The Week In UFO Phenomena: Remember the UFO at the bottom of the Baltic? Updated 6/7

Howdy Space Rangers, it’s been a while since I’ve put out a TWIUP and I just saw a story that most definitely warrants another edition.

Back in August I wrote about a group of researchers who using their scanning sonar thought they spotted a UFO on the bottom of the Baltic Sea,  if you dont remember it's ok you can Go back and read part 1 where they show what they saw in August

I was really excited about this incident as it was one of the few I could think of where you could go back for confirmation of what you saw.  Well they went back, and guess what?

Sonar readings show that the mysterious object is about 60 meters across, or, about the size of a jumbo jet. And it's not alone. Nearby on the sea floor is another, smaller object with a similar shape. Even more fascinating, both objects have "drag marks" behind them on the sea floor, stretching back more than 400 feet.

But Lindberg says the ship theory doesn't really hold up because of the unusually large size of the objects. "Of course it would be something from another ship but it's quite big," he told CNN. Lindberg notes that some observers have speculated that the objects may be Russian warships built around the end of the 1800's. However, Lindberg points out that not only were those ships much smaller, they were not patrolling the Baltic during that era.

Yahoo News Report 

UPDATE 6/7/2012

The folks from Ocean Explorer have returned to the site of the object.  I'll let them say it.

Ocean Explorer

2012-06-07
 BREAKING NEWS 2pm, The divers are now down and investigating the circle and reports from the ship say they are really amazed. There is definitely something unusual hiding at the seabed A Mystery Beneath.  More information and pictures will be released next week.

2012-06-04
News; The expedition started Friday 1st from Norrtälje harbor when Ocean X-Team took their crew out for this exciting adventure trying to find out what the mysterious disc-shaped object is. Unfortunately the weather conditions have been really bad the last days, but now they are on a roll.
Stay alert for more updates within shortly.

 2012-06-04 1.00 pm, Ocean X Team on site

The ship Ancylus, carrying the Ocean X Team, is now anchored above the circle-shaped object. They started to scan the seabed and they are taking samples for analyses. Due to really bad weather conditions the operation took a little bit longer than scheduled. But they are working hard and prepare to dive down there for further investigations today.
bed – a Mystery Beneath. More information and pictures will be released next week.

Namaste Friends

Keep looking up

Republicans..Same as it ever was

The Republican party is blowing the dog whistle of racism and calls for white superiority again except this time it is as loud as an air raid siren. Over this past week we have had two major Republican figures reach for the white race card. I'm really in a blah mood over it and as a member of the NAACP I think I want to yell something else at Newt Gingrich. Playing on racial hatred is nothing new for the Republican Party. It has been part of their electoral strategy from the days of Nixon and the early 70’s. The Republicans adopted racial polarization as an electoral strategy. 

Do you support Barack Obama? Glenn Greenwald says you’d support him raping a nun

Do you think I’m being hyperbolic? Did you read that headline and think; no surely he has at least a modicum of respect for supporters of the President. No he doesn’t and he is completely illustrative of this new lean forward pro left.

I’ve explained in a previous post why I haven’t been blogging as much as I once did. I’ve fallen in love with the Twitter for the time being. It is there that Glenn Greenwald showed his entire ass and by extension has damned anyone who supports him to support this point of view.

I heard a few of the old timers complain about the chirpstory the last time I did one, so I’m going to let Zerlina Maxwell of the MSNBC property The Grio tell the story above the fold, you can read Glenn Greenwald’s disgusting spoor in the form of the chirp story below.

Zerlina Maxwell's must read take down of Glenn Greenwald

In a particularly heated exchange on Twitter Saturday night, a blogger named "DrDawg" tweeted about Gandy: "Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you'd say we weren't seeing what we were seeing." In response, Greenwald chimed in, "No - she'd say it was justified [and] noble - that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape."
 When twitter exploded in attacks on Greenwald for making a "rape joke," instead of apologizing for the comment, Greenwald doubled down, tweeting that the reference to rape was not a metaphor and in fact Obama supporters would defend the president in the face of "ANY evil: assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape violent crime like rape."

