President has no respect for country...

A doctor had his TV on in his office when the news of the military base shootings at Ft. Hood , TX came on.

The husband of one of his employees was stationed there.

He called her into his office and as he told her what had happened, she got a text message from her husband

saying, "I am okay." Her cell phone rang right after she read the message. It was an ER nurse,” I'm the one

who just sent you a text, not your husband.

I thought it would be comforting but I was mistaken in doing so. I am sorry to tell you this, but your husband

has been shot 4 times and he is in surgery."

The soldier's wife left Southern Clinic in Dothan, AL and drove all night to Ft.Hood. When she arrived,

she found out her husband was out of surgery and would be OK. She rushed to his room and found that

he already had two visitors there to comfort him.

He was just waking up and found his wife and the visitors by his side. The nurse took this picture:

What? No news crews and cameras? This is how people with class respond and pay respect to those

in uniform.

I sent my cousin in Fayetteville, N.C. (Retired from Special Forces) that picture of Geo. W. visiting

the wounded at Ft. Hood. I got this reply:

What is even better is the fact George W. Bush heard about Fort Hood, got in his car without any

escort, apparently they did not have time to react, and drove to Fort Hood. He was stopped at the

gate and the guard could not believe who he had just stopped. Bush only asks for directions to the

hospital then drove on. The gate guard called that "The President is on Fort Hood and driving to

the hospital."

The base went bananas looking for Obama. When they found it was Bush, they immediately offered

escort. Bush simply told them it was o.k. and to let him visit the wounded and the dependents of the

dead.

He stayed at Fort Hood for over six hours, and was finally asked to leave by a message from the

White House.

Obama flew in days later and held a "photo opportunity" session in a gym, and did not even go

to the hospital.

All this I picked up from two soldiers here who happened to be at Fort Hood when it happened.

This Bush/Obama/Ft.Hood story is something that should be sent to every voter in the US . Those

who wanted "change". You certainly got it.

Someone, PLEASE, show me anything that will tell us that Obama has ANY respect for the country he seeks to

lead!

I'm looking for just a little sign of respect.

ADVICE FOR WOMEN...

THE REAL NEWS WHY SNOWDEN IS IN CHINA

Why is Edward Snowden in Hong Kong?

by DAVE LINDORFF

A lot of people in the US media are asking why America’s most famous whistleblower, 29-year old Edward Snowden, hied himself off to the city state of Hong Kong, a wholly owned subsidiary of the People’s Republic of China, to seek at least temporary refuge.
Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the US, they say. And as for China, which controls the international affairs of its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, while granting it local autonomy to govern its domestic affairs, its leaders “may not want to irritate the US” at a time when the Chinese economy is stumbling.
These people don’t have much understanding of either Hong Kong or of China.
As someone who has spent almost seven years in China and Hong Kong, let me offer my thoughts about why Snowden, obviously a very savvy guy despite his lack of a college education, went where he did.
First of all, forget about Hong Kong’s extradition treaty. When it comes to deciding whether someone will be extradited, particularly for a political crime, as opposed to a simple murder or bank heist, the decision will be made in Beijing, not in a Hong Kong courtroom. Second, Hong Kong has a long history of providing a haven to dissidents — even to dissidents wanted by the Chinese government. Consider, for example, the Chinese labor movement activist Han Dongfang, who was the subject of a massive dragnet after the Tiananmen protests, but who successfully fled to Hong Kong before the handover of the place from Britain to China, and is continuing to monitor Chinese labor strife and protest from his home on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island. Hong Kong also has a public that is very supportive of democratic values — certainly more so than the majority of American citizens. Hong Kong people may not be paying too much attention to Snowden’s situation right now, but if the US were to actively seek to extradite him, I am confident that the place would erupt in support for him, including the local media.
As for China, while the issue that has Snowden on the run — exposing an Orwellian spying program targeting the American people and run by the super-secret National Security Agency — is certainly not one that the Chinese government likes to discuss in terms of their own locked-down society, you can bet that the folks in the Propaganda Bureau in Beijing, and in the inner circle of the government, are rubbing their hands with glee both at the incredible embarrassment their harboring of Snowden causes the hypocritical US, and at the trove of intelligence information he has, which they may be able ultimately to lure him into disclosing if they treat him well.
Then too, there is the matter of the Confucian concept of gift-giving and mutual obligations. It was, I am sure, no accident that Snowden chose the weekend that President Obama was hosting a summit in California with China’s new president Xi Jinping to disclose his identity as the NSA whistleblower who exposed the national spying program to the Guardian and the Washington Post. In doing that, he gave President Xi an incredible gift — the chance to hold the upper hand in his negotiations with a hugely embarrassed and compromised Obama over issues like Chinese computer hacking of US corporate and government secrets, and theft of intellectual property. For of course it is clear that the NSA is at least as active in hacking Chinese computers and spying on Chinese communications.
Such a gift as that is not easily ignored or forgotten in Chinese culture. President Xi owes Snowden a lot, and I believe he will honor that debt by seeing that Snowden is protected from any threat that might be posed to him by a vindictive or frightened US government.
But Snowden isn’t relying solely on Chinese cultural values to protect himself.
He was also careful to send a powerful message of warning to the US officials in the videoed public interview he gave [1] outing himself. As he told interviewer Glenn Greenwald, “I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world. The locations of every station, we have what their missions are and so forth. If I had just wanted to harm the US? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon.”
That one line at the end had to make the folks in Langley and at NSA headquarters sit up straight or to head to the bar for a stiff one! And indeed he could. And I will guarantee you, Snowden being as smart as he is, that he has already taken that information and dispersed it to a number of trusted people, perhaps including Greenwald, with instructions that they should put it all out on the Web if anything happens to him, such as his being kidnapped or disappeared or terminated. It’s a wonderful insurance policy and one that would not have escaped him. Nor would he have bothered to discover that he had all that information available to him if he hadn’t thought that he might need it.
It would be a relatively easy matter for the high-tech spooks at the NSA to retrace Snowden’s electronic trail to see if he really did download all that super-secret information and really could blow up the entire US spy machine. If they find out that he really has that information, he’s basically untouchable.
The real question is not what they are going to do to Snowden. It’s what we Americans are going to do now that we know how truly insane and totalitarian our government has become.
Will we go back to watching our sports teams and our reality TV programming, and forget about the fact that we no longer have any privacy in our lives, that our elected leaders and our judges are operating on the assumption that if they get out of line the fascist machine at the NSA that works in service of the corporate elite will blackmail or destroy them with its access to all their communications. Or will we rise up and demand an end to this high-tech tyranny in the name of a fraudulent “War” on Terror?
Snowden exiled himself and gave up a great job in Hawaii in the hope that we would rise up when we learned that our democracy has been hijacked.
Let’s hope he’s right

America: Its Own Worst Enemy

by ARNO J. MAYER

America is at war. To be sure, the global and perpetual war on terror has not been declared—by Congress. The enemy the U.S. is fighting is neither a nation-state nor an empire but a largely spectral hydra-headed nebula without nerve center. Washington and its allies claim to be defending themselves against this anomalous non-state transnational actor which has neither sovereignty nor a government, nor an army. In Orwellian speak, the Defense Departments—not War Departments—of the First World, attuned to the Pentagon, are nonplussed in the face of an enemy beyond the reach of the full panoply of their modern and post-modern weapons of individual and mass destruction.
Henceforth the battle against the nebulous and elusive enemy, who is being relentlessly diabolized, is guided and fought by a seamless network of “intelligence” and counter-terrorist CIA-FBI-FSA work and listening stations and operatives in countless countries around the globe. The latest weapon of choice of the vastly overstretched American empire of military, “intelligence,” security, cyber and corporate bases: the remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle, insidiously dubbed drone, presumably to evoke the stingless male honeybee.
The Brothers Tsaraev, who perpetrated the horrendous Boston Marathon Massacre, succeeded beyond their wildest, not to say quixotic, dreams, which were fired by crosswired social, political, religious, and psychological pulsations. The detonation of their artisanal bombs packed with low-grade explosives and ball-bearings killed three people and wounded 260. Sixteen of the injured had limbs blown off by the blast or had to endure amputations. Although small beer in the annals of recent terrorist attacks, the unconscionably willful and indiscriminate Boston carnage resonated far and wide, in large measure thanks to its instrumentalization and exploitation by America’s political class and the mainline media, especially cable television. Indeed, they presented Greater Boston’s vast manhunt and mandatory lockdown by thousands of policemen and National Guardsmen reinforced by SWAT teams, SWAT tanks, and helicopters as a reality show, interspersed with advertisements for palliatives for erectile dysfunctions and facial wrinkles, for cut-rate vacations in the sun, and for the timely investment in gold and silver. The highlight of the Hollywoodian psychodrama came with the invasive and persecutorial interrogation of the sister, parents, and friends and acquaintances of—in Vice President Joe Biden’s carefully crafted words—“the two twisted, perverted, cowardly, knock-off jihadists.”
Presently President Obama set the tone for America’s deep-felt aggrievement and patriotic outrage. The opening sentence in his homily at the Interfaith Service in Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross: “Scripture tells us to ‘run with endurance the race that is set before us’.” He led the congregation in prayer for the victims and for the recovery of the injured. The President commended Greater Boston, by then out from under martial law, for showing “us . . . that in the face of evil, Americans will lift up what’s good” and that “in the face of cruelty, we will choose compassion.” This was in keeping with “Scripture [that] teaches us, ‘God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.”
But the President also spoke in another key. Addressing “those who carried this out and anyone who would do harm to our people: yes, we will find you. And you will face justice. (Applause) We will hold you accountable.” Indeed, the President asserted that if they knew “who we are . . . the perpetrators of such senseless violence—these small, stunted individuals” would know that “a bomb can’t beat us.”
Even or especially in moments like these “we come together to celebrate life, and to walk our cities, and to cheer for our teams.” In the spirit of late Republican and early Imperial Rome’s panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, President Obama averred that “when the Sox and Celtics and Patriots and Bruins are champions again . . . the crowds will gather and watch a parade go down Boylston Street.” (Applause) He concluded his homily with the same Biblical citation with which he had opened it, followed by the invocation “may God hold close those who’ve been taken from us too soon. May He comfort their families. And may He continue to watch over these United States of America.” (Applause) Following Cardinal O’Malley’s closing benediction the congregation rose to intone America the Beautiful, the national hymn on a par with The Star-Spangled Banner, America’s national anthem. This hymn invokes God in four out of seven verses, concordant with the tenor of the President’s address.
The unwritten text of the media frenzy and the hortatory Presidential address is that America is not only uniquely innocent and beautiful but, above all, virtuous, righteous, and powerful. The American peuple noble mourns and shows compassion for the victims of the heinous terrorist attack and mourns and iconizes the American servicemen and servicewomen who make the supreme sacrifice fighting the nebula in distant lands as well as from the high seas and the open skies. But Americans, writ large, are conditioned to be relatively blind and deaf—insensitive—to the innocent victims of the fallout and collateral damage of America’s direct or indirect anti-jihadist war, nay counter-crusade, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lybia, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Yemen, Kenya, Syria—and counting.
To be sure, from 2003 to 2012 on the Iraqi battlefield close to 4,500 U. S. soldiers were killed; and from 2001 to 2013 in the Afghan theater of war over 2,200 U. S. soldiers sacrificed their lives. But whereas the number of American military casualties in these two theaters of the war without borders against terror is beyond dispute, there is not even remotely the same precision about the number of Iraqi and
Afghan casualties, both military and civilian. For Iraq, estimates range between 110,000 and 600,000, and though the estimates of civilian deaths among them vary widely, they most likely run into the tens of thousands. In Afghanistan, while a total of some 14,000 anti- and pro-government military combatants are estimated to have lost their lives, there are not even any ballpark body counts of civilian casualties. The media make little, if any, effort to inform and enlighten the American peuple about the incidence, nature, scale, and aftereffects of civilian casualties. This may be congruent with the near total neglect by American historians of civilian casualties and afflictions–including those of widows, orphans, and the elderly—in America’s own Civil War in which some 750,000 men died, out of a population of 30 million.
Presently the 11-page Federal complaint accuses Dzhokbar Tsarnaev, the younger and surviving terrorist, with having “used a weapon of mass destruction . . . against persons and property.” This (mis)use of the toxic term “weapon of mass destruction” for a ball-bearing-packed pressure-cooker bomb staggers belief. The U. S. holds the palm in the development, production, stockpiling, and deployment of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, and biological. It also leads the world in delivery systems. To boot, America is the only country ever to have used a weapon of mass destruction: on August 6-9, 1945, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took a toll of an estimated 200,000 lives. That was five months after the “conventional” firebombing of Tokyo in which some 100,000 people are estimated to have died. To be sure, this air strike on the Japanese capital was one of the deadliest and most destructive of World War II. But it was the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including the post-attack blight of sickness and death due to radiation-induced leukemia and other cancers that marked a radical qualitative “game-change” in military and diplomatic statecraft.
Of course, the pressure-cooker bombs and the jihadis are all the more terrifying because of that ominous Chechen connection. Just as in its anti-Soviet obsession Washington not so long ago partnered with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, so until only yesterday it extolled the Sunni Islamists—jihadis—of the Caucasus as valiant freedom fighters against an oppressive and repressive post-Soviet Russia. It is nothing short of reassuring that President Vladimir Putin, a tried and true ex-KGB operative, execrated and distrusted by America’s foreign-policy wonks, is now praised for ordering his anti-terrorist and security apparatus to lock arms with President Obama’s CIA and FBI—“intelligence” and security “community”—in tracking down that ominous Al-Qaeda trail that purportedly led to the Boston Marathon Massacre.
This is only the beginning of the reinflammation of the Sunni-Shiite fratricide reminiscent of the fratricide between Protestants and Catholics, and the attendant religious wars, in 16^th-17^th -century Europe. Judging by developments in the Greater Middle East, notably what the West hastened to label the “Arab Spring,” grosso modo, the United States and its allies tend to support the Sunnis, including the Sunni states, while the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are inclined to support the Shiites, including the Shiite states. Needless to say, the interventions of both coalitions of powers are driven primarily by geopolitical and mercantile interests shrouded in ideological mist. In today’s non-Western precincts, Sunnis and Shiites, and their external backers, are equally close to or distant from Allah, just as the Protestants and Catholics in 16^th-17^th-century Europe were equally close to or distant from God.
Meanwhile the analogue of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), might serve as a guide in thinking about the incipient general crisis and thirty years war in today’s Greater Middle East—and beyond. To be sure, the negotiations between May and October 1648 in Münster and Osnabrück resulted in peace treaties between and among the major belligerents which included territorial adjustments. But above all, in addition to ringing down the curtain on the Holy Roman Empire, Westphalia marked the triumph of national sovereignty and rule over the principle and practice of imperial ascendancy. Indeed, Westphalia articulated and warranted the emergent principle of the sovereignty of the state along with the equality of sovereign states in an embryonic European state system. Though implicit and unwrought, the Westphalian settlement also spawned not only the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other states but also that of self-determination.
In its post-colonial and waning imperial era the Western World, not to say the First World, continues to approach the problems facing so many of the non-Western, not to say Third World political and civil societies in the spirit of Westphalia, leavened or exploded by a latter-day “orientalist” mission civilisatrice. To be sure, the states of the Greater Islamic Middle East, notably the Arab states, are sovereign, have frontiers, and have autonomous political regimes. But most of the borders were drawn and most of the regimes were invested by the colonial-imperial powers with little or no concern for the principle of cuius region (whose realm), cuius religio (whose religion), except perhaps with a view to play on religious divisions to better divide ut regnes (divide in order to rule).
Today especially the Western powers artlessly intervene, directly or indirectly, in the internal affairs of sovereign states to foster, weigh in the balance, or prevent regime change. Targeted drone and cyber strikes merely symbolize and facilitate such interventions, most of them in countries caught up in religiously, ethnically, tribally, and socially charged civil wars whose outcome will affect the ongoing regional geopolitical refiguration, including frontier revisions.
Of course, whereas the interventions by the West and its regional allies are cried up for legitimately and overtly promoting the cause of democratic governance, secularization, women’s emancipation, antiseptic free-market capitalism, those by the non-Western countries—most notably Iran and Russia—are decried for illegally and covertly encouraging and supporting the antithesis, or polar opposite.
The so-called Arab and kindred springs in the West’s far-flung bygone colonial-imperial realms are neither mere rebellions, nor popular uprisings, nor full-blown revolutions. Indeed, as yet there is no heuristic term or concept with which to characterize and capture their essence and thrust. Meanwhile it seems evident, however, that their course will be all but determined by the headlong global geopolitical realignment along with the major powers, trapped in globalizing corporate and finance capitalism, bent on pursuing neo-mercantilist policies in an emergent cut-throat competition for critical energy resources, rare metals, and commodities.
One can only hope—against hope?—that the current great transformation of the political and civil societies of the nation-states of the West’s ex-imperial realms will be less turbulent, violent, and interminable than the great transformation in early modern Europe. Specifically, that their civil and sectarian wars as well as foreign wars and internal political skullduggery will be less ferocious and bloody than in England in the time of Oliver Cromwell, in France in the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and in Greater Europe during the General Crisis and Thirty Years War of the Twentieth Century.
In the Greater Middle East, given its tried statehood, governance, moderness, and national identity Israel may be said to be best steeled to weather the high winds of change were it not for its indeterminate and unrecognized borders, which make for a crying deficit of sovereignty compounded by a boundless expansion into Palestinian land. This will continue to feed a deep-felt hostility throughout the turbulent region and sap Israel’s ethnic coherence and nationhood. Indeed, governed by a hubristic and parochial political class Israel is a formidable wild card in a neighborhood of seething geopolitical and international power plays fraught with potentially grave, nay existential self-endangerment for a country which has been its own worst enemy all these years and can no longer claim to be “a light unto the nations.”
Arno J. Mayer is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author of The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions.and Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel (Verso). 

Food warning...

Cake Mix Warning (not a joke)

Warning re: cake mixes - who knew?
I always thought that "old" mixes that were past their expiration date would just not rise/bake correctly. This is scary!
Somebody wrote: 'Before my surgery I bought quite a few Duncan Hines cakes mixes that were on sale. A couple of months ago I decided to use one, I checked the expiration date and found it past, all the boxes were past the expiration date. I phoned Duncan Hinds to ask if the one that was only two months passed if it was OK. She told me in no uncertain words to throw them all out, she even said to open the boxes and throw the mix in the garbage, just in case someone picked it up and used it.

Cake Mixes & Toxins- **PLEASE READ** Pass this on to ALL in your address book. You never know whose life you may save by doing so. For those of you at work, PLEASE remember to check your cupboards when you get home tonight!!!

This is confirmed on Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/pancake.asp
A student at HBHS (high school) had pancakes this week and it almost became fatal. His Mom (registered nurse) made him pancakes, dropped him off at school and headed to play tennis. She never takes her cell phone on the court but did this time and her son called to say he was having trouble breathing. She told him to go to the nurse immediately and proceeded to call school and alert the nurse. The nurse called the paramedics and they were there in 3 minutes and worked on the boy all the way to the hospital. He came so close to dying. Evidently this is more common then I ever knew. Check the expiration dates on packages like pancakes and cake mixes that have yeast which over time develop spores. Apparently, the mold that forms in old mixes can be toxic! Throw away ALL OUTDATED pancake mix, brownie mixes, Bisquick, cake & cookie mixes, etc., you have in your home.

P.S. Tell this to your children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and anyone else who keeps these types of mixes in the cupboard.
P.P.S. This warning especially applies to any person(s) with mold allergies.

NOAH'S ARKS DISCOVERED...

NOAH'S ARK and other ARKS around the world.

                                                NOAH’S ARK

                                        By Henry Kroll

Drawing on my 13,000 days of documented sea time fishing king crab in Alaska and fifty years tendering salmon across Cook Inlet I can see where drogue stones would have been necessary to keep a large vessel from capsizing.  [Drogue stones were 10-ton anchor blocks of stone suspended underneath a large vessel. Whenever a big wave forced it over on its side the stones would pull it back upright again.] Take heed as we may have to use this technology again…

Every culture in the world has a legend of a great flood and people surviving aboard some kind of large floating craft. After researching the various locations of the Ark listed in the Bible and Koran I came to the conclusion that there had to be at least two different Arks grounded on the mountains of Ararat. One is located at the eleven thousand foot level and one at seventy five hundred foot level. I also believe that there are several other Arks on every continent around world.

