Quote:A year of wrangling produced the solution, after a Joint Psychological Warfare Committee had been set up under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and had failed to fulfill an effective policy-supervising function. On 13 June, 1942 the President created the Office of War Information. This agency was given control directly or indirectly over all domestic propaganda, and over white propaganda abroad, except for the Western Hemisphere, which remained under the Rockefeller Committee in the State Department. The FIS was taken from the COI, and the COI took on the new name of OSS—Office of Strategic Services—under which it retained three major functions:

    (1) continuation of scholastic and informal intelligence;
    (2) black propaganda operations (given explicit authority only in March, 1943);
    (3) subversive operations, in collaboration with regular military authority.

The OWI was placed under Mr. Elmer Davis, a Rhodes scholar and novelist who had become one of the nation's most popular radio commentators. The FIS was perpetuated under the control of Mr. Robert Sherwood, who had a most extraordinary coterie of odd personalities assisting him: Socialist refugees, advertising men, psychologists, psychoanalysts (of both the licensed and lay varieties), professional promoters, theatrical types, German professors, a commercial attaché, young men just out of college, oil executives, and popular authors (novelists, slick writers, Pulitzer winners, pulp writers, humorists, poets and a professional pro-Japanese writer, fresh off the Imperial Japanese Embassy payroll).

The War Department agency, under the Military Intelligence Service of G-2, had been renamed Psychological Warfare Branch and had executed within the G-2 structure the equivalent of a knight's move in chess, ending up at a new place on the TO with no observable change in function or authority; it had passed under the authority of Colonel (later Brigadier General) Oscar Solbert, a West Pointer with wide international and business experience; he had been out of the Army as a top official with Eastman Kodak, after a cosmopolitan army career which sent him all over Europe and gave him one tour of duty as a White House aide. With the establishment of OWI, Colonel Solbert's office fissiparated like an amoeba; the civilian half of Psychological Warfare Branch, with a few officers, went over to OWI to be a brain-trust for the foreign broadcast experts, who failed to welcome this accession of talent; the military half remained as an MIS agency until 31 December, 1943, when OWI abolished its half and MIS cooperated by wiping out the other, leaving the War Department in the middle of a war with no official psychological warfare agency whatever, merely some liaison officers.

Psychological warfare became the responsibility of designated individual officers in OPD—(the Operations Division of the General Staff), an outfit celebrated for conscientious overwork, as well as in MIS and the War Department got along very nicely. Meanwhile OWI and OSS fought one of the many battles of Washington, each seeking control of foreign propaganda. The D.C. and Manhattan newspapers ran columns on this fight, along with news of the fighting in Russia, Libya, and the Pacific. For one glorious moment of OSS, it seemed that the President had signed over all foreign propaganda functions conducted outside the United States to OSS, cutting the OWI out of everything except its New York and San Francisco transmitters; the OWI was stricken with gloom and collective indigestion. The next day, the mistake was rectified, and OWI triumphantly planned raids on the jurisdiction of OSS. Meanwhile, the following things were happening:

Highly classified plans for psychological warfare were being drafted for both the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. These were discussed at various meetings and then classified a little higher, whereupon they were locked up, lest the propaganda writers and broadcasters see them and break security on them by obeying and applying them.

Broadcasts—thousands of words in dozens of languages—were transmitted to everyone on earth. They were written by persons who had little if any contact with Federal policy, and none with the military establishment, except for formal security. The plans at the top bore no observable relation to the operations at the bottom.

Quote:That’s right. When Nimitz wasn’t busy with trivial items such as breaking the Japanese codes, setting ambushes at Midway, planning island hopping campaigns, and making sure MacArthur didn’t go off the deep end, he was mixing gallons of this stuff.

