rene's blog

40 Outstanding Award Winning Photos Around the World - noupe

Absolutely mesmerizing photography. Check it out. 

40 Outstanding Award Winning Photos Around the World - noupe.

10 Secrets of Happy Couples | Love + Sex - Yahoo! Shine

Sex is evidently more than necessary or complimentary to a healthy couple's relationship. And I concur that humor comes as a heavy second. Good info in the article, and not too preachy or tedious. Young people -in particular- should be paying close attention.

10 Secrets of Happy Couples | Love + Sex - Yahoo! Shine.

Explorer to embark on quest to find body of Osama bin Laden

Link

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/blog/28489/explorer+to+embark+on+quest+to+find+body+of+osama+bin+laden/

If he has the same kind of security Osama bin Laden had, he'll be dead a hundred times over before he gets there,

The $2 Billion Dark-Matter-Hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer

Linkhttp://gizmodo.com/#!5797064/the-2-billion-dark+matter+hunting-alpha-magnetic-spectrometer/gallery/1

Aspartame Gets a New Name Be Warned | Natural Health News

Linkhttp://www.naturalmedicine.com/news/community-news/aspartame-gets-a-new-name-be-warned/

With a growing awareness of the dangers of artificial sweeteners, aspartame producer Ajinomoto is attempting to rebrand the sweetener as “AminoSweet”. A play on the chemistry of the product.

The artificial sweetener is marketed under various trademark names, including NutraSweet. It is pervasive and is an ingredient of approximately 6,000 consumer foods and beverages sold worldwide.

Over 25 years ago, aspartame was first introduced into the European food supply over 25 years ago, and has been dogged by health concerns ever since.

Although approved in many countries, concerns continue to be raised over possible side effects. In a well know case in 1976, then FDA Commissioner Alexander Schmidt wrote a letter to Sen. Ted Kennedy expressing concern over the “questionable integrity of the basic safety data submitted for aspartame safety”.

Some of the possible side effects that have been claimed of aspartame include:

• Convulsions
• Vision problems
• (for more, follow article's link)

EMP Attack, could this really happen?

EMP Attack Would Decimate America
Monday, 05 Apr 2010 08:58 AM
By: Ronald Kessler

America is totally unprepared for an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that would set civilization back to the 1800s, Dr. William Graham, who was chairman of the bipartisan congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack, tells Newsmax.

An EMP attack occurs when a nuclear bomb explodes in the atmosphere. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast would fry microchips, which are at the heart of electronic devices, throughout North America.

In a rare interview, Graham, who was Ronald Reagan’s science adviser, predicts the vast majority of Americans would die from starvation or disease or would freeze to death. Yet he says that while the military is largely protected from an EMP attack, the government has done virtually nothing to address the effects of such an attack on the civilian sector.

Without that infrastructure, the military would find it difficult to operate as well. Since microchips control vehicles, trains, and airplanes, most would become inoperable.

No one could get to work.

An EMP attack “could not only take down power grids, which are fragile anyway in this country, and telecommunications networks, and financial networks, and traffic controls and many other things, but in addition, there is a very close interrelationship among those national infrastructure capabilities,” Graham says.

“So, for example, we need telecommunications to re-establish the power network, and we need the power network to keep telecommunications going for more than a few hours. And we need the financial network to continue to operate to maintain the economy, we need the transportation system, roads, street lights, control systems, to operate just to get people to the failed power, telecommunication and other systems,” he adds.

Life after an EMP attack “would probably be something that you might imagine life to be like around the late 1800s but with several times the population we had in those days, and without the ability of the country to support and sustain all those people,” Graham says. “They wouldn’t have power. Food supplies would be greatly taken out by the lack of transportation, telecommunication, power for refrigeration and so on.”

Yet life would be far more primitive than even that because in the 1800s, Americans had food from their own farms and police who rode on horseback.

“We don’t have as many horses, and we tend to depend on radios for communication now, that again need power,” Graham notes. “Radios themselves tend to be vulnerable to this if they’re not designed with protection from EMP in mind, because they’re connected to antennas. Anything that looks like an antenna can pick up the EMP signal and conduct it to the electronics, causing it to fail.”

Most computers would become inoperable, Graham says.

“Most computers are connected to things that either are antennas or look like antennas,” he says. “Even a mouse cable looks like an antenna to an electromagnetic signal. Certainly power lines, telecommunication lines, all act as antennas to pick up EMP signals and check them in the computers. And we have done tests with computers, and EMP tends to burn out the computer circuits.”

Stock and banking transactions would also be wiped out.

