[baby factory] what's in a name

Bronx Mowgli, out of Ashlee Simpson, by Pete Wentz and Sophocles Iraia, out of Miranda Manasiadis, by Jermaine Clement, are two of the wackier names of 2008.

They join a long tradition of Moon Unit Zappa, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, Audio Science, out of actress Shannyn Sossamon and some man, Pilot Inspector, out of Beth Riesgra, by boyfriend actor Jason Lee, Saffrom Sahara, out of Yasmin Parvaneh, by Simon Le Bon and God'iss Love Stone, out of rapper Lil' Mo, by husband Al Stone.

Still, that pales by comparison to boxer George Foreman's children George Jr., George III, George IV, George V, and George VI plus daughters Michi, Freeda, Georgetta, Natalie, and Leola.

If I was starting over again, I'd probably name my son Indon Barack Obama Kenya and my daughter Paris Madonna Jolie, asking Gordo to be their godfather and Polly Toynbee their godmother.

Nah, I'm lying. I'd call him Rotten Little Rodent and her Man Magnet II. You have to love your kids, you know.

[salvos] nobbled by the pc maniacs

Eh? Salvos are banned from rattling their tins?

Members have been issued with guidelines stating that they must keep their tins still even when music is playing. One volunteer with the Christian charity said she had been told that rattling could also offend other religions.

Again and again I say - you might not be Christian, you might have a jaundiced view of the Salvos and what they preach but if you sit back and let this go with ne'er a murmur, then one day the PC maniacs are going to turn on you.

This sort of thing requires letters to be written and petitions to be signed, not particularly for the Salvos but for any of us caught in this mindless, do-gooder, wet blanket PC madness. Rattling tins offends other religions? Give me a break.

The other day there were Romanians around our area, playing the accordion. Fine, what was the problem? Or is the problem only that it is a Christian group who are causing the "offence"?

For Boomers and younger, it might be as well to know that before the proliferation of help organizations, hotlines and so on, a very good thing, by the way, it was mainly the Salvos who were on the front line of domestic violence victims, addicts, derelicts and the like.

Kokoda trail, 1942 - salvos on hand


They were at the forefront of helping women and families and had a revolutionary notion of women before the feminists co-opted it ... the Foundation Deed of the Christian Mission, stated that women had the same rights to preach as men.

In America, the Salvation Army's first major forays into Disaster Relief resulted from the tragedies of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Their soup kitchens, thrift shops, family tracing and shelters are just some of the things they do.

Yes, they have a Christian slant and I have a problem with their ideas on alcohol. The music is not something I could listen to all day. However, if I found myself down and out in the coming depression, I'd not say no to a kindly face offering me some soup and sustenance and they could preach all they liked.

[ferry disaster] greed and ignorance

.

First, the news:

A wooden ferry carrying about 100 passengers has sunk in the Philippines, with at least 22 people drowned and about another 30 missing.

The ferry Maejan was approaching Aparri in Cagayan province in the north of the country when its bamboo outrigger broke in heavy seas off Ballesteros.

Passengers panicked and some leapt into the sea, creating instability on the vessel, which then capsized.

As you'll see in the top photo, the outrigger consists of two parts. The spindly arms extending outwards are called the akas and the long log in the water is the ama.

Now look at the photo above of a Hawaiian outrigger under sail. You can see that the ama has very little inherent buoyancy and far less weight, so it's only a balancing act of the crew which keeps the whole platform upright.

It acts in much the same way as poles do in skiing – they’re not designed for pushing hard against the snow – they’re only there for delicate balance.

There is designed to be one ama only, which skims a metre above the water on the "upwind" side [ignore the tiny float on the other side for now] and this long plastic float is kept there, skimming, only by the crew's skill and constant movement.

Furthermore, this ama is designed to be used in conjunction with sail, which gives it nice counterbalance and therein lies the stability. It's not designed for use on a power boat which has no sideways, sail assisted stability.




The south-east Asian variety of the ama really does use an actual log, joined by spindly akas, which don't need to be strongly made because as mentioned already, they are not designed to absorb pressure - they're designed only for delicate balance.

If any downwards pressure were to be put on these amas, then they would instantly go under the water and the boat would roll.

Now, the moment you design amas either side of the central hull [the boaty part of the boat], you have created a trimaran, not an outrigger any more. You are asking the amas for something completely different – you are asking them to absorb sideways and downwards pressure.

Therefore spindly akas and non-buoyant amas are no longer of any use [check the ferry in the top photo again] and must be discarded in favour of far more buoyant and sturdy amas, as in photos 3 and 4.

Also, in 4 below here, you can see that the central hull has no inherent stability whatsoever. It is of concave design near the waterline, [by comparison with a normal convex shaped hull] and the trimaran hull is, by definition, top heavy above.




