Showdown with Evil

It goes without saying that insightful commentators find themselves challenged to face the apparently developing confrontation with what is labeled as radical Islam.  Yes, it is a confrontation.  Wherever it finds succor, it consistently practices sedition against its host.  We see its early stages at work in Canada and the USA and a maturer version at work in Europe.

It knows it is fighting for the mind and loyalty of young men who can be used to attack in the name of its fraudulent version of Islamic Jihad.  It is a profane ideology that subjugates women and its own and anyone else it can intimidate.  I see it as an evil that must be opposed and bled dry and antidotes applied as had to be done with Nazism and Communism.

A reformed Islam may arise and stifle any similar reemergence, but there has been not much sign of that.  The militants are permitted to threaten with impunity and cow more liberal Muslims into silence.

Around the Muslim world, Egypt is struggling in a death grip with its own version known as the Muslim brotherhood.  The same forces are strongly suppressed in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.  Except it appears that authoritarian states can be negotiated into a devil’s deal with these forces in order to preserve themselves.  Thus it continues.  The system appears presently broken in Iraq, but these forces are out there trying to grab control.

Many commentators see only the path to war.  In some situations that has happened and surely it will continue to happen.  More likely the demands of modernism will ameliorate all that.

Strangely, even with outrages ringing in our ears, I am optimistic that war can be generally avoided.  It has taken military confrontation where tribalism rules, but there a sharp lesson also serves.  I recall the Canadian forces arriving in Kandahar several years ago.  The militants saw an opportunity to attack an unseasoned force.  The result was several hundred dead militants after the Canadians induced them into an ambush confrontation.  A local leader discovered he had lost five grandsons and the local militants were hugely diminished in reputation.

Outside that the rest have central governments that need productive citizens.  The pressure on these societies to allow their women to contribute to family incomes is intense and can only worsen.  In time, it cannot be withstood.  This all leads to freedom for women.  With that the rise of a secular society becomes unstoppable.  The problem today is the age old suppression of both women and any other designated minority is ingrained and must be ameliorated.  This can only be done with economic liberation which is been forced on these societies.

A Showdown with Evil

BY PHYLLIS CHESLER

POSTED ON DECEMBER 26 2010 9:30 PM

http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/26/a-showdown-with-evil

Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York. For extended biography visit The Phyllis Chesler Organization.

Dr. Jamie Glazov and his Canadian publisher, Mantua Books, have just published a new kind of “samizdat” which is the Russian word for self-publications written by dissidents and passed from hand to hand. “Self-publishing” (by hand, on typewriters, on printing presses) was a 20th century way of dealing with Soviet government censorship. The Russian authors and readers who were found with such writing in their possession were routinely subjected to harsh imprisonment.

Westerners, (and this includes Israel), do not live in a Soviet Gulag and are not subject to political censorship, but we do face a new kind of Orwellian censorship and self-censorship. Independent and anti-totalitarian thinkers and activists are demonized, “disappeared,” legally sued, threatened with death—and in the name of anti-racism and human rights. Historian, journalist and Frontpage editor Glazov has been tracking this astounding turn of events—both the censorship and its denial—for a very long time, perhaps even in utero. After all, his parents were Soviet dissidents and he dedicates the book to his mother.

Glazov’s book is a careful compilation of selected interviews which he conducted with 30 dissidents, including one with himself and (full disclosure) one with me as well, between 2004-2010. These interviews appeared in David Horowitz’s Frontpage magazine. The book is titled: Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle Against Tyranny and Terror. Glazov understands that the new Evil Empire is the global alliance between Islamist totalitarianism and western liberal progressivism or leftism. The interviewees’ work is post the Intifada of 2000 and post 9/11.

This collection showcases some of the radically dissident work being done by those who are defamed and marginalized by the mainstream media as “conservatives,” “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and “traitors.”  Glazov stands with them. Included here are Steven Emerson, Victor Davis Hanson, David Horowitz, Andrew Klavan, Rep. Sue Myrick, Robert Spencer, and Charles Winecoff.

