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Ugly Buddhist Woman
The Dalai Lama said, "Well, yes, a woman Could be the next Dalai Lama, but she'd have to be good looking." ugly.buddhist.woman@gmail.com
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011

First Responders: Pariah

I wrote an article about the tragedy of denying eyewitness testimony.  It was Very ill-received, though I put forth no theory at as to who caused 3 buildings to come down as in a controlled demolition.  That's how it looked and sounded to me, and many First Responders described exactly what I had seen.
I have no theory at all as to why the official account omitted 12,000 pages of eyewitness testimony, secondmost in importance only to material evidence, (<that is my opinion) and since material evidence was removed and disposed of, I am claiming that those interviews in early days with 503 eyewitnesses are the most important evidence we have. (1)


  1. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
    4 instances of the word "eyewitness" in 568 pages
  2. Structural Fire Response and Probable Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7
    1 Eyewitness account included in
    404 pages vol 1
  3. Structural Fire Response and Probable Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7
    1 Eyewitness account included in
    382 pages vol 2

Government ignored, omitted, rejected out of hand and suppressed the eyewitness testimony of First Responders.  Government and NYC officials denied their claims that their cancers were caused by prolonged exposure to toxins Ground Zero.  And now NYC officials have landed another indignity on First Responders by not inviting them to 9/11 10th Anniversary Commemorative.  I can't help but see a pattern that government has treated First Responders like pariah.



Since I was out of US at the time of 9/11, and all news I got was from the British or Irish press, and only returned to US in 2006, my perspective on what happened is to some degree more objective in that it has not been formed by the "official" US narrative.  The controversy makes very little sense to me, IF facts are facts..
But they are not.  Facts about 9/11 are not facts, eyewitnesses did not see what they saw.  I am astounded at the predominant view, official and that of the US public,  of what caused three buildings to come down in the way that they did.
This goes beyond "a willing suspension of disbelief."  One would have to ignore natural laws, gravity and cause and effect  to support the government's rationale.  But this is what the majority of people have done, in my view.  They "have taken leave of their senses," have lost the powers of observation, common sense, logic, and honest scientific inquiry.
One does not need to be a scientist to connect one’s perception, understanding, and learning to produce a statement of fact or truth, and it should not, certainly, take bravery to do so.  Yet, in my view, America is paralyzed in a state of fear and suspicion, has been slowly poisoning itself with the toxin of denial about what happened 10 years ago, to the point where people are afraid to speak.
We celebrate our freedom, yet the people are afraid to think for themselves and speak up about what they know, what is their truth.
State and federal government idolize the First Responders to 9/11 but refuse to listen to them, to take care of them, even to invite them to the scene of their extraordinary heroism on the 10th Anniversary of the worst day in American history.










__________________________________________________________________



(1) New York Times published all 12,000 pages of interviews with 503 First Responders in 2005. 



A lifelong Liberal Democrat, (and humanist to boot,)  I have been attacked by the left for saying what I am saying here.  This blows my mind!


Lynn Margulis on What Is Good Science?

Interview May, 2011
(transcript)


My name is Lynn Margulis.

I’ve been doing science every day since I was about 16 years old.

I teach at the University of Massachusetts.
I have a PhD in genetics, but I really do much more geological things these days.

In 1999, I was a recipient, one of several,
of the President’s Medal of Science from Clinton, William Clinton. And two days ago, I received the Da Vinci award. That is the membership in the Da Vinci Society. And quoting them, the society is the, for the study of thinking is proud,
proud to announce that they’re giving me this award, and it is to.

The goal of the society is to develop a world-class thinking curriculum and to promote excellence in thinking by developing an honor society for the world’s greatest living thinkers. That’s somewhat of an exaggeration, but they gave me that medal.

I reconstruct the past, natural history, from clues taken to be representational, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the reconstructing of why the buildings were destroyed in 9/11, taking clues that we think are representational.

That’s in a historical science, that’s what must be done.

The thing that’s most important about science is that it’s a way of knowing. And it’s a way of knowing that anyone can participate in re, of course, they have to have some background, and they [always] develop more. But it’s a way of knowing about anything. And it’s, at the end of any kind of science activity, people will agree that they have collected evidence that illustrates a hypothesis.

And if the evidence is contradictory to the hypothesis, you have to— one has to abandon that hypothesis and look for another one. And one must, in testing any hypothesis or trying to establish it, consider all of the relevant evidence, which may come from all kinds of places: observations, measurements, and so on.

And insofar as people can be objective at all, they will come to the same sorts of conclusions.

So science is a fundamentally useful and accurate and universal way of finding out about the world. So scientists always have to collect information, data, observations and measurements around an idea that’s being tested for its validity And if all of those observations and measurements corroborate and are consistent with the basic idea, the ideas, idea then has got to be published and be available in an open and transparent way that others can criticize.