Note the water worn hills with the rugged outcropping that was sticking out of the water at one time indicating the height of the sea level.

It is possible that a global civilization as technological advanced as our own could be destroyed in a gigantic global event? Could our busy and integrated global society vanish overnight with little or no warning? The ancients said yes. The holy Bible says yes. The Book of Enoch says yes. The Book of Kolbrin says yes. The indigenous people from around the world say yes. The mystic seers and visionaries all say YES.

Almost all scientists say no! Who is right? How can we know? Read my book, Cosmological Ice Ages.

Mankind has this overblown opinion of himself that ancient civilizations were primitive and ignorant and didn’t have high technology. The more you study ancient texts it becomes obvious that quite the opposite is true. Yet Academics continue to preach the dogmatic “strait line evolution theory” where primitive man progressed from chipping flints in a cave to putting men on the Moon. More and more we are finding advanced cities with pyramids and multistory buildings on the bottom of the ocean and in jungles on top of mountains where no human has set foot for thousands of years.

More dogma is perpetuated by various religious groups who preach that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. Both sides refuse to read the ancient texts or study the geologic record. This dogma on both sides has held us back from discovering our roots. Then there are the secret societies that hide the facts to keep both sides warring for societal manipulation and profit. 

   

David Rupp and Jack Septkowski compiled the time line disappearance of millions of biological organisms with pink iridium clay layers in ancient sedimentary deposits to make the remarkable discovery that Earth was subjected to regular extinctions every 27-million years. The major extinctions killed up to 95% of all life on Earth right down to bacteria. In addition, there were many minor extinction in between. It’s as if the Earth had to be sterilized every so often before new life could be introduced. Earth is obviously an incubator for new life forms.

Evolution cannot account for the huge diversity of life we see on Earth today. Aliens chose Earth because of its higher rate of evolution. Obviously someone is coming here to re-seeding the Earth between extinctions and they are watching over us at the present time. Many groups call them the “watchers.” Whenever the little grays land in the forest they are seen taking samples of plants and small animals. Then there is the cattle mutilations where strategic animals parts are removed and the bloods completely drained from the carcass.   They seem to be monitoring and concerned about our environment—or what we are doing to it—“the toxins we are releasing with our chemical pesticides and crude carbon burning methods.”

In the spring of 1972 my wife and two children at the time traveled by plane to Cordova to take command of the old 72-foot Mary M. I had purchased it from Rocky Roswell’s widow, Roslyn for $18,000 and traded my father’s old 45-foot power scow Shrimp to Yule Kilcher for his interest in the boat. The boat had been lying idle in Cordova for the past year and was in terrible shape.

Kilcher’s crew had tried to burn it twice. The first time they cut the fuel line running to the aft tanks and drained lots of diesel into the fish hold. There was an old cotton mattress lying in the hold and it made so much smoke they got scarred and put the hatch cover back on and the fire went out. The second time they carried four open five-gallon cans of gas down and threw it down the hatch into the engine room and splashed some of it onto the galley table and threw in a match. This time the fire really took off. 

Cordova has the best fire department in the state. They rushed down to the boat harbor with large chemical fires extinguishers and put the fire out right away. All the overhead beans in the engine room were charred in more than ½ inch. There was no wiring left and there was dry chemical fire extinguisher powder everywhere. The insurance adjuster left behind many Kodak flash cubes from his Instamatic. There were still gas cans sitting around on deck. There was no way anybody was going to collect insurance with so much evidence pointing to arson.

The men who committed the crime turned up missing. They went deep into Prince William Sound and lived off from deer meat and clams for a month.  

The boat had been sitting for more than a year when I arrived and started work. I hired a deck hand and got her shipshape enough to make the tip to Seldovia in ten days. Everybody in Cordova thought the old Mary M would never move again.

The Mary M had been a pirate vessel with a long colorful history as a herring seiner, crab boat, shrimp dragger, tugboat and salvage vessel. Rocky used it to raise six 130-foot military power scows that had capsized off the coast of Nome.

The Mary M was built in Tacoma, Washington in 1928. The main engine was a four-cylinder Atlas that weighing over 20,000 pounds. It was built for the Metsch family who used it to seine herring in San Francisco Bay and South Eastern Alaska. They pulled sein nets by hand in those days because Mario Puretic hadn’t invented the power block yet so fishermen  needed a big crew of ten or twelve men to pull the net aboard. There were six bunks in the focsil ahead of the engine room and two bunks aft in the pilot house.

At the time I didn’t have much experience operating a large vessel. When I approached the fuel dock in preparation for the trip I broke two wooden piling that were cabled together as part of a dolphin to tie up the ferry boat. Fortunately nobody saw the boat glance off the piling. I fuelled the main tanks and departed Cordova.

I was up high on the flying bridge happy as a clam enjoying the view. The engine was chugging along with a wonderful four beat rhythm. The sun was slowly sinking behind the mountains. Suddenly the ancient oil pressure gauge on the bridge suddenly dropped to zero. There was only 4 pounds per square inch to begin with and now it was zero. I slid down the ladder and dashed down to the engine room to shut it off.

The 20,000 pound Atlas diesel is 16-feet long and six-foot high. It is a huge mass of pipes, push rods, cams, oil tanks, rocker arms, ratchets, pawls and pumps. I searched around frantically for the problem, couldn’t find it, bared the flywheel to the start position and pulled the air start lever. It chugged back to life but there was still no oil pressure. Finally after tracing the pipes from the oil tank to the oil pump I noticed that a 1-inch pin had backed out of the rocker arm assembly that operated the plunger pump. I simply pushed it back in and put a 16-penny nail through where a cotter key had fallen out.

I was much younger in those days and thought nothing of worked day and night. We eventually arrived in Seldovia and bought groceries. The engine had been knocking so I the covers off one side and checked the rod bearings. One of the rod bearing caps had was loose so I took it off and laid a strip of solder in it and put it back on again with considerable tork. I removed it again and checked the solder with a micrometer. It was ten thousandths of an inch clearance which according to the book was at the upper limit of tolerance.

We continue on up Kachemak Bay to our house in Halibut Cove. The next week I installed hatch tank in her hold to keep crab alive so that I could fish August 15^th. We made good money fishing king crab the next three years. I was anxious to change the old 1926 Atlas so I decided to take the Mary M south to replace some planks and install a more modern engine.

The first trip we made to Seattle we took our time stopping at every town and village all through South Eastern Alaska and Canada. In Anacortes, Washington we did two months of hull work changing 32 planks and installed a new bow stem. After Christmas I took her through the locks into Lake Union and tied up at East Lake 88 Hamlin Street Columbia Ward Fishers dock. The Mary M was moored right outside Wynn Brindle’s office. Wynn owned ten salmon canneries in various parts of Alaska. Every morning he come by wearing his old felt hat and put one foot up on the dock rail to see how I was progressing. At that time, we were fishing salmon for the Columbia Wards Kenai plant.

Jerry Welch and I disassembled the 20,000 pound engine and drug it aft in pieces into the fish hold. Columbia Ward’s redneck crane operator did his best to destroy the boat by hooking various engine parts under the edge of the hatch. I believe he didn’t like me because I was just a kid and owned a boat and he didn’t. I sold the engine parts to Gagne Machine for $250.00.

I bought a practically new D-8 Cat marine engine from a cab driver for $7,500. The redneck Columbia Wards dock foreman lowered it down into the fish hold. I drug it forward with a cum-a-long on pipe rollers into the engine room. It was too tall to go through the opening in the bulkhead so I had to back it out a little and remove the heads.

As I inched it forward the head bolts gently scraped the wood timbers overhead. I bought two slabs of 1-inch-thick steel plate measuring 8-inches wide and 14- feet long from Puget sound Salvage. I made a plywood pattern of the bolt configuration and cut 1-inch holes in the steel slab with my cutting torch. I used the old Atlas lag bolts to secure them down to the massive engine bed timbers. I welded several 3/8-inch-thick steel plates across the bed plates to build the bed up to the engine mounts and welded two 4-inch angel irons onto the bed to bolt the engine down and secured it with eight ¾ inch bolts. I had allowed adjustment by putting ¾ plywood shims under the engine mounts that I removed and replaced with steel shims to line it up with the coupling.

The engine bed weighed about 2000 pounds and the D-342 Cat engine weighed 6000 pounds with the 3-to 1 ratio reduction gear. I built cement forms out of two by twelves’ planks ahead of the engine and ordered up three cubic yards of concrete. Before the cement truck arrived I had borrowed all the metal fish shuts off from Columbia Ward’s tenders and hung them on wires so that the cement would flow down into the engine room. I had a little too much and had to heap it up over the top of the forms. It all worked out as if I had planned it. After adding 10,000 pounds of concrete and 8000 pound engine, the bow of the boat still floated a foot higher than it did before I removed the Atlas.

I installed a Wagner 32 volt electric-hydraulic jog system with jog levers in the wheel house and on the flying bridge. I bought a cheap autopilot for $500 and removed the electric motor that was designed to attach to a steering wheel of a small boat. I wired the jog steering to the autopilot relays so that it would steer the Mary M. It worked like a charm. When I started the D-8 Cat for the first time it was so quiet I could barely hear it in the pilothouse. We took the Mary M out into Lake Washington for sea trials. It was very smooth and quiet and did over ten knots. It was the kind of feelings that a person experiences only once or twice in a life time.

After loading up with twenty crab pots, groceries and fuel at Fisherman’s Terminal we departed for Alaska. It was a little sloppy crossing Cross Sound so by the time we reached Ketchikan my 20 new crab pots were sliding back and for about six inches. I tack welded them to the iron flat bar on the deck.