Admiral Nimitz recipe for the Old Fashioned Mix which he calls “CINCPAC SPECIAL”

    1 clean one gallon jug
    3 quarts Bourbon
    1/4 of a fifth of gold label rum
    Add sugar cautiously until you can just detect the presence of sugar.
    Fill remainder of jug with tap water.
    Desirable, but not necessary: drop two whole vanilla beans into the jug to stay for many refills of the jug. They last for years.
    Pour generous portions over ice and serve it forth:

This recipe was developed by Admiral Nimitz when he was Commander in Chief of the Pacific at a time when liquor was rationed, a bottle a week to a man and frequently rum was the only kind available.

Sharkbait’s Cocktail of the Week: In The Navy

Quote:MULDER: All this conjecture - the "ontological shock" that you speak of, for which we are so ill-equipped - is not only false but dangerous. This woman ... this woman presents no good or credible testimony apart from the feel-good message that she promotes.

FAZIO: You think she's lying?

MULDER: No, I don't think she's lying. I think that if you prepare people well enough to believe a lie, they will believe it as if it were true. And if you tell them a really big lie, like there are aliens from outer space, much more than a small one, they will believe in it. And if you suggest to them these aliens are doing bad things to them, the ... the power of the suggestion will be to make people believe that certain psychopathologies and neuroses that they're suffering from can now be attributed to that.

LAGERQVIST: Mr. Mulder ... Agent Mulder, she has physical ailments.

WOMAN: Are you discounting any belief in the existence of extraterrestrials?

MULDER: No. I just question mindless belief.

FAZIO: But you've cited evidence. You've made claims yourself.

MULDER: What I've seen, I've seen because I wanted to believe. I ... if you look too hard, you can go mad, but if you continue to look, you become liberated. And you become awake, as if from a dream, realizing that ... that the lies are there simply to protect what they're advertising: a government which knows its greatest strength is not in defense, but in attack. It's strongly held by believers in UFO phenomena that there is military complicity or involvement in abductions, but what if there is no complicity? What if there is simply just the military, seeking to develop an arsenal against which there is no defense: biological warfare, which justifies - in their eyes - making an ass out of the nation with stories of little green men - a conspiracy wrapped in a plot inside a government agenda.

[Several people shake their heads in disbelief. Later, when the conference is over, Mulder goes to leave. But a man in the audience catches his eye - his regression hypnotherapist, DR. HEITZ WERBER.]

MULDER: Dr. Werber?

WERBER: It's been some time.

MULDER: Almost five years.

WERBER: I came down expecting to hear how your work had progressed. I'm ... surprised, to say the least.

MULDER: A lot has changed.

WERBER: You seem to have abandoned something you believed so completely. In spite of what I know about you from our work together - the memories I helped you recover about the experience with your sister.

MULDER: Well, I've come to distrust a lot of things. I've - I've come to distrust those memories.

WERBER: I'm sorry.

MULDER: For what?

WERBER: I've taken a lot of criticism for my work with alien abductees, and in the field itself. The regression hypnosis work I did with you ...

MULDER: I'm not questioning your methods, Dr. Werber. I'm questioning myself, and how I was tricked, how I was led to believe through an elaborate staging of events that my sister had been abducted.

WERBER: A man with faith can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

MULDER: I don't think you understand. There's just too much evidence that it's all been a lie. The conspiracy is not to hide the existence of extraterrestrials. It's to make people believe in it so completely that they question nothing.

WERBER: So, you and I have just been advocates of insanity all along? Is this the extreme possibility you believe in now?

MULDER: Yeah. Is Patient "X" any more credible?

WERBER: I hope so. I'm her doctor. I think you should meet her. I think you might change your mind.

Quote:Chesapeake, a 1,000-ton lift-capacity derrick barge – the largest crane on the East Coast – arrived by Friday, as well as Ferrell, a 200-ton lift-capacity revolving crane barge, and Oyster, a 150-ton lift-capacity crane barge. The Navy is also sending another 400-ton lift capacity barge, expected to arrive next week, according to a Navy release.

Cheseapeake is owned by Donjon Marine Company, Inc., and was built in 1972, according to the company’s website.

