Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Update: “Tit For Tat” or Tip For Tap

Bannerman’s Castle, in Hudson River, Further Crumbles - NYTimes.com - http://bit.ly/5UDUBX

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Should Full Body Scans Become The Norm At Airports Now? - GaryBaumgarten - Open Salon

Should Full Body Scans Become The Norm At Airports Now? - GaryBaumgarten - Open Salon: "US Customs is a paramilitary organization which I once interviewed for. They asked what would you do if you open your law school friend suitcase and there are 2 marijuana cigarettes in it, knowing that he might never be able to practice law? A few days later one of the racks full of suitcases blew up and they never called me back for that summer job. I was eligible by scoring high on the PACE exam, the Reagan Administration got rid of. Guess the wrong answer was turning her/him in? Bigger fish? This explosive seems just as small, and other places to put it. Will they take the big pocket out of men's briefs now with an executive order? Patience please a bomb-free America comes first. Eunuch shaped charges?"

Friday, December 25, 2009

Hadrians Wall (Newcastle – Wallsend)

I just saw "Sting" on the television talking about where he used to live now the Roman archaeology site. This is a wonderful site should get some sort of award. I think he was pointing out the fourth photo and mentioned it's where he used to live, a tough situation then. Wondering where that hall nearby he was meeting with friends and musicians. Now I get it "Wallsend"! Mum's side an Urquhart, built it to keep us out I guess, or to encourage development, I work in archaeology in the States. Merry Christmas. I was once in place in Nissequogue, NY full of lutes! Friend of his?
Comment on “Photographs of Newcastle” – where the modern railroad was invented.

Bush Intentionally Let Osama bin Laden Escape, Asserts Congressman Hinchey

Comment: We also seem to be arguing over the post-Nuremberg results that decisions by military people or others be made with respect to human conventions. A majority of 9/11 co-conspirators, the US warned about by German intelligence as I remember, acted to attack United States' symbols of military and industrial complexity, and in the case of the Pentagon, that section still being upgraded to be "bulletproof" to which, we might ask why to both? According to the Pentagon, in the first coalition invasion, which I've read we were to be reimbursed for as much as $80 billion, we lost as much as $1.5 billion "on the beach" where war materials were mis-managed (or as little as $750 million) that the new RFID tags might have kept track of, sealed containers of which the info was lost to describe them and the location thereby "worthless" stated while an innovation award was given inside the military industrial complex for its new RFID development, "tags" with descriptions and active GPS locations. Well, at least we can find new ones now!

Condom Design

Back around 1990, I worked with Mr. Crow, a Huey pilot in Vietnam, an underwater archaeologist and DJ in Texas, on the Marathon Battery Site in Cold Spring, NY. He related they had a campaign for condoms down there with a catchy phrase “Put a helmet on that rascal” to promote condom usage. Maybe we should follow suit and just make them plain Army green or camouflage, until the troops come home.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/the-wrap-up-of-user-submitted-condom-covers/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/6808138/Father-Christmas-buried-in-Ireland.html

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Relatives of 9/11 victims asked an appeals court Wednesday to force the city to move tons of Ground Zero deis [sic] from the Staten Island landfill to a proper burial site.

Some of the former formal cemeteries in Manhattan have been moved, some haven't, i.e., recently an improvement was halted in Washington Square Park due to human remains where a large veteran seamen's cemetery is beneath the park. A federal U.S. National Monument has been made out of the former "Negro Burial Ground" from the 18th century, once near the Collect Pond, where water still runs in basements and once used to flood cells in the jail called "The Tombs" a block or two from City Hall Park, where the "first Almshouse" cemetery remains were exposed in 1999, near the surface next to the Horace Greeley statue by construction and archaeologists, whom I worked with. It seems to me, and I've worked in others under the Landmarks Commission's purview, the "Old Soldiers Cemetery" in the Bronx, Moore-Jackson in Queens, AME Zion churchyard in Brooklyn, Dutch Reformed in Bowdoin Park, Dutchess county and Watervliet Shakers in Kettering, Ohio that people should be concerned about how we represent those events and those that have gone before us. A proper design and memorial would express the scale of the tragedy, which has not as far as I know, not been presented, yet golf courses on possible toxic landfill has. It should be a priority, and was, for shortly thereafter, the people who presented us with the Statue of Liberty who presented two suggested memorials they would have built for free in tribute.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1352429#1352429#ixzz0aCGFqjNt
7:52 PM
Dec 18, 2009

Friday, December 18, 2009

Protect the Polar Bear

Dear Mr. Evans,

I am pleased that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated a large area of the Arctic as critical habitat for the polar bear. I strongly support this effort to keep one of our national treasures safe.

