Read: Morgellons – A Hidden Epidemic or Mass Hysteria?

Optical image of what sufferers are adamant are morgellons fibres in skin samples – are they made up of alien ­matter, or are ­everyday materials the more likely explanation? Photograph: Vitaly Citovsky/Suny at Stony Brook

I’m not sure which would be weirder –  Morgellons being an actual disease or 12,000 people sharing the same psychosomatic symptoms. Though it wouldn’t be the first time the power of suggestion suspended reason in humans. Read a list of 10 bizarre cases of mass hysteria here

According to The Gaurdian (published May 7, 2011):

It all started in August 2007, on a family holiday in New England. Paul had been watching Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix with his wife and two sons, and he had started to itch. His legs, his arms, his torso – it was everywhere. It must be fleas in the seat, he decided.

But the 55-year-old IT executive from Birmingham has been itching ever since, and the mystery of what is wrong with him has only deepened. When Paul rubbed his fingertips over the pimples that dotted his skin, he felt spines. Weird, alien things, like splinters. Then, in 2008, his wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when the cotton swab she was using gathered a curious blue-black haze from his skin. Paul went out, bought a £40 microscope and examined the cotton. What were those curling, coloured fibres? He Googled the words: “Fibres. Itch. Sting. Skin.” And there was his answer. It must be: all the symptoms fitted. He had a new disease called morgellons. The fibres were the product of mysterious creatures that burrow and breed in the body. As he read on, he had no idea that morgellons would turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.

Morgellons was named in 2001 by an American called Mary Leitao, whose son complained of sores around his mouth and the sensation of “bugs”. Examining him with a toy microscope, Leitao found him to be covered in unexplained red, blue, black and white fibres. Since then, workers at her Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by more than 12,000 affected families.Campaign group the Charles E Holman Foundation states there are sufferers in “every continent except Antarctica”. Thousands have written to Congress demanding action. In response, more than 40 senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the Centres For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) to investigate; in 2006, it formed a special taskforce, setting aside $1m to study the condition. Sufferers include folk singer Joni Mitchell, who has complained of “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space… Fibres in a variety of colours protrude out of my skin: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer – a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year…”

Read the full article here

Read: Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone

A stone tablet in Aneyoshi, Japan warns residents not to build homes below it. Hundreds of these so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan.

Lesson: In the words of poet/philosopher George Santayana, ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

According to NY Times:

The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: “Do not build your homes below this point!”

Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone.

“They knew the horrors of tsunamis, so they erected that stone to warn us,” said Tamishige Kimura, 64, the village leader of Aneyoshi.

Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation. But modern Japan, confident that advanced technology and higher seawalls would protect vulnerable areas, came to forget or ignore these ancient warnings, dooming it to repeat bitter experiences when the recent tsunami struck.

“The tsunami stones are warnings across generations, telling descendants to avoid the same suffering of their ancestors,” said Itoko Kitahara, a specialist in the history of natural disasters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. “Some places heeded these lessons of the past, but many didn’t.”

Read the full article here

Read: The 18 Most Suppressed Inventions Ever

Nikolai Tesla, presumably trying to figure out how it all went so wrong

Throughout history there have been countless attempts to discourage new technologies only to protect other people’s self-interests. From Gawker’s list of the 18 most suppressed technologies here are two we felt stood out both because of their far-reaching implications and the absurdity that surrounded their suppression.

#4: Nikolai Tesla’s Dream of Free Energy

Nikola Tesla was more than just the inspiration for a hair metal band, he was also an undisputed genius. In 1899, he figured out a way to bypass fossil-fuel-burning power plants and power lines, proving that “free energy” could be harnessed using ionization in the upper atmosphere to produce electrical vibrations. J.P. Morgan, who had been funding Tesla’s research, had a bit of buyer’s remorse when he realized that free energy for all wasn’t as profitable as, say, actually charging people for every watt of energy use. Morgan then drove another nail in free energy’s coffin by chasing away other investors, ensuring Tesla’s dream would die.

To learn more about Tesla, his life, his work and those who opposed his dream of free energy watch “The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla”, which is actually an episode from a 1998 show that took an in-depth look at topics from de-classified government documents called Phenomenon: The Lost Archives.

