Friday, September 4, 2009
Nouriel Roubini China cannot drive the world out of recession Sept 1st 2009
Check this link ........ http://bit.ly/qWELz
http://tinyurl.com/n4wbxl
Talking to an attractive woman really can make a man lose his mind, according to a new study.
The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive Photo: GETTY
The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.
Researchers who carried out the study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.
The findings have implications for the performance of men who flirt with women in the workplace, or even exam results in mixed-sex schools.
Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.
This may be simply because men are programmed by evolution to think more about mating opportunities.
Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived.
Researchers said it was as if he was so keen to make an impression he 'temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources.'
To see if other men were affected in the same way, they recruited 40 male heterosexual students.
Each one performed a standard memory test where they had to observe a stream of letters and say, as fast as possible, if each one was the same as the one before last.
The volunteers then spent seven minutes chatting to male or female members of the research team before repeating the test.
The results showed men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.
But when the task was repeated with a group of female volunteers, they did not get the same results. Memory scores stayed the same, whether they had chatted to a man or a woman.
In a report on their findings the researchers said: 'We conclude men's cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.'
Psychologist Dr George Fieldman, a member of the British Psychological Society, said the findings reflect the fact that men are programmed to think about ways to pass on their genes.
'When a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call 'reproductively focused'.
'But a woman also looks for signs of other attributes, such as wealth, youth and kindness. Just the look of the man would be unlikely to have the same effect.'
Zapping things from the sky: Airborne Boeing laser blasts ground target
Boeing and the US Air Force today said that they fired Boeing’s Advanced Tactical Laser at a ground target.
The airborne military laser which promises to destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage has for the first time actually blown something up.Boeing and the US Air Force today said that on Aug. 30, a C-130H aircraft armed with Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) blasted a target test vehicle on the ground for the first time. Boeing has been developing the ATL since 2008 under an Air Force contract worth up to $30 million.
According to Boeing, the C-130 fired its 12,000lb high-power chemical laser through the beam control system while flying over White Sands Missile Range, N.M. The beam control system acquired the ground target and guided the laser beam to the target.
The ATL team includes L-3 Communications/Brashear, which made the laser turret, and Hytec which made various structural elements of the weapon system, Boeing said.
The ATL is complementary to the Airborne Laser (ABL), which Boeing is developing for the US Missile Defense Agency to destroy airborne ballistic missiles. The ABL consists of a megawatt-class chemical laser mounted on a Boeing 747-400 freighter aircraft. According to Boeing the C-130H transport, which belongs to the U.S. Air Force's 46th Test Wing, has been modified to carry the high-energy chemical laser and battle management and beam control subsystems.
Both systems employ a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) that is made by combining a bunch of nasty chemicals - potassium, peroxide, chlorine, iodine and other stuff and then fired at supersonic speeds. According to as post on Wikipedia, each COIL burst produces enough energy in a five-second burst to power a typical American household for more than one hour. The system doesn't so much evaporate its target as melts or damages it rendering it useless. In the case of using it against missiles, the missile is typically weakened and then explodes, experts said.
The extreme scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today said last month they want to develop a laser system the goes way beyond today's opto-mechanical, acousto-optical or electro-optical systems to establish photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology that will provide video frame rate beam steering speeds, and emit multiple beams with a total output power of 10 W.
DARPA said Opto-mechanical scanning devices are usually bulky and relatively slow, while acousto- and electro-optical technologies utilize devices that while small in size, cannot provide the steering speeds and versatility necessary for many of the advanced applications the military envisions.
Known as the SWEEPER, which is wicked short for short-range wide-field-of-view extremely-agile electronically-steered photonic emitters, DARPA said it expects the new laser technology to draw from phased array concepts that revolutionized RADAR systems.
DARPA said it expects SWEEPER will provide a compact, agile alternative to mechanically steered technology, and recognizing the recent advances in photonic device density, circuit complexity, and performance capabilities in the emerging PIC technology, the SWEEPER program should extend phased array beam steering to the optical domain in the near infra red (0.8 to 2 μm range) by developing PIC technology for optical phased arrays. Such arrays will require the integration of thousand of closely packed optical emitting facets, precise relative electronic phase control of these components, and all within a very small form factor with a total output power of 10W, DARPA stated.
