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Op-Ed: Newtown resident: Media is to blame for school tragedy
Everyone deals with shock and grief in different ways in the aftermath of events like the Newtown school shootings. Some go to church, others gather near the site of the horrific event. I write. I write in the hope that I can play a small role in preventing other communities from suffering the horror and anguish that have befallen mine.
The proliferation of guns is the obvious place to look for answers, but there have been various periods in American history when guns were more commonplace than today, yet gunslingers, frontiersmen, even gangsters didn't bust into schoolhouses and randomly kill our precious children. This is as much a product of our popular culture, as it is the number of guns in our society; and mass media, principally television and video games, plays a significant role.
Media likely contributes to the means, the motive and the state of mind necessary to carry out such heinous crimes.
It would be safe to say that a significant number of young people have killed with impunity and without remorse in the stark reality of sophisticated video games; and that the majority of Americans consume prodigious amounts of TV and motion pictures that depict killing as commonplace, dispassionate and a natural outcome of fear, pain and anger. Why then do we find it unimaginable that mentally unstable, impressionable Americans can indiscriminately kill masses of people in public places?
In many respects, life has been devalued by TV and video games. Killing is all too often justified and without remorse. The viewer is emotionally detached from the associated pain and suffering. This is the type of media Americans consume every day and applaud as good entertainment, and our kids grow up watching it.
Gone are the days of ubiquitous, socially redeemable programming like "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" that culminated with a valuable life lesson at the end of every episode. Today, we are frequently left with inane, morally corrupting messages. Disrespectful, confrontational or violent behavior has infected nearly every type of television programming, from talk shows and sports commentaries to sitcoms, reality shows and dramas.
Media, particularly TV news, also helps provide the means for committing these murders by creating an atmosphere of irrational fear which in turn drives people to acquire weapons and fervently defend their right to do so. The old media adage "if it bleeds it leads" the daily news is as current today as it ever was, maybe more so. Crime stories dominate the nightly news and give viewers the false impression there is a clear and present danger to their life and property.
Law enforcement officials reported that the alleged 20-year-old shooter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School appeared to have used three semi-automatic weapons owned by his mother. A troubling question is why a single, middle-aged mother would have such an arsenal better suited for Afghanistan than one of the safest communities in Connecticut. Irrational fear is likely the answer.
As expected, the topic of gun control is dominating the conversation in the aftermath of Newtown and for good reason. If virtually anyone can purchase a weapon, particularly assault weapons and semi-automatic handguns, we are going to see more random mass killings.
But the deranged perpetrators of these monstrous crimes want to display their mental anguish and wrath to the world, and media provides the worldwide forum, in other words, the motive. The incentive is clear to these killers: the greater the number of people they kill, the greater the breadth and duration of the news coverage. This is a fact not to be lost on future mass killers waiting in the shadows.
Gun control legislation is important, but changing the role of media and how we consume it are equally so. If no meaningful social change comes as a result of this unthinkable horror in Newtown, then we allow these innocent victims to die in vain.
Jeff Gewert is a former Stamford resident who lives in Newtown.


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Blog post
Why Transit is an 'Inferior Good'
In my last post, I suggested that transit's "resurgence" is, ultimately, much ado about nothing. Transit's increased ridership, while important for transit managers, will do little to change fundamental travel patterns of US urban areas.
In my last post, I suggested that transit's "resurgence" is, ultimately, much ado about nothing. Transit's increased ridership, while important for transit managers, will do little to change fundamental travel patterns of US urban areas.
Today, I would like to suggest that transit's inability to pierce the hold of automobility on US urban areas is the least of its worries. The real long-term problem faced by transit agencies is that their service-fixed route transportation modes designed to carry large numbers of people in buses or trains-is what economists call an "inferior good." The term is not intended to be pejorative. It's a technical one and characterizes an important economic relationship between income and the demand for a specific product or service. As our income increases, we consume less transit, opting for alternatives, most notably the automobile.
Mobility, on the other hand, is a "normal good": as our income rises, we want more mobility, in terms of flexibility and speed. (Some might think that we devote a higher share of our budget to transportation as our incomes go up, but historically transportation has tended to average around 9 to 10 percent.) Those transportation modes that provide more mobility will see demand increase. That's one reason why vehicle miles traveled and air travel have grown so drastically along with our nation's wealth, while public transport's share of total travel has fallen.
Can transit break out of this economic trap? Possibly, but it will be a long, difficult road. Transit's long-term viability will depend on its ability to provide a reliable, superior alternative to its competition, not a "second best" alternative that consumers choose when they can't afford their first choice (e.g., the automobile). If transit managers want to grow their customer base, let alone gain market share, they will have to provide very high levels of quality and service.
This task is complicated by the fact transit agencies don't rely on their customers for their revenue. Only about one third of transit's revenues come from customer fares. The remainder comes from taxes and federal grants (often funded by road users). Transit agencies have stronger incentives to please grant makers or elected officials than the people that use their service, or, more importantly, could potentially use their service.
Transit can compete, but only if managers make the strategic decision to focus on their core services-providing a superior travel alternatives-and exploit niches in the travel market (such as express bus services). Also, some transit agencies have wisely focused their resources on providing superior service along heavily traveled routes, or in urban neighborhoods where transit provides a complementary alternative, rather than a substitute, for other modes.
What transit cannot do is depend on high gas prices to make us worse off financially in order to push us out of our cars and onto buses and trains. Nor should transit advocates use public policy to purposely degrade the quality of transportation alternatives such as the car to tip the scales unfairly in transit's favor. Those approaches impoverish us all and threaten the economic competitiveness of our cities as well as the economy.

subset: commoncrawl


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Just a little cheer for Stan Wawrinka ahead of his Estoril semi today with big Delpo, it should be interesting.
I love Stan's game obviously his 1hbh but he has a great all court game, terrific from the baseline and rarely misses a volley. A huge hitter off both sides, he compliments this with a serve that rarely gets talked about but is one of the best and a deft touch and good hands.
Watched his match against Rafa in Monte Carlo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-P1rF4wpi8) so close to winning, infact was the only man to get anywhere near Rafa that week. When you look at the highlights (above) its all Stan, which goes to show maybe what his downfall is....the points that dont get shown on the highlights, the simple things, the grind.
Full match is here, well worth a watch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgrBlz0RtKU)
Good luck today Stan, stay agressive and show Delpo who is the Man !!!!!
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Replies to This Discussion
Stan really plays well but with one caveat - as long as the person opposite the net is not Roger Fed. He seems to just lay down when he sees his compatriot across the net.
Delpo laid down both Wawrkinka (your man) and Gasquet (my man)! Call him the "Caretaker"!
Yeah had a feeling he would, has that mental toughness the other two are sadly lacking.
That forehand is just a big sweeper and that serve gets him rollin'.
© 2020 Created by Mark / The Mayor. Powered by


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Watch CBSN Live
What's the secret to looking good? For many, the answer is having a good plastic surgeon. Demand for nose jobs, eye lifts, and other cosmetic procedures rose almost nine percent in 2010, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.
When people go in for surgery, they often ask that the body part in question be made to look like that of a certain Hollywood star, according to Los Angeles-based plastic surgeons Dr. Richard W. Fleming and Dr. Toby G. Mayer. Which stars do the docs say are most popular with plastic surgery patients? Keep clicking to find out...
Credit: Getty Images
Natalie Portman's nose was the most requested, followed by Emma Stone's and Nicole Kidman's.
Jude Law was the number one pick for men's noses, followed by Josh Duhamel and Ben Affleck.
Taylor Swift had the most lusted-after locks, followed by Jennifer Aniston and Kim Kardashian.
Men wanted a cut of Jon Hamm's hair, followed by George Clooney's and Chris Pine's.
Women looking for new eyes wanted Anne Hathaway's the most, followed by those of Mila Kunis and Megan Fox.
Hugh Jackman's eyes were the most wanted, followed by Jake Gyllenhaal's and Ian Somerhalder's.
Scarlet Johansson had the most-requested lips, followed by Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera.
Men agreed Ashton Kutcher had the most desirable lips, followed by Viggo Mortensen and Brad Pitt.
Halle Berry had the most wanted chin/jawline, followed by Keira Knightley and Jennifer Lopez.
Men wanted a chin like Jon Hamm's, followed by Johnny Depp's and Robert Pattinson.
January Jones had the most asked-for cheeks, with Jennifer Garner and Beyonce Knowles not far behind.
Leonardo DiCaprio's cheeks were most wanted, followed by James Franco's and Will Smith's.
Gisele Bundchen had the most desirable body, followed by Jennifer Aniston and Penelope Cruz.
Mark Wahlberg had the body most men wanted, followed by Channing Tatum and Tyson Beckford.
Amy Adam's skin was the most desired, followed by Katy Perry's and Gwyneth Paltrow's.
Neil Patrick Harris had the most sought-after skin for men, followed by Hayden Christensen and Orlando Bloom.


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Alyson Hannigan in "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" plays Wiccan Witch Willow Rosenberg, the Scarlet WOMan a.k.a 'G8way to the City of Pyramids'. We witness her in shot with a poster of the Celestial ZOdiac wearing what appears to be stylized Peacock/Phoenix over her Grail.
Hannigan was explored as resonator of The Scarlet Woman in Scarlet Dragon 2.
The colors of Lust resonate Jumpiter being red, orange and yellow.
Above is Khaled Khan's Thoth trump 11 for Babalon (Scarlet WOMan) "Lust". The Peacock tail type rays radiate from the grail echoing Hannigan's ZOdiac shot above. This is the highlighted and vivified subtle body StarG8 of the female/MOM human form, often called 'pussy'. We note that 2 major attributes of this card is the MOON and LEO/Pussy. In the Rider Waite deck this card is numbered 8 and is called Strength. It depicts a tamed Lion. 11 is a number that will play peekaboo, in resonance with these subjects, a few times yet, as we proceed..
