After the final siege ended, adoring crowds surrounded six buses near the hotel carrying weary, unshaven commandos, shaking their hands and giving them flowers. One sat sipping a bottle of water and holding a pink rose.
Officials said they believe just 10 well-prepared gunmen were behind the attacks that brought the city of 18 million to its knees for three days.
Ten terrorists willing to swap their lives for twenty times their number, using rubber boats, cell phones, machine guns and grenades. For all our security measures, once more, low-tech wins. For me, that’s the scariest thing out of this mass murder in Mumbai. It’s being called India’s 9/11 but it’s should be nudge of seismic proportions for all of us.
The Associated Press is reporting on another kind of seismic activity. A series of small earthquakes that rattled central Arkansas in recent weeks could be a sign of something much bigger to come.
"The potential for generating a high-magnitude earthquake is real," said Haydar Al-Shukri, director of the Arkansas Earthquake Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Nothing seems very stable these days does it? Not even Arkansas where there’s never been any history of earthquakes. And it’s not just the rock that we’re standing on either:
LLOYDMINSTER, Alberta (Nov. 29) - Scientists said Friday they had found remains of the object that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month. The giant fireball proved to be a meteor, as many had believed.
When I first heard about these glowing orbs streaking across the sky over Canada I thought the hostile invading alien armies hovering silently outside of earth’s atmosphere behind their cloaking devices had finally taken my advice and decided to eat the Canadians first. But no. Just meteors. Which proves again, nobody listens to me. Except for Jane Wolf, historian for the Town of Seneca Falls. She listens. Thank you, Jane.
Everybody else out to listen up:
(Physorg.com) In the far north of Canada through a web of transcontinental pipelines down to a network of refineries ringing the Chicago area, a new supply of precious oil has begun flowing into the gas tanks of more Americans, tapped from a source so vast it could one day furnish close to half of U.S. oil needs for 50 years or more.
This Canadian oil is stable and reliable. It promises to substantially reduce America's future dependence on volatile Middle Eastern sources of oil. And much of it is profitable to produce even with oil prices hovering around $50 per barrel.
(Hey, Canada, I was just kidding about that “Eat the Canadians first thing”--just keep the oil flowing.)
But what few American consumers know as they routinely fill up their tanks is that this new petroleum bonanza, drawn from dense, tarry deposits known as oil sands, ranks as what environmentalists call the dirtiest oil on the planet. Extracting it causes widespread ecological damage - and could accelerate global warming.
Hmmmmmm. Let’s think this through. We’d have all the cheap gas we need for the next 50 years but it just it might just warm up the planet a little bit. Hmmmmm. Pretty tempting. How much damage could a few degrees warmer actually cause?
A less than two degree Celsius rise in global temperatures might be sufficient to spark a meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic sea ice, the WWF warned in a new study released Thursday.
"Scientists now suggest that even warming of less than 2 degree Celsius might be enough to trigger the loss of Arctic sea ice and the meltdown of the Greeland Ice Sheet which would mean global sea levels would rise by several metres, threatening tens of millions of people worldwide."
I see. Threatening the lives of tens of millions of people, you say? But I would still be able to buy gas at two dollars a gallon? At least if we missed looking at giant wads of ice we could always go to Antarctica, correct?
CNN) -- Scientists have identified new rifts on an Antarctic ice shelf that could lead to it breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula, the European Space Agency said.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a large sheet of floating ice south of South America, is connected to two Antarctic islands by a strip of ice. That ice "bridge" has lost about 772 square miles this year.
But just to be clear, we’d still have gas at two dollars a gallon and a lot more water on the planet’s surface for our motorboats. Or boathouses, as it were.
OK, I vote to conserve energy and try to burn cleaner fuels when we have to for only one reason. I actually saw Kevin Costner’s movie “Waterworld” and I never want to have to see that again.
Speaking of repeating nightmares:
(PhysOrg.com) -- Endeavor astronaut Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper's loss has turned out to be an amateur star gazers' event of the season. The $100,000 tool bag slipped out of her reach and floated into space while she was trying to clean up a greasy mess, a bag now dubbed ISS Toolbag as it orbits the Earth. According to Space.com, Edward Light spotted the orbiting tool bag using 10 x 50 binoculars from his backyard in Lakewood, New Jersey. (Oh, the humanity).
