northrupgrumman | From unmanned aerial vehicles and underwater mine hunting systems to defense readiness targets, Northrop Grumman is a leader in autonomous systems, helping our customers meet a wide range of missions.
Northrop Grumman is a leader in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learningand
we are working to develop autonomous capabilities and intelligent
payloads for maritime applications, like the Large Unmanned Surface
Vehicle and Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicles.
Northrop Grumman has been pioneering new capabilities in the undersea
domain for more than 50 years. Manta Ray, a new unmanned underwater
vehicle, taking its name from the massive “winged” fish, will need to be
able to operate on long-duration, long-range missions in ocean
environments without need for on-site human logistics support – a unique
but important mission needed to address the complex nature of undersea
warfare.
Northrop Grumman is developing its unique full-scale
demonstration vehicle using several novel design attributes that support
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) vision of
providing ground-breaking technology to create strategic surprise. Manta
Ray will also be able to anchor to the seafloor in a low power state
while harvesting energy from the environment.
Manta Ray will have command, control, and communications (C3)
capability to enable long-duration operations with minimal human
supervision. The data from Manta Ray will help the joint force make
better decisions and gain advantage during missions.
“Manta Ray will provide payload capability from the sea, making it a
critical component of subsea warfare and the DoD’s Joint All Domain
Command and Control (JADC2) vision,” said Alan Lytle, vice president,
strategy and mission solutions, Northrop Grumman.
Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a Phase 2 contract
to continue the Manta Ray program that began in 2020. As part of Phase
2, Northrop Grumman will work on subsystem testing followed by
fabrication and in-water demonstrations of full-scale integrated
vehicles. The company also broke ground on a new system integration and
test lab that will use modeling and simulation to test the system’s
software before getting loaded onto the vehicle.
fp |French police are plagued by “a
double problem of racial discrimination and brutality, with neither one
being acknowledged by governments past and present,” said Sebastian
Roché, an expert on policing at Sciences-Po university in Grenoble.
In France, images of similar
incidents “have emerged in the past, but not as damning as these ones,”
said Éric Marliere, a sociologist at the University of Lille. “We are
looking at a very violent scene that reminds of the George Floyd case”
and has contributed to accelerating the protest movement, he said.
This is also yet another major headache for French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s seeking to rebuild his political capital at home and abroad after months of crippling strikes over his pension reform, and has now had to postpone a scheduled trip to Germany in order to deal with the new crisis, after being forced to leave early from a European summit in Brussels to hurry back to Paris last week.
French police have a long history of
heavy-handedness, particularly with ethnic minorities. In the early
1960s, officers under the command
of Paris police chief Maurice Papon killed dozens, if not hundreds, of
Algerians taking part in a demonstration for independence. Over the
following decades, the heavily immigrant, poverty- and crime-ridden
suburbs at the margins of France’s biggest cities posed a constant
challenge for police. But tensions between residents and security forces
in the banlieues have grown worse over the past 15 years, according to Roché, particularly as a result of the 2005 riots.
Back then, “the police were taken by
surprise and lost control of the situation,” he said. In the following
years, under different governments, a new approach was developed to
police the banlieues,
he said, one that largely revolved around the tougher units—such as the
anti-criminality brigades, which are specifically designed to carry out
arrests and tend to attract the most hot-headed elements. Officers also
started being equipped with “LBDs,” riot guns firing rubber bullets
that can cause severe injuries or even death.
“The logic became: ‘The police aren’t
there to connect with people, earn their trust, and reassure them, but
to detain them,’” Roché said. “A police officer who arrives in a banlieue arrives with their LBD, in a position to impose their point of view by force and instill fear,” he said.
This approach continues to be in
fashion today. In the thick of the recent violence, Alliance Police
Nationale and UNSA, two police unions, defined the rioters as “savage hordes” and “vermin,” against which police are “at war.”
In line with this rhetoric, French
cops tend to be more trigger-happy than their European counterparts. The
rough French average of 44 peoplekilled by police every year since the turn of the decade pales compared to the hundreds who die in the United States, but it’s much higher than in Germany or the United Kingdom. Some of it may have to do with the lower standards
and shorter training that have resulted from Macron’s efforts to
quickly beef up police ranks after he came into office in 2017. In
recent years, admission rates have gone from one in 50 candidates to one
in five. New recruits are now only getting eight months of training,
compared to three years in Germany.
— Top Notch Journal (@topnotchjournal) July 2, 2023
theconservativetreehouse | Let me take you back to 2010 and 2011 when the U.S. State Department, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, CIA Director Leon Panetta and French President Nicholas Sarkozy wanted to support the Islamist Spring uprisings in Tunis, Libya, Egypt and Yemen.
What happened then is very much related to what we are seeing right now in Europe, specifically France; only this time we are seeing the inverse of the government interests regarding social media on display.
The bad dictators were targeted for removal following the now famous Barack Obama Cairo, Egypt speech. President Barack Obama triggered the removal of the Zookeepers and released the big cats to become apex predators; the downstream consequences eventually showed up with ISIS burning people in cages.
When the leaders of Tunis, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan and a
multitude of other unapproved dictatorships, reacted to the collective
effort of the CIA and U.S. state Dept by shutting down cell phone
communication, the CIA and DoS responded by enlisting Twitter and
Facebook as the messaging platforms for the rebels in each country.
Twitter became the main conduit through which the people on the
ground could organize against their regimes. This was the initial merge
of the U.S. government using social media to effect political change.
[Side Note: this is the atom splitting moment which eventually led to
the government’s ability to control, filter and ultimately censor U.S.
social media content.]
Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, served the interests of
western government by helping the people on the ground to organize
protests, violent uprisings, against the dictators in the Arab Spring.
