Tom Cruise Builds Multi-Million Dollar Bunker 'To Protect Against Attacks By Aliens'

Who cares if this tabloid story is a complete fabrication? What a great headline!

From This Is London :

Hollywood star Tom Cruise is planning to build a bunker at his Colorado home to protect his family in the event of an intergalactic alien attack, according to new reports.

The Mission Impossible actor, who is a dedicated follower of Scientology, is reportedly fearful that deposed galactic ruler 'Xenu' is plotting an evil revenge attack on Earth.

According to American magazine Star, a source said: "Tom is planning to build a US$10 million bunker under his Telluride estate."

"It's a self-contained underground shelter with a high tech air purifying shelter."

The facility is said to have enough room for ten people - including wife Katie Holmes, 17-month-old daughter Suri and his adopted children Isabella, 14, and Connor, 12

A spokesperson for the actor has denied the reports, saying: "This is completely untrue. He is not building on his property at all."

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Presumably Tom is building his 'alien attack bunker' with room enough for the spokesperson.

You can only pray that Cruise gets pissed off enough about this story to sue.

Can't wait for the court case.

Look Up In The Sky...It's Only A Cloud, But It's Beautiful


(image credit: Ulrich Brieger)

Why don't people look up more? It's a question that cloud lovers always wonder.

If you're a cloud lover and you've tried to enthuse on your sky passions to friends or family, most often you will get strange looks, or the fast nod.

Why don't people turn their eyes to the sky and enjoy the show more often? Why do they ignore the cathedrals of clouds that so often unroll above our heads in a sky-wide exhibit of spectacular and jaw-dropping beauty?

We are told that those who stare off into the sky are day dreamers, meaning they are time wasters.

Can't think of a better way to waste some time than to see imagery like this :





There's a glorious selection of spectacular cloud photograph over at Dark Roasted Blend.

Go Here For That

Or, if you want to come into others who share your passion, consider a visit to :

The Cloud Appreciation Society

Where you can find pages like this :

Clouds That Really Do Look Like Things

And yes, they really do.

The 'War On Terror' Becomes The War To Control Your Mind

'Psychotronics' is one of those weird Cold War-era Russian mind control conspiracies. Except it isn't.

There is a growing, multi-billion dollar industry taking root across the world focused singularly on finding ways to 'read' the human mind, from a distance, and, at the same time, to control the mind, to direct it, to influence human behaviour in a non-physical way. Naturally, the United States' involvement in pscyhotronic research is all to do with the 'War on Terror'. They're spending millions on R & D into mind control to stop terrorism. The 'Fight Against Terror' has become the greatest excuse of modern times for breaking through the final wall of human privacy - the right to think whatever you like, free of surveillance, or intrusion.

That right of free thought is now going up in smoke.

It's probably best you read this story for yourself.

Science fiction writer Philip K Dick used to believe in the early 1970s that Russian scientists were possibly bouncing energy beams off satellites to send information directly into his brain. It sounded ridiculous. This story makes PKD's theory sound, well, not so nuts. And that's a disturbing thought. I just hope it's my own :

The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia's capital. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study -- dubbed psychoecology -- that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research.

What's gotten DHS' attention is the institute's work on a system called Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, a software-based mind reader that supposedly tests a subject's involuntary response to subliminal messages.

SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory.

Marketed in North America as SSRM Tek, the technology will soon be tested for airport screening by a U.S. company under contract to the Department of Homeland Security.

"If it's a clean result, the passengers are allowed through," said Rusalkina, during a reporter's visit last year. "If there's something there, that person will need to go through extra checks."

This May, DHS announced plans to award a sole-source contract to conduct the first U.S.-government sponsored testing of SSRM Tek.

Igor Smirnov (was) a controversial Russian scientist whose incredible tales of mind control attracted frequent press attention before his death several years ago.

Smirnov...is called the father of "psychotronic weapons," the Russian term for mind control weapons. Bearded and confident, Smirnov in the video explains how subliminal sounds could alter a person's behavior. To the untrained ear, the demonstration sounds like squealing pigs.

In the United States, talk of mind control typically evokes visions of tinfoil hats. But the idea of psychotronic weapons enjoys some respectability in Russia. In the late 1990s, Vladimir Lopatin, then a member of the Duma, Russia's parliament, pushed to restrict mind control weapons, a move that was taken seriously in Russia but elicited some curious mentions in the Western press. In an interview in Moscow, Lopatin, who has since left the Duma, cited Smirnov's work as proof that such weaponry is real.

"It's financed and used not only by the medical community, but also by individual and criminal groups," Lopatin said. Terrorists might also get hold of such weapons, he added.

