John Ernst Worrell Keely
Sometimes I catch myself saying that a particular organ is the most important organ in the body. Of course they are all important; you can get by without a few of them but the rest cannot work alone; the heart is no more important than the stomach or the brain more important than the kidney. If one doesn’t function neither does the other. The same goes for thinking about inventors; who was the greatest? Edison comes to mind for his many patents of practical things we use everyday. But where would he have been without Faraday.
Of Tesla, who for a long time was mostly unknown by the general public, it could be said that the modern technical world would have been impossible with out his inventions.
All of that was a way of introducing you to another name that you may not have heard of. The modern world would have been possible without his work but in some ways it is more profound than that of Tesla’s. I speak of John Keely, a man I had never heard of before 1987. As with Tesla, I began an intense interest which continues to grow.
While Edison and Tesla worked with electricity, Keely work with sound. He was a contemporary of both Edison and Tesla. He was born in 1827 and died in 1898. One author (Jerry Decker, founder of Keelynet.com, which see) said of him, “A man with ideas so revolutionary even today, one hundred years later, his ideas are only beginning to have meaning… Through the use of high-frequency photography we are now discovering what Mr. Keely spoke so truthfully about in his workshop to incredulous "scientists." None of whom ever did get the slightest idea of his true teachings.”
Decker also noted, “It will change society and the world as we know it when we learn to duplicate Keely's discoveries and put them into practical use.”
What were some of Keely’s contributions? As I mentioned before, his discoveries were profound, as you read in Decker’s summary.
1) A means of acoustically dissociating water, instantly exploding 3 drops to produce pressures up to 29,000 pounds per square inch.
2) a microscope believed to have used Ultraviolet light and which could project an image on a wall of an atom in motion, Keely used phase conjugation to slow, speed up or STOP the motion of these atoms, this to him was a research tool.
3) using images of Chladni (vibrating waveplates) tables to analyze the complex motions of single and multiple frequencies, much like our modern oscilloscopes except that rather than stretching a wave out over time, the waves project from one or more excitation points to emanate circular waves which collide and interact with other waves.
4) a means to use sound to reduce 'gravity' in a test mass, even to the point of cancellation.
5) a means to use sound to produce thrust to move an object, not simply sound but to entrain aether/zpe for propulsion.
6) several versions of acoustic engines that could be keyed to resonantly couple with some universal frequency to produce continuous very high torque rotation of a properly designed motor.
7) an understanding of how music and interference can heal and correct conditions in the body including mental problems.
8) a means to acoustically disintegrate quartz mineral.
There are others, but these stand out as rediscoveries that could prove very useful to the world.
His anti-gravity experiments, if true, are mind boggling. In some cases he was able to lift objects weighing tons including a locomotive. The experiments were testified to by many witnesses as reported in the newspapers.
His rock disintegrator, which could go through quartz like a butter knife through butter, holds my fascination. And so the possibilities for mining did not escape the attention of investors. But of great interest to me are the reports that the device had anti-gravity properties and that when the miners got bored at night they played games with it. Newspapers reported ‘boat races in the sky’ in the areas where the machines were used for mining. While some stories may be apocryphal, it should not detract from a serious consideration of his work. He anticipated many later anomalous discoveries of anti-gravitational phenomenon. For example, in the current news is an ongoing story about a discovery Von Braun made at the beginning of the space age, but was kept secret; all having to do with anti-gravity. A notice on the George Noory radio show, Coast to Coast, introduces a program you will want to check out.
Antigravity, Zero Energy, Von Braun, & Nazi Secrets
In a special 4-hour show, Richard C. Hoagland discussed Wernher von Braun's secret related to anti-gravity technology and space exploration. Researcher Joseph P. Farrell joined in the conversation in the latter half of the program. Hoagland presented his thesis that during the launch of the Explorer I rocket in 1958, von Braun discovered an anti-gravity effect was taking place. The effect, related to the craft's orbit, defied Newtonian physics and was kept secret, said Hoagland. He explained that he pieced it together using "circumstantial physics." Farrell outlined Nazi connections associated with the anti-gravity discovery. A "post-war Nazi International" group may have employed alternative physics for a secret space program running parallel to NASA, he stated. Von Braun was obsessed with Mars, and Hoagland suggested the Nazis believed their ancestors came from Mars, and their goal was to return there.
For more, see the Enterprise Mission report Von Braun’s 50-Year-Old Secret Part 1, Part II.
There are many ways to research the properties of gravity; Keely used acoustics to achieve certain frequencies, all of which certainly have electromagnetic properties. Bedini, whom you will read about in the above reference, achieved anti-gravity by spin on a ball. Victor Schauberger discovered that temperature and vortexes accounted for observed anti-gravitational features of water. Townsend Brown used electrostatic charge to reveal information about gravity that became classified. Each of these inventors were debunked in the scientific literature, Keely was no exception.
I end this introduction of a mostly unknown genius with a final note from Decker:
Unfortunately the history books took the Scientific American debunking as fact and John Keely has been portrayed historically as a fraud and a con-man. Those who have any inkling of physics who have studied what remains of his work, know these reports to be mostly erroneous. For those who are too skeptical or brain dead to study the matter, I consider it their loss. We work to correct history by trying to rediscover how to produce the same phenomena Keely demonstrated, some of it copied using electric currents instead of acoustics, by the more famous Nikola Tesla.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
ONCE THERE WAS AMERICA
ONCE THERE WAS AMERICA
...Let it never be forgot that once there was a Camelot.
[I pass on this excellent article by Pierre Lemieux, MP, Ontario, Canada ws]
THE IDEA OF AMERICA
by Pierre Lemieux
As Lord Acton reminded us, the American Revolution exerted much influence in France and in the world. America was seen as a beacon of liberty. The Statue of Liberty proclaims: “From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome”. Liberty – individual liberty – was the essence of the idea of America. In his Civil Disobedience , Henry David Thoreau conveys the spirit when he reports that, in half an hour, he was “in a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.”
The idea of America as the beacon of liberty has survived until quite recently. For example, in a reflection on the growth of government surveillance, law professor Peter P. Swire writes, “the beacon of liberty argument suggests that U.S. adoption of surveillance tools can have significant negative effects elsewhere in the world.” “Instead of applying its weight on the side of liberty,” he explains, “the United States is becoming a leader in requiring surveillance technologies... The moral authority of the United States will be on the side of government rather than on the side of individual liberty.” Swire is not talking about the obvious growth of government surveillance that has followed 9/11: he was writing in 1999, and focussing mainly on the monitoring of financial transactions with tools like money-laundering controls.
When Was America?
Remember America? In the 1950s, there was no political correctness, and Americans were proud of their culture. Despite the grip of religion, one could privately indulge in pornography without much risk. More generally, one could quite safely entertain one’s vices on one’s private property. There were no laws against sexual harassment. There was already much economic regulation, often inherited from the 1930s, but it did not directly affect the average American, and men of business were not scared of the state. There was no public health insurance – no Medicare, no Medicaid. The owner of a restaurant or a bar could run it as he wished, and admit whomever he wanted, including smokers. The rule of law was still more a means for citizens to defend themselves against the state than a way for the state to control them. Except for the driver’s license, there were no ID papers, and even drivers’ licenses often did not bear photographs. Cops were humble, at least if you looked like a sovereign individual and knew how to talk. For a Western European immigrant, America was still a paradise of freedom and the easy life.
Better, consider the first decade of the 20th century. In general, anybody could start a business, find investors, and sell his product without any government license and oversight. There was no SEC, no IRS, no FCC, no FDA, no OSHA, no USCIS (formerly INS), no EPA. The absence of regulation did not prevent the development of vibrant capital markets, and New York City was on its way to becoming the top financial place in the world. The right to keep and bear arms, so typically American in the 20th century, had survived relatively unscathed. There was no witch-hunt and, in a legal fight between an individual and the government, it is the latter that felt handicapped. Writing in 1910, Lord Acton could confidently say that the American people are “more free than any other the world has seen.” In her celebration of American liberty in the early 20th century, Rose Wilder Lane could exclaim: “That is what Europeans meant when, after a few days in this country, they exclaimed, ‘You are so free here!’.”
And there was even more liberty before the Civil War – at least if one was a white man. “[W]e have gone downhill from the Revolution until now,” writes Voltairine de Cleyre.
Once, it seems, there was America.
When was America? It would be overly ambitious to try to answer this question. It is easier, even if less satisfying, to point out the opposition between the libertarian foundations of America, and how these ideas were implemented by American governments. Was it only St. John Crevecoeur’s French naïveté that made him fall in love with America’s “mild government,” and marvel at the colonists “all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they were equitable”? Lord Acton, a more serious analyst, notes that “the temper of the Constitutional Convention was as conservative as the Declaration of Independence was revolutionary.” The Founders were establishing a government, not an anarchistic society. When one starts thinking about America, one is immediately confronted by the puzzle of a powerful state trusted to protect the right of individuals to distrust it. The Revolution, argues Voltairine de Cleyre, aimed at “a change in the political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy,” and she adds parenthetically, “but not so much trusted as not to be continually watched.”
I will come back later to this paradox of a state to be simultaneously trusted and mistrusted. For the moment, let me underline a misleading aspect in the terminology of America’s founding. Using the term “States” to describe the former colonies had the unfortunate effect of abolishing the distance between the state and the subjects who, then, don’t live under a state but in a state. The danger is to disarm mistrust towards the state. Not only does this usage create much noise in international contexts, where “the government” usually means “the administration” (as opposed to the legislative and the judiciary), but it also confuses “the government” and “government,” as if criticizing “government” (i.e., “the state”) could only mean criticizing a specific administration. The reader will thus forgive me for disregarding the American terminology and reverting to the European usage. I will distinguish “the state” as an institution, from “States” as geographical jurisdictions (using a capital “S” for the latter) in America, and by “the American state,” I will mean the global apparatus of government in America.
The history of America does not show a linear progress of liberty. In the early colonies, Puritanism led to serious infringements of individual liberty. In the Connecticut Code of 1650, Tocqueville reports, “there was scarcely a sin which was not subject to magisterial censure.” “Sometimes,” he adds, “the zeal for regulation induces [the legislator] to descend to the most frivolous particulars; thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco.” And this was little compared to the burning of suspected witches in Massachusetts in the late 17th century. These theocratic trends had abated by the time Tocqueville wrote his Democracy in America in the early 19th century. Rothbard argues persuasively that the libertarian influence increased during the 18th century.