As we eventually saw in Libya and Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt,
AQIM) and al-Qaeda (Libya, AQAP) were supported by the State Dept/CIA
during that effort.
The key takeaway is: the uprisings were supported by the western
governments, and the social media platforms served the interests of the
western government leadership.
We have the inverse issue for the interests of western government,
specifically France and broad parts of the EU as well as the United
States.
General uprisings, riots and assorted mayhem created by mostly
Islamic immigrants and the subsequent cultural clash, are against the
interests of France and the EU. The ability of the cultural insurgents
to organize on social media is now against the interests of western
government. How are they reacting? They are shutting down the utility of
the platforms and shutting down the internet.
The initial takeaway from this might be perceived as good. The
rioters are creating social unrest, looting, arson and crisis; they must
be stopped and controlled. It seems like the government action will be a
good thing.
However, as with the example of private corporations joining in
alignment with WEF government to target Russia, what do you think will
happen when a populist revolt of yellow vests, or anti-vaxxers, or
freedom rebels take to the streets? Precedents are being set.
You might cheer France using control over communication to target the
violent brown people now; but what happens when those same EU entities
decide to target the communication of a different type of uprising. This
is me, sending warning flares to those who might not care about this
‘beta-test’.
Oh, and don’t forget the Senate Intelligence Committee recent effort with the “Restrict Act“, total internet and domestic social media control pushed under the auspices of controlling TikTok data collection.
MIT | This paper examines how various private patrons intervened to support research in gravitational physics from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Our analysis centers primarily on two wealthy and eccentric businessmen, Roger Babson and Agnew Bahnson, and their efforts to galvanize the study of gravitation. Not only did these patrons provide generous funding at a time when the subject of gravitation received few other institutional sources of support; they also helped to knit together aresearch community. Moreover, we trace the evolution of their patronage efforts, as scientists and patrons revised their arrangements to address what came to seem weak or ineffective features of the original efforts. These unusual philanthropic efforts played an outsized role in spurring what has been called the renaissance of general relativity during the middle decades of the twentieth century
glennrocess | So
far, not a single physicist of note has been willing to give Dr. Pais’
claims anything but short shrift, and the Navy has since admitted
they were never able to prove the Pais Effect actually existed, much
less enabled any of Dr. Pais’ wondrous inventions. Soooo…that’s the end
of the story, right? It was all just a case of “too good to be true”,
right?
Nope. Don’t take off that neck brace just yet. Whiplash #2 was included in the fine print.
It turns out that during TheDrive.com’s investigation, they found a document submitted by NAVAIR’s Chief Scientist/Chief Technology Officer James Sheehy
wherein he stated that Dr. Pais’ room temperature superconductor is
“operable and enabled via the physics described in the patent
application”.
Whiskey
Tango Foxtrot, Oscar? The Navy says the Pais Effect doesn’t work, but
NAVAIR’s Chief Scientist/CTO gave a sworn statement saying it does
work! While I tend to be strongly skeptical of wild claims by any
scientist, the ones in charge of research are responsible for keeping
the pointy end of our military’s spear the sharpest on the planet, and
tend to be hard-nosed, take-no-BS types. Of course they will lie through their teeth as the situation demands, but why would the one in charge lie about this?
I
often tell my wife that one thing every military retiree learns along
the way is how to justify (almost) anything. At a moment’s notice we can
pump out barely-plausible excuses that would make OJ’s lawyers blush.
This also means that we’re usually pretty good at figuring out why a
government or military functionary would do something out of the
ordinary. In this case, I can think of three possibilities: (1) Drs.
Pais and Sheehy are both wrong and full of bovine excrement, (2) Dr.
Pais is wrong, Dr. Sheehy knows it, but says it works, and (3) they’re
both right and the Navy is now lying when it says that the Pais Effect
cannot be proven to work.
Dr. Pais and Dr. Sheehy are both wrong. While
possible, this scenario is the least likely for the reasons I stated
above. I think it is highly unlikely that Dr. Sheehy, being who and what
he is, would have issued a sworn statement saying the Pais Effect
worked if it didn’t actually work.
Dr. Pais is wrong, Dr. Sheehy knows it, but says it works anyway. This is possible. In fact, Forbes.com posited that this could be a disinformation campaign vis-à-vis Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,
colloquially known as “Star Wars”, in that if we spend a few million
dollars on a project and make wild claims as to its success, perhaps
China will futilely waste hundreds of billions searching down the same
Pais Effect rabbit hole. In fact, as early as 2017, Dr. Sheehy already said
that China is currently investigating the effect. One must wonder,
then, if China is doing the same thing in reverse with the Pais Effect
idea and now our best and brightest are tearing their hair out trying to
develop something that isn’t real.
Both Dr. Pais and Dr. Sheehy are right, and the Navy is now lying about it.
Maybe. Definitely maybe. Despite what the rest of the professional
physics community says about the Pais Effect, IF it works, IF Drs. Pais
and Sheehy are right, the Navy would have very good
reason to deny it. The claimed inventions in and of themselves would
radically change the balance of military and political power around the
planet, so keeping such information under wraps would allow America to
develop the technology and maintain sociopolitical supremacy much as we
did by being the first to develop atomic and thermonuclear bombs. Of
course, China would have the same motivation and would be much more
effective at keeping it secret. “What is this thing called a Freedom Of
Information Act request? Off to the reeducation camp with you!”
Indeed, hope springs eternal in the breasts of geeks, nerds, and retired sailors. Yes, we would dearly love for the Pais Effect to be real, for the dream of having a DeLorean with a Mr. Fusion pumping out the obligatory 1.21 gigawatts (did I mention Dr. Pais also patented a compact fusion reactor and may have worked on a spacetime modification weapons system?).