When built in 1972, Chesapeake was originally called SUN 800.

It is its history as SUN 800 that makes the crane infamous. SUN 800 was built to assist in the construction of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a deep-sea drill-ship platform, according to an article from Engineering News-Record. The ship was built by the CIA to recover the 3,000-ton Soviet Golf II ballistic missile submarine K-129, which sunk in 1968, called Project Azorian, according to USNI News.

The cover for the operations was that billionaire Howard Hughes funded the crane to use it to mine the seafloor for manganese nodules, according to a 2010 piece in Proceedings.

By using SUN 800, the CIA was able to recover the bodies of 70 Soviet crewmembers and parts of the submarine, the Engineering News-Record reported. The CIA returned to the site of the submarine wreckage in 1975 under Project Matador, according to Proceedings.

Hughes Glomar Explorer was sold for scrap in 2015, USNI News reported.

Following its original mission, the Sun 800 was rechristented the Penn 800. It was renamed Penn 1,000 after an upgrade following damage, according to a historical account of Sunship, the company that built the crane. When it transferred to Donjon, it was renamed Chesapeake.

Quote:THE STORY BEHIND THE COVER

We kept warning and warning them, but people just laughed the way they always do or did, rather...

I'd first gotten interested in Flying Saucers back in the fifties when people started thinking there was something to these constantly recurring reports of strange things hurtling through the sky. If this had been a thousand years earlier, we'd all have been on our knees, no doubt, seeing in these strange shapes warnings of the end of the Earth. But, a thousand years later, we were a more sophisticated people. We didn't have the sense to be afraid of what we couldn't understand. When news came through that a cloud (that's what the reports called it, "a cloud") of shapes in the sky had appeared over Lhasa and that devout Tibetans and Chinese Communist officials were milling around the temples in the thousands, animosities forgotten, celebrating the coming of the men from something they called Shambala, we felt superior over these people who weren't as advanced as us.

And then the next day Ovington Proving Grounds went off the air. And then the state of Texas.

The gentlemen who represented Texas in Congress were quick to demand a bipartisan investigation.

A forcefield seemed to have been thrown around the state. No news was coming out of Texas. No radio stations seemed to be working. No planes were able to cross Texas. Reporters who had flown as far as the Texan border and then found themselves unable to proceed a step further, reported seeing people walking about, on the other side, with an obviously dazed look.

The day before Texas had gone off the air, a commentator in Dallas had chortled over the latest Flying Saucer story. A giant Flying Saucer had been seen heading towards Dallas that morning a fantastic round thing, large enough to cover a small village according to one report and the commentator, paying his respects to what he termed the silly season, had quoted the warning of a local Saucer group that the long anticipated Invasion might be on.

The next day, we in New York began to watch for Their coming. We had warned people, just as the group in Texas had done, that there was no assurance that the coming of the Saucers meant the Millenium was near, and we had attacked the emotional blackmailers who had started cults based upon alleged contacts with the "men" piloting the Saucers. We felt that even if these visits had taken place, they could be interpreted as "softening-up" steps, and nothing more. They came, finally, the morning of the sixth day after Texas had gone off the air.

I was down at the Battery, watching, as the huge Mother Ship landed in the Bay-a shimmering forcefield quickly thrown around it while, from inside the ship, more than a doren smaller scouts quickly emerged and were soon hovering over New York.

There was pandemonium where I was, of course. Men and women were kneeling in the streets. A wild-eyed man near me was shouting about the end of the world. But I could only feel numb. The end of the world that we had known was undoubtedly near. The saucer that was hovering closer and closer above our heads heralded a strange Tomorrow......

