Name: Norman Anthony Aguero Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and
we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes: California , Hawaii , Oregon , Washington , Minnesota ,
Wisconsin , Michigan , Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this
split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of
the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas , Oklahoma and all the slave states. We
get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of
Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get
WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85 percent of
America 's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama . We get
two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their
fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian
Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single
moms. Please be aware that New California will be pro-choice and
anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at
once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have
kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose,
and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's
caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the
WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's
Quagmire.
With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of
the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and
lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's
quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech
industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods,
sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus
Stanford, Berkeley, Cal Tech and MIT.
With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88
percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs),
92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes,
90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists,
virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones
University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood
and Yosemite , thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was
actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless
we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say
that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in
9/11 and 61 percent believe they are people with higher morals then we
lefties.
Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed
they grow in Mexico .
In Mysterious America, I detailed the national wave of shadowy 1981 sightings of clowns in vans, trying to kidnap children, from Boston to Kansas City.
The encounters began in May of 1981, in Boston, Brookline, and other Massachusetts communities. By the end of the month, the local newspapers in Kansas City were publishing warnings about "Killer Clowns" said to be after children at bus stops there.
During an era before emails and the Internet, I was able to discover, via my network of correspondents, that a rash of local news articles were appearing across the USA, describing similar abduction scenarios. Although the national newspapers and wire services were totally unaware of the widespread nature of such accounts, the stories were remarkably alike. I called them the "Phantom Clowns."
Repeats of almost identical Phantom Clown encounters have been recorded since 1981. The latest one is now developing in Illinois.
The reports coming from Chicago have even been tied to a Wicker Park, which has a symbolic name linked to New York City's Son of Sam killings of 1976-1977. In letters to the media, the serial killer signed himself as "The Wicked King Wicker" and allegedly shoot a Wicker Street German shepherd.
In the October 2008 incidents, a man wearing clown make-up and a wig is using balloons in an attempt to lure children into his vehicle on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. Police issued an alert about a week after a man with a similar description was spotted on the West Side.
The near abductions were reported in the 8300 block of South Mackinaw and the 10000 block of South Normal, according to a community alert by Calumet Area detectives.
The man, who wears clown make-up and a wig, approached children with balloons attempting to lure them into his vehicle, but the children ran and called 911, the alert said.
The man, who wears a clown mask or white face paint with teardrops on the cheek, has approached children walking to and from school, police said. Witnesses told police he was seen driving a white or brown van with the windows broken out.
The attempted kidnapping/child abduction occurred on October 7, 2008, at 5:55 p.m. and October 10, 2008, at 8:55 a.m.
Police on Sunday morning, October 12th, said the sightings have not been concentrated to one specific area and there have been multiple sightings of clowns across the city, according to a Harrison Area Special Victims Unit detective.
One suspect was seen on foot in the Garfield Park neighborhood and near Beidler Elementary School, 3151 W. Walnut St., and Polaris Charter Academy, 620 N. Sawyer Avenue.
Dressed in a multi-colored clown suit with a mask or white face paint, a red nose and a teardrop on his cheek, the man escaped in a van after the failed attempts.
Police elaborated that there have been multiple sightings of clowns across the city, including one sighting in Wicker Park, but there has been no hard evidence leading to a suspect. No arrests have been made.
(Thanks to Christopher Balzano and Richard D. Hendricks for their news tips on the developing Chicago story.)
To undermine any incorrect misunderstandings regarding the rumored origins of the Phantom Clown stories, they cannot be referenced as being "caused" by Stephen King, as is sometimes written.
Stephen King's It (below) terrorized children (as a novel in 1986 and a TV movie in 1990), after I published my notes on the discovery of the "Phantom Clown" wave of 1981 (first in magazine articles and later in my 1983 first edition of Mysterious America).
smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.
The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.
The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.
“Now that we know hydrogen sulfide’s role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension,” said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.
Snyder and his colleagues compared normal mice to mice that were missing a gene for an enzyme known as CSE, long suspected as being responsible for making hydrogen sulfide. As they measured hydrogen sulfide levels taken from tissues of the CSE-deficient mice, the scientists found that the gas was depleted in the cardiovascular systems of the altered mice. By contrast, normal mice had higher levels of the gas, thereby showing that hydrogen sulfide is naturally made by mammalian tissues using CSE.
Next, the mice were subjected to higher blood pressures comparable to serious hypertension in humans. Scientists had them respond to a chemical called methacholine that relaxes normal blood vessels. The blood vessels of the CSE-lacking mice hardly relaxed, indicating that hydrogen sulfide is a huge contender for regulating blood pressure.
Hydrogen sulfide is the most recently discovered member of a family of gasotransmitters, small molecules inside our bodies with important physiological functions.
This study is the first to reveal that the CSE enzyme that triggers hydrogen sulfide is activated itself in the same way as other enzymes when they trigger their respective gasotransmitter, such as a nitric oxide-forming enzyme that also regulates blood pressure, Dr. Snyder said.