A reversal to authoritarian Puritanism occurred at the end of the 19th century, which can partly be traced to the increase in state power fuelled by the Civil War. The first federal law criminalizing the mailing of obscene material was adopted in 1865, the very year the Civil War ended. With Anthony Comstock’s crusade against birth control and obscenity, and the rise of the Temperance Movement, America seemed to be heading back to theocracy. In the early 20th century, anarchist and feminist Voltairine de Cleyre thought that the spirit of America had been lost. The Prohibition, which lasted from 1919 to 1933, continued to illustrate the dark side of American religion and busybodyism. Other “Comstock laws” had a longer shelf life. Until 1971, contraception was still on the postal prohibition list, and Wendy McElroy reports that, in the late 1960s, a U.S. customs officer forced an American woman to throw her diaphragm into the harbor before allowing her to reenter the country.
During the 20th century, the authoritarian strand in American religion became less influential. The battles won by the Larry Flints during the second half of the century could have suggested that Puritanism was dead. However, other sorts of prohibitionist and puritanical causes were resurrected under a trend that can be put under the general label of “political correctness.” Social and environmental stuff is the god of the new religion, which dictates socially acceptable opinions – on discrimination, feminism, life’s pleasures, the environment, etc. – and is translated into coercive laws.
Government economic intervention during the 19th century should not be underestimated, if only because of state-protected slavery. Radicals like Lysander Spooner and Henry David Thoreau were already raising red flags. Protectionism, in the form of high tariffs, was rampant. But, by and large, at least until the Civil War, if you were a white man, America was the freest economy in the world. From the late 19th century on, economic intervention gathered momentum with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.
According to historian Jeffrey Hummel, the Civil War was “America’s Turning Point.” He argues that the War was basically an enterprise of aggrandizement of central power, of the American state as opposed to the Ameri-can States . The Civil War gave, if only temporarily, immense powers to the state, and “altered attitudes about government.” In 1869, George Ticknor, the well-know scholar and Harvard professor, wrote:
The civil war of ’61 has made a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born, or in which I received whatever I got of political education and principles.
“In contrast to the whittling away of government that had preceded Fort Sumter,” Hummel concludes, “the United States had commenced its halting but inexorable march toward the welfare-warfare state.”
In the field of taxation, the idea of America also started to be lost in the late 19th century. A temporary federal income tax was created in 1862 to finance the Civil War. Extended twice, it died in 1872, but was re-adopted by Congress in 1894, only to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1896. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment legalized it. Frank Chodorov later wrote: “As a result of income taxation, we now have a government with far more power than George III ever exercised.”
The 1910s and 1920s were periods of great increases in government intervention. Between 1913 (the year when the Federal Reserve System was created) and 1920, total government expenditures grew from 7.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 12 per cent. The New Deal was another period of advancing government power, and Rose Wilder Lane, despite her earlier optimism, became very worried about the evolution of American politics. Total government expenditure reached 20 per cent of GDP before World War II, 27 per cent in 1960, and more than 30 per cent from 1980 until now.
For a long time, individual liberty was the essence of the idea of America as it was experienced through the country’s history. Whatever faults and rough edges characterized the average American, however naïve was his idea of individual independence, he was self-reliant, inventive, adventurous, and free. Mark Twain’s beautiful Old Times on the Mississippi (1875) illustrates this vividly.
America Today
What is left of the idea of America? It looks as if what Tocqueville had forecasted has arrived to America. “I had remarked during my stay in the United States,” wrote Tocqueville, “that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism.” Ancient tyrants like Roman emperors “possessed an immense and unchecked power” which they frequently used “to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.” The future democratic tyrannies will extend “over the whole community,” and maintain men “in perpetual childhood”: the state “provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry...” The state, as Tocqueville envisioned its future, “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd...it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Americans are now caught in the “network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform” that Tocqueville forecasted. Virtually all activities – even those protected by the Bill of Rights – are regulated in some way, and most often in many ways. Just at the federal level, there are probably 4,000 statutes, although it’s hard to tell the exact number, notes a Wall Street Journal reporter, “because the statutes aren’t listed in one place.” And this does not include the regulations. “We continue to claim that nobody is supposed to ignore the law,” wrote French legal theorist Georges Ripert in 1949, “but those who know it are certainly to be commended.” In 2001, federal prosecutors brought more than 80,000 cases. To this must be added the laws, regulations and prosecutions at the State and local levels. It is estimated that 15 per cent of all Americans have an arrest record. France has come to America.
James Bovard provides a vivid description of how today’s American state is powerful compared to the English state at the time of the Revolution:
The Massachusetts colonists rebelled after the British agents revived “writs of assistance” that allowed them to search any colonist’s property. Modern Americans submit passively to government sweep searches of buses, schools, and housing projects. Virginia revolted in part because King George imposed a two-pence tax on the sale of a pound of tea; Americans today are complacent while Congress imposes billions of dollars of retroactive taxes...Connecticut rebelled in part because the British were undermining the independence of judges; nowadays, federal agencies have the power to act as prosecutor, judge and jury in suits against private citizens. Maine revolted in part because the British Parliament issued a decree confiscating every white pine tree in the colony; modern Americans are largely complacent when local governments impose almost unlimited restrictions on individuals’ rights to use their own property. The initial battles of the Revolution occurred after British troops tried to seize the colonists’ private weapons; today, residents in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities submit to de facto prohibitions on handgun ownership...
Note again that Bovard was writing before 9/11. Whatever happened afterwards, the American state was, before 9/11, incredibly more powerful than the Founders, or the Americans of the late 19th-century, or even those of the 1950s, could ever imagine.
Consider two paradigmatic illustrations of the demise of the idea of America: the regulation of financial transactions and ID papers.
Serious monitoring of financial transactions can probably be traced to the creation of the SEC in 1934, but the agency’s original mission of monitoring the issuing of securities was only the opening salvo. Seventy-five years later, the state exerts totalitarian financial surveillance over, and imposes minute rules and regulations on, all kinds of financial transactions. Money laundering legislation was introduced in 1970, in order to fight the organized crime generated by the creation of victimless crimes by the state itself. Gradually tightened from the 1980s on, the legislation now allows the state to monitor all cash transactions over $10,000 and virtually all non-cash money transfers. Banks and other financial intermediaries have been drafted in the service of the state against money launderers, that is, against anybody who transfers money earned in one of the innumerable crimes manufactured by galloping legislation. Even after creating costly “compliance departments,” financial intermediaries are not immune to the risk of civil or criminal prosecution by the state. William McDavid, general counsel of J.P. Morgan Chase uses an analogy: “[T]hink if you are running a railroad, and we say to you, ‘We want you to monitor everyone who takes your train and see if their trip is legitimate.’” “One unintended consequence,” continues the Wall Street Journal , “is that banks are simply dropping small money-transfer businesses as clients, a move that could hurt millions of poor immigrants who send cash to relatives overseas.”
The SEC plays a major role in the witch-hunt against corporate executives and financial wizards (the modern Salem witches), and in the governance fad. Through civil suits and administrative proceedings and orders, the SEC mandates securities registration, regulates brokerage, trading and disclosure, and helps enforce the prohibition of insider trading. It scares large companies into settling suits without trial. Royal Dutch/Shell paid a U.S.$120-million settlement. The agency also imposes fines and work bans. It regulates stock exchanges, which were historically private organizations. It files civil suits against violators of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The president of the SEC scolded American CEOs: “You must have an internal code of ethics that goes beyond the letter of the law to also encompass the spirit of the law.” The problem is, where is the spirit of the law explained in writing, so that one knows what is required? Where is the rule of law? By mandating certain sorts of disclosure and preventing others, the SEC is, in fact, engaged in the control of information and speech. Where is the First Amendment?
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act imposes such wide-ranging requirements to corporations that they now compel their employees to change their computer passwords frequently. The risk of forgetting passwords (of course) increases, with the consequence that corporate employees resort to insecure tricks, like writing passwords on sticky notes affixed to their computers.
“Americans today,” wrote Rose Wilder Lane in her famous 1936 celebration of the idea of America, “are the most reckless and lawless of peoples.” Tightly controlling and punishing financial entrepreneurs has been an important step in the taming of the reckless and the lawless – the Michael Milkens, the Martha Stewarts, the Conrad Blacks – that is, in the taming of America.
ID papers are another way of controlling the reckless and the lawless. “We were not obliged, as Continental Europeans have been,” wrote Rose Wilder, “to carry at all times a police card, renewed and paid for at intervals, bearing our pictures properly stamped and stating our names, ages, addresses, parentage, religion and occupation.” Parentage, religion and occupation are not important pieces of information on ID cards, as long as the state has related databases. Indeed, modern European ID cards don’t include all such details. What is dangerous with ID cards, or official ID papers in general, is that they help the state follow an individual from the cradle to the grave, and from one residence to another. Without ID papers, it is very costly for the state to enforce laws requiring that the whereabouts of the subjects be known; consequently, fewer such laws are enacted, and the ones that are cannot be efficiently enforced. It used to be that Americans could escape the state by disappearing where the state is nowhere to be seen, as Thoreau said. Jeffrey Hummel reports that, during the Civil War, about 13 per cent of soldiers, from both the North and the South, deserted, and that over half the deserters were never apprehended. This would be inconceivable with the surveillance apparatus of today’s American state, which relies heavily on the ubiquitous Social Security Number (SSN) and on ID papers – like drivers’ licenses or passports – that can be matched to the SSN or other identifiers.
The last half of the 20th century has seen the introduction of de facto ID papers in America. Simultaneously, the obligation to identify oneself – with official “photo ID,” of course – when agents of authority request it has appeared, and has been legalized by the recent judgment (split 5 to 4) of the Supreme Court in the Hiibel case. The intelligence reform bill adopted by Congress in December 2004 has gone further on the road to a national ID card by mandating federal standards on State driver’s licenses. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) declared, “Nationalizing standards for drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, and linking them together via a national database, creates a national ID system pure and simple.” This, warned Paul, points to “a Soviet-style internal passport system.” The fact that the 3,000-page bill was adopted 336 to 75 by the House, and 89 to two by the Senate, shows how far the idea of America has receded.
