Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupts, shooting jets of lava into the sky

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupts, shooting jets of lava into the sky

The eruption remains within the mountain’s summit caldera inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

25 Dec 2024

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Lava continues to spew from one of the world’s most active volcanoes, days after the eruption of Kilauea on Hawaii’s Big Island began.

The eruption, which began on Monday, has stayed within the mountain’s summit caldera inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Live images broadcast online by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) showed a burst of lava spewing from the Halema’uma’u crater, on the northwest rim of the caldera, early on Wednesday.

The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said the eruption began just after 2:00am local time (12:00 GMT) on Monday.

“At 4:30am [14:30 GMT], lava fountains were observed with heights up to 80 meters [262 feet],” the agency said.

“Molten material, including lava bombs, is being ejected from the vents on the caldera floor up onto the west caldera rim.”

The eruption occurred in an area that has been closed to the public since 2007 due to hazards including crater wall instability and rockfalls. Visitors to the park were able to watch the foundations at a distance from an overlook spot.

This week’s eruption is the sixth in Kilauea’s summit caldera since 2020.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park encompasses the summits of two of the world’s most active volcanoes: Kilauea and Mauna Loa. Kilauea also erupted in June and September.

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/12/25/hawaiis-kilauea-volcano-erupts-shooting-jets-of-lava-into-the-sky 

Islam in Hawaii organised its first official body in 1979, with the incorporation of the Muslim Students' Association of Hawaii, though the organisation had been operational as early as 1968. The group initially prayed in a cottage, before purchasing the Manoa Mosque in the 1979–1980 period.[1] However, a 1992 study by the American Muslim Support group listed zero mosques in Hawaii in 1992.[2]

As of early 2001, the Manoa Mosque was mentioned as having a Friday Prayer attendance of 200 men, the end of Ramadan iftar meal as having 700 attendees, and the mosque itself as having 2,000 members.[3]

Population

According to a 2017 estimate, there are around 5,000 Muslims living in Hawaii. This correspond to 0.34% out of population of 1,455,271. Hawaiian Muslims are racially diverse, consisting of American-born converts and those with familial ties to many regions of the world like Asia and the Middle East. The first Muslims appeared in Hawaii as far back as the 19th century.[4]

Islam Day observance

In May 2009, Hawaiian legislators voted to create a state-designated day of recognition, Islam Day on 24 September of that year, in order to recognize "the rich religious, scientific, cultural and artistic contributions of the Islamic world." The resolution was approved in the State Senate by a 22–3 vote.[5]

Islamic art

The Shangri La mansion built by Doris Duke in 1937 serves as the repository for over 2,500 pieces of Islamic art, as well as the Islamic architecture embodied in the building itself. The building is now operated by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, with tours in cooperation with the Honolulu Museum of Art.[6][7]

Education

The Philosophy Departments of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where the state's main mosque is located, offers an Undergraduate Certificate in Islamic Studies.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Hawaii

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa[a][b] is a public land-grant research university in Mānoa, Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. It is the flagship campus of the University of Hawaiʻi system and houses the main offices of the system. Most of the campus occupies the eastern half of the mouth of Mānoa Valley, with the John A. Burns School of Medicine located adjacent to the Kakaʻako Waterfront Park.

UH offers over 200 degree programs across 17 colleges and schools. It is accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission and governed by the Hawaii State Legislature and a semi-autonomous board of regents. It also a member of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities.

Mānoa is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".[9] It is a land-grant university that also participates in the sea-grant, space-grant, and sun-grant research consortia; it is one of only four such universities in the country to participate in all four consortia (Oregon State University, Cornell University and Pennsylvania State University are the others).

UH and its subsidiary, the Applied Research Laboratory, is one of only 14 University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC) of the United States Department of Defense and is one of five UARCs in the country for the United States Navy.

Notable UH alumni include Patsy T. Mink, Robert Ballard, Richard Parsons, and the parents of Barack Obama – Barack Obama Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham. Forty-four percent of Hawaii's state senators and 51 percent of its state representatives are UH graduates.[10]

History

Founding

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa was founded in 1907 as a land-grant college of agriculture and mechanical arts establishing "the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts of the Territory of Hawaiʻi and to Provide for the Government and Support Thereof".[11] The bill Maui Senator William J. Huelani Coelho through the initiatives of Native Hawaiian legislators, a newspaper editor, petition of an Asian American bank cashier, and a president of Cornell University,[12] was introduced into the Territorial Legislature March 1, 1907 as Act 24, and signed into law March 25, 1907 by Governor George Carter, which officially established the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts of the Territory of Hawaiʻi under a five-member Board of Regents[12] on the corner of Beretania and Victoria streets (now the location of the Honolulu Museum of Art School).[11] The Board of Regents first selected J.E. Roadhouse of the University of California to head the new college in October 1907 but unfortunately had died before leaving Berkely.[12] With classes scheduled to start in February 1908, the regents persuaded Willis T. Pope, vice principal of the Territorial Normal School, to head the college for its first semester. In Spring 1908, the regents appointed John W. Gilmore, professor of agriculture at Cornell University, as the college's first president. The Cornell connection would strongly influence the shaping of the new college, even today.[12] It officially became an institution of higher learning on September 14, 1908, when it enrolled 5 freshmen registered for a bachelor of science degree. Willis T. Pope went on to become the Superintendent of Public Instruction in the Territory of Hawai’i from 1910 until 1913 and later a professor of botany and horticulture at the university.

In September 1912 it moved to its present location in Mānoa Valley on 90 acres of land that had been cobbled together from leased and private lands and was renamed the College of Hawaii.[11] William Kwai Fong Yap, an cashier at Bank of Hawaii, and a group of citizens petitioned the Hawaii Territorial Legislature six years later for university status which led to another renaming finally to the University of Hawaiʻi on April 30, 1919, with the addition of the College of Arts and Sciences and College of Applied Science.[13][12]

In the years following, the university expanded to include more than 300 acres. In 1931 the Territorial Normal School was absorbed into the university, becoming Teacher's College,[13] now the College of Education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Hawai%CA%BBi_at_M%C4%81noa

The Honolulu Volcanics are a group of volcanoes which form a volcanic field on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, more specifically in that island's southeastern sector and in the city of Honolulu from Pearl Harbor to the Mokapu Peninsula. It is part of the rejuvenated stage of Hawaiian volcanic activity, which occurred after the main stage of volcanic activity that on Oʻahu built the Koʻolau volcano. These volcanoes formed through dominantly explosive eruptions and gave rise to cinder cones, lava flows, tuff cones and volcanic islands. Among these are well known landmarks such as Diamond Head and Punchbowl Crater.

Volcanic activity began less than one million years ago and occurred at between 40 and 30 separate volcanic vents, some of which are submarine. Sea level varied during the activity of the volcanic field, and some volcanic eruptions have been dated through correlation with individual sea level fluctuations. The field erupted various kinds of lavas of mostly basaltic type with a high content of xenoliths. During eruptions, ascending magma often underwent interactions with water and thus caused steam explosions and the formation of particular volcanic structures such as tuff cones. The last eruption took place 35,000 or 76,000 years ago and future hazardous eruptions are possible.

Geography and geomorphology

The Honolulu Volcanics are a series of volcanoes in the southeastern sector of Oʻahu[2] and includes dikes, lava flows, spatter cones,[3] tephra deposits,[4] tuff cones,[3] and mesas where the surrounding terrain has been eroded away.[5] Vents span the area southeast of a line between Mokapu Peninsula and Pearl Harbor, and extend from the ridges of Koʻolau volcano to below sea level and to the coast plain of southern Oʻahu.[6]

The system takes its name from Honolulu, the capital of Hawaiʻi,[7] as craters are scattered in and around the city.[8] The volcanic system includes well-known landmarks of Honolulu such as Diamond Head, Koko Head, Punchbowl Crater,[3] Rabbit Island, Tantalus,[9] Hanauma Bay (notable as a snorkeling site)[10] and the Mokapu Peninsula,[11] which is the location of Marine Corps Base Hawaiʻi.[12] The United States military has made use of some of the volcanic islands that were formed by the Honolulu Volcanics.[13] The Koko area is designated as the Koko Head Regional Park[14] and Hanauma Bay is also a state park.[15] Parts of this system are among the best known volcanic vents of Hawaiʻi.[16]

About 30–40 vents have been identified.[17] Most cinder cones on Oʻahu are quite large, over 76 metres (250 ft) high and up to 0.80 kilometres (0.5 mi) wide.[18] Some of the lava flows filled deep valleys cut into the older Koʻolau volcano[19] and displaced streams that previously ran through these valleys; for example, water passing over a lava flow in Kamanaiki Valley forms a waterfall.[20] Together with sediments coming down from the mountains and coral reef growth, the deposits of the Honolulu Volcanics have formed the coastal plain on which the city of Honolulu and military installations are built.[21]

The vents of the Honolulu Volcanics follow northeastward-trending[6] alignments that are at right angles to the rift zone of the Koʻolau volcano.[22] From northwest to southeast these are the Haʻikū Rift, the Tantalus Rift, the Kaimukī/Kaʻau Rift and the Koko Head/Koko Rift,[23][24] but each rift has had eruptions at different times and with different compositions.[25] It is not clear whether these alignments are in any way related to the structure of the previous Koʻolau volcano, instead of being controlled by the crust of the Pacific Ocean,[6] but the trends along the Koko and Tantalus Rifts are parallel to that of the flexural arch[a] of Hawaiʻi Island.[27] There is also a hypothetical "Diamond Head fault" that may be associated with earthquakes on Oahu that occurred in 1948, 1951 and 1961–1981, but it is not parallel to these alignments and its very existence is questionable.[28]

Submarine vents are also known,[29] including a 300-metre (980 ft) high solitary cone with two ridges off northeast Oʻahu, which is covered by pillow lavas and volcaniclastic sediments.[30] At least five cones[31] are found off the southwestern extension of the Koko Rift[32] where they are situated on a southwestward extending ridge. Another set of submarine vents is found south of Diamond Head.[33] It was once proposed that some seamounts (underwater mountains) off northeastern Oʻahu such as Tuscaloosa Seamount are related to the volcanic series;[34] today however they are considered to be fragments of the giant Nuʻuanu Slide off northeastern Oʻahu.[35]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honolulu_Volcanics

A Black Fast, also known as a strict fast, is a form of early Christian fasting.[1] Those undertaking a Black Fast consume no food or water during the day and then break the fast after sunset with prayer, as well as water and a vegetarian meal devoid of meat, eggs, dairy products (lacticinia), and alcohol.[2][3][4][5] Christians normatively fasted in this way during Lent prior to the 6th century.[6]

Description and practice

Traditionally, the Black Fast is undertaken during Lent; it is the early Christian form of fasting consisting of fasting until sunset, and then consuming one vegetarian meal afterwards (with food and water being allowed only at this time).[5][4] This was the normative way of Christian fasting prior to the 6th century A.D. and among certain denominations (such as the Coptic Orthodox Church) and in some localities like India and Pakistan, many Christians continue to observe the Black Fast throughout the whole season of Lent.[6][5][7][8][9] After attending a worship service (often on Wednesday or Friday evenings), it is common for Christians of various denominations to break that day's Lenten fast together through a communal Lenten supper, which is held in the church's parish hall in the public setting; in the home setting Lenten Suppers take place in the context of a family meal every day during Lent (except on the Lord's Day).[10] Throughout the entire Christian year, many Christians keep the Black Fast on Wednesdays (in memory of Jesus' betrayal) and on Fridays (to mourn the crucifixion of Jesus).[11] In Western Christianity, many monastics still retain this practice, though many laypeople voluntarily undertake the Black Fast, especially on Good Friday.[12]

The details of the Black Fast are as follows:[13][3]

No food or liquids are allowed from midnight until sunset.[14][4][9]

One vegetarian meal a day is permitted, only after sunset.[3][14][15][13]

A mealtime prayer is offered at the time the Black Fast is broken.[5]

Flesh meat, eggs, and dairy products (lacticinia: milk, butter, and cheese) are forbidden.[13]

Alcohol is forbidden.[13][16]

During Holy Week (the final week of Lent), the Lenten supper meal consists exclusively of bread, salt, herbs, and water.[3][A]

Oriental Orthodoxy

Coptic Orthodox Church

Further information: Fasting and abstinence of the Coptic Orthodox Church

In the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Black Fast is the normative way of fasting during Great Lent; Coptic Orthodox Christians go without water and food from midnight to sunset; after that time, the consumption of water and one vegetarian meal is permitted.[9] Married couples abstain from sexual relations during this period "to give themselves time for fasting and prayer (1 Cor. 7: 5)."[9]

Roman Catholicism

The Black Fast was widely practiced by the faithful during the Lenten season by "kings and princes, clergy and laity, rich and poor".[18] In addition, the Black Fast was kept on the days preceding one's ordination.[18] When fasting today, Roman Catholics have the liberty to fast in this manner, or in the modern fashion in which a collation is permitted. Fasting rules were liberalised to avoid accidents due to weakness or lack of concentration in modern industrial jobs. For the same reason some soldiers in military orders like the Hospitallers were historically exempt from the strict rule.

Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism

The Black Fast is observed by the devout Eastern Orthodox laity or monks throughout Great Lent, as well as the three other fasting periods of the year (the Dormition Fast, Nativity Fast, and the Apostles' Fast) and occasionally on the weekly fast days of Wednesday and Friday.[19][20]

Some Eastern Catholics and Eastern Lutherans perform the Black Fast on Fridays during Lent, especially on Good Friday.

Romanian Orthodox Church

The term "Black Fast" has a different connotation within the Romanian Orthodox Church, which defines it somewhat similar to the definition given by those within the realms of the Classical Pentecostal movement (see below).

Anglican Communion

In Anglican Communion, the faithful have observed the Black Fast on "the two great Prayer Book fast days, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday".[12] The Black Fast was especially popular during the 19th century as it sought to imitate "the fasting of the ancient church."[12]

Pentecostalism

The term "Black Fast" has a different connotation with writers within Classical Pentecostalism. A Black Fast is complete abstinence from food or water and nothing is consumed in its duration.[21]

Ward states that the terms "Black Fast," "Hebrew Fast," and "Absolute Fast" are synonymous. British evangelical Arthur Wallis coined the term "Absolute Fast" in his book God's Chosen Fast (1968).[22]

A Normal Fast or "Complete Fast" consists of eating nothing but drinking pure water. A Partial Fast (or Daniel Fast) consists of abstinence, either eliminating all but one type of food or eliminating just one type of food. The Black Fast is observed on rare occasions in Pentecostal circles while the Normal Fast is most usually undertaken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Fast

Obsidian (/əbˈsɪdi.ən, ɒb-/ əb-SID-ee-ən ob-)[5] is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed when lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It is an igneous rock.[6]

Obsidian is produced from felsic lava, rich in the lighter elements such as silicon, oxygen, aluminum, sodium, and potassium. It is commonly found within the margins of rhyolitic lava flows known as obsidian flows. These flows have a high content of silica, giving them a high viscosity. The high viscosity inhibits diffusion of atoms through the lava, which inhibits the first step (nucleation) in the formation of mineral crystals. Together with rapid cooling, this results in a natural glass forming from the lava.[7]

Obsidian is hard, brittle, and amorphous; it therefore fractures with sharp edges. In the past, it was used to manufacture cutting and piercing tools, and it has been used experimentally as surgical scalpel blades.[8]

Origin and properties

The Natural History by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder includes a few sentences about a volcanic glass called obsidian (lapis obsidianus), discovered in Ethiopia by Obsidius, a Roman explorer.[9][10][11][12]

Obsidian is formed from quickly cooled lava, which is the parent material.[13][14][15] Extrusive formation of obsidian may occur when felsic lava cools rapidly at the edges of a felsic lava flow or volcanic dome, or when lava cools during sudden contact with water or air. Intrusive formation of obsidian may occur when felsic lava cools along the edges of a dike.[16][17]

Tektites were once thought by many to be obsidian produced by lunar volcanic eruptions,[18] though few scientists now adhere to this hypothesis.[19]

Obsidian is mineral-like, but not a true mineral because, as a glass, it is not crystalline; in addition, its composition is too variable to be classified as a mineral. It is sometimes classified as a mineraloid.[20] Though obsidian is usually dark in color, similar to mafic rocks such as basalt, the composition of obsidian is extremely felsic. Obsidian consists mainly of SiO2 (silicon dioxide), usually 70% by weight or more; the remainder consists of variable amounts of other oxides, mostly oxides of aluminum, iron, potassium, sodium and calcium.[21][22] Crystalline rocks with a similar composition include granite and rhyolite. Because obsidian is metastable at the Earth's surface (over time the glass devitrifies, becoming fine-grained mineral crystals), obsidian older than Miocene in age is rare. Exceptionally old obsidians include a Cretaceous welded tuff and a partially devitrified Ordovician perlite.[23] This transformation of obsidian is accelerated by the presence of water. Although newly formed obsidian has a low water content, typically less than 1% water by weight,[24] it becomes progressively hydrated when exposed to groundwater, forming perlite.

Pure obsidian is usually dark in appearance, though the color varies depending on the impurities present. Iron and other transition elements may give the obsidian a dark brown to black color. Most black obsidians contain nanoinclusions of magnetite, an iron oxide.[25] Very few samples of obsidian are nearly colorless. In some stones, the inclusion of small, white, radially clustered crystals (spherulites) of the mineral cristobalite in the black glass produce a blotchy or snowflake pattern (snowflake obsidian). Obsidian may contain patterns of gas bubbles remaining from the lava flow, aligned along layers created as the molten rock was flowing before being cooled. These bubbles can produce interesting effects such as a golden sheen (sheen obsidian). An iridescent, rainbow-like sheen (fire obsidian) is caused by inclusions of magnetite nanoparticles creating thin-film interference.[26] Colorful, striped obsidian (rainbow obsidian) from Mexico contains oriented nanorods of hedenbergite, which cause the rainbow striping effects by thin-film interference.[25]

Occurrence

Obsidian is found near volcanoes in locations which have undergone rhyolitic eruptions. It can be found in Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Australia,[27] Canada, Chile, Georgia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, Scotland, the Canary Islands, Turkey and the United States. Obsidian flows which are so large that they can be hiked on are found within the calderas of Newberry Volcano (Big Obsidian Flow,[28] 700 acres) and Medicine Lake Volcano in the Cascade Range of western North America, and at Inyo Craters east of the Sierra Nevada in California. Yellowstone National Park has a mountainside containing obsidian located between Mammoth Hot Springs and the Norris Geyser Basin, and deposits can be found in many other western U.S. states including Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Washington,[29] Oregon[30] and Idaho.

There are only four major deposit areas in the central Mediterranean: Lipari, Pantelleria, Palmarola and Monte Arci (Sardinia).[31]

Ancient sources in the Aegean were Milos and Gyali.[32]

Acıgöl town and the Göllü Dağ volcano were the most important sources in central Anatolia, one of the more important source areas in the prehistoric Near East.[33][34][35]

Prehistoric and historical use

The first known archaeological evidence of usage was in Kariandusi (Kenya) and other sites of the Acheulian age (beginning 1.5 million years BP) dated 700,000 BC, although only very few objects have been found at these sites relative to the Neolithic.[36][37][38][39][40] Manufacture of obsidian bladelets at Lipari had reached a high level of sophistication by the late Neolithic, and was traded as far as Sicily, the southern Po river valley, and Croatia.[41] Obsidian bladelets were used in ritual circumcisions and cutting of umbilical cords of newborns.[42] Anatolian sources of obsidian are known to have been the material used in the Levant and modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan from a time beginning sometime about 12,500 BC.[43] Obsidian artifacts are common at Tell Brak, one of the earliest Mesopotamian urban centers, dating to the late fifth millennium BC.[44] Obsidian was valued in Stone Age cultures because, like flint, it could be fractured to produce sharp blades or arrowheads in a process called knapping. Like all glass and some other naturally occurring rocks, obsidian breaks with a characteristic conchoidal fracture. It was also polished to create early mirrors. Modern archaeologists have developed a relative dating system, obsidian hydration dating, to calculate the age of obsidian artifacts.

Europe

Obsidian artifacts first appeared in the European continent in Central Europe in the Middle Paleolithic and had become common by the Upper Paleolithic, although there are exceptions to this. Obsidian played an important role in the transmission of Neolithic knowledge and experiences. The material was mainly used for production of chipped tools which were very sharp due to its nature. Artifacts made of obsidian can be found in many Neolithic cultures across Europe. The source of obsidian for cultures inhabiting the territory of and around Greece was the island of Milos; the Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture obtained obsidian from sources in Hungary and Slovakia, while the Cardium-Impresso cultural complex acquired obsidian from the island outcrops of the central Mediterranean. Through trade, these artifacts ended up in lands thousands of kilometers away from the original source; this indicates that they were a highly valued commodity.[45] John Dee had a mirror, made of obsidian, which was brought from Mexico to Europe between 1527 and 1530 after Hernando Cortés's conquest of the region.[46]

Middle East and Asia

In the Ubaid in the 5th millennium BC, blades were manufactured from obsidian extracted from outcrops located in modern-day Turkey.[47] Ancient Egyptians used obsidian imported from the eastern Mediterranean and southern Red Sea regions. Obsidian scalpels older than 2100 BC have been found in a Bronze Age settlement in Turkey.[48] In the eastern Mediterranean area the material was used to make tools, mirrors and decorative objects.[49]

The use of obsidian tools was present in Japan near areas of volcanic activity.[50][51] Obsidian was mined during the Jōmon period.

Obsidian has also been found in Gilat, a site in the western Negev in Israel. Eight obsidian artifacts dating to the Chalcolithic Age found at this site were traced to obsidian sources in Anatolia. Neutron activation analysis (NAA) on the obsidian found at this site helped to reveal trade routes and exchange networks previously unknown.[52]

Americas

Lithic analysis helps to understand pre-Hispanic groups in Mesoamerica. A careful analysis of obsidian in a culture or place can be of considerable use to reconstruct commerce, production, and distribution, and thereby understand economic, social and political aspects of a civilization. This is the case in Yaxchilán, a Maya city where even warfare implications have been studied linked with obsidian use and its debris.[53] Another example is the archeological recovery at coastal Chumash sites in California, indicating considerable trade with the distant site of Casa Diablo Hot Springs in the Sierra Nevada.[54]

Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans' use of obsidian was extensive and sophisticated; including carved and worked obsidian for tools and decorative objects. Mesoamericans also made a type of sword with obsidian blades mounted in a wooden body. Called a macuahuitl, the weapon could inflict terrible injuries, combining the sharp cutting edge of an obsidian blade with the ragged cut of a serrated weapon. The polearm version of this weapon was called tepoztopilli.

Obsidian mirrors were used by some Aztec priests to conjure visions and make prophecies. They were connected with Tezcatlipoca, god of obsidian and sorcery, whose name can be translated from the Nahuatl language as 'Smoking Mirror'.[46]

Indigenous people traded obsidian throughout the Americas. Each volcano and in some cases each volcanic eruption produces a distinguishable type of obsidian allowing archaeologists to use methods such as non-destructive energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence to select minor element compositions from both the artifact and geological sample to trace the origins of a particular artifact.[55] Similar tracing techniques have also allowed obsidian in Greece to be identified as coming from Milos, Nisyros or Gyali, islands in the Aegean Sea. Obsidian cores and blades were traded great distances inland from the coast.[56]

In Chile obsidian tools from Chaitén Volcano have been found as far away as in Chan-Chan 400 km (250 mi) north of the volcano, and also in sites 400 km south of it.[57][58]

Oceania

The Lapita culture, active across a large area of the Pacific Ocean around 1000 BC, made widespread use of obsidian tools and engaged in long distance obsidian trading. The complexity of the production technique for these tools, and the care taken in their storage, may indicate that beyond their practical use they were associated with prestige or high status.[59]

Obsidian was also used on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for edged tools such as Mataia and the pupils of the eyes of their Moai (statues), which were encircled by rings of bird bone.[60] Obsidian was used to inscribe the Rongorongo glyphs.

Current use

Obsidian can be used to make extremely sharp knives, and obsidian blades are a type of glass knife made using naturally occurring obsidian instead of manufactured glass. Obsidian is used by some surgeons for scalpel blades, although this is not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use on humans.[61] Well-crafted obsidian blades, like any glass knife, can have a cutting edge many times sharper than high-quality steel surgical scalpels: the cutting edge of the blade is only about three nanometers thick.[62] All metal knives have a jagged, irregular blade when viewed under a strong enough microscope; however, obsidian blades are still smooth, even when examined under an electron microscope.[63] One study found that obsidian incisions produced fewer inflammatory cells and less granulation tissue in a group of rats after seven days but the differences disappeared after twenty-one days.[64] Don Crabtree has produced surgical obsidian blades and written articles on the subject.[62] Obsidian scalpels may be purchased for surgical use on research animals.[65]

The major disadvantage of obsidian blades is their brittleness compared to those made of metal,[66] thus limiting the surgical applications for obsidian blades to a variety of specialized uses where this is not a concern.[62]

Obsidian is also used for ornamental purposes and as a gemstone.[67] It presents a different appearance depending on how it is cut: in one direction it is jet black, while in another it is glistening gray. "Apache tears" are small rounded obsidian nuggets often embedded within a grayish-white perlite matrix.

Plinths for audio turntables have been made of obsidian since the 1970s, such as the grayish-black SH-10B3 plinth by Technics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian

The Black Stone (Arabic: ٱلْحَجَرُ ٱلْأَسْوَد, romanized: al-Ḥajar al-Aswad) is a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient building in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is revered by Muslims as an Islamic relic which, according to Muslim tradition, dates back to the time of Adam and Eve.

The stone was venerated at the Kaaba in pre-Islamic pagan times. According to Islamic tradition, it was set intact into the Kaaba's wall by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 605 CE, five years before his first revelation. Since then, it has been broken into fragments and is now cemented into a silver frame in the side of the Kaaba. Its physical appearance is that of a fragmented dark rock, polished smooth by the hands of pilgrims. It has often been described as a meteorite.[1]

Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba as a part of the tawaf ritual during the hajj and many try to stop to kiss the Black Stone, emulating the kiss that Islamic tradition records that it received from Muhammad.[2][3] While the Black Stone is revered, Islamic theologians emphasize that it has no divine significance and that its importance is historical in nature.[4]

Physical description

The Black Stone was originally a single piece of rock but today consists of several pieces that have been cemented together. They are surrounded by a silver frame which is fastened by silver nails to the Kaaba's outer wall.[5] The fragments are themselves made up of smaller pieces which have been combined to form the seven or eight fragments visible today. The Stone's exposed face measures about 20 centimetres (7.9 in) by 16 centimetres (6.3 in). Its original size is unclear and the recorded dimensions have changed considerably over time, as the pieces have been rearranged in their cement matrix on several occasions.[1] In the 10th century, an observer described the Black Stone as being one cubit (46 cm or 18 in) long. By the early 17th century, it was recorded as measuring 140 by 122 cm (4 ft 7 in by 4 ft 0 in). According to Ali Bey in the 18th century, it was described as 110 cm (3 ft 7 in) high, and Muhammad Ali Pasha reported it as being 76 cm (2 ft 6 in) long by 46 cm (1 ft 6 in) wide.[1]

The Black Stone is attached to the east corner of the Kaaba, known as al-Rukn al-Aswad (the 'Corner of the Black Stone').[6] Another stone, known as the Hajar as-Sa’adah ('Stone of Felicity') is set into the Kaaba's opposite corner, al-Rukn al-Yamani (the 'Yemeni Corner'), at a somewhat lower height than the Black Stone.[7] The choice of the east corner may have had ritual significance; it faces the rain-bringing east wind (al-qabul) and the direction from which Canopus rises.[8]

The silver frame around the Black Stone and the black kiswah or cloth enveloping the Kaaba were for centuries maintained by the Ottoman Sultans in their role as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. The frames wore out over time due to the constant handling by pilgrims and were periodically replaced. Worn-out frames were brought back to Istanbul, where they are still kept as part of the sacred relics in the Topkapı Palace.[9]

Appearance of the Black Stone

The Black Stone was described by European travellers to Arabia in the 19th- and early-20th centuries, who visited the Kaaba disguised as pilgrims. Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visited Mecca in 1814, and provided a detailed description in his 1829 book Travels in Arabia:

It is an irregular oval, about seven inches [18 cm] in diameter, with an undulated surface, composed of about a dozen smaller stones of different sizes and shapes, well joined together with a small quantity of cement, and perfectly well smoothed; it looks as if the whole had been broken into as many pieces by a violent blow, and then united again. It is very difficult to determine accurately the quality of this stone which has been worn to its present surface by the millions of touches and kisses it has received. It appeared to me like a lava, containing several small extraneous particles of a whitish and of a yellow substance. Its colour is now a deep reddish brown approaching to black. It is surrounded on all sides by a border composed of a substance which I took to be a close cement of pitch and gravel of a similar, but not quite the same, brownish colour. This border serves to support its detached pieces; it is two or three inches in breadth, and rises a little above the surface of the stone. Both the border and the stone itself are encircled by a silver band, broader below than above, and on the two sides, with a considerable swelling below, as if a part of the stone were hidden under it. The lower part of the border is studded with silver nails.[10]

Visiting the Kaaba in 1853, Richard Francis Burton noted that:

The colour appeared to me black and metallic, and the centre of the stone was sunk about two inches below the metallic circle. Round the sides was a reddish-brown cement, almost level with the metal, and sloping down to the middle of the stone. The band is now a massive arch of gold or silver gilt. I found the aperture in which the stone is, one span and three fingers broad.[11]

Ritter von Laurin, the Austrian consul-general in Egypt, was able to inspect a fragment of the Stone removed by Muhammad Ali in 1817 and reported that it had a pitch-black exterior and a silver-grey, fine-grained interior in which tiny cubes of a bottle-green material were embedded. There are reportedly a few white or yellow spots on the face of the Stone, and it is officially described as being white with the exception of the face.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone

Niggardly (noun: niggard) is an adjective meaning 'stingy' or 'miserly'. Niggard (14th C) is derived from the Middle English word meaning 'stingy,' nigon, which is probably derived from two other words also meaning 'stingy,' Old Norse hnǫggr and Old English hnēaw.[2] The word niggle, which in modern usage means to give excessive attention to minor details, probably shares an etymology with niggardly.[3]

Nigger, a racial slur widely considered to be offensive, derives from the Spanish word Negro, meaning 'black', and the French word nègre. Both negro and noir (and therefore also nègre and nigger) ultimately come from the Latin adjective niger, 'black' or 'dark'.[4] The first recorded use of nigger dates to 1574, and its first recorded derogatory use to 1775.[5][6] Plays on the similarity of the two words date back at least a century, one example being a piece of sheet music from 1900.[7][original research?]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly 

In alchemy, nigredo, or blackness, means putrefaction or decomposition. Many alchemists believed that as a first step in the pathway to the philosopher's stone, all alchemical ingredients had to be cleansed and cooked extensively to a uniform black matter.[1]

In analytical psychology, the term became a metaphor for "the dark night of the soul, when an individual confronts the shadow within."[2]

Jung

For Carl Jung, "the rediscovery of the principles of alchemy came to be an important part of my work as a pioneer of psychology".[3] As a student of alchemy, he (and his followers) "compared the 'black work' of the alchemists (the nigredo) with the often highly critical involvement experienced by the ego, until it accepts the new equilibrium brought about by the creation of the self."[4] Jungians interpreted nigredo in two main psychological senses.