The slow migration of Smirnov's technology to the United States began in 1991, at a KGB-sponsored conference in Moscow intended to market once-secret Soviet technology to the world. Smirnov's claims of mind control piqued the interest of Chris and Janet Morris -- former science-fiction writers turned Pentagon consultants who are now widely credited as founders of the Pentagon's "non-lethal" weapons concept.

Smirnov died in November 2004, leaving the widowed Rusalkina -- his long-time collaborator -- to run the institute.

Despite Smirnov's death, Rusalkina predicts an "arms race" in psychotronic weapons. Such weapons, she asserts, are far more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

She pointed, for example, to a spate of Russian news reports about "zombies" -- innocent people whose memories had been allegedly wiped out by mind control weapons.

The U.S. war on terror and the millions of dollars set aside for homeland security research is offering Smirnov a chance at posthumous respectability in the West.

Smirnov's technology reappeared on the U.S. government's radar screen through Northam Psychotechnologies, a Canadian company that serves as North American distributor for the Psychotechnology Research Institute. About three years ago, Northam Psychotechnologies began seeking out U.S. partners to help it crack the DHS market. For companies claiming innovative technologies, the past few years have provided bountiful opportunities. In fiscal year 2007, DHS allocated $973 million for science and technology and recently announced Project Hostile Intent, which is designed to develop technologies to detect people with malicious intentions.

Larry Orloskie, a spokesman for DHS, declined to comment on the contract announcement. "It has not been awarded yet," he replied in an e-mail.

"It would be premature to discuss any details about the pending contract with DHS and I will be happy to do an interview once the contract is in place," Ioffe, of Northam Psychotechnologies, wrote in an e-mail.

Mark Root, a spokesman for ManTech, deferred questions to DHS, noting, "They are the customer."

Philip K Dick has long been written off as something of a wacko, by the uneducated and unenlightened, for some of the claims he made during the 1970s, in particular that Russian scientists were testing psychotronic weapons on innocent Americans.

Maybe he was speaking the truth, after all.

The 'War on Terror' is morphing into a war to control our minds and thoughts. It doesn't mean 'psychoecology' will actually work, but the Department of Homeland Security is interested enough to be spending money investigating the possibilities. That in itself should be a cause for concern.

Greed, Hangings, Murder, Debauchery : History Doesn't Have To Be Boring

Ian Crofton has put together a fabulous book called History Without The Boring Bits. From what we've seen, it certainly lives up to its name.

Here's a few excerpts from the the book, as published in the UK Independent :

1264

16 August – Henry III of England pardoned one Inetta de Balsham, who had been condemned to death for harbouring thieves. She had been hanged, but reportedly survived after three days swinging on the end of the rope.

1473

Attacking the neighbouring Aztec city of Tlatelolco, the army of Axayacatl of Tenochtitlan was surprised to be met by an army of naked women, who sought to distract their enemies by spraying them with milk from their breasts. However, this ruse did not save Tlatelolco, which was sacked, and many of its people sacrificed.

1919

A 12-year-old black boy called Clayton Bates lost his left leg after it was mangled by a conveyor belt in a cotton mill in his native South Carolina. Undeterred, "Peg Leg" Bates had, by the age of 15, become " the undisputed king of one-legged dancers" (according to the Tap Dance Hall of Fame), bringing new life to such steps as the Suzy Q by exploiting the contrast between the metallic tap of his right shoe and the wooden note of his peg leg. He was still pursuing a successful career in vaudeville in the 1960s, and died in 1998. "Life means do the best with what you've got," he used to say.

1946

The Bournemouth Evening Echo carried the following story: "Mrs Irene Graham of Thorpe Avenue, Boscombe, delighted the audience with her reminiscence of the German prisoner of war who was sent each week to do her garden. He was repatriated at the end of 1945, she recalled. 'He'd always seemed a nice friendly chap, but when the crocuses came up in the middle of our lawn in February 1946, they spelt out Heil Hitler.'"

Go Here For More From History Without The Boring Bits

"The Pornography Of Cruelty" - Cannibal's Home Video Of Slaughter Feast Makes Judge Vomit

You don't need to see the home video shot by 'the Cannibal of Rotenburg' as he encourages his willing victim to mutilate himself. Just reading about it is bad enough.

The video has been described as the "bite-by-bite chronicle of how he amputated, cooked, ate and froze the limbs and organs of a software engineer."

And it gets much much worse. The pathologist, Professor Risse, who examined the remains of the willing victim, describes what he saw in a new book and interviews :

“There was the foot, for example. Meiwes had placed it on a plate, stuck it with a knife and a fork, poured sauce over it and photographed it with the intention of putting the picture on the internet. Then there was the skull, bones, chunks of skeleton and soft organs as well as about 30 sealed packets of meat waiting to be eaten. Other inscriptions were like those you find in a supermarket, you know – mincemeat with sauce.”