Former High-Ranking Intelligence Officer: Cheney Responsible for 9/11
David Steele is a former 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer, the second-ranking civilian in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer.
Steele has previously written that “9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war”.
This month, Steele went further, writing:
Pakistan briefed Cheney [about the plans for the terrorist attacks ahead of time] …nations also got wind of this and warned the CIA. We also had two walk-ins to the FBI, one in Orlando, one in Newark, that were dismissed by the FBI because the names were all virgins and not in the FBI data base–the arrogance of stupid bureaucracy.
Cheney saw an opportunity for what Bush called his trifecta, and gave it to him by giving the go-ahead to ISI and Al Qaeda, and ordering up a terrorism exercise that allowed him to send all relevant close-in air defense strip alert craft away from the target areas, and to disable the NORTHCOM normal response to flight path diversion.
While the details might be open to debate, many other very high-level intelligence officers have said the “official” explanation for 9/11 makes no sense. And see this and this.
DNA to free another inmate
A 49-year-old man who has served more than 14 years of a life sentence for raping two teenage sisters will be released today after DNA tests determined that he wasn't the attacker.
Joseph Lamont Abbitt of Winston-Salem was convicted on June 22, 1995, of two counts of first-degree rape, one count of first-degree burglary and two counts of first-degree kidnapping in connection with the 1991 sexual assaults of a 15-year-old girl and her 13-year-old sister.
A joint motion to vacate the convictions against Abbitt filed by the Forsyth County District Attorney's Office and the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence is scheduled to be heard at noon today by Judge A. Moses Massey in Forsyth Superior Court.
"I'm very pleased for him," said Nancy Wooten, Abbitt's original defense attorney. "I'm surprised. The evidence was strong against him."
The decision to file the motion to set aside the convictions came quickly after DNA evidence collected in the case was retested by the State Bureau of Investigation and LabCorp of Research Triangle Park. The genetic profile the scientists generated "conclusively eliminated the defendant as the offender."
Christine Mumma, the executive director of the innocence center, said yesterday that Abbitt's case once again shows the unreliability of eye-witness identifications.
In 75 percent of the cases in which people were exonerated by DNA evidence, misidentification was a major factor, Mumma said.
"This is another unfortunate misidentification case," she said. "Nobody's at fault."
The conviction
The attacks occurred May 2, 1991. About 5:30 a.m. that day, the sisters were getting ready for school when an intruder entered their house on Fairchild Road in eastern Winston-Salem. According to a summary of the case obtained yesterday by the Winston-Salem Journal, their mother had spent the night at a boyfriend's and the girls were left unattended.
The intruder raped both girls at knifepoint and bound their feet and hands. The attacker stayed in the house for about 1½ hours and searched for money before leaving. The girls told investigators that they believed that their attacker was a man named Joseph who had lived two doors away.
Once police confirmed that Abbitt had lived nearby, they zeroed in on him as a suspect. The girls picked him out in separate photographic lineups, and police collected physical evidence, including rape kits, bedding and clothing from the crime scene.
Before investigators could arrest Abbitt, he left the state. They found him in May 1994 in Texas, where he had been serving time for unrelated crimes.
While Abbitt was missing, the State Bureau of Investigation completed its testing of the physical evidence. Because of the limitations of DNA science at the time, a conclusive genetic profile of the rapist could not be created.
The trial started June 19, 1995. Both victims identified Abbitt as their attacker. He did not testify but said that he had been working that morning as a painter -- a fact that could not be confirmed by his employer.
A jury convicted Abbitt on all counts and Judge Todd Burke of Forsyth Superior Court sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences, plus 50 years. The N.C. Court of Appeals upheld the convictions in May 1996.
What lies ahead
After the 2004 exoneration of Darryl Hunt -- who was convicted on murder spent nearly 19 years in prison before DNA evidence proved that another man was the killer -- Abbitt contacted the innocence center, where an in-house investigation in 2008 determined that he might have a legitimate claim.