America has witnessed a large-scale highjacking of the law by the state. Inherited from the mother country, the rule of law was a crucial component of the idea of America. The Bill of Rights was meant to reinforce the common law guarantees against persecution through legal prosecution. These guarantees were gradually overcome by the state through its mere power to spend, the proliferation of laws, the federalization of virtually all crimes, and the use of civil courts to enforce laws (as opposed to criminal courts, where the burden of proof is much heavier). When the government cannot prove a crime without a reasonable doubt, it now has a whole panoply of legal instruments to threaten and punish virtually anybody it wants.
The events of September 11, 2001 have been used as an excuse to extend the requirement to carry official ID in long distance public transportation, as well as in many other cases. More generally, 9/11 has lowered the political cost of increasing state power. In that respect, the July 2004 Department of Justice report on the PATRIOT Act provides for interesting reading. The government argues that the new powers granted by the PATRIOT Act (wiretappings, searches, warrantless access to ISPs, etc.) have stopped a few terrorist conspiracies. But the report also confirms that the new powers have been used to hunt fraudsters, computer hackers, “individuals operating unlicensed money transmitting businesses that sent money to...India,” child pornographers, drug dealers, etc. The introduction of the report had already prepared the reader: “Some of the examples in this report do not involve terrorism but instead detail how the Department has used certain provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act to combat serious criminal conduct... Congress chose not to limit certain authorities contained in the USA PATRIOT Act only to the context of terrorism, and the examples contained in this report demonstrate the wisdom of that decision.” Recall that “USA PATRIOT” stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”
Regards, Pierre Lemieux
...Let it never be forgot that once there was a Camelot.
[I pass on this excellent article by Pierre Lemieux, MP, Ontario, Canada ws]
THE IDEA OF AMERICA
by Pierre Lemieux
As Lord Acton reminded us, the American Revolution exerted much influence in France and in the world. America was seen as a beacon of liberty. The Statue of Liberty proclaims: “From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome”. Liberty – individual liberty – was the essence of the idea of America. In his Civil Disobedience , Henry David Thoreau conveys the spirit when he reports that, in half an hour, he was “in a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.”
The idea of America as the beacon of liberty has survived until quite recently. For example, in a reflection on the growth of government surveillance, law professor Peter P. Swire writes, “the beacon of liberty argument suggests that U.S. adoption of surveillance tools can have significant negative effects elsewhere in the world.” “Instead of applying its weight on the side of liberty,” he explains, “the United States is becoming a leader in requiring surveillance technologies... The moral authority of the United States will be on the side of government rather than on the side of individual liberty.” Swire is not talking about the obvious growth of government surveillance that has followed 9/11: he was writing in 1999, and focussing mainly on the monitoring of financial transactions with tools like money-laundering controls.
When Was America?
Remember America? In the 1950s, there was no political correctness, and Americans were proud of their culture. Despite the grip of religion, one could privately indulge in pornography without much risk. More generally, one could quite safely entertain one’s vices on one’s private property. There were no laws against sexual harassment. There was already much economic regulation, often inherited from the 1930s, but it did not directly affect the average American, and men of business were not scared of the state. There was no public health insurance – no Medicare, no Medicaid. The owner of a restaurant or a bar could run it as he wished, and admit whomever he wanted, including smokers. The rule of law was still more a means for citizens to defend themselves against the state than a way for the state to control them. Except for the driver’s license, there were no ID papers, and even drivers’ licenses often did not bear photographs. Cops were humble, at least if you looked like a sovereign individual and knew how to talk. For a Western European immigrant, America was still a paradise of freedom and the easy life.
Better, consider the first decade of the 20th century. In general, anybody could start a business, find investors, and sell his product without any government license and oversight. There was no SEC, no IRS, no FCC, no FDA, no OSHA, no USCIS (formerly INS), no EPA. The absence of regulation did not prevent the development of vibrant capital markets, and New York City was on its way to becoming the top financial place in the world. The right to keep and bear arms, so typically American in the 20th century, had survived relatively unscathed. There was no witch-hunt and, in a legal fight between an individual and the government, it is the latter that felt handicapped. Writing in 1910, Lord Acton could confidently say that the American people are “more free than any other the world has seen.” In her celebration of American liberty in the early 20th century, Rose Wilder Lane could exclaim: “That is what Europeans meant when, after a few days in this country, they exclaimed, ‘You are so free here!’.”
And there was even more liberty before the Civil War – at least if one was a white man. “[W]e have gone downhill from the Revolution until now,” writes Voltairine de Cleyre.
Once, it seems, there was America.
When was America? It would be overly ambitious to try to answer this question. It is easier, even if less satisfying, to point out the opposition between the libertarian foundations of America, and how these ideas were implemented by American governments. Was it only St. John Crevecoeur’s French naïveté that made him fall in love with America’s “mild government,” and marvel at the colonists “all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they were equitable”? Lord Acton, a more serious analyst, notes that “the temper of the Constitutional Convention was as conservative as the Declaration of Independence was revolutionary.” The Founders were establishing a government, not an anarchistic society. When one starts thinking about America, one is immediately confronted by the puzzle of a powerful state trusted to protect the right of individuals to distrust it. The Revolution, argues Voltairine de Cleyre, aimed at “a change in the political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy,” and she adds parenthetically, “but not so much trusted as not to be continually watched.”
I will come back later to this paradox of a state to be simultaneously trusted and mistrusted. For the moment, let me underline a misleading aspect in the terminology of America’s founding. Using the term “States” to describe the former colonies had the unfortunate effect of abolishing the distance between the state and the subjects who, then, don’t live under a state but in a state. The danger is to disarm mistrust towards the state. Not only does this usage create much noise in international contexts, where “the government” usually means “the administration” (as opposed to the legislative and the judiciary), but it also confuses “the government” and “government,” as if criticizing “government” (i.e., “the state”) could only mean criticizing a specific administration. The reader will thus forgive me for disregarding the American terminology and reverting to the European usage. I will distinguish “the state” as an institution, from “States” as geographical jurisdictions (using a capital “S” for the latter) in America, and by “the American state,” I will mean the global apparatus of government in America.
The history of America does not show a linear progress of liberty. In the early colonies, Puritanism led to serious infringements of individual liberty. In the Connecticut Code of 1650, Tocqueville reports, “there was scarcely a sin which was not subject to magisterial censure.” “Sometimes,” he adds, “the zeal for regulation induces [the legislator] to descend to the most frivolous particulars; thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco.” And this was little compared to the burning of suspected witches in Massachusetts in the late 17th century. These theocratic trends had abated by the time Tocqueville wrote his Democracy in America in the early 19th century. Rothbard argues persuasively that the libertarian influence increased during the 18th century.
A reversal to authoritarian Puritanism occurred at the end of the 19th century, which can partly be traced to the increase in state power fuelled by the Civil War. The first federal law criminalizing the mailing of obscene material was adopted in 1865, the very year the Civil War ended. With Anthony Comstock’s crusade against birth control and obscenity, and the rise of the Temperance Movement, America seemed to be heading back to theocracy. In the early 20th century, anarchist and feminist Voltairine de Cleyre thought that the spirit of America had been lost. The Prohibition, which lasted from 1919 to 1933, continued to illustrate the dark side of American religion and busybodyism. Other “Comstock laws” had a longer shelf life. Until 1971, contraception was still on the postal prohibition list, and Wendy McElroy reports that, in the late 1960s, a U.S. customs officer forced an American woman to throw her diaphragm into the harbor before allowing her to reenter the country.
During the 20th century, the authoritarian strand in American religion became less influential. The battles won by the Larry Flints during the second half of the century could have suggested that Puritanism was dead. However, other sorts of prohibitionist and puritanical causes were resurrected under a trend that can be put under the general label of “political correctness.” Social and environmental stuff is the god of the new religion, which dictates socially acceptable opinions – on discrimination, feminism, life’s pleasures, the environment, etc. – and is translated into coercive laws.
Government economic intervention during the 19th century should not be underestimated, if only because of state-protected slavery. Radicals like Lysander Spooner and Henry David Thoreau were already raising red flags. Protectionism, in the form of high tariffs, was rampant. But, by and large, at least until the Civil War, if you were a white man, America was the freest economy in the world. From the late 19th century on, economic intervention gathered momentum with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.
According to historian Jeffrey Hummel, the Civil War was “America’s Turning Point.” He argues that the War was basically an enterprise of aggrandizement of central power, of the American state as opposed to the Ameri-can States . The Civil War gave, if only temporarily, immense powers to the state, and “altered attitudes about government.” In 1869, George Ticknor, the well-know scholar and Harvard professor, wrote:
The civil war of ’61 has made a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born, or in which I received whatever I got of political education and principles.
“In contrast to the whittling away of government that had preceded Fort Sumter,” Hummel concludes, “the United States had commenced its halting but inexorable march toward the welfare-warfare state.”
In the field of taxation, the idea of America also started to be lost in the late 19th century. A temporary federal income tax was created in 1862 to finance the Civil War. Extended twice, it died in 1872, but was re-adopted by Congress in 1894, only to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1896. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment legalized it. Frank Chodorov later wrote: “As a result of income taxation, we now have a government with far more power than George III ever exercised.”
The 1910s and 1920s were periods of great increases in government intervention. Between 1913 (the year when the Federal Reserve System was created) and 1920, total government expenditures grew from 7.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 12 per cent. The New Deal was another period of advancing government power, and Rose Wilder Lane, despite her earlier optimism, became very worried about the evolution of American politics. Total government expenditure reached 20 per cent of GDP before World War II, 27 per cent in 1960, and more than 30 per cent from 1980 until now.
For a long time, individual liberty was the essence of the idea of America as it was experienced through the country’s history. Whatever faults and rough edges characterized the average American, however naïve was his idea of individual independence, he was self-reliant, inventive, adventurous, and free. Mark Twain’s beautiful Old Times on the Mississippi (1875) illustrates this vividly.
America Today
What is left of the idea of America? It looks as if what Tocqueville had forecasted has arrived to America. “I had remarked during my stay in the United States,” wrote Tocqueville, “that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism.” Ancient tyrants like Roman emperors “possessed an immense and unchecked power” which they frequently used “to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.” The future democratic tyrannies will extend “over the whole community,” and maintain men “in perpetual childhood”: the state “provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry...” The state, as Tocqueville envisioned its future, “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd...it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Americans are now caught in the “network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform” that Tocqueville forecasted. Virtually all activities – even those protected by the Bill of Rights – are regulated in some way, and most often in many ways. Just at the federal level, there are probably 4,000 statutes, although it’s hard to tell the exact number, notes a Wall Street Journal reporter, “because the statutes aren’t listed in one place.” And this does not include the regulations. “We continue to claim that nobody is supposed to ignore the law,” wrote French legal theorist Georges Ripert in 1949, “but those who know it are certainly to be commended.” In 2001, federal prosecutors brought more than 80,000 cases. To this must be added the laws, regulations and prosecutions at the State and local levels. It is estimated that 15 per cent of all Americans have an arrest record. France has come to America.
