Saturday, May 5, 2012

In Memorium: Adam Yauch, aka MCA

Tonight, it's all about The Beastie Boys. 

Seattle Attorney Andrew Basiago Claims U.S. Sent Him On Time Travels (VIDEO)

Sweet.  Despite the really annoying interviewer and audio, the video is interesting.  The Huffington Post.  Excerpts:

A lot of people have a hard time trusting lawyers as it is, but what about one who claims he was part of a secret government time travel program when he was a kid?



Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in "Project Pegasus," a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.


"They trained children along with adults so they could test the mental and physical effects of time travel on kids," Basiago told The Huffington Post. "Also, children had an advantage over adults in terms of adapting to the strains of moving between past, present and future."
Exploits:
Basiago claimed he can be seen in a photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, which he said he visited in 1972 via a plasma confinement chamber located in East Hanover, N.J.



"I had been dressed in period clothing, as a Union bugle boy," he said. "I attracted so much attention at the Lincoln speech site at Gettysburg -- wearing over-sized men's street shoes -- that I left the area around the dais and walked about 100 paces over to where I was photographed in the Josephine Cogg image of Lincoln at Gettysburg." (The boy on the left in the photo below).(At the link..)


In addition, Basiago said he traveled to Ford's Theatre the night of Lincoln's assassination on five or six occasions. "I did not, however, witness the assassination," he said. "Once, I was on the theater level when he was shot and I heard the shot followed by a great commotion that arose from the crowd. It was terrible to hear."


Basiago said each of his visits to the past was different, "like they were sending us to slightly different alternative realities on adjacent timelines. As these visits began to accumulate, I twice ran into myself during two different visits."


Being sent back in time to the same place and moment, but from different starting points in the present, allowed two of himselves to be in Ford's Theatre at the same time in 1865.




Whether or not you believe him, he is articulate, focused and feels very comfortable with the topic at hand.  I'm hopeful the concept is reality, so I hope Andrew Basiago is indeed telling the truth.  Ladies and Gentlemen; Steve Burns with The Flaming Lips..

The rise of the new Holy Roman Empire? EU technocrats plot to create powerful EU president

Let the cloak and dagger shenanigans begin!  Spoiler alert:  The takeover is spearheaded by a power mad German!  Shocker, right?  Express, via The Extinction Protocol. Excerpts:

Senior Eurocrats are secretly plotting to create a super-powerful EU president to realize their dream of abolishing Britain, we can reveal. A covert group of EU foreign ministers has drawn up plans for merging the jobs currently done by Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. The new bureaucrat, who would not be directly elected by voters, is set to get sweeping control over the entire EU and force member countries into ever-greater political and economic union. Tellingly, the UK has been excluded from the confidential discussions within the shady “Berlin Group” of Europhile politicians, spearheaded by German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle. Opponents fear the plan could create a modern-day equivalent of the European emperor envisaged by Napoleon Bonaparte or a return to the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne that dominated Europe in the Dark Ages. They are concerned that David Cameron’s coalition Government is doing nothing to prevent the sinister plot. The secret talks were uncovered by Independent Labour peer Lord Stoddart of Swindon.

 This won't end well.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Satellite Images Reveal an Ancient Network of Rivers in Arabian Desert

Evidence and Examples of Earth Changes Throughout History.  The Truth Behind The Scenes.  Excerpts:

Satellite images have revealed that a network of ancient rivers once flowed through the sands of the Arabian Desert, leading scientists to believe that the region experienced wetter periods in the past.


The images are the starting point for a major potentially ground-breaking research project led by the University of Oxford into human evolutionary heritage. The research team will look at how long-term climate change affected early humans and animals who settled or passed through and what responses determined whether they were able to survive or died out.


Until now this part of the world has been largely ignored by scholars despite its critical location as a bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In a project funded by the ERC (European Research Council), a multidisciplinary team of researchers will study the effects of environmental change in the Arabian Peninsula over the last two million years. The systematic study of the Pleistocene to Holocene periods will be unique in its length and level of detail.


Over the course of five years the researchers will study the landscape features and excavate sites of likely archaeological interest, using the network of water courses as a map. They will use the latest dating techniques to pinpoint the ages of fossils of animals, plants and different stone tool technologies and compare the similarities and differences displayed in the region’s rock art.


The team’s main focus will be the Arabian Desert, but the work will also cover the wider Peninsula. One key question they will attempt to answer is when the first early modern humans are likely to have first arrived in the Arabian Peninsula from Africa and perhaps surrounding regions. They will also look for evidence that suggests how early modern humans were able to survive, or not, in arid and extreme conditions.


