Saturday, September 29, 2007

Merde en Votre Boeuf

On the occasion of the mass-recall of tons of contaminated Chinese beef, the following weblink movie-short is particularly appropriate:

The Meatrix

http://www.meatrix.com

More reasons to buy home-grown organic range-fed beef.

Hat-tip to Peter Nasselstein for this recommendation.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

USING YOUR MOBILE OVER AN HOUR A DAY 'CAN HARM HEARING'

USING YOUR MOBILE OVER AN HOUR A DAY 'CAN HARM HEARING'
21.09.07
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23413092-details/Using+your+mobile+over+an+hour+a+day+'can+harm+hearing'/article.do

Longterm use of mobile phones could cause hearing problems
Using a mobile phone for more than hour a day could damage hearing, experts have warned.
Research shows that those who regularly use their mobile for longer than an hour a day find it harder to hear - with words starting with the letters s, f, h, t and z proving particularly troublesome.
The study, presented to an ear, nose and throat conference in the U.S. this week, comes as mobile phone use in Britain soars to record levels.
There are 70 million handsets in use in the UK, which are used to make a third of all calls.
The latest research compared the hearing of 100 mobile phone users aged between 18 and 25 with that of 50 others who did not use mobiles.
This showed a link between longterm regular usage and hearing loss, with those who used their mobile for more than an hour a day for more than four years tending to find it harder to distinguish sounds.
The problem was particularly noticeable in the right ear, to which most people hold their phone.
High-frequency sounds, such as those made by the letters s, f, h, t and z, were most likely to pose a difficulty, making it hard to distinguish between words such as hill, fill and till.
Researcher Dr Naresh Panda said it is possible radiation from longterm mobile use damages the inner ear.
Early warning signs may include a warm feeling in the ear, ringing in the ear or a feeling it is clogged up, the American Academy of Otolaryngology's annual conference heard.
Dr Panda, a ear, nose and throat specialist from India, said the small number of people studied means more research is needed to confirm the link.
"Our intention is not to scare the public," he said. "We need to study a larger number of patients."
However, the researcher, who owns a mobile but uses it sparingly, urged caution.
"We should educate the public only to use them when necessary," he added.
The Mobile Operators Association, which represents Britain's mobile phone companies, said independent scientific reviews carried out in the UK and around the world had "consistently concluded that the weight of scientific evidence to date suggests that exposure to radiowaves from mobile phone handsets and base stations does not cause adverse health effects".
Last week, the results of Britain's biggest-ever study into mobile phone safety were published.
It found no short-term harm to the adult brain , but a "very slight hint" of a raised risk of some types of brain tumour among those who had used the devices for more than ten years.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

OBRL Quarterly #16, September 2007

OBRL News/Blog Version
OBRL Quarterly Newsletter #16, September 2007

This is the infrequent, Quarterly Newsletter from the
Orgone Biophysical Research Lab (OBRL) in Ashland, Oregon, USA.

Please responsibly re-post and distribute to other interested persons, groups and websites.
If you received this Quarterly newsletter but do not wish to get it in the future, see the information at the bottom.

Topical notices below:
1. Forthcoming Lectures and Seminars: Paris, Valencia, and Berlin
2. Report on Completed Lectures & Seminars of 2007
3. New Article on "The Suppression of Dissent..."
4. Abstracts of Presented Papers, from the 2007 Orgonomy Today Conference
5. My Recent Letter to New Scientist Magazine
6. New Book: Wilhelm Reich and the Healing of Atmospheres
7. Work In Progress At OBRL
8. About the Growing "Orgone" Nonsense on Global Internet
9. Please review our on-line Fundraising Letter...
10. Due to the high costs of printing and mailing...email is today our primary notification method.

++++++++

1. Forthcoming Lectures and Seminars by James DeMeo, Ph.D.: Paris, Valencia, and Berlin.

* Paris, France: 26-28 October 2007
Friday evening lecture and Saturday-Sunday seminars with James DeMeo. English with French translation.
Friday PM Lecture: "Wilhelm Reich's Discoveries, with new research findings from the USA regarding the current global climate situation", presented by James DeMeo, Director of OBRL.
Weekend Seminars:
Saturday: Sex-economy, Origins of Violence, Early Peaceful Societies, Saharasia
Sunday: Orgone (Life) Energy, the Accumulator, Orgone Field Meter, Cosmic Superimposition, Drought and Dor, Cloudbusting.
The Friday evening Lecture will be free of charge, but a fee will be charged for the Saturday-Sunday seminars. More details to be provided at the weblink below in the near future.
http://www.orgonelab.org/lectures.htm

* Valencia, Spain: 2-5 November 2007
Conference: 50 YEARS AFTER REICH. A LIFE MOVEMENT. James DeMeo will present one major lecture on Saturday morning, Nov.3rd, in English with Spanish translations, as part of this larger event. A special 6-hour seminar will also be given by James DeMeo, on Sunday Evening and Monday Morning, Nov.4-5.  Other speakers include Morton Herskowitz and Michel Odent.
For more details, see here:
http://www.esternet.org/simposium_internacional_2007.htm
http://www.reichunmovimientovivo.com/es/index.html

* Berlin, Germany: 7-8 November 2007
Wednesday PM Lecture: Neue experimentelle Bestätigungen der Reichschen Orgonphysik (New experimental corroborations of Reichian Orgone Physics) by James DeMeo
Thursday PM Lecture: Historische Entstehung und Ausbreitung von Gewalt: Die Saharasia-These  (Historical Origins and Diffusion of Violence: The Saharasia Thesis), by James DeMeo
Times:  18.00 - 21.15 Uhr, in der Fachhochschule für Wirtschaft,
Badensche Str. 50/51, 10825 Berlin-Schöneberg
Nähe U-Bahnhof Bayerischer Platz
Admission is free, look for the room-number signs in the entrance hall.


2. Report on Completed Lectures & Seminars of 2007: 

This year saw increased educational activity, with Dr. DeMeo giving seminars and lectures at a number of places and conferences.  Firstly there was the OBRL Summer Guided Independent Study Program on General Orgonomy held at the Greensprings Center in early July.  About 8 students attended that lively event, one all the way from Norway.  Thanks to all who attended.  A description of that event is still posted to the OBRL website, for those who might wish to attend next year, 2008:
http://www.orgonelab.org/seminar7.htm

Secondly, Dr. DeMeo was also one of many invited speakers at the Conference in Rangeley Maine, hosted by the Wilhelm Reich Museum.  That event, which lasted 4 days over late July and early August, was entitled Wilhelm Reich in the 21st Century: 2007 International Conference on Orgonomy.  A list of the presenters and description of that event, which drew around 100 participants from all over the world, is given here:
http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org/07_08_update.html#success
A big thanks to Kevin Hinchey, Mary Higgins, and other WR Museum friends and volunteers, for their gracious hospitality and organizational efforts.

Thirdly, another major Conference,  entitled Orgonomy Today was held in Chipping Village, Lancashire, United Kingdom, as organized by Peter Jones and his CORE (Centre for Orgonomic Research & Education) organization.  This 7-day event allowed speaker's presentations mixed with demonstrations of apparatus and experimental orgonomic principles.  A full-sized orgone accumulator was available, along with magnificent optics for viewing orgone energy movement in the atmosphere, as well as a microscope for viewing of simple bion preparations, and living blood. Seed charging in the orgone accumulator was demonstrated (with about a 30% boost in the orgone-charged group as compared to the control), along with the Life-Energy Meter, a To-T apparatus, darkroom visualization of orgone energy lumination, and other essentials.  The last two days were devoted to a special session on New Research In Orgonomy, with a more compressed lineup of speakers,   A booklet of Abstracts of presented papers was made available, and also is now posted to internet as a PDF download:
http://www.orgonelab.org/Abstracts2007.pdf
A big thanks to Peter Jones for his warm hospitality, and apparently single-handed effort in organizing this Conference.

Oiy! And the year is not even over yet.  See Note #1, above, for the lectures and seminars still forthcoming in Europe.