“Most financial records are stored electronically. ATMs, which depend upon both power and telecommunications, would not be available; banks, which try to back up records but in general aren’t strongly aware of the EMP problem, would face the problem of unprotected storage and computer systems,” Graham says. “And so it’s very likely that financial and stock brokerage records would at a minimum not be accessible and might not be available at all.”

An EMP attack could be launched by a country such as North Korea or Iran or by terrorists, Graham says. A severe geomagnetic storm — which will definitely occur one day — could cause nearly as much damage.
“The intelligent way to address this is to look at all of these threats and to develop a protection against all of them, not just against one at a time,” Graham observes.

Unlike protection against a nuclear blast, shielding to protect against EMP is a relative bargain. As noted in the Newsmax story "EMP Attack Could Wipe Out U.S.," the 300 transformers that are critical to the power grid could be protected for $200 million to $400 million.

Yet so far, neither power companies nor banks, stock brokerage firms, nor other industries have seen fit to shield their facilities against an EMP strike.

“In talking to the various commercial organizations, they have said, "’Look, it’s not our job to protect the country against a nuclear attack,’” Graham says. “’It’s our job to have the country operate under normal conditions. It’s the military’s job to protect the country in a nuclear attack.’”

Just as the U.S. was unprepared for the 9/11 attack, so is it unprepared for an EMP attack that would be millions of times more devastating.

“Having been confirmed into three different government positions by the Senate, I have some experience in dealing with the bureaucracy,” Graham says. “Bureaucrats never like to deal with a problem before it happens the first time. It’s much easier to ignore a problem that might happen, until it happens.”

The blame rests with both Democrats and Republicans.

“It was a failure in the last administration; it’s a failure in this administration,” Graham notes. “No one has been given the job of marshaling our capabilities — governmental, private, and military — to prepare for this problem.  

Posted by René Volpi 

Comments by stillmind — BackType

via www.backtype.com

Miami is a beautiful city, and it's a spooky city as well. Lately --it is claimed by some people of all walks of life-- there have been highly unusual surreal phenomena that no one can pin down and have any explanation about it whatsoever.  These activities have been sightings of ghostly shadows traumatizing folks galore.   Science as usual is not paying any mind. Nor the authorities.
Some 9 out of 20 people with careers ( i said this because those who are coming forward run the risk of get labeled as coo-coos) still dare to bring those very strange occurrences into the open. Only the ghosts of the old slave-city listen.  And Shadow people.  Even though Georgia probably beats Miami to a pulp on all those counts.

(maybe,  it will be continued)

http://facebook.com/rene.volpi

Tales from The Amazon and Beyond

Tales from The Amazon

by Rene Volpi

 
 
Engines on

I've been on the road before, inconsistently yet constant, a rebellious trade of my character that would not settle for a "you can't do that!" My response to that always has been, "Oh no? Really?. . . Watch me". The challenge was on, and like a cartoon of the Road Runner, my feet kicked the dust and I just zoomed out from the ground where I happened to be standing. I was young and I was restless. And I wanted to mature on the road, find my purpose, and hopefully evolve. I had the good fortune to have highly permissive parents. After all, they 
couldn't repress me, nor stop me. . . .

I sailed from Buenos Aires, donned a backpack and headed north, never looking back. All my senses were alert, and the taste of freedom was incomparable to any other feeling in any other time. I hitchhiked everywhere, going from city to town, crossing rivers and lakes, jungles and falls. And the feeling was that of exhilarating elation. In order to survive, I started to make hippie jewelry with beans and copper strings and I would sell them as I went along. In some cases I would find a girl companion who was either running away or found in my company a good excuse to do just that.
Everybody knows that when you travel with a cute young female, your chances to get picked up grow greatly. During the trip, they would keep the drivers entertained while I slept soundly. It worked like a charm that it was. And I'm going,, getting closer and closer to the point of no return.

Brazil was everything I expected it to be.

From now on, I would have to reinvent myself and use every tool available for my survival. And what an reinvention that turned out to be. . . .