Because gasotransmitters are common in mammals all over the evolutionary tree, these findings on the importance of hydrogen sulfide are thought to have broad applications to human diseases, such as diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases.
The research was supported by grants from the U.S. Public Health Service and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as well as a Research Scientist Award.
Elephant-shaped Ganesh growth cured my ills, Queens man says
BY NICHOLAS HIRSHON
DAILY NEWS WRITER
Thursday, October 23rd 2008, 2:03 AM
Showalter for News
Sam Lal, in his Jamaica, Queens yard with unusual amaranth plant that resembles Hindu god Ganesh. Lal says arrival of the plant that's not native to area has cured his back ailments.
Showalter for News
Separated at birth? The mysterious blossom and the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh (below).
Showalter for News
To most people, the purple flower that sprouted between two concrete slabs in a Queens backyard would be just a hardy vestige of summer.
The Jamaica man is convinced the mysterious blossom is an incarnation of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh - and neighbors and friends are flocking to see it.
The nearly 4-foot-tall flower grew in June and began to resemble an elephant's head and trunk in August. Lal said that the ailments that had plagued him for months disappeared.
"This formation came to heal my illness," the 60-year-old Hindu man said of his relief from pain due to a bone spur near his spine and bulging discs in his neck.
"They say God comes in many forms. I figure this has taken the form of a plant to come into my yard to bless me," said Lal, who immigrated from Guyana three decades ago.
Experts at the Queens Botanical Garden identified the plant as a member of the amaranth family, which is native to Africa, India and southern Central America but not the U.S. Horticulturalists at the garden have never seen an amaranth take an elephant-like shape, garden spokesman Tim Heimerle said.
"For it to have that long trunk like this is not a natural thing," he said.
Lal believes the flower's position - growing through concrete, facing a garage he converted to a prayer space - is evidence of a connection to Ganesh, revered as the Remover of Obstacles.
A manager at a Manhattan uniform company, Lal hurt his back lifting a box and was in pain for 3-1/2 months - but no more.
"I felt that healing power that came with it," he said. "I've lived a religious life all my life. I feel my prayers have been answered through the deities."
Friends and neighbors have already streamed to his 90th Ave. home to see the flower, and Lal said he'd welcome pilgrimages by Hindu faithful.
He knows some people will be skeptical and insisted he did nothing to sculpt the flower.
Heimerle said that wouldn't be possible anyway, because the plant is too fragile.
"Nature is a strange thing, and it's possible it may have just done that spontaneously, but who's to say," Heimerle said.
With the fall chill in the air, Lal fears the flower may die like other amaranths, which are usually killed by winter frost.
"It's a little upsetting," said Lal, who covers the flower with plastic at night to protect it from cold. "It hurts me to know I'll lose it."
Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die
By Jesse Bering
Key Concepts
Almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body.
Even people who believe the mind ceases to exist at death show this type of psychological-continuity reasoning in studies.
Rather than being a by-product of religion or an emotional security blanket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?
And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.
The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.
According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)
Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
Curiously Immortal
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:
Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”
Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.
Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”
You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.
What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.
So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”
Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”
If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that it was a strange idea.
Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answers Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in Developmental Psychology. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to 15-year-olds what happens when you die. Consistent with the simulation-constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’ ”
A Mind-Body Disconnect
But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one should rationally predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife.
In fact, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”
Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about dead Baby Mouse’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from the two older age groups were.
But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp on biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Heck, 85 percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet most of these very young children then told us that dead Baby Mouse was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better or that he was still angry at his brother.
One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.
From an evolutionary perspective, a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes instead that understanding the cessation of “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes). According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.
In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.
The Culture Factor
On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?
In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.
In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”
And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and I teamed with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor—the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.
Free Spirits
The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense
of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.
Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.
As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.
And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "The End?"
MEDIA ALERT: Prophet Yahweh Predicts Spaceships Will Appear Oct. 31st in Support of Senator Obama
Prophet Yahweh, Seer of Yahweh, Master UFO Caller says that on October 31, 2008, superhuman black men, from other planets, will appear in their spaceships and hover over his UFO Summoning School for three days as a sign that all Americans should vote for Obama as President.
Las Vegas, NV (PRWEB) October 17, 2008 -- According to Prophet Yahweh: Some time before Nov. 11, 2008, more than likely before the presidential elections, and possibly on October 31, 2008, at approximately 12 noon, spaceships will start appearing, on my summons request, and hover over my school for all Las Vegans and media to see and film.
He goes on to say that: My UFO Summoning School is located by one of Las Vegas' housing projects in the middle of the ghetto. There I teach people the ancient art of summoning or calling down UFO's and spaceships on-command.
In anticipation of the spaceships' descent, Prophet is planning to install live, Internet broadcast streaming capability at his school. He is doing this so people, worldwide, can see him call down the spaceships on Oct. 31, 2008, exactly at 12 noon, and the spaceships that appear for the entire time they sit up in the sky.