But no.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, a phrase popularized by Carl Sagan, must be applied here. Until there is hard, publicly-verifiable proof that the Pais Effect (and all its follow-on technologies) works, Dr. Pais’ claims belong on the shelf alongside those of Pons and Fleischmann.
polskieradio | The war in Ukraine has weakened the Franco-German axis that once defined
Europe, with the balance of power now shifting toward the UK and
Poland, a British political scientist has claimed.
In an op-ed featured in the British news magazine The New Statesman,
Maurice Glasman, a political scientist from St Mary's University in
London, highlights the profound impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine
on the existing order in Europe.
Glasman argues that the invasion has not only disrupted the balance
of power across the continent but has also had consequences for the
European Union, Poland's wpolityce.pl website reported on Thursday.
Prior
to the crisis, the EU functioned under a shared leadership model, with
France and Germany at the helm. France assumed a dominant role in
military and diplomatic affairs, while Germany focused on economic
matters, according to Glasman.
However, he says the legal framework governing the EU was rooted in
the primacy of EU law within member states, which ultimately created
tensions in both eastern and western Europe.
These tensions were exemplified by Britain's decision to withdraw
from the EU, as well as the opposition voiced by Poland and Hungary on
social issues.
“The status quo was based on an understanding over the export of gas
(as well as oil and coal) from Russia to Germany, most obviously through
the Nord Stream pipeline," according to Glasman.
He writes: "Berlin and Moscow held the fate of Central Europe in
their hands once more. German economic interests were predominant,
partly because the EU did not develop a unified military strategy of its
own."
Significant shift in European landscape
Glasman further states: “This is what made the status of
Ukraine so explosive. Its integration into either the EU or NATO was
not in German interests. It would undermine its economic interests, as
the only serious industrial economy within the EU, which were predicated
upon cheap energy imports from Russia.”
In his analysis, Glasman highlights the fact that the
invasion of Ukraine by Russia has resulted in a significant shift in the
European landscape, particularly in the realms of economics and
military affairs, wpolityce.pl reported.
Glasman says this shift has exposed Germany's relative weakness and
hesitancy in the military sphere, sentiments that are shared by France.
He argues that in the event of a military confrontation with Russia,
power and resources within Europe would gravitate towards NATO,
subsequently leading to a resurgence of influence from the United States
and the United Kingdom.
He writes that “it was widely assumed within academic and elite
political discourse that Brexit would lead to the marginalization of
Britain within Europe, and to the consolidation of the Franco-German
axis within the EU. The opposite has been the case.”
He continues: “Following the invasion of Ukraine, Britain took an
unambiguous position of military and political support for the
beleaguered Ukrainian state. While the US was offering
President Volodymyr Zelensky asylum, Britain immediately transferred
weapons and led the western European political response with an
unprecedented array of economic sanctions against Russia. It seemed as
if Brexit had strengthened its freedom of action at a time of war."
It
came as British travellers were warned about the risk of curfews and
travel restrictions due to the spiralling upheaval and vandalism around
France.
A
domestic intelligence note seen by Le Monde has warned riots could
become increasingly “widespread” and go on for “the coming nights”.
The
French government announced on Friday that all major public gatherings
that could “pose a risk to public order” would be banned. Various rock
concerts have been pulled. Some 45,000 police were deployed.
The
Interior Ministry said 994 arrests were made during Friday night, with
more than 2,500 fires. The night before, 917 people were arrested
nationwide, 500 buildings targeted, 2,000 vehicles burned and dozens of
stores ransacked.
While
the number of overnight arrests was the highest yet, there were fewer
fires, cars burned and police stations attacked around France than the
previous night, according to the Interior Ministry. Gerald Darmanin,
France’s interior minister, claimed the violence was of “much less
intensity”.
Hundreds
of police and firefighters have been injured, including 79 overnight,
but authorities have not released injury tallies for protesters.
Protests
have continued into a fourth night, with rioters in Paris on Saturday
night setting fire to a bus and clashing with police. Unrest has also
spread to Lyon and Grenoble.
Meanwhile, security will be beefed up during the upcoming Tour de France bike race, which is due to start in Spain on Saturday.
In
updated travel advice, the Foreign Office said: “Locations and timing
of riots are unpredictable. You should monitor the media, and avoid
areas where riots are taking place.”
NYTimes | When Jimmy Kimmel asked Hillary Clinton in a late-night TV interview about U.F.O.s, she quickly corrected his terminology.
“You
know, there’s a new name,” Mrs. Clinton said in the March appearance.
“It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon,” she said. “U.A.P. That’s the
latest nomenclature.”
Known for her
grasp of policy, Mrs. Clinton has spoken at length in her presidential
campaign on topics as diverse as Alzheimer’s research and military
tensions in the South China Sea. But it is her unusual knowledge about
extraterrestrials that has struck a small but committed cohort of
voters.
Mrs. Clinton has vowed that
barring any threats to national security, she would open up government
files on the subject, a shift from President Obama, who typically
dismisses the topic as a joke. Her position has elated U.F.O.
enthusiasts, who have declared Mrs. Clinton the first “E.T. candidate.”
“Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics,” said Joseph G. Buchman, who has spent decades calling for government transparency about extraterrestrials.
Mrs.
Clinton, a cautious candidate who often bemoans being the subject of
Republican conspiracy theories, has shown surprising ease plunging into
the discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial beings.
She has said in recent interviews that as president she would release information about Area 51,
the remote Air Force base in Nevada believed by some to be a secret hub
where the government stores classified information about aliens and
U.F.O.s.
In a radio interview
last month, she said, “I want to open the files as much as we can.”