3.  New Article on "The Suppression of Dissent..." by J. DeMeo, posted to the OBRL website

The following article was written in the 1990s, presented to several academic societies (without affect), but recently dusted-off and posted to the OBRL internet site:

The Suppression of Dissent and Innovative Ideas In Science and Medicine,
by James DeMeo
http://www.orgonelab.org/suppression.htm


4.  Abstracts of Presented Papers, from the 2007 Orgonomy Today Conference, and New Research In Orgonomy Session, available as PDF download.

In case you missed the prior announcements, here:
http://www.orgonelab.org/Abstracts2007.pdf


5.  My Recent Letter to New Scientist Magazine

Regarding their published article "Rainfall Records Could Warn of War". 
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19426064.500-rainfall-records-could-warn-of-war.html

Basically this was a confirmation of a part of my Saharasia findings as made in the early 1980s.
http://www.saharasia.org

But unlikely they will print the letter, so following is the full text.

+++++++
June 2007

Dear Editors,
Thank you for publishing the article "Rainfall records could warn of war" by Jim Giles, in your issue #2606 of 2 June 2007, but in fact this is not any "new" finding.  In the early 1980s, I produced what was then (and probably still is) the most comprehensive global cross-cultural and geographically-explicit analysis of human social violence and war, with an examination of prevailing climate conditions for the 1170 different societies evaluated in my study. World maps were made of various social factors, and contrasted to known climate types.  I used a collection of variables as established by the anthropologists and psychologists, on violence towards children and women, measures of social hierarchy demanding violence for their enforcement such as slavery and castes and low-status for women, the presence of violent sexual mutilations directed at children and women, arranged marriage and male-dominance considerations, the existence of violence-advocating High Gods, and similar factors which usually are overlooked by those interested mainly in guns, bombs and tanks, but which reasoned opinion suggests are the foundations upon which the latter and more obvious forms of social violence and warfare spring forth.

What was most unusual in the findings was, that the most extremely violent armored patristic cultures identified in my study were nearly all found within the world's harshest desert climates. The few others could be explained by migrations out of the desert regions into moister climates, where violence tended to persist over generations due to the persistence of desert-formed social institutions, created within the original desert-homelands of those societies, and carried with them as they migrated or invaded and conquered the wetter desert-border regions.  A review of archaeological evidence for warfare, on a time-line, also confirmed that the earliest evidence for social violence and warfare is found in those regions where human societies suffered during long epochs where lush forests and grasslands either slowly or dramatically converted, by agency of major climate change, into harsh deserts.

The most notable example of this was the creation of the large Saharasian desert belt (my term for the Sahara + Middle East + Central Asian deserts) starting around or shortly before c.4000 BCE.  This vast climate change, one of the most dramatic to occur since the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, affected developing human societies across the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere.  Before Saharasia existed, violence on Planet Earth was relatively isolated or non-existent.  After Saharasia formed, violence became a dominant feature across that large territory, gradually spreading by outward-directed mass-migrations and invasions into other parts of the Old World, and farther on from there.  But the geographical analysis demonstrates violence starting firstly and most dramatically within the desiccating Saharasian desert belt.*

I'm very pleased to learn about the findings of Marc Levy, Dan Esty and the IBC, but clearly it would not be correct to say that these issues failed to be appreciated or seriously studied significantly heretofore.  It appears, in fact, that my earlier work has still not been superceded in its scope or implications. My work on Saharasia has been around and published in summary articles over 20 years, including in a major book.* Noteworthy also is, through the late 1980s when I still held my academic appointments, I repeatedly tried to bring my findings to the attention of government policy-makers, suggesting to them the social variables identified in my work which correlated so well with drought and desertification had a strong predictive value, allowing us to identify those nations and regions likely to "go violent" with their weapons, against either their own people, or other nations. My recommendations were treated with smug politeness, but never taken seriously.  Of course, 9-11 happened since then, and while terribly un-PC given how we are not supposed to be critical of other cultures (whatever happened to "National Character Studies" as developed during WW-II?!), most everyone accepts that peoples from the Saharasian Desert Belt are the major principles engaged in global terrorism, and Empire-building through violent means.

Sincerely,

James DeMeo, Ph.D.
Ashland, Oregon, USA
(formerly on the faculty of geography, Illinois State University, University of Miami)

* James DeMeo: "Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child-Abuse, Sex-Repression, Social Violence and War, in the Deserts of the Old World", Natural Energy, 1998.  For details, citations and purchasing weblinks, see:
http://www.saharasia.org

      2nd Edition of Saharasia -- If you did not get the word...

If you haven't yet got the 2nd Edition of Saharasia, with numerous additions to the already-excellent 1st Edition, it can be obtained via here:
http://www.saharasia.org
Links are also given there for Amazon.com, which can provide the book to overseas destinations at shipping rates substantially lower than what we can offer.  However, we do offer Saharasia at a 40% discount (plus shipping) to individuals and groups, when ordered in quantities of four or more going to the same address.

This webpage also provides downloadable PDFs of the 2nd Edition "Preface" and "Update on Saharasia" Appendix article, so you don't have to re-purchase the full book unless you desire.  It also provides summary articles about the Saharasia discovery in English, Spanish, German, Turkish and Greek.  We also seek volunteers who could make French, Polish, Italian and Arabic translations of this same summary article, for internet-posting.


6. New Book: Wilhelm Reich and the Healing of Atmospheres

We are again pleased to announce a new book by Roberto Maglione.  Here's the description as it appears in our on-line catalog:

* WILHELM REICH AND THE HEALING OF ATMOSPHERES: Modern Techniques for the Abatement of Desertification, by Roberto Maglione. Translated from the original Italian, with a Foreword by James DeMeo. A scientific overview of Reich's discovery and applications of Cosmic Orgone Engineering, or "cloudbusting" as it is more popularly known. Covers Reich's experiments, and those of his associates and followers: Richard Blasband, Jerome Eden, and James DeMeo, among others. Experiments in the USA, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, all with positive results supportive of Reich's original claims. Comprehensive with numerous photos, diagrams, graphs and full citation-lists. 121 pp.  $39.00 Softcover

Orders can be placed via this weblink:
http://www.orgonelab.org/cart/xorgone.htm


7.  Work In Progress At OBRL

... pretty much the same as our last Newsletter, but significant nonetheless...

* Work continues on round-the-clock monitoring of the thermal anomaly in the orgone accumulator, or To-T.  Of special note is the observation of a definite increase in the To-T readings starting around mid-March, the time of the Spring Equinox, when the Earth moves into what appears to be a strong streaming or pulse of energy in space. We also more recently are observing a slight increase in these To-T readings during periods of Full and New Moon.

* Also with continued monitoring, anomalous readings are developing from our orgone-charged GM/neutron counter, which soars episodically to several thousand CPM.  A control unit, of identical construction, but not orgone-charged, gives typical readings of 0-2 CPM.

* Our archive project continues, with transfers being made of OBRL's considerable archive of old VHS, U-Matic and Hi-8 videotapes onto digital DVDs, for long-term storage.  The VHS collection is nearly finished, but much remains to be done.  A section of the laboratory building, in the attic section under the observatory, has been set aside for this purpose.

* OBRL was organizing for a major cloudbusting project in Australia, scheduled for a start-up in mid-May of this year.  However, a few weeks before the departure date, natural rains began falling on their own.  The project was then cancelled.  We wish to thank all those who offered to assist on this project, specifically Mr. Tom DiFerdinando of New York, and Chip Wilkins of Tennessee, as well as Dean Davidson, Sam Doust, and Stephen Shanahan of Australia.  Likewise a number of presently-unnamed Australian farmers who offered their facilities to this project.  It was an exciting prospect for us to go "down under", but it is always best when nature provides on her own.  And frankly, we would have felt a bit funny to arrive in Australia for a drought-ending project, with rains falling all around as we got off the airplane.  In fact, many areas of Australia experienced mild flooding, so it really became unnecessary, and a point of relief for everyone.  The meteorologists in Australia were somewhat caught by surprise by this change, which appeared timed to an unexpected conversion of the Pacific El Niño back towards more normal temperature conditions.  Australia then experienced quite a cold, rainy and snowy period, from around mid-May and lasting for several months.  While this did not benefit all the various droughty regions, it truly made a big difference.