Buffy S5 E19 "Tough Love"
When a God messes with her partner in "Tough Love", she doesn't fuck around. No, SHE whips out the big guns to fight that God, in the form of a book called "Darkest Magick". The spelling of Magick with the extra k was popularized by Khaled Khan, meaning we have his singular resonance synchromystically entraining with our Wiccan Willow.
Zooey Deschanel as DG in Tin Man E2. We see her paintings of the vortex or wormhole to OZ.
ZOdiac resonates OZ, the land of mystery and illusion accessed by the StarG8 as spinning Twister. OZ is the presently awakening state of conscious consciousness (KKonsciousness) . Knowing that you kNOw.
It is the NOW or ZOE.
N spins to become Z while the infinitely versatile E spins becoming W (or 3 and M)
Zooey (ZOE) Deschanel's name right of the bat resonates both OZ and NOW. Then the girl doubles this by playing the Dorothy Gale part as DG in "Wizard of Oz" remake series, "Tin Man". Above we see this is all vivified by the network overlay boldly pronouncing NOW (OZ/ZOE) over double OZ resonating Zooey!
WOW MOM, WE are rapidly entering the ZONE of NOW with ZOE!
All is ONE
Jupiter, like all else in existence, is a name for a state of KKonsciousness. There is a Jake state of KKonsciousness, a Mall, a dog, a ball and a beer state of KKonsciousness. These are temporary manifestation of Being, all with infinite depth and infinite connections to all else. We can explore the vast ocean of flavor in all these states of KKonsciousness with our minds and new technologies such as synchromysticism.
Our awareness of Jumpiter and Beer is all part and parcel of KKonsciousness exploring facets of itself.
As Jupiter is of more relevance, resonance and syncnificance to the current sync web, we will explore it in favor over investigating beer.
This is an alchemical symbol for Jumpiter often explained as a Crescent with a Cross shape. The Crescent would be the cup, spirit or MOM while the cross would be the wand, force or POP.
Jim notices and shares that the symbol resembles 2 and 4 combined..
ME and Jim decided to both independently (sharing a few concepts and images) work with this Jovian them and then post what ever we come up with.
Here then is this posts twin over at CentrePortal:
The Tinman's Rainbow Lodge & The Gnosis of 42
Jupiter is also called Jove (By Jove!) thus resonating all things joyous.
A dictionary explanation reads:
|endowed with or characterized by a hearty, joyous humor or a spirit of good-fellowship: a wonderfully jovial host.
|(initial capital letter) of or pertaining to the god Jove, or Jupiter.
Screengrab from the Wikipedia entry on Tin with the 24/42 symbol of Jupiter
Jimbo further relates that Jupiter and Tin are resonators, synchromystically becoming interchangeable.
ZOE discovers the Tin Man (Neal McDonough as Wyatt Cain) trapped inside a metal anthropomorphic prison.
The human shaped container resonates the metal containers of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the sarcophagus. Upon releasing him they are reenacting the resurrection drama, the tale/tail of Phoenix/Horus/Peacock/Jesus/Hiram/Sun etc.
ZOE and Glitch ("Tin Man's" Scarecrow version, played by Alan Cumming) meet the 'Tin Man' or Jumpiter, who is reborn once he finds a Heart.
The quest for the Heart/Compassion/Humility is the journey of alignment, both spiritual and galactic. The movement of humanity beyond the mind made self attached to thought and form. The movement from past and future into NOW.
Esoterically this is the Horus/Jupiter and Star/Moonchild being reborn.
The Tin Man (Jupiter) becomes DG's (ZOE/NOW) guide to the Emerald City inspired Central City (KK/K2). The Jovial state of KKonsciousness is reached through alignment with NOW. NOW, alignment and Joy are inseparable...
Joy becomes the guide to kNOWing you are on the path.
Winnipeg is the Heart Of North America, a perfect synchromystic Central City and thus also OZ.
The Tin Man and ZOE gain access to Central City, hidden in a chariot fronted with the big blue head of Shiva.
Shiva who is often depicted as sitting on a tiger skin - the Chinese ZOdiac (regulated by Jumpiters 12 year cycle!) for 2010 - is another clear Jupiter resonator.
Some believe that the 24/42 symbol for Jupiter has evolved from the major elements at play in the Eye of Horus. A very elegant connection as the Eye/I/Self would tie back to the planet with its distinct red spot.
Jumpiter as Horus, with its giant Scarlet Eye/I/Self as 'tornado', the doorway to OZ.
Another symbol sighted as connected and possibly derived from that of Jupiter is the Rx, found in connection with medical prescription.
Henry Thomas who makes First Contact as EllioT in E.T and Robin Tunney, a synchromystic Isis, in frame with the Rx in "Niagara Niagara". Jupiter is famed in Sci-Fi as a First Contact local in the novels/films "2001" and "2010". Jumpiter as the ever aligning Horus and Tin Man unveils its synchromystic ties to rebirth or realization of Kosmic Konsciousness.
Kosmic Konsciousness - knowing who You really are - and the U.F.O/E.T/First Contact theme are inseparable and part of an elegant dance.
Jupiter as resonator of First Contact and alien resonance furthers the Jovian connection to NOW/OZ.
ZOE, 'Mistress of the NOW', plays Trillian in "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" (H2G2). She meets Arthur Dent (actor Martin Freeman) at a fancy dress party and the two hit it off swimmingly.
She has come as Charles Darwin with a Beagle (the name of Darwin's famous boat) toy dog. A DOG/GOD companion echoes her role as Dorothy who has the faithful Toto in "Wizard of Oz". A K9 also resonates Sirius (often sighted KKontact (Konsciousness recognizing itself as 'alien other') point) and the hound on the edge of the abyss on the Fool Tarot.
Arthur makes, seemingly, the biggest mistake of his life by giving in to fear. The girl of his dreams has just asked him to go to Madagascar with him, he would rather play it safe.
"Well Tricia McMillan, I have a proposition for you.
Why don't we go somewhere a little closer, first, say Cornwall and we'll see how it goes"
The Aquarian waterdoor (StarG8) ripples over the MOON (the OM of OZ) during the Dreamworks studio intro.
Madagascar was last seen in the penguin post where WE followed penguin syncs for a month, culminating in Penguins winking from the MOON in "Madagascar Escape 2 Africa".
Penguins on the MOON in the Dreamworks studio intro for Madagascar 2.
"Well done boys, looks like ice cold sushi for breakfast."
There is an interesting connection here between William Burroughs' Lemur and Madagascar featuring "Ghost of a Chance" short story, but lets move on before that black sync hole catches up with us...
The mention of Cornwall made me jump. I had KKontact with some 'alien other' at this exact location after researching Crop Circles in England in 2007. A friend explained Galactic Alignment to me while we looked up at the Milky Way - this being the first time I actually understood what that practically meant - I retired to my tent and was KKontacted.
Further I was watching this very H2G2 scene on 24 (42/Jupiter) December 2008, the 10 year anniversary, to the day, of my personal StarG8 of 24 December 1998!
This was the date, on a narrative level at least, where I died - after dropping 2 of what the dealer called "double dipped Gemini's" blotter acid - and was reborn on Christmas, entraining with the Birth of Jesus.
All these events 'KKontact in Cornwall' (2007) and 'Personal StarG8' (1998) are briefly described in Personal StarG8 and Scarlet Dragon.
The extreme susynct nature of the mention of Madagascar (resonating the penguin MOON) and Cornwall becomes more clear seconds later of H2G2 screentime...
Arthur is 'cock blocked' by alien Zaphod Beeblebrox (actor Sam Rockwell), who sweeps the adventure hungry Trillian of her feet with the line:
"Hey excuse me. Is this guy boring you. Why dontcha talk to me instead. I'm from a different planet."
"It's true."
"Want to see my space ship?"
An Alien makes First Contact with ZOE while the MOON (Sphere of Babalon) sync winks in shot.
I interpret this as a specific confirmation to ME that there was KKontact in Cornwall and a general message to WE that the MOON resonates First Contact.
As ZOE is present in this sync web - indeed being the contactee - , ME/WE are reminded that KKontact with Aliens and Cosmic Consciousness is also the NOW.
A 'future'* Sam Rockwell picture sees the universe chiming in harmony with itself. "Moon" featuring Zaphod inside the most often sighted StarG8 Mandala, the Octagon.
A 'prediction' about the potential configuration of fluctuations in the eternal NOW based on observations of the play of patterns and themes.
Scarlet Woman Hannigan and Scarlet Woman Basinger interacting with the Alien or KKonsciousness theme in 1988's "My Stepmother is an Alien".
Alyson Hannigan furthers the First Contact theme as associated to realization of NOW in "My Stepmother Is an Alien". We see her framed by the Stars with a DOG/GOD companion above the Blue words "My Stepmother Is An" next to Kim Basinger as Scarlet Woman . The title reminds us of her current involvement in popular sitcom "How I met Your Mother", both being statements about MOM, the great Mother/Spirit/Galactic Center. The Blue in connection to Kosmic Konsciousness themes and Hannigan was briefly explored in Something Blue My Mind. Dan Aykroyd with Zebra striped shirt holds his hands apart in open anticipation of The Scarlet Woman or Alien. He stands above the red word Alien, the I of which is 'dotted' with the cross-quarter star, resonating the octagon.
Dan Aykroyd has been inside the giant walking Statue of Liberty/Isis/Great Mother in "Ghostbusters 2" and WTC (the pyramids of the 911 Mega Ritual) with Black Star Eddie Murphy in "Trading Places"(!).
Below we see the title sequence with the 8 rayed star above the word Alien. WE might ask ourselves why does this shape keep POPping up in contexts of both Illumination and Alien Contact?
Alien Contact and realization of True Self are slightly different flavored roads that lead to the same NOthing. That which can not be spoken or thought of, yet WE are that same NOthing.