If the hypothesis is really correct, the criticisms are, stand up. That is, a scientist has no better friend than valid critics, appropriate critics, who— to whom they respond. And if the criticisms lead to abandonment of the hypothesis because it doesn’t fit— because the facts don’t fit the idea, then the hypothesis must be abandoned and replaced with something more adequate.

And as science goes on, the adequacy of the basic idea and the hypothesis is corroborated over and over again by lost of people from lots of angles and usually generates sub-hypotheses or related ideas that can also be investigated.

But of course, science is never secret when it’s done right. I would say that there’s no bad science. There are just lots of things that are called science that aren’t science. Because science is a way of finding out that is self-correcting and involves many people, over and over again, the same observations, or observations that are expa that are generated by the hypothesis itself.

Anyway, these are kinds of rules that international scientific people will all agree on.

And if a science isn’t science unless it’s published, unless it’s openly published and made available for criticism by anyone who feels that they can criticize it.

Three buildings come down at almost the speed of freefall, which is the gravitational speed.  And for two of them it’s because airplanes hit them, and for the third one, it’s a mysterious reason, that is, there’s no really coherent hypothesis, except it’s claimed that there are these fires in them.

The most obvious hypothesis for anyone looking at the films and that was a lot of people is that the buildings came down because there was very carefully controlled demolition with high explosives that had been planted many weeks, if not months, before.

The first thing they do is ignore, in all cases, the most obvious and reasonable hypothesis that is consistent with all other, destructions in a very short time of buildings.

And what is worse is that all of the evidence was removed.

You can’t do science without evidence.

And unfortunately, there was a lot of evidence about the pieces that the columns were broken into, the nature of, the uniform nature of the dust. But very quickly, if this is a crime I think everybody agrees it’s a crime, evidence was removed from the scene of the crime.

Well, if evidence is removed, no scientist could possibly reconstruct what happened. You can’t do science when you are deprived of the evidence, and when your hypothesis is the least valid, instead of the most likely.  When the most likely hypothesis, in the case of Building 7 wasn’t even mentioned.

This is not science. So the claim is that it’s something else? It’s precon— trying to prove preconceived ideas. not having data that they could fit— use to make a model. But to prove a model that was unprecedented in the history of buildings collapsing.

So we’re not doing science here. We’re not doing bad science; we’re just not doing science at all, is my claim.

So what to me is most impressive, since I do microscopic work all the time, are the many, many microscopic samples that show these extremely totally unique red-gray crystals, red and gray in the same crystal.  And it was found in all, the dust samples.

So the preconceived notion of NIST is that there’s no evidence for explosives, and so there’s no point in looking.  That is the most unscientific thing that you can possibly think of, not to look because the, you don’t expect to find evidence.

And in fact, the evidence is overwhelming that these red-gray crystals are very high-temperature incendiaries, And so they have a lot of evidence for something they have no explanation for,

They don’t even look at it. They ignore it completely, ignorant. And dismiss the explosive argument.

And on the other hand, give an argument that’s patently false, that no scientists will accept, that fires, office fires, can bring buildings down at the speed, roughly, of gravity, of freefall. they state these conclusions for which there’s virtually no evidence, and then they ignore conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence.
This is not a pro a scientific procedure at all.

Rule number one probably of crime investigation is to collect at the scene of the crime as much evidence as possible for what happened.  And you had these steel columns in nice even pieces, and they were whisked away, and evidence was destroyed or removed systematically, extremely close to the time that the crime had occurred.

This is not only unscientific; it’s illegal.

Many witnesses, firemen and lots of people describe flowing molten metal, iron or steel, at extremely hot temperatures. And John Gross categorically did not— denied…their observations. So that  because their observations don’t fit his preconceived notion, he not only ignored evidence, he denied evidence.

That is exactly the opposite of science, which considers all of the evidence that can possibly be relevant, and builds a hypothesis based on the plethora, the total of evidence.

So clearly, if you have to lie, or deny, or ignore evidence, you are not doing science at all. What you’re doing is lying, basically.

So this is what NIST has done, denied and ignored crucial evidence that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions. So NIST hires this UL, this Underwriter Laboratories, to and they do their work, and they show that the floors did not fail. They did not give way.

And then NIST doesn’t like that result ’cause it doesn’t fit into their computer model, so they ignore the real result, and they misrepresent some, and provide evidence from authority that, the computer model is right.

Well, people do this every day and they call it science.

And the people who do it call themselves scientists.

I claim they’re not doing science at all. They’re doing propaganda or publicity, or whatever they’re doing, but it’s not science.

