The Riots In France Are "Moderating"

Arsonists struck again last night, ending the second full week of violence in France. However, the car torchings fell to 482 from 617 the previous night. Sunday night was the peak of destruction, when 1,408 cars were incinerated. Curfews and new restrictions seem to be doing the trick. . .

Right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen said French nationals of immigrant backgrounds should be stripped of their French citizenship and sent "back to their country of origin" if they committed crimes.
---o0o---

Alien Lore No. 42::::A Scholarly Book On Abductions

Since I just wrote about this the other day (well, maybe a couple of other times too), I thought I'd mention a new book. . .

ABDUCTED: HOW PEOPLE COME TO BELIEVE THEY WERE KIDNAPPED BY ALIENS By Susan A. Clancy (Harvard University Press). The book opens with: "Will Andrews is an articulate, handsome, forty-two-year-old. He's a successful chiropractor, lives in a wealthy American suburb, and has a strikingly attractive wife and twin boys, age eight. The only glitch in this picture of domestic bliss is that his children are not his wife's -- they are the product of an earlier infidelity. To complicate matters further, the biological mother is an extraterrestrial."

This hilarious opener segues into a scholarly and seemingly sincerely sympathetic study [a five place alliteration!] of people who believe they have been abducted by aliens. Clancy writes that the proper scientific response is not, "Why investigate abduction since it is not really happening?" but rather "What sort of people are reporting being abducted, and why?"

Dr. Clancy makes the salient point that there are no popular (in fact there are none period) accounts of abduction accounts before 1962. None. Roswell, and other incidents had certainly occurred, but the great watershed of abductions comes after this. 1962, if you have been following this alien lore thread, was shortly after the reported abduction of Betty and Barney Hill became news.

"As far as science knows, nobody is being abducted by aliens," Clancy stressed. One caveat on this book: Dr. Clancy is of the controversial repressed/recovered memory school of psychology. If you find that theory hokum, then this book may not be for you...
---o0o---

Twilight Of The Bush Presidency:::Will The Last Person To Leave The White House Turn Out The Lights?

The Ostroy Report and thousands of other blog and web sites are trumpeting the big Democratic win in the gubernatorial races in Jersey and Virginia. I'm not going to speculate on what this portends for the future, but it feels pretty damned good tonight.

There are plenty of other juicy morsels in the news too: Karl Rove patiently waiting to resign until it is a bit more seemly; President's Bush's pluging approval ratings, now hovering in the 35% range; the rift between the President and Vice-President; President Bush stumping in Virginia in the governor's race (too little, too late); The President cranky after skipped meals and late bedtimes, not to mention massive protests and riots wherever he appeared; Harry Reid's Rule 21 gambit; a new leak (and potential investigation) of information about secret U.S. prisons abroad for interrogation and torture; the deficit nightmare. . .I could go on.


It can't be pretty in The White House tonight.

If we sent The President to France tomorrow, the whole place would go up in flames. The good news about all of this is that The Democrats don't even need a plan, and don't need to take action. We sit on our hands and watch the administration disintegrate.

One year from now the mid-term elections occur. Just what kind of a bloodbath will that be? It feels like we have lost our President. Where do we go from here?

---o0o---

Painting: President Bush In The Twilight Of His Misbegotten Presidency

Click image to enlarge

The Riots Continue In France

The rioting continued last night in France, and has now spread across the entire country, despite Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's "plea for calm." You think?! The rioting has gone on for twelve days now.

Thr French press is painting the disturbances as one of its gravest post-war crises. Every major city faced the threat of fierce rioting that has spun out of control. At least a thousand more cars were burned last night.



Philippe Douste Blazy, the foreign minister, reminds us that France is "not a dangerous country", however, the Foreign Office in London warned travellers that trouble could erupt "almost anywhere".
---o0o---

Alien Lore No. 41 - The Greys Are Interstellar Pirates::::Alien Abductions Or Shared Cultural Delusions?

