War Games

Intelligence watchers are up in arms over Petraeus's nomination to head the CIA:

From this morning's Washington Post article: "Gen. David H. Petraeus has served as commander in two wars launched by the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. If confirmed as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Petraeus would effectively take command of a third -- in Pakistan."

That assessment seems a bit hyperbolic but I can't deny that the Pentagon has been conducting a determined encroachment into the Intelligence arena for the past decade. Unfortunately, judging from the reports of returning officers, even when the CIA's paramilitary teams were blessed with some Pentagonian/Department of Defense acronym and sent out into the field, they were not always well-received by Service Special forces at the front lines..

I don't think  that putting the good general into a bureaucrat's job is the right fix for this type of operational turf war. But more importantly, if Petraeus's nomination is approved then who shall have the job of saying no to Caesar?

Does NSA Document Verify ET Existence?

From The Anomalist, which also has embedded links to the referenced material:

Online radio host Kevin W. Smith of The Kevin Smith Show believes he has located a document with a background indicating it was omitted from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, intentionally, by the National Security Agency (NSA), one of the United States' most secret organizations, if not the most secret such organization of all. Did NSA cryptologists decode 29 messages "from outer space"? According to Smith, "Apparently, these messages had actually been received via the Sputnik satellite, but no one had any idea how to decode them at the time." 

But as my friends over there so intelligently ask, 

And, since the Sputnik venture was a Cold War project of the Soviet Union, why would we think the messages had anything to do with contact from an alien race and not code concocted by the Soviet Union?

Premium Distribution, update report

As I feared, TGM has been bounced out of the Smashwords premium catalog because the footnote format did not transfer to all file types. Html coding is required. grrr.

I TOLD you so!

If Townsend were alive today, he might be tempted to say I told you so. Not that he would...that's not his style. So let me say it for him: "Told you so, told you so. neener neener."

(PhysOrg.com) -- A dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.

The researchers found a way to make an “optical battery,” said Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics. In the process, they overturned a century-old tenet of physics....


Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues found is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect.

Waiting on Premium Distribution

The Smashwords ebook has been sent for the human vetting that determines whether or not the file meets the standards of the BIG distribution catalogs. The single largest technical hurdle has been in finding a workable way of presenting footnotes within the available file formats. If I have succeeded the book should pass through this last stage easily and any reported problems will be ones I can fix.

If not, well, then we will have to call upon a representative of the world's newest occupation: a professional book coder. I'm collecting names, just in case.

Who was Thomas Townsend Brown?

A scientist, yes. 

That would  have been his most instantaneous response to the question. He had a prodigious capacity for wonder and and equally prodigious ability to  imagine and envision the physical forces at work at the subatomic level. 

His career  path began with the US Navy and then continued with the CIA's Section D, the Signals Intelligence group which preceded the founding of both the NSA and the NRO.*  I believe that his work for them brought forth a plethora of techniques for every stealthy thing from fancy eavesdropping to hiding in plain sight. His chosen occupation was  hard on his wife and family but he was invaluable as an Operative-at-Large for the U.S intelligence community.  

The scope of his accomplishments may never be known, but some have placed the impact of his still-classified work on a level of importance with the discovery of fire.

I don't know if anyone will ever be able to substantiate that claim. After all, but for the publication of the Philadelphia Experiment, he might have slipped through history unnoticed--except by the rare electroculture gardener. ; )  All records of his "official"activities after 1942 have been well "weeded" from the official records. 

However, after observing the unusual level of support and resources put forth toward recovering his story, I can see that he was a man who inspired great admiration and devotion among those who worked with him.  And, though he himself would shun the public recognition, those he mentored are determined that he will not go unremembered. I find that kind of  allegiance says quite a bit about who Townsend Brown was in the short time he walked the earth. 

ETA on Feb 2, 2012
*Can I prove this? No, of course not. I can only say that my conclusions are based upon what I know of his career, events and places occurring in parallel with the advances in surveillance technology I find a pattern that makes great sense to me.