8. About the Growing "Orgone" Nonsense on Global Internet

Once again, see here: http://www.orgonelab.org/OrgoneNonsense.htm


9.  Please review our on-line Fundraising Letter...

and respond with a donation if you are able.

http://www.orgonelab.org/funding.htm


10. Due to the high costs of printing and mailing...

email is today our primary notification method. 

If you appreciate getting these materials and have not done so already, and to get "plugged in" to our announcements, please subscribe to OBRL-News or the less-frequent OBRL-Quarterly using the links near the bottom of the OBRL homepage.

http://www.orgonelab.org

The same information presented on the more-frequent OBRL-News is also posted to the OBRL-News Blog, which you can visit at your leisure, here:

http://obrl.blogspot.com/



If you received this Newsletter in error, and do not want it, a simple return email requesting to be removed is all that is necessary.  Our email address is a real one, and all requests are read by a living human being, and will be promptly honored and attended to.

Thanks very much for your attention and support.

James DeMeo, Ph.D.
Orgone Biophysical Research Lab
Ashland, Oregon, USA
http://www.orgonelab.org
http://www.naturalenergyworks.net
http://www.saharasia.org

Additional Articles on CO2 Global Warming Issues

GLOBAL-WARMING SKEPTICS: MIGHT WARMING BE 'NORMAL'?
Some say that today's climate change is merely part of a natural cycle.
By Brad Knickerbocke
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0920/p14s01-sten.html

NASA Scientists Predicted a New Ice Age in 1971
By Noel Sheppard
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/19/nasa-scientists-predicted-new-ice-age-1971

Sunny Outlook: Can Sunshine Provide All U.S. Electricity?
Large amounts of solar-thermal electric supply may become a reality if steam storage technology works-and new transmission infrastructure is built
By David Biello
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=1FC8E87E-E7F2-99DF-3253ADDFDBEC8D41&chanID=sa003


Correspondence on Avery, CO2 and Organic Agriculture

Regarding this article posted out a few days back:

Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming: Analysis Finds Hundreds of Scientists Have Published Evidence Countering Man-Made Global Warming Fears
 http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml

The following correspondence developed over the following days:

+++++++

Dear Dr. DeMeo,

While I appreciate the alternative views OBRL provides on global warming, I want to caution you on this particular item that is associated with Dennis Avery and the Hudson Institute.

Dennis Avery and Alex Avery (I think it is his son) have repeatedly attacked organic farming while promoting pesticides and industrial agriculture.  While, I do not follow the subject of global warming enough to judge the correctness of Avery's position on this, I am very familiar with the organic agriculture literature, and I strongly question Avery's scholarship.  Dennis Avery is author of a book entitled Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic. The Averys have been very selective in their reviews of organic literature and seem to always find a negative slant.  As an example see the article linked below and the letter I wrote in response.  My letter and several additional ones critical of Avery and the Hudson Institute were published by the American Society of Agronomy.  Dennis and Alex Avery have a reported history of trying to personally intimidate anyone who disagrees with them.

Joseph Heckman, Ph.D.
Plant Biology & Pathology Department
Rutgers University

Refs.

Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/1558130691/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_top/102-2627086-4550508?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books#customerReviews

"Going Organic" by Alex Avery, p.8-12
http://www.agronomy.org/cropsandsoils/volume40/issue01/
(10mb pdf download)

Rebuttal Letter to Avery in Crops & Soils

Darby, H. J. Dawson, K. Delate, W. Goldstein, J. Heckman, and S. Seiter. 2007. Readers respond to 'Going Organic'' published in the Spring 200. Crops & Soils. Summer 2007. 40:14.
            While we are pleased to see the return of Crops & Soils magazine, we are disappointed that the inaugural issue featured an article ("Going Organic" by Alex Avery, Crops & Soils, Spring 2007), which overlooks important details about organic history  and provided a selected summary of recent research that creates a negative slant toward organic agriculture.  For example, it is misleading, as Alex Avery seems to suggest, that Rudolf Steiner was the key figure in the development of organic agricultural principles and concepts, while ignoring Sir Albert Howard, along with his influence on Jerome Rodale.  Although Steiner's biodynamic agriculture had an early influence on the origin of organic farming, scholars of organic agricultural history would give due credit to Sir Albert Howard as the foremost pioneer of organic methods.  It was the publications of Sir Albert Howard that inspired Jerome Rodale to launch Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942 (Howard served as associate editor).
            It was not Rodale who coined the term 'organic' as a method of farming.  The word 'organic' in application to farming was apparently first used by Walter Northbourne in an influential book, Look to the Land, published in 1940.  Howard's inspiration for developing organic farming concepts and principles was rooted in his years of agricultural research experiences in India as well as his observations of natural ecosystems.  As an example of Howard's perceptive ecological/organic thinking, he strongly advocated that farming systems include a mix of crops and livestock.  Interestingly, the symposium papers on integrated crop-livestock systems in Agronomy Journal (March-April 2007) highlight the negative environmental consequences from the neglect of this long standing principle of organic agriculture.
            Further in the article by Alex Avery a short quote from Lady Balfour is used to dismiss her work on organic farming research without giving much context for the reader to understand the real meaning of her statement that is at odds with the findings she presents in her book entitled The Living Soil and the Haughley Experiment.  It would be more instructive for the interested to read Lady Balfour's book, which is regarded as classic work in organic agriculture, to fully comprehend the findings and contributions of her long term experiment in the study of organic agriculture.
            The statement by Avery that "there have been a sizable number of studies over the past 50 years that have found no evidence for organic food being more nutritious" is not congruent with the findings from a review of UK farming systems (Shades of Green, 2003) comparing organic and non-organic in animal feeding trials.  Thus, on "the nutrition question" it is prudent to conclude that this is an area in science where the question remains unsettled.
            What is impressive about organic agriculture is how remarkably well it performs in terms of food production given the very limited research funding and attention it has received from agricultural institutions and scientists.  While the article by Avery states that crop yields are sometimes similar, he fails to mention an important finding in the long term Rodale farming systems trial.  Grain yields were significantly better with organic methods in drought years.  He also fails to mention the recent study from Kathleen Delate's group in Iowa that organic methods sometimes achieve corn and soybean yields that are better than under conventional agricultural methods (Agronomy Journal 96:1288-1298, 2004).
            Nevertheless, organic agriculture has always been about more than a single minded focus on yield.  Not only has it been shown that organic foods are less likely to have pesticide residues, the organic farming methods employed also can achieve other benefits.  For example, the study by Michelle Wander's group, showing that organic management improved soil quality and increased soil organic carbon levels 14% above values found in conventional systems (Soil Sci. Soc. Am J. 70:950-959, 2006).
            With the rapid expansion of organic farming across the USA, Crops & Soils magazine can become an effective vehicle for communicating with today's professionals in agronomy that are increasingly called upon to provide objective and practical advice to their organic clientele.  We would hope that Crops & Soils will publish additional articles that will provide practical information of value to both organic and conventional agriculture.  There is ample opportunity to invite the increasing number of agricultural scientists working in organics to write articles useful to organic agriculture.
            We recommend that when Crops & Soils publishes articles on controversial topics that they be subjected to careful external peer review.  Our letter here was subjected to review by members of the ASA Committee on Organic and Sustainable Agriculture.

++++++++

Dear Dr. Heckman,

I did not know about Dennis Avery's pesticide promotions, and thanks for sending the info as well as the copy of your (et al) excellent rebuttal letter.  I also noted the inappropriate reference to Rudolf Steiner in that Avery article, along with the multiple advertisements for pesticides, in that Crop and Soil issue.

There is a trend among some of the critics of the CO2 theory to be dismissive of environmental concerns altogether, and you've identified a big one.  Years ago I warned my environmental friends that a premature embrace of the CO2 theory,lacking as it does a sound scientific foundation, would back-fire upon environmentalism as a whole, in spite of the push towards renewable energy and lowering of pollution which might come as a side-benefit.  Also some of the books which make a very clear and cogent criticism of the weaknesses of the CO2 theory of global warming, or which are critical of global warming altogether, or which provide alternatives to those ideas, sometimes include statements advocating nuclear energy as the only feasible alternative -- I disagree strongly with that latter conclusion.  But we nevertheless sell some of these books via the OBRL bookstore as the climate-related information is otherwise not available.  One of them has Avery as a co-author: "UNSTOPPABLE GLOBAL WARMING: Every 1500 Years," by Fred Singer & Dennis Avery.
 http://www.orgonelab.org/cart/xhistory.htm
In this case, Singer appears to be the climate-change expert, with Avery as co-author.  While I don't know either of these men, it could be that on the climate-change issues, Avery keeps his head screwed on straight, but because of political biases goes blind in other areas.

