo:

It is known that to the right of the Indies there exists an island called California very near the terrestrial paradise; and peopled by black women among whom there was not a single man since they lived in the way of the Amazons. They had beautiful robust bodies, spirited courage and great strength. Their island was the most impregnable in the world with its cliffs and headlands and rocky coasts. Their weapons were all of gold . . . because in all the island there was no metal except gold. And there ruled over that island of California a queen of majestic proportions, more beautiful than all others, and in the very vigor of her womanhood. She was not petite, nor blond, nor golden-haired. She was large, and black as the ace of clubs. But the prejudice of color did not then exist even among the most brazen-faced or the most copper-headed. For, as you shall learn, she was reputed the most beautiful of women; and it was she, O Californias! who accomplished great deeds, she was valiant and courageous and ardent with a brave heart, and had ambitions to execute nobler actions than had been performed by any other ruler — Queen Califia.

This document helped to precipitate the Spanish hunt for gold in North America. In 1536 when the explorer Hernán Cortés landed with his crew in what is known today as Baja California, they believed that they had arrived in Califia's land. A portion of the original of this document Las sergas de Esplandián was translated by Edward Everett Hale for The Antiquarian Society, and the story was printed in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1864.[1] By 1770, the entire Pacific coast controlled by Spain had been given the name California, and the Spanish speaking people who lived there were called Californios.

California Amazons

Dora Beale Polk, The Island of California, A History of the Myth, page 126:

In describing his California Amazons as "mujeres negras" Montalvo was following the color prejudices of the period. In his time, and in some places still, black describes any complexion other than white. John Mandeville describes a tribe neighboring his Amazons as "black enough and more than black . . . and they be clept Moors." When the explorers met the inhabitants of what they believed was "Ind," they lumped them automatically into the dark-skinned category. Attitudes from the New World, the Crusades, and the invasion of the Moors were fused in Montalvo's California Amazons.[2]

A 1926 portrayal of Queen Califia and her Amazons is found in a mural in the Room of the Dons at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was created for the opening of the hotel in 1926 by Maynard Dixon[3] and Frank Von Sloun.

The Spirit of California, Califia, depicted in a mural on the show building of the Golden Dreams attraction at Disney's California Adventure.

The Spirit of California

"Golden Dreams" was a 23-minute film showing the history of California through several recreated scenes, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg as Califia, the Queen of California. The attraction, atDisney's California Adventure at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, opened with the park on February 8, 2001, and closed on September 7, 2008. It is open only to school groups until April of 2009, when it will be demolished to make way for the construction of a Little Mermaid dark ride.

---

Origin of the name California
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This 1562 map by Diego Gutiérrez was the first map to print the toponym California.
The toponym California is currently used by three North American entities—in the United States, by the state of California; and in Mexico, by the states ofBaja California ("Lower California") and Baja California Sur ("South Lower California") (collectively, these three areas constitute Las Californias)—and shared by many other places in other parts of the world whose names derive from these.

Alta California ("Upper California") was the name of the State of California when it was still part of Mexico, and the Sea of Cortés is also known as theGulf of California.

Several origins have been suggested for the word "California", includingSpanish, Latin, South Asian, and Aboriginal American origins. All of these are disputed.[1] The following paragraphs illustrate some of the extant claims.

California originally referred to the entire region composed of the Mexican peninsula now known as Baja California and land in the current US states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming, which was eventually distinguished as Alta California. In even earlier times, the boundaries of the Sea of Cortés and the Pacific shore were only partially explored and California was shown on early maps as an island.

The island of California, from a map circa 1650. Restored.

In the minds of European explorers, an island populated by Amazons off the coast of the Indies was a long-established expectation. The earliest known application of the name "California" to this island of the Amazons was in the romance novel Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián) by Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, whose earliest surviving edition (but not first edition) is from 1510. The book described the Island of California as being east of theAsian mainland, "very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by blackwomen, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons." The Island was ruled by Queen Califia. In his work, the author drew on a long-standing European belief in such an island.

Know that on the right hand from the Indies exists an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons were golden and so were the harnesses of the wild beasts that they were accustomed to domesticate and ride, because there was no other metal in the island than gold.

–Las Sergas de Esplandián, (novela de caballería)
by García Ordóñez de Montalvo.
Published in Seville in 1510.

Since then, that unknown Amazon's Island came to be known as California.

Some scholars speculate the Song of Roland, an 11th century Old French epic poem, may have served as the inspiration for the nameCalifornia. It refers to the defeat suffered August 15, 778, in the retreat of Charlemagne's army at the hands of the Muslim army inBattle of Roncevaux Pass in the Pyrenees. On line 2924 of the poem, which is in verse number CCIX (209), the word Califerne is one of the lands mentioned, with no indication of its geographic location. It is, however, named after a reference to Affrike, or Africa.

Morz est mis nies, ki tant me fist cunquere
Encuntre mei revelerunt li Seisne,
E Hungre e Bugre e tante gent averse,
Romain, Puillain et tuit icil de Palerne
E cil d'Affrike e cil de Califerne.
My nephew's dead, who won for me such realms!
Against me then the Saxon will rebel,
Hungar, Bulgar, and many hostile men,
Romain, Puillain, all those are in Palerne,
And in Affrike, and those in Califerne;

–Song of Roland, Verse CCIX (i.e. 209; lines 2920–2924), 11th c.

"Since the Roland poem concerns the "evil" Saracens, it's possible that the poet derived Califerne from caliph. Montalvo might also have been influenced by such similar names as Californo and Calafornina in Sicily or Calahorra in Spain."[2]

This notion of a place of women without men echoes a passage from the diary of Christopher Columbus's first voyage:

The Indians told him that along that route he would find the island of Matinino, which they said was populated by women without men, to which the admiral replied he wanted very much to bring five or six of them to the king and queen… but they said that it was certain that they [the women] existed and that at a certain time of the year men came to them [women] from the aforementioned island of Carib, which they said was ten or twelve leagues away, and if they gave birth to a son they sent it to the island of the men, and if a girl, they kept her with them.

The lure of an earthly paradise, as well as the search for the fabled Strait of Anián, helped motivate Hernán Cortés,[citation needed]following his conquest of Mexico, to send several expeditions in the late 1530s and early 1540s to the west coast of New Spain. The first expedition reached the Gulf of California and Baja California, and proved that California was in fact a peninsula. Nevertheless, the idea that California was an island persisted for well over a century and was included on many maps. The Spanish gave the name "California" to the peninsula and to the lands north, including both Baja California and Alta California, the region that became the present-day US state.

Fourth carta de relación of Hernán Cortés

In his fourth carta de relación (a letter to Spain narrating events of the conquest), datelined Mexico (meaning what is now Mexico City)15 October 1524, Hernán Cortés wrote to the king of Spain about certain information about a legendary island, information that had been brought to him by the captain who had achieved the conquest of Colima.

And in the same manner I was brought a story from the men of the province of Cihuatlán, which reinforced completely that there is an island populated by women, without a single male, and at certain times men come from the mainland, who are granted access by the women… and if they give birth to women [sic], they keep them; and if men, they throw them out of their company; and that this island is ten days journey from this province; and that many of them have gone there and have seen it. They tell me also that it is very rich in pearls and gold; I will prepare myself to know the truth and tell it at length to your majesty.

–Hernán Cortés. Fourth carta de relación.

The name of California is applied

The name California is the fifth-oldest surviving European place-name in the US and was applied to what is now the southern tip ofBaja California as the island of California by a Spanish expedition led by Diego de Becerra and Fortun Ximenez who landed there in 1533 at the bequest of Hernando Cortes.[3]

Cortés, on his third journey of exploration (1535–36), tried unsuccessfully to establish a colony at La Paz near the southern tip of the recently discovered Baja California Peninsula under a royal charter granting him that land.

Hernando de Alarcón, sent by the viceroy Mendoza—an enemy of Cortés—on a 1540 expedition to verify Cortés's discoveries, referred to the inhospitable lands as California, after the imaginary island in Las Sergas, discussed above. There is no question about Hernando de Alarcón's use of the term, nor about his allusion to Las Sergas, but there is question as to whether this is the first use of the name to refer to those lands and whether he intended the name as mockery. Alarcón provides a clear link from the literary, imaginary California to the real place, but his usage cannot be proven to be the actual origin, in that the name might predate him.[4][5][6]

Today the name California is applied to the Baja California Peninsula, the Gulf of California (also known as the Sea of Cortés), the US State of California, and the Mexican states of Baja California and Baja California Sur.

---

Queen Califia's Magical Circle Garden

Escondido, California

Queen Califia’s Magical Circle garden is a definite must-see in a tour of weird Southern California attractions.

Huge sculptures are covered with thousands and thousands of bright shimmering glimmering pieces of colored and mirrored glass.

Queen Califia is the legendary Amazon queen that California is named after. She is 11 feet tall and stands atop a 13-foot tall eagle.

That's tall!

The eagle is cool! It has 5 legs and a mosaic night-sky dome under its belly. So look up when you walk under the eagle!

There are tall totems surrounding the queen and eagle. They have a variety of all sorts of different creatures and symbols on them. The artist, Niki de Saint Phalle, took a mix of legends and myths from many different cultures all over the world and put them together in bright colorful totems.

This is the only sculpture garden in the U.S. by Niki de Saint Phalle. Her other sculpture garden The Tarot Garden, is in the Tuscany region of Italy.

Queen Califia's Magical Circle garden is tucked away in an undeveloped portion of Kit Carson Park in Escondido, California.

Directions: From I-15 in Escondido, take the Via Rancho Parkway exit east. It becomes Bear Valley Parkway. Turn left at Mary Lane. (The San Pasqual High School is on the right where you're supposed to turn.) Follow this almost to the end (straight across is the path to the garden) and there's parking off to the right. It is about 1/4 mile walk to Queen Califia’s Magical Circle garden.

---

and then we have the Original KALI -

Kali is a destructive and devouring Hindu goddess. She is a terrifying aspect of Devi, who in other forms appears as peaceful and benevolent. Kali is commonly associated with death, violence, sexuality, and, paradoxically, with motherly love. Noted for killing the demon Raktavija, she is usually depicted as a hideous, black-faced hag smeared with blood. In her four hands she holds, variously, a sword, a shield, the severed head of a giant, or a noose for strangling. Nearly naked, she wears a garland of skulls and a girdle of severed hands. She is often shown standing or dancing on her husband, Shiva. Until the 19th century the thugs of India worshiped Kali and offered their victims to her. In the late 20th century she became a symbol of feminine empowerment in some circles.

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Kali
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kali

Kali (Sanskrit: Bengali: both Kālī), also known as Kalika(Bengali: Kālikā), is a Hindu goddess associated with eternal energy. The name Kali means "black", but has by folk etymology come to mean "force of time (kala)". Despite her negative connotations, she is today considered the goddess of time and change. Although sometimes presented as dark and violent, her earliest incarnation as a figure of annihilation still has some influence. More complex Tantric beliefs sometimes extend her role so far as to be the "ultimate reality" or Brahman. She is also revered as Bhavatarini (literally "redeemer of the universe"). Comparatively recent devotional movements largely conceive Kali as a benevolent mother goddess.
Kali is represented as the consort of god Shiva, on whose body she is often seen standing. She is associated with many other Hindu goddesses like Durga,Bhadrakali, Sati, Rudrani, Parvati and Chamunda. She is the foremost among the Dasa-Mahavidyas, ten fierce Tantric goddesses.[1]

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More later on how CONAN THE BARBARIAN (in his 4th movie) defeats CALIFIA (by slashing her 'in half', not unlike the current budget) and 'takes over' her ISLAND!!! What a kawinkydink!!!

+ Mystery Of America- Time Travellers From Our Past w/ Tedd St. Rain (2 hour video & free ebook) +

2009-05-18T18:17:00.001-07:00

+ Mystery Of America- Time Travellers From Our Past w/ Tedd St. Rain (2 hr vid & free ebook) +

www.LostArtsMedia.com & 60th Anniversary Roswell Festival and UFO Conference proudly present:

Mystery of America - Enigmatic Mysteries and Anomalous Artifacts of North America: A Connection to the Ancient Past, by Tédd St. Rain. Mysterious and often inexplicable remnants of civilization's history fascinate scientists and archaeologists. People travel worldwide to visit such sites, yet some of the most enigmatic artifacts and structures have been found right here in North America. Unfortunately, because these records do not fit within accepted academic models of human history, they remain unexplained mysteries, and most people never hear of them. Long before any humans were supposed to be on this continent, unknown hands removed millions of pounds of copper from mines near Lake Superior. Or a three-foot-high adult mummy was discovered in Wyoming. Sandaled feet made footprints in rock at least 300 million years old. A human-like tooth,three times normal size, was found in coal from a Montana mine. According to modern wisdom, humans evolved on Earth no earlier than two million years ago. Yet many of these artifacts were made long before then. How can this be? Could these anomalies have been the result of an advanced civilization once present on our planet? This video-taped lecture presents evidence that there have been intelligent beings on earth long before humans are thought to have evolved here. About 1/2 way through, St. Rain shifts gears and describes the basics of his THEORY OF ALMOST EVERYTHING, fondly referred to as TEDD'S GRAND UNIFIED CONSPIRACY THEORY, where he reveals the nature of the human soul, soul catchers, the interdimensional nature of reality, the reason for the arrival of extraterrestrials, intergalactic vending routes, the prime directive, extinction level events, cosmic dump trucks, Corso's time travelling aliens at roswell, time travel, time dilation, quanta, string theories; and so much more. --- Tedd St. Rain, author, lecturer, and videographer, he has traveled the world extensively investigating the world’s ancient mysteries and enigmas, actively researching the mysterious, the metaphysical and the mythical.

----

Also 'READ the FREE E-BOOK' on Scribd.com: Mystery of America - Enigmatic Mysteries and Anomalous Artifacts of North America: A Connection to the Ancient Past, by Tédd St. Rain - All Rites Reversed.

ENIGMATIC MYSTERIES AND ANOMALOUS ARTIFACTS OF NORTH AMERICA: A CONNECTION TO THE ANCIENT PAST

Mysterious and often inexplicable remnants of civilization's history fascinate scientists and archaeologists. People travel worldwide to visit such sites, yet some of the most enigmatic artifacts and structures have been found right here in North America. Unfortunately, because these records do not fit within accepted academic models of human history, they remain unexplained mysteries, and most people never hear of them.

• Long before any humans were supposed to be on this continent, unknown hands removed millions of pounds of copper from mines near Lake Superior.

• Giant people as tall as 12 feet were buried in Arizona, Nevada and the Midwest.

• A three-foot-high adult mummy was discovered in Wyoming.

• Sandaled feet made footprints in rock at least 300 million years old in Utah.

• A human-like tooth,three times normal size, was found in coal from a Montana mine.

According to modern wisdom, humans evolved on Earth no earlier than two million years ago. Yet many of these artifacts were made long before then. How can this be? Could any of these anomalies have been the result of an advanced civilization once present on our planet?

This book presents the evidence that there have been intelligent beings on earth long before humans are thought to have evolved here. Explore these intriguing possibilities and more in this exciting and informative investigation into the mysteries and anomalous artifacts of North America.

Tedd St. Rain, author, lecturer, and videographer, he has traveled the world extensively investigating the world’s ancient mysteries and enigmas, actively researching the mysterious, the metaphysical and the mythical. Born in Long Beach, California, Tedd is the owner of Lost Arts Media that publishes, markets and distributes fascinating and educational books, videos and multimedia products to help inform, enlighten and inspire humanity.

LA-999 o ISBN 1-59016-999-9 o 107 pages o 6 x 9 o trade paper o heavily illustrated o Large Print Edition

DOWNLOAD the entire book for FREE in PDF FORMAT by clicking HERE(17.6 megs)

Published by:

LOST ARTS MEDIA
LONG BEACH, CA

© 1997-2009
Tédd St. Rain
All Rites Reversed

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or be entered or posted on any computer network, or into any present or future information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

MYSTERYOF AMERICA: BOOK1 – ENIGMATIC MYSTERIES AND ANOMALOUS ARTIFACTS OF NORTH AMERICA:
A CONNECTION TO THE ANCIENT PAST
ISBN 1-59016-999-9

CONCEPT, RESEARCH, LAYOUT AND DESIGN
Tédd St. Rain

MYSTERYOFAMERICA: BOOK 1
ENIGMATIC MYSTERIES AND ANOMALOUS
ARTIFACTS OF NORTH AMERICA:
A CONNECTION TO THE ANCIENT PAST

Presented by Tédd St. Rain

The exact contrary
of what is generally
believed is often the truth.
–Jean de la Bruyere

INTRODUCTION

There are many people today who take a great interest in our past and our history as a civilization. The planet on which we live has a number of mysterious and often enigmatic remnants and artifacts that continue to baffle many scientists and archaeologists. There is a recurring theme that many of the ancient relics have in common, that of being of such unwieldy proportions or sophistication, it is hard to believe that primitive human hands alone could have fashioned them. What we do know of the first recorded civilizations indicates they had a high degree of sophistication (even by today’s standards) in many of the fledging arts and sciences we take for granted. These include the development of and expertise in agriculture, writing, mathematics, cosmology, weights and measures, contracts, education, justice, time reckoning, the Zodiac, art, metallurgy, sculpture and painting, amongst many others.

Modern-day research and scholarship have revealed some interesting details of these ancient civilizations that may explain the nearly instantaneous rise of civilization nearly 6,000 years ago (See Sitchin, Freer, Gardner and others in the bibliography). There is mounting evidence that an extraterrestrial influence may have shaped mankind’s early history and may even be responsible for our very existence.

When one considers ancient mysteries of the world what frequently comes to mind are romantic images of the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, the crumbling walls of Babylon, and of Greece and Rome, the ruins of Baalbek, the remnants of a lost civilization in the Andes, and many others. People travel all over the world to visit places such as these, and yet some of the most perplexing, enigmatic and profound artifacts and structures have been found right here in North America. It is unfortunate that few people outside of certain circles have heard of these incredible archaeological finds. This book (and companion lecture on Video and DVD) will present evidence supporting the notion that there may have been "others" who have come before us. "Others" who have either left, died out, or have returned from elsewhere, possibly as the modern UFO phenomenon.

DEEP WITHIN THE ARCHIVES

A large mountain of evidence available from literary and other sources is available to support the hypothesis that something strange has occurred in the remote past on this planet. Unfortunately, most of the so-called "reputable" institutions have been more interested in piecing together mankind’s historical record than in understanding the significance of the rare and unusual artifacts that from time to time come to their attention. Of much greater concern is the methodical and systematic way in which the authorities and powers-that-be have hidden the truth, oftentimes suppressing evidence that would revise the early history of America, and in many notable cases would completely rewrite the record, and mankind’s place in it, on this planet.

The legendary Vatican archives are an excellent example. There is no doubt that the libraries and storehouses on and below the grounds of the less-than-a-square-mile sovereign republic known as Vatican City contain a wealth of information about mankind’s past. The Vatican library is renowned the world over for its extensive collection on every subject conceivable. There are even rumors of hidden passageways and secret vaults used as safe storage for some of the most incredible curios imaginable. After two millennia of acquisitions, in all likelihood the most unusual of the unusual lie within its walls, literally containing the "secrets of the ages." Astounding artifacts which, if were made public, would revise our understanding and shine the torch of illumination on the complicated history of both the old and new worlds.

The archives of the Smithsonian Institution certainly rival those of the Vatican, in quantity, if not in depth and scope. The Smithsonian Institution was created when its namesake, British scientist James Smithson, bequeathed that his estate should go "to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." The motives behind Smithson’s bequest remain mysterious. He never traveled to the United States and seems to have had no correspondence with anyone here.

It should come as no surprise as to how many of the objects described in the literature and acquired by the Smithsonian have become "lost" or "unaccounted for." Many times they acknowledge having received an object, but its present location is unknown, or there is some other problem, as in a notable case from the Crumf Burial Cave. In 1892, there were several wood coffins that had been hollowed out by fire, aided by stone or copper chisels, discovered in a cave near Birmingham, Alabama. Eight of these coffins were reportedly taken to the Smithsonian, which in the 1950s claimed they had "not been able to find the specimens in our collection, though records show that they were received." Later, in 1992, the Smithsonian told the President of the Gungywamp Society, David Barron, that the coffins could not be viewed because they were housed in an asbestos-contaminated warehouse that would be closed for the next ten years, and which no one was allowed into except Smithsonian personnel. It would be interesting to know where the coffins are now.

Over the past nearly couple hundred years the Smithsonian has played a part in many of the archaeological finds in North America, sometimes accepting material after no one else knew what to do with it. As a result they have collected over a million artifacts, only a small number of which are available for public viewing. Because of this involvement, they have become the main storehouse for many of the obscure and hard-to-explain rarities uncovered on American soil. In addition to the Smithsonian, many colleges and universities, among them the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago and the University of California, were involved and thus claimed the booty, from many of the 19th and 20th century discoveries. Amongst these various archives, institutions, and museums, open only to a select few, lie human-like remains dug up over the past several centuries. Within the literature exists reference to many of these finds, a number of which refer to burials of humans that would be considered giants by today’s standards. While many of these interments were the result of "mound builder" activity, primarily from the Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian cultures, there have been several notable exceptions where the remains most likely predate any historical habitation in the area.

THERE WERE GIANTS ON THE EARTH

There have been a number of modern-day giants, such as the Swans, a happily-married giant couple from around the turn of the century. What concerns us most, however, is any number of enigmatic oversized skeletons unearthed in America.

In a classic example of mound builder activity, an article¹ reports that near Brewersville, Indiana, a stone mound more than 70 feet in diameter was excavated, in 1879, which contained skeletons, at least one of which was over nine and half feet tall. At its feet was a human image of burned clay embedded with pieces of flint. Weapons that had been buried nearby were not common to Native Americans in the area. The excavation was supervised by Indiana State archaeologists, and others from the neighborhood states of New York and Ohio. In an affirmation to the lackadaisical attitude of such discoveries in the past, the artifacts were kept in a basket near the Robinson family grain mill, on whose property they had been found. Unfortunately, in 1937 a flood swept the mill away and with it the contents of the basket, which has never been seen since.

Some of the other "giants" which have been found in North America are much more problematic. There are many burials where the nature and characteristics of the burial indicate the skeletal remains are of an uncommonly old age. Take for instance the discovery in a small now-abandoned town southeast of Tucson, Arizona, called Crittenden. According to newspaper accounts² at the time, there was an astounding discovery which, if it is true, could entirely reshape how we view our past. In 1891, while workmen were digging a basement for a commercial building they made a startling discovery. About eight feet below the surface they discovered a large clay-stone sarcophagus. The contractor then called in expert help, and when they opened it they found a granite mummy case which once held the body of a human-like being more than twelve feet tall. The mummy had worn long hair and a bird-shaped headdress, possibly of an Egyptian motif. Apparently the body had been buried for so many thousands of years that the bones had turned to dust, but inscriptions on the outside of the mummy case indicate that the being had six toes. We must all take reports like this, as we do everything in life, with a grain of salt. Keeping in mind that some of the less scrupulous newspapers of the day would think up stories such as this to fill out the columns. The fact that the alleged discovery it is not an isolated one, and that similar finds can be found throughout North America, does seem to support this report.

THE LOVELOCK GIANTS

Another famous discovery of oversized human remains was first reported³ in 1911, when miners harvesting bat guano at Lovelock Cave (about 80 miles northeast of Reno, Nevada) discovered the skeleton of a large mummified human skeleton. The unusual thing about this particular find, besides its excessive height and the extraordinarily large human skulls, was the fact that the remains showed evidence of red hair and was unlike any Indian known to have lived in North America.

As the workers continued mining past the four-foot level, they continued to discover mummies. A mining engineer and amateur archaeologist, John T. Reid, immediately reported the discovery to numerous colleges and institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and the Smithsonian Institution. He offered them the opportunity to examine the artifacts as they were being removed from the screens of the mining equipment. Unfortunately, it was over a year before the University of California sent a "non-professional observer," by which time the miners had all but disposed of nearly all the bones and other related artifacts.

Another "observer" who had come later from New York, had accompanied the first man in his observation of the site. What became especially puzzling was that these men went out of their way to avoid examination of the bones, and at one point, even insisted on the reburial of a complete skeleton that had just been unearthed. Instead, they focused their investigation primarily on pottery shards, fragments of basketry, and the like. It is no surprise that it took 17 years, in 1929, before their findings were published, and then, only in a small article from California. Understandably, Reid became disillusioned with the establishment, and began to document the discoveries as best he could. Many of the testimonials he collected, as well as his personal memoirs, and some baskets and beads from the area can be found in the Nevada State Historical Society library and museum at 1650 North Virginia Street, Reno, NV 89503.

After the refusal of "establishment science" to make a serious investigation into the matter, local Lovelock residents set up makeshift exhibits of the more impressive finds. As has been the case many times with priceless relics of our past, a devastating fire at one of these displays ended up destroying much of what remained.

There have been reports of other oversize skeletons turning up in the area. Skeletons were found in February and June of 1931 in the Humboldt lake bed near the cave. One of these was said to have been wrapped in an Egyptian-like gum-covered material and was about eight and a half feet tall, while another, stood nearly ten feet tall. Another report in the 29 Sep 1939 Review Miner tells of a seven-foot-seven-inch skeleton that was found on the Friedman Ranch in the vicinity. As a result of the long series of battles that took place in the area, there may still be quite a few undiscovered finds that would be superficially buried, especially in the area of Carson sink, specifically around the south shore and near Pelican Island. Also, a few miles southwest of Lovelock along the railroad, near Perth, is a gravel pit that has yielded artifacts and mummies. Local Indians claim that artifacts have been found in caves near the Pyramid Lake Reservation about 55 miles to the west.

According to Reid, Indians had told him of petrified giants they had found lying in the open wilderness area to the south of Lovelock Cave. In fact, the local Piute Indians spoke of a race of red-headed giants and the bloody conflict that their forefathers had pursued against them. So ferocious was the Piute abomination toward these Si-Te-Cahs, or "lanky redheads," that a collective crusade to wipe them out was organized by local tribes that were normally at odds with one another. A book published in 1882, Life Among the Paiutes, written by Sarah Winnemucca details the strange legends of red-haired giants who had come to the area by boat, apparently when the area was an inland sea. Twentynine years later the cache of oversized skeletons and artifacts in Lovelock Cave were discovered. As is usually the case, these "legends" were scoffed at by the "authorities" until hard evidence began to show up to support it, and even then nothing was properly investigated.

Whereas the skulls from Lovelock measured no more than 12-14 inches from base to crown, there are others of considerably larger size that have been reported. For instance, the well-known zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, once received a letter from an engineer that was stationed on the island of Shemya in the isolated Aleutian chain in northwest Alaska during World War II. While bulldozing a group of hills for a future airstrip, the workmen found several sedimentary layers, under which were found the skeletal remains of what appeared to be extremely large humans. Most of the giant skulls measured about 22 to 24 inches from base to crown; whereas, a normal human skull only measures eight inches. Apparently, Sanderson later received an additional letter from another person in the unit, who confirmed the story. Both letters indicated that the Smithsonian Institution had taken possession of the remains, and of course, they were never heard about again.

