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Post by PhantomWolf on Sept 21, 2005 4:01:07 GMT -4
The Hospitals were supposed to have been evacuated and one of the reasons they weren't checked faster is because they were assumed to be empty.
I'd say that Mrs Blanco will be looking for a new job after this mess settles. The blame looks like it can be squarely laid at her door. Though I suspect that Mr Nagin won't be that far behind her in the unemployment line.
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Post by Dead Hoosiers on Oct 6, 2005 2:29:44 GMT -4
Scalar Electromagnetics and Weather Control....a Tom Bearden letter. He claims it was used to induce Gulf War Syndrome as well. twm.co.nz/Beard_wmod.htm
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Oct 6, 2005 4:24:11 GMT -4
He seems to have confused a mathematical analysis technique with some sort of technology
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Post by sts60 on Oct 6, 2005 8:52:09 GMT -4
Oh, no, it's real. Them eeeeevil scalar-weapon-totin' gubmint men in black not only caused Gulf War Syndrome, Katrina, the Columbia disaster, and the destruction of Pompeii, they also make the coffee in my office taste bad and made Astros 3B Morgan Ensberg throw that ball away in the 9th inning last night. Fortunately, the 'Stros had a 5-run lead at the time. Them scalar wpeaons musta malfunctioned during their big rally in the 8th.
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Post by JayUtah on Oct 6, 2005 10:22:57 GMT -4
Scalar Electromagnetics and Weather Control....a Tom Bearden letter. He claims it was used to induce Gulf War Syndrome as well.
LOL, Tom Bearden is a well-known free-energy crackpot. Nothing in any of his word-salad writings has the slightest to do with the real world. He just uses "scalar electromagnetics" as his buzzword around which to gather a bunch of gullible free-energy enthusiasts and bilk them of their money.
"Scalar electromagnetics", as Bearden formulates it, is scientific hogwash. He simply puts forward a radical new theory and silently ignores all the many common observations his theory fails to predict, such as EM polarization.
D.H., most of these free-energy people follow the pattern of yanking some obscure phrase out of the physics literature and piling around it a mass of utterly incomprehensible and meaningless scientific-sounding jargon whose only value is in impressing non-scientific folk. They make fantastic perpetual-motion machines that only they can build and operate properly and whose only purpose is to obfuscate straightforward physics processes (in Bearden's case, permanent magnets); it becomes so difficult to measure the actual energy usage/production that a mistake is often made in his favor. This leads them to claim that they're getting energy for free, and they just need a "little bit more money" to get it ready for market.
Bearden, elsewhere, makes the standard free-energy crackpot claims: he can't get any capital to develop his technology because the evil government already knows about it and wants it all to themselves; therefore he needs only private investors. And he claims that normally qualified physicists and engineers are the least able to understand and appreciate his work because their conceptual models are too flimsy to account for his theorized effect. And he can't let other scientists see the real secret of his inventions for fear of spies. Oh, and Tesla -- better mention Tesla somewhere. In short, he goes right down the table of contents in the Pseudoscientist's Handbook.
There is no such thing as a "scalar electromagnetic" weapon.
D.H., I fear for you. You are exactly the kind of gullible, excitable person upon whom people like Tom Bearden intend to prey. Please don't believe everything you read.
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Post by sts60 on Oct 6, 2005 12:33:02 GMT -4
I dunno, Jay. Bearden will never achieve his full crackpot potential until Popular Mechanics does an enthusiastic article about him. :-)
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Post by Dead Hoosiers on Oct 6, 2005 15:06:11 GMT -4
Don't worry. If I feel Bearden's hand sliding into my pocketbook I'll slap it away. Apparently Bearden & Co. duped William Cohen as well. "Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations...It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts." www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/1997/t042897_t0428coh.htmlI'm sure you don't mind if I continue looking into this. The truth is out there...somewhere. I'm off to Radio Shack. Building my own interferometer.
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Post by ktesibios on Oct 6, 2005 23:10:46 GMT -4
I dunno, Jay. Bearden will never achieve his full crackpot potential until Popular Mechanics does an enthusiastic article about him. :-) Umm... you might have noticed that nowadays any disastrous or even mildly negative event- be it a hurricane, a tsunami, the loss of a spacecraft, the collapse of burning skyscrapers, the crash of a small plane or deformed lemons will be accompanied by a crank screaming that it was done with scalar electromagnetic weapons. "Scalar weapons" has even provided a remarkably convenient rationale for people to blame symptoms of schizophrenia on- I've seen quite a few screeds to that effect on various Indymedia sites. Bearden has accomplished that essentially single-handed. IMHO, that ought to be good for a Lifetime Achievement award the next time the Academy gets around to giving out a new round of Looneys. BTW, conspiracy buffs have been waving that Cohen quote around like a bloody shirt for a long time now. Again, IMHO, it has exactly the same evidentiary value as the opinion of an economist about structural engineering.