The article originally posted to OBRL-News referencing the Hudson Institute study shows Avery basically compiled a literature-review of other scientist's work.  Here's the original:
http://hudson.org/files/pdf_upload/9-07%20Avery%20Global%20Warming.pdf
It merely gives an annotated list of various studies which demonstrate significant natural climate cycles world-wide, well before industrial pollution.  Nearly every study examining climate over long periods shows variance of a greater or lesser amount, so this citation list is not by itself any controversy, except perhaps to those who are maintaining the false premise of a constant climate since the end of the Ice Ages. We are emerging from a period of history when uniformitarian principles governed the earth sciences.  Long term stability of climate and geology, and planetary systems, has been the guiding ideology, and "climate change" by itself was a heresy only a few years ago, excepting for the Pleistocene Ice Age, after which everything supposedly became totally stabilized.

My impression is, the evaporation of open public and scientific debate on many environmental issues has led to an unfortunate polarization -- and science (or scientism: ideology disguised as scientific theory) is increasingly used as a weapon in the political battlefields.  Direct criticisms of CO2 and global warming theory have a lowered chance to get published these days due to politicization of academic review boards, for a variety of reasons, and this parallels the situation with studies validating organic farming and criticisms of pesticides.  Certainly, I regularly observe academic discussions on organic agriculture, solar energy and wind power being terribly disconnected from reality.  There are several hundred thousand commercial-sized organic farms across America providing foods to an increasingly growing market, even as academic claims of "inefficiency" are published without authentic critique.  Likewise, solar panels and wind-electric systems are being installed as fast as they can be produced -- it is a fast-growing sector of Western economies world-wide -- but this on-going revolution in energy production seems to have escaped notice by most academics and politicians, even at the height of the global energy crisis.  What the marketplace proves daily, the majority of academic nay-sayers ignore.

James DeMeo, Ph.D.
OBRL

++++++

Dr. DeMeo,

Indeed, one of the most troubling outcomes of the CO2 theory is the promotion of nuclear power.  Lester Brown, however, in his book entitled Plan B 2.0 argues that nuclear power with no tax subsides is dead (see page 39) and that three wind-rich sates - North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas - have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy USA electricity needs (see page 188).  Moreover, that if we developed more advanced plug-in gas electric hybrid cars, (which can be mostly powered by electricity generated from wind) we could reduce demand for gasoline by 85%.  The Oct-Nov 2007 issue of Homepower magazine has an excellent article about the potential of plug-in gas electric hybrid cars to interface with wind generated electricity.  I agree with the analogies you draw between the market forces behind the advancement organic agriculture and the growth in demand for "organic" energy sources, namely wind and solar.  Growth in these organic choices came about despite much hostility and minimal support from government agencies.  Never mind what they say, organic agriculture and energy from wind and solar are proving critics wrong.  Note for example in the just published (14th edition) popular soil science textbook, The Nature and Properties of Soils it states on page 898 that: "A generation ago, skeptics said it would be "impossible" to grow food on a commercial scale using organic farming methods, but the organic food now common in modern supermarkets and the thousands of organic farms that produce reasonably high yield and make good profits have proved such skeptics wrong."

Finally, I want to add that I do not wish to imply that modern organic farming should be beyond criticism.  Rather I wish to remind people that traditional organic farming systems generally had a sound ecological basis as a foundation.  Some of the original organic principles have been compromised with the rapid growth of the modern organic movement under the USDA-National Organic Program (NOP).  Take for example the growth in so called organic milk production from cows held in concentrated animal feeding operations and the failure of the USDA-NOP to require that organic cows be on fresh green pasture as a main feed source.  Another example are state laws requiring pasteurization of organic milk.  In 1958, organic farming pioneer J.I. Rodale bluntly stated: "It is not organic to produce milk organically, and then to pasteurize it."  Readers interested in more information about the history and principles of organic farming may want to read: Heckman, J.R. 2006. "A History of Organic Farming: Transitions from Sir Albert Howard's War in the Soil to USDA National Organic Program". Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. 21:143-150.  The article was recently republished by Wise Traditions.  It can now be found on line:
http://www.westonaprice.org/farming/history-organic-farming.html

Joseph Heckman, Ph.D.
Rutgers


Friday, September 21, 2007

Orthodox Science Replication of Reich's Bions.... Again!

This report below sounds like the production of protocellular forms similar to Reich's bions, or as Bernard Grad showed in his recent work, of bions from basic chemical compounds, as recently published in "Heretic's Notebook".
http://www.orgonelab.org/cart/xpulse.htm

The more the classical "origins of life" researchers structure their experiments to resemble those of Wilhelm Reich, the more life-like are the results they achieve -- though I am not holding my breath about their giving credit to Reich.  Amazing that they are getting a half-million Euro for this research.

James DeMeo

Thanks to David Dressler for this item:

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/spring2006/features/life_in_venice/4.html

By Joe Rojas-Burke

Mark Bedau '76 and Norman Packard '77 used to stay up late nights at Reed pondering the nature of life. What makes organisms alive? Is there a knowable organizing principle behind living cells? Can life be broken down into its constituent parts?

Thirty years later, Bedau and Packard are on a quest for answers. Surrounded by powerful computers and sophisticated equipment in a high-tech industrial park on the outskirts of Venice, Italy-and bankrolled with millions of euros-they are trying to produce actual cells. The two Reedies are part of a long-shot entry in the race to create artificial life.

Bedau, a philosophy professor at Reed, and Packard, a physicist known for his entrepreneurial success at applying computer models to predict financial markets, are the founders of ProtoLife, an eight-employee biotech startup. ProtoLife is in turn part of a multi-national research consortium funded by a four-year, $10 million grant from the European Commission. A steady stream of Reedies have been involved in the work of Bedau and Packard over the years, contributing to every aspect from computer simulation to bioethics research (see Reedies on the Artificial Life Trail).

Bedau, who is on leave from Reed this spring, believes that the surest way to resolve life's basic questions is by building a basic life form from scratch. It may sound futuristic and even quixotic, but his is only one of several well-funded research groups vying to create an artificial cell capable of living off its surroundings, multiplying, and evolving.

"It's a problem that clearly has a solution," he says without a hint of hubris, adding that the stakes are anything but purely philosophical. Sooner or later, he predicts, powerful new technologies will create programmable living microscopic entities that can perform any number of tasks: clearing artery-clogging plaque in patients prone to heart attack, digesting toxic pollutants that are lethal to natural forms of life, or splitting water molecules to make hydrogen fuel. "It would open the door to a whole new range of technological applications, because life is incredibly flexible, adaptive, evolving, and capable of repairing itself," Bedau says.

In fact, as Packard likes to point out, even the simplest bacteria can reproduce themselves, a capability far beyond the most advanced human-engineered computer or spacecraft. Which is one key reason Packard has invested a few million dollars of his own money in what he elegantly refers to as "crossing the barrier of nonliving matter to living matter."

And although Packard readily acknowledges that the capabilities of artificial cells will initially fall short of even the simplest existing organisms, that doesn't dampen his enthusiasm. "Even very simple functionality may be extremely powerful," he says, "just by virtue of the fact that life itself is very powerful."

Many scientists agree that advances in chemistry and biology have put the creation of a simple life form from non-living chemicals within reach; a few are convinced the goal can be attained in a decade or less. The contenders are pursuing many different approaches. But Bedau, Packard, and their colleagues at ProtoLife in Venice have embraced what is arguably the most radical and difficult route, a long-shot effort that could, if successful, redefine what it means to be alive.