Glazov has consistently and persistently supported human rights, women’s rights and gay rights. He has a very moving interview with Charles Winecoff in this book. Winecoff “came out” as a conservative in the gay rights movement and had the same kind of “Darkness at Noon” experience that others, including myself have had.

Technically, Glazov did not “self-publish.” Publisher Howard Rotberg founded Mantua Books and is Glazov’s publisher. On the other hand, Mantua is a small, relatively new press, one which was forged in fire, and Rotberg is as determined as Glazov is to publish the truth-which-dare-not-speak-its-name in most mainstream western publications.

Rotberg, a Jewish lawyer, self-published his first novel, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel About a Book and Its Author, in 2003. He was not only defamed in a Canadian bookstore when two Arabs disrupted his lecture by calling him a “f**ing Jew” but was then labeled a racist-Zionist. His work was banned from the bookstore chain. Since then, Mantua has published six books, including David Solway’s Hear, O Israel and now this work by Glazov.

The interviewer, Glazov, and his interviewees all understand that their difficulties here are nowhere near as perilous as are those of their counterparts in the Islamic and communist world where the media is controlled by the state and in which anyone who publishes anything—however minor—against the party line (or which exposes the corruption of government officials), is jailed, tortured, or murdered. 

For example, in 2006, Moscow journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered because of her opposition to Putin’s policies in Chechyna; her murderer remains unknown. Attorney Sergei L. Magnitsky exposed official Russian corruption against an American firm. He was jailed in 2008, and then refused medical treatment while in custody; this purposeful neglect killed him. Finally, professor and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo was arrested, sentenced to eleven years in prison and, in 2010, not allowed to travel to Sweden to receive the Noble Peace Prize. His crime? “Inciting subversion of state power” by crafting and signing a human rights charter in 2008.

And, in the Islamic world: In 2006, Kareem Amer, an Egyptian blogger and former law student, was expelled from al-Azhar University for criticizing some of the university’s instructors, writing in his blog that the “professors and sheikhs at al-Azhar who … stand against anyone who thinks freely” would “end up in the dustbin of history”. The prosecutor admitted that he was on a “jihad” against Amer. In 2007, he was sentenced to 3 years in prison on charges of atheism (“There is no God except Man,” he wrote). His words were seen as defaming the President of Egypt, disrupting public security, and inciting hatred against Islam.

In September 2010, Hossein Derakshan, known as Iran’s “blogfather” because he helped to start Iran’s blogging revolution, was sentenced to 19 ½ years in prison, supposedly for spying on behalf of Israel. He left Iran for Canada in 2000 and visited Israel as a Canadian citizen in 2006. Although at first he was harshly critical of President Ahmadinejad, eventually he changed his mind and began blogging in favor of him, even comparing him to a modern-day Che Guevara. But the regime still decided to make an example of him when he returned to Iran in 2008.

In June, 2010, Bangladeshi authorities arrested the publisher Mahmudur Rahman and closed his newspaper because he dared to publish reports about government corruption and abuses of power. He has been beaten incustody, and 34 charges have been lodged against him. His fate remains unknown.

This does not occur in the West and in Israel. However, Glazov and his contributors have each sounded the alarm about a different and dangerously new kind of censorship. While there is no state censorship—there are no communist-style government-run publishing houses in the West—there is, nevertheless, “politically correct” censorship in public broadcasting which is partially government-funded and which wields enormous influence among the professoriate and the intelligentsia.

Thus, private publishing houses as well as university presses have become increasingly and rigidly left in orientation; the Party Line is an anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Palestinian line. No other views need apply. America and Israel are, allegedly, the world’s greatest imperialists, colonialists, racists, and aggressor nations. The long and tragic history of Islamic colonialism, racism, and jihad is not a welcome view.

More: Like the professoriate, publishers have become especially cautious, some might say cowardly or sadly, realistic. They do not want an Islamist bomb thrown through their windows, they do not want to absorb the cost of security for an author against whom a fatwa has been issued, nor do they want to pay to defend themselves against a battery of Islamist and leftist lawyers charging them with “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

The lawsuits and the fatwas are real. They have exerted a profound and chilling effect on Free Speech in the West. Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, all come instantly to mind. All have required round-the-clock protection or have been sued for “racist” or “hate” speech by those who themselves specialize in telling Big Lies about America, Jews, and Israel. Theo Von Gogh was murdered, butchered, by a Moroccan-Dutch Islamist for daring to co-produce a film titled “Submission” about the normalization of barbaric violence towards Muslim women in Islam’s name.

