Knapp also dug up a 1982 Los Alamos
Monitor news article mentioning '(...)Lazar, a physicist at the Los Alamos
Meson Physics Facility(...).'
Bob Lazar runs United Nuclear, a
scientific supply company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. United Nuclear
sells a variety of materials including radioactive ores, powerful magnets,
scientific curiosities like aerogel, and a variety of lab chemicals. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
United Nuclear claims "over 300,000 satisfied
customers," including law-enforcement agencies, schools, and amateur
scientists.
United Nuclear's site also advertises
a prototype kit for adapting normal road vehicles to run on hydrogen power. The
company says the kits are on hold due to the actions of the Consumer Product
Safety Commission.
Lazar and Gene Huff also run Desert
Blast, an annual festival for "explodaholics" in the Nevada desert.
Starting in 1987 (but only formally named in 1991, inspired by Desert Storm)
the festival features home-made explosives, rockets, jet-powered vehicles, and
other pyrotechnics, with the intention of emphasizing the fun aspect of
physics.
A hair trail has now shed light on a two-centuries-old
historical question.
Napoleon Bonaparte, the famous
dictator of France, died in exile on the island of St. Helena in the southern
Atlantic Ocean. While doctors at the time cited stomach cancer as the cause of
death, some historians believe that arsenic did him in—high levels of the toxic
substance were found in hair samples after he died. But not so fast, says a
team of Italian scientists—the arsenic in Napoleon’s hair probably didn’t kill
him.
The scientists took samples of
Napoleon’s hair from the collections of museums in Rome, Paris, and Parma,
Italy, which date from his boyhood, his first exile on Elba in 1814 and his
death in 1821 . Upon putting the hairs into a nuclear reactor—radiation allows
scientists to identify the elements present, and apparently doesn’t bother the
hairs—the researchers found that Napoleon had consistent arsenic levels in his
body his whole life, not just one spike in the end that doomed him. The levels
are very high, but that makes sense—small doses of arsenic were used as a
health tonic in Napoleon’s day, and medicines with tiny arsenic concentrations
are still used today.
Hairs aren’t the only historical
artifacts that have been brought into the Napoleon death foray. In 2005,
scientists studied his pants, and found that the little corporal was even
littler at his death, having dropped almost 5 inches on his waist, which the
Swiss researchers said parallels the weight drop of modern stomach cancer
patients.
So if the Italians are right,
Napoleon’s original doctors have been vindicated. And they have his hair and
trousers to thank.
Shaking a virus to death is not a new
idea. Arizona State University physicist Kong-Thon Tsen, who pioneered the
practice, conducted eight peer-reviewed studies in 2006 and 2007 demonstrating
that vibrations can deactivate a number of viruses. But Tsen’s latest work may
have found a way to destroy HIV, just by hitting the right note.
In much the same way that opera
singers use sound waves to shatter glass, laser light has shown considerable
potential for killing viruses such as the tobacco necrosis virus and M13
bacteriophages. Like a wineglass, a virus’s outer shell—known as a capsid—has
an intrinsic frequency of vibration. Tsen uses a near-infrared laser to excite
the target’s outer shell and spur vibrations powerful enough to rupture the
capsid.
In March 2008, preliminary testing
revealed that Tsen’s lasers were able to destroy HIV in test tubes. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
For people with AIDS, Tsen’s antiviral
attack could be more effective and safer than the current drug cocktails, which
have a slew of side effects. In the next two or three years, Tsen hopes to test
the technology’s effects on HIV in monkeys, zapping blood outside the body.
“When the blood is channeled outside
the body in dialysis,” Tsen says, “the laser can be applied to inactivate the
HIV, and the HIV-free blood can be circulated back to the body.” Blood cells
would not be affected.
The findings have yet to be published,
and final FDA approval could be more than a decade away. Still, Tsen believes
his preliminary tests give hope that this technique could ultimately help
destroy HIV and possibly prevent AIDS.
Sela Miller was perplexed—and so was
I. She had just emerged from our clinic rest–room, specimen in hand. But her urine was far from the bright
yellow most people produce.
“So this is what it looks like,” she
said, staring at the milky sample. “For weeks I thought something was wrong,
but I couldn’t tell for sure.” Then Sela, a Polynesian woman with long, dark
hair—the wife of a custom car builder and mother of several youngsters—gave a
tiny shrug as if to say, Oh, well.
For a moment I remained quiet. Like
Sela, I had never seen anything quite like the opalescent urine now sitting in
a sterile screw-top jar on my desk.
Sometimes doctors are secretly
grateful when patients underreact. Over my years of practice, specializing in
tropical medicine, I had certainly seen patients at the other end of the
spectrum. Creative people with fertile imaginations seemed especially prone to
panic. Sela—her sci-fi urine notwithstanding—was different.
And so I focused on the job ahead.
“I’ll walk this to the lab,” I said, holding the jar in one hand while reaching
for a requisition slip with my other.