A consent order signed Nov. 5, 2008, allowed DNA testing of any remaining evidence.
A lot of it had been destroyed -- state law did not require it to be saved at the time of Abbitt's conviction -- but the Winston-Salem Police Department kept some items, including rape kits returned by the SBI in 1994.
That round of testing was inconclusive, but another series of tests conducted by LabCorp after a second consent order signed July 7 excluded Abbitt.
When those results were confirmed in the past week, the motion to vacate the convictions was prepared.
Mumma, of the innocence center, said that the district attorney's office and the SBI were cooperative throughout the investigation of the case.
"And that's the way it should be in these cases," she said.
Mumma said that once Abbitt is exonerated, he can apply for a pardon from Gov. Bev Perdue.
And he is also eligible for $700,000 compensation from the state -- $50,000 a year for every year he was wrongly imprisoned.
By Michael HewlettChina denies U.S. reporters were seized in China
BEIJING (Reuters) - China rejected on Thursday claims by two U.S. journalists that they were seized on Chinese territory before being dragged into North Korea and jailed there for illegal entry into the reclusive state.
The journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee said in an article in the Los Angeles Times (http:/link.reuters.com/cug44d) that they strayed into North Korean territory in March when visiting a frozen river that marked the border with China.
They said they rushed back to the Chinese side but North Korean guards chased them and dragged them into North Korea.
But the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu rejected their account.
"According to the understanding of the relevant (Chinese) departments, they did not find the situation as you described it," she told reporters in answer to a question about the two U.S. journalists' account.
Jiang deflected repeated questions about how the two were seized, telling them that her meaning was plain enough.
She did not give details of how China reached its conclusions, except to say that the investigation was carried out by local authorities on the border.
The pair were released in early August when former U.S. President Bill Clinton traveled to Pyongyang, where he met leader Kim Jong-il and secured their freedom.
China's general reticence about the two U.S. journalists' case reflects its close but brittle ties with North Korea.
Beijing is the closest Pyongyang has to a diplomatic ally, and it provides the North with much-needed food and oil. But China also condemned North Korea's second ever nuclear test on May 25, and backed tighter sanctions intended to press the North to return to nuclear disarmament talks.
The U.S. special envoy on the North Korean nuclear dispute, Stephen Bosworth, will be in Beijing on Thursday and Friday for talks before going to other regional capitals.
North Korea's Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong-il is also visiting China. But Bosworth has no plans to meet North Korean officials during his trip, the U.S. State Department has said.
(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Alex Richardson)
QUESTIONS FOR MICHAEL MOORE!
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is a powerful antiwar statement and needs to be supported for that reason. This coming election, we need to vote out the warhawks, both Republican and Democrat.
However, I would like to ask Michael Moore a few questions regarding his implication that Saudi Arabia was behind 9-11.
Question 1: If Saudi Arabia were behind 9-11, why didn't they leave the United States BEFORE the attack? It is an established fact that companies like Odigo received an advance warning of the 9-11 attacks before the hijacked planes had even left the ground, as reported in Ha'Aretz and the Washington Post. If the Saudis were behind 9-11 and were kind enough to warn Odigo, then why did they themselves wait until AFTER the attacks before they left, when the requirement for special permission from Bush would only call attention to their departure?
Question 2: Is Michael Moore aware that the video tape of Osama "confessing" to 9-11 has been proven a fake?
Question 3: Is Michael Moore aware that just ten days after 9-11, the FBI stated (and CNN reported) that the 9-11 perpetrators were using skillfully made fake IDs with identities stolen from Arab men?
Question 4: Is Michael Moore aware that FBI Director Robert Mueller has admitted in public that there is actually no evidence that proves the named 9-11 hijackers were actually on the aircraft?
Question 5: Calling attention to the Anthrax letters case, in which letters which appeared to to be written by Arab Muslims contained Anthrax spores identified as coming from a US Government laboratory. Is Michael Moore aware that neither of the two suspects in the case, Dr. Stephen Hatfill or Dr.Philip Zack, are Arabs, and doesn't this case prove that Arabs are being framed for terror attacks in the United States?