Quote:The egg dance was a traditional Easter game involving the laying down of eggs on the ground and dancing among them whilst trying to break as few as possible. Another variation (depicted in many of the images featured here) involved tipping an egg from a bowl, and then trying to flip the bowl over on top of it, all with only using one's feet and staying within a chalk circle drawn on the ground. Although, as shown in many of its depictions in art, the pastime is associated with peasant villages of the 16th and 17th century, one of the earliest references to egg-dancing relates to the marriage of Margaret of Austria and Philibert of Savoy on Easter Monday in 1498. The event was described in an 1895 issue of American Magazine:

    Then the great egg dance, the special dance of the season, began. A hundred eggs were scattered over a level space covered with sand, and a young couple, taking hands, began the dance. If they finished without breaking an egg they were betrothed, and not even an obdurate parent could oppose the marriage.

    After three couples had failed, midst the laughter and shouts of derision of the on-lookers, Philibert of Savoy, bending on his knee before Marguerite, begged her consent to try the dance with him. The admiring crowd of retainers shouted in approval, "Savoy and Austria!" When the dance was ended and no eggs were broken the enthusiasm was unbounded.

Quote:The image above details the aesthetic requirements for achieving the "Ideal English Rabbit", the benchmark of perfect markings for a particular breed of rabbit first developed in the middle of the nineteenth century. The diagram reproduces one of a series of eight images created by the English artist Ernest George Wippell for Fur and Feather magazine in 1893, two years after the founding of the English Rabbit Club (though some sources give the date for Wippell's drawings as 1903). In 1927, Fur and Feather published the colour print pictured below in their "ideal breed" series.

In Search of the Impossible: The Perfect English Rabbit

Quote:So, yes, Rogan is huge. But now we can compare his podcast following to that of his other platforms. His Spotify following is still smaller than his subscribers on YouTube, which come in at 16.4 million, and his personal Instagram followers, which are at 18.9 million. But it’s worth noting that Rogan accumulated these Spotify followers over just four years – his show wasn’t on the platform until he signed an exclusive deal in 2020.

Now, there are caveats to this figure. Podcasters’ audiences span platforms. These days, Rogan is back on YouTube and Apple Podcasts, as is Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy , and video clips from podcasts like New Heights travel far and wide on the internet. Plus, not all followers listen to every episode. Some might never tune in.

But that said, following a podcast is a specific action taken by listeners to show just how much interest they have in hearing content from these creators.

“This number represents the number of users who have decided to ‘follow’ a show on Spotify — it doesn't represent a show’s total audience or the performance of an episode,” Spotify said in a comment. “The early feedback from both creators and users has been encouraging. We have no further details to share at this time.”

Spotify Reveals Joe Rogan’s Podcast Numbers

Quote:The Spiritual Science Mother Church

The history of the Mother Church was never set down in any writing in the past. When the founder, Rev. Julia Forrest, passed away, her family burnt her personal and church papers. In 1978-79 Rev. Laura Smith, Pastor of the Second Spiritual Science Church of Rochester, NY,, attempted to write a history but Rev. Glenn Argoe (who succeeded Rev. Forrest) and the senior ministers at the time, refused to cooperate with Rev. Smith and give her any information. When Rev. Lillian Corbin (who succeeded Rev. Argoe) passed, the persons who were living in her house at that time destroyed the existing church records that were stored there.

Quote:Countering a toned-down alert from the Centers for Disease Control over a new “bird flu” case, survivalists who have long seen the H5N1 virus as more threatening than COVID-19 this week stepped up their warnings about it.

“This is a real threat,” a national prepper and survivalist organization warned on its app.

“This is a warning to prepare for a potentially severe pandemic and collapse,” added the statement on the “Collapse Survivor App” recently featured in Secrets and produced by the founder of Fortitude Ranch, a chain of survivalist resort camps.

The administration on Monday reported in an alert that a Texas dairy worker was struck by the bird flu, which actually spreads in birds and mammals.

“This infection does not change the H5N1 bird flu human health risk assessment for the U.S. general public, which CDC considers to be low,” the CDC said.

