Best of the Web:


Meteor

Best of the Web: Is it Possible that a meteor brought down Air France 447?


Discover Magazine
Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:58 UTC
Back in 1996, after the initially very mysterious explosion and crash of Flight 800 from JFK to Rome, there were numerous eyewitness accounts of a "streak in the sky" just before the crash. This led to the "missile theory" of the crash, which was eventually attributed to the explosion of the center fuel tank by the NTSB. But, also at the time, it was suggested that a meteor of sufficient size could have struck the plane, bringing it down.

Could a meteor have brought down Air France 447? Today we are starting to see reports that there actually may have been a meteor:
However, both pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon sent a written report on the bright flash they said they saw to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority, the airline told CNN.

"Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds," the captain wrote.

Comment: Let's see what the physics and astronomy professors said exactly in their letter to the NYT in 1996:
In T.W.A. 800 Crash, Don't Discount Meteor
Published: Thursday, September 19, 1996

To the Editor:

In a Sept. 17 news article on conspiracy theories in the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, you report that ''more than once, senior crash investigators have tried to end the speculation by ranking the possibility of friendly fire at about the same level of the idea that a meteorite destroyed the jet.'' In fact, we believe this comparison must be based on a miscalculation of the probability that a meteorite is the cause of the crash.

The odds of a meteor's striking T.W.A. Flight 800 or any other single airline flight are indeed small. However, the relevant calculation is not the likelihood of any particular aircraft being hit, but the probability that one commercial airliner over the last 30 years of high-volume air travel would be struck by an incoming meteor with sufficient energy to cripple the plane or cause an explosion.

Approximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strike Earth. There are 50,000 commercial airline takeoffs a day worldwide. Adopting an average flight time of two hours, this translates to more than 3,500 planes in the air; these cover approximately two-billionths of Earth's surface.

Multiplying this by the number of meteors per day and the length of the era of modern air travel leads to a 1-in-10 chance that a commercial flight would have been knocked from the sky by meteoric impact.

No such calculation of the probability of a rare event can be taken as proof of cause. But it is essential to pose the problem correctly in order to obtain an estimate that can be used in determining whether or not the hypothesis is worth considering. We believe the meteor impact theory deserves more considered attention.

CHARLES HAILEY

DAVID HELFAND

New York, Sept. 17, 1996

The writers are professors of, respectively, physics and astronomy at Columbia University.


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Syringe

Best of the Web: Survival of Billy Best proves Cancer Doctors wrong

Mike Adams
NaturalNews.com
Tue, 26 May 2009 04:44 UTC
Chemotherapy
© Mike Adams, NaturalNews.comChemotherapy
If there's one thing that cancer doctors and health authorities can't stand, it's being wrong. And in the case of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser, the cancer doctors insist that unless the boy submits to chemotherapy as a "treatment" for Hodgkin's Lymphoma, he will almost certainly die.

But there's a problem with that claim. The problem is a man named Billy Best, now 31 years old, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma at the age of 16. Like Daniel Hauser, Billy Best was told he would die if he didn't submit to chemotherapy. But with remarkable courage and wisdom about his own body's healing capabilities, Billy Best fled the health authorities, ran away from his family and began eating roots, superfoods and medicinal herbs. He regularly drank an alternative cancer liquid formula (made from plants) and before long his cancer was cured.

Billy, of course, is alive and well today... fifteen years after his cancer doctors said he should be dead.
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Attention

Best of the Web: Doctors Warn: Avoid Genetically Modified Food

Jeffrey M. Smith
ResponsibleTechnology.org
Tue, 19 May 2009 02:06 UTC
monsanto
© Unknown
On May 19th, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) called on "Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community, and the public to avoid GM (genetically modified) foods when possible and provide educational materials concerning GM foods and health risks."[1] They called for a moratorium on GM foods, long-term independent studies, and labeling. AAEM's position paper stated, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. They conclude, "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation," as defined by recognized scientific criteria. "The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies."

More and more doctors are already prescribing GM-free diets. Dr. Amy Dean, a Michigan internal medicine specialist, and board member of AAEM says, "I strongly recommend patients eat strictly non-genetically modified foods." Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says "I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it."
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Syringe

Best of the Web: Swine Flu Swindle: Mass Vaccination


Journal of Whole Food and Nutritional HEalth
Wed, 13 May 2009 17:31 UTC
infant vaccination
© UnknownInfants can get up to 20 Vaccinations in their first 6 months.
More talk and planning for mass flu vaccinations, not one but perhaps three this year, is getting under my skin. The vaccines are neither safe or effective, studies show. Kids now get up to 48 shots - 20 or so in the first 6 months of life. In the last century, the major vax programs were introduced near the natural end of the epidemics.

A survey of 274 studies conducted by researchers from the internationally prestigious Cochrane Vaccine Field in Italy, and published in the British Medical Journal on October 28, 2006 stated that flu vaccines have not been shown to be effective or safe. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the National Vaccine Information Center is calling on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to stop recommending annual flu immunization.

The latest crystal-ball decree (May 8, 2009) out of the World Health Organization and the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) is that 2 billion humans (one-third of Earth's population) could be infected this fall and winter with the current swine flu virus or its genetic derivatives. It is now being considered to rush and make 600 million doses of a vaccine. The federal government may be asking Americans to receive not one flu vaccine, but three. That's quite an overreaction, given two somewhat related deaths in the U.S. and a few hundred folks running a fever with some diarrhea.
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Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: Obama's Animal Farm - Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice

James Petras
James Petras Web Site
Sun, 17 May 2009 09:37 UTC
"The Deltas are psychos...You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force...", a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980's. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal's rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.
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Syringe

Best of the Web: WHO Investigates Possibility Swine Flu May Be Human "Error"

Jason Gale and Simeon Bennett
Bloomberg News
Wed, 13 May 2009 10:16 UTC
The World Health Organization is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error.

Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint.

"One of the simplest explanations is that it's a laboratory escape," Gibbs said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. "But there are lots of others."

The World Health Organization received the study last weekend and is reviewing it, Keiji Fukuda, the agency's assistant director-general of health security and environment, said in an interview May 11. Gibbs, who has studied germ evolution for four decades, is one of the first scientists to analyze the genetic makeup of the virus that was identified three weeks ago in Mexico and threatens to touch off the first flu pandemic since 1968.

A virus that resulted from lab experimentation or vaccine production may indicate a greater need for security, Fukuda said. By pinpointing the source of the virus, scientists also may better understand the microbe's potential for spreading and causing illness, Gibbs said.

Comment: Given that:

Pharmaceutical companies stand to make billions of dollars from vaccines against new strains of the flu virus

and

in order to make the vaccines pharmaceutical companies combine strains of the virus

what are the chances that any such release was "accidental"?

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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Rebranding the Long War

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online
Fri, 08 May 2009 19:08 UTC
pakistani_obama_protest
© Tribune photo by Candice C. Cusic, August 7, 2007

Obama does his Bush impression

The "lasting commitment" Washington war-time summit/photo-op between United States President Barack Obama and the AfPak twins, "Af" President Hamid Karzai and "Pak" President Asif Ali Zardari was far from being an urgent meeting to discuss ways to prevent the end of civilization as we know it. It has been all about the meticulous rebranding of the Pentagon's "Long War".

In Obama's own words, the "lasting commitment" is above all to "defeat al-Qaeda". As an afterthought, the president added, "But also to support the democratically elected, sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan." To have George W Bush's man in Kabul and former premier Benazir Bhutto's widow defined as "sovereign", one would be excused for believing Bush is still in the White House.
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Igloo

Best of the Web: It's snowing all over the world


EU Referendum
Wed, 06 May 2009 21:18 UTC
Snow
© unknown

Ice in the Arctic is often twice as thick as expected, report surprised scientists who returned last week from a major scientific expedition. The scientists - a 20-member contingent from Canada, the U.S., Germany, and Italy - spent one month exploring the North Pole as well as never-before measured regions of the Arctic.

Among their findings: Rather than finding newly formed ice to be two metres thick, "we measured ice thickness up to four metres," stated a spokesperson for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research of the Helmholtz Association, Germany's largest scientific organisation.

Then we get this from the United States: "Sorry, Al Gore, but Public Cares About the Economy, Not Global Warming".

Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport says he sees no evidence that Al Gore's campaign against global warming is winning. "It's just not caught on," says Newport. "They have failed." Or, more bluntly: "Any measure that we look at shows Al Gore's losing at the moment. The public is just not that concerned." What the public is worried about: the economy.

He adds: "As Al Gore I think would say, the greatest challenge facing humanity . . . has failed to show up in our data."
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UFO

Best of the Web: Famed UFO historian: humanity may be targeted by predatory Reptilian extraterrestrial species

Alfred Lambremont Webre
Seattle Exopolitics Examiner
Fri, 08 May 2009 13:28 UTC
high strangeness
© Red Pill Press
Richard M. Dolan, a preeminent UFO historian whose book series on UFOs and the National Security State is characterized by rigorous empirical and historical research, has affirmed the possible validity of the hypothesis advanced by researcher Laura Knight-Jadczyk that a non-physical predatory Reptilian extraterrestrial species may be targeting humanity.

Writing in a preface to Knight-Jadczyk's new book High Strangeness: Hyperdimensions and the Process of Alien Abductions, Dolan states:
"It's a rare book that has the ability to change one's mind about the world. Rarest of all are those gems with the ability to change one's life. High Strangeness is such a book....

High Strangeness is a book that lays out provocatively and passionately the hidden slavery of the human race." Dolan goes on to describe the field theory set out in that book, "The human race is being manipulated physically and spiritually by a race of beings that we know as the Reptilians.... They can manipulate time with ease, they control the "Greys" and they live in what is known as the Fourth Density.

Dolan writes of this field theory, "The Reptilians are able to manipulate and control us in just the way we can control cattle. But simply because the Reptilians live in a state of consciousness that is higher than ours does not mean they are ethical. They are, in fact, what we would refer to as pretty evil. They exist in what is called a Service to Self (STS) state of being."

Comment: We notice that our author refers to the ideas presented by Laura Knight-Jadczyk as an "hypothesis" - which is correct. But then we see it magically becomes "field theory". Certainly "field theory" may be a loose way of expressing hyperdimensional realities when addressing non-scientists and thus will attract the attention of more readers than just "hypothesis" (doesn't matter how well grounded a hypothesis), however it is just this sort of lack of precision that can lead to erroneous impressions. The point should be not in attracting the readers but in portraying the truth as precisely as possible. This "field theoretical" distortion repeats all through the article.

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Info

Best of the Web: Much Ado About the Flu: Is the Media Frenzy Justified?

Bart Laws
Alternet
Mon, 04 May 2009 00:58 UTC
Scientists use various models to evaluate risk, but researchers have long understood that ordinary people don't rely on mathematical probability to assess the dangers posed by some phenomenon - they use other kinds of rules.

For example, we're much more accepting of risks that we assume voluntarily. That's one reason why people who smoke a pack a day will go to a zoning board meeting to fight against a diesel bus yard.

People are also more accepting of risk when they have a sense of control. Driving a car is much more dangerous than riding in an airplane, but as an airplane passenger, you feel helpless. Another reason people worry more about airplane crashes than motor vehicle accidents is because the events are more noteworthy - a whole lot of people killed all at once, instead of one or two here and there, even though the latter adds up to a lot more people over time.
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