November 4th - 5th

Venue: Renaissance Hollywood Hotel, 1755 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, CA

Theme : "Not of This World - An In-Depth Journey Through The Abduction Phenomenon"

Invited Speakers: Richard Dolan, Nick Redfern, Linda Moulton-Howe, David Sereda, Farah Yurdozu, Dr. Lynne Kitei, Greg Bishop, Terry Hansen, Grant Cameron, Dr. Richard Sauder

Also Presenting...

"Master of Ceremonies" Cheryl Jones-Former CNN news anchor
"UFOLOGY 101" with International Ufologist Rob Simone
"Startling New Evidence on the Billy Meier Case" with UFO Researcher Michael Horn
Crop Circle Answers" with Ed and Kris Sherwood
Preston Denett with "UFO's Over California"
And...
"Bernard Mendez with UFO Q&A - "Understanding Title 14 The Extraterrestrial Exposure Law"
Keynote by Steven Bassett
"50 Years in Ufology" with James W. Moseley

Our Mission: To present top researchers in the field of ufology who will share their ongoing and current research.

We Believe: The UFO phenomena has world wide implications.

Our Goal: To bring this information to you in a professional and educational way while advancing awareness of the phenomena.

Whether you are a UFO buff, just curious or wondering what those strange lights in the sky were, this conference will have something for everyone.

NUFOC has been presenting fresh, objective information to the public for over 40 years and is proud to be the longest running UFO conference in America.

Web: www.nufoc.org

8:54:39 PM    

MUFON LA Presents Greg Bishop
Venue: St. Innocent Orthodox Church (Inside Herman's Hall), 5657 Lindley Ave. Tarzana, CA 91356

Speaker: Greg Bishop

Topic: PROJECT BETA: How the U.S. Government Created An Alien Invasion

In the early 1980s, electrical physicist Paul Bennewitz thought he had stumbled onto evidence of an alien invasion. Unbeknownst to him, he had been fed disinformation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in a counterintelligence operation. The plan backfired, however, because the incident led to renewed calls for disclosure of government UFO secrecy. In the process, Bennewitz had actually stumbled onto strange lights and signals that were part of the vast black budget projects that were going on at Kirtland-projects sponsored by the Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. The Bennewitz episode would provide the government cover-story for those wild UFO conspiracy tales for the next 20 years or more, and serve as a warning to researchers not to confuse the authority of the messenger with the truth of the message.

Thanks to the efforts of author/researcher Greg Bishop, the truth behind the Bennewitz story and its implications to current ufology is finally being revealed. Bishop's lecture will feature personal notes, correspondence, and some of the verified disinformation that was fed to Bennewitz that lead to his eventual breakdown and institutionalization. His presentation will also include an in-depth analysis of the disinformation campaign by an agent specifically assigned to draw Bennewitz into an ever-increasing web of paranoia and intrigue, much of which still runs through the UFO rumor mill today. Other new information and accounts will deal with the famous Cash-Landrum close encounter case and its relationship to the Bennewitz case.

Greg Bishop is the author of the book Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth. Greg says he has been fascinated with the no-man's land between the extremes of wide-eyed belief and closed-minded debunkery ever since 1991, when he co-founded a magazine called The Excluded Middle, a journal of UFOs, conspiracy research, psychedelia and new science (now online at www.excludedmiddle.com ). Wake Up Down There!, a collection of articles from the magazine, was published in 2000. His third and newest book, Weird California, was published by Sterling Publishers and Barnes & Noble in March of 2006. Greg's radio show, Radio Misterioso, can be heard on Sundays from 8-10 PM PST at www.killradio.org. Interviews with fringe-topic researchers and weird music are the usual fare.

Time: 8:00pm

Admission: $9.00 for members, $15.00 for non-members

Web: www.mufonla.com

8:39:08 PM    

Tune-In and Call-In To The Blue Rose Report This Wednesday at 8pm CST

The Blue Rose Report.

Go here to listen:

<www.BlogTalkRadio.com>

After 8pm CST you'll see a LISTEN NOW Icon next to the show on the Host Channel page. Requires Windows Media Player to listen. Once the show has started you can call in by dialing ... (347) 996-3510.

Tune in! Let's talk! UFOs? ESP? RV? ParaPolitics? Synchronicity? Civil Liberties? Cryptozoology? Dreams? What do you want to talk about?