The reason it is designed this way is that if you have a narrower beam [width] at the water line, this in turn means a more efficient, longer shape and less wetted area, which in turn means either more speed or in the case of a commercial craft, more fuel savings.

Clearly, a ferry company is interested in that.

Where the ferry company makes its mistake is in choosing the western trimaran central hull, a wedge shape balancing on its sharp end, combined with a south-east Asian, spindly, log design ama either side, designed to be used with a normal hull shape and not to be used as waterline balancing floats.

In other words, they want a trimaran for fuel efficiency reasons, plus speed, but are not prepared to use the key design component of that – the buoyant amas, which are expensive to build and add weight.

Any expert could tell them that as long as the weather is fine, they may survive but in bad weather, with passengers on board, they're all dead.




Now look at the commercial ferry above. Even with a normal, rounded shape, stabilizers below and a wide beam [width], this boat is rolling in the heavy seas.

So can you imagine what the ferry in the top photo would be doing in such seas? The moment high seas alter its balance, over goes the ferry and in the Philippines region - they do go over and people do die quite regularly.

[state quiz] which of the fifty is it

The way it works is this: 5 points if you can name the state on the first clue. If you need to highlight the second clue but you can then name the state: 4 points and so on.

NOTE ON MONDAY: Some people didn't realize they needed to highlight the blank looking lines with the mouse to reveal the clue.

So, here we go:

1. There is no sales tax and household goods are exempt from property taxes.

2. On January 20, 1954, -70 °F was recorded at a gold mining camp.

3. Its rivers form parts of three major watersheds.

4. The native Americans' last effort to keep their land was here.

5. It’s the fourth largest state in the United States.

Clue [for no points]: Hannah is not the state’s favourite daughter.

[shipping zones] do you know your british coast

In the map below, the zones immediately surrounding the main island have been blanked out, except for their initials. Can you identify the zones?

Answers here.

[weather] giving nature some assistance

One of the chief difficulties in researching sensitive issues is establishing the bona fides of the sources. For the post below, one source was Dr Rosalie Bertell PhD GNSH who wrote of nuclear fission and electro-magnetic pulses.

That was fine except that clearly, powerful interests were going to wish to debunk her and so we got: “Doctor” Rosalie Bartel is a nun of a fringe splinter group from the catholic church with some very strange views." I looked further and found her degree was from a Catholic college and was for biometry.

Does that disqualify her? Well, to answer that, does it disqualify me that my degree was in linguistics, sub-majoring in "issues in the biological sciences"? Does that negate everything I've written in this blog so far? What of you? Are you qualified to write on politics? Do you hold a degree in political science?

All this began with the news:

As many as 1m people have been left without power in the north-eastern US after one of the worst ice storms in a decade crippled the electricity grid.

"What is facing us is the apparent need to rebuild the entire infrastructure of some sections of the electrical delivery system," Martin Murray, a PSNH spokesman, told the Associated Press.

This led to the train of thought that hey, there's been a lot of freak weather occurring in the last decade and it seems to be getting worse:

In Europe, much of center of the continent enjoys balmy, temperate days. The temperature in Prague set a 230-year record of 13.8 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, the north has just been ravaged by floods and gales. A weekend storm which raged eastwards from the Atlantic led to the worst flooding in decades in parts of northern Britain.

That sort of thing, along with that tsunami, can lead one to conclude that things are changing, which shouldn't be too hard to prove or disprove, using meteorological records. Also, we should be a bit circumspect at laying the blame at the door of Climate Change, especially as this is a political tool of the elite at this time.

There are certainly unusual things happening. In a recent post, I mentioned my friend in Russia who reports plus ten degrees in Moscow and rain in his home town, when the whole place should be covered in snow - and this is just a worsening of the past few years.

In Britain, one writer commented:

Increasing storminess across the UK will probably mean more frequent storms on the scale of the great storms of October 1987 and January 1990, and indeed March 2008, while the sweltering 2003 summer, which took more than 35,000 lives in the UK and Europe, will be the norm by 2040, and regarded as "cool" a few decades later.

It's not so much the warming/cooling [depending on which camp you are in] but the seeming increase in freak weather which is quite interesting. The BBC published this about 2007 and it appears to have continued into 2008.

Add to this phenomena like the "upside down rainbow" in September, causing reactions like:

[A] picture was reportedly captured on camera by astronomer Dr Jacqueline Mitton near her home in Cambridge last Sunday.

"I've never seen anything like it before - and I'm 60. The conditions have to be just right: you need the right sort of ice crystals and the sky has to be clear. We're not sure how big an area it was visible over, but it was certainly very impressive."

A spokesman for the Met Office confirmed the inverted rainbows are occasionally spotted in British skies.

There are commercial implications as well:

Canadian insurers are warning that climate change is forcing them to re-examine their coverage policies as costs spiral upward from floods, wind storms and other natural phenomena.