#11 Cold Fusion

Billions of dollars have been spent researching how to create energy using controlled “hot fusion,” a risky and unpredictable line of experimentation. Meanwhile, garage scientists and a fringe group of university researchers have been getting closer to harnessing the power of “cold fusion,” which is much more stable and controllable, but far less supported by government and foundation money. In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had made a breakthrough and had observed cold fusion in a glass jar on their lab bench. To say the reaction they received was chilly would be an understatement. CBS’s 60 Minutes described how the resulting backlash from the well-funded hot-fusion crowd sent the researchers underground and overseas, where within a few years their funding dried up, forcing them to drop their pursuit of clean energy.

For more info watch this episode of Phenomenon: The Lost Archives entitled “Heavy Watergate: The War Against Cold Fusion“.

Read the rest Gawker’s list here

Watch: China’s Ghost Cities

According to SBS Dateline (Australian TV):

Vast new cities of apartments and shops are being built across China at a rate of ten a year, but they remain almost completely uninhabited ghost towns.

 It’s all part of the government’s efforts to keep the economy booming, and there are many people who would love to move in, but it’s simply too expensive for most.

Video journalist Adrian Brown wanders through malls of vacant shops, and roads lined with empty apartment buildings… 64 million apartments are said to be empty across the country and one of the few shop owners says he once didn’t sell anything for four or five days.

 So are the efforts to boost the economy going to end up having the opposite effect and creating a financial crisis for China?

News in Notes: April 7, 2011

• A senior Federal Reserve official warned recently that America is going broke as fears grow the Libyan bombardment could cost more than $1 billion. The first day of Operation Odyssey Dawn had a price tag of well over $100 million for the U.S. in missiles alone, according to estimates. More coverage from Reuters and ABC News.

• ‘Libya war could last 30 years‘ says UK Armed Forces minister in an extraordinary admission which sounds terrible but is still more optimistic than NATO’s assessment of a war without end.

• Rebel fighters claimed NATO airstrikes blasted their forces Thursday in another apparent mistake that sharply escalated anger about coordination with the military alliance in efforts to cripple Libyan forces.

• Two former Afghan Mujahedeen and a six-year detainee at Guantanamo Bay are leading the rebel’s military campaign against infiltrators loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Which is confusing because the rebels we’re supporting in Libya are the same Islamic extremists we’ve been trying to eradicate for over a decade.

• How could the situation get any worse in Libya? Queue the CIA. At least one former CIA analyst thinks going to Libya was a poor choice.

• “There’s no business like war business” says author Pepe Escobar in an article for Asia Times.

• The U.S. military is developing software they’re calling “Sock Puppet” that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. Paying bureaucrats to troll around on Facebook sounds like money well spent.

• Repubelicans and Democraps can’t agree on what they disagree on so the government will partially shutdown come Friday. Read about what it means for you here. More coverage here.

• Japan’s ocean radiation hits 7.5 million times legal limit.

• Company whose rig caused the biggest oil spill in U.S. history rewards executives for “best year in safety performance”. Sounds about right…

• Speaking of oil companies, guess who wants to starting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico again? Say it with me…BP.

• NPR explains how offshore tax havens save companies like Google, Pfizer, Microsoft and Facebook billions. For example, GE made $5.1 billion from their operations in the U.S. alone. Guess how much they paid in taxes? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

• A small Maine town is the first to declare food sovereignty. In short, the ordinance allows buyer and seller to enter their own agreement which overrides the regulation of the federal or state government when dealing with transactions involving local foods.

• Banks profit by processing a vast number of homes into foreclosure as quickly as possible.  In some cases, financial institutions paid contract companies who employed an army of “robo-signers” – office workers who forged signatures on mortgage documents that were then used to initiate foreclosures.

• Chinese artist, activist and social critic Ai Weiwei is being detained by the Chinese government for “economic crimes” otherwise known as having the balls to speak out against a repressive regime. Check out Weiwei’s work here.

• Obama is running for President again. Watch a funny parody of Obama’s lame ad here.

• The on-going treatment of Bradley Manning, the former U.S. soldier who allegedly gave Wikileaks’ a trove of information, while being held in prison on 24 charges was called  ‘ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid’ recently by P. J. Crowley, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton who was later fired for that remark.  Currently Manning is being held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in a cell with no natural light, is not a allowed to sleep during the day, has his clothes taken at night and has serious restrictions on his visitation rights.  Sadly 20,000 prisoners across America receive that same treatment everyday.