Sunday, July 18, 2010
How to Make an HTML5 iPhone App
Click this link .... http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/html5-iphone-app/
PAUL BALLES: The Israeli-US love affair
17. Jul, 2010
Occasionally someone asks why I often carry on about Israel and America. My response: Israel continues to break all the rules of respectable national behaviour with unabashed US support.
The only way to stop that? Have truth reach enough people about American support for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and using American warmongers to advance Israel’s destructive goals.
The relationship between Israel and the US becomes more disgusting every day. That’s an opinion shared by scholars and commentators who are often ignored by the mainstream media.
According to Professor Norman Finklestein, “Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussing their countries’ foreign relations resembles two lovers discussing their future together.”
Founder and CEO of Main Street Advisors, Paul Wachter, reports that “A New York Times investigation revealed that the U.S. Treasury is helping to promote illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank by granting tax exemptions to U.S. groups that funnel money into them. These specific settlements aren’t only illegal under international law, but also under Israeli law.”
Who pays? The American taxpayer. Who suffers? America and the rest of the world.
Revealing the capacity of Zioncon propaganda to brainwash the American public, UPI reports, “One-third, 33 percent, say the seven-year war in Iraq has been a success, 36 percent say it is a failure and 31 percent are unsure.”
It’s now perfectly clear that Israel promoted the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq based on fraudulent intelligence. Despite that fact, one-third of Americans believe it has been a success.
Has the cost of more than a trillion dollars to American taxpayers been a successful part of the Iraq fiasco?
On another issue, the Obama administration makes it clear that they believe “Israel has the right to nuclear capability for deterrence purposes.”
Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid writes, “”The president [Obama] told the prime minister [Netanyahu] he recognizes that Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats, and that only Israel can determine its security needs.”
When will the US learn that Israel’s “nuclear capacity” does not deter? It incites.
There’s no doubt that America has cooperated with Israel’s nuclear development, technically and financially. Israel has thumbed its nose at all requests that they sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Equally bad is the news that ‘Citizens Action to Dismantle Nuclear Weapons Completely’ has prepared a 33-page report showing the presence of tens of tons of depleted uranium in the Gaza Strip, where its insidious radiation has long-term effects.
TBR News has reported that Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm, has offices throughout the U.S. It provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement.
TBR News says, “Investigative reports also indicate that these offices have been and are being used as bases for intelligence operations directed against the United States via the Mossad agents working in this country.”
Operatives from Israel’s spy agency Mossad operate freely in America as spies for Israel. When caught, they are quietly released and deported. Israelis have even operated freely in the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defence Department.
According to Karen Kwiatkowski, former Political-Military Affairs Officer at the Pentagon, “high clearances were granted to Israelis and Likudniks who would march through the halls of the Pentagon.”
What about the leaders? Professor Adel Safty pinpoints “the changing nature of the relationship between Netanyahu and Obama from public confrontation to cordiality, public praise, and various demonstrations of American support for Israel…”
Will the public ever tire of the sick US-Israel love affair?
source http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/07/paul-balles-the-israeli-us-love-affair/
How Facts Backfire
July 14, 2010 "Boston Globe" -- It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.
“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”
On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)
Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”
What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.
New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”
It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.
But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.
There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.
Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.
And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”
In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.
Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”
Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.
Joe Keohane is a writer in New York.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.
“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”
On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)
Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”
What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.
New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”
It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.
But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.
There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.
Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.
And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”
In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.
Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”
Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.
Joe Keohane is a writer in New York.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
900-year-old Song dynasty drains save Chinese city from deadly floods
A 900-year-old drainage system has saved a city in south China from severe floods that have left over one hundred people dead and a million homeless across the region.
The drainage system uses the natural camber of the city to quickly channel water outwards
Torrential rain and flash floods have caused £1.9 billion of damage in China. Nearly forty people were killed this week alone in a series of landslides.
But the 100,000 residents of the ancient city of Ganzhou, in Jiangxi province, are safe and dry, thanks to two drains built during the Song dynasty (960-1279), which proved far more effective than modern sewer systems at coping with the downpour.
Two long tunnels, built using bricks from the city walls, cross the city and channel floodwater into two ponds that function as reservoirs. The designer of the system, Liu Yi, named the drains "Fu" or Fortune, and "Shou" or Longevity.