James Bovard provides a vivid description of how today’s American state is powerful compared to the English state at the time of the Revolution:
The Massachusetts colonists rebelled after the British agents revived “writs of assistance” that allowed them to search any colonist’s property. Modern Americans submit passively to government sweep searches of buses, schools, and housing projects. Virginia revolted in part because King George imposed a two-pence tax on the sale of a pound of tea; Americans today are complacent while Congress imposes billions of dollars of retroactive taxes...Connecticut rebelled in part because the British were undermining the independence of judges; nowadays, federal agencies have the power to act as prosecutor, judge and jury in suits against private citizens. Maine revolted in part because the British Parliament issued a decree confiscating every white pine tree in the colony; modern Americans are largely complacent when local governments impose almost unlimited restrictions on individuals’ rights to use their own property. The initial battles of the Revolution occurred after British troops tried to seize the colonists’ private weapons; today, residents in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities submit to de facto prohibitions on handgun ownership...
Note again that Bovard was writing before 9/11. Whatever happened afterwards, the American state was, before 9/11, incredibly more powerful than the Founders, or the Americans of the late 19th-century, or even those of the 1950s, could ever imagine.
Consider two paradigmatic illustrations of the demise of the idea of America: the regulation of financial transactions and ID papers.
Serious monitoring of financial transactions can probably be traced to the creation of the SEC in 1934, but the agency’s original mission of monitoring the issuing of securities was only the opening salvo. Seventy-five years later, the state exerts totalitarian financial surveillance over, and imposes minute rules and regulations on, all kinds of financial transactions. Money laundering legislation was introduced in 1970, in order to fight the organized crime generated by the creation of victimless crimes by the state itself. Gradually tightened from the 1980s on, the legislation now allows the state to monitor all cash transactions over $10,000 and virtually all non-cash money transfers. Banks and other financial intermediaries have been drafted in the service of the state against money launderers, that is, against anybody who transfers money earned in one of the innumerable crimes manufactured by galloping legislation. Even after creating costly “compliance departments,” financial intermediaries are not immune to the risk of civil or criminal prosecution by the state. William McDavid, general counsel of J.P. Morgan Chase uses an analogy: “[T]hink if you are running a railroad, and we say to you, ‘We want you to monitor everyone who takes your train and see if their trip is legitimate.’” “One unintended consequence,” continues the Wall Street Journal , “is that banks are simply dropping small money-transfer businesses as clients, a move that could hurt millions of poor immigrants who send cash to relatives overseas.”
The SEC plays a major role in the witch-hunt against corporate executives and financial wizards (the modern Salem witches), and in the governance fad. Through civil suits and administrative proceedings and orders, the SEC mandates securities registration, regulates brokerage, trading and disclosure, and helps enforce the prohibition of insider trading. It scares large companies into settling suits without trial. Royal Dutch/Shell paid a U.S.$120-million settlement. The agency also imposes fines and work bans. It regulates stock exchanges, which were historically private organizations. It files civil suits against violators of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The president of the SEC scolded American CEOs: “You must have an internal code of ethics that goes beyond the letter of the law to also encompass the spirit of the law.” The problem is, where is the spirit of the law explained in writing, so that one knows what is required? Where is the rule of law? By mandating certain sorts of disclosure and preventing others, the SEC is, in fact, engaged in the control of information and speech. Where is the First Amendment?
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act imposes such wide-ranging requirements to corporations that they now compel their employees to change their computer passwords frequently. The risk of forgetting passwords (of course) increases, with the consequence that corporate employees resort to insecure tricks, like writing passwords on sticky notes affixed to their computers.
“Americans today,” wrote Rose Wilder Lane in her famous 1936 celebration of the idea of America, “are the most reckless and lawless of peoples.” Tightly controlling and punishing financial entrepreneurs has been an important step in the taming of the reckless and the lawless – the Michael Milkens, the Martha Stewarts, the Conrad Blacks – that is, in the taming of America.
ID papers are another way of controlling the reckless and the lawless. “We were not obliged, as Continental Europeans have been,” wrote Rose Wilder, “to carry at all times a police card, renewed and paid for at intervals, bearing our pictures properly stamped and stating our names, ages, addresses, parentage, religion and occupation.” Parentage, religion and occupation are not important pieces of information on ID cards, as long as the state has related databases. Indeed, modern European ID cards don’t include all such details. What is dangerous with ID cards, or official ID papers in general, is that they help the state follow an individual from the cradle to the grave, and from one residence to another. Without ID papers, it is very costly for the state to enforce laws requiring that the whereabouts of the subjects be known; consequently, fewer such laws are enacted, and the ones that are cannot be efficiently enforced. It used to be that Americans could escape the state by disappearing where the state is nowhere to be seen, as Thoreau said. Jeffrey Hummel reports that, during the Civil War, about 13 per cent of soldiers, from both the North and the South, deserted, and that over half the deserters were never apprehended. This would be inconceivable with the surveillance apparatus of today’s American state, which relies heavily on the ubiquitous Social Security Number (SSN) and on ID papers – like drivers’ licenses or passports – that can be matched to the SSN or other identifiers.
The last half of the 20th century has seen the introduction of de facto ID papers in America. Simultaneously, the obligation to identify oneself – with official “photo ID,” of course – when agents of authority request it has appeared, and has been legalized by the recent judgment (split 5 to 4) of the Supreme Court in the Hiibel case. The intelligence reform bill adopted by Congress in December 2004 has gone further on the road to a national ID card by mandating federal standards on State driver’s licenses. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) declared, “Nationalizing standards for drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, and linking them together via a national database, creates a national ID system pure and simple.” This, warned Paul, points to “a Soviet-style internal passport system.” The fact that the 3,000-page bill was adopted 336 to 75 by the House, and 89 to two by the Senate, shows how far the idea of America has receded.
America has witnessed a large-scale highjacking of the law by the state. Inherited from the mother country, the rule of law was a crucial component of the idea of America. The Bill of Rights was meant to reinforce the common law guarantees against persecution through legal prosecution. These guarantees were gradually overcome by the state through its mere power to spend, the proliferation of laws, the federalization of virtually all crimes, and the use of civil courts to enforce laws (as opposed to criminal courts, where the burden of proof is much heavier). When the government cannot prove a crime without a reasonable doubt, it now has a whole panoply of legal instruments to threaten and punish virtually anybody it wants.
The events of September 11, 2001 have been used as an excuse to extend the requirement to carry official ID in long distance public transportation, as well as in many other cases. More generally, 9/11 has lowered the political cost of increasing state power. In that respect, the July 2004 Department of Justice report on the PATRIOT Act provides for interesting reading. The government argues that the new powers granted by the PATRIOT Act (wiretappings, searches, warrantless access to ISPs, etc.) have stopped a few terrorist conspiracies. But the report also confirms that the new powers have been used to hunt fraudsters, computer hackers, “individuals operating unlicensed money transmitting businesses that sent money to...India,” child pornographers, drug dealers, etc. The introduction of the report had already prepared the reader: “Some of the examples in this report do not involve terrorism but instead detail how the Department has used certain provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act to combat serious criminal conduct... Congress chose not to limit certain authorities contained in the USA PATRIOT Act only to the context of terrorism, and the examples contained in this report demonstrate the wisdom of that decision.” Recall that “USA PATRIOT” stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”
Regards, Pierre Lemieux
FDA GONE MAD
THE FDA'S CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
********************************************************************
Mike Adams
Mike Adams is no stranger to traditional Western medicine. The son of a Pfizer contractor and a clinical trial tester for some of America's biggest pharmaceutical companies, Mike grew up using prescribed pharmaceuticals, trusting doctors and believing what the FDA reported was safe and in the best interests of the country. All that would change when Mike was faced with his own personal health emergency, and the pillars of medicine he once trusted came crumbling down before him.
Mike began his mission as the Health Ranger as a response to his own failing health. At the age of 30, he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a disease brought on by poor diet and severe lack of exercise. As a high-powered software executive, extreme levels of stress and cholesterol, depression and chronic back pain were common features of Mike's past.Searching for answers to his health woes, Mike dove into research; he devoured thousands of books on nutrition, pharmaceutical drugs, wellness programs, the politics of food - anything he could find. Mike has now made it his life mission to share the most remarkable discovery he made on his quest: the vast majority of all diseases can be easily prevented and even cured without drugs or surgery. And that’s exactly what Mike did. He cured himself of diabetes in a matter of months and transformed himself into the picture of perfect health in mind, body and spirit.
from: http://www.healthranger.org/bio.html
MIKE ADAMS
[Few people are aware of what is going on in the food chain and why. I pass along this important article by Mike Adams. See information on Mike at the end of his article. ws]
FDA Unleashes Mass Irradiation of Spinach,Lettuce and Other Vegetables
The FDA has announced that beginning today, spinach and lettuce sold across the United States may now be secretly irradiated before it reaches grocery store shelves. What's "secret" about it? The FDA previously decided that irradiation warning stickers would not be required on any food items because it would be "too confusing to consumers." (The word IRRADIATION apparently has too many letters to be understood to food buyers.) Thus, irradiated foods will not be labeled as such, and consumers are going to be left in the dark about all this (except for those who actually eat the irradiated food, in which case they will glow in the dark).The FDA, of course, insists that the levels of irradiation used to kill e.coli will have no effect whatsoever on the nutritional value of the food. This astonishing statement comes from an agency that doesn't believe food has any nutritional value in the first place, so lowering the value to zero by destroying all the phytonutrients does not, in the opinion of the FDA, alter its nutritional value at all. Thus, destroying all the anti-cancer nutrients in a head of broccoli merely brings that broccoli into "compliance" as a non-functional food, according to the FDA.Radiation, of course, destroys delicate phytochemicals in plants -- the very phytochemicals protecting consumers against cancer, heart disease, high cholesterol, inflammation and other diseases. Microwaving broccoli, for example, destroys up to 98% of its anti-cancer nutrients. (The FDA has not yet acknowledged this scientific fact, either.) In a similar way, irradiating food destroys much of its nutritional content, including vitamins, carotenoids, anthocyanins and other delicate protective nutrients that are right now providing the last, desperate nutritional defense against the American diet of meat, milk, fried foods and processed junk.Irradiating fresh produce will leave the U.S. population is a state of extreme deficiency in protective plant-based nutrients.
