Mr. Adachi bringing it hard in 2011...there really isn't much else to say.
Behold.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
"This Moment to ARise"
A Tornado of Red-Winged BlackbirdsI don't know if I have any readers left following my incredibly long absence this year...but anyone who has followed my work should not be surprised that my attention has been consumed by the recent deaths of some 5,000 Red-winged BLACKBIRDS in Beebe, AR. ("BEE" farmer).
This mass death is being considered blunt force trauma after poisons, and other modes of death have been ruled out by various sources statewide. Official causes are being presented as confusion created by fireworks on that evening, leading the birds to fly into houses and cars; to one report which suggested that 20 loud booms were reported just prior to the birds demise which was methane gas explosions again attributed to fireworks being shot into the sky.
http://www.alien-earth.org/forum/message.php?message=75601&mpage=1&showdate=1/3/11
This bizarre open air bird drop took place Friday, December 31st 2010...during the same period some 80 to 100,000 fish turned up dead in the nearby Arkansas River.
Both events are also tied to a series of tornadoes earlier that day, which swept across Missouri and within 150 miles of Beebe, in Cincinnati, AR. where 3 people were confirmed dead. According to tornado records, only one other tornado has ever been reported at this time of year. Obviously, Arkansas Governor Mike BEEBE ("BEE" farmer) called for a state of emergency.
Monday, January 3rd 2011 another mass bird death is reported in Pointe Coupee, LA. ("Place of the cut off"). This time 500 birds, mostly Red-winged BLACKBIRDS with Starlings mixed in, fell from the skies dead on impact. January 3rd is not exactly one of the hottest firework display dates on ANY calender, and in my mind rules out all previous attempts to explain the Dec. 31st event.
***Breaking News*** Similar stories are now appearing in Kentucky on a smaller scale, and from Maryland where hundreds of thousands of dead fish are turning up in the Chesapeake Bay. Winter weather conditions are the main culprit in these deaths...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/giant-fish-kill-in-chesapeake.html
****The Plot thickens**** Randomly Sweden enters the scene
STOCKHOLM — Officials say about 50 birds have been found dead on a street in Sweden.
Veterinarian Robert ter Horst says the cause of jackdaws' (A SMALL VARIETY OF EUROPEAN CROW/BLACKBIRD) deaths was unclear but that fireworks were set off near the scene Tuesday night.
The birds were found dead on Wednesday.
Ter Horst says cold weather, difficulties finding food and possible shock from the fireworks could be responsible, leading to the stressed birds either dying from the stress or being run over by vehicles.
Five of the dead jackdaws found in the city of Falkoping were being tested.
Mass bird deaths aren't uncommon.
In the U.S., New Year's Eve fireworks were blamed in Arkansas for killing thousands of blackbirds, and a few days later power lines likely killed about 450 birds in Louisiana.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/05/dead-birds-sweden_n_804600.html
Next time we will delve further into BLACKBIRDS, The New Madrid Fault Zone...and what could be happening in the American South in the coming year.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Doubleplusgood CNN
Thanks to Red Ice for this via: John D. Sutter and the folks at CNN...
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.
Editor's Note: This is part of a CNN series called ""End of Privacy." Watch CNN today from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. ET for more "End of Privacy" stories. And please join the conversation on Twitter by replying to @cnntech or following #endofprivacy.
(CNN) -- The opening passage from George Orwell's "1984" depicts a guy hustling up a stairwell that's plastered with giant posters of a man's face staring at him.
"It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move," Orwell writes in the classic dystopian novel. "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran."
These days, Big Brother doesn't need to do much snooping. We just tell him what we're up to. We tweet, check in on Foursquare, use digital payment systems and generally live so publicly that spying loses at least some degree of utility.
Meanwhile, we're quickly expanding the systems we've built to monitor ourselves and our environments. We connect our power consumption to the internet via "smart meters," we let Google's cameras map our streets and we use wireless gadgets to transmit vital signs to doctors.
All of that may sound horrifying. But as old notions of privacy evaporate, some benefits of a shared and monitored life become clearer. All this data has the potential to make our cities more efficient, encourage social connectedness and even aid in response to major disasters, such as earthquakes.
Here's a look at 10 ways constant monitoring and all-the-time online sharing can improve modern life. If you find this contrarian view to be downright Orwellian, let us know in the comments section.
1. Monitored city systems
In 2009, researchers from MIT's SENSEable City Lab tacked wireless GPS monitors onto paper coffee cups, aluminum cans and bottles of dish soap. Then they tossed that stuff in the garbage and sat back to watch what happened.
Some of the trash traveled more than 1,000 miles before landing in a final resting place. They hope that kind of info can help cities and trash management companies do their work more efficiently.
2. Health monitors
Chronic heart diseases, Alzheimer's and diabetes require constant monitoring, but doctor's visits only come about so often. Cue a new generation of wireless heath monitors that let people transmit data about their blood-sugar levels, weight and heart rate to doctors without leaving home.
