80 Years with a Blinking 3rd Eye – Free Austin Event.

The name C.B. Scott Jones is both obscure to many a casual UFO buff yet widely known among “deep seekers” of the UFOlogical and Parapsychological communities. His work for Senator Claiborne Pell investigating paranormal phenomena and his briefing of President Clinton’s Science Adviser on behalf of Laurance Rockefeller are the stuff of legend – and yet they are fact. He is the founder of the Human Potential Foundation and the Center for Applied Anomalous Phenomena. He supported the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR), served on the board and as President of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) and  served as board member for Atlantic University (a division of ARE, the Edgar Cayce organization the Association for Research and Enlightenment). He also helped with the TREAT II (Treatment and Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma) conference at Virginia Tech that brought together many in the UFO, alien abduction and paranormal research fields.

These and a lifetime of other anomalous experience make Cecil B. “Scott” Jones an extraordinary guest for the Austin Consciousness / Anomaly Community.

We hope you will join us in welcoming C.B. “Scott” Jones this coming Tuesday night:

Tuesday, November 25, 2008, 6:30 – 8:30 P.M.
Austin History Center, 810 Guadalupe St., Austin, TX.
Free and open to the public.

Read More Here:

Free Austin Lecture: C.B. Scott Jones on UFO Disclosure – Austin, November 25th

Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones.

By David Leppard.

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.

Read more here:

Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones – Times Online

Smokers banned from fostering.

LONDON (Reuters) – A council has become the first in London to rule that smokers will no longer be able to foster children.

Redbridge Council’s cabinet agreed Tuesday night to a ban on placing children with foster carers who smoke unless there are exceptional circumstances.

The local authority in northeast London said the decision, which will come into force in 2010, was made to protect children from the “damaging effects of passive and second-hand smoke.”

Other councils around the country have introduced similar measures, particularly relating to very young children, but Redbridge’s ban is thought to be the most far-reaching.

“We know this is a difficult issue because some people will feel it is an intrusion on personal freedoms,” said Councilor Michael Stark.

“But we also know that smoking increases the risk of serious illness in childhood. On balance, we have decided children in our care shouldn’t grow up breathing second-hand smoke.”

The council cited scientific evidence that showed passive smoking caused lung cancer and childhood respiratory disease.

Existing smokers will be told of the new policy and given help to quit.

The Fostering Network, a charity which represents groups involved in fostering, said it believed no child under five should be placed with carers who smoked.

However the charity, which estimates there is a shortfall of some 10,000 carers, said it did not want potentially good foster parents to be put off because they had an occasional cigarette.

Tobacco lobby groups said the move was part of an “ongoing campaign to stigmatize smokers.”

“It’s going to exclude people who could be outstanding foster parents,” said a spokesman for pro-smoking group Forest.

“It sends out an insidious message that smokers in general are unfit parents and I don’t think any politician has the right to do that.”

(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Steve Addison)

Smokers banned from fostering | Oddly Enough | Reuters

Children of the Singularity by Mac Tonnies.
A god-like intelligence wanting to understand the workings of our civilization might not be content with occasional “reconnaissance missions” or eavesdropping on our broadcasts. Perhaps nothing less than a robust, interactive simulation — with the aliens playing the roles of indigenous inhabitants — would suffice. In this case, for the simulation to bear anthropological fruit, it would behoove the aliens to think they really were Earthlings, complete with artificial memories. Only upon exiting the simulation would they remember their actual nature.

So maybe Earth as we know it is actually an alien virtual reality constructed as a sort of “Jurassic Park” in which to observe human society from the inside out. Or maybe, less glamorously, we’re all amnesiac participants in a vast nonhuman chat-room or first-person video game.