Examined under a microscope lens, the
fluid teemed with microorganisms and both white and red blood cells. That gave
me one diagnosis, anyway: In addition to strange, milky-white urine, my new patient
had a routine bacterial infection. Back in the exam room, where she stood ready
to leave, I quickly wrote a prescription for antibiotics.
A day later, Sela’s urine culture had
grown a garden-variety strain of E. coli, the single most common cause of
urinary tract infections the world over. Good, I thought. The sulfa drug would
make quick work of that.
However, I had asked the lab to
perform additional urine assays, including protein, cholesterol, and
triglycerides.
“Wow!” the tech exclaimed. “Now here’s
something we almost never see. Her sample is loaded with fat.”
That gave me a second diagnosis—of
sorts. The finding suggested that my patient’s milky urine was not just
infected but also laced with lipid-rich lymphatic fluid. In medical-ese, the condition
is called chyluria. From a purely anatomic standpoint, chyluria represents a
fistula, or microscopic leak, between lymphatic vessels and the kidney.
The fancy name still left unanswered
the most important question: What under–lying process had led to the breach in the first place? My patient
was not likely to have kidney cancer or tuberculosis, two diseases that
occasionally cause chy–luria.
Had some toxic chemical in her husband’s car barn silently damaged her kidneys?
Or, as her primary-care doctor had casually asked when he referred her to me,
was a parasite involved? If so, the likely culprit was Wuchereria bancrofti, a
slender nematode transmitted by tropical mosquitoes. Adult worms of Wuchereria
bancrofti are famous for damming up lymphatic vessels. If they settle near the
kidneys, obstruction and backflow within the delicate lymph vessels nearby can,
over time, cause ruptures and spills of lymphatic fluid into adjacent drainage
structures of the human urinary tract.
Wuchereria bancrofti can inflict still
more harm upon its human hosts. In some cases, the threadlike worms—which
measure several inches in length when fully grown—damage even larger lymphatic
channels. When this happens victims may eventually develop
elephantiasis—grotesquely swollen limbs and genitalia encased in thick, pebbly
skin.
Picture yourself in a mosquito-ridden
enclave with an early case of elephantiasis in, say, a lower extremity. Over
years, periodic nicks and cuts leading to superficial skin infections—the
everyday stuff of tropical poverty—compound the internal lymphatic damage
caused by the adult worms. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
Meanwhile, tiny bloodborne larval
offspring transmit the infection to new mosquitoes.
“Hey, aren’t you getting ahead of
yourself?” I suddenly wondered. My patient was a middle-class housewife, not a
tropical villager, and aside from chyluria she had no sign of damaged
lymphatics. I wasn’t even sure if Wuchereria bancrofti existed in her
Polynesian birthplace.
At her next appointment, Sela
patiently answered my questions one by one. Yes, her husband used many paints
and chemicals in his custom car business, but she was rarely at his shop. No,
to her knowledge she had never been exposed to tuber–culosis. As for encountering a
tropical parasite, who knew? Until age 10, she had lived in the South Pacific,
returning for periodic visits until she married.
When I pressed her for details about
ailments where she grew up, she nodded. From her childhood she vaguely
remembered stories of people with disfigured body parts. A woman with a leg as
thick as a palm tree. A man whose massive, warty foot had required a homemade
rubber sandal. An aged neighbor whose flapping cotton shorts were rumored to
hide an unusually large scrotum.
+++
Picture yourself in a mosquito-ridden enclave
with an early case of elephantiasis.
Finally, she dropped the clue that
cracked her case. A few years earlier, after Sela gave birth, a lab tech in
another hospital had spied tiny larval worms in her blood. Sela then took a
special drug whose name she could no longer recall. But that was long before
the weird pee began, she quickly added.
I was dumbfounded. Had this bright,
capable woman—juggling family, work, and other demands—simply forgotten her
prior diagnosis? Failed to connect the dots between her earlier treatment and
her new milky urine? Or, I wondered, briefly playing amateur psychologist, had
she deliberately avoided the thought that she, too, might one day develop
elephantiasis?
I never explored those questions.
She’s just plain lucky that this is the only problem I found, I finally told
myself, and decided to leave it at that.
My patient remained lucky. On the
suspicion that she might still harbor live worms, I prescribed for her an
old-fashioned medicine called diethylcarbamazine. Within a week or two, her
abnormal urine abruptly stopped: Her hidden fistula had healed. Whether
diethylcarbamazine or the earlier course of antibiotics was responsible, I’ll
never know for sure. Chyluria resulting from progressive lymphatic damage can
crop up well after an active filarial infection has burned out. In any event, I
was relieved. If Sela had come to me with a more ominous harbinger of
elephantiasis—say, a mildly swollen leg—it is doubtful that any drug would have
reversed the problem.
