Showing posts with label long. Show all posts
Showing posts with label long. Show all posts
Saturday, July 26, 2014
ALL PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE COMPLETED THEIR LIFE LONG NORMAL PHASE OF CONTINUAL LIFELONG SEXUAL DEVIANCE
Saturday, June 7, 2014
How long should the prison sentence be for people that break the laws contained within our U.S. Constitution?
The American public has the right to have the U.S. Constitution rights, bills, and amendments to be unchanged and not modified and re-modified for the sake of creating a soviet style police state, and neither does any private U.S. citizen or U.S. non-citizen have the right to use technology to spy on one another to fulfill any of their psychological needs that dissolve their fear and paranoia, since these criminally guilty persons, organizations, agencies, corporations, or groups of persons have 24 hour a day access to audio, visual, location, cyber, personal, family, spousal, property, financial, medical, employment and many other forms of data that either make up a meta-data profile, (for government employees only) or the raw data gathered by a private citizen from his or her technology either purchased or developed by himself or herself.
Now there is the question of just what length of a prison sent and what dollar amount should be given for the fine for the punishment of anyone and everyone that uses technology to break the laws, bills, and amendments that were once not changed in the U.S. Constitution, such as having the right to not have civil liberties broken and privacy removed from U.S. citizens as a direct result of the U.S. government, U.S. corporations, and individual U.S. citizens using technology to spy on one another.
If the U.S. government at one point in the future feels that the only solution that solves the issues and problems that U.S. citizens have with privacy rights being continually broken --is for the complete infrastructure, and the many corporations providing technologies for the internet to be given a federal court order to cease and quit, then issues of privacy might be solved, but most people around the world would be completely outraged.
The internet resulted from the need of the U.S. government and the U.S. military to send information about the U.S.S.R.’s military in relation to the U.S. military over long distances via an encrypted network of 5 computers at UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UIUC. Most of the engineering research and development took place at UCLA and was completed in 1969. The name of this very large engineering project was called the “Athernet”.
Such an event as the 13 day Cuba Missile Crisis of 1962 was now easily prevented when the Athernet was launched in 1969.
The Athernet was also used during all of the Vietnam War. U.S. military generals sent and received information and encrypted messages written in the Navajo Native American language to plan and update military information for U.S. troops on the ground in Vietnam.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Phases of the Human Genome Project Based on the insights gained from the yeast and worm studies, the Human Genome Project employed a two-phase approach to tackle the human genome sequence (IHGSC, 2001). The first phase, called the shotgun phase, divided human chromosomes into DNA segments of an appropriate size, which were then further subdivided into smaller, overlapping DNA fragments that were sequenced. The Human Genome Project relied upon the physical map of the human genome established earlier, which served as a platform for generating and analyzing the massive amounts of DNA sequence data that emerged from the shotgun phase. Next, the second phase of the project, called the finishing phase, involved filling in gaps and resolving DNA sequences in ambiguous areas not obtained during the shotgun phase. Figure 1 shows the exponential increase in DNA sequence information deposited in the High-Throughput Genomic Sequences (HTGS) division of GenBank by the end of the shotgun phase. Indeed, the shotgun phase yielded 90% of the human genome sequence in draft form. The shotgun phase of the Human Genome Project itself consisted of three steps: Obtaining a DNA clone to sequence Sequencing the DNA clone Assembling sequence data from multiple clones to determine overlap and establish a contiguous sequence
The Human Genome Project was a 13-year-long, publicly funded project initiated in 1990 with the objective of determining the DNA sequence of the entire euchromatic human genome within 15 years. In its early days, the Human Genome Project was met with skepticism by many people, including scientists and nonscientists alike. One prominent question was whether the huge cost of the project would outweigh the potential benefits. Today, however, the overwhelming success of the Human Genome Project is readily apparent. Not only did the completion of this project usher in a new era in medicine, but it also led to significant advances in the types of technology used to sequence DNA.
Initial Principles and Goals of the Human Genome Project
From its inception, the Human Genome Project revolved around two key principles (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2001). First, it welcomed collaborators from any nation in an effort to move beyond borders, to establish an all-inclusive effort aimed at understanding our shared molecular heritage, and to benefit from diverse approaches. The group of publicly funded researchers that eventually assembled was known as International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC). Second, this project required that all human genome sequence information be freely and publicly available within 24 hours of its assembly. This founding principle ensured unrestricted access for scientists in academia and in industry, and it provided the means for rapid and novel discoveries by researchers of all types. At any given time, approximately 200 labs in the United States were funded by either the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Department of Energy to support these efforts. In addition, more than 18 different countries from across the globe had contributed to the Human Genome Project by the time of its completion.
Just as the Human Genome Project revolved around two key principles, it also started with two early goals: (1) building genetic and physical maps of the human and mouse genomes, and (2) sequencing the smaller yeast and worm genomes as a test run for sequencing the larger, more complex human genome (IHGSC, 2001). When the yeast and worm efforts proved successful, the sequencing of the human genome proceeded with full force.
Phases of the Human Genome Project
Based on the insights gained from the yeast and worm studies, the Human Genome Project employed a two-phase approach to tackle the human genome sequence (IHGSC, 2001). The first phase, called the shotgun phase, divided human chromosomes into DNA segments of an appropriate size, which were then further subdivided into smaller, overlapping DNA fragments that were sequenced. The Human Genome Project relied upon the physical map of the human genome established earlier, which served as a platform for generating and analyzing the massive amounts of DNA sequence data that emerged from the shotgun phase. Next, the second phase of the project, called the finishing phase, involved filling in gaps and resolving DNA sequences in ambiguous areas not obtained during the shotgun phase. Figure 1 shows the exponential increase in DNA sequence information deposited in the High-Throughput Genomic Sequences (HTGS) division of GenBank by the end of the shotgun phase. Indeed, the shotgun phase yielded 90% of the human genome sequence in draft form.
The shotgun phase of the Human Genome Project itself consisted of three steps:
Obtaining a DNA clone to sequence
Sequencing the DNA clone
Assembling sequence data from multiple clones to determine overlap and establish a contiguous sequence
The approach used by the members of the IHGSC was called the hierarchical shotgun method, because the team members systematically generated overlapping clones mapped to individual human chromosomes, which were individually sequenced using a shotgun approach (Figure 2). The clones were derived from DNA libraries made by ligating DNA fragments generated by partial restriction enzyme digestion of genomic DNA from anonymous human donors into bacterial artificial chromosome vectors, which could be propagated in bacteria.
When possible, the DNA fragments within the library vectors were mapped to chromosomal regions by screening for sequence-tagged sites (STSs), which are DNA fragments, usually less than 500 base pairs in length, of known sequence and chromosomal location that can be amplified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Library clones were also digested with the restriction enzyme HindIII, and the sizes of the resulting DNA fragments were determined using agarose gel electrophoresis. Each library clone exhibited a DNA fragment "fingerprint," which could be compared to that of all other library clones in order to identify overlapping clones. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) was also used to map library clones to specific chromosomal regions. Collectively, the STS, DNA fingerprint, and FISH data allowed the IHGSC to generate contigs, which consisted of multiple overlapping bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library clones spanning each of the 24 different human chromosomes (i.e., 22 autosomes and the X and Y chromosomes).
Next, individual BAC clones selected for DNA sequence analysis were further fragmented, and the smaller genomic DNA fragments were subcloned into vectors to generate a BAC-derived shotgun library. The inserts were sequenced using primers matching the vector sequence flanking the genomic DNA insert, and overlapping shotgun clones were used to generate a DNA sequence spanning the entire BAC clone. A summary of this step is shown in Figure 3. The members of the IHGSC agreed that each center would obtain an average of fourfold sequence coverage, with no clone having less than threefold coverage. The term "shotgun" comes from the fact that the original BAC clone was randomly fragmented and sequenced, and the raw DNA sequence data was then subjected to computational analyses to generate an ordered set of DNA sequences that spanned the BAC clone.
Before the IHGSC had completed the first phase of the Human Genome Project, a private biotechnology company called Celera Genomics also entered the race to sequence the human genome. Led by Dr. Craig Venter, Celera proclaimed that it would sequence the entire human genome within three years. As outlined in Figure 4, Celera used two independent data sets together with two distinct computational approaches to determine the sequence of the human genome (Venter et al., 2001). The first data set was generated by Celera and consisted of 27.27 million DNA sequence reads, each with an average length of 543 base pairs, derived from five different individuals. The second data set was obtained from the publicly funded Human Genome Project and was derived from the BAC contigs (called bactigs); here, Celera "shredded" the Human Genome Project DNA sequence into 550-base-pair sequence reads representing a total of 16.05 million sequence reads. The company then used a whole-genome assembly method and a regional chromosome assembly method to sequence the human genome.
In the whole-genome assembly method (also called the whole-genome random shotgun method), Celera generated a massive shotgun library derived from its own DNA sequence data combined with the "shredded" Human Genome Project DNA sequence data, which together corresponded to a total of 43.32 million sequence reads (Venter et al., 2001). Celera used computational methods and sophisticated algorithms to identify overlapping DNA sequences and to reconstruct the human genome by generating a set of scaffolds (Figure 5).
In contrast, with the regional chromosome assembly approach (also called the compartmentalized shotgun assembly method), Celera organized its own data and the Human Genome Project sequence data into the largest possible chromosomal segments, followed by shotgun assembly of the sequence data within each segment (Venter et al., 2001); this approach was similar to the hierarchical shotgun approach used by the IHGSC. The first step of the regional assembly approach involved separating Celera reads that matched Human Genome Project reads from those that were distinct from the public sequence data. Of the 27.27 million Celera reads, 21.38 million matched a Human Genome Project bactig, and 5.89 million did not match the public sequence data. These reads were assembled into Celera-specific or Human Genome Project-specific scaffolds, which were then combined and analyzed using whole-gene assembly algorithms. The resulting bactig data were again "shredded" to permit unbiased assembly of the combined sequence data.
Celera's whole-genome and regional chromosome assembly methods were independent of each other, permitting direct comparison of the data. Celera found that the regional chromosome assembly method was slightly more consistent than the whole-genome assembly method. Using these complementary approaches, Celera generated data that was in strong agreement with that of the IHGSC.
In February 2001, drafts of the human genome sequence were published simultaneously by both groups in two separate articles (IHGSC, 2001; Venter et al., 2001). Due to technical advances in DNA sequencing methods and a productive level of synergy between the two groups, they tied at the finish line, and both projects were completed ahead of schedule.
A Quick Lesson in DNA Sequencing
As previously mentioned, the IHGSC and Celera used different approaches to determine the sequence of the human genome. However, they used the same general method for the DNA sequencing step (Hood & Galas, 2003). This method uses DNA polymerase, the same enzyme used in DNA replication, to produce DNA sequence information. As shown in Figure 6a, DNA polymerase binds to a single-stranded DNA template and adds DNA bases to the 3′ end of the complementary DNA strand it synthesizes. DNA polymerase requires an existing primer with a free 3′ end to which it adds new DNA bases in a 5′ to 3′ manner, and it moves along the template strand in a 3′ to 5′ direction.
Researchers from both the IHGSC and Celera combined the DNA template they were interested in sequencing with DNA polymerase, a single-stranded DNA primer, free deoxynucleotide bases (dATP, dCTP, dGTP, and dTTP), and a sparse mixture of fluorescently labeled dideoxynucleotide bases (ddATP, ddCTP, ddGTP, and ddTTP) that were each labeled with a different color and would terminate new DNA strand synthesis once incorporated into the end of a growing DNA strand. The mixture was first heated to denature the template DNA strand; this was followed by a cooling step to allow the DNA primer to anneal. Following primer annealing, the polymerase synthesized a complementary DNA strand. The template would grow in length until a dideoxynucleotide base (ddNTP) was incorporated; the conditions were such that this occurred at random along the length of the newly synthesized DNA strands. In the end, the researchers were left with a mixture of newly synthesized DNA strands that differed in length by a single nucleotide, and that were labeled at their 3′ end with the color of the ddNTP-associated dye molecule
In order to determine the sequence of the newly synthesized, color-coded DNA strands, researchers needed a way to separate them based on their size, which differed by only one DNA nucleotide. To accomplish this, they electrophoresed the DNA through a gel matrix that permitted single-base differences in size to be easily distinguished. Small fragments run more quickly through the gel, and larger fragments run more slowly (Figure 6c). By putting the entire mixture into a single well of the gel, a laser can be used to scan the DNA bands as they move through the gel and determine their color; this data can be used to generate a sequence trace (also called an electropherogram), showing the color and signal intensity of each DNA band that passes through the gel (Figure 6d). The color of each band represents the final 3′ base incorporated at that position, and by reading from the bottom to the top of the gel, one can determine the sequence of the newly synthesized DNA strand from the 5′ to the 3′ end.
From Rough Draft to Final Form
As stated earlier, after the completion of the draft phase of the Human Genome Project, the IHGSC pursued the second phase of the project: the finishing phase (IHGSC, 2004). During this phase, the researchers filled in gaps and resolved DNA sequences in ambiguous areas that were not solved during the shotgun phase. The finishing phase yielded 99% of the human genome in final form. The final form of the human genome contained 2.85 billion nucleotides, with a predicted error rate of 1 event per 100,000 bases sequenced. Furthermore, the IHGSC reduced the number of gaps by 400-fold; only 341 gaps out of 147,821 gaps remained. The remaining gaps were associated with technically challenging chromosomal regions. Although the earlier draft publications had predicted as many as 40,000 protein-encoding genes, the finishing phase reduced this estimate to between 20,000 and 25,000 protein-encoding genes. Future challenges identified by the IHGSC during this phase included the identification of polymorphisms as a platform for understanding genetic links to human disease, the identification of functional elements within the genome (genes, proteins, elements involved in gene regulation, and structural elements), and the identification of gene and protein "modules" that act in concert with one another.
From Digital Information to Molecular Medicine
One particularly striking finding of the Human Genome Project research is that the human nucleotide sequence is nearly identical (99.9%) between any two individuals. However, a single nucleotide change in a single gene can be responsible for causing human disease. Because of this, our knowledge of the human genome sequence has also contributed immensely to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying a multitude of human diseases. Furthermore, a merging of cytogenetic approaches with the human genome sequence will continue to propel our understanding of human disease to an entirely new level. Thus, although it was met with skepticism at its inception, the Human Genome Project will certainly be heralded as one of the most important scientific endeavors of our time.
Unfortunately, the initial hope of accelerating the discovery of new treatments for disease was not necessarily accomplished by the Human Genome Project. With the sequence of the human genome in hand, we have learned that it requires more than just knowledge of the order of the base pairs in our genome to cure human disease. Current efforts are therefore focused on understanding the protein products that are encoded by our genes. When a gene is mutated, the corresponding protein is most often defective. The emerging field of proteomics aims to understand how protein function and expression are altered in human disease states. Furthermore, investigators are also turning their attention to the expansive regions of our genome devoid of traditional protein-encoding genes. We have already started to reap the benefits of our knowledge of the human genome, and future data-mining efforts will most certainly uncover many more exciting and unexpected links to human disease.
Summary
Within a span of only 13 years, an amalgam of public and private researchers was able to successfully complete the Human Genome Project. Although these scientists used a number of different methods in their work, they nonetheless obtained the same results. In doing so, the researchers not only silenced their critics, but they also beat their own estimated project timeline by two entire years. Perhaps even more importantly, these scientists inspired an ongoing revolution in our fight against human disease and provided a new vision of the future of medicine, although that future has yet to be fully realized.
Information about the Illuminati click here
Initial Principles and Goals of the Human Genome Project
From its inception, the Human Genome Project revolved around two key principles (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2001). First, it welcomed collaborators from any nation in an effort to move beyond borders, to establish an all-inclusive effort aimed at understanding our shared molecular heritage, and to benefit from diverse approaches. The group of publicly funded researchers that eventually assembled was known as International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC). Second, this project required that all human genome sequence information be freely and publicly available within 24 hours of its assembly. This founding principle ensured unrestricted access for scientists in academia and in industry, and it provided the means for rapid and novel discoveries by researchers of all types. At any given time, approximately 200 labs in the United States were funded by either the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Department of Energy to support these efforts. In addition, more than 18 different countries from across the globe had contributed to the Human Genome Project by the time of its completion.
Just as the Human Genome Project revolved around two key principles, it also started with two early goals: (1) building genetic and physical maps of the human and mouse genomes, and (2) sequencing the smaller yeast and worm genomes as a test run for sequencing the larger, more complex human genome (IHGSC, 2001). When the yeast and worm efforts proved successful, the sequencing of the human genome proceeded with full force.
Phases of the Human Genome Project
Based on the insights gained from the yeast and worm studies, the Human Genome Project employed a two-phase approach to tackle the human genome sequence (IHGSC, 2001). The first phase, called the shotgun phase, divided human chromosomes into DNA segments of an appropriate size, which were then further subdivided into smaller, overlapping DNA fragments that were sequenced. The Human Genome Project relied upon the physical map of the human genome established earlier, which served as a platform for generating and analyzing the massive amounts of DNA sequence data that emerged from the shotgun phase. Next, the second phase of the project, called the finishing phase, involved filling in gaps and resolving DNA sequences in ambiguous areas not obtained during the shotgun phase. Figure 1 shows the exponential increase in DNA sequence information deposited in the High-Throughput Genomic Sequences (HTGS) division of GenBank by the end of the shotgun phase. Indeed, the shotgun phase yielded 90% of the human genome sequence in draft form.
The shotgun phase of the Human Genome Project itself consisted of three steps:
Obtaining a DNA clone to sequence
Sequencing the DNA clone
Assembling sequence data from multiple clones to determine overlap and establish a contiguous sequence
The approach used by the members of the IHGSC was called the hierarchical shotgun method, because the team members systematically generated overlapping clones mapped to individual human chromosomes, which were individually sequenced using a shotgun approach (Figure 2). The clones were derived from DNA libraries made by ligating DNA fragments generated by partial restriction enzyme digestion of genomic DNA from anonymous human donors into bacterial artificial chromosome vectors, which could be propagated in bacteria.
When possible, the DNA fragments within the library vectors were mapped to chromosomal regions by screening for sequence-tagged sites (STSs), which are DNA fragments, usually less than 500 base pairs in length, of known sequence and chromosomal location that can be amplified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Library clones were also digested with the restriction enzyme HindIII, and the sizes of the resulting DNA fragments were determined using agarose gel electrophoresis. Each library clone exhibited a DNA fragment "fingerprint," which could be compared to that of all other library clones in order to identify overlapping clones. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) was also used to map library clones to specific chromosomal regions. Collectively, the STS, DNA fingerprint, and FISH data allowed the IHGSC to generate contigs, which consisted of multiple overlapping bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library clones spanning each of the 24 different human chromosomes (i.e., 22 autosomes and the X and Y chromosomes).
Next, individual BAC clones selected for DNA sequence analysis were further fragmented, and the smaller genomic DNA fragments were subcloned into vectors to generate a BAC-derived shotgun library. The inserts were sequenced using primers matching the vector sequence flanking the genomic DNA insert, and overlapping shotgun clones were used to generate a DNA sequence spanning the entire BAC clone. A summary of this step is shown in Figure 3. The members of the IHGSC agreed that each center would obtain an average of fourfold sequence coverage, with no clone having less than threefold coverage. The term "shotgun" comes from the fact that the original BAC clone was randomly fragmented and sequenced, and the raw DNA sequence data was then subjected to computational analyses to generate an ordered set of DNA sequences that spanned the BAC clone.
