December 12, 2012

Bombshell: Senator Suggested False Flag Attack To Kennedy 2 Years Prior To Operation Northwoods Proposal

Originally posted by Mr.H on share.banoosh.com

According to newly released documents by the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, former Californian democratic senator George Smathers proposed an Operation Northwoods style false flag attack on Gitmo to then Massachusetts senator Kennedy. The Guardian reports Kennedy and Smathers were seriously entertaining the possibility of assassinating Fidel Castro. Kennedy was obviously against the entire idea. Smathers went on to propose the option of bombing American troops to provide an excuse for military intervention in Cuba. Significant about Smather’s confessions is the now apparent fact that the idea of bombing the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay was obviously floating in political circles as well as military ones some time before the actual formalization of the false flag proposals in the Operation Northwoods documents, ultimately rejected by President Kennedy in 1962. The other significant aspect of the confession by Smathers is that the proposals described within Northwoods in March of 1962 literally reflect the false flag proposal submitted to Kennedy in 1960 by senator Smathers.

In the freshly released documents by the JFK Memorial Library, Smathers- who frequently joined John F. Kennedy on trips to the south- admits that he proposed the idea of a false flag attack on Gitmo during a conversation with the President-to-be. After the “killing Castro” propiosal was discarded by Kennedy, Smathers suggested provoking an incident at the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern tip of Cuba as a pretext for a US invasion. Smathers:

“I did talk to him about a plan of having a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and do the job. He asked me to write him something about it. And I think I did.”

As noted this very proposal by Smathers in 1960 is stunningly similar to the infamous Northwoods document, signed by chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff propose some pretty criminal things, among which the one proposed by Smathers to Kennedy in 1960. Under “Incidents to establish a credible attack” the Joint Chiefs came up with the following proposals in regards to the US naval base at Gitmo:

1- Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
2- Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on base.
3- Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
4- Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
5- Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
6- Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
7- Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.
8- Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
9- Capture militia group which storms the base.
10- Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires.
11- Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.

In a February 2 1962 memorandum titled “Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass or Disrupt Cuba,” written by Gen. William H. Craig and submitted to Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, the commander of the Operation Mongoose project outlines Operation Bingo- a plan to “create an incident which has the appearance of an attack on U.S. facilities (GMO) in Cuba, thus providing an excuse for use of U.S. military might to overthrow the current government of Cuba.”

In the context of Operation Mongoose, a highly classified US military operation, the refusal of Kennedy to put his signature under the before mentioned proposals is especially significant. According to countless sources from inside and outside the American intelligence communities, Mongoose was the infrastructure under which the assassination of Kennedy in ’63 has been carried out. Mongoose was in fact one of the largest covert operations ever conducted in the United States. It involved universities, military bases, individuals, businesses and government agencies- all neatly compartmentalized, of course.

Later, just about the time the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted their operation Northwoods document to the President, Smathers recalled Kennedy telling him:

“George, I’d love to have you over … but I want you to do me a favour. I’d like to visit with you, I want to discuss things with you but I don’t want you to talk to me anymore about Cuba.”

Smathers said he didn’t bring it up again until the President invited him to an informal dinner some time after:

“I remember the President was actually fixing our own dinner and I raised the question of Cuba and what could be done and so on,” he related. “And I remember that he took his fork and just hit his plate and it cracked and he said, ‘Now, dammit, I wish you wouldn’t do that. Let’s quit talking about this subject.”

The revealing aspects of the Smathers confessions released by the JFK Memorial Library can hardly be overestimated. By the time Kennedy was presented with Operation Northwoods, he must have recognized the striking similarities to the Gitmo false flag proposal by Smathers. And just like in 1960, he firmly rejected the plans.

Source: https://share.banoosh.com/2012/08/21/bombshell-senator-suggested-false-flag-attack-to-kennedy-2-years-prior-to-operation-northwoods-proposal/

Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes

Originally posted by Christina Bonnington and Spencer Ackerman on Wired.com, August 30, 2012

It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America’s many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store — and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,” according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.

A mockup of developer Josh Begley’s drone-strike app for iOS. Wired.com

It’s the third time in a month that Apple has turned Drones+ away, says Josh Begley, the program’s New York-based developer. The company’s reasons for keeping the program out of the App Store keep shifting. First, Apple called the bare-bones application that aggregates news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia “not useful.” Then there was an issue with hiding a corporate logo. And now, there’s this crude content problem.