Prophet says that he may be off a little with the dates and some details he gives, but let there be no doubt that something within the general overview of what he says is going to happen.
He claims that these space beings are the Angels of Yahweh, the Creator of all things. And, they are talking to him, on a daily basis, via a sophisticated form of telepathic, non-verbal, none-talk, brain-to-brain communication. Most of the time, when they contact him, he is sleep. At that time, he hears a voice speaking to him inside his head.
He also says that: Unless I am misinterpreting my visions, it's very likely that Yahweh's angels are going to descend down from space, in one of their spaceships, on two different occasions, in a different, single ship, each time, and hover over my school, in Las Vegas, NV for three days so the media can film them.
When asked why the spaceships will appear, Prophet boldly says that:
One of the many reasons why they will do this is to show support for Presidential candidate Barack Obama. This will be done so people will know that Obama is the best choice to lead America through the troublesome times to come.
"YAHWEH wants people to know that if Barak Obama does not become President, America will quickly be led into a war with Russia via Iran that will result in: a cut off of oil from the Persian Gulf, a great depression, stock market crash, runaway inflation, devaluation of the dollar, food shortages, riots, famine, race wars, out breaks of disease, etc."
Barack Obama, as President, would do more than any other president to keep these terrible things from happening and hold back the tremendous suffering that would come upon the American people.
YAHWEH, the Creator of all things, wants all Americans to vote for Obama, and put him in the office of the President of the United States, so he can immediately go to work against the terrible times to come.
Prophet Yahweh is quick to reveal that his ability to call down sightings is devine and that the Angels of YAHWEH taught him how to summon their UFO flying machines or their spaceships on his prayer signal.
On May 25, 2005, KTNV ABC TV-13, in Las Vegas, NV contacted Prophet Yahweh to put his summoning abilities to the test. At that time, he made broadcast history as the first person to call down real UFOs for mainstream television cameras to film. The news segment, and the UFOs that appeared, can be seen on the "UFO TV News" channel that's broadcast via YouTube.
Prophet Yahweh is available for radio and television interviews and summoning of UFO's for the media to film.
Also, he is willing to allow television stations, and other media, to set up their cameras on his UFO Summoning School's grounds for perfect line-of-sight filming of the spaceships that will appear in the sky directly above it.
Outer space smells like fried steak, hot metal and welding a motorbike, scientists said today.
Nasa has commissioned Steven Pearce, a chemist and managing director of fragrance manufacturing company Omega Ingredients, to recreate the smell of space in a laboratory.
His research will be used to help astronauts prepare for the conditions they will encounter in space.
The smell of space: Apparently a mixture of steak and hot metal... Just don't take your helmet off for dinner
Mr Pearce began working for Nasa in August and hopes to have recreated the smell of space by the end of the year.
He said: 'I did some work for an art exhibition in July, which was based entirely on smell and one of the things I created was the smell of the inside of the Mir space station.
'Nasa heard about it and contacted me to see if I could help them recreate the smell of space to help their astronauts.
'We have a few clues as to what space smells like. First of all, there were interviews with astronauts that we were given, when they had been outside and then returned to the space station and were de-suiting and taking off their helmets, they all reported quite particular odours.
Astronauts reported the distinctive smells when taking off their helmets following space-walks
'For them, what comes across is a smell of fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike,' one of them said.
'The suggestion to us has been that it's about creating realism for their training, so they train the astronauts in their suits by putting them in big water tanks to simulate the loss of gravity and so it's just about making sure the whole thing is a realistic training exercise.
'We have already produced the smell of fried steak, but hot metal is proving more difficult. We think it's a high energy vibration in the molecule and that's what we're trying to add to it now.'
Mr Pearce visited Moorside High School in Manchester today to discuss the project, as part of the Manchester Science Festival.
Over time mysteries of man have been unraveled. There is nothing that we know of that we have not figured out, or are not figuring out. We are able to clone humans, we know how the body works, and we know how the solar system works. However, there is one question that remains, and has always, throughout history, remained unanswered: What is it like to die?
We use different examples to explain the phenomenon of “dying” to our children and friends. We tell them that it is like sleeping, or maybe like forgetting (Moody 12).
When we really think about it, sleeping is only enjoyable because we wake up the next morning, and when we forget, it's not only bad things that we would forget, but also all the good things. Fact is that we don't really know a lot about death, and therefore aren't able to explain it to anyone either. It is also unlikely that we will ever be able to scientifically prove what it is like to die, since it is just like trying to prove that a certain dream is true! However there is a way that we are able to figure out a tiny glimpse about death.
There are approximately thirteen to fourteen million people in the United States, (2% of the population) and at least fifteen million more around the world that have had an experience defined as a “near-death experience” (William question 1).
A NDE is the experience of dying (when one's heart beat stops) or coming close to death (when one falls into a coma); the subject is not well known because people are afraid of death and do not like to speak about it, yet NDEs are real, and tell us about life after death as well as about life itself.