Before the IHGSC had completed the first phase of the Human Genome Project, a private biotechnology company called Celera Genomics also entered the race to sequence the human genome. Led by Dr. Craig Venter, Celera proclaimed that it would sequence the entire human genome within three years. As outlined in Figure 4, Celera used two independent data sets together with two distinct computational approaches to determine the sequence of the human genome (Venter et al., 2001). The first data set was generated by Celera and consisted of 27.27 million DNA sequence reads, each with an average length of 543 base pairs, derived from five different individuals. The second data set was obtained from the publicly funded Human Genome Project and was derived from the BAC contigs (called bactigs); here, Celera "shredded" the Human Genome Project DNA sequence into 550-base-pair sequence reads representing a total of 16.05 million sequence reads. The company then used a whole-genome assembly method and a regional chromosome assembly method to sequence the human genome.
In the whole-genome assembly method (also called the whole-genome random shotgun method), Celera generated a massive shotgun library derived from its own DNA sequence data combined with the "shredded" Human Genome Project DNA sequence data, which together corresponded to a total of 43.32 million sequence reads (Venter et al., 2001). Celera used computational methods and sophisticated algorithms to identify overlapping DNA sequences and to reconstruct the human genome by generating a set of scaffolds (Figure 5).
In contrast, with the regional chromosome assembly approach (also called the compartmentalized shotgun assembly method), Celera organized its own data and the Human Genome Project sequence data into the largest possible chromosomal segments, followed by shotgun assembly of the sequence data within each segment (Venter et al., 2001); this approach was similar to the hierarchical shotgun approach used by the IHGSC. The first step of the regional assembly approach involved separating Celera reads that matched Human Genome Project reads from those that were distinct from the public sequence data. Of the 27.27 million Celera reads, 21.38 million matched a Human Genome Project bactig, and 5.89 million did not match the public sequence data. These reads were assembled into Celera-specific or Human Genome Project-specific scaffolds, which were then combined and analyzed using whole-gene assembly algorithms. The resulting bactig data were again "shredded" to permit unbiased assembly of the combined sequence data.
Celera's whole-genome and regional chromosome assembly methods were independent of each other, permitting direct comparison of the data. Celera found that the regional chromosome assembly method was slightly more consistent than the whole-genome assembly method. Using these complementary approaches, Celera generated data that was in strong agreement with that of the IHGSC.
In February 2001, drafts of the human genome sequence were published simultaneously by both groups in two separate articles (IHGSC, 2001; Venter et al., 2001). Due to technical advances in DNA sequencing methods and a productive level of synergy between the two groups, they tied at the finish line, and both projects were completed ahead of schedule.
A Quick Lesson in DNA Sequencing
As previously mentioned, the IHGSC and Celera used different approaches to determine the sequence of the human genome. However, they used the same general method for the DNA sequencing step (Hood & Galas, 2003). This method uses DNA polymerase, the same enzyme used in DNA replication, to produce DNA sequence information. As shown in Figure 6a, DNA polymerase binds to a single-stranded DNA template and adds DNA bases to the 3′ end of the complementary DNA strand it synthesizes. DNA polymerase requires an existing primer with a free 3′ end to which it adds new DNA bases in a 5′ to 3′ manner, and it moves along the template strand in a 3′ to 5′ direction.
Researchers from both the IHGSC and Celera combined the DNA template they were interested in sequencing with DNA polymerase, a single-stranded DNA primer, free deoxynucleotide bases (dATP, dCTP, dGTP, and dTTP), and a sparse mixture of fluorescently labeled dideoxynucleotide bases (ddATP, ddCTP, ddGTP, and ddTTP) that were each labeled with a different color and would terminate new DNA strand synthesis once incorporated into the end of a growing DNA strand. The mixture was first heated to denature the template DNA strand; this was followed by a cooling step to allow the DNA primer to anneal. Following primer annealing, the polymerase synthesized a complementary DNA strand. The template would grow in length until a dideoxynucleotide base (ddNTP) was incorporated; the conditions were such that this occurred at random along the length of the newly synthesized DNA strands. In the end, the researchers were left with a mixture of newly synthesized DNA strands that differed in length by a single nucleotide, and that were labeled at their 3′ end with the color of the ddNTP-associated dye molecule
In order to determine the sequence of the newly synthesized, color-coded DNA strands, researchers needed a way to separate them based on their size, which differed by only one DNA nucleotide. To accomplish this, they electrophoresed the DNA through a gel matrix that permitted single-base differences in size to be easily distinguished. Small fragments run more quickly through the gel, and larger fragments run more slowly (Figure 6c). By putting the entire mixture into a single well of the gel, a laser can be used to scan the DNA bands as they move through the gel and determine their color; this data can be used to generate a sequence trace (also called an electropherogram), showing the color and signal intensity of each DNA band that passes through the gel (Figure 6d). The color of each band represents the final 3′ base incorporated at that position, and by reading from the bottom to the top of the gel, one can determine the sequence of the newly synthesized DNA strand from the 5′ to the 3′ end.
From Rough Draft to Final Form
As stated earlier, after the completion of the draft phase of the Human Genome Project, the IHGSC pursued the second phase of the project: the finishing phase (IHGSC, 2004). During this phase, the researchers filled in gaps and resolved DNA sequences in ambiguous areas that were not solved during the shotgun phase. The finishing phase yielded 99% of the human genome in final form. The final form of the human genome contained 2.85 billion nucleotides, with a predicted error rate of 1 event per 100,000 bases sequenced. Furthermore, the IHGSC reduced the number of gaps by 400-fold; only 341 gaps out of 147,821 gaps remained. The remaining gaps were associated with technically challenging chromosomal regions. Although the earlier draft publications had predicted as many as 40,000 protein-encoding genes, the finishing phase reduced this estimate to between 20,000 and 25,000 protein-encoding genes. Future challenges identified by the IHGSC during this phase included the identification of polymorphisms as a platform for understanding genetic links to human disease, the identification of functional elements within the genome (genes, proteins, elements involved in gene regulation, and structural elements), and the identification of gene and protein "modules" that act in concert with one another.
From Digital Information to Molecular Medicine
One particularly striking finding of the Human Genome Project research is that the human nucleotide sequence is nearly identical (99.9%) between any two individuals. However, a single nucleotide change in a single gene can be responsible for causing human disease. Because of this, our knowledge of the human genome sequence has also contributed immensely to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying a multitude of human diseases. Furthermore, a merging of cytogenetic approaches with the human genome sequence will continue to propel our understanding of human disease to an entirely new level. Thus, although it was met with skepticism at its inception, the Human Genome Project will certainly be heralded as one of the most important scientific endeavors of our time.
Unfortunately, the initial hope of accelerating the discovery of new treatments for disease was not necessarily accomplished by the Human Genome Project. With the sequence of the human genome in hand, we have learned that it requires more than just knowledge of the order of the base pairs in our genome to cure human disease. Current efforts are therefore focused on understanding the protein products that are encoded by our genes. When a gene is mutated, the corresponding protein is most often defective. The emerging field of proteomics aims to understand how protein function and expression are altered in human disease states. Furthermore, investigators are also turning their attention to the expansive regions of our genome devoid of traditional protein-encoding genes. We have already started to reap the benefits of our knowledge of the human genome, and future data-mining efforts will most certainly uncover many more exciting and unexpected links to human disease.
Summary
Within a span of only 13 years, an amalgam of public and private researchers was able to successfully complete the Human Genome Project. Although these scientists used a number of different methods in their work, they nonetheless obtained the same results. In doing so, the researchers not only silenced their critics, but they also beat their own estimated project timeline by two entire years. Perhaps even more importantly, these scientists inspired an ongoing revolution in our fight against human disease and provided a new vision of the future of medicine, although that future has yet to be fully realized.
The program came into existence officially on April 13, 1953. It fed on political chimeras and pop culture paranoia, then spewed toxicity back into the zeitgeist. Sixty years later, it is still cited as a driving force behind news headlines, and continues to inspire fictional narratives in movies, novels, TV shows and comics. When assessing MKULTRA’s legacy, it’s almost impossible to draw the line between conspiracy theories, dystopic sci-fi visions of “psych wars” and the scientific thinking about the malleability of the human mind. Happy birthday, then, MKULTRA, meta-narrative extraordinaire. Such a shame outgoing CIA director Richard Helms ordered all your files destroyed back in ’73.
Sometimes, history is more lurid than fiction. We may never know the full extent of MKULTRA, the CIA-sponsored, decades-long, multi-disciplinary investigation into mind control (mainly because large numbers of test subjects had no idea they were being experimented upon), but it has more tentacles than Cthulu. The program came into existence officially on April 13, 1953. It fed on political chimeras and pop culture paranoia, then spewed toxicity back into the zeitgeist. Sixty years later, it is still cited as a driving force behind news headlines, and continues to inspire fictional narratives in movies, novels, TV shows and comics. When assessing MKULTRA’s legacy, it’s almost impossible to draw the line between conspiracy theories, dystopic sci-fi visions of “psych wars” and the scientific thinking about the malleability of the human mind. Happy birthday, then, MKULTRA, meta-narrative extraordinaire. Such a shame outgoing CIA director Richard Helms ordered all your files destroyed back in ’73.
1953 is the date usually given as the official start of the project, but its murky origins can be traced back almost a decade prior to that. MKULTRA evolved from Operation Paperclip, the widespread appropriation of Nazi scientists and their work by the Allies at the end of World War Two. Long before Hitler put a bullet in his brain in a Berlin bunker, the Allies had been eyeing various Third Reich research and development projects with envy – especially their U-boats and V-series rockets. The Nazi master plan revolved around technological as well as military dominance, and scientific programs were enthusiastically resourced. It wasn’t just engineers who enjoyed state support. Nazi-sanctioned biological scientists, unfettered by the usual ethical considerations attached to human experimentation, had the freedom – and camps full of subjects – to explore the limits of the human mind and body. Rather than let the Soviets benefit from this fount of knowledge, the U.S. government hired all the top Nazi guys, sanitized their war records, and smuggled them onto American soil in direct contravention of stated immigration policy (President Truman wanted anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Naziism or militarism" expressly excluded from obtaining a U.S. visa).
In the wake of The Manchurian Candidate’s impact on the zeitgeist, other writers were picking up on the scientific theory of mind control and weaving it into their lurid fiction.
Then, these newly-minted citizens, men who had honed their skills pumping mescaline and morphine into terrified prisoners in Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau, were put to work for their new masters for a new ideological conflict, the all-encompassing deadlock of the Cold War. The broad scientific goals were inspired by the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s; the U.S.A. was interested in extracting information through torture, eradicating dissent, controlling behavior, triggering amnesia and reprogramming identity – via methods that could be applied to a general populace or individual agents. But, where Mao, Stalin and Hitler had used brute physical force to ensure that citizens complied with their thought police, the Americans wanted to take a less obvious approach.
The big question they asked was “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?” This has grim echoes of Winston Smith’s re-education in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hypnosis and drugs were the keys to this brave new world. They left no black eyes or burn marks as evidence that an individual’s resistance had been forcibly broken, and no cages full of ravenous rats were required. The German expatriate scientists shared research (and their cavalier research methods) with American university departments as well as individual doctors, psychiatrists, and even hypnotists, and MKULTRA was born.
In retrospect, MKULTRA sounds like science fiction — the testing of mind-altering substances on unwitting citizens in a systematic effort to examine their reactions under operationally realistic conditions. The initial stages of the project involved feeding LSD to unsuspecting individuals. CIA personnel would spike each other’s beverages, and sit back and watch their colleagues run amok. Casualties included Dr. Frank Olson, an Army bacteriologist, who defenestrated nine days after drinking LSD-laced Cointreau. His family is still fighting a legal battle over compensation for his state-sanctioned murder.
Assisted by Col. George H. White, (a colorful federal narcotics agent and CIA consultant, described as an old-fashioned “rock-em, sock-em cop”), the CIA set up ‘safe houses’, complete with two-way mirrors, and populated them with hookers, junkies, dealers, petty criminals and other lowlifes. They’d dose this group with acid, and watch what happened, smug in the knowledge that, even if any of these subjects figured out they were being used for an experiment, their stories would never be believed. In a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division of the CIA (and the man with overall responsibility for the program), White described his memories of MKULTRA as "fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage, with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?”
Not content with the data gained from watching hallucinogen-driven sex between hookers and their johns, MKULTRA launched a campus recruitment drive, looking for more self-aware subjects who would be told they were taking part in an experiment, without knowing the true purpose of the drug tests. Their policy of using university students backfired somewhat when the kids began to enjoy their mind-altered experiences and decided to tune in and turn on without government help – the counter-culture of the 1960s is one of MKULTRA’s more impressive side effects.
Yet, in the corridors of power, messing with a generation’s minds was deemed entirely acceptable policy – because that’s what the enemy was doing. The forces of Communism were annexing the minds of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. These were the glory years of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Blacklist was in full effect, and high-ranking journalists and government officials were being unmasked as Soviet agents. Newspaper headlines, pulp thrillers and B-movies stoked fear of ‘the Red Menace’ and ‘the Enemy Within’ and the U.S. conducted its very own show trial, leading to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Desperate times require desperate measures: brainwashing.
This term, like all the best neologisms, was coined by a journalist, Edward Hunter. In 1950, he took it from the Chinese phrase (xǐ năo, "wash brain") used by Maoists to describe the favored techniques for overcoming ideological dissent (sleep and sensory deprivation, filthy living conditions, auditory and psychological harassment, group pressure) and applied it to the dazed and confused prisoners of war being shipped back from Korea. There was no concrete evidence to suggest the POWs had been subjected to anything but regular-issue torture, using methods that have been around since at least the days when the Spanish Inquisition were hunting witches. Nonetheless, Hunter – who had served as a spy during his foreign correspondent years in Japan and China – assumed that an iniquitous new scientific method had to be at work, sinister enough to be worthy of the Atomic Age.
Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate distills the essence of the era. Although a synopsis suggests the book is a terrifying thriller (an American marine, Raymond Shaw, taken prisoner in Korea returns to his native country reprogrammed as a political assassin, ready to respond to a trigger word from his handlers), it functions as sharp social satire. Condon says his aim was comedy, rather than feeding paranoia.
As a writer, I just clean house and point out stains on the carpet… Brainwashing existed in 1959; the very word had people terrified. It was like science fiction. McCarthy existed. Antagonism with Russia existed. At the time I was writing The Manchurian Candidate, all that was business as usual. What I did was point things out with melodramatic humor.
Much of the humor stems from the acidic portrayal of ‘Raymond’s mother’ (she’s never given a proper name), a self-serving Senator’s wife with Daddy issues that would make Electra blush. Depicted as a political animal in every cell of her ice-blonde being, she would do anything to
claw out recognition for herself within her chosen community. Her ambition was an extremely distressing condition. She sought power the way a superstitious man might look for a four-leaf clover. She didn’t care where she found it. It would make no difference if it were growing out of a manure pile.
Once he falls into the hands of the Koreans (and their Soviet and Chinese allies), her son is presented as an ideal candidate for brainwashing – he’s been manipulated for his mother’s political ends since before he was born, after all – and his mother’s position and influence put him above suspicion. Raymond’s been programmed via hypnosis to respond to the appearance of a Red Queen in a game of solitaire. This puts him into a trance, ready to absorb and obey orders, without his conscious mind having any memory of the assignment. He becomes what the MKULTRA scientists were hoping to create – a perfect assassin.
MKULTRA supplies a compelling and still-resonant meta-narrative, arcing from World War Two to the present day, giving us a jumping-off point for all kinds of current stories
The book attracted a lot of attention, but wasn’t a major bestseller. The movie, released in 1962 and starring Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh, was picketed by both anti-Communist and Communist groups, but wasn’t a huge box office success. However, the events of November 22, 1963 bathed Condon’s “melodramatic humor” in a whole new light. Had political satire become historical fact? Was Lee Harvey Oswald pre-programmed by the CIA/the Mafia/anti-Castro Cubans/the Soviets (insert conspiracy theory of choice) to fire shots across Dealey Plaza? The term “Manchurian Candidate” embedded itself in the socio-political lexicon, and became even more resonant as the 1960s wore on, and more lone, confused gunmen failed to offer a satisfactory explanation for their acts.
In 1963, of course, no one outside the project knew much about the scope of MKULTRA’s activities, but in the wake of The Manchurian Candidate’s impact on the zeitgeist, other writers were picking up on the scientific theory of mind control and weaving it into their lurid fiction. In a grotesque example of art imitating life, the covert activities of MKULTRA mirrored some of the darkest places of these authors’ imaginations. Fictional mad scientists have always maintained a close kinship with their real-life counterparts – otherwise we wouldn’t find them frightening.
Dr. Ewen Cameron was an eminent psychiatrist who, unbeknownst to his patients, worked for MKULTRA from 1957 to 1964. He commuted from New York to Montreal, where he subjected his patients at the McGill Allan Memorial Institute to his theories about “psychic driving” and “depatterning” – all in the name of national security. His techniques included enforced coma (or “sleep therapy”), sensory deprivation, electro-convulsive therapy (at many, many times the usual levels) and incapacitating muscle relaxants. His stated aim was to wipe the psychological slate clean, removing the broken or traumatized personality, so patients could rebuild themselves as mentally healthy beings. The experiments resulted in prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces), incontinence, amnesia, and some subjects had to relearn basic language and motor skills. Given that most of the people in Cameron’s waiting room were suffering from minor depression or anxiety — as opposed to full-blown schizophrenia – these methods were extreme to say the least.
Although the full horror of Cameron’s experiments wouldn’t be revealed until the Senate Intelligence Committee began its investigation into MKULTRA in 1976, the thinking behind them echoes through speculative fiction of the time. He brings to mind Dr. Benway in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), “an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control.” In The Quaker Cannon by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth (collected in The Wonder Effect 1961), the Korean War is re-imagined as a war against the Utilitarians or Utes. The Chinese use “Blank Tanks” to crack mental resistance in prisoners:
The Blank Tanks are more than deafness. In them a man is blind, even to the red fog that reaches through closed eyelids. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to taste. There is nothing except the swaddling-cloths… It is something like being unborn and something like never having been at all. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, and although you are not dead you are not alive either.
James Kennaway’s The Mind Benders (1963), is set in Oxford in the wake of the suicide of Professor Sharpey, director of a program of mind-control experiments based around the idea of sensory deprivation (described as “the first experiments in the physics of the soul.”) In an attempt to clear his boss’s name, his assistant, Longman, exposes himself to the same procedures:
When a man is submerged in this tank all sensations can be reduced to a minimum. He is utterly isolated; lonely, bewildered. Studying his behaviour in these conditions we find we have stepped into a new and frightening world.
Unfortunately for Longman, it’s a one-way trip, and he finds himself losing his grip on his mind, and the principles he once thought to be unshakable. “When pain and panic are extended this far there can be no identity.”
Anthony Burgess also explores mind control in A Clockwork Orange (1962). Violent sexual predator and killer, “wretched hoodlum” Alex is subjected to ‘the Ludovico Technique’. This involves an extreme form of aversion therapy, whereby Alex is injected with nausea-inducing drugs “while they flashed nasty bits of ultra-violence on the screen”. Pretty soon, the sight of a kicking boot or a punching fist or a spot of vigorous tolchocking is enough to reduce him to a vomiting, sniveling wreck, with a massive pain in the gulliver. But, says the presiding physician, Dr. Brodsky, it’s not quite enough.
You’re not cured yet. There’s still a lot to be done. Only when your body reacts promptly and violently to violence, as to a snake, without further help from us, without medication, only then—
Eventually, Alex reaches the required level of reaction to the thought of violence. A delighted audience of VIPs watches as he recoils from making even the barest attempt to defend himself from physical assault. The only voice of opposition raised belongs to the prison chaplain:
He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
At least Alex is aware of what’s happening to him, although he’s powerless to resist his reconditioning. This is a novel. Even an impotent victim like Alex exists within a logical framework of authorial intent. The real participants in MKULTRA’s mind control experiments had no such underlying narrative structure to give their story shape, or even any semblance of sanity.
