Arrival (2016)

Interruption to our normal programming…  Beware: Major Spoilers!

I haven’t felt like writing a review of a film in a long while. My previous movie musings are still available over at (mostly defunct) CelluloidSeduction.blogspot.com. After seeing this year’s ‘Arrival’, with major theme of communication, I am prompted to express my thoughts, rather than a review, on what makes this movie worth seeing.

Amy Adams, her of ‘American Hustle’ and ‘Batman v Superman’ fame, is chief protagonist, professor of linguistics Louise Banks. As the synopsis goes, the world’s nations teeter on the verge of war, Banks and her elite team of investigators, working for the US government, race against time to find a way to communicate with the ‘visitors’. Hoping to unravel the mystery, Banks takes a chance that could threaten her life. and quite possibly all of mankind.

Based on the short story by Ted Chiang, ‘Story of Your Life’, is a sci-fi conundrum, so to fully appreciate this movie you should cease reading anything more. I mean ANYTHING, even watching the trailer, as going in blind is the best way to experience this visceral masterpiece.

So stop here and come back when you’ve seen it.

Right, how was it for you? On a down-to-earth basics level it’s not bad as sci-fi goes, not many explosions or comic one-liners or mad-cap save-the-world heroics. These do exist in Arrival, but they are a whole different animal.

Some die-hard fans of ‘true sci-fi’, come out asking ‘what’s all the fuss about’? While others, leave this movie feeling like they’ve experienced something profound.

Questions about time, language, and ethics resonate throughout, just as you think you’ve figured it out something changes, ‘til suddenly you get it! Although the Aliens have their strange pictorial language, I worked out more or less that they are communicating with our protagonist via memories. Although there is some debate on this, as  the Aliens ‘experience non-linear time’. Therefore, the consensus is, Banks is actually living the future, or something.

Anyway, like all good sci-fi, the science doesn’t quite add up. There are flaws, no movie is ever perfect, but these flaws make for great debate. I predict this will be one for the annals, much like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although, as a former geek, I must admit that these past few years I’ve missed out on a lot of the contemporary stuff like Interstellar.

So, for me personally, this film is more about prophesy, after all, prophesy exists to avert catastrophe not predict it. That’s what I’ve read. This is the crux of the entire story… if you know something about the future and have a choice to change it, do you… and who do you tell about it?

There is a lot going on in this, a lot of clues mentioned in passing remarks, nuances, that it’s easy to miss the message.

At one point our man from the CIA says, to paraphrase:  ‘Of course there’s an alien threat as there is ‘NO ONE WORLD LEADER’ for them to talk to.” What is he trying to say, you can only wonder in paranoiac ways.

Arrival is many things to many people – if you’ve ever loved and lost, hoped and dreamed, regretted and reminisced, and pondered the age old questions of who we are, and where did we come from, you’ll find it all within the experience that is Arrival.

In essence this is no ordinary sci-fi movie, and you’ll either like it or think it slow, boring nonsense, but by the time you reach your conclusion, it’s already too late.

Musk Military Might

Obama cares, but so does Musk

April 2016... The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday awarded billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX an $83 million contract to launch a GPS satellite, breaking the monopoly that Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. have held on military space launches for more than a decade.

The Global Positioning System satellite will be launched in May 2018 from Florida, Air Force officials said.

Who was seen down at the Pentagon in June? CNN’s Ryan Browne lets us in on a not-so-secret secret meeting…

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, met with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter Wednesday as the Pentagon looks to raise its technology game.

The focus of the closed-door get together was "innovation," according to a Defense Department spokesman, although Musk is also looking to win more government business for SpaceX, which launches satellites into orbit.

Neither Carter nor Musk spoke to reporters after their meeting, but Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook said Monday that Carter "has been reaching out to a number of members of the technology community to get their ideas, their feedback, find out what's going on in the world of innovation."

Musk tweeted Thursday about the visit and included a reference to the Marvel Comics' Iron Man character. He is thought to have partly inspired that character in the 2008 "Iron Man" film.

When asked by CNN's Barbara Starr if Musk's role as a defense contractor would complicate the meeting with Carter, Cook said: "The secretary knows very well the rules and regulations required, and how to keep those issues separate and apart and transparent."

Carter has focused intensely on promoting links between the Department and technology companies from the private sector, making a number of trips to Silicon Valley and establishing the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUX) in Silicon Valley and Boston.

Speaking in San Francisco in March, Carter said DIUX centers would allow the Pentagon "to better tap into the region's innovation ecosystem and build relationships with local companies."

He said one of his goals as secretary "has been to build and in some cases to rebuild the bridges between the Pentagon and America's wonderfully innovative and strong technology community."

The Pentagon is also inviting certain approved hackers to test the department's cybersecurity as part of its "Hack the Pentagon" initiative. According to Cook, the "controlled" pilot project will offer "bounties" to hackers who can identify and improve the Department's cyber vulnerabilities, a practice that is common in the private sector.

Musk is already playing a role in the defense industrial complex. His private space exploration company, SpaceX, has been actively competing for military contracts, seeking to provide rocket launch services to get military satellites into space.

The process of awarding the contracts has been at the center of a contentious fight on Capitol Hill.

SpaceX sued the Air Force in 2014 over what is said was an unfair process for competing for satellite launches before it was certified for military space launches in 2015.

The company successfully landed part of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in April. SpaceX's landing could lead to possibilities of the company reusing rockets for future launches, potentially saving money and even time. Musk tweeted Tuesday that he hopes to reuse a space rocket this fall.

The only other certified launch provider is the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. ULA's Atlas space rocket uses Russian-made rocket engines.

Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sen. John McCain has slammed the Air Force and Department of Defense for continuing to rely on a space rocket that uses Russian-made engines.

During a January committee hearing, McCain charged that the use of Russian RD-180 rocket engines meant that the U.S. is "giving tens of millions of dollars to corrupt oligarchs." McCain also said the Russian company that manufactures the engines is overseen by board members that were placed under sanctions in the wake of the Russian armed annexation of Crimea in 2014.

"They are a bunch of thugs and cronies of Vladimir Putin, some of them are ex-KGB," McCain told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, referring to the board members in question.

But the Air Force and the Pentagon have been reluctant to completely stop purchasing the Russian engines, fearing that doing so would make ULA uncompetitive and leave SpaceX with a monopoly over military space launches. 

Being no fan of Russia, if Hillary wins the election, would she push for change?

Next up… Musk on Mars!

Musk's Sucker Punch

Back in 2015... "Elon Musk walks briskly onto the stage as hard rock blasts in the background. The guitar riff, which sounds like entrance music suitable for a professional wrestler or a minor-league cleanup hitter, fades out, and Musk surveys the crowd, nodding his head a few times and then sticking his hands in his pockets. "What I’m going to talk about tonight," he says, "is a fundamental transformation of how the world works."

The 44-year-old CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX (and the chairman of the solar energy provider SolarCity) is wearing a dark shirt, a satin-trimmed sports coat, and, at this moment, a knowing smirk. An admirer of Steve Jobs, Musk is an heir to the Silicon Valley titan in some psychic sense, but in a setting like this, he’d never be mistaken for the Apple founder.

Jobs worked the stage methodically, with somber reverence and weighty pauses, holding tightly choreographed events on weekday mornings for maximum media impact. Musk’s events, which are generally held at the press-¬unfriendly hour of 8 p.m. Pacific time, have a more ad hoc feel. His manner is geeky and puckish. He pantomimes and rephrases, rolls his eyes, and cracks one joke after another—his capacity for expression barely keeping pace with the thoughts in his head.

Musk begins by showing an image of thick yellow smoke pouring out of a series of giant industrial chimneys, contrasted with the Keeling Curve, the famous climate-change chart that shows more than 50 years of carbon dioxide levels soaring toward a near-certain calamity. It could be mistaken for something out of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. "I just want to be clear," Musk says, with a nervous giggle, his accent betraying his boyhood in South Africa. "This is real."

His comments on this April evening, in front of a raucous crowd of Tesla owners (and some reporters) at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California, are quintessential Musk—weighty but also a bit cheeky. They’re also just preamble. His electric-¬car manufacturer is launching a new product line: large batteries that store energy in homes and even larger batteries that do the same for utilities and businesses.

The Powerwall, a slender appliance designed to be mounted in your garage, comes in five colors and starts at $3,000; the Powerpack, an 8-foot-tall steel box that looks a bit like a utility transformer, is aimed at the energy industry and costs roughly $25,000. These prices are roughly half of what competing battery manufacturers charge.

"The issue with existing batteries is that they suck," Musk says. "They’re expensive. They’re unreliable. They’re stinky. Ugly. Bad in every way." The idea is to pair the new Tesla products with solar panels—either on the rooftops of homes or in large-scale solar farms—that will store energy during the day, when the sun is shining, so that it can be used in our homes, for free, at night instead of energy from power plants that produce greenhouse gases.

Musk thinks it just might be the key to solving the problem of global warming. He explains that if the city of Boulder, Colorado, population 103,000, bought a mere 10,000 Powerpacks and paired them with solar panels, it could eliminate its dependence on conventional power plants entirely. The U.S. could do the same with only 160 million of them. Then he offers even higher figures: 900 million Powerpacks, with solar panels, would allow us to decommission all the world’s carbon-emitting power plants; 2 billion would wean the world off gasoline, heating oil, and cooking gas as well.

"That may seem like an insane number," says Musk, but he points out that there are 2 billion cars on the road today, and every 20 years that fleet gets replaced. "The point I want to make is that this is actually within the power of humanity to do. It’s not impossible."

... Musk's Gigafactory will be unveiled soon.

(If you are interested in reading more of Max Chafkin's factory article go to: https://www.fastcompany.com/3052889/elon-musk-powers-up-inside-teslas-5-billion-gigafactory)

Musk's Super-highway

"I like velvet jackets, what's wrong with that?"

Part 5... By building a reliable rocket at an affordable cost, SpaceX hopes to be able to take small satellites into orbit for a fee of around $6 million. This is half the standard rate in the aerospace business to take something into space. The company already had two customers—the U.S. Department of Defense and the government of Malaysia.

"Many times we've been asked, 'If you reduce the cost, don't you reduce reliability?' This is completely ridiculous," 

Musk explained to Fast Company writer Jennifer Reingold. "

A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000–to–1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets."

Musk serves as the chief technology officer of SpaceX. All employees are shareholders, and the company's casual but committed atmosphere is reinforced by the workday presence of Musk's four dogs. He no longer sleeps at the office, however, for he has a home, a wife there, and in the garage a McLaren F1, a $1.2 million car that is the fastest production, or non-customized race car, in the world.

He has testified before members of the U.S. Congress on the possibility of commercial human space flight and has also established the Musk Foundation, which is committed to space exploration and the discovery of clean energy sources.

The Foundation runs the Musk Mars Desert Observatory telescope in southern Utah, as well as a simulated Mars environment where visitors can experience what life on Mars might be like, including waste-burning toilets.

"I think human exploration of space is very important," he told Reingold. 