During many NDE experiences fascinating and extremely interesting elements occur, however, not all of the people that were either clinically dead or in a coma will have had the same experience, and no one knows why. This phenomenon is probably the most mysterious thing someone can experience, since it is literally the experience of dying. These people have actually had a glimpse of what happens after we die. The fascinating thing about this is that the elements of parts of these people's experiences are similar and correspond (Moody 21).
There is no one experience that has an element that is not found twice, however, there are no two experiences that are exactly the same, but every experience is unique (Moody 23).
The astonishing thing about this is that the people that recount these experiences are not always from the same race, nor social or material background, but are often from totally different cultures. Someone coming from the United States, someone from Africa, and someone from India, will recount the same basic elements that are usually found in each of their NDEs. However, the explanation of various people depends upon their cultural and ethnic background, their vocabulary, and the way they were confronted with death (The Near-Death Experience paragraph 3).
NDE experiences are most probably proof that life after death exists. There are eleven major similarities among NDEs, and even though people often experience similar elements, they will never experience all of them, but on average six to seven (Moody 24).
Many people describe extremely pleasant feelings and sensations during the early stages of their NDEs. They describe feelings such as peace, extreme comfort, ease, relaxation, and solitude. There is also always an extreme contrast described between the pain and burdens before one's death and after.
A man who had died, after suffering from severe wounds in the Vietnam War, by expressed his feelings by describing a great attitude of relief. He experienced no pain and felt extremely good, despite being in a war zone (Moody 30).
The fact that this man described his relief as an attitude is notable since a woman named Kati Ebrahimzadeh, who I interviewed, also made it very clear that the whole thing is more a feeling and sensation than something you can describe in words (Ebrahimzadeh).
Usually when people are asked to recount their experience, they realize that there are no words to describe ‘such things'.
During the interview with Kati Ebrahimzadeh, I could feel how she suffered immensely from the ineffability of this experience, and how she so longed to explain it to me in full measures but couldn't. She described it to me as if trying to explain to someone how you feel when you are in love, and I realized that it was impossible. People seem to have the feeling that they just don't make such words, and adjectives!
One woman put this very clearly when she said, “It is like having to describe a fourth dimension, but since we only have words for three dimensions I can't really give you a complete picture. That's as close as I can get to it.” (Moody 26).
Numerous people have told of hearing or watching their doctors or other spectators, declare or pronounce them dead. Often they feel like they are another person in the room somewhere, watching the whole thing like a spectator, but being unable to feel anything associated with their own body.
Mrs. Ebrahimzadeh was about twenty-three years old when she fell asleep while driving. Her car went out of control, and flew through the air spinning around so hard, that she was thrown out about fifteen meters high, before she fell to the ground. She was picked up by an ambulance and brought to the hospital. She told me that she will never forget the appearance of the doctors that worked on her. He had a pigment illness, and he had white spots all over (Ebrahimzadeh).
The dark tunnel is another element that is often recalled from a NDE. This dark tunnel is described in many ways, such as being like a cave, a well, an enclosure, a funnel, a vacuum, a void, a sewer, a valley, or a cylinder (Moody 30-31).
A man re-tells a significant story about this dark tunnel, because before this experience, which took place in his childhood, when he got involved in a bicycle accident, he had a fear of the dark.
“I had the feeling that I was moving through a deep, very dark valley. The darkness was so deep and impenetrable that I could see absolutely nothing, but this was the most wonderful, worry-free experience you can imagine.” After this experience he wasn't afraid of the dark anymore (Moody 31).
The existence of light is probably the most common and dominant element in the accounts of NDEs. It is this, which has the most profound effect upon the individual being (Moody 58).
Typically, at its first appearance, the light is dim, but it gets brighter quite rapidly until it reaches an unearthly brilliance. Most people make the specific point that the light, even though of great ‘unearthly' brilliance, does not in any way at all hurt their eyes, or dazzle them. The light is also usually described as being either clear or white (Moody 63).
The love and warmth which ‘emanate' from this light are beyond words.
“It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love,” states a woman (Moody 63).
People also make it clear that they feel surrounded by the light and accepted in the presence of this being. Mrs. Ebrahimzadeh, who is now thirty years old, describes herself in an ocean of light, and her being a part of it (Ebrahimzadeh).
Astonishingly, many people describe the light as having a personality. People recount it having a sense of humor, and it being fun to be around. A little girl who died in a swimming pool, and who then told about her experience simply said, “You'll see, heaven is fun” (Morse 1).
Maybe this light is just much, much more than just a light!
When one dies, reviews ones are commonly recounted. The review is usually in the form of a ‘movie' which will show some irrelevant and some significant things about one's life. Watching the review is just like being part of it, standing there in the scene as a spectator.
A woman declares that the light plays a great role in this element, since it is often the light that will ask, “what do you have to show me?” and this being of light does not itself need any information, as if it knows all about you (Moody 66).
It may be as if encountering with one's creator.