Thursday, September 20, 2007

Letter on Melting Glaciers

Email received from a friend of OBRL:

A fellow called Jim Belog (sp?) was on NBC News tonight, he has placed time lapse camera around Greenland and he is tracking this over a three period, his first review of the cameras which were placed in June are fairly dramatic.  You may wish to check this out.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/

Thanks,

I watched the video, which was fascinating but lacking in necessary details.  We've known for some time that the glaciers on the periphery of Greenland were no longer surging forward and hence crumbling back, as they generally have ceased their sea-wards motion from the interior sources.  If they don't move, they don't replace the eroding and melting at their toes.  So that's no surprise by itself.  Now, if the cause for the ending of the ice-surging is that the larger Greenland Ice Cap is withering away, that would be alarming news -- but my last info was that snowfall was actually increasing in the Greenland interior.  That being so, the current absence of glacial surging and meltback at the toes would suggest the current observations are capturing only part of some larger cycle of isostatic movement of glaciers -- if ice is indeed building in the interior which is the source for the coastal glaciers, then there eventually would be a restoration of surging and increasing coastal ice at some point down the line. That can happen with an atmospheric warming, actually faster than during cooling because warm air carries greater moisture and can build snowpack even more quickly.  In any case, when glaciers are on the move, they build a ring of floating ice along the shorelines.  When no longer moving, the ice crumbles into the sea.  That can occur even as there is a period of rebuilding of ice in the interior, which eventually creates new glacier motion and rebuilding of the sea ice shelves.   It is a matter of the weight-pressure of accumulated ice-mass in the glacial feed zones at higher altitudes, versus the slope of the ice sheet towards sea-level, and other friction factors which govern ice-movement over the land, and there can be a considerable lag time between accumulating ice versus glacial motion.

These cycles take place over reasonably to very long periods, decades for some mountain glaciers, hundreds of years for the big ones, as best as can be determined by glaciology.  Regarding the videos, I'd also want to see where those time-lapse cameras were located -- probably in the southern regions where access is possible, so it would represent only a small part of what's happening.  Southwestern coastal Greenland was defrosted and vegetated prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Norse colony was there, living off coastal fishing, growing crops and raising cattle and sheep.  That has been impossible since those colonies were abandoned due to the return of ice conditions hundreds of years ago, but I've read some of the same old habitation ruins are now emerging from under that coastal ice, which is slowly melting back. The same is happening in the Alps, as some high-altitude mountain passes formerly habitated or used as migration paths by humans during the Medieval Warm Period, but covered with ice during the Little Ice Age, are now reappearing once again with the melt-back.  It seems a  warming has been occurring since around 1850 -- the big question remains, if this will melt the big ice cap covers -- climate cycle history going back at least 10,000 years suggests this won't happen, and it appears the assertions of increased droughts and hurricanes won't materialize either.

Since Mars is also experiencing a withering of its ice-cap, it suggests we actually have "solar system warming", with some solar output variation behind such things.

James DeMeo


Sunday, September 16, 2007

What the Muslim Brotherhood means for the U.S.

Article from the Dallas News, exposing the Grandaddy of all Islamic Terror Groups, and the fountainhead from which all others developed.  "Peace" and leftist propaganda + demographic conquest + violent jihad against any infidel or Muslim who stands in the way. Not just in the USA, but in Canada and Europe also.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/columnists/rdreher/stories/DN-dreher_09edi.ART.State.Edition1.4235f88.html

Rod Dreher: What the Muslim Brotherhood means for the U.S.
Memo lays bare group's plans to destroy U.S. from within
11:17 AM CDT on Sunday, September 9, 2007

"Our strategy is this," President Bush said last month. "We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America."

He was talking about jihadists, of course. And Mr. Bush is behind the curve. The president apparently missed the smoking-gun 1991 document his own Justice Department introduced into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. The FBI captured it in a raid on a Muslim suspect's home in Virginia.

This "explanatory memorandum," as it's titled, outlines the "strategic goal" for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community - this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie - but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper.

The HLF trial is exposing for the first time how the international Muslim Brotherhood - whose Palestinian division is Hamas - operates as a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard in the United States. The court documents indicate that many leading Muslim-American organizations - including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim American Society - are an integral part of the Brotherhood's efforts to wage jihad against America by nonviolent means.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an affiliation of at least 70 Islamist organizations around the world, all tracing their heritage to the original cell, founded in Egypt in 1928. Its credo: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Sayyid Qutb, hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966 as a revolutionary, remains its ideological godfather. His best-known work, Milestones, calls for Muslims to wage violent holy war until Islamic law governs the entire world.

According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation, establishing the Brotherhood in the United States has been a 40-year project that has worked mostly underground - even beneath the notice of many Muslims. Richard Clarke, the former top U.S. national security official, told the Senate in 2003 that the Muslim Brotherhood is the common thread linking terrorist fundraising schemes in the United States - which likely explains why so many mainstream American Muslim organizations were named by the feds as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the HLF trial.

Is this just alarmist paranoia? Not at all.

This matters because high-profile organizations with roots explicitly in the Muslim Brotherhood have successfully established themselves in a paramount position to define Islam in America according to a radical politicized model. And they've done so without the American public having the slightest idea about their real agenda. Indeed, the Bush administration is unwittingly helping the Islamist cause by including their leaders in public events, thus conferring them legitimacy. On Labor Day weekend, the same Department of Justice that's presenting evidence of the ISNA's involvement with radical Islam at the Dallas trial sponsored a booth at - wait for it - ISNA's national convention in suburban Chicago.

Look, no rational person believes America is going to exchange the Constitution for a caliphate. Rational people aren't the point. As the London subway bombings showed, even a tiny cell of committed radicals can kill a lot of people. Mustafa Saied, an American Muslim who left the Brotherhood, told the Tribune that he worried about the radicalism the Brotherhood inculcated in its membership here. "With the extreme element," he said, "you never know when that ticking time bomb will go off."

As long as they commit no crimes, CAIR, ISNA and the other Brotherhood-related groups have the right to advocate for their beliefs. But they don't have the right to escape critical scrutiny, and they deserve informed opposition. Courageous Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy are sounding the alarm about radical Islam's stealth takeover of U.S. Muslim institutions. Why are the news media ignoring this? Fear of being called Islamophobic?

This has got to stop. Six years after 9/11, we're still asleep. Islamic radicals have declared war on us - and some are fighting here in what looks like a fifth column. Read their strategy document. It's there in black and white, for those with eyes to see.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Authentic Muslim Reformers -- On Islamo-Nazi Death-Lists

'Whoever changes religion - kill him'
- Muhammad

View this first, a video of Wafa Sultan, a strong woman in full voice, speaking truth to a life-hating woman-hating Islamo-fanatic.

http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

Here's another access for it:
http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/video_480x360.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

Below, a young man, former Muslim living in Europe, must now fight for the right to walk unafraid down the street, breathe air and remain alive!  Because multicultural tolerance of intolerant Islam puts his life at risk in multiple ways -- first for daring to leave Islam, he is an "apostate" who is targeted for death at the hands of "any good Muslim" by Koranic decree.  Second for adopting Western clothes and ideals, he is considered corrupted and, hence, sub-human, so his former friends and family reject him like so much discarded trash. And third for daring to speak out against violent Islam, exposing Muhammed's despicable life-story, and in defence of this most basic human right, to not be killed for your religion (or non-religion) and ideas, he becomes a "blasphemer" who also must be killed by Koranic decree.  "Behead Those Who Insult Islam!" (Gawd help him if he converts to Judaism.)   But he and others with such sentiments in Europe today, who fight for their own right to remain alive, are called "right-wingers" in the liberal-left Muslim-friendly mass-media!  Yes, there are authentic "Muslim reformers" -- but all living outside of Islamic Saharasia, and not even safe from death-fatwas in Europe or the USA!  They must all go about in disguise, or with armed escorts, hiding their addresses and whereabouts, able to speak publicly only with great difficulty. If there are any significant percentage of ordinary Muslims who do not share the attitudes of the fanatics, they remain silent and hidden, out of fear themselves, as there is no such thing as any larger movement within Islam towards denouncing the extremists or taking control of the mosques away from the Wahhabi fanatics.  The reformers are nearly insignificant in numbers, and factually get little support from their bretheren.  However, the fact that this article below appears in the mainstream press is hopeful, even as it exposes a problem of much greater dimensions than is readily apparent.