Fast-forward five years. Once again
Sela battled Los Angeles traffic and met me in the room where we had first
stared at her milky urine. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a
doctor. As we talked, she admitted that her calves sometimes hurt and her skin
felt flaky and dry. These were normal complaints, it seemed to me, for a busy
homemaker with little time to prop up her feet at the end of the day or pamper
herself with lotion. Of course, just to make sure, I asked Sela if there had
been any problems with her urine. Still yellow, she replied. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
Again I wondered if Sela truly grasped
the physical horror that might have befallen her. Then I thought: “Oh, heck,
why add one more worry? Life already has more than enough.”
The blame game for obesity (was it
your parents or those cupcakes?) continues to escalate. Two recent studies—one
in mice and another in humans—provide new evidence that a mind-numbingly
complex array of genes influence body weight. By sampling fat tissue, one group
of researchers found that the activity of 17,000 genes correlate with body mass
index (a measure of body fat based on height and weight), and 14,900 correlate
with waist-to-hip ratio. Complicating matters further, these genes seem to
operate in large networks, interacting with each other and the environment to
influence weight.
So should you blame genes—with labels
like Lpl, Lactb, and Ppm1l—or fast food and failure to exercise for your
weighty woes? The top researchers say they still don’t know.
Data from identical twins going back
as far as the 1930s suggest that body weight is at least partly inherited, but
only in recent years have scientists begun to appreciate the complexity of the
genetic factors underlying obesity. Robert Kushner, a specialist in obesity
medicine at Northwestern University, says that identifying the interacting
genes will help screen those at risk, but far more research is needed before
pharmaceutical interventions might emerge.
And even then, no one thinks that
genetic testing or manipulation will ever lead to a catch-all cure. George
Bray, who heads the clinical obesity and metabolism department at Louisiana
State University, says environment and behavior—like lack of access to exercise
facilities and overeating—so strongly affect gene activity that you cannot
focus on one while ignoring the other. Both experts agree that addressing
energy balance—the number of calories consumed versus the number used in
physical activity—is a good starting point for anyone struggling with obesity.
Research continues, but holding out for a miracle weight-loss drug is probably
not the answer. As Kushner puts it, “a magic bullet is highly unlikely.”
If Machiavelli sat
down at his iMac to confect "The Billionaire Prince," it might sound
remarkably like Felix Dennis's "How to Get Rich" – without the poetry
or the rollicking vulgarity, of course.
Bearded and blustery,
Mr. Dennis is the English high-school dropout who parlayed a 1960s hippie
magazine called Oz and wall-poster tributes to kung fu martyr Bruce Lee into a
publishing empire of computer publications and beer-and-boobs lad mags like
Maxim that has made him one of the richest men in Britain. He has, as he likes
to remind readers, more money than he can possibly count – somewhere between
$400 million and $900 million, "I honestly cannot fix a number any closer
than that."
Mr. Dennis calls his
effort "an anti-self-improvement" book, and he's telling the truth.
"The chances of anyone reading it and then becoming rich are
minuscule," he writes. His basic message is that only those able to turn
themselves into monomaniacal workaholics estranged from loved ones and reviled
by rivals – or willing to unsheathe their inner monster – can hope to hit the
mega jackpot. "Somewhere in the invisible heart of all self-made wealthy
men and women," he says, "is a sliver of razored ice."
He likes to boast
about his hedonistic appetites. Counseling wannabe zillionaires to think big
but "act small" – "Keeping a sense of proportion and
humility" – he invokes his bad old days in the late 1980s and early 1990s:
"I spent millions of dollars on drinking, taking drugs and running around
with whores. . . . At one time, there were no less than fourteen 'mistresses'
depending on a regular stipend from my personal bank account. A single
evening's entertainment could come to thirty or forty thousand in the Big
Apple, London or Hong Kong."
And he can be
hilariously mordant about the magazine industry that made his fortune: "It
is a business," he writes, "where our main activity is chopping down
millions and millions of trees, flattening the pulp and printing hieroglyphics
and images on both sides of it. Then we send the end product out in
diesel-guzzling trucks to shops were perhaps 60 percent [about 25% in the U.S.]
of them sell to customers. Then we pile the remaining unsold magazines into
more diesel-guzzling trucks and take them to a plant where they are either
consumed as fuel, buried or shredded or used to make cardboard boxes for
refrigerators."
But beneath the
braggadocio and buffoonery, Mr. Dennis's book is full of cold-hearted advice
for succeeding in any field, some of it familiar, some quite sophisticated. He
harps on the essential virtues of stamina, persistence and focus, and on the
paramount importance of execution. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
"If you never
have a great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas
of others," he says, "you can succeed beyond your wildest
dreams." It's good to panic in a crisis, he says, because it focuses the
mind on what has to be done. Grovel for capital if you need to but always
remember: "No deal is a must-do deal."