Meeting others during a NDE is not uncommon, and often has great effect upon the person's being afterwards. The people they meet are either family members or very close friends. These people, in form of spiritual beings, are usually there to either protect or guide the person. It is not always common for the person to be seen, but usually they are more ‘felt'.
One woman who met her family when she died states, “… I felt that they had come to protect or guide me. It was almost as if I was coming home, and they were there to greet or welcome me. All this time, I had the feeling of everything light and beautiful. It was a beautiful and glorious moment” (Moody 55).
Accounts have also been reported where the dead person is guided around by his/her pet, that he/she used to have. The people one encounters with are usually people that played an important role in ones life. The people that were seen could often be described as soul mates. So this shows how only people that we have a special bond with in this life, will we encounter in the next.
In many cases, various unusual sensations are reported to occur at or near death; sometimes they are extremely unpleasant. Often it is a really loud, uncomfortable buzzing noise that rings, or other times it is the experience of intense unpleasant feelings. “I had the feeling of being lonesome… I was completely alone, by myself… I really felt a fit of depression then” (Moody 54).
This could be a form of what many religions call ‘hell'. These experiences seem to be much rarer, but maybe they are just so uncommon because people feel uncomfortable talking about them since they are hell-like and may indicate that the person has lived a bad life.
Often when people die and they ‘leave' their body, they either entirely lose their feelings for their bodies or develop extreme feelings of attachment for it.
“I knew it was my body but I had no feelings for it.” Or, “I felt real bad when I looked at my body and saw how badly it was messed up” (Moody 40).
This could depend on many things. One theory I have is that a person with too strong feelings was too attached to material things, and wasn't spiritually advanced enough to separate from his/her body, and to proceed onwards.
When someone experiences or comes close to death, they often recount having seen their physical bodies, but as if they were another person in the room.
“I watched them reviving me from up there… I saw them below beating on my chest and rubbing my arms and legs, I thought, ‘Why are they going through so much trouble? I'm just fine now,'” stated a women that had been suffering from heart disease and been hospitalized for one year (Moody 36).
“I saw my brother, sitting by me in the ambulance, he was so worried. I wished I could have told him that I was much happier where I was then, but I couldn't” (Ebrahimzadeh).
This proves that there is another form of being apart from just the physical body which could be a soul, or some kind of spiritual being.
The ‘spiritual body' possesses many qualities that we also experience in the physical realm, or maybe just associate with, but there are many, many more qualities than what we are able to do in this physical world. The spiritual body seems to have no limitations, and one feels much more capable with it.
Several weeks before one man died, his good friend Bob was murdered.
“I could see him in my mind and it felt like he was there, but it was strange… he was there but he didn't leave a physical body. It was a clear body, and I could sense every part of it- arms, legs and so on- but I wasn't seeing it physically… I didn't really need to see him with my eyes. I didn't really have eyes, anyway” (Moody 56).
The NDE is the experience of death; however, I believe that it is much more an ‘introduction' to death than the actual life after death. I conclude this from one other element that is common in a lot of NDEs: the border or limit. This border or limit is usually described as either “a door, a fence across a field, some kind of mist, or simply a line” (Moody 73).
For this element I will use more than only one direct quote, since I think that this is probably the most prominent element since it is what separates life and life after death. One astonishing account says:
“In the presence of the light, the thoughts or words came into my mind: ‘Do you want to die?' And I replied that I didn't know since I knew nothing about death. Then the white light said, ‘Come over this line and you will learn.'… As I crossed the line, the most wonderful feelings came over me - feelings of peace, tranquility, a vanishing of all worries” (Moody 75).
This experience shows how life and life after death are separated, and how the experiences people have, are just an inter-phase to life after death.
Here, another man talks about his journey and describes it:
"I looked up and saw a beautiful, polished door, with no knob. Around the edges of the door I could see a really brilliant light, with rays just streaming like everybody was so happy in there, and reeling around, moving around. I looked up and said, ‘Lord, here I am. If you want me, take me.' Boy, he shot me back so fast it felt like I almost lost my breath.” (Moody 77).
These two testimonies clearly show the boundary of life after death and the NDE phase.
In order that any of these people could recount their experiences, they had to come back. The coming back from the ‘world' they were in is often extremely hard and unbearable. It is just like leaving someone you loved.
In the beginning, these people have trouble living in this world after having seen portions of the next. However, the longing to stay in the ‘other' world was also interrupted by the loved ones they might have left behind, especially if they were mothers and had young infants at home (Moody 80).
Since this experience has such great magnitude, it has a great psychological effect on people.
People who had a NDE have come to “love and accept others without the usual attachments and conditions society expects” (Lanning Sec.3 A.).
Their desire seems to be that of universal love (Sec.3 A.).
This is probably since the people themselves have experienced this universal love, and now they want to spread it. The inability to recognize and realize limits, boundaries, and rules is another psychological aftereffect that is common (Sec. 3 B.).
People even feel that wearing watches is uncomfortable, because they feel an extent of timelessness (Sec. 3 C.).