SpaceWeather.com has launched a satellite tracking system which allows the public to input their zip code and get a schedule of when the ISS tool bag will be doing a flyby in their neighborhood. The satellite tracking system provides the time, date, direction to look, transit time, maximum elevation and magnitude of the ISS Toolbag.
That has got to be funny to everybody except the woman who dropped it. There it is, this $100,000 tool bag rotating around the planet taunting her from space. That beats my wife’s record of driving almost the entire way to the airport at 70 m.p.h. with her purse on top of her car before it finally blew all over the highway. By the way, wouldn’t a $100,000 dollar tool bag make the perfect gift for the person who has everything?
Here’s what you need. A white tool bag with a camera, some gloves, a putty knife, some cleaning wipes and two grease guns, one of which should be an exploding grease gun.
We, the taxpayers paid $100,000 for that bit of space debris. Now, I know some people have said that in NASA’s defense, these weren’t just any grease guns, these were special space grease guns that, you know, they made just to take into space.
And I say, if those grease guns were really made by NASA to go into space, the damn thing shouldn’t have exploded.
Of course, there are those expensive space wipes to clean space stuff with and that special space putty knife that the astronauts use on all that space putty.
I think I’ll stick with the C.Crane Calamity Kit. A lot cheaper. www.ccrane.com
This is going to be such a big, historic JFK show tonight that I have literally gone into training to be ready for it.
Yesterday I had worked out pretty hard and last night filling in for George I was suffering from some back strain which caused me to stretch during the breaks as
Move over Harry Potter, the new teen other-worldly franchise is here, the tweener vampire fantasy romanceMovie experts underestimated the box office gross for “Twilight” by about a third.
Instead of 27 million, the movie did 35 and should do at least 75 million for the weekend.
The first box office records have already been broken by Twilight's girl power. This is the biggest opening for a female director. Catherine Hardwicke is easily beating Mimi Leder's $41.1M for 1998's Deep Impact. (But with an asterisk since these figures aren't adjusted for inflation, ticket prices, etc.) Twilight will have the 2nd best opening day for a November release behind Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, and the 11th best Friday opening of all time, beating the first Harry PotterAnd The Sorcerer's Stone, and the 15th best opening day ever.
Back in October, perhaps you saw this headline in the Wall Street Journal:
“Is the Pope’s Newspaper Catholic?”
VATICAN CITY -- The newspaper industry might be on the ropes, but one staid broadsheet is getting a makeover at the behest of a lofty patron: Pope Benedict XVI.
In its 147 years as the Vatican's newspaper of record, L'Osservatore Romano has rarely chased advertisers, or even news. Hard to find beyond the world's smallest state, the Vatican's daily paper largely dedicated its pages to theological monologues with headlines like "The Leprosy of Sin."
Those days are over. Now, the Vatican mouthpiece has orders to carry hard-hitting news, international stories and more articles by women.
"There was a really precise request from the paper's publisher," Giovanni Maria Vian, the paper's new editor in chief, said in a recent interview at his office within the medieval walls of Vatican City. "In this case, the publisher just happened to be the pope."
A church historian and longtime journalist, Mr. Vian was tapped by Pope Benedict a year ago to make the sleepy, parochial paper a bit more worldly.
Few topics are deemed too bizarre or mundane. In May, L'Osservatore ran an interview with the Vatican's top astronomer. "If we consider earthly creatures as 'brother' and 'sister,' why cannot we also speak of an 'extraterrestrial brother'?" mused Father José Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory. Pressed on whether heaven might be open to such beings, the Rev. Funes said: "Jesus has been incarnated once, for everyone."
Today, the Telegraph UK is reporting what might be to some, an equally bizarre story:
Saturday's edition of the Vatican's official newspaper absolves John Lennon of his notorious remark (“We’re more popular than Jesus”), saying that "after so many years it sounds merely like the boasting of an English working-class lad struggling to cope with unexpected success".
In a lengthy editorial marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' famous White Album, L'Osservatore Romano heaps lavish praise on the British band.
"The talent of Lennon and the other Beatles gave us some of the best pages in modern pop music.”
Only "snobs" would dismiss the Beatles' songs, which had shown "an extraordinary resistance to the effects of time, providing inspiration for several generations of pop musicians", said the newspaper, regarded as the Vatican's official mouthpiece.
It was in March 1966 that Lennon made his infamous claim.
"Christianity will go," he told a reporter from the Evening Standard.