"Certainly, from a survival standpoint, the probability of living longer is much greater if we're on more than one planet."

Musk in Space

"Okay, I exaggerated, it's this big!"

Part 4... Musk thought that maybe he might be able to build his own rocket instead. He began contacting innovators and technicians in the American aerospace industry, and he managed to lure some experienced engineers and technical specialists away from companies like Boeing and TRW to come and work for him at SpaceX's headquarters in El Segundo, California. He had a much more difficult time attracting venture capital for this idea, however.

"Space is pretty far out of the comfort zone of just about every VC on Earth," he admitted to Matt Marshall of the San Jose Mercury News. Instead, he was forced to put up his own money to build what would become the first reusable rocket in the private sector.

Musk and his new SpaceX team began to build two types of Falcon rockets. The name came from the "Millennium Falcon," the spacecraft in the Star Wars movies. The plan was to build a rocket by using existing technology and at the lowest possible cost. The Falcon I, for example, uses a pintle engine, which dates from the 1960s. It has one fuel injector, while standard rockets used by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) generally use what is known as a "showerhead" design that features several fuel injectors. The company also needed a theodolite, which is used to align rockets, and instead of buying it new, they saved $25,000 by finding one on eBay.

There are other, equally expensive costs associated with rocketry. Since Musk's design would be reusable, the company needed to get back the rocket's first stage, which the rocket sheds as it leaves the Earth's atmosphere. The part usually falls into the ocean, according to safety plans, but retrieval at sea is expensive.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (1953–) is ranked the seventh richest person in the world. Allen has used his wealth to finance SpaceShipOne. This private manned spacecraft, built by aircraft design pioneer Burt Rutan (1943–), was the first of its kind to reach suborbital space twice, which it did in 2004. For this two-time achievement, SpaceShipOne met the conditions of the $10 million Ansari X prize, established by the X Prize Foundation to encourage private entrepreneurship in aerospace.

Doom video game co-creator John Carmack (1970) founded a computer game development company called id Software in 1991. He is considered one of the most gifted programmers ever to work in the gaming industry. He was one of the creators of the successful Doom and Quake games, which sold millions in the 1990s and attracted legions of devoted fans.

In 2000, Carmack funded a new venture, Armadillo Aerospace in Mesquite, Texas, with the goal of building a manned suborbital spacecraft. It lost its bid to win the Ansari X prize when its vehicles ran into technical problems and crashed in 2004 and 2005.

In 1995, Jeff Bezos (1964–) launched Amazon.com, an online bookseller that became one of the most impressive successes in American business history. With an estimated personal fortune of over $5 billion, Bezos began donating some of his wealth to various philanthropic causes, but he also established an aerospace company. His Blue Origin, like Allen and Carmack's ventures, is also committed to manned suborbital space flight. His project is to be propelled by a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and kerosene and is a vertical-takeoff and landing-vehicle.

Companies that contract with NASA charge $250,000 to bring such parts back, but Musk found some ocean-salvage companies that knew how to handle sensitive material. He found one that agreed to do the job for just $60,000. The Falcon does not have a specialty computer on board, which can cost $1 million alone to install and maintain. Instead its computer is a basic one that uses the same technology as an automatic teller machine and costs just $5,000.

Musk knows Cash is King

Part 3... In February 1999 Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash, which was one of the largest cash deals in the Internet business sector at the time. Out of that amount, Musk was paid $22 million for his 7 percent share, which made him a millionaire at twenty-eight. In 1999, he used $10 million of it to start another company, which he called X.com. This was an online bank with grand plans to become a full-range provider of financial services to consumers. The company's one major innovation was figuring out how to securely transfer money using a recipient's e-mail address.

Musk's proven track record from Zip2 helped it gain serious attention and generous investors right away. Two important executives signed on with him: investment banker John Story and Bill Harris, the former chief executive officer of Intuit Corporation, the maker of the best-selling Quicken accounting software as well as TurboTax, a tax-preparation program. Harris was appointed president and chief executive officer of X.com, with Musk serving as company chair. The company received a generous infusion of $25 million in start-up capital from Sequoia Capital, a leading venture-capital firm in California.

X.com went online in December 1999 with a bold offer for new customers: those who opened an online checking account with X.com received a $20 cash card that they could use at an automatic-teller machine (ATM). If they referred a friend, they received a $10 card for each new member who signed up.

Within two months, X.com had one hundred thousand customers, which was close to the number reached by its major competitor, Etrade Telebank. But consumer skepticism about the security of online banking was X.com's biggest obstacle to success, and there was a setback when Musk and the other executives had to admit that computer hackers had been able to perform some illegal transfers from traditional bank accounts into X.com accounts. They immediately started a new policy that required customers to submit a canceled check in order to withdraw money, but there were tensions in the office about the future of the company.

In March 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity, which had started an Internet money-transfer presence called PayPal. PayPal was originally set up to let users of handheld personal digital assistants, or PDAs, transfer money. It had only been in business a few months when X.com acquired it, and Musk believed that its online-transfer technology, which was known as "P2P" for "person-to-person," had a promising future. He and Harris did not agree, and Harris resigned from X.com in May 2000.

Five months later, Musk announced that X.com would abandon its original online bank and instead concentrate on turning itself into the leading global payment transfer provider. The X.com name was dropped in favor of PayPal.

PayPal grew enormously through 2001, thanks in part to its presence on eBay, the online auction Web site where person-to-person sales were happening in the hundreds of thousands. When PayPal became a publicly traded company with an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in February 2002, it had an impressive debut on the first day of Wall Street trading. Later that year, eBay bought the company outright for $1.5 billion. At the time, Musk was PayPal's largest shareholder, holding an 11.5 percent stake, and he netted $165 million in valuable eBay stock from the deal.

