Fiona McCann
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a new beginning
Athbhliain faoi Mhaise Duit! -- Happy New Year!  This coming year, let your light shine in the world's darkness, and may all good things find you in 2005. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
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1.1.05 00:53 |
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ACK!!!
Why ever does Google have a text ad above my head which says: TERRORIST NAME SEARCH Just when I thought it was safe to come out of hiding... :p |
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1.1.05 04:01 |
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Enviro/HAARP-Reichstag Fire
Portland Indymedia (cached) Original link, which will probably be removed, from Portland Indymedia **I saw this article on my Bloglines from Indymedia.ie this morning, but when I went to get it, it had been taken down. I am not surprised. I am posting a Google cached page of the article because I think there are some extremely interesting points made. I am posting 'as is' and cannot verify everything written, but it does give you many things to think about, especially if you wonder why the US naval base at Diego Garcia was warned about the impending disaster, but other entities in the area were not. Click on above links to get 'live' links cited NAZI BUSH REGIME's ENVIRO/HAARP-REICHSTAG FIRE: seize Aceh oil militarily as "rescue" author: various Why has a senior commander involved in the invasion of Iraq been assigned to lead the US emergency relief program? "Lieutenant General Blackman was previously Chief of Staff...leading the Marines into Baghdad..." US Foreknowledge and Selective Warnings. Similar to 9-11, the automatic warning system STANDS DOWN to allow a terrorist act occur, hypothetically using the HAARP technology, to justify upcoming militarization of the area with US troops in an area rich with oil. Whether HAARP or otherwise, the associated issue would be the standdown of the automatic earthquake warning system among its subscribing member nations. This is CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE--U.S. ONLY WARNS AUSTRALIA AND INDONESIA--LEFT OTHERS IN AN ENVIRONMENTAL REICHSTAG FIRE TO DIE FOR POLITIAL GAIN, and then invaded oil rich Aceh with over 2000 U.S. Marines and two aircraft carriers with armed helicopters. No one tells the member countries about the "earthquake". However, the US DOES WARN its military base in the area. And from this military base, part of the invasion of Aceh is proceeding with TWO AIRCRAFT CARRIERS and led by the U.S.'s pre-emptive invasion of Iraq leadership. "In a bitter irony, part of this operation is being coordinated out of America's Naval base in Diego Garcia. The US warns its naval base, though fails to warn Indian Ocean rim governments. "...the strike group, with its seven ships, 2,100 Marines and 1,400 sailors aboard, also has four Cobra helicopters..." The oil rich Aceh area, which like Iraq, was suffering from a civil war making oil extraction difficult. THE AMERICAN NAZI ANSCHLUSS MOVES OUT FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN--INTO ACEH: An·schluss: A political union, especially the one unifying Nazi Germany and Austria in 1938. http://dictionary.reference.com/search... 2004 Sumatra quake/tsunami (click to animate): HAARP and/or Selective Warnings US Foreknowledge of Natural Disaster, then Selective Warning, then US military invasion from Iraqi commander and aircraft carriers SAID IN APRIL 1997 BY THE U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, WILLIAM COHEN: "Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations... It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts." --- Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997. "In short,...the Secretary of Defense of the United States confirmed that there are indeed novel kinds of EM weapons, right now and have been for some time, which have been and are being used to (1) initiate earthquakes, (2) engineer the weather and climate, and (3) initiate the eruption of volcanoes. We wrote about those exact uses of the weaponry decades ago. Several nations now have such weapons. Three of them (two on one side and the other on a hostile side) are even firing practice shots into Western Australia, as a convenient test range." [or undersea Indian ocean, just to see what their power can do]. 11 facts/points, most assembled from PIMC already 1. Foreknowledge of A Natural Disaster Washington was aware that a deadly Tidal Wave was building up in the Indian Ocean Michel Chossudovsky | December 29 2004 The US Military and the State Department were given advanced warning. America's Navy base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was notified. Why were fishermen in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand not provided with the same warnings as the US Navy and the US State Department? Why did the US State Department remain mum on the existence of an impending catastrophe? With a modern communications system, why did the information not get out? By email, telephone, fax, satellite TV... ? It could have saved the lives of more than 80,000 people. And the death toll is rising. The earthquake was a Magnitude 9.0 on the Richter scale, among the highest in recorded history. US authorities had initially recorded 8.0 on the Richter scale. As confirmed by several reports, US scientists in Hawaii, had advanced knowledge regarding an impending catastrophe, but failed to contact their Asian counterparts. Charles McCreery of the Pacific Warning Center in Hawaii confirmed that his team tried desperately to get in touch with his counterparts in Asia. According to McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's center in Honolulu, the team did its utmost to contact the countries. (The NOAA in Hawaii's Report at http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2004/s2357.htm ). His team contacted the US State Department, which apparently contacted the Asian governments. The Indian government confirms that no such warning was received. (The Hindu, 27 Dec 2004) Nine (9.0) on the Richter scale: The Director of the Hawaii Warning Center stated that "they did not know" that the earthquake would generate a deadly tidal wave until it had hit Sri Lanka, more than one and a half hours later, at 2.30 GMT. (see Timeline below) "Not until the deadly wave hit Sri Lanka and the scientists in Honolulu saw news reports of the damage there did they recognize what was happening... 'Then we knew there was something moving across the Indian Ocean,' said Charles McCreery. (quoted in the NYT, 28 Dec 2004 ). This statement is at odds with the Timeline of the tidal wave disaster. Thailand was hit almost an hour before Sri Lanka and the news reports were already out. Surely, these reports out of Thailand were known to the scientists in Hawaii, not to mention the office of Sec. Colin Powell, well before the tidal wave reached Sri Lanka. ''We wanted to try to do something, but without a plan in place then, it was not an effective way to issue a warning, or to have it acted upon,'' Dr. McCreery said. ''There would have still been some time -- not a lot of time, but some time -- if there was something that could be done in Madagascar, or on the coast of Africa.'' The above statement is also inconsistent. The tidal wave reached the East African coastline several hours after it reached The Maldives islands. According to news reports, Male, the capital of the Maldives was hit three hours after the earthquake, at approximately 4.00 GMT. By that time everybody around the World knew. It is worth noting that the US Navy was fully aware of the deadly tidal wave, because the Navy was on the Pacific Warning Center's list of contacts. Moreover, America's strategic Naval base on the island of Diego Garcia had also been notified. Although directly in the path of the tidal wave (see animated chart below), the Diego Garcia military base reported "no damage". "One of the few places in the Indian Ocean that got the message of the quake was Diego Garcia, a speck of an island with a United States Navy base, because the Pacific warning center's contact list includes the Navy. Finding the appropriate people in Sri Lanka or India was harder." (NYT, 28 Dec 2004, emphasis added) Now how hard is it to pick up the phone and call Sri Lanka? According to Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world." Only after the first waves hit Sri Lanka did workers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre [PTWC] and others in Hawaii start making phone calls to US diplomats in Madagascar and Mauritius in an attempt to head off further disaster. "We didn't have a contact in place where you could just pick up the phone," Dolores Clark, spokeswoman for the International Tsunami Information Centre in Hawaii said. "We were starting from scratch." These statement on the surface are inconsistent, since several Indian Ocean Asian countries are in fact members of the Tsunami Warning System. There are 26 member countries of the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System , including Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. All these countries would normally be in the address book of the PTWC, which works in close coordination with its sister organization the ICGTWS , which has its offices in Honolulu at the headquarters of the National Weather Service Pacific Region Headquarters in downtown Honolulu. The mandate of the ICGTWS is to "assist member states in establishing national warning systems, and makes information available on current technologies for tsunami warning systems." Australia and Indonesia were notified. The US Congress is to investigate why the US government did not notify all the Indian Ocean nations in the affected area: "Only two countries in the affected region, Indonesia and Australia, received the warning" "Although Thailand belongs to the international tsunami-warning network, its west coast does not have the system's wave sensors mounted on ocean buoys. The northern tip of the earthquake fault is located near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and tsunamis appear to have rushed eastward toward the Thai resort of Phuket. "They had no tidal gauges and they had no warning," said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Centre in Golden, Colorado, U.S., which monitors seismic activity worldwide. "There are no buoys in the Indian Ocean and that's where this tsunami occurred."" (Hindu, 27 Dec 2004) The issue of the Ocean sensors is a Red Herring We we were not able to warn them because we had no sensors in the Indian Ocean: This argument is a Red Herring. We are not dealing with advanced information based on the Ocean sensors, but on an emergency warning transmitted in the immediate wake of the earthquake. The latter took place at 00.58 GMT on the 26th of Dec. That information was sent to The State Department and the US Navy. With modern communications, the information of an impending disaster could have been sent around the World in a matter of minutes, by email, by telephone, by fax, not to mention by live satellite Television. Coastguards, municipalities, local governments, tourist hotels, etc. could have been warned. According to Tsunami Society President Prof. Tad Murty of the University of Manitoba: 'there's no reason for a single individual to get killed in a tsunami,' since most areas had anywhere from 25 minutes to four hours before a wave hit. So, once again, because of indifference and corruption thousands of innocent people have died needlessly." (Calgary Sun, 28 Dec 2004) Key Questions 1. Why were the Indian Ocean countries' governments not informed? Were there "guidelines" from the US military or the State Department regarding the release of an advanced warning? According to the statement of the Hawaii based PTWC, advanced warning was released but on a selective basis. Indonesia was already hit, so the warning was in any event redundant and Australia was several thousand miles from the epicentre of the earthquake and was, therefore, under no immediate threat. 2. Did US authorities monitoring seismographic data have knowledge of the earthquake prior to its actual occurrence at 00.57 GMT on the 26th of December? The question is whether there were indications of abnormal seismic activity prior to 01.00 GMT on the 26th of Dec. The US Geological Survey confirmed that the earthquake which triggered the tidal wave measured 9.0 on the Richter scale and was the fourth largest quake since 1900. In such cases, one would expect evidence of abnormal seismic activity before the actual occurrence of a major earthquake. 