Stanton Friedman, a physicist who once worked for such giants as Westinghouse and General Electric, has devoted much of his adult life to ferreting out clues in the UFO controversy.
Pitching his case before more than 600 campus audiences, Friedman concludes that alien aircraft have been around for decades and that governments have tried to keep an airtight lid on them.
He has five reasons for a massive and sustained cover-up that he labels “the cosmic Watergate.”
1. Government agents want to figure out how crashed aircraft work.
2. No one wants any enemy governments to know what has been discovered.
3. If some trusted public figures, say the queen of England and the pope, disclosed UFOs, society would be shaken up, and earthlings would begin thinking of themselves as such, rather than as citizens of individual nations.
4. The fourth problem is the fundamentalist Christian perspective that aliens are “the work of the Devil,” quoting 700 Club founder Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The two said earth contains the only intelligence life in the universe, he said.
5. A public confirmation would lead to economic chaos, and lastly, secrecy is a way of life in government.
This morning, you left the house tagged with a tracking device that the government can use to find out where you have been and where you are going.
I'm talking, of course, about your cell phone. Mobile phones communicate continuously with cellular towers in order to receive calls, sending out a signal registering its existence and identity with the provider's nearest towers. The provider stores this cell-site data, which can be triangulated to determine the customer's physical location.
While most courts considering the issue have held that police need "probable cause" to track your movements, a new decision (.pdf) last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only "relevance to an ongoing investigation" to get a historical record of your past movement (something like the Jeffy trail in The Family Circus cartoon).
Why are courts treating past and prospective tracking so differently, and should they?
The problem starts with a basic congressional assumption that real-time information in transit is more private than stored information -- a bias that is enshrined in various laws that protect wire and electronic communications. Congress has imposed stronger limits on how real-time information is accessed and used.
Presidential power is spiraling out of control, making George W. Bush the most powerful American leader since at least WWII, according to a new analysis.
But the current president, now entangled in a controversy over his recent decision to assert Executive Privilege, can’t take full credit for the power grab, the researchers argue. A number of factors have converged over the past 60 years to turn the American presidency into a position of incredible influence that has a negative effect on American politics and which won't change just because someone else takes charge of the White House.
In their new book "Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced" (W. W. Norton, 2007), Johns Hopkins University political scientists Benjamin Ginsberg and Matthew Crenson trace the history of the presidency since the middle of last century, uncovering a series of murder mystery-like motives, means and opportunities that have shaped the executive branch into the most powerful institution on the globe.
Ginsberg and Crenson are not the only researchers to spot the radical change.
“The presidency has grown in size and in power throughout the 20th century,” agreed Christopher S. Kelley, a political scientist at Miami University in Ohio.
We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.
In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.
The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.
As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.
THE NHS is spending more than £1million a month on mind-altering drugs designed to help to calm hyperactive children.
Doctors now write almost 7,500 prescriptions a week for Ritalin tablets, known as “chill pills”.
They cost about £200 a year per child and are likely to cost taxpayers a total of £12.48million this year, figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed.
The revelation comes as new figures show that Ritalin or similar drugs are being linked to at least 11 deaths in Britain.
It's not uncommon here also in the U.S School systems to have nearly 30+% and some schools said to have as high as 40+% of the kids on ritilin or some form of mind altering drug.
Schools are to get the go-ahead to fingerprint pupils as young as five, in new measures to be approved by the Government.
Ministers will issue guidance telling schools they have the right to collect biometric data and install fingerprint scanners. But the decision has angered opposition MPs who say collecting fingerprints from children will be a gift to identity thieves.
The guidance will say that personal data, including fingerprints and eyeball scans, can be collected from pupils and used to monitor attendance, so long as schools consult parents first and do not share the data with outside bodies.
Schools will be able to place fingerprint scanners at the entrances to classrooms, the school gates and even in cafeterias. Fingerprint and eyeball scans would make it easy for schools to track children during the day, and tell if they are playing truant, or even what they have eaten for lunch.
TONY Blair wants to hand the European Union radical new powers in his last act as Prime Minister, it emerged today.
The Prime Minister has welcomed controversial plans to bring back the troubled EU constitution by the back door - totally bypassing the need for public referendums on sweeping new powers for Brussels.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested ditching the name "constitution" from the title and instead calling it an "amending treatyÓ - to avoid having to seek the approval of voters.
French and Dutch voters rejected the original plan - which would hand Brussels the power to represent individual countries at the UN and change national laws - two years ago.
Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.
Although he famously coined the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you', even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.
Today, in Tony Blair's Britain - which I naively voted into power ten years ago - we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.
The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.
Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences - taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.
Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras - a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.
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