Begley is confused. Drones+ doesn’t present grisly images of corpses left in the aftermath of the strikes. It just tells users when a strike has occurred, going off a publicly available database of strikes compiled by the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiles media accounts of the strikes.

iOS developers have a strict set of guidelines that must be adhered to in order to gain acceptance into the App Store. Apps are judged on technical, content and design criteria. As Apple does not comment on the app reviews process, it can be difficult to ascertain exactly why an app got rejected. But Apple’s team of reviewers is small, sifts through up to 10,000 apps a week, and necessarily errs on the side of caution when it comes to potentially questionable apps.

Apple’s original objections to Drones+ regarded the functionality in Begley’s app, not its content. Now he’s wondering if it’s worth redesigning and submitting it a fourth time.

“If the content is found to be objectionable, and it’s literally just an aggregation of news, I don’t know how to change that,” Begley says.

Begley’s app is unlikely to be the next Angry Birds or Draw Something. It’s deliberately threadbare. When a drone strike occurs, Drones+ catalogs it, and presents a map of the area where the strike took place, marked by a pushpin. You can click through to media reports of a given strike that the Bureau of Investigative Reporting compiles, as well as some basic facts about whom the media thinks the strike targeted. As the demo video above shows, that’s about it.

It works best, Begley thinks, when users enable push notifications for Drones+. “I wanted to play with this idea of push notifications and push button technology — essentially asking a question about what we choose to get notified about in real time,” he says. “I thought reaching into the pockets of U.S. smartphone users and annoying them into drone-consciousness could be an interesting way to surface the conversation a bit more.”

But that conversation may not end up occurring. Begley, a student at Clay Shirky’s lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, submitted a threadbare version of Drones+ to Apple in July. About two weeks later, on July 23, Apple told him was just too blah. “The features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining enough,” read an e-mail from Apple Begley shared with Wired, “or your app did not appeal to a broad enough audience.”

Finally, on Aug. 27, Apple gave him yet another thumbs down. But this time the company’s reasons were different from the fairly clear-cut functionality concerns it previously cited. “We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines,” the company e-mailed him.

It was the first time the App Store told him that his content was the real problem, even though the content hadn’t changed much from Begley’s initial July submission. It’s a curious choice: The App Store carries remote-control apps for a drone quadricopter, although not one actually being used in a war zone. And of course, the App Store houses innumerable applications for news publications and aggregators that deliver much of the same content provided by Begley’s app.

Wired reached out to Apple on the perplexing rejection of the app, but Apple was unable to comment.

Begley is about at his wits end over the iOS version of Drones+. “I’m kind of back at the drawing board about what exactly I’m supposed to do,” Begley said. The basic idea was to see if he could get App Store denizens a bit more interested in the U.S.’ secretive, robotic wars, with information on those wars popping up on their phones the same way an Instagram comment or retweet might. Instead, Begley’s thinking about whether he’d have a better shot making the same point in the Android Market.

Drones+ iPhone App from Josh Begley on Vimeo.

Source: https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/drone-app/

Brazillian Court Demands Nestle Label GMO Ingredients

Originally posted by Anthony Gucciardi on NaturalSociety.com, August 22, 2012

Photo courtesy of NaturalSociety.com

It appears another victory has been declared in the battle against Monsanto and GMO ingredients. According to a major Brazilian business publication and GMWatch, a Brazilian court has demanded that multi-billion dollar food giant Nestle label all of their products as genetically modified that have over 1% GMO content. The ruling reportedly coincides with Brazilian law which demands all food manufacturers alert consumers to the presence of GMOs within their products.

Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that the court exposed a deep relationship between the Brazilian government and a major food industry lobby group that was forged in an effort to stop the court from issuing the ruling. This of course is predictable when considering that not only does Monsanto have a massive amount of political power with a figurehead in multiple branches of government, but when considering the previous WikiLeaks report that detailed how those who opposed Monsanto and biotechnology would be subject to ‘military style trade wars.’

The WikiLeaks documents revealed just how closely Monsanto has been working with the United States government, and just how serious the U.S. is about ensuring that the corporation’s GMO crops are widely accepted across the globe.

Amazingly, the Brazilian court took a stand against this corruption. Instead of groveling to Brazilian officials and mega biotechnology groups, the Brazilian business wire reports that the court determined the Brazilian government to be illegally working with the food industry entity known as ABIA. Furthermore, the court stated that consumers have the basic right to know what they are putting into their mouths — especially when it comes to GMO ingredients.