UNUSUAL TEETH AND BONE STRUCTURES

At this point, the credulity of the reader may become tested, for it gets a bit boring telling story after story of gigantic skeletons and skulls two or three times normal size, regardless of how interesting the details may be. But a few more are in order, and then we’ll move on. The central California coastal area near Lompoc is best known for its famous flower fields, but in the field of cryptozoology the region is known for an unusual report⁴ of 12-foot human remains that were found while soldiers were digging a storage pit for gunpowder in 1833. After hacking through cemented gravel, a giant skeleton was found surrounded by stone axes, carved shells, and the most unusual porphyry blocks carved with indecipherable symbols. The teeth arrangement of the skull was unlike any that are known of, in that there were double sets of both the upper and lower rows of teeth, or double dentition, as it is called. In the end, the artifacts were reburied in a secret location because superstitious natives felt the discovery was a bad omen. To date, its location has not been rediscovered.

Naturally, if this were the only reported giant with unusual features and dentition in the area it might be considered a fluke or anomalous report. In another account,⁵ from nearby Santa Rosa Island, about 55 miles southwest of Santa Barbara, the skeletal remains of a giant man, with double rows of teeth, was also unearthed. Research has suggested that his people may have subsisted on a species of small elephants that once lived on that island. The elephants, and the giants that feasted on them, have long since disappeared, as have any skulls or bones and thus the solid evidence to make sense of this report.

And then there’s the teeth themselves. For example there was a discovery made in 1926 from a town outside of Billings, Montana that was reported⁶ of an unusually large human-like tooth that had been found in coal deposits deep within the Bearcreek Mutual Coal Mine. The discovery was made by archaeologist J. F. C. Siegfriedt in lumps of coal that had been set aside for inspection. The tooth was said to be about three times normal size and the roots had been replaced with iron, and the enamel with carbon. He claims to have carefully preserved both the tooth and the mineral matrix around which it was encased, but the "authorities" were not interested and no further mention of it has been seen.

ANOMALOUS SKELETONS

A report from the Big Indian Copper Mine⁷ near the Town of LaSal, Utah, in 1973, shows that human-like teeth are not all that have been found while mining for coal. After bulldozing a site in preparation for a mining operation, amateur rock collector Lin Ottinger found a few pieces of brownish teeth and bones. When he found a large bone buried in rock, that was believed to be at least 100 million years old, he stopped digging and returned later with a professor from the University of Utah, Dr. J. P. Marwitt, who proceeded with the excavation. The bones of two human skeletons were unearthed that had not been dismembered or disfigured, indicating they had not been washed into their position nor had they fallen from a higher level. Marwitt then decided that in order to determine an estimated age accurately, the remains would have to be sent back to the laboratory at the University of Utah. Apparently, establishment science lost interest in the bones, and that was the last that was heard of this incredible find. For those unfamiliar with Michael Cremo’s several books on forbidden archaeology (see Cremo in the bibliography) which detail the evidence of mankind’s prehistoric origins, they are all recommended reading.

From the West Coast to the Midwest, the reports⁸ continue near Chatfield and Clearwater, Minnesota, where local mounds that were excavated during the late 1800s were found to contain the skeletal remains of a number of large skeletons. Some were reported as being buried head down, and the skulls had a complete double set of dentition and a recessed forehead, similar to those found at Lompoc Rancho, California and Santa Rosa Island, California.

And on the East Coast, near Moundsville, West Virginia, a number of fort-like foundations can be found, including an octagon-shaped encirclement and other guard-post type "wells" in the hills along the river. Unfortunately, these are severely eroded, but the principal construction can still be found in the form of a large burial mound. In 1838, when Grave Creek Mound was originally excavated, it was discovered to contain passages similar to those in the Great Pyramid of Egypt. This earthen pyramid has a network of timber-supported tunnels leading to what appears to be a storage chamber at the middle, and to a burial tomb about seven feet below the surface of the ground. The skeletal remains of what appeared to be a man and woman were found in this lower chamber. Their teeth exhibited an unusual feature, in that the peaks of their molars were conically pointed in shape, as opposed to modern man’s, which are squared. Another grave was unearthed above the lower chamber, but below the upper one, which contained another skeleton in a very deteriorated state. There was also a small stone table with 22 runic-like hieroglyphics that was found while excavating near the mound. Luckily, plenty of drawings and casts were made of the object before it disappeared. Since then, "professional" archaeologists have declared it a fake.

One last entry, out of many more of anomalous skeletons and skulls, is an account⁹ from the 1880s, of a group of distinguished antiquarians that excavated a burial mound near Tioga Point, Pennsylvania. Among those present were Professor W. K. Morehead of Phillips Andover Academy, Professor A. B. Skinner of the American Investigating Museum, and Dr. G. P. Donehoo, a Pennsylvania State historian and distinguished Presbyterian minister. During the dig they unearthed the remains of 68 males with an average height of seven feet. Some of the skulls had bony projections, two inches above the forehead, that appeared to be horn-like buds. Not surprisingly, some of these valuable artifacts were sent to the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia, but, as usual, they have since disappeared and no one there knows anything about them.

An important point that needs to be made is how few people realize that when the first Spanish explorers made contact in the New World a fair number of the tribes they encountered were of giant stature. Members of some of these tribes were on average 7 or 8 feet tall, with certain individuals being nearly 10 feet tall and possessing the greatest of strength. A number of the large skeletal remains that have been found, especially in some of the older and enigmatic mounds that dot the Midwestern and Southern landscapes, may indeed fall into the category of "native" burials and can very well be explained by conventional theories. On the other hand, some of the more bizarre claims, especially when observed as a whole, give the indication there may have been another species, similar to humans yet of a different physiology, that once inhabited North America.

A RACE OF DWARFS

Another curiosity found amongst the mysteries of bizarre human-like remains are reports of miniature adult humanoid mummies. In one such instance,¹⁰ in October of 1932, two men were prospecting for gold in the Pedro Mountains of Wyoming when they found the mummified remains of what appeared to be a mature adult male. The miners were blasting near a stone-walled gulch, and when the dust settled they found the opening of a small cave about four-feet by four-feet and close to fifteen-feet deep. Inside they found the 14-inch tall San Pedro mummy, as it is now called, weighing about 12 ounces, with its arms and legs crossed, leaning perpendicularly upon a small ledge. According to the authorities, it did not appear to be the body of an infant because of the well-developed and proportional head, which would have been proportionally larger if it had been an infant. It had a broad, thin-lipped mouth, the nose was short and broad, the forehead was flattened, and the skin was a deeply-wrinkled dark brown.

In an unusual display of confidence, the Harvard University Anthropological Department at one time attested for the authenticity of the mummy; the American Museum of Natural History’s Dr. Henry Shapiro confirmed that the mummy was of an unknown human type and of enormous age. The Egyptian Department at the Boston Museum indicated that it corresponds to the look of an Egyptian mummy that had been left unwrapped. At one time the Goodman Family owned this meaningful relic from our past, but they have since moved from the area. Another report claims that the artifact had been donated to the Smithsonian Institution, which, of course, has no record of it. However, the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History does have pictures of the unusual mummy.

Another mysterious mummy was discovered deep inside of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The cave is one of the largest natural enclosures of its kind in the world. There has been a number of well preserved cadavers, or "Mammoth Cave mummies" as they are usually called, found here since the cave was first discovered in 1809. One of these mummies, found on a deep ledge of the cavern in 1920, was only three feet tall and had red hair. Another Mammoth Cave mummy has been on occasional display at the State Museum of Anthropology in Lexington.

It has come to my attention that in addition to the unusually small mummies noted above, there have been a number of cases where "shrunken skeletons" have been made through the use of known mummification and embalming processes, resulting in the two small fellows pictured here. Notice the very human-like proportions and physiology which are unlike that of the San Pedro mummy.

ANCIENT MINING ACTIVITY

And then there’s the enigma of prehistoric mining. There are approximately 5,000 prehistoric pit mines¹¹ of unknown age and origin found in northern Michigan that extend for about 100 miles along the south shore of Lake Superior. Also known as the Arcadian Copper Mines, this is one of the only places on Earth where copper can be found in large quantities in its raw form, as chunks and nuggets. A massive amount, anywhere from 100 million to 500 million pounds, of pure copper appears to have been extracted from these sites. There are still several copper mines functioning in the area and every one of them is located on a site that had been mined in the prehistoric past. However, there has been almost no evidence of any human habitation or settlements, nor any animal bones or human burials anywhere in the area. And yet, the technical engineering that was employed in the construction of some of the mines indicates a highly specialized and organized civilization. In addition, there have been some unusual idol-like artifacts that have been found in the region; some of these can still be found at a private museum in Marble, North Carolina.

Native Americans had no interest in the mines, besides, few aborigine tribes had much use for copper. There are several so-called "Indian" burial mounds, notably in Fall River, MA and Walkerton, IN, that when excavated in the 19th century yielded skeletal remains (up to 9 feet tall) which wore copper artifacts, including copper and/or bronze armor. Dr. Eiler, an archaeologist from Carleton College in Minnesota, has hypothesized that Near-Eastern explorers might have been in the area to mine metals. While commenting on the Indian theory as to the origins of the copper workings Charles Fort wrote: "I think that we’ve had visitors [and] that they have come here for copper, for instance."

Evidence of mining activity and underground tunnel systems in prehistoric North America are not uncommon. Take for example a report¹² that, in 1954, a pair of existing tunnels were discovered while working a mine owned by the Lion Coal Corporation near Wattis, Utah. At an approximate depth of 8,500 feet, miners found pockets of coal that had been heavily oxidized. Further digging revealed the tunnels, 200 feet apart, that were partially filled with crumpled rock and coal, but that had been mined from both sides. No record of any other mining activity in the area has been recorded and no entrances have ever been found. Due to the nature of mining activity there is no doubt that the location of the tunnels has been lost to history.

UNDERGROUND CAVERNS AND TUNNEL SYSTEMS

Besides evidence of ancient mining, there are also a number of underground chambers and tunnels which have been found over the years. For example, in 1962, Consolidated Edison had planned on building a large electric plant at the north end of where East River Park now stands in New York. When a preliminary soil test was conducted with a large core drilling, at the 200-foot level, the drill reportedly punched through to a large underground cavern of unascertainable size. As the story goes, the hole was secretly filled in and Consolidated Edison built a nice park over it.

Ten years later, in September 1972, a spokesman for the J.F. Barrett Company of Devon reported finding an unusual tunnel while excavating in Milford, Connecticut for a new sewer. The tunnel appeared to be made partially from dry stone masonry and was more than 200 feet long. At one point there was a masonry arch approximately ten feet across and ten feet high. Naturally, the workmen were there to install a sewer, finished the job as expected, and that’s the last anyone’s heard about it.

There is also a series of subterranean tunnel systems that have been made from arched masonry structures, found beneath Memphis, Tennessee. The establishment claims that they were built by the military during the civil war. The tunnels that are accessible show a high degree of skill and workmanship, and a great expense of time went into building them, not likely in time of war. There is an entrance to one of them at the east end of Harahan Bridge on I-55. The entrance is between Indiana and Delaware Streets, to the right heading east on Crump Boulevard. It is said to lead to a bigger tunnel that runs lateral to the Mississippi River north along South Third Street towards the center of the city.

And in Lexington, Kentucky, there was a report by G. W. Ranck in the 1872 History of Lexington describing a gallery of tunnels somewhere beneath this city. The report detailed how, in 1776, hunters from the frontier town of Booneborough found rocks of "peculiar workmanship," behind which was found a tunnel. The small opening inclined sharply into the rock and enlarged to a grand gallery about four feet wide and seven feet high. After a few hundred feet the gallery led to an even larger chamber that was 18 feet high, 100 feet wide and 300 feet in length. Inside of this chamber were found an altar, idols, and about 2,000 human mummies.

SMALLER TUNNELS

Apparently unusual tunnels come in all sizes. In the summer of 1973, in Croften, Maryland, during excavation for a parking lot, workmen found a collection of tunnels which were about 20 inches in diameter. An amateur archaeologist, William Doepkins, concluded that they may have been made by a large rodent, from the claw and tooth marks that were found on the walls. Naturally, the habitat of those oversized rodents was only superficially explored, the lot was leveled, and a parking lot was built over this unusual find.

There is a well-documented case of an unknown tunnel, that originally was discovered in the late 1800s. When searching for a rabbit, a group of hunters discovered an ancient tunnel system made from mortarless dry masonry near the cemetery in Goshen, Massachusetts. The rabbit had jumped into a burrow near the top of a vertical shaft that had been concealed with flagstones covered with sod and shrubbery. The shaft is three and half feet in diameter and about fifteen feet deep, with two horizontal tunnels that branch off, one at the bottom running eastward, and another three feet from the bottom, which travels westward. The tunnels are about two feet wide and about two and a half feet high with flagstone ceilings supported by sidewalls made of stone. The bottom shaft travels about 75 feet, and the upper one about 15 feet, before reaching points where they have collapsed.

There have been a number of theories as to its origin and purpose. One theory is that settlers built it as a shelter from Indian attacks, though none are known to have occurred in the area. Another is that is was part of the "underground railroad," though it was hardly practical for that use. Or that is was a water well, but then why the horizontal shafts, which according to engineers required an enormous amount of effort to bore such narrow shafts, especially in such dense hardpan, at such an unusual right angle, and in such a confined workspace. The structure has more recently been known as "Counterfeiter’s Den," from the story that counterfeiters were once caught several miles southwest of the site.

UNDERGROUND CITIES

There is a Piute, or Paiute, Indian legend of an underground city below Death Valley, that they refer to as Shin-Au-av. An Indian guide in the 1920s, Tom Wilson, claimed that his grandfather had discovered catacombs below the ground in the area. He says that they led to an underground city where people spoke an unknown language and wore leather-like clothing. Also in the Death Valley area, a prospector by the name of White says that he had fallen from an abandoned mine near Wingate Pass into a mysterious tunnel. He claims he followed the tunnel which led to a succession of rooms in which he found stacks of gold bricks guarded by hundreds of humanoid mummies that were clad in leather. It is interesting to note that when times were tough Walter Scotty, of nearby Scotty’s Castle fame, would wander in the desert for a few days at a time and bring back processed gold that he said he had prospected.

Around the turn of the century, near the city of Chehalis, Washington, there was a man named H F. Forest that claimed he had been prospecting when he came upon a large flat rock "which had been hewn from human hands." He removed the rock and found a cave entrance on the south side of Mount Rainier. He entered the cave and discovered an enclosure about 12-feet high and 60-feet wide, on whose smoothly polished walls could be found "hieroglyphics and figures made by human hands." He explored to a depth of about five miles, occasionally encountering side passages containing ice caves, sulfur springs, hot springs, and cold springs. At one location he came upon human-size bathtubs which had been carved into the bedrock with converging streams of water entering them. Forrest then reportedly came upon an immense underground lake, where a large canoe was chained with silver links to the wall. He removed the canoe and explored the enormous lake for more than a mile in each direction, without reaching shore. Later he came upon a side passage with heavy vaults, one of whose lids was ajar. Inside he found the bodies of two people, a man and a woman, reportedly between seven and eight feet in height. Both had been laid out on slabs of ice, and were perfectly preserved in a completely frozen state. Forrest left town on 16 Mar 1901, and was never heard from again.

In another report, reminiscent of a scene from The Twilight Zone, a traveler to the Mojave Desert north of Baker, California claims he found a small habitation of about 30 dwellings, arranged as a planned community, that had been partially unburied by the shifting of the sands. The structures were said to have been built of wood with massive handmade room timbers. He also claims that there were heavy wooden tables that had been set for a meal. There are no trees found for miles around, nor is there any record of any mining, or other settlement, in the area.

The grand-daddy of all underground city stories can be read in the accompanying article that appeared in the April 5th, 1909 Phoenix Gazette. It describes an underground city in the Grand Canyon that contained a number of unusual artifacts. And the grand-daddy of all underground city stories can be read in this article that appeared in the 05 Apr 1909 Phoenix Gazette.

ANCIENT CANALS

In the 1880s, geologist Andrew Douglass described¹³ an ancient canal that ran for a mile and a half between the Naples, Florida, Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The mysterious canal is "straight as an arrow," about 55 feet across and up to 40 feet deep in places, slicing through both plateaus and sand banks. The bottom of the canal narrows to about twelve feet, and has a two-foot-deep trench about four feet across running down the center. Douglass thought this trench might have been for the keel of a boat. Douglass also wrote "it was a work of enormous labor;" but the question is, what was the purpose, and who in this meagerly populated area could have undertaken it?

Other canals have been found as well, in particular the remains from the Hohokam Indians in the area near present-day Phoenix, Arizona. Their canals were lined with caliche, a type of cement that allowed them to irrigate much of the Salt and Gila river valleys and create a desert paradise. The Hohokam had built about 250 miles of canals that date from about the year 1300. Some of the old canals can still be seen in various locations, whereas many of the modern canals that crisscross the greater-metropolitan Phoenix area no doubt follow the same routes.

ARTIFACTS UNEARTHED

There have been a number of artifacts which have been brought up from below ground that have baffled the authorities. In August,1889, an object that has become known as the "Nampa Image" was reportedly¹⁴ pumped up from a well on the property of M. A. Kurtz, a professional well-driller from the Nampa, Idaho area. Kurtz and two workmen claim they were drilling through coarse sand at the 300-foot level when the artifact was brought up by the machinery. The object is obviously humanoid, and is a brownish piece of clay an inch and a half in length. The image had been sent back East for analysis and a professor at Oberlin College, Albert A. Wright, found it was half clay and half quartz, and that the fractured right leg was not recent. Then, Dr. G. Frederick Wright (no relation), of the Boston Society of Natural History went to Nampa to investigate the circumstances in which it was discovered. He inspected the steam-driven pump and drilling machinery. He then questioned Kurtz at length, and reported to the Society that "there is no grounds to question the fact that this image came up in the sand pump from the depth reported." Professor F. W. Putnam, also of Boston, stated "the cementing of quartz grains by iron molecules under the image’s right arm was evidence of great age." The Idaho State Historical Society, in Boise, has retained caretakership of the artifact, one of only a few surviving objects of a similar nature that have been found in America.

In another similar report,¹⁵ from August 1870, near Lawnridge, Illinois, there was an artifact that was brought up with drilling residues while boring an artesian well at a depth of 125 feet, according to Jacob W. Moffit of Chillicothe. The coin-like object was about the size of a quarter-dollar of the era. The illustration shows a man-like being riding some sort of bird. Scientist William E. DuBois examined the coin carefully and stated that the coin showed no signs of hammering and the patterns on it appeared to have been etched with chemicals, rather than being stamped or engraved. DuBois also felt that the coin must have been passed through a rolling mill and that there were other signs of work in a machine shop. He concluded by stating "how it got into such a deep place, supposing it to be a bona fide discovery, which I cannot call into question, is a very perplexing point . . ."

And this most unusual report,¹⁶ from 1851, of an unusual object unearthed in Dorchester, Massachusetts while blasting to expand a house of worship operated by the Reverend Mr. Hall. Amongst the tons of debris scattered about, workmen discovered a "metallic vessel in two parts." The object was approximately four inches wide by six inches high, was bell-shaped, and showed a high degree of craftsmanship. Apparently, it had been blown out of solid pudding stone from 15 feet below the surface. The Scientific American stated that it was satisfied that it had occurred as reported. It was believed to be an alloy of silver and zinc and had six figures of a bouquet around the circumference and a wreath-like decoration around the base, both of which had been beautifully inlaid with silver.

THE COGSTONES OF THE TOPANGA CULTURE

Artifacts of significant archaeological interest have been found¹⁷ throughout the Los Angeles basin, the western half of San Diego county, and on certain isles in the Channel Islands chain not far from shore. The most famous relics from this lost civilization are known as the "cog stones of the Topanga Culture" and have been found mostly in the Bolsa Chica State Beach area. These California cog stones, as they are commonly called, are gear-like stones ranging in size from two to six inches in diameter, with a thickness up to two inches. The cog stones come with different characteristics such as cups, cusps, hemispherical grooves and dents, sprocketed teeth around the edges, as well as cookie-cutter patterns. Most all of these features occur at precise and repeating intervals, and about 15 percent had a single hole bored through the center. Many times these holes are narrower on one side, have elliptical sides, are conical, or double conical, where the entry point holes are narrower on either side than at the midpoint.

One of the artifacts in particular has a striking anomaly in that it has perfectly square perforation in the middle, something that would be troublesome to duplicate even with our present machine shop technology. Many of the cog stones are found at the circa 6,000 B.C.E. strata, containing artifacts that are some of the most primitive found in North America. The uniqueness of these artifacts are not so much their being found primarily at the estimated 8,000 year old level, but in the fact that a cog-stone-only level occurs below this one that is of a correspondingly older age. It seems pretty obvious that the later peoples may have found the relics of the previous culture and they thus became deposited in their strata. Questions remain on the origins of this earlier tribe.

ROMAN RELICS OFARIZONA

More unusual artifacts were unearthed¹⁸in 1924, when Charles E. Manier found a riveted lead cross and other artifacts of a mysterious nature near Tucson, Arizona. The cross had been protruding from where the roadway had cut through an embankment on a bluff on the west side of the Santa Cruz River. Nearly three dozen artifacts were eventually found at this site. One of the first crosses to be unearthed was bound together by rivets; and when each half was separated they revealed Latin and Hebrew inscriptions, but of an unknown style and form.

Reminiscent of Havisupal Canyon, one of the crosses had, as its only inscription, a depiction of what could only be a dinosaur. A number of the symbols revealed possible mystical origins, including emblems of freemasonry, in particular the Masonic square and compass. Another cross that was found had a snake entwined around it and displayed a number of indecipherable symbols and a few Hebrew letters. Many of the artifacts have an esoteric element associated with them in one way or another.

Manier and his friend Thomas Bent, who owned the property and therefore the artifacts, had brought in skilled professionals with irreproachable credentials to assist in the excavation. The establishment’s final verdict was that a catholic boy of Hispanic decent, Vicente Odohui, who had lived in the area; or possibly Mormons trying to support doctrine, had planted the artifacts beforehand.

to read the rest (and download your free copy), GO HERE: www.MysteryOfAmerica.com

+ Pathways to Higher Consciousness - Understanding the PINEAL GLAND and the Development of the "GOD HELMET" by Tedd St. Rain +

2009-05-13T13:01:00.001-07:00

+ Pathways to Higher Consciousness - Understanding the PINEAL GLAND and the Development of the "GOD HELMET" by Tedd St. Rain +

"PATHWAYS TO HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS - UNDERSTANDING THE PINEAL GLAND AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "GOD HELMET" (OR) HOW TO STIMULATE YOUR MIND'S EYE WITH DIRECTED COUNTER-ROTATING ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS, by Tédd St. Rain

The human endocrine system, as you may know, it's composed of various glands, the hypothalmus, the pituitary, the adrenals, etc, and also various 'transport systems' (aka 'neuroendocrine pathways'). And so, deep within the brain, at the very center of our skull, lodged just beneath our two CEREBRAL HEMISPHERES, is the PINEAL GLAND, and it works hand-in-hand with the nearby Pituitary Gland, aka 'The Master Gland'. So it's this PINEAL GLAND that is interest to us here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland you've probably heard of it, it's best known for producing MELATONIN, which regulates our sleep/wake patterns, and thus OUR CONSCIOUSNESS (did you know that our natural body state is to be in a COMA, it's only our hormones and endocrines that keep up AWAKE and conscious), though science still can't fully explain exactly how the pineal gland works, or how it produces HALLUCINATIONS IN THE MIND when stimulated in the 'right way', like when you trip on acid or have a DMT 'experience', and so, when your 'trippin', this gland becomes fully-activated, and it quite literally 'pulses' in a certain rhythmic fashion, whereas 'normally' it's quite dormant in everyday life, and in older adults, especially, it becomes withered and 'calcified' (see below for the 'FLUORIDE CONSPIRACY')...

and then there's the egyptian 'eye of horus' connection:

but we won't go there...

as somewhat of a 'side bar', it is interesting to note that there are actually very few ways that the 'outside world' can 'communicate' with 'our consciousness' directly, sure, we have our 5, or 6 senses, and certain limbic responses, and of course, we use HUMAN LANGUAGE AS OUR PRIMARY METHOD OF COMMUNICATION, but did you know, that there's also another way, a BACK DOOR to mind, a HIDDEN PATHWAY into our brain's subconscious, that's been HARD-WIRED INTO EACH OF US since the 'dawn of man' - ie: while listening to 'CERTAIN' RHYTHMS OF MUSICAL NOTES!!!

so, there's this shortcut to our subconscious, and naturally, some frequencies work better than others, for example 2 beats per second, or around 120 beats a minute seems to be the ideal rhytmn to open this pathway, does that sound familiar? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_per_minute ie: it's the TEMPO OF HOUSE MUSIC, and so, when the BRAIN ENTRAINS to these 'musical frequencies', it's opening up a 'carrier' deep withing the mind, and so 'THE MESSAGE' get's heard LOUD AND CLEAR, though we don't normally realize it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_the_brain

and then we come to "BINAURAL BEATS" or "HEMISPHERIC SYNCRONIZATION" ie: Hemi-Synch™ for short, developed by Robert Monroe in the 1970s, and 'furthered to this day' by the Monroe Institute, which has created (and patented) a series of mediation tapes, which use specific FREQUENCY AND SOUND WAVES to 'ARTIFICIALLY' ENTRAIN BRAIN WAVE FUNCTION, though it only works by using STEREO HEADPHONES (or specially designed acoustic labs), the basic premise is that you play one frequency in one ear, and another freq in the other, and not-suprisingly, the brain SUBTRACTS THE DIFFERENCE, and interprets it as a THIRD SOUND, ie: a Binaural Beat... This ALSO opens a special pathway that can be used for non-verbal communication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemisync

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe

and then along came 'MICHAEL PERSINGER", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Persinger who in the 1980s used 'transcranial magnetic stimulation' to INDUCE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES and/or DRUG-LIKE HALLUCINATIONS in about 80% of the subjects who tried his device, some reported SEEING JESUS, others reported feeling THE PRESENCE OF GOD in the room, ie: where the device gets it's nickname: THE GOD HELMET!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

and new, updated god-helmets can be acquired:

http://www.shaktitechnology.com

http://www.shaktitechnology.com/god_helmet.htm

---

and, of course, there's always 'got to be' a good conspiracy associated with all good stories, and this subject is no different, i'm not sure how much you know about 'fluoride', and how it's a deadly poison, that the germans were using for chemical experiments, 'human willpower' manipulation, mind control, etc... it is so toxic, that in this country, they used to have to treat it as a toxic waste, and pay to have it disposed of properly... until lobbyists for the aluminum industry (ie: ALCOA, the largest producer of the stuff) got the government to dump it in our water, and thus, food supply... THE POINT IS: research has shown that ingesting fluoride regularly causes the PINEAL GLAND to calcify and shut down, never to be 'young and pliable' again, awww... "use it, or lose it" my friends...

history of fluoridation:

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=14949

Hello Everyone!!!

2009-04-12T18:33:00.001-07:00

Especially Brienne!!!

The 'Economic Collapse' for Dummies - From www.DeesIllustrations.com

2008-09-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

and this one's funny too:

Wall Street Bailout to Cost 1/2 Trillion Dollars

2008-09-19T22:38:00.000-07:00

Radical bailout plan has a jawdropping price tag

WASHINGTON - Struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration on Friday laid out a radical bailout plan with a jawdropping price tag — a takeover of a half-trillion dollars or more in worthless mortgages and other bad debt held by tottering institutions.