Aykroyd (as Steven Miller) is experimenting with beaming signals, way far out into space, using a satellite dish and lighting. Lighting is commonly associated with Zeus and synchromystically associated with the energy/wave/water double line symbol of Aquarius. Zeus is the Greek Jupiter meaning we have the Jovian blue energy (image below) assisting the transmission of signals into deep space.
Unknown to Dr. Steven Miller the device is receiving a crucial boost of power from the accidental contact of brass buttons to the mechanism...
This sends the range of the signal far beyond the anticipated and causes, unbeknown to Aykroyd at this point, KKontact (First Contact interchangeable with Kosmic Konsciousness).
The signal moves out of our galaxy reaching the clouds of Magellan (local irregular dwarf galaxies)
We meet Jess (Hannigan) for the first time, shooting hoops and yelling "Why cant I dunk!"
Basketball returns to the sync web.. See Scarlet Dragon 1 and 2 for more context.
A preliminary quick take on this clearly manifesting sync ripple is that it is associated to the Mayan Ballgame, which in turn John Major Jenkins views as symbolizing Galactic Alignment (see his book of the same name for details).
Simply the ball is the sun which has to move through the circular opening of the goal, or our solar system aligning with the 'dark road' of the galactic equator.
In the simplest boiled down synchromystic view we could say the dot has to be placed in the middle of the circular mandala or StarG8. Basketball being then yet another fractal of the spiritual and galactic alignment 'drama'.
The twined/rope/DNA/Ayahuasca/Dragon or Axis Mundi surrounded Ballgame Goal at Chichen Itza. A gorgeous and sucynct StarG8 portal.
Jess' faithful dog, Dave, watches her play, 'Woofing' his support.
POP comes home telling Jessie about sending a signal outside of the Galaxy. She wishes her deceased MOM had live to seen the this day.
Aykroyd with a sync winking vine of plant KKconsciousness as he talks to his DOG about Sirius.
POP looks up at the sky - the traditional place the dead is honored and remembered (the infinite) - and says:
"What do you say Dave? Can we see Sirius tonight?"
"You know, its also called the dog star"
Sirius, the Dog Star, is the most often sighted heavenly body with Alien and Kosmic Konsciousness resonance.
Alien and Scarlet Woman Basinger at the portal to Jessie's room. Of course the Wiccan Willow's - who uses Dark Magick - favorite Baskeball Star is "Magic" 32/23.
Kim Basinger, an Alien in human disguise, is sent to investigate Earths new found technological prowess by infiltrating the Miller family and becoming the new MOM.
She must learn the secret of how Earth has realized this unprecedented new stage of evolution and eventually by falling in love with US and Our ways, save the planet.
Unfortunately because Aykroyd hasn't realized that the anomalous conducting power of the brass buttons boosted his signal he is unable to replicate the experiment, at first...
Will Farrel (Elf/Pan/Green Man/Osiris/Snt Patrick etc) passes the spiraling red and white coiled candy cane forest during his travels. The spiraling Red Road resonating the Rose Line of DNA and Ayahuasca. These are also somewhat Scarlet Dragon axis of the Earth Pole, one of the parameters of the Heavenly Ark and Galactic Alignment.
Will Farrel as Buddy the "Elf" travels from the Wonderland/OZ of the North Pole to the Wonderland/OZ of Manhattan. N and Y one letter ahead in the alphabet being O and Z.
Elf is 11 in Afrikaans.
He looks up to the Empire State Pillarmid (a building interpreted as pillar and pyramid) the light of our local Star shines ON. Both as Green Man (Osiris/Nature Man) and pointy eared Elf, WE find some Pan flavor in WiLL(77) FarreLL(77). Green Man is questing for his POP who resides in the famous N.Y. Tower.
In the image below, in the right hand lower corner we see the 42 (Jupiter/Tin) with a Sagittarian arrow pointing at the the Pillarmid.
Already the StarG8 is wide open, but there is still so much depth that can help ad lovely texture to Our experience...
WE can for instance note the recurrence of 4 and 2, the numbers of Joy on James Caan's Empire State Building Office door.
A direct result of being in alignment with the NOW is the natural Joy of Being. Existence and life unfettered by constant mind evaluation, resistance to what is or self seeking.
Micheal Learner exiting Caan's office with the Jovial 24.
Below is Green Man's POP's apartment, yet again 4 and 2...
Wi77 Fare77 also in shot with a 4 and 2. We catch a sly little Mason and p(ARK) in this same frame.
Our real golden goodies are yet to come as we encounter 'ZOE, Mistress of the NOW' (Zooey Decshanel) as Farre77's love interest. A person you truly love is someone in whom You recognize Your non-dual sElF.
Below is Zoe with a lovely candy swirl halo. Her name is Jovie derived from Joyful/Happy or being Jovial. SHE is Jupiter.
She stands in the presence of Osiris, Pan and Nature with the word MOM signifying her resonance with the Great Mother or Spirit.
Tying Jovie our 'ZOE, Mistress of The NOW' doubly to Jupiter, we see her in the amazing still below, with a 4 and 2. Again the Jupiter State of KKonsciousness is connected synchromystically to ZOE or NOW.
Other syncnificant things are happening here. We see a golden star and the word gold emitting from her crown, fitting as the NOW is also the Golden Dawning Age.
We see a bunch of crescent moons and Black Stars, symbol of Galactic Center, radiating from her green shoulder. She interacts with living Black Stars, shortly..
Back in the O-Z DG and Tin Man near the final confrontation with the evil Azkadellia but must first find her father in the 'Realm of the Unwanted'. Once there they again interact with a Shiva resonator.
The multiple arms and other numerous body parts often seen on Hindu deities point towards the reality of Organism. WE, as Life, are one unified body or Being. All Eyes and arms are Ours, quite literally meaning WE have multiples..
Thus both depictions of one unified eye (Cyclops, Eye of Horus etc) and multiple eyes (third eye of the Buddha) are pointing towards the same silent truth.
Zooey Deschanel seen below dressed in blue with the multiple limbs of the Alien Zaphod Beeblebrox back in H2G2. Quite susynct, Sam Rockwell our synchromystic Moon Man, with both Hindu God and E.T. resonance.
Rapper and actor Mos Def (a black pop star) touching the profile of ZOE. Mos Def and fellow hip hop artist Talib Kwali perform together as rap unit "Black Star". Thus just like in "Elf" we see the Black Star emanate from Deschanel. Marvin is actor Warwick Davis who played Willow in 1988's (same year as "My Stepmother") "Willow" thus resonating Hannigan as Willow in "Buffy".
Deschanel playing AllissON in "Yes Man" tying her synchromystically to Alyson Hannigan.
ZOE as multiple eyed GOD in "Yes Man". In this scene she is meeting Jim Carrey our JC or Jesus Christ resonator. Surrounding and further vivifying the subtle body is a strip of Scarlet checkers. One aspect of the checker symbolism is the patterned and unified duality. This is the same idea Being expressed by the Yin-Yang.
We have another Tin Man type companion in depressed android Marvin and Black Star Mos Def as Ford Prefect interacting with 'ZOE, Mistress of the NOW' in H2G2. All this action is happening in space (the infinite or heavens) on the spaceship 'The Heart of Gold'...
NOW might be a good time to reflect on the fact that 42 plays a central role in the H2G2 universe as the answer to "Life, The Universe and Everything"!
If WE interpret 42 as Joy beyond concept, this is spot ON.
NOW (Zooey Deschanel as Trillian), Moon Man (Sam Rockwell as Zaphod) and Black Star (Mos Def as Ford) show up at the super computer purpose built to figure out the answer to "Life The Universe and Everything". Earlier in the narrative WE had already learned the answer as being 42. Unfortunately the exact question that would potentially allow the answer to make more sense needs to be derived through the creation of an even vaster super computer, our very planet Earth. Synchromystically the Earth can be interpreted as is its anagram, Heart.
The Heart or Joy is needed to realize Jumpiter.
Interestingly the computer called Deep Thought is depicted as being overgrown with vines during the 10 billion years the 'Earth Computer' has been running, time needed to process 'Ultimate Question'.
It seems the 2005 version of this A.I. (a realized Self) has kept itself busy for all this time watching cartoons with its single unified Jupiter Eye/I/Self. The cartoons depict lightning which perfectly fits the comparison of Deep Thoughts red Eye with Jumpiter. Jupiter being the lighting wielding Zeus.
Above and slightly to the right of the Hal-9000 type Eye we see the Apple logo. Symbol of Eve and the Garden of Eden, the state of KKonscoiunsess NOW returning as the human, machine and plant KKonscoiusness merge as ONE.
Its eye is surrounded by the coiling vines which in this sync web resonates plant KKonsciousness and Ayahuasca in particular.
Most susynct as Ayahuasca is indeed playing a key role in the Earth's realization of Joy.
This lovely image sees ZOE/NOW/ONE backed by a staircase, symbol of ascension, while vines sprout from her crown. The symbol of the Hunab Ku, in its human Black Star variant, is also present with the vine sprouting from the Hip Hop (HH) artists melon.
Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg a synchromystic Scarlet Woman in "Buffy The Vampire Slayer"
The Scarlet Woman wears her color (red) and number (11 the "Lust" Thoth Tarot number) in S6 E1 "Bargaining" of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer".
The Black Star of Galactic Center moves in to crown position signifying wacky shit to come..
And come it does, hard and heavy as Buffy is dead - having died during the cliffhanger ending of Season 5 - and we need big time magick to resurrect the slayer.
Major McGuffin Babalon needs to resurrect Sarah Michelle Gellar - our synchromystic Krysta "Now" Kapowski - is the freakin' 'Urn of Osiris'!
"You found the last know urn of Osiris on eBay?"
"Osiris keeper of the gate. Master of all fate. Here us."
All set then as the Scoobies are off to resurrect the Saviour/phoenix/Sun (Buffy Summers (the sunny time of year)) from the tomb/coffin in the local graveyard with the help of Osiris (!!!(once more !!?!!?)).