Indeed, Mr. Dennis's
don'ts are probably more useful than his do's. Never part with even a share of
a business you founded, although partnerships in new ventures are acceptable
because you can always walk away from them. Give generous bonuses to your employees,
but don't let them share in the money from an asset sale. Don't hand out
company credit cards, cellphones or cars – the expenses run riot. Never
delegate authority to people just like you – find a complementary brain
instead. Avoid venture capitalists with their mania for short-term results.
Never loan money to friends – make it a gift. Never trust a senior accountant
who won't take a vacation (because he is afraid that his thievery will be
uncovered while he is away from the office). http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
Close readers of
"How to Get Rich" will find an opaque reference midway through to the
author's determination "never to be sent back to prison." Later Mr.
Dennis clarifies the story a tad – it was an obscenity case against Oz
magazine. But you've got to look elsewhere for the details. In 1971, three
editors of Oz, including Mr. Dennis, then 24, were found guilty of corrupting
children and sentenced to hard labor at Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London.
Mr. Dennis was given a lighter sentence than his confederates because the judge
deemed him "very much less intelligent" than the other two and thus
less responsible. As it happened, Mr. Dennis served only a few days before he
was sprung. In early April, he created a small flap when he bragged in a Times
of London interview that, about 25 years ago, he killed a man – who was
harassing one of his woman friends, he said – by pushing him off a cliff. Mr.
Dennis later called the reporter to say that it was the Chablis and his
medicine talking.
Mr. Dennis's prose has
its flaws. He seems to think, for example, that prevaricate is a synonym for
procrastinate. He can contradict himself. "Lead. Do not be led," he
exhorts on one page, but three pages later he hails the virtues of listening to
staffers. And he can be comically unaware of his own predilections. "Watch
out for blowhards," he warns. But no matter, his book is full of lively
ideas and language to match – and, besides, his true writing interest these
days is poetry. He has published a couple of volumes and even had his poems
recited by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Based on the examples in
"How to Get Rich," his verse will never be confused with that of his
beloved Metaphysical Poets, but some of it is deft.
Another of his
aesthetic preoccupations is the Forest of Dennis, an ambitious project to plant
a huge tract in Warwickshire with saplings to create the largest deciduous
forest in England – late but fitting atonement, perhaps, for all those trees
that had to be sacrificed to make Felix Dennis rich.
The Los Angeles Times reported today
that Judge Alex Kosinski, who's presiding over the Ira Isaacs obscenity trial,
had a personal website on which he posted sexually explicit photos and videos.
Kosinzki, who is chief judge of the
U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, said he was unaware that the public would be
able to access the material. The site, http://alex.kosinski.com, has been taken
down.
The site's content included a photo of
naked women on all fours dressed to look like cows and another of a man
cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. The judge conceded that some of
the material was inappropriate but said that other parts were
"funny."
Also posted were images of
masturbation and public sex and a slide show of a striptease featuring a
transsexual.
Kosinski, who is one of the country's
highest ranking judges, said he used the site for his personal storage and
wasn't aware the public could get access to it. He told a Times reporter that
he didn't think any of the material posted would qualify as
"obscene."
At issue is whether the judge should
recuse himself from the Isaacs case. Kosinski said this afternoon that he was
considering disqualifying himself.
"I didn't know about the [Times]
story before the jury was sworn," Kosinski told reporters this afternoon
in court. "I don't really have any comment on the story."
Attorney Roger Jon Diamond told the
judge, "We would oppose disqualification."
Judge Kosinksi replied, " I hope
to move forward, but I would understand if counsel objects."
A BBC documentary uncovers, for the
first time, the original manuscript where Newton forecast the date of the end
of the world.
Newton, the father of modern
mathematics, dedicated a large part of his life to a quest to decode the Bible
which he believed to be the word of God.
For over 50 years, he studied the
Bible trying to unravel God's secret laws of the Universe.
He was fanatical in his quest to
discover the date for the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world.
Scholars have spent years trying to
unravel Newton's writings on the Book of Revelation to establish when he
thought the apocalypse was coming.
For the first time, Newton: The Dark
Heretic reveals the date he forecast is within many people's lifetimes - 2060. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
The BBC was given rare access to
Newton's original manuscripts in the Hebrew National Library in Jerusalem.
Buried in his papers, Dr Stephen
Snobelen, from the University of King's College in Nova Scotia, found the
original document where Newton had written down his prediction.
In 2060, Newton believed the dramatic
events forecast in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation would occur: massive
plagues and fires; the terrible battle of Armageddon between good and evil and
the destruction and eternal damnation of the wicked.
Producer Malcolm Neaum says:
"Newton prayed daily for the end of the world which he believed would
herald the Second Coming of Christ. This would usher in the 1000 year rule of
the Saints and Newton believed he would then take his place as Chief
Saint."
Viktor Schauberger (30 June 1885 – 25
September 1958) was an Austrian forester/forest warden, naturalist, philosopher
and inventor.