Fears that one might have had before the experience might have vanished, while confusing and misunderstood things become clear (Sec. 4 E.).
Mrs. Ebrahimzadeh, for example, had many questions about death since her father died early in her life. After this experience all her worries and concerns were settled (Ebrahimzadeh).
Also, many people will come to regard themselves as immortal souls currently residing in a mortal form, where the immortal soul travels on to the next life, and the body is left behind (Sec. 3 F.).
Even though these experiences are a great gift and bounty, they can also be confusing and trigger uncomfortable feelings. The most common negative effect of a NDE is being disappointed and angry for having to leave from wherever they were, and great depression at the contrast of life they live here compared to the life they had experienced. They realized how unworthy this material life is, in contrast to what the life they experienced was like. They often think that their experiences are unreal and don't like to talk about them, but think that it is just a fantasy or a dream that they had (Lanning Sec. 5).
The impact of the experience on one's life is the concluding element that draws the ‘lesson' learned from this experience into use. This element is defined and very powerful. When someone who undergoes such an experience comes back to life, his/her attitude towards life entirely changes. They find that they can find less pleasure in material activities, such as shopping, but more and more with things that are related to the soul (Ebrahimzadeh).
The people that had NDEs also get a totally new picture of what death is like! Most of the time they enjoy it so much that they are not even afraid of dying - not a single bit.
“If it were to decide who was to die, between me and my daughter,” stated Kati Ebrahimzadeh, “I would choose me … but with a selfish conscious” (Ebrahimzadeh).
Having looked at all of these elements, it is doubtless that life after death does exist. So if the answer is so close, we should take it, instead of having to live a life of not knowing. Often people are afraid of death and do not talk about it. We never like talking about the end, but if we take this as an answer, then we won't have to be afraid of an end, but instead, we can look forward to a new start.
There is no reason to believe that these experiences are all dreams or fantasies, since it would be very unlikely for more than fifteen million people to have the same dream. The only reason we doubt these things would be because we haven't yet ourselves experienced them. If only 2% of the Earth's population would dream, would they still be believable, or only to those who dream them. It is the same thing with NDEs. They surely give us more factual insight about life after death, than we ever had.
References
Ebrahemzadeh, Kati. “Seconds of absolute peace?” Interview. By Asis Khabirpour. 7 May 2001.
Moody, A. Raymond. Life After Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
“The Near-Death Experience.” Near Death Experiences. IANDS 27 Mar. 2000. The International Association for Near-Death Studies. 4 June 2001 http://www.iands.org/nde.html
Williams, Kevin. “Questions People Ask about the NDE.” 2001. Questions People Ask about the NDE. 4 June 2001 http://www.iands.org/faq.html
Bibliography
Ebrahemzadeh, Kati. “Seconds of absolute peace?” Interview. By Asis Khabirpour. 7 May 2001.
Moody, A. Raymond.Life After Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
M. Spurgin, Nora “Insights Into the Afterlife 30 Questions and Answers on What to Expect.” Near-Death Experiences. 34 sections. 4 June 2001 http://www.ettl.co.at/uc/misc/insights.html
“The Near-Death Experience.” Near Death Experiences. IANDS 27 Mar. 2000. The International Association for Near-Death Studies. 4 June 2001 http://www.iands.org/nde.html
Williams, Kevin. “Ideas for a paper on the subject of near-death experiences.” 1 Feb. 2001. Ideas for a paper. 6 May, 2001 http://www.near-death.com/paper.html [page no longer exists]
Williams, Kevin. “Secrets of near-death experiences: Kevin Williams' research conclusions.” 2001. Secrets of near-death experiences. 6 May 2001 http://www.near-death.com/research.html [page no longer exists]
Williams, Kevin. “Questions People Ask about the NDE.” 2001. Questions People Ask about the NDE. 3 May 4 June 2001 http://www.iands.org/faq.html
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona
Losses are great, and continuous, says the report
The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.
It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.
The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.
The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change.
It has been discussed during many sessions here at the World Conservation Congress.
Some conservationists see it as a new way of persuading policymakers to fund nature protection rather than allowing the decline in ecosystems and species, highlighted in the release on Monday of the Red List of Threatened Species, to continue.
Capital losses
Speaking to BBC News on the fringes of the congress, study leader Pavan Sukhdev emphasised that the cost of natural decline dwarfs losses on the financial markets.
"It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year," he told BBC News.
Teeb will... show the risks we run by not valuing [nature] adequately."
Andrew Mitchell
Global Canopy Programme
"So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."
The review that Mr Sukhdev leads, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), was initiated by Germany under its recent EU presidency, with the European Commission providing funding.
The first phase concluded in May when the team released its finding that forest decline could be costing about 7% of global GDP. The second phase will expand the scope to other natural systems.
Stern message
Key to understanding his conclusions is that as forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free.
So the human economy either has to provide them instead, perhaps through building reservoirs, building facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, or farming foods that were once naturally available.
Or we have to do without them; either way, there is a financial cost.