But Drew Miller, the Fortitude founder, said the CDC was being too dismissive. A former government intelligence officer, retired Air Force colonel, and Harvard Ph.D. graduate, Miller told Secrets, “The Center For Disease Control is endangering Americans with false assurances that H5N1 is ‘low risk.’ The opposite is true: H5N1 is a clear, growing risk of a pandemic that could kill billions.”

He and others who help the public prepare for disasters have long warned about the threat of the virus once it reaches human-to-human spread levels.

“The recent human case in the U.S. is not from human-to-human transmission of H5N1, but the risks of this are clearly rising,” Miller said. “H5N1, which historically has been about 60% lethal to humans, had a major mutation last year, enabling it to spread in many mammal populations around the world.”

He added in a memo to members, “We cannot know when human-to-human transmissible H5N1 pandemic will happen, but to say it is low risk is wrong. An H5N1 pandemic is coming. It could start tomorrow, or a few more years from now. The CDC must stop reassuring people that H5N1 is low risk; it is a looming huge disaster that will kill billions if we are not prepared for it. The CDC should be publishing the message the Collapse Survivor App just released: H5N1 is a huge risk, and you need to be prepared for a bad pandemic and collapse.”

Quote:What we know about H5N1 bird flu in cows — and the risk to humans

The discovery of H5N1 bird flu in U.S. cattle — and the news that at least one person in Texas has been infected, apparently through contact with infected cows — has taken scientists who study influenza by surprise.

Cows from 12 dairy herds in five states have tested positive for H5N1. Those states are Texas (seven herds), Kansas (two), Michigan (one), New Mexico (one), and Idaho (one).

...
Is this picture likely to change?

Almost undoubtedly.

“We’re doing science here. And science changes. And when the science changes, then our assessment may change,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Quote:However, the question remains how many nuclear weapons would be needed to meet U.S. military objectives if deterrence fails (including, for example, counterforce targets and damage limitation objectives). Current numbers appear sufficient to fight one nuclear war while deterring another. No changes in U.S. numbers will be needed before the 2030s as China builds up its arsenal over a decade to its goal of at least 1,500 nuclear weapons by 2035. Nearing 2035, the current objectives for nuclear weapons employment in the event of escalation to a large-scale nuclear war with China and Russia may require higher numbers to cover additional targets. The value of meeting these objectives should be evaluated critically against adversary reactions to new capabilities.

There is no evidence that additional low-yield options (including more prompt options for using low-yield nuclear weapons) would deter Russia from using low-yield nuclear weapons. Instead, managing deterrence of limited nuclear war requires credibly signaling that an adversary will not gain any military or political advantage from using nuclear weapons.

Quote:...it is not in any way realistic for the United States to fight two nuclear wars to acceptable outcomes—one large-scale nuclear war would end civilization as we know it. ... Amid or after a major nuclear war with Russia or China, it is highly unlikely that a U.S. president would have any plausible incentive to fight a second large-scale nuclear war. Thus, a scenario where the United States fights one nuclear war and deters another nuclear war is realistically sufficient.

 

Quote:The hurricane season is still nearly two months away but Dr. Phil Klotzbach and his research team at Colorado State University released their forecast for the 2024 hurricane season today.

Unfortunately, it's likely to be a very active season. The forecast calls for 23 named storms, 11 of those becoming hurricanes and 5 of those becoming major hurricanes (category 3 or higher). In an average year, we expect 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes.

IMPORTANT - None of these preseason forecasts CANNOT tell you where any storm will go

Dr. Klotzbach indicates record warm tropical and eastern subtropical Atlantic water temperatures as the primary factor for a busy season. Additionally, El Nino is likely transition to La Nina by the peak of hurricane season.  In years with La Nina, the wind shear is typically lighter. When wind shear is lighter, there is generally an increase in hurricane activity.

Remember, whether there are 5 or 25 named storms, it only takes one hitting us to make it a bad year. That's why it's important to prepare every year!

https://twitter.com/EdPiotrowski/status/1775884933220692177

Quote:A new study led by researchers at New York University finds that exposure to chronic radiation from Chornobyl has not damaged the genomes of microscopic worms living there today—which doesn’t mean that the region is safe, the scientists caution, but suggests that these worms are exceptionally resilient.