10:07:15 PM    

Sept. 11 plaintiffs wait for answers, resolution - boston.com

Now, nearly five years after the historic disaster, roughly 60 lawsuits are still grinding their way through court. And the families pushing ahead with litigation, including numerous New Englanders, are mired in a massive legal case that has become a complicated behemoth for the federal judge overseeing it.
..
The case pits those who consider the day's events an unpreventable tragedy against others who believe government and aviation officials ignored clear warnings that such an assault was possible. That lapse, in their view, led to the deaths of beloved friends and relatives, and they now want accountability and answers.

For some litigants, their decision to sue was met by public disapproval from skeptics who questioned their motives and dismissed their quest for justice as futile. But in interviews with the Globe, many family members said they are committed to pursuing the case until government, airline, and security officials are held responsible for their roles in the attacks. And they are aware that litigation is a gamble that could produce neither answers nor money, they said.
..
Still, many of the firm's clients say they sued not for financial gain, but because they believe litigation will fully reveal whether government and aviation officials could have anticipated and prevented the events of Sept. 11. Some also sued because life insurance and other "offsets" would have reduced their payments from the compensation fund, which awarded $2 million in death cases and $400,000 in injury cases, on average.

Thanks Revolution Corporation for the heads up!

read more

1:39:09 AM    

Update: Tom Maxwell, author of this song sez, "Ken Mosher and myself are former Squirrel Nut Zippers. The band no longer exists, and its name is owned by a candy company that might not look kindly on political content. We did the song as Maxwell/Mosher and not as the Zips."

1:33:21 AM    

Brazil is sick and tired of companies stealing their plant names, and they're not going to take it any more! Brazil has a wonderful rep for not just rolling over and accepting the increasingly draconian intellectual property treaties being foisted on developing nations by the first world. Their latest move comes in response to a growing trend. It goes like this:

1) Brazilians spend millennia eating some great tasting Brazilian plant that's also great for your health.
2) Foreign company learns about the plant.
3) Foreign company trademarks the plant name and creates a company to sell the plant (turned into a health drink, or shampoo, or anti-aging cream, or brain-topic pills, or God knows what else).
4) Some poor guy in Brazil opens up a local business cooking up the plant for the locals. (He uses the plant name in his company's name). He starts a little export business selling his product.
5) He gets the pants sued off of him because some company 5,000 miles away trademarked the plant name. Never mind the fact that folks in Brazil have been calling the plant by that name forever.
6) Repeat over and over.

Brazil has now come up with a wonderfully pragmatic way to break this cycle. They've compiled a list (there's a pdf here) of more than 5,000 Portuguese language names of plants, seeds, roots, etc. They've shipped the list off to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and trademark offices around the world. The idea is that if all of these organizations and countries know a term is already in use they will be less likely to grant some company a trademark on it. Clever!

Reader comment: Jason Bandlow says,

Brazil is not the only country trying to defend the knowledge its people have had for centuries. This article from the BBC last December describes India doing the same thing for medicine. Link

1:31:39 AM    

Here's a 2000 Washington Post article about the painting, called "Dangers of the Mail," painted in 1937 by Frank Albert Menchau, Jr.

Check out the big mural on the fifth floor, a friend told Myrna Mooney one day last August, shortly after Mooney and fellow employees of the Environmental Protection Agency moved into new headquarters in the Federal Triangle complex. A Native American from the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, Mooney was "flabbergasted" by what she saw:

Splashed across a 13-foot-wide canvas in the Ariel Rios Building was a graphic scene of Indians attacking and scalping white people. Called "Dangers of the Mail," the 1930s-era painting included half a dozen naked white women being assaulted by Indians and an Indian stabbing a white man in the back.

"It portrays Indians as cowardly. It's an insult," said Mooney. "When you come from the reservation, these kinds of images make you physically ill."

A handful of government murals that depict Indian people in an unfavorable light will undergo a review to determine whether they are appropriate to display, a federal agency announced on Wednesday.

After years of complaints by Indian employees and their advocates, the General Services Administration initiated the review of six murals at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. The GSA plans to take input from the public under the National Historic Preservation Act because the artwork is more than 70 years old.

By noemail@noemail.org (Mark Frauenfelder). [Boing Boing]

1:29:20 AM    

Ballot backstop
Houston Chronicle editorial

In in an electronic age haunted by computer viruses and hackers, many people cling to paper security blankets, whether they come in the form of ATM receipts, itemized credit card charges or monthly bank statements.

Yet in the essential civic exercise of choosing our representatives, Texans who use electronic machines are forced to trust a fallible computer program with no way to check the accuracy of the results. Such a system amounts to faith-based voting.

With the knowledge that no computer is tamperproof and a growing list of malfunctions by direct recording electronic machines (DREs) during elections, 27 states have enacted laws requiring voting systems that produce paper ballots that voters can verify (VVPBs). After individuals make their selections and cast their vote electronically, a hard copy of the ballot is printed showing the selections. The voter views the results to make sure their vote is accurate, and then drops the ballot into a sealed box, providing a record independent of the electronic machine that can later be audited.