Relieved investors sent stocks soaring on Wall Street and around the globe. The Dow-Jones industrials average rose 368 points after surging 410 points the day before on rumors the federal action was afoot.

A grim-faced President Bush acknowledged risks to taxpayers in what would be the most sweeping government intervention to rescue failing financial institutions since the Great Depression. But he declared, "The risk of not acting would be far higher."

The administration is asking Congress for far-reaching new powers to take over troubled mortgages from banks and other companies, including purchasing sour mortgage-backed securities. Administration officials and congressional leaders are to work out details over the weekend.

Congressional officials said they expected a request for legal authority to buy up the bad loans, at a cost in excess of $500 billion to the government. Democrats were discussing whether to try to attach middle class assistance to the legislation, despite a request from Bush to avoid adding controversial items that could delay action. An expansion of jobless benefits was one possibility.

In other major steps, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve moved to give money-market mutual funds the same kind of federal protection, at least temporarily, that now applies to savings and checking accounts and certificates of deposit at banks. Money-market accounts sold through retail banks are already FDIC insured.

The spreading global selling panic had started to threaten some money-market funds, usually thought of as rock-solid investments. Administration officials feared a run on these funds, held by millions of Americans.

"Every American should know that the federal government continues to enforce laws and regulations protecting your money," Bush said at the White House. The 75-year-old Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation now insures savings and checking accounts and certificates of deposit up to $100,000.

Separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission acted to block short-selling in financial securities. That is a trading method that bets the value of stocks will go down. It has been blamed for accelerating the plunge in stock prices of banks and other financial institutions.

"This is a pivotal moment for America's economy," Bush said. "In our nation's history, there have been moments that require us to come together across party lines to address major challenges. This is such a moment."

Congressional leaders of both parties welcomed the administration's bold moves, after a series of ad hoc rescues.

The talk on the presidential campaign trail, barely six weeks before the election, was of bipartisanship, too.

Democrat Barack Obama said it was critical that leaders in both parties work in concert. "Truly, we are all in this together," he said.

GOP presidential nominee John McCain said leaders should put aside partisan differences and "any action should be designed to keep people in their homes and safeguard the life savings of all Americans."

The federal government already has pledged more than $600 billion in the past year to bail out, or help bail out, some of the biggest names in American finance. That includes the rescue of investment bank Bear Stearns in March, the takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac earlier this month and the takeover of the world's largest insurance company, American International Group, just this week.

But the contagion continued to spread, bringing political consensus that drastic and comprehensive federal action was needed.

There are precedents for such a federal takeover.

In the late 1980s, the government created the Resolution Trust Corporation to tackle the savings and loan crisis. It acquired the defaulted mortgages, foreclosed real estate and other assets of nearly a thousand failed S&Ls, restoring order and stability to the system. Resolving that crisis took six years and $125 billion in taxpayer money — roughly equal to $200 billion in today's dollars.

And there was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Depression-era relief program formed in 1932 by President Hoover that tried to revive the market by giving loans to banks and other businesses.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave few details about the structure of the new program. Asked about an overall price tag, he said, "hundreds of billions" of dollars.

Congressional leaders said they were ready to move quickly but still needed details of the administration plan. For instance, there was no indication of what the government would get in return from financial companies for the federal assistance.

Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke briefed lawmakers in both parties on the idea by conference call Friday.

In a session with House Democrats, they described a plan where the government would in essence set up reverse auctions, putting up money for a class of distressed assets — such as loans that are delinquent but not in default — and financial institutions would compete for how little they would accept for the investments, said Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., who participated in the call.

"You give them good cash; they give you the worst of the worst," Sherman said of the plan, which he complained that Bush and his economic advisers were trying to panic lawmakers into rubber-stamping.

Paulson rejected Democrats' calls to include tighter regulations, corporate reforms or limits on executive compensation as part of the measure, Sherman said. "He's doing his best to paint a picture of the sky falling, and then he says, because the sky's falling, you have to do it my way."

Paulson said the new troubled-asset relief program that he wants Congress to enact must be large enough to have the necessary impact while protecting taxpayers as much as possible.

"I am convinced that this bold approach will cost American families far less than the alternative — a continuing series of financial institution failures and frozen credit markets unable to fund economic expansion," Paulson. "The financial security of all Americans ... depends on our ability to restore our financial institutions to a sound footing."

Bush said simply, "We must act now."

"America's economy is facing unprecedented challenges. We're responding with unprecedented measures," Bush declared, standing in the White House Rose Garden with Paulson, Bernanke and Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Shortly after his remarks, Bush called congressional leaders with whom the administration will be working on the final plan. He spoke to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

The administration wants to see a package emerge from the weekend, to lend calm to Monday morning's market openings, said Keith Hennessey, the director of the president's economic council. The goal is to have something passed by Congress by the end of next week, when lawmakers recess for the elections.

Paulson said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will step up their purchases of mortgage-backed securities to help provide support to the crippled housing market. He also said the Treasury Department will expand a program, announced earlier this month, to buy mortgage-backed securities, which have been badly hurt by the housing and credit crises.

"As we all know, lax lending practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible lending and irresponsible borrowing. This simply put too many families into mortgages they could not afford," Paulson said.

Bush authorized Treasury to tap up to $50 billion from a Depression-era fund to insure the holdings of eligible money-market mutual funds. And the Federal Reserve announced it would expand its emergency lending program to help support the $3.4 trillion in total assets of the funds.

On Wednesday alone, investors had pulled more than $89 billion from money-market funds, according to iMoneyNet, publisher of the newsletter Money Fund Report.

The government's actions could help alleviate the uncertainty that has been sending the markets into tumult over the past week. Lending has come to a virtual standstill in the wake of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

European Central Bank, Swiss National Bank and Bank of England also offered up more cash Friday. The three banks put a combined $90 billion into money markets.

---

America's Surprising Foreclosure Hot Spots

The crisis on Wall Street is shrinking net worths and erasing nest eggs. Next on the block: multimillion-dollar homes.

In some of America's wealthiest spots, that's already happening. According to RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif.-based listing firm that tracks foreclosures and provided the data here, several of the country's wealthiest ZIP codes--where year-to-date median home sales are above $700,000--have reported foreclosures into the triple digits. They include La Jolla, Calif.; Miami Beach; and Carlsbad, Calif.

In Carlsbad, for example, there are 302 homes in foreclosure. The wealthy beach town--the median home sale price is $710,000--has suffered from overvaluation and risky financing, says Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac. The only thing that separates homeowners in Carlsbad from those in spots like St. George, Utah, with 274 current foreclosures and a median home price of $218,000, and Ann Arbor, Mich., with 436 current foreclosures and a median home price sale of $225,000, is that in Carlsbad folks are losing their second homes.

In Pictures: America's Surprising Foreclosure Hotspots

"In this real estate cycle, no ZIP code, no neighborhood, was immune," says Sharga. Not only are average Americans defaulting on subprime loans, wealthier individuals who were relying on bonuses that never came through or who took out option adjustable-rate mortgages and must now face the skyrocketing monthly rates have also had to flee.

Take Lake Forest, Ill., a Midwestern town with a love for--of all things--polo. (The local country club hosts matches every weekend in August.) The fondness for the upper-echelon game is a tip-off that the brunt of Lake Forest residents aren't suffering financially. Still, many of the community's properties are vacation homes, which means that those who secured a second mortgage even though it was beyond their means are now defaulting. While the median house sale price is $873,750, the current number of foreclosures is 53.

Overvaluation is another major factor in high-end foreclosures, says Sharga. During the housing boom of the mid-aughts, buyers paid prices for homes with a huge expected appreciation cooked into the price. As prices corrected, many were saddled with mortgages, with monthly payments reflecting the former value of the home.

Speculative activity, or people betting pricey homes will always have ready buyers, is another factor. "People were leveraging the equity in their homes to speculate on other properties," says Sharga.

That's the case in Malibu, Calif., and other California spots, including Newport Beach and La Jolla. The median home sale price in Newport Beach is $1.4 million and there are 89 homes in foreclosure; in La Jolla, there are 158 foreclosures, due mostly to second-home buyers overextending themselves.

It's not just vacation towns in California taking a hit. Foreclosures have been more prevalent since the credit crunch has caused those in the New York and Philadelphia metro areas who could once afford a vacation home to default as well. On the southern part of New Jersey's Long Beach Island, Beach Haven boasts a median house sale of $722,500.

In other areas, buyers took out loans for properties that were beyond reach. This happened in Scarsdale, N.Y., just 30 minutes from Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. This pleasant commuter town, whose Tudor-style buildings evoke an English village, currently has 57 foreclosures.

Another problem is overabundance of property. The affluent area of Scottsdale, Ariz.--a popular spot for retired snowbirds--has been affected by overbuilding in the condominium sector. That means values have dropped and speculators have no one to sell to. "Typically, when we see an abnormal surge in an otherwise stable area, homes are being overbuilt," says Sharga.

Whether because of overbuilding, overvaluation or risky financing, the current foreclosure dilemma suggests one thing: No one is truly "comfortable" right now when it comes to finances.

+ And the Beneficiary of My Entire Estate Shall Be: www.WikiLeaks.org +

2008-09-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

If you haven't, you should...

---

Selected Leak Reportage

For media reports (past 30 days only), try: English, Deutsch, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian or other languages and blogs

Fresh Leaks Needing Reportage

+++ Vitamin C Injections Kills Cancer - Research Confirms +++

2008-08-06T03:34:00.001-07:00

Also visit me on my normal blog: http://www.TruthBlog.org

Vitamin C 'breakthrough' in war on cancer

INJECTIONS of vitamin C could halve the growth of cancerous tumours, research suggested yesterday.
A study in the United States found that the vitamin could prove useful in treating cancers for which few other options currently exist.

The breakthrough, which comes following tests on mice, follows decades of research into the potential of vitamin C in tackling cancer.

However, experts warned that the benefits of the vitamin had yet to be demonstrated in human patients.

For the latest study, researchers from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, examined the effects of vitamin C ..s grown in laboratories. Two hours of exposure to the vitamin significantly cut the survival of ovarian, pancreatic and brain tumour (glioblastoma) cancer cells.

Similar results were seen when cancer-ridden mice were injected with vitamin C. The therapy halved the growth of aggressive tumours, killing cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

It is thought the discovery could provide a new lifeline for patients with a poor prognosis and few other options.

Tackling cancer with vitamin C would also have the added advantage of being cheap compared with many of the very expensive cancer treatments.

Usually the body keeps a tight rein on high vitamin C levels in the blood. But the scientists found that the mechanism can be by-passed if the vitamin is injected straight into the blood instead of passing through the digestive system. When this is done it releases the powerful anti-cancer potential of the vitamin, according to the researchers writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The experiments showed that high levels of vitamin C in the blood generate hydrogen peroxide, which is lethal to tumours. The chemical forms in the spaces between cancer cells, damaging membranes, upsetting metabolism and scrambling the DNA of the tumour.

Even the growth of aggressive cancers was held back in the experiments. But healthy tissues appeared to resist the effects.

The use of high-dose vitamin C as an alternative cancer treatment has a long history dating back to the 1970s. Patients have taken the vitamin both by mouth and intravenously, but with mixed results in scientific trials. For this reason, claims that vitamin C can treat cancer have been dismissed by conventional cancer experts. But the new investigation, led by Dr Qi Chen, may help to start changing attitudes towards this approach.

The scientists said: "Pharmacologic concentrations of ascorbate (the chemical name for vitamin C] decreased tumour volumes 41-53 per cent in diverse cancer types known for both their aggressive growth and limited treatment options."

Dr Alison Ross, science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is encouraging work but it's at a very early stage because it involves cells grown in the lab and mice."

--

Cancer hopes as Vitamin C injections kill mice tumours
WILLIAM TINNING August 05 2008
Comment | Read Comments (11)
Vitamin C that is injected rather than swallowed could provide a new lifeline for cancer patients with a poor prognosis and few treatment options, according to new research.

Scientists say the therapy halved the growth of aggressive tumours in mice, killing cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

Tackling cancer with vitamin C would also have the added advantage of being less expensive, the research claims.

advertisement

The body usually keeps tight control of vitamin C levels in the blood.

However, a new US-based investigation, led by Dr Qi Chen from the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, Ohio, found that the mechanism can be by-passed if the vitamin is injected straight into the bloodstream instead of passing through the digestive system.

When this is done it releases the powerful anti-cancer potential of the vitamin.

Experiments showed that high levels of vitamin C in the blood generate hydrogen peroxide, which is lethal to tumours. The chemical forms in the spaces between cancer cells, damaging membranes, upsetting metabolism and scrambling DNA.

Even the growth of aggressive, hard-to-treat cancers was held back in the studies. But healthy tissues appeared to resist the effects.

The use of high-dose vitamin C as a complementary or alternative cancer treatment was first promoted in the 1970s. Patients have taken the vitamin both by mouth and intravenously. But despite some positive outcomes, there has been insufficient reliable evidence that the therapy works leading conventional cancer experts to dismiss claims that vitamin C can treat cancer.

Dr Chen's investigation involved testing the effects of vitamin C on laboratory cell lines and cancer-ridden mice.

Laboratory tests showed that two hours of exposure to the vitamin significantly reduced the survival of ovarian, pancreatic and brain tumour cancer cells.

Similar results were achieved when mice bearing the same kinds of tumours were injected with vitamin C.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists said: "Pharmacologic concentrations of ascorbate decreased tumour volumes 41-53% in diverse cancer types known for both their aggressive growth and limited treatment options."

They said a "rapid and sustained increase" in hydrogen peroxide was detected in tumour fluids within 30 minutes of the treatment commencing.

An early stage patient study showed that similar therapeutic levels of vitamin C in the blood could be achieved when ascorbate was administered intravenously in humans.

The scientist added: "A regimen of daily pharmacologic ascorbate treatment significantly decreased growth rates of ovarian, pancreatic and glioblastoma tumours established in mice.

"Similar pharmacologic concentrations were readily achieved in humans given ascorbate intravenously. These data suggest that ascorbate as a prodrug may have benefits in cancers with poor prognosis and limited therapeutic options."

Dr Alison Ross, science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is encouraging work but it's at a very early stage because it involves cells grown in the lab and mice. Much more research is needed before we'll know whether vitamin C could be a viable cancer treatment in the future.

"There is currently no evidence from clinical trials in humans that injecting or consuming vitamin C is an effective way to treat cancer. Some research even suggests that high doses of antioxidants can make cancer treatment less effective, reducing the benefits of radiotherapy and chemotherapy."

Vitamin C supplements have been hailed since the 1970s as an aid for fighting colds, principally thanks to the US Nobel Prizewinning chemist Dr Linus Pauling, who championed it.

However, in July last year, Australian and Finnish scientists describe d the claim as a myth, saying that there was no evidence that, for the average person, taking extra vitamin C can stop coughs and sneezes.

---

Vitamin C
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that Vitamin C and Common Cold be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)
This article is about the nutrient. For the chemical compound, see ascorbic acid.
For other uses, see Vitamin C (disambiguation).

Vitamin C
Systematic (IUPAC) name
2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol
or
(R)-3,4-dihydroxy-5-((S)- 1,2-dihydroxyethyl)furan-2(5H)-one
Identifiers
CAS number 50-81-7
ATC code A11G
PubChem 5785
Chemical data
Formula C6H8O6
Mol. mass 176.14 grams per mol
Synonyms L-ascorbate
Physical data
Melt. point 190–192 °C (374–378 °F) decomposes
Pharmacokinetic data
Bioavailability rapid & complete
Protein binding negligible
Metabolism ?
Half life 30 minutes
Excretion renal
Therapeutic considerations
Pregnancy cat.
A

dehydroascorbic acid
(oxidized form)
Vitamin C or L-ascorbate is an essential nutrient for a large number of higher primate species, a small number of other mammalian species (notably guinea pigs and bats), a few species of birds, and some fish. [1]
The presence of ascorbate is required for a range of essential metabolic reactions in all animals and plants. It is made internally by almost all organisms, humans being the most well-known exception. It is widely known as the vitamin whose deficiency causes scurvy in humans.[2][3][4] It is also widely used as a food additive.
The pharmacophore of vitamin C is the ascorbate ion. In living organisms, ascorbate is an antioxidant, since it protects the body against oxidative stress,[5] and is a cofactor in several vital enzymatic reactions.[6]
The uses and the daily requirement amounts of vitamin C are matters of on-going debate. People consuming diets rich in ascorbate from natural foods, such as fruits and vegetables, are healthier and have lower mortality from a number of chronic illnesses. However, a recent meta-analysis of 68 reliable antioxidant supplementation experiments involving a total of 232,606 individuals concluded that consuming additional ascorbate from supplements may not be as beneficial as thought.[7]

Further information: ascorbic acid
Vitamin C is purely the L-enantiomer of ascorbate; the opposite D-enantiomer has no physiological significance. Both forms are mirror images of the same molecular structure. When L-ascorbate, which is a strong reducing agent, carries out its reducing function, it is converted to its oxidized form, L-dehydroascorbate.[6] L-dehydroascorbate can then be reduced back to the active L-ascorbate form in the body by enzymes and glutathione.[8]
L-ascorbate is a weak sugar acid structurally related to glucose which naturally occurs either attached to a hydrogen ion, forming ascorbic acid, or to a metal ion, forming a mineral ascorbate.
[edit]Function
In humans, vitamin C is a highly effective antioxidant, acting to lessen oxidative stress, a substrate for ascorbate peroxidase,[4] as well as an enzyme cofactor for the biosynthesis of many important biochemicals. Vitamin C acts as an electron donor for eight different enzymes:[9]
Three participate in collagen hydroxylation.[10][11][12] These reactions add hydroxyl groups to the amino acids proline or lysine in the collagen molecule (via prolyl hydroxylase and lysyl hydroxylase), thereby allowing the collagen molecule to assume its triple helix structure and making vitamin C essential to the development and maintenance of scar tissue, blood vessels, and cartilage.[13]
Two are necessary for synthesis of carnitine.[14][15] Carnitine is essential for the transport of fatty acids into mitochondria for ATP generation.
The remaining three have the following functions:
dopamine beta hydroxylase participates in the biosynthesis of norepinephrine from dopamine.[16][17]
another enzyme adds amide groups to peptide hormones, greatly increasing their stability.[18][19]
one modulates tyrosine metabolism.[20][21]
Biological tissues that accumulate over 100 times the level in blood plasma of vitamin C are the adrenal glands, pituitary, thymus, corpus luteum, and retina.[22] Those with 10 to 50 times the concentration present in blood plasma include the brain, spleen, lung, testicle, lymph nodes, liver, thyroid, small intestinal mucosa, leukocytes, pancreas, kidney and salivary glands.
[edit]Biosynthesis

Model of a vitamin C molecule. Black is carbon, red is oxygen, and white is hydrogen
The vast majority of animals and plants are able to synthesize their own vitamin C, through a sequence of four enzyme-driven steps, which convert glucose to vitamin C.[6] The glucose needed to produce ascorbate in the liver (in mammals and perching birds) is extracted from glycogen; ascorbate synthesis is a glycogenolysis-dependent process.[23] In reptiles and birds the biosynthesis is carried out in the kidneys.
Among the animals that have lost the ability to synthesise vitamin C are simians (specifically the suborder haplorrhini), guinea pigs, a number of species of passerine birds (but not all of them), and in apparently many major families of bats and perhaps all of them. Humans have no enzymatic capability to manufacture vitamin C. The cause of this phenomenon is that the last enzyme in the synthesis process, L-gulonolactone oxidase, cannot be made by the listed animals because the gene for this enzyme, Pseudogene ΨGULO, is defective.[24] The mutation has not been lethal because vitamin C is abundant in their food sources. It has been found that species with this mutation (including humans) have adapted a vitamin C recycling mechanism to compensate.[25]
Most simians consume the vitamin in amounts 10 to 20 times higher than that recommended by governments for humans.[26] This discrepancy constitutes the basis of the controversy on current recommended dietary allowances.
It has been noted that the loss of the ability to synthesize ascorbate strikingly parallels the evolutionary loss of the ability to break down uric acid. Uric acid and ascorbate are both strong reducing agents. This has led to the suggestion that in higher primates, uric acid has taken over some of the functions of ascorbate.[27] Ascorbic acid can be oxidised (broken down) in the human body by the enzyme ascorbic acid oxidase.
An adult goat, a typical example of a vitamin C-producing animal, will manufacture more than 13,000 mg of vitamin C per day in normal health and the biosynthesis will increase "many fold under stress".[28] Trauma or injury has also been demonstrated to use up large quantities of vitamin C in humans.[29] Some microorganisms such as the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been shown to be able to synthesize vitamin C from simple sugars.[30][31]
[edit]Deficiency
Scurvy is an avitaminosis resulting from lack of vitamin C, since without this vitamin, the synthesised collagen is too unstable to perform its function. Scurvy leads to the formation of liver spots on the skin, spongy gums, and bleeding from all mucous membranes. The spots are most abundant on the thighs and legs, and a person with the ailment looks pale, feels depressed, and is partially immobilized. In advanced scurvy there are open, suppurating wounds and loss of teeth and, eventually, death. The human body can store only a certain amount of vitamin C,[32] and so the body soon depletes itself if fresh supplies are not consumed.
It has been shown that smokers who have diets poor in vitamin C are at a higher risk of lung-borne diseases than those smokers who have higher concentrations of Vitamin C in the blood. [33]
[edit]History of human understanding

James Lind, a British Royal Navy surgeon who, in 1747, identified that a quality in fruit prevented the disease of scurvy in what was the first recorded controlled experiment.
The need to include fresh plant food or raw animal flesh in the diet to prevent disease was known from ancient times. Native peoples living in marginal areas incorporated this into their medicinal lore. For example, spruce needles were used in temperate zones in infusions, or the leaves from species of drought-resistant trees in desert areas. In 1536, the French explorer Jacques Cartier, exploring the St. Lawrence River, used the local natives' knowledge to save his men who were dying of scurvy. He boiled the needles of the arbor vitae tree to make a tea that was later shown to contain 50 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams.[34][35]
Throughout history, the benefit of plant food to survive long sea voyages has been occasionally recommended by authorities. John Woodall, the first appointed surgeon to the British East India Company, recommended the preventive and curative use of lemon juice in his book "The Surgeon's Mate", in 1617. The Dutch writer, Johann Bachstrom, in 1734, gave the firm opinion that "scurvy is solely owing to a total abstinence from fresh vegetable food, and greens; which is alone the primary cause of the disease."
While the earliest documented case of scurvy was described by Hippocrates around the year 400 BC, the first attempt to give scientific basis for the cause of this disease was by a ship's surgeon in the British Royal Navy, James Lind. Scurvy was common among those with poor access to fresh fruit and vegetables, such as remote, isolated sailors and soldiers. While at sea in May 1747, Lind provided some crew members with two oranges and one lemon per day, in addition to normal rations, while others continued on cider, vinegar, sulfuric acid or seawater, along with their normal rations. In the history of science this is considered to be the first occurrence of a controlled experiment comparing results on two populations of a factor applied to one group only with all other factors the same. The results conclusively showed that citrus fruits prevented the disease. Lind published his work in 1753 in his Treatise on the Scurvy.

Citrus fruits were one of the first sources of vitamin C available to ship's surgeons.
Lind's work was slow to be noticed, partly because he gave conflicting evidence within the book, and partly because the British admiralty saw care for the well-being of crews as a sign of weakness. In addition, fresh fruit was very expensive to keep on board, whereas boiling it down to juice allowed easy storage but destroyed the vitamin (especially if boiled in copper kettles[36]). Ship captains assumed wrongly that Lind's suggestions didn't work because those juices failed to cure scurvy.
It was 1795 before the British navy adopted lemons or lime as standard issue at sea. Limes were more popular as they could be found in British West Indian Colonies, unlike lemons which weren't found in British Dominions, and were therefore more expensive. This practice led to the American use of the nickname "limey" to refer to the British. Captain James Cook had previously demonstrated and proven the principle of the advantages of carrying "Sour krout" on board, by taking his crews to the Hawaiian Islands and beyond without losing any of his men to scurvy[37]. For this otherwise unheard of feat, the British Admiralty awarded him a medal.
The name "antiscorbutic" was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as general term for those foods known to prevent scurvy, even though there was no understanding of the reason for this. These foods included but were not limited to: lemons, limes, and oranges; sauerkraut, cabbage, malt, and portable soup.
In 1907, Axel Holst and Theodor Frølich, two Norwegian physicians studying beriberi contracted aboard ship's crews in the Norwegian Fishing Fleet, wanted a small test mammal to substitute for the pigeons they used. They fed guinea pigs their test diet, which had earlier produced beriberi in their pigeons, and were surprised when scurvy resulted instead. Until that time scurvy had not been observed in any organism apart from humans, and had been considered an exclusively human disease.
[edit]Discovery of ascorbic acid

Albert Szent-Györgyi, pictured here in 1948, was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of vitamin C
In 1912, the Polish-American biochemist Casimir Funk, while researching deficiency diseases, developed the concept of vitamins to refer to the non-mineral micro-nutrients which are essential to health. The name is a portmanteau of "vital", due to the vital role they play biochemically, and "amines" because Funk thought that all these materials were chemical amines. One of the "vitamines" was thought to be the anti-scorbutic factor, long thought to be a component of most fresh plant material.
In 1928 the Arctic anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson attempted to prove his theory of how the Eskimos are able to avoid scurvy with almost no plant food in their diet, despite the disease striking European Arctic explorers living on similar high-meat diets. Stefansson theorised that the natives get their vitamin C from fresh meat that is minimally cooked. Starting in February 1928, for one year he and a colleague lived on an exclusively minimally-cooked meat diet while under medical supervision; they remained healthy. (Later studies done after vitamin C could be quantified in mostly-raw traditional food diets of the Yukon, Inuit, and Métís of the Northern Canada, showed that their daily intake of vitamin C averaged between 52 and 62 mg/day, an amount approximately the dietary reference intake (DRI), even at times of the year when little plant-based food were eaten.)[38]
From 1928 to 1933, the Hungarian research team of Joseph L Svirbely and Albert Szent-Györgyi and, independently, the American Charles Glen King, first isolated the anti-scorbutic factor, calling it "ascorbic acid" for its vitamin activity. Ascorbic acid turned out not to be an amine, or even to contain any nitrogen. For their accomplishment, Szent-Györgyi was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine.[39]
Between 1933 and 1934, the British chemists Sir Walter Norman Haworth and Sir Edmund Hirst and, independently, the Polish chemist Tadeus Reichstein, succeeded in synthesizing the vitamin, making it the first to be artificially produced. This made possible the cheap mass-production of what was by then known as vitamin C. Only Haworth was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work, but the "Reichstein process" retained Reichstein's name.
In 1934 Hoffmann–La Roche became the first pharmaceutical company to mass-produce synthetic vitamin C, under the brand name of Redoxon.
In 1957 the American J.J. Burns showed that the reason some mammals were susceptible to scurvy was the inability of their liver to produce the active enzyme L-gulonolactone oxidase, which is the last of the chain of four enzymes which synthesize vitamin C.[40][41] American biochemist Irwin Stone was the first to exploit vitamin C for its food preservative properties. He later developed the theory that humans possess a mutated form of the L-gulonolactone oxidase coding gene.
[edit]Daily requirements