"...despite the fact that we humans are great collectors of souvenirs, not one of these persons [claiming to have been aboard a flying saucer] has brought back so much as an extraterrestrial tool or artifact, which could, once and for all, resolve the UFO mystery."
- Philip Klass

The alien abduction story that ignited the cult about alien visitation and experimentation is the Betty and Barney Hill story. The Hills claim to have been abducted by aliens on September 19, 1961.

The rise in UFO sightings is, of course, attributed to an increase in alien activity on Earth. The aliens are abducting people in larger numbers, are leaving other signs of their presence in the form of so-called crop circles, are involved in cattle mutilation, and occasionally provide revelations such as the Urantia Book to selected prophets.

According to a Gallup poll done at the end of the twentieth century, about one-third of Americans believe aliens have visited us.

In the body of alien lore, The Greys are interstellar pirates, marauding in from Zeta Reticuli. Their victims include a number of outcast (when they go public) human beings who insist they've been shanghaied by these visitors. These alleged abductees are considered crackers; bull-goose looney.

Tales of UFO contacts have become commonplace, but contact with The Greys themselves is highly suspect, and talking about it is tantamount to saying you're ready for a long rest stay in "the shop."

One of the main theories of alien abduction centers on the notion that Greys are clones, and like mules, or clones we have created, are incapable of reproducing. I guess it sounds kind of racist, but, they might be clones. The Greys all look alike!

The Greys abduct human males and females to extract sperm, ova, and other samples of our genetic sequences for reasons unknown.

The Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle (referring to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty of the location and momentum of an electron in orbit) postulates that genetic sequences break down and begin to have errors in the sequence after several generations of continuous cloning. This, they say, is what happened to The Greys.

Cloning from clones, after several generations, is equivalent to living in say, Bugtussle, Arkansas, where errors in the code accumulate due to to intermarriage within too small a genetic pool--not unlike the chinless wonders that still inhabit some of Europe's thrones. The Hapsburg's may be gone, but you can certainly see the effects of too tight a gene pool in the very visages of the horse-faced Windsors. Prince Charles' sons, to some extent, escaped that fate, having an infusion of their mother's gene sequences. But this is digressing pretty far from The Greys' genetic issues.

DNA looks pretty digital to me, but apparently, cloning is similar to to the analog duplication of an audio or video cassette from another recording (like some of those fourth generation Grateful Dead shows I used to have). As copies are copied, the overall fidelity and quality decreases. Therefore the Greys need to frequently freshen their code.

Human mutations from one generation to the next increase diversity. The mutations created don't involve the function of major systems of the body. With clones, however, the mutations are copied from one generation to another, and as the number of mutations accumulate, the chance of a fatal or highly defective mutation increases rather than decreases. In a closed system clones like this Mutation=Mutilation.

While the Greys allegedly successfully cross-breed their genetic material with that of humans, their actual knowledge of truly advanced genetic engineering appears slim and the Greys have little control over the genetic code of the hybrids. Thus, cloning eventually becomes fatal to the Greys, and has left them racially impure, since much of their population are now hybrids.

Abductees often experience memory loss and "missing time". Some of them have been able to recall their abductions from memory and others have recalled their abductions by the aid of hypnosis (Betty Hill for one). Often these encounters involve being taken aboard an alien craft and examined by the Greys and put through a variety of physical and mental procedures. Naturally, many of these experiments involve sex and reproduction. When the individuals are returned, they become, as Dark Skies termed it throwbacks. Many of the abduction victims are reported to show signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

A 1992 Roper Poll tells that one in fifty people believe they have had these experiences. If it is true then it is also possible that what is occurring with abductees may be the beginning of something much larger.

There has been some material evidence of Alien contacts. There have been markings and injuries on abductees, including scoop-marks in the flesh, incisions, burns, apparent radiation exposure, bruises, inflammation, etc. Skeptics believe these marks are self-inflicted.