It’s not playing by the rules of science.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

No Nation Left Behind

I have been writing about a shameful time in US history when government ignored, rejected out of hand, ommitted and suppressed eyewitness testimony.
As a result of this Some people suspected that the government had something to hide.  Even worse Some people suspected the government, or someone within government had something to gain.  Here begins the insanity.
As a result of this suspicion Some people concluded that someone within government was complicit, responsible and evil.
This conclusion, also known as Conspiracy Theory, is completely extremist and nutz, and it tore the populace in two.
This alienation fostered a climate of suspicion and fear.  It factioned the people, that endures almost ten years later.
As a result of that factioning public forae became more restricted. 
And that restriction negatively impacts the functioning of the democracy.
And it all began when government refused to listen to eyewitness testimony.
And that is where we are at.

______________________________________________________________________________
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has 568 pages.  The word "eyewitness" occurs only 4 times.
Friday, August 26, 2011

Faith Based Architecture

Optical illusion, crooked camera or intelligence test? (live webcam 8/24/2011 washingtonviews)
This photo capture comes from the live webcam trained on the Washington Monument the day after the August 23, 2011 earthquake.(1)   Although most people think the camera is crooked, the horizon reflects the sloping of the National Mall.  The camera is straight on. (2)
Tilting at Monuments
 There is a long documentary history of monitoring the tilt and curl of The Washington Monument going back to the 1800's. (see case studies in engineering: Washington Monument for records of settlement, tilt and sway going back to 1879 (3))
     The tiltiness of the Monument was regularly reported in the news until news became so fair and balanced:
"The Washington Monument not only tilts, but is sinking steadily, new measurements show" Calgary Herald, May 1959
"The (sinking) movement is straight down, though the Monument has had a slight tilt - three-eighths of an inch - for 75 years. On a hot day, however, the shaft may curl as much as three inches." Tall Problem, David Barnett Portsmouth Times, Feb 24, 1960  (While three eighths of an inch was the official “slant,” really, one has to wonder!)
"Although some of the 1,185 persons who visited the shrine last year swore the shaft is leaning like the Tower of Pisa, even the combination of tilt and curl cannot be noticed without special instruments." David Barnett, Portsmouth Times, Feb 24, 1960. 
Well that was a very odd thing of Mr. Barnett to say when every visitor to the Monument that year did indeed carry a very sophisticated and sensitive instrument to measure tilt:  the vestibular system of the inner ear responsible for our being able to perceive tilt and balance ourselves in sloped environments.  As visitors to the Guggenheim Museum can attest, one’s vestibular system is working in overdrive to compensate for slope while trying to look at paintings that are plumb.  It can be stressful! 
     Why were some and not all the visitors in 1960 highly attuned to the imbalance of the Monument comparing it to the Tower of Pisa?  Could be many reasons.  Maybe some of the visitors were more aware of their sensory perceptions, more aware of the incoming information reported by their vestibular system and processing that information more efficiently; maybe others were preoccupied, or maybe some had taken a plane that day or the day before and their inner ears were not quite recovered.
  To say the Washington Monument is NOT tilting is pretty silly. All buildings are to some degree off of plumb... all buildings settle and sway, and these stress tolerances are built into All tall buildings... (except the ones that fall down.)

 "The sun scorches it, and strong winds tilt it. The sides are scarred and stained, the corners chipped and the stone faded..." Washington Monument is Deteriorating, Washinton Post, October 1998


Monuments Don't Lean, Heroes Don't Talk


     It is important to remember that when the Monument was built it was referred to as a shrine, meant to stand forever. Every story and every person who claims that the Monument is not tilting as a result of the earthquake is claiming a miracle... that the Monument which has tilted since the 1850's has been miraculously set straight and true... call it an Architectural Divine Adjustment, which would have pleased the architect, Robert Mills, a Freemason.
  

    



The story beneath the story here is the now historic American public's policy that believing is seeing... The Washington Monument is not tilted because Symbols of American strength and endurance are inviolate.  As far as "Faith Based Architecture" the official policy has been to idolize our heroes but refuse to listen to 12,000 pages of their eyewitness interviews. When extraordinary ordinary people say, "I saw explosions," or "I am worried about the tilt of the Washington Monument post-earthquake." or "I visited the Washington Monument and it was like the leaning Tower of Pisa," the choice is to consider impartially the true, corroborated account, or blindly believe what you are told to or need to believe.
 
       How did it happen that in the early 21st Century in America that it actually took bravery to connect one’s perception and understanding to produce a statement of fact or truth?  I don’t think the 1960 visitors to the Monument felt they were bucking the system when they compared their experience to that of visiting the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or that it took any type of courage to say so. 
    Today around the country say the Washington Monument is tilting and you are in for a fight!  How did something so common sensical become political?  And really, why strain the brain?  It is so much easier to adopt the credo: “If my enemy speaks it, it must be false.”  (In Google Latin: “si inimicus meus loquitur, oportet quod falsum.”)  This relieves stress, no necessity of thinking required and it will work no matter what side you’re on.
Washington needs another Monument!  Location: entry West Mall.  I am thinking a combination of the Arc de Triomphe and the Tower of Babel.  Inscribed all over with every language known to man, (don’t forget net-speak, text-speak, geek-speak and Double Speak, and of course Google Latin,) it should read “Abandon all thinking, ye who enter here.”



