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Gear

Best of the Web: Why We Are Not Surprised? Air France Recorder Found, but Missing Its Memory


Comment: In THIS article we wrote that "what ever happened to The Airbus 320-303 was a big tragedy, and finding an explanation including providing a needed closure is a priority. But considering what we know about authorities' ability to either ignore or distort the available data, we are a bit skeptical if the highly probable cause will ever be seriously looked into, and especially announced. Meanwhile, time is running out for another similar disaster to occur".

And now, it appears that due to the supposedly "dissociated" memory module of the plane's flight data recorder we may never know what really happened. At least from the official point of view. Didn't we tell you not to hold your breath?


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© Unknown
The investigation into what caused the crash of an Air France jet two years ago suffered a major setback, officials said Wednesday, when search crews in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean located one of the plane's black boxes - only to discover that its memory unit was missing.

Martine Del Bono, a spokesman for France's Bureau of Accident Investigations, said the memory module of the plane's flight data recorder - which contains information on the plane's position, speed, altitude and heading when it ran into trouble - had been "dissociated" from its protective housing. "This is no doubt due to the shock of impact with the water," she said.

French investigators said the recorder was located by underwater drones late Tuesday, surrounded by debris from other parts of the airplane. The search continued Wednesday for the missing component, as well as for a second black box, which contains recordings of the conversations in the cockpit in the minutes before the crash.

Heart - Black

Best of the Web: The Darkest Secret

Mairilyn Van derbur
© People Magazine
Former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur Bravely Shares Her Difficult Past. Behind the Facade of a 'Perfect' Family, Her Father Committed An Unspeakable Crime: Incest.

"My father was a handsome, intelligent man," recalls Marilyn Van Derbur. "He served as president of the Denver Area Boy Scout Council and helped establish Denver's Cleo Wallace Village for Handicapped Children. But there was another - secret - side to him. From the time I was 5 until I was 18 and moved away to college, my father sexually violated me."

Even in an age when public confessions are commonplace, Marilyn Van Derbur's has the power to shock. The crime is repulsive almost beyond words; the people involved, as in a Greek tragedy, are larger than life. Francis S. Van Derbur, the father, was a millionaire socialite and a pillar of the Denver community; Marilyn, the youngest of his four daughters, was a golden-haired beauty, a straight-A student and an AAU swimming champ. In 1957, when she was 20, her predecessor, Marian Ann McKnight, would crown her Miss America in Atlantic City.

"We had all the trappings of a perfect family, " Marilyn says now. "Wealth, social status, a handsome father and lovely mother." So perfect was the illusion, in fact, that Marilyn completely repressed any knowledge of sexual violation by her father until she was 24, when D.D. Harvey, former youth minister at her Presbyterian church in Denver, broke down her guard. She shared her painful secret with her husband-to-be, attorney Larry Atler, now 56, and with her eldest sister, Gwen, 59, who revealed that she too had been victimized. (Sisters Nancy, 55, and Valerie, 57, have not commented.) Still, Marilyn's experience continued to haunt her, causing her emotionally rooted bouts of lethargy, physical paralysis and finally an anxiety so crushing that in 1984 her career as a motivational speaker came to a complete halt.

Since then, with the help of a number of therapists, she has found the courage to talk with her mother, Gwendolyn, about the incest and, more recently, with the world. On May 8, after two years of working with Denver's Kempe National Center for Prevention and Treatment for Child Abuse and Neglect, Marilyn told an audience of 35 the grimly inspiring story of what she calls "the greatest accomplishment of my life - surviving incest." Her address was frequently interrupted by applause. At her luxurious Denver ranch-style house, she talked to correspondent Vickie Bane about her struggle to survive.

Comment: Yet Gwendolyn Van Derbur allowed her daughters' lives to be ruined to keep her illusions of her "Adonis" and her marriage intact. That for years and years her husband was sexually abusing her daughters under the same roof and her being completely unaware of it says a lot about her wish to not see reality and the deep levels of denial into which she threw herself.


Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Psychopathic Gitmo Doctors Hid Evidence of Torture

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© John Riley /EPAUS military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

They explained away the bone fractures, didn't ask what caused the lacerations, and called the hallucinations routine. Rather than blowing the whistle, medical professionals entrusted with the care of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay turned a blind eye when there were clear indications of abuse.

That's according to a newly published report from two physicians with unprecedented access to the medical records of nine Gitmo detainees.

Writing in the online journal PLoS Medicine, Physicians for Human Rights senior medical adviser Vincent Iacopino and retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist now in private practice, found that medical personnel at Guantanamo concealed mental and physical ailments that signaled abusive treatment.

