Ozone layer most fragile on record

I think this is more serious than a sunburn.

Paul Brown, environment correspondentWednesday April 27, 2005The Guardian
Fears over increase in skin cancer as scientists report that climate change continues to destroy the earth's protection
The protective ozone layer over the Arctic has thinned this winter to the lowest levels since records began, alarming scientists who believed it had begun to heal.
The increased loss of ozone allows more harmful ultraviolet light to reach the earth's surface, making children and outdoor enthusiasts such as skiers more vulnerable to skin cancer - a disease which is already dramatically increasing.
Scientists yesterday reinforced the warning that people going out in the sun this summer should protect themselves with creams and hats.
Research by Cambridge University shows that it is not increased pollution but a side effect of climate change that is making ozone depletion worse. At high altitudes, 50% of the protective layer had been destroyed.
The research has dashed hopes that the ozone layer was on the mend. Since the winter of 1999-2000, when depletion was almost as bad, scientists had believed an improvement was under way as pollution was reduced. But they now believe it could be another 50 years before the problem is solved.
What appears to have caused the further loss of ozone is the increasing number of stratospheric clouds in the winter, 15 miles above the earth. These clouds, in the middle of the ozone layer, provide a platform which makes it easier for rapid chemical reactions which destroy ozone to take place. This year, for three months from the end of November, there were more clouds for longer periods than ever previously recorded.
Cambridge University scientists said yesterday that, in late March, when ozone depletion was at its worst, Arctic air masses drifted over the UK and the rest of Europe as far south as northern Italy, giving significantly higher doses of ultraviolet radiation and sunburn risk.
full article here

Meteor sighting

There have beeen quite a few space rocks around lately.

Last Updated Apr 26 2005 05:22 PM CDTCBC News
WINNIPEG – Local stargazing experts have been fielding dozens of calls from people who spotted a massive meteor in the daytime sky over western Manitoba on Saturday.
Scott Young of the Manitoba Museum's planetarium says calls are coming in "fast and furious" from people who saw or heard the meteor, which passed over Riding Mountain before exploding high over the St. Ambroise area, north of Portage la Prairie.
"About half the people only heard it because of the sonic boom – the explosion – and people were thinking maybe it's a plane crash or something like that. They ran outside and would see this cloud of smoke that was expanding in the upper atmosphere that was visible for tens of minutes," says Young.
"The people who saw it described it as a flaming baseball or a Roman candle with all sorts of flames and trailing smoke arching across the sky and then detonating in a final explosion. Sounds like a spectacular sight."
Young says this type of thing doesn't happen very often.
"We've been trying to find other references to meteors that were bright enough to be seen in the daytime, and there's a handful throughout all recorded history in the Prairies at all. There was one in Manitoba maybe 20 years ago," he says.
"It's a very rare kind of thing. Most of the meteors that we see at night are just little grains of sand, and a really bright one might be the size of a marble. But this was probably the size of a suitcase."
Young hopes more people will contact him to say where they were and what direction they were looking when they saw the space rock hurtling through the sky, so he can pinpoint the exact details of the meteor's path.
"What we need to do is get a bunch of reports, put them all together and that will help us narrow down the search area for looking for pieces," he says. "Almost certainly this event would have produced at least one sizeable chunk of meteorite which would have made it to the ground, and we'd like to find it."
Signs Of The Times

Deer in the headlights

Searching for the truth is ugly, frightening and dangerous— and the only worthwhile choice
By John Kaminskiskylax@comcast.net