Nestle World Headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland - Panoramio.com

The court issued a fine of $2,478 per product that was found to violate the ruling after finding the presence of GMO ingredients in Nestle’s strawberry “Bono” cookies.

Other nations have taken similar actions against Monsanto and GMOs as a whole, with Poland banning Monsanto’s GM maize and Peru passing a monumental 10 year ban on GMOs as a whole. In the United States, the government continues to ignore and deny the concerns surrounding genetically modified crops and ingredients, instead streamlining the approval process for Monsanto’s new modified creations.

Americans Toss Out As Much As 40% Of Their Food, Study Says

Originally posted by Tiffany Hsu on LATimes.com, August 21, 2012

Americans waste up to 40% of their food, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. (Beth Hall / Bloomberg News)

Americans are throwing out nearly every other bite of food, wasting up to 40% of the country’s supply each year – a mass of uneaten provisions worth $165 billion, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

An average family of four squanders $2,275 in food each year, or 20 pounds per person per month, according to the nonprofit and nonpartisan environmental advocacy group.

Food waste is the largest single portion of solid waste cramming American landfills. Since the 1970s, the amount of uneaten fare that is dumped has jumped 50%. The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in Southeast Asia, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Such profligacy is especially unwarranted in a time of record drought, high food prices expected to get higher and families unable to afford food, according to the council. Efforts are already in place in Europe to cut back on food waste.

But American consumers are used to seeing pyramids of fresh produce in their local markets and grocery stores, which results in $15 billion annually in unsold fruits and vegetables, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. In restaurants and home kitchens, massive portions often end up partly in the trash.

Half of American soil and many other key resources are used for agriculture – the Natural Resources Defense Council says wasted food eats up a quarter of all freshwater consumed in the U.S. along with 4% of the oil while producing 23% of the methane emissions.

In its report, the council urges the government to set a target for food-waste reduction. Companies should look for alternatives in their supply chain, such as making so-called baby carrots out of carrots too bent to be sold whole at the retail level.

The study also asks Americans to learn when food goes bad and to become less averse to buying scarred or otherwise imperfect produce. The average consumer should also save and eat leftovers, researchers said.

Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-food-waste-nrdc-20120821,0,7810321.story

Argentinian Study Finds Roundup Ingredient Causes Birth Defects

Originally posted by Elizabeth Renter on NaturalSociety.com, August 17, 2012

A study out of Buenos Aires has found that glyphosate, an herbicide created by Monsanto, and used on GMO soy in Argentina, could cause birth defects in unborn children. The most interesting thing about this revelation is that the herbicide known as glyphosate in Argentina, is also known to be connected with Roundup in the U.S.

Roundup Ingredient Shown to Cause Birth Defects

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, researchers with the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research conducted the study on amphibian embryos. The lead researcher says their results are “completely comparable to what would happen in the development of a human embryo.”

“The noteworthy thing is that there are no studies of embryos on the world level and none where glyphosate is injected into embryos,” said professor Andres Carrasco, one of the lead authors of the study.

The amounts shown to cause birth defects were said to be much lower than those levels used in fumigations. However, it’s important to note that the glyphosate was injected directly into the fetuses, not administered via food products, as it would be in humans.

Still, it’s possible, because our food feeds our cells, which in turn would feed an embryo, that digestion of foods containing the chemical would have similar, though perhaps not as dramatic effects. And of course this isn’t the only time glyphosate and Monsanto’s Roundup has been shown to cause birth defects.

GMO soy is Argentina’s leading crop. They are the world’s third largest exporter, and they use between 180 and 200 million liters of glyphosate annually. In agricultural regions, where the spraying of this Monsanto chemical is common, numerous cancers have shown up that are being associated with it.

A district called Ituzaingo, outside of Cordoba, has seen about 300 cancer cases in the last eight years. This district houses only about 5,000 people.

“In communities like Ituzaingo it’s already too late, but we have to have a preventative system, to demand that the companies give us security frameworks and, above all, to have very strict regulations for fumigation, which nobody is adhering to out of ignorance or greed,” said Carrasco.

Carrasco, and others, are calling on the government of Argentina to fund more in-depth research into the effects of glyphosate on humans. He says, “The companies say that drinking a glass of glysophate is healthier than drinking a glass of milk, but the fact is that they’ve used us as guinea pigs.”

