By request: What are American satellites capable of?

In the radio spectrum, American satellites are able to lock on to the oscillator in a digital watch from outer space. This is, however, only possible if the watch is not in a city, where there is a lot of interference. The watch would have to be worn by a survivalist way out in the back country. The NSA has spy satellites with dishes over 200 feet across, which are unfolded when the satellite reaches orbit. This is completely possible, because very thin mesh can be used in outer space, where no support structure is needed to keep the dish in the correct shape. Such satellites can lock on to any electronic device under the correct conditions. As far as outside the NSA? All I can go on is press releases. And back in 1987 there was an article published by the St Paul Pioneer Press that had an image from an American spy satellite that clearly showed the headlines in a newspaper being read by a Russian on the sidewalk. So, that is quite perfect for the spy state.
Obviously this would also need good conditions, the atmosphere is an obstacle, but there is no doubt they can see you from space. I saw an unconfirmed picture from an "American spy satellite" in 2008 that had artistic photographic quality from outer space. It was zoomed in on an Arab from above, and the colors and detail it captured were surreal. It would have, at that time, taken a Canon 5D to bag such a beautiful shot from even 100 feet away. The perspective of the shot strongly indicated that it was not a 5D that took it.
You do not need "beautiful" to track and kill someone.
High quality gigapixel imagers have existed for almost a decade now. How good would such an imager do if it was only 300 miles up and looking through a 20,000X optical zoom? Such lenses are easy when the military pays for them and there are no structural barriers to long focal lengths in outer space.
The problem with photographic spy satellites is limited resources. One satellite cannot get a clear picture of a fisherman on lake superior at the same time it gets a clear picture of a cherry picker on the shores of Lake Michigan, they have to be planning ahead to get a shot and are still only effective for military purposes, such as getting the details on a military installation or the position of a ship. Tracking moving people who are pre set targets in real time is still practically impossible. That is what drones are for.
March 8 2015   http://jimstonefreelance.com/index.html

MORE MYSTIFICATION REGARDING MALAYSIA ARE FLIGHT 370    ~ some~thin "funny" is go~in ON here ???

Posted on August 16, 2015 by Joseph P. Farrell • http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/08/more-mystification-regarding-malaysia-are-flight-370/

The last couple of weeks have seen yet more interest in the mystery of Malaysia Air flight 370, and its still strange disappearance, with the discovery of allaged wreckage on the French island of Reunion. Well, now there is more debris washing up in the Maldives, northeast of Reunion island(this article courtesy of Ms. B.H):
Has MH370 debris washed up in the Maldives? Investigators examine items found where locals say they 'saw a low-flying jet' on the day the plane vanished
But... if you're reading closely, you'll have noticed a potential problem:

A photograph of one of the large pieces of metal found near the Banyan Tree resort on Vabbinfaru island bears a striking resemblance to the barnacle-covered wing part that washed up on Reunion island in July, a distance of 2,000 miles from the Maldives.

Maldives resident Mohamed Wafir, who posted the original photographs to Facebook, claimed that they were found on May 31.
(Emphasis added)

Now, in today's internet age, the fact that the Maldives debris was apparently known as early as the end of May, and is just now making the mainstream media, raises my suspicion meter into the red zone once again, for it prompts the obvious question, why is this only coming out now? My high octane suspicion and speculation remains what it was when the Reunion debris was reported: someone does not want the MH 370 story to go away, for whatever reason.

As the Daily Mail article also notes, there were apparently eyewitnesses in the Maldives who reported a low flying aircrat with markings similar to Malaysia air flying over their island the day of the flight's disappearance:

Islanders on a remote Maldives atoll have been insisting for months that they saw a large jet with the red stripe of Malaysia Airlines jets, flying low overhead on the morning MH370 lost contact - a phenomenon they had not witnessed before.

But their reports were dismissed by their own government as attention turned to a search area some 2,000 miles south west of Australia.

The recovery of a wing flap bearing a maintenance code number that matches Boeing 777 aircraft has led to increasing excitement that the first clue has been found indicating that the missing jet had crashed into the Indian Ocean and not in the Gulf of Thailand or the Bay of Bengal.

Maldive islanders have claimed that they of saw a low-flying aircraft head away from them in a south-westerly direction - towards Mauritius and La Reunion.