Throughout the 1960s, leading fashion model Candy Jones was completely unaware that she was undertaking covert missions in the U.S. and abroad as “Arlene Grant”, an alter personality controlled by a hypnotist and CIA handler. It was only when she got married – to talk radio host “Long” John Nebel – at the end of 1972 that anyone noticed anything amiss. Nebel, disturbed by what he perceived as unpleasant shifts in his new wife’s personality, hypnotized Candy, and was amazed by the torrid tale that came tumbling out. The Control of Candy Jones (1976) by Donald Bain is pieced together from the recordings made of the hypnosis sessions.
Candy’s story is a twisted take on the American Dream. Born Jessica Wilcox in Atlantic City in 1925, she survived a lonely childhood dominated by an abusive mother. She took comfort in a group of imaginary friends, one of whom she named Arlene. Jessica grew into a statuesque blonde, and, after a name change to ‘Candy Jones’ at the behest of her modeling agency, became one of the most recognizable pin-ups gracing magazine covers and billboards in the 1940s. Naturally, she did her patriotic duty during World War Two, and entertained GIs in the Pacific as part of a theatrical revue. A bout of malaria and ‘jungle rot’ put her into a field hospital in the Philippines in 1945, where she met a young medic called Gilbert Jensen. Fifteen years later they met again in Oakland, in circumstances that were to transform Candy’s life.
During nightly hypnotism sessions, Nebel coaxed the story out of Candy of how Jensen hypnotized her with the intention of using her for secret missions for the CIA. Short on cash after a failed marriage, Candy agreed to undertake simple messenger duties for one of her CIA contacts. One of her letter drops was at Gilbert Jensen’s office. He was tasked with exploiting their previous acquaintance — and various MKULTRA-developed drugs and hypnotic techniques — and turning her into an independent CIA contractor. When her ‘alter’ Arlene emerged during one session (it’s not uncommon for abused children to generate alternate personalities to help them deal with the trauma), Jensen latched onto her as a viable covert identity for Candy. Arlene was the opposite to Candy, tough, strong-willed, sarcastic, and very protective of her alter-ego. Jensen trained Arlene to dominate Candy’s consciousness. When she heard the trigger (usually a sequence of electronic sounds over the telephone), Arlene would don a brunette wig and await further commands, going wherever Jensen told her. Often, her mission involved being subjected to sadistic sexual humiliation. Jensen delighted in showing off the total compliance of his subject, and, on one occasion, made her insert a lit candle into her vagina in front of an audience of CIA operatives. Candy had no conscious memory of this, but became distressed at the sight of flickering candles in a restaurant.
There are many bizarre elements to Candy’s story. It’s possible that Nebel made the whole thing up, or that he inadvertently implanted false memories during hypnosis (he had no previous experience). It’s possible that Candy suffered from dissociative identity disorder, and created Arlene as a glamorous, tough-as-nails, fictional alter. It’s also possible that Nebel, Candy and Bain were involved in some murky CIA disinformation campaign to suggest to the Soviets that MKULTRA had produced a network of Manchurian Candidates, and that even someone as high-profile as Candy Jones could, when triggered, perform as a deadly assassin. It’s difficult to dismiss the story entirely, as there’s supporting evidence in the form of a passport photo of Arlene/Candy, and a letter Candy wrote to her attorney, explaining that she sometimes went by the name of “Arlene Grant” and issuing instructions in case of her death “due to an accident or sudden illness.” The truth, as ever, is elusive, and very probably stranger than any fiction. Nonetheless, The Control of Candy Jones is a fascinating read, and its influence can be seen most recently in Joss Whedon’s 2009 TV show, Dollhouse.
MKULTRA wound down during the later 1960s and was officially halted in 1973. Despite the millions of dollars spent, the lives sacrificed, and the human rights violated, the CIA was unable to achieve their goal of total mind control. Their scientists were never able to make Richard Condon’s fictional Manchurian Candidate a reality, or even reprogram the hard-wiring of a reprobate like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. MKULTRA’s legacy lives on however, in the rumors woven into conspiracy theories about Jonestown and Waco. In The Men Who Stare At Goats (2004) Jon Ronson explores ongoing attempts by the U.S. military to harness the power of the mind for national security purposes. In Shock Doctrine (2007), Naomi Klein suggests techniques developed under the MKULTRA umbrella became the notorious KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, used by the CIA to train death squads in Latin America in the 1980s, and as the basis for the regime at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay over the past decade. MKULTRA supplies a compelling and still-resonant meta-narrative, arcing from World War Two to the present day, giving us a jumping-off point for all kinds of current stories, from the latest Danny Boyle movie, Trance, to speculation about Colorado spree-killer James Holmes. But, for now, the nightmare visions of novelists like George Orwell, William Burroughs, James Kennaway and Anthony Burgess remain mostly in the realm of fiction. Your mind is still your own. Information about the Illuminati click here
Monday, April 28, 2014
What do Americans think about the N.S.A. now?
The NSA, which long promised it was only spying on people in other countries, then only on “terrorists,” has been revealed to be funneling data and other information captured without a warrant (as required by the 4th Amendment) to
local law enforcement via a previously-secret organization called Special Operations Division (SOD). The 4th Amendment Protection Act would ban your state from accepting this kind of warrantless information in its criminal investigations.
The NSA has established deep partnerships with over 160 universities around the country. These partnerships not only provide a massive recruiting ground for future NSA spies, it is a major source of research and testing – all expanding the NSAs warrantless data-collection capabilities.
In 2006, it was reported that the NSA had maxed out capacity of the Baltimore-area power grid via Baltimore Gas and Electric. Insiders reported that “The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment. At minimum, the problem could produce disruptions leading to outages and power surges. At worst, it could force a virtual shutdown of the agency.” The cost of electricity at Fort Meade, provided by Baltimore Gas and Electric, was probably one of NSA’s single biggest expenses, said Matthew Aid, author of The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (Bloomsbury Press, 2009). He estimated the agency could end up spending 95 percent less on electricity in Utah than in Maryland.
The new “Data Center” is a massive complex. It requires 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate. That water is provided by a political subdivision of the state of Utah. The electricity is provided by Rocky Mountain Power. Snow removal is by another contractor.
The Texas Cryptologic Center is being built on a former Sony warehouse, just down the road from a new Microsoft data center. The NSA waited to confirm Microsoft’s opening there before leasing the property from Corporate Office Properties Trust. A major part of the decision for the location was also the independent power grid in Texas, again confirming NSA’s very real concern about access to power. The electricity is provided by CPS Energy, the United States’ largest municipally owned utility company, with combined natural gas and electric service.. It appears that water will be as well.
The Threat Operations Center has its water and sewage handled by the city of Augusta. Before a partnership in 2006 with Georgia Power, outages were a regular occurrence on post, particularly during the summer, when heavy demands were placed on the system.
The “listening post” is scheduled to be closed and moved to Colorado. No date “in the future” has been confirmed.
Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects. A
new facility is being developed on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design
necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.
The Sugar Grove Station downloads a “staggering” amount of communications per NSA expert James Bamford.
The NSA has established deep partnerships with over 160 universities around the country. These partnerships not only provide a massive recruiting ground for future NSA spies, it is a major source of research and testing – all expanding the NSAs warrantless data-collection capabilities.
In 2006, it was reported that the NSA had maxed out capacity of the Baltimore-area power grid via Baltimore Gas and Electric. Insiders reported that “The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment. At minimum, the problem could produce disruptions leading to outages and power surges. At worst, it could force a virtual shutdown of the agency.” The cost of electricity at Fort Meade, provided by Baltimore Gas and Electric, was probably one of NSA’s single biggest expenses, said Matthew Aid, author of The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (Bloomsbury Press, 2009). He estimated the agency could end up spending 95 percent less on electricity in Utah than in Maryland.
The new “Data Center” is a massive complex. It requires 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate. That water is provided by a political subdivision of the state of Utah. The electricity is provided by Rocky Mountain Power. Snow removal is by another contractor.
The Texas Cryptologic Center is being built on a former Sony warehouse, just down the road from a new Microsoft data center. The NSA waited to confirm Microsoft’s opening there before leasing the property from Corporate Office Properties Trust. A major part of the decision for the location was also the independent power grid in Texas, again confirming NSA’s very real concern about access to power. The electricity is provided by CPS Energy, the United States’ largest municipally owned utility company, with combined natural gas and electric service.. It appears that water will be as well.
The Threat Operations Center has its water and sewage handled by the city of Augusta. Before a partnership in 2006 with Georgia Power, outages were a regular occurrence on post, particularly during the summer, when heavy demands were placed on the system.
The “listening post” is scheduled to be closed and moved to Colorado. No date “in the future” has been confirmed.
Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects. A
new facility is being developed on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design
necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.
The Sugar Grove Station downloads a “staggering” amount of communications per NSA expert James Bamford.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Home to the oldest university in Europe, Bologna’s long tradition of education, cultural heritage and political vitality makes it an attractive location for SAIS' European campus
The Future of Eugenics. Eugenics, although based on the science of genetics, is not itself a science, for it must above all concern itself with social values, with the question: Whither mankind? Perhaps general agreement could be had that freedom from gross physical or mental defects and the possession of sound health, high intelligence, general adaptability, and nobility of spirit are the major goals toward which eugenics should aim; perhaps even that diversity of nature is better than uniformity of type. But how far ought selective reproduction to interfere with human freedoms? Genetically, as in other respects, "there is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us" that it is hard to assess the worth of the manifest hereditary characteristics are the product of environment, particularly for those qualities that are eugenics' major concern: sound health, high intelligence, and the like. The Jukes and Kallikaks were horrible examples of degenerate humanity, but what might they have been in a better world? Were their alcoholism, their crime, and their vice inescapable products of their genes? It seems very doubtful. Only the experiment of putting them from earliest infancy into an optimum environment--not forgetting that it need not be the same for everyone--than to modify gene frequencies by wise selection. Once mankind has produced an approximation of that optimum environment, the eugenics task will be much simpler. In fact, the natural selection exerted by such an environment may make eugenics quite unnecessary.
-H. Bentley Glass
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States led by its newly created space agency NASA. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth, and doing it before the Soviet Union, as part of the early space race. It involved 7 astronauts flying a total of 6 solo trips. On 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space in a suborbital flight after the Soviet Union had put Yuri Gagarin into space and orbit one month earlier. John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit on 20 February 1962, he was the third person to do so, after soviet Gherman Titov had made a day long flight in August 1961. When the project ended in May 1963, the Americans' NASA program was still behind the Soviet Space Program, but the gap was seen as closing. The race to the Moon began.
The space race started in 1957 by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik I. This came as a shock to the American public and led to the creation of NASA to gather the efforts in space exploration already existing in USA. After the launch of the first American satellite in 1958, manned space flight became the next goal. The spacecraft was produced by McDonnell Aircraft. It was cone shaped with room for one person together with supplies of water, food and oxygen in a pressurized cabin. It was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida by modified military missiles, most importantly Atlas D, and had a rescue tower for protection from a failing rocket. The whole flight could be controlled from the ground through a network of tracking stations which also allowed communication with the astronaut. If necessary, the astronaut could override commands from the ground. For reentry into Earth's atmosphere, small rockets were used to bring the spacecraft out of its orbit. A heatshield would protect the spacecraft from the heat of reentry, and a parachute would slow the craft for a water landing. Here both astronaut and spacecraft were picked up by helicopter and brought to a ship.
From a slow start with humiliating mistakes, the Mercury Project became popular and the manned flights were followed by millions on radio and TV not only in United States, but around the world. Apart from the manned missions, Mercury had a total of 20 unmanned launches as a part of the development of the project. This also involved test animals, most famously the chimpanzees Ham and Enos. Mercury laid the groundwork for Project Gemini and the follow-on Apollo moon-landing program, which was announced a few weeks after the first manned flight. The astronauts went under the name Mercury Seven and they named their spacecraft with a "7" to the name. The project name was taken from Mercury, a Roman god. It is estimated to have cost $1.71 billion and have involved the work of 2 million people.
Yossi Leshem worked at the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), the leading NGO in Israel, for 25 years, as a guide, as Director of a Field Study Center,as Head of the Nature Protection Department, Initiator and Director of the Israel Raptor Information Center between 1980-1991, and as the Executive Director of the SPNI between 1991-1995. Leshem is Senior Researcher in the Department of Zoology in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University and is the founder and Director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Latrun, Israel, established by Tel Aviv University and the SPNI. In November 2007 he was elected as the Chairman of the SPNI Council. Leshem has been involved in many aspects of nature conservation, with the emphasis on bird research for 38 years. Since 1984 his research for his doctorate, which was conducted with the cooperation of the Israeli Air Force and the Ministry of Science, has resulted in a decrease of 76% in the number of collisions with aircraft caused by birds, and has saved 790 million dollars, not to mention the numbers of lives, both human and avian. Today he serves as Lt. Col. (Ret) in the Israeli Air Force and continues this research. In 2005 he won the prestigious Mike Kuhring Prize for achievements of high significance for an improved flight safety concerning the bird problems of aviation, and for his mission to connect safety with nature conservation via education that gave bird strike prevention world wide appreciation. Leshem is involved in a variety of activities in bird migration research, in educational activities that take place in over 250 schools in Israel part of cooperation with the Palestinians and the Jordanians, and has developed an educational and scientific site on the Internet ( www.birds.org.il ) called "Migrating Birds Know No Boundaries". Leshem developed a 6 year research and an educational program in cooperation with the Palestinians and Jordanians under the same title as the web site. At the moment Dr. Leshem is conducting a number of scientific projects, among them a project which tracks migrating birds that have been fitted with satellite transmitters, and a project that tracks migration with the aid of radar, in cooperation with a team of Russian immigrant scientists. Leshem initiated a program to use Barn Owls and Kestrels as pest controllers to reduce the use of pesticides in agricultural fields, which became a national program and a regional project with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Leshem published 3 books, scientific papers, and hundreds of articles in popular magazines. Dr. Leshem visited Japan as a visiting Prof. at the University of Tokyo, June 30 th – October 12 th, 2006. Leshem is a Recipient of "Lifetime Achievement Award for Environmental Protection" in 2008, given for sixty years of Israel
It is important to understand the cultural background of the era that created this field of science.” After the Civil War, there was turbulent economy and an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The economy of the US had rapid fluctuations and remained in this tenuous manner until WWI. As the economy became more uncertain, the social inequalities between different segments of society became more visible.
In the same era, the idea of Social Darwinism became popular and was used to explain these social inequalities. Social Darwinism utilizes the concept of natural selection from Charles Darwin and applies it to society. Social Darwinism explains survival of the fittest in terms of the capability of an individual to survive within a competitive environment. This explains social inequalities by explaining that the wealthy are better individuals and therefore better suited to survive in the uncertain economy. In terms of survival of the fittest the wealthy are more likely to survive and produce more offspring than the poor.
However, this was not occurring. The birthrate of the elite was declining while the birthrate of the poor was increasing. Meanwhile governmental social programs and aid were doing little help the increasing poverty. The government utilized the idea of scientific management, known as progressivism. Progressive reformers relied on science to control both nature and human society. This view of science as a method of reform and the newly rediscovered science of genetics gave rise to social engineering. Eugenicists believed genetics were the cause of problems for the human gene pool. Eugenics stated that society already had paid enough to support these degenerates and the use of sterilization would save money. The eugenicists used quantitative facts to produce scientific evidence. They believed that charity and welfare only treated the symptoms, eugenic sought to eliminate the disease. The following traits were seen as degenerative to the human gene pool to which the eugenicists were determined to eliminate: poverty, feeble-mindedness-including manic depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, rebelliousness, criminality, nomadness, prostitution.
The accuracy of eugenicist methods was severely overrated. Although based on genetics, the eugenic scientists did not document any genetic relationship to some qualities that they studied, such as politeness, bluntness, etc. It is especially amazing that the scientists made such brilliant relationships between genes and behavior at a time when they did not even know that DNA carried genes, causing the researchers to treat complex behavior as though it had a single cause. Other flaw in research included the researchers did not did not take into account the impact that the environment plays into a person’s phenotype. They also used culturally based IQ tests on immigrants to determine IQ. Finally, the early eugenicists made up results to give scientific results.
Many of the eugenicist's ideas came from studies of the supposed deterioration of a genetic stock over time. For example, the sociologist Richard Dugdale based his study on “The Jukes,” which is a clan of 700 criminals, prostitutes, and paupers. Dugdale believed that bad environment caused their degeneracy and could be reversed over time. A.H. Estabrook resurveyed the Jukes in 1915 but saw little improvement in the family. He concluded that several traits associated with inadequacy were inherited. However, since the eugenicists did not understand genetics and the methods of inheritance, they formed their method of inheritance. The meant that desired traits could only be spread to children through marriage between two “worthy” families. Undesired traits were always spread between “shiftless” families. A child between a worthy family and a shiftless family would be mostly shiftless…but a little desirable.
Before eugenics became internationally recognized in WWII, it was a very popular movement in the United States. In fact the American Eugenics Society set up pavilions and "Fitter Families Contest" to popularize eugenics at state fairs. The average family advocated for the utilization of eugenics while educational systems embraced eugenics, which was presented as science fact by the majority biology texts. In fact, eugenics became so popular that eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported study in 1911, to report the best practical means for eliminating defective genes in the Human Population. Although the eighth of the 18 solutions was euthanasia, the researchers believed it was too early to implement this solution. The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a lethal chamber, or gas chamber. Instead, the main solution was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as increased marriage restrictions. However, not everybody was in favor of eugenics, Punnett at the first international congress for Eugenics in 1911 stated, “Except in very few cases, our knowledge of heredity in man at present is far to slight and far too uncertain to base legislation upon.” Carrie Buck, and her mother Emma, had been committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Carrie and Emma were both judged to be “feebleminded” and promiscuous, because they had both had children out of wedlock. Carrie’s child, Vivian, was judged to be “feebleminded” at seven months of age. Hence, three generations of “imbeciles” became the “perfect” family for Virginia officials to use as a test case in favor of the eugenic sterilization law enacted in 1924. Upon reviewing the case, the Supreme Court concurred “that Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” It is impossible to judge whether or not Carrie was “feebleminded”, but she was not promiscuous. Vivian’s was the result of Carrie’s rape by the nephew of her foster parents. She was probably institutionalized to prevent further shame to the family. Just as clearly, Vivian was no imbecile. Vivian’s first grade report card from the Venable School in Charlottesville showed that this daughter of a supposed social degenerate got straight “As” in deportment (conduct) and even made the honor role in April 1931. She died a year later of an intestinal disorder.
Although in 1942 the Supreme Court made a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of criminals, it never reversed the general concept of eugenic sterilization. In 2001, the Virginia General Assembly acknowledged that the sterilization law was based on faulty science and expressed its "profound regret over the Commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement in this country and over the damage done in the name of eugenics.” On May 2, 2002 a marker was erected to honor Carrie Buck in her hometown of Charlottesville.