SNIP

Meanwhile, an irony of the infusion of rape into a debate in which it doesn't belong, is that theNDAA that Greenwald finds so offensive, also includes a provision which finally addresses the serious problem of rape, abuse and sexual harassment in the military.
Before this version of the NDAA, servicewomen who are raped were not allowed to transfer to another base or had a very difficult time doing so. Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), who along with Democratic Rep. Niki Tsongas fought to get these provisions into the bill has said that, "in civilian life, you have complete control of your movements, and if you're in an unsafe situation, you can remove yourself. In military life, the victim needs permission to take even basic self-preservation actions." 

Don’t believe me or Madame Maxwell join me over the fold and believe your lying eyes.

Adept2u V Nicole Sandler and the National Defense Authorization Act: The Professional Left In ChirpStory

So do you want to see an interesting Chirpstory?


Ok so I'm becoming addicted to Twitter. The thing that so fascinated me about the internet when I first achieved high speed access was the ability to almost instantly talk to mega watt smart people. I chat with people from Astrophysicists to The Rev. Al Sharpton who read my tweet on the air Friday regarding Black conservatives.

@TheRevAl a Black man voting conservative in this day and age is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders #southernstrategy

Heh, Anyhow as I jumped into the Twitterpool I pretty much rushed to follow opinion makers etc. from my side of the political spectrum I could think of but there were a few people who were pretty much always on my follow list and one was The Angry Black Lady. http://www.angryblacklady.com/ A person I've pretty much always read from those magical high speed days, but more than that despite her name and reputation a truly sweet person who provided support for me when I got the ban hammer from the DK.

So anyway I'm following Nicole Sandler for the above reason and she's going all in on the recent Defense Authorization. Now I will admit and would have that I replied initially to the wrong tweet. The tweet I meant to respond to actually asked the question am I wrong, but like I said I'm a newbie twit.

BOOM Goes the Dynamite in the Healthcare Law

It’s not often you’ll see someone advocate the destruction of their profitable business, but yeah I did it, and now the fuse lit with the passage of our healthcare law has hit the explosive.

You know it seemed a lot of the disappointment in the law surrounded the idea that the Insurance companies were making out like a fat rat. Some of us (ME ME ME ME) who actually knew what was about to happen tried to state no they weren't, but because like most things the President does this was subtle this was at the heart of the matter but not loudly just effectively people lost their minds.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/12/02/the-bomb-buried-in-obamacare-explodes-today-halleluja/2/

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ration will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insurers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 percent of their receipts providing their customers with the coverage for which they paid. If they could, we likely would never have seen the extraordinary efforts made by these companies to avoid paying benefits to their customers at the very moment they need it the most.

Today, that bomb goes off.

Here’s how I wrote about it just before passage of the act.

I’ve sold health insurance and health insurance products for coming up on 8 years now. It’s been a fantastic business and a wonderful place to put my skills at communication and explanation to work. Understanding policies is difficult for those of us who are trained and licensed it can be a bear for those who have limited to zero understanding of how health insurance works. I’ve made a comfortable living being a person who takes honesty and integrity into your open enrollment meetings, and as the letters from my policy holders can attest a God send to people trapped in claims hell.

With the passage of the proposed health care insurance reform I will be put out of business, and I couldn’t be happier to have to find another gig in the midst of one of the worst financial crisis in America with unemployment numbers not seen since Ronald Reagan.

You see insurance companies don’t pay the people who sell their products with W2 style wages where you are an employee of the company with benefits and the payroll fairy to visit every other week. Brokers and agents are paid by straight commission, a percentage of the premium written on policies issued. Depending on the product and the carrier it can range from 3% to 25% and for the supplemental type products as much as 40%. So, when you see your little 100 man company has a health insurance bill of say 1 million per year someone your broker is getting bigtime paid.