Project leader Professor Michael Petraglia, Co-Director of the Centre for Asian Archaeology at Oxford University’s School of Archaeology, said: ‘From NASA images (above) taken of the Arabian Desert we can see physical landscape features that are visible from space that denote a whole network of former river valleys and lake basins. These lines and dips in the sand provide us with a map of the region upon which we will focus our research activity. The presence of water is an accurate indicator of where early humans and animals migrated to or settled.

Given enough time, a completely, radically different understanding of Earth's physical history will develop.  It's happening now, and when unified, will be awesome.  Not now, but soon.  Tomorrow's Started..

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

FCC urged to revoke Fox broadcast licenses

Wow.  CREW's picking a HUGE fight.  Now that Rupert's been ruled unfit for stewardship of NewsCorp International in Great Britain, there's a chance he can lose his American television licenses, too.  It'll be interesting to see how the media covers this one..  The Raw Story.   Excerpts:

A Washington-based ethics watchdog is calling on federal regulators to revoke News Corporation’s 27 Fox broadcast licences in the wake of the highly critical report on phone hacking from the UK parliament.



Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) has written to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, calling on the regulator to pull the plug on Rupert Murdoch’s lucrative television licences on grounds of character.


The letter argues that the final report of the UK Commons culture, media and sport committee, which concluded that Murdoch was not fit to run a major international company, had implications for the US regulators that they had now to act upon.


Melanie Sloan, Crew’s director, said that the Murdochs had clearly failed the character test that is embedded within US media law as it is within British. “If they are not passing the character standard under British law, it seems to me that they are not going to meet the character standard in America.”


In their report, the British parliamentarians found Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person” to exercise stewardship of a major international company. The Commons culture, media and sport select committee also concluded that James Murdoch showed “wilful ignorance” of the extent of phone hacking during 2009 and 2010.


Under FCC regulations, broadcast frequencies can only be handed to firms run by people of good “character” who serve the “public interest” and speak with “candor”. In making that judgment, the FCC is entitled to consider past conduct of media owners, including conduct that does not relate directly to their broadcasting interests, as well as any patterns of alleged misbehaviour.
..

But Crew insisted that as more information emerges about the failure of News Corp to deal with its hacking crisis, federal authorities would eventually be forced to act. The watchdog has also written to the US Senate and House committees on commerce calling for congressional hearings into whether the Murdochs were fit to hold the Fox TV licences. A similar request from Crew last year went unanswered.

And:
Some shareholders are intensifying their calls for a shake-up at the top of News Corp on the back of the British parliamentary report. Change to Win, an advisory group that works with pension funds with over $200bn in assets, called for Murdoch to resign. Senior policy analyst Michael Pryce-Jones said News Corp’s board should meet to form a succession plan immediately. “This is a company in crisis,” he said.



Pryce-Jones said that when he first saw the headlines about the report he had assumed they were talking about James Murdoch. “This is far worse than I had expected,” he said. “The focus is now on Rupert.”
He added: “In any other company James would have have been sacked in July and we’d be preparing for succession. [Rupert] Murdoch clearly can not stay on a CEO and chairman of this company.”


Pryce-Jones said he blamed News Corp’s independent directors for much of what had gone wrong. The directors include top US lawyer Viet Dinh, chief architect of the USA Patriot Act, Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City department of education and Rod Eddington, former chief executive of British Airways. “They have said that they are going to act, but they have done nothing. They need a Plan B. Plan A was apparently to ignore this and hope it would go away,” he said.


The headwinds Rupert faces now just got stronger.

Music Spolight: Really Random 70's. Really.

Pay attention!  Beginning at 10 seconds, going to 24, the man on the far right:  Best dancing I've ever seen.  Brilliant.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Sakurajima erupted

Short and sweet post from Fukushima Diary, and non-nuclear, to boot!  The pictures are worth the click.  Sakurajima's activity is not out of the ordinary, as they had 996 eruptions last year (Averaging almost three a day..).  Scientists are concerned, though, that further crustal deformations might facillitate more serious eruptions.  No event timeline predictions were included.