"It will vanish and shrink. We're more popular than Jesus now - I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was alright, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
Of course, I know a few Christian theologians who would agree with that statement too--and are making a pretty good living writing books on that exact topic. And frankly, judging by the scriptures, I’m not sure that Jesus wouldn’t agree with John Lennon that many of his disciples were thick and ordinary and this followers have twisted his messages.
That having been said, I wonder if the Vatican newspaper would comment on this question:
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 18,2008 - Did John Lennon sell his soul to the devil in exchange for his worldly musical success with The Beatles and beyond? That's the theory set forth by Joseph Niezgoda in his soon-to-be released book The Lennon Prophecy, A New Examination of the Death Clues of the Beatles.
The Lennon Prophecy offers a new interpretation of the hidden messages and symbols that have ornamented Beatles mythology for years and offers the view that Lennon joined historical figures such as Mississippi "Crossroads" blues guitarist Robert Johnson, Dr. Johann Faust, Pope Sylvester II among others who entered into a pact with the devil to exchange their souls for earthly successes. Niezgoda dissects and examines the Beatles' and Lennon's recordings and album artwork and follows a fascinating and unique trail of sorcery, mysticism, numerology, backward masking, anagrams and literary and theological writings to explain his conclusions.
I’ve ordered a copy of the book and we have some open dates coming up before the end of the year so I’m keeping an open mind. You might say, ‘Imagine the author’s done his research . . . “
Finally, if you ever get a chance to get to the International Space Station, you might see if you can sneak a Pepsi on board with you. Or some mouthwash.
(AP) -- NASA's revolutionary new space water recycling system is having serious hiccups. The $154 million device for turning astronauts' urine and sweat into drinking water aboard the international space station shut down again Friday, and engineers on the ground were scrambling to figure out what was wrong.
The astronauts and flight controllers are up against the clock: NASA wants samples of the processed urine before space shuttle Endeavour pulls away from the space station late next week. The recycled water needs to be tested back on Earth before anyone up there can drink it and NASA commits to doubling the size of the space station crew next year.
No one was surprised by the startup trouble. Space station commander Mike Fincke said it's common for things to go wrong in a flight test and stressed that he wasn't worried - so far. Nor was he concerned about eventually drinking the final product.
"It's just the water that's taken out," Fincke said during a news conference. "It's really clean and purified water. In fact, it's probably more pure than most people's tap water. So I'm not afraid to drink it."
Bottoms up, as it were, Commander Fincke. I understand it’s just the water that’s taken out but that’s not what I would be worried about. It’s not about the problems of drinking my own purified pee that creeps me out. It’s the filter problem with somebody else’s--or for that matter--the whole space shuttle crew brew.
Saturday, November 22, 2008, 12:41 AM CST [General]
by Ian Punnett
"The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning."
That is the first line of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, “Casino Royale,” published back in 1953.
I was reminded of that the other night when I was watching the most recent and the best of the three versions of “Casino Royale” starring Daniel Craig as James Bond 6.0 who just nails it as far as I’m concerned.
On paper, the casting didn’t work for me because I couldn’t get Daniel Craig as the pyscho killer from “Road to Perdition” out of my head.
The second I saw the first trailer, I got it.
Same thing with Robert Downey, Jr as Tony Starke in “Iron Man.” Had to shake my head when I first heard the announcement but from the second the movie trailer for “Iron Man” graced my laptop, I was hooked.
On the other hand, I’m not so sure about this new “Star Trek” trailer I keep seeing. Ay, I love the franchise and want to see it continue forever but I’m not sure I’m ready for James T. Kirk, Spock and McCoy as teenagers.
And I know that it’s a J.J. Abrams production and I’ve really enjoyed much of his work on Lost, Cloverfield and even MI3.
But from what I have seen so far, Star Trek XI really does look like “Star Trek 90120.”
I will reserve final judgement only because it has Simon Pegg in it as Scotty and I love him in “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” to name a few.
William Shatner has commented on the new casting in “Star Trek XI” and if you haven’t seen that yet, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fu656gGkhI
Speaking of remakes, have you heard this story?
A kitten with two faces that meows out of both mouths at the same time was born Wednesday near Perth, Western Australia.
The kitten was delivered in a vet's operating room after its mother had complications with the birth.
The two-faced feline was one of three in a litter and appears to be doing well.