Laws against interracial marriage had existed in some states since colonial times, but the number increased after the Civil War. In 1913, 29 states had laws forbidding mixed-race marriages. Twenty-two states had stiff penalties -- fines of up to $2,000 and/or prison terms of up to 10 years. Eugenicists actively supported the old laws and the making of new ones. The eugenicist-inspired Virginia Integrity Act of 1924 prohibited marriage between a white person and anyone with a trace of blood other than Caucasian. The Act was struck down, along with all other anti-miscegenation laws, in 1967. The world thought Hitler was mad, but the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Adolf Hitler’s. The idea was created in the United States at least two decades before Hitler came to power. In fact, in 1924, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he frequently quoted American eugenics and displayed a thorough knowledge. “There is today one state, Hitler wrote, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States." Hitler told his fellow Nazis that he closely followed American eugenic legislation. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
During the beginning of the third Reich, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical implementation of their own research. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginias Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
In 1934, the number of sterilizations in Germany was accelerating beyond 5,000 per month. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans were taken from homes for the elderly, mental institutions and other state ran institutions and was systematically gassed. In all, between 50,000 and 100,000 were killed. Hitler’s believed that Jewish were racially inferior. They played a decisive role in social degeneracy, such as prostitution, pornography, modern art, financial crimes, and the narcotics trade. Jewish people possessed no ethics or morality and that they had been engaged in a 4,000-year-old conspiracy to dominate the world pursuant to their view of themselves as the chosen people. Just like other eugenicists, Hitler believe that these characteristics and values were in the genes of the Jewish people, and therefore are able to be eradicated from the general population (cf. generally Mein Kampf). Hitler's made his threat to exterminate European Jewry was made to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939: “In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it . . . If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe”
Hitler attempted to succeed in this goal by annihilating hundreds of thousands of the Jewish population in concentration camps using the American favored method of extermination of the gas chambers. There were also rumors that Hitler made Lebensborn a "stud farms" where SS men and suitable young women were mated to breed a master race. However this is nothing more than a myth. Lebensborn was in fact a conservative institution with a conservative sexual code, attempting to maintain middle-class respectability.
The connection between the American Eugenics movement and the Nazi eugenic movement was further solidified in the Nuremburg trials that judged the crimes committed by the Nazis during the war. In their defense the Nazis quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes from the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
• Hereditary feeble-mindedness: 200,000
• Schizophrenia: 80,000
• Epilepsy: 60,000
• Manic-depressive psychosis: 20,000
• Serious physical deformities: 20,000
• Hereditary deafness: 16,000
• Hereditary alcoholism: 10,000
• Hereditary blindness: 4,000
• Huntington's chorea: 600
• TOTAL: 410,600
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a lethal chamber, or gas chamber. Instead, the main solution was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as increased marriage restrictions. However, not everybody was in favor of eugenics, Punnett at the first international congress for Eugenics in 1911 stated, “Except in very few cases, our knowledge of heredity in man at present is far to slight and far too uncertain to base legislation upon.” Carrie Buck, and her mother Emma, had been committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Carrie and Emma were both judged to be “feebleminded” and promiscuous, because they had both had children out of wedlock. Carrie’s child, Vivian, was judged to be “feebleminded” at seven months of age. Hence, three generations of “imbeciles” became the “perfect” family for Virginia officials to use as a test case in favor of the eugenic sterilization law enacted in 1924. Upon reviewing the case, the Supreme Court concurred “that Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” It is impossible to judge whether or not Carrie was “feebleminded”, but she was not promiscuous. Vivian’s was the result of Carrie’s rape by the nephew of her foster parents. She was probably institutionalized to prevent further shame to the family. Just as clearly, Vivian was no imbecile. Vivian’s first grade report card from the Venable School in Charlottesville showed that this daughter of a supposed social degenerate got straight “As” in deportment (conduct) and even made the honor role in April 1931. She died a year later of an intestinal disorder.
The Philadelphia Experiment was a naval military experiment alleged to have been carried out at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA sometime around October 28, 1943. The U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge was claimed to be rendered invisible (or "cloaked") to enemy devices.
The story is thought to be a hoax. The U.S. Navy maintains that no such experiment was ever conducted, and details of the story contradict well-established facts about the Eldridge itself, as well as commonly accepted physics. The experiment was allegedly based on an aspect of the unified field theory, a term coined by Albert Einstein. The Unified Field Theory aims to describe mathematically and physically the interrelated nature of the forces that comprise electromagnetic radiation and gravity, in other words uniting the fields of electromagnetism and gravity into one field. Consequently, if light were bent, then space-time would be bent, effectively creating an invisible time machine. According to the accounts, unspecified 'researchers' thought that some version of this Unified Field Theory would enable a person to use large electrical generators to bend light around an object so that the object became completely invisible. The Navy would have regarded this as being of obvious military value, and by the accounts, it sponsored the experiment. Another unattributed version of the story proposes that researchers were preparing magnetic and gravitational measurements of the seafloor to detect anomalies, supposedly based on Einstein's attempts to understand gravity. In this version, there were also related secret experiments in Nazi Germany to find antigravity, allegedly led by SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler. There are no reliable, attributable accounts but in most accounts of the experiment, the destroyer escort USS Eldridge was fitted with the required equipment at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. Testing allegedly began in the summer of 1943, and it was supposedly successful to a limited degree. One test allegedly resulted in the Eldridge being rendered almost completely invisible, with some witnesses reporting a "greenish fog" appearing in its place. Crew members supposedly complained of severe nausea afterwards. Also, it is said that when the ship reappeared, some sailors were embedded in the metal structures of the ship, including one sailor who ended up on a deck level below that where he began, and had his hand embedded in the steel hull of the ship, as well as some sailors who went "completely bananas". At that point, it is said that the experiment was altered at the request of the Navy, with the new objective being solely to render the Eldridge invisible to radar. None of these allegations has been independently substantiated. The conjecture then alleges that the equipment was not properly re-calibrated, but in spite of this, the experiment was repeated on October 28, 1943. This time, the Eldridge not only became invisible, but she physically vanished from the area in a flash of blue light and teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, over 200 miles (320 km) away. It is claimed that the Eldridge sat for some time in full view of men aboard the ship SS Andrew Furuseth, whereupon the Eldridge vanished from their sight, and then reappeared in Philadelphia at the site it had originally occupied. It was also said that the warship went approximately 10 seconds back in time. Many versions of the tale include descriptions of serious side effects for the crew. Some crew members were said to have been physically fused to bulkheads, while others suffered from mental disorders, and still others supposedly simply vanished. It is also claimed that the ship's crew may have been subjected to brainwashing, in order to maintain the secrecy of the experiment.
The earliest practical precursor to the human space flight program was Project Albert. It was a horrific failure, with nearly all its pilots unable to survive the ordeal. Of course, these pilots were monkeys. Still, their story — full of confiscated rockets, drugs, and desert skies raining body parts — is one of the most tragic tales of the early space program.
Towards the end of World War II, a group of German aviation experts found themselves in possession of a lot of rockets and not a lot of pleasant options. They had engineered the V-2 rocket, which had been used to vigorously bomb Britain. They were on the losing side of a war that had inflicted massive casualties on the USSR. Both armies were now closing in and the scientists didn't relish the prospect of being captured by either of them. And so they went looking for Americans. When they found them, they offered to lead the American military to whatever rocket parts they could offer in exchange for political considerations and transport to America.
RELATED
Remember the time we bombed Mexico with German rockets?
Germany spent the end of the 1930s and half the 1940s inventing and perfecting missiles. They made so many, they still had a ton of them left over… Read…
They got the transport, and America got a lot of rockets. These aviation experts did various things with the V-2s, including accidentally bombing Mexico once, but one of the most exciting ideas they had was preliminary tests for sending humans into space. This was hard to do, since no one knew anything about the effects of space on physiology. It was entirely new territory. And so they started the project in 1948 with an ill-fated rhesus monkey named Albert.
The Grisly Failures of Project Albert, Precursor to the Apollo Space Program
SEXPAND
On June 11th Albert went up on the first test, drugged slightly, but otherwise healthy. At least on the way up to the 63 kilometer high trip he was healthy. No one had a reliable way to monitor his vital signs, and so it fell to medical experts afterwards to discover that the dead monkey that scientists found at the end of the trial had suffocated during the flight, not in reaction to the altitude. A year later Albert II went up to 134 kilometers. This time the person examining the corpse was asked for time, not cause of death. The parachute to his rocket had failed to deploy.
Albert III went up in September. His rocket exploded at ten kilometers up. No one was consulted this time about either time or cause of death. Albert IV was snuffed in another parachute failure in 1949.
It's fair to say that the scientists were somewhat disillusioned with what the V-2s had to offer at that point, and so they switched to rockets made by Aerojet in the fifties. They kept the name Albert, though, and the next two Alberts inherited the luck of the first four. Yet another parachute failure claimed Albert V. It seemed that luck was changing when Albert VI landed alive and safe in 1951. Sadly, he landed rather off course. He waited for hours in the New Mexico sun in a sealed metal container until military teams found and recovered the rocket, but he died of stress and heat exhaustion two hours after the recovery.
At last the proto-space experts decided to switch the names as they had switched the rockets. Two monkeys named Patricia and Mike survived a flight in 1952. Their flight had also not gone as planned, and had only managed to climb a little over twenty kilometers. But, considering they were the first monkeys to make it out of a rocket comfortably alive, their flight was celebrated. It took another seven years - and no more monkeys named Albert - for any simians to actually make it to space and back alive. Still, let us give thanks for all those fallen Alberts, and wonder if NASA should institute some new naming requirement for their missions.
Germany spent the end of the 1930s and half the 1940s inventing and perfecting missiles. They made so many, they still had a ton of them left over… Read…
They got the transport, and America got a lot of rockets. These aviation experts did various things with the V-2s, including accidentally bombing Mexico once, but one of the most exciting ideas they had was preliminary tests for sending humans into space. This was hard to do, since no one knew anything about the effects of space on physiology. It was entirely new territory. And so they started the project in 1948 with an ill-fated rhesus monkey named Albert.
The Grisly Failures of Project Albert, Precursor to the Apollo Space Program
SEXPAND
On June 11th Albert went up on the first test, drugged slightly, but otherwise healthy. At least on the way up to the 63 kilometer high trip he was healthy. No one had a reliable way to monitor his vital signs, and so it fell to medical experts afterwards to discover that the dead monkey that scientists found at the end of the trial had suffocated during the flight, not in reaction to the altitude. A year later Albert II went up to 134 kilometers. This time the person examining the corpse was asked for time, not cause of death. The parachute to his rocket had failed to deploy.
Albert III went up in September. His rocket exploded at ten kilometers up. No one was consulted this time about either time or cause of death. Albert IV was snuffed in another parachute failure in 1949.
It's fair to say that the scientists were somewhat disillusioned with what the V-2s had to offer at that point, and so they switched to rockets made by Aerojet in the fifties. They kept the name Albert, though, and the next two Alberts inherited the luck of the first four. Yet another parachute failure claimed Albert V. It seemed that luck was changing when Albert VI landed alive and safe in 1951. Sadly, he landed rather off course. He waited for hours in the New Mexico sun in a sealed metal container until military teams found and recovered the rocket, but he died of stress and heat exhaustion two hours after the recovery.
At last the proto-space experts decided to switch the names as they had switched the rockets. Two monkeys named Patricia and Mike survived a flight in 1952. Their flight had also not gone as planned, and had only managed to climb a little over twenty kilometers. But, considering they were the first monkeys to make it out of a rocket comfortably alive, their flight was celebrated. It took another seven years - and no more monkeys named Albert - for any simians to actually make it to space and back alive. Still, let us give thanks for all those fallen Alberts, and wonder if NASA should institute some new naming requirement for their missions.
The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's Project Albert is the research and development effort whose goal is to develop the process and capabilities of Data Farming, a method to address decision-maker's questions that applies high performance computing to modeling in order to examine and understand the landscape of potential simulated outcomes, enhance intuition, find surprises and outliers, and identify potential options. Data Farming is the method by which potentially millions of data points are explored and captured. It could be considered akin to Data Mining combined with feedback which allows for the more intelligent collection of more data points. This process is made possible, in part, by the exploitation of High Performance Computing assets and methods, and the project is fully supported by the Maui High Performance Computing Center. The Project Albert modeling approach is achieved through the development of a suite of models, called Distillations, to drive home the point that these models are produced as an intentional complement to the very highly-detailed simulations being developed within the DoD, which by the very fact that they are so highly-detailed and encumbered, do not permit the examination of a very wide range of possibilities and outcomes.
By virtue of their being much easier to run and understand (think: SimCity adapted to a combat situation), they are proving to be effective tools that help capture and scientifically reproduce the ideas of Subject Matter Experts, such as those thinking about tomorrow's concepts, doctrine, and requirements. This suite of entity-based models allow for rapid and highly tailorable changes in entity characteristics and behaviors, quite amenable to, and intentionally designed for rapid, repeatable concept exploration. Project Albert develops a suite, vice a single model, to allow for the testing of robustness of observations across modeling platforms, and because each model has inherent strengths and unique capabilities with regard to each aspect of modeling how entities think, decide, shoot, move, and communicate. The Project Albert suite of models includes Map-Aware Non-Uniform Automata (MANA), Socrates, and Pythagoras. It is of note that MANA is developed by the New Zealand Defense Technology Agency, and it is used free of charge by members of the Project Albert Team. Project Albert is also harnessing existing, and developing new, methodologies for investigating the results of running such models. In this regard, a wide range of Data Exploration and Data Visualization tools and methods are being employed.
Also being developed is the concept and initial implementation of Automated Red Teaming, a methodology that helps identify how Red can beat Blue through intelligent, effective, and efficient search through the space of possibilities. This is accomplished in part through the employment of a variety of evolutionary algorithms.
Currently, Project Albert is collaborating with military decision-makers, both inside the USMC, jointly, and within coalitional arrangements, to apply these techniques and tools to real-world questions. Some examples of the work efforts can be found on the Project Albert International Workshop pages. Another example of collaboration efforts is Project Albert 's Internship and Experimental History Program. This program has employed interns from U.S. Naval Academy, Naval Postgraduate School, U.S. Military Academy, and civilian academic institutions. Experimental History describes the process of taking a historical battle of interest and recreating it in one or more of our distillations and applying the process of data farming to it to yield a set of data that address interesting what ifs. In a sense, it is akin to taking a single data point (of history) and expanding the understanding of it to a region of possibilities. Finally, initial progress is also already being made on the integration (translation of scenarios) between different models and C2 Platforms, e.g. from C2PC to one of the Project Albert models, and on the development of collaborative environments that assist in the whiteboarding and creation of scenarios and in the joint understanding of the data that results from Data Farming the scenario.
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States led by its newly created space agency NASA. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth, and doing it before the Soviet Union, as part of the early space race. It involved 7 astronauts flying a total of 6 solo trips. On 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space in a suborbital flight after the Soviet Union had put Yuri Gagarin into space and orbit one month earlier. John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit on 20 February 1962, he was the third person to do so, after soviet Gherman Titov had made a day long flight in August 1961. When the project ended in May 1963, the Americans' NASA program was still behind the Soviet Space Program, but the gap was seen as closing. The race to the Moon began.
The space race started in 1957 by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik I. This came as a shock to the American public and led to the creation of NASA to gather the efforts in space exploration already existing in USA. After the launch of the first American satellite in 1958, manned space flight became the next goal. The spacecraft was produced by McDonnell Aircraft. It was cone shaped with room for one person together with supplies of water, food and oxygen in a pressurized cabin. It was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida by modified military missiles, most importantly Atlas D, and had a rescue tower for protection from a failing rocket. The whole flight could be controlled from the ground through a network of tracking stations which also allowed communication with the astronaut. If necessary, the astronaut could override commands from the ground. For reentry into Earth's atmosphere, small rockets were used to bring the spacecraft out of its orbit. A heatshield would protect the spacecraft from the heat of reentry, and a parachute would slow the craft for a water landing. Here both astronaut and spacecraft were picked up by helicopter and brought to a ship.
From a slow start with humiliating mistakes, the Mercury Project became popular and the manned flights were followed by millions on radio and TV not only in United States, but around the world. Apart from the manned missions, Mercury had a total of 20 unmanned launches as a part of the development of the project. This also involved test animals, most famously the chimpanzees Ham and Enos. Mercury laid the groundwork for Project Gemini and the follow-on Apollo moon-landing program, which was announced a few weeks after the first manned flight. The astronauts went under the name Mercury Seven and they named their spacecraft with a "7" to the name. The project name was taken from Mercury, a Roman god. It is estimated to have cost $1.71 billion and have involved the work of 2 million people.
Yossi Leshem worked at the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), the leading NGO in Israel, for 25 years, as a guide, as Director of a Field Study Center,as Head of the Nature Protection Department, Initiator and Director of the Israel Raptor Information Center between 1980-1991, and as the Executive Director of the SPNI between 1991-1995. Leshem is Senior Researcher in the Department of Zoology in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University and is the founder and Director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Latrun, Israel, established by Tel Aviv University and the SPNI. In November 2007 he was elected as the Chairman of the SPNI Council. Leshem has been involved in many aspects of nature conservation, with the emphasis on bird research for 38 years. Since 1984 his research for his doctorate, which was conducted with the cooperation of the Israeli Air Force and the Ministry of Science, has resulted in a decrease of 76% in the number of collisions with aircraft caused by birds, and has saved 790 million dollars, not to mention the numbers of lives, both human and avian. Today he serves as Lt. Col. (Ret) in the Israeli Air Force and continues this research. In 2005 he won the prestigious Mike Kuhring Prize for achievements of high significance for an improved flight safety concerning the bird problems of aviation, and for his mission to connect safety with nature conservation via education that gave bird strike prevention world wide appreciation. Leshem is involved in a variety of activities in bird migration research, in educational activities that take place in over 250 schools in Israel part of cooperation with the Palestinians and the Jordanians, and has developed an educational and scientific site on the Internet ( www.birds.org.il ) called "Migrating Birds Know No Boundaries". Leshem developed a 6 year research and an educational program in cooperation with the Palestinians and Jordanians under the same title as the web site. At the moment Dr. Leshem is conducting a number of scientific projects, among them a project which tracks migrating birds that have been fitted with satellite transmitters, and a project that tracks migration with the aid of radar, in cooperation with a team of Russian immigrant scientists. Leshem initiated a program to use Barn Owls and Kestrels as pest controllers to reduce the use of pesticides in agricultural fields, which became a national program and a regional project with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Leshem published 3 books, scientific papers, and hundreds of articles in popular magazines. Dr. Leshem visited Japan as a visiting Prof. at the University of Tokyo, June 30 th – October 12 th, 2006. Leshem is a Recipient of "Lifetime Achievement Award for Environmental Protection" in 2008, given for sixty years of Israel
About the Bologna Center
Home to the oldest university in Europe, Bologna’s long tradition of education, cultural heritage and political vitality makes it an attractive location for SAIS' European campus. On the cusp of its 60th anniversary, SAIS Bologna is distinguished by strong faculty-student relationships, vigorous debate and a cohesive social and intellectual community. Exposure to contrasting European and U.S. perspectives on global issues offers a distinctive academic pairing—making for an extraordinarily enriching experience.
Degrees & Programs
Master of Arts
Master of Arts in International Affairs
Master of International Public Policy
Diploma in International Studies
Visit the Bologna Center
Prospective Students
Campus Tours
SAIS Bologna has an open-door policy for prospective students and encourages vists throughout the academic year when classes are in session. To arrange a visit, contact the Admissions Office at admissions@jhubc.it.
Open Day
Open Day is an opportunity for students to visit the SAIS Bologna campus. During the day-long event visitors meet current students and faculty and attend classes. To register for Open Day, please click here
Information Sessions
We understand that many of our applicants live far from the places we travel to. To make sure as many candidates as possible have their questions answered, we have arranged a set of online information sessions. To connect to the sessions, prospective students need access to a computer, an internet connection and a phone line (or Skype). For instructions on how to log-in, please contact admissions.eu@jhu.edu. Below is the fall 2013 schedule.