The inventor of what he called
"implosion technology", Schauberger developed his own theories based
on fluidic vortices and movement in nature. Very little of Schauberger's work
has received mainstream acceptance, although his work is directly related to
valid accepted mathematical principles and harmonics.
Viktor Schauberger was born in
Holzschlag, Austria, to a long line of Austrian foresters. Creek and river flow
fascinated him during his youth. He went on to develop a basic theory that
contains a twofold movement principle for such phenomena.
His first idea was brought upon by
trout. The fact that they could use so little force to go against the current
invoked him to study the force that allowed such effortless motion. His study of
trout concluded in the theory of natural vortexes.
Schauberger's second major theory was
in the structure of water. He believed that water is at its densest when cold
(and at the time of a full moon), and that there are many layers in the
structure of flowing water. He claimed that nature creates vortexes to create
equilibriums. He further claimed that our current form of energy
production/consumption scatters matter into disequilibrium. His studies were
not approved by science at the time, even when his ideas were put into
practice.
In 1926, he undertook research at a
timber flotation installation in Neuberg an der Mürz in Styria. In 1929
Schauberger submitted his first applications for patents in the fields of water
engineering and turbine construction. He conducted research on how to
artificially generate centripetal movement in various types of machines. He
proposed a means of utilising hydroelectric power by a jet turbine. The log
flumes used for timber flotation allegedly disregarded the Law of Archimedes,
i.e., Schauberger was allegedly able to transport heavier-than-water objects by
creating a centripetal movement (making the timber spin around its own axis, by
special guiding-vanes which caused the water to spiral).
In 1934 Viktor was meeting with
Hitler, and had discussions about fundamental principles of agriculture,
forestry and water engineering. However, Schauberger refused to work for the
German Reich.
In 1941, an intrigue caused by the
Viennese Association of Engineers[citation needed] resulted in Schauberger's
enforced confinement in a mental hospital in Mauer-Öhling, under continuous
observation by the SS. In Augsburg, Schauberger worked with Messerschmidt on
engine cooling systems and was in correspondence with designer Heinkel about aircraft
engines.
In 1944, Schauberger continued to
develop his Repulsine machine at the Technical College of Engineering at
Rosenhügel in Vienna. By May 1945 a prototype had been constructed.
In 1945 Schauberger started to work on
his "Klimator".
At the end of the war Schauberger was
apprehended by US intelligence agents, and kept in custody for 9 months. They
confiscated all his documents and prototypes, and interrogated him to determine
his activities during the war.[1]
After the war Schauberger continued
his work, leading to water-based power generation through vortex action in a
closed cycle, the "Spiral Plough", an "Apparatus for soil
cultivation made of copper", tests with "spiral pipes", and so
on.
In 1958 Schauberger was approached by
Karl Gerchsheimer and Robert Donner, with an invitation to come to the US to
further develop his inventions. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
Schauberger spent several months in
the US making drawings and reports, and then returned to Austria. He died in
Linz, Austria, on September 25 1958.
Nazi UFOs (German: Rundflugzeug,
Diskus, Haunebu, Hauneburg-Geräte, VRIL, Andromeda-Geräte, Flugkreisel or
ironically Reichsflugscheiben) refers to claims about advanced aircraft or spacecraft
Nazi Germany supposedly developed during World War II and which Nazi scientists
continued to develop afterwards. References to such craft appear mostly in
fiction, although some of these claims are said to be true.
These stories are often associated
with esoteric Nazism, an ideology that supposes the possibility of Nazi
restoration by supernatural or paranormal means.
These myths were likely inspired by
historical German development of jet aircraft such as the Me 262, the Horten Ho
229 the guided missile V1 and the ballistic missile V2, which formed a basis
for the early missile and space programs of both the Soviet Union and the
United States.
Nazi UFO tales and myths conform
largely to documented history on the following points:
* Nazi Germany claimed the territory of New
Swabia in Antarctica, sent an expedition there in 1938, and planned others.
* Nazi Germany conducted research into advanced
propulsion technology, including rocketry, Viktor Schauberger's turbine
research, and the Arthur Sack A.S.6 experimental "flying disc".
* Some UFO sightings during World War II,
particularly those known as foo fighters, were thought to be enemy aircraft.
The earliest non-fiction assertions of
Nazi flying saucers appear to be a series of articles by and about Italian
turbine expert Giuseppe Belluzzo. The following week, German scientist Rudolph
Schriever claimed to have developed flying saucers during the Nazi period.
Aeronautical engineer Roy Fedden
remarked that the only craft that could approach the capabilities attributed to
flying saucers were those being designed by the Germans towards the end of the
war. Fedden also added that the Germans were working on a number of very
unusual aeronautical projects, though he did not elaborate upon his statement.
Sir Roy Feddon, Chief of the Technical
Mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, stated in 1945:
“ I
have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realise that if they
(the Germans) had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have
been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air
warfare. ”
In 1956, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt,
Chief of the US Air Force Project Bluebook, stated the following:
“ When
WWII ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided
missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages,
but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of
objects reported to UFO observers. ”
A 1967 book by Louis Pauwels and
Jacques Bergier made many spectacular claims about the Vril Society of Berlin.