Sources:

https://naturalsociety.com/argentinian-roundup-ingredient-causes-birth-defects/#ixzz24qrIcFwU

Laht.com

Giant Mega Corporation, URS Corporation, Runs Monsanto’s World HQ, Trains Troops

Special Thanks to the team at Exposing The Truth for compiling information

Monsanto’s World HQ in St. Louis, Missouri - from urscorp.com

I did a search for Monsanto’s World HQ and came upon this page.

“URS provides complete facilities management services in support of Monsanto’s world headquarters.” They (URS Corporation) have a network of offices in nearly 50 countries and provide national, state and local government services to a myriad of countries, as well as private sector services worldwide.

Who is URS Corporation?

They build weapons and train troops. “URS manages and operates government installations, military bases and laboratories.”

They help run Kennedy Space Center, where NASA is based, and work with Kennedy to “develop and execute the ‘Master Plan.’” Recently a new master plan was developed in which it was decided that NASA will sell in to the private sector.

According to Trey Carlson, Master Planner for Kennedy Space Center, one of the themes of the new “Future Development Concept” is “to adopt new business practices allowing companies and outside organizations to make investments in the center to operate their enterprises.”

“It is very challenging making the transition from a government program focused primarily on a single crewed spacecraft to a multiuser program.”

An artist rendering of the new headquarters building for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. - nasa.gov

According to URS Corporation, they “provide vital services for every facet of daily operations at the Kennedy Space Center.”

As one of the goals of the new plan is “to build new facilities that are economically and environmentally sustainable,” it would stand to reason that URS Corporation are involved in that facet.

They are “one of the largest contractors serving the food, beverage and consumer products industries and have engineered and constructed more pulp and paper mill facilities than any other contractor.” They constructed the Hoover Dam in the 1930′s.

“Through a joint venture with Alberici Constructors, URS is building one of the world’s largest cement plants for Holcim (US) Inc.”

They “are one of the few companies globally that offer wholly integrated services spanning the full project life cycle for the mining industry” and “are the only North American contractor—and one of only four globally—to offer operations and maintenance services.”

They “have engineered more than 250,000 megawatts of electricity worldwide—more than any other contractor and equivalent to almost one-fourth of the current generating capacity in the United States. ”

“URS has provided planning, engineering or construction services for virtually every nuclear power plant operating in the United States today”

In regards to fossil fuels, they have “experience in dealing with all major suppliers in this industry.”

On oil, they “are a leading provider of design, construction and production services across the upstream, midstream and downstream supply chain” (That’s drilling, pipe-lining and refining). Since purchasing Flint Energy Services (now URS Flint) for $1.25 billion in February of 2012, they now service ” every major active North American oil and gas basin.”

They have ” longstanding relationships with the world’s leading petrochemical and specialty chemical companies.”

They “operate approximately 300 miles of toll roads in the United States” and “have design and construction experience on every type of highway, bridge, tunnel and interchange.”

They were responsible for the “Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit project—the first design-build-operate-maintain transit project in the United States” in which they “are now providing operations and maintenance under a 20-year contract.” Upon further exploration, I noticed the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail is actually operated by 21st Century Rail Corporation. Then I noticed that the $1.9 billion 20 year contract was actually awarded to 21st Century Rail Corporation. THEN I noticed that 21st Century Rail Corporation is a “team led by URS.” So if URS Corporation has the 20 year contract, but 21st Century Rail Corporation has the contract, wouldn’t it mean URS Corporation is 21st Century Rail Corporation? How many other corporations are also URS Corporation?

It is more involved than that, though. URS Corporation “supoprts a wide range of complex, multiyear programs at U.S. Department of Defense and other government facilities throughout the world,” among which include “the renovation of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. and the prototype design for all future U.S. embassies.”

“Since 1986, URS has trained over 20,000 student pilots at the U.S. Army Aviation Center for Excellence at Fort Rucker, Alabama.” URS Corporation “also is a leader in creating curricula for a new aviation community–Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) operators.” “Since 1990, [they] have worked with the U.S. Navy to develop flexible education programs for every level of officer operating VIRGINIA class submarines.”

The Pentagon, Headquarters of the US Department of Defense - photo by David B. Gleason

The first paragraph of their “Operations & Maintenance” page states clearly, “URS provides operations and maintenance services to weapons systems worldwide for the United States government. These services are performed for all branches of the Department of Defense, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard. URS’ services support every type of vehicle—in the air, on the ground and at sea. This includes manned and unmanned, rotary- and fixed- wing, wheeled and tracked, and above- and under-sea vessels.”