By then Musk had already moved on to his next venture. In June 2002 he founded SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies. He had long been fascinated by the possibility of life on Mars and was a member of the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that encourages the exploration of the red planet. Filmmaker James Cameron (1954–) is one of several notable Mars Society members.

Musk wanted to create a "Mars Oasis," sending an experimental greenhouse to the planet, which in favorable alignment of the planets is about 35 million miles distant from Earth. His oasis would contain a nutrient gel from which specific Mars-environment-friendly plant life could grow. His plan had a cost of $20 million. But then he learned that to send something into space with the standard delivery method, a Delta rocket made by the Boeing Corporation, would add another $50 million to the cost.

Musk even tried to buy a rocket from Russia, but realized that dealing with the somewhat suspect international traders who dealt in such underground, or illegal, items was just too risky.

Entrepreneur Elon

"Yeah, it's this big!"

Part 2...   Elon Musk was a multi-millionaire by the time he reached the age of thirty-one thanks to his creation of the company that became PayPal, the popular money-transfer service for Web consumers. Musk has become one of a new breed of what the New York Times called "thrillionaires," or a class of former high-tech entrepreneurs who are using their newfound wealth to help turn science-fiction dreams into reality.

Musk is the founder of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, a company based in El Segundo, California. In 2005 SpaceX was busy building the Falcon rocket, which he hoped could some day make both space tourism and a colony on the planet Mars realistic goals for humankind.

Musk is a native of South Africa, born in 1971 to parents who later divorced. His father was an engineer and his mother—originally from Canada—was a nutritionist. Musk was fascinated by science fiction and computers in his adolescent years. When he was twelve, he wrote the code for his own video game and actually sold it to a company. In his late teens, he immigrated to Canada in order to avoid the required military service for white males in South Africa.

It was still the era of apartheid, the South African legal system that denied political and economic rights to the country's majority-black native population. Musk was uninterested in serving in the army, which was engaged at the time in a battle to stamp out a black nationalist movement. Thanks to his mother's Canadian ties, he was able to enroll at Queen's University in Kingston, one of Ontario's top schools.

Musk had planned on a career in business, and he worked at a Canadian bank one summer as a college intern. This was his only real job before he became an Internet entrepreneur. Midway through his undergraduate education, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a second bachelor's in physics a year later.

From there, he won admission to the prestigious doctoral program at Stanford s. He moved to University in California, where he planned to concentrate on a Ph.D. in energy physicCalifornia just as the Internet boom was starting in 1995, and he decided he wanted to be in on it, too. He dropped out of Stanford after just two days in order to start his first company, Zip2 Corporation. This was an online city guide aimed at the newspaper publishing business, and Musk was able to land contracts with both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to provide content for their new online sites.

Musk was just twenty-four when he started the company, and he devoted all of his energies to see it succeed. At one point,he lived in the same rented office that served as his company's headquarters, sleeping on a futon couch and showering at the local YMCA, which "was cheaper than renting an apartment," he explained in an interview with Roger Eglin of the Sunday Times of London.

Still, the company struggled to fulfill its contracts and meet the payroll and other costs, and he looked for outside financing. Eventually a group of venture capitalists, investors who provide start-up money to new businesses, financed Zip2 with $3.6 million, but he gave up majority control of the company in exchange.

It's a Must - Elon Musk

For months now I've been thinking about Elon Musk. I know, that sounds kind of weird, but as time and events pass I'm finding it a must to write about Musk.

The Internet is choc-full of profiles about many businessman-inventor-capitalist-dreamers, and it appears there is a lot of information around about him. An interesting and intriguing figure that seems to be influencing the world's future is many ways is worth pursuing, in a literal sense of course. I've worked with many South Africans, and I have a strong opinion which will keep for later.

Let's start at the beginning, well kind of. The beginning that I can find on the biography sites start with school, logical I guess...

BusinessWeek covered Musk's beginning like this: "At age 15, Musk decided that the path to self-actualization traveled through the U.S. His mother was born in Canada, which was close enough. Musk got a Canadian passport, bought a plane ticket, and arrived in Montreal with little money and no home. He spent the year showing up unannounced on the doorsteps of distant Canadian relatives and doing stints on farms, tending vegetable patches, and shoveling grain. The low point was cleaning out boilers at a lumber mill.

“You had to put on this hazmat suit and shimmy through this little tunnel,” Musk recalls. “Then you take this steaming goop and shovel it back into the hole you just came through and wait for someone else to put it into a wheelbarrow.”

Musk eventually made his way to Queen’s University in Ontario for two years and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where he got degrees in economics and physics."

The kid Elon, apparently bullied and brutalized as a child growing up in South Africa under the very stern hand of his father (Source: A.Vance)

Hi ex-wife Justine has also spoken about their college days, but in a rather less entrepreneurial publication: the Marie-Claire article goes like this:

When I first met Elon, I wasn't blonde, either. I was an aspiring writer in my first year at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, sprung from a small hometown and recovering from a difficult case of first love with the older man I'd left behind. I liked older. I liked poetic and rebellious and tortured. I liked a guy who parked his motorcycle beneath my dorm-room window and called my name through the twilight: Romeo in a dark-brown leather jacket.

Elon wasn't like that. A fellow student a year ahead of me, he was a clean-cut, upper-class boy with a South African accent who appeared in front of me one afternoon as I was leaping up the steps to my dorm. He said we'd met at a party I knew I hadn't been to. (Years later, he would confess that he had noticed me from across the common room and decided he wanted to meet me.) He invited me out for ice cream. I said yes, but then blew him off with a note on my dorm-room door. Several hours later, my head bent over my Spanish text in an overheated room in the student center, I heard a polite cough behind me. Elon was smiling awkwardly, two chocolate-chip ice cream cones dripping down his hands. He's not a man who takes no for an answer.