Two days later we pulled into Yakutat to wait for weather. I was getting anxious after two days of waiting. The weather report said the wind was south east increasing to 35 later in the day. I fished in 30-knot wind lots of times and since it would be on our tail I took off out into the pacific far enough to clear Cape St. Elias. About the time we were abreast Cape St. Elias the wind picked up to over fifty knot. The seas were building higher than anything I ever saw before. The wind steadily increased to eight knots and I couldn’t see the tops—just a big wall of water looming up at a 45 degree angle. By that time, the water as cascading down the front of the 100-foot waves. Each time the cascading water filled up the back deck with six feet of water. The boat shuddered from side to side as it slowly rose up out of the trough of the wave.

With the Cat engine running full ahead we’d try to climb up the back side of the wave. The auto pilot never wavered a foot off course. All the pumps were working fine but it was particularly alarming when the boat slid down each wave backwards about 16 feet—this while the engine was at full speed ahead. Slowly the boat would inch up the back side of the wave. At the crest of the mountain-like wave I could see forward about a half mile to the top of the next wave.

The old Mary M would break through the top crest and slide down what seemed like an almost vertical incline. At that time of the cycle the boat surged forward at over 16 knots down the wave for a good quarter mile. If the auto pilot had veered off course one tiny bit the boat would have dug into the water and flipped over on its side or pitch poled completely over. If this had happened you wouldn’t be reading this right now. When we reached the bottom of the trough where the back deck filled up with water and the whole process would start over again. We rode that way four hours which seemed like an eternity.

Gradually the mountainous swells subsided. The wind switched directions more to the northeast. We were approaching the entrance of Prince William Sound entrance between Hinchinbrook and Montague islands. The weather influence of the Copper River ice fields and the delta were diverting the 80-knot winds to the northeast.

Gradually the waves changed direction and turned into real rough sixteen footers spaced about twenty-feet apart. I should have slacked off on the throttle but after the harrowing experience of weathering 100-foot waves I was anxious to get into calmer waters. My old Bendix radar would only reach out four miles. It was difficult to see the entrance to the sound.

Suddenly a vertical wall of green water blasted over the bow and smashed two windows of the wheel house. I ducked the plate glass as it smashed against the bulkhead behind me. A foot-high wave of salt water flushed down the companion way into the galley where my poor wife and kids were huddled near the stove. I heard them scream and hollered back that we weren't sinking that everything was alright. I immediately pulled back on the throttle and tried to reassure them telling them that we wold be inside the sound soon... The situation was grim as  everything in the pilot house instantly quit working. I manually steered the boat with only the compass for direction.

I hollered at Jerry Welch to grab a hammer and nails. I passed him an old rain coat and some scrap lumber that I keep around for emergencies. He had difficulty pushing the door of the wheelhouse open against the wind. I watched him to make sure he didn't get washed overboard as he nailed boards over the windows with 16-penny nails.

Once the engine was idling the water stopped coming over the bow. He entered the pilot house all red-faced and I increased the throttle to half speed. It took two more hours to work our way inside Prince William Sound. Jerry reported that the wind was blowing so hard he had to aim the hammer four inched to the right of the nail in order to hit it. When he hit his finger with the hammer he said he didn't even feel it.

Even after we were inside the sound the weather was very bad. Another three hours passed as we made our way to a small bay and anchored up for a day of rest.

We were lucky. We had survived the storm of a century. Many boats and planes went down that day all over Alaska. I lost a good friend. He took off in Jakaloff bay when a gust of wind let off and his Cessna 206 fell out of the sky. Fortunately he wasn't carrying passengers.

I often think back and wonder how we could have survived. Tacoma Shipyard did a marvelous job when they built the Mary M back in 1928. Surviving that storm was such a harrowing ordeal that I don’t like to think about it; let alone write about it. This will be the first and last time I will ever write about this.

NOAH's ARK

I now know how Noah must have felt riding such seas in a wooden ship filled with his large family and a host of animals.

Every culture in the world has a legend of a great flood and people surviving aboard some kind of large floating craft. After researching the various locations of the Ark listed in the Bible and Koran I came to the conclusion that there has to be at least two different Arks grounded on the mountains of Ararat. One is located at the eleven thousand foot level and one at seventy five hundred foot level. 

Further down the mountain from the above picture there is a trail of 5-ton drogue stones. It’s as if they dropped the stones one after the other to slow the drift toward land. If you look at the terrain in the picture you can see that the top of the mountain is jagged rock while just below it is smooth water worn land that has been submerged for some time. Is it possible the land rose in this location while the pressure of the flood waters receded?

Pegs to secure animals?

Below are what the explorers believe are dried peas inside the ARK used for animal food.

Look at the hills above the Ark. In the above picture you will see rounded terrain as if it had been under water or under ice for a very long time because it is completely smooth. Near the top of the hill is a jagged vertical cliff. Obviously this was sticking above the water level because it shows very little water erosion. 

A team of evangelical Christian explorers claim they've found the remains of Noah's ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Turkey's Mount Ararat.

But some archaeologists and historians are taking the latest claim that Noah's ark has been found about as seriously as they have past ones—which is to say not very.

Turkish and Chinese explorers from a group called Noah's Ark Ministries International made the latest discovery claim Monday in Hong Kong, where the group is based.

"It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it," Yeung Wing-cheung, a filmmaker accompanying the explorers, told The Daily Mail.

