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News Briefs 15-04-2005

By Katon

I grew up in a small, rural town where most folks got along well enough with each other to encourage my early fantasy that, for the most part, people seemed to basically agree with each other on the nature of reality. And I very clearly remember the day that naive fantasy ended. Lately, it seems a lot of people are suddenly discovering just how different other people’s notions about reality can be.

  • Scaffies? They’ve aye bin the thing in auld Aberdeen.
  • Temple Mount relics saved from garbage.
  • Bird-like eggs found inside dinosaur fossil.
  • 250 million years ago, atmospheric oxygen levels dropped from 30 percent to 12 percent, which worsened the ‘Great Dying’.
  • Erotica may date back to Stone Age.
  • From Mecca to Jerusalem: Muhammad’s out-of-body experience in which the Prophet of Islam travelled to Jerusalem on a winged steed and then ascended to the heavens in the company of the Angel Gabriel.
  • The Apocalyptic Secret of Rennes-le-Chateau.
  • Fireballs: Mysterious phenomenon is simply electrifying.
  • Optical computer made from frozen light.
  • How the orbits of extrasolar planets became so eccentric.
  • Relic stars pose cosmic puzzles.
  • Ice Age Ocean Circulation Reacted to, did not cause, Climate Change at Glacial Boundaries.
  • Scientists recover rocks from more than 4,644 feet (1416 meters) below the sea floor, but Earth’s elusive mantle is a near miss.
  • A solid look at Earth’s core.
  • Liverpool Scientist Discovers New Layer of the Earth.
  • Study offers alternative view on how faults form in the ocean’s depths.
  • New method for dating ancient earthquakes through cave evidence developed.
  • Indonesia scientists monitor 3 volcanoes: Earthquake activity believed responsible for recent rumblings.
  • At the Molecular Level, the Predator is the Prey.
  • Developing drugs for neglected diseases of the poor world.
  • Chemical present in clear plastics can impair learning and cause neurodegenerative diseases.
  • Master Gene Controls Healing Of “Skin” In Fruit Flies And Mammals.
  • Whale-dolphin hybrid has baby wholphin.
  • Will anyone ever notice that octopuses are an intelligent alien species?
  • Does an orangutan find freedom in the gift of words? Do we?
  • Police break down door to save woman screaming, “Help me! Help me! Please help me!’ We TDG news editors at least occasionally aim to please.
  • A reason you should never give up on a lost pet.
  • Parents give unattractive children less attention. Nasty hobbitses.
  • Researchers claim prisoners executed by lethal injection may be aware of what is happening to them; say standards do not meet those for putting animals down.
  • Some say earthquakes are caused by archaeologists removing bones from ancient burial gounds.
  • Others say, whether natural or manmade, the recent earthquake and tsunami may indeed be another ‘sign of the times’ signalling the last days of the present world order.
  • There one second… and gone the next. Strange cases of unsolved disappearances, from common folk to aristocrats to entire villages!
  • The Rapture, Armchair Armageddon, and a split among Christians.
  • Scripture as foreign policy. A literary battle is being waged through books like The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation and The American Prophecies: Ancient Scriptures Reveal Our Nation’s Future.
  • Meet the Dominionists — biblical literalists who believe God has called them to take over the U.S. government.
  • Book of Revelation: Is it literal Scripture or allegory?
  • In the late 13th century, Olivi saw Revelation as a historical road-map laying out the course of the church, which he said had become so big and powerful, the result was a moral decay which infected the whole from head to toe, and turned it into a new Babylon as it were.
  • Rapture Fiction: “Left Behind” co-creator transcends religious realm to mass market.
  • Medieval New England Apocalypse: Puritan Appropriations of Catholic Discourses in Michael Wigglesworth’s runaway, best selling blockbuster book, The Day of Doom.
  • Evangelicals have no monopoly: 2012 Watch — The Last Emperor of Babylon and the Coming Cosmic Civilisation.
  • Welcome to Doomsday.
  • This Overshadowed Planet — one effort to add up the evidence.
  • Did Christopher Columbus see himself on an apocalyptic mission?
  • Waiting for the Apocalypse: medieval minds was fixated on the end of the world.
  • What’s going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle? An excerpt from The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century.
  • The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle: Commentary on the Flux of Events.
  • Some autistics now see their condition as a cognitive gift and even the next stage in human evolution.
  • Electrical Response of the Human Cortex to Photic Stimulation: a brief history and future possibilities via The Dreamachine.
  • A new alarm clock, called SleepSmart, measures your sleep cycle, and waits for you to be in your lightest phase of sleep before rousing you.
  • Soul, Spacetime and The Hidden Observer.
  • Ending the news on a positive note — in case you’re a little depressed by now: ‘Termite guts can save the planet,’ says Nobel laureate.