August 28 at 4pm - general introduction
September 26 at 10 am - standardized tests
October 23 at 4pm - statement of purpose
November 26 at 10am - letters of recommendation
December 12 at 4pm - analytical essay
all times local Bologna, Italy time
Academic Catalog
Public & Press
Events
Various seminar series are organized at SAIS Bologna throughout the academic year. Seminars are grouped thematically and each one is hosted by a SAIS Bologna faculty member. These events bring prominent scholars and practitioners from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world to present current research to the Bologna Center and local community.
Event Calendar
Contact
Bologna Center
Via Belmeloro 11
40126 Bologna
Italy
+39 051 2917811
The,Bad,Science,Mark,R.,Rowe,San,Diego,California,92102,Mark,Rowe,David,Rowe,Nina,Dougherty,Clifford,Dougherty,Anita,Ferguson,Virginia,Ferguson,William,Jones,Frederick,Jones,Charles,Rowe,Jacqueline,Kennedy,Esther,Rowe,Ralph,Rowe,Judy,Garland,Ethel,Kennedy,Robert,John,Kennedy,international,affairs,world,economic,domination,and,control,policy,makers,decisions,for,material,gain,persuasion,of,the,masses,Did,you,know,that,the,NSA,can,track,the,location,of,your,phone,even,when,it,is,turned,off,and,the,batteries,have,been,removed,This,admission,went,largely,unnoticed,in,a,Washington,Post,report,entitled,NSA,growth,fueled,by,need,to,target,terrorists,In,the,article,writer,Dana,Priest,details,how,teams,of,NSA,employees,stationed,around,the,globe,are,dedicated,to,tracking,phones,in,real,time,By,September,2004,a,new,NSA,technique,enabled,the,agency,to,find,cellphones,even,when,they,were,turned,off,JSOC,troops,called,this,The,Find,and,it,gave,them,thousands,of,new,targets,including,members,of,a,burgeoning,al,Qaeda,sponsored,insurgency,in,Iraq,according,to,members,of,the,unit,At,the,same,time,the,NSA,developed,a,new,computer,linkup,called,the,Real,Time,Regional,Gateway,into,which,the,military,and,intelligence,officers,could,feed,every,bit,of,data,or,seized,documents,and,get,back,a,phone,number,or,list,of,potential,targets,It,also,allowed,commanders,to,see,on,a,screen,every,type,of,surveillance,available,in,a,given,territory,The,technique,by,which,the,NSA,can,wiretap,cellphones,even,when,they,are,turned,off,and,powered,down,is,most,likely,being,performed,with,the,complicity,of,telecommunications,companies,who,have,proven,friendly,to,NSA,snooping,Trojan,horse,programs,disguised,behind,routine,system,updates,are,the,likely,method,through,which,the,NSA,gains,direct,access,to,millions,of,Americans,cellphones,and,other,devices,you,may,recall,the,fact,that,Verizon,and,ATT,notably,did,not,sign,the,collective,letter,asking,the,government,to,allow,affected,companies,to,release,information,on,government,requests,for,data,writes,Tim,Cushing,given,this,background,its,not,unimaginable,that,Verizon,and,ATT,would,accommodate,the,NSA,and,FBI,if,it,wished,to,use,their,update,systems,to,push,these,trojans,as,we,have,also,previously,highlighted,terms,of,agreement,for,many,of,the,apps,you,download,to,your,smartphone,now,use,your,microphone,to,listen,to,you,and,your,camera,to,take,pictures,of,you,without,your,knowledge,the,notion,of,the,federal,government,tracking,your,location,via,your,cellphone,is,particularly,prescient,given,yesterdays,report,concerning,the,DHS,funded,mesh,network,system,that,seattle,police,eventually,intend,to,roll,out,across,the,city,but,have,temporarily,been,forced,to,deactivate,due,to,a,privacy,outcry,aruba,networks,company,behind,the,system,of,wifi,hubs,which,can,record,the,last,1000,locations,of,cellphones,belonging,to,anyone,in,the,coverage,area,bragged,in,their,promotional,material,that,the,grid,could,track,rogue,or,unassociated,devices,In,other,words,even,if,you,do,not,allow,your,phone,to,connect,to,such,wifi,networks,they,can,still,access,your,device,record,its,current,and,historical,location,as,well,as,download,private,information,from,your,apps,and,other,settings,And,there,appeared,a,great,wonder,in,heaven;,a,woman,clothed,with,the,sun,and,the,moon,under,her,feet,and,upon,her,head,a,crown,of,twelve,stars:,And,she,being,with,child,cried,travailing,in,birth,and,pained,to,be,delivered,And,there,appeared,another,wonder,in,heaven;,and,behold,a,great,red,dragon,having,seven,heads,and,ten,horns,and,seven,crowns,upon,his,heads.,And,his,tail,drew,the,third,part,of,the,stars,of,heaven,and,did,cast,them,to,the,earth:,and,the,dragon,stood,before,the,woman,which,was,ready,to,be,delivered,for,to,devour,her,child,as,soon,as,it,was,born.,And,she,brought,forth,a,man,child,who,was,to,rule,all,nations,with,a,rod,of,iron:,and,her,child,was,caught,up,unto,God,and,to,his,throne.,And,the,woman,fled,into,the,wilderness,where,she,hath,a,place,prepared,of,God,that,they,should,feed,her,there,a,thousand,two,hundred,and,threescore,days.,And,there,was,war,in,heaven:,Michael,and,his,angels,fought,against,the,dragon;,and,the,dragon,fought,and,his,angels,And,prevailed,not,neither,was,their,place,found,any,more,in,heaven,And,the,great,dragon,was,cast,out,that,old,serpent,called,the,Devil,and,Satan,which,deceiveth,the,whole,world:,he,was,cast,out,into,the,earth,and,his,angels,were,cast,out,with,him.,And,I,heard,a,loud,voice,saying,in,heaven,Now,is,come,salvation,and,strength,and,the,kingdom,of,our,God,and,the,power,of,his,Christ,for,the,accuser,of,our,brethren,is,cast,down,which,accused,them,before,our,God,day,and,night,And,they,overcame,him,by,the,blood,of,the,Lamb,and,by,the,word,of,their,testimony;,and,they,loved,not,their,lives,unto,the,death,Therefore,rejoice,ye,heavens,and,ye,that,dwell,in,them.,Woe,to,the,inhabiters,of,the,earth,and,of,the,sea!,for,the,devil,is,come,down,unto,you,having,great,wrath,because,he,knoweth,that,he,hath,but,a,short,time.,And,when,the,dragon,saw,that,he,was,cast,unto,the,earth,he,persecuted,the,woman,which,brought,forth,the,man,child,And,to,the,woman,were,given,two,wings,of,a,great,eagle,that,she,might,fly,into,the,wilderness,into,her,place,where,she,is,nourished,for,a,time,and,times,and,half,a,time,from,the,face,of,the,serpent,And,the,serpent,cast,out,of,his,mouth,water,as,a,flood,after,the,woman,that,he,might,cause,her,to,be,carried,away,of,the,flood.,And,the,earth,helped,the,woman,and,the,earth,opened,her,mouth,and,swallowed,up,the,flood,which,the,dragon,cast,out,of,his,mouth,And,the,dragon,was,wroth,with,the,woman,and,went,to,make,war,with,the,remnant,of,her,seed,which,keep,the,commandments,of,God,and,have,the,testimony,of,Jesus,Christ,Charles,Rowe,Jacqueline,Kennedy,Esther,Rowe,Ralph,Rowe,Judy,Garland,Ethel,Kennedy,Robert,John,Kennedy,international,affairs,world,economic,domination,and,control,policy,makers,decisions,for,material,gain,persuasion,of,the,masses,Did,you,know,that,the,NSA,can,track,the,location,of,your,phone,even,when,it,is,turned,off,and,the,batteries,have,been,removed,This,admission,went,largely,unnoticed,in,a,Washington,Post,report,entitled,NSA,growth,fueled,by,need,to,target,terrorists,In,the,article,writer,Dana,Priest,details,how,teams,of,NSA,employees,stationed,around,the,globe,are,dedicated,to,tracking,phones,in,real,time,By,September,2004,a,new,NSA,technique,enabled,the,agency,to,find,cellphones,even,when,they,were,turned,off,JSOC,troops,called,this,The,Find,and,it,gave,them,thousands,of,new,targets,including,members,of,a,burgeoning,al,Qaeda,sponsored,insurgency,in,Iraq,according,to,members,of,the,unit,At,the,same,time,the,NSA,developed,a,new,computer,linkup,called,the,Real,Time,Regional,Gateway,into,which,the,military,and,intelligence,officers,could,feed,every,bit,of,data,or,seized,documents,and,get,back,a,phone,number,or,list,of,potential,targets,It,also,allowed,commanders,to,see,on,a,screen,every,type,of,surveillance,available,in,a,given,territory,The,technique,by,which,the,NSA,can,wiretap,cellphones,even,when,they,are,turned,off,and,powered,down,is,most,likely,being,performed,with,the,complicity,of,telecommunications,companies,who,have,proven,friendly,to,NSA,snooping,Trojan,horse,programs,disguised,behind,routine,system,updates,are,the,likely,method,through,which,the,NSA,gains,direct,access,to,millions,of,Americans,cellphones,and,other,devices,you,may,recall,the,fact,that,Verizon,and,ATT,notably,did,not,sign,the,collective,letter,asking,the,government,to,allow,affected,companies,to,release,information,on,government,requests,for,data,writes,Tim,Cushing,given,this,background,its,not,unimaginable,that,Verizon,and,ATT,would,accommodate,the,NSA,and,FBI,if,it,wished,to,use,their,update,systems,to,push,these,trojans,as,we,have,also,previously,highlighted,terms,of,agreement,for,many,of,the,apps,you,download,to,your,smartphone,now,use,your,microphone,to,listen,to,you,and,your,camera,to,take,pictures,of,you,without,your,knowledge,the,notion,of,the,federal,government,tracking,your,location,via,your,cellphone,is,particularly,prescient,given,yesterdays,report,concerning,the,DHS,funded,mesh,network,system,that,seattle,police,eventually,intend,to,roll,out,across,the,city,but,have,temporarily,been,forced,to,deactivate,due,to,a,privacy,outcry,aruba,networks,company,behind,the,system,of,wifi,hubs,which,can,record,the,last,1000,locations,of,cellphones,belonging,to,anyone,in,the,coverage,area,bragged,in,their,promotional,material,that,the,grid,could,track,rogue,or,unassociated,devices,In,other,words,even,if,you,do,not,allow,your,phone,to,connect,to,such,wifi,networks,they,can,still,access,your,device,record,its,current,and,historical,location,as,well,as,download,private,information,from,your,apps,and,other,settings,The,Future,of,Eugenics,Eugenics,although,based,on,the,science,of,genetics,is,not,itself,a,sciences,for,it,must,above,all,concern,itself,with,social,values,with,the,question:,Whither,mankind?,Perhaps,general,Agreement,could,be,had,that,freedom,from,gross,physical,or,mental,defects,and,the,the,freedom,from,gross,physical,or,mental,defects,and,the,possession,of,sound,health,high,intelligence,general,adaptability,and,mobility,of,sprier,are,the,major,goals,toward,which,eugenics,should,aim;,perhaps,even,that,diversity,of,nature,is,better,than,uniformity,of,type,But,hour,far,ought,selective,reproduction,to,inters,with,human,freedoms:,Genetically,as,in,other,respects,"there,is,so,much,bad,in,the,best,of,us,and,so,much,good,in,the,worst,of,us",that,it,is,hared,to,asses,the,worth,of,the,manifest,hereditary,characteristics,of,a,person;,and,the,numerous,hidden,recessive,genes,or,genes,of,low,penetrance,make,it,quit,impossible,Nor,can,on,determine,to,what,extent,a,person's,manifest,characteristics,a,the,product,of,environment,particularly,for,this,qualities,what,eugenics',major,concern:,con,health,high,intelligence,and,the,like,THe,Jukes,and,Kallikaks,were,horrible,examples,of,degenerate,humanity,but,what,might,they,have,been,in,a,better,world:,Were,their,alcoholism,their,crime,and,their,vice,inescapable,products,of,their,genes?,It,seems,very,doubtful,Only,the,experiment,of,putting,them,from,earliest,infancy,in,to,an,optimum,environment,could,possible,yield,and,answer,It,is,easier,to,define,the,essentials,of,a,optimum,environment,not,forgetting,that,it,need,not,be,the,same,for,everyone,than,to,modify,gene,frequencies,by,wise,selection,Once,mankind,has,produced,an,approximation,of,that,optimum,environment,the,eugenic,task,will,be,simpler,In,fact,that,natural,selection,exerted,by,such,an,environment,may,make,eugenics,quite,unnecessary,See,also,Birth,Control,Genetics,Mark,Rowe,David,Rowe,Nina,Dougherty,Clifford,Dougherty,Anita,Ferguson,Virginia,Ferguson,William,Jones,Frederick,Jones,Charles,Rowe,Jacqueline,Kennedy,Esther,Rowe,Ralph,Rowe,Judy,Garland,Ethel,Kennedy,Robert,John,Kennedy,international,affairs,world,economic,domination,and,control,policy,makers,decisions,for,material,gain,persuasion,of,the,masses,Did,you,know,that,the,NSA,can,track,the,location,of,your,phone,even,when,it,is,turned,off,and,the,batteries,have,been,removed,This,admission,went,largely,unnoticed,in,a,Washington,Post,report,entitled,NSA,growth,fueled,by,need,to,target,terrorists,In,the,article,writer,Dana,Priest,details,how,teams,of,NSA,employees,stationed,around,the,globe,are,dedicated,to,tracking,phones,in,real,time,By,September,2004,a,new,NSA,technique,enabled,the,agency,to,find,cellphones,even,when,they,were,turned,off,JSOC,troops,called,this,The,Find,and,it,gave,them,thousands,of,new,targets,including,members,of,a,burgeoning,al,Qaeda,sponsored,insurgency,in,Iraq,according,to,members,of,the,unit,At,the,same,time,the,NSA,developed,a,new,computer,linkup,called,the,Real,Time,Regional,Gateway,into,which,the,military,and,intelligence,officers,could,feed,every,bit,of,data,or,seized,documents,and,get,back,a,phone,number,or,list,of,potential,targets,It,also,allowed,commanders,to,see,on,a,screen,every,type,of,surveillance,available,in,a,given,territory,The,technique,by,which,the,NSA,can,wiretap,cellphones,even,when,they,are,turned,off,and,powered,down,is,most,likely,being,performed,with,the,complicity,of,telecommunications,companies,who,have,proven,friendly,to,NSA,snooping,Trojan,horse,programs,disguised,behind,routine,system,updates,are,the,likely,method,through,which,the,NSA,gains,direct,access,to,millions,of,Americans,cellphones,and,other,devices,you,may,recall,the,fact,that,Verizon,and,ATT,notably,did,not,sign,the,collective,letter,asking,the,government,to,allow,affected,companies,to,release,information,on,government,requests,for,data,writes,Tim,Cushing,given,this,background,its,not,unimaginable,that,Verizon,and,ATT,would,accommodate,the,NSA,and,FBI,if,it,wished,to,use,their,update,systems,to,push,these,trojans,as,we,have,also,previously,highlighted,terms,of,agreement,for,many,of,the,apps,you,download,to,your,smartphone,now,use,your,microphone,to,listen,to,you,and,your,camera,to,take,pictures,of,you,without,your,knowledge,the,notion,of,the,federal,government,tracking,your,location,via,your,cellphone,is,particularly,prescient,given,yesterdays,report,concerning,the,DHS,funded,mesh,network,system,that,seattle,police,eventually,intend,to,roll,out,across,the,city,but,have,temporarily,been,forced,to,deactivate,due,to,a,privacy,outcry,aruba,networks,company,behind,the,system,of,wifi,hubs,which,can,record,the,last,1000,locations,of,cellphones,belonging,to,anyone,in,the,coverage,area,bragged,in,their,promotional,material,that,the,grid,could,track,rogue,or,unassociated,devices,In,other,words,even,if,you,do,not,allow,your,phone,to,connect,to,such,wifi,networks,they,can,still,access,your,device,record,its,current,and,historical,location,as,well,as,download,private,information,from,your,apps,,and,other,settings,washington,the,white,house,has,cancelled,a,planned,summit,meeting,next,month,between,president,barack,obama,and,russian,president,vladimir,putin,and,one,of,the,reasons,given,was,moscows,decision,to,grant,asylum,to,an,american,who,leaked,top,secret,information,Former,Vice,President,Dick,Cheney,called,Edward,Snowden,a,traitor,for,leaking,top,secret,documents,from,the,National,Security,Agency,in,an,interview,that,aired,Monday,afternoon,on,CNN,Cheney,added,that,he,hopes,the,U,S,is,eventually,able,to,catch,Snowden,who,was,granted,a,one,year,asylum,in,Russia,in,August,and,hopes,he,receives,the,justice,he,deserves,Cheney,said,Snowden,leaks,which,most,recently,revealed,that,the,National,Security,Agency,monitored,the,phone,conversations,of,35,world,leaders,have,hurt,Americas,ability,to,defend,itself,The,former,second,in,command,would,not,comment,on,whether,or,not,that,the,surveillance,began,in,2002,as,the,documents,indicated,The,fact,is,we,do,collect,a,lot,of,intelligence,without,speaking,about,any,particular,target,or,group,of,targets,Cheney,told,CNN,Jake,Tapper,That,intelligence,capability,is,enormously,important,to,the,United,States,to,our,conduct,of,foreign,policy,to,the,defense,matters,to,economic,matters,And,Im,a,strong,supporter,of,it,The,same,day,Cheney,came,out,against,Snowden,Wikileaks,set,up,a,Free,Snowden,a,website,designed,to,collect,money,to,defend,the,former,NSA,contractor,whose,asylum,ends,in,August,2014,Damascus,knows,the,struggle,for,the,moment,is,to,sway,American,public,opinion,With,that,in,mind,President,Assad,In,his,interview,with,CBS,and,statements,from,other,Syrian,officials,,have,stressed,at,least,three,ways,in,which,a,US,military,strike,would,backfire,There,is,the,unspecific,warning,if,not,outright,threat,of,direct,reprisals,by,Syria,,and,indirect,action,by,its,allies,such,as,Hezbollah,in,Lebanon,and,Iranian,backed,Shia,militias,in,Iraq,There,is,the,warning,that,American,action,would,strengthen,rebel,factions,linked,to,al,Qaeda,and,could,even,enable,them,to,seize,power,if,the,strike,were,damaging,enough,And,there,is,the,threat,echoed,by,Moscow,that,any,such,attack,would,scupper,already,dim,chances,of,a,political,settlement,through,peace,talks,in,Geneva,In,reality,much,depends,on,what,exactly,the,Americans,intend,to,do,If,their,strike,is,as,Mr,Kerry,said,incredibly,small,the,repercussions,might,be,very,limited,Iranian,backed,militias,in,Iraq,might,fire,off,some,mortars,at,the,enormous,US,embassy,compound,in,Baghdad,for,example,But,more,serious,actions,such,as,Hezbollah,striking,at,Israel,are,unlikely,unless,the,US,launches,a,very,major,operation,indeed,Russia,has,asked,Syria,to,put,its,chemical,weapons,stockpiles,under,international,control,and,then,have,them,destroyed,in,an,attempt,to,avoid,US,military,strikes,Foreign,Minister,Sergei,Lavrov,said,the,offer,was,made,during,talks,with,his,Syrian,counterpart,Walid,Muallem,who,welcomed,the,initiative,The,US,said,it,was,skeptical,but,would,have,a,hard,look,at,the,plan,The,US,accuses,Damascus,of,war,crimes,allegations,denied,by,the,regime,US,Secretary,of,State,John,Kerry,in,Europe,to,garner,support,for,the,military,action,,inadvertently,started,the,talk,of,Syria,giving,up,its,chemical,weapons,early,on,Monday,When,asked,at,a,news,conference,whether,there,was,anything,Syrian,President,Bashar,al,Assad,could,do,to,avoid,military,action,Mr,Kerry,replied,that,he,could,hand,over,his,entire,stockpile,of,chemical,weapons,within,the,next,week,US,officials,subsequently,clarified,that,Mr,Kerry,was,making,a,rhetorical,argument,rather,than,a,serious,offer,However,Mr,Lavrov,later,revealed,in,a,news,conference,that,he,had,urged,Mr,Muallem,to,not,only,agree,on,placing,chemical,weapons,storage,sites,under,international,control,,but,also,on,their,subsequent,destruction,He,said,he,had,also,told,Mr,Muallem,that,Syria,should,then,fully,join,the,Chemical,Weapons,Convention,Mr,Muallem,told,reporters,through,an,interpreter,that,Syria,welcomed,the,initiative,and,praised,Russia,for,attempting,to,prevent,American,aggression,against,our,people,Mr,Kerry,and,Mr,Lavrov,spoke,on,the,phone,after,the,Russian,proposal,was,put,forward,but,US,officials,sounded,a,cautious,note,over,the,plan,White,House,spokesman,Jay,Carney,said,the,US,government,would,study,the,proposal,but,had,skepticism,over,the,credibility,of,the,Assad,regime,In,an,interview,earlier,Assad,refused,to,even,acknowledge,that,he,has,chemical,weapons,Of,course,the,whole,world,knows,he,does,said,Mr,Carney,White,House,spokesman,Jay,Carney,said,the,US,would,study,Russia's,proposals,He,promised,that,the,US,would,continue,to,push,for,strikes,because,the,credible,threat,of,military,action,was,vital,in,putting,pressure,on,the,Assad,regime,US,allies,have,also,reacted,cautiously,UK,Minister,David,Cameron,said,the,destruction,of,the,weapons,would,be,a,huge,step,forward,but,warned,that,it,should,not,be,used,as,a,distraction,tactic,French,Foreign,Minister,Laurent,Fabius,called,on,Mr,Assad,to,make,rapid,serious,and,verifiable,comments,to,the,plan,German,Chancellor,Angela,Merkel,said,it,was,an,interesting,proposal,but,added,that,she,hoped,real,action,would,follow,Pay,the,price,Moscow,has,been,Mr,Assad's,main,international,ally,throughout,Syria's,two,and,a,half,year,civil,war,Russia,has,blocked,three,resolutions,against,Syria,in,the,UN,Security,Council,and,has,dismissed,US,claims,that,Mr,Assad's,forces,carried,out,a,chemical,attack,in,Damascus,on,August,killing,people,Mr,Assad's,government,blames,the,attack,on,rebels,fighting,to,overthrow,him,in,a,conflict,that,the,UN,says,has,claimed,some,lives,The,UN,sent,weapons,experts,into,Damascus,to,investigate,the,attack,UN,Secretary,General,Ban,Ki,moon,said,on,Monday,that,if,the,experts,concluded,chemicals,had,been,used,,he,would,consider,asking,the,Security,Council,to,approve,a,safe,zone,in,Syria,where,the,weapons,could,be,destroyed,Meanwhile,the,Syrian,leader,gave,an,interview,to,US,network,PBS,in,which,he,warned,the,US,against,intervention,saying,the,Middle,East,was,on,the,brink,of,explosion,You're,going,to,pay,the,price,if,you're,not,wise,with,dealing,with,terrorists,There,are,going,to,be,repercussions,he,said,The,government,is,not,the,only,player,in,this,region,You,have,different,parties,different,factions,different,ideologies,You,have,everything,in,this,decision,now,Mr,Assad,did,not,explain,whether,his,comment,was,a,threat,that,Syrian,backed,groups,such,as,Hezbollah,would,launch,retaliation,or,a,warning,that,strikes,would,bolster,al,Qaeda,linked,groups,He,also,denied,using,chemical,weapons,saying,there,was,no,evidence,to,hold,his,government,responsible,for,the,August,attack,Continue,reading,the,main,story,Start,Quote,The,proposal,to,destroy,Syria's,chemical,weapons,could,be,a,one,day,wonder,but,it,could,also,be,a,game,changer,Mark,Mardell,North,America,Heavy,lift,US,President,Barack,Obama,has,cleared,his,schedule,this,week,to,focus,all,his,attention,on,building,support,for,the,Syrian,intervention,He,has,acknowledged,he,faces,a,heavy,lift,to,win,congressional,backing,A,poll,carried,out,by,ABC,and,the,BBC,on,Friday,suggested,more,than,members,in,the,House,of,Representatives,were,either,opposed,or,likely,to,oppose,strikes,Just,representatives,said,they,would,support,or,were,likely,to,support,action,and,a,large,proportion,are,still,undecided,on,the,issue,Many,US,politicians,and,members,of,the,public,remain,concerned,that,military,action,could,draw,the,nation,into,a,prolonged,war,and,spark,broader,hostilities,in,the,region,of,the44,21,230,433,100000,1429,21
-H. Bentley Glass
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States led by its newly created space agency NASA. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth, and doing it before the Soviet Union, as part of the early space race. It involved 7 astronauts flying a total of 6 solo trips. On 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space in a suborbital flight after the Soviet Union had put Yuri Gagarin into space and orbit one month earlier. John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit on 20 February 1962, he was the third person to do so, after soviet Gherman Titov had made a day long flight in August 1961. When the project ended in May 1963, the Americans' NASA program was still behind the Soviet Space Program, but the gap was seen as closing. The race to the Moon began.