Maybe I'm already sufficiently hunkered down; safely ensconced in my leaky trailer; barricaded against the onslaughts to come; insulated from the contrived catastrophes that get worse with each new assault; prepared for the biological barrage our masters have scheduled for us to cull this feckless human herd and make their sinister existences even more profitable; as fortified as I can be against the imminent financial collapse about to engulf us all, at least for someone who earns his meager coins by hurling reckless adjectives at all these endless crimes against humanity.
After all, they haven't come for me yet. But will they come next week?
Oh, I am so prudent. I remove the magnetic antiwar sticker from my trunk in certain rural parking lots so the rednecks won't trash my car. Mmm, such courage. And sagacity. And always the darting eyes of man hazardously at large in an alien world. Who the hell are all these people, and why are practically all of them fast asleep?
Never have I heard so much talk as over the past few years about people wanting to escape from warmongering America. I get postcards from Costa Rica, cryptic e-mails from Thailand, letters about how nice it is in Denmark or Portugal or Brazil, all from people who have shucked that furtive sense of panic that still grips many people with actually functioning souls who remain uneasily in their decaying United States.
Once I wrote that we shouldn’t run off to foreign places, that the best of us should stay and fight for what is truly ours. But who can blame those of us who are intimidated by the widespread lack of support for values and actions that are truly humane. What’s the score now? About six people in the entire Congress who are apt to tell the unvarnished truth about anything? And not a single newspaper.

To not be afraid is to be stupid.

read entire article at Signs Of The Times

On a lighter note Laura Knight-Jadczyk has a very nice genealogy site. We may all be Blue Bloods!!

Bush's most radical plan yet

President Bush--or is that King George..

With a vote of hand-picked lobbyists, the president could terminate any federal agency he dislikes By OSHA GRAY DAVIDSONRolling Stone

If you've got something to hide in Washington, the best place to bury it is in the federal budget. The spending plan that President Bush submitted to Congress this year contains 2,000 pages that outline funding to safeguard the environment, protect workers from injury and death, crack down on securities fraud and ensure the safety of prescription drugs. But almost unnoticed in the budget, tucked away in a single paragraph, is a provision that could make every one of those protections a thing of the past.
The proposal, spelled out in three short sentences, would give the president the power to appoint an eight-member panel called the "Sunset Commission," which would systematically review federal programs every ten years and decide whether they should be eliminated. Any programs that are not "producing results," in the eyes of the commission, would "automatically terminate unless the Congress took action to continue them."

full article at Signs Of The Times

Why Americans refuse to believe the 911 evidence

BOTTOM LINE
Ironically, it's almost funny when the fact-based 9/11 research community gathers to discuss the events of that day. The official government version of what happened loses so much credibility in the light of the available facts, films, testimony & chronicled history that it is almost impossible not to laugh in disbelief when we start to share what we know. The evidence that has been amassed is so persuasive as to rip the official version of 9/11 to shreds. And still, there is no one but ourselves to hear us.
We go on and on and on like people obsessed because as responsible citizens of the world we have assigned ourselves the task of exposing the truth. But we also have to accept the obstacles we face. We must understand how and why people refuse to believe what we say despite all the evidence in our possession. To explain that phenomenon I think about my friend Jeffery and his book launch. He did something no one believed he could possibly have done. As a result, he carried it off.
The people who were responsible for the attacks of 9/11 did something so unbelievable that most people would not believe they did it, even if presented with conclusive evidence of their guilt. As a result, they also carried it off, and the evidence be damned.
In the end, there is always the comment by those who would discredit the research and the evidence that has been uncovered. The defenders of the official version of 9/11 inevitably ask how so many people could keep a secret. "Wouldn't someone have blown the whistle by now?" is the constant challenge by the champions of denial. How naïve they are.
At the higher levels of government the issue is no longer about secrecy, but about survival. The extent of the 9/11 crimes are so great that a very real scenario of self preservation has arisen. Exposing the truth about 9/11 would virtually mean the end of the United States of America as a viable power. If the good people in our government and in our intelligence community exposed the truth, America would never ever regain its credibility in the world. We would never again be respected or trusted. We would immediately relinquish our leadership position in the world and sink to the position of a rogue nation that had committed an unforgivable atrocity against its own people for political purposes. We would expose the huge betrayal of trust that has been developed and nurtured over our 230 year history as a nation.
The minute any ranking government official was charged with complicity in 9/11, this nation would be no more. We would never recover. The people who were involved in 9/11 know this. They know that there is more at stake than their exposure. They know that once they did what they did, they would never be held accountable. As I did with Jeffery, let me be the first to admit that these folks committed the perfect crime. Not in the sense that they would not be discovered, but in the sense they knew it would do more harm to the country to expose them than it would to play along with them.
The perpetrators of 9/11 knew they were they protected by the blind loyalty of the American people who would refuse to believe they could have been involved. But they had another ace in the hole as well. They knew that no one who cared for the nation would reveal the truth, for to seek justice would in essence bring down the nation.
Bottom line: the truth is out there, the evidence is real. But there are none so blind as those who will not see. Think about that, and weep for us all.