The Teeb calculations show that the cost falls disproportionately on the poor, because a greater part of their livelihood depends directly on the forest, especially in tropical regions.
The greatest cost to western nations would initially come through losing a natural absorber of the most important greenhouse gas.
Just as the Stern Review brought the economics of climate change into the political arena and helped politicians see the consequences of their policy choices, many in the conservation community believe the Teeb review will lay open the economic consequences of halting or not halting the slide in biodiversity.
"The numbers in the Stern Review enabled politicians to wake up to reality," said Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an organisation concerned with directing financial resources into forest preservation.
"Teeb will do the same for the value of nature, and show the risks we run by not valuing it adequately."
A number of nations, businesses and global organisations are beginning to direct funds into forest conservation, and there are signs of a trade in natural ecosystems developing, analogous to the carbon trade, although it is clearly very early days.
Some have ethical concerns over the valuing of nature purely in terms of the services it provides humanity; but the counter-argument is that decades of trying to halt biodiversity decline by arguing for the intrinsic worth of nature have not worked, so something different must be tried.
Whether Mr Sukhdev's arguments will find political traction in an era of financial constraint is an open question, even though many of the governments that would presumably be called on to fund forest protection are the ones directly or indirectly paying for the review.
But, he said, governments and businesses are getting the point.
"Times have changed. Almost three years ago, even two years ago, their eyes would glaze over.
"Today, when I say this, they listen. In fact I get questions asked - so how do you calculate this, how can we monetize it, what can we do about it, why don't you speak with so and so politician or such and such business."
The aim is to complete the Teeb review by the middle of 2010, the date by which governments are committed under the Convention of Biological Diversity to have begun slowing the rate of biodiversity loss.
In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake."
We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.
Analysis
Since we first wrote about Obama's birth certificate on June 16, speculation on his citizenship has continued apace. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.
Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?
Doocy: What do you mean they have a "false birth certificate" on their Web site?
Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.
Doocy: Well, couldn't it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?
Corsi: No, it's a -- there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.
Corsi isn't the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:
The birth certificate doesn't have a raised seal.
It isn't signed.
No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
In the zoomed-in view, there's a strange halo around the letters.
The certificate number is blacked out.
The date bleeding through from the back seems to say "2007," but the document wasn't released until 2008.
The document is a "certification of birth," not a "certificate of birth."
Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it's stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.
The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller
Alvin T. Onaka's signature stamp
The raised seal
Blowup of text
You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven't been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.
The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: "your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records." The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.
The document is a "certification of birth," also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.
The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.
We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that's when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and "all the records we could get our hands on" according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn't release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama's citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: "[We] couldn't get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we've found out it's pretty irrelevant for the outside world." The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 - 010641.
Blowup of certificate number
Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama's information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn't have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible "scenario" without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.
We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn't meet the Constitution's requirement that the president be a "natural-born citizen."
We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: "It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over."
In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:
Obama's birth announcement
The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama "likely" was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.
Of course, it's distantly possible that Obama's grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.
Update, August 26: We received responses to some of our questions from the Hawaii Department of Health. They couldn't tell us anything about their security paper, but they did answer another frequently-raised question: why is Obama's father's race listed as "African"? Kurt Tsue at the DOH told us that father's race and mother's race are supplied by the parents, and that "we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be." We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama, Sr., would have thought of and reported himself as "African." It's certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be.
When we asked about the security borders, which look different from some other examples of Hawaii certifications of live birth, Kurt said "The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed. A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised." He also confirmed that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for "all reasonable purposes."
What look like tennis balls gone evil are actually the tiny suckers on the tentacles of squid. The miniscule suction cups, with diameters of around 400 µm (400 millionths of a meter, or 0.04 centimeters), can be seen in detail in this false-color microscope image. The suckers are lined with fangs (in white) that help grab onto the squid's prey.
The Loligo pealei, or long-finned squid, have eight arms and two tentacles, all of which are coated with the monstrous suckers. This image, taken by Jessica D. Schiffman and Caroline L. Schauer of Drexel University, won an honorable mention for photography in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation.
Run! No, Run Away!
2008 Darwin Award Nominee
Confirmed True by Darwin
(July 16, 2008, Italy) Ivece Plattner, 68, was queued at a traffic light in his Porsche Cayenne sportscar. Before one reaches the light, there is a railroad crossing. As you might imagine, given Murphy's law, a train was coming.
The man did not let the queue progress forward far enough before he crossed the railroad. The safety bars came down, leaving the Porsche trapped on the rails. It took the driver awhile to realize he was stuck, according to witnesses. Finally, he jumped from the car and started to run -- toward the oncoming train, waving his arms in an attempt to save his car!
The attempt was successful. The car received less damage than its owner. He was pushed hard enough to land 30 meters away, and attempts to revive him were unsuccessful.
Report: Fluorescent bulbs may do more harm than good
06:00 AM PDT on Saturday, October 4, 2008
By KEELEY CHALMERS, kgw.com
Bulb report
If you use compact fluorescent bulbs to light your house, a new study shows you may actually be doing more harm to the environment than good.