3. Why is the US military Calling the Shots on Humanitarian Relief Why in the wake of the disaster, is the US military (rather than civilian humanitarian/aid organizations operating under UN auspices) taking a lead role? The US Pacific Command has been designated to coordinate the channeling of emergency relief? Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Rusty Blackman, commander of the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force based in Okinawa, has been designated to lead the emergency relief program Lieutenant General Blackman was previously Chief of Staff for Coalition Forces Land Component Command, responsible for leading the Marines into Baghdad during "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Three "Marine disaster relief assessment teams" under Blackman's command have been sent to Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. US military aircraft are conducting observation missions. In a bitter irony, part of this operation is being coordinated out of America's Naval base in Diego Garcia, which was not struck by the tidal wave. Meanwhile, "USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, which was in Hong Kong when the earthquake and tsunamis struck, has been diverted to the Gulf of Thailand to support recovery operations" (Press Conference of Pacific Command, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2004/n12292004_2004122905.html ). Two Aircraft Carriers have been sent to the region. Why is it necessary for the US to mobilize so much military equipment? The pattern is unprecedented: Conway said the Lincoln carrier strike group has 12 helicopters embarked that he said could be "extremely valuable" in recovery missions. An additional 25 helicopters are aboard USS Bonhomme Richard, headed to the Bay of Bengal. Conway said the expeditionary strike group was in Guam and is forgoing port visits in Guam and Singapore and expects to arrive in the Bay of Bengal by Jan. 7. Conway said the strike group, with its seven ships, 2,100 Marines and 1,400 sailors aboard, also has four Cobra helicopters that will be instrumented in reconnaissance efforts. Because fresh water is one of the greatest needs in the region, Fargo has ordered seven ships — each capable of producing 90,000 gallons of fresh water a day — to the region. Conway said five of these ships are pre-positioned in Guam and two will come from Diego Garcia. A field hospital ship pre-positioned in Guam would also be ordered to the region, depending on findings of the disaster relief assessment teams and need, Conway said. (Ibid) Why has a senior commander involved in the invasion of Iraq been assigned to lead the US emergency relief program? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Tsunami Timeline Sunday 26 December 2004 (GMT) 00.57 GMT: Between 00.57 GMT and 00.59 GMT, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake occurs on the seafloor near Aceh in northern Indonesia. (See http://ioc.unesco.org/itsu/ and other reports) 00.58 GMT: Saturday 25 December, 2.58 pm Hawaii Time (GMT-10) 26 Dec 00.58 GMT. US government's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center registers the earthquake on its seismic instruments. In other words at the time of its occurrence at 00.58 GMT. shortly after 01.00 GMT: Earthquake hits several cities in Indonesia, creates panic in urban areas in peninsular Malaysia. The news of the earthquakes is reported immediately. 01.3O GMT: Phuket and Coast of Thailand: The tidal wave hits to coastline shortly after 8.30 am, 01.30 GMT 02.30 GMT: Colombo Sri Lanka and Eastern Coast of Sri Lanka, the tidal wave hits the coastal regions close to the capital Colombo, according to report at 8.30 am local time, 02.30 GMT (an hour and a half after the earthqake) 02.45 GMT: India's Eastern Coastline. The tsunami hits India's eastern coast from 6:15 a.m.(2:45 GMT) 04.00 GMT: Male, Maldives: From about 9:00 am (0400 GMT), three hours after the earthquake, the capital, Male, and other parts of the country were flooded by the tsunami. (more than three hours after the earthquake) 11.00 GMT (approximate time according to news dispatches): East Coast of Africa is hit. More than ten hours after the earthquake The animation below indicates approximate times at which the tidal wave hits the coastal areas of Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, The Maldives. Click on the image to see an animation (650 KB) (Animation provided by Kenji Satake, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 26 Dec 2004 Seismic Activity on Dec 26 (click http://www.pgc.nrcan.gc.ca/seisplots/long-period/200412/20041226.PGC.LHZ.24hr.gif Note: extreme seismic activity prior to 01.00 GMT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Richter Scale US scientists in Hawaii had initially indicated that the earthquake was of a magnitude of 8.0 (ten times weaker than in the case a 9.0 earthquake on the Richter scale). How can an error of this nature be made, with very sophisticated measuring equipment? According to Natural Resources Canada: "The magnitude of an earthquake is a measure of the amount of energy released. Each earthquake has a unique magnitude assigned to it. This is based on the amplitude of seismic waves measured at a number of seismograph sites, after being corrected for distance from the earthquake. Magnitude estimates often change by up to 0.2 units, as additional data are included in the estimate. The Richter scale is logarithmic, that is an increase of 1 magnitude unit represents a factor of ten times in amplitude. The seismic waves of a magnitude 6 earthquake are 10 times greater in amplitude than those of a magnitude 5 earthquake. However, in terms of energy release, a magnitude 6 earthquake is about 31 times greater than a magnitude 5. The intensity of an earthquake varies greatly according to distance from the earthquake, ground conditions, and other factors. The Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale is used to describe earthquake effects." ( http://www.pgc.nrcan.gc.ca/seismo/eqinfo/richter.htm ) The following criteria are given by Natural Resources, Canada: M=8: "Great" earthquake, great destruction, loss of life over several 100 km (1906 San Francisco, 1949 Queen Charlotte Islands) . M=9: Rare great earthquake, major damage over a large region over 1000 km (Chile 1960, Alaska 1964, and west coast of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, 1700) . Source Natural Resources Canada: http://www.pgc.nrcan.gc.ca/seismo/eqinfo/richter.htm 2. "To be able to cause natural disasters to that extent could put the entire world in jeopardy. Mother nature isn't exactly a force to reckon with, nor try to manipulate on such a large scale. " Title: HAARP-watch: fake HAARP tremors rock earth deep beneath San Andreas Fault Author: haarp-watch, Michel Chossudovsky Date: 2004.12.11 07:02 Description: Mysterious tremors deep beneath the San Andreas Fault near the quake-prone town of Parkfield are shaking the earth's brittle crust, FAR BELOW THE REGION WHERE EARTHQUAKES NORMALLY STRIKE -- and scientists say THEY CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S HAPPENING or what the motions mean. Seismic researchers are monitoring the strange vibrations..."..."We see this kind of tremor activity inside volcanoes like Mount St. Helens," Nadeau said, "but that's due to the movement of rising magma, and in the tremors we've recorded there's NO EVIDENCE OF VOLCANISM and NO SEISMIC WAVES TYPICAL OF ORDINARY EARTHQUAKES." "In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the ("Star Wars") Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction. Potentially, it constitutes an instrument of conquest capable of selectively destabilising agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions." the how of HAARP causing seismic irregularities 11.Dec.2004 23:16 more link "A short scan of the verbiage pertaining to HAARP in this post shows no theories offered as to how a high-powered radio-frequency transmitter like HAARP can cause seismic irregularities." I'm sure other people are curious so here is more: SAID IN APRIL 1997 BY THE U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, WILLIAM COHEN: "Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations... It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts." --- Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997. "In short,...the Secretary of Defense of the United States confirmed that there are indeed novel kinds of EM weapons, right now and have been for some time, which have been and are being used to (1) initiate earthquakes, (2) engineer the weather and climate, and (3) initiate the eruption of volcanoes. We wrote about those exact uses of the weaponry decades ago. Several nations now have such weapons. Three of them (two on one side and the other on a hostile side) are even firing practice shots into Western Australia, as a convenient test range." [or undersea Indian ocean, just to see what their power can do]. http://www.earthchangestv.com/ufo/0209gandor.htm http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/12/305741.shtml 3. Unusual Weather Patterns (2003-2004) of Bush/Pentagon's global enviro-warfare 28.Dec.2004 19:44 more link Environmental warfare is defined as the intentional modification or manipulation of the natural ecology, such as climate and weather, earth systems such as the ionosphere, magnetosphere, tectonic plate system, and/or the triggering of seismic events (earthquakes) to cause intentional physical, economic, and psycho-social, and physical destruction to an intended target geophysical or population location, as part of strategic or tactical war." (Eco News) TABLE 1: Unusual Weather Patterns (2003-2004) Alex, Ivan, Frances, Charley and Jeanne (August-September 2004): Four destructive hurricanes and a tropical rain storm occur in a sequence, within a short period of time. Unprecedented in hurricane history in the Caribbean, the island of Grenada is completely devastated: 37 people died and roughly two-thirds of the island's 100,000 inhabitants have been left homeless, in Haiti, more than two thousand people have died and tens of thousands have been made homeless. The Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and the Bahamas have also been devastated. In the US, the damage hitting several Southern states including Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and the Carolinas is the highest in US history. Brazil March 2004: The first-ever hurricane formed in the South Atlantic, striking Brazil with 90 mph winds and causing up to a dozen deaths. "Meteorologists were left scratching their heads in bewilderment as the familiar swirl of clouds, complete with a well-defined eye, appeared in an oceanic basin where none had been spotted before." (WP, 19 September 2004, See also http://www.climate.org/topics/climate/brazil_hurricane.shtml ) Japan, China and the Korean Peninsula: "Japan has suffered its highest number of typhoon strikes on record, and the storms -- which hit at the rate of one a week for much of the summer -- wreaked havoc in Taiwan, China and the Korean Peninsula." (ibid) China (August 2004): Typhoon Rananim, the worst in 48 years, has killed at least 164 people and injured more than 1800 in China's Zhejiang province. Rananim is confirmed by China's meteorological authorities to be the strongest to hit the Chinese mainland since 1956. It is estimated to have disrupted the life of some 13 million people, http://www.cma.gov.cn/ywwz/englishread.php... United States May 2003 : 562 tornadoes hit the United States, the highest in recorded history, far exceeding the previous monthly peak of 399 in June 1992.(CNN, July 3, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/WEATHER/07/03/wmo.extremes/ ) India, early 2003: a pre-monsoon heat wave caused peak temperatures of between 45 and 49 degrees Celsius (113 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit), killing more than 1400 people.