Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon

News Briefs 21-11-2005

By Rick MGon

Ugh.

  • Jimmy Walter is offering US$1 million to anyone who can prove that planes weren’t the cause of the World Trade Center’s destruction on 9/11. It’ll be the easiest million bucks you’ll ever make.
  • A US soldier believed he would be killed in Iraq, after once being told by a psychic he would die before his 27th birthday. No offence, but if I went to Iraq as a US soldier, I’d be pretty confident of not returning home too.
  • A sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1994 is believed to have come back from the dead. It’s as simple as absent-minded Death leaving the door unlocked.
  • Again in Africa, a poltergeist has terrorised a school, threatening to kill the children with a garden fork.
  • Demons are wreaking fiery havoc in other parts of Africa, burning a man’s feet and causing a schoolgirl to no longer wear clothes because they spontaneously combust.
  • Sorcery in Papua New Guinea affects people of all classes.
  • A man in Kuala Lumpur has sought the help of a medium to banish a sex-hungry ghost who won’t leave him alone. I hope she’s not into S&M.
  • Next door in the Philippines, ghosts aren’t as scary as you think. They’re not as celibant either.
  • Up to 140 men were murdered in a Hungarian village, and the 26 women who stood trial in 1929 never revealed why they did it.
  • A Bulgarian researcher says she has solved the mystery of Crop Circles.
  • Cereologist Colin Andrews is trying to solve the mystery of how to pay the rent, and is auctioning off his complete archive of Crop Circle files on ebay.
  • A Tennessee man filmed “… the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen. And to explain it, I can’t. It defied laws of Physics, it defied laws of flight. It was powered. What it was, I can’t say.” With video.
  • A NASA/Stanford physics experiment will determine whether the Earth is in a vortex of space-time.
  • The Raelian cult wants to establish an extraterrestrial embassy in Jerusalem.
  • UfOlogists weigh in on the human origins debate.
  • After interviewing a whopping 50 alien abuctees, and writing an astoundingly large figure of books (one!) debunking the phenomenon, Susan Clancy is washing her hands of the whole affair. Can’t face the music, eh Susie? Again, no mention of John Mack.
  • The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement wants to see the human race extinct. How about they start with themselves.
  • Orangutans are every bit as sociable, as technically adept and as culturally capable as chimpanzees … and possibly humans. Actually, they’re probably more evolved than humans.
  • Do elephants have a sixth sense for pending dangers? They can remember the dead too.
  • Meditation doesn’t just calm you down and make you feel good — it alters the brain. Very strong coffee does the same thing.
  • A very interesting paper discussing the effects of diseases, drugs and chemicals on the creativity and productivity of famous artists.
  • The mathematics of the collective consciousness: human thought grows exponentially.
  • Confused by today’s news? Blame it on the Moon. It’s no coincidence my sun-sign is ruled by the Moon.

Quote of the Day:

“There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness.”

Michio Kaku, Physicist

Rick MG
Related

13 Comments

  1. Beaut crop circles
    Rick, don’t you just love those crop circles? I do.Colin Andrews is getting old and he doesn’t look well in the pic.That stuff of his would be amazing.
    I loved the moon stuff.I quietly go nuts every full moon.In fact if you look at my posts here you will usually see me snarling at someone on the full moon.

    Great stuff, thanks Rick.

    shadows

  2. Killed in Iraq – Prediction

    No offence, but if I went to Iraq as a US soldier, I’d be pretty confident of not returning home too.

    Luckily, our brave men and women are a bit more level headed and realize that the death rate for U.S. troops is a small fraction of 1% since that front on the War on Terror was opened.

    Lefties…as you were, carry on.

    And just for the fun of it…..

    If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.

    The death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation’s Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.

    Conclusion: Clearly we are in a quagmire and we should immediately pull out of Washington D.C.

    1. yeah what the heck
      I mean the people who died in Iraq are only soldiers and probably from the lowest socio-economic group in the US.
      The numbers prove you are right.
      It’s only a couple of thousand deaths, it’s not as if any of them mattered or anything.

      shadows

    2. Oh Dear
      That’s what you get for reading Free Republic and its downstream followers – the belief that clapping louder makes things better.

      The statistics actually show that it is 2.6 times more fatal to be a US serviceman in Iraq as opposed to a civilian living in the USA.

      Further, you neglect the fact that US servicemen do most of their exposure to danger in armored vehicles and wearing ballistic body armor – something not commonly available to the guy on the street. Without those protections, the life of a soldier in Iraq would be far worse. Further, only one third of US troops in Iraq are combat troops – the rest are rear echelon. You would do better to compare death rates of soldiers in Iraq to SWAT police in inner cities for to do less is to compare apples to oranges – and the apples still have a worse time of it by a factor of 2.6 to 1!

      Of course, Iraqi civilians don’t get that protection either – but they aren’t worth mentioning, otherwise you would have mentioned them, right?