It hasn't got a name yet, but the owner is thinking of calling it Quasi Modo.
Now, that’s just wrong. To name the cat “Quasimodo” after the unloved title character in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” just seems mean.
If we’re going to make movie references, how about calling the cat “Harvey” in honor of Harvey Dent, aka “Two-Face,” from the Batman comics.
Or, better yet, just call the critter “Kitty Kitty.” That way when you call it you can just say, “Here, Kitty Kitty.”
In other movie inspired Crypto-News:
The latest milestone in the quest for a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak has been reached: a way of bending the geometry of space so that light from all directions travels around an object, rather than hitting it.
Unable to interact with light, the hidden object is therefore invisible, a new study found.
But how real is the possibility of an invisibility device? Is it years, decades, or millennia away? Even the author of the latest study doesn't want to hazard too strong a guess.
Also, in the ongoing fight against pirates,
Gone are the swashbuckling days of repelling pirates with cutlasses -- a British firm is spearheading use of a high-tech "sonic laser" to beat bandits on the high seas.
About the size of a domestic satellite dish, LRADs blast the target with a precise beam of sound -- warning messages, noises, sirens -- which can be turned up to excruciatingly painful levels should an attacker get too close.
"You'll be in absolute agony," company chief executive Nick Davis, a 38-year-old ex-army man.
"It's very effective up to 1,000 metres and excruciating if you get within 100 to 200 metres if it's at full power. It would give you more or less permanent hearing damage." (Physorg.com)
I know this makes me some kind of geezer but this excruciating sonic blast reminds of the old cartoon character “Peter Potamus.”
I wish I could find some footage of Peter’s legendary “Hippo Hurricane Holler” to show the youngsters. Peter Potamus didn’t need some jive Long Range Audio Device to blast pirates out of the water!
As of last report, those Somali pirates still have their own oil tanker with a $100 million dollar cargo and are demanding $25 million ransom.
Maybe the Saudi owners of the tanker won’t mind so much if drives the price of oil up!
Right now in the Upper Midwest, gas prices are already some of the lowest in the country.
Hope this blog finds you well. I had a rare day of reading in peace nothing on my plate more than some sliced apples, a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee.
At the park near my house, migratory birds were enjoying a dip in the neighborhood ponds before leaving to finish their trip south. I counted 150 or so Canada geese (they never stood still long enough to get a very accurate census!) and six ducks that didn’t get some kind of memo.
As I walked with my dog, Jack, about half of the gaggle just stood up and flew far out of sight.
And judging by what was left behind in the grass and on the sidewalks of my local park, you should keep an eye on those geese and their U-F-Os--”Unwanted Falling Objects.”
Out on the web tonight, some amazing historical photos from the last 140 years of regular UFO sightings. Here’s the link:
Astronomers have taken what they say are the first-ever direct images of planets outside of our solar system, including a visible-light snapshot of a single-planet system and an infrared picture of a multiple-planet system.
Earth-like worlds might also exist in the three-planet system, but if so they are too dim to photograph. The other newfound planet orbits a star called Fomalhaut, which is visible without the aid of a telescope. It is the 18th brightest star in the sky.
Meanwhile on our home planet, our greenhouse gasses may not be the death of us after all:
Scheduled shifts in Earth's orbit should plunge the planet into an enduring Ice Age thousands of years from now but the event will probably be averted because of man-made greenhouse gases, scientists said Wednesday.
They cautioned, though, that this news is not an argument in favour of global warming, which is driving imminent and potentially far-reaching damage to the climate system.
Earth has experienced long periods of extreme cold over the billions of years of its history. The big freezes are interspersed with "interglacial" periods of relative warmth, of the kind we have experienced since the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 years ago (Physorg.com).
So, next time I pass one person in a giant, out of tune Hummer doing a jack-rabbit start at a green traffic light, I’ll tip my cap and say “thank you for keeping us warm.”
Next time you glance at the night sky remember:
India's unmanned lunar spacecraft successfully entered the operational lunar orbit after ISRO scientists carried out final orbit reduction manoeuvre, lasting one minute which means that India is now a member of the global moon club. The others are members are the US, Russia (former Soviet Union), ****an, China and members of European Space Agency (ESA).
Experts said it was a significant feat because India's moonshot was successful in the very first attempt — something that even major space powers like the US and Russia could not achieve. The man who launched the Indian moon mission said, "It's undoubtedly a great moment for India because nearly 50% of the moon missions of other countries have not been successful."