The North American Dietary Reference Intake recommends 90 milligrams per day and no more than 2 grams per day (2000 milligrams per day).[42] Other related species sharing the same inability to produce vitamin C and requiring exogenous vitamin C consume 20 to 80 times this reference intake.[43][44] There is continuing debate within the orthodox scientific community over the best dose schedule (the amount and frequency of intake) of vitamin C for maintaining optimal health in humans.[45] It is generally agreed that a balanced diet without supplementation contains enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy in an average healthy adult, while those who are pregnant, smoke tobacco, or are under stress require slightly more.[42]
High doses (thousands of milligrams) may result in diarrhea in healthy adults. Proponents of alternative medicine (specifically orthomolecular medicine)[46] claim the onset of diarrhea to be an indication of where the body’s true vitamin C requirement lies, though this has yet to be clinically verified.
United States vitamin C recommendations[42]
Recommended Dietary Allowance (adult male) 90 mg per day
Recommended Dietary Allowance (adult female) 75 mg per day
Tolerable Upper Intake Level (adult male) 2,000 mg per day
Tolerable Upper Intake Level (adult female) 2,000 mg per day
[edit]Government recommended intakes
Recommendations for vitamin C intake have been set by various national agencies:
40 milligrams per day: the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency[2]
45 milligrams per day: the World Health Organization[47]
60 mg/day: Health Canada 2007 [2]
60–95 milligrams per day: United States' National Academy of Sciences[42]
The United States defined Tolerable Upper Intake Level for a 25-year-old male is 2,000 milligrams per day.
[edit]Alternative recommendations on intakes
Some independent researchers have calculated the amount needed for an adult human to achieve similar blood serum levels as vitamin C synthesising mammals as follows:
400 milligrams per day: the Linus Pauling Institute.[48]
500 milligrams per 12 hours: Professor Roc Ordman, from research into biological free radicals.[49]
3,000 milligrams per day (or up to 300,000 mg during illness): the Vitamin C Foundation.[50]
6,000–12,000 milligrams per day: Thomas E. Levy, Colorado Integrative Medical Centre.[51]
6,000–18,000 milligrams per day: Linus Pauling's personal use.[52]
[edit]Vitamin C high dose arguments

Main articles: Vitamin C megadosage, Megavitamin therapy, and Orthomolecular medicine
There is a strong advocacy movement for large doses of vitamin C based on some in vitro and retrospective studies [53], though large, randomized clinical trials are still lacking. Many pro-vitamin C organizations promote usage levels well beyond the current Dietary Reference Intake. The movement is led by scientists and doctors such as Robert Cathcart, Ewan Cameron, Steve Hickey, Irwin Stone and the twice Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling and Dr Matthias Rath. Pauling's 1986 book How to Live Longer and Feel Better was a bestseller and advocated taking many grams per day orally. There is some scientific literature critical of governmental agency dose recommendations.[45][54] The biological halflife for vitamin C is fairly short, about 30 minutes in blood plasma, a fact which high dose advocates say that mainstream researchers have failed to take into account. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health decided upon the current RDA based upon tests conducted 12 hours (24 half lives) after consumption. Mainstream medicine remains skeptical of these claims.
[edit]Genetic rationales for high doses
Four gene products are necessary to manufacture vitamin C from glucose. The loss of activity of the gene for the last step, Pseudogene ΨGULO (GLO) the terminal enzyme responsible for manufacture of vitamin C, has occurred separately in the history of several species. The loss of this enzyme activity is responsible of inability of guinea pigs to synthesize vitamin C enzymatically, but this event happened independently of the loss in the haplorrhini suborder of primates, including humans. The remains of this non-functional gene with many mutations, is however still present in the genome of the guinea pigs and in primates, including humans.[55][56] GLO activity has also been lost in all major families of bats, regardless of diet.[57] In addition, the function of GLO appears to have been lost several times, and possibly re-acquired, in several lines of passerine birds, where ability to make vitamin C varies from species to species. [58]
Loss of GLO activity in the primate order supposedly occurred about 63 million years ago, at about the time it split into the suborders haplorrhini (which lost the enzyme activity) and the more primitive strepsirrhini (which retained it). The haplorrhini ("simple nosed") primates, which cannot make vitamin C enzymatically, include the tarsiers and the simians (apes, monkeys and humans). The suborder strepsirrhini (bent or wet-nosed prosimians) which are still able to make vitamin C enzymatically, include lorises, galagos, pottos, and to some extent, lemurs. [59]
Stone[60] and Pauling[44] calculated, based on the diet of our primate cousins[43] (similar to what our common descendants are likely to have consumed when the gene mutated), that the optimum daily requirement of vitamin C is around 2,300 milligrams for a human requiring 2,500 kcal a day.
The established RDA has been criticized by Pauling to be one that will prevent acute scurvy, and is not necessarily the dosage for optimal health.[52]
[edit]Therapeutic uses

Main articles: Vitamin C megadosage, Megavitamin therapy, and Orthomolecular medicine
Since its discovery vitamin C has been considered by some enthusiastic proponents a "universal panacea", although this led to suspicions by others of it being over-hyped.[61] Other proponents of high dose vitamin C consider that if it is given "in the right form, with the proper technique, in frequent enough doses, in high enough doses, along with certain additional agents and for a long enough period of time,"[62] it can prevent and, in many cases, cure, a wide range of common and/or lethal diseases, notably the common cold and heart disease,[63] although the NIH considers there to be "fair scientific evidence against this use."[64] Some proponents issued controversial statements involving it being a cure for AIDS,[65] bird flu, and SARS.[66][67][68]
Probably the most controversial issue, the putative role of ascorbate in the management of AIDS, is still unresolved, more than 16 years after a study published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (USA) showing that non toxic doses of ascorbate suppress HIV replication in vitro.[69] Other studies expanded on those results, but still, no large scale trials have yet been conducted.[70][71][72]
In an animal model of lead intoxication, vitamin C demonstrated "protective effects" on lead-induced nerve and muscle abnormalities[73] In smokers, blood lead levels declined by an average of 81% when supplemented with 1000 mg of vitamin C, while 200 mg were ineffective, suggesting that vitamin C supplements may be an "economical and convenient" approach to reduce lead levels in the blood.[74] The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study which concluded, based on an analysis of blood lead levels in the subjects of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, that the independent, inverse relationship between lead levels and vitamin C in the blood, if causal, would "have public health implications for control of lead toxicity".[75]
Vitamin C has limited popularity as a treatment for autism spectrum symptoms. A 1993 study of 18 children with ASD found some symptoms reduced after treatment with vitamin C,[76] but these results have not been replicated.[77] Small clinical trials have found that vitamin C might improve the sperm count, sperm motility, and sperm morphology in infertile men[78], or improve immune function related to the prevention and treatment of age-associated diseases.[79] However, to date, no large clinical trials have verified these findings.
A preliminary study published in the Annals of Surgery found that the early administration of antioxidant supplementation using α-tocopherol and ascorbic acid reduces the incidence of organ failure and shortens ICU length of stay in this cohort of critically ill surgical patients.[80] More research on this topic is pending.
Dehydroascorbic acid, the main form of oxidized Vitamin C in the body, was shown to reduce neurological deficits and mortality following stroke, due to its ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, while "the antioxidant ascorbic acid (AA) or vitamin C does not penetrate the blood-brain barrier".[81] In this study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001, the authors concluded that such "a pharmacological strategy to increase cerebral levels of ascorbate in stroke has tremendous potential to represent the timely translation of basic research into a relevant therapy for thromboembolic stroke in humans". No such "relevant therapies" are available yet and no clinical trials have been planned.
In January 2007 the US Food and Drug Administration approved a Phase I toxicity trial to determine the safe dosage of intravenous vitamin C as a possible cancer treatment for "patients who have exhausted all other conventional treatment options."[82] Additional studies over several years would be needed to demonstrate whether it is effective.[83]
In February 2007, an uncontrolled study of 39 terminal cancer patients showed that, on subjective questionnaires, patients reported an improvement in health, cancer symptoms, and daily function after administration of high-dose intravenous vitamin C.[84] The authors concluded that "Although there is still controversy regarding anticancer effects of vitamin C, the use of vitamin C is considered a safe and effective therapy to improve the quality of life of terminal cancer patients".
Vitamin C has been shown to lower IOP in glaucoma patients when taken in massive amounts according to the September 2007 issue of GLEAMS.
In an August, 2008 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Mark Levine and colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases found that direct injection of high doses of vitamin C reduced tumor weight and growth rate by about 50 percent in mouse models of ovarian, brain, and pancreatic cancers. No human therapies have yet been developed using this technique.[85]
A Cochrane Review in 2008 found no evidence to support any increase in lifespan as a result of vitamin C supplementation. As opposed to supplementation with vitamin A, vitamin E, and beta-carotene, vitamin C was not linked with a decrease in lifespan. [86]
[edit]Testing for ascorbate levels in the body

Simple tests use DCPIP to measure the levels of vitamin C in the urine and in serum or blood plasma. However these reflect recent dietary intake rather than the level of vitamin C in body stores.[6] Reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography is used for determining the storage levels of vitamin C within lymphocytes and tissue.
It has been observed that while serum or blood plasma levels follow the circadian rhythm or short term dietary changes, those within tissues themselves are more stable and give a better view of the availability of ascorbate within the organism. However, very few hospital laboratories are adequately equipped and trained to carry out such detailed analyses, and require samples to be analyzed in specialized laboratories.[87][88]
[edit]Adverse effects

[edit]Common side-effects
Relatively large doses of vitamin C may cause indigestion, particularly when taken on an empty stomach.
When taken in large doses, vitamin C causes diarrhea in healthy subjects. In one trial, doses up to 6 grams of ascorbic acid were given to 29 infants, 93 children of preschool and school age, and 20 adults for more than 1400 days. With the higher doses, toxic manifestations were observed in five adults and four infants. The signs and symptoms in adults were nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, flushing of the face, headache, fatigue and disturbed sleep. The main toxic reactions in the infants were skin rashes.[89] On the other hand, Cathcart has demonstrated that sick patients, with influenza and cancer for example, do not suffer any adverse effects whatsoever until the dosage is raised to fairly high levels such as 100 grams or higher.[90]
[edit]Possible side-effects
As vitamin C enhances iron absorption[91], iron poisoning can become an issue to people with rare iron overload disorders, such as haemochromatosis. A genetic condition that results in inadequate levels of the enzyme glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), can cause sufferers to develop hemolytic anemia after ingesting specific oxidizing substances, such as very large dosages of vitamin C.[92]
There is a longstanding belief among the mainstream medical community that vitamin C causes kidney stones, which is based on little science.[93] Although some individual recent studies have found a relationship[94] there is no clear relationship between excess ascorbic acid intake and kidney stone formation. [95]
In a study conducted on rats, during the first month of pregnancy, high doses of vitamin C may suppress the production of progesterone from the corpus luteum.[96] Progesterone, necessary for the maintenance of a pregnancy, is produced by the corpus luteum for the first few weeks, until the placenta is developed enough to produce its own source. By blocking this function of the corpus luteum, high doses of vitamin C (1000+ mg) are theorized to induce an early miscarriage.
In a group of spontaneously aborting women at the end of the first trimester, the mean values of vitamin C were significantly higher in the aborting group. However, the authors do state: 'This could not be interpreted as an evidence of causal association.'[97]
However, in a previous study of 79 women with threatened, previous spontaneous, or habitual abortion, Javert and Stander (1943) had 91% success with 33 patients who received vitamin C together with bioflavinoids and vitamin K (only three abortions), whereas all of the 46 patients who did not receive the vitamins aborted. [98]
[edit]Chance of overdose
As discussed previously, vitamin C exhibits remarkably low toxicity. The LD50 (the dose that will kill 50% of a population) in rats is generally accepted to be 11.9 grams per kilogram of body weight when taken orally.[36] The LD50 in humans remains unknown, owing to medical ethics that preclude experiments which would put patients at risk of harm. However, as with all substances tested in this way, the LD50 is taken as a guide to its toxicity in humans and no data to contradict this has been found.
[edit]Natural and artificial dietary sources

Rose hips are a particularly rich source of vitamin C
The richest natural sources are fruits and vegetables, and of those, the camu camu fruit and the Kakadu plum contain the highest concentration of the vitamin. It is also present in some cuts of meat, especially liver. Vitamin C is the most widely taken nutritional supplement and is available in a variety of forms, including tablets, drink mixes, crystals in capsules or naked crystals.
Vitamin C is absorbed by the intestines using a sodium-ion dependent channel. It is transported through the intestine via both glucose-sensitive and glucose-insensitive mechanisms. The presence of large quantities of sugar either in the intestines or in the blood can slow absorption.[99]
[edit]Plant sources
While plants are generally a good source of vitamin C, the amount in foods of plant origin depends on: the precise variety of the plant, the soil condition, the climate in which it grew, the length of time since it was picked, the storage conditions, and the method of preparation.[100]
The following table is approximate and shows the relative abundance in different raw plant sources.[101][102][103] As some plants were analyzed fresh while others were dried (thus, artifactually increasing concentration of individual constituents like vitamin C), the data are subject to potential variation and difficulties for comparison. The amount is given in milligrams per 100 grams of fruit or vegetable and is a rounded average from multiple authoritative sources:
Plant source Amount
(mg / 100g)
Kakadu plum 3100
Camu Camu 2800
Rose hip 2000
Acerola 1600
Seabuckthorn 695
Jujube 500
Baobab 400
Blackcurrant 200
Red pepper 190
Parsley 130
Guava 100
Kiwifruit 90
Broccoli 90
Loganberry 80
Redcurrant 80
Brussels sprouts 80
Wolfberry (Goji) 73 †
Lychee 70
Cloudberry 60
Elderberry 60
Persimmon 60
† average of 3 sources; dried
Plant source Amount
(mg / 100g)
Papaya 60
Strawberry 60
Orange 50
Lemon 40
Melon, cantaloupe 40
Cauliflower 40
Garlic 31
Grapefruit 30
Raspberry 30
Tangerine 30
Mandarin orange 30
Passion fruit 30
Spinach 30
Cabbage raw green 30
Lime 30
Mango 28
Potato 20
Melon, honeydew 20
Cranberry 13
Tomato 10
Blueberry 10
Pineapple 10
Plant source Amount
(mg / 100g)
Pawpaw 10
Grape 10
Apricot 10
Plum 10
Watermelon 10
Banana 9
Carrot 9
Avocado 8
Crabapple 8
Cherry 7
Peach 7
Apple 6
Blackberry 6
Beetroot 5
Pear 4
Lettuce 4
Cucumber 3
Eggplant 2
Fig 2
Bilberry 1
Horned melon 0.5
Medlar 0.3

[edit]Animal sources

Goats, like almost all animals, make their own vitamin C. An adult goat will manufacture more than 13,000 mg of vitamin C per day in normal health and levels manyfold higher when faced with stress.
The overwhelming majority of species of animals and plants synthesise their own vitamin C, making some, but not all, animal products, sources of dietary vitamin C.
Vitamin C is most present in the liver and least present in the muscle. Since muscle provides the majority of meat consumed in the western human diet, animal products are not a reliable source of the vitamin. Vitamin C is present in mother's milk and, in lower amounts, in raw cow's milk, with pasteurized milk containing only trace amounts.[104] All excess Vitamin C is disposed of through the urinary system.
The following table shows the relative abundance of vitamin C in various foods of animal origin, given in milligram of vitamin C per 100 grams of food:
Animal Source Amount
(mg / 100g)
Calf liver (raw) 36
Beef liver (raw) 31
Oysters (raw) 30
Cod roe (fried) 26
Pork liver (raw) 23
Lamb brain (boiled) 17
Chicken liver (fried) 13
Animal Source Amount
(mg / 100g)
Lamb liver (fried) 12
Lamb heart (roast) 11
Lamb tongue (stewed) 6
Human milk (fresh) 4
Goat milk (fresh) 2
Cow milk (fresh) 2

[edit]Food preparation
Vitamin C chemically decomposes under certain conditions, many of which may occur during the cooking of food. Normally, boiling water at 100°C is not hot enough to cause any significant destruction of the nutrient, which only decomposes at 190°C, [36] despite popular opinion. However, pressure cooking, roasting, frying and grilling food is more likely to reach the decomposition temperature of vitamin C. Longer cooking times also add to this effect, as will copper food vessels, which catalyse the decomposition.[36]
Another cause of vitamin C being lost from food is leaching, where the water-soluble vitamin dissolves into the cooking water, which is later poured away and not consumed. However, vitamin C doesn't leach in all vegetables at the same rate; research shows broccoli seems to retain more than any other.[105] Research has also shown that fresh-cut fruits don't lose significant nutrients when stored in the refrigerator for a few days.[106]

[edit]Vitamin C supplements
Vitamin C is widely available in the form of tablets and powders. The Redoxon brand, launched in 1934 by Hoffmann-La Roche, was the first mass-produced synthetic vitamin C.
Vitamin C is the most widely taken dietary supplement.[107] It is available in many forms including caplets, tablets, capsules, drink mix packets, in multi-vitamin formulations, in multiple antioxidant formulations, and crystalline powder. Timed release versions are available, as are formulations containing bioflavonoids such as quercetin, hesperidin and rutin. Tablet and capsule sizes range from 25 mg to 1500 mg. Vitamin C (as ascorbic acid) crystals are typically available in bottles containing 300 g to 1 kg of powder (a teaspoon of vitamin C crystals equals 5,000 mg).
[edit]Artificial modes of synthesis
Vitamin C is produced from glucose by two main routes. The Reichstein process, developed in the 1930s, uses a single pre-fermentation followed by a purely chemical route. The modern two-step fermentation process, originally developed in China in the 1960s, uses additional fermentation to replace part of the later chemical stages. Both processes yield approximately 60% vitamin C from the glucose feed.[108]
Research is underway at the Scottish Crop Research Institute in the interest of creating a strain of yeast that can synthesise vitamin C in a single fermentation step from galactose, a technology expected to reduce manufacturing costs considerably.[30]
World production of synthesised vitamin C is currently estimated at approximately 110,000 tonnes annually. Main producers have been BASF/Takeda, DSM, Merck and the China Pharmaceutical Group Ltd. of the People's Republic of China. China is slowly becoming the major world supplier as its prices undercut those of the US and European manufacturers.[109] By 2008 only the DSM plant in Scotland remained operational outside the strong price competition from China. [110] The world price of Vitamin C rose sharply in 2008 partly as a result of rises in basic food prices but also in anticipation of a stoppage of the two Chinese plants , situated at Shijiazhuang near Beijing, as part of a general shutdown of polluting industry in China over the period of the Olympic games.[111]

Where Have all the Sunspots Gone?

2008-07-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

if anyone actually reads what i post here, you should come join me at www.TruthBlog.org where i post most of my pertinent articles...

Last month I wrote:

———————

From this story on space.com where they talk about the opposing views solar scientists have for cycle 24 they offer some opinions. NOAA Space Environment Center scientist Douglas Biesecker, who chaired the panel, said in a statement:

[…] despite the panel’s division on the Sun cycle’s intensity, all members have a high confidence that the season will begin in March 2008.

———————-

We are halfway through March, and the sun has been very quiet, Ap magnetic index remains low, sunspots are zilch, all we have is a bit of solar wind from the occasional coronal hole.

The forecast from SWPC is flatness for the 10.7cm band:

This is the one that worries me though, as I’ve pointed out before, we have that step function (or discontinuity) in 2005 (see red arrows) which gives the impression that something just “switched off” in the solar magnetic dynamo:

Additionally, the sunspot forecast from SWPC calls for sunspot numbers to be very low for the remainder of 2008, which seems to put a kibosh on the consensus formed by NASA’s convened solar scientist panel which made that prediction of “…the season will begin in March 2008” uttered by panel chair Biesecker quoted above.

We live in interesting times.

---

January 2008

The first sunspot group of the new solar cycle, AR 981, was seen on the 5th as two sunspots in a group of type Axx at 28°N/249°. These were not seen on the following day. The only other group seen from the eight observations made during the month was on the 30th - AR 982 at 9°S/247° was from the old cycle as was seen as a collection of 5 sunspots of type Bxo.

The six observations made between the 6th and 27th all showed a blank disk.

Hydrogen Alpha:

Prominences seen on the 5th, 6th and 13th were not particularly striking. On the 27th an arch type prominence was seen on the SE limb while further towards the equator a bright but not particularly tall prominence was seen. By the 30th quite long filaments were seen on the eastern part of the disk together with plage around AR 982. In fact these filaments appeared to be pointing towards this active area. Also on the 30th another small but bright prominence was seen near the equator on the eastern limb.

February 2008

On the 2nd AR 982 was observed under poor seeing conditions an Axx group consisting of two small sunspots. On the 9th a short-lived Bxo group was seen at 3°N/118° (it was not seen on the preceding or following days and was not reported by NOAA). The other 5 observations made during the month showed blank disks.

Hydrogen Alpha:

5 Hα observations were made during the month. The most striking prominences seen were on the 10th on the W limb and on the 16th & 17th on the NE limb. Both were of the hedgerow type. No filaments were seen.

March 2008

No sunspots were seen until the observation of the 24th when the Dsc group of AR 987 at 7°S/261° and the Cso group of AR 988 at 7°S/236° were both seen in eastern hemisphere. By the 29th AR 987 had reduced in size slightly from 90 to 50 millionths while AR 988 had developed into an Eao group with an area of 140 millionths. These two groups were joined by a third group, AR 989, at 11°S/207°. On the 31st AR 987 had reduced to a single Hsx spot approaching the western limb, AR 988 had lost its following penumbral spot although its area had increased to 190 millionths and AR 989 was no longer visible having decayed on the disk.

Hydrogen Alpha:

From the 7 Hα observations made during the month the most striking prominences seen were on the 21st when four were visible, three on the eastern limb and one on the western. One of these consisted of arches. Filaments were much more visible than during recent months, especially at the start and end of the month. On the 2nd, for example, four regions of filaments were seen while on the 24th and 29th a long filament was seen to the south of AR 988. A flare was seen during a short observing session from 14h 40m to 14h 50m on the 24th within AR 988. Plage was seen around all three active regions of AR 987, AR 988 and AR 989 on the 29th.

April 2008

AR 987 and AR 988 were still visible on the 1st although AR 987 was an Axx spot close to the western limb and it had rotated around the limb by the time of the next observation on the 3rd. AR 988 was a single Hax spot on the 1st and 3rd and it had disappeared by the 4th.

No further sunspots were seen until the observation of the 22nd when AR 992 had developed on the disk as a Bxo group at 14°N/274°. This group was seen again on the following day but not on the next observation on the 26th.

Hydrogen Alpha:

Prominence activity was quite low during the month with at most four prominences seen on any of the 15 observations – none of the prominences seen were particularly striking. Filaments were seen on the 3rd and 4th and again on the 23rd and 26th. Plage was seen around new cycle AR 990 on the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th.

May 2008

On two small sunspot groups were seen during the month. AR 994 was seen at 12°S/311° on the 18th as a Bxo group and 19th as an Axx spot. The other group was AR 996 also on the 19th at 7°N/258° as a Bxo group. The other 18 observations made during the month, from the 1st to 14th, 22nd to 24th and the 31st all showed blank disks.

Hydrogen Alpha:

A dynamic prominence was seen on the 14th on the SE limb. At 07h15m it was seen as a tower of hydrogen that turned through a right angle and then fall back towards the limb. When observing later the same day at 16h45m, this prominence had changed shape to appear more like a wind sock and it was changing shape over the timescale of a few minutes with regions of hydrogen appearing and disappearing. Another active prominence was seen on the 14th also on the SE limb but not as bright on the above dynamic prominence.

Plage was seen around AR 994 on the 18th and 19th and around AR 996 on the 18th, 19th and 22nd.

+++ The Humorous Artwork of David Dees - Check These Out +++

2008-06-29T10:39:00.001-07:00

The Humorous Artwork of David Dees

http://www.deesillustration.com

This art is free to use for non-profit individual purposes and blogs. I encourage you to openly distribute to others with the hope it will educate, enlighten, deprogram, and at least, entertain. For magazine, book, or website use please inquire at davodees@hotmail.com

All material Copyright©2006-2008, David Dees

Wow!!!

Mysterious Ring Above Kazachstan!!!! Very Bizarre Video - Check This Out!!!

2008-06-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

Video: Gigantic Mysterious Ring Above Kazachstan!

The Sun And Three Other Bright Objects Connected With A Ring Of Light

Is this HAARP burning the sky? I don't read Russian - so I have no idea what is being said and I believe the date is either May 6, 2008 or June 5, 2008.

[FULL VIDEO HERE] http://video.mail.ru/mail/eternal_8/5/6.html [FULL VIDEO HERE]

below are only screen captures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, also spelled Kazakstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a country in Central Asia and Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world as well as the world's largest landlocked country,^[4]^[5] it has a territory of 2,727,300 km² (greater than Western Europe). It is bordered by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and China. The country also borders on a significant part of the Caspian Sea.

Vast in size, the land in Kazakhstan is very diverse in types of terrain: flatlands, steppes, taigas, rock-canyons, hills, deltas, mountains, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Kazakhstan has the 62nd largest population in the world, with a population density of less than 6 people per square kilometre (15 per sq. mi.).

For most of its history the territory of modern-day Kazakhstan has been inhabited by nomadic tribes. By the 16th century the Kazakhs emerged as a distinct group, divided into three hordes. The Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppe in the 18th century, and by the mid-19th century all of Kazakhstan was part of the Russian Empire. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganized several times before becoming the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936, a part of the USSR. During the 20th century, Kazakhstan was the site of major Soviet projects, including Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and the Semipalatinsk "Polygon", the USSR's primary nuclear weapon testing site.

Kazakhstan declared itself an independent country on December 16, 1991, the last Soviet republic to do so. Its communist-era leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, became the country's new president. Since independence, Kazakhstan has pursued a balanced foreign policy and worked to develop its economy, especially its hydrocarbon industry. While the country's economic outlook is improving, President Nazarbayev maintains strict control over the country's politics. Several opposition leaders and journalists have been killed in recent years, and Western observers generally do not consider Kazakhstan's elections to be free and fair. Nevertheless, Kazakhstan's international prestige is building. It is now considered to be the dominant state in Central Asia.^[6] The country belongs to many international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO's Partnership for Peace, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In 2010, Kazakhstan will chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Kazakhstan is very diverse, in part due to mass deportations of many ethnic groups to the country during Stalin's rule. Kazakhs are the largest group, followed by Russians. Kazakhstan allows freedom of religion, and many different beliefs are represented in the country. Islam is the primary religion, followed by Orthodox Christianity. The official language is Kazakh, though Russian is still commonly used for everyday communication.

My Love for Ishtar is Great - Pics of my Favorite Goddess

2008-06-08T10:19:00.001-07:00

I TURN THE MALE TO THE
FEMALE. I AM SHE WHO
ADORNETH THE MALE FOR THE
FEMALE; AM AM SHE WHO
ADORNETH THE FEMALE
FOR THE MALE.

The words of the goddess Ishtar.

And Ishtar's Gate:

and finally, how the 'real' ishtar gate looked in 1963:

You Says She's a Virgin - LiveEarth Symbolism Explained

2008-05-29T17:33:00.000-07:00

You Say She's A Virgin

By Matthew Delooze

http://www.matthewdelooze.co.uk/readarticle.php?article_id=9

Hello Folks,

Having missed the Live Earth concerts myself I have decided to write this belated article based on the recordings made about the Live Earth concert in London that was presented on the net by my favourite email blocking company 'MSN'.