As a BSA Explorer I attended "Polar Bear" outings that were too cold or snowed so hard the Boy Scouts were called off, one particularly today at the new National Purple Heart Center in Vail, NY. As an adult, I studied with an archaeologist, who working with volunteers in Labrador, Canada for the Smithsonian, lost one of his students to perhaps the polar bear sighted. A scholarship was started in her name.

However, I was disturbed to learn that the Department of Interior has announced a risky, aggressive drilling plan with Shell Oil, aimed squarely at polar bear habitat. This is unacceptable, and I urge you to do everything necessary to prevent harmful activities such as oil drilling in the polar bear's vulnerable habitat.

Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.

CREDO:

Protect the Polar Bear

The polar bear is in trouble.

Due to climate change and oil drilling, Arctic ice is melting at faster rates. This interrupts the feeding and breeding patterns of polar bears, strands bears on unfamiliar land masses, and even causes some bears to drown. Yet, the Department of Interior just approved a risky, aggressive drilling plan for Shell Oil in key polar bear habitat in the Beaufort Sea.

This was just days before the very same Interior Department announced how important protecting polar bear habitat is by designating a large area of America's Arctic as critical habitat.

If the polar bear is truly going to be protected, the Department of Interior needs to maintain the critical habitat designation and stop rampant, risky and harmful oil expansion.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting public comment until December 28th. Fax them today and urge them to support critical habitat designation and to stop harmful activities such as oil drilling in the polar bear's habitat.

If you also would like to send a fax or just read the petition click here.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Good news, bad news for Paterson - First Read - msnbc.com

tomi190- N.Y. Times

New York needs new bridges, i.e. the Tappan Zee is listed worst in the state by the AAA, and the Peace Bridge to Canada should not be another "edifice complex" to a Governor, as the State Capitol was once referred to under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, later VP under appointed President Ford. For that we need clear responsible legal and fiscal leadership, and cooperation. Divisive politics will never build bridges, only burn them. I hope New Yorkers make the right choices, they are very needed improvements.

Inserted from <http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/12/14/2150938.aspx#comments>

Friday, December 11, 2009

Marriage Act, 1791. Statutes of New Brunswick, 31 Geo. III, c. 5

Marriage Act, 1791. Statutes of New Brunswick, 31 Geo. III, c. 5

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Newsom on San Francisco Gay Marriage - Newsweek 2010

Newsom on San Francisco Gay Marriage - Newsweek 2010
Years ago people had to find places between municipalities and religious "diocese" people that did not post "banns" of marriage, i.e. Scots and Jews. In a sense the setbacks and claims to be fighting "secularism" is a repeat of the medieval values used against those two groups in my opinion by insisting that "gays" cannot marry. The Hippocratic Oath (the long version) makes specific reference to those that take the healers oath to be fair and equal with all their patients?
...
Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.
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Thursday, December 10, 2009

“Tit For Tat” or Tip For Tap

Maybe too many of the federal contracts, a competitor upriver hired by the Confederacy built a "powder mill" 30 miles outside Atlanta, Georgia, from brochures from the Crystal Palace exhibition in London, which burned down. Some historians think the Civil War to have been shortened by a year if General Sherman had found it.

It might have been a little "tit for tat" the foundry workers were from England who were given other identities, i.e., teacher, maid, etc. since they had a law against leaving the country with the knowledge learned in the production of weapons of mass destruction. There was also signed "industrial indenture" there as a surviving document attests, some of the last in the civilized world of indentures. I think Michigan Technological University in their five years or more of fieldwork in the West Point Foundry core has shown that to be true. Reported the first "labor action" in a Federal facility perhaps it was under different circumstances not "private enterprise" in the civil war, became a federal facility.

From 1989-1994 I was in the archeology, EPA, Marathon Battery National Priority Superfund Site, below the former "Bridge Shop" of the Chicago Bridge and Steel Co., burned down in 1912, we recovered a R.P. Parrott "gun platform" on grillage was the prototype or actually "Swamp Angel" used in the incendiary bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina in 1863. The cannon exploded and was obtained by the citizens of Trenton, NJ where it still is.
“The Secret Bowling Alley” Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

“By A Lady From New Orleans, US” – Julia (pseud.)
“Tit for Tat is Sharp Sauce”- -English Proverb.
London:
Clarke and Beeton, 148, Fleet Street 1855

It is thought by people a lot smarter than me, that this book, was written by Marion Southwood.  It is a treatise against the use of children 7 or 8 years old climbing through chimneys to clean them, a very dangerous occupation, under the “chimney sweeps”. In it she also mentions “Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly” (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who once introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, he is said to have remarked, “Here’s the little lady that started the war.” There is some record of Stowe staying on what today is Bannermans Castle on Pollopel Island, I think I read in the older ephemera associated with Cold Spring, NY. The island has recently became a part of New York State Parks, the “castle” ruins from the estate built by a dealer in military surplus, the “Father of the Army-Navy store” after the US Civil War and late 19th century wars.  I think I recall reading that Stowe got the idea of Eliza fleeing across ice-floes from the ice that forms there, West Point and Cold Spring, just down the Hudson River, a very short way, from her time there, as perhaps Jules Verne in 1865, for his first trip to the Moon, from the West Point Foundry, its Moon launch cannon assembled underground in Florida. Marion Southwood would later write:

