There are four major sunspot cluster today and Sunspot 1476 is decaying, but it still has a 'beta-gamma-delta' magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class solar flares. On May 11th, a coronal mass ejection from sunspot cluster 1476 raced away from the sun traveling ~1000 km/s. The fast-moving cloud will deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field on May 14th around 14:30 UT, according to a forecast track prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab. Mars is also in the line of fire.
One in seven thinks end of world is coming: poll
NEW YORK (Reuters) - - Nearly 15 percent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and 10 percent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012, according to a new poll.
The end of the Mayan calendar, which spans about 5,125 years, on December 21, 2012 has sparked interpretations and suggestions that it marks the end of the world.
"Whether they think it will come to an end through the hands of God, or a natural disaster or a political event, whatever the reason, one in seven thinks the end of the world is coming," said Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos Global Public Affairs which conducted the poll for Reuters.
"Perhaps it is because of the media attention coming from one interpretation of the Mayan prophecy that states the world 'ends' in our calendar year 2012," Gottfried said, adding that some Mayan scholars have disputed the interpretation.
Responses to the international poll of 16,262 people in more than 20 countries varied widely with only six percent of French residents believing in an impending Armageddon in their lifetime, compared to 22 percent in Turkey and the United States and slightly less in South Africa and Argentina.
But only seven percent in Belgium and eight percent in Great Britain feared an end to the world during their lives.
About one in 10 people globally also said they were experiencing fear or anxiety about the impending end of the world in 2012. The greatest numbers were in Russia and Poland, the fewest in Great Britain.
Gottfried also said that people with lower education or household income levels, as well as those under 35 years old, were more likely to believe in an apocalypse during their lifetime or in 2012, or have anxiety over the prospect.
"Perhaps those who are older have lived long enough to not be as concerned with what happens to their future," she explained.
Ipsos questioned people in China, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Argentina, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, France, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Italy, South Africa, Great Britain, Indonesia, Germany.
Rand Paul Launches Campaign to End the TSA
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Senator Rand Paul has issued a press release in which he vows to lead the charge to “end the TSA” and put a stop to the needless and humiliating groping of toddlers and grandmothers.
Earlier this year, Paul was detained by the TSA after refusing to submit to an invasive pat down after already having passed through a body scanner. The incident prompted national headlines and caused the Senator to miss his flight.
“It’s time to END the TSA and get the government’s hands back to only stealing our wallets instead of groping toddlers and grandmothers,” says Paul in the statement.
The accompanying article sent out to Campaign for Liberty members encourages recipients to sign a petition in support of Rand Paul’s ‘End the TSA’ bill.
The legislation would forcibly privatize the TSA and kick government out of airport security entirely. A recently passed bill actually allows airports to replace TSA screeners with private security but they have to go through a complex TSA permission process to do so, meaning only a handful of small airports have applied to evict the TSA.
Financial contributions are also being sought to launch a “full, targeted media campaign to convince representatives and senators to either get on board or be held responsible for this continuing outrage.” A previous ‘End the TSA Money Bomb’ started by Congressman Ron Paul following his son’s treatment at the hands of the federal agency has already raised over $1.6 million dollars.
The email points out that the TSA’s invasive and dangerous body scanners have been proven to be completely useless, most recently by engineer Jon Corbett who was able to fool the device by simply sowing an object into a side pocket.
The email lists a handful of recent TSA outrages amidst the deluge that occur on a weekly basis.
- A TSA agent patting down a young girl at New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport in 2011. The video shows a cooperative family, and when the girl’s mother asks, “Can’t you just re-scan her?” the agent replies, “No” and proceeds to grope the poor child;
- A cancer survivor in Charlotte was forced to remove a prosthetic breast;
- A young mother of a two-week-old infant in Florida was harassed to open the bottles of baby formula she was traveling with on her flight, which would have spoiled the only food available to the infant;
- Detroit TSA officers ignored a man’s warning about a colostomy bag, breaking it and forcing him to board a plane covered in urine.