(Ibid) Sri Lanka, "heavy rainfalls from Tropical Cyclone 01B exacerbated already wet conditions, causing flooding and landslides and more than 300 fatalities." (Ibid) Western Europe Summer 2003: experienced extremely high Summer temperatures. "Switzerland experienced its hottest June [2003] in at least 250 years while in the south of France average temperatures were between 5 and 7 degrees Celsius (9 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the long term average. England and Wales also experienced their hottest month since 1976." (Ibid) ... The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: "Owning the Weather" for Military Use by Michel Chossudovsky www.globalresearch.ca 27 September 2004 The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO409F.html This article is follow-up on an earlier study by the author entitled Washington's New World Order Weapons Have the Ability to Trigger Climate Change, Third World Resurgence, January 2001, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO201A.html What are the underlying causes of extreme weather instability, which has ravaged every major region of the World in the course of the last few years? . . . A study released in July 2003, by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) places the blame, without further examination, at the feet of global warming: "These record extreme events [high temperatures, low temperatures and high rainfall amounts and droughts] all go into calculating the monthly and annual averages which, for temperatures, have been gradually increasing over the past 100 years," the WMO said in its statement (CNN, July 3, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/WEATHER/07/03/wmo.extremes/ ) While global warming is undoubtedly an important factor, it does not fully account for these extreme and unusual weather patterns. Weather Warfare The significant expansion in America's weather warfare arsenal, which is a priority of the Department of Defense is not a matter for debate or discussion. While, environmentalists blame the Bush administration for not having signed the Kyoto protocol, the issue of "weather warfare", namely the manipulation of weather patterns for military use is never mentioned. The US Air Force has the capability of manipulating climate either for testing purposes or for outright military-intelligence use. These capabilities extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes. In recent years, large amounts of money have been allocated by the US Department of Defense to further developing and perfecting these capabilities. Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally... It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog, and storms on earth or to modify space weather, ... and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of technologies which can provide substantial increase in US, or degraded capability in an adversary, to achieve global awareness, reach, and power. (US Air Force, emphasis added. Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report, http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/ emphasis added) http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO409F.html 4. did you note that people above basically admitted that though Sumatra was only "minutes" from the tsunami when USGS noted it, they instead were presumably doing something for "20 minutes," and only after Sumatra/Aceh (oil area) was hit, then the US sent their indirect "email warning" 20 minutes later. Hypothetically, an expedited phone call to police or the main government on Sumatra would have definitely preserved more human lives. No one did this though. Surely this is criminal negligence and criminal forethought particularly in regards to Aceh. Or, sit back and watch corp media. Here's what you would see. ABC talked up (with very detailed graphics already at the ready) Atlantic tsunamis on the morning of Dec 30. No one mentioned HAARP though. I was channel flipping, and I was shocked to see ABC repeating the same "Atlantic tsunamis" story over and over and over. I caught it twice myself and I was only channel flipping. 5. How likely is it that this whole terrible earthquake/tsunami happened because US/Indonesian army folks thought it was a good idea to use a big bomb to quash the Aceh independence movement? 6. Hehehe... 29.Dec.2004 19:47 Tony Blair's dog link "I think it would be too obvious to too many scientists that something had happened at the bottom of the ocean to instigate an earthquake." You mean scientists like the ones who got censored by the corporate media when they exposed the explosions taking place at the WTC *before* the WTC buildings went down on 9/11? Yeah, I think they would find it a little too obvious. But then, who could they reach out to with that information when the big media would not let them tell about it? ;-) 7. scalar fingerprint = missing p wave 29.Dec.2004 20:53 know somethin' about it link Yes, scalar does have a "fingerprint." They typically lack a p-wave when they are a "scalar EM hit". The Kobe earthquake in Japan, and one in San Fran a while back, I know, were missing this p wave. Likely if someone queried the people...they would relate the same thing:... 8. September 2004 prediction for Aceh quake, US did a report/study about a huge quake there regarding planning for it, then it happens prediction = oil = epicenter = present ceasefire = EM history there.... 29.Dec.2004 21:12 . link Sept AGSO Report On Tsunami-Quake Danger For SW Sumatra From Harry Mason orbitx@bigpond.com 12-29-4 Dear Jeff, Interestingly with amazing prescient "co-incidence" The Australian GeoScience Organisation - AGSO - ran an article in its AUSTGEO NEWS for September 2004 about the risk factors for earthquakes and consequent tsunamis developing off the SW coast of Sumatra. See attached pdf file - note the AGSO model for a possible SW Sumatra tsunamis and compare with the recent tsunamis animation just posted on the Jeff Rense site (from http://iri.columbia.edu/~lareef/tsunami/ ). AGSO got it nearly right but failed to (publicly at least ) predict that multiple earthquakes would let rip along most of the entire Sumatra-Andaman shear zone and that this would create multiple tsunamis and that these would funnel up the Bay of Bengal and across to Sri Lanka with such DEADLY force. The AGSO model showed the tsunamis vectoring SW into the un-inhabited section of the Indian Ocean. This is similar to the amazing coincidence of the Worlds foremost authorities on earthquakes and seismic events being in Tokyo for a major conference when disaster struck Kobe a few years ago, or the marine survey being located off shore of southern New Guinea when the "on fire" tsunamis hit their north coast. None of these coincidences on their own are out of the question BUT when taken as a class one has to seriously wonder... The BIG question is was this AGSO report just an amazing co-incidence or were they asked to model the SW Sumatra area by someone wanting to know what might happen if the plate boundary was tickled by energetic scalar EM ??? The same area of the 9.2 richter quake has been the site of deliberate use of scalar EM to whip up cyclones (hurricanes). A Malaysian newspaper ran that story a few years back implying a deal between the Malaysian government and a Russian state owned company to create a cyclone to push smoke from Indonesian forrest fires offshore. The actual cyclone creation event was visible on weather imagery shown on West Australian TV during the 7.00pm ABC weather news. It consisted of an annular ring say 50 miles in diameter consisting of multiple micro spirals (each say 5 miles in diameter) in edge contact - each micro-spiral being created sequentially until the annular ring was closed back to the first micro-spiral. Within a day the cyclone centred upon the angular ring had begun to spin up to full power. If AGSO were "simply" being prescient their guys deserve high accolade. However prescience is not something for which AGSO is normally known. However if the study was requested from "on high" we have a potential conduit to the source. It will be interesting to see if AGSO suffers senior staff loss by suicide in the new year. Best Regards, Harry Mason http://www.rense.com/general61/ssag.htm 9. Aceh Province stands out amid the disaster's deepening toll, not only because it was closest to the earthquake's epicenter, but because the disaster has intruded on a region in the grip of a civil war. Aceh has been under martial law since May of last year, when five months of peace talks between separatist rebels and the government broke down. The president at the time, Megawati Sukarnoputri, dispatched 40,000 troops to secure the province, whose oil and gas resources are vital to government revenue. The government declared a cease-fire after the earthquake, and observers said the truce appeared to be holding, allowing relief workers to tend to survivors. http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/123004X.shtml 10. If I were to rig earthquake/tsunami...I'd hit Indian Ocean because... 29.Dec.2004 21:50 . link I'd rig it in the Indian ocean area, because there is nothing in the way of warning systems. ONLY PLACE WITHOUT TSUNAMI WARNING SYSTEM. Last tsunami: 500 years ago there. Therefore, you could really guage your Machiavellian effects of a hypothetical HAARP operation on an unsuspecting population. This hypothetical surprise would be closer to an actual test of an eco-terrorism scalar hit. "A tsunami last crossed the Indian Ocean in 1509. Scientists had not expected anything close to the quake and killer waves that struck Sunday because 90 percent of tsunamis occur in the Pacific Ocean, where there are warning systems." http://www.rense.com/general61/ring.htm http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/37340.htm 11. U.S. alibi: "WE EMAILED THEM! umm, after Sumatra was hit! Did they get it?" 29.Dec.2004 22:19 this is criminal negligence! link Scientists in USA saw tsunami coming, opted for email warning after 20 minute standdown [I sure hope I get an email warning form letter (sic)--after a national disaster.] In fact, the detector buoys that monitor tsunami surges have been available for decades. None placed there though. Tue Dec 28, 7:11 AM ET By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY ***Minutes after*** a massive earthquake rocked the Indian Ocean on Sunday, international ocean monitors knew that a tsunami would likely follow. But they didn't know whom to tell. [so they say] [Though we knew within minutes, we took our time and crafted a great memo! Hey, didn't you read it! Didn't you get it!] "We put out a bulletin within 20 minutes, technically as fast as we could do it," says Jeff LaDouce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. LaDouce says e-mails were dispatched to Indonesian officials, but he doesn't know what happened to the information. ["All that was important was to shift the blame from us to them, and once that was accomplished we could sit back and watch!" This ignores that the US only warned Indonesia and Australia--and kept other countries in the dark.] The [red herring] problem is that Sunday's earthquake struck the unmonitored Indian Ocean. An international system of buoys and monitoring stations - the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center based in Hawaii - spans the Pacific, alerting nations there to any oncoming disasters. But no such system guards the Indian Ocean. [The issue is the lack of typical warning about earthquakes--which was stood down.] (There isn't one in the Atlantic Ocean because there are comparatively few earthquakes there.[yet!] LaDouce says efforts are being made in the Caribbean to set up a warning system after last year's tsunami caused by the volcanic collapse on the island of Montserrat.) "Sumatra has an ample history of great earthquakes, which makes the lack of a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean all the more tragic," says geologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey (news - web sites). "Everyone knew Sumatra was a loaded gun."[heh heh, freudian slip?] On Monday, Asian government officials, notably in India, discussed plans to coordinate efforts to develop an Indian Ocean system. "It's a people problem, not a technology problem," says geophysicist Teng-fong Wong of the State University of New York-Stony Brook. "Governments just have to cooperate." [and do what we say, or else.] 12. Tsunamis as U.S. enviromental blitzkrieg war? Regardless, this is being used to expand the American Nazi Anschluss as they Americans surf into oil-rich Aceh armed to the teeth on a 50 foot high wave. add a comment on this article disaster relief = military occupation 30.Dec.2004 13:34 luna moth link The bouy sensors would have also notified about the tsunami, but most likely the earthquake was registered at the epicenter hours before the wave arrived and a warning could have been sent just as easily with enough time for people to evacuate.. That brings to attention the eagerness of the US military to provide humanitarian relief after the disaster already happened. There is of course the obligation on the part of the world's last superpower to "help out" those in need. Forget the fact that the slaughter of so many people was preventable. Not to mention the coastal overdevelopment is a direct result of the hotel tourist trade spawned by WTO imperialism that benefits G8 nations.. Then relief agencies like Red Cross and others rush in to help, once again looking like heroes. The US media broadcasts the body count and people donate huge sums of money to disaster relief agencies.. The Indonesian government has long waited for disaster to strike the areas of autonomous groups like the Tamil Tigers. What better way to squash indigenous resistance than to have the US military there for "disaster relief support"?? Prevention of death and catastrophe is never in the interest of the US government and their corporate puppet masters. Whether a detectable tsunami or US funded dictators like Hitler, Saddam, etc. the US creates the monster than rushes in as heroe to help the helpless victems.. Thank you... 30.Dec.2004 15:35 Tony Blair's dog link for a most interesting collection of information. Again, things are starting to look completely different from the "official" versions of events. Will "W" be allowed to be "inaugurated" again? Or will the true patriots still alive in the defence administration do their duty and detain the scum? Adding insult to injury 30.Dec.2004 18:29 brahmin link Lookout Malaysia, Thailand and India; World Vision is bringing humanitarian aid to your nations. The leader of this organization has ties to the CIA and is personal friends with the Bush crime family. It is a known spook infiltration front for the Nazi criminals running this phoney war on terrorism. This Southeast Asian sector, especially Malaysia, is currently resisting the fiat banking scam run by the IMF and world bank. Maybe this tragedy is being used by the global crime syndicates as a warning to the leaders to cooperate with their scam. A sophisticated version of the Mafia trick of throwing a brick through a shopkeepers front window and then walking in and asking if the shopkeeper wants to buy their protection. The Weather Machine 31.Dec.2004 03:32 weatherman link or The Tesla Howitzer, pictured...  