They have “longstanding relationships with the world’s leading chemical and pharmaceutical companies” and offer “innovative support services during all stages of the development and operations cycle.”

I feel like I’m talked out, and all I’ve really done is quote their website. They also offer “a full range of planning, design, construction and program and construction management services across the water and wastewater industry, including water supply planning, water storage and transmission, water quality management planning, water treatment and distribution, and wastewater collection, treatment and disposal.”

It would be difficult to display the vast array of projects taken on and listed by URS Corporation here, so I urge you to visit their project page and peruse yourself. I also urge you to visit their home page to get a glimpse at some of the categories of things they handle.

URS Corporation’s Headquarters is located at:

600 Montgomery Street, 26th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94111-2728 USA
+1.415.774.2700 +1.415.398.1905 fax

Sources:

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/news/kscmasterplanrevision.html

https://ursflint.acquisitioninformation.com

https://www.urscorp.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_class_submarine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson%E2%80%93Bergen_Light_Rail

Ancient Builders Created Monumental Structures that Altered Sound and Mind, Say Researchers

Originally posted by Popular-Archeology.com on March 5, 2012

 

The results of recent research suggests that ancient, or prehistoric, builders of the monumental structures found in such diverse places as Ireland, Malta, southern Turkey and Peru all have a peculiarly common characteristic — they may have been specially designed to conduct and manipulate sound to produce certain sensory effects.

 

Hal Saflieni Hypogeum on the island of Malta

Beginning in 2008, a recent and ongoing study of the massive 6,000-year-old stone structure complex known as the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum on the island of Malta, for example, is producing some revelatory results. Like its related prehistoric temple structures on Malta, this structure features central corridors and curved chambers. But this structure is unique in that it is subterranean, created through the removal of an estimated 2,000 tons of stone carved out with stone hammers and antler picks. Low voices within its walls create eerie, reverberating echoes, and a sound made or words spoken in certain places can be clearly heard throughout all of its three levels. Now, scientists are suggesting that certain sound vibration frequencies created when sound is emitted within its walls are actually altering human brain functions of those within earshot.

 

“Regional brain activity in a number of healthy volunteers was monitored by EEG through exposure to different sound vibration frequencies,” reports Malta temple expert Linda Eneix of the Old Temples Study Foundation, “The findings indicated that at 110 Hz the patterns of activity over the prefrontal cortex abruptly shifted, resulting in a relative deactivation of the language center and a temporary shifting from left to right-sided dominance related to emotional processing and creativity. This shifting did not occur at 90 Hz or 130 Hz……In addition to stimulating their more creative sides, it appears that an atmosphere of resonant sound in the frequency of 110 or 111 Hz would have been “switching on” an area of the brain that bio-behavioral scientists believe relates to mood, empathy and social behavior. Deliberately or not, the people who spent time in such an environment under conditions that may have included a low male voice — in ritual chanting or even simple communication — were exposing themselves to vibrations that may have actually impacted their thinking.” [1]

Researchers at the University of Malta are confirming the findings in an ongoing study.

Inside Malta’s Hal-Saflieni Hypogeum. Courtesy Old Temples Study Foundation

But the Hypogeum is not alone in its peculiar sound effects. A study conducted in 1994 by a consortium from Princeton University found that acoustic behavior in ancient chambers at megalithic sites such as Newgrange in Ireland and Wayland’s Smithy in England was characterized by a strong sustained resonance, or “standing wave” in a frequency range between 90 Hz and 120 Hz. ”When this happens,” says Eneix, “what we hear becomes distorted, eerie. The exact pitch for this behavior varies with the dimensions of the room and the quality of the stone.” Going further back in time, she points to the ancient 10,000 B.C. site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey. Built by hunter-gatherers, the site is thought by many scientists to be located in the area transitional to the first development of agriculture and domesticated livestock. Located on a hilltop, it consists of 20 round stone-built structures which had been buried. Those structures that have been excavated feature massive, T-shaped, standing limestone pillars. “In the center of a circular shrine,” she says, “a limestone pillar “sings” when smacked with the flat of the hand. Obviously made to represent a human with a decorated belt and hands carved in relief at its waist, it bears unexplained symbols in the area of the throat.” [1]

The site of Göbekli Tepe. Courtesy Old Temples Study Foundation

And now, new findings of a recent archaeoacoustic study suggests that the ancients of the 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center at Chavín de Huántar, in the central highlands of Peru, practiced a fine art and science of manipulating sound with architecture to produce desired sensory effects. With the assistance of architectural form and placement, and sounds emitted from conch-shell trumpets, the “oracle” of Chavín de Huántar ”spoke” to the ancient center’s listeners.