The first sense represented a subject's initial state of undifferentiated unawareness, "the first nigredo, that of the unio naturalis, is an objective state, visible from the outside only ... an unconscious state of non-differentiation between self and object, consciousness and the unconscious."[5] Here the subject is unaware of the unconscious; i.e. the connection with the instincts.[6]

In the second sense, "the nigredo of the process of individuation on the other hand is a subjectively experienced process brought about by the subject's painful, growing awareness of his shadow aspects."[7] It could be described as a moment of maximum despair, that is a prerequisite to personal development.[8] As individuation unfolds, so "confrontation with the shadow produces at first a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective or even impossible ... nigredo, tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia."[9] Here is "the darkest time, the time of despair, disillusionment, envious attacks; the time when Eros and Superego are at daggers drawn, and there seems no way forward ... nigredo, the blackening."[10]

Only subsequently would come "an enantiodromia; the nigredo gives way to the albedo ... the ever deepening descent into the unconscious suddenly becomes illumination from above."[11]

Further steps of the alchemical opus include such images as albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowness), and rubedo (redness). Jung also found psychological equivalents for many other alchemical concepts, with "the characterization of analytic work as an opus; the reference to the analytic relationship as a vas, vessel or container; the goal of the analytic process as the coniunctio, or union of conflicting opposites."[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigredo

The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; as many as 50 million people[2] perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population.[3] The disease is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas and through the air.[4][5] One of the most significant events in European history, the Black Death had far-reaching population, economic, and cultural impacts. It was the beginning of the second plague pandemic.[6] The plague created religious, social and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history.

The origin of the Black Death is disputed.[7] Genetic analysis suggests Yersinia pestis bacteria evolved approximately 7,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic,[8] with flea-mediated strains emerging around 3,800 years ago during the late Bronze Age.[9] The immediate territorial origins of the Black Death and its outbreak remain unclear, with some evidence pointing towards Central Asia, China, the Middle East, and Europe.[10][11] The pandemic was reportedly first introduced to Europe during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in Crimea by the Golden Horde army of Jani Beg in 1347. From Crimea, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin and reaching North Africa, West Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula.[12] There is evidence that once it came ashore, the Black Death mainly spread from person-to-person as pneumonic plague, thus explaining the quick inland spread of the epidemic, which was faster than would be expected if the primary vector was rat fleas causing bubonic plague.[13][14][15] In 2022, it was discovered that there was a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan from the Black Death in the late 1330s; when combined with genetic evidence, this implies that the initial spread may not have been due to Mongol conquests in the 14th century, as previously speculated.[16][17]

The Black Death was the second great natural disaster to strike Europe during the Late Middle Ages (the first one being the Great Famine of 1315–1317) and is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of the European population, as well as approximately 33% of the population of the Middle East.[18][19][20] There were further outbreaks throughout the Late Middle Ages and, also due to other contributing factors (the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages), the European population did not regain its 14th century level until the 16th century.[a][21] Outbreaks of the plague recurred around the world until the early 19th century.

Names

European writers contemporary with the plague described the disease in Latin as pestis or pestilentia, 'pestilence'; epidemia, 'epidemic'; mortalitas, 'mortality'.[22] In English prior to the 18th century, the event was called the "pestilence" or "great pestilence", "the plague" or the "great death".[22][23][24] Subsequent to the pandemic "the furste moreyn" (first murrain) or "first pestilence" was applied, to distinguish the mid-14th century phenomenon from other infectious diseases and epidemics of plague.[22]

The 1347 pandemic plague was not referred to specifically as "black" in the time of occurrence in any European language, though the expression "black death" had occasionally been applied to fatal disease beforehand.[22] "Black death" was not used to describe the plague pandemic in English until the 1750s; the term is first attested in 1755, where it translated Danish: den sorte død, lit. 'the black death'.[22][25] This expression as a proper name for the pandemic had been popularized by Swedish and Danish chroniclers in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and in the 16th and 17th centuries was transferred to other languages as a calque: Icelandic: svarti dauði, German: der schwarze Tod, and French: la mort noire.[26][27] Previously, most European languages had named the pandemic a variant or calque of the Latin: magna mortalitas, lit. 'Great Death'.[22]

The phrase 'black death' – describing Death as black – is very old. Homer used it in the Odyssey to describe the monstrous Scylla, with her mouths "full of black Death" (Ancient Greek: πλεῖοι μέλανος Θανάτοιο, romanized: pleîoi mélanos Thanátoio).[28][26] Seneca the Younger may have been the first to describe an epidemic as 'black death', (Latin: mors atra) but only in reference to the acute lethality and dark prognosis of disease.[29][26][22] The 12th–13th century French physician Gilles de Corbeil had already used atra mors to refer to a "pestilential fever" (febris pestilentialis) in his work On the Signs and Symptoms of Diseases (De signis et symptomatibus aegritudium).[26][30] The phrase mors nigra, 'black death', was used in 1350 by Simon de Covino (or Couvin), a Belgian astronomer, in his poem "On the Judgement of the Sun at a Feast of Saturn" (De judicio Solis in convivio Saturni), which attributes the plague to an astrological conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.[31] His use of the phrase is not connected unambiguously with the plague pandemic of 1347 and appears to refer to the fatal outcome of disease.[22]

The historian Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet wrote about the Great Pestilence in 1893[32] and suggested that it had been "some form of the ordinary Eastern or bubonic plague".[33][b] In 1908, Gasquet said use of the name atra mors for the 14th-century epidemic first appeared in a 1631 book on Danish history by J. I. Pontanus: "Commonly and from its effects, they called it the black death" (Vulgo & ab effectu atram mortem vocitabant).[34][35]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season and is the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States. Many stores offer highly promoted sales at discounted prices and often open early, sometimes as early as midnight[2] or even on Thanksgiving. Some stores' sales continue to Monday ("Cyber Monday") or for a week ("Cyber Week").

"Black Friday" has evolved in meaning and impact over the years, initially referring to calamitous days, with a notable early instance being Black Friday (1869) in the US. This financial crisis saw a dramatic plunge in gold prices, affecting investors. The term was later used in American retail, starting ambiguously in the 1950s. Initially associated with workforce absenteeism post-Thanksgiving, it was reinterpreted by Philadelphia police to describe the shopping-induced congestion. Attempts at rebranding to "Big Friday" failed, and the term "Black Friday" solidified by the 1980s, referring to the pivotal point where retailers purportedly shifted from loss ("in the red") to profit ("in the black"). This day marks the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season, with promotional sales aiming to draw large crowds. Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States[3][4][5] and retailers prioritize it and Cyber Monday as highly profitable holiday shopping days.[6]

The concept has since globalized, with countries around the world adopting "Black Friday" sales to mimic the U.S. phenomenon, adjusting local customs or creating similar events. The advent of online shopping and events like "Cyber Monday" have expanded the traditional one-day shopping frenzy into a broader holiday shopping season, diluting the singular focus of Black Friday, and expanding its economic impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)

Black project is an informal term used to describe a highly classified, top-secret military or defense project that is not publicly acknowledged by government, military personnel, or contractors.

United States and black projects

In the United States, the formal term for a black project is an unacknowledged special access program (SAP). Black projects receive their funding from the black budget.

The US depends on private defense contractors to develop and build military equipment. The two most notable examples are Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The R&D department of Lockheed Martin is commonly referred to as Skunk Works; it is responsible for a number of aircraft designs, highly classified R&D programs, and exotic aircraft platforms.

Two well known sites for testing of black projects are the Nevada Test site and Area 51.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project

World, the: 1. It is proper to our vocation: to go to diverse places and live in whatever part of the world and to be sent wherever the greater service of God and the help of souls can be hoped for [82, 92, 304, 308, 588, 603, 605, 626, 749]; to this purpose is directed the vow of special obedience to the supreme pontiff regarding missions, FI no. 3 [603, 605], 2 §1; consequently a complete availability, mobility, and universality are necessary, 110, 121 4°, 242 §3, 246 7°, 248, 259, 411; at the service of which is chastity, 144 §2; consequently our community is a community for dispersion, 255 §1, 312, 314 §2, 315, 317; thus also the need for communicating with different cultures of the world and for insertion into them, 99 §2, 106 §2, 110, 111, 246 2°; and for promoting that perfect and open cooperation among the members of the entire Society, of whatever province or region they may be, 396 §2. See also Cooperation, interprovincial and supraprovincial; Culture(s); Insertion 2. God is present in the world: exercising the ministry of healing and reconciliation, 246 4°; thus he is there to be sought and found, 223 §§3-4; the world, in great part afflicted with atheism and injustice and increasingly divided by diverse economic, social, and ethnic systems and by other sources of division and opposition, 59 §2, 223 §3, 246 4° 3. The world, as distinguished from religious life: is to be left behind, trampled underfoot, and renounced [30, 50, 53, 61, 66, 297]; it is to be despised because of the love for and imitation of Christ [101]; contempt for it assists in the union of minds and hearts [671]: customs which smack of the world are not to be introduced, 322.

The Constitutions of The Society of Jesus and Their Complimentary Norms

A Complete English Translation of the Official Latin Texts

THE INSTITUTE OF JESUIT SOURCES

SAINT LOUIS, 1996

https://web.archive.org/web/20200211182223/https://jesuitas.lat/uploads/the-constitutions-of-the-society-of-jesus-and-their-complementary-norms/Constitutions%20and%20Norms%20SJ%20ingls.pdf

This Babylonian clay tablet, called Plimpton 322, was created around 1750 BCE in Sumeria, during the reign of Hammurabi the Great.

While more than 1000 years older than Pythagoras, the rows and columns on this table contain Pythagorean triples: integer solutions for the equation a2+b2=c2. For example, (3, 4, 5) is a Pythagorean triple because 32+42=52.

The exact purpose of the tablet has been debated by archeologists. Some think that it was a “teachers aid”, designed to help generate right-angled triangles. Others think it may be a very early trigonometry table.

https://mathigon.org/timeline/plimpton-322

"A major landslide occurred 4 miles (6.4 km) east of Oso, Washington, United States, on March 22, 2014 (3/22/2014), at 10:37 a.m. local time. A portion of an unstable hill collapsed, sending mud and debris to the south across the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, engulfing a rural neighborhood, and covering an area of approximately 1 square mile (2.6 km2). Forty-three people were killed and 49 homes and other structures destroyed."

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide

Published: 10 October 1996

Russian documents Set out 'tectonic weapon' research

Carl Levitin 

Moscow. The first official details have emerged in Moscow of ambitious research into 'tectonic warfare' carried out by the former Soviet Union and subsequently by the government of Russia, and involving atte mpts to stimulate 'artificial' earthquakes as weapons of destruction. According to documents obtained by the newspaper Moscow News, two research programmes, the first known as ' Mercury ' and the second as ' Volcano', were aimed at creating new earthquake epicentres by using underground nuclear explosions . Geophysicists are aware that impending earthquakes may be triggered by underground nuclear explosions . But Western geophysicists remain sceptical about tectonic warfare and have all but abandoned research after two unsuccessful phases of activity in the 1960s and 1980s, says Roger Clark, a lecturer in geophysics at the University of Leeds. Clark is not at all surprised that th e Russians tried to create earthquakes and control their location electromagnetically, however. "This sort of science is very much part of their heritage. We don't think it is impossible, or wrong , but past experience suggests it is very, very unlikely. "

The programme , which was secretly launched by the Communist rulers of the former Soviet Union in 1987, and has been unofficially known to Western geophysicists for several years, is now believed to have been abandoned. It would certainly contravene the terms of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Russia signe d at the United Nations in Geneva last month . The Mercury project was launched in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, but came to a halt when the republic became independent. It was superseded by the Volcano project. Three underground nuclear tests are believed to have taken place at sites in Kyrgyzstan.

According to the documents, the Mercury project was launched by a secret decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. The objective was to "develop a methodology for remote operation on an earthquake epicentre by using weak seismic fields and research possibilities of transferring the seismic energy of an explosion ".

The documents say that the Mercury project involved 22 scientific and industrial organizations, including the Geological Institute of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences in Baku. The remit extended to developing the electronic equipment to be installed aboard space satellites that would control the tectonic weapon. The scientists were given three years to complete research, with testing planned for 1990.

During the research phase, Azerbaijani scientists grew increasingly confident and, according to the documents, were sure that " after [a] nuclear explosion, subterranean energy may accumulate at huge distances from the epicentre and reach massive capacity, after which the next directed explosion can release it all ".

Underground testing began at the town of Batken in Kyrgyzstan, and was directed by lkram Ke rimov , of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences. The documents say that scientists detonated an underground nuclear charge and tried to control the direction of seismic energy release d using British-built equipment known as 'system 9690 ' .

A report prepared by the Mozhaisky Military Engineering Institute concluded that the test had been a success. But progress slowed considerably following Azerbaijan's independence from the Soviet Union. At about this time , Russia embarked on a more comprehensive tectonic warfare programme known as the Volcano project. The Earth Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) became the project headquarters .

Research was scheduled to be completed in 1992, with underground testing beginning the following year. The final test was carried out at a place code-named S36NZ-0Kh; Moscow News believes the letters 'NZ' refer to Novaya Zemlya, where Soviet nuclear testing began in the 1950s."

https://www.nature.com/articles/383471a0 

9. Interprovincial Works and Houses in Rome

304 §1. In the spirit of our fourth vow, the Society confirms its commitment to the interprovincial Roman works entrusted to it by the Holy See: the Pontifical Gregorian University and its associated institutes, the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Oriental Institute, as well as the Pontifical Russicum College, the Vatican Radio, and the Vatican Observatory, all of which are common works of the whole Society, placed directly under the superior general. Recognizing the very valuable service that these institutions have offered and continue to offer today, it calls upon major superiors who share Father General s responsibility for them to continue their help through subsidies and especially by training and offering professors and other personnel to them.

§2. Also recommended to the care of all the provinces are those other works or houses in Rome that render a service to the entire Society, such as the Historical Institute of the Society of Jesus and the international colleges of the Society in Rome.[142] 

The Constitutions of The Society of Jesus and Their Complimentary Norms

A Complete English Translation of the Official Latin Texts

THE INSTITUTE OF JESUIT SOURCES

SAINT LOUIS, 1996

https://web.archive.org/web/20200211182223/https://jesuitas.lat/uploads/the-constitutions-of-the-society-of-jesus-and-their-complementary-norms/Constitutions%20and%20Norms%20SJ%20ingls.pdf

The National Security Act of 1947 (Pub.L. 80-253, 61 Stat. 495, enacted July 26, 1947) was a law enacting major restructuring of the United States government's military and intelligence agencies following World War II. The majority of the provisions of the act took effect on September 18, 1947, the day after the Senate confirmed James Forrestal as the first secretary of defense.[1][2]

The act merged the Department of the Army (renamed from the Department of War), the Department of the Navy, and the newly established Department of the Air Force (DAF) into the National Military Establishment (NME).[3] The act also created the position of the secretary of defense as the head of the NME.[3] It established the United States Air Force under the DAF, which worked to separate the Army Air Forces into its own service.[3] It also protected the Marine Corps as an independent service under the Department of the Navy.[3] Aside from the unification of the three military departments, the act established the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, the latter of which is headed by the Director of Central Intelligence.[3]

The legislation was a result of efforts by Harry S. Truman beginning in 1944.[4] President Truman proposed the legislation to Congress on February 26, 1947.[5] The bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on February 28, 1947, and in the Senate on March 3, 1947.[6] Senator Chan Gurney was the bill's sponsor.[6] Senator Gurney, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, led committee hearings for the bill from mid-March to early May.[7][8][9] The bill passed in the Senate on July 9, 1947, and in the House on July 19, 1947.[10] The Senate agreed to a related House resolution (80 H.Con.Res. 70) on July 16, 1947.[10] The bill received bipartisan support and was passed in both chambers by voice vote.[4][10] The National Security Act of 1947 was signed into law by President Truman on July 26, 1947, while aboard his VC-54C presidential aircraft Sacred Cow.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947

Harry R. Truman (October 1896 – May 18, 1980) was an American businessman, bootlegger, and prospector. He lived near Mount St. Helens, an active volcano in the state of Washington, and was the owner and caretaker of Mount St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake near the base of the mountain. Truman came to fame as a folk hero in the weeks leading up to the volcano's 1980 eruption after refusing to leave his home despite evacuation orders. He was killed by a pyroclastic flow that overtook his lodge and buried the site under 150 ft (46 m) of volcanic debris.

After Truman's death, his family and friends reflected on his love for the mountain. In 1981, Art Carney portrayed Truman in the docudrama film St. Helens. He was commemorated in a book by his niece, and also in various pieces of music, including songs by Headgear, Billy Jonas, and Shawn Wright and the Brothers Band.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_R._Truman

Newly added to Digital Collections: Harry S. Truman Letters

July 14, 2020

Did you know that President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) was in correspondence with Melvin Maynard Johnson (1871-1957), the head of the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction's Supreme Council during the 1940s and 1950s? A number of recently digitized letters, written from Truman to Johnson on White House stationery are available through the Van Gorden-Williams Library & Archives Digital Collections website. They reveal a friendly relationship, with President Truman beginning his letters to Johnson by addressing him "Dear Mel."

Truman became a Freemason in 1909. By 1940, he was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri. In 1945, Truman was created a 33rd degree Sovereign Grand Inspector General in the Scottish Rite's Supreme Council, Southern Jurisdiction. That same year, the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, awarded Truman its first Gourgas Medal, the Supreme Council's highest honor.

The letters in this collection include both those from Harry Truman as well as one written by his wife, Bess Truman (1885-1982). The majority of the correspondence in this collection consists of letters written by President Harry S. Truman to his friend and fellow Freemason, Melvin Maynard Johnson (1871-1957). Johnson served as the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction's Sovereign Grand Commander from 1933 to 1953.

For more about the friendship between Truman and Johnson, have a look at one of our earlier blog posts, A Mason Answers His Country's Call and Receives the Scottish Rite's Highest Award.

There are now over 750 items in the Van Gorden-Williams Library & Archives Digital Collections website. Be sure to visit and check them all out!

Caption:

Letter from President Harry S. Truman to Melvin M. Johnson, 1948 August 3. Collection of Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, Lexington, Massachusetts. SC069.

https://nationalheritagemuseum.typepad.com/library_and_archives/harry-s-truman/

Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the U.S. and 33rd degree Freemason, in full occult regalia, in an official lodge portrait. Truman ordered the atomic incineration of two Japanese cities, killing at least 150,000 people, mostly women and children. Roosevelt's chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, admitted to Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune, that Japan was ready to surrender conditionally without an invasion by U.S. ground forces. It was Truman's insistence upon "unconditional surrender" that set the stage for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare 

by Michael A. Hoffman II

Extrusive (Volcanic) Rock Classification

Volcanic rocks are classified based on their chemical composition as determined by analytical techniques that identify the proportion of major elements found in them. Unlike for plutonic rocks, it is not possible to classify volcanic rocks based on the minerals found in them.

Some volcanic rocks contain some crystals (phenocrysts) that grew in the magma chamber prior to eruption, but others contain no crystals at all or are volcanic glass (obsidian).

In addition to the mafic (low silica) basalt, and the silicic rhyolite, several subdivisions exist between the two compositional end members.

https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/igneous.htm

THE CONCLAVE OR CELESTIAL CITY

Containing an epitome of the twelve degrees of the Philosophic Chamber of the Ancient and Accepted Rite.

The twelve degrees preceding the Rose Croix are as we have shown, associated with the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

From these fixed signs, the Rite passes to the Sun, Moon and the Planets.

From these the Rite looks to the four elements or four components of man, etc., and from these it considers the spirit and matter, or infinite and finite of the Universe and of man.

In the Rose Croix Degree, we have seen the son of masonry and heard the promise of universal peace and joy. Now let us proceed to seek the methods of realization, and learn how to restore the lost Eden and reedify the Celestial City." 

Scotch Rite Masonry Illustrated

THE COMPLETE RITUAL OF THE

Ancient AND Accepted Scottish Rite,

PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED.

Volume 2

https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/scotchritemasonr02blan/scotchritemasonr02blan.pdf

"Very soon now, it will no longer be a mystery of 'when' these events will take place; they will have become a terrible reality. Where then, will each of us stand on these issues, when the onslaught actually begins? Quickly it will be seen that the New Ager's counterfeit messiah, Lord #Maitreya, is also the same person as the #Pontifex Maximus pope of Rome, who then will take the reins of the New World Order. The deceptions will mesh wonderfully together, as the "World Harmonic Convergence" accomplishes new values for mankind in the cooperation, collaboration and unification on behalf of the "Spirit of the Earth." For those of you who read this book, be patient, it won't be long and you will know that it revealed to you the truth.

Also, it is only a matter of time when Pope John Paul II, old and tired, will succumb to his great age, and his mantle will then go to a more younger and aggressive pope. By him, a work will now be accomplished, known as the "Era of Reseeding" when major population areas will be 'thinned out' and the human population will be resettled. Finally, will come the "Era of the New Harmony" and the "Crystal Kingdom" of the earth will be set up. This is the glorious version of Rome's final victory and total conquest of humanity. But there is one last crowning act that is needed to make this masterpiece of deception complete.

FALSE MESSIAH OCCUPIES JERUSALEM

The counterfeit surpassing all other counterfeits, Rome has now fulfilled its grandest dreams. The entire world lays in shambles at its feet. "Order out of Chaos" ,was its beloved motto.

Now the 'great pretender' , the Pontifex Maximus pope declares himself to be God over all the earth! Not content with just being ruler of all the earth - but "is worshiped; so that he as God sitting in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God."

Only a Luciferic mind could think like that.

After usurping the very exalted position of grandeur, magnificence, majesty and sovereignty of God Himself - what other place would he choose to locate his Crystal Kingdom headquarters - other than where the God of creation has placed His own Holy name Jerusalem; where else? Rome has always had its covetous eye set on Jerusalem. The Crusaders were sent there to conquer it, after which, the Knights Templar were named after its temple. And now the Pontifex Maximus pope, dripping in blood of the world's innocents, claims this city as his too; to be the headquarters for ruling his New World Order.

Does all of this sound like some grotesque farcy tale or the terror of some fearsome nightmare? Oh my friend, how I wish that could really be the case; that we could actually wake up and none of this would really be true, and I could be called a liar. What I wouldn't give, if I could make that be so. But for all the sadness and horror it brings, it must be acknowledged that it is the truth. Not because man says so, but because God's Word has declared it. There is only one way to face the onslaught that is just ahead. We must fully trust our life into the hands of God, and then resolve in our minds that we are going to be killed; forgetting entirely the thought that we might be fortunate enough to escape. That is how thoroughly God's people are going to be rooted out. Know for sure in your own mind - they can kill your body ever so dead, but they can never take your life - if it is in Christ Jesus. That belongs to God alone.

Very soon, God's people are going to be confronted with the exact same experience as our Lord and Saviour. To know and look straight into the face of death - and yes, by the very same executioner - Rome. But our Lord loved you, dear reader, and me, and all, that He gave up His own life for ours. We must now respond to that love and be resolved to die also for Him, standing firm for His truth, as He died for us. And Rome can not kill us so dead, that our mighty God can not raise us back up to life. Not the miserable life we know now but incorruptible life for eternity. A quick calculation will tell you, that if one third of the earth's population, or nearly two billion people, are going to be slaughtered, only a minuscule fraction of that amount are fundamentalist Christians . That means a huge amount of people are going to die that are not Christians. Sadly, beyond any comprehension, they will have died for a very lost cause.

From all the horror, misery, and bloodshed, people universally, will become utterly paralyzed from sheer shock.

And to the overwhelming majority of them, sadly, this life is their only world, as they watch it being ripped apart; everywhere, nothing but chaos and devastation. They are terrified. They just do not understand! But there are a people that do understand; as they watch now with solemn awe, events occurring that they had known about and anticipated for many many years. This is what gives to God's people "hope". They know that God does not lie. God has given to His people promises, predictions, and prophecies that have never ever failed. That, dear friend, is wonderful, unselfish, and abiding love! - that builds unswerving trust. And no other promise is so deeply embedded into their hearts, than the one given that

Christ will soon return and redeem His people out of this wretched world. It buoys their spirits, as it assures them precious

'hope'.

Five hundred years before Jesus Christ walked the earth, God revealed to His people that Rome's false messiah, in the very end times, would "plant the tabernacles of his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain." In other words, Jerusalem. (Daniel 11:45) What an incredible God we have! But notice how God describes it. He calls Rome setting up its New World Order headquarters in Jerusalem the "abomination that maketh desolate." In fact, Christ Himself prophesied that Rome would invade Jerusalem soon after His departure from earth, which it did in A.D.70. And this first invasion was to become a "type" for when it would occur again, with vengeance, in the very end time." 

CHAPTER 17 "TWO OCCULT POWERS UNITED FOR FINAL WORLD

CONTROL" 

The Grand Design Exposed 

by John Daniel

http://www.granddesignexposed.com/contents.html 

Fourteenth Rule. Although there is much truth in the assertion that no one can save himself without being predestined and without having faith and grace; we must be very cautious in the manner of speaking and communicating with others about all these things.

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YC_luOfFWl0Bm0BWkbANKZGC1kkmdHQf/view?usp=sharing

Galatians 2

1599 Geneva Bible

2 1 That the Apostles did nothing disagree from his Gospel, 3 he declareth by the example of Titus being uncircumcised, 11 and also by his . . . the same against Peter’s dissimulation. 17 And so he passeth to the handling of our free justification by Christ, etc.

1 Then [a]fourteen years after, I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took with me Titus also.

2 And I went up by revelation, and declared unto them that Gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but particularly to them that were the chief, lest by any means I should run, or had run [b]in vain:

3 But neither yet Titus which was with me, though he were a Grecian, was compelled to be circumcised,

4 To wit, for the [c]false brethren which were craftily sent in, and crept in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage.

5 To whom we gave not place by [d]subjection for an hour, that the [e]truth of the Gospel might continue with [f]you.

6 But by them which seemed to be great, I was not taught (whatsoever they were in time passed, I am nothing the better: God accepteth no man’s person) for they that are the chief, did add nothing to me above that I had.

7 But contrariwise, when they saw that the Gospel over the [g]uncircumcision was committed unto me, as the Gospel over the circumcision was unto Peter:

8 (For he that was mighty by Peter in the Apostleship over the circumcision, was also mighty by me toward the Gentiles.)

9 And when James, and Cephas, and John, knew of the grace that was given unto me, which are [h]counted to be pillars, they gave to me and to Barnabas the right [i]hands of fellowship, that we should preach unto the Gentiles, and they unto the circumcision,

10 Warning only that we should remember the poor: which thing also I was diligent to do.

11 ¶ And when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to his [j]face: for he was to be condemned.

12 [k]For before that certain came from James, he ate with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision.

13 And the other Jews played the hypocrites likewise with him, insomuch that Barnabas was [l]led away with them by that their hypocrisy.

14 But when I saw, that they went not the [m]right way to the [n]truth of the Gospel, I said unto Peter before all men, If thou being a Jew, livest as the Gentiles, and not like the Jews, why [o]constrainest thou the Gentiles to do like the Jews?

15 [p]We which are Jews [q]by nature, and not [r]sinners of the Gentiles,

16 Know that a man is not justified by the works of the Law, but by the faith [s]of Jesus Christ, even we, I say, have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the Law, because that by the works of the Law, [t]no flesh shall be justified.

17 [u]If then while [v]we seek to be made righteous by Christ, we ourselves are found sinners, is Christ therefore the minister of sin? God forbid.

18 For if I build again the things that I have destroyed, I make myself a trespasser.

19 For I through the Law am dead to the [w]Law, that I might live unto God.

20 I am crucified with Christ, but I live, yet not [x]I anymore, but Christ liveth in me: and in that I now live in the [y]flesh, I live by the faith in the Son of God, who hath loved me, and given himself for me.

21 [z]I do not abrogate the grace of God: for if righteousness be by the Law, then Christ died without a [aa]cause.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%202&version=GNV

English mantle and mantel both derive from the Latin word for "cloak," mantellum, which was adopted into Old English in the form mentel. The word eventually evolved to mantle under the influence of Anglo-French mantel—a derivative of the Latin term that was borrowed into early Middle English. Initially, mantle referred to a loose, sleeveless cloak or a protective garment or blanket. It then specified the long cloaks worn by royalty, dignitaries, and ecclesiastics as symbols of authority or preeminence. By the 17th century, this sense of mantle gained figurative use in contexts describing a transfer of power, with allusion to the allegorical passing of Elijah's mantle to Elisha in the biblical Books of Kings.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-mantle-vs-mantel 

Earth's mantle is a layer of silicate rock between the crust and the outer core. It has a mass of 4.01×1024 kg (8.84×1024 lb) and makes up 67% of the mass of Earth.[1] It has a thickness of 2,900 kilometers (1,800 mi)[1] making up about 46% of Earth's radius and 84% of Earth's volume. It is predominantly solid but, on geologic time scales, it behaves as a viscous fluid, sometimes described as having the consistency of caramel.[2][3] Partial melting of the mantle at mid-ocean ridges produces oceanic crust, and partial melting of the mantle at subduction zones produces continental crust.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_mantle

Wayne Maurice Keown[1][6] (born November 29, 1949) is an American professional wrestling manager, booker and retired professional wrestler, better known by the ring name Dutch Mantel (also spelled Dutch Mantell). Since May 2022, Mantell has co-hosted Story Time with Dutch Mantell, hosted by James Romero on the WSI Network.[7][8][9]

Keown debuted in 1972, as Wayne Cowan.[10] He achieved fame in the regional and independent circuits, as well as World Championship Wrestling (WCW), as "Dirty" Dutch Mantell. Keown also worked with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) as Uncle Zebekiah in the mid-1990s, and again in the 2010s as Zeb Colter.[5] In the late 1990s, 2000s, and late-2010s, he worked as a booker for the World Wrestling Council (WWC), International Wrestling Association, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) and Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) as well as Championship Wrestling from Florida.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Mantel

Peter Hans Kolvenbach SJ (30 November 1928 – 26 November 2016) was a Dutch Jesuit priest and professor who was the 29th superior general of the Society of Jesus, the largest male Catholic religious order.

Early years

Kolvenbach was born and grew up in Druten, near Nijmegen in the Netherlands.[1] There he attended Canisius College for his secondary studies, where he concentrated on modern languages. He entered the novitiate at Mariendaal on 7 September 1948. After completing philosophy studies at Berchmans Institute in Nijmegen, he was assigned to Lebanon, where he completed his doctorate in Sacred Theology at Université de Saint-Joseph in Beirut. On 29 June 1961, he was ordained a priest in the Armenian Catholic Church, an Eastern-rite church in communion with Rome.[2]

The next years of his life were spent in academia, specifically in linguistics. From 1964 to 1976 he taught general and Oriental linguistics in The Hague, Paris, and then Beirut where he became Professor of General Linguistics and Armenian at Université Saint-Joseph. He served in that capacity until 1981, when he became rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute.[2]

During his time on the faculty of Saint-Joseph, he also served as superior of the Jesuit Near-East Vice-Province.[3]

Father General

On 7 August 1981, Father General Pedro Arrupe suffered a severe stroke in the plane on his way back to Rome. Although he survived for another ten years, he wanted to step down as Superior General. Though Arrupe proposed Vincent O'Keefe of Fordham University as interim successor, Pope John Paul II intervened and named Paolo Dezza his delegate to lead the order for an interim period.[4] Two years later John Paul II allowed the Jesuits to proceed in selecting their new leader. Meeting in September 1983, the 33rd General Congregation of the Society of Jesus accepted the formal resignation of Father Arrupe and on the first ballot elected Father Kolvenbach to be 29th Superior General of the Jesuits.[5]

Kolvenbach took office at a time when the Jesuits' "strongly pro-social justice and church reform orientation was seen by critics as having made the Jesuits something akin to John Paul’s in-house opposition. ...Over time, Kolvenbach was credited with having managed to win back the trust of John Paul II and his Vatican team, without alienating the more liberal members of the order."[6][7]

Meeting a fellow Jesuit personally.