Sometimes our liberty slips away silently, and it is almost hard to notice what went wrong and where. The one fortunate thing about the TSA is that they certainly don’t fit that definition.
The American people shouldn’t be subjected to harassment, groping, and other public humiliation simply to board an airplane. As you may have heard, I have some personal experience with this, and I’ve vowed to lead the charge to fight back.
Report warns of weather satellites' 'rapid decline'
By Ledyard King, Gannett Washington Bureau
Updated 18h 32m ago
Predicting the weather is tricky enough. Now a new government-sponsored report warns that the USA's ability to track tornadoes, forecast hurricanes and study climate change is about to diminish.
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You may want to do a search for Shamanic Schools of weather forecasting and manipulation. It appears thatthe number and capability of weather satellites circling the planet "is beginning a rapid decline" and tight budgets have significantly delayed or eliminated missions to replace them, says a National Research Council analysis out Wednesday.
The number of in-orbit and planned Earth observation missions by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is projected to drop "precipitously" from 23 this year to only six by 2020, the report found.
That means the number of instruments monitoring Earth's activity is expected to decline from a peak of about 110 last year to fewer than 30 by the end of the decade.
"Right now, when society is asking us the hardest questions and the most meaningful questions, we're going to be even more challenged to answer them," said Stacey Boland, a senior systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and a member of the committee that wrote the report. "We'll slowly become data-starved here."
The report credits NASA with finding creative ways to prolong the life of existing satellites and working with international partners to fill in forecasting gaps.
But, the authors said, glue and scissors only go so far.
When a similar analysis was issued five years ago, eight satellites were expected to be in space by 2012 tracking a variety of conditions. Only three are in orbit. Of the remaining five, two failed, one was canceled and two others won't launch until at least next year.
The pipeline looks emptier over the next decade.
Of 18 missions recommended in the 2007 report through 2020, only two are close enough to completion to register launch dates.
Dennis Hartmann, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, and chair of the committee, warned that the loss of capacity will have "profound consequences on science and society, from weather forecasting to responding to natural hazards."
New Report May Change your Mind About Buying an Abandoned Missile Silo
You may want to reconsider purchasing a demilitarized missile silo as a safe domicile. Russia’s most senior military officer said Thursday that Moscow would preemptively strike and destroy U.S.-led NATO missile defense sites in Eastern Europe if talks with Washington about the developing system continue to stall.
“A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.
The threat comes as talks about the missile defense system, which the U.S. and its allies insist is aimed at Iranian missiles, appear to have stalled. Also, silos that the U.S. claims are no longer in military service, but have been sold as luxury survival homes, may not have been taken off the old Soviet target map. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the very bunker outfitted as the ultimate man cave was still a red dot on the ICBM program. After all, who checks those old software maps to make sure they’re updated as retired?
“We have not been able to find mutually-acceptable solutions at this point and the situation is practically at a dead end,” Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said.
Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. special envoy for strategic stability and missile defense, insisted the talks about NATO plans for a missile defense system using ground-based interceptor missiles stationed in Poland, Romania and Turkey were not stalemated.
But she acknowledged Wednesday that the recent elections in Russia and the upcoming elections in the U.S. make it “pretty clear that this is a year in which we’re probably not going to achieve any sort of a breakthrough.”
She reiterated that the U.S.-built system, still in development, is being designed to shoot down Iranian intermediate-range missiles aimed at Europe, not Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Russian officials insist that the system has the capability to shoot down their ICBMs, thus robbing their nuclear deterrent of its credibility and destabilizing the Cold War-era balance of mutually assured destruction. Of course, they are right. The folks down as Wars-R-Us are always planning a feint within a feint within a feint to throw off the enemy. How hard is it to have a subroutine ready to go with the flip of a code to make the entire missile defense system anti-Russian instead of anti-Iranian? For that matter, how hard is it to flip it to a first-strike capability. Who is madder? The hat maker or the one who wears the hat?
Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon had any immediate comment on the Russian threat Thursday.
The Cancelled Check is in My Garage…Somewhere.