Asked if she believed in U.F.O.s, Mrs. Clinton said: “I don’t know. I
want to see what the information shows.” But she added, “There’s enough
stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their
kitchen making them up.”
When asked about extraterrestrials in an interview with The Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire last year, Mrs. Clinton promised to “get to the bottom of it.”
“I think we may have been” visited already, she said in the interview. “We don’t know for sure.”
While
Americans typically point to issues like the economy and terrorism as
top priorities for the next president, a desire for answers about aliens
has inspired a passionate bloc of voters, who make their voices heard
on social media.
Stephen Bassett, who lobbies the government
on extraterrestrial issues, views a Clinton presidency as a chance to
finally get the United States to disclose all it knows about life beyond
Earth. Since November 2014, Mr. Bassett’s organization has sent roughly
2.5 million Twitter messages to presidential candidates, elected
officials and the news media urging a serious discussion of the issue.
“That was a storm, and now it’s like a steady drip,” Mr. Bassett said.
The
movement viewed Mrs. Clinton’s decision to correct Mr. Kimmel’s use of
the term U.F.O., which some view as loaded and rooted more in science
fiction than in science, as a breakthrough because it “suggested she’d
been briefed by someone and is not just being flippant,” Mr. Buchman
said.
In fact, Mrs. Clinton had been
briefed. She was prepped by her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, who
is not only a well-respected Washington hand, having served as a top
adviser to Mr. Obama and President Bill Clinton, but also a crusader
for the disclosure of government information on unexplained phenomena
that could prove the existence of intelligent life outside Earth.
“The
time to pull back the curtain on the topic is long overdue,” Mr.
Podesta wrote in his foreword for the 2010 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots
and Government Officials Go on the Record,” by Leslie Kean, an
investigative journalist.
Mrs.
Clinton’s position is not a political response to public sentiment — 63
percent of Americans do not believe in U.F.O.s, according to an
Associated Press poll. But it reflects the decades of overlap between
the rise to power of Bill and Hillary Clinton and popular culture’s
obsession with the universe’s most mysterious questions.
strategic-culture | In her 2012 book Area 51 Uncensored,
journalist Annie Jacobson provided lengthy detail of the Cold War
experiments, aerospace technology and nuclear bomb testing that took
place at Area 51 during this period which largely put the earlier social
engineer experiment of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds emergency broadcast
read aloud in 1938. The mass panic that ensued the broadcast provided
an insight into the levers of mass psychology that certain social
engineers drooled over.
What could account for observed UFO phenomena?
In an interview with NPR Radio, Jacobson stated: “The
UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2
intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent
an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third
Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had
allegedly created [a] flying disc. … American intelligence agents fanned
out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact,
they had made this flying disc.”
During WWII, the Horten brothers were associated with the Austrian scientist Viktor Shauberger whose innovative designs
for implosion (vs explosion) flying technology utilized water currents,
and electromagnetism to generate flying machines that by all surviving
accounts flew faster than the speed of sound. While much of his research
was confiscated and classified by victor nations after WWII,
Schauberger was promised government sponsorship in America which induced
the inventor to move across the ccean where Canada’s Avro Arrow program
sought his designs for supersonic nuclear missile delivery aircraft.
When he discovered that his work would only be used for military
purposes, Schauberger pushed back and over the course of several months,
his patents were essentially stolen, and he returned to Austria to die
broke and depressed in 1958.
The Strategic Importance of Space
It was never a secret that the post-1971 globalized world order
championed by the likes of Sir Henry Kissinger, David and Laurence
Rockefeller and other Malthusians throughout the 20th century
was always designed to collapse. With the mass shock therapy that such a
collapse would impose upon the world, it was believed that a
deconstruction of the Abrahamic traditions that governed western society
for 2000 years could be accomplished and a new society could be
socially engineered in the image of the Brave New (depopulated) World
that would live like happy sheep forever under the grip of a hereditary
alpha class and their technocratic managers. The story of the
Tavistock-led attack on scientific progress is told brilliantly in the
2010 Lpac film The Destruction of NASA.
The only problem these social engineers have encountered in recent
years is the re-emergence of actual statesmen who are unwilling to
sacrifice their people and traditions on the altar of a new global Gaia
cult. Such defenders of humanity’s better traditions have launched the
multipolar alliance and have driven a policy of long-term growth and
advance scientific and technological progress which is embodied
brilliantly by the New Silk Road, and its extensions to the Arctic. The
most exciting aspect of this New Silk Road/Multipolar Paradigm is the
leap into space exploration as the new frontier of human
self-development which has not been seen since the days of President
Kennedy.
With China and Russia signing a pact to jointly develop lunar bases and the NASA Artemis Accords
calling for international cooperation on Lunar and Mars resource
development/industrialization, the age of unlimited growth that was lost
with the LSD-driven mass psychosis of 1968’s “live in the now” paradigm
shift may finally be recaptured. Programs designed to put humanity’s
focus on real objective threats like Asteroid collisions, and solar-induced new ice ages are seriously being discussed by leaders of Russia, China and the USA.
There are billions of suns and potentially billions of galaxies, and
chances are there is indeed life on many of the planets orbiting some of
the stars within our growing, creative universe… and there is also a
fair chance that cognitive life has also emerged on some of those
planets. The best way to find out is not to sit at home while the world
economic system collapses under a controlled disintegration thinking
about Rockefeller-funded conspiracy theories, but rather to fight to
revive humanity’s open system destiny starting with a cooperative space
program to extend human culture and economy to the Moon and Mars, and
then onto other planetary bodies followed by missions to deep space.
If other civilizations exist, maybe it is our duty to take up the torch left to us by JFK and go find them.
space | A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including
filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — is set to
announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as
precious metals and water.
Planetary Resources, Inc. intends
to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it
also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space,
with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our
species spread throughout the solar system.
"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids,"
Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told
SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach
energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system."
Planetary Resources is officially unveiling its asteroid-mining plans at
1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) Tuesday (April 24) during a news conference at
Seattle's Museum of Flight.
Platinum-group
metals — ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum —
are found in low concentrations on Earth and can be tough to access,
which is why they're so expensive. In fact, Anderson said, they don't
occur naturally in Earth's crust, having been deposited on our planet
over the eons by asteroid impacts.
"We're
going to go to the source," Anderson said. "The platinum-group metals
are many orders of magnitude easier to access in the high-concentration
platinum asteroids than they are in the Earth's crust."
And there are a lot of precious metals up
there waiting to be mined. A single platinum-rich space rock 1,650 feet
(500 meters) wide contains the equivalent of all the platinum-group
metals ever mined throughout human history, company officials said.
"When
the availability of these metals increase[s], the cost will reduce on
everything including defibrillators, hand-held devices, TV and computer
monitors, catalysts," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman
Peter Diamandis said in a statement. "And with the abundance of these
metals, we’ll be able to use them in mass production, like in automotive
fuel cells."
Asteroid water could help astronauts stay hydrated
and grow food, provide radiation shielding for spaceships and be broken
into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket
fuel, Anderson said.
Planetary Resources hopes its mining efforts lead to the establishment of in-space "gas stations" that could help many spacecraft refuel, from Earth-orbiting satellites to Mars-bound vessels.
"We're really talking about enabling the exploration of deep space," Anderson said. "That's what really gets me excited." [Future Visions of Human Spaceflight]
In
addition to Page, Planetary Resources counts among its investors Ross
Perot Jr., chairman of The Perot Group and son of the former
presidential candidate; Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google; K.
Ram Shriram, Google board of directors founding member; and Charles
Simonyi, chairman of Intentional Software Corp., who has taken two
tourist flights to the International Space Station.
Cameron serves the company as an adviser, as does former NASA space shuttle astronaut Tom Jones.
lockheedmartin | As we look at the technologies Skunk Works continues to develop now and for the future, it’s just as exciting, and as classified, as Skunk Works’ illustrious history. Work continues in critical areas like UAS, hypersonics, artificial intelligence, low observables and other revolutionary technologies. A prime example that is not being developed under the cloak of secrecy is the team partnering with NASA to develop and build X-59, the prototype that will quiet the supersonic boom.
The way we engineer and build these capabilities is evolving too, as we lean more and more into a digital approach that reduces cost and accelerates development.
The unique and proven Skunk Works philosophy has enabled the impossible to become reality for 80 years. This dedicated and growing team continues to embrace Kelly Johnson’s motto: be quick, be quiet and be on time. We innovate with urgency to push the boundaries, ensuring our customers have the capabilities needed to stay ahead of ready.
Of course, there are programs that we can’t share…yet.
9:04
that's the only explanation I can get is that that if they if people are here
9:10
from another civilization then they if they've understood the the
9:15
higher the higher the finer points of quantum of quantum physics and how to
9:20
couple that from particles into beings that can do what quantum what particles
The best way to understand their approach is by considering something
else ordered yet non-repeating: "quasicrystals." A typical crystal has a
regular, repeating structure, like the hexagons in a honeycomb. A
quasicrystal still has order, but its patterns never repeat. (Penrose
tiling is one example of this.) Even more mind-boggling is that
quasicrystals are crystals from higher dimensions projected, or squished
down, into lower dimensions. Those higher dimensions can even be beyond
physical space's three dimensions: A 2D Penrose tiling, for instance,
is a projected slice of a 5-D lattice.
9:25
can do now when I was at wright-patterson we had the flying saucers it went up I think they covered the distance from
9:32
Columbus to Detroit in something like equivalent of about 20,000 miles an hour
9:39
I don't think anyone in the canoe in the ordinary aerospace business would have
9:46
had any knowledge of what they were even talking about if you mentioned quantum
9:51
physics or or wormholes are the type of things we know now because if you went
9:59
to CERN and talked to the particle physicists they would tell you certainly some of this was possible because they
10:06
see it all the time where they think they see mass they really see they
10:12
really see energy frozen in it in a time quantum and what they're seeing is not
10:18
is this is really a frozen bundle of energy and it moves back and forth
10:25
almost without any restriction
I thought there were enough credible stories that I may not be able to
10:32
explain them but they weren't phenomenon that were people's imagination whatever
10:41
they saw was real but I couldn't explain how it how it was real what made it real but I think what they I think they saw
10:48
what they saw near st. Louis there was a fairly large triangular object seen and
10:54
it covered the distance down to south st. Louis in some in some of its
11:00
sightings it was moving relatively benign Lee but then it it literally jumped about 20 miles in a sec couple of
11:07
seconds and I've received a lot of phone calls from the local newspapers and TV
11:13
stations is how can that be and
I said I don't know how it can be except if you
11:18
explain it through something like a quantum physics explanation of time and
11:24
space relationships it gave you time and space travel but other than that I don't
11:30
there's no way I know that I can put the biggest rocket engine I could think of
11:36
on it it still couldn't get there at that speed and the noise and the sounds
11:42
you would make doing something like that would wake everybody up for 10 miles and
11:47
it made no sound at all it's see it starts out at hover and it literally almost disappears and pops
11:53
over here so it's not like it's not like a cartoon where it goes whoosh it's
12:00
almost like it disappears and comes up over here at least that the descriptions
12:06
that some of the police officers gave to it a lot of combat pilots routinely go
12:13
up to 7 and 8 GS but that's a very specific direction that's from your head
12:19
downward along the axis of your spine if you were to take that what's called
12:24
eyeballs in which is when you accelerate the forces this way you literally would
12:32
have your eyeballs and compressed out of their sockets and you have brain damage so that the G's the do that might be in
12:40
the level of order of so no that's not physically possible for any even even insects to take that level
12:48
of acceleration even over a short period of time you might get in an automobile
12:53
accident you might get a hundred two hundred and fifty G's and that's when the car is completely crushed so that's
13:00
what happened would happen to a human being if that were a conventional force accelerator so it's not a conventional
13:06
force accelerator because if there's people in human beings in them or something being in them that isn't
13:13
crushed then it has to be a different way of doing it the hard part is to find
13:19
a way to physically do that
you know there are people who have been experimenting with zero-point energy or
13:25
try to tap zero-point energy for years every once in a while someone will do it
13:30
accidentally they'll call it cold fusion but I don't think it's cold fusion I just think it's a zero-point energy tap
13:36
except for three people that I know no
13:41
one has been able to control it when it happens it happens for a short period of time
13:47
and it's almost always destructive it's like drilling a hole into the base of Grand Coulee Dam and all of a sudden
13:54
this jet of water comes out that literally has enough pressure to cut you in half without a valve on it you can't
14:02
shut it off does one guy that that that
14:07
a friend of mine actually visited in Ann Arbor Michigan that was I consider a mathematical genius that actually
14:14
figured out a way to control it he was so paranoid he divorced his wife
14:20
left his wife and children and went in hiding because he was terrified that someone
14:26
would would kill him for the knowledge that he had the ability to tap this whenever he chose to and control it we
14:33
don't know worried we haven't seen him in five years I don't worry is you know right now today you've got an energy
14:39
problem with the price of oil what do you think would happen if you introduced
14:45
an ability to attempt zero-point energy represents about 40 to 50 megawatts of
14:53
power per cubic inch of space that's a lot of power
15:00
that's 4600 million watts of power and
15:07
if you could tap it at will then no one
15:12
would have to sell gasoline or oil anymore you would just tap into it it would be it would be like taking and
15:20
going out to the Great Lakes and taking out one drop and using it it would you'd
15:25
hardly miss it and since it permeates the whole universe and it continually
15:31
fluctuates as it as as that as the matter and antimatter interact it's not
15:40
like it's a steady lake it's um you see it's a pool the size of the universe so
15:45
you'd never for what we've used before you never even miss it the only thing this one guy claimed that happened is if
15:52
you bottle it and move it to another location and release it he sounded
16:00
exactly like mr. Spock he said you create a tear in the in the time time
16:07
domain of the of local space and actually caused a problem which he
16:13
claims he did and he will never do it again which is bottle and move it the other part is that you're knock it
16:19
doesn't work on conventional jet engines one has to create an actual zero point
16:25
energy engine to do that this one guy in Ann Arbor Mich Michigan had one running in his basement
16:30
not connected to any power source whatsoever sitting in the middle of a table and it had been running for a year
The following is a description of the global body sensing exercise.
The aim is to obtain a more complete experience of oneself through a gradually more complete sensation of the physical body included in the attention. It is an exercise in expanding the attention, but what is specified here is not fixed and rigid. There is nothing unique about the bodily parts that are mentioned, nor the order in which they are included in the attention. We may want to experiment, including more or less detail as we proceed to increase the awareness of our physical presence. It is at the same time an exercise in the relaxation of muscular tension to conserve energy.
One of the things we shall almost certainly notice is that while proceeding through this exercise we "disappear." Our attention is taken by one turning thought or another, and it is only seconds or even minutes later that we realize we have not completed the establishment of a global awareness of our physical presence. In this event, it is sometimes better to just recapitulate the whole exercise, but we may discover that we need not go through it in as much detail up to the point where we "disappeared."
I begin this exercise by sensing the very top of my head, not thinking about it, but actually making the effort to have a sensation of it. Although a thought is required at the outset, the actual experience is one of physical sensation. As I go through the subsequent steps, I try to include each new sensation in the expanding attention, holding them in the attention.
I next include the sensation of my forehead with special notice to its center. This is the location of the "third eye." In The Secret Doctrine, earlier humanity is described as having a functioning third eye, the eye of intuition. For most of us as we are now, it is only vestigial in the pineal gland, but careful observation of this area reveals a vibratory sensation that we are able to include in the attention. At the same time I recognize that thoughts, such as speculation on something like the "third eye" while in the midst of the exercise, are a diversion of the attention into identification with the thought. So, I simply lay the thought aside and continue the sensing.
I then include the sensation of the back of my head. At this point I have a more complete experience of my upper head.
I now move my attention to my eyebrows and then to my eye sockets. I sense my eyes in their sockets. I may wish to move them to the left, to the right, up, down, center, behind the closed lids. This helps me to be more aware of my eyes. I sense my eyelids as they touch each other. I inhale deeply through my nostrils several times, noticing the sensation of the inhalation of air into my organism and its subsequent exhalation. I do not interfere with the breathing. I simply observe and sense it.
I sense my ears on each side of my head, and I see that it is possible to have a sensation of them, sensing even each earlobe in addition to the upper ear.
I sense my cheeks. I may notice muscular tensions here in the small muscles of the face or, indeed, at many other places in the body as I proceed with the exercise. Wherever I encounter muscular tension, I simply, as best I can, intentionally relax those muscles. Relaxation of muscles as I proceed is a critical part of this exercise, because tensed muscles use up energy, energy which I wish to contain. My body must be relaxed if I am to transcend it. (Note: Many people find it easier to relax muscles after first tensing them as hard as they can.)
I notice the various parts of the mouth and include them in my attention: the sensation of my lips touching together, my tongue touching against my teeth and/or my palate, the moisture of the saliva in my mouth.
I sense my chin and jawbone. Here again, I may especially notice muscular tension, and if so, I simply try intentionally to relax those muscles.
At this point I realize that I have a more complete experience of my entire head. It has shape and it has weight as it rests on my neck, and I notice these things also.
I continue down the body, sensing my neck, especially its center front where I may also notice a slight vibration. This is the so-called throat chakra, described in the Hindu chakra system as one of the seven energy centers of the body, just as is the third-eye energy center mentioned already. The vibrations of energy are real and although I may notice them, I try not to go off into identification with thoughts about chakras or energy centers. I simply observe, sensing whatever there is to be sensed. I sense the connection of the neck to the torso, again noticing the entire weight of the head and neck resting on the torso.
I continue further, down the left side of the body, including more and more in my attention. I could just as well have chosen to go down the right side of the body first. I may especially notice muscular tension in the shoulders and upper back, and I simply try to relax those muscles. I sense my left shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, and left hand with all its parts. I sense my thumb, forefinger, middle finger, fourth finger, little finger. I may notice moisture in the palm of my hand and the sensation of one hand touching the other.
I sense my left buttock as I pass my attention farther down the left side of the body. I notice the weight of my body on it and perhaps the texture of the cushion below it. I sense my left thigh, knee, calf, ankle, top of the left foot, heel, instep, arch, ball of the left foot, and each of the toes in order, from the big toe to the little toe, as I pass my attention down the left side of my body.
At this point it is clear to me that I have a considerably more inclusive experience of my head, neck and left side of my body than of the right side. I can verify this through my experience.
Now I circle up the right side of the body sensing each toe of the right foot in order, from the little toe to the big toe, then the top of the right foot, the ball of the foot, arch, instep, heel, ankle, calf, knee, thigh, and buttock.
I continue up the right hand, sensing the little finger, fourth finger, middle finger, forefinger, and thumb. Then I sense the palm of the hand, back of the hand, wrist, fore-arm, elbow, upper arm, and right shoulder. If I have been sitting with my hands together, I notice again the sensation of the one hand touching the other.
I continue to check for muscular tensions and when I notice them, I try intentionally to relax those muscles.
There is, at this time, a more complete global experience of myself. However, I wish also to more fully include the torso in this experience, so I intentionally breathe deeply, again noticing the inhalation and exhalation, and especially experiencing the movement of the diaphragm as my chest expands and contracts. I sense the air as it passes through my nostrils and into my lungs as I inhale and exhale. If I am a person who has learned to breathe abdominally, I also sense the movement within my abdomen as it contracts and expands.
I pass my attention down the torso from upper to lower, continuing to include more and more in the attention, sensing the solar plexus, the lower abdomen, the genitalia. I may then also wish to pass my attention from lower to upper, paralleling the spine and sensing each part of the torso in the reverse direction. I may notice a flow of vibratory energy coursing through the body rising from the area of the genitalia. I may possibly notice an additional flow of energy that seems to descend through the body from the head. Whatever I notice I simply include in my attention. All the while I am still holding the global experience of my physical presence including all my limbs, in my attention. (Students of hatha yoga may recognize the vibratory flow as the awakening of kundalini, the vibratory force usually paralleling the spine. Sometimes this is called kundalini yoga. Students of tao may understand what appears as a circular vibratory movement as the so-called “microcosmic orbit.')
Now, here I am in this place, in this moment, relaxed with this more complete experience of myself. Included in my attention is the global sensation of my physical presence, the awareness of certain external impressions that continue to come in to the attention, the experience of vibratory energy, and even thoughts and emotions that I watch detachedly. I am here now! I hold still in this state of expanded and pure attention, mind quieted, and constructively imagined or actually experienced energy coursing through the body. I am in this state and aware of being aware of myself. I am self-conscious with not even a fleeting thought in my attention.
Physical discomfort often sets a limit to the period of undisturbed meditation. We may, therefore, have to learn to change our position occasionally (not fidgeting) without disturbing the state of mind. This, incidentally, is one of the side benefits of getting accustomed to physical work, with all the aches and pains that must be tolerated and lived with.Thus, we learn to put up with a fair degree of discomfort before feeling forced to move. When the mind truly withdraws, the body and its discomforts are forgotten.
Another obstacle to long meditation, is the sheer habit of sleeping a fixed number of hours, with the accompanying belief that we must have our full sleep in order to be bright and alert in the competitive world. The actual need of sleep for an individual on the Fourth Way is about 4−5 hours,23 with possibly an odd 10 minutes (or longer if possible) of withdrawal into meditation occasionally during the day, in addition to the morning meditation period. Recent medical studies insist that most human beings do not get enough sleep. Many practitioners of the Work find the opposite to be true. The point is that the state of true meditation is as restful as sleep and often more so. What we are really fighting is not the body's demands for rest, but the fixed mental belief that those demands must be satisfied.
Supporting that "belief" is the conscious or subconscious knowledge that sleep is an escape. Meditation is not an escape.
Meditation exercises such as this can temporarily still the mind, but we remain, as it were, in the midst of a stilled mental process that can and does start again at any moment. Adequate stillness usually requires a period of prolonged sitting.
If we hold quiet, the next thing to look for is a slight dissociation from the thinking process, which makes it relatively easy to stay in this quiet state. It is peaceful but eventually unsatisfying. This state can deepen into the state where the body passes into sleep and we are awake within it. Deliberately invoking sleep, while keeping in a position that discourages sleep, is an aid in this process. It also points to the fact that this movement is not, initially, anything that we can achieve by intention. In practice, we have to hold in the quiet state and let ourselves get tired.
After sitting quietly for a sufficiently long period, there will occur a "shift" from the intense awareness of the body, to a total detachment from it. Here we begin to "back out," using the attention to move further and further back in our awareness from the detached body.
At this moment, through the above suggested techniques or something similar, the chain of thought will have exhausted itself, and a kind of vacuity exists before the next chain of thought begins. In this critical moment, an emotional yearning (not a thought) for self-transcendence may be set up. This moment in between chains of thought does not seem to be in time, even though it is measurable in time, because the potential experience is of a different order. This has an emotional component but it is without thought. To pass beyond into the unitive vision requires:
1. Prolonged effort. 2. Aspiration. 3. The help of maximized energy garnered through transmutation and conservation
4. Grace, or what appears as grace, because we have no direct control over it.
Persistent perseverance without actual expectation of this "grace," which sometimes is called "help from above," is a sort of indirect control.
This effort is like leaning with our back to a door.
We hold steady, steady! Eventually, the door will open of its own accord and we'll "fall" through. It is a falling through the "barrier" to the real world, free of all fear and desire. There will be a moment of unconsciousness, but then one becomes conscious in a different state. It is like falling to sleep except that in falling to sleep you just go unconscious and stay that way. Here, after the moment of unconsciousness, one is conscious of standing in the bigger self, of seeing things from a more detached perspective, the perspective of the unitive vision. Passing through the "barrier" can be an ecstatic experience, but it does not necessarily happen to all people as some sort of dramatic thing. Some people do just ease into it.
The unitive experience or unitive vision is the ultimate objective of meditation. But the different terms used to describe it: the "real world," "objective consciousness," "enlightenment," all lack specificity in helping us to understand just what it is. It has been said that the unitive experience cannot be described in words, although numerous people have attempted a description. Thomas Merton, the Christian mystic, was one of many people who have tried to describe the ecstasy of his awakening into the unitive vision. His description of it is representative:
We enter a region which we had never even suspected, and yet it is this new world which seems familiar and obvious. The old world of our senses is now the one that seems to us strange, remote and unbelievable ...
A door opens in the center of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact ...
You seem to be the same person and you are the same person that you have always been: in fact you are more yourself than you have ever been before. You have only just begun to exist. You feel as if you were at last fully born. All that went before was a mistake, a fumbling preparation for birth. Now you have come out into your element. And yet now you have become nothing. You have sunk to the center of your own poverty, and there you have felt the doors fly open into infinite freedom, into a wealth which is perfect because none of it is yours and yet it all belongs to you. And now you are free to go in and out of infinity ... And you, while you are free to come and go, yet as soon as you attempt to make words or thoughts about it you are excluded − you go back into your exterior in order to talk.
The "breathless contact" written of by Merton is that which takes place in the vacuity between two chains of thought. The region he describes is not in the world of the senses and, therefore, does not seem to the meditator to be experienced in passing time.
Once we have had the experience of breaking through, we will know that the experience has been had. It will then not necessarily be repeatable at will, but the direction in which to go will be known, and continuing efforts will eventually bring about repeated access. Having had the experience, we will want to watch, observe, stick at it, even push. We are bound to make "mistakes," but we cannot find the right track without trying out a few wrong ones.
We need to remember, if we get stuck with nothing happening, it is likely to be because we think we ourself can do it, the ordinary mundane "I," whereas that "I" can only serve the higher being that does the thing. Therefore, we may have to go on sitting and watching for longer than we need to at first.We cannot make something happen. We simply make ourselves available for the experience.
This step of "passing beyond" is that for which earlier work should prepare us for untermed periods of sitting. Although we may be able to arrive at a sufficient quietude after about 20 minutes of sitting, we need to allow sufficient time after that, during which we make ourselves available to further experience. It is best not to set up a predetermined time limit.
It must be remembered that the sort of instruction being given here is for people who have practiced long enough to have formed a degree of self-consciousness through the preliminary exercises. Only then is there something to stay awake when the barrier is passed.
It is best if the thing that we are seeking can be understood in more subtle terms, so that the attention can be turned in the right direction, and some sort of "active imagination" can be put to practical use. But for this to work, there has to be full acceptance of the reality of subtle energies. "Active imagination" cannot work if it is thought to be mere imagination.
Once we have learned to transcend the barrier, teaching of a higher order can be received. This does not necessarily mean that there will be visions of a wise sage propounding great wisdom. Often, teaching is received simply as insight that appears
to come from, we know not where, from the very center of our being. At the same time, images received in the deep meditative state, as distinguished from turning thoughts or imaginative reveries, should be carefully noted for the purpose of familiarization, before they are set aside.
We should realize that facility in meditative practice is ordinarily attainable only with long experience. So we need not be discouraged at any apparent lack of success, and we must remember that our work is to provide the conditions for a different experience, not to presume that we can generate the experience itself.
Meditation must be practiced every day at least once each day, preferably upon arising. It is a daily reminder to function in self-consciousness as we proceed through our day. Its quietude provides us the best conditions to experience the dividing of attention.
Dividing of the attention is necessary to commence the separation of the real self from the personality. Remember Gurdjieff's dictum: "As long as a man (or woman) does not separate himself from himself he can achieve nothing and no one can help him." During this next week, let us take it as an exercise that every day we will go somewhere in our home and sit quietly using the meditative techniques that have been suggested here or something similar. It is important that this morning sitting become a primary and regular part of our day, something that we will not want to skip.
Meditation may be the one essential practice, without which nothing of significance will happen.
But we need to caution ourselves that more is required of us than just sitting in silence once or twice each day.
The requirements of total self-dedication cannot be met by an hour or two's practice. One cannot be totally "given" at some times of the day and following one's own selfish interests at other times. The attempt has to be made to bring the totality of one's nature into harmony with one's perceptions of the nature and source of being.
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