Says Miriam Kolar, Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, PhD Candidate
 at Stanford University and leader of the study: 

”At Chavín, we have discovered acoustic evidence for selective sound transmission between the site’s Lanzon monolith and the Circular Plaza: an architectural acoustic filter system that favors sound frequencies of the Chavín pututus [conch-shell trumpets] and human voice.” [2]

The Lanzon is a sacred statue or stela depicting the central deity of the ancient Chavín culture. Thought to be Chavin’s central “oracle” for its inhabitants, it is housed in a chamber, part of a series of underground passages within the Old Temple of the ceremonial and religious center of Chavín de Huántar. A central duct was built to connect the area of the Lanzon monolith with that of the Circular Plaza, an open-air place of ceremonial activity and significance. The duct was specifically designed to filter and magnify or conduct to a certain sound range — namely, the special range emitted by the Chavín pututu instrument. The specific reasons for this acoustical configuration are not entirely understood, but studies involving human participants within the ancient architectural and artifact context of the site are indicating that the resultant sound effects may have been related to intentional auditory perceptual effects of sound and space on humans.

So what does all of this mean? What explains these similar, yet geographically and culturally disparate finds?

“How curious that such varied ancient structures, separated by so much time and distance, should have common features which imply sophisticated knowledge”, observes Eneix. “Did the architects of the day each make and develop their own discoveries or did they inherit a concept from some older school of learning? Adding the time element to other fields of comparison suggests human trail-blazing of monumental proportion.” [1]

A detailed article about the acoustical qualities of prehistoric ancient architecture is published in the March 2012 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine, and a live illustrated presentation on the implications of acoustics in the creation of megalithic structures is in production. More information about the lecture, “Sound and the Onset of Building Monumentally” is available from The OTS Foundation.

More information about the temples of Malta and Gozo can be obtained by going to: www.otsf.org and www.ancientmed.org

Article Sources

https://popular-archaeology.com/issue/march-2012/article/ancient-builders-created-monumental-structures-that-altered-sound-and-mind-say-researchers

https://wakeup-world.com/2012/08/24/ancient-builders-created-monumental-structures-that-altered-sound-and-mind-say-researchers/

[1] Linda Eneix, The Ancient Architects of Sound, Popular Archaeology Magazine, Vol. 6, March 2012. https://popular-archaeology.com

[2] Magic Sounds of Peru’s Ancient Chavín de Huántar, Popular Archaeology Magazine, Vol. 5, December 2011. https://popular-archaeology.com

Darpa Looks to Make Cyberwar Routine With Secret ‘Plan X’

Col. Todd Wood (right), commander of 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, briefs National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander at Forward Operating Base Masum Ghar in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Photo: Sgt. Michael Blalack/U.S. Army

Originally posted by Noah Shachtman on wired.com on August 21, 2012

The Pentagon’s top research arm is unveiling a new, classified cyberwarfare project. But it’s not about building the next Stuxnet, Darpa swears. Instead, the just-introduced “Plan X” is designed to make online strikes a more routine part of U.S. military operations. That will make the son of Stuxnet easier to pull off — to, as Darpa puts it, “dominate the cyber battlespace.”

Darpa spent years backing research that could shore up the nation’s cyberdefenses. “Plan X” is part of a growing and fairly recent push into offensive online operations by the Pentagon agency largely responsible for the internet’s creation. In recent months, everyone from the director of Darpa on down has pushed the need to improve — and normalize — America’s ability to unleash cyberattacks against its foes.

That means building tools to help warplanners assemble and launch online strikes in a hurry. It means, under Plan X, figuring out ways to assess the damage caused by a new piece of friendly military malware before it’s unleashed. And it means putting together a sort of digital battlefield map that allows the generals to watch the fighting unfold, as former Darpa acting director Ken Gabriel told the Washington Post: “a rapid, high-order look of what the Internet looks like — of what the cyberspace looks like at any one point in time.”