In the age of digital record keeping and commercial shredder operations popping up all over the country, there are still more boxes of records than you can imagine. Of course, paper records are only for the really important stuff. The stuff you don’t want anyone to be able to hack into. Sometimes those boxes come up missing. The National Archives and Records Administration has lost track of dozens of boxes of confidential and secret government files at its records center just outside of Washington, the latest in a series of such incidents spanning more than a decade.
The missing classified materials include four boxes of top-secret restricted files from the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as records from several U.S. Navy offices, documents obtained by The Washington Times show. Remember, HAARP is owned and operated by the Navy. There are also records of polar undersea expeditions where information about the deep crust of the Earth has been collected.
The problems came to light after a three-year investigation by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Office of Inspector General. While the investigation ended last year, officials recently provided a copy of the report on their findings in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Of course, the information turned up missing when people went looking for it after a Freedom of Information Act petition was made. It happened enough times that applicants apparently filed a request to find out how many boxes are actually missing.
It’s not the first time the inspector general's office has raised concerns about missing files at the Washington National Records Center. It’s not as though they have had much time to keep up with this subject, what with the GSA spending millions of Vegas parties, and Presidential ministers faking expense reports for extra spending money. According to the report, the office conducted previous inventories of classified materials in 1998 and 2004, concluding that boxes were missing during both of those searches. No one seemed to care enough to write a procedure for correcting the problem. They simply admitted, “Yep, there sure are some boxes missing.”
“According to those staffers that can recall—incidentally the ones who can recall are termed whistleblowers and prosecuted under the new NDAA as threats to national security—minimal corrective actions were taken,” the inspector general's office noted in the report on its most recent investigation. Those boxes are missing, and it’s in the best interest of national security if they stay missing.
NARA officials say they cooperated with investigators and insist there is no indication that any of the boxes were stolen. Instead, they blame the problems on “bad data” for a tiny fraction of the millions of boxes stored in the Washington National Records Center, where 250,000 boxes enter the Suitland facility each year. No efforts have been made to scan the and save the documents electronically to preserve the information. When the mice, moisture, or mold destroys them, it’s just too bad. Now, we will never know who killed Kennedy or where the Moon landings were faked.
Joe Newman, a spokesman for the nonpartisan watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO), said the inspector general’s report raised troubling but not unexpected questions. Looks like we need a new Inspector General; one that won’t ask so many darned questions.
“While it’s troubling that there are boxes of top-secret and confidential materials missing, it’s not entirely unexpected considering the sheer volume of data the National Archives and Records Center is responsible for storing and protecting,” he said.
“The report raises some issues of careless handling and filing of materials that certainly deserve the attention of the administration. However, these problems also raise bigger questions of how recent budget cuts and staffing reductions have affected the ability of the National Archives to do its job effectively. Without more money, I just don’t see it getting any better.” It is better to sell the boxes to the highest bidder than to worry about keeping track of everything in this old dusty place.
NARA, the nation’s official record keeper, does not own the facility where the records are stored, instead leasing the property from the General Services Administration. GSA folks could not be raised for comment, as they are out of town on their semi-annual awards banquet where their six new party planners are being celebrated. The former secret service agents were uniquely qualified after their highly publicized recent success in El Salvador. Likewise, the boxes, which are stored in row after row of high shelves in rooms twice the size of football fields at the facility, do not belong to NARA, either. The agency acts as the custodian and stores the boxes temporarily until they’re either destroyed or turned over for permanent placement in the National Archives.
William J. Bosanko, appointed last year by President Obama as NARA’s Executive For Agency Services, said officials are continuing what he called a “very aggressive search” for boxes reported missing in the inspector general’s investigation.
Mr. Bosanko said one measure officials think will result in better tracking is the bar coding of boxes as they come in and out of the records center. Previously, he said, paper tracking slips, which could detach from boxes and fall off shelves, could result in a box reported as missing when it is still in the records center.
Another problem he cited is the fact that agencies sometimes have asked for boxes to be returned, only to later send them back to NARA in different boxes with different so-called “accession numbers,” which are used to track the materials.