Does the FDA plan to destroy the health of the U.S. population?
Many people suspect that's what the FDA really wants. A nutritionally-deficient, disease-ridden population would mean a windfall of profits for the FDA's buddies in Big Pharma -- the folks who sell patented medications at monopoly prices. With the food supply destroyed by radiation, ordinary people would have virtually no remaining sources of protective phytonutrients!In promoting this food radiation policy, the FDA has accomplished what all the terrorists in the world could not: The mass irradiation of the U.S. food supply -- much like setting off a dirty bomb over the nation's farms (but with less radiation). This destruction of the nutritional value of the food supply is a far greater threat to the health of the U.S. population than any terrorist event, including 9/11. And yet it is being done by our own people, TO our own people, by a lawless agency that answers to no one. FDA officials are not voted into office by the People; they are appointed by politicians. They answer to no one, they refuse to follow federal law, and they operate as tyrants over a quarter of the U.S. economy.And now they have taken it upon themselves to destroy the national food supply.We should be more than just alarmed -- we should be outraged! The FDA has committed an act of war against the People. With this decision, the FDA has firmly positioned itself as an enemy of the People, and a bringer of death and disease to the nation. Why are our elected representatives in Washington allowing this madness?Think about this: If the FDA has its way:• All your food will be irradiated, pasteurized or killed• All your children will be vaccinated• All your medicine will be based on pharmaceuticals• All your free speech about health will be suppressed• All informative labeling on food and supplements will be outlawed• Growing and selling non-irradiated garden vegetables will become a crime!
Today it's spinach and lettuce; tomorrow it's all fresh produce
Don't think the FDA will stop with spinach and lettuce, either. They're already talking about irradiating tomatoes, peppers and onions. Before long, radiation could become mandatory for ALL fresh produce, and all the fresh fruits and vegetables that are supposed to contain health-protecting nutrients will be transformed into sterile, inert plant mass with no health benefits at all. (Brilliant scam, huh?)This is by design. I believe the FDA wants the American public to be sickened and diseased. Why else would they ban Free Speech about healing foods like cherries, broccoli and garlic? Why would they outlaw the selling of herbs and nutritional supplements that claim to treat and prevent disease? The FDA wants you to be sick, enslaved and medicated, and irradiating the food supply is the quickest way to accomplish that.He who controls the food controls the People.He who destroys the food can profit from the People's sickness.
The FDA's crimes against humanity
In pushing this radiation agenda, the FDA is committing a crime against humanity -- a nutritional atrocity that violates fundamental human rights. And yet the FDA's top decision makers continue to operate with zero oversight and zero accountability. They make decisions in a corporate-sponsored vacuum, absent any input from reasonable, health-conscious consumers or scientists. And because they have been granted tyrannical powers by Congress, the FDA operates above the law.It is not subject to any laws whatsoever; not even the U.S. Constitution which is supposed to protect the People's right to "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" (as stated in the Declaration of Independence).The mass irradiation of the food supply is a violation of the "Life" part of that phrase, wouldn't you agree? If we can no longer buy nourishing foods with their nutrients intact, then we are all doomed to degenerative disease and death... but not before paying out our life savings to doctors, drug companies and hospitals. That's the evil genius of the food irradiation plot: It kills you slowly, at just the right pace to drain your bank account before you expire from malnutrition.I truly believe this irradiation of the food supply is the beginning of the end of America. No nation can survive the destruction of its food supply. The FDA is dooming America to a slow, painful, medicated death. In a generation, this nation will be lost, destroyed from within by short-sighted tyrants who violated nature and left the People to rot.
What you can do right now to fight this latest transgression by the FDA
For starters, you can:1) Grow your own food. A little gardening is good. Grow whatever you can, even if it's just a few kitchen herbs.2) Buy your food at farmer's markets, coops and CSAs. See http://www.localharvest.org/csa3) Ask your grocery store if they are buying irradiated spinach. If they don't know, demand they find out!4) Raise hell with your Senators and Congresspeople, demanding they pass new laws protecting consumers from the FDA and its plot to destroy the nutritional value of the food supply.The second podcast was just posted today. I recorded it right before writing this article. It goes into much greater detail about the FDA's plot to destroy the health of the U.S. population. You can listen to that here: http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Podcas...Finally, don't stand for this food supply madness! Raise your voice. Write your local paper, call your representatives in Washington and tell them you strongly oppose the irradiation of the food supply. Teach people about phytonutrients. And stay tuned to NaturalNews as we continue to cover this important story.The FDA has gone mad.
Criminally mad.
It is an agency that will literally kill you if given the chance, and it is up to all of us to stop this madness before we lose our health, our children and our very nation.
********************************************************************
Mike Adams
Mike Adams is no stranger to traditional Western medicine. The son of a Pfizer contractor and a clinical trial tester for some of America's biggest pharmaceutical companies, Mike grew up using prescribed pharmaceuticals, trusting doctors and believing what the FDA reported was safe and in the best interests of the country. All that would change when Mike was faced with his own personal health emergency, and the pillars of medicine he once trusted came crumbling down before him.
Mike began his mission as the Health Ranger as a response to his own failing health. At the age of 30, he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a disease brought on by poor diet and severe lack of exercise. As a high-powered software executive, extreme levels of stress and cholesterol, depression and chronic back pain were common features of Mike's past.Searching for answers to his health woes, Mike dove into research; he devoured thousands of books on nutrition, pharmaceutical drugs, wellness programs, the politics of food - anything he could find. Mike has now made it his life mission to share the most remarkable discovery he made on his quest: the vast majority of all diseases can be easily prevented and even cured without drugs or surgery. And that’s exactly what Mike did. He cured himself of diabetes in a matter of months and transformed himself into the picture of perfect health in mind, body and spirit.
from: http://www.healthranger.org/bio.html
Thursday, August 21, 2008
KING ARTHUR WAS 'WELSH'
KING ARTHUR WAS 'WELSH'
King Arthur ‘was Welsh’ say French academics
Jul 1 2008 by Darren Devine, Western Mail
FRENCH historians have suggested King Arthur was indeed a Welshman despite years of English “spin” claiming the mythical figure as their own.
As part of a major conference into the legend, academics say that if the king ever existed he was probably from Wales with strong links to Brittany, in northern France.
And far from being English – a ploy, they say, to appeal to nationalist sentiment – he would actually have been the sworn enemy of the Anglo-Saxons.
The organisers of the event at Rennes University, in Brittany, say the fable of Arthur and Camelot has been continually updated by English nationalists keen to bring back the Age of Chivalry.
Being held next month, the conference and exhibition – King Arthur a Legend in the Making – will suggest English historians, artists and writers conspired to create a fictitious national hero.
Curator of the Rennes exhibition Sarah Toulouse said: “These stories deal with universal themes. The earliest fragments of the tales can be traced back to Wales in the seventh century.
“But by the 13th century stories based on the Arthurian legends were being told right across Europe.”
When the British Empire was at its zenith, writers like the Victorian poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson depicted King Arthur as an upstanding Englishman whose masculine virtues saw him try to create heaven on earth.
Mrs Toulouse added: “King Arthur is a mythical figure who was invented at a certain point in history for essentially political reasons.”
The tales of Camelot, Excalibur and Arthurian derring-do have long been popular throughout Europe, with the earliest images of the king found in Italy, dating from about 1120. They also quickly spread as far apart as Iceland and found particular popularity in rural Brittany, although French historians have not gone as far as trying to claim the king as French. “It would be out of the question for us to say that,” said Mrs Toulouse.
Alan Wilson, a Welsh authority on Arthur, agreed with many of the conference’s claims, even claiming he has discovered evidence the monarch famed for his Knights of the Round Table lived and died here.
He says the nation is missing out on a tourism bonanza by ignoring our connections to the legendary leader.
In the early 1980s Mr Wilson, along with Arthurian co-author Baram Blackett, found what they claimed was the King’s memorial stone at the small ruined church of St Peter-super-Montem on Mynydd-y-Gaer, near Bridgend.
A decade later, after using deep ground metal detection equipment, the two say that a cross weighing 2.5lb with an inscription reading “Pro Anima Artorius” (For The Soul Of Arthur) was among several articles discovered. They say the National Museum of Wales was offered both items for analysis, but the offer was declined.
Mr Wilson said despite writing to Culture Minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas about the strength of Wales’ claims on King Arthur, his work is being ignored here.
The writer, who is originally from Cardiff but who now lives in Newcastle, claims historical records from the life of St Illtyd, Arthur’s cousin who buried the monarch, show his body was taken up the Ewenny River.
It was later placed in a cave near Pencoed following his death in 579AD, says Mr Wilson.
The 76-year-old author, whose latest work on the leader was the King Arthur Conspiracy, said the King’s body was then moved to the church where it was buried under a crypt.
Mr Wilson, who believes Arthur’s mythical kingdom of Camelot was in an area now known as Castlefield in Cardiff, said, “I gave them (Assembly officials) copies of our books last year and met the First Minister Rhodri Morgan’s private adviser.”
Mr Wilson, who worked in shipbuilding as a master planner and received commendations from both the Italian and Swedish Governments, added: “The Culture Minister [Rhodri Glyn Thomas] was due to meet us, but ducked out at the last minute. We’ve sent them documents within the last six weeks.
“But it seems the Welsh establishment don’t want tourists. We’ve made monumental discoveries that could create a tourist bonanza like you can’t imagine. You’re sitting on a tourism gold mine in Wales.”
A spokesman for Assembly tourism organisation Visit Wales said overly exploiting every part of Wales said to have connections to Arthur would ruin the visitor experience.
He added: “In addition, the Arthurian story is not unique to Wales since many other parts of the UK and France can claim and demonstrate strong links with the great legend.”
Laying claim to the legend
Almost every corner of the UK has laid claim to the legend of King Arthur. Here we highlight just a few of the places associated with the King:
Authors Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett say Arthur’s kingdom of Camelot was in the Castlefield area of Cardiff.
Tintagel, in Cornwall, has also had a long association with Arthur and the area’s castle is said by local legend to have been the King’s fortress.