Elon and his beloved icecream again, this time with second wife Talulah (who told him she was a virgin) Obviously still a bit of a dork! 

He was a scientific type, at home with numbers, commerce, and logic. I was not the only woman he pursued, but even after he transferred to Wharton he kept sending roses. When he'd return to Queen's to visit friends, I found myself agreeing to have dinner with him. Once, in the bookstore together, I pointed to a shelf and said, "One day I want my own books to go right there." I had said this before to a girlfriend, who laughed and spun on her heel. But Elon not only took me seriously, he seemed impressed. It was the first time that a boy found my sense of ambition —  instead of my long hair or narrow waist — attractive. Previous boyfriends complained that I was "competitive," but Elon said I had "a fire in my soul." When he told me, "I see myself in you," I knew what he meant.

Elon Musk's college pal, Adeo Ressi, from some YouTube video said of his friend: 

"He was the biggest dork I've ever met. He's actually de-dorkified by a 100 fold. It's been over 20 years, you're much cooler. I mean, I remember, like, when, exactly like, I was able to hang-out with him, but back then it was kinda painful. You'd be like, he literally was the straight-edge, didn't drink, I'd always be like, "Elon! I think the police are here! Can you go deal with it", you're like, "Sure! I'm fine."

More on Musk to follow...

Never stop dreaming Rex!

Courtesy of Space Weather.com - pic of a bolide over Cali by Kevin Greene 

The End of the World as we know it, and I feel fine?

The news is just so full of doom and gloom right now, I thought we deserve seventeen minutes worth of procrastination before heading out there to read, write, watch and debate about the truth of our future, and what our controllers might really be up to.

Apparently the world is going to end this Friday (I KNOW…again, right?)

I couldn’t resist stealing this article from The Metro and I have no idea where this picture comes from. Hope it lights up your gloomy week!

In case you’ve forgotten, the world is scheduled to end this Friday, with a global earthquake softening us all up before a really angry Jesus comes back to wipe out his creation.
Well, unless you’re a devout Christian who watches a lot of YouTube videos – in which case you’ll be off to play harp on a cloud with your grandpa!

But questions have now been raised about a video predicting the end of the world this Friday (which has been watched four million times) – with apocalypse believers claiming that their video has been ripped off and re-uploaded.

So, in other words, the end of the world IS coming – just not on Friday.

John Preacher of Armageddon news said, ‘Someone is re-uping our videos and saying that the end of the world is July 29th. Nothing is going to happen on July 29th. We have never claimed such a thing, this date is just another false date being promoted online.

‘We in no way promote that anything will happen on July 29th. There are a number of prophecies which must be fulfilled first, including the conquest of Jerusalem by the surrounding Arab nations, which lasts for 42 months (Rev 11:2), before the Second Coming and global earthquake/reeling occurs.
This prediction, by End Time Prophecies, is just one of several doomsday prophecies for this year – including that an asteroid would hit us on May 6 (it didn’t), and a prediction that Barack Obama would reveal he is the Antichrist in June (he didn’t).



This one is studded with Bible verses, and a lot of very dubious science – as well as some truly awesome CGI graphics.

End Times Prophecies says – in that computer voice favoured by all good YouTube nutters, ‘This is Armageddon News. In this broadcast we’ll discuss the second coming of Jesus Christ, which occurs at the same time as a magnetic polar flip and catastrophic global earthquake.
‘On the day which Jesus returns, there will be a polar reversal.

‘Revelations 6:12 says, ‘There was a violent earthquake, and the Sun became black like coarse black cloth, and the moon turned completely
‘The stars fell down to the Earth, like ripe figs falling from the tree when a strong wind shakes it. Every mountain and island is moved from its place.

‘The polar flip will make the stars race across the sky, and the vacuum createrd by the reeling of the Earth will pull the atmosphere along the ground, trying to catch up.

‘The global earthquake will be so bad that every hill and mountain will crumble.

Revelations 6:15 says, ‘The kings of the Earth, the Princes, the commanding officers, the rich, the strong and every slave and free person hid themselves… from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.’

Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/25/friendly-reminder-the-world-is-going-to-end-in-a-global-apocalypse-this-friday-or-is-it-6027624/#ixzz4FRjaQ82i

Doom and gloom on the High Street with the BHS fire sale going down yesterday too!

Big Bad Johnson?

Another lone gunman?

Johnson in Central Intelligence

Another (Lyndon B) Johnson - "Yup, Black lives do matter"

The Jo Cox Killing... intrigue continues

Jo Cox and husband Brendan on election night 2015

The intrigues in the Jo Cox killing continue to rattle around the blogosphere and forums, but are nowhere to be found on the mainstream. Overshadowed by the grief and stories of humanitarianism circulating throughout the political spectrum, there's no room for doubts.

Today I discovered a rather different take on this 'tragedy'...

https://theholisticworks.com/2016/06/19/the-truth-about-the-late-jo-cox-mp-and-her-husband-brendan/

And a link with synchronicity about it...

http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/kirklees-mp-jo-cox-apologises-11305865

Closer to the event, we hear yet again about a man named Thomas (Tommy) Mair...

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/horrified-mum-saw-photos-son-8222262#rlabs=1%20rt$category%20p$4%23p0wlEEY42e2UAwGd.97#kbKV88h98mBT17H1.97

Courtesy of Aangirfan Blog - The other Tommy Mair. Resemblance? 