see www.haarp.alaska.edu http://www.alaska.net/~logjam/HAARP.html HAARP phased array transmitter at Gakona, Alaska The Ummah Factor & Band Aid Logic 31.Dec.2004 06:03 Devil's Advocate link So what you're saying is that the US has the technological might to cause global disasters just to get oil? And they have used said technology which released enough energy to wobble a planet just to gas up a Hummvee? I think different kinds of wobble (spin) should be considered. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world outside the Middle East. Would this administration use this catastrophe to win "hearts and minds" in their war on terrorism? Simple opportunism is by far more cost effective than the use of a superweapon. Another point to consider is does the US Government have fleets of hospital ships the size of aircraft carriers to render aid? Entire squadrons of heavy lift cargo aircraft dedicated to relief efforts? Do they have divisions of 'citizen medics' to radiply deploy and "liberate" suffering anywhere in the world? No. This country has no civilian infrastructure to quickly send the amount of equipment needed in a relief effort of this magnitude. It's all tied up in "providing for the common defense". So again it's more cost effective that a military conquistador would be put in charge of relief efforts. It would simply be a question of logistics. sympathy for the Devil's advocate 31.Dec.2004 16:33 link To be Devil's Advocate, you have to intentionally ignore the US's selective warnings which were the only rationale why so many deaths occurred. This provides a context for the invasion. Plus, you have to ignore the warning that was received by the US military bases at the same time... |
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2.1.05 19:08 |
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The Shadow Internet They start with a single stolen file and pump out bootleg games and movies by the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are terrorizing the entertainment business. By Jeff Howe Just over a year ago, a hacker penetrated the corporate servers at Valve, the game company behind the popular first-person shooter Half-Life. He came away with a beta version of Half-Life 2. "We heard about it," says 23-year-old Frank, a well-connected media pirate. "Everyone thought it would get bootlegged in Europe." Instead, the hacker gave the source code to Frank - it turned out that he was a friend of a friend - so that Frank could give Half-Life 2 to the world. "I was like, 'Let's do this thing, yo!'" he says. "I put it on Anathema. After that, it was all over." Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in. Within minutes of appearing on Anathema, Half-Life 2 spread. One file became 30 files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files as Valve stood helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal... READ ON>>>Wired |
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2.1.05 23:38 |
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This is for Donna ;-)
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3.1.05 20:51 |
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Bush--'Defender of the World'
Guardian 'We have to protect people' President Bush wants 'pro-homosexual' drama banned. Gary Taylor meets the politician in charge of making it happen Thursday December 9, 2004 The Guardian  On the black list... A Chorus Line (pictured: Daniel Crossley and Jason Durr in the 2003 Sheffield Crucible production). Photo: Tristram Kenton What should we do with US classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Color Purple? "Dig a hole," Gerald Allen recommends, "and dump them in it." Don't laugh. Gerald Allen's book-burying opinions are not a joke. Earlier this week, Allen got a call from Washington. He will be meeting with President Bush on Monday. I asked him if this was his first invitation to the White House. "Oh no," he laughs. "It's my fifth meeting with Mr Bush." Bush is interested in Allen's opinions because Allen is an elected Republican representative in the Alabama state legislature. He is Bush's base. Last week, Bush's base introduced a bill that would ban the use of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that "promote homosexuality". Allen does not want taxpayers' money to support "positive depictions of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle". That's why Tennessee Williams and Alice Walker have got to go. I ask Allen what prompted this bill. Was one of his children exposed to something in school that he considered inappropriate? Did he see some flamingly gay book displayed prominently at the public library? No, nothing like that. "It was election day," he explains. Last month, "14 states passed referendums defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman". Exit polls asked people what they considered the most important issue, and "moral values in this country" were "the top of the list". "Traditional family values are under attack," Allen informs me. They've been under attack "for the last 40 years". The enemy, this time, is not al-Qaida. The axis of evil is "Hollywood, the music industry". We have an obligation to "save society from moral destruction". We have to prevent liberal libarians and trendy teachers from "re-engineering society's fabric in the minds of our children". We have to "protect Alabamians". I ask him, again, for specific examples. Although heterosexuals are apparently an endangered species in Alabama, and although Allen is a local politician who lives a couple miles from my house, he can't produce any local examples. "Go on the internet," he recommends. "Some time when you've got a week to spare," he jokes, "just go on the internet. You'll see." Actually, I go on the internet every day. But I'm obviously searching for different things. For Allen, the web is just the largest repository in history of urban myths. The internet is even better than the Bible when it comes to spreading unverifiable, unrefutable stories. And urban myths are political realities. Remember, it was an urban myth (an invented court case about a sex education teacher gang-raped by her own students who, when she protested, laughed and said: "But we're just doing what you taught us!") that all but killed sex education in America. Since Allen couldn't give me a single example of the homosexual equivalent of 9/11, I gave him some. This autumn the University of Alabama theatre department put on an energetic revival of A Chorus Line, which includes, besides "tits and ass", a prominent gay solo number. Would Allen's bill prevent university students from performing A Chorus Line? It isn't that he's against the theatre, Allen explains. "But why can't you do something else?" (They have done other things, of course. But I didn't think it would be a good idea to mention their sold-out productions of Angels in America and The Rocky Horror Show.) Cutting off funds to theatre departments that put on A Chorus Line or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof may look like censorship, and smell like censorship, but "it's not censorship", Allen hastens to explain. "For instance, there's a reason for stop lights. You're driving a vehicle, you see that stop light, and I hope you stop." Who can argue with something as reasonable as stop lights? Of course, if you're gay, this particular traffic light never changes to green. It would not be the first time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ran into censorship. As Nicholas de Jongh documents in his amusingly appalling history of government regulation of the British theatre, the British establishment was no more enthusiastic, half a century ago, than Alabama's Allen. "Once again Mr Williams vomits up the recurring theme of his not too subconscious," the Lord Chamberlain's Chief Examiner wrote in 1955. In the end, it was first performed in London at the New Watergate Club, for "members only", thereby slipping through a loophole in the censorship laws. But more than one gay playwright is at a stake here. Allen claims he is acting to "encourage and protect our culture". Does "our culture" include Shakespeare? I ask Allen if he would insist that copies of Shakespeare's sonnets be removed from all public libraries. I point out to him that Romeo and Juliet was originally performed by an all-male cast, and that in Shakespeare's lifetime actors and audiences at the public theatres were all accused of being "sodomites". When Romeo wished he "was a glove upon that hand", the cheek that he fantasised about kissing was a male cheek. Next March the Alabama Shakespeare festival will be performing a new production of As You Like It, and its famous scene of a man wooing another man. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival is also the State Theatre of Alabama. Would Allen's bill cut off state funding for Shakespeare? "Well," he begins, after a pause, "the current draft of the bill does not address how that is going to be handled. I expect details like that to be worked out at the committee stage. Literature like Shakespeare and Hammet [sic] could be left alone." Could be. Not "would be". In any case, he says, "you could tone it down". That way, if you're not paying real close attention, even a college graduate like Allen himself "could easily miss" what was going on, the "subtle" innuendoes and all. So he regards his gay book ban as a work in progress. His legislation is "a single spoke in the wheel, it doesn't resolve all the issues". This is just the beginning. "To turn a big ship around it takes a lot of time." But make no mistake, the ship is turning. You can see that on the face of Cornelius Carter, a professor of dance at Alabama and a prize-winning choreographer who, not long ago, was named university teacher of the year for the entire US. Carter is black. He is also gay, and tired of fighting these battles. "I don't know," he says, "if I belong here any more." Forty years ago, the American defenders of "our culture" and "traditional values" were opposing racial integration. Now, no politician would dare attack Cornelius Carter for being black. But it's perfectly acceptable to discriminate against people for what they do in bed. "Dig a hole," Gerald Allen recommends, "and dump them in it." Of course, Allen was talking about books. He was just talking about books. He never said anything about pink triangles. |
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5.1.05 07:19 |
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animal cruelty protest