Comment and full article from Signs of The Times

Comment: Consider the following two quotations from this article:
"Sometimes, there is no way that people can connect the criminal with the crime: the very idea of guilt is so far out of the norm as to be unthinkable."
"We would expose the huge betrayal of trust that has been developed and nurtured over our 230 year history as a nation."
A careful and thorough re-examination of US history will clearly reveal that the idea of the complicity of elements of the US government in 9/11 is not so far out of the norm as to be unthinkable. Successive US governments have been overthrowing democratically-elected regimes and financing brutal dictators for ages. Latin American countries are a prime example.
The lie is therefore far more grand than many people are willing to admit. After all, who would believe that the last 230 years of US actions have all been leading up to what is occurring now? How could such an endeavor possibly have been organized over such an extraordinary span of time?
The disbelieving American would not only have to admit that the current government is corrupt and willing to sacrifice US citizens to further its own nefarious aims, but that it is quite possible that America as a whole was never the "greatest democracy on Earth" as we were all told.
The question remains: How can any of this be possible? Furthermore, just the what the heck can we do about it, if anything?

For some potential answers, we highly recommend Laura Knight-Jadczyk's groundbreaking and eye-opening work, The Secret History of the World - And How to Get Out Alive.

David Beckham, Russia and 911

I was surfing around in Blogsville last night and came across a very good blog named Catalytic Converter with a lot of fascinating information.It appears that it is common knowledge in some Russian circles that Russian satellites photographed a ship-launched craft that ended up impacting the Pentagon on Sept 11, 2001, and it seems that information was kept from the public. Elsewhere on this blog I have asked “what’s up with Putin?” Well, I may have a clue now.It also seems that the government is planting black propaganda in the international media, and certain groups for their own reasons are doing all they can to debunk the PENTAGON STRIKE FLASH. (if you haven't seen this yet, you ought to have a look at it)I have pasted a portion of his post below, where he also discusses the peak oil issue, Ruppert and Mark Rabinowitz .