He is credited with successfully defending Jesuit theologian Jacques Dupuis from charges made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Fr. Thomas J. Reese, who was removed as editor of America magazine by the insistence of the Vatican, says that he “always felt that Kolvenbach did everything he could to defend me.” He manifested his personal interest in each Jesuit's work, with an interest in meeting each Jesuit individually.[3] He traveled extensively to visit Jesuits in 112 countries, and “his knowledge of them and their ministries is legendary.” He also emphasized the need to make laypersons feel their place of equal partnership in Jesuit ministries, recognizing with Vatican II that “holiness is one - that sanctity is cultivated by all who are moved by the Spirit of God'." He expressed his belief that “the church of the next millennium will be called the 'church of the laity' ...this development is a 'grace of our day and a hope for the future'."[8]

Resignation and retirement

Kolvenbach in Goa, India, in 2006

Grave in Collège Notre Dame de Jamhour

On 2 February 2006, Kolvenbach informed the members of the Society of Jesus that he intended to step down in 2008, the year he would turn 80. As the Superior General is elected for life, Kolvenbach was only the second to resign the office.

The 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus convened on 5 January 2008 in Rome. On 14 January it accepted Kolvenbach's resignation and elected Adolfo Nicolás as his successor.[9]

Kolvenbach died in Beirut on 26 November 2016 and is buried outside Beirut on the grounds of Collège Notre Dame de Jamhour.[10] He left just before his death a personal letter to a young medicine doctor, Anthony Kallas-Chemaly, who worked with him on the history of the Jesuits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hans_Kolvenbach

Obsidian (/əbˈsɪdi.ən, ɒb-/ əb-SID-ee-ən ob-)[5] is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed when lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It is an igneous rock.[6]

Obsidian is produced from felsic lava, rich in the lighter elements such as silicon, oxygen, aluminum, sodium, and potassium. It is commonly found within the margins of rhyolitic lava flows known as obsidian flows. These flows have a high content of silica, giving them a high viscosity. The high viscosity inhibits diffusion of atoms through the lava, which inhibits the first step (nucleation) in the formation of mineral crystals. Together with rapid cooling, this results in a natural glass forming from the lava.[7]

Obsidian is hard, brittle, and amorphous; it therefore fractures with sharp edges. In the past, it was used to manufacture cutting and piercing tools, and it has been used experimentally as surgical scalpel blades.[8]

Origin and properties

The Natural History by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder includes a few sentences about a volcanic glass called obsidian (lapis obsidianus), discovered in Ethiopia by Obsidius, a Roman explorer.[9][10][11][12]

Obsidian is formed from quickly cooled lava, which is the parent material.[13][14][15] Extrusive formation of obsidian may occur when felsic lava cools rapidly at the edges of a felsic lava flow or volcanic dome, or when lava cools during sudden contact with water or air. Intrusive formation of obsidian may occur when felsic lava cools along the edges of a dike.[16][17]

Tektites were once thought by many to be obsidian produced by lunar volcanic eruptions,[18] though few scientists now adhere to this hypothesis.[19]

Obsidian is mineral-like, but not a true mineral because, as a glass, it is not crystalline; in addition, its composition is too variable to be classified as a mineral. It is sometimes classified as a mineraloid.[20] Though obsidian is usually dark in color, similar to mafic rocks such as basalt, the composition of obsidian is extremely felsic. Obsidian consists mainly of SiO2 (silicon dioxide), usually 70% by weight or more; the remainder consists of variable amounts of other oxides, mostly oxides of aluminum, iron, potassium, sodium and calcium.[21][22] Crystalline rocks with a similar composition include granite and rhyolite. Because obsidian is metastable at the Earth's surface (over time the glass devitrifies, becoming fine-grained mineral crystals), obsidian older than Miocene in age is rare. Exceptionally old obsidians include a Cretaceous welded tuff and a partially devitrified Ordovician perlite.[23] This transformation of obsidian is accelerated by the presence of water. Although newly formed obsidian has a low water content, typically less than 1% water by weight,[24] it becomes progressively hydrated when exposed to groundwater, forming perlite.

Pure obsidian is usually dark in appearance, though the color varies depending on the impurities present. Iron and other transition elements may give the obsidian a dark brown to black color. Most black obsidians contain nanoinclusions of magnetite, an iron oxide.[25] Very few samples of obsidian are nearly colorless. In some stones, the inclusion of small, white, radially clustered crystals (spherulites) of the mineral cristobalite in the black glass produce a blotchy or snowflake pattern (snowflake obsidian). Obsidian may contain patterns of gas bubbles remaining from the lava flow, aligned along layers created as the molten rock was flowing before being cooled. These bubbles can produce interesting effects such as a golden sheen (sheen obsidian). An iridescent, rainbow-like sheen (fire obsidian) is caused by inclusions of magnetite nanoparticles creating thin-film interference.[26] Colorful, striped obsidian (rainbow obsidian) from Mexico contains oriented nanorods of hedenbergite, which cause the rainbow striping effects by thin-film interference.[25]

Occurrence

Obsidian is found near volcanoes in locations which have undergone rhyolitic eruptions. It can be found in Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Australia,[27] Canada, Chile, Georgia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, Scotland, the Canary Islands, Turkey and the United States. Obsidian flows which are so large that they can be hiked on are found within the calderas of Newberry Volcano (Big Obsidian Flow,[28] 700 acres) and Medicine Lake Volcano in the Cascade Range of western North America, and at Inyo Craters east of the Sierra Nevada in California. Yellowstone National Park has a mountainside containing obsidian located between Mammoth Hot Springs and the Norris Geyser Basin, and deposits can be found in many other western U.S. states including Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Washington,[29] Oregon[30] and Idaho.

There are only four major deposit areas in the central Mediterranean: Lipari, Pantelleria, Palmarola and Monte Arci (Sardinia).[31]

Ancient sources in the Aegean were Milos and Gyali.[32]

Acıgöl town and the Göllü Dağ volcano were the most important sources in central Anatolia, one of the more important source areas in the prehistoric Near East.[33][34][35]

Prehistoric and historical use

The first known archaeological evidence of usage was in Kariandusi (Kenya) and other sites of the Acheulian age (beginning 1.5 million years BP) dated 700,000 BC, although only very few objects have been found at these sites relative to the Neolithic.[36][37][38][39][40] Manufacture of obsidian bladelets at Lipari had reached a high level of sophistication by the late Neolithic, and was traded as far as Sicily, the southern Po river valley, and Croatia.[41] Obsidian bladelets were used in ritual circumcisions and cutting of umbilical cords of newborns.[42] Anatolian sources of obsidian are known to have been the material used in the Levant and modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan from a time beginning sometime about 12,500 BC.[43] Obsidian artifacts are common at Tell Brak, one of the earliest Mesopotamian urban centers, dating to the late fifth millennium BC.[44] Obsidian was valued in Stone Age cultures because, like flint, it could be fractured to produce sharp blades or arrowheads in a process called knapping. Like all glass and some other naturally occurring rocks, obsidian breaks with a characteristic conchoidal fracture. It was also polished to create early mirrors. Modern archaeologists have developed a relative dating system, obsidian hydration dating, to calculate the age of obsidian artifacts.

Europe

Obsidian artifacts first appeared in the European continent in Central Europe in the Middle Paleolithic and had become common by the Upper Paleolithic, although there are exceptions to this. Obsidian played an important role in the transmission of Neolithic knowledge and experiences. The material was mainly used for production of chipped tools which were very sharp due to its nature. Artifacts made of obsidian can be found in many Neolithic cultures across Europe. The source of obsidian for cultures inhabiting the territory of and around Greece was the island of Milos; the Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture obtained obsidian from sources in Hungary and Slovakia, while the Cardium-Impresso cultural complex acquired obsidian from the island outcrops of the central Mediterranean. Through trade, these artifacts ended up in lands thousands of kilometers away from the original source; this indicates that they were a highly valued commodity.[45] John Dee had a mirror, made of obsidian, which was brought from Mexico to Europe between 1527 and 1530 after Hernando Cortés's conquest of the region.[46]

Middle East and Asia

In the Ubaid in the 5th millennium BC, blades were manufactured from obsidian extracted from outcrops located in modern-day Turkey.[47] Ancient Egyptians used obsidian imported from the eastern Mediterranean and southern Red Sea regions. Obsidian scalpels older than 2100 BC have been found in a Bronze Age settlement in Turkey.[48] In the eastern Mediterranean area the material was used to make tools, mirrors and decorative objects.[49]

The use of obsidian tools was present in Japan near areas of volcanic activity.[50][51] Obsidian was mined during the Jōmon period.

Obsidian has also been found in Gilat, a site in the western Negev in Israel. Eight obsidian artifacts dating to the Chalcolithic Age found at this site were traced to obsidian sources in Anatolia. Neutron activation analysis (NAA) on the obsidian found at this site helped to reveal trade routes and exchange networks previously unknown.[52]

Americas

Lithic analysis helps to understand pre-Hispanic groups in Mesoamerica. A careful analysis of obsidian in a culture or place can be of considerable use to reconstruct commerce, production, and distribution, and thereby understand economic, social and political aspects of a civilization. This is the case in Yaxchilán, a Maya city where even warfare implications have been studied linked with obsidian use and its debris.[53] Another example is the archeological recovery at coastal Chumash sites in California, indicating considerable trade with the distant site of Casa Diablo Hot Springs in the Sierra Nevada.[54]

Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans' use of obsidian was extensive and sophisticated; including carved and worked obsidian for tools and decorative objects. Mesoamericans also made a type of sword with obsidian blades mounted in a wooden body. Called a macuahuitl, the weapon could inflict terrible injuries, combining the sharp cutting edge of an obsidian blade with the ragged cut of a serrated weapon. The polearm version of this weapon was called tepoztopilli.

Obsidian mirrors were used by some Aztec priests to conjure visions and make prophecies. They were connected with Tezcatlipoca, god of obsidian and sorcery, whose name can be translated from the Nahuatl language as 'Smoking Mirror'.[46]

Indigenous people traded obsidian throughout the Americas. Each volcano and in some cases each volcanic eruption produces a distinguishable type of obsidian allowing archaeologists to use methods such as non-destructive energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence to select minor element compositions from both the artifact and geological sample to trace the origins of a particular artifact.[55] Similar tracing techniques have also allowed obsidian in Greece to be identified as coming from Milos, Nisyros or Gyali, islands in the Aegean Sea. Obsidian cores and blades were traded great distances inland from the coast.[56]

In Chile obsidian tools from Chaitén Volcano have been found as far away as in Chan-Chan 400 km (250 mi) north of the volcano, and also in sites 400 km south of it.[57][58]

Oceania

The Lapita culture, active across a large area of the Pacific Ocean around 1000 BC, made widespread use of obsidian tools and engaged in long distance obsidian trading. The complexity of the production technique for these tools, and the care taken in their storage, may indicate that beyond their practical use they were associated with prestige or high status.[59]

Obsidian was also used on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for edged tools such as Mataia and the pupils of the eyes of their Moai (statues), which were encircled by rings of bird bone.[60] Obsidian was used to inscribe the Rongorongo glyphs.

Current use

Obsidian can be used to make extremely sharp knives, and obsidian blades are a type of glass knife made using naturally occurring obsidian instead of manufactured glass. Obsidian is used by some surgeons for scalpel blades, although this is not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use on humans.[61] Well-crafted obsidian blades, like any glass knife, can have a cutting edge many times sharper than high-quality steel surgical scalpels: the cutting edge of the blade is only about three nanometers thick.[62] All metal knives have a jagged, irregular blade when viewed under a strong enough microscope; however, obsidian blades are still smooth, even when examined under an electron microscope.[63] One study found that obsidian incisions produced fewer inflammatory cells and less granulation tissue in a group of rats after seven days but the differences disappeared after twenty-one days.[64] Don Crabtree has produced surgical obsidian blades and written articles on the subject.[62] Obsidian scalpels may be purchased for surgical use on research animals.[65]

The major disadvantage of obsidian blades is their brittleness compared to those made of metal,[66] thus limiting the surgical applications for obsidian blades to a variety of specialized uses where this is not a concern.[62]

Obsidian is also used for ornamental purposes and as a gemstone.[67] It presents a different appearance depending on how it is cut: in one direction it is jet black, while in another it is glistening gray. "Apache tears" are small rounded obsidian nuggets often embedded within a grayish-white perlite matrix.

Plinths for audio turntables have been made of obsidian since the 1970s, such as the grayish-black SH-10B3 plinth by Technics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian

The Black Stone (Arabic: ٱلْحَجَرُ ٱلْأَسْوَد, romanized: al-Ḥajar al-Aswad) is a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient building in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is revered by Muslims as an Islamic relic which, according to Muslim tradition, dates back to the time of Adam and Eve.

The stone was venerated at the Kaaba in pre-Islamic pagan times. According to Islamic tradition, it was set intact into the Kaaba's wall by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 605 CE, five years before his first revelation. Since then, it has been broken into fragments and is now cemented into a silver frame in the side of the Kaaba. Its physical appearance is that of a fragmented dark rock, polished smooth by the hands of pilgrims. It has often been described as a meteorite.[1]

Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba as a part of the tawaf ritual during the hajj and many try to stop to kiss the Black Stone, emulating the kiss that Islamic tradition records that it received from Muhammad.[2][3] While the Black Stone is revered, Islamic theologians emphasize that it has no divine significance and that its importance is historical in nature.[4]

Physical description

The Black Stone was originally a single piece of rock but today consists of several pieces that have been cemented together. They are surrounded by a silver frame which is fastened by silver nails to the Kaaba's outer wall.[5] The fragments are themselves made up of smaller pieces which have been combined to form the seven or eight fragments visible today. The Stone's exposed face measures about 20 centimetres (7.9 in) by 16 centimetres (6.3 in). Its original size is unclear and the recorded dimensions have changed considerably over time, as the pieces have been rearranged in their cement matrix on several occasions.[1] In the 10th century, an observer described the Black Stone as being one cubit (46 cm or 18 in) long. By the early 17th century, it was recorded as measuring 140 by 122 cm (4 ft 7 in by 4 ft 0 in). According to Ali Bey in the 18th century, it was described as 110 cm (3 ft 7 in) high, and Muhammad Ali Pasha reported it as being 76 cm (2 ft 6 in) long by 46 cm (1 ft 6 in) wide.[1]

The Black Stone is attached to the east corner of the Kaaba, known as al-Rukn al-Aswad (the 'Corner of the Black Stone').[6] Another stone, known as the Hajar as-Sa’adah ('Stone of Felicity') is set into the Kaaba's opposite corner, al-Rukn al-Yamani (the 'Yemeni Corner'), at a somewhat lower height than the Black Stone.[7] The choice of the east corner may have had ritual significance; it faces the rain-bringing east wind (al-qabul) and the direction from which Canopus rises.[8]

The silver frame around the Black Stone and the black kiswah or cloth enveloping the Kaaba were for centuries maintained by the Ottoman Sultans in their role as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. The frames wore out over time due to the constant handling by pilgrims and were periodically replaced. Worn-out frames were brought back to Istanbul, where they are still kept as part of the sacred relics in the Topkapı Palace.[9]

Appearance of the Black Stone

The Black Stone was described by European travellers to Arabia in the 19th- and early-20th centuries, who visited the Kaaba disguised as pilgrims. Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visited Mecca in 1814, and provided a detailed description in his 1829 book Travels in Arabia:

It is an irregular oval, about seven inches [18 cm] in diameter, with an undulated surface, composed of about a dozen smaller stones of different sizes and shapes, well joined together with a small quantity of cement, and perfectly well smoothed; it looks as if the whole had been broken into as many pieces by a violent blow, and then united again. It is very difficult to determine accurately the quality of this stone which has been worn to its present surface by the millions of touches and kisses it has received. It appeared to me like a lava, containing several small extraneous particles of a whitish and of a yellow substance. Its colour is now a deep reddish brown approaching to black. It is surrounded on all sides by a border composed of a substance which I took to be a close cement of pitch and gravel of a similar, but not quite the same, brownish colour. This border serves to support its detached pieces; it is two or three inches in breadth, and rises a little above the surface of the stone. Both the border and the stone itself are encircled by a silver band, broader below than above, and on the two sides, with a considerable swelling below, as if a part of the stone were hidden under it. The lower part of the border is studded with silver nails.[10]

Visiting the Kaaba in 1853, Richard Francis Burton noted that:

The colour appeared to me black and metallic, and the centre of the stone was sunk about two inches below the metallic circle. Round the sides was a reddish-brown cement, almost level with the metal, and sloping down to the middle of the stone. The band is now a massive arch of gold or silver gilt. I found the aperture in which the stone is, one span and three fingers broad.[11]

Ritter von Laurin, the Austrian consul-general in Egypt, was able to inspect a fragment of the Stone removed by Muhammad Ali in 1817 and reported that it had a pitch-black exterior and a silver-grey, fine-grained interior in which tiny cubes of a bottle-green material were embedded. There are reportedly a few white or yellow spots on the face of the Stone, and it is officially described as being white with the exception of the face.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone 

BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment company. Founded in 1988, initially as an enterprise risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with US$11.5 trillion in assets under management as of December 31, 2023.[1] Headquartered in New York City, BlackRock has 70 offices in 30 countries, and clients in 100 countries.

BlackRock is the manager of the iShares group of exchange-traded funds, and along with The Vanguard Group and State Street, it is considered to be one of the Big Three index fund managers.[3][4] Its Aladdin software keeps track of investment portfolios for many major financial institutions and its BlackRock Solutions division provides financial risk management services. As of 2023, BlackRock was ranked 229th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue.[5]

BlackRock has sought to position itself as an industry leader in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations in investments.[6] The U.S. states of West Virginia,[7] Florida,[8] and Louisiana[9] have divested money away from or refuse to do business with the firm because of its ESG policies. BlackRock has been criticized for investing in companies that are involved in fossil fuels, the arms industry, the People's Liberation Army and human rights violations in China. The company has also faced criticism for its close ties with the Federal Reserve during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock

Academi, formerly known as Blackwater and Blackwater Worldwide, is an American private military contractor founded on December 26, 1997,[2] by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince.[3][4] It was renamed Xe Services in 2009, and was again renamed to Academi in 2011, after it was acquired by a group of private investors.[5] In 2014, Academi merged with Triple Canopy to form Constellis Holdings.[6][7][8]

Constellis and its predecessors provide contract security services[9] to the United States federal government. Since 2003, it has provided services to the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2007, Blackwater received widespread notoriety for the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20. Four employees were convicted in the United States and later pardoned on December 22, 2020, by President Donald Trump.[10][11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(company) 

Black project is an informal term used to describe a highly classified, top-secret military or defense project that is not publicly acknowledged by government, military personnel, or contractors.

United States and black projects

In the United States, the formal term for a black project is an unacknowledged special access program (SAP). Black projects receive their funding from the black budget.

The US depends on private defense contractors to develop and build military equipment. The two most notable examples are Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The R&D department of Lockheed Martin is commonly referred to as Skunk Works; it is responsible for a number of aircraft designs, highly classified R&D programs, and exotic aircraft platforms.

Two well known sites for testing of black projects are the Nevada Test site and Area 51.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project

A lava lamp is a decorative lamp, invented in 1963 by British entrepreneur Edward Craven Walker, the founder of the lighting company Mathmos.

It consists of a bolus of a special coloured wax mixture inside a glass vessel, the remainder of which contains clear or translucent liquid. The vessel is placed on a base containing an incandescent light bulb whose heat causes temporary reductions in the wax's density and the liquid's surface tension. As the warmed wax rises through the liquid, it cools, loses its buoyancy, and falls back to the bottom of the vessel in a cycle that is visually suggestive of pāhoehoe lava, hence the name. The lamps are designed in a variety of styles and colours.

Lava lamps can be associated with hippie and cannabis cultures.[1][2]

Operation

A classic lava lamp contains a standard incandescent or halogen lamp which heats a tall (often tapered) glass bottle. A formula from a 1968 US patent consisted of water and a transparent, translucent, or opaque mix of mineral oil, paraffin wax, and carbon tetrachloride.[3]p. 2, line 30 The clear water or mineral oil can optionally be coloured with translucent dyes.

Common wax has a density much lower than that of water and would float on top at any temperature. However, carbon tetrachloride is denser than water (also nonflammable and miscible with wax) and is added to the wax to make its density at room temperature slightly higher than that of the water. When heated, the wax mixture becomes less dense than the water, because it expands more than water when both are heated.[3]p. 1, lines 40 & 45 It also becomes fluid, causing blobs of it to ascend to the top of the lamp. There, they cool, increasing their density relative to that of the water, and descend.[3]p. 1, line 47 A metallic wire coil in the bottle's base breaks the cooled blobs' surface tension, allowing them to recombine.

Video of an orange lava lamp in operation

Since 1970, lava lamps made for the US market have not used carbon tetrachloride, the use of which was banned that year due to toxicity.[4] Haggerty, their current manufacturer, has stated that their current formulation is a trade secret.[5]

The underlying fluid mechanics phenomenon in lava lamps is a form of Rayleigh–Taylor instability.

The bulb is normally 25 to 40 watts. It generally takes 45–60 minutes for the wax to warm up enough to form freely rising blobs, when operating the lamp at standard room temperature, and as long as 2 to 3 hours if the room is cooler.

Once the wax is molten, the lamp should not be agitated, or the two fluids may emulsify, and the fluid surrounding the wax blobs will remain cloudy rather than clear. Some recombination will occur as part of the normal cycle of the wax in the container, but the only way to recombine all of the wax is to turn off the lamp and wait for a few hours. The wax then settles back to the bottom, forming one blob once again. Severe cases can require many heating-cooling cycles to clear. [6]

In 2015, a new design was introduced that uses ferrofluid in place of wax.[7]

History

British entrepreneur Edward Craven Walker had the idea for the lava lamp in 1963 after watching a homemade egg timer, made from a cocktail shaker filled with liquids, as it bubbled on a stovetop in a pub.[8] This precursor was designed and patented GB patent 703924 by Donald Dunnet.[9] Craven Walker hired British inventor David George Smith to develop the device and the chemical formula it required. Smith is credited as the inventor on the original U.S. patent 3,387,396 for a "Display Device" filed and assigned to Craven-Walker's company in 1965, and subsequently issued in 1968.[3] Craven Walker's company, Crestworth, was based in Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom. He named the lamp "Astro" and had variations such as the "Astro Mini" and the "Astro Coach" lantern.

In 1965, Adolph Wertheimer and Hy Spector were intrigued by Walker's product when they saw it at a German trade show. They bought the American rights and began the Lava Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago to sell what they called the Lava Lite Lamp. In the late 1970s, US rights were sold to Larry Haggerty, who created a subsidiary of his company, Haggerty Enterprises, called Lava World International, which produced American lava lamps for over 30 years.[10]

In 2003, American lava lamp maker Lava World International (formerly Lava-Simplex-Scribe Internationale) moved its production to China. In 2008, it was acquired by Talon Merchant Capital and its name was changed to Lava Lite LLC. As of 2016, lava lamps were being sold under Lifespan brands in North America.[11] In 2018, the "Lava Lamp" brand was acquired by toy and gift maker Schylling Inc. of North Andover, MA.[12] who continue to hold the US trademark rights to both the shape and name of LAVA lamp.[13]

When the American rights were sold, Craven Walker retained the rights for the rest of the world, and took on two business partners in the late 1980s, Cressida Granger and David Mulley. They eventually took over the company and changed its name to Mathmos in 1992. Edward Craven Walker remained a consultant to them until his death in 2000. Mathmos continues to make Lava Lamps and related products. They have won two Queens Awards for Export, and the Best Multi-Media prize at the Design Week awards.[14][15] Astro lava lamp was launched in 1963 and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013.[16] Mathmos lava lamps are still made in the original factory in Poole, Dorset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lamp

As the fertility goddess, Ishtar was often associated with eggs, which were seen as a symbol of new life and rebirth. In ancient times, people would decorate eggs in honour of Ishtar and give them as gifts to one another during the spring equinox, which marked the beginning of the agricultural season.

Over time, decorating eggs spread to other cultures and religions. In Europe, for example, people began decorating eggs during the Christian celebration of Lent, a period of fasting and repentance leading up to Easter. Eggs were seen as a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the new life he brought to the world.

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In many countries, people dye eggs in bright colours and decorate them with intricate designs and patterns. Some cultures even have special games and competitions centred around egg decorating and hunting.

https://www.sbs.com.au/language/assyrian/en/podcast-episode/what-is-the-connection-between-easter-and-ishtar/duroih1gj 

The nuclear egg: challenging the dominant narratives of the atomic age

By Hebatalla Taha

August 15th 2022

While researching early Egyptian perspectives on nuclear weapons, I repeatedly came across the symbol of the egg. The atomic bomb, and atomic technology more broadly, was frequently imagined and drawn as an egg in the period after August 1945 in Egyptian magazines and popular science journals. Cartoonists, journalists, and even some scientists narrated the dawn of the atomic age through this recurring visual. The atomic bomb, some authors suggested incorrectly, was the size of an egg. The description of the atomic bomb as tiny likely emerged because of the association of atoms as miniscule, though others have offered more scientific explanations for the visual. Today, this visualization has largely faded, though it is still invoked in some jokes. 

The image of the egg can be contrasted with other unrealistically small depictions, such as Albert Camus’s description of the bomb being the size of a football. However, it is notable that the mushroom cloud, considered to be the uncontested image of the nuclear age, barely featured in early Egyptian accounts of nuclearization. By going beyond this iconic image, which reflects the specific vantage point of the US, we can better understand the agency of actors typically seen as lying beyond the scope of nuclear politics. In a recent article published in a special section of International Affairs, dealing with Feminist Interrogations of Global Nuclear Politics, I discuss the implications of the visual of the egg, alongside several other images and metaphors that featured in Egyptian nuclear imaginations. In doing so, the article challenges the dominant narratives, histories, and aesthetics of the atomic age.

https://blog.oup.com/2022/08/the-nuclear-egg-challenging-the-dominant-narratives-of-the-atomic-age/

The Arab Spring (Arabic: الربيع العربي, romanized: ar-rabīʻ al-ʻarabī) or the First Arab Spring (to distinguish from the Second Arab Spring) was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began in Tunisia in response to corruption and economic stagnation.[1][2] From Tunisia, the protests then spread to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain. Rulers were deposed (Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia in 2011, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya in 2011, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in 2011, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen in 2012) or major uprisings and social violence occurred including riots, civil wars, or insurgencies. Sustained street demonstrations took place in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. Minor protests took place in Djibouti, Mauritania, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.[3] A major slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world is ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām! (Arabic: الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام, lit. 'the people want to bring down the regime').[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring 

Hadrian's Tomb

The tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian, also called Hadrian's mole,[1] was erected on the right bank (or northern edge) of the Tiber, between 134 and 139 CE.[2] Originally the mausoleum was a decorated cylinder, with a garden top and golden quadriga. Hadrian's ashes were placed here a year after his death in Baiae in 138, together with those of his wife Sabina, and his first adopted son, Lucius Aelius, who died in 138. Following this, the remains of succeeding emperors were also placed here, the last recorded deposition being Caracalla in 217. The urns containing these ashes were probably placed in what is now known as the Treasury Room, deep within the building. Hadrian also built the Pons Aelius facing straight onto the mausoleum – it still provides a scenic approach from the center of Rome and the left bank of the Tiber, and is renowned for the Baroque additions of statues of angels holding aloft instruments of the Passion of Christ.[citation needed]

Decline

Much of the tomb contents and decorations have been lost since the building's conversion to a military fortress in 401 and its subsequent inclusion in the Aurelian Walls by Flavius Honorius Augustus. The urns and ashes were scattered by Visigoth looters during Alaric's sacking of Rome in 410, and the original decorative bronze and stone statuary were thrown down upon the attacking Goths when they besieged Rome in 537, as recounted by Procopius. An unusual survivor, however, is the capstone of a funerary urn (probably that of Hadrian), which made its way to Saint Peter's Basilica, covered the tomb of Otto II and later was incorporated into a massive Renaissance baptistery.[3] The use of spolia from the tomb in the post-Roman period was noted in the 16th century – Giorgio Vasari writes:

...in order to build churches for the use of the Christians, not only were the most honoured temples of the idols [pagan Roman gods] destroyed, but in order to ennoble and decorate Saint Peter's with more ornaments than it then possessed, they took away the stone columns from the tomb of Hadrian, now the castle of Sant'Angelo, as well as many other things which we now see in ruins.[4]

Legend holds that the Archangel Michael appeared atop the mausoleum, sheathing his sword as a sign of the end of the plague of 590, thus lending the castle its present name. A less charitable yet more apt elaboration of the legend, given the militant disposition of this archangel, was heard by the 15th-century traveler who saw an angel statue on the castle roof. He recounts that during a prolonged season of the plague, Pope Gregory I heard that the populace, even Christians, had begun revering a pagan idol at the church of Santa Agata in Suburra. A vision urged the pope to lead a procession to the church. Upon arriving, the idol miraculously fell apart with a clap of thunder. Returning to St Peter's by the Aelian Bridge, the pope had another vision of an angel atop the castle, wiping the blood from his sword on his mantle, and then sheathing it. While the pope interpreted this as a sign that God was appeased, this did not prevent Gregory from destroying more sites of pagan worship in Rome.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castel_Sant%27Angelo

The Al-Aqsa mosque compound, atop the site, is the second oldest mosque in Islam,[23] and one of the three Sacred Mosques, the holiest sites in Islam; it is revered as "the Noble Sanctuary".[24] Its courtyard (sahn)[25] can host more than 400,000 worshippers, making it one of the largest mosques in the world.[23] For Sunni and Shia Muslims alike, it ranks as the third holiest site in Islam. The plaza includes the location regarded as where the Islamic prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven,[26] and served as the first "qibla", the direction Muslims turn towards when praying. As in Judaism, Muslims also associate the site with Solomon and other prophets who are also venerated in Islam.[27] The site, and the term "al-Aqsa", in relation to the whole plaza, is also a central identity symbol for Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians.[28][29][30]

Since the Crusades, the Muslim community of Jerusalem has managed the site through the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf. The site, along with the whole of East Jerusalem (which includes the Old City), was controlled by Jordan from 1948 until 1967 and has been occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967. Shortly after capturing the site, Israel handed its administration back to the Waqf under the Jordanian Hashemite custodianship, while maintaining Israeli security control.[31] The Israeli government enforces a ban on prayer by non-Muslims as part of an arrangement usually referred to as the "status quo".[32][33][34] The site remains a major focal point of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[35]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount 

On 13 May 1981, in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded by Mehmet Ali Ağca while he was entering the square. The Pope was struck twice and suffered severe blood loss. Ağca was apprehended immediately and later sentenced to life in prison by an Italian court. The Pope forgave Ağca for the assassination attempt.[1] He was pardoned by Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi at the Pope's request and was deported to Turkey in June 2000. Ağca converted to Roman Catholicism in 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Pope_John_Paul_II

Shanksville is a borough in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, United States. It has a population of 197 as of the 2020 U.S. census.[2] It is part of the Somerset, Pennsylvania Micropolitan Statistical Area and is located 78 miles (126 km) southeast of Pittsburgh and 226 miles (364 km) west of Philadelphia.