It’s not quite the same as building the weapons themselves, as Darpa notes in its introduction to the five-year, $100 million effort, issued on Monday: “The Plan X program is explicitly not funding research and development efforts in vulnerability analysis or cyberweapon generation.” (Emphasis in the original.)

But it is certainly a complementary campaign. A classified kick-off meeting for interested researchers in scheduled for Sept. 20.

The American defense and intelligence establishment has been reluctant at times to authorize network attacks, for fear that their effects could spread far beyond the target computers. On the eve of the Iraq invasion of 2003, for instance, the Bush administration made plans for a massive online strike on Baghdad’s financial system before discarding the idea out of collateral damage concerns.

It’s not the only factor holding back such operations. U.S. military chiefs like National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander have publicly expressed concern that America may not be able to properly respond to a national-level attack unless they’re given pre-defined battle plans and “standing rules of engagement” that would allow them to launch a counterstrike “at net speed.” Waiting more than a few moments might hurt the American ability to respond at all, these officers say.

“Plan X” aims to solve both problems simultaneously, by automatically constructing mission plans that are as easy to execute as “the auto-pilot function in modern aircraft,” but contain “formal methods to provably quantify the potential battle damage from each synthesized mission plan.”

Then, once the plan is launched, Darpa would like to have machines running on operating systems that can withstand the rigors of a full-blown online conflict: “hardened ‘battle units’ that can perform cyberwarfare functions such as battle damage monitoring, communication relay, weapon deployment, and adaptive defense.”

The ability to operate in dangerous areas, pull potential missions off-the-shelf, and assess the impact of attacks — these are all commonplace for air, sea, and land forces today. The goal of Plan X is to give network-warfare troops the same tools. “To get it to the point where it’s a part of routine military operations,” explains Jim Lewis, a long-time analyst of online operations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Of course, many critics of U.S. policy believe the deployment of cyberweapons is already too routine. America’s online espionage campaign against Iran has been deeply controversial, both at home and abroad. The Russian government and its allies believe that cyberweapons ought to be banned by international treaty. Here in the U.S., there’s a fear that, by unleashing Stuxnet and other military-grade malware, the Obama administration legitimized such attacks as a tool of statecraft — and invited other nations to strike our fragile infrastructure.

The Darpa effort is being lead, fittingly, by a former hacker and defense contractor. Daniel Roelker helped start the intrusion detection company Sourcefire and the DC Black Ops unit of Raytheon SI Government Solutions. In a November 2011 presentation (.pdf), Roelker decried the current, “hacker vs. hacker” approach to online combat. It doesn’t scale well — there are only so many technically skilled people — and it’s limited in how fast it can be executed. “We don’t win wars by out-hiring an adversary, we win through technology,” he added.

Instead, Roelker continued, the U.S. needs a suite of tools to analyze the network, automate the execution of cyberattacks, and be sure of the results. At the time, he called these the “Pillars of Foundational Cyberwarfare.” Now, it’s simply known as Plan X.

Source: https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/plan-x

Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF

Originally posted by Jeff Neilson for thestreet.com on August 15, 2012

VANCOUVER (Silver Gold Bull) — For approximately three years, our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement. We were told that the key was to stomp on the Little People with “austerity” in order to continue making full interest payments to the Bond Parasites — at any/all costs.

Following three years of this continuous, uninterrupted failure, Greece has already defaulted on 75% of its debts, and its economy is totally destroyed. The UK, Spain and Italy are all plummeting downward in suicide-spirals, where the more austerity these sadistic governments inflict upon their own people the worse their debt/deficit problems get. Ireland and Portugal are nearly in the same position.

Now in what may be the greatest economic “mea culpa” in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland’s approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.

What was Iceland’s approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail out the criminal Big Banks, at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing.

The bankers told us that no amount of suffering (for the Little People) was too great in order to make sure that the Bond Parasites got paid at 100 cents on the dollar. Iceland told the Bond Parasites they would get what was left over, after the people had been taken care of (by their own government).

The bankers told us that our governments could no longer afford the same education, health care and pension systems which our parents had taken for granted. Iceland told the bankers that what the country could no longer afford was to continue to be blood-sucked by the worst financial criminals in the history of our species. Now, after three-plus years of this absolute dichotomy in economic policymaking, a clear picture has emerged (despite the best efforts of the propaganda machine to hide the truth).

In typical fashion, the moment that the Corporate Media is forced to admit that it has been serially misinforming us for the past several years; the Revisionists are immediately deployed to rewrite history, as shown in this Bloomberg Businessweek excerpt:

…the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to the country said.