The space race started in 1957 by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik I. This came as a shock to the American public and led to the creation of NASA to gather the efforts in space exploration already existing in USA. After the launch of the first American satellite in 1958, manned space flight became the next goal. The spacecraft was produced by McDonnell Aircraft. It was cone shaped with room for one person together with supplies of water, food and oxygen in a pressurized cabin. It was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida by modified military missiles, most importantly Atlas D, and had a rescue tower for protection from a failing rocket. The whole flight could be controlled from the ground through a network of tracking stations which also allowed communication with the astronaut. If necessary, the astronaut could override commands from the ground. For reentry into Earth's atmosphere, small rockets were used to bring the spacecraft out of its orbit. A heatshield would protect the spacecraft from the heat of reentry, and a parachute would slow the craft for a water landing. Here both astronaut and spacecraft were picked up by helicopter and brought to a ship.
From a slow start with humiliating mistakes, the Mercury Project became popular and the manned flights were followed by millions on radio and TV not only in United States, but around the world. Apart from the manned missions, Mercury had a total of 20 unmanned launches as a part of the development of the project. This also involved test animals, most famously the chimpanzees Ham and Enos. Mercury laid the groundwork for Project Gemini and the follow-on Apollo moon-landing program, which was announced a few weeks after the first manned flight. The astronauts went under the name Mercury Seven and they named their spacecraft with a "7" to the name. The project name was taken from Mercury, a Roman god. It is estimated to have cost $1.71 billion and have involved the work of 2 million people.
Yossi Leshem worked at the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), the leading NGO in Israel, for 25 years, as a guide, as Director of a Field Study Center,as Head of the Nature Protection Department, Initiator and Director of the Israel Raptor Information Center between 1980-1991, and as the Executive Director of the SPNI between 1991-1995. Leshem is Senior Researcher in the Department of Zoology in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University and is the founder and Director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Latrun, Israel, established by Tel Aviv University and the SPNI. In November 2007 he was elected as the Chairman of the SPNI Council. Leshem has been involved in many aspects of nature conservation, with the emphasis on bird research for 38 years. Since 1984 his research for his doctorate, which was conducted with the cooperation of the Israeli Air Force and the Ministry of Science, has resulted in a decrease of 76% in the number of collisions with aircraft caused by birds, and has saved 790 million dollars, not to mention the numbers of lives, both human and avian. Today he serves as Lt. Col. (Ret) in the Israeli Air Force and continues this research. In 2005 he won the prestigious Mike Kuhring Prize for achievements of high significance for an improved flight safety concerning the bird problems of aviation, and for his mission to connect safety with nature conservation via education that gave bird strike prevention world wide appreciation. Leshem is involved in a variety of activities in bird migration research, in educational activities that take place in over 250 schools in Israel part of cooperation with the Palestinians and the Jordanians, and has developed an educational and scientific site on the Internet ( www.birds.org.il ) called "Migrating Birds Know No Boundaries". Leshem developed a 6 year research and an educational program in cooperation with the Palestinians and Jordanians under the same title as the web site. At the moment Dr. Leshem is conducting a number of scientific projects, among them a project which tracks migrating birds that have been fitted with satellite transmitters, and a project that tracks migration with the aid of radar, in cooperation with a team of Russian immigrant scientists. Leshem initiated a program to use Barn Owls and Kestrels as pest controllers to reduce the use of pesticides in agricultural fields, which became a national program and a regional project with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Leshem published 3 books, scientific papers, and hundreds of articles in popular magazines. Dr. Leshem visited Japan as a visiting Prof. at the University of Tokyo, June 30 th – October 12 th, 2006. Leshem is a Recipient of "Lifetime Achievement Award for Environmental Protection" in 2008, given for sixty years of Israel
It is important to understand the cultural background of the era that created this field of science.” After the Civil War, there was turbulent economy and an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The economy of the US had rapid fluctuations and remained in this tenuous manner until WWI. As the economy became more uncertain, the social inequalities between different segments of society became more visible.
In the same era, the idea of Social Darwinism became popular and was used to explain these social inequalities. Social Darwinism utilizes the concept of natural selection from Charles Darwin and applies it to society. Social Darwinism explains survival of the fittest in terms of the capability of an individual to survive within a competitive environment. This explains social inequalities by explaining that the wealthy are better individuals and therefore better suited to survive in the uncertain economy. In terms of survival of the fittest the wealthy are more likely to survive and produce more offspring than the poor.
However, this was not occurring. The birthrate of the elite was declining while the birthrate of the poor was increasing. Meanwhile governmental social programs and aid were doing little help the increasing poverty. The government utilized the idea of scientific management, known as progressivism. Progressive reformers relied on science to control both nature and human society. This view of science as a method of reform and the newly rediscovered science of genetics gave rise to social engineering. Eugenicists believed genetics were the cause of problems for the human gene pool. Eugenics stated that society already had paid enough to support these degenerates and the use of sterilization would save money. The eugenicists used quantitative facts to produce scientific evidence. They believed that charity and welfare only treated the symptoms, eugenic sought to eliminate the disease. The following traits were seen as degenerative to the human gene pool to which the eugenicists were determined to eliminate: poverty, feeble-mindedness-including manic depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, rebelliousness, criminality, nomadness, prostitution.
The accuracy of eugenicist methods was severely overrated. Although based on genetics, the eugenic scientists did not document any genetic relationship to some qualities that they studied, such as politeness, bluntness, etc. It is especially amazing that the scientists made such brilliant relationships between genes and behavior at a time when they did not even know that DNA carried genes, causing the researchers to treat complex behavior as though it had a single cause. Other flaw in research included the researchers did not did not take into account the impact that the environment plays into a person’s phenotype. They also used culturally based IQ tests on immigrants to determine IQ. Finally, the early eugenicists made up results to give scientific results.
Many of the eugenicist's ideas came from studies of the supposed deterioration of a genetic stock over time. For example, the sociologist Richard Dugdale based his study on “The Jukes,” which is a clan of 700 criminals, prostitutes, and paupers. Dugdale believed that bad environment caused their degeneracy and could be reversed over time. A.H. Estabrook resurveyed the Jukes in 1915 but saw little improvement in the family. He concluded that several traits associated with inadequacy were inherited. However, since the eugenicists did not understand genetics and the methods of inheritance, they formed their method of inheritance. The meant that desired traits could only be spread to children through marriage between two “worthy” families. Undesired traits were always spread between “shiftless” families. A child between a worthy family and a shiftless family would be mostly shiftless…but a little desirable.
Before eugenics became internationally recognized in WWII, it was a very popular movement in the United States. In fact the American Eugenics Society set up pavilions and "Fitter Families Contest" to popularize eugenics at state fairs. The average family advocated for the utilization of eugenics while educational systems embraced eugenics, which was presented as science fact by the majority biology texts. In fact, eugenics became so popular that eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported study in 1911, to report the best practical means for eliminating defective genes in the Human Population. Although the eighth of the 18 solutions was euthanasia, the researchers believed it was too early to implement this solution. The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a lethal chamber, or gas chamber. Instead, the main solution was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as increased marriage restrictions. However, not everybody was in favor of eugenics, Punnett at the first international congress for Eugenics in 1911 stated, “Except in very few cases, our knowledge of heredity in man at present is far to slight and far too uncertain to base legislation upon.” Carrie Buck, and her mother Emma, had been committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Carrie and Emma were both judged to be “feebleminded” and promiscuous, because they had both had children out of wedlock. Carrie’s child, Vivian, was judged to be “feebleminded” at seven months of age. Hence, three generations of “imbeciles” became the “perfect” family for Virginia officials to use as a test case in favor of the eugenic sterilization law enacted in 1924. Upon reviewing the case, the Supreme Court concurred “that Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” It is impossible to judge whether or not Carrie was “feebleminded”, but she was not promiscuous. Vivian’s was the result of Carrie’s rape by the nephew of her foster parents. She was probably institutionalized to prevent further shame to the family. Just as clearly, Vivian was no imbecile. Vivian’s first grade report card from the Venable School in Charlottesville showed that this daughter of a supposed social degenerate got straight “As” in deportment (conduct) and even made the honor role in April 1931. She died a year later of an intestinal disorder.
Although in 1942 the Supreme Court made a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of criminals, it never reversed the general concept of eugenic sterilization. In 2001, the Virginia General Assembly acknowledged that the sterilization law was based on faulty science and expressed its "profound regret over the Commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement in this country and over the damage done in the name of eugenics.” On May 2, 2002 a marker was erected to honor Carrie Buck in her hometown of Charlottesville.
Laws against interracial marriage had existed in some states since colonial times, but the number increased after the Civil War. In 1913, 29 states had laws forbidding mixed-race marriages. Twenty-two states had stiff penalties -- fines of up to $2,000 and/or prison terms of up to 10 years. Eugenicists actively supported the old laws and the making of new ones. The eugenicist-inspired Virginia Integrity Act of 1924 prohibited marriage between a white person and anyone with a trace of blood other than Caucasian. The Act was struck down, along with all other anti-miscegenation laws, in 1967. The world thought Hitler was mad, but the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Adolf Hitler’s. The idea was created in the United States at least two decades before Hitler came to power. In fact, in 1924, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he frequently quoted American eugenics and displayed a thorough knowledge. “There is today one state, Hitler wrote, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States." Hitler told his fellow Nazis that he closely followed American eugenic legislation. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
During the beginning of the third Reich, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical implementation of their own research. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginias Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
In 1934, the number of sterilizations in Germany was accelerating beyond 5,000 per month. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans were taken from homes for the elderly, mental institutions and other state ran institutions and was systematically gassed. In all, between 50,000 and 100,000 were killed. Hitler’s believed that Jewish were racially inferior. They played a decisive role in social degeneracy, such as prostitution, pornography, modern art, financial crimes, and the narcotics trade. Jewish people possessed no ethics or morality and that they had been engaged in a 4,000-year-old conspiracy to dominate the world pursuant to their view of themselves as the chosen people. Just like other eugenicists, Hitler believe that these characteristics and values were in the genes of the Jewish people, and therefore are able to be eradicated from the general population (cf. generally Mein Kampf). Hitler's made his threat to exterminate European Jewry was made to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939: “In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it . . . If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe”
Hitler attempted to succeed in this goal by annihilating hundreds of thousands of the Jewish population in concentration camps using the American favored method of extermination of the gas chambers. There were also rumors that Hitler made Lebensborn a "stud farms" where SS men and suitable young women were mated to breed a master race. However this is nothing more than a myth. Lebensborn was in fact a conservative institution with a conservative sexual code, attempting to maintain middle-class respectability.
The connection between the American Eugenics movement and the Nazi eugenic movement was further solidified in the Nuremburg trials that judged the crimes committed by the Nazis during the war. In their defense the Nazis quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes from the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
• Hereditary feeble-mindedness: 200,000
• Schizophrenia: 80,000
• Epilepsy: 60,000
• Manic-depressive psychosis: 20,000
• Serious physical deformities: 20,000
• Hereditary deafness: 16,000
• Hereditary alcoholism: 10,000
• Hereditary blindness: 4,000
• Huntington's chorea: 600
• TOTAL: 410,600
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a lethal chamber, or gas chamber. Instead, the main solution was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as increased marriage restrictions. However, not everybody was in favor of eugenics, Punnett at the first international congress for Eugenics in 1911 stated, “Except in very few cases, our knowledge of heredity in man at present is far to slight and far too uncertain to base legislation upon.” Carrie Buck, and her mother Emma, had been committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Carrie and Emma were both judged to be “feebleminded” and promiscuous, because they had both had children out of wedlock. Carrie’s child, Vivian, was judged to be “feebleminded” at seven months of age. Hence, three generations of “imbeciles” became the “perfect” family for Virginia officials to use as a test case in favor of the eugenic sterilization law enacted in 1924. Upon reviewing the case, the Supreme Court concurred “that Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” It is impossible to judge whether or not Carrie was “feebleminded”, but she was not promiscuous. Vivian’s was the result of Carrie’s rape by the nephew of her foster parents. She was probably institutionalized to prevent further shame to the family. Just as clearly, Vivian was no imbecile. Vivian’s first grade report card from the Venable School in Charlottesville showed that this daughter of a supposed social degenerate got straight “As” in deportment (conduct) and even made the honor role in April 1931. She died a year later of an intestinal disorder.
The Philadelphia Experiment was a naval military experiment alleged to have been carried out at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA sometime around October 28, 1943. The U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge was claimed to be rendered invisible (or "cloaked") to enemy devices.
The story is thought to be a hoax. The U.S. Navy maintains that no such experiment was ever conducted, and details of the story contradict well-established facts about the Eldridge itself, as well as commonly accepted physics. The experiment was allegedly based on an aspect of the unified field theory, a term coined by Albert Einstein. The Unified Field Theory aims to describe mathematically and physically the interrelated nature of the forces that comprise electromagnetic radiation and gravity, in other words uniting the fields of electromagnetism and gravity into one field. Consequently, if light were bent, then space-time would be bent, effectively creating an invisible time machine. According to the accounts, unspecified 'researchers' thought that some version of this Unified Field Theory would enable a person to use large electrical generators to bend light around an object so that the object became completely invisible. The Navy would have regarded this as being of obvious military value, and by the accounts, it sponsored the experiment. Another unattributed version of the story proposes that researchers were preparing magnetic and gravitational measurements of the seafloor to detect anomalies, supposedly based on Einstein's attempts to understand gravity. In this version, there were also related secret experiments in Nazi Germany to find antigravity, allegedly led by SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler. There are no reliable, attributable accounts but in most accounts of the experiment, the destroyer escort USS Eldridge was fitted with the required equipment at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. Testing allegedly began in the summer of 1943, and it was supposedly successful to a limited degree. One test allegedly resulted in the Eldridge being rendered almost completely invisible, with some witnesses reporting a "greenish fog" appearing in its place. Crew members supposedly complained of severe nausea afterwards. Also, it is said that when the ship reappeared, some sailors were embedded in the metal structures of the ship, including one sailor who ended up on a deck level below that where he began, and had his hand embedded in the steel hull of the ship, as well as some sailors who went "completely bananas". At that point, it is said that the experiment was altered at the request of the Navy, with the new objective being solely to render the Eldridge invisible to radar. None of these allegations has been independently substantiated. The conjecture then alleges that the equipment was not properly re-calibrated, but in spite of this, the experiment was repeated on October 28, 1943. This time, the Eldridge not only became invisible, but she physically vanished from the area in a flash of blue light and teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, over 200 miles (320 km) away. It is claimed that the Eldridge sat for some time in full view of men aboard the ship SS Andrew Furuseth, whereupon the Eldridge vanished from their sight, and then reappeared in Philadelphia at the site it had originally occupied. It was also said that the warship went approximately 10 seconds back in time. Many versions of the tale include descriptions of serious side effects for the crew. Some crew members were said to have been physically fused to bulkheads, while others suffered from mental disorders, and still others supposedly simply vanished. It is also claimed that the ship's crew may have been subjected to brainwashing, in order to maintain the secrecy of the experiment.