Michael Moore rightly condemns the US Government for the USAPATRIOT act's draconian assault opon our rights. However, one of those rights is that nobody shall be declared guilty of a crime without proof beyond a reasonable doubt. As Michael Moore professes a deep respect for American values, he should not glibly declare that someone is guilty of a crime without being able to make his case beyond that reasonable doubt.
There is a reasonable doubt.
And if Michael Moore is a reasonable man who respects American principles, he must acknowledge that.
9/11 and Anthrax: FRAMING ARABS
Let us start with the infamous Anthrax letters, which terrorized the United States in the weeks after 9-11.
CIA: "Iraq did it!"
| Britain's Guardian newspaper reported Sunday that American investigators probing anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York believe they have all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack -- and have named Iraq as the prime suspect as the source of the deadly spores. The London paper quoting CIA sources as saying that "Iraq has the technology and supplies of anthrax suitable for terrorist use." One CIA source told the paper: "They aren't making this stuff in caves in Afghanistan. This is prima facie evidence of the involvement of a state intelligence agency. Maybe Iran has the capability. But it doesn't look likely politically. That leaves Iraq." [NewsMax 10-15-01] |
Wrong!
The Anthrax letters came from inside the United States.
The letters contained a specific type of weaponized Anthrax made by a United States military lab which had been claiming for a lot of years that it wasn't doing that sort of thing any more. "What? Oh, you mean THAT Anthrax over there! Sheesh, we thought you said 'Pamflax' and shuckies but we quit making that stuff a long time ago. Honest. Really. If we're lying may God strike us... a glancing blow."
(Ahem)
The pattern of the mailings of the Anthrax letters was also suspicious. Congress got their Anthrax letters just in time for the vote on the disingenuously named USA Patriot Act (aka the anti-terror bill) which the terrorized Senators voted into law without bothering to read. The bill was signed on Oct. 26, 2001, and it opened the door for a wide array of civil rights and liberties violations. How convenient for the bill's sponsors that there was a terror attack on the Congress just when Congress was about to vote on the anti-terror bill. Eerie timing, isn't it?
So now, knowing that the Anthrax letters came from an American source, take another look at the actual letters.
Click letters for full sized image |
There are several indications of deliberate deception in these items.
A terrorist group who hates every American would not advertise the fact that the letters contained a biological weapon, they would have enclosed an innocuous letter to ensure maximum spread of the agent. Look at the letters, they are virtually shouting "seal off the area and see a doctor now!"
The addresses are written at a slight slant, oddly enough matching the look of the posters and flyers at the Post Office warning all America to "watch out for these". Dates written by Middle Easterners begin with the day first, then the month, then the year - the date should have read 11-9-01. The above letters follow the American convention for dates.
One of the letters is a photocopy of another. Most places which have copiers have typewriters or word processors, appliances whose operation is no mystery to the sort of people who go in and out of government laboratories.
In short, the entire look of the letters is a contrived fake, creating what they thought a letter from Arabs would look like, so that the phrases "Death to Israel", and "Allah is Great" (a real Muslim says either "Allah Achbar" or "God is Great") would point the finger of blame for the Anthrax at Arabs.
Except that we know for a fact that the Anthrax didn't come from the Middle East. It isn't Saddam's or Osama's, it's the very best high quality mil-spec Anthrax home grown at Fort Detrick, Dugway, and USAMRIID.
It's our Anthrax.
And that means that all the slanted writing, the extra crossings on the "T"s, the references to Allah and Israel are a carefully crafted hoax, designed to trick Americans into thinking that Arab Muslims were to blame for the Anthrax letters.
There are two suspects accused of being the source of the Anthrax letters. The first is Dr. Philip Zack, who was caught on camera entering the storage area where the Anthrax was kept without proper authorization after being fired from his job for a racially motivated attack on an Egyptian coworker. The second suspect is the more well known Dr. Stephen Hill, accused (and re-accused and re-accused) by Dr. Barbara Rosenberg although no actual evidence of his involvement has surfaced.
Regardless of whether one thinks Dr. Zack or Dr. Hill is the culprit, neither man is an Arab Muslim, which means that the above letters are not evidence of a terrorist attack. They are evidence of an intentional deception against the people of the United States; a deliberate frame-up of middle eastern Arabs for acts of terror committed inside the United States.