Several later writers, including Jan van Helsing, Norbert-Jürgen Ratthofer, and
Vladimir Terziski, have built on their work, connecting the Vril Society with
UFOs. Among their claims, they write that the society had made contact with an
alien race and dedicated itself to creating spacecraft to reach the aliens. In
partnership with the Thule Society and the Nazi Party, it developed a series of
flying disc prototypes. With the Nazi defeat, the society allegedly retreated
to a base in Antarctica and vanished.
Terziski, a Bulgarian engineer who
bills himself as president of the American Academy of Dissident Sciences,
claims that the Germans collaborated in their advanced craft research with Axis
powers Italy and Japan, and continued their space effort after the war from New
Swabia. He writes that Germans landed on the Moon as early as 1942 and
established an underground base there. When Russians and Americans secretly
landeƒd on the moon in the 1950s, says Terziski, they stayed at this
still-operating base. According to Terziski, "there is atmosphere, water
and vegetation on the Moon," which NASA conceals to exclude the third
world from moon exploration. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
Terziski has been accused of
fabricating his video and photographic evidence.
When German Holocaust denier Ernst
Zündel started Samisdat Publishers in the 1970s, he initially catered to the
UFOlogy community, which was then at its peak of public acceptance. His main
offerings were his own books claiming that flying saucers were Nazi secret
weapons launched from an underground base in Antarctica, from which the Nazis
hoped to conquer the world. Zündel
also sold (for $9999) seats on an exploration team to locate the polar entrance
to the hollow earth. Some people who interviewed Zündel about this material
claim that he privately admitted it was a deliberate hoax to build publicity
for Samisdat, although he still defended it as late as 2002.
In 1978 Miguel Serrano, a Chilean
diplomat and Nazi sympathizer, published The Golden Band, in which he claimed
that Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu and was then communing with
Hyperborean gods in an underground Antarctic base. Serrano predicted that
Hitler would lead a fleet of UFOs from the base to establish the Fourth Reich.
Secrecy has clouded “Sex and the City”
since it was first announced. When would the film appear? Who would find a
husband? Would one of the main characters die? If so, would she commit suicide
by self-pity (a constant threat), or would a crocodile escape from the Bronx
Zoo and wreak a flesh-ripping revenge for all those handbags? As the release
date neared, the paranoia thickened; at the screening I attended, we were asked
not only to surrender our cell phones but to march through a beeping security
gate, as if boarding a plane to Tel Aviv. There was even a full-body pat-down,
by far the biggest turn-on of the night. Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had
been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the
woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break
up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried.
“How do you know?”
What followed was not strictly a
movie. It was more like a TV show on steroids. The televised episodes, which
ran from 1998 to 2004, lasted for no more than half an hour each. So, spare a
thought for the director of the film, Michael Patrick King, who also wrote the
screenplay. Faced with the flimsiest of concepts, he had to take it by both
ends and pull until he stretched it out to two and a quarter hours. Two and a
quarter! When Garbo made “Anna Karenina,” in 1935, she got happy, unhappy,
loved, left, and under the train in less than a hundred minutes, so how the
hell are her successors supposed to fill the time?
To be fair, there are four of
them—banded together, like hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring. As
the story begins, two are married already. First, there is Miranda (Cynthia
Nixon), who has a job, a child, and not enough sex with her husband, Steve
(David Eigenberg), perhaps because he reminds her of Radar, from “M*A*S*H.”
Then comes Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who is blissfully wedded to—well, what is
she wedded to, exactly? He goes by the name of Harry (Evan Handler), but he’s a
ringer for Dr. Evil, from the “Austin Powers” franchise, with all the evil
sucked away; what remains is fey and shiny-headed, smiling sweetly about
something known only to himself. For a movie about the need for real men—lusty,
loyal, and loaded—this unusual earthling is truly a most peculiar advertisement
for the gender. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Next, we have Samantha (Kim Cattrall).
Everyone has Samantha, or had her at some point; so she would like us to
believe, and this is where the film of “Sex and the City” begins to part
company with the original. The TV show was smart enough to trade on both the
sentimentality and the shockability of its viewers, encouraging them to sigh at
romantic satisfaction while snickering at the dirty talk that gave it spice.
Behind it all, one caught a whiff of stale Puritanism: despite the women’s
knowing bid for urbanity, there was an old-school, anti-sophisticated wish to
put desire in its proper place, or, better still, to disperse it in a shared
public giggle, for fear of where it might lead. Now the whiff has become a
blast, and Samantha’s efforts to signal her appeal, which might have seemed
languorous on the small screen, are blown up here into an embarrassing
semaphore: thudding closeups of her slurping through a cocktail straw or
swallowing a mouthful of guacamole. No self-respecting maker of soft erotica
would countenance such shots, and, as for the matching dialogue (“Something
just came up,” Samantha murmurs over the phone, as her boyfriend stands beside
her in bulging briefs), it’s a straight lift from flaccid, mid-period James
Bond. In a daring plot development, she buys a dog the size of a child’s
slipper; the camera keeps cutting away to it, and guess what—the pooch screws,
too! Mirth is unconfined.