Shanksville garnered global attention during the September 11 attacks when United Airlines Flight 93, bound from Newark, New Jersey for San Francisco, crashed in adjacent Stonycreek Township after its passengers rebelled against the flight's al-Qaeda terrorist hijackers. It was the only one of the four hijacked planes that failed to reach the terrorists' intended target.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanksville,_Pennsylvania

Pope John Paul II (Latin: Ioannes Paulus II; Italian: Giovanni Paolo II; Polish: Jan Paweł II; born Karol Józef Wojtyła [ˈkarɔl ˈjuzɛv vɔjˈtɨwa];[b] 18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his death in 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II 

As May 18 dawned, Mount St. Helens's activity did not show any change from the pattern of the preceding month. The rates of bulge movement and sulfur dioxide emission, and ground temperature readings did not reveal any changes indicating a catastrophic eruption. USGS volcanologist David A. Johnston was on duty at an observation post around 6 mi (10 km) north of the volcano: as of 6:00 am, Johnston's measurements did not indicate any unusual activity.[9]

At 8:32 am, a magnitude-5.1 earthquake centered directly below the north slope triggered that part of the volcano to slide,[31] approximately 7–20 seconds after the shock,[9] followed a few seconds later by the main volcanic blast. The landslide, the largest subaerial landslide in recorded history, traveled at 110 to 155 mph (177 to 249 km/h) and moved across Spirit Lake's west arm. Part of it hit a 1,150 ft-high (350 m) ridge about 6 mi (10 km) north.[9] Some of the slide spilled over the ridge, but most of it moved 13 mi (21 km) down the North Fork Toutle River, filling its valley up to 600 feet (180 m) deep with avalanche debris.[31] An area of about 24 sq mi (62 km2) was covered, and the total volume of the deposit was about 0.7 cu mi (2.9 km3).[9]

Scientists were able to reconstruct the motion of the landslide from a series of rapid photographs by Gary Rosenquist, who was camping 11 mi (18 km) away from the blast 46°18′49″N 122°02′12″W.[9] Rosenquist, his party, and his photographs survived because the blast was deflected by local topography 1 mi (1.6 km) short of his location.[32]

Sound of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, as heard from 140 miles away

Duration: 44 seconds.0:44

Amateur recording of a series of booms produced by the eruption, as heard from the town of Newport, Oregon (audio filtered and amplified).

Problems playing this file? See media help.

Most of St. Helens's former north side became a rubble deposit 17 mi (27 km) long, averaging 150 ft (46 m) thick; the slide was thickest at 1 mi (1.6 km) below Spirit Lake and thinnest at its western margin.[9] The landslide temporarily displaced the waters of Spirit Lake to the ridge north of the lake, in a giant wave about 600 ft (180 m) high.[33] This, in turn, created a 295 ft (90 m) avalanche of debris consisting of the returning waters and thousands of uprooted trees and stumps. Some of these remained intact with roots, but most had been sheared off at the stump seconds earlier by the blast of superheated volcanic gas and ash that had immediately followed and overtaken the initial landslide. The debris was transported along with the water as it returned to its basin, raising the surface level of Spirit Lake by about 200 ft (61 m).[9]

Four decades after the eruption, floating log mats persist on Spirit Lake and nearby St. Helens Lake, changing position with the wind. The rest of the trees, especially those that were not completely detached from their roots, were turned upright by their own weight and became waterlogged, sinking into the muddy sediments at the bottom where they are in the process of becoming petrified in the anaerobic and mineral-rich waters. This provides insight into other sites with a similar fossil record.[34]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Helens

Updated May 18, 2023 Defense Primer: Directed-Energy Weapons Both the 2022 National Defense Strategy and the House Armed Services Committee’s bipartisan Future of Defense Task Force Report have identified directed energy as a technology that could have a significant impact on U.S. national security in the years to come. As the Department of Defense (DOD) continues to invest in directed-energy (DE) weapons, Congress may consider implications for defense authorizations, appropriations, and oversight. Overview DOD defines DE weapons as those using concentrated electromagnetic energy, rather than kinetic energy, to “incapacitate, damage, disable, or destroy enemy equipment, facilities, and/or personnel.” DE weapons include high-energy lasers (HEL) and high-powered microwave (HPM) weapons; other DE weapons, such as particle beam weapons, are outside the scope of this In Focus. HELs might be used by ground forces in short-range air defense (SHORAD), counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS), or counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar (C-RAM) missions. The weapons might be used to “dazzle” (i.e., temporarily disable) or damage satellites and sensors. This could in turn interfere with intelligence-gathering operations; military cmmunications; and positioning, navigation, and timing systems used for weapons targeting. In addition, HELs could theoretically provide options for boost-phase missile intercept, given their speed-of-light travel time; however, experts disagree on the affordability, technological feasibility, and utility of this application. In general, HELs might offer lower costs per shot and— assuming access to a sufficient power supply—deeper magazines compared with traditional munitions. (Although a number of different types of HELs exist, many of the United States’ current programs are solid state lasers, which are fueled by electrical power. As a result, the cost per shot is equivalent to the cost of the electrical power required to fire the shot.) This could in turn produce a favorable costexchange ratio for the defender, whose marginal costs would be significantly lower than those of the aggressor.

Similarly, HPM weapons could provide a nonkinetic means of disabling adversary electronics and communications systems. These weapons could potentially generate effects over wider areas than HELs, which emit a narrower beam of energy. As a result, some analysts have noted that HPM weapons might provide more effective area defense against missile salvos and swarms of drones. HPM weapons have also been considered for use as nonlethal “heat ray” systems for crowd control. Directed-Energy Weapons Programs A number of countries are investing in directed-energy weapons programs. This In Focus discusses a selection of unclassified DE weapons programs in three leading military powers: the United States, China, and Russia. United States DOD requested approximately $1 billion for unclassified DE programs in FY2024. (For additional information about specific U.S. DE weapons programs, see CRS Report R44175, Navy Lasers, Railgun, and Gun-Launched Guided Projectile: Background and Issues for Congress, by Ronald O'Rourke, and CRS Report R45098, U.S. Army WeaponsRelated Directed Energy (DE) Programs: Background and Potential Issues for Congress, by Andrew Feickert.) DOD does not currently have any DE programs of record. DOD directed energy programs are coordinated by the Principal Director for Directed Energy within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD[R&E]). The Principal Director for Directed Energy is additionally responsible for development and oversight of the Directed Energy Roadmap. According to OUSD(R&E), DOD’s current DE roadmap outlines DOD’s plan to increase power levels of DE weapons from around 150 kilowatts (kW—a unit of power), as is currently feasible, to 300 kW by FY2023, “with goal milestones to achieve 500 kW class with reduced size and weight by FY2025 and to further reduce size and weight and increase power to MW [megawatt] levels by FY2026.” For reference, although there is no consensus regarding the precise power level that would be needed to neutralize different target sets, some analysts believe that lasers of around 100 kW could engage unmanned aircraft systems, small boats, rockets, artillery, and mortars, whereas lasers of around 300 kW could additionally engage cruise missiles flying in certain profiles (i.e., flying across—rather than at—the laser). Lasers of 1 MW could potentially neutralize ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons. In addition to the DE roadmap, OUSD(R&E) manages the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI), which former Principal Director for Directed Energy Dr. Jim Trebes notes is “to demonstrate laser output power scaling while maintaining or improving beam quality and efficiency.” HELSI is intended to strengthen the defense industrial base for potential future directed energy weapons by providing near-term prototyping opportunities for industry partners. Dr. Trebes additionally notes that OUSD(R&E) has completed a DOD-wide Laser Lethality Analysis Process Review to identify future needs for the Department and best practices for DE development and use. According to OUSD(R&E), DOD is also testing a Directed Defense Primer: Directed-Energy Weapons https://crsreports.congress.gov Energy Lethality Database that is to serve as a searchable repository for the department’s DE analyses. China According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, China has been developing DE weapons since at least the 1980s and has made steady progress in developing HPM and increasingly powerful HELs. China has reportedly developed a 30-kilowatt roadmobile HEL, LW-30, designed to engage unmanned aircraft systems and precision-guided weapons. Reports indicate that China is also developing an airborne HEL pod. According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, China is additionally pursuing DE weapons to disrupt, degrade, or damage satellites and their sensors and possibly already has a limited capability to employ laser systems against satellite sensors. China [has likely fielded] a ground-based laser weapon that can counter low-orbit spacebased sensors ... and by the mid-to-late 2020s, it may field higher power systems that extend the threat to the structures of non-optical satellites. Russia Russia has been conducting DE weapons research since the 1960s, with a particular emphasis on HELs. Russia has reportedly deployed the Peresvet ground-based HEL with several mobile intercontinental ballistic missile units. Although little is publicly known about Peresvet, including its power level, some analysts assert it is to dazzle satellites and provide point defense against unmanned aircraft systems. Russia’s deputy defense minister Alexei Krivoruchko has stated that efforts are underway to increase Peresvet’s power level and to deploy it on military aircraft. Reports suggest that Russia may also be developing HPMs as well as additional HELs capable of performing antisatellite missions. Potential Issues and Questions for Congress Technological Maturity Directed-energy weapons programs continue to face questions about their technological maturity, including the ability to improve beam quality and control to militarily useful levels and the ability to meet size, weight, and power (SWaP) and cooling requirements for integration into current platforms. Some DE systems are small enough to fit on military vehicles, but many require larger and/or fixed platforms that could potentially limit deployment options and operational utility. In what ways, if any, are DOD technology maturation efforts reducing the SWaP and cooling requirements of DE systems? Weapons Characteristics Although HELs may offer a lower cost per shot than traditional weapons such as missiles, they are also subject to a number of limitations. For example, atmospheric conditions (e.g., rain, fog, obscurants) and SWaP and cooling requirements can limit the range and beam quality of HELs, in turn reducing their effectiveness. Traditional weapons, in contrast, are not affected by these factors. How, if at all, might HEL limitations be mitigated by technological developments, concepts of operation, or other methods? What impact might a failure to mitigate these limitations have on future military operations? Mission Utility Given the strengths and weaknesses of DE weapons, DOD is continuing to examine their role within the military. DOD is additionally conducting multiple utility studies to analyze potential concepts of operation for DE weapons and to assess the scenarios in which they might be militarily useful. How might Congress draw upon the conclusions of these analyses as it conducts oversight of DE weapons programs? What is the appropriate balance between DE weapons and traditional munitions within the military’s portfolio of capabilities? Defense Industrial Base Some analysts have expressed concerns that, in the past, DOD did not provide stable funding for DE weapons programs or sufficient opportunities for the DE workforce. According to OUSD(R&E), HELSI is intended to address these concerns by providing industry with assured prototyping opportunities. In what ways, if any, has HELSI strengthened the defense industrial base for DE weapons? What, if any, challenges does the base continue to face and how might they be mitigated?

Intelligence Requirements

Some analysts have questioned whether DOD has sufficient knowledge of adversary DE weapons systems and materials to develop its weapons requirements. DOD is currently attempting to further define its DE collection requirements for the intelligence community (IC) through the Directed Energy Lethality Intelligence initiative. To what extent, if at all, is this initiative improving connectivity between DOD’s DE community and the IC? What collection requirements, if any, remain? Coordination within DOD Pursuant to Section 219 of the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (P.L. 114-328), OUSD(R&E)’s Principal Director for Directed Energy is tasked with coordinating DE efforts across DOD and with developing DOD’s Directed Energy Roadmap, which is to guide development efforts. To what extent are the military departments and defense agencies adhering to this roadmap? What, if any, additional authorities or structural changes would be required to ensure proper coordination throughout DOD? Related CRS Products CRS Report R46925, Department of Defense Directed Energy Weapons: Background and Issues for Congress, coordinated by Kelley M. Sayler. This report was originally co-authored by John Hoehn. Kelley M. Sayler, Analyst in Advanced Technology and Global Security IF11882 Defense Primer: Directed-Energy Weapons https://crsreports.congress.gov | IF11882 · VERSION 8 · UPDATED Disclaimer This document was prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). CRS serves as nonpartisan shared staff to congressional committees and Members of Congress. It operates solely at the behest of and under the direction of Congress. Information in a CRS Report should not be relied upon for purposes other than public understanding of information that has been provided by CRS to Members of Congress in connection with CRS’s institutional role. CRS Reports, as a work of the United States Government, are not subject to copyright protection in the United States. Any CRS Report may be reproduced and distributed in its entirety without permission from CRS. However, as a CRS Report may include copyrighted images or material from a third party, you may need to obtain the permission of the copyright holder if you wish to copy or otherwise use copyrighted material"

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11882

It's hard to see how the fishing industry will pick itself up again. Takeshi is moving away from the coast as is his neighbor and fellow fisherman. His wife has refused to return here since the tsunami hit. At the age of 77, he is unlikely to be able to start from scratch. But he picks up any remnants of his fishing gear he can find, just in case. What is left intact barely fills one small basket. His neighbor finds his clock. It has stopped at 3:22pm -- the exact moment his life changed and countless others ended." Misplaced trust: 30-foot tsunami wall didn't save Japanese village by Paul Hancocks

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/31/japan.tsunami.village/index.html

Skull and Bones, The Order, Order 322 or The Brotherhood of Death is an undergraduate senior secret student society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut."

"There is a secret that binds the two men who would be the next leader of the free world. President George W Bush and Senator John Kerry both spent a portion of their youth laying bare their sex lives in Gothic rituals presided over by a human skull and the skeletal remains of various other animal species in a windowless building known as the Tomb. They also formed an unusual attachment to the number 322, which holds a special resonance for the club's members." Skeletons in the closet

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/20/usa.internationaleducationnews

"It is perhaps worth noting, in light of George W.'s controversial episode at Bob Jones University and the specter of anti-Catholicism, that at one point in the proceedings every initiate kisses the slippered toe of the "Pope." At last the initiate is formally dubbed a Knight of Eulogia. Amid more raucous ritual he is cast from the room into the waiting arms of the patriarchs."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/george-w-knight-of-eulogia/304686/

"A major landslide occurred 4 miles (6.4 km) east of Oso, Washington, United States, on March 22, 2014 (3/22/2014), at 10:37 a.m. local time. A portion of an unstable hill collapsed, sending mud and debris to the south across the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, engulfing a rural neighborhood, and covering an area of approximately 1 square mile (2.6 km2). Forty-three people were killed and 49 homes and other structures destroyed."

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide

Published: 10 October 1996

Russian documents Set out 'tectonic weapon' research

Carl Levitin 

Moscow. The first official details have emerged in Moscow of ambitious research into 'tectonic warfare' carried out by the former Soviet Union and subsequently by the government of Russia, and involving atte mpts to stimulate 'artificial' earthquakes as weapons of destruction. According to documents obtained by the newspaper Moscow News, two research programmes, the first known as ' Mercury ' and the second as ' Volcano', were aimed at creating new earthquake epicentres by using underground nuclear explosions . Geophysicists are aware that impending earthquakes may be triggered by underground nuclear explosions . But Western geophysicists remain sceptical about tectonic warfare and have all but abandoned research after two unsuccessful phases of activity in the 1960s and 1980s, says Roger Clark, a lecturer in geophysics at the University of Leeds. Clark is not at all surprised that th e Russians tried to create earthquakes and control their location electromagnetically, however. "This sort of science is very much part of their heritage. We don't think it is impossible, or wrong , but past experience suggests it is very, very unlikely. "

The programme , which was secretly launched by the Communist rulers of the former Soviet Union in 1987, and has been unofficially known to Western geophysicists for several years, is now believed to have been abandoned. It would certainly contravene the terms of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Russia signe d at the United Nations in Geneva last month . The Mercury project was launched in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, but came to a halt when the republic became independent. It was superseded by the Volcano project. Three underground nuclear tests are believed to have taken place at sites in Kyrgyzstan.

According to the documents, the Mercury project was launched by a secret decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. The objective was to "develop a methodology for remote operation on an earthquake epicentre by using weak seismic fields and research possibilities of transferring the seismic energy of an explosion ".

The documents say that the Mercury project involved 22 scientific and industrial organizations, including the Geological Institute of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences in Baku. The remit extended to developing the electronic equipment to be installed aboard space satellites that would control the tectonic weapon. The scientists were given three years to complete research, with testing planned for 1990.

During the research phase, Azerbaijani scientists grew increasingly confident and, according to the documents, were sure that " after [a] nuclear explosion, subterranean energy may accumulate at huge distances from the epicentre and reach massive capacity, after which the next directed explosion can release it all ".

Underground testing began at the town of Batken in Kyrgyzstan, and was directed by lkram Ke rimov , of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences. The documents say that scientists detonated an underground nuclear charge and tried to control the direction of seismic energy release d using British-built equipment known as 'system 9690 ' .

A report prepared by the Mozhaisky Military Engineering Institute concluded that the test had been a success. But progress slowed considerably following Azerbaijan's independence from the Soviet Union. At about this time , Russia embarked on a more comprehensive tectonic warfare programme known as the Volcano project. The Earth Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) became the project headquarters .

Research was scheduled to be completed in 1992, with underground testing beginning the following year. The final test was carried out at a place code-named S36NZ-0Kh; Moscow News believes the letters 'NZ' refer to Novaya Zemlya, where Soviet nuclear testing began in the 1950s."

https://www.nature.com/articles/383471a0 

Extrusive (Volcanic) Rock Classification

Volcanic rocks are classified based on their chemical composition as determined by analytical techniques that identify the proportion of major elements found in them. Unlike for plutonic rocks, it is not possible to classify volcanic rocks based on the minerals found in them.

Some volcanic rocks contain some crystals (phenocrysts) that grew in the magma chamber prior to eruption, but others contain no crystals at all or are volcanic glass (obsidian).

In addition to the mafic (low silica) basalt, and the silicic rhyolite, several subdivisions exist between the two compositional end members.

https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/igneous.htm

THE CONCLAVE OR CELESTIAL CITY

Containing an epitome of the twelve degrees of the Philosophic Chamber of the Ancient and Accepted Rite.

The twelve degrees preceding the Rose Croix are as we have shown, associated with the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

From these fixed signs, the Rite passes to the Sun, Moon and the Planets.

From these the Rite looks to the four elements or four components of man, etc., and from these it considers the spirit and matter, or infinite and finite of the Universe and of man.

In the Rose Croix Degree, we have seen the son of masonry and heard the promise of universal peace and joy. Now let us proceed to seek the methods of realization, and learn how to restore the lost Eden and reedify the Celestial City." 

Scotch Rite Masonry Illustrated

THE COMPLETE RITUAL OF THE

Ancient AND Accepted Scottish Rite,

PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED.

Volume 2

https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/scotchritemasonr02blan/scotchritemasonr02blan.pdf 

ALM 3 - NAZI JESUITS

In late May, 2003, The Voice Of Israel radio broadcast a report from Rome. After visiting his papal pals, Shimon Peres decided to run for chairman of the Israeli Labor Party. The eighty year old Peres promised to keep Israel on the Roadmap and fulfil the promises of Oslo.

Peres, educated in his youth at a Jesuit school in Poland, is the highest ranking operative run by the Jesuits in Israel and his task is spreading chaos ending with national destruction. The destruction of the Jews is a primary goal of the Jesuits and I am presenting proof of this assertion through a book that collected the facts

brilliantly but missed the most obvious conclusions. I speak of Unholy Trinity by Mark Aarons and John Loftus.

This is not the first time Aarons and Loftus collected evidence with flair but missed the whole picture. In their far better known, the Secret War Against The Jews, the authors exposed the likes of the Dulles brothers and the Harriman clan and their machinations against the Jews without understanding their direct connections to

the Council On Foreign Relations and ultimately, the Jesuits.

I pointed this out to John Loftus several years ago and he replied that he didn't miss the connection, he didn't believe it. However, since then, he has grudgingly budged a bit, twice writing that my own evidence gathering was, at least, "interesting."

So let's help the boys again, shall we? I am citing the St. Martin's Griffin edition of Unholy Trinity. I have no intention of describing the gruesome acts of the diabolical characters portrayed in the book, nor will I even identify their roles. For that, get the book. My intention is to expose the Jesuit connection to the Holocaust, and the escape of the perpetrators to the four corners of the planet by way of the Jesuit's Ratlines to safety.

Before we examine Unholy Trinity, it would be helpful to supply some historical background. John Daniel does so admirably in his book, The GRAND DESIGN, (CHJ Publishing, 1999).

pp 22: American intelligence had been taking an active interest in the Vatican's response to the 'Red Menace' for some time. Indeed 'high-ranking Allied intelligence officers' were reportedly in 'close relations with high Vatican dignitaries' well before the Nazi collapse. In October 1945 the Americans noted the 'preponderant influence which the Jesuit fathers, who always present concrete and well-reasoned projects, tend to exercize at the Curia. According to their source, the Jesuits were leading the Holy See's struggle with Moscow, and the, 'one positive step so far taken by the Vatican has been the organization of a penetration program; especially resourceful that is being sent into the area to lead the catholic elements and through their zeal and example to keep these elements from wavering. Most of these agents are Jesuits.'

pp 31: Father Burkhart Schneider, a German Jesuit, is also certain that, 'Bishop Hudal was not at all close to the Vatican.' Schneider, who prepared the Holy See's defence of Pius XII's wartime role, was adamant that Hudal was 'very much on the fringes.'

pp 57: In 1932, Draganovic went to Rome to study at the Papal Oriental Institute and the Jesuit Gregorian University...Draganovic had returned to Rome in August 1943, representing the Ustachi and the Croatian Red Cross. This allowed him to build his escape routes for Nazi war criminals.

pp 58: One of Draganovic's most important lay colleagues was Miha Krek. Leader of the Catholic Slovene People's Party, Krek worked for British Intelligence.

Draganovich's own contacts reached to the very top of the Italian Interior Ministry.

The two men had another thing in common: high level Vatican contacts.

pp 59: In October 1945 the OSS had identified the Jesuits as key Vatican agents in a 'penetration program' inside Communist-occupied areas. pps 61, 68: Vajta worked for the Hungarian secret service before the war. He had also been a senior Nazi propagandist for German-sponsored newspapers...that

poisoned Hungarian public opinion... Vajta arrived in New York on 16 December 1947...The Embassy had passed the details of Vajta's trip together with a list of people he wished to meet in America. These included Cardinal Spellman, Jesuit leader Father La Farge and a host of emigre political leaders.

pp 79: Father Draganovic was the man who could lead to Pavelic's arrest and extradition...The Jesuits were among his closest Church helpers at this time, assisting his plans to leave Italy by arranging for his passage to Spain.

pp 162: For security reasons, Pius XII stated that he would not meet with Muller directly, but would receive his communications through a Jesuit priest, Father Leiber, a Vatican archivist, whom the pope trusted absolutely...On October 27 Muller was summoned to meet Father Leiber at the Jesuit Gregorian University.

pp 165: This may have been Turkul's first espionage work for the Jesuits... It is perhaps only a coincidence that Turkul was running his own Japanese Ratline into the Soviet Union for the Abwehr at the same time as the Jesuits. Even if Turkul had no direct Jesuit connection in 1938, his Abwehr boss certainly did...Turkul's NTS

network had longstanding relations with British intelligence. Several of Turkul's close associates were Uniate and Orthodox clergymen who were well known to the Jesuits. Indeed, the Jesuits had built an entire college in Rome to train Uniate seminarians.

pp 175: A united Eastern Church had been the Vatican's dream since the great Orthodox schism tore Christianity apart in 1024 A.D. The hybrid Uniate Church was a compromise devised in the sixteenth century by the Jesuits and encouraged by the Habsburg dynasty.

pp 181: The centrepiece of Wachter's strategy was the five million Catholic Uniates.

Their religious leader Archbishop Szepticky pointed the way by blessing the Galician SS Division. The Galician SS, complete with Uniate chaplains, would soon be a Catholic army in crusade against the 'Godless Bolsheviks.'

Aarons and Loftus, whether they intended to or not, provide evidence of Jesuit manipulations in the rise of nazism and the near total disappearance of European Jewry. To make certain their goal of the complete extermination of the Jews was reached, they saved their carefully cultivated exterminators. With that understood,

see if you find a pattern in the Roadmap of recent events:

http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters07-02-162744.asp?reg=MIDEAST

"Spain offers to host Middle East peace conference

MADRID, July 2 — Spain offered on Wednesday to host a Middle East peace conference and a top Palestinian official said he would be glad to see the conference held in Madrid.

Madrid hosted a 1991 conference that launched a series of Arab-Israeli peace moves. Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio took advantage of a meeting with Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath to push Madrid's claims to hold a second conference now Middle East peace efforts have resumed.

''For Spain, it would be a very great honour to host a conference...If such a decision is taken, we would facilitate it, by providing a venue for a conference,'' Palacio told a news conference held jointly with Shaath.

Shaath said the Palestinian administration would be ''very happy and proud if the next peace conference were here in Madrid.''

He said the Spanish government had tried to host a peace conference last year but the time had not been right. ''According to the (Middle East peace) road map, this conference will be necessary at the end of 2003 or at the beginning of 2004,'' he said.

Palacio and Shaath were in an upbeat mood with both saying it was a ''moment of hope'' in the Middle East.

Palestinians and Israelis have this week taken the first tentative steps to implement the ''road map,'' which envisages a Palestinian state by 2005 in the West Bank and Gaza alongside a secure Israel

Shaath said he believed an agreement on Jerusalem, which both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital and is seen as one of the toughest obstacles to overcome, was possible.

''I really don't see anything as impossible. On the contrary, I see that we can reach an agreement,'' he said.

East Jerusalem would be the capital of Palestine and the other part of the city the capital of Israel, he said.

Both Palacio and Shaath said they believed that three Palestinians given refuge in Spain last year should at some point return to Bethlehem.

The three were among 13 Palestinians flown to European countries in May 2002 under a deal which ended a siege by Israeli forces of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.

''There is a European agreement for all of the Palestinians (who left last year) to return to Bethlehem,'' Shaath said.

Palacio and Shaath signed an agreement under which Spain will provide 10 million euros ($11.54 million) in aid to the Palestinians this year to fund health, education and job creation. Some 80 vehicles were expected to be shipped from Spain soon for the use of the Palestinian police."

Shabtai Tzvi, Labor Zionism and the Holocaust  

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B66Pc9x2hkIrV2Y3QWxPbkpKYWc/view?resourcekey=0-5ak831cRNQohyyjZYfFKvw 

– Chapter One – Vatican Moves on Temple Mount 

Within two months of the end of Camp David the Palestinian Authority birthed the second intifada – a terrorist war on Israel, but giving Israel a continual bloody nose did not yield the desired result. Israel soundly defeated the second intifada moving the Palestinians back to square one. Present Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has now implemented a different tactic: to get the UN to step in and impose a solution on Israel. US Secretary of State John Kerry restarted negotiations in July of 2013 bringing Israeli and Palestinian negotiators together in Washington to restart formal negotiations after a more than three year void. A nine month deadline was set which ended April 31st 2014. How did the talks go? What was being worked out behind the scenes? No one is talking, at least not to the press. US Secretary of State John Kerry clarified at the outset of the talks which he labored so intensively to restart that he would be the only one authorized to speak on their progress. "The negotiations", he said, "would only succeed if held far from the bright camera lights." Only if the negotiators were not required to report to their own domestic audience after each meeting did the talks have any chance of succeeding. Therefore, Kerry said, he would be the only one discussing the progress. But he never revealed much beyond platitudes about the need for peace and the courage of both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in deciding to reengage. The talks failed to meet their deadline. Just weeks after the last round of the U.S. sponsored peace negotiations faltered, Pope Francis embraced the divided Middle East leaders to preside over Christian, Jewish and Muslim prayers at the Vatican in a bid to revive the collapsed peace talks. The Associated Press reported: Vatican officials have insisted Pope Francis has no political agenda by inviting the two leaders to pray at his home other than to rekindle a desire for peace among the two parties. However, the meeting could have significance on the ground beyond 10 mere symbolism. The meeting will also cement Francis' reputation as a leader unhindered by diplomatic and theological protocol who is willing to go out on a limb for the sake of peace. John Kerry had made a previous January pit stop in Rome to discuss the peace process between Israel and Palestine, this would indicate he knew the talks were not going well. With Pope Francis' visit to the Holy Land in May and subsequent invitation of the parties to the Vatican, the United States had hoped the Pope as a key ally could push both sides back to the negotiating table. The Vatican Prayer Summit seems to have gone very well. Time will tell. Over the course of the last decade the State of Israel has been subsidizing nonprofit organizations that advocate the building of a New Temple atop Jerusalem’s holiest site: the Temple Mount. The Israel Education and the Culture Ministries have transferred substantial amounts of funding to the non-governmental organization known as The Temple Institute. Should this be an indication to the Palestinian Authority that it needs to make certain major concessions to get what it wants? Perhaps the trump card Abbas will need to play is to grant access to the Temple Mount for Jews, a partition to allow Israel to build a Temple on the Temple Mount. Until the Palestinian Authority plays this card, Israel may move no further. Add to the mix the present Israel-Vatican negotiations over the Holy Basin and this is the move that the whole world is waiting for, peace between the three great Abrahamic faiths, sealed by equal access to the Holy Basin and the most holy site of all, the Temple Mount. The term “Holy Basin” refers to the area of the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, Mount Zion and a variety of Christian holy sites which the administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton recommended be administered under a special regime. Pope Francis, upon celebrating his first Christmas as the Vatican State leader, prayed for a "favorable outcome" to the peace process between the parties, and called for dialogue to end the conflicts. Though John Kerry is still not talking we can observe the parties as they jockey for position. In recognition of Bible Prophecy, the belief that we are on the verge of the Mark of the Beast One World Money System, we can also anticipate the Temple Mount play about to begin. I will expose in this book the fallacy of the counter-reformation futurist scheme of prophecy as a completely unbiblical interpretation. However most of the Evangelical and nominal Christian world has totally bought into this view through Seminary/Ministry indoctrination and Corporate Christian Media exposure, and not because of sound biblical interpretation. Some may even regard as conspiratorial, the mainstream re-release of the Left Behind Movie with Actor Nicholas Cage portraying the main character as an attempt to further reinforce in the minds of all, this perception of biblical prophecy in order to condition the masses for the play about to begin. Because they see the world stage shaping to fulfill what they have been led to believe is sound interpretation, a "Left Behind Rapture” scenario, this false view of prophecy is reinforced in the mind of not only its adherents, but also includes those who have been merely exposed to the specific media through popular movies such as Left Behind and the fictional book series. Is it possible that false prophecy can be fulfilled? The rapture theories have always been in dispute: pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib disputes have risen up in exclusively evangelical circles of recent history, so that when 12 "true believers" don't suddenly disappear this element will easily go by the wayside when all see a New Jewish Temple begin to be built. Will this be a part of the great delusion that will come upon the whole earth? It seems that this great prophetic delusion has already overcome practically the entire American Evangelical and Christian World! Let me quote the late Jewish Israeli Researcher and Author, Joel Bainerman from his article:

The Vatican Agenda: How Does The Vatican View The Legitimacy of Israel's Claims To Jerusalem? 

...The institution of "The Vatican" is not understood by Israelis and Jews. The conventional wisdom you get from the spokespersons in Israeli government ministries and the conventional Israeli media is "both sides have great intentions to do good" and that's about it. When it comes to Israel's bi-lateral affairs, nothing much gets investigated by the Israeli media. Thus a secret deal could be done between the Vatican and the State of Israel and nobody in Israel would ever find out about it. In fact, that is exactly what happened. 

What Does The Vatican Want? 

It can't be that the Vatican is only interested in "access to their Holy Sites" in Jerusalem. They already have that as well as legal jurisdiction under Israeli law for their institutions and assets in Jerusalem... It is something else, which the Vatican wants... to have certain versions of events be played out for them to stand in front of mankind and proclaim: our Messiah has returned." Of course, to the Jews, this Messiah will be as false as the first one was supposed to be. Don't matter. This is the goal of the Vatican and this is what all Israelis need to worry about. 