I have been writing about festivals and the harvesting of spiritual energy for several years now. Indeed I still remember my spiritual download, beside-the-seaside, in 2004 at Morecambe. The article is on this site.

Following further spiritual direction, after regaining some better understanding, I was able to write about Live 8 and Glastonbury Festival both in articles and in books. If you are new to this information I suggest you read this article before you go any further:

http://matthew-delooze.blogspot.com/2007/04/answer.html

To those that already know me I say "let's get on with the show".
It has become obvious to me since my awakening in 1999 that the collection of spiritual energy in certain symbolic locations around the world is on the increase. The location used for the Live Earth concert in London is no exception. I point out that the new Wembley Stadium is rife with illuminati eye and arch symbolism. People also seem to forget that Wembley was on a par with events of 9/11 and was also a place where twin towers were 'pulled'.

'Pulled'. Twin Towers in London (Nothing new there then!)

The new Wembley rising from the ashes or should I say the 'Benben rising out of the watery chaos'?

It is easy to point out the blatant symbolism behind the logos adopted by Live Earth. The one heading this very article is a typical example. The Sun and Phallic symbolism is so easy to spot now that most of you have had it pointed out to you for years by the likes of David Icke and others. The forums these days seem to be full of symbolism experts pointing out the statue of liberty etc as an illuminati monument.

This is all well and good but in my opinion it doesn't stop there and no one is going to wake up by simply recognising a famous landmark. We need to start to look deeper in my opinion. Now is the time to start doing so because we haven't even scratched the surface yet. The forces that rule this world are not going to be shaken by people just because they can recognise a crappy symbolic monument built by their puppets. This is simply because they will just replace it with one that you cannot recognise and indeed they will still carry on using the ones you have already failed to recognise and therefore continue to surrender your spiritual power to. Or do you think you know of them all because of the info supplied by the biggest forum gossips or the jazziest looking websites? Please think again if you do because I assure you that we are dealing with a very deceptive awareness that is operating on a far higher level of consciousness than the dumbed down human race is. I say that with sincerity.

Dozy Dick to Dizzy Doris whilst looking at the London Eye.…..

….'OoooH look Doris there's another of them there 'Hill-hum-in-hatty' monuments that those nutty conspiracy theorists talk about. Glad I recognised it Doris…..that will put an end to the dastardly reptilian agenda for sure, let's go for a cup of tea and a slice of currant cake now and forget all about it'…

It's time to start looking deeper if you want break free and the Live Earth concert events may, unknowingly to the organisers, provide a few good examples and triggers for you, despite the effort to steal your energy. I will point out what I saw on a slightly deeper level at the London event in the hope it helps a few of you out there click on to what goes on right under our noses, but our own enforced stupidity fails to notice.

When these events take place it is not just the visual symbolism on stage that matters. Far from it. The naming of groups/performers and titles and lyrics of songs also plays a very major part on a spiritual level. Whilst our five sense reality concentrates on the celebrities and we prance around to lyrics and music we can't see that a massive deception is taking place.

The simplest way I can show you these things is to show you some images from the concert and point out both the visual AND the audio symbolism to you in the hope that you will research things for yourself. You will need to grasp the idea that The Serpent Cult can deliver a double whammy on you and mesmerise your emotional feelings and control your physical actions. This will affect your emotional state and lead you into surrendering your spiritual energy to the powers that created the visual symbolism that is backed up with cryptic and symbolic audio terminology.

Let's start with the opening scene at Live Earth London. I will provide a link to the event later for you to check what I am saying. Indeed I highly recommend that you at least watch the scenes I mention as they are the parts that I believe you can grasp and understand on a five sense level.

The event opens with the 'SOS All Stars: Drummers'. Believe me there is nothing going on in this opening event that will save your soul or yourself. It is a very blatant Sun worship ritual. The powerful beat of the drums make people alert, just like fireworks do on New Years Eve, and whilst this is going on there are graphic images of the rising sun (rebirth) being displayed on the screens on stage. Once the Sun is in its full glory images of the world's creation are shown. 'Let there be light' sort of thing. Here are a couple of still images from the concert showing the birth of the Sun. Look… Can you see what I mean?

The opening ceremony at Live Earth. The birth of The Sun.
The crowd witness it and then they applaud and cheer.

The Sun is now fully risen. The crowd at the venue and all those watching worldwide are now deceived into taking part in a Sun (Serpent) Worship Ritual in the guise of watching a concert IMO.

Ok? Coincidence is it? Well the next act to perform is a little bit more of a coincidence. Yes folks it is 'Genesis'. Let there be light again eh? I realise this seems comical but I try to point out in my articles and especially my new book that the Serpent Cult, reptilians, love taking the piss out of us apes. Here are a couple of symbolic pictures of 'Genesis' at the venue. One showing the planet Earth on screen and the other showing the 'BA' London Eye on screen.

'Turn it on again'. Genesis: Let There Be Light

'Land of confusion' is being sung by Genesis, order out of chaos. The rising benben. The London Eye. Coincidence?

I have pointed out in many articles that the London Eye (big wheel) is symbolic of the rising Benben and the Sun and it is used in most festivals. Obviously I received a bit of stick when I first started talking about these things but is it starting to click with you now? I bloody well hope so because my wife thinks I have developed a fetish for Ferris wheels!

Maybe it is just a coincidence again eh? Genesis sings 'Turn it on again' (clever reference to sun rebirth) and 'Land of confusion' (clever reference to 'order out of chaos'). This is a very good example of visual symbolism and symbolic audio terminology being used together to mesmerise you and soften you up subconsciously for you to unknowingly give up your energy. The vast majority of artists don't know what is going on either.

Anyway there are several other symbolic references to lights and eyes both on and off stage at the event. I cannot possibly mention them all and some details go very deep but I will mention Razorlight- In the morning, Corrine Bailey Rae (Ray) - Mercy Mercy Me as simple food for thought. Other bands also performed that emphasised symbolic eyes both in lyrics and in the actual names of the acts.

David Gray also took my attention with his song 'Babylon'. This song is a classic example where there is no obvious connection with the word Babylon in context with the other lyrics of the song. I have asked a lot of people why they happily sing along with 'Babylon'. They haven't got a bloody clue. Can anyone tell me what the word 'Babylon' has to do with this song then I can pass it on to the sheep that blindly sing along to it with eyes like a learned poet?

Could it be that people who slip symbolic words into songs get famous?

Ask Robbie Williams.

If you watch the recorded event, look at the crowd singing and blindly dancing along with 'Babylon'…... For 'crying out loud' wake up! Ask yourself now why people blindly do such things? If Robbie Williams wrote a song containing a chorus about dog shit I can imagine the crowd blindly singing along with it at a concert…...

To the sound of 'Sailing' (Rod Stewart)

"We are Dog Shit ..We are Dog Shit
We haven't a clue... what's goin on
We are hypnotised.. oh so hypnotised
And we never will be free."

I realise that example may seem a bit harsh but it is a very accurate description of what we are really doing at the hands of the Serpent Cult and we blindly endorse our spiritual enslavement by being conned into going along with Sun worship rituals. It is so easy for us to surrender to a talented artist and loose ourselves in the lyrics and music of their songs. That is why the Serpent Cult control the music industry, they get mostly unknowing talented artists to attract our emotional respect towards their occult symbolism and terminology.

Anyways let us move on and look at the performance by 'Spinal Tap' that happens halfway through the Live Earth event. This group is supposed to be a spoof band. They reunited just to do the concert. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinal_Tap

Spinal Tap... a classic example of Serpent Cult puppets.

It would be another coincidence if this band also did Sun worship stuff on stage wouldn't it? Obviously symbolism can be easily hidden within their comedy can't it? I can only suggest you look at the Spinal Tap performance and try to look beyond the comedy side of things. It is really not that hard to do as Spinal Tap are not even funny. If you do watch the clip please note that two stone towers are placed on stage.

Spinal Tap singing 'Stonehenge'. Comedy? Or an occult sun ritual? I'm not laughing.

To the crowd this is just suppose to be cheap props representing 'Stonehenge' and the 'top stone' doesn't appears on time so only the two pillars are used to carry out a ritual instead. (Nice one Mr Gore)

It is obvious to me that the top stone was meant to be missing all along despite the pathetic acting (watch the recording yourself). Here are a couple of clips but I strongly suggest you see the performance (link at the end of this article)

The twin stone pillars placed on stage at Wembley to the song Stonehenge.

Ring any bells?

The top stone arrives far too late…..all staged of course.

I assure you that this performance is part of a sun worship ritual despite the spoof scenario.

Let us move on to the end of the concert. Madonna. Basically apart from the announcement at the beginning of the concert everything was leading up to Madonna's performance. I don't need to point out to seasoned researcher that Madonna is an illuminati puppet through and through. She literally is and has always been 'walking symbolism'.

Bright threads. I bet she didn't get those robes on eBay.

It is debatable if Madonna is aware of what she is doing or she is just ego running riot. The symbolism used at the end of the Live Earth concert in London was intense and delivered very, very fast. Billions of people went along with the symbolism being thrown at them without having the slightest clue what was really going on. I cannot explain it all to you in this article but I can and will explain some important parts.

First of all let us look at the name 'Madonna'. I believe Madonna is the symbolic Isis, a sun deity and symbolic Virgin/ Queen/ Mother of the world. Madonna simply means 'Our Lady' but our lady represents all goddesses doesn't she? I also remind people that Big Ben (the world's time) is dedicated to Queen Isis and her namesakes (see my book the Stars Are Falling).

Time goes by… so slowly

What do you see?

I believe Madonna is being used by multidimensional beings to act as a symbolic energy extractor. In other words when energy is directed at Madonna it goes to the multidimensional beings that rule this world because Madonna is a puppet/agent for them. When we show respect to Madonna we are showing respect to what Madonna really represents and that is the Sun Deities that represent the Serpent. The Serpent is representative of reptilian alien beings, as I have said all along.

Madonna has also official taken on the name of the ancient goddess Esther. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200406/s1135561.htm

Esther is linked to Christianity (Serpent Cult), Judaism (Serpent Cult) and Islam (Serpent Cult) basically Ishtar/Esther is another word for Isis and so is Madonna. So basically Madonna is symbolically representing all the so- called different religions in one go. Is this clear?

I have mentioned many times that concerts and festivals are used to extract emotional respect and acceptance from the audience, whether that is a live audience or an audience listening or watching through all the other media services. Madonna basically demanded respect at the Live Earth event. First of all she deceptively collected emotional respect by singing 'Hey You'. She then moved on to raise the level of spirit slightly by singing Ray of Light (Ra).

I quote Madonna just before she sang 'Ray of Light' (another coincidence eh?)
Quote "Right now I don't want anyone saving up their energy, I want you ALL to give it up now". "I want to see you all jump up and down". "Come on you mother-fuckers".

Madonna then moved on to 'La Isla Bonita' again increasing the atmosphere leading up to the finale, where she sang 'Hung Up' and before that she makes another reference to Amen Ra. The crowd is at its highest point of excitement during the song 'Hung Up'. The mass energy is at its peak. Madonna has got them all going. Time goes by so slowly. Those with knowledge of music and those old enough to remember will know that 'Hung Up' uses the same music melody as ABBA's song 'Gimme Gimme'. This is no coincidence.
The tune is very, very, hypnotic and you are meant to realise that the tune is linked to ABBA. It is not a rip off by Madonna, she has not stolen the tune, its simply part of the ritual. It is the audio part of the ritual that simply mingles in with the visual part of the ritual. This is because the 'BA' has to be subconsciously recognised at the ritual event. Just like the BA has to be recognised in the London Eye. This is what I meant when I said we have to start looking deeper. We need to raise our levels of awareness to be able to see just what we are spiritually accepting and endorsing. The Serpent wants to keep you dumbed down so you can't see these things. The Serpent wants you to stop looking deeper and it will make it very difficult for you to do so. You are programmed, under a spell, to dismiss information like this, especially if it's too much trouble for your head. I am trying to start to break the spell you are under.
BA = Meaning: The word ba is usually translated as "soul" or "spirit". However, ba is probably better translated as "spiritual manifestation." Also known as a "double"
The name of the pop group ABBA really means double or soul. Indeed Abba the group used to use this symbol below. Or should I say the Serpent Cult controlled music industry made them use this symbol.

So the 'musical' tunes used by 'ABBA' are the officially accepted symbolic tunes of the BA or double (spiritual manifestation) and have been unknowingly accepted as such by the mass consciousness of the human race. That is why an ABBA tune has been mixed into the song of Madonna (Esther/ Ishtar/Mary/Isis). It is for its spiritual symbolic reasons that will be used at events and symbolic concerts.

Again the modern day music industry is completely controlled by the Serpent Cult and artists are unknowingly conned into creating sun symbolism within their work that in turn get us to unknowingly worship Deities connected to the Sun. When we do this we literally become spiritual slaves to the force we have surrendered to through deception.
ABBA is also an ancient term in Hebrew for 'Father' so is it just another coincidence that Madonna who calls herself Esther in Hebrew also uses symbolic 'ABBA' music in her song? You have to dig deep to see what is going on, please don't give up. The human race is too dumbed down to see what is really going on. I am not calling you stupid I am saying we all had our true awareness removed. It is time to get it back. Do you really want it back or do you want to stay on your knees? The choice is entirely yours.

Going back to the Madonna performance, once she had the whole of Wembley rocking and millions of others watching on TV etc, esoteric symbolism was flashed very quickly around on the screen, on stage and in the audience. The crowd's energy had been whipped up by the virgin…Madonna/Isis/Esther/Ishtar/Mary… and when it reached a peak, with the audience literally worshipping Madonna, spiritual energy was being released. It was not only released to feed the Madonna but it was also released to the symbolism that Madonna promoted. Although the symbolism was hardly noticeable on a five sense level I will assure you that the symbolism was taken in by everyone on a subconscious level.

When spiritual energy is released it takes on a different form and can energise things in a very different way than say 'gas in an oven' does. The energy released can actually feed the creators of the symbolism present at the said event at the time.

If you look at the stills below I will point out a small example of the symbolism being directed into the collective subconscious of the viewers whilst production of their spiritual energy, through emotional excitement, was at its peak.

A Knight Templar cross is thrown on stage in a heap (allegedly from a fan) whilst the energy was at its highest during the song 'Hung Up'

At the very same time (coincidently my arse) the same ancient symbol appeared on the screen. Look at the narrow screen behind Madonna

Madonna then approaches the 'Seal of Solomon' (Star of David), ancient symbolism again, which coincidently is placed centre stage in the crowd. Look dead centre of the still. I apologise for picture quality.

The symbolic Madonna /Isis/ Esther/ Ishtar/ Mary in front of the Seal of Solomon (bottom right corner)

Please don't forget that the spiritual energy has also been directed at the location and the opening (Sun rebirth) ceremony of the event, not to mention the symbolic Sun Goddess Madonna at the end of the event. Obviously this Live Earth event went on all day long and followed the Sun to other events around the globe all day long too. It was a global sun ritual.

If you watched Live Earth you will see that esoteric symbolism was not only constantly being used throughout the event but it came to a sharp head during Madonna's performance? Please watch the recording yourself and make your own mind up. Surely a Templar Cross landing on stage at the very moment another one is flashed on the screen cannot be a coincidence. Was it planned? If so ask yourself why.

Is it also coincidence that an ancient seal of Solomon (Sol means Sun) or the Star of David was also given a prime position, centre stage, in front of the Symbolic 'Esther' who represents both Christianity and Judaism? (The Templar Cross and the Star of David)

For crying out loud (Babylon - thought I'd slip that in)…. come on truth seekers just what the hell is going on here? How long are we going to let these things go on unchallenged simply because they don't fit in with our brainwashing state education? Fookin hell… the timing whilst displaying this flag symbolism was spot on. This was not an act nor was it coincidental that two ancient flags were openly displayed at exactly the right time, when the atmosphere was at its peak. There was also a lot more symbolism being displayed on the screens on the stage that I have not even mentioned to you. It was being flashed so fast that it could only have been created and produced to affect our subconscious.

I have mentioned in my Glastonbury article that spiritual energy is being sucked out of the masses at symbolic events. I believe the farcical Live Earth was just another deceptive 'Sun Worship' ritual. The powers behind this event don't give a monkey's toss about global warming. It was simply another 'wham bam thank you ma'am' energy extraction ritual disguised as a charity or an awareness concert, just like Live 8 was.

The crowd only wanted to see their 'idols' and other celebrities and the majority of artists were simply getting publicity to further serve their careers. At the end of the day I believe mass spiritual energy was extracted from millions of people around the globe at all the Live Earth concerts and it endorsed our spiritual enslavement. We again gave our permission for multidimensional beings to rule over us.

I am totally convinced that Live Earth was a fallacy. I am amazed that time and time again these events are coming to pass without any serious questions being raised.

Am I so crazy to suggest that Live Earth was a Sun Worship ritual and the masses were led like sheep to give their energies away and endorse our spiritual enslavement? Yes? What are the alternatives to my comments then my friends? Is it that the likes of Al Gore and pampered pop stars actually give a fuck about the planet? Come on wake up for crying (Babylon) out loud!

Could it be that the ego chasing crowds who are totally conditioned to worship celebrities, and would literally trample on babies just to get a glimpse of their favourite idol, give a monkey's toss about the planet and global warming? Again, for crying out loud, come on, wake up.

Even a few rock bands are clicking on that these concerts are basically full of deceptive shit, Roger Daltrey and The Artic Monkey's, to name a couple, have publicly spoken out yet even they still fail to realise that even events like Glastonbury are also being 'used' for dubious spiritual means.

These ambiguous rituals have been going on for thousands of years and the masses are programmed to take part in them without even thinking about it. The time to start thinking is now.

I have said enough in this article. I humbly thank you for your time. I have tried to take you a little deeper than just spotting a pyramid or an eye at these events and deceiving yourself that you are awake to it all. I believe you need to start to realise that all of your five senses are constantly being manipulated at the same time, and they have been since you were born and will be when you are born again, unless you have the guts to fully wake up.

Please look at the Live Earth event yourself. Here is the link.
http://entimg.msn.com/i/ExperienceData/p1-7/us/x.htm?sh=LiveEarth&ep=le_london

There is a panel on the left hand side please use it click on the relevant artists and song.
To see the sun rising symbolism click on SOS All Star drummers.
To see the stone pillars click on Spinal Tap 'Stonehenge'.
I suggest you watch all of Madonna's songs to catch her comments but the finale is a must to see the build up of energy.
If you connected with this article then please see the info below.

May love reign o'er you all.

Matthew Delooze 27/07/07

Join the New Wave - of Freemasons

2008-05-21T09:15:00.001-07:00

"Yeah, I think it's going to become hip and chic to be a Mason," Zulu said. "And that could be a dangerous thing."
Freemasons in midst of popularity, membership boom
May 18, 2008

The secretive society gains a higher, hipper profile as younger men seek out a place for fraternal bonding.

From left, Zulu, Jonathan Kanarek and Daemon Hillin are representative of a new wave of Freemasons that's stamping a younger, hipper profile on the centuries-old fraternity.

IN LOS FELIZ, across from a 7-Eleven on North Vermont Avenue, a few dozen men in their early 20s to late 80s share a dinner behind closed doors. Some wear full tuxedos with bow ties and jeweled cuff links, some have shoulder-length hair, and others wear open-collared shirts that reveal the slightest filigree of tattoo arching across their chests.

Photos: Meet the millennial Masons

Photos: Stylish Masons through history

Photo credits: In Sunday's Image section, an article about Freemasons was accompanied by a photograph of President Ford that was credited to the Los Angeles Times; Eric Draper of the Associated Press was the photographer. The uncredited photo of Clark Gable that also ran with the story should have been credited to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. —

Over Italian food, retired lawyers and judges sit elbow-to-elbow with owners of scrap metal yards and vintage clothing boutiques. They hold forth on philosophy, the weather; they rib each other and joke about saving room for cannoli. As they reach for seconds, they reveal skull-cracking rings emblazoned with a compass and a square.

Meet the millennial Masons. As secret societies go, it is one of the oldest and most famous. Its enrollment roster includes Louis Armstrong and Gerald Ford, and it has been depicted in movies such as "The Da Vinci Code" and "National Treasure." Once more than 4 million strong (back in the 1950s), it has been in something of a popularity free-fall ever since. Viewed with suspicion as a bastion of antiquated values and forced camaraderie, the Masons have seen membership rolls plummet more than 60% to just 1.5 million in 2006.

Only now the trend seems to be reversing itself, and nowhere more noticeably than in Southern California. The reasons seem clear. In another Masonic Hall, this one on La Cienega, a Sri Lankan-born banker, a sunglasses-wearing Russian immigrant and a continent-hopping Frenchman break bread, poke at their salads and chat about their health.

"For a time it looked as if Masonry was going into a sharp decline, if not the death throes," said UCLA history professor Margaret C. Jacob, who has written extensively about the fraternal order. "But it looks like it may be making a comeback."

That's because the Freemasons, whose tenets forbid soliciting or recruiting members, have enthusiastically embraced the Internet as a way to leverage curiosity about an organization with its roots in Europe's medieval stonemasons guilds. Freemasonry today sees itself as a thinking man's salon, a learned society with a philanthropic bent.

"We had a record number of new members last year," said Allan Casalou, grand secretary of the Grand Lodge of California. "We added 2,000 men, which is the most since 1998 and our seventh straight year of membership increases."

And, to paraphrase that Oldsmobile campaign, these definitely aren't your father's Freemasons. They are bar owners, male models and olive-oil brokers. They are men like Zulu, an L.A. tattoo artist with a swirling Maori-inspired design inked across his face and a panoply of metal piercing his ears, nose and face. They are men like Jonathan Kanarek, who runs a men's vintage clothing store on Hollywood Boulevard and whose retro chic wardrobe of polka-dot ascots, glen-plaid jackets and smartly pressed pocket squares earned him a spot on Esquire magazine's 2007 list of best-dressed real men in America. And they are men like Daemon Hillin, whose surfer-dude looks and blinding white smile can be found on Japanese TV, where he plays sidekick and comic foil to the Japanese version of the Hilton sisters.

They are also all men who want to be part of an all-for-one and one-for-all brotherhood built on shared ideals, philosophical pursuits and a penchant for rings, aprons and funny hats. As Zulu bluntly put it: "I joined because I was looking for people to hang with that were like-minded but also hip and cool, and a lot of tattoo artists tend to be drunks and druggies."

Hillin, who originally joined the Masons in Temecula, moved to L.A. and is interested in the Santa Monica-Palisades Lodge No. 307, one of the youngest and most diverse congregations in the state (the average age of active brothers is just 33). The lodge's senior deacon, Jim Warren, calls it " 'Star Trek' without the chicks." "We have every possible national origin, ethnicity and religious denomination you could imagine," he said.

Warren credits the Internet. "We were one the first lodges in the state to have a website up," he said. "That led to a huge spike in membership."

Other lodges followed suit, putting up their own sites and drawing a crowd. That's how prospective Mason Johnny Royal ended up at the door of Elysian Lodge No. 418 last month. Intrigued by the distinctive Masonic architecture that graces most halls, the 31-year-old publicist with sideburns to his chin and hair to his shoulders and a Renaissance lute player tattoo on his right forearm hit the Web.

What he read about the Masonic ideals -- wisdom, strength, beauty and the pursuit of knowledge -- made him decide to pursue membership. "My generation wants to be part of something beyond itself," Royal said. "I want to learn; I want to participate."

The Web generation

THE INTERNET hasn't only made it easier to learn about the Freemasons, Casalou says, it's changed the type of men coming forward. "There is so much information on the Internet that by the time someone comes to a lodge to seek membership, they already know a lot about Masonry," he said. "Which is a big departure from previous generations. And it means they are more likely to be active participants."

Zulu became curious about Freemasonry after tattooing Masonic symbology on several clients. He joined five years ago at age 39 and now serves as webmaster and senior warden of North Hollywood Lodge No. 542. He has also gone on to become both a Scottish Rite Mason and Shriner (Masonic membership is a prerequisite for both), and next year he will become the leader of his lodge. "I'll be the first black worshipful master in the lodge's history," he said, using the proper term of respect.

But he probably won't be the last. Because California's contingent of Freemasons is expected to grow, the average age of its members, once 71 and now 65, is expected to drop. By 2018, as Casalou predicts, the state will be awash in 55-year-old pre-retirement Masons giving each other secret handshakes, wearing ritual aprons and invoking the Grand Architect of the Universe.

The Internet continues to help. Zulu said that he gets at least four e-mails a week from prospective Masons around the globe who see his tattooed and pierced visage at the lodge website and want to be reassured such an alternative look isn't a barrier to membership.

"Yeah, I think it's going to become hip and chic to be a Mason," Zulu said. "And that could be a dangerous thing."

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-ig-masons18-2008may18,0,562412.story

Lawyer Asks Grandma the Wrong Question...

2008-04-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

Lawyers should never ask a Mississippi grandma a question if they aren't prepared for the answer.

In a trial, a Southern small-town prosecuting attorney called his first witness, a grandmotherly, elderly woman to the stand. He approached her and asked, 'Mrs. Jones, do you know me?' She responded, 'Why, yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I've known you since you were a boy, and frankly, you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, and you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you're a big shot when you haven't the brains to realize you'll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes, I know you.'

The lawyer was stunned. Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the room and asked, 'M rs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?'

She again replied, ' Why yes, I do. I've known Mr. Bradley since he was a youngster, too. He's lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anyone, and his law practice is one of the worst in the entire state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him.'

The defense attorney nearly died.

The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench and, in a very quiet voice, said, 'If either of you idiots asks her if she knows me, I'll send you both to the electric chair.

+++ Important Info +++ Comprehensive Annual Financial Reposts!!!!

2008-03-12T17:47:00.000-07:00

+++ To automatically subscribe to CAFR1 posts, send a blank email to: NATIONAL@CAFR1.com with: subscribe in the subject line, or to unsubscribe from CAFR1 posts if subscribed, just put: unsubscribe in the subject line. +++

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I can't say enough GOOD THINGS about Walter Burien and www.CAFR1.com He's really got the answer to what's happening to the world right now, and the economy... so please, please, please!!! send him an email and ask to be added to his private email list!!! also check out www.CAFR1.com for more information!!! this is very important information!!! if you have extra money, i plead of you, please DONATE IT TO HIM, he's doing very important research about how we are all 'OWNED'!!!!

www.CAFR1.com

Thanks,

Teddsadventure
(kicking ass in boston)

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CAFR1 NATIONAL - 03/11/08
Article linked at: http://CAFR1.com/NGE.html

The New Government Economy
by Walter Burien - http://CAFR1.com

One way Government now "creates wealth" out of thin air is by covertly taking it "all" from everyone else. The 512 trillion dollar international derivative market is a key tool used by Government to do just that. Read the article linked below, but before you do, please read my comments below the link first:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/derivatives-new-ticking-time-bomb/story.aspx?guid=%7bB9E54A5D-4796-4D0D-AC9E-D9124B59D436%7d&print=true&dist=printTop

The fiat dollar not backed by any hard commodity value gave government the opportunity to print value with no backing and by printed dollar creation to takeover the market place wealth of all others, doing so spanning the last several decades.

Government now owns it all (equity; stock market; debt market; insurance; banking; etc.) by investment. Read through my site CAFR1.com

The game though in the last thirty years has transitioned into an international game "outside" of the dollar. So, to control the World economy a new strangle-hold needed to be created that encompassed all currencies; commodities; or anything of value. The answer: Derivatives!