I was never sure how funny the TV
series was meant to be. It kept lapsing into a straight face, even a weepy one,
as the characters’ contentment came under serious threat. This uncertainty
survives into the movie, which made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine
editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played
by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only
bona-fide movie star on show. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
You cannot simply shift a load of
television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater
expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious
confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to
offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable
sources of that self. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Kim
Cattrall’s come-ons wilt in the transition; but who would have guessed that
Sarah Jessica Parker, a nimble performer who has had a career in movies aside
from the TV show, should also seem diminished and ill at ease?
She plays Carrie, the writer whose
voice-overs keep us up to speed with the doings of her friends, and with the
reckless amassing of what she calls “the two Ls: labels and love.” Whether
Carrie is able to acknowledge how tightly the two Ls lock together in her mind
is another matter. Early in the film, she receives a proposal of marriage from
her long-term boyfriend, Mr. Big (Chris Noth), and this triggers a Babylonian
orgy of spending. In a montage of wedding-dress fittings, she honors “new
friends like Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera and Christian Lacroix, Lanvin and
Dior,” and so on; what I object to is not the name-dropping—think of it as a
chick response to “American Psycho”—but the montage itself, which is shot in
lazy veils of schmaltz. Compare the quick-change sequence in “Funny Face,” with
Audrey Hepburn robed in one Givenchy masterpiece after another, and you sense
not merely the greater snap in Stanley Donen’s direction (with more than a hand
from Richard Avedon), and the hotter bloom of the coloring, but the way in
which Hepburn herself outglows the frocks, with her smile and her imperious
shout—“Take the picture, take the picture!” No thoroughbred was ever just a
clotheshorse.
The women in “Sex and the City,” by
that standard, are little better than also-rans, and their gallops of
conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to
be. “When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the
beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment
(“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other
fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding
condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The
creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as
he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women
applauding. The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with
image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble
attempts to rein it in. When the wedding hits a bump (look out for Kristin
Davis screaming “No! No!” at Chris Noth like a ninth grader auditioning for
“The Crucible”), and the bridegroom veers away, our heroine’s reaction to the
split is typical: “How am I going to get my clothes?” What, honey, even the
puffball skirt that you wear to the catwalk show—the one that makes you look
like a giant inverted mushroom? That plea gets second prize for the most
revealing line in the film, the winner being Miranda’s outburst as she hunts
for an apartment in a mainly Chinese district: “White guy with a baby! Let’s
follow him.” So that’s what drives these people: Aryan real estate.
At least, you could argue, Miranda has
a job, as a lawyer. But the film pays it zero attention, and the other women
expect her to drop it and fly to Mexico without demur. (And she does.) Worse
still is the sneering cut as the scene shifts from Carrie, carefree and
childless in the New York Public Library, to the face of Miranda’s young son,
smeared with spaghetti sauce. In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of
being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And
don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated
fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, “Sex and the City” was never
as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically
retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured
four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and
friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and
Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their
wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies,
we’re not worth it. It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour,
but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I
love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the
City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to
exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice
evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets,
delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness. Louis Sheehan
All the film lacks is a subtitle: “The
Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.”
Tug of war, which was yanked out of
the Olympics in 1920, would like to get back in. The Tug of War International
Federation acknowledges, however, that the sport falls on its face in the vital
Olympic arena of mass exposure. "The biggest thing with tug of war is we don't
get any television," says Glen Johnson, a construction worker in
Orfordville, Wis., and the federation's secretary general.
You can't say that about ballroom
dancing. Like tug of war, it's on the International Olympic Committee's
31-sport waiting list for a spot in the Summer Games. On the IOC's latest
seven-sport short list, at least two -- golf and rugby -- get good play on TV.
But for the world-wide mega-audiences that Olympic impresarios place high on
their checklists, ballroom has outdone them both.
It's got a reality show.
See ballroom dancers Eugene Katsevman,
Maria Manusova and their proteges in action. (June 6)
"Dancing With the Stars," a
pastiche of samba, celebrity and melodrama, went world-wide in 2005, a year
after the Olympics in Athens. Local versions now air in 25 countries -- from
Estonia to India to Israel to South Africa. In the U.S., where the show's
newest boldface champ is ex-Olympic figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, 20 million
people watch. In China, the first week's audience was 40 million.
To ballroom's promoters and to the
show's producers, those numbers ought to convince the IOC that tango has as
good a claim to Olympic status as beach volleyball, a recent addition with a
similar emphasis on deep tans.