Recovered implants are yet to be identified as alien in nature. They could be similar to the stones that are found in kidneys which are normal concretion, usually composed of mineral salts, occurring chiefly in the hollow organs of their passages.

No one seems to have staked out, or performed long term observation on abductees who claim to be visited by their alien raptors on a regular basis. Professor David Jacob's book The Threat says "Training a video camera and recorder on an abductee every night has produced limited results. Some abductees report a dramatic decrease in abductions. Most report that the frequency of abductions tends to decrease only a bit. So far, no abductions have been videotaped. Rather, tapes reveal people getting up and inexplicably turning off the VCR, or unusual power outages during which the camera turns off, or the camera simply goes off mysteriously." Of course, anyone with the ability to travel in space ships at the speed of light, communicate telepathically, and stealthily conquer earth, might also be able to shut off a camera without being seen.

This is all basically hot-air until we capture an alien in the act, in flagrante. . .but as fantastic as the story is, it has become an accepted part of the lore of UFOs and alien contact.
---o0o---

It Was Sixty-five Years Ago Today. . .That The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapsed Into Puget Sound, Four Months After Opening

You may have seen the movie of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing in science class. It is often used to demonstrate resonance. Even during construction, they noticed that breezes as low as four miles per hour caused oscillations, while stronger breezes often had no effect. The $6.4 million Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened in July, 1940, linking the Washington State mainland with the Olympic Peninsula. Click here to download a clip of the movie.

Locals named the bridge "Galloping Gertie." People would drive hundreds of miles to cross the bridge and experience the rolling and undulating. The disappearance and reappearance of cars in the concrete swells was a highlight.

On Thursday, November 7, 1940, the center span had been undulating three to five feet in winds of 35 to 46 miles per hour. They closed the bridge. Soon, the motion dramatically changed from a rhythmic rising and falling to a two-wave twisting motion with the road tilting 45 degrees from horizontal one way and then 45 degrees from horizontal the other.

The roadbed broke up, and finally the center span of the bridge fell into the Sound. 600 feet of the western end of the span twisted free, flipped over, and plunged into the water. At 11:09 A.M., the remaining bridge sections ripped free and thundered down into the Sound. The 1,100 foot side spans dropped 60 feet, bounced up and settled into a sag of 30 feet. The center span rested on the bottom of the Narrows.

Leonard Coatsworth, a Tacoma newspaper editor, somehow talked the guards into letting him cross after the bridge had closed. He was the last person to drive on the bridge:

"Just as I drove past the towers, the bridge began to sway violently from side to side. Before I realized it, the tilt became so violent that I lost control of the car... I jammed on the brakes and got out, only to be thrown onto my face against the curb.

"Around me I could hear concrete cracking. I started to get my dog Tubby, but was thrown again before I could reach the car. The car itself began to slide from side to side of the roadway.

"On hands and knees most of the time, I crawled 500 yards or more to the towers... My breath was coming in gasps; my knees were raw and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the concrete curb... Toward the last, I risked rising to my feet and running a few yards at a time... Safely back at the toll plaza, I saw the bridge in its final collapse and saw my car plunge into the Narrows."

---o0o---

It Was Eighty-eight Years Ago Today That The Bolsheviks Revolted In Russia. . .And Changed The World For The Better Part Of A Century

Eight-eight years ago today, leftist revolutionaries led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin launched an almost bloodless coup d'etat against Russia's pathetic Provisional Government.

The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in the Russian capital of Petrograd (a/k/a St. Petersburg) and within two days formed a new government with Lenin as its head. Bolshevik Russia, later renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was the world's first Marxist state.

John Reed wrote an excellent book, Ten Days That Shook The World, about these events:

“What side do you belong to?” I asked. “The Government?”

“No more Government,” one answered with a grin, “Slava Bogu! Glory to God!”