Well, of course India has the advantage to get it right--the US and Russia did all the trial and error.
The two-year Indian moon mission is hunting for water or ice on the moon surface (Indian News Agency).
Well, of course they need to find more water--it’s all that curry. Best curry I ever had was in London leading that tour of “Da Vinci Code” readers through Europe about six years ago. I love England but London is crowded--and not just for the living.
Double-decker graves set for go-ahead
Human remains are to be dug up and re-buried deeper in the ground in double-decker graves to tackle a shortage of space for new burials.
New inscriptions will then be added to existing headstones while some old gravestones could even be removed altogether, reports the Daily Telegraph.
A Government report last year found that burial space in England and Wales will be full in 30 years, while some urban boroughs are already out of room.
The chief executive of the Institute of Cemeteries and Crematorium Management says that only graves more than 100 years old that are no longer visited will be considered for the scheme.
So, not only will you share a grave with somebody, you might just be bunking with somebody you were never related to and didn’t even know! That would be weird. As much as I love the stuff, I hope they don’t smell like curry! I don’t think I could handle that for an eternity.
Here in Minnesota there is an active Indian community with some decent Indian restaurants although it’s probably the only place where a diner might be able to order a “Spam curry” because just down the road a bit from me is where they make Spam--and they are making more of it than ever.
(Austin, MN) The economy is in tatters and, for millions of people, the future is uncertain. But for some employees at the Hormel Foods Corporation plant here, times have never been better. They are working at a furious pace and piling up all the overtime they want.
Even as consumers are cutting back on all sorts of goods, Spam is among a select group of thrifty grocery items that are selling steadily (NYT).
Hey, here’s an idea. There’s a Spam shortage in the US and a grave shortage in the UK. What if we took the bodies and brought them to America and then we . . . just sayin’ . . . I mean it’s not like it would change the flavor. For all I know they could be making Spam right now with pigs and Long Pigs (if you know what I mean) . . .
Sorry, I know that’s kind of grisly. So’s this:
Eric Bland, Discovery News
Nov. 13, 2008 -- A team of experts assembled by the Discovery Channel has recreated the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Using modern blood spatter analysis, new artificial human body surrogates, and 3-D computer simulations, the team determined that the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was the most likely origin of the shot that killed the 35th president of the United States.
"The question we were trying to answer is, given the spatter evidence in a vehicle, and knowing an individual was sitting at a particular location, is there something we could use to determine where the shot originated?" said Steve Schliebe, a blood spatter and trace evidence specialist with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, who was part of the special investigation.
Will we ever have an answer to “Who Killed JFK?” that will satisfy everybody? Will the question become an unanswerable one for the ages like “What came first, the chicken or egg?”
Let’s hope so! Because according to the website “Live Science,” that riddle is solved. The egg came first. It’s a matter of logic that is related to the discovery of new fossil evidence of dinosaur egg nests. Here’s how they describe it:
Dinosaurs were forming bird-like nests and laying bird-like eggs long before birds (including chickens) evolved from dinosaurs.
"The egg came before the chicken," Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist of the University of Calgary in Alberta says, "Chickens evolved well after the meat-eating dinosaurs that laid the (original) eggs."
So the new riddle might now be re-phrased: Which came first, the dinosaur or the egg? (Live Science.com)
OK, OK, I got it. I got about a dozen links to this first Crypto-News story since I was talking with John Michael Greer last night about the US would look at the end of the industrial age when, presumably, all the oil had run out and our power supplies would be limited and exotic.
In his book “The Long Descent,” Greer said that nuclear power would not be an option because we could never have enough enriched uranium to keep the nuclear plants running. If this story had come out when we were talking, I would have mentioned it to him but it hadn’t yet.
Not that we shouldn’t conserve gas--I still think that’s crucial. But, as so many of you pointed out in the e-mail, it looks like we might have other options:
Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.
The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'
Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said. (Guardian.UK)
Oil independence could be easier than you think with this “leapfrog technology.” Which is not to be confused with “tree frog” technology.
Also from the Guardian UK:
A tree fungus could provide green fuel that can be pumped directly into tanks, scientists say. The organism, found in the Patagonian rainforest, naturally produces a mixture of chemicals that is remarkably similar to diesel.