Of course Buffy dies and is reborn - like KKonsciousness itself - during the year of the 911 Mega Ritual and Space Odyssey of 2001...
Note how the massively plant resonating Willow Rosenberg, is wearing a flower design dress as Osiris opens the scarlet StarG8. Plant KKonsciousness' role in the awaking of the Jovial awareness of NOW is ever present in the sync web that opens the G8way to the City Of Pyramids.
Perhaps in the future we can go into just how intelligently and clearly her death and resurrection reflects the 911 event, but we must press on with Babalon and ZOE for NOW.
One of the side effects of Hannigan calling on Osiris to open the Stargate sees her vomiting a coiled rattlesnake.
In Scarlet Dragon 2 it is explained how Ayahuasca played a role in leading my attention to Hannigan. How susynct then that she can be found in such an amazingly Ayahuasca resonating sequence. The plant abounds with coiled serpentine type resonance and vomiting is frequently experienced by those who consume the AmoZOnian brew. I have myself experienced this and found it a rather profound event with great depth of meaning.
We even saw the plant resonating Willow (who plays Lily the kindergarten teacher in "How I met Your Mother") get a special sync kiss from rattlesnake in S5 E18 "Earshot". The resonance chimes along soundly as Rosenberg is covered in plant KKonsciousness greenery.
As a serpent the rattlesnake already resonates Zigzags, as does all these legless animals, through there singular motion. This particular type of snake does so doubly through its distinctive patterning.
My mind connects these 'up and down' steps to the indented tessel design of the Tracing Boards and the symbol of Aquarius.
We have already connected the serpentine twin zigzags to Zeus/Jupiter's energy bolts.
The waves of water, electricity, the ebb and flow of energy etc.
Ayahuasca is a wave resonating Twin, a brew made of 2 plants. Aquarius' double wave lines suite it well.
It feels logical then to connect the 'double sign wave' type design to the coils of DNA and Ayahuasca as well.
A telling 'Coiling Zigzag' theme helping Jumpiter, DNA, Aquarius, Snakes and Ayahuasca resonate with more harmony.
More Zig Zags explored in the shapes of Twin Castles Barbury (a recent Crop Circle) and El Castillo (The Mayan Pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza) as both connected to the rattlesnake in Scarlet Dragon 2.
We meet up again with ZOE as Jovie (little Jupiter) in front of the "30 Rock" pillarmid and its ZOdiac banded and K2 resonating golden pyramount (pyramid/mountain) in "Elf". Atop this Mound of Atum is a giant Golden Boy as Prometheus.
This resonates soundly with Winnipeg's (Center City) Hermes topped K2 resonating Galactic Center Temple.
Will Farrell leans in for the sync kiss as he and Little Jupiter Ice Skate past the ZOdiac.
We see the specific signs behind the Mistress of the NOW as Being Scorpio and Sagittarius. Her crown entrains sublimely with the very signs that frame Galactic Center!
(After reading Jim's Jumpiter post I keep slapping my forehead and have to add a few of his associations. First off Dechanel or Jovie interacts with Shiva in "Tin Man" and "H2G2" a variation of Jupiter. Here we just saw her head get sync kissed by Sagittarius, a sign which is ruled by the same planet...)
The young Scarlet Woman Hannigan's street address, NOW also the dwelling of her Alien StepMOM, displays the 42 resonance of Jumpiter.
Inside Aykroyd, Willow's POP, passes the gas giants, including our Tin resonating planet of the NOW, Jupiter.
Jessie wears the 'Heart of Gold' backed by scarlet as she learns of MOM's secret identity as being KKosmic. We saw the 'Heart of Gold' as Zooey Deschanel's spaceship 'chariot of the gods' in "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy".
Syncnificantly she is the first Earthling to discover Alien life. We could say the Scarlet Woman as 'G8way to The City Of Pyramids' leads humanity into Kosmic Konsciousness.
The phallic handbag inhabiting Alien accomplice of MOM displays the unified Eye/I/Self of KKonsciousness just like Jupiter.
The Kosmic Konsciousness becomes the evil vilified other or monster. Often in movies the unified Self is portrayed as a villain to be feared. We are attempting to cloth the Self as Alien bad guy in order to hide from our unified self.
Joy is what WE fear.
WE fear that there is NOthing to fear.
The 'all seeing eye' of the Alien emits StarG8 shapes at Hannigan and her DOG/GOD.
Alyson Hannigan trapped inside the E.T's vortex or StarG8 rays. A classic case of negative depiction of the StarG8.
Why do WE climb inside the roller coaster or jump from a plane, even when WE are afraid?
The exhilaration and fear of union and alignment with SELF is a flirtatious dance WE secretly enjoy. We love to be terrified by the monster in the movie.
Scarlet Woman's POP finally realizes how to replicate the signal boost and save the day, he just frantically needs one last thing...
"Grady a conductor! We need a conductor!"
Grady, Dr. Millers lab assistant, takes off his bracelet and triumphantly displays the solution. Not just to the experiment but indeed the instrument to saving the entire planet from impending doom!
"Solid Tin!"
After saving the planet MOM has one more trick up her sleeve. Having just enough power left to grant Jessie her wish. Hannigan jumps and slam dunks.
The credits role.


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This is a mural I designed for the Akron Art Museum in Ohio (akronartmuseum.org). The museum will print and install the mural. It is going to be 30 ft long (including the door) and 8 ft tall. It will be on display from February 9 to August 4. It is part of an exhibition called Draw Me a Story, which will also feature picture books created by 2nd and 3rd graders of Leggett Elementary, King Elementary, Glover Elementary and The Lippman School. Here is a clip from the museum's member's magazine with more info.
The books the children made and the mural I designed are homage to Ezra Jack Keats and to his groundbreaking book The Snowy Day, which was the first modern picture book to feature an African American protagonist. An exhibition called The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats will open at the museum on March 16. It will be the first retrospective of the award-winning author-illustrator in the US.
Keats books are set in Brooklyn where he grew up and lived. His spreads are filled with Brooklyn buildings, graffiti and traffic lights. But more importantly, his books feature children of diverse ethnic backgrounds. They reflect the environment that surrounded him. This is a nice little video on youtube with plenty of information on Keats' work and life.
Keats' work was revolutionary in terms of content, but also in terms of technique. He would do collage and mixed media when no one else was doing it.
I have a lot of admiration and I feel a great affinity towards Keats. I do collage in my illustrations (but I use the computer). I am drawn to urban settings and try to make relevant social commentaries in my work.
I wanted the mural to look like a modern Pre-Columbian codex set in contemporary Brooklyn during winter. The characters are always drawn in profile and I chose to use a limited palate: blue, red, white, black, gray and a tiny bit of yellow. The color choice was intentional. Red, white and blue are the colors of the American flag. The US is one of the most, perhaps the most diverse country in the world. There are people from all races and backgrounds here, especially in big urban centers like New York. Unfortunately a lot of prejudice and racism still prevails.
I had a lot of fun with this project and tried to make reference to several pieces of art and artifacts. The bundled children are inspired by egg-shaped Aztec sculptures in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City.
The four children making snow angels in the center are meant to look a bit like a Huichol Ojo de Dios. The 4 directions are of utmost importance to indigenous groups. I drew children of different ethnicity pointing towards each direction.
I included some text in the mural. The text comes directly from things that 2nd and 3rd graders wrote. I sent them a brief letter with a short questionnaire. I asked them what winter sounded, smelled, felt, looked and tasted like. I also asked them what was their favorite thing to do on the first snowy day of the year. My drawings are based on their responses. Snowball fights and sledding where among their favorite activities. Those are also some the things Peter, the protagonist of The Snowy Day does in the book.
I tried to integrate some of their text into the image, and make it a part of the illustration, much in the spirit of my friend Lauren Redniss.
I will be visiting Akron from April 12 to the 16. I am looking forward to meeting the students that I corresponded with and seeing the full scale mural! Hopefully you can make it to Akron and see it yourself. When the exhibition ends I will be donating the mural to one of the Elementary Schools that participated in the project.


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The creation of induced pluripotent stem cells – cells transformed from a mature into a less differentiated state – caused a major breakthrough in...
By William van Grunsven
Cell culture has come a long way since the establishment of the first cell lines in the 1950s, with improvements made in almost every aspect of the...
By William van Grunsven
Growth media are extremely important for cell culture technology. They ensure that cells can live and thrive even outside their natural environment....
By Ulrich Kraft
2017 marks the 60th anniversary of a true mainstay of protein research and bioprocessing. First established in 1957, the Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO)...
By William van Grunsven
Although vaccinations have saved billions of lives over the past decades, it was a cell culture breakthrough in the 1960's - isolation of the first...
By Claudia M. Huether-Franken
What if we could absorb superpowers from bacteria?
By Heike Laue
Do our bodies contain far more bacteria than human cells? Researchers have found that this is not the case. The ratio is approximately equal. But...
By Ursula Barth
Very different figures circulate about the quantity of cells found in the human body. An international team of scientists has done systematic...
By Ursula Barth
In the early 20th century, New York's tabloid newspapers were invited each year to celebrate chicken heart cells. The scientists who cultivated the...
By Claudia M. Huether-Franken
In February 1951, George and Margaret Gey, a married couple working as scientists at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, received a penny-sized...
By Claudia M. Huether-Franken
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For one night only, you can shop 'til you drop when stores all over the world stay open late for Fashion's Night Out.
The special event, which takes place on September 6, started in 2009 in New York as a way to encourage people to shop and support the fashion industry during the economic crisis.
In the PSA for his year's event a whole slew of stars including Victoria Beckham, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber—who lets us know, he's in it for the models—hype up the night's events. Darren Criss, better known as Blaine from Glee, even shows off his moves with an updated rendition of Madonna's "Dress You Up," arranged by none other than his Glee boss, Ryan Murphy.