Beauty and Booty: New Orleans During Federal Occupation
by Marion Southwood
originally published in 1867
paperback; 303 pages
This is an accurate eyewitness account of events in occupied New Orleans written by a true unreconstructed lady of the South. The author paints a very unflattering picture of General Benjamin Butler and shows how he earned his nickname of "The Beast."  (from The Confederate Reprint Company)

Saturday, December 05, 2009

The Secret Bowling Alley

Bowling is probably as old as New York (New Amsterdam) and was played down on "Bowling Green" now a park. It was once I recall outlawed as "10 pins" so it was then played with only 9 and the prohibition revoked. Another story is that thunder heard around the Hudson Valley is the Knickerbockers bowling. More likely the early cannon "proofing" at what became the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, NY which had its offices in Manhattan. Congress authorized its creation shorty after the nation's founding, to be one of its foundries producing cannons for the new US Navy, which later was "born" on the Great Lakes in the War of 1812, particularly at Sackets Harbor, NY on Lake Ontario.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Friday, December 04, 2009

The Secret Bowling Alley

To add to bowling alley locations I have two. Germania Hall, on the Bowery, where during the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, I think, and people peaceably in NYC assembled in various halls, this one recently torn down and was where Kate Mullaney, of Troy, NY, sitting next to Susan B. Anthony was the first women elected to union management, is listed in a city history as a single lane bowling alley. Unfortunately the history of it as a predominately Upstate National Guard unit, perhaps descended from the Revolutionary War and post-war protection of the early government, the first federal assembly in NYC, later known as "Steuben Rifles" may have been overlooked, perhaps for its use in the "draft riots" in the Civil War, one its officer's tried in courts martial. The later guard unit up the street became the Seventh Ave Armory, the only privately built one.

The other bowling alley is in the Wave Hill complex in Riverdale in the Bronx, two Hudson River estates joined, one where Samuel Clemens, Arturo Toscanini, and others lived, lastly the British Embassy compound in the early 1960s. I mapped an inventory of trees in the botanical center and performance place today. The lower level of the "promenade" has an entrance to a single lane bowling alley, said the archaeologist then working in Riverdale Park on the proposed impacts to remove invading species of plants that were severely altering the ecology of the park on the Hudson River.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The Republican Way: Keeping Everything The Way It Is


So I think perhaps when the OMB sued for the "energy meeting" with VP Chaney in the early days of the first Bush term, and then President Bush says they can't have that, without perhaps even knowing what was discussed, the "great decider" did us a dis-service. What if they decided, and to support Mr. Baldwin's assertion, the first former President Bush was a "wildcat driller" after WWII, they basically "don't need no stinking maps" or research, just "drill baby drill" to set up Enron as the fall guy. I was working after 9/11 (during anthrax) at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, and elsewhere on Federal land, Picatinney Arsenal, NJ, West Point Academy, and in the flooded Bridgewater, NJ solution, digging archeology test holes in the Parade Field behind the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers, that they had lost like $17 million in fuel oil at Fort Hamilton, Enron had been their supplier, and had to come up with the funds to cover their energy production. The archeology by the way was to prove or disprove that the previous archeology tests had actually found anything other than fill, nearby also the Robert E. Lee house, who lived there and was a former Commandant of the West Point Academy President Obama spoke at tonight to the Nation. The "Nation" publication has a wonderful open letter to the President that apparently the "dude does not abide by".

The "kicker" to the story is that then President Bush fired the head of the US Army because he sat on the board of Enron, without any "due process" or barely any public interest.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Further:
“I recall the Canadian press, investigating the source of hard drugs in North America, in the "Golden Triangle" in Southeast Asia, implicated people inside the US military, carried on flights by the US Air Force, and received an award for the report. In the Gulf War they also reported the strange occurrence of US ordnance next to one of the burning oil wells set afire in that conflict.
More recently, 1/4 million "ecstasy" pills were intercepted on a US National Air Guard cargo carrier at the Stewart Airport, near Newburgh, NY which recently started commercial flights to Florida, once to be the "fourth" area jetport, connected with high-speed rail, proposed by then Governor Rockefeller to take some of the air traffic from above nearby New York City. Then Senator Hillary Clinton, reviewing the Revolutionary War re-enactors there, reminded the press of the then officers plot, thwarted by General Washington, to make him a king of America. Perhaps why history repeated is often a tragedy?”