In recent years, researchers have found that some animals living in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone—the region in northern Ukraine within an 18.6-mile radius of the power plant—are physically and genetically different from their counterparts elsewhere, raising questions about the impact of chronic radiation on DNA.

Tiny Worms Tolerate Chornobyl Radiation

Quote:Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, said: “Hella was an incredible force and an inspiration. She had unrivalled contacts and immense knowledge about world affairs and was always steely in her determination to find out the facts.

Pick was born in Vienna in 1927, and spent her early childhood in what she described as a “very conventional middle-class environment”. But after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and attacks on Jews rose sharply, her mother decided to put her 11-year-old daughter on a Kindertransport train for the UK.

Simon Tisdall, another former foreign editor of the Guardian, said: “Hella was a force to be reckoned with. Fiercely intelligent, passionate about all she did, incredibly well connected in the exclusive world of international diplomacy – and ever courageous in navigating a male-dominated journalistic profession that feared powerful women.

“Well into her 90s she was writing elegant long-form pieces for Prospect magazine, including an article drawing sobering parallels between the war she fled as a Kindertransport child in 1939 and the rise of Putin. She was one of a kind.”

Describing her as a “trailblazer for a generation”, he wrote: “Pick is testament to the necessity of having a broad intellectual hinterland and an open mind, the value of cultivating sources and finding things out. There is no better manifesto against the current clickbait culture and narcissistic social media obsession.”

“She was probably the oldest working journalist in the UK, and was deeply engaged with the world, even as she was leaving it. The days before her death, weak and in hospital, she still wanted to talk about her horror at the situation in Gaza and her fear for Ukraine’s future, with Europe and America distracted and divided.

Hella Pick, pioneering Guardian journalist, dies aged 96

Quote:Offered here is Scallion’s Future Map of North America, which “illustrates the way I see North America by 2012, with many of the more significant changes occurring by 2002.” The map is a “before and after” image, the base a relief map of North America and part of Latin America with national, state and provincial boundaries shown in white. Vast areas are overprinted in blue, reflecting Scallion’s prophecy that by 2012 much of the region would be inundated following “three separate magnetic pole shifts… each comprised of a six to eight degree westerly shift.” Surrounding the map are long blocks of text summarizing Scallion’s predictions of the geophysical, climactic and demographic consequences of these successive shifts.

This parade of cataclysms will cause mass migrations, with much of the population ending up concentrated in huge “survival camps”. Making things worse, these survivors will be afflicted by “new plagues… as the body’s electrical system becomes imbalanced by changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and electromagnetic pollution”. Further, “infrasonic waves” from shifting tectonic plates will leave humans “vulnerable to pronounced mood swings, depression and even something akin to possession”. On the other hand, there’s also some really good news, at least for those who’ve had it with the patriarchy: The magnetic pole shifts will (somehow) “cause the moon to orbit closer to the Earth. This will cause a move towards a lunar society with more feminine than masculine overtones. As a result, both men and women will experience increases in intuitive capabilities.”

On the off chance things don’t work out as expected (hoped?), Scallion gives himself an out: “Predictions are given as probabilities. Even at this time, consciousness can alter an event, modify changes in a particular area, or at the very least, help prepare for what is to come.” It’s worth noting that similar hedging appears on his 1992 Future Map of the United States, which predicted that the magnetic pole shifts and attendant cataclysms would occur in 1993-95. It’s all reminiscent of the Millerites’ recalculation of the Second Coming of Christ after the “Great Disappointment” of 1844.

(04-06-2024, 02:35 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: It's easy to forget how relatively recently it was that Florida (and Texas) grew into very high-population states. Check this Electoral College map from 1948: FL had 8 EVs! NY had 47, PA had 35, OH 25, MI 19. Iowa had 10! Compare to the 2024 map.