From special offers to events the night is dedicated to those who love fashion. There's even a special edition Fashion's Night Out tee shirt, which you can see Taylor modeling in the video, available at participating stores and online. Forty percent of the proceeds raised from sales of the shirt will go to the New York City AIDS Fund in the New York Community Trust.
Watch the latest PSA here and then find out what stores in your area are participating in the one night only event.
-Shannon Carlin, CBS Local
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One of the best perks of managing a professional orchestra is meeting so many fascinating guest artists. I've had lunch in Amarillo Texas with violinist Itzhak Perlman where we talked about fine wines, driven around Florida in a limo on tour with flutist James Galway, chatted backstage with John Denver and Tony Bennett, been yelled at by Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary and drove the legendary Boston Symphony Orchestra concertmaster and conductor Joseph Silverstein to a discount shopping mall in Orlando Florida so he could buy presents for his grandchildren. This week I get to meet 27-year old rising superstar cellist Alisa Weilerstein for the first time, and I'm really looking forward to it. Weilerstein was recently described by New York Magazine as "arguably Yo-Yo Ma's heir apparent as sovereign of the American cello,"
On Friday, September 25 and Saturday, September 26 Alisa will be playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 with the San Antonio Symphony. You can hear her play Variations On One String On A Theme By Rossini by clicking here.
While in San Antonio, Alisa will continue her work with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation by meeting with children in San Antonio with type 1 diabetes. On Thursday, September 24 at 5 pm she will speak and play at the Elvira Cisneros Senior Center at 517 SW Military Drive. This event is free and open to the public.
Her story is so extraordinary that I'm posting this quote from her web site.
FROM: http://www.alisaweilerstein.com/
"In November 2008 Ms. Weilerstein, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was nine, was made a Celebrity Advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. She meets with members of the local chapters of JDRF when she tours with the aim of demonstrating to young people that living with and managing diabetes does not stop you from doing anything you want to do.
There were two milestones in Alisa Weilerstein's childhood that were to have life-long repercussions: when she was four years old she began to play the cello, and when she was nine years old she was diagnosed with diabetes. In the years since, Ms. Weilerstein, who is now 26, has become a sought-after soloist and recitalist, performing around 100 concerts each year around the world. Her performance and travel schedule would challenge any young performer. That Ms. Weilerstein maintains such a busy schedule while managing her diabetes 24 hours a day, seven days a week makes her an excellent example of how diabetes does not mean curtailing ambition, a message she aims to spread in her new role as a Celebrity Advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).
Ms. Weilerstein monitors her blood sugar levels with the aid of a continuous glucose monitoring device and receives regular infusions of insulin through a pump. When performing, Ms. Weilerstein wears the pump on her leg with garter-like strap she calls her 'Bond girl device.'"
Here is a video of Alisa playing a work for solo cello by Kodaly:
Jack Fishman
Twitter @SASym
Facebook: San Antonio Symphony
Read more blogs by Jack Fishman at a


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The Gospel of Judas was developed by a Gnostic sect in the second century A.D. and was originally written in Greek around 130-170. This fact alone tells us that it was not authored by Judas himself. The oldest extant copy is a Coptic manuscript written in Sahidic (last phase of ancient Egyptian) in the fourth or fifth century.
The gospel of Judas is included in a 62-page papyrus1 manuscript that was uncovered in Egypt during the 1950's or 1960's.2 The translator of the Gospel of Judas is Rodolphe Kasser of the University of Geneva, a leading Coptic Scholar, and the contents are due to be released in April, 2006. At the date of writing this article (April 7th, 2006), the complete translated text of this pseudepigraphal writing is unavailable. However, at CNN.com we have the following excerpts:
- "The newly translated document's text begins: 'The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot.'
- "In a key passage Jesus tells Judas, 'You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.'
- "'This indicates that Judas would help liberate the spiritual self by helping Jesus get rid of his physical flesh,' the scholars said."
- "'Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom,'" Jesus says to Judas, singling him out for special status. 'Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star.'"
- "The text ends with Judas turning Jesus over to the high priests and does not include any mention of the crucifixion or resurrection."3
According to the National Geographic website on the Gospel of Judas page, it says that the newly discovered gospel is "One of the most significant biblical finds of the last century's lost gospel that could challenge what is believed about the story of Judas and his betrayal of Jesus."4 In fact, National Geographic has invested a lot of money in its presentation.
"Retired Claremont Graduate University professor James Robinson said that 'early in November he learned that Kasser and several European, Canadian and U.S. scholars had signed agreements with the National Geographic Society to assist with a documentary film and a National Geographic article for an Easter 2006 release and a succession of three books.'"5
Is the Gospel of Judas authentic?
The Gospel of Judas apparently depicts Judas in favorable terms and commends him as doing God's work when he betrayed Christ to the Jewish religious leaders. This, of course, contradicts what was written by the apostles in their gospels of Matthew and John, as well as those gospels written by Mark and Luke who are under the direction of Peter and Paul.
The Gospel of Judas falls into the category of pseudepigraphal writings. This means that the gospel is not authentic, it is a false writing. In fact, the gospel was not written by Judas, but by a later Gnostic sect in support of Judas. Gnositicsm was an ancient heresy that taught salvation through esoteric knowledge. Gnosticism was known at the time of the writing of the later epistles in the New Testament and was rejected by the apostle John.6
The ancient writer Irenaeus (130 - 202 AD), in his work called Refutation of All Heresies, said that the gospel of Judas was a fictitious history:
"Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas."7
We can conclude that the Gospel of Judas is not authentic, is not inspired, and was properly rejected by the early church as an unreliable and inaccurate depiction of what really happened concerning Judas.
Of course, the complaint is often raised that this opinion, like that of the early church, simply rejected anything that opposed a preconceived idea. But, this complaint falls by the wayside when we understand that the early church knew which documents were authored by the apostles and which were not. God did not make a mistake when he led the Christian Church to recognize what is and is not inspired. The Gospel of Judas was never recognized by the church as being inspired.
On April 9, National Geographic aired the special on the Gospel of Judas. Unfortunately, the special was below standard in its scholarly representation of both sides of the argument--on the validity of the New Testament Gospels as well as the Gospel of Judas. It did not give competent counter evidences against its liberal and inaccurate suggestions regarding the formation of the New Testament Cannon. The special failed miserably to adequately deal with the formation of the New Testament Cannon, how the gospels were arrived at, how we know who wrote them, and when they were written, etc. I was extremely disappointed. Here is a quick example of one of the many problems.
The National Geographic show had a "scholar" who stated that most experts agree that the earliest gospels weren't written until around 60 A.D. The problem here is that no substantiation was offered for this opinion. Second, internal evidence in the Gospels and the book of Acts contradicts the statement. The book of Acts was written by Luke well after he wrote the Gospel of Luke. Acts is a history of the early Christian church and it does not include the accounts of "Nero's persecution of the Christians in A.D. 64 or the deaths of James (A.D. 62), Paul (A.D. 64), and Peter (A.D. 65)."8 The book of Acts is a compilation of the early church's history. One would think that it would naturally include the death of such important figures as James, Paul, and Peter if it were written any time after their deaths. Since this book does not include such information, it appears that it was written before, at least, the death of James (A.D. 62). Let's offer a conservative number of three years prior to the death of James, which would mean Acts could have been written around A.D. 59. This would mean that the Gospel of Luke was written years before that, let's pick a low number of five years before Acts which puts Luke at around A.D. 54. Additionally, it is generally agreed upon that Mark was the first Gospel written. Therefore, Mark was before Luke. Let's pick another low number of five years by which Mark preceded Luke. This would reasonably put the Gospel of Mark at 49 A.D. This is a conservative estimate, and it could be that Mark was written much earlier. Therefore, very quickly we see that the statement made in the program that the gospels weren't really written until after 60 A.D. can be easily countered. The question is, why is it that National Geographic did not produce competent counter arguments?
Another issue is regarding Gnosticism, which was not properly represented. Gnosticism basically states that God cannot become incarnate. The show suggested that gnostics were Christians, but this cannot be since they contradict one of the essential doctrines of the Christian faith--which was also taught in the Old Testament (Zech. 12:10). John the apostle, who wrote 1 John, addressed the early formation of Gnostic thought in Chapter 4 when he denounced those as antichrists who denied that Jesus had "come in the flesh." National Geographic failed miserably to represent Christian theology, and instead misrepresented Gnosticism, trying to make it appear that the present Christian theological system was merely the result of political happenstance.
CARM concludes that the National Geographic program was very biased and insufficiently researched.
This article is also available in: Español
- 1. Papyrus: A plant growing along the Nile in Egypt during biblical times. It was used as writing material. Papyrus scrolls were made by cutting and pressing sections of the papyri plant together at right angles. They typical maximum length of a scroll was about 35 feet. The scribe, when using papyrus, would often use the natural horizontal fibers of the papyrus plant as guidelines. He would take a blunt instrument and score horizontal lines and then score two or more vertical lines as margins for the edge of the sheet or to define columns on it. We get the word "paper" from this word. Many of the biblical manuscripts were on papyrus.
- 2. http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=13097.
- 3. http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/04/06/gospel.judas.ap/index.html.
- 4. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/gospelofjudas.
- 5. http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=1594.
- 6. 1 John speaks of those who deny the physical incarnation of Christ as being the spirit of the Antichrist. Many scholars agree that this is a reference to the Gnostic error that denied that God could incarnate.
- 7. Irenaeus, Heresies, 31,1.
- 8. McDowell, Josh, A Ready Defense, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993, p. 80.


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ABC: Expanded Profile By Lowell Ponte 2005 Examples of Media Bias at ABC By Media Research Center ABC Bias in Reporting about Israel By Honest Reporting
77 West 66th Street New York, NY 10023
The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) is one of the three largest television and radio networks in the United States, rivaled in size only by NBC and CBS. Since 1996 it has been owned by The Walt Disney Company. ABC was created in 1943 when NBC was pressured by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to divest one of its two parallel networks. It sold NBC "Blue" and kept NBC "Red" which we know today simply as NBC. The American Broadcasting System, Inc. was a company put together by Edward Noble, the owner of Lifesaver candy and the radio station WMCA in New York City. It paid NBC $8 million for the "Blue" station. In the early 1950s, when few cities or towns had a third television station to air a third network, struggling ABC merged with cash-rich United Paramount Theatres (UPT), despite UPT's stake in the fading DuMont network. On December 7, 1965, ITT (then the ninth largest employer in the U.S.) announced a merger with ABC. The FCC approved this merger on December 21, 1966, but the U.S. Justice Department fought it, citing ITT's high proportion of foreign owners who might try to influence ABC's news reporting. After years of political and legal wrangling and delays, ITT chairman Harold Geneen called the merger off on January 1, 1968. In the 1970s ABC found a measure of success through producer Roone Arledge, who re-oriented the station towards a younger audience. Arledge is widely credited with having created the "Up Close and Personal" approach ABC introduced to sports programming, which focused not only on sporting competitions but also on the personalities and life-stories of individual athletes. Arledge became President of both ABC News and ABC Sports in 1977. He was responsible for the selection of the late Peter Jennings as anchorman of ABC's "World News Tonight" in 1983. (Tom Brokaw had been Arledge's first choice for the job; only after Brokaw refused it was the position offered to Jennings.) ABC merged with media conglomerate Capital Cities in 1986, creating Capital Cities/ABC, in a deal generally described in the business press as Cap Cities buying ABC for $3.5 billion. In 1996 the Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC for $18.5 billion. At that point, ABC's politics shifted noticeably to the left. Whereas during the Vietnam War era the station had sometimes been disparaged by the anti-war left as the "Silent Majority Network" because its coverage was often more positive and patriotic than that aired by NBC and CBS, ABC became more leftist than the others in tone and content following its acquisition by Disney. The host chosen in June 2002 to anchor ABC's Sunday news program "This Week" after the departure of broadcasting icon David Brinkley was George Stephanopoulos, a left Democratic partisan who served as Senior Advisor and Press Secretary in President Bill Clinton's White House. This show remains home to one of ABC's only two identified personalities on the political right -- Washington Post columnist George Will. (The other is John Stossel, an anchor of "20/20," who is a Libertarian.) Will used to appear as the principal commentator on "This Week," but with Stephanopoulos in control Will's role has been greatly diminished. Mark Halperin, the son of high-level Bill Clinton advisor Morton Halperin, has been the Political Director of ABC News since 1997 and is responsible for the planning and editorial content of all political news on the network. One of ABC's newest national reporters seen on "World News Tonight" is Jake Tapper, a former correspondent for the left webzine Salon.com and former Press Secretary to Democratic congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky. Like several of the other major networks, ABC maintains alliances with the print press. Most notable is its close relationship with the Washington Post, one ongoing manifestation of which is the ABC-Washington Post Poll. If ABC Television is left-of-center, ABC Radio has in some ways been a bastion of conservatism. Rush Limbaugh was launched to national stardom by former ABC Radio Vice President Ed McLaughlin, and Limbaugh's affiliates in some of his biggest markets such as New York City and Chicago continue to be ABC-owned and -operated stations. Popular talk-show host Sean Hannity was launched to national stardom from New York City's WABC Radio, which remains his flagship, and he is syndicated by ABC. In San Francisco, ABC Radio affiliates include centrist KGO Radio and conservative KSFO Radio, home station of Michael Savage. Paul Harvey, whose weekday conservative newscasts air on more than 1,200 stations, broadcasts for ABC from Chicago. ABC Radio News boasts that its features and newscasts air on more stations than do any of its competitors.
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Exploring Social Media Analytics
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I'll admit that I am somewhat of a social media novice so it will be a learning experience for me too. I am intrigued by the depth of analytics that may be possible. Only this month did I setup my profile on Facebook and I'm 47! I have been using Twitter more regularly of late, since our Teradata Universe conference and I probably look at it 3 or 4 times a day, depending on what's on my schedule for the day. I am finding some interesting, funny and informative updates each day, as I slowly expand the number of people I follow. It is really a mixture of friends and work related contacts at the moment. I have been a member of LinkedIn for a number of years and find it a useful resource from a professional perspective. I am within the first 1% of members who subscribed to this site (I received an email to that effect, that I was within the first 1 million sign ups when the site hit 100 million). Finally I am keen on blogging more frequently when I have something interesting to share (i.e. this! :-) ) I had stopped blogging for about 5 years at one point. I have also started with Flickr and YouTube as well. I'll be my own guinea pig in some ways as I explore and experiment on possible useful analytics in these social media channels.
However when most people think of Social Media and associated analytics, Facebook and Twitter are often mentioned first. These social media systems do provide an API that can be used to readily access data, and these split into two broad categories that reflect the social media's attitude to customer data.
The first approach is the open approach adopted by Twitter. Users on Twitter are warned that their posts are visible to anyone (who can find them). The second approach is that adopted by Facebook. There is an extensive privacy model, and data needs to be accessed using authorizations (from likes and games).
- Data is free but there is a lot of it
- Identifying relevant stuff isn't easy
- History isn't usually available
- Public data is free through search
- Basic data available through application
- More sophisticated data available with permissions (using Oauth 2.0)
Data from social media must be linked in three ways:
The most secure forms of linking are to use unique references: email addresses, IP addresses and telephone numbers. This can be supported by direct access methods (i.e. asking the user for their Twitter name, or persuading them to Like the bank on Facebook from within a known environment).
However, even then the confidence in the link must be evaluated and recorded: this information is user provided and may be wrong in some cases. The notion of a "soft match" should be adopted – we think that this is the same person, but we cannot be sure.
I would like to end this post with a recommendation to read the following white paper by John Lovett from Web Analytics Demystified Beyond Surface-Level Social Media. Lovett, who has written a book on Social Analytics , lays out a compelling vision for Deeper Social Analytics for companies. He clearly presents the value for companies to go beyond surface level analytics of likes, followers and friends and challenges you to ask deeper and more important questions. This white paper has been sponsored by Teradata Aster and is available for free from here.
In reading this white paper you will gain an understanding of the term 'Surface-Level Social Media' coined by John and how it is possible to gain competitive advantage even operating at this level. He will outline how Generation-Next Marketing is being powered by Social Analytics backed up with a number of interesting customer examples. He goes on to outline a 7 point strategy to build your deeper social media strategy. Finally John concludes with how unstructured data can yield valuable customer intelligence.
I found it to be very informative and well written and gave me a number of new insights and points to ponder. I would be interested in your thoughts on it too.
Published at DZone with permission of Donal Daly , DZone MVB. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.


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Next up for the San Antonio Symphony on March 22 & 23 is one of the best known works of the Baroque era — Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. The soloist and conductor will be violinist Cho-Liang Lin.
This is not the only Baroque game in town this week. Two visiting groups offer Baroque music:
Saturday, March 16 at 7 pm
Ensemble Settecento
Christ Lutheran Church of Alamo Heights (6720 Broadway, Alamo Heights/San Antonio, TX 78209
Sunday, March 17 at 3 pm
The Four Nations Ensemble
Fredericksburg United Methodist Church.
Address: 1800 N. Llano, Fredericksburg
Phone: (830) 990-2886
The next concert in the new Symphony Baroque Series at San Fernando Cathedral is Sunday, April 21. The program is called Fiesta Baroque and features Akiko Fujimoto, conductor; Hideaki Okada, oboe; and Sayaka Okada, violin.
Also this weekend, in non-Baroque repertoire, the San Antonio Chamber Music Society presents David Finckel, cellist, and Wu Han, pianist on Sunday, May 17 at 3:15 p.m. at Temple Beth-El.


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Two explosions. Hundreds of injuries. A sea of backpacks to be searched by hand. The worst day in the life of the Boston Bomb Squad.
On the morning of April 15, 2013, Chris Connolly, a sergeant with the Boston police bomb squad, completed a ritual he had performed annually for the past eight years. It started after dawn at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth in the city's tony Back Bay neighborhood. There Connolly and his teammates peered inside trash cans, peeked into car and store windows, and inspected flower planters.
In the post-9/11 world, this was standard operating procedure, a precaution practiced by civilian bomb squads around the country. Later that morning half a million spectators would watch nearly 25,000 athletes run the Boston Marathon, and security experts have considered major sporting events to be potential terrorist targets since the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Even at this early hour, revelers were starting to gather, most ignoring the techs methodically working their way around bars and restaurants and postrace recovery areas.
Connolly himself looks more like a weight lifter than a jogger, a stocky P90X devotee with military-short salt-and-blond hair. With his blue eyes and thick accent, he is a cliche of the Boston Irish cop. His father was even a longshoreman. He started his career as an average patrolman and worked his way up to sergeant and night-shift supervisor after years of chasing gangs and drugs. After 9/11 he volunteered for the FBI's challenging Hazardous Devices School—it was all volunteers, nobody gets coerced into working with explosives—and then became a member of the city's 17-man bomb squad in 2004.
Once the Back Bay sweep was done and the route declared clear, Connolly returned to his post near Copley Square, the hub for medical staff and exhausted runners just past the finish line. The forecast called for cool weather. "Good," Connolly thought, "fewer heat victims for the docs."
Other bomb techs took up positions elsewhere along the route, but each knew that the finish line—the maximum concentration of bystanders and media—was the most likely place for an incident to occur. For now, they stood by, ready to respond to a suspicious car or an untended bag discovered by a K-9 patrol.
A sweep and a long wait: This was the life of an urban bomb squad. The hardest part, as Connolly knew, was staying alert. It's difficult to maintain vigilance in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence that nothing is going to happen. Soon runners started coming in—the swift ones first, but gradually the slower ones, in greater numbers and more celebratory.