It was the home movie that disturbed Professor Risse the most. “A shiver went down my spine, my palms were moist,” he said. “I have been doing this job 20 years, have carried out 5,000 autopsies, seen maybe 30,000 corpses but the cannibal’s film was the most repulsive experience.”

The film was so shocking that one of the judges vomited after she saw it in a closed showing, while the jury was shown only 19 minutes. In one sequence Brandes urges Meiwes to cut off his penis so that they can fry it. At one point, while bleeding heavily, he jokes: “If I’m still alive in the morning, we can eat my balls for breakfast.”

The film shows Brandes on the butcher’s table. It was the pathologist’s task to determine whether he was still alive then. “A decisive question in the trial was whether the victim was still alive when Meiwes applied the final slash to his throat. He was. His heart must have been beating because blood started to bubble strongly out of his throat.”

He added: “The extraordinary thing about this film is that . . . one can follow the suffering and death of the victim step by step. You can see directly how Mr Brandes is responding to the pain of his destruction, you can see when he loses consciousness and how long he clings on to life.”

You couldn't make up something so horrific.

American Senator Sues God : 'The Ultimate Terrorist'


God, the defendant

You can sue anyone for just about anything in the courts of the United States. Or you can sue anything for just about everything.

An American state senator wants to prove that point by suing God for unleashing hell on Earth :

(Senator) Chambers lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Douglas County Court, seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.

The lawsuit admits God goes by all sorts of alias, names, titles and designations and it also recognizes the fact that the defendant is omnipresent.

The lawsuit accuses God "of making and continuing to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons, including constituents of Plaintiff who Plaintiff has the duty to represent."

It says God has caused "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like."

The suit also says God has caused "calamitous catastrophes resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction."

Chambers also says God "has manifested neither compassion nor remorse, proclaiming that defendant will laugh" when calamity comes.

Chambers asks for the court to grant him a summary judgment. He said as an alternative, he wants the judge to set a date for a hearing as expeditiously as possible and enter a permanent injunction enjoining God from engaging in the types of deleterious actions and the making of terroristic threats described in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit makes some very valid points. Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre and killed just under 3000. God, allegedly, either created or allowed the Asian Tsunami of 2005, which killed more than 200,000 people.

Who's the bigger terrorist?

Monkey Loves Pigeon



Sure, nature can be cruel. But it also has moments of transcendent beauty. What is love?

This is :

They're an odd couple in every sense but a monkey and a pigeon have become inseparable at an animal sanctuary in China.

The 12-week-old macaque - who was abandoned by his mother - was close to death when it was rescued on Neilingding Island, in Goangdong Province.

After being taken to an animal hospital his health began to improve but he seemed spiritless - until he developed a friendship with a white pigeon.

The blossoming relationship helped to revive the macaque who has developed a new lease of life, say staff at the sanctuary.

Chihuahua Adopts Baby Squirrels



In the animal world, mothers are mothers, it seems, and it doesn't matter what infant creature needs a feed, and some life-saving warmth, even ones from other species :

At first glance, the scene appears normal: a Chihuahua mother appearing to cuddle with her pups as they nurse. A closer look at the days-old babies reveals they aren't canines, but four tiny squirrels...

A Columbia County family said its dog's maternal instinct kicked in when 10-year-old Mimi laid eyes on the baby squirrels.

Mimi took the motherless squirrels in as if they were her own, making for one mix-and-match family.

Their eyes are still closed, but their tails are a dead giveaway that Mimi's babies are squirrels -- three females and one male.

Derek Varnes, who works for a tree-cutting company, said he found the squirrels' nest last week on a downed limb. "I didn't know what to think. They looked like rats at first," Varnes said. "I wasn't going to leave them. They say after they're out of the nest or the tree, the momma won't mess with them anymore. I wasn't going to let them die."

He gave the squirrels to his fiancee's mother, Jeanette Young."My 10-year-old Chihuahua would come and watch me and start whining and carrying on," Young said. "I thought she was going to eat them. She said that when she eventually put the squirrels down, Mimi started licking them to clean them and then began nursing them. Young said although Mimi's last litter was born four years ago, the dog is still able to make enough milk to keep the baby squirrels full. Mimi doesn't venture far from her new little ones."

"...she seems like it was just meant for her to have them and take care of them," Young said.

She said a veterinarian told her as long Mimi is able to feed the squirrels, the babies would continue to grow and be healthy.

But will the squirrels grow up thinking they're dogs? And how will Mimi be able to follow them up the trees when the natural instinct kicks in?

Dog Blocks Traffic To Stand Guard Over Dead 'Companion' - Future Uncertain

The story of what will happen to a dog found standing guard over the corpse of his dead 'companion', in the middle of a busy road, is riveting the readers of the Rocky Mountain News. Will he find a new home, or will he have to be put down, for being 'un-adoptable'?

A male chow mix lay down in the middle of a busy street Tuesday morning to keep watch over its companion, a female German shepherd mix, after it was hit and killed by a car on Chambers Road near East 52nd Avenue.

The dogs lacked any identifying tags and had been reported running loose together for the past two days, according to Doug Kelley, director of Denver Animal Care & Control.

"When a companion animal is hit, they'll stand vigil. It's sad," Kelley said. "It's kind of uncommon to see it in the middle of the road."

He speculated the two dogs, neither of which had been spayed, had been involved in a "romance."

Denver police were called to the scene just after 6:30 a.m. to help direct traffic until animal control could respond, police said.

Patrolman Bill Tyler said two "good Samaritans" helped out at the scene.

One driver blocked the lane with a car and turned on the vehicle's flashing lights after a couple of cars narrowly missed hitting the chow.

Another person was able to get the surviving dog onto the median between the northbound and southbound lanes of Chambers, Tyler said.

"The chow didn't want me to get anywhere close to the dead dog," Tyler said. "I guess you could say (the dog was upset)."

The male dog wore no collar; the shepherd had a blue nylon collar.

Animal control had received a call about the dogs Monday because they were on the loose in the area, but officers were unable to find them when they responded.

The chow was not happy and was taken back to a local animal shelter.

A few days later, the newspaper supplied an update to the story :

The dog who kept watch over his dead female companion earlier this week began to show improvement in his behavior toward people, making it possible for the animal shelter to work with him today to determine whether he can be adopted.

"He wasn't growling anymore," Doug Kelley, director of Denver Animal Care & Control said today. "He's actually kind of bonded with me."

The department received several phone calls from people offering to adopt the dog, regardless of any issues he has with people. But despite rolling onto his back, taking some treats and letting a stranger hold his leash for a walk today, the dog still wouldn't be able to pass a behavioral test required for adoption.

The chow did make "some very small steps forward now that he's around people," said Ellen Dumm, spokeswoman for the Denver Department of Environmental Health. "We're going to wait for a few days to see if he improves."

It seems unlikely the dog will be put down now. At worst, it may be moved to a shelter where it can live out the rest of its life. But you get the feeling someone will give it a new home.

The Beautiful, But Rare, Pink Dolphin



Spotted and photographed off the coast of Louisiana.

More wonderful pink dolphin photos here.

More on the boto - or rare pink dolphin. They're basically albino dolphins, and they can turn a bright pink colour when excited. Almost as though they are blushing.

Madonna On A Garage Door?



It's been a few months since we've run a post on a mysterious image of Jesus or the Madonna appearing like a vision before incredulous evangelical Americans.

If Jesus and Mary have been making unscheduled appearances across the US of recent, we haven't heard about them.

But we've found another one.

400 or so people who gather in front of a garage door in Pennslyvannia to watch a sunbeam cast a somewhat vague image of Madonna think they are witnessing something special, perhaps even miraculous :

To some, it's an image of the Virgin Mary that has appeared at 6 p.m. each day since Aug. 15 -- the day of the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. To others, it's just a reflection of light from the setting sun.

The crowd in the street grew as 6 p.m. neared -- young and old, children and the elderly, believers and skeptics.

''Yeah, we're waiting for Jesus,'' Evan Ponter, an 11th-grader at Minersville High School, told someone who had called him on his cell phone.

Dozens lined the sidewalk facing the garage where the image is said to appear, others packed balconies and rested on lawn chairs. Hundreds more stood in the street, closing it to traffic while drivers on side streets slowed down to try to figure out was going on.

''There she is!'' shouted Tim Heckman, founder of the Coal Region Ghost Hunters, who's doing his first investigation in Minersville.

He said he detected spikes in electromagnetic fields and energy that spirits use to manifest themselves. He said the coal region is a hot spot of paranormal activity because of the tragedies that befell coal miners decades ago.

''There has to be a reason,'' said Yolanda Demcher of Minersville, who was surprised to see so many young people in the crowd. ''There has to be a reason.''

She speculated that the purpose of the appearance might be to draw young people back to their faith, to church and to prayer.

Nine-year-old Adrian Datte of Pottsville, who had bought a video camera with his Holy Communion money, gently touched the bright and blurry image.

''It's like, like it's weird that it's here,'' he said. ''Like it's really interesting to see. I think it's something like a ghost or a spirit or Jesus.''

You see what you want to see. Or what you need to see.