As a (presumed) Earthling, I like the idea that there’s some nobler purpose to our existence, even if we’re ultimately nothing more than a flux of electrons inside from unfathomable alien computer. Just as some of us enjoy historical simulations such as Renaissance fairs, an arbitrarily advanced civilization — either alien or human — might decide to reconstruct a time-period for educational purposes. Indeed, we are fortunate (?) to find ourselves living in such a pivotal time, possibly just years away from achieving the technological “Singularity” predicted by some futurists.

Read the entire article at About SETI dot com:

Children of the Singularity

JJ Lumsden is a UK based experimental parapsychologist who has just released his debut book “The Hidden Whisper” (See my review of The Hidden Whisper). Centring on a fictional poltergeist case in Southern Arizona, the book seeks to explain various aspects of parapsychology and where paranormal research currently stands. Lumsden gained his PhD at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (University of Edinburgh), before moving into independent research.

Could you please start by telling about how and why you became a parapsychologist?

As a youngster, I was curious as to how things ‘worked’ in the world, and naturally intrigued by paranormal phenomena. This intrigue grew stronger as I got older; if telepathy and precognition, for example, were real – there were serious implications for our world view and how the universe operated. I didn’t enter the field because of any personal paranormal experiences, or because I wanted to prove or disprove anything. I just wanted to look into things for myself.

What do the studies of parapsychology in the Koestler Parapsychology Unit include?

Things have changed now, but when I attended (2000-2003), there was a buoyant set of research programmes in place. These were conducted by full-time staff, postgraduates working on their PhD studies, and undergraduates doing final year projects. We had a full Ganzfeld suite in the unit, so (as you can imagine) there was a fair amount of research into Extra Sensory Perception. In addition, there was Psychokinesis work, investigations into ‘haunted’ settings, and DMILS (Direct Mental Interaction with Living Systems) studies.

Between 1984 and 2003, almost two dozen people gained their PhDs at the KPU, but in recent years, following the untimely death of Professor Robert Morris in 2004, the unit has been substantially downsized. Nowadays, there are only two permanent members of staff, the laboratory space has been given up, and very few students are taken on. Today, Edinburgh University seems to prefer to focus resources on other areas of psychology.

What specific areas of parapsychology did you concentrate on?

I primarily investigated emotion and its bearing on Psychokinetic functioning (the idea that your mind can influence events in your environment).

Using ‘Random Event Generators’ to generate random data-streams of ones and zeros, (akin to lots of coin tosses with perfectly balanced coins) I looked at how highly emotive states like anger, sadness and happiness impacted on the behaviour of these devices.

Later on, I began to examine psychic healing (still using micro PK protocols), and spent time in Zululand, South Africa – working with indigenous healers (izangoma).

*The REG approach is a measure of so called micro-Psychokinesis. With micro-PK, we rely on statistical analyses to see if the behaviour of a measuring system (e.g. the REG) can be accounted for by ‘chance’ (i.e. the ones and zeros are summed, and compared with mathematical probability). This is in contrast to macro-PK events like levitation, where you can see the event with the naked eye.

Read the entire interview here:

Interview with parapsychologist JJ Lumsden author of The Hidden Whisper – Parapsychology articles and blog

REUTERS

The brain knows more than we sometimes give it credit for. Those subtle feelings of foreboding may be your gray matter telling you that you’ve made a mistake.

Have Scientists Discovered Intuition?

By Gerald Traufetter

Whenever humans recognize a mistake, a mysterious wave of electricity passes through the brain. Researchers think the signal could explain addiction, error correction and even the sixth sense.

Stress is normal for the 5,500 scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They know that whenever they make a decision, even the slightest error could have serious consequences.

Memories of 1999, after all, are still fresh. Eight years ago, when the Mars Polar Lander space probe entered the atmosphere of the red planet, radio contact was suddenly lost. The satellite simply disappeared from the screens at the control center. Four hundred million dollars had vanished into silence.

The two managers in charge of the project were convinced that they would be fired without further ado. “That’s how we deal with errors in our culture,” says Markus Ullsperger. But this time, the managers were spared, Ullsperger, a brain researcher at the Cologne-based Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research, recounts. “And it was a good decision,” he says. “After all, millions had been invested in their training and education.”