It happened at 2:50 pm. Connolly didn't see the first explosion; he felt it. By the time his brain registered what it was, he felt another. The Boston Public Library and a mass of exhausted runners blocked his view. But slowly a cloud of smoke began to rise above the rooflines.
Connolly pushed his way through the dazed crowd, running toward the finish line. He saw nothing but confusion and pain. It smelled like burning hair. An acrid haze hung like smog. People were sprawled everywhere on the pavement, some with limbs at impossible angles. His mind raced. A bomb? Two? Smaller than a car bomb, for sure. But still stout, maybe 10 pounds, and easy to hide. Panicked runners were fleeing past him. Several people were trying furiously to make calls on their cell phones. To initiate another device? How many more bombs were there? Was this going to be another Madrid? Mumbai?
Connolly surveyed the scene for lone packages and backpacks—anything that could hide another similar device.
He saw bags everywhere.
With no other options, he pulled out his knife, grabbed a bag, and cut into it.
Ripping open potential explosive devices with a knife is not standard procedure. Bomb squads are loaded with sophisticated equipment, and techs normally inspect suspicious packages with a robot, an x-ray machine, or a remotely detonated explosive tool. A so-called hand entry—that Hollywood-style search for the red wire—is almost never done, unless there is no other way to quickly save a life. But that is exactly the situation Connolly and his fellow bomb squad colleagues faced in Boston.
I was an explosive-ordnance-disposal officer in the US Air Force, and I have been disarming bombs or training military and civilian squads for more than a decade. I deployed twice to Iraq, where I dismantled car bombs and investigated suicide attacks. I've witnessed the worst that humans can do to each other. But I have never experienced anything like what the Boston bomb squad went through in April.
Bomb work is usually highly methodical. In an average operation, a team of bomb techs will spend an hour or two disassembling a single device—and that's if it proves to be a hoax. If it is live, it takes longer. Safety is foremost. As a military officer, fighting a war overseas, I was trained that no bomb was worth my life or the lives of the men and women under me. None of us ever made a blind hand entry. We worked bombs the right way, or we didn't work them at all.
In Boston the rules changed. This attack wasn't on the battlefield but on American soil, in the middle of a massive public event, and that forced the bomb techs to work in ways they never had before. They knew they could die but had a job to do: protect people from being killed by another device. Suspected explosives needed to be eliminated in seconds. The primary tool became a knife. Every single suspicious package needed to be checked.
One of the legacies of the Boston bombing will be that it officially ushered the United States into the modern epoch of Betty Crocker explosives: Follow a recipe in Inspire, al Qaeda's online magazine, to whip up a pressure cooker packed with nails. It's a reality that other nations know well; four suicide bombs detonated on trains and a bus in London, 10 backpack bombs discharged on trains in Madrid, three devices exploded in Bali, coordinated time-bomb attacks aimed at civilians in Mumbai hotels and taxis. And while American bomb squads were aware of these events, of course, and had even trained for them, none had seen the chaos, confusion, and enormous risks up close. No one was quite prepared for this.
McCormick saw body parts. Then he saw it — twisted metal and a battery that were clearly out of place.
When he heard the first boom, Mitch McCormick thought, "They must have shot off a celebratory cannon. That's new." But when the BPD bomb squad veteran felt the second crack deep in his chest, heard it echo down the Boylston Street channel, he knew, just knew, what it was. "Those are bombs!" he shouted at his partner, and jumped in the truck.
When he arrived at the second blast site, he saw "a girl with no legs," he says. She was a grisly mess yet somehow already had tourniquets on both limbs. McCormick didn't stop; he was a bomb tech, not a medic, and he knew that right now his job was to keep another device from going off.
Blood and cash and food were strewn everywhere. McCormick could see frightened forms huddling in a restaurant, behind a wall of glass. If there was another bomb on the patio ...
He stepped inside and yelled, "If another bomb goes off, the glass will fragment into you!" The place emptied immediately. It worked so well he went next door and said the same thing.
In training, McCormick had heard that the head and feet of a suicide bomber remain intact after a blast while the rest of their body disintegrates, but he had never actually had a chance to test that rumor. Truth was, his total "live" experience was typical of most civilian bomb techs: three pipe bombs and a smattering of old hand grenades found in veterans' attics.
He didn't see any severed heads, but he did see other body parts. Then he saw it—the twisted sheet metal and a battery. The jagged shards were so obviously out of place among the discarded shoes and jackets and water bottles of the runners and victims. He realized it most likely had been hidden in a backpack, and he was surrounded by those, abandoned on the streets and sidewalks.
"Well, now I know what I'm looking for," he thought, and then took a breath to steel himself. "Mitch," he told himself, "this is American history in the making, and you're smack-dab in the middle of it. Now don't fuck this up, 'cause you'd rather be dead than have another one of these go off."
"If two, why not three?" Connolly thought as he tore into a bag. He avoided the zipper, which could be a trigger, and cut into the base of the pack as he'd been taught. Nothing. If three, why not four? He cut into the next backpack, nearly slipped on the blood-slicked sidewalk, and tore the bag in two. Nothing. There would be a third bomb for sure, he reasoned, to kill the cops and medics. He reached for another bag.
"I'm gonna fucking die," he thought. "One of these is gonna be real. But that's OK. If it goes, it goes. That's just the way it's going to be today."
Connolly cut through several more bags before he realized he couldn't clear them all himself. He needed more techs. He tried his cell phone first but couldn't get through. He reached for his handheld radio on his belt and pushed the transmit button.
"I need every available bomb tech at Boylston and Exeter. Boylston and Exeter. Now!"
Todd Brown and his partner Hector Cabrera hadn't needed the prompt—they'd headed to the scene immediately after the
blasts. As they dismounted from their response truck, Connolly appeared through the smoke, waved them down, pointed at each man, and actually crossed his arms in front of his chest, like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, directing them to different suspicious packages. Brown and Cabrera nearly ran into each other complying.
Brown surveyed the scene, seeing backpacks, limbs, and blood, and a continuous stream of oblivious runners still pouring into the site like cattle from a chute. Cops in fluorescent traffic-control vests were trying to evacuate pedestrians. They pointed out bags to Brown and had the look of men who have suddenly realized they're halfway into a minefield and don't know how to get out.
Brown is a big man, with long arms and a loping step. As it happened, his unit had recently conducted intensive counterterrorism training with a retired Israeli bomb technician who taught them how to quickly assess and cut into suspicious packages found near victims at a still-warm blast scene. During the simulation, the dozen bags that needed to be cleared looked overwhelming. Now there were hundreds.
Brown knew he had to check the bags, and he knew he couldn't just unzip them, because that might set off a booby trap. He had only the knife in his pocket, a cheap blade branded with the ATF logo, given to him free for attending some seminar or another.
It would have to do. He ran up to a backpack in the thick of the crowd, placed his body between the bag and a victim prone on the ground, felt for wires, felt for a pipe bomb. He thought, "thisisfuckingreal thisisfuckingreal thisisfuckingreal," but he cut anyway, found nothing, and moved to the next bag, cut, keep moving, moving, moving, to the next bag, to the next bag, hoping to get to the end of the row without another detonation.
The tension of repeated hand entries was quickly getting to McCormick. After clearing the second blast scene he returned to his truck, strapped on a bomb suit—80 pounds of armored Kevlar and fire-resistant Nomex—and slowly worked his way east, cutting every bag on the way to the finish line. There he found his teammate James Parker, who had turned his attention to a large, pristine bag sitting upright next to the initial blast site. The crowd had mostly dispersed, and it looked so suspicious, he hadn't cut into it.
Instead, Parker put on a bomb suit of his own and broke out the Logos XR200—a portable x-ray unit powered by a Dewalt battery from a cordless drill. He put a thin imaging plate next to the bag and shot it with the x-ray source. He then developed the plate in the Logos Imaging system, "the breadmaker," a gray appliance in a portable case. Parker shot two x-rays. The image they revealed was textbook: a heavy metal tube with wiring throughout.
With so many other potential bombs littering Boylston Street, McCormick decided there was no more time to investigate this one. The techs built a disruptive tool, a water bottle with an explosive charge down the center axis, and placed it carefully next to the clean bag. The area was clear, so the techs called their superiors to let them know he was going to crank it off. Within minutes, every national cable news outlet announced that the Boston bomb squad was about to conduct a controlled blast.
McCormick detonated the device and walked over to inspect his handiwork. He had just blown up a camera bag.
For the next hour, up and down Boylston Street, more than a dozen bomb technicians from the Boston police, FBI, and state police were working the scene. All of them cutting into bags.
Eventually, the initial game of Whac-A-Mole came to an end without any further explosions. As the tide of adrenaline passed, Connolly organized one final methodical search for the day, one last clearance before the whole street morphed from crisis zone to crime scene. Eight bomb technicians and eight bomb-sniffing-dog handlers started at Hereford Street and swept the five long blocks to Copley Square.
It was relatively silent now, except for the distant chop of a helicopter and the eerie ringing of fire alarms, an atonal symphony along the length of Boylston Street. Three people were dead and 264 injured. The deceased were still there on the sidewalk, and the searchers worked around them, watching their footing, imagining it was their own family member lying there. Fortunately it was a cool evening, so the pools of blood weren't cooking on the black pavement.
It was after dark by the time the team returned to the impromptu command center that Connolly had set up in the Lenox Hotel at Boylston and Exeter, the center of the crime scene. Brown, McCormick, and the others soon found themselves in a conference room packed with bomb techs—from the Massachusetts State Police, from the Cambridge squad, from the Army National Guard at Camp Edwards, Navy guys from Rhode Island, guys from Suffolk County on Long Island, and state police from New Hampshire, New York, and Connecticut. In all, 45 bomb techs and 40 K-9 handlers had answered the request for assistance issued by Boston police hours earlier. In the days ahead, they would need them all.