Ocean currents swirling in an anticlockwise direction, experts agreed, could have carried any debris from an aircraft crashing in the Maldives to the coast of La Reunion, where the wing part was found

All of this raises yet another question, namely, why was the crash site off Australia promoted in the first place, if there was significant indication, as there now appears to be, of a catastrophic even much rather away, near the Maldives?

As I suggested when the Reunion debris story first surfaced, it appears that someone very definitely does not want the story to go away, and the question now becomes: why? A partial answer may be implicated in the varioous conspiracy theories surrounding the flight, which the Daily Mail partially enumerates:

1. the pilot hijacked his own plane;
2. the co-pilot hijacked the plane;
3. Vladimir Putin ordered the plane hijacked and flown to Baikonur cosmodrome;
4. it was hijacked for a potential suicide attack on Chinese Navy ships in the region;
5. the flight made a water born landing (no real conspiracy theory here);
6. the USA shot the flight down fearing a terrorist attack on Diego Garcia.

While the Daily Mail points out the obvious flaws in these theories,I'd like to add that my own iniitial observations on the late Ms. George Ann Hughes' The Byte Show pointed out that the various theories like this would have been exposed by the other players in the story: if China suspected some sort of operation against it, particularly by the USA, it would have stated such; similarly, if the USA had suspected terrorist plots againist Diego Garcia, it would have had other means of averting the flight than shooting it down; and most importantly, if it had suspected Mr. Putin as having ordered the diversion to Kazakstan, the USA would have been shouting this from the rooftops.
So with the apparent discovery of more wreckage that could be from flight 370, we are chin to chin with the whole mystery once again, and now, this mystery must be plausibly explained. And yet, no one is stepping forward, in the light of this new evidence, to investigate the story.
And that may be what is behind the debris: the story now will not go away, and a narrative is going to have to be discovered from the evidence, or created in spite of it. And in either case, those preparing it know that it will be picked over by researchers.
Between you, me, and the doorpost(as my mother used to say), I suspect that once any narrative is agreed upon, that the mystery is only going to be enhanced. Why do I say this? Well, again, between you, me, and the doorpost, if one looks at the pictures thus far released of the debris, the debris does not seem to show evidence of sheer stresses such as one would expect of crash landings(unless there are pictures I have not seen), nor (as yet) any signs of shootdown. And that again, raises all sorts of question marks.
And, as if to emphasize those question marks, Malaysia is denying that the Maldives debris is from flight 370, while it affirms the Reunion debris is(our thanks to Mr. T.M. for sharing this article):
Malaysia says most of the debris found in Maldives not from plane; unclear if all examined
You'll note, that while the Maldives had eyewitnesses to a low-flying aircraft, Malaysia insists the Maldives wreckage is not from flight 370, but insists that the Reunion debris is from 370, while France has after two weeks yet to make a determination.
Looks like we might have to wait a bit for that "agreed upon narrative" folks. With all the geopolitical actors on the stage, if any one of them suspected the foul play of another as being involved, there would seem to be a curious silence of mutual denunciations in the media. And perhaps that means my "extraordinary disappearance theory" may not yet have "extraordinarily disappeared." Time will tell.

Human head transplants: are we close to making them a reality? 2015-08-14 http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=34059
By Darren Ó hAilín | independent.co.uk
Even if we figure out how to fuse spines and restore connectivity, we still don’t know whether the brain can rewire itself to control a new body, without the body’s immune system attacking it, argues neuroscientist Darren Ó hAilín

So when Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero first announced his intention to perform the first ever human “head transplant” by December 2017 – part of his “head anastomosis venture” or HEAVEN project – science fiction seemed to inch a little closer to science fact. Canavero’s idea involves a 36-hour surgery during which the head of a patient suffering from a debilitating disease would be fused at the spinal cord to a brain dead donor with an otherwise healthy body.

Despite scientists and surgeons voicing some serious doubts that such a massive undertaking would be successful, Canavero is adamant that the technology now exists – by employing his novel GEMINI protocol, he argues, the likelihood of success is around 90%.

But just how well do his claims stand to scientific scrutiny? Below are just three of the many important issues that haven’t been convincingly addressed.


Fundamental principles

First of all, let’s look at how the surgery would be performed. The head of the patient and spinal cord of the donor body would be cooled below 20°C. This would give the surgical teams less than an hour to simultaneously remove both heads at the neck, transfer the head of the patient to the donor body, and reconnect the spine and blood vessels before nervous system cells begin to decay. The spines would be held together and stabilised, and a specialised compound known as polyethylene glycol (PEG) would be used to connect the bundles running through the spinal cords. After all the blood vessels, neck muscles and connective tissue are sewn up, the patient would be placed in a chemically induced coma for three to four weeks to allow the connections to seal and recover.

One of the fundamental principles behind this procedure is that severed spinal cords possess the ability to reconnect, but that spinal injuries smash up the millions of connections beyond repair. Canavero argues that by slicing through the spine with an extremely sharp knife, the mostly intact fibres could reconnect with the help of the PEG glue and electrical stimulation. He illustrated this concept at a TEDx talk this year, where he compared a banana squashed at the centre with one finely sliced with a sharp knife.

Serious flaws in Canavero’s proposal include the failure of previous animal models or the implausibility of keeping the head alive during the procedure. Canavero, however, is not only convinced that the head could be connected, but that it could gain full control of the body. To understand whether his conviction is warranted, we should look at the neuroscience behind his arguments.


Glial scars: the Gandalf between bridges

Neurons in the brain sprout tails known as axons, which travel through the spinal cord to send and receive signals to and from the body. In a spinal cord injury, these axons are severed, preventing the signals from reaching their target. To some extent, Canavero is correct that the spine is equipped with the tools to repair axons, but these connections are actively blocked by the almost immediate formation of glial scars.

Glial scars are clusters of immune cells that flock to the site of injury when the spinal cord is damaged. These scars patch up holes in the axons and protect against further injury, but they also release chemicals that stop the two ends from fusing. Canavero’s GEMINI protocol makes no mention of glial scars, which would likely prove to be a fatal hindrance to his procedure.


Fixing a spine needs more than glue

If we ignore the glial scar problem, the next question is whether using polyethylene glycol to fuse the spinal cords would actually work. PEG has indeed been shown to promote axon repair to some extent, but most of these experiments were performed on cells isolated in a lab as opposed to in the body. Some promising results have, however, been shown in recent animal models. One group used PEG to treat rats with fully severed spinal cords and found that some axons did reconnect. They also restored some movement, with some rats gaining minor control of their hind legs.

 Frankenstein, Boris Karloff and Colin Clive, 1931 No doubt, these findings offer some important implications for treating spinal cord injuries, but when considering how this could be applied to a head transplant, the devil is in the detail. Only the physical control of the body of the rats was tested, which means that we’re still unsure as to whether they regained sensation in their lower bodies. The PEG treatment also offered only modest improvement in function and repair of cells in the spine. Most importantly, though, the rats’ spines were disconnected at the thoracic level TH8/9. This is a region about half way down the spine, which is low enough to preserve the most important bodily functions.

In Canavero’s procedure, the spine would be cut at the cervical region where axons carry signals involved in functions that keep the body alive. Unsuccessful fusion of these axons would leave a patient paralysed and breathing with a machine. Canavero claims in his proposal that a research group in China has already successfully carried out a similar operation in mice. This is partially true, in that 18 out of 80 mice operated on survived for three hours after being taken off a ventilator. Importantly, there was also no spinal fusion with these mice and the brain stem of the donor bodies were kept intact. As the brainstem controls vital functions including breathing, the mouse heads were essentially stitched onto a paralysed incubator.


Massive hurdles

Queen Mombi head-swapping in Return to Oz Although Canavero’s proposal is an exciting idea, the research simply doesn’t support his claim that we now have the technology to pull it off. However, significant advances are being made in the way treating spinal cord injuries through stem cell therapy or forming bridges over glial scars. A more robust and stable development of this technology would be an important step in the spinal cord injury treatment and a possible first step towards realising Canavero’s vision.

We still have a long way to go, however, before we can start swapping our bodies. Even after we figure out how to fuse spines and restore connectivity, we still don’t know whether the brain can rewire itself to control a new body. We know from studies into hand transplants, which are several magnitudes less complex, that function can be restored to some degree, but even this varies in success with our current technology. More worryingly, though, episodes of the immune system attacking the transplanted hand are extremely common. This could be a catastrophic event following a head transplant, as the donor body’s immune system could attack the head.

To convince neuroscientists that this procedure could work, more compelling evidence is needed. In Canavero’s own paper he argues that a preliminary experiment would need to be performed on a primate model. Whether or not this would even be ethical given our current understanding would be another major question. For Canavero’s ideal to be realised, science has some massive hurdles to jump. Before we move onto humans, we should start with fixing the banana.

Source: independent.co.uk