The Vatican/Roman Catholic's version of events is this: 

They know this isn't the end of the story that the Jewish G-d had in mind, but that doesn't mean they won't try and engineer their own ending to the story. So what if it is fraudulent. Doesn't matter, that is their game plan and that is what matters and that is what Israeli Jews need to be better informed about. It is important for everyone to know what The Vatican has up its sleeve because it directly relates to our existence and our future destiny as an independent nation. This, a very powerful force is scheming to get control of the Old City of Jerusalem so you better know why and how the Vatican intends to do this... First, you have to realize that for centuries The Vatican has attempted to obtain control of Jerusalem, which started with the Crusades. For them to convince the world that the Messiah they put on the world's stage is going to be accepted as genuine, they need to perform this play in the Old City. The story of this production is that this "Messiah" will merge the three monotheistic religions, usher in peace and harmony in the world, and solve the Middle East conflict. The location for this "production" will be in none other than the Old City of Jerusalem. This so-called "Messiah" that will be proclaimed, will be a false one and it will insist that by having a "world government" (i.e., the United Nations) the world peace and harmony will be ushered in. This will be a lie, and a fraud, but never mind. In our world, reality isn't important. Public perceptions are. The end result is the stripping of Israel's sovereignty as an independent nation giving way to a "regional bloc of nations" in the Middle East. Israel will be pressured to accede to these demands by all world bodies and the superpowers on the claim that "this is the only way to solve the Middle East conflict). In order to the Jews to go along they will convince them that with the "Messiah" having appeared for the Jews, it is time to start rebuilding the Third Temple - what they call "Solomon's Temple". This version of events is widely available through a simple search on the Internet as there are many Christian groups and organizations (the majority of which who are very pro-Israel) who don’t buy into these beliefs and thus are against them. I didn’t come up with the theory - I am just bringing it to the attention of the Israeli public. Make no mistake about it. The Old City of Jerusalem, as well as most of the eastern half of the city, is what The Vatican is after. Why? Because controlling the entire Old City of Jerusalem (and not just Church properties) and being able to build whatever they want on Mount Zion is critical for the program they have planned to put into play in our capital city. The deal that it has signed with Israel via Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres (in secret and without the approval of the 14 Knesset) gives The Church not only extraterritorial status to their properties (which is what the bi-lateral agreement the Israeli government signed with the Vatican on December 30th, 1993, put in law) but of control over the entire city as "custodians" under UN presence. In this way the Jews will give up control over the Old City. To the Vatican the Israeli people would have a problem with. To the UN, they would say, "we had no choice". www.redmoonrising.com/chamish/vaticanagenda.htm

Evangelicals today are waiting with bated breath for a New Jewish Temple to be built and a Priest-Temple Sacrifice system to be resumed. They seem to have no problem with this wrong sacrifice for sin (according to the Gospel) taking place, but reserve the title, Abomination of Desolation for the “Left Behind” Anti Christ character moving into the Temple and proclaiming himself to be God. Something similar to this may or may not happen. Entertain if you will the idea that there are powerful forces at work in this world with the motivation to take advantage of this very compelling and popular, but specious view of prophecy, a juxtaposed seventieth week of Daniel, or we could call it The Seven Year Tribulation Deception. At the time for the building of a Jewish Temple a figure will arise who fits the bill of the Anti-Christ of the popular pseudo prophecy. This Anti-Christ character will follow the popular view close enough to be accepted by the adherents of this Futurist/Left Behind Rapture orientation to be misidentified as the True Anti-Christ, while at the same time through popular media manipulation he will be accepted by the world as a Peacemaker when he makes a mid-east peace deal which includes the building of the New Temple. To follow the script, three to four years into this Treaty the deal will begin to unravel and have to be abandoned. Perhaps a conflict will arise out of opposition to the Third Temple. The deal will be broken! Islam will most likely at some point balk so any deal with their leadership to allow it is doomed from the start. The Vatican cannot allow it to be completed because any sacrifice other than their bloodless sacrifice of trans-substantiation is unacceptable. Only Orthodox Jewry desire a Third Temple as true believers. Evangelical adherents are true believers with a different motivation, which is to bring about events that will precipitate the return of Christ, however they are unwitting participants in the design of the counter-reformation eschatology that they hold so dear, false prophecy. We can only speculate that these events will likely be accompanied by a major multilateral military conflict or threat in the mid-east, and the world will cry for peace as would be expected. Then will step onto the scene the True Anti-Christ bringing peace to that conflict. Because he fulfills the false prophecy and vanquishes the first treaty breaking Pseudo Anti-Christ he will be accepted as the fulfillment of the popular prophecies of the return of Christ proclaiming that he is The Vicar Of Christ, His Replacement on Earth and the true meaning and fulfillment of Bible Prophecy. He may propose the building of a Synagogue for the Jews and a Cathedral to represent Universal Christianity which will accompany Islam's Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, thus uniting the Three Great Abrahamic Religions as one, bringing peace to the region and the entire world. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if [it were] possible, they shall deceive the very elect. (Mat 24:24) The fulfillment of this false prophecy will delude the entire world and even the Elect, if it were possible. True Bible Believers will suddenly be the majority dissenters and will be demonized for all the ills that have plagued the world and precipitated the former crisis; eventually Social Justice will require that they be eliminated for the good of the whole. This has happened before, it was called The Inquisition, and The Bible tells us that it will happen again. Past Inquisitions have lasted extended periods of time, so the coming crusades may even go on for decades. How comforting the thought of relegating tribulation to a mere seven or three and a half year period which may even then be escaped by a “pre- or midtribulation rapture” based entirely upon a the seven year tribulation deception. How many hundreds of millions of bible believing martyrs would have benefited from a rapture type escape? And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, 16 both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Rev 13:15-17) The Bible tells us about the mark of the beast which will be necessary so “that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark.” Receiving this mark will be the test of whether you are or are not a part of the New World Social-Economic Order. True Bible Believers will need to discern exactly who or what this beast is and what is or does this mark represent. For that we must turn to The Bible and true prophecy. If you are a True Bible Believer you will not just dismiss the things that I am exposing here without due investigation. If Daniel's seventieth week is truly past then every prophecy that is based on this seven year period being future is tenuous at best. I challenge all to find that gap between the sixty-ninth and seventieth week for themselves - it is not there - so don’t feel bad if you cannot find it, even Chuck Missler will not take up the challenge to Show Me The Gap. This revelation changes everything prophetic. Be not deceived. 

Jerusalem Corpus Separatum 

...Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. (Luke 21:24) 

Corpus Separatum (Latin for "separated body") is a term used to describe the Jerusalem area in the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. According to the plan the city would be placed under international regime, conferring it a special status due to its shared religious importance. The Corpus Separatum was one of the main issues of the Lausanne Conference of 1949, besides the other borders between Israel and Palestine and the question of the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. The plan was adopted by the General Assembly with a two-thirds majority, although its implementation failed and the view that Jerusalem should be the capital of both Israel and Palestine internationally is widely supported now. (wikipedia)

Israel Resource Review, The Vatican's Jerusalem Agenda. Did Shimon Peres make a deal with the Vatican? 

Consider the evidence: 

On Sept. 10, '93, just three days before the signing of the Declaration of Principles in Washington, the Italian news magazine La Stampa reported that part of the peace deal was an unwritten understanding that the Vatican would receive political authority over the Old City of Jerusalem by the end of the millennium. The newspaper reported that Shimon Peres had promised the Pope to hand over the holy sites of Jerusalem the previous May and that Arafat had accepted the agreement. In March '94, the Israeli newsmagazine Shishi published an interview with Mark Halter, a French intellectual and close friend of Shimon Peres. He said he delivered a letter from Peres to the Pope the previous May, within which Peres offered the Vatican hegemony over the Old City of Jerusalem. The article detailed Peres's offer which essentially turned Jerusalem into an international city overseen by the Holy See. In March '95, the radio station Arutz Sheva announced that it had seen a cable sent by the Israeli Embassy in Rome to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem outlining the handover of the Old City of Jerusalem to the Vatican. Two days later Haaretz published the cable on its front page. The Foreign Ministry explained that the cable was genuine but someone had whited out the word "not." ie We will not transfer authority to the Vatican. Incredibly, numerous Bnei Brak rabbis who had canceled Passover meetings with Peres over the issue of the cable accepted the explanation and re-invited him to their homes. The Foreign Ministry's Legal Affairs Spokesperson, Esther Samilag, publicly complained about "various capitulations" to the Vatican. She was immediately transferred to a post at the Israeli Embassy in Katmandu, Nepal. MK Avraham Shapira announced in the Knesset that he had information that all Vatican property in Jerusalem was to become tax exempt and that large tracts of real estate on Mount Zion were given to the pope in perpetuity. Jerusalem's late Deputy Mayor Shmuel Meir announced that he had received "information that properties promised to the Vatican would be granted extra-territorial status." Beilin was forced to answer the accusations. He admitted, "Included in the Vatican Agreement is the issue of papal properties in Israel that will be resolved by a committee of experts that has already been formed." If so, this committee has not since released any proof of its existence. 

With all this in mind, how do we interpret the Vatican's current position on Jerusalem? 

The following report, circulated by MSANews may shed some light on that:

Vatican City, Jun 14, 1997 (VIS) - Archbishop Renato Martino, apostolic nuncio and Holy See permanent observer to the United Nations, spoke June 9 on the status of Jerusalem at the New York headquarters of the Path to Peace Foundation. The archbishop addressed members of this foundation as well as U.S. members of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. He began by briefly summarizing the "well-known and long-standing position of the Holy See with regard to Jerusalem. He stated that Jerusalem "for us, of course, along with the rest of the Holy Land, is that special link between heaven and earth, that place where God walked and ultimately died among men. And of course we recognize that others revere Jerusalem as the city of David and the prophets and the city known to Mohammed.... It is a spiritual treasure for all of humanity, and it is a city of two peoples, Arabs and Jews, and of the three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam." Archbishop Martino added that "in recent years it has been increasingly difficult to break through the political and media-imposed stranglehold on the question of Jerusalem." he recounted Jerusalem's recent history, recalling in particular the UN's General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 calling for Jerusalem to be considered a 'corpus separatum' under the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations," a resolution which Israel accepted. He pointed out that, in addressing the gridlock which has resulted from the 1967 Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, "the Holy See has therefore advocated the granting to Jerusalem of an 'internationally guaranteed special statute. That is the phrase used by Pope John Paul II in his 1984 Apostolic Letter 'Redemption is Anno'."

This statute "asks that regardless of how the problem of sovereignty is resolved and who is called to exercise it, there should be a supranational and international entity endowed with means adequate to insure the preservation of the special characteristics of the City, its Holy Places, the freedom to visit them, its religious and ethnic communities, a guarantee of their essential liberties, and its city plan'." The apostolic nuncio recalled the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel in 1993, when both signed the 'Fundamental Agreement." He noted Article 4 of this agreement where "both the Holy See and Israel affirm their continuing commitment to the 'Status quo' in the Christian Holy Places." He also spoke of the problems sparked by Israel's recent authorization of "a project for the construction of settlements in occupied territory in East Jerusalem" for which "there was wide-spread international condemnation." This issue, he reminded those present, was brought before the UN Security Council on March 7 and March 21 of this year, but without resolution "because the sole country on the Security Council which opposed the Resolution was the United States." An Emergency Session of the General Assembly, "organized only nine other times in the history of the United Nations" was held on April 24-25. The Holy See delegation was contacted and asked for suggestions for a Resolution, Archbishop Martino said. And he recounted the meetings, rough drafts of proposals and negotiations which followed. The approved texts of the eventual Resolution, he underlined, contained "those points championed by the Holy See.... The General Assembly has here called for 'internationally guaranteed provisions' - the equivalent of the 'internationally guaranteed special status' called for by Pope John Paul II. This is particularly noteworthy because in this case, the Arab delegations all voted for this Resolution and therefore for this provision." "The Holy Places within Jerusalem," concluded Archbishop Martino, "are not merely museum relics to be opened and closed by the dominant political authority, no matter who that might be at any given moment. They are living shrines precious to the hearts and faith of believers." 

DELSS/STATUS JERUSALEM/UN:MARTINO VIS 970616 (640)

Could that supra-national entity which will oversee the international city of Jerusalem be the Vatican just as Peres promised? And how do we react to Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert's recent announcement that he will begin negotiations with the Vatican, but "only over holy sites?" 

(used by permission of the author, Barry Chamish,) 

----------------------------------------------------------------

Even after Israel pushed it's aggressor enemies beyond Jerusalem's boundaries in 1968, Israel remained compliant to the U.N. recommendation by allowing the Islamic Waqf to maintain control over the Temple Mount. I can think of no other reason why Israel did not move in and destroy the Dome of the Rock and other Islamic edifices to take possession of the Temple Mount other than “the times of the Gentiles” prophetically spoken of by Jesus has not yet been fulfilled. The Daniel chapter two Mystery Babylon Image still stands. For the most part the world refuses to recognize Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem even though the United States Congress in 1995 overwhelmingly passed the "Jerusalem Embassy Act" stating that "Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of Israel and the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999." The provocative nature of this issue continues to prevent the actual move to this day. The facts on the ground ultimately prove that even the United States denies Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem until this very day.

Jerusalem Old City Initiative 

The Jerusalem Old City Initiative, was bolstered by the implementation of the Oslo Peace Accord and is a fruit of the peace process and inter faith dialogue. The 2005 formation of The Council of the Religious Institutions of the Holy Land with Muslims, Jews, Catholics and Christians in its governing body has in their statement of faith the declaration of a one world type of religion which contends that all faiths lead to the same god. 

Statement of faith: 

As religious leaders of different faiths, who share the conviction in the one Creator, Lord of the Universe; we believe that the essence of religion is to worship G-d and respect the life and dignity of all human beings, regardless of religion, nationality and gender.

The Rapture Will Be Cancelled

by Nicklas Arthur

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hwvsMLXT7Z35KlbSdXw6x5EH0VLHPZsM/view?usp=sharing 

Trump to Pope Francis After Vatican Meeting: I 'Won't Forget What You Said'

President Trump met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Wednesday — the latest in a string of high-level meetings at sacred religious sites.

Pope Francis poses with US President Donald Trump, US First Lady Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump, at the end of a private audience at the Vatican on May 24, 2017.Evan Vucci / AFP - Getty Images

May 23, 2017, 11:52 PM PDT / Updated May 24, 2017, 8:05 AM PDT

By F. Brinley Bruton and Claudio Lavanga

ROME — Donald Trump met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Wednesday — the latest in a string of high-level meetings at sites sacred to the world's three great monotheistic religions.

The president smiled broadly beside the pontiff, who appeared subdued and stone-faced before their 30-minute private conversation.

However, Francis' mood lightened considerably during their gift exchange and the two men shook hands before parting.

"Thank you. Thank you. I won't forget what you said," Trump told the pope after their private meeting.

PHOTOS: Trump Family Tours Vatican, Meets With Pope

In the past, Trump and the pontiff have disagreed on issues including environmental protection.

During the election campaign, Francis criticized Trump's promise to build a wall on the Mexican border and his declaration that the U.S. should turn away Muslim immigrants and refugees.

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," Francis said at the time.

Trump reacted to the pontiff's comments by calling Francis "disgraceful" for doubting his faith.

First lady Melania Trump, the president's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner accompanied him to the Vatican.

The pope's gifts to Trump included a medal by a Roman artist depicting an olive, which is a symbol of peace.

The president responded, "We can use peace."

The pope also gave him copies of his three main teaching documents. Some of the main themes contained in them contrast sharply with Trump's policies and campaign promises, particularly concerning approaches to the environment and income inequality.

The president told Francis he'd be reading them.

Trump's gift for the pontiff was wrapped in a big blue box. The president said he was delivering "books from Martin Luther King. I think you'll enjoy them. I hope you do."

The meeting with the leader of the world's more than one billion Catholics caps off a trip during which Trump visited the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia, and then Jerusalem and Bethlehem — highlighting the president's outreach to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Trump's reception in Europe was low-key compared to the extravagantly warm welcomes he received in Riyadh and Jerusalem. Greenpeace climate change activists projected the message "Planet Earth First" over St. Peter's Basilica on Tuesday night.

On Wednesday, protesters hung a sign saying "Rome Resists" on a bridge in the Vatican.

F. Brinley Bruton reported from London.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/trump-s-first-foreign-trip/trump-trip-president-arrives-vatican-meet-pope-francis-n763911

Ivanka Trump Opens U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem During Israeli Massacre of Palestinians in Gaza

A smiling Ivanka Trump welcomed Israeli dignitaries to the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, while Israel's armed forces killed dozens of Palestinian protesters.

Robert Mackey

May 14 2018, 1:26 p.m.

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TOPSHOT - US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (C-L) claps as US President's daughter Ivanka Trump unveils an inauguration plaque during the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018. - The United States moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem after months of global outcry, Palestinian anger and exuberant praise from Israelis over President Donald Trump's decision tossing aside decades of precedent. (Photo by Menahem KAHANA / AFP)        (Photo credit should read MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT - US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (C-L) claps as US President's daughter Ivanka Trump unveils an inauguration plaque during the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018. - The United States moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem after months of global outcry, Palestinian anger and exuberant praise from Israelis over President Donald Trump's decision tossing aside decades of precedent. (Photo by Menahem KAHANA / AFP) (Photo credit should read MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images) Photo: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

In a graphic demonstration of disregard for the lives and rights of Palestinians, a smiling Ivanka Trump welcomed Israeli dignitaries to the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, while, just 60 miles away in Gaza, Israel’s armed forces shot hundreds of Palestinian protesters, killing at least 60.

Treasury Secretary @stevenmnuchin1 and Senior Advisor @IvankaTrump unveiled the U.S. #embassy in #Jerusalem, declaring the city, once again, the capital of #Israel: pic.twitter.com/XreXwUpQGs

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) May 14, 2018

Left: #Jerusalem

Right: #Gaza

(Pictures taken at the same time this afternoon) pic.twitter.com/0ySzaGjQC9

— Patrick Galey is on @patrickgaley.bsky.social (@patrickgaley) May 14, 2018

As American officials, including President Donald Trump’s former bankruptcy lawyer, Ambassador David Friedman, offered the new embassy to Israel as a sort of gift to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state, thousands of Palestinians came under fire from Israeli snipers for demanding the right to return to homes that their families were forced to abandon in 1948.

https://twitter.com/abgutman/status/996025015224160257

Death toll in Gaza today rises to 52, over 2,400 wounded. At Shifa hospital a doctor who worked there for 17 years said he had never seen a day like this. pic.twitter.com/RZgDryzfUS

— Sharif Kouddous ???? ??? ?????? (@sharifkouddous) May 14, 2018

16-year-old Tallal Mattar has died of wounds sustained yesterday, according to health ministry. Death toll from Monday now at 60.

— Sharif Kouddous ???? ??? ?????? (@sharifkouddous) May 15, 2018

More than two-thirds of the Palestinians confined to Gaza are refugees from towns and cities in what is now Israel. The protests along Israel’s perimeter fence that began on March 30 — and were immediately met with lethal force — are intended to draw attention to what Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or catastrophe, of Israel’s founding, which led to the forcible displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians.

“Choosing a tragic day in Palestinian history shows great insensibility and disrespect for the core principles of the peace process,” said Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah in a statement.

What a great day for the great American-Israeli alliance ????

?????: ??? ??????, ???? pic.twitter.com/Q2rUdD3ID5

— Benjamin Netanyahu – ?????? ?????? (@netanyahu) May 14, 2018

Big day for Israel. Congratulations!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 14, 2018

The US president, everyone. Ululating the 1948 massacres by Haganah and Irgun Zionist forces and today allowing the continuation of it by not only rewarding Israel, but also saying it is okay to take lands if you slaughter enough people. #Palestine #Nakba70 https://t.co/0nZYrv4IID

— Mariam Barghouti ???? ???????? (@MariamBarghouti) May 14, 2018

The death toll on Monday means that Israel has now killed more than 90 Palestinians in the past six weeks for approaching the fence it placed around Gaza, surpassing the total number of East Germans shot and killed for trying to scale the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989.

As the Trump administration signaled its full embrace of the ultranationalist Israeli position, Palestinian-American activists suggested that news coverage of the massacre in Gaza was biased against the protesters.

When you talk about Palestinians "attempting to charge a fence" or "breach a border" in the context of Gaza you are accepting and normalizing the notion that they have no right to return to their homes.

— Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) May 14, 2018

Over 70% of the Palestinian population in Gaza are refugees. They live under Israeli occupation and siege. If they dare protest, they are executed by sniper fire. They are denied their right to return. The media normalizes their murder. Their simple struggle for freedom smeared

— Remi Kanazi (@Remroum) May 14, 2018

In remarks at the embassy ceremony, Trump’s son-in-law and novice peace envoy, Jared Kushner, blamed Palestinian protesters — not the Israeli snipers who gunned them down: “As we have seen from the protests of the last month and even today, those provoking violence are part of the problem and not part of the solution.”

"Those provoking violence are part of the problem and not part of the solution."

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's Middle East envoy and son-in-law, speaks at the new US embassy in Jerusalem, following protests in Gaza in which reportedly dozens of Palestinians were killed. pic.twitter.com/gVnjnRxZF0

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) May 14, 2018

Kushner also praised his father-in-law for keeping a campaign promise made to supporters of Israel.

Jared Kushner: “When President Trump makes a promise, he keeps it.” pic.twitter.com/VoMTeuYXHK

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 14, 2018

The sense that Trump had taken a major foreign policy decision mainly for domestic political reasons was underscored by the front-row seats awarded to Sheldon Adelson, a major donor to both his campaign and those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

First row at the embassy opening, from left to right: David Friedman, Tammy Friedman, Sara Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Reuven Rivlin, Steven Mnuchin, Sheldon Adelson.

Chief rabbis and cabinet ministers are seated in the row behind them. pic.twitter.com/jqg9RAX8so

— Raphael Ahren (@RaphaelAhren) May 14, 2018

At a party the night before the ceremony, Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam, described themselves as “euphoric” over Trump’s decision to effectively recognize Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem, which it seized by military force in 1967.

????? ????? ??????: ?????????, ??? ???? ??? ??????, ??? ????? ?? ???? ?????? pic.twitter.com/lLIsfSiVkn

— Noa Landau ??? ????? (@noa_landau) May 13, 2018

“This is a massacre of a stateless population living under military siege,” the Israeli-American writer Mairav Zonszein wrote in +972, a digital magazine with contributors in Israel and Palestine. “And we are all accomplices for not doing more to stop it.”

“The overwhelming majority of the Jewish Israeli population has not spoken out,” Zonszein added. “According to an Israel Democracy Institute Peace Index poll from April, 83 percent of Jewish Israelis find the IDF’s open fire policy in Gaza ‘appropriate.’ Just hours after the massacre, thousands went out into the streets to celebrate the Eurovision winner Netta Barzilai in Tel Aviv.”

This is Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, tonight. Tens of thousands gathered, not protest the killings in Gaza, but to celebrate Israel's #Eurovision victory.

Photo via @WallaNews pic.twitter.com/8VSV0Z1A0b

— Elizabeth Tsurkov? (@Elizrael) May 14, 2018

In Jerusalem and Washington, hundreds of young Jewish activists from the groups If Not Now and All That’s Left did protest Trump’s decision to ignore Palestinian claims and move the U.S. embassy before the final status of the city has been negotiated.

For Immediate Release | ON THE DAY TRUMP MOVES AMERICAN EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM, AND DEADLIEST DAY FOR PALESTINIANS SINCE 2014, 150 YOUNG JEWS AND RABBINICAL STUDENTS SHUT DOWN BUSY D.C. INTERSECTION FOR TWO HOURS. #EmbassyOfFreedomhttps://t.co/vqgSpUxKh6 pic.twitter.com/8LHtoMCfID

— IfNotNow??? (@IfNotNowOrg) May 14, 2018

Police uses violence against protesters pic.twitter.com/h7oXn9mhTC

— All That's Left: Anti-Occupation Collective (@ATLCol) May 14, 2018

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which monitors conditions for Palestinians living under military rule in the territories Israel has occupied since 1967, denounced the killings. “The fact that live gunfire is once again the sole measure that the Israeli military is using in the field evinces appalling indifference towards human life on the part of senior Israeli government and military officials,” the group said in a statement. “B’Tselem calls for an immediate halt to the killing of Palestinian demonstrators. If the relevant officials do not issue an order to stop the lethal fire, the soldiers in the field must refuse to comply with these manifestly unlawful open-fire orders.”

As Palestinians in Gaza buried their dead and prepared to protest again on Tuesday, Daniel Seidemann, a Jerusalem peace activist, suggested that America’s full capitulation to Israeli extremists had dealt a further blow to dreams of a two-state solution to the conflict — making a single, binational state inevitable.

Infuriation and grief throughout Gaza and large number of funerals #Gaza pic.twitter.com/haoFoSF56P

— Farah Baker (@Farah_Gazan) May 14, 2018

This probably will sound pathetic, but my thoughts are not at the fetishistic embassy ceremony nearby, but with the residents of Gaza, and the families of those killed today.

The day will come when we will share this tortured land, even if I will not live to see it.

God bless.

— Daniel Seidemann (@DanielSeidemann) May 14, 2018

Updated: Tuesday, May 15, 6:27 a.m. EDT

This post was updated with a revised death toll as more Palestinians shot by Israeli snipers during protests on Monday died of their wounds.

Top photo: Ivanka Trump and Steven Mnuchin, the U.S. Treasury secretary, welcomed Israeli dignitaries to the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday.

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Contact the author:

Robert Mackey

robert.mackey@theintercept.com

@RobertMackey

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Ben Deri (C), a 24-year-old Israeli policeman accused of killing a Palestinian teenager in 2014 during clashes in Beitunia in the occupied West Bank, is seen at the district court in Jerusalem on April 25, 2018. - The Israeli court sentenced Deri to nine months in jail for the fatal shooting of a Palestinian teenager in 2014, an incident documented by video footage. He was found guilty of negligent homicide and also ordered to pay 50,000 shekels ($14,000) to the family of the then-17-year-old Nadeem Nuwarah. (Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP) (Photo credit should read AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty Images)

Israeli Police Officer Jailed for Killing Unarmed Palestinian Protester Without Permission

Palestinian protesters chant slogans next to burning tires during clashes with Israeli troops along Gaza's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Friday, April 6, 2018. Palestinians torched piles of tires near Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, sending huge plumes of black smoke into the air and drawing Israeli fire that killed one man in the second large protest in the volatile area in a week. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Israel Denounced for “Smear Campaign” Against Palestinian Journalist It Killed in Gaza

Israeli soldiers take aim as they lie prone over an earth barrier along the border with the Gaza strip in the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz on March 30, 2018, as Palestinians demonstrate on the other side commemorating Land Day.Land Day marks the killing of six Arab Israelis during 1976 demonstrations against Israeli confiscations of Arab land. / AFP PHOTO / Jack GUEZ (Photo credit should read JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

Israel Confirms Video of Sniper Shooting Unarmed Palestinian, as Soldiers Cheer, Is Genuine

A picture taken on March 30, 2018 from the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz across the border from the Gaza strip shows Palestinians participating in a tent city protest commemorating Land Day, with Israeli soldiers seen below in the foreground.Land Day marks the killing of six Arab Israelis during 1976 demonstrations against Israeli confiscations of Arab land. / AFP PHOTO / Jack GUEZ (Photo credit should read JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

Israel Opens Fire on Palestinian Protesters in Gaza, Trump Envoy Blames “Hostile March”

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Tom Homan during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024.

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Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting ICE director who contributed to Project 2025, will be “border czar” in the next administration.

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Noah Hurowitz - Nov. 12

The House nixed a bill empowering the Treasury Department to revoke nonprofits’ tax-exempt status over alleged ties to “terror.”

Palestinian children wait to receive meals distributed by charity organizations, as people struggle with hunger and Israeli attacks continue in Nuseirat Refugee Camp of Deir al-Balah, Gaza on November 12, 2024.

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“A Final, Deadly Exclamation Point”: Biden Backs Down on 30-Day Israel Arms Ultimatum

Jonah Valdez - Nov. 12

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https://theintercept.com/2018/05/14/ivanka-trump-opens-u-s-embassy-jerusalem-israeli-massacre-palestinians/

Very soon now, it will no longer be a mystery of 'when' these events will take place; they will have become a terrible reality. Where then, will each of us stand on these issues, when the onslaught actually begins? Quickly it will be seen that the New Ager's counterfeit messiah, Lord #Maitreya, is also the same person as the #Pontifex Maximus pope of Rome, who then will take the reins of the New World Order. The deceptions will mesh wonderfully together, as the "World Harmonic Convergence" accomplishes new values for mankind in the cooperation, collaboration and unification on behalf of the "Spirit of the Earth." For those of you who read this book, be patient, it won't be long and you will know that it revealed to you the truth.

Also, it is only a matter of time when Pope John Paul II, old and tired, will succumb to his great age, and his mantle will then go to a more younger and aggressive pope. By him, a work will now be accomplished, known as the "Era of Reseeding" when major population areas will be 'thinned out' and the human population will be resettled. Finally, will come the "Era of the New Harmony" and the "Crystal Kingdom" of the earth will be set up. This is the glorious version of Rome's final victory and total conquest of humanity. But there is one last crowning act that is needed to make this masterpiece of deception complete.

FALSE MESSIAH OCCUPIES JERUSALEM

The counterfeit surpassing all other counterfeits, Rome has now fulfilled its grandest dreams. The entire world lays in shambles at its feet. "Order out of Chaos" ,was its beloved motto.

Now the 'great pretender' , the Pontifex Maximus pope declares himself to be God over all the earth! Not content with just being ruler of all the earth - but "is worshiped; so that he as God sitting in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God."

Only a Luciferic mind could think like that.

After usurping the very exalted position of grandeur, magnificence, majesty and sovereignty of God Himself - what other place would he choose to locate his Crystal Kingdom headquarters - other than where the God of creation has placed His own Holy name Jerusalem; where else? Rome has always had its covetous eye set on Jerusalem. The Crusaders were sent there to conquer it, after which, the Knights Templar were named after its temple. And now the Pontifex Maximus pope, dripping in blood of the world's innocents, claims this city as his too; to be the headquarters for ruling his New World Order.

Does all of this sound like some grotesque farcy tale or the terror of some fearsome nightmare? Oh my friend, how I wish that could really be the case; that we could actually wake up and none of this would really be true, and I could be called a liar. What I wouldn't give, if I could make that be so. But for all the sadness and horror it brings, it must be acknowledged that it is the truth. Not because man says so, but because God's Word has declared it. There is only one way to face the onslaught that is just ahead. We must fully trust our life into the hands of God, and then resolve in our minds that we are going to be killed; forgetting entirely the thought that we might be fortunate enough to escape. That is how thoroughly God's people are going to be rooted out. Know for sure in your own mind - they can kill your body ever so dead, but they can never take your life - if it is in Christ Jesus. That belongs to God alone.

Very soon, God's people are going to be confronted with the exact same experience as our Lord and Saviour. To know and look straight into the face of death - and yes, by the very same executioner - Rome. But our Lord loved you, dear reader, and me, and all, that He gave up His own life for ours. We must now respond to that love and be resolved to die also for Him, standing firm for His truth, as He died for us. And Rome can not kill us so dead, that our mighty God can not raise us back up to life. Not the miserable life we know now but incorruptible life for eternity. A quick calculation will tell you, that if one third of the earth's population, or nearly two billion people, are going to be slaughtered, only a minuscule fraction of that amount are fundamentalist Christians . That means a huge amount of people are going to die that are not Christians. Sadly, beyond any comprehension, they will have died for a very lost cause.

From all the horror, misery, and bloodshed, people universally, will become utterly paralyzed from sheer shock.