"We run a serious competition
that has massively raised the profile of ballroom dancing and would make it a
successful Olympic sport," says Paul Telegdy, the executive at BBC
Worldwide America who introduced "Dancing with the Stars" to ABC.
"Ten years ago, the only people
who would watch ballroom dancing were ladies over the age of 50," says
Peter Pover, who heads the U.S. arm of ballroom's main amateur body, which now
calls itself the International DanceSport Federation. "It's all been
transformed by 'Dancing With the Stars.' "
So has ballroom's customary decorum.
TV fame -- plus the idea of Olympic glory -- has ignited a feud between the
amateur federation and ballroom's international organization of professional
dancers. The professionals, who mount big for-profit competitions like
England's famous Blackpool Dance Festival, worry that the Olympics will
relegate their own events to ballroom's bush league. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
The spat has led to angry public exchanges
and the rise of rival world championships. But aside from the chances of making
or not making a lot of money, the quarrel comes down to differences over
ballroom's true nature.
Is it an art, like ballet? A sport,
like fencing? Or a contest, like hot-dog eating?
[Ballroom photo]
Barry Newman for the Wall Street
Journal
Eugene Katsevman practicing part of
his dance routine in a studio in Times Square, in New York City.
"It's competitive," Eugene
Katsevman was saying not long ago, as he drove his SUV in New York City
traffic. "But it's artistic."
From the back seat, Maria Manusova
said, "And creative. But accidents happen. You crash into other
couples."
"I guess we're dancers,"
said Mr. Katsevman.
"Or athletes," said Ms.
Manusova.
Either way, they are good at it. Mr.
Katsevman, 29 years old, and Ms. Manusova, 28 -- both born in Ukraine -- won
the U.S. National Latin Championships 11 years in a row before turning pro this
year. They were heading home, to Brooklyn, after an hour with an instructor in
a Times Square studio, working through a dramatically physical pasodoble they
planned to unreel in Blackpool.
Reality TV piles on publicity, they
agreed, and the Olympics confers legitimacy. But neither quite addresses
ballroom's essence, which seems to lie somewhere between bumper cars and
choreography.
"That show isn't about
dancing," said Mr. Katsevman, hunting for a parking place in Bensonhurst.
Said Ms. Manusova, who weighs 100 pounds, "It's about diets. Always, 'Look
how much weight I lost.' "
"The whole sports thing came from
the DanceSport federation and the IOC," Mr. Katsevman said. He found a
spot to park in front of a Turkish snack bar. "The word wasn't in our
vocabulary before all that."
All that began in 1990, after the IOC
rejected an application from what was then the International Council of Amateur
Dancers. Mr. Pover, now 76, was a council officer. "What did we have to do
to convince these Olympic people that we were a sport?" he says.
"Well, the first thing was to call ourselves a sport."
So ballroom dancing was rechristened
as "DanceSport." A video was made in Germany of splendidly fit
dancers swimming laps. A split screen showed an 800-meter runner alongside a
couple doing the quickstep. Then, a German researcher from the University of
Freiberg performed tests demonstrating stress levels in the two events to be
equal. "And our women do it backwards in high heels," says Mr. Pover.
DanceSport was a game without rules.
It doesn't even have a set of tricks like figure skating. Couples moved with
the music and tried catching the spirit of a dance. Judges watched and picked
winners. Still, the federation got something down on paper -- including a code
of ethics -- and in 1997, DanceSport achieved Olympic "recognition."
That put it in a class with bridge and
bowling. DanceSport hired IMG, the sports marketer, to impress the IOC with TV
deals in more countries. No luck. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, hundreds of
dancers did a samba with big kewpie dolls in the closing ceremony. Their reward
was a joke about pulled hamstrings by a sportscaster on NBC.
Then reality TV struck. Revitalized,
DanceSport now has branches in 90 countries and IOC affiliates in 65. In May,
Mr. Pover got an invitation, his first, to visit the U.S. Olympic Committee in
Colorado Springs. "I met all these people from hockey, swimming,
curling," he says. "We instantly bonded. It was totally great."
The IOC itself, though, is sitting
this one out. Its officials have nothing public to say about ballroom's
aspirations. But 2012's Olympic calendar is already full, and the IOC drew up
its short list of candidates for 2016 before "Dancing With the Stars"
blasted off. So if DanceSport ever does ride the reality comet into the Games,
it won't be for 12 years -- too late for Bensonhurst's Eugene and Maria. Louis
J. Sheehan, Esquire
After a Turkish meal in a neighborhood
where Italians once discoed, they were in their own mirror-walled row-house
studio, laying down the laws of cha-cha for two potential 2020 Olympians.
Armen Petrosyan, 17, from Armenia, and
Nicole Pyatetskaya, 14, from Ukraine -- the 2008 U.S. National Youth Latin
Champions -- took a break to think about it: Will they go to the Olympics?
"As soon as possible," young
Armen said.
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