Islamic growth in the West today constitutes the most severe and threatening life-negative change in Western social institutions -- in a manner that will put all softer freedom-oriented elements of our Western cultures at grave risk, and dramatically increase human armoring far more so than the existing life-negative social institutions already in place.  J.D.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2426314.ece

Young Muslims begin dangerous fight for the right to abandon faith

Ehsan Jami rejected Islam after the 9 11 terror attacks. He wants Muslims to be able to give up their religion

David Charter in The Hague

A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.

The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance.

The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands.

Ehsan Jami, the committee's founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death threats and a recent attack.

The threats are taken seriously after the murder in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an antiimmigration politician, and in 2004 of Theo Van Gogh, an antiIslam film-maker.

Speaking to The Times at a secret location before the committee's launch today, the Labour Party councillor said that the movement would declare war on radical Islam. Similar organisations campaigning for reform of the religion have sprung up across Europe and representatives from Britain and Germany will join the launch in The Hague today.

"Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up," Mr Jami said. "In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in."

Mr Jami, 22, who has abandoned his studies as his political career has taken off, denied that the choice of September 11 was deliberately provocative towards the Islamic Establishment. "We chose the date because we want to make a clear statement that we no longer tolerate the intolerence of Islam, the terrorist attacks," he said.

"In 1965 the Church in Holland made a declaration that freedom of conscience is above hanging on to religion, so you can choose whether you are going to be a Christian or not. What we are seeking is the same thing for Islam."

Mr Jami, who has compared the rise of radical Islam to the threat from Nazism in the 1930s, is receiving only lukewarm support from his party which traditionally relies upon Muslim votes. His outspoken attack on radical Islam has led to a prelaunch walk-out from fellow committee founder Loubna Berrada, who herself rejected Islam.

She said: "I don't wish to confront Islam itself. I only want to spread the message that Muslims should be allowed to leave Islam behind without being threatened."

There have been suggestions that Mr Jami might defect to the right-wing Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, the most outspoken politician in the Netherlands, who has called for the Koran to be banned. But Mr Jami said: "I have respect for Wilders but we do not have the same ideology. I am for the freedom of religion.

"Banning something is not going to help. I am the opposite - everyone should read the Koran." Mr Jami is being compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee who became a prominent Dutch politician campaigning for the reform of Islam but who left eventually for an academic career in the United States.

Jannie Groen, a writer for De Volksrant newspaper, said: "[Among Muslims] he is getting the same reaction as Ayaan Hirsi Ali that he is too confrontational but you are seeing other former Muslims now coming forward. So he has been able to put this issue of apostasy on the agenda, even though they do not want to be in the same room as him and he has had to pay a price."

By the Book

- 14 passages in the Koran refer to apostasy

- According to Baidhawi's commentary, Sura 4: 88-89 reads: "Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard."

- The hadith, tradition and legend about Muhammad and his followers used as a basis of Sharia, tells of some atheists who were brought to "'Ali and he burnt them. The news of this reached Ibn Abbas who said: 'If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah's Apostate forbade it . . . I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah's Apostate, 'Whoever changed his [Islamic] religion, then kill him'."

- According to hadith, a special reward in Paradise is reserved for the killer of apostates

Friday, September 14, 2007

CO2/Global Warming Theory Roasted by Scientific Findings

Go to the originals for the full articles...

Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming: Analysis Finds Hundreds of Scientists Have Published Evidence Countering Man-Made Global Warming Fears

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance. "This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850," said Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery.
Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.
Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention. "Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics," said Avery, "but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see."
<snip>

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml


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And the revelations get worse every day -- photos of US weather-measuring devices... next to heat-exhausts, on hot pavements, etc.  When independent scientists start exposing the problem, NOAA slams the door shut in full bureaucratic "kill the messenger" mode.

Cooking Up Global Warming
by Christopher C. Horner
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22243

Related...

NOAA Cover Up Of US Historical Climate Network Surface Station Photographs
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/06/29/noaa-cover-up-of-us-historical-climate-network-surface-station-photographs/

"Recently, Anthony Watts has established a website [http://www.surfacestations.org] to record these photographs. He has worked to assure that the photographs are obtained appropriately.
As a result of this effort, NOAA has removed location information from their website as to where they are located. "



KSM: "I was responsible for 911, from A to Z"

More nightmares for the "Truthers".  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not only confessing for 911, but the beheading of Daniel Pearl, involvement in the Bali bombings, and attempts to assassinate both President Clinton and the Pope during their visits to the Philippines.  This new confession is actually a followup to an earlier boasting confessional made by KSM and his lieutenant Ramsi Binalshibh to an al-jazeera reporter at a time when they were still on the run, before they were captured.  That confessional was detailed in several articles, and in the book "Masterminds of Terror" by Fouda and Fielding, which is still available at the OBRL bookstore.    J.D.
http://www.orgonelab.org/cart/xsaharasiatoday.htm

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Pentagon Releases Audio of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Testimony
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296695,00.html
http://www.pentagon.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=47437

Transcript
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/muhammad_transcript.pdf

Related, from March 2007
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=32456

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Nazi Terror and Muslim Terrorism

Lessons of history lost?  Suggest to also review Chuck Morse's book "The Nazi Roots of Islamic Terror" for additional facts and photos.  Available from the OBRL bookstore:
http://www.orgonelab.org/cart/xsaharasiatoday.htm
World War II still remains to have been the largest geographical expansion of various combined Saharasian Empires since the Saharasian geographical landscape converted over to desert more than 6000 years ago.  Whether or not something similar happens in the 21st Century depends upon how seriously we learn the lessons of the 20th.  J.D.

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Jew-Hatred and Jihad
The Nazi roots of the 9/11 attack.
by Matthias Küntzel
09/17/2007, Volume 013, Issue 01
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/080ruyhg.asp

The idea of using suicide pilots to obliterate the skyscrapers of Manhattan originated in 1940s Berlin. "In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame," wrote Albert Speer in his diary. "He described the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky."

Not only Hitler's fantasy but also his plan of action foreshadowed September 11: He envisioned having kamikaze pilots fly light aircraft packed with explosives and with no landing gear into Manhattan skyscrapers. The drawings for the Daimler-Benz Amerikabomber from the spring of 1944 show giant four-engine planes with raised undercarriages for transporting small bombers. The bombers would be released shortly before the planes reached the East Coast, after which the mother plane would return to Europe.

Hitler's rapture at the thought of Manhattan in flames indicates his underlying motive: not merely to fight a military adversary, but to kill all Jews everywhere. Possessed of the notion that the whole of the Second World War was a struggle against an imaginary Jewish enemy, he deemed "the USA a Jewish state" and New York the center of world Jewry. "Wall Street," as a popular book published in Munich in 1919 put it, "is, so to speak, the Military Headquarters of Judas. From there his threads radiate out across the entire world." From 1941 on, Hitler pushed to get the bombers into production, in order to "be able to teach the Jews a lesson in the form of terror attacks on American metropolises." Towards the end of the war this idea became an obsession.

Sixty years later, it so happens, the assault on the World Trade Center was coordinated from Germany. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who piloted the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center; Marwan al--Shehhi, from the United Arab Emirates, who steered the plane into the South Tower; Ziad Jarrah, from Lebanon, who crashed United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and their friends Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, and the Moroccan student Mounir al-Motassedeq had formed an al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, where they held regular "Koran circle" meetings with sympathizers.
What ideas propelled Atta and the others to act? Witnesses provided part of the answer at the world's first 9/11-related trial, the prosecution of al-Motassedeq, which took place in Hamburg between October 2002 and February 2003. One participant in the Koran circle meetings, Shahid Nickels, said Atta's Weltanschauung was based on a "National Socialist way of thinking." Atta was convinced that the Jews were striving for world domination and considered New York City the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy No. 1. Fellow students who lived in Motassedeq's dormitory testified that he shared these views and waxed enthusiastic about a forthcoming "big action." One student quoted Motassedeq as saying, "The Jews will burn and in the end we will dance on their graves."

Amazingly, neither the American media nor the international press took much notice of this testimony, largely refusing to report on Atta's and Motassedeq's explicit Jew-hatred. The above quotations come from the weekly Der Spiegel and from the detailed notes of the trial taken by journalist Michael Eggers, who attended every session and wrote about it for Reuters. If this had been the trial of a Ku Klux Klan member or someone from the far right such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, reports of Nazi-like dreams of exterminating the Jews would probably have made the headlines. But in this case, involving attackers of Arab background, journalists apparently found the issue irrelevant. Moreover, this Jew-hatred was no quirk of the Hamburg cell. Osama bin Laden himself declared in 1998, "The enmity between us and the Jews goes back far in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between us is inevitable. . . . The Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews."