And to the overwhelming majority of them, sadly, this life is their only world, as they watch it being ripped apart; everywhere, nothing but chaos and devastation. They are terrified. They just do not understand! But there are a people that do understand; as they watch now with solemn awe, events occurring that they had known about and anticipated for many many years. This is what gives to God's people "hope". They know that God does not lie. God has given to His people promises, predictions, and prophecies that have never ever failed. That, dear friend, is wonderful, unselfish, and abiding love! - that builds unswerving trust. And no other promise is so deeply embedded into their hearts, than the one given that

Christ will soon return and redeem His people out of this wretched world. It buoys their spirits, as it assures them precious

'hope'.

Five hundred years before Jesus Christ walked the earth, God revealed to His people that Rome's false messiah, in the very end times, would "plant the tabernacles of his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain." In other words, Jerusalem. (Daniel 11:45) What an incredible God we have! But notice how God describes it. He calls Rome setting up its New World Order headquarters in Jerusalem the "abomination that maketh desolate." In fact, Christ Himself prophesied that Rome would invade Jerusalem soon after His departure from earth, which it did in A.D.70. And this first invasion was to become a "type" for when it would occur again, with vengeance, in the very end time." 

CHAPTER 17 "TWO OCCULT POWERS UNITED FOR FINAL WORLD

CONTROL" 

The Grand Design Exposed 

by John Daniel

http://www.granddesignexposed.com/contents.html 

Live Now: 24/7 Fuego Volcano Eruption in 4K Ultra HD afarTV Dec 17, 2024

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17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Genesis 2:7 KJV

"We Are Fighting For Islam, and We Will Surely Win!" 

Saviors' Day 

Nation of Islam

Shirley Temple Black (born Shirley Jane Temple; April 23, 1928 – February 10, 2014) was an American actress, singer, dancer, and diplomat, who was Hollywood's number-one box-office draw as a child actress from 1934 to 1938. Later, she was named United States Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, and also served as Chief of Protocol of the United States.

Temple began her film career in 1931 when she was three years old and was well-known for her performance in Bright Eyes, which was released in 1934. She won a special Juvenile Academy Award in February 1935 for her outstanding contribution as a juvenile performer in motion pictures during 1934 and continued to appear in popular films through the remainder of the 1930s, although her subsequent films became less popular as she grew older.[1] She appeared in her last film, A Kiss for Corliss, in 1949.[2][3]

She began her diplomatic career in 1969, when she was appointed to represent the U.S. at a session of the United Nations General Assembly, where she worked at the U.S. Mission under Ambassador Charles Yost. Later, she was named U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, and also served as the first female U.S. Chief of Protocol. In 1988, she published her autobiography, Child Star.[4] After her biography was published, she served as the U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia (1989–1992).

Temple was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Kennedy Center Honors and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. She is 18th on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest female American screen legends of classic Hollywood cinema.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Temple

Jesse Leroy Brown: Ushering in a New Era of Naval Aviation

Feb 21, 2023

By Thomas Paone

Jesse Leroy Brown: Ushering in a New Era of Naval Aviation

The passing of Brig. Gen. Charles McGee in January 2022 reminded the nation of his service with the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American aviators to serve in the United States armed forces. The Tuskegee Airmen were part of the U.S. Army Air Forces, the predecessor to today’s U.S. Air Force, and served in Europe during World War II, mostly as escort pilots for American bombers. The U.S. Navy, however, had no such group during World War II that allowed African Americans to train and fly as naval aviators. One African American pilot by the name of Oscar Holmes was named a naval aviator during the war, but he had previous flight experience that assisted his entry into the service, and he was often mistaken for being white at the time. Jesse Leroy Brown, however, fought through many hurdles to become the first African American to complete Navy flight training.

Brown, one of six children, was born in Mississippi in 1926, where his father worked numerous jobs, from factory work to sharecropping. Brown became interested in flight at a very young age after his father took him to an airshow in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. From that point on, he constantly thought about flight, and dreamed of a time when he could take to the skies. Brown performed well in school, especially in mathematics, and endeavored to obtain a higher education no matter what it took. In 1944, he enrolled in Ohio State University where he studied architectural engineering. Brown worked numerous jobs, including unloading boxcars for the Pennsylvania Railroad to pay for his education. While in school, he informed his sweetheart, Daisy Pearl Nix, that he planned to join the Naval Reserve to help pay for his educational expenses. He met early resistance to his attempts to enlist in the naval aviation program, despite the active recruitment program at Ohio State. After much effort with the recruitment officer, Brown took the first series of tests granting him entrance into the program. In a letter to a friend in July 1946, he wrote:

"I’m in the Navy, as an Apprentice Seaman, USNR [US Naval Reserve], V-5, on inactive duty. I had to go down to Cincinnati to take the test and for a while I thought the mental exams were going to be too much for me, but I managed to muddle thru the five hours of written tests. One interviewer asked me a lot about aircraft types and thank God I knew the answers. By evening, about half the guys were eliminated. I took the physical tests the next day. No problem. All that running and lifting boxes in the railroad yard took care of me. I’m not sure the Navy really wants me. I’m classified 'desirable' rather than 'outstanding or superior.' I guess I’m lucky to be 'desirable.' However they classify me, I’ll be getting $50 a month for the privilege of taking naval orientation, drilling, etc.…"

In August 1947, Brown started Basic Flight training after completing his preflight requirements. He married Nix over a weekend in secret as cadets were not permitted to be married while training, and he could have been removed from the program if anyone found out. It was during this training that Brown faced additional hurdles. He struggled with mistakes, hampered by men like Ross Tipton, whose racism towards Brown created an atmosphere where Brown almost seemed destined to fail. Brown faced a panel to decide whether he would be allowed to continue in the program or be removed. To his surprise, Bill Zastri, an instructor who worked with Brown earlier in his training, came to his defense, and Brown continued with his training. He trained in numerous locations, including Glenview, Illinois, Naval Air Station Ottumwa, and Naval Air Station Pensacola, in aircraft such as the F6F Hellcat and became the first African American to complete Navy flight training on October 21, 1948.

Brown earned the rank of ensign in 1949, and trained in Grumman F8F Bearcats and later the Vought F-4U Corsairs as part of the USS Wright. At the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Brown was stationed aboard the USS Leyte, which was sent to support military operations in Korea in August of that year. In December, Brown and his section were tasked with providing close air support for 15,000 Marines on the ground who were attempting to make it to the port of Hungnam to be evacuated while under constant attack by Chinese forces. Brown flew numerous flights in terrible winter weather to assist the Marine forces out of their encirclements. On December 4, 1950, Brown reported that his aircraft had loss oil pressure after being hit by ground fire while supporting troops in the Chosin Reservoir. Lt. Cmdr. Richard L. Cevoli, the executive officer for Brown’s squadron later reported:

“We saw Brown set his plane down in a rough field about five miles beyond our friendly lines. He must have hit something, because the landing gear was up and the engine flew off the plane. I could tell that Brown was still alive, so I went off to summon a rescue helicopter. I instructed [Brown’s wingman Lieutenant (j.g) Thomas J.] Hudner and another pilot to destroy the plane as soon as the pilot was clear. Hudner started circling Brown’s plane to protect him from the hundreds of Chinese troops whose footprints could be seen in the snow everywhere in the area. The injured pilot waved his arms to show that he was alive, but remained in the plane even though it was beginning to burn. Realizing that Brown could not extricate himself from the plane and that he would shortly be burned to death, Lieutenant Hudner unhesitantly landed nearby to help his injured shipmate. Finding that he could not open the burning plane’s canopy, Lieutenant Hudner packed the fuselage with hastily scooped-up snow in an effort to keep flames away from Ensign Brown.”

Hudner failed to free Brown from the aircraft, even after receiving assistance from Marine First Lt. Charlie Ward, pilot of a rescue helicopter that arrived to evacuate them both. Brown remained trapped in the wreckage before he passed away due to injuries and the extreme cold, and reportedly requested Hudner to pass his love onto Daisy Brown. Hudner and Ward reluctantly left Brown’s body in the aircraft and evacuated the area for fear of capture. Brown became the first African American Naval officer killed in the Korean War, and was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart, the Air Medal, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. The story was recently made into a major motion picture Devotion, showcasing the friendship between Hudner and Brown. Hudner was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his attempts to save Brown at great personal risk. The New York Times reported that Daisy Brown, his widow, attended the ceremony and, “sobbed quietly in the background in the rose garden of the White House, [as President Harry S.] Truman recited the stirring details of Lieutenant Hudner’s “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty” in trying to rescue her husband…”

The news of the death of Brown affected many African American members in the armed forces, but also offered inspiration to what the future could hold. In his biography Into the Tiger's Jaw: America's First Black Marine Aviator, U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Frank Petersen Jr. wrote, “Late on a December evening in 1950 on Treasure Island, I lay sacked out listening to music and the news on my portable radio, as was my usual habit. That’s when I heard about Ens. Jesse L. Brown, the black Navy pilot shot down over Korea. The first black man to earn the Navy’s ‘wings of gold,’ Jesse manned his F-4U Corsair on the carrier USS Leyte, flew off on a mission to help free a trapped Marine division, and was killed. A posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross was awarded. I sat straight up. Possibilities surged in my mind. My first awareness dawned that blacks could, in fact, be a part of the Naval Cadet Program. It was a dream I’d harbored. Jesse had done it, so now it didn’t seem impossible. Perhaps it could be done again.” Petersen Jr. went on to become the first African American aviator in the Marine Corps, as well as the first African American general officer in the Marine Corps, a dream realized in no small part to the service, dedication, and sacrifice of Ensign Jesse Leroy Brown.

https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/jesse-leroy-brown-new-era-naval-aviation

"In the religion of Thelema, it is believed that the history of humanity can be divided into a series of aeons, each of which was accompanied by its own forms of "magical and religious expression".[1]

The first of these was the Aeon of Isis, which Thelemites believed occurred during prehistory and which saw mankind worshipping a Great Goddess, symbolised by the ancient Egyptian deity Isis. In Thelemite beliefs, this was followed by the Aeon of Osiris, a period that took place in the classical and mediaeval centuries, when humanity worshipped a singular male god, symbolised by the Egyptian god Osiris, and was therefore dominated by patriarchal values.[2] The third aeon is the Aeon of Horus, controlled by the child god, symbolised by Horus.[2]

In the New Aeon, prophesied by Aleister Crowley during his lifetime throughout his esoteric and occult writings, Thelemites believe that humanity shall leave behind the tyranny of Abrahamic religions and enter a time of greater consciousness and self-actualization.[2] Within the Thelemite religion, each of these aeons is believed to be "characterized by their [own specific] magical formula", the use of which "is very important and fundamental to the understanding of Thelemic Magick".[3]"

Aeon (Thelema) - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_(Thelema)

Æthelred II (Old English: Æþelræd,[n 1] pronounced [ˈæðelræːd]; Old Norse: Aðalráðr; c. 966 – 23 April 1016), known as Æthelred the Unready, was King of the English from 978 to 1013 and again from 1014 until his death in 1016.[1] His epithet comes from the Old English word unræd meaning "poorly advised"; it is a pun on his name, which means "well advised".

Æthelred was the son of King Edgar the Peaceful and Queen Ælfthryth.[1] He came to the throne at about the age of 12, following the assassination of his older half-brother, King Edward the Martyr.

The chief characteristic of Æthelred's reign was conflict with the Danes. After several decades of relative peace, Danish raids on English territory began again in earnest in the 980s, becoming markedly more serious in the early 990s. Following the Battle of Maldon in 991, Æthelred paid tribute, or Danegeld, to the Danish king. In 1002, Æthelred ordered what became known as the St Brice's Day massacre of Danish settlers. In 1013, King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark invaded England, as a result of which Æthelred fled to Normandy in 1013 and was replaced by Sweyn. After Sweyn died in 1014, Æthelred returned to the throne, but he died just two years later. Æthelred's 37-year combined reign was the longest of any Anglo-Saxon English king and was only surpassed in the 13th century, by Henry III. Æthelred was briefly succeeded by his son Edmund Ironside, but Edmund died after a few months and was replaced by Sweyn's son Cnut. Another of Æthelred's sons, Edward the Confessor, would become king of England many years later.

Name

Æthelred's first name, composed of the elements æðele, "noble", and ræd, "counsel, advice",[2] is typical of the compound names of those who belonged to the royal House of Wessex, and it characteristically alliterates with the names of his ancestors, like Æthelwulf ("noble-wolf"), Ælfred ("elf-counsel"), Eadweard ("rich-protection"), and Eadgar ("rich-spear").[3]

Æthelred's notorious nickname, Old English Unræd, is commonly translated into present-day English as "The Unready" (less commonly but more accurately "The Redeless").[n 2] The Anglo-Saxon noun unræd means "evil counsel", "bad plan", or "folly".[4] It was most often used in reference to decisions and deeds, but once in reference to the ill-advised disobedience of Adam and Eve. The element ræd in unræd is the same element in Æthelred's name that means "counsel" (compare the cognate in the German word Rat and Dutch raad). Thus Æþelræd Unræd is an oxymoron: "Noble counsel, No counsel". The nickname has also been translated as "ill-advised", "ill-prepared", thus "Æthelred the ill-advised".[5]

Because the nickname was first recorded in the 1180s, more than 150 years after Æthelred's death, it is doubtful that it carries any implications as to the reputation of the king in the eyes of his contemporaries or near contemporaries.[6][n 3]

Early life

Sir Frank Stenton remarked that "much that has brought condemnation of historians on King Æthelred may well be due in the last resort to the circumstances under which he became king."[7] Æthelred's father, King Edgar, had died suddenly in July 975, leaving two young sons behind. The elder, Edward (later Edward the Martyr), was probably illegitimate,[8] and was "still a youth on the verge of manhood" in 975.[9] The younger son was Æthelred, whose mother, Ælfthryth, Edgar had married in 964. Ælfthryth was the daughter of Ordgar, ealdorman of Devon, and widow of Æthelwald, Ealdorman of East Anglia. At the time of his father's death, Æthelred could have been no more than 10 years old. As the elder of Edgar's sons, Edward – reportedly a young man given to frequent violent outbursts – probably would have naturally succeeded to the throne of England despite his young age, had he not "offended many important persons by his intolerable violence of speech and behaviour."[9] In any case, a number of English nobles took to opposing Edward's succession and to defending Æthelred's claim to the throne; Æthelred was, after all, the son of Edgar's last, living wife, and no rumour of illegitimacy is known to have plagued Æthelred's birth, as it might have his elder brother's.[10]

Both boys, Æthelred certainly, were too young to have played any significant part in the political manoeuvring which followed Edgar's death. It was the brothers' supporters, and not the brothers themselves, who were responsible for the turmoil which accompanied the choice of a successor to the throne. Æthelred's cause was led by his mother and included Ælfhere, Ealdorman of Mercia and Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester,[11][12] while Edward's claim was supported by Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Oswald, the Archbishop of York[13] among other noblemen, notably Æthelwine, Ealdorman of East Anglia, and Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex. In the end, Edward's supporters proved the more powerful and persuasive, and he was crowned king at Kingston upon Thames before the year was out.

Edward reigned for only three years before he was murdered by members of his brother's household.[14] Though little is known about Edward's short reign, it is known that it was marked by political turmoil. Edgar had made extensive grants of land to monasteries which pursued the new monastic ideals of ecclesiastical reform, but these disrupted aristocratic families' traditional patronage. The end of his firm rule saw a reversal of this policy, with aristocrats recovering their lost properties or seizing new ones. This was opposed by Dunstan, but according to Cyril Hart, "The presence of supporters of church reform on both sides indicates that the conflict between them depended as much on issues of land ownership and local power as on ecclesiastical legitimacy. Adherents of both Edward and Æthelred can be seen appropriating, or recovering, monastic lands."[8] Nevertheless, favour for Edward must have been strong among the monastic communities. When Edward was killed at Æthelred's estate at Corfe Castle in Dorset in March 978, the job of recording the event, as well as reactions to it, fell to monastic writers. Stenton offers a summary of the earliest account of Edward's murder, which comes from a work praising the life of St Oswald:

On the surface his [Edward's] relations with Æthelred his half-brother and Ælfthryth his stepmother were friendly, and he was visiting them informally when he was killed. [Æthelred's] retainers came out to meet him with ostentatious signs of respect, and then, before he had dismounted, surrounded him, seized his hands, and stabbed him ... So far as can be seen the murder was planned and carried out by Æthelred's household men in order that their young master might become king. There is nothing to support the allegation, which first appears in writing more than a century later, that Queen Ælfthryth had plotted her stepson's death. No one was punished for a part in the crime, and Æthelred, who was crowned a month after the murder, began to reign in an atmosphere of suspicion which destroyed the prestige of the crown. It was never fully restored in his lifetime.

— Stenton 2001, p. 373

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86thelred_the_Unready

"According to ancient and medieval science, aether (/ˈiːθər/, alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether), also known as the fifth element or quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere.[1] The concept of aether was used in several theories to explain several natural phenomena, such as the propagation of light and gravity. In the late 19th century, physicists postulated that aether permeated space, providing a medium through which light could travel in a vacuum, but evidence for the presence of such a medium was not found in the Michelson–Morley experiment, and this result has been interpreted to mean that no luminiferous aether exists.[2]

The word αἰθήρ (aithḗr) in Homeric Greek means "pure, fresh air" or "clear sky".[3] In Greek mythology, it was thought to be the pure essence that the gods breathed, filling the space where they lived, analogous to the air breathed by mortals.[4] It is also personified as a deity, Aether, the son of Erebus and Nyx in traditional Greek mythology.[5] Aether is related to αἴθω "to incinerate",[6] and intransitive "to burn, to shine" (related is the name Aithiopes (Ethiopians; see Aethiopia), meaning "people with a burnt (black) visage").[7][8]

Aether (classical element) - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_(classical_element)

Vice President Kamala Harris

August 12 

It is my honor to travel our nation as Vice President and fight for the freedom of Americans to make decisions about their own body, to love who they love openly and with pride, to be safe from gun violence and hate, and to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1084659100326245&set=a.287432416715588

"As early as 1990, weather force specialists at the U.S. Air Force Academy were hard at work studying how to chemically mix and lay “aerial obscuration” they called “chemtrails.” Project Cloverleaf began quietly enough (as all classified projects do) with the 1994 Hughes Aircraft patent for Welsbach Seeding For Reduction of Global Warming. Welsbach seeding called for spreading highly reflective materials in the atmosphere to reflect back into space 1–2 percent of incoming sunlight and thus slow down “global warming.” However, it was also about beginning to create a more conductive atmosphere in preparation for Bernard Eastlund’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) already under construction in Alaska. The reflective material (~10 microns) to be added to jet auxiliary fuel tanks was the highly conductive compound aluminum oxide (Al2O3). The jet’s main tanks would be reserved for takeoff and landing, and the auxiliary loaded with Al2O3 for cruising altitude. Lawrence Livermore National Labs priced the program at US$1 billion per annum (in 1994 dollars). By the late 1990s, aerial grids were being laid over chosen regions and cities of the U.S. and other NATO nations. In 1996, the military went public with two documents that obliquely referenced what Cloverleaf was up to: the Pentagon paper “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” in Air Force 2025,1 which called the chemical whitening effect “cirrus shielding”; and U.S. Space Command’s Vision for 2020 calling for full spectrum dominance of space, land, sea, and air.2 Air traffic controllers (ATC) at major airports were coached to re-route commercial air traffic around military craft engaged in “classified aerial operations” at 37,000–40,000 feet. ATC radar revealed a haze of aluminum and barium—Al2O3 for solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering, barium stearate Ba(C18H35O2)2 for lubrication, radar imaging, and highpowered RF-microwave beam weapons.

A wide range of particles could be released into the stratosphere to achieve the SRM objective of scattering sunlight back to space. Sulfates and nanoparticles currently favored for SRM include sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbonyl sulfide, black carbon, and specially engineered discs composed of metallic aluminum, aluminum oxide and barium titanate. In particular, engineered nanoparticles are considered very promising. The particles would utilize photophoretic and electromagnetic forces to self-levitate above the stratosphere. These nanoparticles would remain suspended longer than sulfate particles, would not interfere with stratospheric chemistry, and would not produce acid rain. However, while promising, the self-levitating nanodisc has not been tested to verify efficacy, may increase ocean acidification due to atmospheric CO2 entrapment, has uncharacterized human health and environmental impacts, and may be prohibitively expensive.3

The truth is that the 10 billion SRM discs 10 micrometers across and 50 nanometers thick are engineered with a core of aluminum, a top layer of aluminum oxide, and a bottom layer of barium titanate—aluminum to reflect heat up, heavier barium purportedly to push the discs up (photophoresis). Introduce a magnetic component, then spray, and the nanoparticles will follow the Earth’s magnetic field into the upper atmosphere. By 1998, the Ontario Ministry of Environment (Canada) found 7X the safe limit for aluminum in rainwater samples. More and more citizens complained of sudden headaches, joint pains, dizziness, fatigue, acute asthma, gastrointestinal pain, coughs, and feverless flu symptoms. In 2000, Cloverleaf went public in an offhand way with a comment from an anonymous airline executive to independent scientist Clifford Carnicom, then the most visible scientist collecting data on the aerosol fallout over northern New Mexico. According to this “Deep Throat,” the purpose of Cloverleaf was “to allow commercial airlines to assist in releasing these chemicals into the atmosphere.”4 Military jets simply could not keep up with the “global dimming” now called solar radiation management (SRM), so the entire airline industry was being drafted in the name of national security."

Under An Ionized Sky: From Chemtrails To Space Fence Lockdown by Elana Freeland

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oneu_kEMMH5AeAffiWOR_7NJ0HptHJrC/view?usp=sharing

Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025

"In 2025, US aerospace forces can own the weather by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map. A high risk, high reward endeavor, weather modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather modification offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. Some of the potential capabilities a weather modification system could provide to a war fighting commander in chief CINC are listed in table 1. Technology advancements in five major areas are necessary for an integrated weather modification capability 1 advanced nonlinear modeling techniques, 2 computational capability, 3 information gathering and transmission, 4 a global sensor array, and 5 weather intervention techniques. Some intervention tools exist today and others may be developed and refined in the future."

Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 (dtic.mil)

"The Day Called 'X' is a dramatized CBS documentary film set in Portland, Oregon, in which the entire city is evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear air raid, after Soviet bombers had been detected by radar stations to the north; it details the activation of the city's civil defense protocols and leads up to the moment before the attack (the ending is left intentionally unknown). The operations were run from the Kelly Butte Bunker, which was the emergency operations center at that time. It was filmed in September 1957[1] and aired December 8 of that year.[2][3] Apart from presenter/narrator Glenn Ford, none of the people shown are actors. They are locals of Portland shown in their real jobs, including Mayor Terry Schrunk.

Its local re-broadcast in 2004[4] and appearance in the on-line Prelinger Archives attracted interest among local history buffs due to its extensive outside shots of the city, and the use of non-actor participants (local officials and broadcasters). Whenever one of these individuals is heard uttering warnings or statements regarding attack, the words "AN ATTACK IS NOT TAKING PLACE" are superimposed over the picture.[2]

On September 27, 1955, Portland actually conducted an exercise evacuation of downtown called "Operation Greenlight",[5][6] and the film is often misattributed to that year. Ford's narration, however, does make direct reference to the 1955 exercise."

The Day Called 'X' - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Called_%27X%27

"Regimini militantis Ecclesiae (Latin for To the Government of the Church Militant) was the papal bull promulgated by Pope Paul III on September 27, 1540, which gave a first approval to the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, but limited the number of its members to sixty."

Regimini militantis Ecclesiae - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regimini_militantis_Ecclesiae

"416 Finally, those means that are proposed by our holy father Saint Ignatius in Part X of the Constitutions for the preservation and development not only of the body or exterior of the Society but also of its spirit, and for the attainment of the objective it seeks, which is to aid souls to reach their ultimate and supernatural end, [10] are to be observed eagerly and diligently by all, with a truly personal sense of responsibility for its increase and development, for the praise and service of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, and the help of souls.[11]

L. D. S. "

The Constitutions of The Society of Jesus and Their Complimentary Norms

https://jesuitas.lat/uploads/the-constitutions-of-the-society-of-jesus-and-their-complementary-norms/Constitutions%20and%20Norms%20SJ%20ingls.pdf

Malcolm Little, alias “Malcolm X,” 1925 – 1965

Unknowingly controlled by the Order through the mulatto and “the honorable” Elijah Muhammad—the absolute Masonic dictator of the Nation of Islam (NOI) who was the obedient servant of the White Archbishop of Chicago, Albert Cardinal Meyer and later John Cardinal Cody—Malcolm bore all the marks of a Jesuit agitator including his detestation of Jews, White Anglo Saxon Protestants, the U.S. Constitution and the King James Bible. Surnamed “Big Red” due to his reddish-brown hair inherited from a White forefather, Malcolm’s racial views had been born out of deplorable crimes of White Catholic and White Masonic violence, including intolerable, hate-filled racism experienced in the Northern, Mafia-dominated, Jesuit-controlled, White Roman Catholic cities of Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C., as well as the Second Ku Klux Klan’s gruesome murder of his father, Earl Little—an influential Baptist preacher and an outspoken advocate of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa Movement. In opposition to the Jesuit Order’s intended plan for a totally integrated North America thereby destroying the “heretic and liberal” White races, both Garvey and Malcolm seriously pursued the same policy of final separation and repatriation, as did Presidents Jefferson, Monroe and Lincoln. Malcolm advocated that Blacks should break away from Whites either by returning to Africa or by establishing a separate Black North American nation, which indeed is the correct and Biblical solution to the Black Pope’s international anti-White, Negro Agitation! Upon publicizing Elijah Muhammad’s fathering of nine illegitimate children to six teenage girls, and for exposing the collusion between the NOI and KKK leaders (whose cooperative extremism created “collective guilt” among all Whites—cunningly calculated to unite Catholics and Protestants pursuant to the ecumenical doctrines of the Second Vatican Council while destroying the God-given preference to one’s own race thus ensuring the success of the Civil Rights Movement), Malcolm became a threat to the Black Pope’s NOI and was silenced for ninety days. This resulted in his trip to Mecca during which: he was carefully watched by Cardinal Spellman’s CIA; he was converted to Orthodox Islam in spite of the brutal enslavement of African Blacks by Arab Muslims for centuries; he ceased to advocate Black separatism; and he finally broke with the NOI’s Masonic leadership which included FBI informers Wallace Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. The eloquent and independent Malcolm X who was now preaching against the NOI could not be allowed to live, as the genocidal race-mixing plot of the Order’s Socialist-Communist Second Reconstruction, led by the wicked Black Martin Luther (Lucifer) King, Jr., championing the Order’s doctrine of “universal equality” as perfected on the Reductions of Paraguay, could not be allowed to fail again. Therefore, Malcolm became another victim of the Order’s Jesuit Oath and “leaden bullet,” savagely shot down on stage at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom by three NOI assassins, all of whom were aided by Cardinal Spellman’s CIA, FBI and New York City police.

Vatican Assassins Wounded In The House of My Friends by Eric Jon Phelps

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uQl1CmWeLL87RWVtzKttGFKm0frSNR8D/view?usp=sharing 

The philosophy at the core of all the Mystery Schools is secular humanism, the foundation and the font of socialism/communism. Most socialists/communists don't have the slightest idea that they are puppets of an arcane philosophy bent upon world domination. They actually believe they will ultimately realize a world where everything is free courtesy of Big Brother and where all risk and worry has disappeared... any such world would only be a world of slaves dependent upon an elite class of "Masters".

The Knights Templar were an communist organization symbolized by the two knights riding one horse. Each initiate had to give up all wealth, property, and worldly goods to the Order. Each performed according to his ability and received according to the need of his position within the order. They were pledged to absolute and unquestioning obedience to their superior Knight or knights, the Grand Master, and the Order. In that respect every knight and every piece of property, all wealth, was totally owned and controlled by the Order.

According to MAJESTYTWELVE the Knights Templar have become the driving influence at the highest levels of all the secret societies among the adepts known as the Illuminati. The most accessible font of their influence will be found in the (Cecil Rhodes) Roundtable Group (The Group), The Royal Institute Of International Affairs, the Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City, the Council On Foreign Relations, the Jason Society, the Skull and Bones Society (Russell Trust), the Scroll and Key Fraternity, the highest Degrees of the York and Scottish Rites of Freemasonry, the Ancient Order of Rosae Crucae, and many other secret societies which collectively make up the modern equivalent of the "Brotherhood of the Snake" also known as (a.k.a.) the "Guardians," the "Builders," the "Philosophers of Fire," or the "Illuminati".

The Philosophy of the Mystery Schools is the Luciferian Philosophy as espoused by General (Christopher) Albert Pike, one of the founders of the KKK. But it is not his original thought... he just expounded upon it in forms that eventually became accessible to those who seek it out. Christopher means Christ-like. To the adept, Albert Pike achieved a mystical apotheosis in the Lodge of Perfection and brought forth the Christ within. He thus became Christed taking on the name Christopher.

Watch "StarTrek" from the beginning episodes up to the present, and you will begin to realize that it was an indoctrination into the concepts of socialism through subliminal initiation of the youth of the nation. The Captains James T. Kirk (JTK = K(nights) (of the) T(emple) (of) J(erusalem) and Christopher Pike are symbolic salutes to the Order of the Templars, and to the Brotherhoods greatest philosopher and probably its most prolific writer the Christed General Albert Pike. The Enterprise represents their great work or plan which if navigated properly will lead them to the realization of their dream of a united socialist utopian world.

"As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God." Interview with Gene Roddenberry in "Star Trek Creator" by David Alexander, Roc, an imprint of Dutton Signet a division of Penguin Books New York, page 568, par 1

Those who understand the symbolic language will have noticed that the most recent Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award Ceremony recognized the coming of the New Dawn. The rising Sun on the backdrop and the two triple crowns of the Mysteries representing the Trinity of Osiris, Isis, and the child Horus were revealing. Trooping before it were the Stars, some of the thousand points of light, who make the movies that mold the minds of the sheople, creating the future world.

Very simply the Luciferian philosophy is, "Adam and Eve were held prisoner in the bonds of ignorance by an unjust and vindictive God in the Garden of Eden. They were set free from their chains (Evolution through "Primordial Knowing") by Lucifer (Prometheus) through his agent Satan in the guise of a serpent (ancient symbol of Wisdom) with the gift of Intellect (Fire). Through the use of his intellect man will perfect the race (Anglo/Aryan) and will himself become God (promise of Satan to Adam and Eve)." Any religion, church, organization, or People who believe they are God, will become God, or are becoming God is practicing the Luciferian philosophy of the Mystery Schools, and are acting in furtherance of the conspiracy.

The Luciferian philosophy is a metaphor for the development of the perfected man (Marxist/Leninist) through the process of evolution by learning how to dominate and control nature (called science). The result (they say) will be the apotheosis of the race of mankind and the elimination of all who cannot make this paradigm shift in the coming New Age. The Soviet Union was the most perfect expression of illuminist secular humanist philosophy that has ever been presented before the eyes of an ignorant but gullible public. Now they strive for enslavement of the human race in the new utopia. This will be brought about through deception, manipulation, and psychological operations which make up the art of illusion called magic.

The Alchemists had the same religion but disguised it under the profane interpretation of the exoteric or outward expression of mutating lead into gold. The search for the philosophers stone was the attempt to perfect the race (Anglo/Aryan) and lead the evolution of what the Illuminati believe to be the inferior races of mankind, what they believe to be useless eaters.