indymedia.ie **Posted by Amanda K - Animal Rights Action Network (ARAN) Wednesday, Jan 5 2005, 2:50pm arancampaigns@eircom.net address: Po Box, 722 Kilare, Ireland. phone: 087-6275579 dublin / animal rights / press release For Immediate Release: 5 January 2005 Contact: John Carmody 087-6275579 Public welcome to come out and support. BLINDFOLDED ACTIVISTS PROTEST AGAINST BENETTON OVER AUSTRALIAN ABUSE OF SHEEP Activists Want Retailer to Stop Using Australian Wool Until Mutilation and Live Export End Dublin- Wearing blindfolds and carrying signs reading Benetton: Blind to Animal Suffering, members of Animal Rights Action Network (ARAN) will gather outside Benetton's St Stephens Green store in Dublin to show potential customers the horrific abuse of lambs and sheep by Australia's wool industry. The action is part of an intense international campaign launched by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to convince the retail chain to ban garments made with Australian wool until a gruesome procedure called mulesing (live flaying) and live sheep exports are banned: Date: Thursday, January 6 Time: 1:15 p.m. Place: In front of St Stephens Green shopping center Mulesing is a crude mutilation whereby Australian farmers carve flesh from lambs' backsides with a pair of garden shears and without painkillers as a cheap way to try to reduce flystrike 'C' which is when blowfly eggs hatch into maggots and eat away at the sheep even though more sophisticated, humane blowfly control methods exist. When their wool is no longer the best, millions of sheep are shipped to the Middle East through all weather extremes aboard open-deck, multi-tiered ships. Many sick and injured sheep, treated as mere cargo, are thrown overboard or ground up alive in mincing machines. Many of those who survive the grueling voyage are fully conscious when their throats are slit. After repeatedly asking the Australian government to end these atrocities, PETA announced an international boycott of Australian wool in mid-October 2004 and has already won the support of prestigious retailers Abercrombie & Fitch and New Look. The united colors of Benetton are turning to blood red, says ARAN Campaigns Coordinator John Carmody. "If Benetton wants to wipe the blood of millions of sheep off its hands, it must refuse to sell clothes made from Australian wool." Activists are urging consumers to boycott Benetton until it pledges to stop using Australian wool and is planning to bombard Benetton with ads and protests around the world to alert the public to the company's support of cruelty. For more information, please visit PETA's Web site UnitedCrueltyofBenetton.com. Similar demonstrations will be taking place this month in Wicklow, Waterford, Limerick, Cork, Galway, Sligo, Clare and Carlow. http://www.unitedcrueltyofbenetton.com |
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5.1.05 19:57 |
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Missing boy
Examiner Fears missing boy may have been abducted  By Sean O’Riordan 06/01/05 FEARS grew last night that an 11-year-old boy may have been abducted while cycling near his home. Senior gardaí said they couldn’t rule out the possibility that Robert Holohan had been abducted from his home near Midleton, Co Cork. They have issued a nationwide alert, which includes surveillance at airports and ports. The boy was last seen by his family at 2.30pm on Tuesday when he left to go for a cycle on his new BMX, a Christmas present from his parents, Mark and Majella. His worried parents started looking for him when three hours later a neighbour spotted Robert’s bicycle propped up against a ditch half-a-mile from his home at Ballyedmund, which is two miles north of Midleton. Gardaí were alerted shortly before 10pm, and scores of local people started searching for the boy. More than 500 people joined the search yesterday, including Robert’s father, Mark, who is a builder. Dozens of gardaí, Red Cross personnel, Civil Defence units and an Irish Coastguard Sikorsky helicopter also scoured the countryside for the missing child. Mark’s distraught mother, his sister Emma (8), and baby brother Harry (4), were being comforted by relatives and friends in the family home. “We are worried to death about where he is. Please come home Robert,” Mr Holohan said. He added that his son was in great form when he left the house and acknowledged there was a possibility that somebody could have taken him. Robert had his mobile phone with him when he left home, but repeated efforts by his family and gardaí to contact him have failed. Chief Superintendent Kieran McGann, who is leading the investigation, said he was very concerned about Robert’s safety. “Hopefully things will work out, but at this stage we are very concerned and treating the matter very seriously,” Chief Supt McGann said. Dozens of gardaí and hundreds of volunteers attended a special meeting in Midleton Golf Club yesterday afternoon to review what areas had been searched. Extensive searches of the immediate area failed to turn up any sign of Robert and teams started to scour Curragh Woods, a large forest to the north east of the town. As night fell, gardaí called off their official search which is scheduled to resume again at 8.30am today. The Garda fixed-wing plane arrived on the scene last night along with the Garda Dog Unit. Army units have been put on standby in case they are needed to join in the search. However, a local Red Cross team with search and rescue dogs and dozens of family friends continued to search through the night. Superintendent Liam Hayes urged anybody who saw Robert or has any information to immediately contact their local gardaí or Midleton gardaí at 021-4621550. A boy fitting Robert’s description was seen near a petrol station in Dungarvan during the early hours of yesterday morning. However, gardaí do not believe it was him. Robert is 4ft 11ins tall. He has blonde hair, blue eyes and when last seen was wearing a black jacket with Nike written in orange on the back and black tracksuit bottoms. |
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6.1.05 18:29 |
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Crackhouse lifestyle :p
Squalor Survivors - Moving out of the mess I CAN IDENTIFY   "PIGPEN'S TALE: "I used to be a perfect slob. I couldn't eat at my table - it was piled high with junk. To sleep in my bed, I had to lift off yet more boxes of junk. In the morning I piled them back on, so there was room to get out of my bedroom. One night I was too tired to move the boxes so I decided to sleep on the sofa, just once. Six months later the boxes still occupied the prime real estate of my bed, while I made do with the sofa. Every day I would try to clean up my mess but my efforts were ineffective..." **This site speaks to me--okay, so I'm not to the "crack-house" stage, but I have collected so many books and stuffed animals and REAL animals in my life and I work so much of the time and am addicted to the net, etc., the REST of the time that clutter has just about gotten the best of me. I grew up with a mother who insisted we wipe off every drop of water we got on the bathroom faucets after we washed our hands. We had to wipe the shower down with the towel after we used it. Believe me, I KNOW what clean and tidy is--I just can't be arsed to continue in that tradition. But there's a difference between casual and crack-house. This site offers resources to people whose relaxed lifestyle has, over time, ambushed them. |
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9.1.05 17:50 |
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Linux with no installation
All That I Know :: Full Linux OS without Installation1 Check out the above link for some very interesting information. To quote: "In short, a Live CD is a bootable CD that brings up a full working operating system without installing anything on the PC." |
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10.1.05 19:43 |
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Lost Boy in Phuket
...has been found, only I was evidently the last one on the net to know it! :p |
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11.1.05 03:52 |
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Lost marbles
I'm thankful the wee boy was found. I received helpful comments from Beachhutman and Cha0tic. I also got a testy comment over at another blog! Maybe I should start putting pictures of stray animals up and see if I get similar favourable outcomes :p |
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11.1.05 11:57 |
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They can't hear me...
**I don't know about you, but I cuss people out on the phone all the time, only I do it when I am on hold. They can't hear you anyway right? WRONG!!! This article has given me a lot to think about because with the things I say, I'm surprised someone hasn't put a contract out on me. :p CNET **Got this from J-Walk Your rants on hold will be monitored Published: January 11, 2005, 6:07 AM PST By Ken Belson The New York Times It is the opening line on so many phone conversations these days: This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes. The taped message is so common that many callers might assume that no one is ever listening, let alone taking notes. But they would be wrong. Monitoring is intended to track the performance of call center operators, but the professional snoops are inadvertently monitoring callers, too. Most callers do not realize that they may be taped even while they are on hold. It is at these times that monitors hear husbands arguing with their wives, mothers yelling at their children, and dog owners throwing fits at disobedient pets, all when they think no one is listening. Most times, the only way a customer can avoid being recorded is to hang up. "You could have a show on Broadway just playing the calls," said Mike Schrider, president of J.Lodge, a call monitoring service based in Hammonton, N.J. Call monitors eavesdrop on millions of exchanges a year, and listening to the mumblings and rants of people on hold comes with the job. Over all, about 2 percent of the hundreds of millions of calls made to call centers are monitored by a company's own managers or, increasingly, by third-party monitoring companies, which have come on the scene in the last couple of years. Tapping into calls from his cubicle in Melville, N.Y., Stuart Pike is one of an army of listeners employed by these companies. He has an unrestricted view of how corporate America deals with the public--and how the public talks back. The business of assessing the behavior of operators has taken on a new urgency in recent years. With so many companies selling similar products at similar prices, competent and professional customer service agents are more and more the difference between a sale and a lost opportunity, a burnished brand and a tarnished one. That reality has turned third-party call monitoring into a fast-growing industry watching over the nation's 6 million call center operators as well as hundreds of thousands offshore. And people like Pike, who listens to about 150 calls a week, have become the equivalent of factory foremen policing America's service economy. Flirtations Recently, Pike stumbled onto a call where a young male customer was flirting with a female service agent at a cell phone company. After some giggles and banter, the woman relented and gave her personal phone number to the customer. Pike quickly alerted the cell phone company to the phone date. "You'd be surprised how casual it can get," said Pike, who works at Aon Consulting, one of the nation's biggest third-party call center monitors. "It's like watching TV. There's always something interesting on." Some privacy advocates worry that monitors, as well as operators, can steal customer passwords and other sensitive data. Thus far, few documented cases of identity theft have been unearthed involving monitors, and most monitoring companies screen their applicants. State wiretapping laws generally do not provide protection against recording of call center conversations. (The taped message at the start of the call is in most cases considered an adequate privacy warning.) Fears of identity theft have not slowed the monitoring business. In fact, under tighter scrutiny by regulators, most financial institutions are now taping all their calls. The growth of monitoring has also been fueled by the advent of Internet phone technology, which has substantially cut the cost of long-distance calls and made call monitoring as easy as clicking a mouse. Sophisticated software that automatically records conversations has increased the number of calls monitors can assess. As more call centers move offshore, companies are starting to outsource the monitoring, too. From any corner of the globe, call monitors with just a computer and an Internet connection can oversee workers virtually anywhere. For instance, Pike on Long Island listens to service agents in India who may be talking to customers in Indiana. Monitors in Britain are likely to listen to customers in New York talking to German operators in Frankfurt. In effect, monitors have become referees on an international scale. "We act as the conscience of the company," said Paul Kowal, the president of Kowal Associates, an industry consultant and a third-party monitor. Sometimes, refereeing means