In fact, from the moment the Crash of ’08 was orchestrated and our morally bankrupt governments began executing the plans of the bankers, I have written that the only rational strategy was to put People before Parasites. While I wouldn’t expect national policymakers to take their cues from my writing, when I wrote out my economic prescriptions for our economies I didn’t base my views on compassion, or simply “doing the right thing.”

Rather, I have consistently argued that it was a matter of simple arithmetic and the most-elementary principles of economics that “the Iceland approach” was the only strategy which could possibly succeed. When Plutarch wrote 2,000 years ago “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics,” he was not parroting socialist dogma (1,500 years before the birth of Socialism).

Plutarch was simply expressing the First Principle of economics; something on which all of the modern capitalist economists who followed in his footsteps have based their own theories. When modern economists produce their own jargon, such as the Marginal Propensity to Consume; it is squarely based on the wisdom of Plutarch: that an economy will always be healthier with its wealth in the hands of the poor and the Middle Class instead of being hoarded by rich misers (and gamblers).

So when the Bloomberg Revisionists attempt to convince us that Iceland’s strong (and real) economic recovery was a “surprise”; this could only be true if none of our governments, none of the bankers and none of the media’s precious “experts” understood the most-elementary principles of arithmetic and economics. Is this the message the media wants to convey?

What is even more disingenuous here is the congratulatory tone in this exercise in Revisionism, since nothing could be further from the truth. As I detailed in a four-part series one year ago, the campaign of “economic rape” perpetrated against the governments of Europe over the past two and half years (in particular) has been expressly designed to take away “the Iceland option” for Europe’s other governments.

IMF headquarters in Washington, DC

One of the reasons for Iceland being able to escape the choke-hold of the Western banking cabal is that its economy (and its people) still retained enough residual prosperity to tough it out — as the banking cabal tried to strangle Iceland’s economy as retribution for rejecting their Debt Slavery.

Thus, austerity has been nothing less than a deliberate campaign to destroy these European economies so that the Slaves would be too economically weak to be able to sever their own choke-holds. Mission accomplished!

One can only assume that neither the Corporate Media nor their Banker Masters would have allowed this clear acknowledgment that Iceland was right and we were wrong to appear within its own pages, unless it felt secure in the knowledge that all the remaining Debt Slaves had been crippled beyond their capacity to ever escape this economic oppression.

Indeed, for evidence of this we need only look to Greece: the one other European nation where there had been “rumblings” (i.e. riots) aimed at toppling the Traitor Government that served the banking cabal. After two elections, the combination of fear and propaganda bullied the long-suffering Greek people into choosing another Traitor Government — which had expressly pledged itself to reinforcing the bonds of economic slavery. When the Slaves vote for slavery, the Slave Masters can afford to gloat.

Here, the purpose of this Bloomberg propaganda was not to praise Iceland’s government (when both the bankers and Corporate Media despise Iceland with all of their considerable malice). Rather, the goal of this disinformation was to manufacture a new Big Lie.

Instead of the Truth: that from Day 1 Iceland’s approach was the only possible strategy which could have succeeded, while our own governments chose a strategy intended to fail; we get the Big Lie. Our Traitor Governments were acting honestly and honourably; and Iceland’s success and our failure was yet another “surprise which no one could have predicted.”

We saw precisely the same Revisionism following the Crash of ’08 itself, where the mainstream media trotted out all their expert-shills to tell us they had been “surprised” by this economic event; while those within the precious metals sector had been predicting precisely such a cataclysm, in ever more-assertive terms, for several years.

The real message here for readers is that when an economic strategy of People before Parasites succeeds that there is nothing the least-bit “surprising” about this. As with all the remainder of the world around us, promoting the health of Parasites is only good for the Parasites themselves.

Source: https://www.thestreet.com/story/11665082/1/iceland-was-right-we-were-wrong-the-imf.html

Israel deploys Iron Dome missile system on Egypt border

Originally posted by breakingnews.sy on August 20, 2012

The Israeli military has stationed an Iron Dome missile-defense battery west of Eilat.

The move came days after two Grad rockets were reportedly fired from the Sinai Peninsula at the Red Sea resort city.

The remains of a Grad rocket were found north of Eilat on Friday evening.

The deployment of the battery was part of a national plan to test the Iron Dome system.

 

Source: https://breakingnews.sy/en/article/5215.html