Some older people have taken this idea a step further still, installing networks of sensors in their homes so someone will know if they break from the routine. If an older woman hasn't opened her refrigerator in several hours, for example, an automatic alarm might send text messages to her kids so they can check to make sure she's eating regularly.
3. Disaster response
In the aftermath of January's earthquake in Haiti, volunteers all over the world scoured the internet for information about the damage.
Public tweets -- some tagged with data about where they were sent -- as well as text messages and photos from Haiti were put on a living, updating map. This info was used by emergency responders who were trying to get aid to the places where it was needed most.
4. Bored on Tuesday
Location-based social networks aren't the most widely used services in the tech world. By the measure of one survey, only about 4 percent of internet users connect with friends on Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR and the like.
But for people who blab their real-world locations on these networks, social connections can emerge. Foursquare users, for example, can look at their smartphones to see where all of their friends have "checked in" most recently. If a friend is at your neighborhood bar on a random weeknight, you might just drop in to say hello.
5. Traffic maps
Once upon a time, people got traffic reports from radio DJs who spewed off the latest car crashes, usually only taking into account the major interstates. Now, a real-time traffic layer on Google Maps shows users a block-by-block view of where the backups are.
Magic? Not quite. Google relies on drivers to share anonymous information about where they are. It then takes that data, in aggregate, and figures out how quickly cars are moving on various roads and then creates a map of the flow.
6. Smart grid
Right now, most of us don't know much about our home electricity consumption. Bills go up in the summer for air conditioning and down in the winter. That's about it. But the U.S. government is in the process of deploying a smart electricity grid, which will take information about home energy use and translate it into money-saving energy tips.
One software company, called OPOWER, takes data from the smart grid and spits out home energy use reports that compare one person's energy use to that of their neighbors, on average. This data helps OPOWER's users save, on average, 2% to 3% on their energy bills.
7. Free stuff
There's often a trade-off between privacy and free services. Products such as Gmail are free because they target users with ads. Similarly, people who are willing to "check in" on smartphone apps to their favorite stores can get deals. Foursquare "mayors" -- the people who visit one location more times than anyone else -- often are eligible for free stuff. And SCVNGR app users complete check-in-based challenges that can earn them free merchandise or food.
8. Monitoring earthquakes
We can't accurately predict them, but some researchers say we could respond to earthquakes more quickly if we turned huge networks of laptop and desktop computers into seismic monitors.
In a pilot project from Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, researchers linked up at least 1,400 computers to do just that. Sensors -- either inside computer hard drives or attached to office desks -- send readings to a central database that processes them in aggregate.
9. Looking for content you'll "like"
The Web is so big that it can seem infinite and daunting. But by sharing the content you "like" on the internet with Facebook friends, you help them find websites, stories and videos they otherwise would have missed. Increasingly, these public preferences are visible to your Facebook friends both on and off Facebook.com. If you're logged into Facebook, now, for instance, you can see if any of your Facebook friends have "recommended" this article.
10. Environmental sensors
We're not the only ones who can be watched. Plenty of environmental scientists are interested in using tiny sensors, sometimes called "smart dust," to monitor nature and get a better understanding of how it works.
Sensors in California's redwood forests, for example, have taught scientists at the University of California at Berkeley about how these giant trees take in water through fog. And researchers at Intel Labs have developed a prototype smartphone that, when uploading information to the internet, including a person's location, could be used to track air quality readings in major metro areas.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Cthulhu Sighting!
This rather intriguing story from the wonderful folks over at io9:
The Reverend Ichabod Wiswall (1637-1700) is a historical footnote. When he's remembered, it's for giving the first funeral sermon in America, in Duxbury, Massachusetts. So why is there a Lovecraftian cephalopod on his gravestone?
Wiswall was responsible, with the Reverend Increase Mather, for persuading Queen Mary to create the 1692 charter which united the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay into the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which became the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Wiswall served the town of Duxbury as a minister for 24 years and is buried in Duxbury in the Myles Standish Burial Ground, supposedly the oldest continually maintained cemetery in the United States.
The winged skull atop the gravestone is not unusual for pre-1750 gravestones, which had a range of meaning-laden symbols on them, from arrows (symbolic of martyrdom) to scallops (symbolic of resurrection). But the cephalopod, which might be anything from a cuttlefish to a squid, is seemingly unique-a search of the literature turned up no record of a pre-1750 gravestone with any version of a cephalopod on it.
It's fitting that Wiswall's gravestone has a touch of weirdness. According to the record books of Plymouth Colony, there were two Ichabod Wiswalls alive in 1667, the second Ichabod marrying Remember Wiswall that year-but the second Ichabod Wiswall disappears from the historical record after that, an oddity for the record-obsessed Puritans. The Myles Standish Burial Ground was abandoned in 1789 under mysterious circumstances-1789 of course being the year of George Washington's first inauguration as well as the year that the French Revolution began-and was "reclaimed" only in 1887. Standish himself, the military advisor to the Plymouth Colony and a man of particular brutality, seems to have rested unquietly in the Burial Ground: the initial location of his burial site was unknown, and it took three separate exhumations to conclusively discover where he lay. The center of the Burial Ground was occupied by two pyramids, although pyramids as grave markers only became common in the 19th century.