      But just suppose we did mention them…the UN and the Iraqi Ministry of Development and Planning have conducted a standard survey that covers all of Iraq from May 2003 to May 2004 and have concluded that the absolute lowest excess death figure that they could attribute to combat was between 18,000 to 29,000 Iraqis. They noted that their methodology under-counts fatalities as families that are killed as a complete family are not able to be surveyed.

      The study period covers twelve months for all but three provinces (Kurdistan covers 16 months), but working with the assumption that most of the violence is happening in non-Kurdish areas we can calculate comparable rates if Iraq was the United States.In the twelve month study period, taking the lowest boundary of 18,000 deaths, this works out to be about 1,500 violent deaths per month that are directly attributable to some military action by some party.

      Doing just a straight line approximation, this would have the United States losing 18,000 individuals per month due to violence.

      This is a rate higher than the annual US murder toll. If we correct for differences in medical care, the United States, if it was as “safe” as Iraq, would be seeing 12,000 or so citizens dying per month, 144,000 every year, due to violence. The unadjusted risk ratio is 13:1 for Iraqis to die a violent death when compared against the chance of an American to die due to a homicide or negligent manslaughter. The medical adjustment reduces the risk to 8.3:1.

      Major, 100+ fatality car bombings have occurred several times a year for the past two years in Iraq. The United States has experienced no car bombs during this time frame. The same applies to suicide bombings, company sized ambushes of the New York Police Department, the overrunning of the Montana State House, the capturing of the governor of Missouri and the assassination of the director of the Washington D.C. METRO system. These are common types of events in Iraq. If the US was as dangerous as Iraq, we would be seeing these actions occurring here. We don’t.

      Regards, C

      2. Binro the Heretic
        Statistics are just numbers, prone to being misused and not terribly helpful in grasping a situation in any but the crudest quantitative sense. The saddest part of the Iraq war may be something that can’t be quantified at all; the number of people who will ultimately be killed by the Depleted Uranium munitions the Americans so dearly love.

        I see it as a pretty problem in international law…if one could get Bush and his gang to stand trial as the war criminals they are, how many deaths would the indictment mention, given that the remains of the DU munitions will be harmful and/or lethal for a very long time?

        It’s ironic that the Americans, who are so worried about terrorists using radiological weapons in the US, would go to Iraq and do largely the same thing. I guess this happens by the same logic whereby the US goes to Iraq to kill people to prevent them from being killed by someone else.

        1. You are so right Binro
          Your logic is impeccable.
          The DU in Iraq is going to prove one of the biggest problems of the 21st century.
          Because it is also in America with the thousands of US troops affected by it.
          And the Europeans who work in Iraq.
          The fallout from this one aspect of this despicable war is going to be immense.

          Yes you are a heretic.As am I.

          shadows

  3. Clancy redux
    That’s the same Clancy article that first appeared Oct 15, 2005. It is an Associated Press piece, so papers have been reprinting it since then. It has appeared on the Grail three times so far, I think. Just mentioning it because I’m freaking sick of it. 🙂

    1. Sick of being sick
      Not as much as I’m getting sick of it. 😉

      You’ll see this same article recycled over and over, partly due to lazy journalism, but mostly due to Susan Clancy refusing to comment on alien abductions ever again. Which doesn’t leave book reviewers a lot to work with. Hence the repeats.

      It’s quite a cowardly act, to publish a book and declare the entire alien abduction phenomenon a figment of everyone’s wild imaginations, then refuse to deal with the subject ever again. Hate-mail writers aren’t helping the matter, but at least I spiced up mine with a bit of manly cologne and a glitter-pen. I even had it delivered by owl.

  4. WTC planes and explosives
    He Rico,

    Is it just me or you got it wrong with the requirements for the $1M prize?

    “He is offering $US1 million ($1.36 million) to anyone who can prove that explosives were not used in the World Trade Centre”

    1. Explode
      Nope, Walters is a conspiracy theorist who believes explosives were planted in the WTC and planes weren’t the cause of the twin towers’ collapse.

      So either you prove explosives weren’t used, or prove planes were used — either way, you win a million smackeroonies.

      1. Does not compute
        Sorry to say that the logic seems flawed Rico.
        No one disputes that planes were used. What has been disputed is that they were the cause of the collapse.

        What has been officially given is the pancake theory, based on the assumption that the fire had melted the steel and that is one major point of contention.

        For those who might be interested to read more:

        Proving explosives were not used would be equivalent to proving the pancake theory right. There are first hand witnesses like Firemen , WTC workers, journalists and a score of other people also who either testified or reported explosions immediately prior to the beginning of the collapses and there are of course the infamours transcripts.

        Even Underwriter Laboratory staff did at one point claims refuting the official theory got him fired.

        Obviously, the impact of a plane is not even the question in regards to WTC 7, yet it collapsed as well and quite squarely and completely.

        Actually, it would instead be equivalent of proving the planes were the first cause in a chain of events rather than proving planes were used, which of course were used.

        To remain fair in the 911skeptics vs debunker skeptics out there, I am adding this Reply to Scientific American’s very own Michael Shermer Attempt at Debunking the 9/11 Skeptics for good measure.

        (Skeptics vs debunkers! Pretty good stuff!)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal