Dragon's Shadow: Fee Fi Fo Fum

Interesting. In the last few decades they've found an amazing series of archeological finds. First they found a stone monument of the philistines commemorating a victory over the "house of David" that proved that a historical David did exist. Then they found more recently the stone tomb of Odyseus and the original Ithaca. Then they found a Christian holy place and a surviving mosiac with the original symbol of Christianity - the fish. Now they've found an inscription of Goliath's name at his home town:

Scientists find ‘Goliath’ inscribed on potteryReference from 950 B.C. lends credence to Bible tale, archaeologists say

JERUSALEM - Archaeologists digging at the purported biblical home of Goliath have unearthed a shard of pottery bearing an inscription of the Philistine’s name, a find they claimed lends historical credence to the Bible’s tale of David’s battle with the giant.

While the discovery is not definitive evidence of Goliath’s existence, it does support the Bible’s depiction of life at the time the battle was supposed to have occurred, said Dr. Aren Maeir, a professor at Bar-Ilan University and director of the excavation.

“What this means is that at the time there were people there named Goliath,” he said. “It shows us that David and Goliath’s story reflects the cultural reality of the time.” In the story, David slew Goliath with a slingshot.

Some scholars assert the story of David slaying the giant Goliath is a myth written down hundreds of years later. Maeir said finding the scraps lends historical credence to the biblical story.

The shard dates back to around 950 B.C., within 70 years of when biblical chronology asserts David squared off against Goliath, making it the oldest Philistine inscription ever found, the archaeologists said.

Scientists made the discovery at Tel es-Safi, a dig site in southern Israel thought to be to be the location of the Philistine city of Gath.

I've always felt that the Biblical stories were in fact based on actual historical personages. As for the exact accuracy of the stories they did read more like history than most ancient texts, often showing the foilibles and flaws of the all too human characters described. The description of the whining and complaining and general back-biting were too hilariously close to modern human behavior to be entirely fabricated. However even so I never expected so much evidence of the ancient stories to be verified even in outline. Which is all cool, but it makes me worry a little bit. I mean the existence of Odyseus's tomb doesn't for instance verify that he once held the four winds in a bag at his disposal. There is still plenty of room for exagerated elements.

Dragon's Claw: Pawn checks White King

Once I supported Blair. Now he is on the brink of ruin.

Blair took a considerable political gamble in refusing to back down and had called in every supporter to shore up numbers. Treasury chief Gordon Brown was called back from an official visit to Israel only two hours after arriving there. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw cut short an official EU visit to Russia, while Labour Party chairman Ian McCartney, who is recuperating from heart surgery, volunteered to return for the vote.

The defeat comes at a difficult time for the prime minister.

Bookmakers Ladbrokes cut the odds on Blair stepping down next year from 11 to 4, to 5 to 2 in the wake of the defeat.

"The prime minister has just fallen off the high wire," said Scottish Nationalist Party leader Alex Salmond. "He is a victim of his own arrogance. He may well be on the way out of office."

Already I have prepared the way for Blair's successor. First I engineered the decline of Labor's majority in parliment in a way that sociologists said could not be done. Then I smoothed the way for the young David Cameron to take over, preventing a scandal from developing about questions of his youthful experimentation in drugs at a crucial juncture of his campaigning. Even the prime ministers and kings of the earth must answer to me. Blair is now on his way out.

Just as I struck down with disease Ashcroft and whispered in his ear. Then Ashcroft "finding God" in his difficulty appointed Fitzgerald. Then I undermined the liar Judith Miller. Then she testified snaring Libby Scooter. And I protected Fitzgerald so that now the White House calls Fitsgerald "Elliot Ness" ... implacable and incorruptible were his natural traits but I have protected Fitzgerald against blackmail or "accidental" harm so he could complete the mission I set him on.

In my other work the demons I let loose from the hellgate in Mesopotamia worsen the situation daily. First their temptations created Abu Ghraib staining the reputation of US forces. Then their temptations created Fallujah. The whispers I put in the ears of soldiers to fire on journalists I then turned the outrage of the journalists into a documentary of evidence from Fallujah. It is displaying evidence now in Europe that the US forces loosed white phosperous and neo-napalm on civilian populations in Fallujah.

Meanwhile I continue to engineer the deaths of crucial Shiite leaders who have defied me. Soon the President will be forced into an untenable situation. Here however is danger. He could strike out at Syria or Iran and escalate the situation seeking to fight his way out of this trap. However in the end that will only destroy him. That is the only reason why I have not pushed harder. The pressure I have put on the governments of the world has caused cracks in civilization.

This is why France has burned for twelve days. Civilization is fragile, I must restrain myself lest I push these leaders into rashness. It is time to let destiny play out.

Dragon's Eye: Neither Fish Nor Fowl

MSNBC reports that "fireballs" have again been seen in the sky.

Meteor showers may account for UFO sightings
Mysterious lights look like ‘something out of science fiction horror film’

BERLIN - Numerous sightings of massive fireballs in the skies over Germany this week have led to an upsurge in reports of UFOs, but scientists believe the cause could be a bizarre annual meteor blitz.

According to NASA's Web site, such fireballs have been reported elsewhere in the world and may also be due to the fact that the Earth is now orbiting through a swarm of space debris.

Many people in Germany have noticed the fireballs, said Werner Walter, an amateur astronomer in Mannheim who runs a Web site on unexplained astronomical phenomena and a hotline for reports on UFOs.

"The last reported sighting was yesterday at 7:30 p.m. (1:30 p.m. ET) in a corridor near the border of the Netherlands," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"This week we have had at least 15 e-mails and phone calls from people reporting these fireballs," he said. "Some people said it looks like something out of a science fiction horror film."

In addition to a possible meteor streak, Walter said amateur and professional astronomers were considering the possibility that the blitz was the result of a "falling satellite or UFOs."

"It is possible that they are UFOs, which are after all things which we cannot explain," he said. NASA's science Web site (http://science.nasa.gov) mentions reports of recent fireball sightings in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, North Ireland and Japan.

It includes images of the fireballs, which one man likened to a spotlight. Walter described them as "super-large, colored fireballs that shoot with the speed of lightning through the sky."

However, the NASA Web site quotes meteor expert David Asher from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland as saying that people "are probably seeing the Taurid meteor shower."

Taurids are meteors that shoot out of the constellation Taurus, which peaks at the end of October and early November.

Personally I used to live in another so-called "hot spot" and I've seen one of those "fireballs" for myself. Me and my friend had put a ladder on my parent's house and had climbed up to the roof for some star-gazing. We saw one of those fireballs and at first we thought it was a hotair balloon at night. No such luck it began zig-zagging across the sky doing sharp turns and then fled into the distance. Now I've seen a lot of falling stars in my lifetime, including an awesome blue-white effersecent comet looking fragment that managed to make it close to earth and then shattering into a thousand sparkling shimmering pieces in a rare visible near-earth atmospheric detonation. And that fireball was no meteorite.

I've also interviewed and spoken with many witnesses who have gotten even closer and the word they always used was "fireball". These things can be seen by some witnesses floating close to the ground, speeding up or slowing down at high rates, and hovering or flying in formation. I've seen the mainstream news footage of the strange lights over phoenix as well as the geometric flying formation of the lights over Denmark several years back. I've also seen credible amatuer footage of the "fireballs" fre flying in strange shifting geometric patterns high in the iar. There has also been credible footage of strange glowing lights closely shadowing the wings of a commercial airplane.

For the record the interviews I've had indicated that while the effects near the ground were similar to repeated lightning strikes so I don't think they have anything to do with crop-circles which just seem too tidy to be anything other than a human hoax. Interviews of people who have come close to them seem to indicate some kind of shock, paralysis, and usually delusional fantasies of a religious or alien persecution drama. Probably the hallucinations of somebody zapped by high-voltage in an extremely distorted electromagnetic field.

I'm not ruling out the possibility of sentience, rather the reverse, that these "fireballs" seem to bear quite closely to certain biblical descriptions of seraphim. Your standard solid "ufo" seems to be simply one of these energy-plasma formations with an opaque visual index. Meaning the ones that seem to glow are called seraphim and the dark/solid/slightly shimmering ones apparently cheruhim. They all appear to operate as vortices and closer to the ground may pan out to look more saucer like or perhaps even narrow to seem like pillars. Supposedly the Israelites were led out of the land of egypt by a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of smoke by day.

Dragon's Teeth: Exceptional

Tornado hits mobile home park, of mobile homes hit one survivor young female found amidst decris.

Dale Naylor, assistant chief of the Knight Township Fire Department, said rescuers found the girl under debris at a mobile home park in Indiana. She was conscious and talking to rescuers, and was taken to a hospital, he said.

Naylor said finding the girl at least briefly made rescuers “ecstatic ... We’ve been dealing with death all day.”

Williams said emergency sirens sounded twice around 2 a.m. in Evansville, but many residents of the mobile home park said they didn’t hear the warnings.

There were other survirors in the area of course, but just one direct hit survivor. Exceptional.

Dragon's Chortle: Curse on the Iceman

Another scientist succumbs to the curse on the ice-man.

When the 5,300-year-old body of a Stone Age man was discovered entombed in a glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991, it was hailed as one of the most significant archeological finds ever. Then the deaths began.

These were strange, often accidental deaths of people who had come into close contact with the frozen corpse, dubbed Oetzi. There was talk of a curse. Could it be that the Iceman was angry at being disturbed from his 53 century-long slumber?

A fortnight ago, he was found dead at his home in Brisbane. It was only yesterday, ahead of a memorial service on Monday, that the news emerged.

His brother, Gareth, who has travelled to Australia for the service, told The Australian newspaper that an autopsy had proved inconclusive. The coroner ruled out foul play, stating that he had died of natural causes, or an accident, or both.

Gareth Loy, however, said his brother had not been a well man. Twelve years ago, just after starting work on the Oetzi project, he had been diagnosed as suffering from a hereditary condition that caused his blood to clot. Asked about the issue of a curse, Mr Loy said that it had never been a subject of discussion between them.

Academics, of course, pour scorn on such notions. Tom Loy's colleagues at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience refused to comment yesterday. But one university source said staff were deeply upset, not only by his death, but by all the speculation about a curse.

"They feel that it trivialises his death, and does not do justice to his life and work," said the source. "He was a brilliant academic, and that is how his colleagues want to remember him."

But for others, the link between Mr Loy's death and that of other men associated with Oetzi is irresistible. Mr Simon, 67, met a strikingly similar end to the man whom he chanced across in an icy tomb in northern Italy, near the Austrian border. A retired caretaker from Nuremberg, he was hiking through the snow with his wife when they made the historic find in September 1991. But the event came to haunt the couple, for they grew embittered by the world's failure to recognise the role that they played, and to recompense them financially.

In October last year, Mr Simon went walking in Austria, barely 100 miles from the spot where he encountered Oetzi. He failed to return and was found dead eight days later, having apparently fallen 300ft during a freak blizzard.

An hour after Mr Simon's funeral, Dieter Warnecke, the head of the mountain rescue team dispatched to look for him, died of a heart attack. Mr Warnecke was 45 and, according to his family, perfectly fit.

The first "victim" of the curse, though, was Rainer Henn, 64, a forensic pathologist who picked up the cadaver with his bare hands and placed it in a body bag. Dr Henn died in a head-on collision in 1992 while on his way to a conference where he planned to present new findings on the remains.

Not long afterwards Kurt Fritz, a mountaineer who guided Dr Henn to the Iceman and was one of the first people to gaze upon his face, died in an avalanche. An experienced climber who knew the region intimately, he was the only member of his party to be struck by the falling rocks.

Rainer Hölz, 47, an Austrian journalist, exclusively filmed the removal of the body from its cocoon of ice, making an hour-long documentary that was shown around the world. A few months later he died of a brain tumour.

Before Dr Loy, the most recent "victim" was Konrad Spindler, an Austrian archeologist and leading expert on the Iceman. Spindler had scoffed at suggestions of a curse, declaring: "I think it's a load of rubbish. It is all a media hype. The next thing you will be saying I will be next." He died last April, aged 66, of complications from multiple sclerosis.

Note that I am remarking on the curse on the ice-man. A man who dies alone in the cold after violence is not the kind to derive a death-curse or a grave-wight to haunt those who disturb his rest. If it were the battlefields of thousands of altercations across the world would be unholy sites of undead terror and misfortune by the shades of the untimely dead. No the iceman had such spectacular bad luck to die in the manner which he did because he himself was the subject of an awful curse. This curse was so powerful that 5000 years after the events in question have transpired and the main subject of the curse himself perished the curse itself lingers pseudo-randomly killing people who become remotely associated with the original target's corpse. Now that's one frighteningly powerful curse.

Dragon in Strike: Watching the World Die

News says what I already knew, Amazon is having worst drought in forty years.

While hurricanes thousands of miles away battered the United States and the Caribbean with water and wind, the residents of this fishing town in the deep Amazon watched the lake they depend on for food and transportation shrivel away.

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians across seven states have been hit this year by the Amazon region's worst drought in four decades, the result, meteorologists say, of warmer ocean water, which also is being blamed for one of the most violent hurricane seasons on record around the Gulf of Mexico.

The summer rains have begun here, but it remains to be seen whether enough water will fall to restore the rivers.

Scientists say the drought is part of a climatic shift that's overturned the lives of millions around the Western Hemisphere this year.