The article linked above shows the growth of the derivative market but the driving force is not disclosed. The first question in logic you must ask yourself is; Who is the primary player? Here the answer is our own government in composite totals between local and federal creating the biggest monopoly the world has ever seen is "the player" of no equal.

OK, what are they doing here?? Now you must ask yourself; What is the advantage of a derivative?

Being that I want you to understand, we will keep it simple here and to the point:

A derivative is a contract bet for "future" pricing in which the buyer and seller to the bet agrees to be held financially accountable for the outcome of the bet. This could be pricing days, months, or years ahead. The bet may apply to: a stock, bond, commodity, currency, interest rate, liability on an insurance policy, building project, mortgage, etc.

In principle and in an open free market where players involved in these items wish to use derivatives to lock in prices or limit liability on the sale or purchase of the underlying item, derivatives are a useful tool to stabilize unknown price liability. Very little money is used to trade the derivative (1% or 2%) of the value as a good faith deposit towards price swings of the underlying item to lock in the price for the future.

EXAMPLE: Gold is at $950 / oz and you think it will collapse to $550 / oz twelve month out from today and the derivative on the commodity market one year out; June 2009 Gold is priced today at $1050 / oz on a 100 oz derivative contract (the market thinks it will be higher one year out)

You are a small player so you SELL One (1) June 2009 Gold contract at $1050 when hit as a paper commitment to to deliver 100 oz come June of 2009. Keep in mind this is a "paper" commitment, you do not have to fulfill the commitment until June 2009 but even though you may not own 1 oz of gold, your bet is for lower prices so you SELL and someone on paper who you sold to bought that contract agreeing on paper to pay $1050 come June 2009.

Well, hypothetically let's say a research company next week announces they have developed a process to extract gold from sea water whereby millions of ounces of gold can be extracted a day for a cost of $5 / oz. Ouch! SELL, SELL, SELL! Gold now collapses to $50 / oz over the next thirty days.

Well, big smile on your face, you have a commitment from a bet a few weeks ago from a buyer at $1050 so you now BUY One (1) June 2008 Gold on the derivative exchange at $50 with someone now willing to sell one at $50 (thinks the price is going to $5 due to the seawater extraction discovery) and you now have canceled out your commitment to deliver come June of 2009 locking in $1000 / oz on the trade. This on a contract size of 100 onces equals in cash profit $100,000 and your good faith margin deposit to make that trade was only $2000. Hmmm, Las Vegas a million times over!

If on the example above you were a big trader and had clear inside information on the exact date of the upcoming announcement per Gold extraction from the sea, and filtered in 400,000 contracts between the NY, Chicago, London, Zürich, and Hong Kong derivative gold exchanges, and also went short derivatives on all international Gold mining stocks, and International currencies backed by gold, then do the math. You are now deciding from pocket change on if to buy that small island called Hawaii or that small state called Texas.

Here is the problem folks: Our Government at the top knows "what is going to happen" in the near future. They control the reports released; interest rates assigned; if or if not a war will take place; or as a few did - if an event such as 911 will occur.

Additionally through the SEC (for stocks) and the CFTC (for commodities and currencies) government knows every position held by all players domestic and Internationally. With that knowledge and armed with the historical knowledge from decades of what price swings or information will "suck in" food to feed on (players they can strip bare of their wealth), the price swings are manipulated with extreme swings to do just that. Government bottom-line end results are in the black on their trillion dollar composite investment funds by overbearing consistency prove this to be true.

Many of these investment funds are now managed outside of the US (off-shore) with trillion dollar US Government account balances that are not even visible for ease of inspection per their trading activity..

Last year the Chinese Government cut off further US Government investments in China (US Government investment funds, especially on their derivatives market were taking over) India on the same day put restrictions on US Government investments in their derivatives market for the same reason also. The following day the US Stock Market was down 650 points. (Some thought the game was over, but it was not)

But don't worry about the US Stock market foolks,(whoops, sic: folks) US Government local and federal owns the primary corporations in the US Market by composite stock ownership. Private sector ownership is insignificant in comparison.

The Oil Companies; Pharmaceutical Companies; the War Industry Companies; the Insurance Companies; and the Banks government now owns by investment..

REALITY CHECK: When you own the cookie jar, you determine the price of the cookies, what cookies are eaten and what cookies are discarded... Do you think one of those Fortune 500 Companies are going to buck government and find themselves in the trash can the following day? Me thinks not.

Now you know why the stock, currency, and commodity markets have done what they have done over the last decade or two. You also now know the driving force (motive) behind every upper-level government policy and decision.

Keep in mind that on those down swings, Government is the #1 derivative player of no equal so they make the money on the downswings and they make the money on the the upswings. The EXCHANGES guarantee the bets, the houses clearing trades through the exchanges will collect the bets if need be, and the Government who is taking the mother-load of the profits will make sure both do what is necessary to collect on the bets if money is due.

On the bet whether you are an individual, company, or country, they will seize your property, money, or business to satisfy the bet if it results in a loss to you and a balance for payment is left outstanding to them. After all, it does influence Government's bottom line return on their investments. Want to look at the profits from just one government investment fund? Then CLICK HERE.

Two months ago CALPERS (The CA Gov Pension Fund team) announced they were expanding their derivative management team by 450 individuals. Business must be good! Follow the trail off-shore through CALPERS International since 1982 and things will get real interesting for you.

Will this 500 trillion dollar derivative bubble pop? Well, if a free and open market was in place at this time, and being that there are ten times the value in derivatives out there with most truly not backed with the real item, a collapse would occur tomorrow resulting with many of the players being cast on the street with a cup in their hand hoping to get a meal for the day. (those that did not jump off the roof to the street below that is)

But alas, being that government owns the cookie jar, what their plans are for the future, only time will tell. My guess is they will maintain their book value of investments as they continue with the conquest of everyone else's wealth. Massive moves up and down will occur in some markets though as they "milk the cow" of the international derivative market place.

US Government through the use of their investment funds as they developed have evolved themselves and this country into a landscape in reality more foreign looking than the face of the moon over what our founding fathers anticipated for us centuries ago.

Is this a bad thing? Not for the top players, they have been laughing all the way to the bank as the public is masterfully entertained, being schooled like minnows in a pond at every turn of the page. END RESULT??? They own the cookie jar now so, the object is to make a bigger cookie jar for the cooperative players in the game and to starve off all the rest into submission.

To have a NWO (New World Order) under your control, derivatives are an important step to knock-out all opposition by taking their wealth and they will come in-line for management soon enough and then be accepted into the ranks of the inside players..

Not a peep on TV per the core of this game? Well, Silence is Golden it seems.

Who wants to make a movie on the above? I do! Call me if you can make it happen! If you know someone who can make it happen, call them first. I "bet" if done well, it will be a top seller! (if we can get it aired that is) Mel, where are you now????

Truly yours,

Walter J. Burien, Jr.
P. O. Box 2112
Saint Johns, AZ 85936

Tel: 928-445-3532

Website: http://CAFR1.com

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Pension funds pay a salary and benefits at retirement. Any local government can be restructured to meet their annual budget needs "Without" taxes. TRF (Tax Retirement Funds) paying for every City, County, States annual budgetary needs! This now makes the people the true owners with government being the true service provider. Government has already shown that a TRF works by example through the management of their own combined multi-trillion dollar pension funds! CAFR1 says: Make it law and make it so!
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To automatically subscribe to CAFR1 posts, send a blank email to: NATIONAL@CAFR1.com with: subscribe in the subject line, or to unsubscribe from CAFR1 posts if subscribed, just put: unsubscribe in the subject line.

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CAFR1 NATIONAL POST - 03/09/08

VERY IMPORTANT!

Many of you may not be aware of the fact that there is a web site that archives all prior pages of every other website Copies of that website on specific dates going back years.

Gerald Klatt [CAFRMan] died on his birthday July of 2004. The current version of his site in 2008 http://CAFRMan.com has been stripped down to the bare basics. His CAFR review programs for city, county, state, school districts, pension fund CAFR surplus instruction work-sheets have been taken off, past CAFR reviews, etc. I am in the process of rescuing this work. One thing I noticed from looking at the past version of his site the month before he died mysteriously, he put up the procedure to review government retirement fund CAFRs. Did he step on a land-mine there which took him out the following month????

I strongly suggest that if you have an interest in CAFR surplus review work, then please go to http://archive.org and pull up the past versions of CAFRMan.com from 2002 - 2004 of Gerald Klatt's work, go through the archived pages and save it! When a past version of a site is pulled up, most of the links when clicked on go to the archive page of the site for that date. If at first it will not pull up, this site has massive traffic demand so try again and a specific page on the second or third try may just pull up.

** Also for all of your other needs, how many times have you gone to a website or a specific page of a site to get something that you saw there months back to find out; They took it down! Well, now you know how to find it again even if it was years ago. Archive.org contains over 85 billion web page archives.. This makes it one of the most fantastic tools out there to find what once you though was lost..but now you know it may be found!

Truly yours,

Walter J. Burien, Jr.
P. O. Box 2112
Saint Johns, AZ 85936

Tel: 928-445-3532

Website: http://CAFR1.com

The Power of Nightmares - CIA Admits Creating Al-Qaeda

2008-03-07T20:42:00.001-08:00

Windy [New World OVER.]
Thanks Vance... what a goddamned circusII
Date: Mar 7, 2008 7:47 PM

From: Flavord-dn[a] non_violent anarchist<->ॐ
Debbie Peace, Love and Harmony
Third Estate, Second Estate. No, United... States
R
Date: Mar 7, 2008 10:22 PM

http://video. google. com/videoplay?docid=-5272802791005405759
Power of Nightmares Part 1

http://polidics. com/cia/top-ranking-cia-operatives-admit-al-qaeda-is-a-complete-fabrication. html

Top Ranking CIA Operatives Admit Al-qaeda Is a Complete Fabrication

BBC’s killer documentary called “The Power of Nightmares“. Top CIA officials openly admit, Al-qaeda is a total and complete fabrication, never having existed at any time. The Bush administration needed a reason that complied with the Laws so they could go after “the bad guy of their choice” namely laws that had been set in place to protect us from mobs and “criminal organizations” such as the Mafia. They paid Jamal al Fadl, hundred’s of thousands of dollars to back the U.S. Governments story of Al-qaeda a “group” or criminal organization they could “legally” go after. This video documentary is off the hook…

FOX NEWS Interview with Tony Blair: Blair said, “Al Qaeda is not an organization. Al Qaeda is a way of working … but this has the hallmark of that approach.”

The Power of Nightmares - CIA Admits Creating Al-Qaeda

2008-03-07T20:42:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul Calls It Quits...

2008-03-06T23:09:00.001-08:00

Ron Paul hints he's quitting race
12 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul is hinting to supporters that he is ending his long-shot campaign for the presidency.

The Texas Republican congressman addressed supporters in a 7 1/2-minute video on his campaign Web site Thursday night and did not specifically say he was quitting the race.

He said that although victory in the conventional political sense is not available in the presidential race, many victories have been achieved due to the hard work and enthusiasm of his supporters.

He said that he hoped that one day he and his supporters could look back and say his campaign was a significant first step that signaled a change in direction for the country.

Paul said their job now was to plan for the next phase of their effort.

Aftermath - Population Zero - The Day After We're All Gone

2008-03-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

Paulina ? Ron Paul REVOLUTION

National Geographic Channel
Sunday March 9, 2008
8 pm eastern

AFTERMATH - POPULATION ZERO

www.ngcaftermath.com

What Happens when 6.6
Billion People Disappear ???

How would the Earth react
if people suddenly disappeared?
The long-term effects are explored here.

Aftermath: Cities Crumble

Aftermath: Life After People: Day 1 to Day 7

March 3, 2008

Imagine if the human race vanished from existence. What would happen to all we left behind? What would happen to our pets? What would happen to homes that we left standing? What about our electric and nuclear plants - would they keep churning out energy?

Many questions, and few definite answers, but scientists are beginning to explain and explore what would happen if the human race suddenly did not exist. Below are just a number of effects that the earth would experience in the first week of non-human existence.

Without electric fencing to keep them in place, some zoo animals begin to escape their cages. The streets are becoming overrun with animals that are unaccustomed to their new surroundings.

In the United States alone, over 245 million pets (including 88 million cats and 75 million dogs) aren't being fed. These hungry animals are now either foraging in their homes or trying to break out to find other sources of food. Millions of cockroaches will die during the first winter without indoor heating to keep them warm. Squirrels, skunks, and other animals find new dens in newly vacant human homes.

Without people to maintain the system, power grids fail as rolling blackout spread across the United States. Coal-burning power plants go offline as coal deliveries cease. In hydro-electric plants, turbines flood without humans to maintain water levels. Highly automated nuclear power plants detect power-grid failures and automatically shut down their reactors.

The chlorine that oil refineries use to create gasoline is no longer being kept cold. Pressure release valves begin to discharge chlorine, endangering any animals that keep their noses close to the ground. Liquefied natural gas from natural gas depots also starts to escape through vents. What isn't burned by flares will ignite large explosions causing many chemical plants catch fire.

The bright lights from cities had interfered with birds' natural navigational instincts. With the electricity off, these birds fly safely over urban areas.

Aftermath: Life After People: Day 10 to 1 Year

March 4, 2008

Drastic changes to the environment. Animals running wild. Meltdowns and explosions all over the world. This is what life will be like on earth from day ten to one year after humans vanish from existence. Below are some of the changes that could effect earth between day 10 and the first year without the human race.

Cattle Can't Survive - Dairy cows need to be milked every day or their udders will get infected. Without humans to take care of them, many have died.

Nuclear Meltdown - Super-heated steam pours out of nuclear power plants as spent nuclear fuel boils the water in cooling tanks. Buildings buckle under the intense heat. As radioactive fallout spreads, nearby forests are decimated. Pine trees turn red as chlorophyll is damaged.

Radioactive Aftermath - Large animals are fleeing areas where plants have died from radiation. Smaller animals aren't as fortunate. They live on the forest floor where leaves and dirt are coated with radioactive material. Within the next ten years half the rodents and insects in the tainted areas will die. Large forests have become eerily quiet.

Radioactive Recovery - Trees within five miles of the nuclear power plant meltdowns can't regenerate. Further away, rainstorms are washing the radioactive particles into the ground.

Weather Changes - Much of the radiation has fallen out of the skies. Without humans, cities are quiet. The weather is changing, too. With less dust in the air, less rain falls in cities. The cleaner air increases visibility, in some cities from 20 to 100 miles.

Unconventional Clashes - Packs of wild dogs have reached the countryside in search of food. Without easy prey, they're willing to attack just about anything, including escaped elephants.

World Without Polluters - Without cars pumping seven billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, greenhouse pollution begins to abate. New plants and leaves draw carbon from the air, helping to remove human pollution.

- - -

The underground bases are for who again? Without people the elite could start over with a small group of slaves - er ... workers to rebuild.

Vegan and Vegetarian Joke Pictures (Humor)

2008-03-05T07:36:00.000-08:00

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No Strain, No Gain - EU Fines Heirloom Seed Company for Selling "Endangered Strains"

2008-03-05T06:12:00.001-08:00

SchNEWS looks at how corporations and governments are limiting and controlling the varieties of crops grown…

Last week, in France, the independent seed-saving and selling Association Kokopelli were fined €35,000 after being taken to court by corporate seed merchant Baumaux. Their crime was selling traditional and rare seed varieties which weren’t on the official EU-approved list – and, therefore, illegal to sell – thus giving them an ‘unfair trading advantage’. As the European Commission met this week to prepare new legislation for seed control, due in 2009, which will further restrict the geographic movement and range of crop varieties, this ruling will set a dangerous precedent.

Kokopelli, the non-profit French group set up in 1999 to safeguard endangered seed strains, may be driven out of existence by the fine. Their focus is biodiversity, food security, and the development of sustainable organic agriculture and seed networks in the ‘global south’. They have created one of the largest independent collections in Europe – with over 2500 sorts of vegetable, flower and cereals. Other non-government seedbanks are held by large agro-industrial companies like Limagrain, Syngenta and Pioneer – and guess what their main interest is money rather than starving subsistence farmers.

You may think that in an era of mass extinction it would be a no-brainer that we need to protect biodiversity and the heritage of the crop varieties which have been build up over centuries… but no. Since the 1970s, laws in the UK and Europe mean that to sell seeds, the strain needs to be registered – and everything else becomes ‘outlaw’ seeds, illegal to sell. In the UK it costs £300 per year to maintain the registration and £2000 to register a ‘new’ one – which all disadvantages smaller organisations.

Garden Organic in the UK run a Heritage Seed Library (www.organicgardening.org.uk/hsl), and they get around the law by not selling ‘outlaw’ seeds, but getting individual gardeners to become ‘seed guardians’ who pass around seeds for free to other members of the Library. Unlike other seedbanks, seeds are not kept in cold storage, but are living species which are continually grown and allowed to adapt to new environmental factors.

Another law-busting approach is seed swaps – which in recent years have sprouted up and down the country. People freely share seeds for another year’s growing – a co-operative way of maintaining genetic diversity. Most are around February - see www.seedysunday.org for the remaining events this year.

DIGGING THE DIRT

There’s so many types of potato – why not just use the best ones and forget the rest? Seed varieties which have been developed over the centuries have adapted to environments, and the genepool has to survive unforeseen factors such as pests and diseases – or climate change. The Irish potato famine was caused by an over-reliance on blight afflicted spuds, or, to take another example, a variety of cauliflower grown in Cornwall was abandoned in the 1940s for a French cauli which gave a higher yield, but turned out to be vulnerable to fungal ringspot – but the old ringspot-resistant Cornish type is now extinct.

Limiting the varieties means limiting the genetic base – presumably to leave GM technology in the clear as the only option.

While mass extinctions are taking place in natural ecosystems, the same has taken place in domesticated seeds. Today there are only half a dozen apple types grown in the UK, down from 2,000 a century ago. Over 90% of crop types listed in the US have been lost in 80 years, and China now grows fifty types of rice, down from 8,000 just twenty years ago. The whole human population is supported by just 30 main crop varieties – a recipe for disaster.

LIFE INC.

Originally laws regarding seeds were brought in during the 1920s – mostly to regulate quality and make sure they did what they said on the tin, and not disease ridden, full of stray weed seed or stones. At the time these laws were a good thing but guess what! It’s all been twisted around and now companies use these and subsequent laws to get control of the market. By cutting out the independent networks of farmers, gardeners, and independent seed-sellers - on a worldwide scale - ten companies now control two-thirds of seed distribution. And which companies are we talking about? It’s yer bio-tech giants like Monsanto and Syngenta. Unsurprisingly governments around the world are building up the legal framework to support these firms.

When you register a seed type, potentially anyone growing it is liable to pay you royalties – making ‘intellectual property’ out of plants which have evolved over thousands of years. These companies take an interest in the myriad of varieties with a view to splicing genetic traits into other types, and take out patents on the genetic content. Monsanto have a European patent on a type of wheat which is derived from a traditional Indian one, the sort used to make chapatis.

These same companies are narrowing the market down to the few mono-culture crops they are flogging, reducing diversity. Once farmers limit theirs to these few types – often hybrids which produce defective seeds – they are forced to return to ‘the man’ to buy next year’s seed rather than being able to save and use last year’s. This is the next thing down from the prospect of ‘terminator’ seeds – genetically modified to be sterile, and deliberately unable to supply future yields (See SchNEWS 557).

The farmers were in a far stronger position with their traditional varieties which were open-pollinated, carrying a wider genepool, and better able to adapt to new conditions and diseases.

SEWING WILD OATS

Seeds – and ultimately the control over production of food - becomes another front in which communities and individual farmers across the world have to fight against the forces of neoliberalism and corporatisation.

Via Campesino – the international peasants movement – held a gathering last weekend in Austria, bringing together small farmers from sixteen countries on ‘food and power’. They are increasing networking and solidarity amongst farmers across the world both to protect biodiversity and increase the sharing of crop choices and farming techniques. And it’s not just the corporations and large-scale agro-industry they are up against – due to climate change they are being forced to adapt quickly to new environmental factors and more than ever need to pool knowledge and resources.

For more see www.viacampesina.org

JUDGEMENT DAY

But don’t fret – whatever catastrophe, armageddon or ecocide befalls us, measures are at hand to make sure that if we survive a nuclear winter or total desertification, we’ll be able to recreate a bucolic paradise: This Tuesday (26th), Norway opened the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic circle. The vault is over 500 feet inside a mountain, and 130 metres above sea-level – in case the polar ice caps melt. Seeds are stored at below -20 degrees in moisture free packs and it is claimed that many will last a hundred years – longer for some cereals. Maybe after all the cyborg mutant terminator seeds have all long since sprouted legs and run off into the sunset, the traditional common-or-garden varieties will be the ones saying, “I’ll be back”.

* See www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
* For more about Kokopelli see www.kokopelli-seeds.com

http://rinf.com/alt-news/business-news/no-strain-no-gain/2591/

Wikileaks Due Back in Court after Illicit Swiss Bank Creates "Streisand Effect" over Internet Censorship (Redux)

2008-02-28T09:58:00.002-08:00

Subscribe to my blog - www.TruthBlog.org

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Wikileaks-Shutdown.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

February 27, 2008
Wikileaks Case Due Back in Court

SAN FRANCISCO -- An effort at damage control has snowballed into a public relations disaster for a Swiss bank seeking to crack down on a renegade Web site for posting classified information about some of its wealthy clients.

Documents from Bank Julius Baer containing information about several bank clients, including San Diego venture capitalist Jonathan Lampitt, were posted last month on Wikileaks.org. The site purports to discourage unethical behavior by corporations and governments by putting leaked documents online.

The Web site claimed the documents showed tax evasion and money laundering schemes at the bank's Cayman Islands branch. Lampitt's lawyer says his client was interviewed and cleared of any wrongdoing by the FBI in 2005 after a former Bank Julius Baer employee allegedly circulated the same documents that appeared on Wikileaks.

The lawyer, Jim Ellis, said he initially received a call from a bank executive alerting him to the Wikileaks posting and saying the leak was the work of the same disgruntled former employee. Ellis was assured the bank would do everything possible to remove the sensitive documents.

In federal court in San Francisco, the bank asked a judge to take down the site. Much to the outrage of free speech advocates and others, the judge did.

But instead of the information disappearing, it rocketed through cyberspace, landing on other Web sites and Wikileaks' own ''mirror'' sites outside the U.S. The digerati call the online phenomenon of a censorship attempt backfiring into more unwanted publicity the ''Streisand effect.''

Techdirt Inc. chief executive Mike Masnick coined the term on his popular technology blog after the actress Barbra Streisand's 2003 lawsuit seeking to remove satellite photos of her Malibu house. Those photos are now easily accessible, just like the bank documents.

Masnick said the bank's lawsuit demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such legal actions in the Internet age, when anyone with a computer and online connection can thumb his nose at a judge's ruling and resurrect the ''banned'' information elsewhere.

''It's a perfect example of the Streisand effect,'' Masnick said. ''This was a really small thing that no one heard about and now it's everywhere and everyone's talking about it.''

The case has also become the latest anti-censorship cause celebre, drawing legal filings from the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several media organizations, including The Associated Press. Those arguments will be heard Friday when the bank presses on with its efforts to have Wikileaks permanently barred from posting the documents.

The legendary Swiss bank has a lot at stake. It has catered to the world's super wealthy for more than 100 years with guarantees of discretion and privacy that are the bedrocks of the Swiss banking system.

''It's a good bank,'' said Ellis, who said Lampitt has nothing to hide and abides by all the country's tax laws. ''But we'll see. My client may get tired of this.''

The bank says its lawsuit against Wikileaks and the San Mateo-based company Dynadot that sold the site its U.S. domain name has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with protecting the privacy of bank customers.

''This action has been brought solely to prevent the unlawful dissemination of stolen bank records and personal account information of its customers,'' the bank's lawyers argued in court papers filed Wednesday. ''Many of those documents have also been altered and forged.''

The bank chastised the ACLU, press organizations and the other groups who have come to Wikileaks' defense this week.

''Quite obviously there will be harm from the widespread dissemination of private and confidential banking information, including account numbers, personal identification numbers, account transactions and history, and account balances,'' the bank stated. ''Wikileaks has laid bare a road map for the unsavory to engage in identity theft and electronic theft of account balances.''

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who made the ruling taking down Wikileaks.org, has drawn widespread criticism for ordering the disabling of the entire site rather than issuing a narrowly tailored order to remove the bank's documents.

''Blocking access to the entire site in response to a few documents posted there completely disregards the public's right to know,'' said Ann Brick, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The lawsuit and the judge's order also thrust the obscure Web site into prominence. The site claims to have been launched by Chinese dissidents and other activists who encourage the posting of leaked documents that show unethical behavior of governments and corporations. It says it has posted 1.2 million documents, including a 2003 operation manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Wikileaks has so far not shown up in court nor has it responded to court orders for legal filings stating its position. Organization representatives have not responded to e-mail inquiries into whether they or their lawyer plan to show up for the court hearing Friday.

''If they defy the court and refuse to participate, Wikileaks will have crossed a very serious line,'' said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C. ''They are basically functioning as an anarchist entity, not a protest group.''

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Swiss Banks Wins Injunction against Whistleblower Site

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

Swiss bank Julius Baer has obtained an injunction in a Californian court against a whistleblowers website that published details of its financial activities in the Cayman Islands.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Wikileaks aims to offer a platform for whistleblowers to expose malpractice by governments and firms across the globe in the name of transparency and freedom of speech. The site claims to contain 1.2 million documents, including confidential briefing notes on Northern Rock and the UK's identity card plans.

The site has previously published confidential documents relating to the US army's rules for engagement in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, the Chinese government and Thailand's military junta. Users can post documents anonymously on the site, which looks like Wikipedia.

Intermediary firm

In order to deal with Chinese censorship, Wikileaks has many backup sites such as wikileaks.be (Belgium) and wikileaks.de (Germany) which remain active. The injunction, therefore, focused on the use of the domain address instead.

Unable to lawfully attack the site's servers based in several countries, the order was served on the intermediary firm through which Wikileaks purchased the 'Wikileaks.org' name, California registrar Dynadot.

District court judge Jeffery White ordered Dynadot on 15 February to use its access to the internet website name registration system to delete the records for 'Wikileaks.org' and to replace the site's content with a blank page. The court's total of six orders also prevented anyone aware of the injunction from linking to the site's content.

"Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court," the judge ruled.

The firm was told to hand over all administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account plus the IP addresses of anyone who had accessed the site's admin system.

Wikileaks said it never expected to be using the alternative servers to deal with censorship attacks from the United States.

Suspicious transactions

The Cayman Islands are located between Cuba and Honduras. In July 2000, the US Department of the Treasure Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said that there were "serious deficiencies in the counter-money laundering systems of the Cayman Islands".

"Cayman Islands law makes it impossible for the supervisory and regulatory authority to obtain information held by financial institutions regarding their client's identity," according to the Network.

It warned that failure of financial institutions in the Cayman Islands to report suspicious transactions was not subject to penalty and that these deficiencies, among others, had caused the Cayman Islands to be identified by the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (The 'FATF') as non-cooperative in the fight against money laundering.

As of 2006 the US State Department listed the Cayman Islands in its money laundering "Countries of Primary Concern".

Wikileaks said the order was written by Julius Baer's lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or its solicitors.