Stormtrooper

Best of the Web: The military's war on the Earth

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© Unknown
Use as many low-energy lightbulbs as you like, turn down the thermostat and drive a hybrid car, but whatever you do as an individual -- indeed, the sum of what we all do for the environment --does almost nothing to alleviate the U.S. military's destruction of the earth.

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In The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, Barry Sanders writes that like other capitalist institutions, "each military branch ... must grow larger and fatter each year; expansion is the life blood of imperialism." Further, Sanders asserts, "The military can brook limits of no kind whatsoever. ... The Pentagon conducts its business behind very thick and very closed doors. It writes its own rules and either follows them or violates them, depending on the situation."

Almost all "military numbers remain off of official reports, secret and out of sight." Sanders obtained the information he cites in the book by gleaning what he could from "arcane reports" and obscure Web sites belonging to the Department of Defense and Government Accounting Office, plus books and articles.

Bell

Best of the Web: America appears to be sleepwalking towards disaster - does no one care?

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So let me get this straight. The Standard and Poor's rating agency last week took the historic step of putting the US government's AAA credit rating on "negative watch".

There is now, according to S&P, "at least a one in three chance" that American debt will be downgraded from its top-notch status over the next two years - which would be a first in modern times.

A New York Times/CBS News opinion poll has also suggested the US public is now more economically pessimistic than at any time since President Barack Obama's first two months in office in early 2009 - when the country was still caught in the "Great Recession".

Amid renewed talk of a "jobless recovery", the number of Americans who think the economy has deteriorated spiked by 13 percentage points over the past month. Congress, meanwhile, is locked in a bitter dispute over the federal government's ability to make ends meet.

These are the stark realities facing the world's largest economy. They are set, furthermore, against Europe's sovereign debt turmoil, Japan's nuclear crisis and ongoing violence in the Middle East.

Yet despite all this bad news, this veritable litany of woe, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended last week at a three-year high. US equities are now at levels not seen since mid-2008 - before the credit crunch really took hold. On top of that, despite S&P's announcement, the price of Treasuries kept rising, as their yield - the cost the US government must pay to borrow - fell to its lowest level in a month. Has the world gone mad?

Family

Best of the Web: Insane Psychiatrists Redefining Process of Mourning - Proposal Would Label Grief a Mental Disorder

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© Unknown"This is a disaster," says Frances, a renowned U.S. psychiatrist who chaired the task force that wrote the current edition of the DSM

Human grief could soon be diagnosed as a mental disorder under a proposal critics fear could lead to mood-altering pills being pushed for "mourning."

Psychiatrists charged with revising the official "bible" of mental illness are recommending changes that would make it easier for doctors to diagnose major depression in the newly bereaved.

Instead of having to wait months, the diagnosis could be made two weeks after the loss of a loved one.

The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - an influential tome used the world over - excludes people who have recently suffered a loss from being diagnosed with a major depressive disorder unless his or her symptoms persist beyond two months. It's known as the "grief exclusion," the theory being that "normal" grief shouldn't be labelled a mental disorder.

But in what critics have called a potentially disastrous suggestion tucked among the proposed changes to the manual, "grief exclusion" would be eliminated from the DSM.

Attention

Best of the Web: Another "Anomalous" Observation Scientists Having Trouble Explaining: Pluto's Expanding Atmosphere Confounds Researchers

Recent observations of Pluto reveal that the icy orb's atmosphere has expanded dramatically since 2000, and for the first time researchers have detected carbon monoxide. The findings may be evidence of seasonal changes in climate linked to Pluto's most recent close approach to the sun, but scientists still aren't sure about how those variations unfold over the course of each 248-year orbit.

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© ESO/L. CalçadaArtist’s impression of how the surface of Pluto might look. The image shows patches of pure methane on the surface.
Pluto is the only object orbiting in the frigid realm beyond Neptune that is known to have an atmosphere. That tenuous sheath of gas was discovered in 1988 when the "dwarf planet" passed between Earth and a distant star, blocking some of the star's light. Although telescopic observations at various wavelengths since the early 1990s have since identified several substances in Pluto's surface ices - including nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide - only methane had been detected previously in its atmosphere.

Comment: Pluto's atmosphere "unexpected growth" may be a great puzzle to the scientists who are unable to let go of theories that evidently aren't working!

From the latest Connecting the Dots:
Buddha is quoted as saying, "This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning." But in our case, lightning, or electrical phenomena, is exactly the binding force that may explain many of the perceived mysteries and inconsistencies in weather, on Earth and in Space. Remember how "everything is made of stardust"? But what if everything is also highly electrical in nature? Radical thinking, you say? No, it's just one of the good hypotheses we abandoned, and now it's coming back to light after years of spinning wheels, and due to the necessity of explaining accumulating "anomalous" observations.