Quote of the Day:

When you combine the seven deadly sins with high technology, you get some really serious problems. You get turbo-sins. It’s dreadful to imagine what goeth after turbo-pride.

James Howard Kunstler

Kat
Related

15 Comments

    1. I found a parrot!!
      Is there more than one?
      I loved the story, that is the sort of thing my parrot would do to me.
      Thank you, thank you.

      The orangutan story and pic is Stunning!Beautiful creature and so like a child.

      And the wholphin! Where did you get this stuff! You are amazing Kat.

      I have n’t finished yet, have to go to bed.Tomorrow I will look at more.

      Great stories about The Rapture which you folk don’t have to worry about seeing as I am the only one riding to heaven on a cloud.

      Terrific links Kat.You are Superwoman and I salute you!

      Thanks for all your trouble.

      love shadows

      2. You found a parrot!
        But I found two parrots – or maybe I should say two stories that have the word parrot in them, but which are both about pet birds. Hint – they’re back to back.

        And I may as well admit I don’t know whether the second bird is officially classified as a parrot or not.

        Kat

  2. Octopi Are Cool!
    Great story on the octopus. Thanks Kat!

    I once read an article about some aquarium whose lobsters were disappearing. Thinking it must be the night watchman, they set up a video cam to find the octopus in the tank across the room climbing out of it’s tank and into the lobster tank, then back home again after it’s feast. Those mollusks are so cleaver!

    1. octopus running
      Hi TA,
      did you see the video recently of the octopus running on 2 legs? I can’t remember if it was on TV or the net but it was the sort of sensational thing you think you would never see.
      My daughter in law who is captain of a rig tender has seen them on the screen while doing dynamic positioning.
      She said they hide in crevices and when startled come running out on 2 legs.
      I suppose it’s lucky they don’t have an opposable thumb, or they’d long since have taken over the world.

      shadows

  5. What I found interesting
    TDG editors rarely comment on the news anymore. Now that I’m one of them, I know at least one reason why. After a 12 hour news search, we go to sleep. Now that I’m vertical again (if not entirely conscious yet), there are a few tasty bits and pieces I’d like to point out, partly because sometimes the headline doesn’t tell the whole story – or even point in the right direction. So in this case, I’ll just identify the articles by beginning with the highlighted words:

    the Flux — Last week, the International Energy Agency, after years of dithering, warned of an imminent global oil shortage and made a list of surprisingly draconian recommendations, from lowering speed limits in all the advanced industrial nations, to a reduced work week, to a ban on using privately-owned vehicles (!). Nobody in the American government dared comment on that because it might unravel the web of delusion that we can continue living as a nation of tanning hut managers who qualify to buy 3000 square foot suburban McHouses (while making monthly payments on GMC Yukons).

    doomsday — why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? Why bother to convert to alternative sources of energy and reduce dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East? Anyway, until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.

    One is foolish to think that their bizarre ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the fundamentalists’ fantastical theology, but he would not be president without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported that the President “was casting his vision, and that of the country, in the grand vision of God’s master plan.”

    That will mean one thing to Dick Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don’t see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush’s master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration’s multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.

    running out of cheap gas — It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life — not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense — you name it.

    The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

    The United States passed its own oil peak — about 11 million barrels a day — in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily.
    The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West’s ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.

    Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.

    It will change everything about how we live.

    the last days — The plotline of Hammer of Eden, written by best-selling author Ken Follett, revolves around a terrorist group threatening to level San Francisco with a man-made earthquake. When asked by Salon magazine how real is the idea of a man-made earthquake, Follett replied that, “Some of the seismologists told me, ‘There’s no way this could happen.’ But others gave sad little shrugs and said, ‘It’s hard to say. Who knows? Maybe. It’s within the realm of possibly.’”

    In a book entitled Tesla – The Lost Inventions, a section is headed “Man-Made Earthquake”. It discloses Tesla’s fascination with the power of resonance and how he experimented with it not only electrically but on the mechanical plane as well. In his Manhattan lab, Tesla built mechanical vibrators and tested their powers. One experiment got out of hand.

    Tesla attached a powerful little vibrator driven by compressed air to a steel pillar. Leaving it there, he went about his business. Meanwhile, down the street, a violent quaking built up, shaking down plaster, bursting plumbing, cracking windows, and breaking heavy machinery off its anchorages.

    Tesla’s vibrator had found the resonant frequency of a deep sandy layer of subsoil beneath his building, setting off a small earthquake. Soon Tesla’s own building began to quake. It is reported that just as the police broke into his lab, Tesla was seen smashing the device with a sledge hammer, the only way he could promptly stop it.