Texas, unfortunately, has no such requirement, and Harris County, which uses the Hart Intercivic machine and also conducts municipal elections, has no plans to purchase the company's optional printer system to create a paper trail. County Democratic Party officials are clamoring for such a system, as well as increased security and voting machine tests for accuracy.

"If folks can hack the Pentagon," Harris County Democratic Chairman Gerry Birnberg said, "they can certainly hack a machine in Harris County."

County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, a Republican, says such concerns are unfounded. "There's this kind of cavalier attitude on these folks' part that all you've got to do is just bolt on a printer and there it is," said Kaufman, who estimates that it would cost up to $8 million to buy equipment and reprogram the system with the capability to print ballots in three languages. "We're just not at a point here where we're able to do it if we wanted to, which we don't."

Kaufman also contends that the current system has the capability to produce a paper copy of results after the election is concluded. However, whatever would be printed out would simply reflect what the system recorded and would not detect computer malfunctions, erased votes or fraudulent manipulation of programming.

In a report this year on electronic voting machines entitled "Malfunction and Malfeasance," researchers for the nonpartisan group Common Cause concluded that DRE machines "are vulnerable to malfunction and also to tampering in which a computer-savvy hacker with minimal access to the machine could introduce malicious code to the DRE software and change the results of an election."

The report cites an incident during this spring's Texas primary in which voting machines in Tarrant County, which uses the same system as Harris, recorded 100,000 votes that were never cast. Hart Intercivic officials took responsibility for the programming mistake that caused the overcount but discounted the incident because votes for all candidates were boosted equally.

Last year the Commission on Federal Election Reform led by former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, and former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, issued election reform recommendations that included a call for a federal law requiring all electronic voting systems to be equipped with paper printouts. Legislation died in the last session of Congress but has been reintroduced by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J. A similar bill, the Voter Integrity and Verification Act, has been introduced in the Senate by Republican John Ensign of Nevada.

Since Texas has yet to approve paper trails that voters can verify, it is not Kaufman's responsibility to make that decision. The Texas Legislature and Congress should pass legislation mandating the installation of paper audits on all electronic voting machines.

They are more expensive and might create more work for election officials, but VVPBs are necessary to boost voter confidence in system and give candidates recourse to recounts.

1:21:39 AM    

'The information commissioner, who is responsible for enforcing the Data Protection Act, is investigating the arrangement, which has seen details of computerised transactions from around the world passed to the CIA in an attempt to spy on the financiers of jihadist terrorism.' (Guardian article). [Disinformation]

1:13:20 AM    

'The clients, three young Palestinian-Americans from Texas, had been arrested while driving their van from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart buying cheap cellphones. The county prosecutor had filed state terrorism charges against the trio, believing they were jihadis plotting to blow up the Mackinac Bridge. Though Ayad knew that the terrorism case was already collapsing, and expected his clients would soon be in the clear, he still wanted to get them out of jail on bond in the interim.' (Salon Magazine article). [Disinformation]

1:08:45 AM    

Was 9/11 more than just an attack? Could the Bush administration have had anything to gain from the attack? Two prominent European politicians express their serious doubts about the official version of the 9/11 story.

Former UK Government Minister Michael Meacher: "The war on terror is bogus"

Former German Secretary Of Defense Andreas Von Bulow: "The official story is so inadequate and far fetched that there must be a different one". (Information Clearing House video stream).

media-underground.net

11:53:16 PM    

The largest nest (entomologist Dr. Charles) Ray has inspected this year filled the interior of a weathered 1955 Chevrolet parked in a rural Elmore County barn. That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said. Four satellite nests around it have gotten into the eaves of the barn, about 300 yards from his home.

"I'm kind of afraid for the grandkids. I had to sneak down there at dark and get my tractor out of the barn," Coker said. "It's been a disruption..."

In previous years, a yellow jacket nest was no larger than a basketball, Ray said. It would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. These gigantic nests may have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens.

11:45:45 PM    

Olbermann Exposes Nexus Of Politics And Terror
Details ten clear examples where Bush admin. alerts preceded by damaging revelations

During a prime time segment on his MSNBC show last night, anchor Keith Olbermann presented ten clear examples where the Bush administration had issued terror alerts days after politically damaging revelations and questioned the credibility of each of the alleged plots' authenticity in light of astounding evidence to the contrary.

Read entire article HERE or view the VIDEO below.

8:45:02 AM