Even the 9/11 Commission Report, the summation produced by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in July 2004, falls short in this regard. Its chapter on "Bin Laden's worldview" makes no mention of his hatred of Jews. This silence is all the more surprising in that the commission quotes documents in which bin Laden unambiguously expresses his hatred of Jews. For example, in the "Letter to the American People" of November 2002, which the report repeatedly cites, bin Laden warns: "The Jews have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense." Osama goes on: "Your law is the law of rich and wealthy people. . . . Behind them stand the Jews who control your policies, media and economy." Yet the report's authors inexplicably fail to see the significance of these words and the ideology behind them. The report also ignores the history of Islamism. It accords the entire pre-1945 period just five lines. Yet it is precisely this period that fostered the personal contacts and ideological affinities between early Islamism and late Nazism--the linkage between Jew-hatred and jihad.

Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Nazism, and prior to 1951 all its campaigns were directed not against colonialism but against the Jews. It was the Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, that established Islamism as a mass movement. The significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al Qaeda and Hamas.

It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism, insofar as Islamism viewed itself as a resistance movement against "cultural modernity." The Islamists' solution was the call for a new order based on sharia. But the Brotherhood's jihad was not directed primarily against the British. Rather, it focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews. Membership in the Brotherhood shot up from 800 to 200,000 between 1936 and 1938, according to the research of Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi for his book The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question 1928-1947. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted only one major campaign in Egypt, and it was against Zionism and the Jews.

This campaign, which established the Brotherhood as a mass movement, was set off by a rebellion in Palestine directed against Jewish immigration and initiated by the notorious grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al--Husseini. The Brotherhood organized mass demonstrations in Egyptian cities under the slogans "Down With the Jews!" and "Jews Get Out of Egypt and Palestine!" Leaflets called for a boycott of Jewish goods and Jewish shops, and the Brotherhood's newspaper, al-Nadhir, carried a regular column on "The Danger of the Jews of Egypt," which published the names and addresses of Jewish businessmen and allegedly Jewish newspaper publishers all over the world, attributing every evil, from communism to brothels, to the "Jewish danger."

The Brotherhood's campaign against the Jews used not only Nazi-like tactics but also German funding. As the historian Brynjar Lia recounted in his monograph on the Brotherhood, "Documents seized in the flat of Wilhelm Stellbogen, the Director of the German News Agency affiliated to the German Legation in Cairo, show that prior to October 1939 the Muslim Brothers received subsidies from this organization. Stellbogen was instrumental in transferring these funds to the Brothers, which were considerably larger than the subsidies offered to other anti-British activists."

At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood was the first modern organization to propagate the archaic idea of a belligerent jihad and the longing for death. In 1938, Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood's charismatic founder, published his concept of jihad in an article entitled "The Industry of Death." He wrote: "To a nation that perfects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come." This slogan was enthusiastically taken up by the "Troops of God," as the Brothers called themselves. As their battalions marched down Cairo's boulevards in semi-fascist formation they would burst into song: "We are not afraid of death, we desire it. . . . Let us die to redeem the Muslims!"

The death cult that became a hallmark of modern jihadism was laced with Jew-hatred from the very beginning. Moreover, this attitude sprang not only from European influences; it also drew directly on Islamic sources. First, Islamists considered, and still consider, Palestine an Islamic territory, Dar al-Islam, where Jews must not run a single village, let alone a state. At best, in their view, this land should be judenrein; at the very least, Jews there should be relegated to subservient status. Second, Islamists justify their aspiration to eliminate the Jews of Palestine by invoking the example of Muhammad, who in the 7th century not only expelled two Jewish tribes from Medina, but also beheaded the entire male population of a third Jewish tribe, before proceeding to sell all the women and children into slavery. Third, they find support and encouragement for their actions and plans in the anti-Jewish passages of the Koran.

After World War II it became apparent that the center of global Jew-hatred was shifting from Nazi Germany to the Arab world. In November 1945, just half a year after the end of the Third Reich, the Muslim Brothers carried out the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in Egypt's history, when demonstrators penetrated the Jewish quarters of Cairo on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. They ransacked houses and shops, attacked non-Muslims, and torched the synagogues. Six people were killed, and some hundred more injured. A few weeks later the Islamists' newspapers "turned to a frontal attack against the Egyptian Jews, slandering them as Zionists, Communists, capitalists and bloodsuckers, as pimps and merchants of war, or in general, as subversive elements within all states and societies," as Gudrun Krämer wrote in her study The Jews in Egypt 1914-1952.

In 1946, the Brotherhood made sure that Heinrich Himmler's friend Amin al-Husseini, the former grand mufti who was being sought as a war criminal by Britain and the United States, was granted asylum and a new lease on political life in Egypt. As leader of the Palestine National Movement, al-Husseini had been a close ally of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazis. Based in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, he had directed the Muslim SS divisions in the Balkans and had been personally responsible for blocking negotiations late in the war that might have saved thousands of Jewish children from the gas chambers. All this was known in 1946. Nonetheless, Britain and the United States chose to forgo criminal prosecution of al-Husseini in order to avoid spoiling their relations with the Arab world. France, which was holding al-Husseini, deliberately let him get away.

For many in the Arab world, what amounted to amnesty for this prominent Islamic authority who had spent the war years broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin was a vindication of his actions. They started to view his Nazi past with pride, not shame, and Nazi criminals on the wanted list in Europe now flooded into the Arab world. Large print-runs of the most infamous libel of the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were published in the following decades at the behest of two well-known former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Both the Muslim Brothers' unconditional solidarity with al-Husseini and their anti-Jewish riots mere months after Auschwitz show that the Brotherhood did not object, to say the least, to Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

The consequences of this attitude, this blindness to the international impact of the Holocaust, continue to affect the course of the Arab-Jewish conflict today. How do Islamists explain international support for Israel in 1947? Ignoring the actual fate of the Jews during World War II, they revert to conspiracy theories, viewing the creation of the Jewish state as a Jewish-inspired attack by the United States and the Soviet Union on the Arab world. Accordingly, El-Awaisi writes, the Brotherhood "considered the whole United Nations intervention to be an international plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians and the British, under the influence of Zionism." The mad notion of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, suppressed in Germany since May 8, 1945, survived and flourished in the political culture of the Arab world.

In particular, Nazi-like conspiracy thinking persisted and grew. An especially striking example of its continuing influence is the charter adopted in 1988 by the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, better known as Hamas. In this charter--which "sounds as if it were copied from the pages of Der Stürmer," as Sari Nusseibeh, former PLO representative in Jerusalem, has written--Hamas defines itself as "the spearhead and the avant-garde" of the struggle against "world Zionism." The Jews, the charter explains, "were behind the French Revolution [and] the Communist Revolution. . . . They were behind World War I . . . they were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. . . . There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it. . . . Their plan," states Article 32, "is embodied in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."

As in the 1930s and 1940s, the sheer absurdity of the claims makes it difficult for educated people to believe that anyone could take them seriously. Nonetheless, this notion of Jews as the root of all evil continues to inspire the mass murder of civilians in Israel and to motivate the joy with which Islamists greet those murders. "Hitler's Islamic heirs," as the historian Jehuda Bauer has called the Islamists, have replaced an anticolonialism aspiring to emancipation with a Jew-hatred aspiring to salvation through the annihilation of everyone "Jewish." It should not be surprising to find Osama bin Laden accusing "the Jews" of "taking hostage America and the West"--or to find Mohamed Atta's acquaintances attributing to him a Nazi worldview. What is truly surprising is that this Islamist hatred of Jews is often overlooked by Western analysts, political actors, and media.