Regular readers know that I am opposed to the Peak Oil concept, particularly when it is used to downplay the obvious crimes of the Bush Regime. In a blatant and obvious attempt at sleight of hand trickery, Ruppert (and buddyRobinowitz) is telling us to not look at the man behind the curtain, instead focus on our impending economic collapse due to peak oil.While searching for information on the email I received, I turned up this very interesting tidbit:David Beckham and Flight 77 in Paris[...] The dinner itself was "normal" in every respect, and MOST of the conversation was also "normal." It only got strange when politics - including the subject of George Bush and 9-11 - was brought up.Our friends who circulate socially among various government officials brought out some photos to show of a recent private party. Among the attendees of said party - which I reiterate, was private and not an "official function," was the brother of Vladimir Putin! There was the usual grouping of various ministers, AND one of the most powerful men in the Financial World (and here I don't mean America, I mean the GLOBAL Financial world!)What was interesting about these photos was the obvious camaraderie of these individuals depicted in the photographs. There was Vlad's brother whooping it up with what were obviously close pals in France.Hmmmm...So, of course I asked about this. What came next was, in a sense, quite shocking. It seems that it is common knowledge in these circles that Russian satellites photographed a ship-launched craft (seems to have been a drone type plane rather than a missle) that ended up impacting the Pentagon on Sept 11, 2001, and that, for various reasons this information has been withheld from the public.I was naturally startled to hear this even though I have long held the opinion that it was NOT a commercial jetliner that hit the Pentagon. I think the thing that startled me was the fact that, if Russia (and perhaps other countries with satellites?) had proof that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon, why weren't they revealing this?It was explained to me that during part of the time George Bush was "incommunicado" on September 11, 2001, he was on the phone to Putin "negotiating." That was a polite way of saying "blackmailing." Apparently, Bush, by way of MOSSAD and/or the CIA had enough goods on Vlad to keep him silent.Now THAT explains why Putin has not responded publicly to the rather obnoxious criticisms of Russia made by Bush and Condi Rice.In any event, it was explained to me further that these satellite photos HAD been revealed to Thierry Meyssan who was asked by either French or Russian intell to write his book "Pentagate" to "leak" the info that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon. His instructions were, apparently, that he had to "make the case" without recourse to official backing; he couldn't refer to the satellite photos.Well, suddenly, a LOT of things began to make sense. [...]A lot of pieces begin to fall into place if we begin to consider that the above has some validity (and I do). The above post from Perfect Infidel, goes on to discuss the author of the email sent to me, Mark Rabinowitz:Another interesting event in this timeline was the creation of a website with the domain name oilempire.us. This site lists what it calls "Bogus 9-11 Websites" saying:The three biggest stories used to alienate the public from 9/11 truth1. No Planes on 9/11 (Pentagon, North Tower WTC, "pod plane" at SouthTower, Pennsylvania)2. The Jews Did It (Israel had foreknowledge and possibly played a role,but that doesn't justify anti-semitism and Holocaust Denial)3. The Victims' Phone Calls Were Faked (a way to keep the 9/11 familiesand the skeptics from working together)why are there bogus 9/11 websites? a mix of malice and incompetence, but both make real evidence harder to findConsidering the very good case for the involvement of MOSSAD in 9-11, the very good case that the victims phone calls WERE faked, not to mention what I have discovered about satellite photos on 9-11, it sure does look like the Oil Empire Website is a "plant," so to say. So I did a whois lookup. Here's what I found: [...] [catalytic: I cut out the whois information]The site is claimed by a Mark Rabinowitz even if it was "prepared for use" as early as February of 2003. That, in itself, is rather suspicious. Seems that this was right about the time that the Meyssan book was making a splash.Robinowitz was posting on usenet as far back as 1994 in regards to an auto free DC. He's on a few dc.biking threads on usenet.Rabinowitz then did some reporting for the Institute of Global Communications based in MD.[See: http://www.igc.apc.org/]He then moved to Eugene, Oregon by the looks of things and is into permaculture. He appears to be coming from a "green" perspective. He got into the Y2K hysteria for a bit and now it appears he's onto the "Peak Oil deal" via Ruppert.Do a Ruppert- Robinowitz search on google and you'll see what I mean in regards to the Ruppert promotion.So it DOES look like Ruppert - who has been quoted as promoting the "no plane theory" but has now advised everybody to just "forget 9-11 and concentrate on Peak Oil" - has a strange bedfellow with Rabinowitz.Shades of COINTELPRO!The Pentagon Strike Video has been such a hit on the internet that even the Washington Post sat up and took notice. Something had to be done.Now just imagine what you would do, if you committed the crime of the century and had infinite resources to cover it up along with willing lackeys to sally forth and do your bidding. I am reminded of an old AC/DC song.Playing along with the Bush Regime is much worse than anything the anti-hero of that song could imagine doing. 9/11 has been used to justify mass murder and genocide. For the Worldwide Attack Matrix to continue, it is imperative that the truth not come out.And they might have overplayed their hand with blowing a hole in the side of the Pentagon. Hubris will get you every time.I have not yet seen a reasonable explanation as to how a plane could plow into the side of Pentagon in the heaviest defended air space in the world - without destroying the lawn or the lamp posts. The Regime is counting on most of us to not question the official story. For the rest of us, they send out their agents to create a lot of confusion and misdirection.Even with the message that the Bush regime allowed it to happen, justification can be made in the minds of some that we should continue and escalate the "War on Terrorism". That psyop fantasy still handily delivers the idea of the enemy out there, ready to strike at any moment, so give up your freedoms as we march off to war.Who had the resources to pull of such an attack? Who has benefited from these wars? Certainly not the people of Iraq or Afghanistan, who had nothing to do with 9/11 anyway. As the US and Israel prepare to escalate the violence, we can expect more desperate attempts to have us look away from the truth.Click here for entire post