Those who are attracted to the Mysteries who are unable to grasp the esoteric meaning of their education often take the exoteric interpretation to be truth. They often turn to Satan or Lucifer (Light) as their object of worship never understanding the metaphor for a much deeper philosophy. These Satan worshipers are useful. They furnish a diversion and are often a source of large sums of money. The Brotherhood has seldom found itself lacking in fools or funds. Ex-FBI operative Ted Gunderson is the hegelian tool in this instance pointing you off after Satanists, a cull-d-sac where you will chase your own tail round, and round, and round. I do not believe that Ted knows that he is being used in this regard. I may be wrong.

Shirley McClain understands the philosophy, though probably not in its correct interpretation. She is a member in good standing. "I am GOD," is her message.

Fire (Intellect, Light, Illumination) is the God of the Mysteries and its Priests are the Philosophers of Fire (Illumined Ones or Illuminati). They believe that any concept of creation must contain the idea that all things are manifestations of a supreme force (Pantheism). Since man is the only creation with intelligence and original thought, they believe that the combined, or collective consciousness of mankind, is the mind of the Great Architect of the Universe, ergo Man IS GOD. And that should "enlighten" you to the source of some of the more difficult to understand concepts of the New Age movement.

Please do not get the fool (profane = you) mixed up with the adepts, or Fraternitis Rex Mundi, or Brotherhood (Illuminati) of the king of the World (Lucifer or Satan). Those who cannot understand this philosophy through the occult language of symbology and make the shift in thinking for the coming millenium may be doomed to extinction. The spokespersons for the New Age make no secret of their intent in that regard.

This is the age of deception. The world is on the razor. One half is scheduled to be exterminated if these people have their way, and the other half is scheduled to be enslaved when the mystical union between the moon IS (Isis or Church) and the sun RA (Osiris or Doctrine) greets the Son of the morning EL (Horus or full body of Adepts) on the horizon (Horus risen)  in the New Dawn (ISRAEL or realization of the New World Order). When the process is complete a new worldwide Soviet Union will emerge to thin the herd, shear the sheople, and march them off to enslavement or slaughter depending upon their individual ability to accept and adhere to their reeducation.

A prime illustration of the symbology of the Mystery Schools is the following Art Bell logo.

Notice the hidden messages, A.L. and R.T. Bel? Can you decipher them? Notice that a capstone is in place? Did you notice Bel is placed above the capstone by the flying arrow? Do you know what that means? Did you spot the all seeing eye?

Here is a clue... A.L. is the abbreviation for the Latin which translates Year of Light referring to the year 6,000 when the Illuminati believe Prometheus, Lucifer, Baal, Bel, Satan, the angel of light who was cast out of heaven, will triumph over God and mount the throne in the north (A metaphor for the triumph of socialism over religion, nation states, and the common herd). A.L. can be found by adding 4,000 to the current year, 1998 + 4000 = 5998. All who say they are Light Workers are engaged in the battle against God on Lucifer's behalf.

I have long recognized that Art Bell is a shill for the New World Odor. It is confirmed in his book . World government is, in fact, the theme of the book.

Did you know that the sea (mare or Mary) is a symbol of vast numbers of People, the masses in Marxist symbology? Did you notice that the pyramid rises from the sea (People) and dominates the scene as a promise, or savior? Did you know the pyramid missing the capstone represents the Great (unfinished) Work of the Mystery School? Did you know that the Great Work represents social engineering (socialism) working toward the apotheosis of the race (perfected man, sixth root race) as promised to Adam and Eve by Satan, and a New World Order? Did you notice that the name Art Bell straddles the capstone signifying that he is the Light Worker, or Illumined Man, or Master Mason, or Horus, or perfected god-Man, or Savior, who completes the Great Work? Did you notice the Bright Star fallen from heaven just above the capstone? Do you know who or what it represents? Do you see the Thousand Points of Light working in silence behind the veil (clouds) in the heavens. Illuminism is Marxism. It is a false promise that the human race will be perfected bringing a perfect utopian society through social engineering. This is a brainwashing mechanism whereby an ignorant slave race may be created to be ruled by a totalitarian socialist world government.

Art Bell is a Freemason. He is a member of the Illuminati. Art Bell's book The Quickening is one of the most blatant, in your face, pieces of new world order propaganda that I have ever seen. In it Art Bell, claiming to be a patriotic American, shamelessly advocates the formation of a world totalitarian socialist government.

"Will there be a global government with a benevolent dictator, overseeing global law, global police and a global judiciary in an attempt to make the world cleaner, peaceful and prosperous? If that's what it takes to achieve these ends, so be it." -- from The Quickening by Art Bell, page 309

The Art Bell Overnight and Dreamland radio shows dish up nightly servings of ridiculous, outrageous, and fantastic conspiracy fantasies. Occasionally Bell stirs in legitimate, real and dangerous conspiracies. Although Art Bell pretends to be serious, the mix of incredulous fantasy with fact serves to debunk all conspiracies. Bell effectively implants the idea that anyone who believes in any conspiracy is a whacked out nutcase that should be locked up in a mental institution. He is a most effective change agent operating on behalf of our enemies.

The conspiracy is racist, considering Blacks, Hispanics, and Aboriginal Peoples to be inferior races of useless eaters. They believe or at least profess that the Anglo/Aryan race is the true Israel (British Israel and Christian Identity for the dupes and an Anglophile Secular Humanism for the leaders) and thus the Master race. They have convinced the so-called useless eaters that they are friends, benefactors, and protectors. In the meantime they plan to enslave these poor People under socialism or eliminate them altogether. The Illuminati has convinced them that Karl Marx is their savior, and the sheople follow this Judas goat eagerly.

There will be no individual Rights only privileges. These will be granted or denied at will by the world supra government. All property is to be owned by the State. There will be a redistribution of wealth. They plan to eliminate class differences and reduce the standard of living to a lower level in the advanced nations, such as the united States, and to a higher standard of living in the so-called third world nations. This leveling of the standard of living will be accomplished through a global economic collapse which is in its beginning stages. The economic collapse will fulfill the goal of Marx and Engles' Communist Manifesto mandating the elimination of the middle class. The graduated income tax was the first implementation of this process and is one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto. NAFTA and GATT are a part of this process encouraging industry to move into third-world nations in order to exploit cheap labor.

All existing religions will disappear. The only religion will be the state religion (humanism or illuminism).

All County and State governments will be eliminated and replaced with regional government. These regional governments (Home Rule) are already in place. Regionalism is gradually taking control throughout America.

There will be no more cash. Trade will be accomplished by a system of computer credits with accounts accessed through debit cards or computer chip implants. The cards or implants will also serve as personal identification, drivers license, and etc. When this is completed the human race will be shackled to a computer in a never ending cycle of debt. No action or movement will ever again be private.

The plan for the creation of a socialist world government is protected by an artificial extraterrestrial threat from space. The entire UFO phenomenon and the uFOOLogy movement has been created to further the protection and activation of the plan.

Within MAJESTYTWELVE is Operation Majority justifying the plan by presenting an extraterrestrial threat as the reason for the necessity for world government ala "Who speaks for planet Earth... Argentina?" Exactly the manner in which Stanton T. Friedman ends his UFOs Are Real lectures.

Operation Majority is named after the original Bolshevik party which sparked the Russian Revolution. Bolshevik means the majority. The plan claims that if the American people are ever told of this extraterrestrial presence aliens will destroy the United States. All who have access to the plan or who inadvertently discover the plan are silenced by that warning. They believe in the government and thus believe the extraterrestrial lie. These dupes do not know that the Illuminati are the aliens who plan to destroy the United States of America in any event.

The natural skepticism of reporters insures that anyone who believes in extraterrestrial visitation or who links the so-called alien threat with the coming world government will be ridiculed and discredited.

When I saw Operation Majority while serving in the Navy I believed the alien threat was real just like everyone else. It was not until I had performed many years of research that I was able to fully understand exactly what it was that I had seen. It was extremely difficult for me to believe that my government and the United States Navy had used me, especially since I had dedicated my life to government and military service. Most government and military personnel cannot and will not believe such and idea.

The plan is real. The extraterrestrial threat is artificial. The threat is presented through the use of secret technology originally developed by the Germans in their secret weapons programs during WW-II, by geniuses like Nikola Tesla, and many others.

Military and government personnel who have access to this material believe it is real. None of them, however, has ever seen any evidence of the existence of any extraterrestrial creature nor any advanced technology other that that of human origin. It is not what they see that convinces them it is extraterrestrial in origin but the manner in which it is presented. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Top Secret government or military documentation could be lies. It is trust in government by men and women who have given their lives in its service that keeps this monumental lie a alive.

All so-called leaks are intentional misinformation projects designed to promote the alien threat scenario while allowing for complete deniability on the part of government. The antics of Vicki (Cooper) Ecker (CIA), Donald Francis Ecker III (Dupe), William Moore, Jaime Shandera, Stanton T. Friedman, Bruce Maccabee (CIA, ONI), Barry Taff PhD.(Pneuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA worked with recently deceased Dr. Louis Jollyn "Jolly" West), Whitley Strieber, Bud Hopkins (CIA), John Lear (CIA), Linda Moulton Howe Order of the Eastern Star and American Federation of Human Rights (American co-masonry), Art Bell (Freemason), Glen Campbell, George Knapp (Freemason), Colonel Philip Corso (CIA, a monumental liar now Deceased), Richard Hoagland and his Face on Mars, the so-called alien autopsy film, NASA and the Apollo Moon Missions, the so-called Mars Meteorite which was fraudulently promoted as containing fossil evidence of life on Mars, the War Of The Worlds, and many other people and events are projects of this type. Some (very few) of these People are unwitting accomplices in the charade and truly believe in the extraterrestrial threat.

Most of those named, and others not named, are active, and with full knowledge, agents of illuminism/socialism. The most well known are active Fellow Travelers, communist agents of the KGB, the Central Intelligence Agency, or one of the many psychological warfare agencies founded by the Rhodes Round Table Group (The Group), the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the Council On Foreign Relations.

MAJESTYTWELVE by William Cooper Copyright © 1997 William Cooper All Rights Reserved

HOTT - MAJESTYTWELVE (hourofthetime .com)

https://www.hourofthetime .com/majestyt.htm

The Dark Architecture of National Security

How the built environment of the security state reflects the anxieties of the modern age.

By Kriston Capps

June 8, 2017 at 12:28 PM PDT

All that is known about this photo for sure is that it was taken after 1986. The Headquarters Building for the National Security Agency is the one in the back, a modest nine-story structure that resembles an anonymous apartment complex. It was completed in 1963; the lower, mall-shaped building, Operations Building 1, predates it by a decade. The more prominent towers—a pair of blue-black boxes, Operations 2A and 2B, clad in copper to block electromagnetic signals, like a Faraday cage—were finished in 1986.

That much is knowable thanks to a 2012 document published by the NSA for its 60th anniversary. The agency itself would not confirm when the buildings had been finished (or if they even were), according to Jack Self, a writer for the U.K. magazine Dezeen who dug into the history of the NSA campus a couple years back, revealing the unlikely architects behind the structures.

Mirrored and forbidding, the NSA campus stands as a fortress surrounded by a moat of parking. The public knows almost nothing about what happens inside: As Self writes, “the authorised information available on the building could practically be published in a single tweet.”

The NSA dominated headlines this week after The Intercept published agency documents on June 5 that detailed Russian efforts to hack the 2016 election. An hour after the story went live, the FBI arrested Reality Winner, an intelligence contractor and the alleged source of the leaked report. Winner, who may be released on bond on Thursday, is expected to plead not guilty to charges of “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.”

Photos of Winner, a 25-year-old woman who lives in Augusta, Georgia, are circulating widely. So is the official photo of the NSA campus in Fort Meade, Maryland—one of the most striking architectural images of the moment. It is a reminder that the built environment of the security state has taken dark turns over the last 30 years.

There is a through-line from the federal government’s most secretive and ominous buildings to its most noble and idealistic ones. The NSA’s Operations 2A and 2B buildings were designed by Eggers and Higgins, a New York architecture firm named after Otto Eggers and Daniel Higgins—the architects who completed the National Gallery of Art and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. (The firm has since changed names through mergers and acquisitions. Eggers and Higgins were longtime associates of John Russell Pope, the original designer of these classical projects; Pope died before they were constructed.)

Like the FBI Building, the NSA headquarters is a metaphor for the agency it hosts.

The NSA headquarters building is as compelling as it is unsettling—much like the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters for the FBI. The hundreds of cars parked around the building stand in for the thousands of intelligence workers inside—the serfs of the deep state, as it were. The photo anonymizes them: It’s not possible to make out the make or model of most of the vehicles, much less any information about the lives of the employees who drive them. Dots of colors of vehicles reflected in the mirrored building envelope betray nothing about what happens inside. Fort Meade looks like it might be the end of the earth, an exurb you never hope to have reason to visit. Like the FBI Building, the NSA headquarters is a metaphor for the agency it hosts.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives headquarters in Washington, D.C., is another piece of security architecture with a design pedigree. It was built by Moshe Safdie, who is best known for designing Expo 67 in Montreal and Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. Elsewhere in D.C., he designed the U.S. Institute of Peace, a building that is more frequently mentioned in connection with Safdie’s name locally than the ATF Building.

But the latter is absolutely more distinctive, especially as an example of security theater in the built environment. ATF’s headquarters, completed in 2008, was the first to abide by new security standards set forth for federal buildings after the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. Blast-resistant glass is a defining feature, as are deep setbacks—a “landscaped demilitarized zone between the building and the street,” as critic Witold Rybczynski once put it. Much of the ATF campus is given over to pure design: Two giant arching wings form a crescent “garden wall” along the north and west sides of the building, which face out to the busy intersection of New York and Florida Avenue NW. (A grave concern, then and now: As far back as 2003, al Qaeda was pledging that “cars of death” would rain destruction down on D.C.)

A paranoid style is easy to spot in even the more sophisticated national security designs from the post–9/11 era. Consider the forthcoming U.S. Embassy in London, a $1 billion landmark designed by KieranTimberlake. While (soon-to-be former) Rep. Jason Chaffetz described the project’s glass curtain wall as “opulent looking,” his comments came during a discussion about whether Congress could rely on claims that this façade would be utterly blast proof. As my colleague Amanda Kolson Hurley explains for CNN, critics say that the embassy—which also gets its own moat—is too forbidding. The architecture of the security state is awesome: terrible in its implications, but also an almost poetic reflection of national anxiety.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-08/the-dark-architecture-of-the-national-security-state

Historical Events | Aug. 20, 2021

The Black Chamber

The United States entered the Great War in 1918 with an intercept service of limited experience, and with equally limited experience in making and breaking codes. In the course of the war, the U.S. Army developed a cryptologic service that was probably the equal of any in the world.

And then the Army demobilized it.

At the conclusion of World War I, the U.S. Army had to adjust to steep budget reductions as Washington tried to return the government to pre-war levels of activity. Many programs important to modern warfare were downsized or eliminated. The "listening in" service, which had been important to the conduct of operations in France and to saving American lives, was one of these.

Conversely, however, as the military eliminated this function, the civilian side of the government established an organization to do it. This was the first peace-time national-level intelligence agency in U.S. history. Tellingly, it was a code-breaking organization.

The sponsor for this organization was the State Department, although the Army and the Navy shared in the budgeting and decrypts. Herbert Yardley, formerly a code clerk for the Department of State, recently a major in command of MI-8, Military Intelligence's wartime cryptologic section, was chosen as head of the new civilian organization.

Yardley was and is a fascinating character. He had a reputation as a blatant self-promoter and a "wheeler-dealer" in business. He was a dedicated poker player and, by his own admission, a womanizer. He was also a skilled and serious practitioner of codebreaking.

Yardley's proficiency as a telegrapher brought him from the small town of Worthington, Indiana to Washington, D.C. His steady job as a code clerk in the Department of State enabled him to send for his hometown sweetheart, and they were married in the District of Columbia. He was employed by the State Department from 1912 until he entered the military in 1917.

The regular duty of a code clerk at Yardley's level was simply to register incoming cables from U.S. diplomatic posts overseas and distribute them to the correct pigeon-hole. Ever restless, and bored on the night shift, Yardley took notice of incoming messages in cipher and began to wonder whether the cryptosystems really protected American secrets. To keep himself amused, he attempted to solve State Department cables, and quickly learned that American secrets were not safe.

Through reading and further experimentation, Yardley became proficient at cryptanalysis, though hardly an expert. Yet, when the United States entered World War I, he met with Major Ralph Van Deman, the head of Military Intelligence, and emerged as chief of MI-8, the code section.

Yardley spent the war in Washington, starting out in an office on the mezzanine of what is now Theodore Roosevelt Hall on Fort McNair. Toward the end of the war he was sent to Europe to meet with Allied cryptologists, but little came of these meetings. He emerged from the war with the rank of major.

Although the military demobilized its COMINT units after the war, the civilian side of the U.S. government began to appreciate the potentials of Communications Intelligence.

An agreement between the Acting Secretary of State and the Secretary of War in May 1919 created the Cipher Bureau. The original concept called for a $100,000 annual appropriation, with the Army providing 60 percent. However, since the Cipher Bureau concentrated on diplomatic decrypts, which were of lesser interest to the Army, the Chief of Staff cut the Army's contribution and left funding of the Bureau primarily with the State Department.

Based on his leadership during and immediately after the war, Yardley was selected as chief of this unprecedented organization. He assembled a staff and began operations -- in New York City!

There were a number of sound bureaucratic reasons for locating the Cipher Bureau outside Washington, not least of which was the location in New York of several cable companies with international connections. America's first civilian intelligence agency began work in the Big Apple disguised as a company that compiled commercial codes for banks and businesses.

Yardley later claimed that the Cipher Bureau solved the systems of two dozen foreign countries. Many of the records of the organization no longer exist, so it is impossible to verify all his claims. However, it is known that he provided valuable information from Mexican communications about on the revolution south of the border.

The Cipher Bureau is best known for its work during the Washington Conference of 1921-22 and the resultant Five-Power Naval Treaty. This gathering was an attempt to limit the size of postwar navies and thus head off an international arms race.

During the conference, Yardley himself, with assistance from his staff, solved the cipher used by the Japanese representatives to this conference.

The decrypt intelligence produced by the Cipher Bureau during the Washington Conference was of mixed importance. Some was timely and revealed the Japanese government's internal discussions (and dissents) over its negotiating position for the conference. Some of the Bureau's translations were late and covered information already revealed in the press -- but even these decrypts had value, since they confirmed or refuted media reports that were of unknown validity.

The Washington Treaty imposed a limit on capital ship tonnage by the major powers. Yardley's decrypts helped the U.S. negotiators encourage Japan to accept its minimum position rather than hold out for a higher tonnage level.

The election of 1928 brought Herbert Hoover to the presidency, with Henry Stimson as his Secretary of State. Stimson was one of the towering figures in foreign and defense policy in the first half of the Twentieth Century (he also later served in Franklin Roosevelt's administration as Secretary of War).

Stimson made a decision to eliminate the Cipher Bureau. The decision likely was based on budget considerations, but it has come down to us as based on the need for acting in good faith in international relations. Whatever the reason for terminating the Cipher Bureau, when he did so Stimson spoke the single most famous sentence ever uttered about codes and ciphers:

"Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail."

In his history of the Cipher Bureau, Yardley charged that Stimson had axed the organization strictly for moralistic reasons. In his own autobiography, Stimson did not deny this: he noted that although he became a heavy consumer of decrypt intelligence in wartime, certain practices that might be necessary during war were unacceptable during peace.

One other important factor apart in the decision to dissolve the Cipher Bureau was the reorganization of the Army's cryptologic units. In May 1929, the Signal Corps assumed responsibility for cryptology from Military Intelligence and wished to rebuild it from the bottom up to serve military needs better. A half-hearted offer was made to Yardley to join a new cryptologic organization, but at a salary the Signal Corps expected he would refuse.

The upshot: in late 1929, employees of the Cipher Bureau were given three months' salary as severance pay, and dismissed. They had been employed using "confidential funds," therefore had no civil service status or rehire rights.

Out of work, with a family to support, and few prospects as the Great Depression worsened, Yardley decided to write his story. It appeared first in serial form in The Saturday Evening Post, then as a book, The American Black Chamber.

The American Black Chamber was filled with good stories well told, as well as frank descriptions of Yardley's successes in cryptanalysis. It was a best-seller in 1932 -- overseas as well as domestically.

While many of his former colleagues and those now engaged in military cryptanalysis were appalled at the revelations in his book, Yardley defended his publication. He claimed self-righteously that his only motive had been to alert the United States to the weakness of its own systems and to the power of cryptanalysts. What he could do, he said, people in other nations could also do.

It has been difficult until recently to assess the contribution of the Cipher Bureau to policy. For most cases, the only account of its activities were Yardley's own. With the exception of the Washington Naval Conference, it is impossible to state unambiguously that Yardley's operation directly affected policy formation or the outcome of negotiations.

But, if it did not provide continuity in U.S. cryptologic service, the Cipher Bureau at least had the distinction of being the first national, civilian intelligence organization in peacetime. Yardley and his staff gave the U.S. government what it had never had before, and what it would soon acquire an insatiable appetite for.

https://www.nsa.gov/History/Cryptologic-History/Historical-Events/Article-View/Article/2740622/

The black box: Inside America's massive new surveillance centre

James Bamford

BusinessMar 30, 2012 6:33 AM

Image may contain Nature Outdoors Universe Space Astronomy Outer Space Night and Starry Sky

US Army Corps of engineers conceptual site plan / Wired

This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and green-grey sagebrush rustles in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a valley in the shadow of Utah's Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It's the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the world, to understand the mysterious words sent from their god as revealed on golden plates, and to practise what has become known as "the principle", marriage to multiple wives.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who keep to themselves. They too are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than 2km from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted builders are laying the groundwork for the newcomers' own temple and archive, a complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town's boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol building.

Rather than Bibles and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts and armed guards. These newcomers will be capturing, storing and analysing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world's telecommunications networks. In the town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbours.

Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target Senior intelligence official

The blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the US National Security Agency (NSA). A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade.

Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyse and store vast amounts of the world's communications from satellites and underground and undersea cables of international, foreign and domestic networks.

The heavily fortified $2 billion (£1.25 billion) centre should be operational in September 2013. Stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including private emails, mobile phone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails -- travel itineraries, purchases and other digital "pocket litter". It is the realisation of the "total information awareness" programme created by the Bush administration -- which was killed by Congress in 2003 after an outcry over its potential for invading privacy.

By Louryn Strampe

But "this is more than just a data centre", says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the programme. The mammoth Bluffdale centre will have another important and far more secret role. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes, which is crucial because much of the data that the centre will handle -- financial information, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications -- will be heavily encrypted.

According to another top official also involved, the NSA made a breakthrough several years ago in cryptanalysis, or breaking complex encryption systems used not only by governments around the world but also average computer users. The upshot, says this official, is that "everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target."

For the NSA, with tens of billions of dollars in post- 9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth in size and power. Established as an arm of the US Department of Defense (DoD) following Pearl Harbor, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post- Cold War years. Caught off guard by the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and 9/11, the agency's reason to exist was in question. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And although there is little indication that its effectiveness has improved -- after all, it missed the attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009, and the car bomber in Times Square in 2010 -- there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process -- and for the first time since Watergate -- the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of emails and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer to look for patterns and unscramble codes.

Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store everything captured in its electronic net. And, it's all being done in secret.

By Louryn Strampe

US Army Corps of engineers conceptual site plan / Wired

Freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of ­January 6, 2011, mixing with heavy grey smog. At the city's international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted and outbound jets were grounded. But among those making it through was a figure whose grey suit and tie made him almost blend into the background.

He was tall and thin, with dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency's highest-ranking civilian who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.

Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data centre, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency's associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they jabbed awkwardly at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had dubbed "the spy centre". Hoping for some details on what was to be built, reporters turned to one of the guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility? "Absolutely not," he said with a half laugh. "Nor do I want them spying on me."

By Louryn Strampe

Inglis simply engaged in double-talk, emphasising the least threatening aspect of the centre: "It's a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation's cybersecurity."

Cyber-security will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale -- what and how it is collected, and what is done with the material, are more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover -- who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the centre as "a great tribute to Utah".

This was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation's largest cybersecurity project, yet no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke at it. In fact, the official who'd originally introduced the data centre, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a career CIA man. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country's human and electronic spies.

Within days, the gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 builders. The plans for the centre show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million (£6m) anti-terrorism protection programme, including a fence designed to stop a heavy vehicle travelling 80kph, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle-inspection facility and a visitor-control centre. Inside, the facility will consist of four 2,300-square-metre halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 83,600 square metres for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 6.4 million litres of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool.

Electricity will come from the centre's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag -- about $40 million (£25 million) a year, according to one estimate.

Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence\c community is most comfortable 2010 Defense Science Board report

Given the facility's scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of your little finger, the amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the sensors of the intelligence agencies. As a result of this "expanding array of theatre airborne and other sensor networks", as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is trying to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes -- so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) It needs that capacity because, according to a report by Cisco, global internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totalled five exabytes. And the flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than two billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA's need for a 93,000-square-metre data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah centre with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

The data stored in Bluffdale will go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet -- data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and non-commercial file-sharing between trusted peers. "The deep web contains government reports, databases and other sources of information of high value to DoD and the intelligence community," according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. "Tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web...

By Louryn Strampe

Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable."

With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets.

The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, "a potential adversary".

Before yottabytes of data can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA's new centre, they must be collected. To achieve that more efficiently, the agency has installed secret electronic-monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. These are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping programme have long been exposed -- how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorise highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the programme allowed monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the programme's exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What hasn't been revealed until now, however, was the size of this domestic spying programme.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the programme, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail.

William Binney was a senior crypto-mathematician responsible for automating the agency's worldwide listening network. A tall man with dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA's bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that's still probably in use.

He explains that the agency could have installed its gear at the nation's cable landing stations -- the two dozen or so sites where fibre-optic cables come ashore. If it had, the NSA could have limited its eavesdropping to international communications, which at that time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it put wiretapping rooms at key junctions throughout the country, thus gaining access to most of the domestic traffic. The network of intercept stations, or "switches", goes far beyond the room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistleblower in 2006. "I think there's ten to 20 of them," Binney says. "Not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and on the East Coast."

By Louryn Strampe

Listening in doesn't stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications, the agency also monitors AT&T's powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away in rural Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek's three 32-metre dishes handle much of the country's communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on a remote stretch in Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company's Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping programme. "They violated the

[US] Constitution setting it up," he says. "But they didn't care.

They were going to do it, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn't stay." Binney says Stellar Wind was larger than has been disclosed and included listening to domestic phone calls as well as inspecting domestic email.

At the outset the programme recorded 320 million calls a day, he says -- about 73 to 80 per cent of the total volume of the agency's worldwide intercepts.

The haul only grew. According to Binney -- who has kept close contact with agency employees until a few years ago -- the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are powered by software programs that conduct "deep packet inspection", examining internet traffic as it passes through the ten-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

The software, created by a company called Narus that's now part of Boeing, is controlled from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords and phrases in emails. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, is recorded and transmitted to the NSA. The scope expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all communications to and from that person are routed to the NSA's recorders. "If your number's in there? Routed and gets recorded." And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there.

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind programme -- again, never confirmed until now -- was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T's domestic and international billing records. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex. Verizon was also part of the programme. "That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five," Binney says. "So you're over a billion and a half calls a day." (Verizon and AT&T said they would not comment on matters of national security.)

By Louryn Strampe

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people's communications according to how closely they are connected to a target. The further away from the target -- say just an acquaintance of a friend of the target -- the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. He says: "They're storing everything they gather."

Once communications are stored, the datamining begins. "You can watch everybody all the time with datamining," Binney says.

Everything a person does is charted on a graph, "financial transactions or travel or anything", he says. Thus the NSA is able to paint a detailed picture of someone's life. The NSA can also eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne Kinne, who worked before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks "basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans". Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. "A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families," she says. "Intimate, personal conversations." Kinne found eavesdropping on innocent citizens distressing. "It's like finding somebody's diary," she says.

But there is reason for everyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on anti-war protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.

Before he left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorised by a court.

At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant;

Binney devised a method to computerise the system. But such a system would have required close co-ordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren't interested, Binney says. Asked how many communications -- "transactions", in NSA's lingo -- the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates "between 15 and 20 trillion over 11 years".

By Louryn Strampe

Binney hoped that Barack Obama's new administration might be open to addressing constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J Kirk Wiebe, tried to explain an automated warrant-approval system to the Department of Justice's inspector general. They were given the brush-off. "They said, oh, OK, we can't comment," Binney says. Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state," he says.

US Army Corps of engineers conceptual site plan / Wired

There is still one technology preventing untrammelled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone -- from

terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions and ordinary email senders -- can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths -- 128 bits, 192 bits and 256 bits -- it's incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm -- trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption -- would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).

By Louryn Strampe

Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale.

That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyse. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. "We questioned it one time," says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. "Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys -- the crypto guys." According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, "You've got to build this thing because we just don't have the capability of doing the code-breaking." It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers -- the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer- security industry -- the code breakers were admitting defeat.

So the agency had one major ingredient -- a massive data-storage facility -- under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the US government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems programme, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflop -- the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing programme was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 40km from Knoxville, it is the "secret city" where uranium-235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit said: "What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here."

Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it's engaged in a new secret war.

Such an advance would open a window on a trove of foreign secrets

In 2004, as part of the supercomputing programme, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. "For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility," says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the programme.) It was an expensive undertaking.

Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-storey, 20,000m2 structure was built on a plot of land on the lab's East Campus and completed in 2006.

By Louryn Strampe

Inside, 318 scientists, computer engineers and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The centre was named in honour of George R Cotter, the NSA's now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology programme. Not that you'd know it. "There's no sign on the door," says the ex-NSA computer expert.

At the DOE's unclassified centre at Oak Ridge the team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops and was the world's fastest computer in 2009.

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. "They made a big breakthrough," says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the programme.

The NSA's machine was probably similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. They were moving from the R&D phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems.

The codebreaking effort was up and running.

The agency pulled the shade down on the project, says the former official. "Only the chairman, vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told," he says. "They were thinking this was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption."

In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans' personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. Whereas today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the centre is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. "Remember," says the former intelligence official, "a lot of foreign government stuff we've never been able to break is 128[-bit] or less. Break all that and you'll find out a lot more of what you didn't know -- stuff we've already stored -- so there's an enormous amount of information still in there."

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale and its mountains of long-stored data will come in. What can't be broken today may be broken tomorrow. "Then you can see what they were saying in the past," he says. "By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now."

But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years.

The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.

But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy's exascale computing initiative (the NSA's budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. "The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities," the senators noted. By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan's "K Computer", with 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.

But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totalling 24,100m2, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimise the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DoE employees in 2009, it will be an "unassuming facility with limited view from roads", in keeping with the NSA secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run alongside the unclassified effort for the DoE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the JaguarXT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to ten to 20 petaflops.

Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions -- the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world's knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it's only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.

James Bamford is author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (Anchor Books)

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

James Bamford is the author of the The Shadow Factory: the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

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Have you ever stuck a batch of cookies in the oven with high hopes that you've *finally* found the perfect recipe, only for them to emerge being far from what you imagined? According to cookie science, there are a variety of factors that will affect the taste & texture of the final product, from the type of ingredients to the temperature of your oven. Keep reading below for our cookie baking tips, so you can finally bake the cookies of your dreams!

Ingredients

Baking requires a great level of precision when measuring out the ingredients. A little more or a little less of an ingredient might change your cookies quite drastically. We recommend using a kitchen scale to help with the precision & accuracy of your measurements, but it will also help to have a deeper understanding behind the impact each ingredient has on the outcome of your cookies.

https://www.quebradabakingco.com/news-item/how-to-bake-perfect-cookie/

What are HTTP Cookies? HTTP cookies, or internet cookies, are built specifically for web browsers to track, personalize and save information about each user's session. A “session” is the word used to define the amount of time you spend on a site. Cookies are created to identify you when you visit a new website.