"The ancient residents of Ganzhou were very advanced in hydro-technology," said Wang Ronghong, head of the city's project management and maintenance office.
"They built 12 water gates at the mouth of the drain, which help block rising water during the rainy season. When the river level is lower than the gate, the water from the drainage system flows out, but if the water outside the city rises, the gates snap shut to prevent any of it coming in," he explained.
The drainage system also uses the natural camber of the city to quickly channel water outwards. The original Song Dynasty system used hundreds of ponds across the city as reservoirs.
However, most of these have now been filled in by keen property developers, leaving only the old town's ponds intact. As a consequence, the ancient city is the only one of Ganzhou's 18 districts not to suffer from flooding.
Rust Discovered On Bank Of Russia Issued 999 Gold Coins
Here's a head scratcher: as everyone knows from elementary chemistry courses, gold is the most inert metal in the world - it does not rust, nor corrode. Yet this is precisely what Russian commercial precious metal trading company, International Reserve Payment System, discovered on thousands of (allegedly) 999 gold coins "St George" (pictured insert) issued by the Central Russian Bank. The serendipitous discovery occurred after various clients of the company had requested that their gold be stored not in a safe, but in a far more secure place: "buried under an oak tree." As the website of IRPS president German Sterligoff notes: once buried, "the coins began to oxidize under the influence of moisture." And hence the headscratcher: nowhere in history (that we know of) does 999, and even 925 gold, oxidize, rust, stain, spot or form patinas, under any conditions. Furthermore, as IRPS discovered, Sberbank of Russia released an internal memorandum ordering the purchase of the defective coins with the spotted appearance. Sterligoff concludes: "It should be noted that the weight and density of the rusty coins coincide with the characteristics of gold that would be expected after after conventional testing methods would reveal. We think that the experts will be interesting to determine the nature of this phenomenon." So just how "real" is 999 gold after all, either in Russia or anywhere else?
As a consequence of this discovery, IRPS decided to "rid itself of all stocks, bought up earlier from the Central Bank on behalf of investors. Investment coins "St. George The Conqueror", as well as other gold coins of the Bank of Russia, are now excluded from the company's operations until all circumstances in the case are determined." Additional, as disclosed in the interview below for Here and Now show on TVRainRu, the Russian Central Bank would buy back the coins at a price of 9,300 rubles, despite prevailing prices for the bullion at well over 10,000.
As Zero Hedge has pointed out previously, the Central Bank of Russia has been one of the biggest purchasers of gold in 2010, having bought gold every single month. It would be embarrassing if it were discovered that not only is the bank diluting the gold content once received with oxidizable materials, but subsequently passing it off for 999 proof precious metal.
And if this is happening in Russia, one wonder what trickery other Central Banks, with a far lower amount of gold in their vaults, resort to...
h/t JanisStrange Time To Decide To Make Vietnam War Fiasco Public! Update Added PDF!
SO...IN 1964 THEY CLASSIFIED ALL THIS TO KEEP THE PUBIC FROM OVER-REACTING TO THE FACTS?
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tonkin+gulf+incident+&a...
AND NOW THEY DECIDE TO LET IT ALL OUT...THAT THE GULF OF TONKIN INCIDENT DIDNT REALLY HAPPEN AFTER ALL...BUT EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS THAT ANYWAY SO NO BIGGIE....
ARE THEY TOTAL LUNATICS TO THINK IT DOESNT MATTER TO US?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/world/asia/15vietnam.html?_r=1&am...
ADMIRAL STOCKDALE (DOES THE NAME RING A BELL? IT SHOULD!!) HAD A FIGHTER PILOTS VIEW OF THE GULF OF TONKIN DURING THE TIME OF THE INCIDENT....HERE IS HIS EYEWITNESS REPORT!!
http://truthvault.ning.com/profiles/blogs/lbj-and-mcnamara-attacked
SENATOR CHURCH WANTED THE PUBLIC TO KNOW ABOUT THIS INFORMATION REAL TIME...HE WAS THE REAL DEAL...FROM WHAT I HAVE SEEN!!