From the standpoint of neuropsychology, this was an excellent management decision. Errors, Ullsperger is convinced, are in fact one of the most valuable sources of knowledge. “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery,” Irish writer James Joyce once said, anticipating a conclusion modern neuroscience has now confirmed.

Read the rest here:

Error Detection in the Gray Matter: Have Scientists Discovered Intuition? – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International

Even as he pledges to end the war in Iraq, Obama promises to increase Pentagon spending, boost the size of the Army and Marines, bolster the Special Forces, expand intelligence agencies and maintain the hundreds of US military bases that dot the globe. He supports a muscular multilateralism that includes NATO expansion, and according to the Times of London, his advisers are pushing him to ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to stay on in an Obama administration. Though he is against the idea of the United States imposing democracy abroad, Obama does propose a sweeping nation-building and democracy-promotion program, including strengthening the controversial National Endowment for Democracy and constructing a civil-military apparatus that would deploy to rescue and rebuild failed and failing states in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

…

www.thenation.com/doc/20080721/dreyfuss

Obama’s Evolving Foreign Policy

High tech gadget instantly reveals identities

Police officials are excited about a new high tech gadget that will make their jobs a little bit easier.

Through a Homeland Security grant, Los Angeles County purchased 500 mobile fingerprint scanning devices that can be used by officers in the field.

The device allows officers to identify people through their fingerprints who have previously been booked through the Los Angeles County penal system.

Roughly 200 scanners went to LAPD, and the rest were spread to agencies throughout the county. The Claremont Police Department only got one, but it has already been put to good use.

Police just picked up the machine last Thursday, and by Friday it helped them nab a potentially dangerous criminal. At a sobriety checkpoint on Indian Hill Boulevard, just south of the 10 Freeway, over 2000 vehicles were screened, resulting in 14 arrests. Two were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Among those stopped at the checkpoint was a man who told police that he did not have his driver license. His car was pulled off to the shoulder, where police asked his identity.

Entire article here:

High tech gadget instantly reveals identities

MoD Versus MoD – The Inside Story of Project Condign By Nick Pope.

Introduction

In May 2006 the Ministry of Defence published on their website documentation relating to Project Condign – a highly-classified study into UFOs undertaken by a private contractor at the behest of the Defence Intelligence Staff. The study itself has been analysed extensively by ufologists, but in this article I will explain some of the politics behind the study and show readers what the paper trail itself never can: the intrigue, the personalities and the internal politics that lie beneath the surface. This is the inside story of Project Condign, told here for the very first time.

MoD Policy

The MoD’s policy on UFOs hasn’t changed much in over fifty years, and was no different from the United States Air Force’s policy in their research effort, Project Blue Book. The remit was to examine UFO sightings to see if anything reported might be of any “defence significance”. It sounds a simple remit, but actually it isn’t, largely because of debate over what “defence significance” actually means. I’m not implying that ufologists don’t understand the term. The issue is that the MoD doesn’t understand it, or to be more accurate, that different MoD officials involved with the UFO issue have interpreted the term in very different ways.

Within the MoD, sceptics who think the subject is nonsense interpret “defence significance” in terms of foreign aircraft or UAVs making unauthorised incursions into the United Kingdom’s Air Defence Region. For the more open-minded, it relates to issues about UFOs – whatever they may be – penetrating our air defences with impunity. For believers (and there have been several) it can be interpreted as the potential for acquiring UFO technology in terms of avionics, aerodynamics and propulsion systems, whatever the true origin of UFOs. Belief will drive action, so people coming to the issue from such different angles are bound to handle the subject in different ways.