Nor is Duxbury free of its own oddities. Duxbury does not feature in any of Lovecraft's fiction; "Arkham" is based on Salem, "Innsmouth" is based on a combination of Ipswich and Gloucester, and "Dunwich" is based on Athol. But Duxbury was no stranger to sea serpents, even in Wiswall's day. The English writer John Josselyn's An Account of Two Voyages to New-England (1674) described the 1639 sighting of a sea serpent off Cape Anne, north of Duxbury, which sparked a rash of sea-serpent sightings along the Massachusetts coast, including Duxbury. And in 1857 Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal that Daniel Webster had seen a sea-serpent off the coast of Duxbury.
So it makes a kind of sense for a Lovecraftian cephalopod to appear on the Reverend Wiswall's gravestone. The only question remaining is, is Wiswall dead in his grave, or does he merely wait there, dreaming?
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Off the Court
Manu Ginobili has started something with the UFO sighting he reported outside the Spurs’ hotel in Santa Monica, Ca, back on Dec. 1.
Trail Blazers coach Nate McMillan related his own encounter — not that close, but definitely unexplainable — with an object in the sky he couldn’t identify.
It happened when McMillan was a youngster growing up in Raleigh, N.C., in the 1970s.
[I too saw something which I recalled many years later and think to have maybe been a UFO. This was in the 1970's, and in Raleigh, NC. as well...]
“I was playing football with friends, and on the way home, behind the library I saw something that looked a little strange to me as a kid,” McMillan said before Sunday’s game between the Spurs and Blazers. “It was just starting to get dark, and on my way home, walking behind the library, I just saw something that didn’t look right
“I’m not saying a UFO. I just saw something that, for me, was, well, I don’t know what I saw. “I never really said anything about it, or made a fuss about it, but it was weird to me.”
http://www.whalesinspace.com/2010/12/basketball-player-shares-ufo-experience-with-fans-on-facebook/
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
New World Airport throws a bone
http://www.kwgn.com/news/kdvr-dia-debunks-theories-txt,0,5366148.story
"When asked why the Masons were allowed to bury artifacts in an international airport, Chasansky replied, "I wasn't there for the discussion about why that happened, but that happens in a lot of buildings because the tradition of the Masons is --as people who make buildings."
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Angels & Demons
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7056689.ece
Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican", according to the Holy See's chief exorcist.
Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon".
He added: "When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' [a phrase coined by Pope Paul VI in 1972] in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia."
He claimed that another example of satanic behavior was the Vatican "cover-up" over the deaths in 1998 of Alois Estermann, the then commander of the Swiss Guard, his wife and Corporal Cedric Tornay, a Swiss Guard, who were all found shot dead. "They covered up everything immediately," he said. "Here one sees the rot".
A remarkably swift Vatican investigation concluded that Corporal Tornay had shot the commander and his wife and then turned his gun on himself after being passed over for a medal. However Tornay's relatives have challenged this. There have been unconfirmed reports of a homosexual background to the tragedy and the involvement of a fourth person who was never identified.
Father Amorth, who has just published Memoirs of an Exorcist, a series of interviews with the Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti, said that the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981 had been the work of the Devil, as had an incident last Christmas when a mentally disturbed woman threw herself at Pope Benedict XVI at the start of Midnight Mass, pulling him to the ground.
Father José Antonio Fortea Cucurull, a Rome-based exorcist, said that Father Amorth had "gone well beyond the evidence" in claiming that Satan had infiltrated the Vatican corridors.
"Cardinals might be better or worse, but all have upright intentions and seek the glory of God," he said. Some Vatican officials were more pious than others, "but from there to affirm that some cardinals are members of satanic sects is an unacceptable distance."
Father Amorth told La Repubblica that the devil was "pure spirit, invisible. But he manifests himself with blasphemies and afflictions in the person he possesses. He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, transform himself or appear to be agreeable. At times he makes fun of me."
He said it sometimes took six or seven of his assistants to to hold down a possessed person. Those possessed often yelled and screamed and spat out nails or pieces of glass, which he kept in a bag. "Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals."
He said that hoped every diocese would eventually have a resident exorcist. Under Church Canon Law any priest can perform exorcisms, but in practice they are carried out by a chosen few trained in the rites.
Father Amorth was ordained in 1954 and became an official exorcist in 1986. In the past he has suggested that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were possessed by the Devil. He was among Vatican officials who warned that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels made a "false distinction between black and white magic".
He approves, however, of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which although "exaggerated" offered a "substantially exact" picture of possession.
In 2001 he objected to the introduction of a new version of the exorcism rite, complaining that it dropped centuries-old prayers and was "a blunt sword" about which exorcists themselves had not been consulted. The Vatican said later that he and other exorcists could continue to use the old ritual.
He is the president of honour of the Association of Exorcists.
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