As noted above, the 9/11 Commission Report is a case in point. Instead of discussing the fact that Jew-hatred had reached epidemic proportions in the Islamic world well before September 11, the report gives the impression that Islamism originally arose in response to recent American and Western policies. This is first conveyed in a remark on the early days of Islamism, when, we are told, "Fundamentalists helped articulate anticolonial grievances," an idea that ignores crucial dimensions of the outlook of the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1930s. The stereotypical message that the West is responsible is repeated in the report's analysis of bin Laden's motives: "Bin Laden's grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far deeper." The report gets the history wrong. The al Qaeda leader was first politicized not by "specific U.S. policies," but by the writings of Sayyid Qutb and the jihadist lectures of Abdullah Azzam. As a result, the commission's explanation of al Qaeda's appeal is one-sided: "As political, social, and economic problems created flammable societies, Bin Laden used Islam's most extreme fundamentalist traditions as his match."

It is, of course, true that Islamists seek to exploit social problems for their own ends. But Islamism is not an ideology that ignites protest as it rubs up against social injustice. On the contrary, what provokes Islamist violence is any sign of modern development in the Muslim world: scientific inquiry, political or personal self-determination, economic progress, women's equality, freedom of expression in cinema and theater. The radicalization of Islam is less the consequence of poverty and lack of opportunity than their cause.

The refusal to see this and to recognize the substance of Islamist ideology--the death cult, the hatred of Jews, and the profound hatred of freedom--leads back again and again to the mistaken "discovery" that the "root cause" of terrorism is U.S. policies. Ultimately, the refusal to recognize al Qaeda's true motives results in a reversal of responsibility: The more deadly the terrorism, the greater the American guilt. The appeal of this approach is related to the specious hope it holds out: If suicide terrorism has its roots in U.S. policy, then a change in U.S. policy can assuage terrorism and the fear it induces. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, benefits, since the bloodier its attacks, the greater the anger against .... the United States.

The same pattern explains the bizarre reaction to the Middle East conflict that is widespread in the West: The average observer, ignorant of the anti-Jewish content of the Hamas Charter, has to find some other explanation for terrorism against Jews, which must be--Israel. It is not the terrorists who are guilty, but their victims. Finding suicide terrorism incomprehensible, Westerners rationalize it as an act of despair that invites sympathy. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. Here, too, following the principle of "the more barbaric the anti-Jewish terror, the greater the Israeli guilt," the bombers' victims become the scapegoat for global terrorism. The old stereotype of Jewish guilt is thus amplified in contemporary form--and only encourages the terrorists.

A struggle against Islamism waged in ignorance of Islamist ideology weakens the West. The attribution of guilt to Israel and the United States adds fuel to the flames of Islamist propaganda and drives the wedge deeper into the Western camp rather than where it belongs--in the Muslim world.

Such blindness is especially hazardous in the case of the Iranian nuclear program, whose danger arises from the unique ideological stew surrounding it: the mish-mash of Jew-hatred, Holocaust denial, and Shiite death-cult messianism that is the context for Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and advanced missiles. Here the worst-case scenario is not an increase in suicide bombing attacks against individuals, but a perhaps suicidal nuclear attack on the Israeli state. Back in Munich in 1938, many believed they could resolve the Sudeten German problem with Hitler without considering how it fit into the Nazis' overall -strategy. In the same way today, in U.N. Security Council decisions and the positions of the Permanent Five, the technical aspects of Iran's nuclear program are often divorced from their ideological context.

The problem is not that the Islamists hide their goals. The problem is that the West does not listen. Osama bin Laden's chief reproach of the Americans in his "Letter to the American People" is that they act as free citizens who make their own laws instead of accepting sharia. The same hatred of freedom can be found in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letter to the American president: "Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems."

Not to confront the ideological roots of Islamism--notably its well-documented connection to Nazi Jew-hatred--stymies any Western push for political, economic, and cultural modernization in the Muslim world. Yet only such modernization can split the majority of Muslims, who would benefit from social progress, from the Islamists, who are willing to die to prevent it. Without challenging the ideological roots of Islamism, it is impossible to confront the Muslim world with the real choices before it: Will it choose life and hope, or does it prefer the cult of death? Will it stand up for individual and social self-determination, or will it finally submit to the mullahs' program of Jew-hatred and jihad?

Matthias Küntzel is a Hamburg-based political scientist and a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This essay includes material from his forthcoming book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, November 2007). This article was translated from German by Colin Meade.

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The manner in which the terrible events of WW-II continue to affect world events today is a subject which should get more serious attention.  For example, some of my contacts, when given the original article above, found the Amerikabomber aspect to be "unbelievable", even though they knew well about the technical advances of German technology in rocketry and jet aircraft towards the end of that war.  It was a reality, however.  Americans and other Allied nationalities today hardly appreciate how narrowly WW-II was won, and that until the middle of the conflict, when the American factories and the "arsenal of democracy" finally got roaring, the Allied forces were badly out-gunned and out-numbered.



http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200405/wulf

Had Hitler's scientists succeeded in developing their own a-bombs prior to the war's end, the aircraft for delivery of them to British, Canadian and USA East Coast cities existed, either by aircraft or rocket.  Some historians have claimed the German military tested their abomb very late in the war, in a region still under their controls near Berlin, based upon eyewitness reports of a massive unexplained explosion.  But this was too late in the war to allow further development, thankfully.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4348497.stm

The Japanese also were furiously working on their own a-bomb program, in consultation with Germany, which shared technical apparatus, materials and information all the way to Japan via submarine deliveries.  By some accounts, the first testing of a Japanese a-bomb took place shortly before the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- but it did not fission correctly, and instead created only a flash-explosion similar to a "dirty bomb", wiping out a small island off the coast of Japan, including several Japanese fishing boats.  Like much else of that period, new information emerges monthly from old archives.  Soviet archives of the WW-II period, which include much of German archives, only became available to Western historians after the end of communism.
http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/jp-hung.htm
http://www.sharkhunters.com/hirschfeld.htm

Another lesser-known series of Japanese assault bombers were made around this same time for the sole purpose of attacking West Coast American cities.  The aircraft were positioned in airbases in Manchuria, far removed from American attacks, with planned great-circle routes over Alaska.  Other large bombers were constructed with fold-up wings for launching from a special class of giant airplane-launching submarines which could travel round-trip from Japan to the West Coast of the USA without refueling.  Their payloads were potentially atomic weaponry, but more explicitly the Japanese had already tested and perfected a bio-weapons program on Chinese targets.  Billions of Black-Plague and Bubonic Plague infested fleas were bred in special laboratories, for the purpose of infecting humans.  The fleas were infested into cloth strips or rice canisters which could be dropped from high altitude bombers, planned for  mass-droppings over San Francisco, Seattle and other west-coast cities.  These bio-warfare agents were created and tested in Japanese "medical" death-camps in Manchuria, on imprisoned Chinese, American and British POWs and civilians, and later in massive air-drops on Chinese civilian populations.  The attacks killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and military -- millions by some accounts.  The Japanese program of creating primitive balloons which were carried by prevailing air currents across the Pacific to drop incendiary devices for igniting of forest fires in the Western USA (these failed to create the anticipated conflagrations, but one of them did kill a family out on a picnic) was in fact a preliminary for the later dropping of plague-infested fleas.   It was part of the Japanese ideology at the time, to enslave or exterminate local populations, considered "sub-humans" by Imperial Japanese Shinto/Buddhist ideology. The same plans were organized for the populations of all Japanese occupied territory, just as the Nazis organized slavery/extermination policies for their occupied regions.  The failure of the Japanese to hold the specific military officers, political leaders and butcher-doctors accountable for these bio-war programs, or to even acknowledge or apologize for them, or to make compensations to victims, or to even mention those and other Japanese atrocities (the massacres in Nanking) in their typical schoolbooks or history books, is a big part of the ongoing tensions between China and Japan today -- though it must be said, the Chinese are total hypocrites on this issue, as they do not acknowledge the even greater butchery of Mao Tse-Dong and the Communist Party in the years after WW-II.  Portraits of the butcher-Mao still adorn Chinese public buildings and their currency.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ABQ2GQ4--NYC&pg=PA135&lpg=PA135&dq=japanese+bomber+black+plague+fleas&source=web&ots=yyD9eHtkeh&sig=lFM7bOGKMlYCwp1Cto-sZcn8e0I#PPP1,M1
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9205
http://www.ww2pacific.com/unit731.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1338296,00.html




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