Polygraph test

The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.

The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former vice president of its Cayman Island's offshoring operation, Rudolf Elmer.

Initial research easily turned up that 2002/03 some sensitive documents had slipped out of the Swiss banks office in the Cayman Islands, apparently reaching US tax investigation units.

They were eventually sent to the Swiss financial magazine CASH, which reported on the disclosure, but possibly due to an injunction or Swiss banking law, not the details.

When the leak of trust structures was discovered in 2003, Bank Julius Baer initiated legal investigations on the Caymans, involving the search of the home of each employee and when not gaining any insights from that, undertaking a lie detector test on the employees.

It still remained unclear where the data went. The group of people having legitimate access to these documents was small.

Sick leave

Elmer, who was BJB Caymans deputy head and chief operating officer at that point in time also fulfilled the position of Hurricane Officer, whose duties included keeping backups.

Elmer, facing a spinal surgery coming up in a few days time, was on sick leave and had some trouble scheduling the test. He thus became a suspect.

He complained to the American Polygraph Association (APA), the institution his interrogator works for, the Cayman Prime Minister and other entities about the conduct of the test.

Normally sick people would not be interviewed, but the APA's Ethics Commission, stated in a letter that the ethical rules for polygraphing do not apply to the Cayman Islands, and that, as the test had not been fully carried out, most of the APA rules would not apply anyway.

He was informed there were no regulations on the Caymans for polygraph tests as in the United States. After the test Bank Julius Baer laid off Elmer as an employee and the family decided to move back to Switzerland.

Permanent observation

Bank Julius Baer, not being able to substantially prove anything, but still investigating into him, allegedly hired different private investigators to track him.

According to Elmer's assertions, he was threatened not to go to the police verbally by officials of the bank, most of them composing the boards of directors and similar entities within the various distributed BJB companies and holdings.

According to Elmer's December 2007 court documents, he was subject to more or less permanent observation, as was his family.

His then 6-year old daughter was followed on her way to school, while his wife and daughter claim to have been engaged in a chase on a Swiss autobahn by the private detectives, which police confirmed to have intercepted.

Elmer said that cars driving in the dead-end street he lived in at night annoyed his neighbours and put further pressure on him.

He also was offered CHF 500,000 by the bank, according to his statement, in an effort to buy his silence. He turned down the offer and asked the bank to be charged with bribery, but was told the police found no law against bribing private persons.

Legal denial notice

Bank Julius Baer also started claims against Elmer in Switzerland. These could not be followed by prosecution as BJB refused to give out information on its activity on the Cayman Islands that would provide a basis for investigation and Elmer's defence.

Elmer wrote a letter to the newly appointed CEO of Bank Julius Baer in Switzerland, Johannes de Gier, in which he explained his position.

He hinted that he was in possession – lawfully - of information on the bank's Cayman Islands operations, to make sure nothing would happen to him or his family.

Wikileaks said the document was submitted in a bundle with the legal denial notice issued by the prosecutor in Zurich after Elmer launched claims against the bank.

The prosecutor's office of Zurich-Sihl ruled that stalking can not be substance of a criminal prosecution in Switzerland, a land where no free person is restricted to move the same way as another in public space.

Acknowledging the car pursuit, the prosecutor only mentioned they were able to verify that a private investigator agency had been engaged by BJB, but did not comment any further on this incident at all.

The prosecutor's office stated that while there could be moral claims towards someone ordering such an observation, the actions did not break criminal law.

Regarding the bribery claims that Elmer had made towards the bank, the prosecutor further ruled that bribery was not applicable to a private person but only to a state entity.

The prosecutor said he did not understand Elmer's motivation for these claims, stating the whistleblower should be happy about the money and the bank dropping its complaint.

Banking transparency

Wikileaks said the prosecutor's verdict posed important questions on how much Switzerland would be able to harmonise with the EU on the issue of banking transparency in order to stop illegal money flows.

Following the subsequent Californian injunction obtained by Bank Julius Baer, Wikileaks vowed to continue publishing details of alleged money laundering by banks though its alternative sites and servers.

It has the help of six pro-bono attorney's in San Francisco but claims it was given only hours notice by email prior to the hearing.

Wikileaks pre-litigation California council Julie Turner attended the start of hearing in a personal capacity but said she was then asked to leave the court room.

Elmer to this day claims he has not leaked any documentation related to Bank Julius Baer in order to harm anyone, only set up insurance for his and his family's personal safety.

Wikileaks said, "Whether this assertion was true, technically true or untrue, or whether Elmer had been driven a bit batty by the pressure should not distract from the actions of Bank Julius Baer in its attempts to silence its former high-level employee or the role it plays in supporting ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding and money laundering."

As of Friday 15 February those going to Wikileaks.org have been shown "Server not found" messages.

Also appears as: http://dofonline.co.uk/governance/swiss-bank-obtains-injunction-against-whistleblower-site5352.html

swiss bank shits down whistleblower website over secret accounts

2008-02-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

Swiss bank Julius Baer has obtained an injunction in a Californian court against a whistleblowers website that published details of its financial activities in the Cayman Islands.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Wikileaks aims to offer a platform for whistleblowers to expose malpractice by governments and firms across the globe in the name of transparency and freedom of speech. The site claims to contain 1.2 million documents, including confidential briefing notes on Northern Rock and the UK's identity card plans.

The site has previously published confidential documents relating to the US army’s rules for engagement in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, the Chinese government and Thailand’s military junta. Users can post documents anonymously on the site, which looks like Wikipedia.

Intermediary firm

In order to deal with Chinese censorship, Wikileaks has many backup sites such as wikileaks.be (Belgium) and wikileaks.de (Germany) which remain active. The injunction, therefore, focused on the use of the domain address instead.

Unable to lawfully attack the site’s servers based in several countries, the order was served on the intermediary firm through which Wikileaks purchased the 'Wikileaks.org' name, California registrar Dynadot.

District court judge Jeffery White ordered Dynadot on 15 February to use its access to the internet website name registration system to delete the records for 'Wikileaks.org' and to replace the site’s content with a blank page. The court's total of six orders also prevented anyone aware of the injunction from linking to the site’s content.

“Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court,” the judge ruled.

The firm was told to hand over all administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account plus the IP addresses of anyone who had accessed the site's admin system.

Wikileaks said it never expected to be using the alternative servers to deal with censorship attacks from the United States.

Suspicious transactions

The Cayman Islands are located between Cuba and Honduras. In July 2000, the US Department of the Treasure Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said that there were "serious deficiencies in the counter-money laundering systems of the Cayman Islands".

"Cayman Islands law makes it impossible for the supervisory and regulatory authority to obtain information held by financial institutions regarding their client's identity,” according to the Network.

It warned that failure of financial institutions in the Cayman Islands to report suspicious transactions was not subject to penalty and that these deficiencies, among others, had caused the Cayman Islands to be identified by the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (The 'FATF') as non-cooperative in the fight against money laundering.

As of 2006 the US State Department listed the Cayman Islands in its money laundering "Countries of Primary Concern".

Wikileaks said the order was written by Julius Baer’s lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or its solicitors.

Polygraph test

The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.

The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former vice president of its Cayman Island's offshoring operation, Rudolf Elmer.

Initial research easily turned up that 2002/03 some sensitive documents had slipped out of the Swiss banks office in the Cayman Islands, apparently reaching US tax investigation units.

They were eventually sent to the Swiss financial magazine CASH, which reported on the disclosure, but possibly due to an injunction or Swiss banking law, not the details.

When the leak of trust structures was discovered in 2003, Bank Julius Baer initiated legal investigations on the Caymans, involving the search of the home of each employee and when not gaining any insights from that, undertaking a lie detector test on the employees.

It still remained unclear where the data went. The group of people having legitimate access to these documents was small.

Sick leave

Elmer, who was BJB Caymans deputy head and chief operating officer at that point in time also fulfilled the position of Hurricane Officer, whose duties included keeping backups.

Elmer, facing a spinal surgery coming up in a few days time, was on sick leave and had some trouble scheduling the test. He thus became a suspect.

He complained to the American Polygraph Association (APA), the institution his interrogator works for, the Cayman Prime Minister and other entities about the conduct of the test.

Normally sick people would not be interviewed, but the APA's Ethics Commission, stated in a letter that the ethical rules for polygraphing do not apply to the Cayman Islands, and that, as the test had not been fully carried out, most of the APA rules would not apply anyway.

He was informed there were no regulations on the Caymans for polygraph tests as in the United States. After the test Bank Julius Baer laid off Elmer as an employee and the family decided to move back to Switzerland.

Permanent observation

Bank Julius Baer, not being able to substantially prove anything, but still investigating into him, allegedly hired different private investigators to track him.

According to Elmer's assertions, he was threatened not to go to the police verbally by officials of the bank, most of them composing the boards of directors and similar entities within the various distributed BJB companies and holdings.

According to Elmer’s December 2007 court documents, he was subject to more or less permanent observation, as was his family.

His then 6-year old daughter was followed on her way to school, while his wife and daughter claim to have been engaged in a chase on a Swiss autobahn by the private detectives, which police confirmed to have intercepted.

Elmer said that cars driving in the dead-end street he lived in at night annoyed his neighbours and put further pressure on him.

He also was offered CHF 500,000 by the bank, according to his statement, in an effort to buy his silence. He turned down the offer and asked the bank to be charged with bribery, but was told the police found no law against bribing private persons.

Legal denial notice

Bank Julius Baer also started claims against Elmer in Switzerland. These could not be followed by prosecution as BJB refused to give out information on its activity on the Cayman Islands that would provide a basis for investigation and Elmer's defence.

Elmer wrote a letter to the newly appointed CEO of Bank Julius Baer in Switzerland, Johannes de Gier, in which he explained his position.

He hinted that he was in possession – lawfully - of information on the bank’s Cayman Islands operations, to make sure nothing would happen to him or his family.

Wikileaks said the document was submitted in a bundle with the legal denial notice issued by the prosecutor in Zurich after Elmer launched claims against the bank.

The prosecutor's office of Zurich-Sihl ruled that stalking can not be substance of a criminal prosecution in Switzerland, a land where no free person is restricted to move the same way as another in public space.

Acknowledging the car pursuit, the prosecutor only mentioned they were able to verify that a private investigator agency had been engaged by BJB, but did not comment any further on this incident at all.

The prosecutor's office stated that while there could be moral claims towards someone ordering such an observation, the actions did not break criminal law.

Regarding the bribery claims that Elmer had made towards the bank, the prosecutor further ruled that bribery was not applicable to a private person but only to a state entity.

The prosecutor said he did not understand Elmer's motivation for these claims, stating the whistleblower should be happy about the money and the bank dropping its complaint.

Banking transparency

Wikileaks said the prosecutor’s verdict posed important questions on how much Switzerland would be able to harmonise with the EU on the issue of banking transparency in order to stop illegal money flows.

Following the subsequent Californian injunction obtained by Bank Julius Baer, Wikileaks vowed to continue publishing details of alleged money laundering by banks though its alternative sites and servers.

It has the help of six pro-bono attorney's in San Francisco but claims it was given only hours notice by email prior to the hearing.

Wikileaks pre-litigation California council Julie Turner attended the start of hearing in a personal capacity but said she was then asked to leave the court room.

Elmer to this day claims he has not leaked any documentation related to Bank Julius Baer in order to harm anyone, only set up insurance for his and his family's personal safety.

Wikileaks said, “Whether this assertion was true, technically true or untrue, or whether Elmer had been driven a bit batty by the pressure should not distract from the actions of Bank Julius Baer in its attempts to silence its former high-level employee or the role it plays in supporting ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding and money laundering.”

As of Friday 15 February those going to Wikileaks.org have been shown “Server not found” messages.

Also appears as: http://dofonline.co.uk/governance/swiss-bank-obtains-injunction-against-whistleblower-site5352.html

Vegan pics

2008-02-24T18:32:00.001-08:00

Happy Leap Year!!!

Warning to Parents - Shampoos, Lotions, Powders May be Toxic

2008-02-04T14:50:00.001-08:00

http://news.aol.com/health/story/_a/baby-products-linked-to-chemical-risk/20080204063309990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

CHICAGO (Feb. 4) - Baby shampoos, lotions and powders may expose infants to chemicals that have been linked with possible reproductive problems, a small study suggests.

The chemicals, called phthalates, are found in many ordinary products including cosmetics, toys, vinyl flooring and medical supplies. They are used to stabilize fragrances and make plastics flexible.

In the study, they were found in elevated levels in the urine of babies who'd been recently shampooed, powdered or lotioned with baby products.

Phthalates (pronounced thowl-ates) are under attack by some environmental advocacy groups, but experts are uncertain what dangers, if any, they might pose. The federal government doesn't limit their use, although California and some countries have restricted their use.

Animal studies have suggested that phthalates can cause reproductive birth defects and some activists believe they may cause reproductive problems in boys and early puberty in girls.

Rigorous scientific evidence in human studies is lacking. The current study offers no direct evidence that products the infants used contained phthalates, and no evidence that the chemicals in the babies' urine caused any harm. Still, the results worried environmental groups that support restrictions on these chemicals.

"There is an obvious need for laws that force the beauty industry to clean up its act," said Stacy Malkan of Health Care Without Harm.

The study's lead author, Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, a University of Washington pediatrician, said, "The bottom line is that these chemicals likely do exist in products that we're commonly using on our children and they potentially could cause health effects."

Babies don't usually need special lotions and powders, and water alone or shampoo in very small amounts is generally enough to clean infant hair, Sathyanarayana said.

Concerned parents can seek products labeled "phthalate-free," or check labels for common phthalates, including DEP and DEHP.

But the chemicals often don't appear on product labels. That's because retail products aren't required to list individual ingredients of fragrances, which are a common phthalate source.

The Food and Drug Administration "has no compelling evidence that phthalates pose a safety risk when used in cosmetics," spokeswoman Stephanie Kwisnek said. "Should new data emerge, we will inform the public as well as the industry."

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the health effects in humans are uncertain.

"Although several studies in people have explored possible associations with developmental and reproductive outcomes (semen quality, genital development in boys, shortened pregnancy, and premature breast development in young girls), more research is needed," a 2005 CDC report said.

The new study, which appears in February's issue of the journal Pediatrics, involved 163 babies. Most were white, ages 2 to 28 months and living in California, Minnesota and Missouri.

The researchers measured levels of several phthalates in urine from diapers. They also asked the mothers about use in the previous 24 hours of baby products including lotions, powders, diaper creams and baby wipes.

All urine samples had detectable levels of at least one phthalate, and most had levels of several more. The highest levels were linked with shampoos, lotions and powders, and were most prevalent in babies younger than 8 months.

John Bailey, chief scientist at the Personal Care Products Council, questioned the methods and said the phthalates could have come from diapers, lab materials or other sources.

"Unfortunately, the researchers of this study did not test baby care products for the presence of phthalates or control for other possible routes of exposure," Bailey said.

New Space Port Blasts Iran into Space Race - Satellite Launch Planned for May

2008-02-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

Iran opens first space centre, launches rocket
by Aresu Eqbali

TEHRAN - Iran on Monday fired a rocket into space to mark the opening of its first space centre, hailing the base's inauguration as a step forward in its battle against Western dominance.

The space centre, located in the remote desert of northern Iran, will be used to launch Iran's first home-produced satellite "Omid" (Hope) in May or June this year, officials said.

"We witness today that Iran has taken its first step in space very firmly, precisely and with awareness," declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he gave the order for the rocket's launch.

"The evil and dominant system's most important instrument is humiliating people and nations by making them think that they are incapable," he said in a reference to the West.

The rocket launch is believed to be the second time Iran has attempted to put an object into space after it claimed the successful firing of a missile above the atmosphere in February 2007.

The new space centre includes an underground control station and launchpad which will be used to fire Omid into space, followed by other planned satellites in the future, state media said.

"Building and firing a satellite is a major and valuable achievement," said Ahmadinejad, who gave the order from the headquarters of Iran's space organisation in Tehran.

The opening of the space centre comes as Iran has been trumpeting its progress in its nuclear programme, which the West fears could be used to make atomic weapons.

The emphasis on Iran's development of its own domestic space technology is highly reminiscent of its insistence on developing its nuclear capabilities, which has led it into a four-year standoff with the West.

Ahmadinejad has made Iran's scientific development one of the main themes of his presidency, asserting the country has reached a peak of progress and no longer needs to depend on foreign states for help.

"No power can overcome the Iranian nation's will," said Ahmadinejad.

"The world must know that the Iranian nation will preserve the principles and ideals of the Imam (revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini) until the end."

State television made great play of the opening of the space centre, which came just days after the annual holiday marking the Islamic revolution, repeatedly showing pictures of the launch and playing patriotic music.

Iran has been pursuing a space programme for the past few years and in October 2005 a Russian-made Iranian satellite was put into orbit by a Russian rocket.

But Omid would be Iran's first domestically manufactured probe and the first to be launched in Iran.

State television broadcast pictures of the launch of the rocket, which resembled Iran's longer-range missile Shahab-3, which has a range of 1,300 to 1,600 kilometres (800 to 1,000 miles).

The rocket blasted off after a countdown to cries of "Allahu Akbar!" (God is Greatest), from the space centre in a desert region in the northern Semnan province.

The pictures showed the rocket heading out towards space but no information was given on what height it reached. A small probe was seen falling back to earth on a parachute but it was not clear what it contained.

State media said the rocket was a sounding probe sent to conduct experiments to pave the way for the launch of the Omid satellite.

Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency that the satellite would be launched in the Iranian month of Khordad, which begins on May 21.

The Russian-launched satellite Sina-1 was Iran's first -- and so far only -- probe to be launched into space, and was described by the Iranian press at the time as being for research and telecommunications.

Iran has said it plans to construct and launch several more satellites over the next three years.

The Master of Disaster - Prescott Bush (Historic Video 20:00)

2008-02-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

From Skull and Bones and stealing Geronimo's bones to selling tires, marrying well, financing Hitler, fathering Satan and buying two presidencies with money from the Holocaust, I give you the Master of Disaster, Prescott Bush. From: Greyson®
Date: Feb 4, 2008 4:09 AM

Hear a traitor speak! 1of2

Hear a traitor speak! 1of2
Uploaded by 911Revolution

Hear a traitor speak! 2of2

Hear a traitor speak! 2of2<

The Fkn News Reposts - www.FknNews.com for Archives

2008-02-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

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2/1/8

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9/10/07

Mississippi Legislation would Ban Restaurants Serving the Obese

2008-02-04T07:08:00.000-08:00

Jerry {Inciting Dissent}
..Flo4RonPaul
Date: Feb 3, 2008 10:24 PM

RE: Bill that Would Ban Restaurants from Serving the Obese
Republican Liberty Caucus Of Texas
Date: Feb 3, 2008 8:11 PM

Mississippi Legislature Introduces Bill that Would Ban Restaurants from Serving the Obese

With nearly one-third of the population of Mississippi now classified as "obese", the state is understandably concerned about encouraging its residents to start shedding some pounds. A group of legislators in Mississippi have introduced a new bill that takes aim at solving this issue - HB 282, which would make it illegal for restaurants to serve fat people.

According to HB 282, the health department could revoke the health dept. license of any restaurant, fast-food or otherwise, if it is caught serving food to anyone who meets the department's criteria of being "obese."

The specifically states:

"Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the State Department of Health after consultation with the Mississippi Council on Obesity Prevention and Management established under Section 41-101-1 or its successor."

The bill would also require the State Department of Health to distribute materials to dining establishments that would define what an obese person is. The US Government defines an obese person as someone with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above, although it is not yet clear whether Mississippi would use that as their template for what defines "obese".

http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/4524

Architects of Deception - Secret History of Freemasonry (Video, 54:00)

2008-02-04T07:02:00.000-08:00

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=7652891847477492406

Societe Generale, and 138 People, to be Indicted for Money Laundering Scam

2008-02-03T20:16:00.000-08:00

SocGen, Israel in money laundering scam

Mon, 04 Feb 2008

Societe Generale is facing more trouble as a trial begins in Paris over a huge money laundering scam between France and Israel.

Four banks, including Societe Generale, and 138 people, including the bank's chairman Daniel Bouton, will go on trial on Monday over the multi-billion dollar scam that allegedly began in the late 1990s, according to TODAY.online.

The other banks include Societe Marseillaise de Credit, Barclays France and the National Bank of Pakistan.

This is while Societe Generale had just revealed late last month, that it had lost an amazing $7.1 billion in the biggest rogue trading scandal in history and is currently facing a takeover bid.

Claims of a money laundering network stretching between France and Israel first surfaced during an investigation into a separate fraud involving companies in the Sentier garment-making district of Paris.

Checks trafficked from France were allegedly cleared in money exchange offices or banks in Israel, where a third party can clear a check by paying a cash sum, therefore making it difficult to trace the origin of the funds. The sums were then sent back to French banks.

Among those charged in the France-Israel scam include six rabbis, a former French prosecutor and 57-year-old Bouton, along with other banking managers.

All four banks are charged with contributing to money laundering and profiting from the deals. All deny the charges.

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=41606§i..351020603

Real Estate Prices May Fall Another 25% - Experts Claim

2008-02-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

Home Prices May Drop Another 25%

Excerpts below from an article in Business Week, makes the case for at least a 25% drop in the price of homes over the next few years. The article gives a similar but different look at the housing market then one commonly sees in the financial press. Allow me to go one step further and state that at the end of the current housing crisis, assuming no free money give away by Uncle Sam, the housing market that we have known since the end of WWII will have fundamentally changed. Houses will be judged on a cost basis compared to rent and will no longer be viewed as a wealth builder or an investment vehicle. Text in bold is my emphasis. By the way, the original article has an excellent slide show, so I encourage you to visit the Business Week article.

As Washington policymakers struggle to keep the U.S. out of recession, the swirling confusion over the housing market is making their job a lot tougher. Will American consumers keep shopping or be forced to pull back? Will banks lend freely or be hamstrung by mortgage defaults? What are the best policy options right now? Those and other important questions simply can't be answered without a good idea of whether home prices will rise, flatten out, or keep dropping.

Some experts have begun to suggest that a bottom is in sight. Pali Research analyst Stephen East wrote in a research note to his firm's clients on Jan. 25 that "the sun is not shining very brightly, but at least the worst of the storm has likely passed." With optimism budding, Standard & Poor's beaten-down index of homebuilder stocks soared 49% from Jan. 15 through Jan. 29.

But it's considerably more likely that the storm is still gathering force. On Jan. 30 the government said annual economic growth slowed to just 0.6% in the fourth quarter as home construction plunged at a 24% annual rate. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index fell 7.7% in November from the year before, the biggest decline since the index was created in 2000.

And that could be just the start. Brace yourself: Home prices could sink an additional 25% over the next two or three years, returning values to their 2000 levels in inflation-adjusted terms. That's even with the Federal Reserve's half-percentage-point rate cut on Jan. 30.

While a 25% decline is unprecedented in modern times, some economists are beginning to talk about it. "We now see potential for another 25% to 30% downside over the next two years," says David A. Rosenberg, North American economist for Merrill Lynch, who until recently had expected a much smaller slide.

Shocking though it might seem, a decline of 25% from here would merely reverse the market's spectacular appreciation during the boom. It would put the national price level right back on its long-term growth trend line, a surprisingly modest 0.4% a year after inflation. There's a recent model for this kind of return to normalcy after the bursting of a financial bubble. The stock market decline that began in 2000 erased most of the gains of the boom of the second half of the 1990s, leaving investors with ordinary-sized returns.

Why might housing prices plunge violently from here? Remember the two powerful forces that pushed them up: lax lending standards and the conviction that housing is a fail-safe investment. Now both are working in reverse, depressing demand for housing faster than homebuilders can rein in supply. By reinstituting safeguards such as down payments and proof of income, lenders have disqualified thousands of potential buyers. And many people who do qualify have lost the desire to buy. "A down market is getting baked into expectations," says Chris Flanagan, head of research in JPMorgan Chase's asset-backed securities group. "People say: I'm not buying until prices are lower.'" He predicts prices will fall about 25%, bottoming in 2010.

Nobody can be sure how far prices will decline. Still, if prices drop that much, it could mean big trouble for the U.S. economy, which is already on the brink of recession. It would blow a hole in the balance sheets of banks and households, slicing more than $5 trillion off household wealth. That's roughly the size of the drop in stock market wealth from the peak in early 2000, a big reason for the recession of 2001. Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, a longtime housing bear, points out that a housing decline that started in 1925 and ran until 1932 weakened banks and contributed to the Great Depression, which started in the U.S. in 1929.

It has become a cliché, but an accurate one, that Americans used their homes as ATMs during the boom years. They lined up for cash-out refis or home-equity loans to turn housing wealth into spending money. So far, the amount of equity being withdrawn has remained surprisingly strong—$700 billion at an annual rate in the third quarter. But it's bound to dwindle if prices keep falling, giving the economy a further downward push. According to an analysis conducted for BusinessWeek by Zillow.com, the real estate Web site, a further 20% decline in prices nationwide would mean that two-thirds of people who bought in the past year would owe more than their homes would be worth, meaning they couldn't take out cash if they wanted to. . . .

. . . . The second shock to the economy from the housing bust will come from the financial sector, which has been weakened by losses on mortgages as well as mortgage-backed securities and more exotic derivatives. Banks borrow so much money to fund their investments that if a loss on some holding reduces their capital by $10, they have to reduce their lending by $100 to avoid exceeding their self-chosen leverage targets, calculates Goldman Sachs chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius. He estimates that banks and other financial institutions will suffer about $200 billion in real estate losses and respond by cutting their lending by $2 trillion, or about 5% of total lending. The cutback could be even more extreme if they react to the turmoil by lowering their leverage ratios, he says, rather than keeping them intact. Banks have already begun tightening lending standards. In the third quarter, mortgages were harder to get than at any time in the 17-year history of the Federal Reserve's survey of senior loan officers.

Prices won't fall uniformly, of course. Once-booming cities such as Las Vegas and Miami and weak economies like Detroit are likely to fare worse than Seattle or Charlotte, N.C. The price decline will be smaller if it's stretched out over longer than, say, two years, because inflation will have more time to do some of the job of eroding the real value of homes. Still, if the national average decline is anywhere near 25%, the entire U.S. economy is in for trouble. Keep in mind, says Merrill's Rosenberg, that the relatively puny price decline to date has already pushed home-loan delinquencies to their highest level in 20 years. The plunge in residential construction reduced the economy's annual growth rate by a full percentage point in the third quarter of 2007. A bigger decrease would wipe out even more jobs—carpenters, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, furniture salespeople.

For American consumers, meanwhile, huge losses would almost certainly undermine the long-held premise that homeownership is the most reliable way to build wealth and a middle-class life. "I know you're not supposed to say I told you so,' but I'm at the age where I can do it: Homeownership was oversold," says 67-year-old House Finance Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

One look at the long-term home price chart (above) tells you all you need to know: Starting in 2000, prices crossed above their trend line and just kept going up. The spike had never happened in modern U.S. history, according to data dating back to 1890 that Shiller painstakingly compiled for the second edition of his book Irrational Exuberance in 2005. Back then he predicted a sharp drop in house prices. Now he says lawyers won't let him publicly forecast home prices because he's involved in preparing the market-sensitive Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price indexes. All he'll say is: "This is a historic turning point."