Water temperatures in the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico have been as much as 3.6 degrees higher than normal this year. That helped feed the hurricanes that devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast and the Caribbean.

It also helped generate warmer-than-normal air currents that poured into the Amazon basin and prevented rain clouds from forming, said Edvardo Souza, a meteorologist with a Brazilian agency that monitors conditions in the Amazon forest.

I don't feel one bit sorry for the locals. They've been destroying the Amazon at super fast rates which satellite images can now document and prove.

Brazil's Amazon rain forest - one of the most biologically productive regions on the planet - is disappearing twice as fast as scientists previously estimated.

That is the stark conclusion ecologist Gregory Asner and his colleagues reached after developing a new way to analyze satellite images to track logging there.

And of course the Californian watershed ecology is crashing. And the Northeast was deluged. And avian influenza is rampaging across the globe unchecked. And the Iranians are pushing toward a confrontation by dismissing moderate and experience diplomats and gearing up for nuclear fuel production. Not too much to worry about then, just the destruction of the world.

I have been insulted, taken for granted, dissed, dismissed ... whatever. I don't care about humanity any more. Let the disasters multiply. People want to blame me for the mistakes I've made and the deaths that those have caused? Sure, okay I'll take the blame. And now you can feel the full brunt of events like the Pakistani earthquake that they now say killed 73,000. For years more earthquakes have been happening but scientists denied there was a problem because they could not explain it and the public didn't notice it because the destructive ones in populated areas were snuffed or moved to unpopulated areas.

Well you know what humanity? Here's a middle finger raised alone from me to you. Fuck you. I paid my dues a long time ago. I've saved the world several times. If I do it again, it'll be for my own interests. See how you like it when the dragonking goes on strike. Not doing so hot by yourselves eh? Don't worry, it'll get worse yet you can be sure of that.

None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See

MSNBC reports:

WASHINGTON - Even when the brain can’t consciously tell what the eyes are seeing, it may still be able to sense what’s there.

The finding suggests that the brain may have “blindsight” — an alternate way of processing visual information. That might help scientists better understand the nature of consciousness and suggest ways to restore some types of vision loss, according to Tony Ro, a psychology professor at Rice University in Houston.

Not all vision researchers accept the idea of blindsight, however, and other studies into the concept are under way.

Ro and his research team studied what could be sensed by volunteers who were temporarily blind. Their findings are reported Monday in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, temporary, reversible blindness was induced in volunteers by using magnetic pulses that affected the visual cortex, the area in the back of the brain that processes what the eyes are seeing.

A computer screen was in front of the volunteers. In one test, during their momentary blindness the screen flashed with either a vertical or horizontal line. In a second test a red or green ball was shown on the screen.

When the volunteers were asked what they had seen during the temporary blindness, they said they saw nothing, the researchers reported.

But, the researchers said, when the patients were told to guess which way the line was oriented, they were right 75 percent of the time. And they got the color of the ball right 81 percent of the time. Random guessing would be expected to result in a 50 percent correct rate.

Some of the participants said they were guessing randomly and were surprised with their high success rates, the researchers said. Others reported they had a “feeling” about what had been there.

Asked to rate the confidence of their guesses, the higher confidence ratings tended to correspond with more accurate guesses.

“These findings demonstrate that while certain brain areas are necessary for awareness, there is extensive processing of information that takes place unconsciously,” Ro said via e-mail.

He said the results, “suggesting the existence of alternate visual processing routes that function unconsciously, may provide some hope for people with damage to the primary visual cortex.”

Dr. Edmond Fitzgibbon of the National Eye Institute said the report adds weight to the idea of a second pathway for experiencing sight, but he added that the idea remains controversial and many researchers don’t accept it.

The new study is “intriguing,” Fitzgibbon said. But he added that there can be perception that people aren’t aware of, such as subliminal suggestions briefly flashed during a film.

“If you’re not aware of it, does that really mean you didn’t see it?” he asked.

What makes them sure that it's visual processing that allows the people to perceive this? Drop a physical screen in front of the monitor image so that it's blocked but after they've been blinded and then ask again and see if they can still get the guesses right. Remember sensory deprivation is one of the most important tools for revealing ESP signal reception. It's only when the "noise" of ordinary consciousness decreases that "ESP" or paranormal insight becomes clear.

Drop the screen and ask the question and my bet is the test subjects get the answers as equally right as when the screen is not blocking any light from the monitor. Yet this will not be tried. Why? Because it's "obviously" impossible. There are none so blind as those who will not see, but in this case it isn't the test subjects but the "objective" scientists that are leading this experiment.

Test it and see. In a manner of speaking that is regarding seeing. lol.