ARABS ARE BEING FRAMED FOR TERROR ATTACKS IN THE UNITED STATES!
Does that plot extend to 9-11 itself.
Just ten days after the events of 9-11, the FBI admitted that the IDs used by the perpetrators were high-quality fakes using identities stolen from Arab men. FBI Director Robert Mueller has admitted in public that there is actually no evidence that proves the named 9-11 hijackers were actually on the aircraft. Mueller admitted on CNN on September 20 and 27 that the FBI had no proof of the identities of the men actually on board the airplanes.
In an April 19 speech delivered to the Common wealth Club in San Francisco, Mueller said that the purported hijackers, in his words, “left no paper trial.” The FBI director stated flatly, "In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot." In describing Mueller’s evidence fiasco, Los Angeles Times reporters Erich Lichtblau and Josh Meyer, whose article was reprinted in The Washington Post on April 30, note that: Law enforcement officials say that while they have been able to reconstruct the movements of the hijackers before the attacks—all legal except for a few speeding tickets—they have found no evidence of their actual plotting.
Now think about that for a moment. What Mueller admitted is that despite all the immediate pronouncements of these Arab names and assertions that they all worked for Osama bin Laden, the FBI with all its investigatory powers did not find one single piece of evidence that actually connected these Arab men to the events of 9-11. All the FBI had were fake IDs found in suitcases left conspicuously where they could be found.
Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists' identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, "Whatever trail was left was left deliberately--for the F.B.I. to chase." The New Yorker - What Went Wrong by Seymour Hersh - 10/1/01 |
But the story gets better! AT LEAST 7 OF THE 9-11 HIJACKERS ARE STILL ALIVE!
- Revealed: the men with stolen identities
- Seven of the WTC Hijackers found alive!
- Hijack 'suspects' alive and well
- Saudi suspect left for holy war in Chechnya
Saudi Arabia asked for AND GOT, an official apology from the United States government for naming Abdul Rahman Said al-Omari as one of the hijackers. The United States barely evaded a lawsuit from Saudi Airlines for accusing one of its pilots of being a 9-11 hijacker.
The two faces of Flight 93 'hijacker' Ziad Jarrah In lining up the one eye and the mouth it is obvious that the man in the Visa has a rounder skull, a more pronounced cheek bone, and the eyebrows are different. There are a lot of other minor differences. The two men look alike, no question, but they are not the same man. |
The stark reality is that Arab men were named as the suspects for 9-11 on the basis of IDs admitted by the FBI to be fake. Aside from evidence which senior intelligence officials admit appears to have been planted, the FBI was unable to find any evidence at all that the named suspects had anything to do with 9-11.
None of the alleged Arab hijacker's names appear on any of the aircraft passenger lists:
The official autopsy results from Flight 77 failed to identify any remains from any Arabs at all!
Click above documents for full sized images. |
Do you GET IT yet?
Whoever committed 9-11 intended to blame Arabs for it.
9-11 WAS A FRAME-UP. Based on the evidence, we do not know who was on those planes. We do know that whoever was behind 9-11 went to a great deal of trouble to plant evidence to point the finger of blame at Arabs. We therefore only really know who we were supposed to blame. And given that most of the stolen identities were those of Saudis, it is clear that suspicion for 9-11 was intended to be planted mostly on Saudi Arabia, with the purpose of at least sabotaging US/Saudi relations, and at worst, triggering an outright attack by the US on Saudi Arabia.
Somewhere there is a nation that is very jealous of the US/Saudi relations. Somewhere there is a nation that, like a spoiled child who tolerates no siblings to intrude on the relationship to the spoiling parent, tries to sabotage all those who might intrude on their special relationship with the United States. Somewhere there is a nation that cannot compete with the influence that nearly a trillion dollars in investment capital buys in the United States, and resorts to dirty tricks to undermine that influence.
Whoever was behind 9-11 failed in their first attempt to frame Saudi Arabia for 9-11. Are they trying again? And if so, who is helping them?
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