NOW LOOK AT THIS SERIES OF PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVES...AND DECIDE WHAT JOHNSON WAS DOING...IN HIS TRANSITION FROM BEING VICE PRESIDENT TO PRESIDENT!!
THIS PREVIOUS POST NOV2008 IS REPRODUCED AS REFERENCE TO THIS ONGOING DECEPTION AND SLOW LEAK OF ACCURATE INFORMATION...
http://truthvault.ning.com/profiles/blogs/45-years-ago-tomorrow-a-s...
45 Years Ago Tomorrow! A Series of 3 Documents, An Assassination, A Coup, and A War!!
THESE THREE DIRECTIVES CHANGED THE COURSE OF HISTORY IN OUR RELATION TO VIETNAM!
ONE PARAGRAPH (PARAGRAPH 7) CHANGED ON THE PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE 273 SIGNED BY JOHNSON 4 DAYS AFTER JFK WAS MURDERED. NOTICE THE ORIGINAL PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE DRAFT DATED 21NOV1963 WAS NUMBERED 263 WHILE THE SECOND DRAFT WAS FROM THE SAME DAY WITH A DIFFERENT NUMBER AND THE SAME CONTENT......HMMMMM
THEN COMES THE FINAL DIRECTIVE 273 WITH PARAGRAPH 7 CALLING FOR INFORMATION ON INCREASED ACTION AGAINST NORTH VIETNAM INFORMATION FROM DOD, STATE ETC...THEN SIGNED BY JOHNSON!! ONE PARAGRAPH...SO MANY LIVES....AND HIS COMPANY WAS....KELLOGG BROWN AND ROOT.....AKA KBR....HMMM!!
National Security Action Memorandums 263 273
A series of 3 documents that show the Kennedy plan for withdrawal from Vietnam and how with one paragraph change in the National Security Action Memorandum we went to war for LBJ!! The question is WHY!!!
http://foreign.senate.gov/
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tonkin+gulf+incident+&a...
AND NOW THEY DECIDE TO LET IT ALL OUT...THAT THE GULF OF TONKIN INCIDENT DIDNT REALLY HAPPEN AFTER ALL...BUT EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS THAT ANYWAY SO NO BIGGIE....
ARE THEY TOTAL LUNATICS TO THINK IT DOESNT MATTER TO US?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/world/asia/15vietnam.html?_r=1&am...
ADMIRAL STOCKDALE (DOES THE NAME RING A BELL? IT SHOULD!!) HAD A FIGHTER PILOTS VIEW OF THE GULF OF TONKIN DURING THE TIME OF THE INCIDENT....HERE IS HIS EYEWITNESS REPORT!!
http://truthvault.ning.com/profiles/blogs/lbj-and-mcnamara-attacked
SENATOR CHURCH WANTED THE PUBLIC TO KNOW ABOUT THIS INFORMATION REAL TIME...HE WAS THE REAL DEAL...FROM WHAT I HAVE SEEN!!
NOW LOOK AT THIS SERIES OF PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVES...AND DECIDE WHAT JOHNSON WAS DOING...IN HIS TRANSITION FROM BEING VICE PRESIDENT TO PRESIDENT!!
THIS PREVIOUS POST NOV2008 IS REPRODUCED AS REFERENCE TO THIS ONGOING DECEPTION AND SLOW LEAK OF ACCURATE INFORMATION...
http://truthvault.ning.com/profiles/blogs/45-years-ago-tomorrow-a-s...
45 Years Ago Tomorrow! A Series of 3 Documents, An Assassination, A Coup, and A War!!
THESE THREE DIRECTIVES CHANGED THE COURSE OF HISTORY IN OUR RELATION TO VIETNAM!
ONE PARAGRAPH (PARAGRAPH 7) CHANGED ON THE PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE 273 SIGNED BY JOHNSON 4 DAYS AFTER JFK WAS MURDERED. NOTICE THE ORIGINAL PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE DRAFT DATED 21NOV1963 WAS NUMBERED 263 WHILE THE SECOND DRAFT WAS FROM THE SAME DAY WITH A DIFFERENT NUMBER AND THE SAME CONTENT......HMMMMM
THEN COMES THE FINAL DIRECTIVE 273 WITH PARAGRAPH 7 CALLING FOR INFORMATION ON INCREASED ACTION AGAINST NORTH VIETNAM INFORMATION FROM DOD, STATE ETC...THEN SIGNED BY JOHNSON!! ONE PARAGRAPH...SO MANY LIVES....AND HIS COMPANY WAS....KELLOGG BROWN AND ROOT.....AKA KBR....HMMM!!