That was all I could get out of him…"

Vladimir Illitch Ulianov a/k/a Lennin, liked John Reed's book so much he wrote a an introduction for it:

"With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, “Ten Days that Shook the World.” Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed’s book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the universal workers’ movement. "

The world would live with the Soviets until just a few years ago, and in 2005, only a few countries of that movement remain communist, most notably China and Cuba.

Warren Beatty (coincidentally the subject of yesterday's blog posting) wrote, directed, and starred in Reds, one of the greatest American movies ever. Reds is a three and a half hour epic that focuses on John Reed and his coverage of the Russian Revolution.
---o0o---

Is Paris Burning?

Is Paris Burning? Yeah, it is. Across France, they are incinerating cars at a rate of something like 1,000 a day. Chirac has called a security meeting to discuss the riots. The rioting has spread from the the Mediterranean to the German border and into central Paris.

Chirac is under the blowtorch from opposition parties for sitting on his hands during the outbreak of violence. France was stunned by the intensity of the rioting this weekend. According to the associated Press, "Arsonists burned 1,295 vehicles nationwide, including 35 within Paris itself, a sharp increase from the 897 incinerated the night before. Police spokesman Patrick Hamon said police made 349 arrests nationwide."




The riots may be intensifying. Police have pointed out that the rioters now arrange attacks through cell phone messages, and have disseminated information on bomb making. Chirac meets tonight to plot his next move.
---o0o---

Bulworth V. The Terminator::::Beatty And Schwarzenegger Square Off In Califoria

Yesterday in San Diego, Warren Beatty and his wife Annette Bening tried to bust into a campaign appearance by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It didn't work, but they got some ink. The Hollywood couple were barred by a Schwarzenegger aide, Darrel Ng, who told the star he needed a wristband to get inside.

According to an AP story, "Beatty's appearance caused momentary confusion at the rally. Just before the governor took the stage, the hangar door was closed - literally in the face of Beatty and Bening. It was later reopened as Schwarzenegger told cheering supporters at the rally that his slate of four ballot proposals would "reform the broken system."

"It's time for some people to retire," said former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock, who hosts a popular radio talk show. "I'm trying to be gentle about it but it's clear that Warren is over the hill and desperately looking for something else to do."

Democratic activist Beatty has criticized Schwarzenegger lately, leading people to speculate that he may run for governor next year.

AP also reported that Beatty, 68, would shadow Schwarzenegger all day and urge citizens to vote against the ballot measures supported by Schwarzenegger.

"The sun is hot, the agenda is clear, the task is at hand, so let's get out and do what we have to do," Beatty told the crowd. "Let's get out the vote." On the bus Truth Squad Beatty said, "We may just have some fun."

Beatty told reporters he had no plans to run for public office, but didn't rule it out entirely. He also said he wasn't a gubernatorial candidate in next year's election.

"I don't want to run for governor," he told reporters. "I want to say what I think."

In Anaheim, Beatty told supporters outside a Schwarzenegger rally that the issues on the ballot could have been resolved by the Legislature, but the governor forced a special election because he knew there would be low voter turnout and a high chance of success.

"To my knowledge, I have not heard him debate a human, living person," Beatty said. He also said "My experience in politics goes way, way back [Jack note...I first remember him politically working very hard on the '72 McGovern campaign]. I don't drop the issues simply because I know someone socially."

I confess that I am a fan of Beatty, the director, actor, and activist. If he were to run for Governor, and ran something like a Bulworth campaign, I'd take a leave of absence and head down to California tomorrow to help.
---o0o---

Painting: Another Flag

Click painting to enlarge. . .
---o0o---

Poem: You Rehearse Dying

You Rehearse Dying

It's not "all good,"
But closer than you think.

Everything you refuse to believe
Is true

Love and mercy and goodness
Fill the air

You look and listen and feel it
But you won't believe

Blue sparks arc in the air
Leaving a trail of ozone

The man in the moon
Is psychotic

Mother Earth
Had a sex change

Every flower is finished

The rising water
Is up to your knees.
---o0o---