Glastonbury Abbey has been taken to be the Isle of Avalon, where Arthur was said to have gone to be healed of his wounds following the Battle of Camlann in 537. Late tradition assumes that he died and was buried there. Other legends have it that the Island of Avalon is the Isle of Aval in northern Brittany.
Stories of King Arthur holding court at Caerleon, near Newport, stretch back to the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century and further still to the oral traditions set down in the Mabinogion.
Keep up to date with the news. Sign up for News Alerts
Have your say on the latest news and sport in our Forums
Have your say on Wales news in our Forums
King Arthur ‘was Welsh’ say French academics
Jul 1 2008 by Darren Devine, Western Mail
FRENCH historians have suggested King Arthur was indeed a Welshman despite years of English “spin” claiming the mythical figure as their own.
As part of a major conference into the legend, academics say that if the king ever existed he was probably from Wales with strong links to Brittany, in northern France.
And far from being English – a ploy, they say, to appeal to nationalist sentiment – he would actually have been the sworn enemy of the Anglo-Saxons.
The organisers of the event at Rennes University, in Brittany, say the fable of Arthur and Camelot has been continually updated by English nationalists keen to bring back the Age of Chivalry.
Being held next month, the conference and exhibition – King Arthur a Legend in the Making – will suggest English historians, artists and writers conspired to create a fictitious national hero.
Curator of the Rennes exhibition Sarah Toulouse said: “These stories deal with universal themes. The earliest fragments of the tales can be traced back to Wales in the seventh century.
“But by the 13th century stories based on the Arthurian legends were being told right across Europe.”
When the British Empire was at its zenith, writers like the Victorian poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson depicted King Arthur as an upstanding Englishman whose masculine virtues saw him try to create heaven on earth.
Mrs Toulouse added: “King Arthur is a mythical figure who was invented at a certain point in history for essentially political reasons.”
The tales of Camelot, Excalibur and Arthurian derring-do have long been popular throughout Europe, with the earliest images of the king found in Italy, dating from about 1120. They also quickly spread as far apart as Iceland and found particular popularity in rural Brittany, although French historians have not gone as far as trying to claim the king as French. “It would be out of the question for us to say that,” said Mrs Toulouse.
Alan Wilson, a Welsh authority on Arthur, agreed with many of the conference’s claims, even claiming he has discovered evidence the monarch famed for his Knights of the Round Table lived and died here.
He says the nation is missing out on a tourism bonanza by ignoring our connections to the legendary leader.
In the early 1980s Mr Wilson, along with Arthurian co-author Baram Blackett, found what they claimed was the King’s memorial stone at the small ruined church of St Peter-super-Montem on Mynydd-y-Gaer, near Bridgend.
A decade later, after using deep ground metal detection equipment, the two say that a cross weighing 2.5lb with an inscription reading “Pro Anima Artorius” (For The Soul Of Arthur) was among several articles discovered. They say the National Museum of Wales was offered both items for analysis, but the offer was declined.
Mr Wilson said despite writing to Culture Minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas about the strength of Wales’ claims on King Arthur, his work is being ignored here.
The writer, who is originally from Cardiff but who now lives in Newcastle, claims historical records from the life of St Illtyd, Arthur’s cousin who buried the monarch, show his body was taken up the Ewenny River.
It was later placed in a cave near Pencoed following his death in 579AD, says Mr Wilson.
The 76-year-old author, whose latest work on the leader was the King Arthur Conspiracy, said the King’s body was then moved to the church where it was buried under a crypt.
Mr Wilson, who believes Arthur’s mythical kingdom of Camelot was in an area now known as Castlefield in Cardiff, said, “I gave them (Assembly officials) copies of our books last year and met the First Minister Rhodri Morgan’s private adviser.”
Mr Wilson, who worked in shipbuilding as a master planner and received commendations from both the Italian and Swedish Governments, added: “The Culture Minister [Rhodri Glyn Thomas] was due to meet us, but ducked out at the last minute. We’ve sent them documents within the last six weeks.
“But it seems the Welsh establishment don’t want tourists. We’ve made monumental discoveries that could create a tourist bonanza like you can’t imagine. You’re sitting on a tourism gold mine in Wales.”
A spokesman for Assembly tourism organisation Visit Wales said overly exploiting every part of Wales said to have connections to Arthur would ruin the visitor experience.
He added: “In addition, the Arthurian story is not unique to Wales since many other parts of the UK and France can claim and demonstrate strong links with the great legend.”
Laying claim to the legend
Almost every corner of the UK has laid claim to the legend of King Arthur. Here we highlight just a few of the places associated with the King:
Authors Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett say Arthur’s kingdom of Camelot was in the Castlefield area of Cardiff.
Tintagel, in Cornwall, has also had a long association with Arthur and the area’s castle is said by local legend to have been the King’s fortress.
Glastonbury Abbey has been taken to be the Isle of Avalon, where Arthur was said to have gone to be healed of his wounds following the Battle of Camlann in 537. Late tradition assumes that he died and was buried there. Other legends have it that the Island of Avalon is the Isle of Aval in northern Brittany.
Stories of King Arthur holding court at Caerleon, near Newport, stretch back to the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century and further still to the oral traditions set down in the Mabinogion.
Keep up to date with the news. Sign up for News Alerts
Have your say on the latest news and sport in our Forums
Have your say on Wales news in our Forums
The Plane that flew...but never took off
THE AIRPLANE THAT FLEW… BUT NEVER TOOK OFF
In 1944 the Canada Car & Foundry built an aircraft in its Montreal shops designated the CBY-3, also called the Loadmaster. There were two units built. The CBY-3 was far superior to the planes of its day (its primary competition was the DC-3 - Dakota), but the CBY-3 got caught up in a web of controversy and was killed less than one year later.
One of the most interesting stories I stumbled into on the internet is from a website ( Mysteries of Canada) that promotes Canadian history with many fascinating stories. I guess I found the site when I was researching the questionof how planes fly. The average person perhaps never looked into or even knew of a controversy over how wings actually create a lift. The leading theory is called the Bernoulli principle. It is taught in most textbooks beginning in the primary grades through college. It basically says that air going over the top of the wing has to travel further than the air on the bottom of the wing and so it must travel faster in order to meet the air on the trailing side. High velocity creates low pressure. Well it is something like that. I had ten hours dual instruction in a Piper Cub back in the 40’s, so what do I know about aerodynamics? I do have however, a four hundred page book entitled, Airplane Aerodynamics, third edition published in 1961. The math in it would make Einstein wish he had gone into another occupation. If one needed to master that book before getting a ticket to fly, there would be no pilots. Just having it on my shelf makes me feel like an engineer and impresses other people when I talk about the theory of flying. Good thing the Wright brothers made a successful flight before the book came out. Of course their contemporary, Simon Newcomb, America’s greatest mathematician, did publish his calculations, and concluded in 1902, "Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."
In any case it seems that Bernoulli was wrong according to many experts and lift is generated by the ‘angle of attack’, meaning the angle at which the wing cuts through the air. [See for example, terrycolon.com] Every kid has held his hand out the window of a moving car and experienced what happens with a change in the angle of the hand meeting the air.
That is not the topic of this paper though I do plan to return it at a later time. I mention it here because after over a century of flight with hundreds of airplane designs the debate still goes on:How do airplanes fly?
This is the story of a plane designated CBY-3 , also called the Loadmaster and another designated US-14. Only two or three of the CBY-3s were ever built for reasons that will unfold. Its design was created by Vincent Burnelli, not to be confused with the Bernoulli just mentioned. In 1915, he and a friend, John Carisi, designed and built an open biplane (two wings). They tested the plane at Hempstead Plains Airfield which was later renamed Roosevelt Field. There is an irony in this as you will see later.
World War I created a demand for aviation designers and Bernelli established himself as one of the finest and he came up with a revolutionary design concept. His design was based on lift-body theory, a simple principle indeed. Conventional design ( a tubular body with wings) carries people or cargo with the lift coming from the wings alone, the body itself causing a drag. But how else could you do it?
Simple, lift-body design makes the body part of the wing,
(Not unlike the stealth aircraft of today, suspiciously looking like the Burnelli Transport of 1951). So the body creates lift as well as the wing.
Here is the kicker. Conventional aircraft gets its lift from the wings which make up only 15% of the structural weight, while lift-body design gets lift from 65% of the structural weight. So what, you say. With this design, airport runways could be cut in half and the planes would fly with 60% less fuel. Hello! We are not finished yet. The same planes would carry more cargo and/or people and cost less to manufacture. Moreover, it is claimed that the design is far safer and less prone to crashes.
The story of the history of this plane reads like a docudrama, as you will see if you go to the website I mentioned and get the full story. The story includes a shot fired in an assassination attempt on Roosevelt in Miami in 1934. We pick up on the story here from the website (mysteriesofcanada.com):
In 1939, the US Army Air Corp held a competition for a new bomber. The plane had to be capable of low and high level operations, carry a large load of bombs and be rugged enough to take a pounding and return to be repaired. Burnelli submitted his UB-14B design. (The UB-14B was a customized version of his UB-14 passenger design.)
The UB-14B could carry 2000 lbs. more bomb load than the design specification, it could take off and land on a smaller (half the length) runway (meaning that the Air Corp could get closer to the front without building big airfields) and the UB-14B was the cheapest to build.
The Army Air Corp, quite rightly, selected the Burnelli UB-14B design. In his 1939 report to the Secretary of War, General H. H. "Hap" Arnold stated... "In my opinion, it is essential, in the interest of national defence, that this Burnelli procurement be authorized."
After the competition in 1939, Burnelli was invited to the US White House to witness the signing of the UB-14B procurement contract by President Roosevelt. In idle chatter, prior to the signing, Roosevelt asked Burnelli who his major financial backers included. Burnelli replied... " A fellow Texan, Arthur Pew." This name sent Roosevelt ballistic. He refused to sign the contracts, threw his pen across the room and ejected Burnelli from the White House. (I warned you earlier that the Roosevelt name would become ironic.) Not only was Burnelli humiliated, for reasons unknown to him at the time, but Roosevelt also directed the Army to issue a new report denigrating the Arnold report.
What made Roosevelt go "postal"?
Arthur Pew was on the board of SUN Oil in Texas and was the major financial backer of Republican Wendell Wilkie, Roosevelt's opposition.
In February of 1933, the newly-elected President Roosevelt was giving a speech in Miami when six shots rang out. Roosevelt was not injured but the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was standing beside him, was hit in the stomach and later died.