Today's Blind Items - The Hookers Return

Juicy.  Crazy Days And Nights.  Excerpts:


I have written about the hookers a couple of times. The famous duo that split when one had success and the other continued to keep selling her body for less and less money. The less successful hooker just has never been able to find that gold mine but now she figures she has a huge way to make money and has been shopping a book about her former partner in crime. It features stories that even I didn't know and apparently also documents how the more successful hooker has always planned to have happen what is happening in her life right now. There are e-mails and copies of texts from a few years ago when they were still speaking all the time about how the more successful hooker wanted to find a rich man who was good looking but in the closet. It turns out that the successful hooker hates sex. In fact, the less successful hooker says that pills are about the only way the more successful one can get through it. The successful hooker even named four guys she thought would be perfect for her and she got one of the four.



The book also names names and how much celebrities and athletes paid. It talks about every athlete they have been with and how many times they were busted by wives but because the hookers were celebrities they managed to not get accused of doing anything with the husbands. They would say they were with the husband for a reality show idea. The wives would get so excited at the prospect of being on a reality show they would not even wonder why the husband had been with one or both of the hookers in his hotel room.


Yowsah.  The consensus from commenters appears to indicate either Brittany Gastineau or Paris Hilton(!) for the less successful hooker, and Kim Kardashian(!!) as the more successful one.  Crazy?  Maybe..  Other than that miserable, short lived "E" show, I've never heard of Gastineau, and if she has a sex tape out, it isn't nearly as famous as the other two.  Also, that's how they became famous!  Both of their biographies make more sense if this is indeed about them.  The phenomenon of famous-for-being-famous has never made sense to me, especially considering none of these people seem to have "talent." 

So if this indeed who the consensus thinks this is, when their sex tapes were released, were they "accidents" as much as they were "marketing strategy?"  Also, would this really be that much of a stretch to believe that, with sex as pervasive as it is culturally, that nationally famous attention whores might have started their careers as bona-fide whores?

I feel bad for whomever this may be.  Money, fame, fabulous-ity, surrounded by equally soul-less vessels, all dancing faster as The Void becomes larger, inescapable..  Chaos and  flashbulbs and chasing the Next Big Fix slowly snuffs out any remains of humanity.  The quiet of an empty room must be terrifying.

Spain in recession as austerity bites deep

Austerity is Stasis/Immovable Object.  Dynamic populations are Inertia/Irresistible Force.  There's definitely going to be more trouble before stability and growth returns.  Reuters.  Excerpts:

Spain sank into recession in the first quarter and economists said spending cuts aimed at meeting strict EU deficit limits, together with a reeling bank sector, would delay any return to growth until late this year or beyond.



It is the second recession in just over two years for the euro zone's fourth largest economy and comes as the government tries to convince investors it will not need outside aid to put its house in order.


The country is caught between pressure from its European peers to fix public finances and growing domestic resistance to austerity measures that have helped push unemployment to more than double the EU average.



Ratings agency Standard & Poor's added to the country's problems with a two-notch rating downgrade last week and on Monday it chopped the credit score of 11 banks.
..
"The wheels are very clearly coming off," Jefferies economist David Owen said. "It wouldn't surprise me to see a very significant decline in GDP both in the second and third quarters this year."

..
Spain's demand for electricity, a good indicator of the strength of economic output, fell for the eighth month in a row in April, the national grid operator said.



Spanish bonds showed little reaction to the GDP report but yields have risen to around 6 percent in recent weeks. At around 7 percent, they are seen as financially unsustainable.


The IBEX share index finished April down 12.7 percent, its worst monthly showing in nearly 1-1/2 years..

The real problems haven't even begun.  Spain and Greece are just the opening act.  Followed by, in no particular order, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland.  The others(E.U. and non-E.U.) will also be sucked asunder, victims of Austerity's implosion wave.  How much pressure can France, and ultimately Germany, withstand? 

The E.U.'s individual country/collective state implosion illustrates the concept of Immovable Object/ Irresistible Force:  I'm unsure of the outcome, but the Victor will soon be known by all.  These circumstances, at present, cannot sustain.  There will be no dispute after this head-on, high-impact event.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Mysterious ‘Montauk Monster’ Washes Up In Seal Beach, CA – April 26, 2012

Aww yeah..  He, she, or it is back!  The Truth Behind The Scenes.  Excerpts:

An unidentified ‘Mountak’ creature was discovered Wednesday by a woman taking her daily walk along the shore in Seal Beach.



Karen Summers says the animal corpse didn’t look like anything she had ever witnessed.
And:
The discovery is reminiscent of the so-called “Montauk Monster,” an unidentified creature that allegedly washed up on a beach near the business district of Montauk, New York in July 2008.”

Techno Chimera What remains of a test animal from a failed time travel experiment?  Designer Pet?  Montauk Monster; Explain yourself!