A message to the public from the Dry Cleaner in Birstall...

The Jo Cox Killing. No Ordinary Death, No Ordinary MP

Today politicians and ordinary folk laid flowers and wreaths for a murdered member of the British Parliament under the statue of a local historic figure, the discoverer of Oxygen, Joseph Priestly (1773-1804).

One of the very first reports on the shocking news story gives some background to the strange murder.

    The Labour MP Jo Cox has died after being shot and stabbed multiple times following a constituency meeting. Armed officers responded to the attack near a library in Birstall, West Yorkshire, on Thursday afternoon. A 52-year-old man was arrested in the area, police confirmed. The suspect was named locally as Tommy Mair.

Police added that Cox, 41, the MP for Batley and Spen, had suffered serious injuries and was pronounced dead at 1.48pm on Thursday by a doctor with paramedics at the scene.

Arrest of suspect

Police confirmed that a man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby suffered slight injuries in the incident. They are also investigating reports that the suspect shouted “Britain first”, a possible reference to the far-right political party of that name, as he launched the attack.

Police are understood to be talking to at least one witness who claimed to have heard the attacker shout the words, and the motivation for the incident will form part of their inquiry.

"She was a breath of fresh air"

WHO WAS JO COX?

Ms Cox was born in Batley, West Yorkshire, grew up in Heckmondwike and studied at Cambridge University, graduating in 1995.

The 41-year-old was married with two young children, and it would have been her 42nd birthday next Wednesday.

She lived with her family on a converted barge, moored near London's Tower Bridge.

Prior to entering politics she was head of policy for the charity Oxfam for ten years, which described her as a "passionate advocate on humanitarian issues". She travelled throughout war torn areas as an aid worker, including in Afghanistan and Darfur.

She was also an adviser to Sarah Brown and Baroness Kinnock at the European Parliament in Brussels, and advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2014-2015) and to anti-slavery campaign group The Freedom Fund.

In 2008 she worked in North Carolina for US President Barack Obama’s election campaign, where Hilary Clinton was thrashed.

Last October, she launched the All Party Parliamentary Friends of Syria group, becoming its chair.

In the same month, she co-authored an article in The Observer with the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, arguing that British military forces could help to achieve an ethical solution to the conflict in Syria. 

She abstained in the Commons vote last autumn on allowing British military action in Syria, insisting that any solution to the conflict needed to be more wide-ranging.

With Cameron in Darfur pre-election

Speaking to the Yorkshire Post last December, Ms Cox said that after a happy childhood, going to Cambridge University had unsettled her.

"I never really grew up being political or Labour.

"It kind of came at Cambridge where it was just a realisation that where you were born mattered.

"That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.

"I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people...

"To be honest my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years."

Ultimately, though, it proved useful.

Tommy Mair - suspect/scapegoat/patsy?

THE SUSPECT

Jo Cox Killing Suspect  'Not A Violent Man'
    Friday, 17th June 2016 09:48

The brother of the suspect held over the deadly attack on Labour MP Jo Cox was "not a violent man", according to his brother.

Neighbours of Tommy Mair have also expressed shock following the arrest of the 52-year-old near his home in Birstall, West Yorkshire, describing him as a "loner" who "kept himself to himself".

Police have been searching his home not far from where the mother of two young children was stabbed and shot several times.

Scott Mair, 50, has told reporters his brother had a "history of mental illness, but he has had help".

He told the Sun newspaper: "We are struggling to believe what has happened. My brother is not a violent man and is not that political.

"We don't even know who he votes for. I am visibly shaken at this news. I am so sorry for the MP and her family."

The alleged gunman is reported to have shouted "Britain first" or "put Britain first" during the attack.

Mair's half-brother, Duane St Louis, 41, told the Sun: "He's never expressed any views about Britain, or politics or racist tendencies.

"I'm mixed race and I'm his half-brother, we got on well."

The Britain First group said it in a statement it "obviously is NOT involved and would never encourage behaviour of this sort".

Back in 2010, a Thomas Mair, then aged 46, was quoted in his local paper talking about his mental health issues.

After being a patient of the Mirfield-based Pathways Day Centre for adults with mental illness, he had volunteered at Oakwell Hall country park in Birstall, according to a Huddersfield Examiner report at the time.

He told the paper: "I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world.

Neighbours said Mair had lived at the property for more than 30 years, much of it on his own following the death of his grandmother.

David Pickles said: "He's lived there longer than me and I've lived here since 1975. I still can't believe it. He's the last guy I would have thought of.

"He's just quiet. He kept himself to himself. He lived by himself. He's been on his own for about 20 years.

"I can't say a wrong word about him, he was so quiet. It's come as a shock to everybody."

Extremists vote Brexit?

SYRIA

Writing For The Times on 25th May 2016, Jo Cox said…

I am a huge President Obama fan. I worked on his first campaign in North Carolina in 2008, I admire the leadership he has shown on everything from the financial crisis to climate change and the good advice he gave us recently on Europe. But on Syria both President Obama and the prime minister have been a huge disappointment. Both men made the biggest misjudgment of their time in office when they put Syria on the “too difficult” pile and instead of engaging fully, withdrew and put their faith in a policy of containment.

This judgment – made by both leaders for different reasons – will be judged harshly by history. And the failure of their strategy has had huge repercussions: the biggest refugee crisis in Europe in a generation, the emergence of Isis and all that has followed, the strengthening of a resurgent Russia and most importantly the human suffering that continues unabated for the people of Syria. It’s been nothing short of a foreign policy disaster.
.....