"This is the only organism that has ever been shown to produce such an important combination of fuel substances," said Gary Strobel, a plant scientist from Montana State University who led the work. "We were totally surprised to learn that it was making a plethora of hydrocarbons."
And the best thing is? You’re not taking food out of anybody’s mouth to make it like with corn and soybeans. I mean, except for the people who eat tree fungus. I mean other than mushrooms because I love mushrooms on my pizza. But if it meant oil independence, I’ll learn to like pineapple and ham or eat sub sandwiches.
Speaking of subs! Did you hear about this guy who built his own sub?
ROTAN, HONDURAS (Fortune Small Business) -- Karl Stanley is cruising in his submarine, the Idabel, 1,700 feet beneath the waters off Roatan, Honduras. At that depth, amid jagged black boulders and hills of sediment, you can see some amazing creatures: lobsters with spindly arms as long as their bodies, silver-skinned fish the size of a cavalry saber, orange anglerfish with jaws locked in a perpetual grin.
Stanley can trace his obsession back to the age of 9, when he read a children's book about a team of preteen detectives who build a submarine to help solve an underwater mystery. He started sketching plans for a craft of his own, and by 15 he had started construction in his parents' backyard in Ridgewood, N.J. Stanley took the project with him to college in Florida, where he studied English literature (he has no formal training in engineering).
Last night, through a fluke phone connection, I talked Richie Kohler, half of the dive team on the History Channel’s “Deep Sea Detectives” and one of the divers who dropped down to the ocean floor using Mir submersibles. We chatted about Brad Matsen, our first hour guest last night and the author of “Titanic’s Last Secrets” and what it was like for Richie Kohler to not only dive the Titanic in a mini-sub but also to discover something that nobody ever had before. One minute Brad Matsen and I were talking about the Deep Sea Detective diver and five minutes later I was talking to him. I would love to go on one of those mini-sub dives with him--as long as Richie isn’t making his own subs like Karl Stanley.
Here’s an interesting story that just surfaced--UFO researcher Robert Stanley’s open letter to President-Elect Obama. It reads, in part:
Mr. Obama,
Your campaign was based on a simple, but profound promise — change. There is one important aspect of the current bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., that desperately needs to change — UFO secrecy.
During your campaign, you stated your willingness to have a dialogue with all world leaders regardless of their political views. Are you willing to engage in an open, diplomatic dialogue with the occupants of the unidentified aerospace craft visiting Washington, D.C.? If not, why not?
As reported in my book "Close Encounters on Capitol Hill," according to NATO's classified assessment in the 1960s, many of the occupants of these exotic space craft are in fact human. More importantly, NATO concluded that these people did not pose a direct threat to our security. If that is true, then why should we continue to deny their existence and refuse to engage them in open debate? In closing, I would like to make it crystal clear that this is an ongoing situation that will not go away simply by ignoring or denying it exists.
These exotic craft have been sighted and or photographed all over the world. But, they are also very interested in Washington, D.C. To illustrate my point, below are some of the most recent eyewitness accounts and photographs from our nation's capital.
Respectfully,
Robert M. Stanley
I don’t know about you but if I were President Obama, I wouldn’t need an open letter from Robert Stanley to dive head first into every secret do****ent in every secret file cabinet in every undisclosed location in the Washington DC metro area and beyond.
On Wednesday Nov. 5, before all the confetti had hit the floor, I would have been showing up at the White House with flashlight, a pith helmet, a thermos of coffee and a ham sandwich saying, “Which way to the Roswell files!”
The White House transition team would be trying to tell me about pending national security issues and trying to show me Al Qaeda targets and I’d be trying to sneak a peak at the JFK files and the unpublished NASA photos of Mars.
And with the economy being what it is, the first thing I would do is share them with the American people and give them something to take their minds off our financial setbacks. Right after the inauguration, if I were president, I would be hanging a giant screen on the Washington Monument and putting on a very memorable Powerpoint presentation for the world.
At least that’s the kind of politician I hope I would be. I hope I wouldn’t be like this guy:
(NBC New York) A Jersey City councilman has reportedly been arrested for urinating on a crowd of concertgoers from the balcony of a Washington D.C. nightclub.
The New York Daily News reports in Sunday's editions that two-term Jersey City councilman Steve Lipski has been charged with simple assault.
Gross. How about that for the arrogance of a politician? A recognized civic leader relieving himself on a crowd of concertgoers. There’s only one thing to call that.
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