    If HAARP is a TMT [Tesla Magnifying Transmitter], and these researchers correctly understand Tesla’s work, we could be in a lot of trouble.

    He published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes. MacDonald made a revealing comment: “The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy.”

    In her book Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War, renowned scientist and nuclear activist Dr. Rosalie Bertell says such electromagnetic weapons “have the ability to transmit explosive and other effects such as earthquake induction across intercontinental distances to any selected target site on the globe with force levels equivalent to major nuclear explosions.”

    Rapture — “A huge problem is a lack of willingness to be involved with environmental concerns, because if Jesus returns tomorrow it doesn’t matter if we destroy the Earth.”

    the dominionists — “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost,” Kennedy says. “As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors — in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”

    The Long Emergency — offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy, we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance over the last 200 years. But the oil age, which peaked in 1970, is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.

    photic stimulation — It is interesting to consider the history of flicker, and the Dreamachine’s functional prototypes. Aside from physiologist W. Grey Walter’s astonishing postulate that the Old Testament’s “Tree of Knowledge” is a shrouded reference to the Sun’s rays interrupted by swaying leaves and branches, and the resultant flicker’s contemplative effects on sensitive higher primates, the Rennaissance observed an overt flurry of optic nerve-related occult activity within the Catholic Church.

    Humm, here’s one I left out — must have been temporarily invisible.
    America’s Religious Right – Saints or Subversives?

    apocalyptic secret — Lost for almost 1700 years — Glanum disappeared from history in the generation after 270 CE and was not rediscovered until 1921 — this ancient city holds the key to the “underground stream,” the hidden mysteries of western esotericism. From Parzival and the Holy Grail to Alchemy and the mystery of the cathedrals, from the origins of the Tarot cards to the Hebrew/Druidic/Arthurian cabala, most of the major currents flowing through the underground stream surface, or have their origin, within a few miles of the lost Roman city of Glanum.

    Michel Nostradamus, the justly famous Seer of Provence, was born barely a mile from the Arch and the “pyramid,” as the Augustinian mausoleum was called in the 16th century. In Nostradamus’ time, these two monuments were all that remained above ground of Glanum.

    Standing in the midst of the vineyard planted by Nostradamus’ grandfather, Jean de St. Remy, at the Chateau Roussan, not far from the Roman city of Glanum, it is easy to see in this grafting of vines, the grafting of cultures, from Egyptian to Celtic to Greek to Hebrew, which finally produced the fruit of a specifically European Gnostic Christianity and the wine of the medieval esoteric wisdom.

    King Rene’s interest in the foremost Jewish family in St. Remy might be based on more than their medical skills. Pierre, Jean’s son and Michel’s father, changed his name to Nostredome, or Our Lady, suggesting some link with the Holy Family. Michel Nostradamus, as he Latinized the name, enjoyed a great degree of noble and even royal support all out of proportion to his position as a poor doctor from a recently converted family.

    I can hardly wait to read all 24 pages — whoever Vincent Bridges is, as a writer, he certainly knows how to hold his readers’ attention!

    I recommend Mohammad’s out-of-body experience too. Got a laugh out of Gabrielle saying God was used to Moses yelling at him.

    I’d love to know what all of you TDG readers think about today’s news. So speak up out there. 😉

    Kat

    1. Speak up? I’m too stunned to talk!
      Jesus Kat, I always said you were brilliant,now will you believe me?
      I’ll be reading here for years.
      It’s all amazing, the whole kit and kaboodle.I don’t know how you do it.
      Next week though, can you put something really gory and diabolic in for the ‘Dake,as I owe him one.
      Thanks.

      You not only post the news, you know the news.
      Is this oil shortage the reason we are paying over a dollar a litre here for petrol?
      Actually I think in this case it is profiteering.
      Well looks like the old earth is in for a big shake-up.And how the hell do we get rid of those religious nuts before they run the place.

      shadows

    2. You get a 9.5
      I add my kudos to your fine job of news selection. All the references to Revelations were timely after the TV series premier Wednesday on that topic. (IMO, the premier was not awful. I’ll give it another chance before I deliver my verdict.) The article on RlC was very readable, I concur. The author tied every piece of the known puzzle together in a straightforward and concise manner. The graphics were good and were explained in a way I hadn’t seen — with pentagrams overlaid on text as a way of decoding the secret.

      In Olympic scoring, I’d rate your news day a 9.5. (It would have been a 10 had you included a story (you could easily write this story yourself) about Bill’s Philadelphia-type experiments.) p.s. Don’t be intimidated Jameske, Bill, et al, — your news days are very good also — each with a signature slant that guarantees something for every interest. I love this place.