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8 Things You Need to Know about Surveillance

8 important truths about surveillance

ai-in-society

Author

Rachel Thomas

Published

August 7, 2019

Over 225 police departments have partnered with Amazon to have access to Amazon’s video footage obtained as part of the “smart” doorbell product Ring, and in many cases these partnerships are heavily subsidized with taxpayer money. Police departments are allowing Amazon to stream 911 call information directly in real-time, and Amazon requires police departments to read pre-approved scripts when talking about the program. If a homeowner doesn’t want to share data from their video camera doorbell with police, an officer for the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office said they can just go directly to Amazon to obtain it. This creation of an extensive surveillance network, the murky private-public partnership surrounding it, and a lack of any sort of regulations or oversight is frightening. And this is just one of many examples related to surveillance technology that have recently come to light.

I frequently talk with people who are not that concerned about surveillance, or who feel that the positives outweigh the risks. Here, I want to share some important truths about surveillance:

Surveillance can facilitate human rights abuses and even genocide

Data is often used for different purposes than why it was collected

Data often contains errors

Surveillance typically operates with no accountability

Surveillance changes our behavior

Surveillance disproportionately impacts the marginalized

Data privacy is a public good

We don’t have to accept invasive surveillance

While I was writing this post, a number of investigative articles came out with disturbing new developments related to surveillance. I decided that rather than attempt to include everything in one post (which would make it too long and too dense), I would go ahead and share the above facts about surveillance, as they are just a relevant as ever.

Surveillance can facilitate human rights abuses and even genocide

There is a long history of data about sensitive attributes being misused, including the use of the 1940 USA Census to intern Japanese Americans, a system of identity cards introduced by the Belgian colonial government that were later used during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (in which nearly a million people were murdered), and the role of IBM in helping Nazi Germany use punchcard computers to identify and track the mass killing of millions of Jewish people. More recently, the mass internment of over one million people who are part of an ethnic minority in Western China was facilitated through the use of a surveillance network of cameras, biometric data (including images of people’s faces, audio of their voices, and blood samples), and phone monitoring.

Adolf Hitler meeting with IBM CEO Tom Watson Sr. in 1937. Source: Computer History

Pictured above is Adolf Hitler (far left) meeting with IBM CEO Tom Watson Sr. (2nd from left), shortly before Hitler awarded Watson a special “Service to the Reich” medal in 1937 (for a timeline of the Holocaust, see here). Watson returned the medal in 1940, although IBM continued to do business with the Nazis. IBM technology helped the Nazis conduct detailed censuses in countries they occupied, to thoroughly identify anyone of Jewish descent. Nazi concentration camps used IBM’s punchcard machines to tabulate prisoners, recording whether they were Jewish, gay, or Gypsies, and whether they died of “natural causes,” execution, suicide, or via “special treatment” in gas chambers. It is not the case that IBM sold the machines and then was done with it. Rather, IBM and its subsidiaries provided regular training and maintenance on-site at the concentration camps: printing off cards, configuring machines, and repairing them as they broke frequently.

Data is often used for different purposes than why it was collected

In the above examples, the data collection began before genocide was committed. IBM began selling to Nazi Germany well before the Holocaust (although continued for far too long), including helping with Germany’s 1933 census conducted by Adolf Hitler, which was effective at identifying far more Jewish people than had previously been recognized in Germany.

It is important to recognize how data and images gathered through surveillance can be weaponized later. Columbia professor Tim Wu wrote that “One [hard truth] is that data and surveillance networks created for one purpose can and will be used for others. You must assume that any personal data that Facebook or Android keeps are data that governments around the world will try to get or that thieves will try to steal.”

Plenty of data collection is not involved with such extreme abuse as genocide; however, in a time of global resurgence of white supremacist, ethno-nationalist, and authoritarian movements, it would be deeply irresponsible to not consider how data & surveillance can and will be weaponized against already vulnerable groups.

Data often has errors (and no mechanism for correcting them)

A database of suspected gang members maintained by California law enforcement officials was found to be full of errors, including 42 babies who had been added to the database when they were less than 1 year old (28 of whom were marked as “admitting to being gang members”). Even worse, there was no process in place for correcting mistakes or removing people once they’ve been added.

An NPR reporter recounts his experience of trying to rent an apartment and discovering that TransUnion, one of the 3 major credit bureaus, incorrectly reported him as having two felony firearms convictions. TransUnion only removed the mistakes after a dozen phone calls and notification that the story would be reported on. This is not an unusual story: the FTC’s large-scale study of credit reports in 2012 found 26% of consumers had at least one mistake in their files and 5% had errors that could be devastating. An even more opaque, unregulated “4th bureau” exists: a collection of companies buying and selling personal information about people on the margins of the banking system (such as immigrants, students, and people with low incomes), with no standards on what types of data are included, no way to opt out, and no system for identifying or correcting mistakes.

Surveillance typically operates with no accountability

What makes the examples in the previous section disturbing is not just that errors occurred, but that there was no way to identify or correct them, and no accountability for those profiting off the error-laden data. Often, even the existence of the systems being used is not publicly known (much less details of how these systems work), unless discovered by journalists or revealed by whistleblowers. The Detroit Police Dept used facial recognition technology for nearly two years without public input and in violation of a requirement that a policy be approved by the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, until a study from Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy & Technology drew attention to the issue. Palantir, the defense startup founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, ran a program with New Orleans Police Department for 6 years which city council members did not even know about, much less have any oversight.

After two studies found that Amazon’s facial recognition software produced inaccurate and racially biased results, Amazon countered that the researchers should have changed the default parameters. However, it turned out that Amazon was not instructing police departments that use its software to do this either. Surveillance programs are operating with few regulations, no oversight, no accountability around accuracy or mistakes, and in many cases, no public knowledge of what is going on.

Surveillance changes our behavior

Hundreds of thousands of people in Hong Kong are protesting an unpopular new bill which would allow extradition to China. Typically, Hong Kong locals use their rechargeable smart cards to ride the subway. However, during the protests, long lines of people waited to use cash to buy paper tickets (usually something that only tourists do) concerned that they would be tracked for having attended the protests. Would fewer people protest if this was not an option?

In the United States, in 2015 the Baltimore Police Department used facial recognition technology to surveil people protesting the death of Freddie Grey, a young Black man who was killed in police custody, and arrested protesters with outstanding warrants. Mass surveillance could have a chilling impact on our rights to move about freely, to express ourselves, and to protest. “We act differently when we know we are ‘on the record.’ Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus in a sense, to be who we really are,” Columbia professor Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times.

Flyer from the company Geofeedia Source

Surveillance disproportionately impacts those who are already marginalized

Surveillance is applied unevenly, causing the greatest harm to people who are already marginalized, including immigrants, people of color, and people living in poverty. These groups are more heavily policed and surveilled. The Perpetual Line-Up from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology studied the unregulated use of facial recognition by police, with half of all Americans appearing in law enforcement databases, and the risks of errors, racial bias, misuses, and threats to civil liberties. The researchers pointed out that African Americans are more likely to appear in these databases (many of which are drawn from mug shots) since they are disproportionately likely to be stopped, interrogated, or arrested. For another example, consider the contrast between how easily people over 65 can apply for Medicare benefits by filling out an online form, with the invasive personal questions asked of a low-income mother on Medicaid about her lovers, hygiene, parental shortcomings, and personal habits.

In an article titled Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor, Ciara Byrne wrote, “Current public benefits programs ask applicants extremely detailed and personal questions and sometimes mandate home visits, drug tests, fingerprinting, and collection of biometric information… Employers of low-income workers listen to phone calls, conduct drug tests, monitor closed-circuit television, and require psychometric tests as conditions of employment. Prisoners in some states have to consent to be voiceprinted in order to make phone calls.”

Data privacy is a public good, like air quality or safe drinking water

Data is more revealing in aggregate. It can be nearly impossible to know what your individual data could reveal when combined with the data of others or with data from other sources, or when machine learning inference is performed on it. For instance, as Zeynep Tufekci wrote in the New York Times, individual Strava users could not have predicted how in aggregate their data could be used to identify the locations of US military bases. “Data privacy is not like a consumer good, where you click ‘I accept’ and all is well. Data privacy is more like air quality or safe drinking water, a public good that cannot be effectively regulated by trusting in the wisdom of millions of individual choices. A more collective response is needed.”

Unfortunately, this also means that you can’t fully safeguard your privacy on your own. You may choose not to purchase Amazon’s ring doorbell, yet you can still show up in the video footage collected by others. You might strengthen your online privacy practices, yet conclusions will still be inferred about you based on the behavior of others. As Professor Tufekci wrote, we need a collective response.

We don’t have to accept invasive surveillance

Many people are uncomfortable with surveillance, but feel like they have no say in the matter. While the threats surveillance poses are large, it is not too late to act. We are seeing success: in response to community organizing and an audit, Los Angeles Police Department scrapped a controversial program to predict who is most likely to commit violent crimes. Citizens, researchers, and activists in Detroit have been effective at drawing attention to the Detroit Police Department’s unregulated use of facial recognition and a bill calling for a 5-year moratorium has been introduced to the state legislature. Local governments in San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville have banned the use of facial recognition by police.

For further resources, please check out: - Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology - Digital Defense Playbook

https://www.fast.ai/posts/2019-08-07-surveillance.html 

Crematorium I

Crematorium I operated [at Auschwitz] from August 15, 1940 until July 1943. According to calculations by the German authorities, 340 corpses could be burned every 24 hours after the installation of the three furnaces.

The largest room in this building was designated as a morgue. It was adapted as the first provisional gas chamber in the autumn of 1941. The SS used Zyklon B to kill thousands of Jews upon arrival, as well as several groups of Soviet prisoners of war.

Prisoners selected in the hospital as unlikely to recover their health quickly were also killed in the gas chamber. Poles sentenced to death by the German summary court.

After the establishment in Auschwitz II-Birkenau of two more provisional gas chambers, Bunkers No. 1 and 2 (the so-called "little red house" and "little white house"), the camp authorities shifted the mass murder of the Jews there and gradually stopped using the first gas chamber.

After the completion of four crematoria with gas chambers in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the burning of corpses in Crematorium I was halted. The building was used for storage, and then designated as an SS air-raid shelter. The furnaces, chimney, and some of the walls were demolished, and the openings in the roof through which the SS poured Zyklon B were plastered.

After the war, the Museum carried out a partial reconstruction. The chimney and two incinerators were rebuilt using original components, as were and several of the openings in the gas chamber roof.

Bunker No. 1

When larger Jewish transports were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in the first half of 1942, the Nazis began using - in addition to the first operational gas chamber - two provisional gas chambers set up in farmhouses whose owners had been evicted from the village of Brzezinka.

Jewish men, women, and children, as well as Polish political prisoners selected by physicians in the camp hospital, were killed with poison gas in Bunker No. 1, which was also known as "the little red house" (because of its brick walls). The bunker contained two provisional gas chambers. It operated from the early months of 1942 until the spring and summer of 1943, when four new buildings with gas chambers and crematorium furnaces came into use in Birkenau concentration camp. At that time, Bunker No. 1 was demolished and the adjacent burning pits were filled in and landscaped.

Bunker No. 2

When larger Jewish transports were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in the first part of 1942, the Nazis began using - in addition to the first operational gas chamber - two provisional gas chambers set up in farmhouses belonging to people who had been expelled from the village of Brzezinka.

Jewish men, women, and children, as well as Polish political prisoners selected by physicians in the camp hospital, were killed with poison gas in Bunker No. 2, which was also known as "the little white house" (because of the color of the plaster covering its walls). The bunker contained four provisional gas chambers, which operated from 1942 four new buildings with gas chambers and crematorium furnaces came into use in Birkenau concentration camp in the spring and summer of 1943. In the period when the Germans needed additional gas chambers for the destruction of the Jews deported from Hungary in 1944, they temporarily put Bunker No. 2 back into operation.

Crematorium II

The Crematorium II building, which contained a gas chamber and furnaces for burning corpses. Several hundred thousand Jewish men, women and children were murdered here with poison gas, and their bodies burned. The bodies of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners who died in the concentration camp were also burned here. According to calculations by the German authorities, 1,440 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every 24 hours. According to the testimony of former prisoners, the figure was higher.

The gas chamber and Crematorium II functioned from March 1943 through November 1944.

At the end of the war, in connection with the operation intended to remove the evidence of their crimes, the camp authorities ordered the demolition of the furnaces and crematorium building in November 1944. On January 20, 1945, the SS blew up whatever had not been removed.

Crematorium III

The Crematorium III building, which contained a gas chamber and furnaces for burning corpses. Several hundred thousand Jewish men, women and children were murdered here with poison gas, and their bodies burned. The bodies of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners who died in the concentration camp were also burned here. According to calculations by the German authorities, 1,440 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every 24 hours. According to the testimony of former prisoners, the figure was higher.

The gas chamber and Crematorium III functioned from June 1943 through November 1944.

At the end of the war, in connection with the operation intended to remove the evidence of their crimes, the camp authorities ordered the demolition of the furnaces and crematorium building in November 1944. On January 20, 1945, the SS blew up whatever had not been removed.

Crematorium IV

The Crematorium IV building, which contained a gas chamber and furnaces for burning corpses.

Thousands of Jewish men, women and children were murdered here with poison gas, and their bodies burned.

The bodies of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners who died in the concentration camp were also burned here. According to calculations by the German authorities, 768 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every 24 hours. According to the testimony of former prisoners, the figure was higher.

The apparatus of mass murder in this building functioned, with interruptions, from March 1943 until October 7, 1944. The building was burned down on the day of the mutiny of the Jewish prisoners from the Sonderkommando.

Crematorium V

The Crematorium V building contained a gas chamber and furnaces for burning corpses. Thousands of Jewish men, women and children were murdered here with poison gas, and their bodies burned.

The bodies of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners who died in the concentration camp were also burned here. According to calculations by the German authorities, 768 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every 24 hours. According to the testimony of former prisoners, the figure was higher.

At times, the bodies of the people who had been murdered were also burned on pyres in pits located near Crematorium V and the so-called bunkers.

The apparatus of mass murder in this building functioned, with interruptions, from April 1943 until January 1945. In connection with the operation intended to remove the evidence of their crimes, the SS blew up the building on January 26, 1945.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/crematoria-and-gas-chambers-at-auschwitz-birkenau

Himmler used the Jesuits as the model for the SS, since he found they had the core elements of absolute obedience and the cult of the organisation.[59][60] Hitler is said to have called Himmler "my Ignatius of Loyola".[59] As an order, the SS needed a coherent doctrine that would set it apart.[61] Himmler attempted to construct such an ideology, and deduced a "pseudo-Germanic tradition" from history.[61] Himmler dismissed the image of Christ as a Jew and rejected Christianity's basic doctrine and its institutions.[62] Starting in 1934, the SS hosted "solstice ceremonies" (Sonnenwendfeiern) to increase team spirit within their ranks.[63] In a 1936 memorandum, Himmler set forth a list of approved holidays based on pagan and political precedents meant to wean SS members from their reliance on Christian festivities.[64] In an attempt to replace Christianity and suffuse the SS with a new doctrine, SS-men were able to choose special Lebenslauffeste, substituting common Christian ceremonies such as baptisms, weddings and burials. Since the ceremonies were held in small private circles, it is unknown how many SS-members opted for these kind of celebrations.[65]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_SS 

The large Latin inscription on the façade reads: Clemens XII Pont Max Anno V Christo Salvatori In Hon SS Ioan Bapt et Evang. This abbreviated inscription translates as: "The Supreme Pontiff Clement XII, in the fifth year [of his Pontificate, dedicated this building] to Christ the Savior, in honor of Saints John the Baptist and [John] the Evangelist".[5] The inscription indicates, with its full title (see below), that the archbasilica was originally dedicated to Christ the Savior and, centuries later, rededicated in honor of Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist. Christ the Savior remains its primary dedication, and its titular feast day is 6 August, the Transfiguration of Christ. As the cathedral of the pope as bishop of Rome, it ranks superior to all other churches of the Catholic Church, including Saint Peter's Basilica.

Name

The archbasilica's Latin name is Archibasilica Sanctissimi Salvatoris ac Sancti Ioannis Baptistae et Ioannis Evangelistae ad Lateranum,[6] which in English is the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior and Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist at the Lateran, and in Italian Arcibasilica [Papale] del Santissimo Salvatore e Santi Giovanni Battista ed Evangelista in Laterano.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archbasilica_of_Saint_John_Lateran#Lateran_Palace 

From modest beginnings the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons), became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany, staffed by men who perceived themselves as the “racial elite” of Nazi future.

In the Nazi state, the SS assumed leading responsibility for security, identification of ethnicity, settlement and population policy, and intelligence collection and analysis. The SS controlled the German police forces and the concentration camp system. The SS conceived and implemented plans designed to restructure the ethnic composition of eastern Europe and the occupied Soviet Union.

From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question; after 1941, its leadership planned, coordinated and directed the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question. This “solution” was the annihilation of the European Jews, which we now refer to as the Holocaust

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ss 

2 §1. The character and charism of the Society of Jesus arise from the Spiritual Exercises which our holy father Ignatius and his companions went through. Led by this experience, they formed an apostolic group rooted in charity, in which, after they had taken the vows of chastity and poverty and had been raised to the priesthood, they offered themselves as a HOLOCAUST to God,[2] so that serving as soldiers of God beneath the banner of the cross and serving the Lord alone and the Church his spouse under the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth,[3] they would be sent into the entire world[4] for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine. [5]

The Constitutions of The Society of Jesus and Their Complimentary Norms

https://jesuitas.lat/uploads/the-constitutions-of-the-society-of-jesus-and-their-complementary-norms/Constitutions%20and%20Norms%20SJ%20ingls.pdf 

20. It is better and safer to make alliance and amity with [Moslem] Turks, [Communist] Infidels, or [Talmudic and anti-Torah, Zionist] Jews, than with [Reformation Bible-believing] Heretic Protestants [and Baptists], because they may draw us into the errors of their novelties. {1}

Absolutist Papal Maxims of the Jesuits

To sum up: men crucified to the world, and to whom the world itself is crucified[7] such would our Constitutions have us to be; new men, I say, who have put off their affections to put on Christ;[8] dead to themselves to live to justice; who, with St. Paul in labors, in watchings, in fastings, in chastity, in knowledge, in long suffering, in sweetness, in the Holy Spirit, in charity unfeigned, in the word of truth, show themselves ministers of God[9] and by the armor of Justice on the right hand and, on the left, by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report, by good success finally and ill success, press forward with great strides to their heavenly country. This is the sum and aim of our institute. 

Preface to the First Edition

Rome, the house of the Society of Jesus, 1559

The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and Their Complimentary Norms

https://web.archive.org/web/20200211182223/https://jesuitas.lat/uploads/the-constitutions-of-the-society-of-jesus-and-their-complementary-norms/Constitutions%20and%20Norms%20SJ%20ingls.pdf

What does the Bible say about spying/eavesdropping?

When we spy or eavesdrop on someone, we are trying to gain information that is not being willingly shared with us. There are many cases in which eavesdropping or spying is a sin. But in other cases there may, in fact, be legitimate reasons to spy or eavesdrop.

Spies are employed by governments as a part of their national security. Without spying on enemy plans, a nation could lose its freedom. During times of war, spying on the enemy and collecting military intelligence have been crucial to victory. God told Moses to send spies into the land of Canaan to learn what the Israelites were facing in taking it (Numbers 13:1–2). Later, Joshua sent spies into Jericho before that decisive battle (Joshua 2:1). In Judges 7:9—15, God instructed Gideon and his servant Purah to spy on the Midianites.

Eavesdropping, secretly listening to a private conversation, is a violation of privacy and often a breach of trust. But eavesdropping also has its place. It could have been eavesdropping that prevented the murder of Paul (Acts 23:16) and thwarted the assassination of King Xerxes (Esther 2:21–23). As a modern example, a mother concerned about the direction her teenager is going may pause outside the bedroom door when she hears her daughter on the phone. The words drinking and party catch her attention. Because she has her daughter’s best interest in mind, she may eavesdrop in order to know how to protect her child. So spying and eavesdropping are not wrong in themselves. The sin lies in the purpose behind the action.

When we spy or eavesdrop due to selfish motives, we are crossing a line. Envy, jealousy, or desire for revenge may wrongly motivate us to eavesdrop or spy on someone. If our intent is to use the information gained to give ourselves an unfair advantage or to harm someone else, then eavesdropping is wrong. It is dishonest and unloving (Romans 13:8; Luke 6:31). Christians are to be “blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation” (Philippians 2:15). Eavesdropping out of nosiness is being sneaky, which is dishonest (Proverbs 11:3). If we hear something juicy, we often don’t want to keep it to ourselves, so eavesdropping becomes the first step to gossiping.

On those occasions when spying or eavesdropping is done with altruistic motives, then it is allowable. But any hint of selfishness, egoism, or voyeurism taints it with sin. If in doubt about the virtue of spying or eavesdropping in any given situation, we should always default to Jesus’ words in Luke 6:31: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

https://www.gotquestions.org/Bible-spying-eavesdropping.html

Numbers 13

1599 Geneva Bible

13 4 Certain men are sent to search the land of Canaan. 24 They bring of the fruit of the land.  31 Caleb comforteth the people against the discouraging of the other spies.

1 Then afterward the people removed from Hazeroth, and pitched in the wilderness of [a]Paran.

2 ¶ And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

3 [b]Send thou men out to search the land of Canaan which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, such as are all rulers among them.

4 Then Moses sent them out of the wilderness of Paran at the commandment of the Lord: all those men were [c]heads of the children of Israel.

5 Also their names are these: of the tribe of Reuben, Shammua the son of Zaccur:

6 Of the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat the son of Hori:

7 Of the tribe of Judah, Caleb the son of Jephunneh:

8 Of the tribe of Issachar, Igal the son of Joseph:

9 Of the tribe of Ephraim, [d]Hoshea the son of Nun:

10 Of the tribe of Benjamin, Palti the son of Raphu:

11 Of the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel the son of Sodi:

12 Of the tribe of Joseph, to wit, of the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi the son of Susi:

13 Of the tribe of Dan, Ammiel the son of Gemalli:

14 Of the tribe of Asher, Sethur the son of Michael:

15 Of the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi the son of Vophsi:

16 Of the tribe of Gad, Geuel the son of Machi.

17 These are the names of the [e]men, which Moses sent to spy out the land: and Moses called the name of Hoshea the son of Nun, Joshua.

18 So Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said to them, Go up this way toward the South, and go up into the [f]mountains.

19 And consider the land what it is, and the people that dwell therein, whether they be strong, or weak, either few or many.

20 Also what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be [g]good or bad: and what cities they be, that they dwell in, whether they dwell in tents, or in walled towns.

21 And what the land is: whether it be fat or lean, whether there be trees therein, or not. And be of good courage, and bring of the fruit of the land (for then was the time of the first ripe grapes.)

22 ¶ So they went up, and searched out the land, from the wilderness of [h]Zin unto Rehob, to go to Hamath.

23 And they ascended toward the South, and came unto Hebron, where were Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the sons of [i]Anak. And [j]Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.

24 Then they came to the river of Eshcol, and cut down thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it upon a bar between two, and brought of the pomegranates and of the figs.

25 That place was called the [k]river Eshcol, because of the cluster of grapes, which the children of Israel cut down thence.

26 Then after forty days they turned again from searching of the land.

27 And they went and came to Moses and to Aaron, and unto all the Congregation of the children of Israel, in the wilderness of [l]Paran, to Kadesh, and brought to them, and to all the Congregation tidings, and showed them the fruit of the land.

28 And they told [m]him, and said, We came unto the land whither thou hast sent us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey: and here is of the fruit of it.

29 Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled and exceeding great: and moreover, we saw the [n]sons of Anak there.

30 The Amalekites dwell in the South country, and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the mountains, and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coasts of Jordan.

31 Then Caleb stilled the people [o]before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it: for undoubtedly we shall overcome it.

32 But the men that went up with him, said, We be not able to go up against the people: for they are stronger than we.

33 So they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched for the children of Israel, saying, The land which we have gone through to search it out, is a land that [p]eateth up the inhabitants thereof: for all the people that we saw in it, are men of great stature.

34 For there we saw giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants, so that we seemed in our sight like grasshoppers: and so we were in their sight.

Footnotes

Numbers 13:1 That is, in Rithmah, which was in Paran, Num. 33:18.

Numbers 13:3 After the people had required it of Moses, as it is in Deut. 1:22, then the Lord spake to Moses so to do.

Numbers 13:4 Or, rulers.

Numbers 13:9 Or, Joshua.

Numbers 13:17 Which in number were twelve, according to the twelve tribes.

Numbers 13:18 Or, his country.

Numbers 13:20 Plentiful or barren.

Numbers 13:22 Which was in the wilderness of Paran.

Numbers 13:23 Which were a kind of giants.

Numbers 13:23 Declaring the antiquity thereof: also Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Jacob were buried there.

Numbers 13:25 Or, the valley of Eshcol, that is, of grapes.

Numbers 13:27 Called also Kadesh Barnea.

Numbers 13:28 That is, Moses.

Numbers 13:29 Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, whom Caleb slew afterward, Josh. 11:21, 22.

Numbers 13:31 Or, murmuring against Moses.

Numbers 13:33 The giants were so cruel, that they spoiled and killed one another and those that came to them.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%2013&version=GNV 

Philippians 2

1599 Geneva Bible

2 1 He exhorteth them above all things, 3 to humility,  6 and that by the example of Christ. 19 He promiseth to send Timothy shortly unto them, 26 and excuseth the long tarrying of Epaphroditus.

1 [a]If there be therefore any consolation in [b]Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any [c]compassion and mercy,

2 Fulfill my joy, that ye be like minded, having the [d]same love, being of one accord, and of one judgment,

3 That nothing be done through contention or vainglory, but that in meekness of mind every man esteem others better than himself.

4 Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of other men.

5 [e]Let the same mind be in you that was even in Christ Jesus,

6 Who being in the [f]form of God, [g]thought it no robbery to be [h]equal with God:

7 But he made himself of [i]no reputation, and took on him the [j]form of a servant, and was made like unto men, and was found in shape as a man.

8 He humbled himself, and became obedient unto the death, even the death of the cross.

9 [k]Wherefore God hath also highly exalted him, and given him a [l]name above every name.

10 That at the Name of Jesus should [m]every knee bow, both of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.

11 And that [n]every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord, unto the glory of God the Father.

12 [o]Wherefore my beloved, as ye have always obeyed me, not as in my presence only, but now much more in mine absence, so [p]make an end of your own salvation with fear and trembling.

13 [q]For it is God which worketh in you both [r]the will and the deed, even of his good pleasure.

14 [s]Do all things without murmuring and reasonings,

15 [t]That ye may be blameless, and pure, and the sons of God without rebuke in the midst of a naughty and crooked nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world,

16 Holding forth the [u]word of life, [v]that I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither have labored in vain.

17 Yea, and though I be offered up upon the [w]sacrifice, and service of your faith, I am glad, and rejoice with you all.

18 For the same cause also be ye glad, and rejoice with me.

19 [x]And I trust in the Lord Jesus, to send Timothy shortly unto you, that I also may be of [y]good comfort, when I know your state.

20 For I have no man like-minded, who will faithfully care for your matters.

21 For [z]all seek their own, and not that which is Jesus Christ’s.

22 But ye know the proof of him, that as a son with the father, he hath served with me in the Gospel.

23 Him therefore I hope to send as soon as I know how it will go with me,

24 And I trust in the Lord, that I also myself shall come shortly.

25 But I supposed it necessary to send my brother Epaphroditus unto you my companion in labor, and fellow soldier, even your messenger, and he that ministered unto me such things as I wanted.

26 For he longed after all you, and was full of heaviness, because ye had heard that he had been sick.

27 And no doubt he was sick, very near unto death: but God had mercy on him, and not on him only, but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.

28 I sent him therefore the more diligently, that when ye should see him again, ye might rejoice, and I might be the less sorrowful.

29 Receive him therefore in the Lord with all gladness, and make much of such:

30 Because that for the [aa]work of Christ he was near unto death, and regarded not his life, to fulfill that service which was lacking on your part toward me.

Footnotes

Philippians 2:1 A most earnest request to remove all those things, whereby that great and special consent and agreement is commonly broken, to wit, contention and pride, whereby it cometh to pass, that they separate themselves one from another.

Philippians 2:1 Any Christian comfort.

Philippians 2:1 If any feeling of inward love.

Philippians 2:2 Like love.

Philippians 2:5 He setteth before them a most perfect example of all modesty and sweet conversation, Christ Jesus, whom we ought to follow with all our might: who abased himself so far for our sakes, although he be above all, that he took upon him the form of a servant, to wit, our flesh willingly, subject to all infirmities, even to the death of the cross.

Philippians 2:6 Such as God himself is, and therefore God, for there is none in all parts like to God, but God himself.

Philippians 2:6 Christ, that glorious and everlasting God, knew that he might rightfully and lawfully not appear in the base flesh of man, but remain with majesty meet for God: yet he chose rather to debase himself.

Philippians 2:6 If the Son be equal to the Father, then is there of necessity an equality, which Arrius, that Heretic, denieth: and if the Son be compared with the Father, then is there a distinction of persons, which Sabellius, that heretic, denieth.

Philippians 2:7 He brought himself from all things, as it were to nothing.

Philippians 2:7 By taking our manhood upon him.

Philippians 2:9 He showeth the most glorious event of Christ’s submission, to teach us, that modesty is the true way to true praise and glory.

Philippians 2:9 Dignity and renown, and the matter with it.

Philippians 2:10 All creatures shall at length be subject to Christ.

Philippians 2:11 Every nation.

Philippians 2:12 The conclusion: We must go on to salvation with humility and submission, by the way of our vocation.

Philippians 2:12 He is said to make an end of his salvation, which runneth in the race of righteousness.

Philippians 2:13 A most sure and grounded argument against pride, for that we have nothing in us praiseworthy but it cometh of the free gift of God, and is without us, for we have no ability or power, so much as to will well (much less to do well) but only of the free mercy of God.

Philippians 2:13 Why then, we are not stocks, but yet we do not will well of nature, but only because God hath made of our naughty will a good will.

Philippians 2:14 He describeth modesty by the contrary effects of pride, teaching us, that it is far both from all malicious, and close or inward hatred and also from open contentions and brawlings.

Philippians 2:15 To be short, he requireth a life without fault, and pure, that being lightened with the word of God, they may shine in the darkness of this world.

Philippians 2:16 The Gospel is called the word of life, because of the effects which it worketh.

Philippians 2:16 Again he pricketh them forward, setting before them his true Apostolic care that he had of them, comforting them moreover, to the end they should not be sorry for the greatness of his afflictions, no not although he should die to make perfect their oblation with his blood, as it were with a drink offering.

Philippians 2:17 As if he said, I brought you Philippians to Christ, my desire is that you present yourselves a lively sacrifice to him, and then shall it not grieve me to be offered up as a drink offering, to accomplish this your spiritual offering.

Philippians 2:19 Moreover he confirmeth their minds both by sending back Epaphroditus unto them, whose fidelity towards them, and great pains in helping him, he commendeth: and also promising to send Timothy shortly unto them, by whose presence they shall receive great commodity, and hoping also to come himself shortly unto them, if God wills.

Philippians 2:19 May be confirmed in my joy of mind.

Philippians 2:21 The most part.

Philippians 2:30 He calleth it here the work of Christ, to visit Christ, being poor and in bands in the person of Paul.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=philippians%202&version=GNV