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Post by Dead Hoosiers on Oct 7, 2005 0:46:57 GMT -4
ktesibios
He was the Secretary of Defense. You'd think he'd know something about terrorism, be privy to insider information.
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Oct 7, 2005 5:40:23 GMT -4
A touching faith that Secretaries of Defense are chosen for their relevant expertise ;D
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Post by sts60 on Oct 7, 2005 8:57:54 GMT -4
He was the Secretary of Defense. You'd think he'd know something about terrorism, be privy to insider information.
He was a lawyer. He had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, when it came to whether such a thing made sense or not. Don't forget that the intelligence and defense communities have wasted tens of millions of dollars on idiocy like "remote viewing"; it's hardly surprising they would give some credence to idiocy like electromagnetic volcano triggers.
While qualified people are certainly not immune from believing BS, the unqualified (like Cohen in this example) are much more likely to fall for it. That's why the ranks of PCTs raving about HAARP are so bereft of physicists, and among the ranks of those raving about WTC "demolition" the structural engineers are conspicuous by their absence.
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Post by echnaton on Oct 7, 2005 9:27:34 GMT -4
ktesibiosHe was the Secretary of Defense. You'd think he'd know something about terrorism, be privy to insider information. In context, Cohen was talking about what Alvin Toffler and others have written about. Toffler’s Future Shock was all the rage when I was in high school because his futurist writings had the proper mix of impending doom and possible though difficult way to save ourselves that appeals to many people. I never put much stock in him because it seemed to be a secular version of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. Specifically Cohen is not speaking about thing people are actually doing he is answering a question by discussing what others are speculating about some things that might happen in the future and saying the government needs to be concerned about unknown threats. Cohen is taking a page from Toffler in talking about the possibility of a future disaster and the saying there is a possibility of getting through. That cautious optimism is a way to motivate people and a good way for the Secretary to act to get funding for the DoD. It does not mean that he is right or that weather change is even remotely possible or theoretically plausible. You are reading too much into his words.
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Post by JayUtah on Oct 7, 2005 9:57:06 GMT -4
He was the Secretary of Defense.
That doesn't mean he knows anything about electromagnetic theory or whether it can alter climate, cause earthquakes, etc. And he doesn't mention Bearden at all. Electromagnetism is a huge field of study. Just because Bearden talks about electromagnetic waves and Cohen talks about electromagnetic waves doesn't mean one man is referring to the other.
You'd think he'd know something about terrorism, be privy to insider information.
But the part of the quote you didn't post was about how he had received "reports" of these things. That means intelligence -- spies, etc. -- not firm, actionable information.
Electromagnetic waves indeed have their place on the battlefield or in the hands of terrorists. But they directly cause very few of the effects Cohen and others have mistakenly attributed to them. Tom Bearden's particular brand of electromagnetism -- "scalar electromagnetism" -- is scientific hogwash, and I wouldn't be surprised if he knew it was.
As people have examined and commented on his theories, Bearden keeps retreating farther and farther from what is known to work. Now it's his position that nearly everything that mainstream science knows about electromagnetism is wrong. It's been my rule of thumb that the more of the real world people have to reinvent in order to make their claims seem plausible, the less likely that claim is to be true.
Modern, standard electromagnetic theory explains far more of the real world than anything from Bearden. Bearden's theories explain only the peculiar things he says are unique to him. I mentioned polarization, for example. If you imagine electromagnetism as normal waves, polarization is akin to whether the wave passing through space fluctuates up and down or side-to-side. Bearden says this phenomenon simply doesn't exist: electromagnetism is "scalar" -- without that kind of direction. Unfortunately anyone with polarizing sunglasses can demonstrate for himself that electromagnetic waves are polarized. And the EM polarization effect is how we differentiate signals from satellites that come down on the same frequency. You can actually put two carriers on one frequency by sending them at opposite polarization. So anyone with DirectTV or Dish Network relies on EM polarization just to watch TV. Bearden simply denies this reality so that he can continue to wax apocalyptic about what's keeping him famous and making him money from gullible investors.
By all means keep researching it. I know you're wary of Bearden et al. getting into your pocketbook, but beware also of them getting into your mind. Remember what I said long ago: reliance on crackpot theories to explain disaster keeps you from understanding and alleviating the true causes.
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Post by Dead Hoosiers on Oct 8, 2005 2:21:51 GMT -4
Since I don't know ANYTHING about this kind of stuff, most of the theories sound pretty good to me. Do you know what the true causes are? (Catastrophic hurricanes in this case.)
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golfhobo
Venus
DAMN! That woulda gone in the hole IF....
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Post by golfhobo on Oct 8, 2005 11:03:10 GMT -4
About 99% of all Meterologists would tell you that hurricanes are caused AND strengthened by the interaction of cooler air masses and warmer waters beneath them, in conjunction with prevailing winds like the jet stream or trades.
One theory I heard during Katrina coverage, was that they will start getting stronger and bigger from now on due to warmer waters in the Gulf, caused by increased Global Warming.
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