UPDATE

Interesting article which clearly contradicts the timeline of the above incident. It's shaping up to be some kind of False Flag event...

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3646807/Last-words-MP-Jo-Cox-assistant-revealed.html

Aanirfan Blog pics up on the conspiracy angle....

http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/mysterious-death-of-jo-cox-mp.html

More contradictions here...

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/jo-cox-attack-people-screamed-brought-towels-a-77-year-old-tried-to-help-in-the-end-they-laid-floral-tributes

Mercury/Hermes: The Messenger I'd Most Like to Shoot!

Mercury Transit May 9th 2016

Just like the planets in our Solar system, I’m going back over old ground after receiving a very unsettling and disturbing message. This has caused me to have to change my life plans again. So here I am asking the Universe the age-old question... why?

Courtesy of Sally Kirkman, I’ve had to re-read and reproduce here what she explained a few days ago on her blog.

There was a rare phenomenon in the sky on May 9th, as the messenger planet Mercury could be seen as a black dot as it moved across the light of the Sun.

The last time this cosmic event took place was November 8th 2006, almost 10 years ago.

Astrologers and astrology-lovers will be focusing on the symbolism of this exciting event. What does it mean?

Mercury/Hermes the winged messenger of the Gods

The Facts

Here are some basic facts about the communication planet Mercury and May 9th Sun/Mercury union.

Mercury turns retrograde three times a year for three weeks at a time and this period often coincides with communication problems – Mercury is currently retrograde. This Mercury transit is important for astrologers because the Sun and Mercury are in conjunction. They are both at 19 Taurus.

There are numerous Sun/Mercury conjunctions throughout the year, e.g. the last Sun/Mercury conjunction took place on March 23rd 2016. Yet it’s rare to see a Mercury transit in front of the Sun.

The Sun/Mercury conjunction on May 9th 2016 is called an inferior conjunction and this can only occur when Mercury is in retrograde motion. It’s the beginning of a new Mercury cycle and on July 7th 2016, the Sun and Mercury will meet again at 16 Cancer, this time when Mercury is in direct motion. This is the superior conjunction. Mercury then completes its current cycle and a new one begins on September 12th 2016.

Hermes on an old Brazilian stamp?

This inferior conjunction is the equivalent to the New Moon phase, a time of pure potential. This is the eager, progressive phase which will culminate in two months time at the superior conjunction. This conjunction is effectively the change-over time when Mercury moves from setting behind the Sun in the west to rise before the Sun in the east. It changes from being an evening star to a morning star.

What does it mean?

Here’s what we can surmise about this rare transit. Currently Mercury is looking backward which might link to insights from the past. During retrograde phases there is more focus on the subconscious and it’s a fertile time of learning and evaluation.

Effectively this is Mercury’s hidden phase and yet on May 9th Mercury was visible, as a tiny black dot in front of the Sun. Mercury is currently mid-way through its current retrograde phase. Therefore what is being brought forth in your life? What messages are you receiving? Make time to listen to your inner voice. Look out too for synchronicities, nudges from the universe. How are you being guided, what is life telling you?

Today I saw the new trailer for the TMNT - the turtle being just one of the symbols of  Hermes - it appears as if they are standing on the top of the Acropolis, like Greek Gods in this shot?

I finally caught up with Captain America: Civil War, but sadly there was no Thor and his winged helmet- aka another one of the symbols of Hermes/Mercury!

Certainly, in line with the way things are moving, I also discovered Suicide Squad's trailer
has Queen with Freddy Mercury singing Bohemian Rhapsody and not Flash?!!

You've got to laugh right?

Ok, now this just appeared on Twitter: Final manned Mercury mission launched atop Atlas rocket with Gordon Cooper today in 1963 http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/05/15/otd-may-15-and-faith-

“…Caught in the Middle of the Dawn and the Sunrise…”

Minus One's Alter Ego - No Zombies Allowed

Travelled my old route home again, enjoying the strange coincidences that afford a trip to the eastern Med. I sat next to a counsellor for the Libyan Embassy. She seemed very well educated, quite knowledgeable about the troubles of the Middle East, and a westernised Muslim who, she explained, wore the hijab because ‘she chooses to’. Though, on this occasion jeans and a t-shirt with designer labels would do.

In front of me sat two Orthodox Jewish boys, wearing their kippahs and fringe and tasselled tzitzits around their waists. The politest guys you could ever meet. Cute and friendly to everyone around them, saying please and thank you, except when I started talking about Syria.

As for strange and unusual punishment, someone was listening as I was subsequently stuck in the airport lounge for five hours. The silence of the dark endless night pierced periodically by the barista making faux Cappuccinos for the red-eye crowd of a Slovenian, three disgruntled Russians, and me.

As I waited I watched the sunrise, and the swallows darting above the decks, as cabin crew came in to take their cigarette breaks before boarding another flight. Eventually my ride arrived and I was officially back on the Island, in one tattered piece.

Now quite weary, with the sound of ethereal music floating around my brain, the Bible, the Koran, how Born Again Christians are evil (Just think Cliff Richard) and that in all probability Prince died from a medical mistake when his celebrity doctor’s son gave him Narcan in contradiction to Buprenorphine, thus causing a massive respiratory depression (just speculating of course). I was in Zombie Land once more. It’s good to be back here, albeit for a short time anyway.

The sun is now high in the sky, the warm summerlike breeze shooing away the stale dust that had suspended itself in mid-air for six months in the locked rooms of the apartment. Hoping I would find nothing lurking in the corners, as not very good with exotic spiders and their ilk. Praying my transvestite neighbour had finally seen the light and ditched those disgusting incense sticks, and wishing I was lucky (?)