In a sense it’s a mistake to talk about MoD policy on UFOs at all. Never has a subject been handled so differently over the years, according to the whims of those involved. The reason is clear. With a few notable exceptions, there is little top-down direction on the subject, because senior career-minded personnel (Service and civilian) and ambitious Ministers don’t want to touch the issue with a bargepole, for fear their involvement will be taken as interest, and will count against them. Sceptic versus believer debates on UFOs have raged at the very heart of the Establishment, but at desk officer level too, some people thought MoD’s involvement in the subject was a waste of time and money, while others thought there were serious defence, national security and flight safety issues at stake, and that more should be done. To summarise, sceptics see “defence significance” more in terms of threats from foreign aircraft, while others see it in terms of an opportunity in terms of technology acquisition.

Entire article here:

MoD Versus MoD

Prosecutor Seeks Life Term for Italy Slay Suspect.

Prosecutor alleges Satanic rite; seeks life term for Ivorian in Perugia slaying of Briton.

By FRANCES D’EMILIO Associated Press Writer – The Associated Press / ROME.

Italian prosecutors on Saturday accused an American student of fatally stabbing her British house mate in a Satanic rite and asked a court to put an alleged African accomplice in prison for life, defense lawyers said.

The American, Amanda Knox, 21, proclaimed her innocence at the closed-door hearing in the Umbrian university town of Perugia and accused police of hitting her and calling her a liar during an interrogation, defense lawyers said.

At his lawyers’ request, a fast-track trial is being conducted for Rudy Hermann Guede, the Ivorian accused in the case. He has acknowledged being in the bedroom where Meredith Kercher’s body, stabbed in the neck and lying in a pool of blood, was found in November 2007 in the house she rented with Knox.

Fast-track trials sometimes result in lighter penalties. But prosecutors asked the court to convict Guede and mete out Italy’s stiffest punishment — life imprisonment. Italy has no death penalty.

The court deciding Guede’s fate is also hearing arguments on whether Knox and her former boyfriend, Italian student Raffaele Sollecito, should stand trial for the slaying. A ruling is expected by the end of October.

All three suspects have denied wrongdoing.

Prosecutors on Saturday “laid out a scenario like from some crime novel,” Sollecito’s lawyer, Luca Maori, said by telephone after the seven-hour hearing.

Prosecutors “alleged it was some kind of Satanic rite, with Amanda allegedly first touching Meredith with the point of a knife, then slitting her throat, while Sollecito held her by the shoulders, from behind, Guede held her by an arm” and tried to sexually penetrate her, Maori said.

One of Knox’s lawyers, Carlo della Vedova, told reporters that prosecutors had laid out “a presumed scenario” with no hard evidence to justify putting his client on trial.

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, contacted by The AP, declined to elaborate on his allegations Saturday about the slaying nor comment on his request for life imprisonment for Guede.

In the hearing, Knox “proclaimed her innocence, and got emotional when she recalled her interrogation by police in Perugia,” another member of Knox’s defense team, Luciano Ghirga, said in a telephone interview.

The lawyer denied Italian news reports that she wept, but said Knox was upset as she recounted “the pressure, the aggressiveness of the police who called her a liar.”

Maori said Knox accused police of hitting her on the head during her questioning.

Italian TV showed a brief, partial view of Knox as she addressed the court. Only her hands, busily gesticulating, could be seen. There was no audio.

Knox and Sollecito, 24, have been jailed since shortly after the slaying. The pair have given conflicting statements.

Knox Accused of ‘Satanic Rite’ Killing

ID microchips

Bilderberg and plans to microchip Americans

ID microchips | Conspiracy Corner | Strange Days | Fortean Times UK

The Schirmer Abduction

Read entire article here: A Different Perspective: The Schirmer Abduction

KOSA	RNC Troublemakers Prime Suspects in Governor’s Mansion Fire 9/11/08 KOSA, TX - Sep 11, 2008 Texas officials have video surveillance of a young man lighting a Molotov cocktail and using it to set the governor’s mansion on fire. …

molotov RNC texas governor mansion – Google News

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