Today, both in “Eurabia” (the term is Bat Ye’or’s) and in North America, any thinker, writer, academic, or intellectual who dares challenge the Party Line will be marginalized, scorned, demonized, not published; if published, not reviewed; if reviewed, reviewed negatively; and, in any event, not assigned by professors, and never quoted in the left, liberal, and mainstream media as an expert. In addition, friendships will end, political networks will crumble. The post-9/11 and “matzav” world viewers will not be hired as professors; their works will only be read by other post 9/11 world viewers.

Thus, in the wake of this steady tsunami, conservative internet sites, publishing imprints, and small, new publishers, such as Mantua Books, have arisen. I want to introduce you to the steadfast and principled Glazov by quoting from him at length from the excellent interview with him which was conducted by David Swindle, the editor of NewsReal Blog. Here is Glazov in his own words:

“Radical Islam is now the greatest threat the West faces. We are, as Norman Podhoretz has noted, in World War IV. We face totalitarian and religious zealots who seek to establish an Islamic caliphate worldwide. They hate freedom and liberty, and so they hate and need to destroy the United States and Israel the most, since these two nations are the bulwarks and representatives of freedom in the world.”

They also hate women: “…it is obvious that woman-hatred is intertwined with Islamic terror. The more fanatical and violent the Islamic terrorist and his milieu, the more misogyny you will find there…to fight for women’s rights under Islam is also to stick a dagger into the heart of Islamic jihad.”

Where Islamic gender apartheid is allowed to flourish, cancerous, violent extremism is destined to follow.

Glazov does not mince words about what is wrong with Islam in the 21st century. But there is a difference, he insists, between being blunt and being bigoted.

“This is not about demonizing Muslims or attacking Muslims,” he writes. “We are the allies of Muslims. I consider myself pro-Muslim. Muslims are the victims of Islam and its totalitarian structures. I spend a large part of my life fighting for the rights of Muslim women who suffer under Islamic gender apartheid. Does this make me anti-Muslim or pro-Muslim? I fight on behalf of Muslims who want to live in freedom and who don’t want to suffer the harsh punishments of Sharia Law. I fight for a world where young Muslim boys and girls are not brainwashed and forced to blow themselves up. Does this make me anti-Muslim or pro-Muslim?”

These are crucial questions and I expect that Glazov will keep asking them.

This article was originally published by Israel National News on December 26, 2010.

Whey Proteins Suppress Cancers

The lesson of course is that certain proteins in cow’s milk naturally inhibit cancer and breast cancer in particular.  Besides the benefit of having cow’s milk in your diet, the other lesson is that these are benefits associated with whey, which has steadily been converted into a usable food source these past decades.

In fact it is likely high time to draw the loose ends together on whey and see were we presently are at.

We are a long way from merely recognizing the importance of vitamins, and I am old enough to recall a little of the surprise that produced as it spread out and became accepted.  We are more and more appreciating the use of a range of complex proteins in our diets and whey happens to be an excellent source.

New Research on Dairy Whey Emerges

By News Editor

Posted: December 28, 2010

http://www.wdexpo.org/2010/12/28/new-research-on-dairy-whey-emerges/

Scientists have found that lactoferrin, a whey protein found in milk, could be an anticancer agent for breast cancer. Lactoferrin is an iron-binding protein that has been reported to inhibit several other types of cancer.

According to a study that will be published in the January 2011 issue of the American Dairy Science Association’s Journal of Dairy Science, scientists in Portugal found that breast cancer cells treated with lactoferrin decreased the cancer cells’ viability by 47-54 percent and decreased the growth rates of the cancer cells by 40-64 percent.

“There is overwhelming evidence that biologically active food components are key environmental factors affecting the incidence of many chronic diseases,” says Lígia Raquel Rodrigues, author of the study. “However, because the full extent of such components in our diet isn’t known, nor is the understanding of their mechanisms of action, we undertook this study for a closer look.”