The earliest practical precursor to the human space flight program was Project Albert. It was a horrific failure, with nearly all its pilots unable to survive the ordeal. Of course, these pilots were monkeys. Still, their story — full of confiscated rockets, drugs, and desert skies raining body parts — is one of the most tragic tales of the early space program.
Towards the end of World War II, a group of German aviation experts found themselves in possession of a lot of rockets and not a lot of pleasant options. They had engineered the V-2 rocket, which had been used to vigorously bomb Britain. They were on the losing side of a war that had inflicted massive casualties on the USSR. Both armies were now closing in and the scientists didn't relish the prospect of being captured by either of them. And so they went looking for Americans. When they found them, they offered to lead the American military to whatever rocket parts they could offer in exchange for political considerations and transport to America.
RELATED
Remember the time we bombed Mexico with German rockets?
Germany spent the end of the 1930s and half the 1940s inventing and perfecting missiles. They made so many, they still had a ton of them left over… Read…
They got the transport, and America got a lot of rockets. These aviation experts did various things with the V-2s, including accidentally bombing Mexico once, but one of the most exciting ideas they had was preliminary tests for sending humans into space. This was hard to do, since no one knew anything about the effects of space on physiology. It was entirely new territory. And so they started the project in 1948 with an ill-fated rhesus monkey named Albert.
The Grisly Failures of Project Albert, Precursor to the Apollo Space Program
SEXPAND
On June 11th Albert went up on the first test, drugged slightly, but otherwise healthy. At least on the way up to the 63 kilometer high trip he was healthy. No one had a reliable way to monitor his vital signs, and so it fell to medical experts afterwards to discover that the dead monkey that scientists found at the end of the trial had suffocated during the flight, not in reaction to the altitude. A year later Albert II went up to 134 kilometers. This time the person examining the corpse was asked for time, not cause of death. The parachute to his rocket had failed to deploy.
Albert III went up in September. His rocket exploded at ten kilometers up. No one was consulted this time about either time or cause of death. Albert IV was snuffed in another parachute failure in 1949.
It's fair to say that the scientists were somewhat disillusioned with what the V-2s had to offer at that point, and so they switched to rockets made by Aerojet in the fifties. They kept the name Albert, though, and the next two Alberts inherited the luck of the first four. Yet another parachute failure claimed Albert V. It seemed that luck was changing when Albert VI landed alive and safe in 1951. Sadly, he landed rather off course. He waited for hours in the New Mexico sun in a sealed metal container until military teams found and recovered the rocket, but he died of stress and heat exhaustion two hours after the recovery.
At last the proto-space experts decided to switch the names as they had switched the rockets. Two monkeys named Patricia and Mike survived a flight in 1952. Their flight had also not gone as planned, and had only managed to climb a little over twenty kilometers. But, considering they were the first monkeys to make it out of a rocket comfortably alive, their flight was celebrated. It took another seven years - and no more monkeys named Albert - for any simians to actually make it to space and back alive. Still, let us give thanks for all those fallen Alberts, and wonder if NASA should institute some new naming requirement for their missions.
Germany spent the end of the 1930s and half the 1940s inventing and perfecting missiles. They made so many, they still had a ton of them left over… Read…
They got the transport, and America got a lot of rockets. These aviation experts did various things with the V-2s, including accidentally bombing Mexico once, but one of the most exciting ideas they had was preliminary tests for sending humans into space. This was hard to do, since no one knew anything about the effects of space on physiology. It was entirely new territory. And so they started the project in 1948 with an ill-fated rhesus monkey named Albert.
The Grisly Failures of Project Albert, Precursor to the Apollo Space Program
SEXPAND
On June 11th Albert went up on the first test, drugged slightly, but otherwise healthy. At least on the way up to the 63 kilometer high trip he was healthy. No one had a reliable way to monitor his vital signs, and so it fell to medical experts afterwards to discover that the dead monkey that scientists found at the end of the trial had suffocated during the flight, not in reaction to the altitude. A year later Albert II went up to 134 kilometers. This time the person examining the corpse was asked for time, not cause of death. The parachute to his rocket had failed to deploy.
Albert III went up in September. His rocket exploded at ten kilometers up. No one was consulted this time about either time or cause of death. Albert IV was snuffed in another parachute failure in 1949.
It's fair to say that the scientists were somewhat disillusioned with what the V-2s had to offer at that point, and so they switched to rockets made by Aerojet in the fifties. They kept the name Albert, though, and the next two Alberts inherited the luck of the first four. Yet another parachute failure claimed Albert V. It seemed that luck was changing when Albert VI landed alive and safe in 1951. Sadly, he landed rather off course. He waited for hours in the New Mexico sun in a sealed metal container until military teams found and recovered the rocket, but he died of stress and heat exhaustion two hours after the recovery.
At last the proto-space experts decided to switch the names as they had switched the rockets. Two monkeys named Patricia and Mike survived a flight in 1952. Their flight had also not gone as planned, and had only managed to climb a little over twenty kilometers. But, considering they were the first monkeys to make it out of a rocket comfortably alive, their flight was celebrated. It took another seven years - and no more monkeys named Albert - for any simians to actually make it to space and back alive. Still, let us give thanks for all those fallen Alberts, and wonder if NASA should institute some new naming requirement for their missions.
The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's Project Albert is the research and development effort whose goal is to develop the process and capabilities of Data Farming, a method to address decision-maker's questions that applies high performance computing to modeling in order to examine and understand the landscape of potential simulated outcomes, enhance intuition, find surprises and outliers, and identify potential options. Data Farming is the method by which potentially millions of data points are explored and captured. It could be considered akin to Data Mining combined with feedback which allows for the more intelligent collection of more data points. This process is made possible, in part, by the exploitation of High Performance Computing assets and methods, and the project is fully supported by the Maui High Performance Computing Center. The Project Albert modeling approach is achieved through the development of a suite of models, called Distillations, to drive home the point that these models are produced as an intentional complement to the very highly-detailed simulations being developed within the DoD, which by the very fact that they are so highly-detailed and encumbered, do not permit the examination of a very wide range of possibilities and outcomes.
By virtue of their being much easier to run and understand (think: SimCity adapted to a combat situation), they are proving to be effective tools that help capture and scientifically reproduce the ideas of Subject Matter Experts, such as those thinking about tomorrow's concepts, doctrine, and requirements. This suite of entity-based models allow for rapid and highly tailorable changes in entity characteristics and behaviors, quite amenable to, and intentionally designed for rapid, repeatable concept exploration. Project Albert develops a suite, vice a single model, to allow for the testing of robustness of observations across modeling platforms, and because each model has inherent strengths and unique capabilities with regard to each aspect of modeling how entities think, decide, shoot, move, and communicate. The Project Albert suite of models includes Map-Aware Non-Uniform Automata (MANA), Socrates, and Pythagoras. It is of note that MANA is developed by the New Zealand Defense Technology Agency, and it is used free of charge by members of the Project Albert Team. Project Albert is also harnessing existing, and developing new, methodologies for investigating the results of running such models. In this regard, a wide range of Data Exploration and Data Visualization tools and methods are being employed.
Also being developed is the concept and initial implementation of Automated Red Teaming, a methodology that helps identify how Red can beat Blue through intelligent, effective, and efficient search through the space of possibilities. This is accomplished in part through the employment of a variety of evolutionary algorithms.
Currently, Project Albert is collaborating with military decision-makers, both inside the USMC, jointly, and within coalitional arrangements, to apply these techniques and tools to real-world questions. Some examples of the work efforts can be found on the Project Albert International Workshop pages. Another example of collaboration efforts is Project Albert 's Internship and Experimental History Program. This program has employed interns from U.S. Naval Academy, Naval Postgraduate School, U.S. Military Academy, and civilian academic institutions. Experimental History describes the process of taking a historical battle of interest and recreating it in one or more of our distillations and applying the process of data farming to it to yield a set of data that address interesting what ifs. In a sense, it is akin to taking a single data point (of history) and expanding the understanding of it to a region of possibilities. Finally, initial progress is also already being made on the integration (translation of scenarios) between different models and C2 Platforms, e.g. from C2PC to one of the Project Albert models, and on the development of collaborative environments that assist in the whiteboarding and creation of scenarios and in the joint understanding of the data that results from Data Farming the scenario.
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States led by its newly created space agency NASA. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth, and doing it before the Soviet Union, as part of the early space race. It involved 7 astronauts flying a total of 6 solo trips. On 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space in a suborbital flight after the Soviet Union had put Yuri Gagarin into space and orbit one month earlier. John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit on 20 February 1962, he was the third person to do so, after soviet Gherman Titov had made a day long flight in August 1961. When the project ended in May 1963, the Americans' NASA program was still behind the Soviet Space Program, but the gap was seen as closing. The race to the Moon began.
The space race started in 1957 by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik I. This came as a shock to the American public and led to the creation of NASA to gather the efforts in space exploration already existing in USA. After the launch of the first American satellite in 1958, manned space flight became the next goal. The spacecraft was produced by McDonnell Aircraft. It was cone shaped with room for one person together with supplies of water, food and oxygen in a pressurized cabin. It was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida by modified military missiles, most importantly Atlas D, and had a rescue tower for protection from a failing rocket. The whole flight could be controlled from the ground through a network of tracking stations which also allowed communication with the astronaut. If necessary, the astronaut could override commands from the ground. For reentry into Earth's atmosphere, small rockets were used to bring the spacecraft out of its orbit. A heatshield would protect the spacecraft from the heat of reentry, and a parachute would slow the craft for a water landing. Here both astronaut and spacecraft were picked up by helicopter and brought to a ship.
From a slow start with humiliating mistakes, the Mercury Project became popular and the manned flights were followed by millions on radio and TV not only in United States, but around the world. Apart from the manned missions, Mercury had a total of 20 unmanned launches as a part of the development of the project. This also involved test animals, most famously the chimpanzees Ham and Enos. Mercury laid the groundwork for Project Gemini and the follow-on Apollo moon-landing program, which was announced a few weeks after the first manned flight. The astronauts went under the name Mercury Seven and they named their spacecraft with a "7" to the name. The project name was taken from Mercury, a Roman god. It is estimated to have cost $1.71 billion and have involved the work of 2 million people.
Yossi Leshem worked at the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), the leading NGO in Israel, for 25 years, as a guide, as Director of a Field Study Center,as Head of the Nature Protection Department, Initiator and Director of the Israel Raptor Information Center between 1980-1991, and as the Executive Director of the SPNI between 1991-1995. Leshem is Senior Researcher in the Department of Zoology in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University and is the founder and Director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Latrun, Israel, established by Tel Aviv University and the SPNI. In November 2007 he was elected as the Chairman of the SPNI Council. Leshem has been involved in many aspects of nature conservation, with the emphasis on bird research for 38 years. Since 1984 his research for his doctorate, which was conducted with the cooperation of the Israeli Air Force and the Ministry of Science, has resulted in a decrease of 76% in the number of collisions with aircraft caused by birds, and has saved 790 million dollars, not to mention the numbers of lives, both human and avian. Today he serves as Lt. Col. (Ret) in the Israeli Air Force and continues this research. In 2005 he won the prestigious Mike Kuhring Prize for achievements of high significance for an improved flight safety concerning the bird problems of aviation, and for his mission to connect safety with nature conservation via education that gave bird strike prevention world wide appreciation. Leshem is involved in a variety of activities in bird migration research, in educational activities that take place in over 250 schools in Israel part of cooperation with the Palestinians and the Jordanians, and has developed an educational and scientific site on the Internet ( www.birds.org.il ) called "Migrating Birds Know No Boundaries". Leshem developed a 6 year research and an educational program in cooperation with the Palestinians and Jordanians under the same title as the web site. At the moment Dr. Leshem is conducting a number of scientific projects, among them a project which tracks migrating birds that have been fitted with satellite transmitters, and a project that tracks migration with the aid of radar, in cooperation with a team of Russian immigrant scientists. Leshem initiated a program to use Barn Owls and Kestrels as pest controllers to reduce the use of pesticides in agricultural fields, which became a national program and a regional project with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Leshem published 3 books, scientific papers, and hundreds of articles in popular magazines. Dr. Leshem visited Japan as a visiting Prof. at the University of Tokyo, June 30 th – October 12 th, 2006. Leshem is a Recipient of "Lifetime Achievement Award for Environmental Protection" in 2008, given for sixty years of Israel
About the Bologna Center
Home to the oldest university in Europe, Bologna’s long tradition of education, cultural heritage and political vitality makes it an attractive location for SAIS' European campus. On the cusp of its 60th anniversary, SAIS Bologna is distinguished by strong faculty-student relationships, vigorous debate and a cohesive social and intellectual community. Exposure to contrasting European and U.S. perspectives on global issues offers a distinctive academic pairing—making for an extraordinarily enriching experience.
Degrees & Programs
Master of Arts
Master of Arts in International Affairs
Master of International Public Policy
Diploma in International Studies
Visit the Bologna Center
Prospective Students
Campus Tours
SAIS Bologna has an open-door policy for prospective students and encourages vists throughout the academic year when classes are in session. To arrange a visit, contact the Admissions Office at admissions@jhubc.it.
Open Day
Open Day is an opportunity for students to visit the SAIS Bologna campus. During the day-long event visitors meet current students and faculty and attend classes. To register for Open Day, please click here
Information Sessions
We understand that many of our applicants live far from the places we travel to. To make sure as many candidates as possible have their questions answered, we have arranged a set of online information sessions. To connect to the sessions, prospective students need access to a computer, an internet connection and a phone line (or Skype). For instructions on how to log-in, please contact admissions.eu@jhu.edu. Below is the fall 2013 schedule.
August 28 at 4pm - general introduction
September 26 at 10 am - standardized tests
October 23 at 4pm - statement of purpose
November 26 at 10am - letters of recommendation
December 12 at 4pm - analytical essay
all times local Bologna, Italy time
Academic Catalog
Public & Press
Events
Various seminar series are organized at SAIS Bologna throughout the academic year. Seminars are grouped thematically and each one is hosted by a SAIS Bologna faculty member. These events bring prominent scholars and practitioners from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world to present current research to the Bologna Center and local community.