Optimists point out that the Fed, Congress, and the White House are all committed to keeping housing aloft so it doesn't kill the economy. The Fed reduced the federal funds rate by three quarters of a percentage point on Jan. 22 and followed with a half-point cut on Jan. 30—an extremely rapid move for a major central bank. Homebuilders also are doing their bit to support prices: They've cut production so drastically that even though home sales fell more than expected in December, the backlog of unsold new homes shrank slightly. . . . .

. . . . . Pessimists aren't impressed. One of the first high-profile bears on housing, Ian Shepherdson of consulting firm High Frequency Economics, is looking for a 20% decline in prices from their peak but says 40% wouldn't shock him. "We've never been here before, so there's no road map," he says.

There's even uncertainty about where prices are right now, since many would-be sellers are refusing to cut them enough to make a sale. A Harris Interactive survey for Zillow.com in December found that 36% of homeowners thought their homes had increased in value over the past year, vs. 23% who thought they had decreased. That willful optimism translates directly into the record overhang of unsold existing homes: more than 4 million.

For a truer picture of the market, look at sales by banks and builders, which don't have the luxury to wait things out because they have to worry about cash flow. Deutsche Bank, among other banks, has been slashing prices on repossessed homes to get rid of them. In a recent transaction mentioned on BusinessWeek's Hot Property blog, Deutsche Bank sold a house in Woodbridge, Va., in December for $150,000, less than half its last sale price of $315,000 in the spring of 2005.

In November, Lennar, the big builder, sold 11,000 home sites to a joint venture it formed with Morgan Stanley Real Estate for $525 million, 60% below what they were valued on Lennar's books. That's capitulation, and it's likely to occur more often as sellers get the idea that waiting won't solve their problems.

Plenty of other evidence supports the notion that home prices have further to fall. There's a crisis of confidence in the securitization of mortgages, which pumped up housing demand by giving buyers access to nationwide and even global pools of capital. The loose links in the securitization chain allowed risky loans to be made at low rates. Trust in that system is broken and will not be mended quickly.

Almost the only mortgages being securitized successfully are the ones bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the private companies with implicit government backing. They accounted for about 87% of mortgage securitizations in December, vs. fewer than half in 2005 and 2006, according to the publication Inside MBS & ABS and the investment bank UBS. Subprime lending is nearly shut down, home-equity loans and lines of credit are scarce, and jumbo mortgages (too big for Fannie and Freddie to purchase) command premium rates. A survey of real estate agents found that a third of planned home sales were canceled or delayed last fall because of loan problems.

Even Fannie and Freddie, which style themselves as the last resort of the home buyer, have tightened standards and raised fees. And they remain reluctant to raise funds to buy mortgages if it means lowering returns to shareholders. Fannie Mae Chief Executive Daniel H. Mudd joked to Wall Street analysts in December that the process of cutting the dividend and selling preferred shares to raise money pained him so much that "I wanted to cut off both my arms and both my legs, and my head, and my kidney."

Cheaper mortgages won't necessarily ride to the rescue, either. Thirty-year conventional fixed-rate mortgages failed to fall after the Fed's two January rate cuts, averaging 5.5% on Jan. 30. Financing remains cut off for subprime borrowers and for owners whose home equity has dipped too low to qualify for a new loan. Fed rate cuts will ease, but not eliminate, the pain from resets on adjustable-rate loans.

For another bearish view, there's what economists refer to as the Mankiw paper. In 1989, long before working in the White House as chief economic adviser or writing his best-selling textbook, Principles of Economics, Harvard University economist N. Gregory Mankiw co-wrote a paper that was startlingly negative on housing. He and David N. Weil predicted that home prices would decline by 47% after inflation over the next 20 years, based on a shrinking pool of potential first-time buyers and an expectation that baby boomers as a group would spend less on housing as they grew older.

It could be that Mankiw and Weil were not so much wrong as premature. Although boomers have thwarted expectations by adding on rooms and second homes as they age, they won't thwart nature. "At some point, death or illness will cause baby boomers' houses to come onto the market," observed John Krainer, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, in an in-house publication in 2005. When the huge boomer generation shuffles off, the nation's housing needs will wane. That will create an oversupply unless builders see it coming and reduce construction. Judging from the recent overbuilding binge, though, their forecasting abilities leave a lot to be desired.

Observers with a Calvinist streak see a housing crash as not only necessary but also positive. It will force Americans to live within their means, which will enable the U.S. to work off some of its towering debt, says Peter D. Schiff, president of Darien (Conn.) brokerage Euro Pacific Capital, who was early in predicting the crash. In 2005 the share of gross domestic product devoted to residential construction reached the highest since 1950, when the U.S. was racing to house the baby boom generation and make up for the lack of construction during the Depression and World War II. Now, says Schiff, "if there's any construction, it's going to be factories, oil exploration, mines." He takes almost unseemly delight in predicting tougher times ahead: "Americans are going to have their credit cards taken away from them by the lenders. We're going to turn the American economy into a cash economy."

Foreclosure counselors such as Mildred Wilkins foresee similar changes, except in looking back they put more of the blame for the fiasco on builders and lenders and less on borrowers. "We have been fed the illusion that acquiring a home was a magic key to stability, to wealth-building," says Wilkins, who travels the country advising lawyers and others on how to handle foreclosures. Even though she is president and founder of an Indianapolis company called Home Ownership Matters, which promotes responsible ownership, Wilkins says she never believed the "poppycock" that homeownership was a sure path to wealth, calling it a myth foisted on lower-income Americans by politicians serving the builders and bankers.

The sense of betrayal is probably most intense among the working-class families who were supposed to be the greatest beneficiaries of easy access to low-down-payment mortgages. . . . .
. . . . .If home prices really fall an additional 25%, Washington's rescue program is likely to seem seriously inadequate. So far the Bush Administration is pushing two main ideas: FHASecure, which offers new mortgages to certain well-qualified borrowers, and Hope Now, a private-sector program to streamline the modification of unaffordable loans. But FHASecure isn't open to people who are underwater on their mortgages—in other words, those who most need help. And the Hope Now alliance doesn't seem to be coping successfully with the mounting backlog of loan delinquencies. The other big Washington initiative, to crack down on loose lending practices, could be ineffective and even counterproductive, because it's making loan funding less available right when it's needed most.

The next big reform ideas may hark back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many of the housing market's props today—including Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration—were launched during the 1930s. If things get bad enough, say some analysts, it could raise interest in renewing another innovation of the Depression years, the Home Owners' Loan Corp., which lent money directly to hard-pressed borrowers to prevent foreclosure. If enough banks get into trouble, Congress might even create something roughly parallel to the 1980s-era Resolution Trust Corp., which cleared up the savings and loan crisis by shutting down weak thrifts, thus wiping out the investments of the owners, and then selling off their assets to the highest bidders.

And with homeownership no longer seeming like such a sure thing, national housing policy could become more evenhanded toward renters. Congress is weighing the creation of a National Affordable Housing Trust Fund that would build, rehabilitate, and preserve 1.5 million units of housing for the lowest-income families over the next 10 years. The national homeownership rate has already fallen about one percentage point from its peak, to 68.2% in last year's third quarter.
However things unfold, the changes are likely to be wrenching. The bigger the boom, the harder the fall.

Arctic Sea Ice Not Vanishing Afterall

2008-02-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

So it appears that Arctic ice isn't vanishing after all

There was some coverage of the chaos caused in central and southern China by their heaviest snowfalls for decades - but little attention was paid to the snow that last week carpeted Jerusalem, Damascus and Amman, none of them exactly used to Dickensian Christmas card weather.

Similarly, Saudis last month expressed amazement at their heaviest snow for many years, in Afghanistan snow and freezing weather killed 120 people and large parts of the United States and Canada have been swept by unusually fierce blizzards.

The biologist who took this picture says this pair were within easy swimming distance of the Alaskan coast

If the northern hemisphere's chilliest winter in a long time was bad news for the propagandists of global warming, they also had to face serious questions about some of the most iconic images used to support the claims that the world is hotting up towards disaster.

Last autumn the BBC and others could scarcely contain their excitement in reporting that the Arctic ice was melting so fast there would soon be none left.

Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the website Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois.

This body is committed to warmist orthodoxy and contributes to the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km.

A second graph, "Global Ice Area", shows a similar pattern repeated every year since satellite records began in 1979; while a third, "Southern Hemisphere Ice", shows that sea ice has actually expanded in recent years, well above its 30-year mean.

Still more inconvenient was the truth about an image that has been relentlessly exploited to promote this panic over the "vanishing" Arctic ice. It is the photograph of two polar bears standing forlornly on the fast-melting remains of an iceberg which has been reproduced thousands of times to show that there will soon be no bears left (ignoring evidence that their numbers have risen recently).

Now, thanks to a Canadian journalist, Carole Williams (on NewsWithViews.com), we can read the story behind this picture, which was taken in 2004 just off Alaska by a marine biologist, Amanda Byrd. As Ms Byrd is happy to point out, the bears were in no danger so close to the coast (they can swim 100 miles). She wanted a photograph more of the "wind-sculpted ice" than of the bears.

The image was copied by another member of the crew and passed on to Environment Canada. Then it was eagerly adopted by the warmist propaganda machine - above all by Al Gore, who used it to powerful effect as an emotive backdrop to his highly lucrative lectures.

"Their habitat is melting," he likes to declaim, "beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet."

As the old joke has it, it seems those famous bears were not drowning after all, they were just waving. But the BBC is no more likely to tell us that than it was to lead the news with last week's snow in Jerusalem.

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Brussels steps in - to stop a wind farm

A delightful row has blown up in Scotland over the plan to erect 181 600ft wind turbines on the Hebridean island of Lewis.

For years we have been told how this largest onshore windfarm in Britain was going to help the UK to meet its now mandatory EU target to produce 20 per cent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020 - even though the 200 megawatts of electricity the turbines would intermittently produce represents only a quarter of the output of a modest-sized gas-fired power station.

But the £500 million scheme, which would involve building 100 miles of new roads, has aroused vehement opposition not only from the majority of the island's inhabitants but from an array of conservation bodies, led by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

They are horrified at the immense damage this vast industrial installation would do to wildlife over a huge area of specially-designated peatland, not least to Scotland's largest population of golden eagles.

Now the "Scottish government" (as it likes to call itself), which was shortly expected to give the go-ahead to this scheme, has been told by the European Commission that this would be in serious breach of various EU environmental directives.

So, on one hand, the EU exhorts us to build thousands more giant turbines, as the only way to fulfil our environmental obligations on renewable energy.

On the other, when a highly unpopular project is proposed to do just that, the EU turns round to say that this would be so environmentally damaging that, if the project goes ahead, the UK could face a colossal fine from the European Court of Justice.

If anyone suggests that, under the EU, you cannot win, who could disagree?

Tory MEP is hoist with his own canard

When smoking was banned in English pubs last July, many landlords realised that the only way to keep a good many of their customers was to install patio heaters.

As the Irish discovered when they introduced a smoking ban, the only pubs that didn't lose business were those that bought heaters, allowing smokers to continue their wicked habit in relative comfort outside. English publicans accordingly spent £85 million following suit.

But then up jumped Friends of the Earth to demand that, since these heaters give off carbon dioxide, they too should be banned. This naturally made a huge impression on the greenie Lib Dems, with the eventual result that last Thursday one of their MEPs moved a motion in the European Parliament calling on Brussels to ban patio heaters.

So imbued are MEPS with a priggish desire to save the planet that 526 voted for the ban, with only 26 against.

In a letter in next day's Daily Telegraph, a Tory MEP, Richard Ashworth, pointed out that the amount of carbon dioxide saved by banning patio heaters in the EU was only slightly less than the amount emitted every year by MEPs themselves, as they engage in the laborious farce of transferring the entire European Parliament every month from Brussels to Strasbourg.

Apart from the car, train and plane journeys of the MEPs, this involves a convoy of some 60 trucks trundling 100 miles between the two cities and back again, loaded with trunks-full of parliamentary papers.

Mr Ashworth will doubtless have won plaudits from Telegraph readers reading his letter over the marmalade, for such a telling comment.

But any who then bothered to examine the list of those 526 MEPs who supported this absurd ban might have been surprised to see among them the name of Mr Ashworth.

Death Photo of Famous War Correspondent "Ernie Pyle" Found

2008-02-03T17:15:00.001-08:00

Death photo of war reporter Pyle found
By RICHARD PYLE
NEW YORK - The figure in the photograph is clad in Army fatigues, boots and helmet, lying on his back in peaceful repose, folded hands holding a military cap. Except for a thin trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, he could be asleep.

But he is not asleep; he is dead. And this is not just another fallen GI; it is Ernie Pyle, the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II.

As far as can be determined, the photograph has never been published. Sixty-three years after Pyle was killed by the Japanese, it has surfaced — surprising historians, reminding a forgetful world of a humble correspondent who artfully and ardently told the story of a war from the foxholes.

"It's a striking and painful image, but Ernie Pyle wanted people to see and understand the sacrifices that soldiers had to make, so it's fitting, in a way, that this photo of his own death ... drives home the reality and the finality of that sacrifice," said James E. Tobin, a professor at Miami University of Ohio.

Tobin, author of a 1997 biography, "Ernie Pyle's War," and Owen V. Johnson, an Indiana University professor who collects Pyle-related correspondence, said they had never seen the photo. The negative is long lost, and only a few prints are known to exist.

"When I think about the real treasures of American history that we have," says Mark Foynes, director of the Wright Museum of World War II in Wolfeboro, N.H., "this picture is definitely in the ballpark."

___

"COMMAND POST, IE SHIMA, April 18 (AP) — Ernie Pyle, war correspondent beloved by his co-workers, GIs and generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning ..."

The news stunned a nation still mourning the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt six days earlier. Callers besieged newspaper switchboards. "Ernie is mourned by the Army," said soldier-artist Bill Mauldin, whose droll, irreverent GI cartoons had made him nearly as famous as Pyle.

He was right; even amid heavy fighting, Pyle's death was a prime topic among the troops.

"If I had not been there to see it, I would have taken with a grain of salt any report that the GI was taking Ernie Pyle's death `hard,' but that is the only word that best describes the universal reaction out here," Army photographer Alexander Roberts wrote to Lee Miller, a friend of Ernie and his first biographer.

But Ernie Pyle was not just any reporter. He was a household name during World War II and for years afterward. From 1941 until his death, Pyle riveted the nation with personal, straight-from-the-heart tales about hometown soldiers in history's greatest conflict.

In 1944, his columns for Scripps-Howard Newspapers earned a Pulitzer Prize and Hollywood made a movie, "Ernie Pyle's Story of G.I. Joe," starring Burgess Meredith as the slender, balding 44-year-old reporter.

Typically self-effacing, Pyle insisted the film include fellow war correspondents playing themselves. But he was killed before it was released.

In April 1945, the one-time Indiana farm boy had just arrived in the Pacific after four years of covering combat in North Africa, Italy and France. With Germany on the verge of surrender, he wanted to see the war to its end, but confided to colleagues that he didn't expect to survive.

At Okinawa he found U.S. forces battling entrenched Japanese defenders while "kamikaze" suicide pilots wreaked carnage on the Allied fleet offshore.

On April 16, the Army's 77th Infantry Division landed on Ie Shima, a small island off Okinawa, to capture an airfield. Although a sideshow to the main battle, it was "warfare in its worst form," photographer Roberts wrote later. "Not one Japanese soldier surrendered, he killed until he was killed."

On the third morning, a jeep carrying Pyle and three officers came under fire from a hidden machine gun. All scrambled for cover in roadside ditches, but when Pyle raised his head, a .30 caliber bullet caught him in the left temple, killing him instantly.

Roberts and two other photographers, including AP's Grant MacDonald, were at a command post 300 yards away when Col. Joseph Coolidge, who had been with Pyle in the jeep, reported what happened.

Roberts went to the scene, and despite continuing enemy fire, crept forward — a "laborious, dirt-eating crawl," he later called it — to record the scene with his Speed Graphic camera. His risky act earned Roberts a Bronze Star medal for valor.

Pyle was first buried among soldiers on Ie Shima. In 1949 his body was moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl Crater, near Honolulu.

Roberts' photograph, however, was never seen by the public. He told Miller the War Department had withheld it "out of deference" to Ernie's ailing widow, Jerry.

"It was so peaceful a death ... that I felt its reproduction would not be in bad taste," he said, "but there probably would be another school of thought on this."

___

Eight military museums and history centers queried by AP said the negative and photo were unknown to them. This included the National Archives & Records Administration, the most likely repository.

"Considering all the photo research done on World War II, and thousands of letters requesting information about our holdings, my guess is it would have been `discovered' by a researcher or staff member by now," said Edward McCarter, NARA's top still-photos archivist.

Prints taken from Roberts' negative at the time of Pyle's death "would appear to be the only record that the photo was actually made," McCarter said.

At least two such prints were kept as souvenirs by veterans who served aboard USS Panamint, a Navy communications ship in the Okinawa campaign. Although the two men never met, they came by the photo in similar ways, and both later recognized its importance to posterity.

Retired naval officer Richard Strasser, 88, of Goshen, Ind., who recalls Pyle visiting the ship just before he was killed, said a friend named George, who ran the ship's darkroom, gave him a packet of pictures after Japan surrendered in August 1945.

Months later, back in civilian life, Strasser finally opened the envelope. "I was surprised to find a picture of Ernie Pyle," he said. "At the time, Ernie's widow was still alive and I considered sending the photo to her, but had mixed feelings about it. In the end I did nothing."

Strasser recently provided his photo — a still-pristine contact print from the 4-by-5-inch negative — to the AP. He since has made it available to the Newseum, a $435 million news museum scheduled to open in Washington this year.

Margaret Engel, the Newseum's managing editor, says the photo is "of strong historic interest," and because Pyle died at the height of his fame, "the circumstances of his death ... remain a compelling story for students of journalism and the war."

Ex-Petty Officer Joseph T. Bannan, who joined USS Panamint's crew in May 1945 after his own ship was damaged by a kamikaze, said his Pyle photo came from a ship's photographer he remembers only as "Joe from Philadelphia."

Bannan, 82, of Boynton Beach, Fla., said "Joe" told him he had been ordered to destroy the negative "because of the effect it would have on the morale of the American public."

In 2004, Bannan donated copies of the photo to the Wright Museum, the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site at Dana, Ind., and the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla.

Yet another copy was acquired by the Indiana Historical Society at a 1999 auction. Historian Susan Sutton said she had no information on its origin or the seller.

Both Strasser and Bannan assumed a Navy photographer had made the picture. Only Roberts, however, is known to have visited the death scene, and with no Army Signal Corps photo lab nearby, his film went to the nearest ship offshore — USS Panamint.

This was "standard procedure" in the Pacific, says retired AP photographer Max Desfor, 96, who covered Okinawa and later won a Pulitzer Prize in Korea. "No question that's what happened."

In tracing the picture's history, AP learned of a second photo, showing Pyle's body on a stretcher. The fatal wound, unseen in Roberts' photo, appears as a dark spot above his left eyebrow.

That photo, of unknown origin, appears to be an amateur snapshot, said Katherine Gould, assistant curator of cultural history at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis, which acquired it and Bannan's photo last year from the Dana historic site.

As war photographs go, neither could be considered grisly, but they were never displayed at Dana. "We get a lot of kids here," spokeswoman Janice Duncan said.

One who did see the Roberts photo there is Bruce L. Johnson, 84, of Afton, Minn., a nephew and one of the few surviving relatives who knew Pyle.

In April 1945, Johnson was a sailor aboard the seaplane tender USS Norton Sound, which by a quirk of fate was a few miles away when Pyle was killed. In fact, the two had been writing letters home, trying to figure out a way they could rendezvous.

"We were in the mess hall and the news came over the ship's loudspeaker," he recalled. "It was just a shock."

Ill Lottery Winner says "No Shops in the Cemetery"

2008-02-03T17:01:00.000-08:00

Lottery winner's sweet wish...
Thu Jan 31, 1:03 PM ET
LONDON - Retired hospital porter Steve Smith, who is suffering from a potentially fatal heart defect, won almost 19 million pounds ($38 million) on Britain's National Lottery -- but said he would give it all up if he could spend a few more years living with his wife Ida.

"I have a one in 10 chance of living. It's like a ticking time bomb," said the 58-year-old Smith, enjoying a bittersweet glass of celebratory champagne with his wife Ida.

Smith, who has an aortic aneurysm, told reporters when collecting his check: "It's Ida I worry for, it's leaving her behind. I would give all that back if I am allowed to still be with her because there are no shops in the cemetery are there?"

Smith landed the giant prize with an extra stroke of luck -- the couple stopped off on the way home from a family visit to buy some lucky dip tickets and it was one of those which hit the jackpot.

How to Make Healthy Food for Your Pets

2008-02-03T16:07:00.000-08:00

Kindness of Strangers homemade pet food recipes
Current mood: busy
Category: Pets and Animals

Warning for those animal rights purist friends i do suggest feeding companion animals some flesh in this blog, it is not my preference, and many alternatives are also suggested

Thank you Wolfdreamer for this info about pet food companies testing on animals! * Wolfdreamer *

"Hi Nan, Please help me in speaking out against animal testing. Share this information and tell people about the testing and the ongoing pain and cruelty these poor animals go thru.
Blessings, Wolfdreamer

Feeding dogs and cats a plant based diet is doable and healthy—there are some problems and naturally i get to experience them! My "companion animal friends" are NOT vegan or vegetarian, as feeding them right and in an environmentally sensitive way can be expensive or time consuming, that is the direction we've been going though. My part pit-bull rescue, Angel has grain allergies and i see from both doggies poop that unless beans, nuts, and veggies are ground up it just goes right through them!

100% Organic dog poop, healthy for the Planet but my wallet says "Ouch"

Since i feed our brood all expensive organic veggies, nuts, fruit, etc i have been trying to grind their food rather than have 100% organic poop! But then i spend more hours in the kitchen cleaning the blender, the majority of my kitchen time already spend caring for them that is not acceptable!

A friend correctly stated "saying feeding dogs and cats raw is dangerous is 'bullshit'" he is right, in nature dogs eat rotten carcasses and really smelly garbage, they are natural scavengers. Cats are too picky to eat meat that is not fresh. i have been feeding my animals mostly a raw meat diet for over twelve years, they do very well on it. However, the "bullshit" part is true for another reason. We animal lovers do not like to think about it—but animal waste from factory farms is the chief culprit in global warming!

Here are alternatives that are more Earth friendly and humane,

The best solution thus far i have found to feed my companion animals a healthy, less meat diet. i will soon do a video with more detail.

1. My pet rescued chickens "Thanks" and "Giving" provide egg yokes and shells for calcium. Although the egg white is toxic and not safe to feed to dogs or cats, the eggshells are easy to handle as i freeze them and grind them in the blender after i have enough to add to the homemade pet food.

2. i have used Feedthis! Inc. raw food for the last nine years, it is convenient for a busy person, delivered, fresh frozen to my door every two weeks. Best of all for a conscientious environmentalist, Feed This Inc. recycles the plastic food containers, coolers, ice packs, boxes and liners in which the food arrives, (if i throughly washed and dried everything.) Eventually i just got tired of washing all those plastic containers so carefully — and with multiple rescued animals it was just too expensive—Angel alone weighs 92 pounds and needs a lot of food. So i stopped having FeedThis! deliver the raw meat mix.

3. Now Feedthis! delivers just the ground 100% organic veggie mix every two weeks. That means a lot less plastic containers filling up my freezer or to wash and dry and it is a lot less expensive to buy my own meat. And it is less work!

4. i purchase the best quality ground meat i can, if it is ground cows i make sure it is grass fed, and if it is chicken or turkey i shop ahead of time to get the best deals on organic meat when available. I mix enough in a big bowl to last a few days, and as much as i hate touching raw meat with my hands that is the best way to really mix it well, otherwise the cats will just eat the meat and leave their vegetables! i have been alternating this with plant based pet foods. And begging my friends who produce pet food to come up with a raw plant based grain free meat substitute like this Raw Organic Homemade Grain-Free Dog Food

http://www.thehonestkitchen.com/products/preference.shtml

5. i now give my old 17 year old Now Brand vegan glucosamine and her limp has gone away

My good friends at David and Darrell of V-Dog are developing three new products;

1. 100% organic vegan dog food

2. Grain free for allergic pets and

3. Vegan cat food

Right now V-dog is close to carrying their products in Whole Foods and all products are in the planning stage—however they will need our support to do as soon as we would all like.

If you are an environmentalist and care about the effects of using products most corn and soy are genetically modified. that are not organic like my family, you can try what my friend Martha of MotherNature researched for us:

I just looked into the V-dog food ingredients...from what I have researched in relation to my pets' health, I have learned that any wheat, corn, or soy product has been linked to cause allergies in animals. My feeling is due to the fact that all these products are now GMO'd these days, and unless they are USDA organic, should NOT be consumed. Here is Holistic Company I found:

Raw Organic Homemade Grain-Free Dog Food

It is a grain-free, meat-free, dehydrated form, which means all the enzymes are intact! They will deliver to your door.

i will be ordering this product and trying it asap however still want to support my friends at V-Dog so they can also go organic, which is very expensive for a small company like them.

How to Avoid Foods Dangerous for Your Dog

The following information is from Feedthis! i do not agree totally with everything they say, i do think a grains can be okay but if you observe your animals poop you can often see that corn and rice are not being digested, why pay for something that is not being digested? And as i said before most corn and soy are genetically modified
No grains No animal would ever choose in the wild to eat cooked grains. Grains are a cheap filler to make your pet and the kibble company execs pockets feel full. And like with humans and carbs they become addicted. Also grains plus yeast (see below) equals alcohol.....hmmmm I wonder if this can explain some of the bad behavior we see. Also in large breeds grain will stretch the stomach and loosen the muscles that hold the stomach in place and can cause bloat as well as the stomach or other organs to twist or fold (torsion) Lastly grains deposit a mucous in the intestinal tract...A beautiful environment for parasites to grow and thrive. Sometimes the intestines are so badly coated with mucous your pet may not get most of the nutrients in their food and are begging for more or eating stools that they find a the dog park

No Yeast if you have an itchy dog or a dog with runny eyes or smelly ears this is probably why

No Dairy human dairy products are supplemented with vitamin D which can cause problems. In addition dairy can cause runny stool and most dairy has all sorts of hormones and antibiotics.

No Raw Salmon There is a parasite that can be fatal to dogs found in Pacific salmon [Note from Kindness of Strangers i do not give my animals any fish, the tiny bones are a chocking hazard, have you ever seen a dog eat a fish in nature and the oceans are overfished
and we cannot control the heavy metals fish flesh is so high.]

No Grapes or Raisins there are a few considerations. It was thought that it may have been the enormous amounts of pesticides that growers use on their grapes however I have heard that even organic grapes can cause problems. In talking with grape growers, veterinarians and bacteriologists it seems that some of the molds/fungus that grow on grapes that give sweeter wines their nice flavor may be similar or the same as molds that can cause kidney failure in dogs.

No Nightshade Veggies (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers) These foods wont kill your pet but they can trigger arthritis in pets who are prone to that. Also they can trigger autoimmune problems.

No Mushrooms of any kind (some can be eaten by humans but not dogs or cats)

No Preservatives why keep dog poop in the environment for 20 years. A preservative free stool dissipates in 2-4 days naturally.

No Colors come one the colors are for humans not the animals they don't care what color it is.

European Parliament Erupts After Calls for "Referendum"

2008-02-03T15:46:00.000-08:00