While additional studies will be needed to establish a clear role for lactoferrin as a potential tool in fighting breast cancer, the results from this study suggest that lactoferrin interferes with some of the most important steps involved in cancer growth.

Source: Dairy Herd Management; American Dairy Science Association

What's Wrong with the Sun

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the sun.  It is merely doing what it has always done.  What is wrong is that in the past century and particularly in the past decade, we chose to stick our bare behinds out in the way of the occasional blow torch and everyone knows it will hurt if we catch it.

We actually need to snug things up under the control of perhaps NORAD in particular and similar agencies else where.  Our sensors will provide warning that a major EMP blast is on the way and even what time it will hit.  Like a tsunami, very little time is available to do the right thing, but if one knows what the right thing is and appropriate drills have been undertaken, it is possible to ride it all out.

Power companies in particular must go into emergency shutdown.  Public alarms need to be sounded, but the first alarm for most would be the power going down.

Plenty of damage is still going to occur, but this way it is constrained to a lot of fried electronics.  The public could even be in a position to largely ride it out.

The take home now is that simple cheap methods can hugely control prospective damage.  We used them to survive bombs and other threats, and implementing them is an exercise in education and community planning. 

Ideally the grid can be brought on line almost immediately and then properly brough up again building by building. 

What's wrong with the sun?

http://www.helium.com/items/1854504-whats-wrong-with-the-sun

by Terrence Aym

The sun has been worrying scientists for quite a while.

Back in the late 1990s its eruptions became increasingly violent until it spewed mammoth plasma streamers at an intensity and rate never observed at any other time in history. Earth's satellites were at risk as well as electrical power grids and all electrical communications.

Then the sun went quiet—abnormally quiet. Normal cycles of increased activity came and went with little or no sunspot activity. Around the globe sun watchers began to ask each other—a bit uneasily—what was wrong with the sun?

Their question is about to be answered. The giant is about to awaken from its abnormal slumber and scientists around the world, NASA included, are very concerned.

The director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, Richard Fisher, sheds some light on the growing worry: "The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we're getting together to discuss."

Fisher echoes the growing worry amongst electrical engineers, computer experts, space application experts—even the Pentagon.

The warning shot has been fired

The solar space probe, Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded one of the largest solar eruptions in years on April 19, 2010. Experts breathed a collective sigh of relief as the solar storm missed our planet by a wide margin. Some expressed the opinion that we dodged a major bullet.

How long we can continue dodging that bullet is a matter of speculation. The law of averages, however, leads the experts in heliophysics (the study of the properties of the sun) to suspect our days are numbered. The odds of avoiding a planet crippling storm are piling up against Earthlings and our fragile, susceptible technology underlying our civilization. As the sun awakes our risk increases. 

Emergency measures to be discussed

At the Space Weather Enterprise Forum being held at the National Press Club on June 8th, some of the world's solar experts are gathering to decide how to protect our technology (and by extension, our civilization) from a rampaging, exploding sun.

Earth's necklace of orbiting satellites are particularly at risk. The suggestion has been made to place them in a 'safe-mode' that—theoretically at least—afford them some protection from the electrified plasma and energized particles of a full blown solar storm blasting Earth.

Forecasting the intensity, duration and direction of a storm is critical to defending against it.

Forecasting the sun's next move is the business of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. Its director, Thomas Bogdan notes that, "Space weather forecasting is still in its infancy, but we're making rapid progress."

In that regard, an old NASA satellite, the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) launched in 1997, is Bogdan's choice for early warning. "ACE is our best early warning system," asserts Bogdan. "It allows us to notify utility and satellite operators when a storm is about to hit.”

Now into its 4th year, the annual meeting of the Space Weather Enterprise Forum  takes on a special new urgency. Many of the speakers carry with them an aura of increased intensity almost matching that of the star they are focused upon.

As one unnamed observer remarked, the underlying current of the participants this year is one of "frenetic calm." 