reporting off-color calls--known in call center parlance as a "hot line"--like the flirtation that Pike overheard. Plenty of other calls also raise red flags, including customers and operators who shout, swear, talk politics or threaten bodily harm. Anyone hanging up--either an operator or an angry customer--sends out warnings, too. Not just speed Just a few years ago, most companies simply ranked their operators on how quickly they picked up calls and ended them. Now call monitors rate operators by checking off boxes on detailed electronic questionnaires that assess qualities like efficiency, conversational skills and ability to mollify frustrated customers. The scores from each monitored call are collected to rank an operator's performance. Handling angry callers is "like dealing with road rage," Pike said. Operators who can defuse aggression--a not-insignificant talent--win plaudits. Operators also have to deal with the slow talkers, the lonely chatterers and the absent-minded. At night, the drunks come out. Hearing this hidden side of American commerce turns the monitors into amateur experts in American phone etiquette. "Bad calls stick in my mind because I can't believe what I've heard," said Renee Rea, who sits, with headphones on, a few rows from Pike in a room largely silent except for fingers tapping on keyboards. To do the job, Rea and her colleagues need an aptitude for listening, a rare commodity in a culture where the opposite of talking is waiting to talk. Indeed, finding monitors willing to sit in silence all day is not easy, and turnover is a problem for jobs that involve a mix of industrial psychology and Marketing 101. Monitors typically score operators on their "openings," like the friendliness of their greeting. They flag annoying habits like using run-on sentences or talking in a monotone, and even gauge the mood of calls by noting whether operators sound like they are smiling as they talk. Operators are given demerits for transferring customers without asking, keeping someone on hold for too long and blaming others instead of trying to solve problems. Providing incorrect information is another no-no. Occasionally, monitors will right mistakes they hear. Michael Betts, another Aon assessor, once heard an operator book a hotel room for a customer on the wrong date. Betts, a former comptroller who says he is "a born editor," alerted the hotel, which notified the customer and undid the error. Domestic disputes Sometimes, monitors are privy to domestic disputes that erupt in the background during a call. But intervening on those calls is rare because many are recorded and are assessed hours after they take place; often the monitor does not know the caller's location. Joyce Van Doren, an assessor for J.Lodge, recalled one man who canceled the cable service that was in his name because, he said, he had just divorced. The man, however, failed to hang up the phone when the customer service agent ended the call, so the tape kept rolling. That is when Van Doren heard him reveal his real motive to a friend in the room: getting back at his former wife, who was going to be livid when she came home to find the cable TV disconnected. Other calls are more poignant. Rea at Aon recalled with a tinge of sadness a woman who called a financial institution to change the name on her account because her husband had died. Rather than offering condolences and making an emotional connection with the customer, however fleeting, the agent robotically asked for her account number. Rea marked the agent down for failing to show empathy. Operators can also be marked down for being too helpful. Van Doren recalls one who told a customer about a special promotion on a cable service that was to start two weeks later. The customer was delighted, but the operator was reprimanded for failing to make the sale the day the customer called. With thousands of call center jobs moving overseas, monitors are also noticing a growing reaction against operators with foreign accents. More customers now ask to speak to an American after they hear an operator with an Indian accent, said Miriam Nelson, who helps run Aon Consulting's center. "In India, the operators are doing a lot of the courtesies they are trained to do," Nelson said, but they often miss the nuance of conversations. She added that some Indian call centers show their operators episodes of "Seinfeld" and "Friends" to teach them about American culture. Nothing on television, though, can prepare an Indian operator for chatty American consumers who like to talk about the ups and downs of the New York Yankees or the latest blizzard in Chicago. Perhaps inevitably, monitoring is also moving offshore. HyperQuality, which is based in Seattle, has 100 call monitors in New Delhi who eavesdrop on call center workers around the United States. Those raters, oceans away, are trying to make sense of hot lines and hotheads, too. Entire contents, Copyright © 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved. |
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12.1.05 04:34 |
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Blogger fired for blogging!
Guardian Waterstone's says bookseller brought firm into disrepute Patrick Barkham Wednesday January 12, 2005 The Guardian  Former Waterstone's employee Joe Gordon. Photograph: Murdo MacLeodA bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his "sandal-wearing" boss. Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone's in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for "gross misconduct" and "bringing the company into disrepute" through the comments he posted on his weblog. Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog (The Woolamaloo Gazette) he writes in his spare time. Mr Gordon, a senior bookseller who rarely mentioned work in his blog and did not directly identify his branch of Waterstone's, said he had offered to stop posting anything about his working life online when the company called a disciplinary meeting. According to his union, Waterstone's rejected his plea despite it not having any guidelines on whether its employees are allowed to keep weblogs. "This wasn't a sustained attack," Mr Gordon told the Guardian. "I was not deliberately trying to harm the company. I was venting my spleen. "This was moaning about not getting your birthday off or not getting on with your boss. I wasn't libelling anyone or giving away trade secrets." Mr Gordon joined Waterstone's while a student in 1993, a year after he began a satirical newsletter which evolved into his blog, called the Woolamaloo Gazette. Named after Monty Python's fictional University of Woolloomooloo, the blog contains the typical musings of online diarists across the world, linking to interesting websites and sounding off about current affairs and favourite films. There is much to please Waterstone's: most of the blog is devoted to extolling the virtues of reading and Mr Gordon's favourite science fiction and graphic novels. In the past two months, the bookseller, who helped set up a branch of Waterstone's, ran bookclubs and appeared on radio and TV for his company, mentioned his work twice. On one occasion, he ranted about his "sandal-wearing" manager he nicknamed "Evil Boss", which he said was a caricature like the "Pointy Haired Boss" in the Dilbert cartoons. In another posting, Mr Gordon joked about "Bastardstone's". After he was suspended pending an investigation into his blog, he was called before a formal disciplinary meeting and sacked last week. "The book trade can only exist with freedom of speech and information," he said last night. "It is a big personal blow to me to lose my job and it also has grave implications beyond that - for anybody who works for any company and blogs, which is thousands of people." The move has also alarmed the global internet community. Mr Gordon has received dozens of emails from other bloggers who have heard about his plight, with some pledging to boycott Waterstone's. While Boris Johnson wrote about his sacking from the Tory frontbench on his blog, it is believed to be the first time in Britain a blogger has been dismissed for what they published on the web. In the US, Ellen Simonetti was sacked from her job as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines after her bosses saw pictures of her posing in her uniform on her website, which recounted the adventures of an anonymous flight attendant who worked for "Anonymous Airline". Jessica Cutler, a 24-year-old secretary at a senator's office who wrote about selling sex to officials in Washington under the online name of Washingtonienne, was outed on the internet and sacked from her job. The literary world has also spoken out against the sacking. Richard Morgan, the science fiction author, has written a letter of protest to Waterstone's. "This bears comparison with taking disciplinary action based on private conversations overheard in a pub, and raises some disturbing issues of freedom of speech," he said. "Waterstone's is, after all, a bookseller, whose stock in trade is the purveying of opinion, not all of it palatable to those concerned. The action that has been taken so far bears more resemblance to the behaviour of an American fast-food chain than a company who deal in intellectual freedoms and the concerns of a pluralist liberal society." Five years ago, an award-winning advertising campaign for Waterstone's focused on the importance of freedom of speech. One image featured a burned book with the slogan: "Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot & Mao Tse-Tung were right about one thing. The Power of Books." A spokeswoman for Waterstone's confirmed Mr Gordon had been sacked. "At this stage we can't comment on it," she said. "He has two opportunities to appeal after he receives his letter of dismissal through the post." The Retail Books Association, which represents 6,000 people working in the book trade, said it would help Mr Gordon appeal against his dismissal. If an appeal with a regional area manager is rejected, the blogger could take the matter to an employment tribunal. According to the RBA, Waterstone's should introduce guidelines determining what its employers can say online about their work. "We are hopeful we can get him reinstated," said David Pickles, president of the RBA. "We feel it was heavy-handed and they have overreacted. The company has no guidelines to say 'please don't' [write about work on a weblog]. They shouldn't use a hammer to crack a nut. "Some of the products they sell that are on open view to the public upset people far more. If MPs can slag each other off in parliament and the press, then surely Joe having a bad day and putting it down on the website should be allowed. "As long as there is no one being discriminating or offensive, if it is just fun and opinion, then I can't see it being a problem. It's just how he felt on the day." Adventures with Evil Boss Monday, Dec 13 2004 On the way home from a dreadful day at work (I should really have phoned in sick but couldn't face the hassle this causes), I walked rather than catching the bus to get the blood flowing a little. Not far from my flat is a new bakery/pastry store, The Old Bakehouse, which also has an art gallery in the basement. Delicious pastries and artwork? Now how cool is that? Groovy. Tuesday, Nov 16 Bad things recently. Having to pay Edinburgh bastard moneygrubbing council's tax, may they choke on every penny. Return to shift working as Evil Boss decrees even those now in stockroom must do late and early shifts, which is a waste of time for that post. Xmas working hours brought in early - first shift now starts at 7.30 bloody am, which is fucking ridiculous. Evil Boss fucking me off by refusing my requests for a day's holiday on the 31st of December for my birthday and the first week of January off as I have taken for the last few years ... Evil Boss then has cheek to ask me to work one of the bloody bank holidays in the week he refused me off. Cheeky smegger. Said no. Noticing he has put me down for one of those days anyway, the sandal-wearing bastard. Words will be exchanged - if he gives me my birthday off I will do his bank holiday day. If not, he can kiss my magnificent Celtic ass, since it is voluntary. Monday Nov 8 Yes, my day slaving for Bastardstone's was lightened (never an easy task on a Monday) by one of the avalanche of humour books that appear before Xmas, Far From [Dull] and Other Places by Dominic Greyer ... Amusing myself this week with Rich Hall's excellent biography of his redneck "uncle", Otis Lee Crenshaw: I Blame Society, and probably pissing everyone in our staffroom out by laughing my arse off. |
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12.1.05 19:23 |
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Strawberry Fields Forever