  

Noah's Ark Location in Turkey a Secret

The team claims to have found in 2007 and 2008 seven large wooden compartments buried at 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level, near the peak of Mount Ararat. They returned to the site with a film crew in October 2009.

Many Christians believe the mountain in Turkey is the final resting place of Noah's ark, which the Bible says protected Noah, his family, and pairs of every animal species on Earth during a divine deluge that wiped out most of humanity.

"The structure is partitioned into different spaces," said Noah's Ark Ministries International team member Man-fai Yuen in a statement. "We believe that the wooden structure we entered is the same structure recorded in historical accounts. ... "

The team says radiocarbon-dated wood taken from the discovery site—whose location they're keeping secret for now—shows the purported ark is about 4,800 years old, which coincides roughly with the time of Noah's flood implied by the Bible.

{Could they have dated a piece of wood that was used to build a shrine marking the location of the Ark?}

 There is a tail of many such drogue stones with Christian crosses carved on the surface.

(Related: "'Noah's Flood' May Have Triggered European Farming.")

"Noah's Ark" Wood "Way, Way, Way Too Young" Skepticism of the new Noah's ark claim extends to at least one scholar who interprets the Bible literally.

Biologist Todd Wood is director of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College in Tennessee, which pursues biology in a creationist framework.

As a creationist, Wood believes God created Earth and its various life-forms out of nothing roughly 6,000 years ago.

{This author believes that anyone who believes that is uneducated and refuses to look at the geologic and other scientific data. Earth has undergone regular extinctions every 27,000,000 million years where 90% of all life forms are exterminated. It is obvious to me that the Earth has been reseeded each time because evolution is a too slow a process to account for the diversity of life forms we have today.} 

Radiocarbon dating estimates the ages of organic objects by measuring the radioisotope carbon 14, which is known to decay at a set rate over time. The method is generally thought to reach its limit with objects about 60,000 years old. The half-life of carbon 14 is about 25,000 years. Earth is generally thought to be about four and a half billion years old.

Given this perceived overestimation in radiocarbon dating, the wood the Noah's Ark Ministries International team found should have a "traditional" radiocarbon date of several tens of thousands of years.

"I'm really, really skeptical that this could possibly be Noah's Ark," he added. The wood date is "way, way, way too young."

Wood thinks Noah's ark will never be found, because "it would have been prime timber after the flood," he said.

"If you just got off the ark, and there's no trees, what are you going to build your house out of? You've got a huge boat made of wood, so let's use that," he said. "So I think it got torn apart and scavenged for building material basically."

             I don't think building houses out of ARK timbers is likely--especially when it is located at the 13,000 foot level. You can't grow food at that altitude so why would they build houses there? To even suggest that is idiotic.

Another reason scholars are skeptical of the latest Noah's ark discovery claim is that Genesis—the first book of the Bible—never specifies which peak the vessel supposedly landed on in Turkey.

"The whole notion is odd, because the Bible tells you the ark landed somewhere in Urartu,"—an ancient kingdom in eastern Turkey—"but it's only later that people identified Mount Ararat with Urartu," said Jack Sasson, a professor of Jewish and biblical studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
The Koran is much more precise as to the location of the Ark. The wood timbers at the 13,000 foot level in these pictures fit the Koran location wile the ship laying at the 7,000 foot level might be the Christian Ark of Noah or some other large ship. If there was more than one ARK it doesn't make any difference as long as humanity survived. Let's not quibble over minor details.  

Stony Brook's Zimansky agreed. "Nobody associated that mountain with the ark" until the tenth century B.C., he said, adding that there's no geologic evidence for a mass flood in Turkey around 4,000 years ago.

 [Here we go again with trying to mold reality to fit religious dogma. The flood didn't occur 4,000 years ago. it occurred 12,500 years ago.]

My book research has led me to the conclusion that Earth was terra-formed 12,500 years ago to thaw back the ice caps so they could mine gold. This extended the life of the planet giving us a few extra thousand years to become conscious. 

I believe there were several Arks built in all parts of the world. Every culture around the world has an Ark legend. They all knew something catastrophic was going to happen. If you look hard enough you will find boats on mountain tops on every continent. Either mankind had progressed technologically enough to see what was going to happen to Earth and started building Arks or somebody tipped us off to that reality. Either way there are probably several Arks. The US Navy discovered two five-mile-long cylinders on the bottom of the Atlantic and more recently some sort of 49-mile long iron ship is thawing out of the middle of Greenland.

We have a 3-million solar mass black hole at the center of our galaxy that is ten times the diameter of our sun. Every so often this massive black hole sucks in a star that is many times larger than our sun traveling at more than 1000 kilometer per second. When this happens the invisible burst of ultraviolet light "comes like a thief in the night." You can't see this light because it is above the range of human sight. 

It is obvious that Earth has been receded after each extinction with new life forms because evolution cannot produce the huge diversity of life that we have on the planet today.

  

We don’t know who we are because the powers that be want to keep it that way. We don't know where we came from and haven't a clue as to what we are supposed to be doing here. My book, COSMOLOGICAL ICE AGES is my attempt to set the record straight. To order go: www.Trafford.com or go to www.GuardDogBooks.com or type, Henry Kroll into Google.     





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