That’s a surprising find considering CFLS’s are touted as a greener alternative to traditional lighting.
They are much more energy efficient and last a lot longer than incandescent bulbs. But unlike traditional bulbs CFL's contain toxic mercury.
The study by a team of researchers from Yale University shows that in states that rely on cleaner power like Oregon, the fluorescent lights may actually do more harm than good.
The study says fluorescent bulbs actually release more mercury than Oregon coal plants. But Kendall Youngblood with Energy Trust of Oregon says the study is simply not accurate.
“Oregon is not necessarily as clean powered of a state as the general media thinks it is. We use a lot of coal to produce our electricity here in Oregon so there is still mercury emission associated with the electricity that we use,” explained Youngblood.
In fact PGE says 26 percent of the energy it produces comes from coal. What energy experts will agree on is that this study shows the importance of *recycling the bulbs.
The mercury is released when the bulbs are put into landfills.
By recycling them, there would be no pollution.
CFL's can be recycled at all of Metro's household hazardous waste sites and at all Home Depots. Manufactureres say they are working on ways to reduce the mercury in CFL's.
Pictured: The amazing natural wonders captured by the world's best photographers
By Claire Bates
Last updated at 6:01 PM on 30th September 2008
A black-striped cleaner fish tentatively grooms a bullethead parrotfish ten times its size off the Red Sea.
In another stunning photograph a mass of swirling starlings create the illusion of a giant bird in flight.
Birds are also featured in a mind-boggling portrait of a heaving sandpiper congregation, resting before their great migration.
These extraordinary images are among those submitted by finalists for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 competition.
The annual event is an international showcase for the best photography featuring natural subjects. The finalists will exhibited at the Natural History Museum from the end of October.
Fish off the coast of Eilat, Israel, get a quick clean from smaller fish that pick off parasites
The fish photograph was taken by Noam Kortler from Israel and was highly commended in the category 'The Underwater World'.
He had captured life at Moses Rock, near Eilat, where most big reef fish make a point of turning for a daily grooming session from cleaner fish, who pick off parasites.
The cleaner fish advertise their identity and their services with their black-striped livery and a special jerky swim.
The stunning sandpiper image was made by Arthur Morris who caught on camera more than 6,000 sandpipers in the Alaskan fishing town of Cordova.
He flew to the town in early May when he knew flocks were likely to be at their peak, but was disappointed when told he had missed the peak of migration by just one week.
A congregation of sandpipers in Canada. Birds are among the most popular subjects in the competition
Mr Morris was told there may be a few birds on a sandbar near town but when he arrived he found a snoozing congregation of western sandpipers, and got his magical snap.
His image was highly commended in the category Animal Behaviour: Birds, which is one of the most popular categories.
Starlings gather in the sky above Lake Morgan in Turkey to form the shape of a giant bird
Another stunning image from this field was taken by Baris Koca at Lake Mogan, near Ankara in Turkey. The photographer had tried to capture the amazing shape-shifting of the flocks of starlings coming in to roost for days. But none of his attempts did the spectacle justice.
Then one weekend when he was standing on the frozen lake with the sun behind him, the thousand-strong flocks of starlings wheeled in over the horizon to merge into a dense super-flock, which for a second formed the shape of a giant bird in flight, and the moment was captured.
Another category called 'In Praise of Plants' showcases the beauty and importance of flowering and non-flowering plants.
Darran Leal saw this close-up image he took in Queensland as a symbol of renewal in an area hit by a cyclone
Darran Leal captured his beautiful image after he explored the rainforest in the far north of Queensland in Australia, a year after Cyclone Larry had decimated vast areas in 2006.
He came across a small tree backlit by the sun and sparkling with rain among the ruins.
'A jewel-like drop, with its perfect reflection of leaves inside, struck me as a great symbol of the regrowth of the rainforest, but I had to move fast,' Darran said.
'The challenge was to capture the moment in spite of gusts of wind and the great magnification required.'
The spectacular images were picked from 32,351 photographs from 82 countries, which were entered into the popular open contest.
The competition is run by the NHM and BBC Wildlife Magazine and winners from 17 categories, including three for photographers under 18, will be announced at the exhibition launch.
e goes on to say that: My UFO Summoning School is located by one of Las Vegas' housing projects in the middle of the ghetto. There I teach people the ancient art of summoning or calling down UFO's and spaceships on-command. 
Over time mysteries of man have been unraveled. There is nothing that we know of that we have not figured out, or are not figuring out. We are able to clone humans, we know how the body works, and we know how the solar system works. However, there is one question that remains, and has always, throughout history, remained unanswered: What is it like to die? 
Ebrahemzadeh, Kati. “Seconds of absolute peace?” Interview. By Asis Khabirpour. 7 May 2001.
Teeb will... show the risks we run by not valuing [nature] adequately." 
Run! No, Run Away!
