I have been reading “The Men who Stare at Goats” a book and movie based on the true story of General Albert Stubblebine who started a unit of military men with so called psychic abilities. He believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Of course none of this worked and lots of tax dollars were spent investigating this bunkum, the general became a bit of a joke as a result.
So I should not have been surprised that the man who ran into his office wall thinking he could melt right through it using the power of his mind would also buy into the nonsense of the 9/11 Truth people. Me thinks the general must have run head first into that wall on more than just one occasion. It would seem that many in the truth movement do have a tendency to follow the leader rather quickly and without vetting so Stubblebine is welcomed by many a truther. They think of the person as an authority because they have a title, Dr. or General, former USG official.
One thing I have learned when dealing with truthers is they like to embrace all sort of claptrap. You know those condensation trails you see coming out of high flying jets? In trutherville it is thought to be chemical spraying of mind control drugs or weather changing compounds. And then you have the subset of truthers who believe no airplanes hit the towers, No-Planers who buy the idea of holographic projections were what everyone saw. High energy space beam weapons are popular with a certain faction. Your basic big tent of loonies.
The only good point of the general involvement is it have sparked accusations of disinformation among members of the “Truth” movement. The infighting among the “planers” and “no-planers”, the controlled demolition and non-controlled demolition and the “Let it happen on purpose” LIHOP and the “Made it happen on purpose” MIHOP is comedy gold. I myself get accused of being a paid government agent because I happen to have enough sense to call a kook a kook. Yeah, Yeah, I know, it’s not cool or politically correct dismiss others deeply felt ideas, but when your idea is pure 100% crap like staring at goats with deadly intent or thinking the WTC was a controlled demolition one would be a fool himself to entertain the ideas as some how based on reality.
I spotted this bit of bullshit while driving around.
To anyone with the least bit of education can easily see where this billboard is dead wrong. It shows a picture of Charles Darwin, a man who while at Cambridge studied Paley’s Natural Theology which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as god acting through laws of nature. Of course his interest in natural history inspired his theory of natural selection, a theory that has proven to be correct in 200 years of research by others in such diverse fields as geology, biology and astronomy. From the age of forty he was, to use his own words, a complete dis-believer in Christianity. He professed himself an agnostic not an atheist. So if you are going pick a man to be the image of the average atheist, Darwin is a rather weak choice, Maybe Benjamin Franklin, Bertrand Russell or Thomas Jefferson would be a better choice. But Christian sure do not want to admit many of the countries founding fathers were not Christians.
And then you have the uninformed idea that evolution is an atheist belief. It ignores the fact there are many religious people out there who accept the biological reality of evolution but believe a god made evolution as a tool for designing man. Even the Pope accepts evolution. So here again Darwin is a stupid choice. Fact is one could be an atheist but not believe in evolution. True not very likely but I can imagine someone out there who thinks man is merely the product of alien experiments and our entire universe exist only in a petri disk in a giant alien laboratory.
You then have the silly idea evolution makes a statement on the issue of existence, it does not. Evolution only makes an observation of the reality that living matter changes over time and that plants and animals, including man, show unmistakable signs of evolving from similar species. The idea of something from nothing is not a biological question, but a cosmological one. Our expanding universe tends to support a Big Bang beginning but makes no statement on what came before, or if time even existed “before”. Science is honest in that regard, saying we may never be able to say what happened at the Big Bang. Religion on the other hand prefers you to buy an intellectual dead end, god did it they says, but ask what came before god and they don’t even want to think about it.
Now imaging if I were to buy a billboard saying “Pull the Plug on Christianity” or “Pull the Plug on Judaism”. I would be accused of promoting religious hatred.
Pamela Mosier-Boss and colleagues at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California, are claiming to have made a “significant” discovery – clear evidence of the products of cold fusion using a special plastic to track neutrons. The researchers placed a sample of CR-39 plastic in contact with a gold or nickel cathode in an electrochemical cell filled with a mixture of palladium chloride, lithium chloride and deuterium oxide, so-called “heavy water”. When a current was passed through the cell, palladium and deuterium became deposited on the cathode.
After several weeks, the team found a small number of “triple tracks” in the plastic three 8 micrometre wide pits radiating from a point. The team says such a pattern occurs when a high-energy neutron strikes a carbon atom inside the plastic and shatters it into three charged alpha particles that rip through the plastic leaving tracks.
If you recall back in 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons proposed a their experiment as proof of cold fusion. Problem is their work could not be reproduced by anyone else. But the story caught the public imagination because the cold fusion process would mean a cheap, clean and limitless source of power. And when it didn’t pan out, many conspiratorial types started in with the old claim that the government was suppressing the discovery to aid “Big Oil”. Gee… if this free energy is so repressed, why is the latest news coming from a lab with such close government and military ties? You would think they would be easy to hush-up.
To be sure Hot Fusion does occur, it’s what powers stars like our Sun, Hot fusion reactions have been done by researchers, but so far the process requires putting in more energy than is produced, So fusion is a reality, but many scientist think cold fusion remains science fiction. Many in the field prefers to categorise the work as evidence of “low energy nuclear reactions”, something observable at tiny scale and sensitive recording equipment of a lab, but useless for any real work. It will be interesting to see what happens with the latest discovery and more importantly, if it can be scaled to a useful size.
It’s been a popular claim by autism activists like Kathie Lee Gifford and others who that measles shots caused their children’s disorders. But a courts confirmed what scientist have been saying all along, this is just popular myth.
The evidence “is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive,” concluded Special Master Denise Vowell. “Sadly, the petitioners in this litigation have been the victims of bad science conducted to support litigation rather than to advance medical and scientific understanding” of autism.
The preservative, thimerosal was outlawed in 2001, and yet we continues to see an increase in autism cases. Why is that? if the drugs were the cause the cases of autism should decline. Maybe the reason is because blaming a child’s development difficulties is easier to take if you can put on a someone else, big paramedical or the government. Add to that lawyers who will take your case to get you some cash and famous TV and movie personalities who peddle the so called cause, and it easy to see why people find the idea compelling.
Rather then admit the vaccines were not to blame, activist continued to tell people not to have their kid vaccinated even though doing so not only threatened their own children but others by increasing the likelihood of measles outbreaks in school children. It’s the “herd immunity” that keeps diseases like the measles in check and once a certain percentage of the population is no longer immune you have a real danger of an epidemic.
Stem cell biologists in the US have been waiting for a long time to be able to use the more Pluripotent embryonic stem cells that were banned by the Bush administration. Reversal of the ban is an action scientists hope will lead to cures for deadly ailments like diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.
“What happened today is huge,” says Kevin Wilson, director of public policy at the American Society for Cell Biology. “We’ve gone from having a small number of cell lines eligible for federal funding to having at least a few hundred.”
Photograph of ball lightning, which prompted scientists to acknowledge the phenomenon.
The world is complex and often mysterious. So the fact people see light in the sky they can’t explain is not that unusual.
Things like the atmospheric electrical phenomenon called Ball Lightning have been known for years. And if you are not familiar with Ball Lighting by all means look it up, it’s fascinating.
Now scientist at the Tel Aviv University have discovered yet another natural light emitting phenomenon that takes place high above thunder storms called “Sprites”. True, not as intriguing as saying you looked up in the sky and saw ET flying around but I find the real world much more appealing.
Sprightly Explanation For UFO Sightings?
I have been reading “The Men who Stare at Goats” a book and movie based on the true story of General Albert Stubblebine who started a unit of military men with so called psychic abilities. He believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Of course none of this worked and lots of tax dollars were spent investigating this bunkum, the general became a bit of a joke as a result.