      1. great gee hose of fats
        My thanks to everyone who thought today’s news list was (as I myself called it) a doozy. But I was asking for comments about the info in the articles, not about the news list itself, so as Jack Benny would say, Now Cut That Out!, ’cause you’re embarrassing me.

        Shadows, I think you made an unintentional joke, because in my long ‘comment’ above, for the most part, all I did was copy and paste. My only comments were about Moses yelling at God, Vincent Bridges writing skills, and news editors.

        Anon, thanks for the further review of Bridges’ The Apolcalyptic Secret of Rennes-le-Chateau. Being one of only about a dozen people on the planet who hasn’t read The Da Vinci Code, I had begun to feel more and more culturally ignorant of late. So last week I bought the illustrated version. I managed to get it in the house before another wave of resistance, procrastination, intimidation or whatever hit me, causing me to decide that before reading it, I should refresh my memory and fill in any gaps with the known facts of the case. The rest of the story is that google and Bridges are pretty tight. 😉

        That’s all I can say without another cup of coffee first 😉
        Kat

  6. Your May bill is going to decrease
    I just got around to reading today’s Rocky Mt. News newspaper. The bottom 1/5 of Section C, page 3, is separated from the rest of the page by a bold black line, above which, in relatively small letters, it says “Business Briefing”. All the items under that black line are tiny little stories – usually one paragraph, maybe up to three paragraphs – with tiny little headlines to match. There’s even a tiny headline of “Etc.”, to group stories that are only one or two sentences long.

    Back in Oct. of last year, The Denver Post announced, with a big quarter-page headline, Natural Gas Rates to Increase 40% in November, accompanied by a long article about it.

    Today, this tiny little headline says “Xcel natural gas bills to show May increase”. Ummm – my May bill, huh? Bound to warm up a bit more by May, don’t you think. …I said to myself.

    Then I read the tiny little three-paragraph article under that tiny headline, way down at the bottom of page 3, Section C:

    “Xcel Energy customers who use natural gas to heat their homes will see a 29 percent to 33 percent decrease in May from April, although bills still will be 15% to 19% higher than in May 2004.

    Xcel on Friday asked state regulators for a 9 percent increase in the price of natural gas it charges customers starting May 1, in view of rising wholesale prices. May is much milder than April, so customers use 36 percent to 43 percent less gas.

    If regulators approve, the natural gas bill of an average residential customer in May will be $36.15, about 33 percent lower than in April but 15 percent higher than last May. For small business customers, the average bill in May will be $162.66 – about 29 percent lower than April and 19 percent higher than a year ago.”

    Okay, are all of you straight on all those percentages? They were really important – they came both before and after the main point – I mean the secondary poi – uhhh, the third point of the article, which was there in the middle somewhere.

    But if you missed that, uhh, third point, I wouldn’t worry about it. Inflation is so under control, hardly anyone ever mentions it. And everyone knows there isn’t any energy problem. Sure, gasoline may be up a little, but you know that’s just because of all those stupid state regulations saying in the summer we need a different kind of gasoline mix, with more ethanol or something to prevent smog or ozone or something, and every spring it costs all the refineries an arm and a leg to switch over to making this totally unnecessary summer mix – heck, every spring they forget they’re supposed to switch, because it’s so stupid, and then prices go up because it takes them so long to switch over to making this summer mix. I’m sure I read that the price of a barrel of oil fell this past week, so this increase must just be due to all this unnecessary regulation.

    The main thing I need to keep in mind is that my May natural gas heating bill is going to be lower than my April natural gas heating bill. That part was perfectly clear.

    Kat

  7. I found the other parrot
    Like the wheels of God I grind slowly, but exceedingly sure.
    Or something like that.

    The other parrot is actually a kookaburra, a member of the kingfisher family and not a parrot at all.
    They are stunning looking birds and when I was a kid we called them Laughing Jackasses.
    I think that term is now applied to politicians.

    They like to hang around householders who will give them meat but they get short shrift at my place because if you have a kookaburra in residence in a local tree you won’t have any small birds like finches or thrushes.

    My mother had a budgie in a cage many years ago and she put it out in the morning to get some sun.
    A kookaburra killed it by sticking it’s beak in the cage and pecking it to death trying to get it out.

    Once you hear the sound of a kookaburra laughing you know you must be in Australia, although Hollywood had a habit of inserting their laugh into the sound-track of any jungle movie.

    About the parrot who resides with me, old Garlic Mouth….he inherited my old keyboard and spent the morning writing emails to his mates in his little Capitalist Clique.
    You know the type…what’s your’s is mine and what’s mine’s my own.
    And what’s everyone else’s is mine too.
    Probably complaining about conditions….no full-time access to the net and garlic only three times a day.

    Thanks Kat,

    shadows

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