There won’t be any margin in the new health care bills for brokers as there will be a mandated 85% premium to benefit ratio. That means for every dollar the health insurer takes in 85 cents has to go to benefit. There will be no more 10 cents for me your local insurance agent, and we won’t be needed anyway. The new health insurance reform that I have dubbed the StepOne Healthcare act of 2010 will provide for exchanges where individuals and groups can purchase their policies without needing me the middle middle man. The plans will have a defined benefit so I imagine that they won’t need me to explain them. The plans will have set costs and one huge pool to draw from, so you there won’t be any advantage to a company hooking its wagon to a large brokerage firm that could negotiate with the carriers the exchanges will fill that role.

After next week and the passage of reform unless I’m just an idiot, and I’m not, I’m going to have to look for a new wagon to pull. I imagine you’re asking yourself then why have you been fighting like hell for this bill?

I have collected a file of too many individuals I can’t get covered at any price. One of the ways I made a niche for myself is I would dive into difficult cases and I would seek coverage for people who other big firms or little ones like mine would refuse, and back in the day I could do something for them. Today as my Big Daddy would say they are SOL. Yeah they have maladies, and yes they are suffering. It’s real hard to know that.

I’ve been to open enrollment meetings where a new change in benefit has been installed with one of those $5000 dollar deductibles and I’ve spoken with people who have literally told me that they were not going to let their kids out to play. They were so frightened of what would happen if God forbid they broke a bone or took some stitches that they actually kept them locked up like a prime veal cow. I have to think back to my youthful boyhood and I was so dangerous the ER doctor knew me by first name, but damn I had fun, and this wasn’t the first story I’ve ever heard like that or the 10th.

I’ve met with business owners who loved their employees. By love I mean this person and say those 20 key players behind his door started something together and have been together from the beginning 25 years. The receptionist is like a member of the family, the loading dock guy named his kid after him. I’ve seen them break down into tears as they can no longer afford to offer health insurance to people they consider family. I’ve seen them rage when their group got dropped right when Betty the secretary develops breast cancer and I can’t find them group coverage anywhere. I don't want to see that anymore.

Pass the bill. Don’t fight passing the bill. I've seen a lot of commentary where this will be a boondoogle for insurance companies, and that's horse pucky.

Don't pass this bill and did you see the increases you got? Those near 40% hikes? Well if you don't pass this bill you wont work for money anymore, you'll work for coverage. Those 40% hikes will be broken down monthly, and oh I'll get a raise everytime they put one through, but I don't want it. PUT ME OUT OF BUSINESS!

Don't worry about me folks, I'll be just fine.

Three Science Stories Making Me Say Holy Crap!

So as I peruse my reader this morning I’ve been presented with stories one after the other that are just tickling me to death!

There are seismic shifts going on in the realm of science and in a sense I feel like Salieri looking at Mozart, except I don’t think I’m fully appreciating what’s going on, but I know it’s tremendous.

So here we go.

They really think water may exist on the Jovian moon Europa.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/17/huge-lakes-of-water-may-exist-under-europas-ice/

We’ve known for years that Jupiter’s moon Europa almost certainly has an ocean of liquid water deep under its frozen surface. For one thing, the surface is almost all water ice. We also know that it’s covered in thousands of cracks that look very much like the type we see in ice floes floating on liquid water here on Earth. And we have a heating mechanism: tides from Jupiter as well as from the other moons flex Europa, causing its interior to warm up.

A nagging question has been how thick is the solid ice shell over that ocean: is it many kilometers thick, or much thinner? Evidence supports both arguments, which is maddening. However, that problem may now be solved: astronomers studying Europa’s terrain think the ice shell is generally very thick, but — and this is the cool part — may have vast underground lakes of water!

Humanity there’s our filling station right there! Let’s go and exploit that instead of each other!

The scientist that detected neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light have re-done their experiment with the calibration fixed that cast their previous results into doubt, and the results were? Confirmed?

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/11/faster-than-light-neutrinos-opera.html#

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound.

OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus) measures the properties of neutrinos that are sent through the Earth from the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and arrive in its detector located under the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy. On 22 September, the collaboration reported in a paper on the arXiv preprint server that it had measured neutrinos arriving some 60 nanoseconds earlier than they would have if travelling at light speed. The researchers obtained that result by statistically comparing the temporal distribution of protons within the 10.5 microsecond pulses that produce the neutrinos at CERN with that of the neutrinos observed in its detector.
The new tests, completed 6 November, did away with the statistical analysis by splitting each pulse into bunches just 1- to 2-nanoseconds long, allowing each neutrino detected at Gran Sasso to be tied to a particular bunch produced at CERN. These tests were carried out over 10 days and provided 20 events. The researchers confirmed that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds early, with an uncertainty of about 10 nanoseconds, comparable to that of the initial result.

This is the day of the expanding man
That shape is my shade there where I used to stand!

The hits just keep on coming



http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/11/quantum-mechanics-gets-even-weirder-or-maybe-less-weird

three physicists have produced a theorem implying that the quantum wavefunction is not merely a mathematical abstraction that tells us the probability of subatomic particles being in certain locations and having certain properties. The Copenhagen interpretation, they say, is wrong. The wavefunction is an actual physical thing:

“I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Valentini believes that this result may be the most important general theorem relating to the foundations of quantum mechanics since Bell’s theorem, the 1964 result in which Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proved that if quantum mechanics describes real entities, it has to include mysterious “action at a distance”.
Action at a distance occurs when pairs of quantum particles interact in such a way that they become entangled. But the new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other. As that seems very unlikely to be true, the researchers conclude that the wavefunction must be physically real after all.
....Their theorem effectively says that individual quantum systems must “know” exactly what state they have been prepared in, or the results of measurements on them would lead to results at odds with quantum mechanics. They declined to comment while their preprint is undergoing the journal-submission process, but say in their paper that their finding is similar to the notion that an individual coin being flipped in a biased way — for example, so that it comes up 'heads' six out of ten times — has the intrinsic, physical property of being biased, in contrast to the idea that the bias is simply a statistical property of many coin-flip outcomes.

So if this is true, what does it mean? In my vague and probably confused understanding of things, I always understood that the wavefunction of Bell's Theorem traveled faster than light. However, that was OK since it wasn't a physical thing and didn't convey any information. But if it's a physical thing, even a massless physical thing, how can that be?

Don't you guys remember me talking about this next week?

Dear #OWS

May I suggest a change in tactic?  I understand people are considering this new movement an analogue and continuation of the civil rights movement, and so be it.  However if you’re going to do that at least take a lesson from the movement.  Engage your enemy and provoke an ugly response from them that the vast moral universe of the American middle will empathize with and support.

Camping in the park is not it.  Fighting police over the right to camp in the park under the guise of “free speech” is not it. 

Unless the cities and municipalities who have to expend extra funds in extremely tight times are the enemy and I thought the bankers were this tactic is going to earn you the enmity not the support of that middle I was talking about.

So here’s what you do.  Occupy foreclosed homes.  Occupy them in the neighborhoods of the 1% and make the banks evict you through the legal process.  Now wouldn’t that be grand?  You would have the benefit of costing the actual entities of #OWS anger the banks money and time.  You wouldn’t have to meet the business end of night sticks defending a park, and here comes the sweet part:  The banks would have to prove they own the place in order to evict you!  Remember all those strange loan documents all the people who got their homes taken away through robo-signing?  All those documents would get fresh judicial review and as I understand it lots of #OWS folks have legal training that would make that an interesting adventure.  Why this tactic has the added benefit of almost being like the lottery you just might be able to stay in the house you occupy because the banks can’t prove they own it.