Back in 2008, the National Academy of Sciences issued their dire report: "Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts." The report outlined, in excruciating detail, the potential demise of America's 21 st Century technological base—and the resulting havoc to the economy and society. It spelled out how people in the first world countries rely heavily upon technologies at risk from solar storms—a technology that powers financial systems, power grids, water plants, air travel, farming, transportation, GPS navigation of aircraft and sea going vessels...even the daily operation of government at all levels. 

A massive solar storm hitting Earth could kick the US back into the 19th Century and cause havoc for years.

Fisher worries aloud, "I believe we're on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather. We take this very seriously indeed."

Go to the Space Weather Enterprise Forum home page here for complete information.

Presidential Bigfoot

This story is important for a couple of reasons.  It is dated from the 1880’s and recalls an event taking place in the 1830’s before either the significant advent of Europeans or their rifles quite able to make any intelligent animal wary.  This is possibly the earliest rep0ort of a bigfoot and it is told long before a mass of reports shaped the story itself or even made such knowledge available.

More importantly, the observer is a class A observer.  I have read hundreds of individual reports and can include only a half dozen or so class A observers.  By this I mean the observer must have lived years directly in the environment as part of his occupation and must depend on his observation skills for his livelihood making error implausible.  My list includes a grizzly hunter and guide who bagged over 300 bears and made two separate observations and a senior guide in Yellowstone who made one observation.

Please note that these individuals made at best two such observation in a lifetime of opportunity.  That is the norm.  In fact the best observations made by others also occur when the observer surprises a creature.  The creature is seen before he has a chance to retire.

As may be deduced from this it is hardly surprising that the creature was nearly legendary to the natives.  This animal largely used the forest and general cover as a matter of course to avoid contact and this continues into the present were we now have thousands of individual reports.

The earliest reports show an animal less shy of human contact than at present.  This report shows us an animal angered by intruders in his domain.  It may well have considered these strangers some form of competition and reacted accordingly.  Later reports have stone throwing episodes, again possibly a result of intruding on home ground.

In the event, this report conforms to our expectations and other similar reports.  This observer’s good fortune was to be interviewed by Teddy Roosevelt who was both sympathetic and a competent reporter prepared to stare down naysayers.  How much has been lost for the lack of such?

Presidential Bigfoot

POSTED BY ADMIN ON DECEMBER - 23 – 2010

http://www.fatemag.com/subjects/cryptozoology/presidential-bigfoot/#more-224

Teddy Roosevelt during his time as a rancher.

Just 100 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was the country’s chief executive and favorite son. His personality was larger than life. His exploits captured people’s imaginations worldwide. After the death of his first wife in 1884, Roosevelt spent two years as a rancher and hunter on his ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. He climbed down from the saddle long enough to pen three books during this period. In 1893, he published a lengthy and most entertaining narrative entitled The Wilderness Hunter: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle, a memoir of sorts of his days in the territories. Among the stories recorded here is what seems to have been a 19th-century Bigfoot encounter.

The Frontiersman’s Tale

The report came to Roosevelt from the lips of a grizzled old mountain man named Bauman, who had spent the entirety of his very long life on the frontier. As he recollected the details of the event, Bauman had difficulty controlling his emotions. The event was very real to him.

Bauman was a trapper as a young man. His strange encounter occurred sometime between 1810 and 1840 when he and a partner were trapping in an area around the forks of the Salmon and Wisdom rivers in the Bitteroot Mountains, near the border of Idaho and Montana. The trapping business was rather lean so the two frontiersmen decided to try their skills in a remote area around a small mountain stream that seemed to have a lot of beaver signs.

This area had a rather sinister reputation. A year earlier, a lone hunter had wandered into the area and been slain by a wild beast. His half-eaten remains were discovered by a prospector. People who knew of the strange killing gave that area a wide berth, but this did not deter the two adventuresome trappers.

Bauman and his partner rode to within a four-hour hike of the area where they were going to trap. They hobbled their mountain ponies in a beaver meadow and set off on foot into the underbrush of the Bitteroot Range.

The trappers hastily erected a lean-to  where they stowed their packs, then hurried upstream to set a few traps and explore for signs before nightfall. When they returned to their makeshift camp at dusk, they made an unpleasant discovery. Their packs had been vandalized, and their gear thrown in every direction. Whatever attacked the camp had been vigorous in its assault, churning up the ground and completely destroying the lean-to.

Such vandalism was completely out of place. Frontiersmen knew of the hardship of survival. Lean-tos might stand for years as hunter after hunter used them and passed on their way. Packs were far too valuable to be recklessly strewn on the ground; they might be purloined by the unscrupulous, but never vandalized. Bears and other creatures might be drawn to food, but this was evidently not the case. It appeared someone was bent on destroying their packs.

As the unfortunate trappers gathered up their possessions, they noticed footprints in the ground that were “quite plain.” The urgency of salvaging their goods and rebuilding the lean-to required their immediate energies. The footprints, plain or otherwise, would have to wait.

Two Long Nights

When the camp was restored, Bauman began cooking a meal while his partner examined the footprints by torchlight. Returning for another firebrand, he remarked that the attacker walked on two legs. Bauman broke into laughter at the idea of a marauding bear walking upright as it demolished the camp. His partner insisted the bear must have walked on its hind legs and took a larger firebrand to examine the tracks in more detail. The prints clearly indicated that they were made by a creature that walked upright, having been made by two paws or feet.

Around midnight, Bauman was awakened by a noise. An awful stench filled his nostrils, the strong odor of a wild beast. By the opening of the lean-to, he saw the menacing shadow of a great body lurking in the darkness. He fired his rifle. The shot either missed its intended mark or did little harm to the towering form, but whatever it was ran off. The curtain of night could not obscure the sounds of something very large forcing its way through the thick underbrush surrounding the camp.

The second half of the night passed slowly as the trappers watchfully tended the fire. Nothing more of the great thing was heard, seen, or smelled that night.

When daylight came the two men set out to check their traps and make additional sets. Both were experienced mountain men, but instead of separating and covering twice as much area, they worked together all day. The events of the previous night obviously impacted them enough to alter their behavior.

As the last light of the afternoon began to give way to the ensuing night, the men reached their camp. It was déjà vu: again the camp had been destroyed. All their possessions had been rummaged and tossed about. The earth was churned up, indicating a great deal of furious activity. In the soft, damp earth near the stream were found clear footprints as crisp as if made in snow. The tracks were made by a creature that was obviously bipedal.

As darkness surrounded them, the trappers restored their camp as best they could, concentrating their efforts on building a roaring fire. That night, they could hear branches breaking in the underbrush, indicating that it was near. Occasionally it emitted long, drawn-out groans and moans, sounds that proved to be terrifying to the two men.

With the arrival of the new day came a decision. Although the area showed signs of an abundance of game, very little had been taken so far. Combined with the harassment of the unwelcome camp follower, the trappers decided to leave.

As the two men collected the traps they had set the day before, they felt the presence of someone or something watching them, dogging them. Their awareness of this phantom seemed to intensify their resolve to leave the area.

A Fatal Decision

But the light of day began to work on their manhood. They felt embarrassed about sticking so close together. Both men were experienced in wilderness survival. Both had faced danger from man, beast, and the elements before and had prevailed. Perhaps this reasoning influenced their next move. They decided to separate. Bauman was to check the remaining traps while his partner returned to camp and pack. They would meet at the camp and move somewhere else.

Fortune blossomed at the wrong time: each of the three remaining sets had caught a beaver. One of the poor creatures had fought with the trap and tangled the chain in a beaver lodge, requiring extra time to untangle. By the time Bauman had skinned the beaver carcasses and stretched the pelts, most of the afternoon was gone. As the last moments of daylight were disappearing, he neared the camp.

An eerie silence seemed to envelop the site. No birds could be heard. Bauman’s steps were muted by the pine needles and even the perpetual breeze of the mountains was still. He whistled, expecting a reply from his partner. No acknowledgement was heard. All was silent.

Within sight of the camp, Bauman saw that the fire was out, a thin blue smoke trailing from the dying embers. His partner’s lifeless body lay stretched on the ground by the trunk of a fallen tree. The body was still warm. The poor man’s neck had been broken. Four fang-like incisions marked the throat. Footprints indicated the attack was from an animal that walked on two legs.