The perpetrator, an Italian immigrant-turned-US-citizen, Giuseppe Zangara, blamed former President Hoover and, by association as newly minted President, Roosevelt for the poor treatment of the working class in the US during the depression years.
Roosevelt always thought that Zangara was acting on behalf of others in the crime and not alone as was the official story.
One year after the assassination attempt, in 1934, there was a failed attempt at a political coup against the US government of Roosevelt. [That too is a story for another time.] Little is known about the episode. Although the allegations were confirmed by a congressional committee, the findings were hushed up amid murmurs of a cover-up.
The Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 stated, "Sworn testimony showed that the (coup) plotters represented notable families -- Rockefeller, Mellon, Pew, Pitcairn, Hutton and great enterprises -- Morgan, Dupont, Remington, Anaconda, Bethlehem, Goodyear, GMC, Swift, Sun."
Aha! The Roosevelt-Pew-Burnelli connection. Pew plots to overthrow Roosevelt... Roosevelt hates Pew.. Pew backs Burnelli... Roosevelt throws a fit. Burnelli is toast!
Poor Burnelli, he went from flying his biplane at Roosevelt field to the flying pen in the Roosevelt Office and never knew what happened.
It is unfortunate. Today the only place you can see the only known CBY-3 is The New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where it is decaying in the open air. In case you are wondering Burnelli kept designing up to the time of his death in 1964. If you go to the Mysteries of Canada website, be sure to see part 4, The Bomber That Could Have Been.
Given the price of fuel and the fact that airlines are being forced out of business by high costs, it would seem appropriate to revive interest in a design that would make flying practical again.
******************************************************************
I cannot end this story without a reference to Tesla's turbine design. We mentioned earlier about drag, the resistence of the plane's body to the flow of air. Millions have been spend on ways to reduce that drag. Instead of it being a problem, Tesla used it to an advantage in his so-called boundary layer pumps and turbines. In a revolutionary design made with flat disks rotating at high speed, he created pumps that never have been equalled and that can do things no other pump can do. Because the drag principle keeps the materials going through the pump from actually touching the disks, the pumps almost never wear out. Air or liquid flowing over the spinning disks are pulled through the pump by the drag on the disks. The same principle is used in the turbines. Helicopters without flying blades overhead are a possibility.
The Tesla Turbine could far surpass the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. [from peswiki.com website]
Today, Tesla turbines can be used in a number of practical settings. Co-generation of electric power uses waste heat from conventional diesel generators to provide additional energy from the same fuel, which makes the entire process more efficient. They can also be used for generating electric power from hydro, thermal solar, and ocean-waves. (Saipan Tribune; May 13, 2005)
In 1944 the Canada Car & Foundry built an aircraft in its Montreal shops designated the CBY-3, also called the Loadmaster. There were two units built. The CBY-3 was far superior to the planes of its day (its primary competition was the DC-3 - Dakota), but the CBY-3 got caught up in a web of controversy and was killed less than one year later.
One of the most interesting stories I stumbled into on the internet is from a website ( Mysteries of Canada) that promotes Canadian history with many fascinating stories. I guess I found the site when I was researching the questionof how planes fly. The average person perhaps never looked into or even knew of a controversy over how wings actually create a lift. The leading theory is called the Bernoulli principle. It is taught in most textbooks beginning in the primary grades through college. It basically says that air going over the top of the wing has to travel further than the air on the bottom of the wing and so it must travel faster in order to meet the air on the trailing side. High velocity creates low pressure. Well it is something like that. I had ten hours dual instruction in a Piper Cub back in the 40’s, so what do I know about aerodynamics? I do have however, a four hundred page book entitled, Airplane Aerodynamics, third edition published in 1961. The math in it would make Einstein wish he had gone into another occupation. If one needed to master that book before getting a ticket to fly, there would be no pilots. Just having it on my shelf makes me feel like an engineer and impresses other people when I talk about the theory of flying. Good thing the Wright brothers made a successful flight before the book came out. Of course their contemporary, Simon Newcomb, America’s greatest mathematician, did publish his calculations, and concluded in 1902, "Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."
In any case it seems that Bernoulli was wrong according to many experts and lift is generated by the ‘angle of attack’, meaning the angle at which the wing cuts through the air. [See for example, terrycolon.com] Every kid has held his hand out the window of a moving car and experienced what happens with a change in the angle of the hand meeting the air.
That is not the topic of this paper though I do plan to return it at a later time. I mention it here because after over a century of flight with hundreds of airplane designs the debate still goes on:How do airplanes fly?
This is the story of a plane designated CBY-3 , also called the Loadmaster and another designated US-14. Only two or three of the CBY-3s were ever built for reasons that will unfold. Its design was created by Vincent Burnelli, not to be confused with the Bernoulli just mentioned. In 1915, he and a friend, John Carisi, designed and built an open biplane (two wings). They tested the plane at Hempstead Plains Airfield which was later renamed Roosevelt Field. There is an irony in this as you will see later.
World War I created a demand for aviation designers and Bernelli established himself as one of the finest and he came up with a revolutionary design concept. His design was based on lift-body theory, a simple principle indeed. Conventional design ( a tubular body with wings) carries people or cargo with the lift coming from the wings alone, the body itself causing a drag. But how else could you do it?
Simple, lift-body design makes the body part of the wing,
(Not unlike the stealth aircraft of today, suspiciously looking like the Burnelli Transport of 1951). So the body creates lift as well as the wing.
Here is the kicker. Conventional aircraft gets its lift from the wings which make up only 15% of the structural weight, while lift-body design gets lift from 65% of the structural weight. So what, you say. With this design, airport runways could be cut in half and the planes would fly with 60% less fuel. Hello! We are not finished yet. The same planes would carry more cargo and/or people and cost less to manufacture. Moreover, it is claimed that the design is far safer and less prone to crashes.
The story of the history of this plane reads like a docudrama, as you will see if you go to the website I mentioned and get the full story. The story includes a shot fired in an assassination attempt on Roosevelt in Miami in 1934. We pick up on the story here from the website (mysteriesofcanada.com):
In 1939, the US Army Air Corp held a competition for a new bomber. The plane had to be capable of low and high level operations, carry a large load of bombs and be rugged enough to take a pounding and return to be repaired. Burnelli submitted his UB-14B design. (The UB-14B was a customized version of his UB-14 passenger design.)
The UB-14B could carry 2000 lbs. more bomb load than the design specification, it could take off and land on a smaller (half the length) runway (meaning that the Air Corp could get closer to the front without building big airfields) and the UB-14B was the cheapest to build.
The Army Air Corp, quite rightly, selected the Burnelli UB-14B design. In his 1939 report to the Secretary of War, General H. H. "Hap" Arnold stated... "In my opinion, it is essential, in the interest of national defence, that this Burnelli procurement be authorized."
After the competition in 1939, Burnelli was invited to the US White House to witness the signing of the UB-14B procurement contract by President Roosevelt. In idle chatter, prior to the signing, Roosevelt asked Burnelli who his major financial backers included. Burnelli replied... " A fellow Texan, Arthur Pew." This name sent Roosevelt ballistic. He refused to sign the contracts, threw his pen across the room and ejected Burnelli from the White House. (I warned you earlier that the Roosevelt name would become ironic.) Not only was Burnelli humiliated, for reasons unknown to him at the time, but Roosevelt also directed the Army to issue a new report denigrating the Arnold report.
What made Roosevelt go "postal"?
Arthur Pew was on the board of SUN Oil in Texas and was the major financial backer of Republican Wendell Wilkie, Roosevelt's opposition.
In February of 1933, the newly-elected President Roosevelt was giving a speech in Miami when six shots rang out. Roosevelt was not injured but the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was standing beside him, was hit in the stomach and later died.
The perpetrator, an Italian immigrant-turned-US-citizen, Giuseppe Zangara, blamed former President Hoover and, by association as newly minted President, Roosevelt for the poor treatment of the working class in the US during the depression years.
Roosevelt always thought that Zangara was acting on behalf of others in the crime and not alone as was the official story.
One year after the assassination attempt, in 1934, there was a failed attempt at a political coup against the US government of Roosevelt. [That too is a story for another time.] Little is known about the episode. Although the allegations were confirmed by a congressional committee, the findings were hushed up amid murmurs of a cover-up.
The Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 stated, "Sworn testimony showed that the (coup) plotters represented notable families -- Rockefeller, Mellon, Pew, Pitcairn, Hutton and great enterprises -- Morgan, Dupont, Remington, Anaconda, Bethlehem, Goodyear, GMC, Swift, Sun."
Aha! The Roosevelt-Pew-Burnelli connection. Pew plots to overthrow Roosevelt... Roosevelt hates Pew.. Pew backs Burnelli... Roosevelt throws a fit. Burnelli is toast!
Poor Burnelli, he went from flying his biplane at Roosevelt field to the flying pen in the Roosevelt Office and never knew what happened.
It is unfortunate. Today the only place you can see the only known CBY-3 is The New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where it is decaying in the open air. In case you are wondering Burnelli kept designing up to the time of his death in 1964. If you go to the Mysteries of Canada website, be sure to see part 4, The Bomber That Could Have Been.
Given the price of fuel and the fact that airlines are being forced out of business by high costs, it would seem appropriate to revive interest in a design that would make flying practical again.
******************************************************************
I cannot end this story without a reference to Tesla's turbine design. We mentioned earlier about drag, the resistence of the plane's body to the flow of air. Millions have been spend on ways to reduce that drag. Instead of it being a problem, Tesla used it to an advantage in his so-called boundary layer pumps and turbines. In a revolutionary design made with flat disks rotating at high speed, he created pumps that never have been equalled and that can do things no other pump can do. Because the drag principle keeps the materials going through the pump from actually touching the disks, the pumps almost never wear out. Air or liquid flowing over the spinning disks are pulled through the pump by the drag on the disks. The same principle is used in the turbines. Helicopters without flying blades overhead are a possibility.