National Security Action Memorandums 263 273
A series of 3 documents that show the Kennedy plan for withdrawal from Vietnam and how with one paragraph change in the National Security Action Memorandum we went to war for LBJ!! The question is WHY!!!
http://foreign.senate.gov/
Saturday, July 17, 2010
District of Columbia Earthquake History
District of Columbia Earthquake History
No historical earthquake has been centered within the District of Columbia.
Ground vibrations from earthquakes in such seismic regions as the St. Lawrence River Valley, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina have been felt by D.C. residents, but have caused no damage. A great earthquake which did considerable damage at Guadeloupe, West Indies, was felt in the Eastern United States, especially at Washington, D.C., in 1843.
The earliest shock that may have affected some sections of Washington occurred on April 24, 1758. Its probable center was near Annapolis, Maryland, and it was felt into Pennsylvania.
A sequence of great earthquakes occurred in the Mississippi Embayment in 1811 and 1812. They were noticed by people over an area of 2 million square miles, including the District of Columbia. District residents were "badly frightened" according to old records.
An earthquake in March 1828 was felt over a wide area, including seven Eastern States and the District of Columbia. Although no damage occurred, it was reported to be "violent" in D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. John Quincy Adams, then President of the United States, left the following account in his diary of the occurrence as he observed the shock at the White House:
March 9, 1828. There was this evening the shock of an earthquake, the first which I ever distinctly noticed at the moment when it happened. I was writing in this book, when the table began to shake under my hand and the floor under my feet. The window shutters rattled as if shaken by the wind, and there was a momentary sensation as of the heaving of a ship on the waves. It continued about two minutes, then ceased. It was about eleven at night. I immediately left writing, and went to my bedchamber, where my wife was in bed, much alarmed.
A moderate shock with probably epicenter in Virginia was felt in D.C. on April 29, 1852. It caused no damage in the District, but downed at least one chimney at Wytheville, Virginia.
A moderate shock in August 1861, probably centered in Virginia or North Carolina, was felt along the Atlantic coast from the District to South Carolina. Throughout most of the area, it was strong enough to awaken people, and to rattle doors and windows. Two shocks, at five second intervals, were noted at D.C.
A shock in September 1884 near Columbus, Ohio, was distinctly felt by District workmen on top of the then unfinished Washington Monument, 500 feet above ground. The tremor caused light effects in Ohio, Indiana, and parts of adjacent States.
A Virginia earthquake in October 1885 was felt strongly at Staunton and Lexington, and was claimed to have been felt by at least one perceptive person in Washington, D.C. The shock sent people running from buildings near its center, and shook furniture and windows.
The destructive South Carolina shock in August 1886 was probably felt by D.C. residents. At Alexandria, Virginia, there was considerable alarm, and many rushed into the streets. It killed 60 Charleston, South Carolina, citizens and caused heavy property damage. It is speculated that its magnitude was at least 7 on the Richter scale. An aftershock on October 22 was also felt north to D.C.
A tremor in May 1897, more popularly known as the Giles County (Virginia) earthquake, was felt in D.C. Near its epicenter (Pearisburg area), old brick houses and chimneys were cracked, bricks were thrown from chimney tops, and slight ground fissures were noted. This was the strongest earthquake in Virginia's history.
A moderate tremor in the Luray, Virginia, area in April 1918 reportedly broke windows in D.C. Earth sounds were heard over a very large area. Windows broke and plaster badly cracked in Shenandoah Valley.
A magnitude 7 earthquake in Canada's St. Lawrence River region shook a 2 million square mile area in February 1925. The felt area included Washington, D.C.
Another Canadian earthquake in November 1935 caused minor damage in New York and was felt south to Washington. The magnitude 6 1/4 tremor shook U.S. residents from Maine to Wisconsin.
Source:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/district/history.php
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