Upon completion of packing, the unfortunate trapper must have sat on the tree trunk facing the fire waiting for Bauman to return. Reaching out from behind the resting man, the unknown creature must have wrenched the trapper’s neck. Evidence indicated that whatever killed the lone trapper had thrown the body about and rolled on it.

Bauman abandoned the camp, taking only his rifle. He made his way down the mountain pass to the hobbled ponies in the beaver meadow, then rode beyond the point of pursuit.

Roosevelt noted that Bauman was of German ancestry, and would have heard many a ghost and goblin story as a child. In his years on the frontier he would have heard tales of the unexplained and of the magic of the Indian medicine man. As a hunter and trapper he would have learned the track of every animal in the area. Roosevelt did not doubt that an incident took place, but he gives the impression that a psychological explanation would account for the unexplainable part of the story.

According to this report, a large, foul-smelling creature that appeared to be bipedal repeatedly attacked two young frontiersmen in the region of the Bitterroot Mountains. What was it? Roosevelt did not say. However, something about the story of the old mountain man must have impressed the future president deeply for him to include it in his great narrative of the frontier West.

Written by Gary W. Hemphill, a writer living in Greenville, Pennsylvania. Story published in FATE Feb/Jan 2009.

ICE CUBE Completed

Yes, we actually built this device and we will soon be seeing information flow in from this.  This is a wow that compares nicely with CERN in terms of big science research. 

There is sometimes no other way except to go out and spend the big bucks.  Today those big bucks seem a little easier to eat than even a decade ago.

I guess that for our next trick we need to build one in Greenland and take a look in the other direction.  Perhaps next century!

The Strangest Telescope On Earth is Complete!

Posted by Dan Satterfield

22 DECEMBER 2010

http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2010/12/22/the-strangest-telescope-on-earth-is-complete/

http://blogtest.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wildwildscience/files/2010/12/IMG_0085-1024x682.jpg

One of the deep holes at the South Pole that make up Ice Cube. Amundsen-Scott Station is in the background. Dan's pic Jan. 2010

It’s called ICE CUBE and it’s at the bottom of the World. Actually it’s IN the bottom of the World, and without doubt it’s the strangest telescope on Earth.

http://blogtest.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wildwildscience/files/2010/12/Screen-shot-2010-12-21-at-23.29.17.jpg

Ice Cube is HUGE. The detectors are frozen for centuries in the polar ice cap.

Ice Cube is a neutrino observatory. It’s made up of hundreds of detectors embedded in the ice 1 km beneath the South Pole. My name is on one of those detectors, and it something I am very proud of!

The NSF announced this week that the final detectors have been installed and Ice Cube is officially complete. I visited last January as they were well underway.

Neutrinos are the smallest thing you cannot imagine. They are the tiniest wisp of nothing we humans can contemplate. They are so small that billions are passing through your eyeball right now.

Not to worry, they will likely hit nothing. Most neutrinos pass through the entire Earth and hit nothing. They could pass through a light year thick slab of Lead and still most would not hit anything!

Do you begin to understand what I mean when I say small?

http://blogtest.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wildwildscience/files/2010/12/Screen-shot-2010-04-10-at-01.38.53-300x169.jpg

Hoses carrying super hot water are used to melt the ice and make deep holes to hold the detectors.

Neutrinos have no charge like electrons and protons, and they do not interact with matter. The only time we can observe one is when one just happens to crash into the nucleus of an atom.

When that happens in ice, a particle called a muon is ejected at nearly the speed of light. The speed of light is slower in ice than in a vacuum, and if a particle is going faster than the light speed in ice, it produces a flash of blue light called Cherenkov radiation. (Yes, nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, but particles can go faster than the speed of light in ice!)

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The DOM (Digital Optical Module) I signed. It's now frozen in the ice and a part of Ice Cube.

By tracking the direction of the flashes of Cherenkov light researchers can calculate backwards where the neutrino came from. They can also measure the intensity.

So where are you going to find a 1km thick cube of clear pristine ice with the facilities to house scientists and do research? The answer is easy, Amundsen Scott Station at the South Pole.

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This is the hole that holds the detector I signed.