The Tesla Turbine could far surpass the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. [from peswiki.com website]
Today, Tesla turbines can be used in a number of practical settings. Co-generation of electric power uses waste heat from conventional diesel generators to provide additional energy from the same fuel, which makes the entire process more efficient. They can also be used for generating electric power from hydro, thermal solar, and ocean-waves. (Saipan Tribune; May 13, 2005)
Monday, August 18, 2008
Bigfoot
My grandson Alex called me yesterday from his school where he is a high school senior. My first thought was he needs a ride home and his mom is not around to pick him up. But he was excited, “Grandpaw they found Bigfoot.” They had been talking about the recent report from Georgia that some hunters had shot a bigfoot and had him in a freezer. I told him that I was aware of the story and had reposted it in the internet. I then told him he needed to talk to me more often. We will see how that goes. Alex is a typical teenager who is heavily involved in sports and he has a girl friend, so even though we live in the same house I rarely get to talk to him. I have my own apartment downstairs and only on occasion do I eat with the rest of the family. He knew of my interest in Bigfoot from earlier conversations at the table sometime ago.
He knew of my trip a few years ago, to an area not far from Death Valley, California that I made with my friend Dr. Richard Clark. We were looking for bigfoot; though we did not find him, we did find his footprint and made a plaster cast. Dr. Clark has plans for a return trip in the fall of 2008 to a place he went twenty-two years ago where he had a hair-raising, near-death experience with one of the anomalies; a story for another time.
For many years Dr. Clark and I have had conversations about where creatures like the Lock Ness monster and Bigfoot come from. He is of the opinion that we are dealing with a dimensional phenomenon. There are certain places on earth where stresses in the earth’s crust affect the ether (or some substrate of ethereal matter) at which points anomalies of many sorts are found. There is a correlation with the sun, moon and tides which activates or alters energy fields, and which opens barriers between dimensions. Bigfoot, doing whatever he is doing, finds himself in our world and he continues with his activities as if nothing happened. When conditions change he goes back. That is why he is hard to find unless you know when to look for him. I am not sure Dr. Clark would state it exactly as I have, but that is my understanding. Dr. Clark, a Ph.D. in mathematics, has made incredible inroads in the study of the forces of nature found at intersecting stress points.
The study involves earth history when continents broke apart, not gradually over millions of years, but suddenly by enormous forces
not comprehended by today’s cosmologists. The earth globe doubled in size; the rift marks on the oceans floors and scars on land masses testifying to such events. Celestial bodies are focal points where galactic energies manifest in matter. Matter itself sometimes may carry transitional scars where energy is, so to speak, trapped. It is at these points, at least on earth, where strange events are apt to happen. As an example, where two mountain ranges come together one might expect anomalous events. Often mountains were torn apart, half going east and half going west with a valley in between, but the mountains are still joined at north and south terminals. It is at such points of stress, or even in the valleys below, where the stress continues and the dimensions interface.
This non-academic terminology describes the notes I have made from discussions with Dr. Clark. I alone am responsible for the way I have expressed it. Dr. Clark may put it otherwise.
Is Bigfoot a species that has managed to elude discovery or are the sightings really mistaken identifications? Orthodox science is understandably skeptical of the discoveries made by untrained scholars. The roots of modern science began in a dark age culture of superstition against which it rebelled. In moving to rational, empirical standards it may have gone too far in the other direction rejecting what we refer to as paranormal. Going beyond paranormal and crossing dimensional barriers will have an even tougher struggle with academic authority. But we got footprints. What the Georgia hunters have in the freezer I don’t know.
[Latest reports claim it to be an opossum. Give me a break. Georgia hunters know the difference between a ‘possum and bigfoot, even if they don’t spell it right. And its seems to me that even a hoaxer could do better than that.]
He knew of my trip a few years ago, to an area not far from Death Valley, California that I made with my friend Dr. Richard Clark. We were looking for bigfoot; though we did not find him, we did find his footprint and made a plaster cast. Dr. Clark has plans for a return trip in the fall of 2008 to a place he went twenty-two years ago where he had a hair-raising, near-death experience with one of the anomalies; a story for another time.
For many years Dr. Clark and I have had conversations about where creatures like the Lock Ness monster and Bigfoot come from. He is of the opinion that we are dealing with a dimensional phenomenon. There are certain places on earth where stresses in the earth’s crust affect the ether (or some substrate of ethereal matter) at which points anomalies of many sorts are found. There is a correlation with the sun, moon and tides which activates or alters energy fields, and which opens barriers between dimensions. Bigfoot, doing whatever he is doing, finds himself in our world and he continues with his activities as if nothing happened. When conditions change he goes back. That is why he is hard to find unless you know when to look for him. I am not sure Dr. Clark would state it exactly as I have, but that is my understanding. Dr. Clark, a Ph.D. in mathematics, has made incredible inroads in the study of the forces of nature found at intersecting stress points.
The study involves earth history when continents broke apart, not gradually over millions of years, but suddenly by enormous forces
not comprehended by today’s cosmologists. The earth globe doubled in size; the rift marks on the oceans floors and scars on land masses testifying to such events. Celestial bodies are focal points where galactic energies manifest in matter. Matter itself sometimes may carry transitional scars where energy is, so to speak, trapped. It is at these points, at least on earth, where strange events are apt to happen. As an example, where two mountain ranges come together one might expect anomalous events. Often mountains were torn apart, half going east and half going west with a valley in between, but the mountains are still joined at north and south terminals. It is at such points of stress, or even in the valleys below, where the stress continues and the dimensions interface.
This non-academic terminology describes the notes I have made from discussions with Dr. Clark. I alone am responsible for the way I have expressed it. Dr. Clark may put it otherwise.
Is Bigfoot a species that has managed to elude discovery or are the sightings really mistaken identifications? Orthodox science is understandably skeptical of the discoveries made by untrained scholars. The roots of modern science began in a dark age culture of superstition against which it rebelled. In moving to rational, empirical standards it may have gone too far in the other direction rejecting what we refer to as paranormal. Going beyond paranormal and crossing dimensional barriers will have an even tougher struggle with academic authority. But we got footprints. What the Georgia hunters have in the freezer I don’t know.
[Latest reports claim it to be an opossum. Give me a break. Georgia hunters know the difference between a ‘possum and bigfoot, even if they don’t spell it right. And its seems to me that even a hoaxer could do better than that.]
Friday, August 15, 2008
SECRET VOYAGES
SECRET VOYAGES
There were many so-called secret voyages to the New World in not so ancient times. Maps were secret documents of royalty. They were treasure maps; new lands being potential sources of wealth. Only captains of officially sponsored voyages, were privy to them. Cover stories of specific destinations were common tactics.
Gunnar Thompson is favorite writer of mine because, in keeping with my research, he is correct in his historical reconstructions. He has done extensive and detailed studies tracing the origin of New World cultures to India and Asia. I recommend his book, Nu Sun, about Asian – American Voyages in 500 BC. Thompson is an artist and has carefully reproduced the art of Asian cultures and the same with New World cultures and placed them side by side. There can be do doubt that the latter had their origin in Asia.
In another book, Secret Voyages to the New World, he unveils some most interesting revelations about these secret voyages. The facts in this book, or his other works, won’t soon be in school textbooks. It upsets too many long held beliefs.
I don’t think my friend Fred Jueneman will object to my use of his brief review of this book, recently posted on the internet.
Review
According to Gunnar Thompson (Secret Voyages to the New World, Misty Isles Press, Seattle, 2006), Marco Polo's voyages under the aegis of Kublai Khan were over a century prior to Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered America, outlining the armadas of Zheng He during the reign of Emperor Zhu Di.
Thompson daringly has Marco Polo on two voyages to the west coasts of the Americas to oversee the marketing strategies of Kublai Khan's vast overseas interests. (The Polo brothers and Marco weren't the only Europeans in China at this time, as Genoese and Venetian commercial enterprises competed fiercely for such trade.) More recently, as an historical detective, Thompson has uncovered a collection of maps and letters from Marco Polo's daughters, some of which had lain fallow at the Library of Congress when they were archived there by the Rossi family in the 1930s. Moreover, Thompson also speculates that the north magnetic pole was in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle as early as the 13th century, as later European explorers who used magnetic compasses (in defiance of canon law) thought they were sailing north when their voyages were actually more westerly, since they were surprised at the temperate climates and grape vines found in their New World landings.
Satellite positioning and more earthbound measurements have indeed found a radical northward migration of the north magnetic pole, from the Canadian archipelago and now heading into Russian waters. The USGS had been constantly upgrading their maps because of this known magnetic migration. Whether or not this migration is solar caused is as yet not known for certain.
Frederic Jueneman
There were many so-called secret voyages to the New World in not so ancient times. Maps were secret documents of royalty. They were treasure maps; new lands being potential sources of wealth. Only captains of officially sponsored voyages, were privy to them. Cover stories of specific destinations were common tactics.
Gunnar Thompson is favorite writer of mine because, in keeping with my research, he is correct in his historical reconstructions. He has done extensive and detailed studies tracing the origin of New World cultures to India and Asia. I recommend his book, Nu Sun, about Asian – American Voyages in 500 BC. Thompson is an artist and has carefully reproduced the art of Asian cultures and the same with New World cultures and placed them side by side. There can be do doubt that the latter had their origin in Asia.
In another book, Secret Voyages to the New World, he unveils some most interesting revelations about these secret voyages. The facts in this book, or his other works, won’t soon be in school textbooks. It upsets too many long held beliefs.
I don’t think my friend Fred Jueneman will object to my use of his brief review of this book, recently posted on the internet.
Review
According to Gunnar Thompson (Secret Voyages to the New World, Misty Isles Press, Seattle, 2006), Marco Polo's voyages under the aegis of Kublai Khan were over a century prior to Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered America, outlining the armadas of Zheng He during the reign of Emperor Zhu Di.
Thompson daringly has Marco Polo on two voyages to the west coasts of the Americas to oversee the marketing strategies of Kublai Khan's vast overseas interests. (The Polo brothers and Marco weren't the only Europeans in China at this time, as Genoese and Venetian commercial enterprises competed fiercely for such trade.) More recently, as an historical detective, Thompson has uncovered a collection of maps and letters from Marco Polo's daughters, some of which had lain fallow at the Library of Congress when they were archived there by the Rossi family in the 1930s. Moreover, Thompson also speculates that the north magnetic pole was in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle as early as the 13th century, as later European explorers who used magnetic compasses (in defiance of canon law) thought they were sailing north when their voyages were actually more westerly, since they were surprised at the temperate climates and grape vines found in their New World landings.
Satellite positioning and more earthbound measurements have indeed found a radical northward migration of the north magnetic pole, from the Canadian archipelago and now heading into Russian waters. The USGS had been constantly upgrading their maps because of this known magnetic migration. Whether or not this migration is solar caused is as yet not known for certain.
Frederic Jueneman
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