I did discover a nice surprise while catching up on local happenings. Apparently Cyprus is finally through to the grand finale of the Eurovision Song Contest this Saturday night in Stockholm, Sweden.

Shock-horror Cyprus is through with none other than a ROCK song by a local band of crazy and talented cover-artists with tattoos and hair to match. Who would have believed it? I’d seen them quite a few years ago, and suddenly here they are all over the news, with a hit song and massive international exposure.

So, there is a God of sorts, I guess, as the question was pretty ripe on the flight over here. If Cyprus can win the cheesiest song contest in the world with an English language Rock song, then there is no telling what could happen next!

As night falls, I’ll leave you with a taste of ‘Alter Ego’ by Minus One, a song that strangely resonates with my journey. This is a Cypriot Rock band. However, the lead singer is French and a contestant of TVs ‘The Voice’ talent show, but don’t hold that against him. (The rest have American and Greek accents, but you can’t tell that from their guitars!) It’s quite good, even The Guardian reviewer said so!

If there’s a Eurovision street party on Saturday night in the capital Nicosia… I’ll be there!

"...Who's Next... Who's Next...?"

R.I.P

Monster Found In Panama....

Just like the optical illusion that appears in the above photograph, the so-called 'Panama Papers' are nothing more but another feeble attempt to distort reality. Bringing with it a lot of attention to something that everyone in corporate finance knows already, and most people with a brain cell have already figured out year's ago!

There is no 'big secret'. There is no surprise in today's news about a Panamanian law firm leak of thousands of confidential papers about the off-shore dealings of the elite. The world's financial markets run on 'offshore'. The world runs on 'offshore'.

1. 
   
2. launder

   ˈlɔːndə/

   verb

   1. 1.

      wash and iron (clothes or linen).

      "he wasn't used to laundering his own bed linen"

      synonyms:

      wash, clean, wash and iron, wash and press, dry-clean "the used sheets are taken away to be laundered"

   2. 2.

      informal

      conceal the origins of (money obtained illegally), typically by transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses.

      "$123,000 had been laundered through Geneva bank accounts"
      
      

The question is why Panama? ... Why now?

Bad Moon Rising?

2016 Eclipse season has started 

Thinking that the latest news about terror in Europe is shocking and unexpected? Well sages of old always use to say that eclipses were portents, usually of doom. I'm still shocked at today's news about the atrocities in Belgium. I'm still trying to contact some friends over there, hopefully find out how they are doing and wish them some heart-felt peace.

Not to insult readers with the obvious but, as the esteemed Loren Coleman mentions often, 322 is nothing if not ominous!

What I found quite telling was the black-gloved suicide terrorists on the airport cctv... those Black Hands are very telling... Visup blog has a lot more  history on this Gladioesque type of operation...

Apparently two of three terror suspects

'Black Hand' is so interesting and the significance is not lost on readers. 

Black Hand, byname of Ujedinjenje Ili Smrt (Serbo-Croation: Union or Death), secret Serbian society of the early 20th century that used terrorist methods to promote the liberation of Serbs outside Serbia from Habsburg or Ottoman rule and was instrumental in planning the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand. We all know what that resulted in. Perhaps it's true, there are some out there who are determinded to start WWIII

What all of today's horrific news does is remind me of an episode of the reboot of X-Files...the one with the terrorist suicide bombers! Prophetic in some weird way yet again...

As well as being eclipse season it's also the Vernal equinox, March 20th, beginning of spring and all that!

Signs coming thick and fast of a 2016 full of conspiracy, political intrigue, war and ominous events to terrorize the people. 

Lost

Beached Sperm Whales, Gibraltar Point, Skegness

There's a strange sync with 'Gibraltar' at the moment. There have been dozens of earthquakes in the Straits of Gibraltar these past couple of weeks. How sad to see these dead and dying creatures of the sea lose their way and somehow come to rest at Gibraltar Point, near Skegness in the UK.

As it turns out, these are not the only ones in the area to have lost their bearings.

From the 'Lincolnshire Free Press/Spalding Guardian' newspaper we read...

Residents along the east coast of Britain are praying they will not see a repeat of the tragedies seen in Skegness and Hunstanton where six whales have now washed up on the beach.

Hundreds of people from all over the East Midlands flocked to Skegness to see three dead whales on Central Beach before they were removed to Sheffield for rendering last Wednesday. A fourth whale that beached of former Ministry of Defence (MOD) land in Wainfleet remains there and a fifth was removed from Hunstanton a week ago.

Today, as staff from the Hunstanton Sealife Centre worked to ease the suffering of another whale beached there at about 7.30am, residents were asking why whales keep straying into the North Sea - and will we again see a repeat of the distressing scenes of last week?

The whale that beached in Hunstanton this morning brings the total in Germany, the Netherlands, France and the UK to 29.

Rob Deaville, of the Zoological Society of London, was one of the officers who performed the autopsy of a whale in Skegness.

Mr Deaville was in touch with Hunstanton when the Skegness Standard spoke to him. He said “We are currently helping to manage the whale’s passing.

“It may be that it gets washed out alive in the high tide but the signs are not good."

“We are appealing to the public to stay away so the whale does not become any more distressed.
“Should the whale die we will again visit Hunstanton to try to understand why this keeps happening."

“There have now been 29 whales wash up and die in the North Sea and we are in contact with our colleagues in Germany, the Netherlands and France to try and find the answer.

“It is however still far too early to say whether the whales are part of one bachelor pod or separate pods are coming into the North Sea.”

On a different note today...

Japan's Sakurajima Volcano erupts