Donald E. Scott says, that it is becoming clear that 99% of the universe is made up not of "invisible matter", but rather, of matter in the plasma state.
Mainstream astrophysicists are continually "surprised" by new data sent back by space probes and orbiting telescopes. That ought to be a clue that something is wrong. New information always sends theoretical astrophysicists "back to the drawing board". In light of this, it is curious that they have such "cock-sure" attitudes about the infallibility of their present models. Those models seem to require major "patching up" every time a new space probe sends back data.

When confronted by observations that cast doubt on the validity of their theories, astrophysicists have circled their wagons and conjured up pseudo-scientific invisible entities such as neutron stars, weakly interacting massive particles, strange energy, and black holes. When confronted by solid evidence such as Halton Arp's photographs that contradict the Big Bang Theory, their response is to refuse him access to any major telescope in the U.S.
But if these theories that mainstream astronomers peddle are only ad-hoc then what is the real story here?

In light of the theories of J.M. McCanney, this influx of carbon monoxide into Pluto's atmosphere may hold special significance. What McCanney theorizes is that when a comet or protoplanet-like body passes by another planet, "the body with the greater 'surface gravity' will pull in the volatile elements from the atmosphere of the smaller body." Could this newly discovered carbon monoxide on Pluto's atmosphere be due to Pluto winning a "gravitational tug-a-war" with a grazing comet? If this event happened sometime within the last decade, then this implies that something wicked may indeed be headed our way.


Question

Best of the Web: Was JFK Killed Because of His Interest in Aliens? Secret Memo Shows President Demanded UFO Files 10 Days Before Death

An uncovered letter written by John F Kennedy to the head of the CIA shows that the president demanded to be shown highly confidential documents about UFOs 10 days before his assassination.

The secret memo is one of two letters written by JFK asking for information about the paranormal on November 12 1963, which have been released by the CIA for the first time.

Author William Lester said the CIA released the documents to him under the Freedom of Information Act after he made a request while researching his new book A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier.

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© unknownAssassination: Was JFK shot to stop him discovering the truth about UFOs?
The president's interest in UFOs shortly before his death is likely to fuel conspiracy theories about his assassination, according to AOL News.

Alien researchers say the latest documents, released to Mr Lester by the CIA, add weight to the suggestion that the president could have been shot to stop him discovering the truth about UFOs.

Comment: This article seems to be pointing to "disclosure fever" that has taken over in recent months. The PTB are desperate to get the public's attention onto anything but Earth changes.

That's not to say that JFK wasn't determined to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery, but the plans for his assassination were obviously well-advanced by the time the events described in this article took place.

For those who are interested in the historical events that led up to the assassination of John F Kennedy, please read the JFK series by Laura Knight-Jadczyk. The most comprehensive treatment of the forces behind the death of JFK - which could include those involved in UFO screcey - is James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters.


Megaphone

Best of the Web: US: Must See! Palin, Breitbart Booed at Tea Party Event - The People are Waking Up!

Not everyone at Saturday's tea party gathering in Madison, Wisconsin were fans of Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin.

The two popular conservatives had to talk over the boos of about 3,000 pro-labor supporters at the Capitol.

"Shame, shame, shame!" the crowd chanted, according to The Progressive.

"Tax, tax, tax the rich!" was another chant heard there.

"Go to hell!" Breitbart shouted back at the protesters.

Watch this, uploaded to YouTube April 17, 2011.

Magic Wand

Best of the Web: Narcissism and Spiritual Materialism: The New Age Legacy

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© Unknown
Recently, I went for a walk with a close friend in a nearby town. It was a beautiful day and the town was one of those places where there is an abundance of antique stores, craft shops, book stores and the like. As we walked along I spotted a sign in a window that said "Zen" and "Tai Chi." Curious what the "zen" reference involved, we entered the establishment.

Immediately we were assailed by the distinctive "odor" of New Age -- that sweet smell of candle perfume combined with cheap, saccharine Indian incense. The ubiquitous CD was playing in the background, permeating the store with a soothing rather mysterious ambient music, very "spacey." The store was filled with books, posters, crystals and assorted materials.

We spent some time looking at the books, a large assortment of topics ranging from angels to zen. Their selection of Buddhist books was fairly decent. A copy of Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism was prominently displayed. I could not help flashing on the sly little smile that would have crossed Rinpoche's face had he been there and seen his book displayed in such an establishment.

Leafing through the books and looking at the titles, I was struck by the heavy emphasis on the notion that the vast majority of them were offering people something other than reality. The theme of altered, higher, better states of consciousness occurred repeatedly. I was surprised at the number of books dedicated to "angels." The recurrent thread throughout was that of personal entitlement, getting something, reaching or attaining something. All of it seemed demeaning in a way, a tacit acknowledgment that there was something missing, that an individual could find and possess by reading the book. I could not help noticing some of the customers browsing the titles, most appeared to be dissatisfied people desperately seeking some sort of answers.