Society Guardian Doors to close at home that inspired Lennon  Press Association Wednesday January 12, 2005 A children's home made famous by the Beatles hit Strawberry Fields Forever is set to close, it was announced today. A young John Lennon used to visit the Strawberry Field home in Woolton, Liverpool, to play with the orphans. Its name became the inspiration for Strawberry Fields Forever, released as a double A-side with Penny Lane in February 1967. The Salvation Army, which runs the home, confirmed it is to shut. Marion Drew, divisional leader for the north-west Salvation Army, said the closure was due to the current preference of placing children with foster carers rather than institutions. She added: "We have to give two years' notice of closure, which we did yesterday, but there is no precise date for closure yet. "The three children currently staying there will be found foster homes. That was always the plan for them, so they will not be affected by the closure. "We have around 30 staff at the home, who we will try to relocate, although we cannot give any guarantees," she said. Ms Drew said no decision has yet been made on the fate of the building or its famous gates, which have become a landmark for Beatles fans paying homage to Lennon. Lennon left money to the home in his will and his widow, Yoko Ono, donated more than £50,000 in 1984 to keep it afloat. It has been suggested that Lennon felt a kinship with the orphans after he was abandoned by his father and his mother Julia sent him to live with his Aunt Mimi. Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever reached number two in the charts but was kept off the top slot by Engelbert Humperdinck's Release Me. |
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12.1.05 19:40 |
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Paul Smith's Typewriter Art
The Paul Smith Foundation Home Page PAUL SMITH **I got this wonderful link from J-Walk, and it's fascinating. I thought at first it might be a hoax. I don't know how this man does what he does! He has severe cerebral palsy, but he TYPES these pictures.  Paul's Dog There are many, many more pictures of his astounding art and lots of other things to see. |
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12.1.05 22:09 |
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evolution
Guardian **Live links for further reading on site Bones of contention The discovery of a new species of human astounded the world. But is it what it seems? John Vidal went to remotest Flores to find out Thursday January 13, 2005 The Guardian If you want to understand human evolution, it may be worth starting with Johannes Daak from the remote village of Akel in the heavily forested centre of the Indonesian island of Flores. Johannes, from the Manggarai ethnic group, reckons he is 100 years old and says he owes his longevity and enduring strength to having only ever known one woman. He says he owes his stature to his ancestors. Johannes is no more than 4ft 1in (1m 25cm) tall, give or take an inch. His grandfather and father were also tiny, and so is his son. All of them had "normal" sized mothers, but for some reason, only the males in his family seem to be small. Next month, two researchers from Indonesia's leading Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, will head to Akel and nearby Rampasasa villages to measure Johannes's family and other "little" people who live there. The size and proportions of their limbs and skulls will then be compared with those of the most celebrated skeleton in the world - Homo floresiensis, aka the Hobbit, the little lady of Flores, ebu, or, in the shorthand of the scientists who found the skeleton in a Flores cave called Lian Bua, LB1. This 13,000-year-old, 1m tall, 25-year-old hominin with a brain one-third the size of modern man's, was found just a few miles from Johannes's village and was a scientific sensation last October when the team of Australian and Indonesians that unearthed it claimed in the journal Nature that it was an entirely new human species. Dubbing it Homo floresiensis and nicknaming it hobbit, they said it was a descendant of a long-extinct ancestor of modern man (Homo erectus), thought to have flourished between 1.8m and possibly 300,000 years ago. Dubbed one of the breakthroughs of 2004 by US journal Science, it made worldwide news. Fossils show only about 10 human species and 50 sub-species, so finding a brand new one is a huge story for anthropologists, and Homo floresiensis was greeted as the most breathtaking and important discovery in 150 years, changing our understanding of late human evolutionary geography, biology and culture. It was not only the smallest adult hominid found, but the Australian team even suggested that because it came so late in the human evolutionary scale, a group of Homo floresiensis could be alive today in the forests of Flores. But every major find has a backlash, and in this case a fierce, high-level challenge has come from academics in several countries. Leading them is Professor Teuka Jacob, who heads the Laboratory of Bioanthropology and Paleoanthropology at Gadjah Mada. The only man outside the excavating team to have inspected the skeleton, Jacob says it is conceivable that Johannes' family are descendants of the Little Lady of Flores. But even if his researchers find no direct link, he says he is certain from his own preliminary inspection that the bones now locked in a safe in his vault at the university do not belong to a new species within the genus homo, or even a sub-species, but a pygmy version of Homo sapiens - not unlike Johannes. And he claims that behind the intense media attention last October were ill-equipped, hurried young academics whose work was not properly scrutinised. The world of anthropology is used to disputes, but the fierce nature of this one has split the field. Lian Bua, the limestone cave where Homo floresiensis was found 5.9m below the floor in October 2003, translates as "cold cave". It is at least 10C cooler than the deep, hidden valley of paddy fields that it overlooks. It is also easy to see why early man used this cave for so long. It is ideal for hunter-gatherers. Light and dry, with 20m ceilings, easily defensible ledges and secret chambers, a tribe could live under its stalactites "This is where they found the skeleton," says Riccus Bandar, a farmer from the nearby village of Beotaras who helped the dig and is now the cave's unofficial custodian, guide and gateman. He points out the slightly disturbed ground, a few feet from the cave's left wall. "They also found pygmy elephants, komodo dragons, and tools. It is the most beautiful cave in the world." Lian Bua has a colourful recent history. At one point a schoolroom for villagers, it was first investigated in the 1950s by Theodoor Verhoevenis, a Dutch missionary and amateur archaeologist. Indonesian archaeologists excavated it again in the 1980s but the work was suspended during the Asian financial crash. Since then it has become a favourite picnic spot for locals. But it is legendary in Beoteras. "My grandmother told me when I was about six of how, long ago, six children from the village went hunting and one of their dogs went into the cave but did not come out," says Bandar, who is in his 60s. "They went in and saw a little man there. He was very small, standing on a rock. They were frightened and ran back. The people were very afraid." The story is more or less echoed in other villages, many of whose people say they originate from the island of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo) - where pygmy-sized people live. According to one account, the little people of Flores were also called the Reba Ruek and were very hairy. The Australian scientists say they were told of the Ebu Gogo who reportedly lived on Flores until just a few hundred years ago. But no one in the villages near Lian Bua has heard that name. Some 1,500km to the west of Flores, on the far more developed island of Java, is Jacob's laboratory. The only one of its kind in south Asia, its ground floor is a chaos of cabinets and shelving, holding 40 years of excavated material. It includes Jacob's large collection of hominids - including his discoveries of Homo erectus, Homo erectus palaeojavanicus and Homo erectus soloensis. But he is keeping the latest Flores find in a safe in his steel-doored vault. Like all other major finds made by the department of archaeology, the bones were sent to his laboratory. He did not - as the press have said - kidnap them. "They even gave me the money for the transport." He insists he is not jealously guarding his patch, or upset that Australians found the skeleton. "At my age you look at things quite calmly. I have been working in this field for more than 40 years ... Here [in this laboratory] we have one third of the world's homo erectus finds." But Professor Richard "Bert" Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia, a co-author of the original Nature paper, accuses Jacob of "stifling study" by not releasing the bones. "Jacob has a habit of hanging on to fossils for a long time. He cannot be allowed to keep these, to stifle the study that he so advocates. I urge him to send the fossils back." Jacob is one of the world's most experienced paleoanthropologists, as well as being a pathologist. After training in Holland and getting his PhD in the US, he worked for 40 years on many of Indonesia's major sites, as well as in Kenya, Australia, Italy, China and South Africa. He has written more than 20 books and is one of Asia's most decorated and well-known academics. All his experience, he says, tells him that this is not a new species. "When I saw the Australians' research, I refused to comment for the first two weeks. Then the head of the archaeological centre [which co-sponsored the dig] asked me to take the bones and then we got a really good look. "The skull looked to me like a primate's. It was only when I picked it up that I knew it was Homo sapiens. We did the measurements. A few things might confuse people, like the shape of the skull from the back is pentagonal. Later I saw the pelvis and the thigh bone. It's just human. It's not erectus." He believes that the small brain volume may be a sign of mental abnormalities, specifically microcephaly, (small brain) which has been observed elsewhere in early man. "I started to get confirmation about the size of the brain. Then I knew they had found [something] similar to a microcephelate. It [the disease] could be genetic or acquired during birth." He did not find the tiny skull remarkable. "It was what we call microcranic - very small. There was a very small brain and jaw. In this case there were no other abnormalities, only in the skull. The legs, arms and everything else were genetically normal. But this [microcephaly] can happen anywhere. It could be as common as one in 500." In rapid succession he picks up bits of the bones laid out on his desk. "Look at the teeth, they are clearly modern ... so is the skull. The arm bones, the leg bones ... all are small, but that is all. If you analyse the front of the face, you might think it is an ape. But look at the whole head and it looks much more human, especially from behind." He inspects the jaw. "The front teeth are very small. It has only one premolar. In [Homo] erectus, they get smaller and then larger. This has the same occlusal pattern as recent Javanese finds." He believes that the Australians got not only the species wrong but even the gender. "The margin of the eye hole is rounder than for a female," he says. He picks up the thighbone. "Observe the muscular attachments. They are more pronounced than with females. Again, the pelvis is rounded [which suggests a man]." The row is now splitting anthropologists. Although the Australian and Indonesian scientists stand their ground and are backed by many experts, a group which includes paleo-pathologist Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide and anthropologist Alan Thorne of the Australian National University in Canberra is sceptical of their case. Henneberg argues that the skull of the Flores hominid is very similar to a 4,000-year-old microcephalic Minoan skull found on Crete in 1975. Jacob says he is now getting support from around the world and hopes to publish a paper setting out his arguments in Science soon. The Australians' mistake, he says, was not to fully compare their findings with others made in Flores or elsewhere in the region. A find like this, he says, "must be seen from all aspects, in relation to the environment and neighbouring areas. They did their study without comparative material. We are now studying every detail and comparing it with all the other remains from Flores caves and neighbouring islands, like the