The calls from around the city started within a half hour of the bombings. While some techs continued to work the investigation on Boylston Street, most pulled grueling 16-hour shifts to keep up with the reports of suspicious packages. The teams used photos of the marathon bombs to help them identify similar devices.
They found everything but. Eight propane tanks in a small car two blocks from the finish line. Another car full of fuel canisters in the parking garage below the One Financial tower. An aluminum catering tray full of tossed salad, forgotten near a restaurant's back door. A homemade toy bomb, complete with cardboard tubes of dynamite and wires and bright red lights.
Connolly made his base the Lenox Hotel, took his meals there, and slept an hour or two when he could. "But why bother sleeping?" he said later. "There's just going to be another call." Eventually Connolly ran home briefly to put on a clean shirt.
Everyone was worn out from lack of sleep and an unending barrage of calls. Still, three days after the marathon, things had started to wind down, the surge of suspicious-package calls gradually trailing off in a predictable logarithmic decay. The story seemed to be reaching its conclusion.
That's when the alleged bombers resurfaced and started a shootout.
It was Thursday night, and Todd Brown was waiting for a call at the Lenox Hotel when radio traffic came in that a cop had lost his gun. The story changed several times: a 7-Eleven was robbed. A Cambridge cop was shot. No, he was an MIT cop, the same one whose gun had gone missing, but he'd be fine. Then finally: No, he was dead. Brown was sure it was the bombers. He grabbed Dave Cardinal, another Boston bomb tech, and they hopped into a truck and headed west.
Along the way, the radio reported that two young men who identified themselves as the Boston Marathon bombers had carjacked a Mercedes. Authorities soon tracked the car to Watertown, and within minutes half of the law enforcement personnel in New England were on the Mass Turnpike, following the stolen Mercedes and a Honda Civic that was, unknown to police at the time, registered to one of the alleged bombers.
Brown and Cardinal tried to keep up with the stream of troopers. The radio issued a constant barrage of terrifying updates: "They're shooting at us! They are throwing grenades at us! They threw a bomb at us out a window!" Cardinal exited and made his way into a dense neighborhood in East Watertown.
They reached the corner of Laurel and Dexter just after the shooting stopped. One bomber and the Mercedes were gone, but the Honda Civic remained in the street. Nearby, the second suspect was being worked on by medical personnel, one wounded police officer was on his way to the hospital, and metal fragments littered the street. Brown and Cardinal immediately approached Boston PD superintendent-in-chief Daniel Linskey.
"Where are the IEDs, Super?" Cardinal asked, getting out of the truck.
Fifteen feet away lay two pipe bombs that had been thrown at the cops but failed to detonate, 2-inch cast-iron elbows primed with hobby fuses, faithfully executed versions of explosives detailed in Inspire magazine.
Brown pulled out a Talon robot to inspect the pipe bombs. The Talon is the workhorse of the modern bomb squad, a squat all-black rig with rugged tank treads and a flexible arm to carry tools or rip into devices. Meanwhile, Cardinal investigated on foot along the row of houses where the shootout had occurred. He found a crumb-line of weapons and frag scattered in the chaos of the gun battle, a sort of terrorist-fetish striptease: a switchblade, then BBs and scrap from a marathon-type bomb, an empty 9-mm magazine, a handgun with an extended magazine, a second handgun, and finally a Kangol hat. "It looked like a crime scene they laid out for us in school," he says.
Brown noticed scorched pavement where at least three other elbow pipe bombs had detonated. He walked down a nearby driveway and was astonished to find most of a pressure cooker lodged in the door of a parked car. In ordnance lingo, it had low-ordered, failing to completely detonate and mechanically scattering. The weapon had turned into a missile and launched down the driveway.
By now more and more bomb technicians were arriving. A robot placed the two pipe bombs into the Cambridge Police Department's Total Containment Vessel, a dive bubble on wheels designed to safely stifle any accidental explosion locked in its sealed chamber. Parker used another Talon robot to investigate the green Honda the bombers had abandoned. He discovered a malign treasure trove including a computer bag containing ball bearings and components similar to those from the initial bombings.
How big was this plot? Was there a team of bombers wearing suicide vests? The contained frenetic energy of such a dense concentration of police was suddenly released in a wave of house-to-house searches. Bomb technicians from a host of agencies paired off with SWAT teams, and for hours they knocked on doors and searched apartments, sheds, houses, and garages.
In the dining room of one such home, bomb technician Billy Farwell of the Massachusetts Army National Guard was alerted to a large plastic box. Sheathed in bubble wrap, it had a wire leading from it, and there were holes cut in the top. As the SWAT team backed off, Farwell carefully shined his flashlight in. He met the eyes of an enormous boa constrictor.
The next afternoon, Brown and Cardinal got word that the suspect, now identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had been spotted, and bomb squad support was needed. When they arrived at the scene, they found Tsarnaev hunkered down in a boat in someone's backyard, with police firing warning shots and popping off the occasional flash-bang grenade to try to scare him out. But before the bomb techs could start to check the boat and surrounding area for bombs, Tsarnaev surrendered.
It's hard to overstate how intense those last few days were. In Kirkuk in 2006, a bloody time in a bloody place, my military unit completed 900 missions in five months. In the week of the Boston Marathon bombings, the Boston bomb squad and their partners went on 196 calls in five days, a pace to rival the worst of the Surge in Baghdad.
"Calls are down, but sweeps are up," Connolly says, as we walk Boylston Street weeks after the marathon attack. He has had time to sleep, finally, but the pace of preventative work is unrelenting and expanding. "Now we go out for every road race and festival," he says, shaking his head. "The Dorchester Day Parade is this coming Sunday." This on top of a slate of much larger events: the first lady visiting the bombing victims, the Bruins in the playoffs, Harvard commencement week, and the Sox coming back to Fenway.
Life returned to normal on Boylston a while ago, but Connolly doesn't seem to realize it as he gives me a walking tour of bombing landmarks: the locations of the medical tents where he and his team were set up to respond, the Lenox Hotel, each surveillance camera that recorded the Tsarnaev brothers and their backpacks.
The marathon finish line is still painted across the street, and tourists duck out in the small gaps between traffic to take photos. Connolly points to a rooftop where they found one of the lids to a pressure cooker. He points to where a piece of frag tore a restaurant's fabric awning, the jagged hole still circled in investigator's chalk. He points at the concrete; we have arrived at the site of the first blast.
There is no memorial or marker, but scored into the cement is a circular impression 8 inches in diameter. A hundred faint scratches emanate from it like the rays of the sun in a child's drawing.
What happened here will, without a doubt, fundamentally change bomb tech work in the United States.
American civilian bomb squads have long focused on coping with the single bomb, the truck bomb, the next Oklahoma City or 9/11. But the events in Boston showed the limitations in this thinking. In a mass bombing, there is an added burden besides simply disarming the devices found by others. Now we know that the bomb squad will be called to prevent further detonations in the very midst of the attack, slashing through chaos and terror by hand, while coping with the deluge of false alarms.
Some progressive units have already adjusted. Pittsburgh held its marathon, three weeks after Boston's. "We had more teams working that race than we did when the G20 came to town in 2009," Dave Tritinger, a Pittsburgh police bomb squad technician told me. "We have the PGA Championship here this week," said David Gutzmer, commander of the Monroe County Sheriff's Office bomb squad in Rochester, New York, when I spoke with him in August. "We have really beefed up our presence. "
They're shooting at us! They are throwing grenades at us! They threw a bomb out the window!
Several years after 9/11, I conducted training with a military bomb unit charged with guarding Washington, DC. Our final exam was a nightmare scenario—a homemade nuke at the Super Bowl. Our job was to defuse it while the fans were still in the stands, there being no way to quickly and safely clear out 80,000 people. That scenario made two fundamental assumptions that are no longer valid: that there would be one large device and that we would find it before it detonated.
Boston showed that there's another threat, one that looks a lot different. "We used to train for one box in a doorway. We went into a slower and less aggressive mode, meticulous, surgical. Now we're transitioning to a high-speed attack, more maneuverable gear, no bomb suit until the situation has stabilized," Gutzmer says. "We're not looking for one bomber who places a device and leaves. We're looking for an active bomber with multiple bombs, and we need to attack fast."
A post-Boston final exam will soon look a lot different. Instead of a nuke at the Super Bowl, how about this: Six small bombs have already detonated, and now your job is to find seven more—among thousands of bags—while the bomber hides among a crowd of the fleeing, responding, wounded, and dead. Meanwhile the entire city overwhelms your backup with false alarms. Welcome to the new era of bomb work.
There are some things no training can prepare you for. The week after the marathon, Connolly met with the police commissioner to review the bomb squad's performance. Connolly feared they had somehow missed the pressure cookers during that morning's sweep of Boylston Street. But they hadn't, the police commissioner assured Connolly. Surveillance videos proved the bombs were planted well after their sweeps.
It was a relief, but not a big one. Any pride the bomb techs felt about their performance was far outstripped by a sense of failure. "Bombs went off in our city," McCormick says. "We're the bomb squad. I wish we could have prevented it."
Back at the Boston station house, the emotional fallout from the event weighs just as heavily on Connolly. "You don't even know what to say to the victims," he says. "If I was anybody else but a bomb tech, it would be a lot easier to go up and say, 'We're with you. We're behind you.'"
"We're supposed to stop an attack," Cardinal says.
"Exactly," Connolly says. "Recently I was working a Bruins game in the handicapped area, and the girl, the dancer who lost her
foot, she was in front, and she was in good spirits," he says. "She was having a Sam Adams, she was talking and laughing, and I just couldn't bring myself to walk up and say anything to her. She sees this on your shirt, Boston police bomb squad. 'Where were you?' Is that what she's thinking? Maybe. I'm afraid that's what she's thinking."
"The one time I need you, you weren't there," Cardinal says, and then both men go quiet.