(1) W Washington DC, Live from Washington DC, photo capture refreshed every few hours.
http://www.wWashingtondcviews.com/
(2) Calculating tilt:  Is it possible to calculate tilt of Washington Monument using the live webcam photo? 
The camera is straight on. The horizon reflects slope of national mall area, as it would when you take photos of hills, mountains. All other buildings in this photo capture are plumb straight up and down...
The only way to really calculate the tilt (other than to drop a plumb bob from the Monument) would be to create 3-D model using this photo and dimensions of Monument. Also one would have to know distance between left tower and Monument.   Due to the curvature of the Earth, IF the distance between the left tower and the Monument was 138 miles, the live webcam photo would show two perfectly plumb buildings.
(3) Washington Monument Case History:
International Journal of GeoEngineering Case Histories, Vol. 1, Issue 3
casehistories.geoengineer.org/volume/volume1/issue3/IJGCH_1_3_3.pdf
(4) Illustration arch says “deserere cogitabat. Donec a die  “Abandon Thinking.  Have a nice day.”
Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Is The Washington Monument Tilting?

BEST VIEWED FULL SCREEN


Common sense will tell you that if the earth is round there will be Some deviation from plumb... but not enough to see in this short a distance.

_____________________________________________________________________________

A Poem for the Post-Earthquake Washington Monument:

    William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
       THE SECOND COMING
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Saturday, August 13, 2011

Take A Ticket



I'm keeping a supply of these in my back pocket.


Friday, August 12, 2011

Understanding A Thing.. Stuart Davis




































July 22, 1940

Understanding a Thing
Makes the Thing.
No-one understands
anything until some
Patient Person points
out its Value.

Picasso
1921
1925
1926
1927

Stuart Davis

_____________________________________________

Gloucester Sketchbooks, 1932

"These seascapes, interlocking shapes and geometric doodles, accompanied by pages of notes, may be of slight artistic value, but artists, students and scholars will find them of interest." -- Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc

slight artistic value? Oy Vey Gevalt!

Reed Business Information has its head up its..

.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Darcus Howe: We HAVE to resolve it in a civilized way

Democracy Now
Over 1,000 Arrested as Anger over Inequality, Racism Boils Over
August 10, 2011


Amy Goodman:  How do you think this should all be resolved? We’re talking about four days of this uprising, of the riots, of the fires, of more than a thousand people arrested, police out in the largest presence in history now in the streets of London and others. What do you think needs to happen right now?

DARCUS HOWE: There has to be an overture made to young blacks, saying, "Peace." And you could do that with making clear that you disassociate yourself—I’m talking about the Prime Minister now—disassociate themselves with Operation Trident and dissolve it, dissolve Operation Razorback, which is terrorizing communities right now.  (Operation Razorback changed the stop and search law which needed grounds, to groundless stop and search on the suspicion of terrorism.  As a result black people are being harrassed and bullied All The Time!)

And the other thing, the genuine black intellectuals and working-class unionists, and so on, should hold an international conference within the next six months to lay out precisely the state of society. We must have black Americans there.

We must have broadcasters from all over the world and discuss the future of a civilization within a civilization, and make that absolutely clear.

We invite delegates from Africa, we invite delegates from the Caribbean, and say this is not the country that Cameron boasts of—and how, beneath the surface, the terror and the disrespect—on the question of race, mainly—and we have to resolve it. We have to resolve it, and resolve it in a civilized way.

..... Not go with a demonstration to the House of Lords or Parliament and to your MP and whatever. We have to lift it sky-high and let the entire civilization of this world know that what they’re doing in Afghanistan is much of what they do to kill people here. I’m not angry, but I’m deadly serious. Every time I walk the street, my eyes are scanning the landscape for rogue police officers. And that’s—I warn my children to do that, and my grandchildren.



Sunday, August 7, 2011

Happy Psychiatrists Day !


You don't hafta bring yer psychiatrist flowers for Psychiatrist's Day... just try to act well for just one day ;))
Tell him/her how much you appreciate the help and how your quality of life has improved while in his/her care.
Monday, August 1, 2011

Einstein -- A Letter of Condolence


Albert Einstein to Robert S. Marcus of the World Jewish Conference consoling him on the loss of his son to polio.
In 1947 Marcus took the position of Political Director representative of the World Jewish Conference to the United Nations.
Marcus died in 1951, a year after his son.