Using very hot water, produced from melted ice, the ice cube folks have drilled a bunch of deep holes in the ice. Then they lowered a string with special detectors on them into the ice. The detectors freeze into the ice and can detect flashes of light when a neutrino hits an atom. There are 80 holes with a string of 60 detectors called DOMS in each hole.

That’s around 4800 detectors! When I was at the Pole, I got to sign one. That detector with my name on it is now in the ice and part of Ice Cube.

Oh the things that make a science geek smile!

Why are neutrinos so important? To answer that properly requires an expert to write a good book. Fortunately someone did and the book is a really interesting read.

Frank Close of Oxford wrote NEUTRINO. You might think a book about a particle would be boring. It’s not! Frank Close tells an intriguing story of how science finally spotted one!

Neutrinos are made in stars, and they were made in the big bang when the universe was a fraction of a second old. They are kind of like an astronomical X-ray. They allow astronomers to see into stars and through the gas and dust of the universe.

Below is a video clip I shot that gives a feel of the place.

Neutrinos are the subject of intense research right now and Ice Cube may very well make some amazing discoveries that begin to answer some of the most weighty questions in science. Think about it. 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy.

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The exact bottom of the planet is about a 5 min. walk from Ice Cube. It was -22F by the way and I had my coat off just long enough to take that pic.

It’s called dark because we cannot see it and have no idea what it is! Only 4% of the universe is visible to us. Neutrinos may very well help scientists to figure out what dark energy and dark matter really are. It’s a really big deal and you will understand how big, if you read the book.

You will also know more about neutrinos than 99.9% of the people on Earth!

You can find out more about Ice Cube here.

IceCube Explained

http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/info/explained.php

IceCube, a telescope under construction at the South Pole, will search for neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars. The IceCube telescope is a powerful tool to search for dark matter, and could reveal the new physical processes associated with the enigmatic origin of the highest energy particles in nature. IceCube will encompass a cubic kilometer of ice and uses a novel astronomical messenger called a neutrino to probe the universe.

Neutrinos are produced by the decay of radioactive elements and elementary particles such as pions. Unlike other particles, neutrinos are antisocial, difficult to trap in a detector. It is the feeble interaction of neutrinos with matter that makes them uniquely valuable as astronomical messengers. Unlike photons or charged particles, neutrinos can emerge from deep inside their sources and travel across the universe without interference. They are not deflected by interstellar magnetic fields and are not absorbed by intervening matter. However, this same trait makes cosmic neutrinos extremely difficult to detect; immense instruments are required to find them in sufficient numbers to trace their origin.

IceCube Event Model

http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/info/images/grid.jpg

Although trillions of neutrinos stream through your body every second, none may leave a trace in your lifetime. We actually use large volumes of ice below the South Pole to watch for the rare neutrino that crashes into an atom of ice. This collision produces a particle—dubbed a "muon"—that emerges from the wreckage. In the ultra-transparent ice, the muon radiates blue light that is detected by IceCube's optical sensors. The muon preserves the direction of the original neutrino, thus pointing back to its cosmic source. It is by detecting this light that scientists can reconstruct the muon's, and hence the neutrino's, path. The picture is radically complicated by the fact that most muons seen by IceCube have nothing to do with cosmic neutrinos. Unfortunately, for every muon from a cosmic neutrino, IceCube detects a million more muons produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere above the detector. To filter them out, IceCube takes advantage of the fact that neutrinos interact so weakly with matter. Because neutrinos are the only known particles that can pass through the earth unhindered, IceCube looks through the earth and to the northern skies, using the planet as a filter to select neutrinos.

Since the 1950s scientists have built a compelling scientific case for doing astronomy and particle physics using high-energy neutrinos. The challenge has been one of technology to build the kilometer-sized observatory needed to do the science. Theorists anticipate that an instrument of this size is required to study neutrinos from distant astrophysical sources. Antarctic polar ice has turned out to be an ideal medium for detecting neutrinos. It is exceptionally pure, transparent and free of radioactivity. A mile below the surface, blue light travels a hundred meters or more through the otherwise dark ice. Frozen in the ice, IceCube not only will be the largest and most durable particle detector, but a real bargain at just 25 cents per ton!