This got me to thinking how damned convenient it all was for bodies like FEMA. What's the point of having an emergency body if you have no emergencies? This, in turn, recalled to the memory human intervention in the weather and the cloud seeding prior to the last Olympics are as good a place as any to start down this path:

The idea is for the peasant gunners to work with meteorologists watching radar in the capital. Together, they will hunt pregnant rain clouds and pound them with rockets containing silver iodide. The hope is that any moisture will fall before the clouds can threaten the parade of athletes and lighting of the Olympic flame at the new National Stadium.

So, if this works for one city, multiply that by the exponential factor required to cover the whole of China, add the coal burning tradition across that country and you have a large question mark about what humans are doing.

Eventually we get to the HAARP and Woodpecker projects, not to be confused with the current HAARP project, addressed further here:

Press releases and other information from the military on HAARP continually downplay what it could do. Publicity documents insist that the HAARP project is no different than other ionospheric heaters operating safely throughout the world in places such as Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union. However, a 1990 government document indicates that the radio-frequency (RF) power zap will drive the ionosphere to unnatural activities.

" ... at the highest HF powers available in the West, the instabilities commonly studied are approaching their maximum RF energy dissipative capability, beyond which the plasma processes will 'runaway' until the next limiting factor is reached."

One patent taken out by physicist Bernard Eastlund stated:

"Thus, this invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art, particularly by detonation of nuclear devices of various yields at various altitudes... "

... and:

"... large regions of the atmosphere could be lifted to an unexpectedly high altitude so that missiles encounter unexpected and unplanned drag forces with resultant destruction."

"Weather modification is possible by, for example, altering upper atmosphere wind patterns by constructing one or more plumes of atmospheric particles which will act as a lens or focusing device ... molecular modifications of the atmosphere can take place so that positive environmental effects can be achieved. Besides actually changing the molecular composition of an atmospheric region, a particular molecule or molecules can be chosen for increased presence. For example, ozone, nitrogen, etc., concentrations in the atmosphere could be artificially increased."

... and:

For example, Air Force documents revealed that a system had been developed for manipulating and disturbing human mental processes through pulsed radio-frequency radiation (the stuff of HAARP) over large geographical areas. The most telling material about this technology came from writings of Zbigniew Brzezinski (former National Security Advisory to U.S. President Carter) and J.F. MacDonald (science advisor to U.S. President Johnson and a professor of Geophysics at UCLA), as they wrote about use of power-beaming transmitters for geophysical and environmental warfare.

Carter's Brzezinski wrote of the mindset in the upper echelons which can access this technology:

"Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Technical and scientific momentum would then feed on the situation it exploits."

In effect, it's like the military-industrial complex saying to you, in your home:

"Trust us. We'd never use this technology for military or commercial advantage over our rivals. We're completely transparent and above board. Besides, we have a history of altruism and efficiency, after all."

Researchers have warned of this for some time:

Among other researchers quoted is Paul Schaefer of Kansas City. His degree is in electrical engineering and he spent four years building nuclear weapons. "But most of the theories that we have been taught by scientists to believe in seem to be falling apart," he says. He talks about imbalances already caused by the industrial and atomic age, especially by radiation of large numbers of tiny, high-velocity particles "like very small spinning tops" into our environment.

He adds:

"One might compare the abnormal energetic state of the Earth and its atmosphere to a car battery which has become overcharged with the normal flow of energy jammed up, resulting in hot spots, electrical arcing, physical cracks and general turbulence as the pent-up energy tries to find some place to go."

Naturally, spin-offs from this include weather control and more pinpointed modification in a given region. None of this stuff is an accident - it's been going on for quite some time. Here I invoke Bertell [mentioned at the start], not for her opinion but for her listing of projects leading up to the current Alaskan scheme:

Project Argus (1958)

Project Starfish (1962)

SPS: Solar Power Satellite Project (1968)

Saturn V Rocket (1975)

SPS Military Implications (1978)

Orbit Maneuvering System (1981)

Innovative Shuttle Experiments (1985)

Mighty Oaks (1986)

Desert Storm (1991)

High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program HAARP (1993)

Poker Flat Rocket Launch (1968 to Present)

Conclusions

Further References

Though there are undoubtedly fiendish hawks in uniform who see the opportunity of exploiting the new destructive technologies, it is not so much that which will cause the catastrophe but the analogy I read of, of an experimenter sticking a firecracker up a grizzly bear's bottom to measure its effects. The effects could be other than allowed for in original calculations.

It's the arrogance of people labelling themselves the elite playing about with "dial in" technology they have not fully explored, for short term gain and damn the consequences. It's the essential short-sightedness of these grand planners and their incompetence [see Brown's lackeys for evidence of that].

It's the unmitigated gall of playing around with our future and that of our children's children, all in the name of some slick new fashionable scheme which will, as it always has in the past, go sadly awry, simply because what was possible is now in the hands of the criminally incompetent.