Event Calendar
Contact
Bologna Center
Via Belmeloro 11
40126 Bologna
Italy
+39 051 2917811
The,Bad,Science,Mark,R.,Rowe,San,Diego,California,92102,Mark,Rowe,David,Rowe,Nina,Dougherty,Clifford,Dougherty,Anita,Ferguson,Virginia,Ferguson,William,Jones,Frederick,Jones,Charles,Rowe,Jacqueline,Kennedy,Esther,Rowe,Ralph,Rowe,Judy,Garland,Ethel,Kennedy,Robert,John,Kennedy,international,affairs,world,economic,domination,and,control,policy,makers,decisions,for,material,gain,persuasion,of,the,masses,Did,you,know,that,the,NSA,can,track,the,location,of,your,phone,even,when,it,is,turned,off,and,the,batteries,have,been,removed,This,admission,went,largely,unnoticed,in,a,Washington,Post,report,entitled,NSA,growth,fueled,by,need,to,target,terrorists,In,the,article,writer,Dana,Priest,details,how,teams,of,NSA,employees,stationed,around,the,globe,are,dedicated,to,tracking,phones,in,real,time,By,September,2004,a,new,NSA,technique,enabled,the,agency,to,find,cellphones,even,when,they,were,turned,off,JSOC,troops,called,this,The,Find,and,it,gave,them,thousands,of,new,targets,including,members,of,a,burgeoning,al,Qaeda,sponsored,insurgency,in,Iraq,according,to,members,of,the,unit,At,the,same,time,the,NSA,developed,a,new,computer,linkup,called,the,Real,Time,Regional,Gateway,into,which,the,military,and,intelligence,officers,could,feed,every,bit,of,data,or,seized,documents,and,get,back,a,phone,number,or,list,of,potential,targets,It,also,allowed,commanders,to,see,on,a,screen,every,type,of,surveillance,available,in,a,given,territory,The,technique,by,which,the,NSA,can,wiretap,cellphones,even,when,they,are,turned,off,and,powered,down,is,most,likely,being,performed,with,the,complicity,of,telecommunications,companies,who,have,proven,friendly,to,NSA,snooping,Trojan,horse,programs,disguised,behind,routine,system,updates,are,the,likely,method,through,which,the,NSA,gains,direct,access,to,millions,of,Americans,cellphones,and,other,devices,you,may,recall,the,fact,that,Verizon,and,ATT,notably,did,not,sign,the,collective,letter,asking,the,government,to,allow,affected,companies,to,release,information,on,government,requests,for,data,writes,Tim,Cushing,given,this,background,its,not,unimaginable,that,Verizon,and,ATT,would,accommodate,the,NSA,and,FBI,if,it,wished,to,use,their,update,systems,to,push,these,trojans,as,we,have,also,previously,highlighted,terms,of,agreement,for,many,of,the,apps,you,download,to,your,smartphone,now,use,your,microphone,to,listen,to,you,and,your,camera,to,take,pictures,of,you,without,your,knowledge,the,notion,of,the,federal,government,tracking,your,location,via,your,cellphone,is,particularly,prescient,given,yesterdays,report,concerning,the,DHS,funded,mesh,network,system,that,seattle,police,eventually,intend,to,roll,out,across,the,city,but,have,temporarily,been,forced,to,deactivate,due,to,a,privacy,outcry,aruba,networks,company,behind,the,system,of,wifi,hubs,which,can,record,the,last,1000,locations,of,cellphones,belonging,to,anyone,in,the,coverage,area,bragged,in,their,promotional,material,that,the,grid,could,track,rogue,or,unassociated,devices,In,other,words,even,if,you,do,not,allow,your,phone,to,connect,to,such,wifi,networks,they,can,still,access,your,device,record,its,current,and,historical,location,as,well,as,download,private,information,from,your,apps,and,other,settings,And,there,appeared,a,great,wonder,in,heaven;,a,woman,clothed,with,the,sun,and,the,moon,under,her,feet,and,upon,her,head,a,crown,of,twelve,stars:,And,she,being,with,child,cried,travailing,in,birth,and,pained,to,be,delivered,And,there,appeared,another,wonder,in,heaven;,and,behold,a,great,red,dragon,having,seven,heads,and,ten,horns,and,seven,crowns,upon,his,heads.,And,his,tail,drew,the,third,part,of,the,stars,of,heaven,and,did,cast,them,to,the,earth:,and,the,dragon,stood,before,the,woman,which,was,ready,to,be,delivered,for,to,devour,her,child,as,soon,as,it,was,born.,And,she,brought,forth,a,man,child,who,was,to,rule,all,nations,with,a,rod,of,iron:,and,her,child,was,caught,up,unto,God,and,to,his,throne.,And,the,woman,fled,into,the,wilderness,where,she,hath,a,place,prepared,of,God,that,they,should,feed,her,there,a,thousand,two,hundred,and,threescore,days.,And,there,was,war,in,heaven:,Michael,and,his,angels,fought,against,the,dragon;,and,the,dragon,fought,and,his,angels,And,prevailed,not,neither,was,their,place,found,any,more,in,heaven,And,the,great,dragon,was,cast,out,that,old,serpent,called,the,Devil,and,Satan,which,deceiveth,the,whole,world:,he,was,cast,out,into,the,earth,and,his,angels,were,cast,out,with,him.,And,I,heard,a,loud,voice,saying,in,heaven,Now,is,come,salvation,and,strength,and,the,kingdom,of,our,God,and,the,power,of,his,Christ,for,the,accuser,of,our,brethren,is,cast,down,which,accused,them,before,our,God,day,and,night,And,they,overcame,him,by,the,blood,of,the,Lamb,and,by,the,word,of,their,testimony;,and,they,loved,not,their,lives,unto,the,death,Therefore,rejoice,ye,heavens,and,ye,that,dwell,in,them.,Woe,to,the,inhabiters,of,the,earth,and,of,the,sea!,for,the,devil,is,come,down,unto,you,having,great,wrath,because,he,knoweth,that,he,hath,but,a,short,time.,And,when,the,dragon,saw,that,he,was,cast,unto,the,earth,he,persecuted,the,woman,which,brought,forth,the,man,child,And,to,the,woman,were,given,two,wings,of,a,great,eagle,that,she,might,fly,into,the,wilderness,into,her,place,where,she,is,nourished,for,a,time,and,times,and,half,a,time,from,the,face,of,the,serpent,And,the,serpent,cast,out,of,his,mouth,water,as,a,flood,after,the,woman,that,he,might,cause,her,to,be,carried,away,of,the,flood.,And,the,earth,helped,the,woman,and,the,earth,opened,her,mouth,and,swallowed,up,the,flood,which,the,dragon,cast,out,of,his,mouth,And,the,dragon,was,wroth,with,the,woman,and,went,to,make,war,with,the,remnant,of,her,seed,which,keep,the,commandments,of,God,and,have,the,testimony,of,Jesus,Christ,Charles,Rowe,Jacqueline,Kennedy,Esther,Rowe,Ralph,Rowe,Judy,Garland,Ethel,Kennedy,Robert,John,Kennedy,international,affairs,world,economic,domination,and,control,policy,makers,decisions,for,material,gain,persuasion,of,the,masses,Did,you,know,that,the,NSA,can,track,the,location,of,your,phone,even,when,it,is,turned,off,and,the,batteries,have,been,removed,This,admission,went,largely,unnoticed,in,a,Washington,Post,report,entitled,NSA,growth,fueled,by,need,to,target,terrorists,In,the,article,writer,Dana,Priest,details,how,teams,of,NSA,employees,stationed,around,the,globe,are,dedicated,to,tracking,phones,in,real,time,By,September,2004,a,new,NSA,technique,enabled,the,agency,to,find,cellphones,even,when,they,were,turned,off,JSOC,troops,called,this,The,Find,and,it,gave,them,thousands,of,new,targets,including,members,of,a,burgeoning,al,Qaeda,sponsored,insurgency,in,Iraq,according,to,members,of,the,unit,At,the,same,time,the,NSA,developed,a,new,computer,linkup,called,the,Real,Time,Regional,Gateway,into,which,the,military,and,intelligence,officers,could,feed,every,bit,of,data,or,seized,documents,and,get,back,a,phone,number,or,list,of,potential,targets,It,also,allowed,commanders,to,see,on,a,screen,every,type,of,surveillance,available,in,a,given,territory,The,technique,by,which,the,NSA,can,wiretap,cellphones,even,when,they,are,turned,off,and,powered,down,is,most,likely,being,performed,with,the,complicity,of,telecommunications,companies,who,have,proven,friendly,to,NSA,snooping,Trojan,horse,programs,disguised,behind,routine,system,updates,are,the,likely,method,through,which,the,NSA,gains,direct,access,to,millions,of,Americans,cellphones,and,other,devices,you,may,recall,the,fact,that,Verizon,and,ATT,notably,did,not,sign,the,collective,letter,asking,the,government,to,allow,affected,companies,to,release,information,on,government,requests,for,data,writes,Tim,Cushing,given,this,background,its,not,unimaginable,that,Verizon,and,ATT,would,accommodate,the,NSA,and,FBI,if,it,wished,to,use,their,update,systems,to,push,these,trojans,as,we,have,also,previously,highlighted,terms,of,agreement,for,many,of,the,apps,you,download,to,your,smartphone,now,use,your,microphone,to,listen,to,you,and,your,camera,to,take,pictures,of,you,without,your,knowledge,the,notion,of,the,federal,government,tracking,your,location,via,your,cellphone,is,particularly,prescient,given,yesterdays,report,concerning,the,DHS,funded,mesh,network,system,that,seattle,police,eventually,intend,to,roll,out,across,the,city,but,have,temporarily,been,forced,to,deactivate,due,to,a,privacy,outcry,aruba,networks,company,behind,the,system,of,wifi,hubs,which,can,record,the,last,1000,locations,of,cellphones,belonging,to,anyone,in,the,coverage,area,bragged,in,their,promotional,material,that,the,grid,could,track,rogue,or,unassociated,devices,In,other,words,even,if,you,do,not,allow,your,phone,to,connect,to,such,wifi,networks,they,can,still,access,your,device,record,its,current,and,historical,location,as,well,as,download,private,information,from,your,apps,and,other,settings,The,Future,of,Eugenics,Eugenics,although,based,on,the,science,of,genetics,is,not,itself,a,sciences,for,it,must,above,all,concern,itself,with,social,values,with,the,question:,Whither,mankind?,Perhaps,general,Agreement,could,be,had,that,freedom,from,gross,physical,or,mental,defects,and,the,the,freedom,from,gross,physical,or,mental,defects,and,the,possession,of,sound,health,high,intelligence,general,adaptability,and,mobility,of,sprier,are,the,major,goals,toward,which,eugenics,should,aim;,perhaps,even,that,diversity,of,nature,is,better,than,uniformity,of,type,But,hour,far,ought,selective,reproduction,to,inters,with,human,freedoms:,Genetically,as,in,other,respects,"there,is,so,much,bad,in,the,best,of,us,and,so,much,good,in,the,worst,of,us",that,it,is,hared,to,asses,the,worth,of,the,manifest,hereditary,characteristics,of,a,person;,and,the,numerous,hidden,recessive,genes,or,genes,of,low,penetrance,make,it,quit,impossible,Nor,can,on,determine,to,what,extent,a,person's,manifest,characteristics,a,the,product,of,environment,particularly,for,this,qualities,what,eugenics',major,concern:,con,health,high,intelligence,and,the,like,THe,Jukes,and,Kallikaks,were,horrible,examples,of,degenerate,humanity,but,what,might,they,have,been,in,a,better,world:,Were,their,alcoholism,their,crime,and,their,vice,inescapable,products,of,their,genes?,It,seems,very,doubtful,Only,the,experiment,of,putting,them,from,earliest,infancy,in,to,an,optimum,environment,could,possible,yield,and,answer,It,is,easier,to,define,the,essentials,of,a,optimum,environment,not,forgetting,that,it,need,not,be,the,same,for,everyone,than,to,modify,gene,frequencies,by,wise,selection,Once,mankind,has,produced,an,approximation,of,that,optimum,environment,the,eugenic,task,will,be,simpler,In,fact,that,natural,selection,exerted,by,such,an,environment,may,make,eugenics,quite,unnecessary,See,also,Birth,Control,Genetics,Mark,Rowe,David,Rowe,Nina,Dougherty,Clifford,Dougherty,Anita,Ferguson,Virginia,Ferguson,William,Jones,Frederick,Jones,Charles,Rowe,Jacqueline,Kennedy,Esther,Rowe,Ralph,Rowe,Judy,Garland,Ethel,Kennedy,Robert,John,Kennedy,international,affairs,world,economic,domination,and,control,policy,makers,decisions,for,material,gain,persuasion,of,the,masses,Did,you,know,that,the,NSA,can,track,the,location,of,your,phone,even,when,it,is,turned,off,and,the,batteries,have,been,removed,This,admission,went,largely,unnoticed,in,a,Washington,Post,report,entitled,NSA,growth,fueled,by,need,to,target,terrorists,In,the,article,writer,Dana,Priest,details,how,teams,of,NSA,employees,stationed,around,the,globe,are,dedicated,to,tracking,phones,in,real,time,By,September,2004,a,new,NSA,technique,enabled,the,agency,to,find,cellphones,even,when,they,were,turned,off,JSOC,troops,called,this,The,Find,and,it,gave,them,thousands,of,new,targets,including,members,of,a,burgeoning,al,Qaeda,sponsored,insurgency,in,Iraq,according,to,members,of,the,unit,At,the,same,time,the,NSA,developed,a,new,computer,linkup,called,the,Real,Time,Regional,Gateway,into,which,the,military,and,intelligence,officers,could,feed,every,bit,of,data,or,seized,documents,and,get,back,a,phone,number,or,list,of,potential,targets,It,also,allowed,commanders,to,see,on,a,screen,every,type,of,surveillance,available,in,a,given,territory,The,technique,by,which,the,NSA,can,wiretap,cellphones,even,when,they,are,turned,off,and,powered,down,is,most,likely,being,performed,with,the,complicity,of,telecommunications,companies,who,have,proven,friendly,to,NSA,snooping,Trojan,horse,programs,disguised,behind,routine,system,updates,are,the,likely,method,through,which,the,NSA,gains,direct,access,to,millions,of,Americans,cellphones,and,other,devices,you,may,recall,the,fact,that,Verizon,and,ATT,notably,did,not,sign,the,collective,letter,asking,the,government,to,allow,affected,companies,to,release,information,on,government,requests,for,data,writes,Tim,Cushing,given,this,background,its,not,unimaginable,that,Verizon,and,ATT,would,accommodate,the,NSA,and,FBI,if,it,wished,to,use,their,update,systems,to,push,these,trojans,as,we,have,also,previously,highlighted,terms,of,agreement,for,many,of,the,apps,you,download,to,your,smartphone,now,use,your,microphone,to,listen,to,you,and,your,camera,to,take,pictures,of,you,without,your,knowledge,the,notion,of,the,federal,government,tracking,your,location,via,your,cellphone,is,particularly,prescient,given,yesterdays,report,concerning,the,DHS,funded,mesh,network,system,that,seattle,police,eventually,intend,to,roll,out,across,the,city,but,have,temporarily,been,forced,to,deactivate,due,to,a,privacy,outcry,aruba,networks,company,behind,the,system,of,wifi,hubs,which,can,record,the,last,1000,locations,of,cellphones,belonging,to,anyone,in,the,coverage,area,bragged,in,their,promotional,material,that,the,grid,could,track,rogue,or,unassociated,devices,In,other,words,even,if,you,do,not,allow,your,phone,to,connect,to,such,wifi,networks,they,can,still,access,your,device,record,its,current,and,historical,location,as,well,as,download,private,information,from,your,apps,,and,other,settings,washington,the,white,house,has,cancelled,a,planned,summit,meeting,next,month,between,president,barack,obama,and,russian,president,vladimir,putin,and,one,of,the,reasons,given,was,moscows,decision,to,grant,asylum,to,an,american,who,leaked,top,secret,information,Former,Vice,President,Dick,Cheney,called,Edward,Snowden,a,traitor,for,leaking,top,secret,documents,from,the,National,Security,Agency,in,an,interview,that,aired,Monday,afternoon,on,CNN,Cheney,added,that,he,hopes,the,U,S,is,eventually,able,to,catch,Snowden,who,was,granted,a,one,year,asylum,in,Russia,in,August,and,hopes,he,receives,the,justice,he,deserves,Cheney,said,Snowden,leaks,which,most,recently,revealed,that,the,National,Security,Agency,monitored,the,phone,conversations,of,35,world,leaders,have,hurt,Americas,ability,to,defend,itself,The,former,second,in,command,would,not,comment,on,whether,or,not,that,the,surveillance,began,in,2002,as,the,documents,indicated,The,fact,is,we,do,collect,a,lot,of,intelligence,without,speaking,about,any,particular,target,or,group,of,targets,Cheney,told,CNN,Jake,Tapper,That,intelligence,capability,is,enormously,important,to,the,United,States,to,our,conduct,of,foreign,policy,to,the,defense,matters,to,economic,matters,And,Im,a,strong,supporter,of,it,The,same,day,Cheney,came,out,against,Snowden,Wikileaks,set,up,a,Free,Snowden,a,website,designed,to,collect,money,to,defend,the,former,NSA,contractor,whose,asylum,ends,in,August,2014,Damascus,knows,the,struggle,for,the,moment,is,to,sway,American,public,opinion,With,that,in,mind,President,Assad,In,his,interview,with,CBS,and,statements,from,other,Syrian,officials,,have,stressed,at,least,three,ways,in,which,a,US,military,strike,would,backfire,There,is,the,unspecific,warning,if,not,outright,threat,of,direct,reprisals,by,Syria,,and,indirect,action,by,its,allies,such,as,Hezbollah,in,Lebanon,and,Iranian,backed,Shia,militias,in,Iraq,There,is,the,warning,that,American,action,would,strengthen,rebel,factions,linked,to,al,Qaeda,and,could,even,enable,them,to,seize,power,if,the,strike,were,damaging,enough,And,there,is,the,threat,echoed,by,Moscow,that,any,such,attack,would,scupper,already,dim,chances,of,a,political,settlement,through,peace,talks,in,Geneva,In,reality,much,depends,on,what,exactly,the,Americans,intend,to,do,If,their,strike,is,as,Mr,Kerry,said,incredibly,small,the,repercussions,might,be,very,limited,Iranian,backed,militias,in,Iraq,might,fire,off,some,mortars,at,the,enormous,US,embassy,compound,in,Baghdad,for,example,But,more,serious,actions,such,as,Hezbollah,striking,at,Israel,are,unlikely,unless,the,US,launches,a,very,major,operation,indeed,Russia,has,asked,Syria,to,put,its,chemical,weapons,stockpiles,under,international,control,and,then,have,them,destroyed,in,an,attempt,to,avoid,US,military,strikes,Foreign,Minister,Sergei,Lavrov,said,the,offer,was,made,during,talks,with,his,Syrian,counterpart,Walid,Muallem,who,welcomed,the,initiative,The,US,said,it,was,skeptical,but,would,have,a,hard,look,at,the,plan,The,US,accuses,Damascus,of,war,crimes,allegations,denied,by,the,regime,US,Secretary,of,State,John,Kerry,in,Europe,to,garner,support,for,the,military,action,,inadvertently,started,the,talk,of,Syria,giving,up,its,chemical,weapons,early,on,Monday,When,asked,at,a,news,conference,whether,there,was,anything,Syrian,President,Bashar,al,Assad,could,do,to,avoid,military,action,Mr,Kerry,replied,that,he,could,hand,over,his,entire,stockpile,of,chemical,weapons,within,the,next,week,US,officials,subsequently,clarified,that,Mr,Kerry,was,making,a,rhetorical,argument,rather,than,a,serious,offer,However,Mr,Lavrov,later,revealed,in,a,news,conference,that,he,had,urged,Mr,Muallem,to,not,only,agree,on,placing,chemical,weapons,storage,sites,under,international,control,,but,also,on,their,subsequent,destruction,He,said,he,had,also,told,Mr,Muallem,that,Syria,should,then,fully,join,the,Chemical,Weapons,Convention,Mr,Muallem,told,reporters,through,an,interpreter,that,Syria,welcomed,the,initiative,and,praised,Russia,for,attempting,to,prevent,American,aggression,against,our,people,Mr,Kerry,and,Mr,Lavrov,spoke,on,the,phone,after,the,Russian,proposal,was,put,forward,but,US,officials,sounded,a,cautious,note,over,the,plan,White,House,spokesman,Jay,Carney,said,the,US,government,would,study,the,proposal,but,had,skepticism,over,the,credibility,of,the,Assad,regime,In,an,interview,earlier,Assad,refused,to,even,acknowledge,that,he,has,chemical,weapons,Of,course,the,whole,world,knows,he,does,said,Mr,Carney,White,House,spokesman,Jay,Carney,said,the,US,would,study,Russia's,proposals,He,promised,that,the,US,would,continue,to,push,for,strikes,because,the,credible,threat,of,military,action,was,vital,in,putting,pressure,on,the,Assad,regime,US,allies,have,also,reacted,cautiously,UK,Minister,David,Cameron,said,the,destruction,of,the,weapons,would,be,a,huge,step,forward,but,warned,that,it,should,not,be,used,as,a,distraction,tactic,French,Foreign,Minister,Laurent,Fabius,called,on,Mr,Assad,to,make,rapid,serious,and,verifiable,comments,to,the,plan,German,Chancellor,Angela,Merkel,said,it,was,an,interesting,proposal,but,added,that,she,hoped,real,action,would,follow,Pay,the,price,Moscow,has,been,Mr,Assad's,main,international,ally,throughout,Syria's,two,and,a,half,year,civil,war,Russia,has,blocked,three,resolutions,against,Syria,in,the,UN,Security,Council,and,has,dismissed,US,claims,that,Mr,Assad's,forces,carried,out,a,chemical,attack,in,Damascus,on,August,killing,people,Mr,Assad's,government,blames,the,attack,on,rebels,fighting,to,overthrow,him,in,a,conflict,that,the,UN,says,has,claimed,some,lives,The,UN,sent,weapons,experts,into,Damascus,to,investigate,the,attack,UN,Secretary,General,Ban,Ki,moon,said,on,Monday,that,if,the,experts,concluded,chemicals,had,been,used,,he,would,consider,asking,the,Security,Council,to,approve,a,safe,zone,in,Syria,where,the,weapons,could,be,destroyed,Meanwhile,the,Syrian,leader,gave,an,interview,to,US,network,PBS,in,which,he,warned,the,US,against,intervention,saying,the,Middle,East,was,on,the,brink,of,explosion,You're,going,to,pay,the,price,if,you're,not,wise,with,dealing,with,terrorists,There,are,going,to,be,repercussions,he,said,The,government,is,not,the,only,player,in,this,region,You,have,different,parties,different,factions,different,ideologies,You,have,everything,in,this,decision,now,Mr,Assad,did,not,explain,whether,his,comment,was,a,threat,that,Syrian,backed,groups,such,as,Hezbollah,would,launch,retaliation,or,a,warning,that,strikes,would,bolster,al,Qaeda,linked,groups,He,also,denied,using,chemical,weapons,saying,there,was,no,evidence,to,hold,his,government,responsible,for,the,August,attack,Continue,reading,the,main,story,Start,Quote,The,proposal,to,destroy,Syria's,chemical,weapons,could,be,a,one,day,wonder,but,it,could,also,be,a,game,changer,Mark,Mardell,North,America,Heavy,lift,US,President,Barack,Obama,has,cleared,his,schedule,this,week,to,focus,all,his,attention,on,building,support,for,the,Syrian,intervention,He,has,acknowledged,he,faces,a,heavy,lift,to,win,congressional,backing,A,poll,carried,out,by,ABC,and,the,BBC,on,Friday,suggested,more,than,members,in,the,House,of,Representatives,were,either,opposed,or,likely,to,oppose,strikes,Just,representatives,said,they,would,support,or,were,likely,to,support,action,and,a,large,proportion,are,still,undecided,on,the,issue,Many,US,politicians,and,members,of,the,public,remain,concerned,that,military,action,could,draw,the,nation,into,a,prolonged,war,and,spark,broader,hostilities,in,the,region,of,the44,21,230,433,100000,1429,21
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)