small individuals found in east Java in the 1950s. "I have studied the remains from several caves in Flores in the 1960s. There are five similar caves in the area. Catholic priests found some small skeletons in the 1950s. Dutch anthropologists found some in the 1960s." The Australians say it is too much of a coincidence to have seven possible hominids all with small bones (only one skull has been found) but Jacob says small people are not uncommon in the region. "There is plenty of other evidence of pygmy peoples in the region. There are pygmies still living in west Papua, the Andeman and Nicobar islands, and in the Philippines. But they are all Homo sapiens. They're just a smaller size. These pygmies were once quite common, but only pockets remain. There was far more diversity of people before." He says the row has become personal. "I have been called everything. They say it's jealousy, a turf war, but it's not." He claims the Australian team were "scientific terrorists" forcing ideas on people, that it was unethical for them to have made the announcement without the Indonesians being invited, and that they were not experienced enough. "I don't think the Australians have the expertise. They were very narrow. They have a tunnel vision and were not equipped in this area." He absolves the Indonesians on the team. "Professor RP Soejono, [the head of the Indonesian archaeology centre which jointly sponsored the dig] was in the list of authors, but he never even saw the drafts [of the Nature article]. The others were young Indonesians. In the present climate it's hard to get a job. You usually follow the hand that feeds you. "I would say [to the Australians] 'do some more work. Think twice. Look at everything from different angles. Don't start with the conclusion.'" And he has concerns about the referees of the Nature article. "The reviewers seemed unevenly selected, very one-sided." It is an argument Roberts categorically rejects. The referees were leading anthropologists. "They [Nature] had six referees on each paper, the most I have ever known. They made damn sure they had a cushion behind their arse. The papers had to be submitted three times. It took six months, so was hardly rushed out. It was fair and rigorous. "Our team had everyone involved - geomorphologists, geochronologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropolgists ... We left no bone unturned. Good grief, it was a soccer team of authors!" And he raises the stakes by suggesting that Jacob and other critics have an "intellectual interest" in denying that the skeleton was a new species. "All ... are supporters of the multiregionalism evolutionary model ... This discovery would destroy their theory. It suits their purposes very nicely [to oppose Homo floresiensis]." The background to the row is a long and bitter debate between those anthropologists who say the modern human evolved in Africa and that all modern Homo sapiens developed there, and those such as Jacob who say that Homo erectus migrated from Africa through the north and spread [and developed] throughout the rest of the world. The argument is far from being resolved on either side. One of the original advocates of multiregionalism, Professor Alan Thorne of the Australian National University at Canberra, was co-author of a reaction to the Flores paper in the journal, Before Farming, and has weighed in on Jacob's side. He says: "If it was another species, as they are saying, then it's very unlikely that all the details of racial characteristics [are] exactly the same as Homo sapiens living there today. They might have one or two features but not all of them. There is something seriously misleading here." Like Jacob, he thinks Homo floresiensis is a case of "secondary microcephaly". "That means that we don't know the genetic reason for [the disorder] but that secondary reasons may be responsible, like something being wrong in the gut. There are many examples in the literature. The disorder may be as common as mongolism, say one in 2,000. Dwarfism, anyway, goes with microcephaly, especially in hunter/gatherer populations." And he supported Jacob's broader points. "Paleoanthropology has lost its way and people are desperate for new species. People are more aggressive. If, as Jacob thinks, it's a case of microcephaly, there are a lot of people in my field who cannot recognise a village idiot when they see one." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jacob loves a good row. "This is like ecstasy without the drug. It relieves you. The blood speeds up. It excites you. You think more. But it has stirred up a nest of hornets. It's like opening a can of worms and you cannot put them back in again. The creationists are using it for the wrong reason [to deny evolution]. I am not a creationist at all. "I don't want to seem like a killjoy but we are looking for truth, not for fame. You have to look for the truth but fame will come to you whether you look for it or not," he says. "I think it's quite possible that there are other species. But in the past 15,000 years there is only one. It's not an entirely unimportant find because it is a pygmy skeleton found in a controlled excavation. But it's certainly not the most important in the last 150 years." |
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13.1.05 18:18 |
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Robert Holohan
Irish Examiner A memorial card reads: ‘Sleep now little angel’ 15 January 2005 By Claire O’Sullivan, Midleton  EVERY hour at least a couple of cars slow down, pull up and a little offering is left at the impromptu grotto that has appeared near Inch strand since Robert Holohan’s body was found. Rain-sodden daffodils, multi-coloured carnations, Mass cards, a lantern, candles and teddy bears mark the junction 300 yards from where his 11-year-old body was dumped down a gully. Ten-year-old Shauna and five-year-old Craig Condon, from nearby Ballinacurra, asked their mother to drive them to Inch so they could place a teddy bear and a toy truck near the memorial site. “We wanted to leave something there for the little boy, Robert. We think it is very sad. I know one of his cousins,” said Shauna. Memorial cards attached to flowers read: ‘sleep now little angel’ and ‘I hope you are at peace’. Passersby smiled sadly as they saw one particular message which read ‘God must have needed another little hurler in heaven. It is so unfair’. “This site has now become a point where locals can remember Robert and express their empathy with the Holohan family,” one local said. “People want to do something but just don’t know what to make of what has happened in the past 10 or 11 days.” Some have turned to the Church for solace and for answers. “People are coming into the church a lot more than usual in the past week. There are mothers and children going in to light candles and quite a few groups of young girls from the local high school have gone in to pray at break time. We would not normally see that,” said Fr Billy O’Donovan. “I was in and out of the church yesterday and at one stage I was gone for over an hour but some of the people praying were still there when I returned.” Robert’s body was released to his family yesterday and Fr O’Donovan appealed for them to be allowed “private family time”. His funeral will take place at 3pm today at Midleton’s Holy Rosary Church, with burial in the adjoining cemetery. Preparations were underway in the town yesterday to close shops for a period today in honour of the hurling-mad primary school pupil who was found dead eight days after he disappeared. GAA fixtures have been cancelled in the town, as have social events and a planned wedding fair at Water Rock House. “Everyone is so upset. The town has just been depressed, whereas it would normally be full of hustle and bustle on a Friday. An awful lot of my customers have been coming in to buy ‘little angel’ Mass cards for Robert. It’s all anybody is talking about,” said Carmel O’Leary, who works in Hurley’s Newsagents. The urgency in tracking down Robert’s killer was also preying on people’s minds, according to Mary Power, who works in a gift shop on Main Street. “I keep on thinking that it could be somebody passing me on the street. We don’t know who it is and all this talk about it being someone local is terrifying,” she said. Her question hangs in the air: “Who could want to do this?” |
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15.1.05 16:14 |
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Saying good bye
BBC Thousands attend boy's funeral  Robert Holohan had been missing for more than a week Thousands of people have attended the funeral of a schoolboy who was found murdered in County Cork. The body of Robert Holohan, 11, was discovered near Inch Strand in east Cork on Wednesday, more than a week after he disappeared. The Midleton boy had died from asphyxiation. Gardai said that there was no evidence of sexual assault. Among the mourners at his funeral were political figures and volunteers who took part in the search for the child. Robert's body was found in dense woodland about seven miles from where he went missing. Detectives have begun a murder inquiry as they try to piece together when and where he died. "No-one in Ireland has been untouched by this". Mary McAleese Irish President Gardai are continuing to search the area where his body was found. Hundreds lined the main street of Midletown on Saturday as Robert's body was brought from the family home to the Holy Rosary Church in the town. The church was filled to capacity while thousands more gathered outside. Father Billy O'Donovan, said 4 January, the day Robert disappeared, would live long in the nation's memory.  The town came to a standstill for the little boy's funeral He told the congregation that the schoolboy's parents, Mark and Najella, had the support of the country. "They know themselves they must start the long journey of looking to the future, coping with their grief and, in time, putting their lives back together again," he said. Many cried as Father O'Donovan recalled his conversation with a police officer who had been guarding the scene where Robert's body was found. The police officer told him that he wanted Robert's parents to know that their young son was not alone that night. "I just wished I had a blanket wrapped around him," the officer said. Fr O'Donovan said all the people who had taken part in the searches for Robert were heroes. "During the past 12 days we've witnessed and experienced something very special here in Midleton and the surrounding community," he said. Fr O'Donovan read a message from Irish President McAleese, who said she wanted to convey her admiration for what the community had done to help the family. "No-one in Ireland has been untouched by this," she added. The funeral was attended by a number of politicians, including representatives of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern as well as Employment Minister Micheal Martin. |
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16.1.05 01:43 |
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Thankful
 I tried to make this post last week, but then my puter froze and I had to restart and I lost it, so I am trying again. This time I will do it from Semagic so it will be saved in case of a problem. Doesn't it tick you off when you wax eloquent for about 20 minutes and pour your hear and soul out to God and everybody and then your machine crashes and you lose everything? At any rate, I wanted to say that Issy is doing better, thanks be to God, Our Lady, and all the angels and saints. I didn't think she was going to make it. There were many, many times when I thought I should give up and let her go. Plus I felt guilty for not taking her somewhere where they could do a gastric tube, but we persevered with dropper feedings and medication and fluids, and slowly she came around, and now she is eating and drinking on her own and seems so peaceful and contented. Of course, she is spoiled rotten for the deli food she has been getting. but at least I know she is happy and feeling better. I consider this a miracle of sorts because truly she had death in her eyes. This happened with my heart cat too, but I have to say that it doesn't happen often. Most of the time they go on to the Rainbow Bridge and leave me behind no matter how hard we try or how much praying I do. So, it's peaceful around here--or would be if the neighbour's wanker son weren't out of jail, perpetrating his life of worthless crime below my flat. If only he would go on to the Rainbow Bridge--or pit of fire, morelike. I shall have to begin praying anew... (Tabby portrait from >>>here) |
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16.1.05 05:42 |
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