:

                                                                    ~000~

Tales... (part 3)

40 minutes to leave the country

(continued from below)

Fine. So far so good. We figured 40 minutes is better than no minutes at all, hence we couldn't be more happy.
Strange looks and stares came upon us everywhere we turned. It must have been way below freezing and we were in t-shirts, jeans and sandals. This was not good. We quickly unpacked and started putting on more and more shirts over shirts and jeans over jeans to the point that we must have looked ridiculous because the people that were staring started to laugh and groan about us and all around us. We needed to think, think, damn you! Time was passing and we were nowhere near getting a ride out of there. The cops were watching, oh, sure. They wanted to make sure we were leaving. So bad that they even gave us a ride to the freeway where we were now standing and freezing our asses off. Menacing clouds were threatening heavy rain as the late afternoon progressed. Our chaotic stand came to an end when a tip from a good man sent us scurrying into the city. Suddenly there was hope.
Maybe, just maybe, there was something like 5 minutes left in our exit clock when then man prescribed our solution. The plan was to try to get a vehicle from a rent-a-car agency that needed to be driven back to different cities throughout Europe. This was our chance, but a problem ensued when neither of us had a driver license --not a legal one anyway--, so here we are, back at square one. As fate would have it, another hitchhiker showed up at the agency trying to get a ride out to Amsterdam. Wasn't that the place where we were going? I suppose "lucky" would be a humble misnomer at this time, because he did have a driving license. In less than two minutes we filled all the paperwork furiously, got the gas, the car and the subsequent driver and we were on our way to our destination. The cops that witnessed the whole charade were ecstatic and we left them very impressed with our hassling abilities and broad smiles on each of their faces. But no one was more amazed than we were. After all, if things would have turned out otherwise, we were going to be sent back to banana land in a hurry. That very same day. Lucky. Real lucky...
.
                                                                      ~000~


Tales... (part 2)


An unexpected visit

Back in high school I always dreamed of adventure. I felt it was just a matter of time before i could exercise my Great Escape. I knew it was just a matter of time, among some other small issues, like permission from the adults and things of that nature. And a passport.
The phone rang at my parents house and "they" where asking for me. Then the visit came, and now they want me. Bad. They were all wearing suits, and they were escorted by two military supervisors. They had my name on the list and they were coming to sign me up." They" were the Army, and I suddenly had no friends. My Dad promptly offered them chairs to sit down as they engaged in discussing my future induction in the Service.
Hell, no, I thought to my self. Why?, why me, why now, who is deciding?. I waited, I paced, I sat, and my mind was racing. I was done; but I didn't want to accept it. If i was to make a move , it would have to be immediate and I would need some money quick. Lots of money.
So this is what I did...

The Getaway

Since the military wasn't what inspired me the most, I quickly decided
that it wasn't an option. After all, being 17 was really what counted
since the world was out there, and all for the taking. No, I didn't
prepare for much. I had a great backpack, had a passport ( which was
about to expire), got a down sleeping bag, got maps to all neighboring
countries, jeans, t-shirts and a jacket and in less than three days after
getting some money from who else but Mom, I was ready
to hit the road. I did my best to assure her that everything will be fine,
like if I had any idea. Tearfully she handed me the equivalent of a real
fortune to me, something like $200 USD plus a huge bag of Mom-made
sandwiches, a thermos full of coffee, home-made brownies and lots of
candy and chewing gum..I kissed her while holding back the tears and I left.
It would be years until I saw any of my parents again.
I headed North towards the border with Brazil. I remember clearly that
my head was exploding with excitement. I had been on the road before,
this same road that now was gonna take me much further. So this for me
was the Big Time and a whole new set of emotions was going through
all the fibers of my being. It was almost as if I was destined to do this;
born to run as they say. Indeed, I was just following my destiny.

                                                                 ~000~

Tales from The Amazon

(part 1)

The beginning


The jungle was overrun with sounds. There were little monkeys on the road, basking in the sun. So we decided to stop. They were as curious as we were: "Who are these people?", they surely must have thought. They allowed as to approach to just a few feet, playfully, but by the time we got too close, they just vanished. These were very fast monkeys. We've been on the road now for what seemed like the entire day, but the day wasn't in a hurry; it kept on pounding with incessant heat and glare. The road seemed to be going on forever. This was after all the Amazon. We left Cayenne traveling on the coast; a sneaky road making its way through the thick forest, It was indeed a sight to behold. Finally, we reached the river that served as the border between French Guyana and Suriname, Now all we needed was money to cross it; the Chinese dude in charge told everybody he was running late--like if anybody cared--and proceeded to show everyone inside the boat. We figured, hey, at least we are going across. What could be the worse that could happen?...and it did.
 


Ok, so, here we are; but are we? The Chinese dude was in no mood to listen to our poverty rap, nor was he in a very generous mood neither, so he immediately called the police. Next thing we know, we are sitting in front of this huge individual asking us questions that we didn't have any answers for; like, where is your money?...do you have a visa?... where are you going, or rather where do you think you are going? All that in a very strange dialect of Dutch and a whole variety of hand symbols and not-too friendly gestures. Suddenly he stops, stands and as he 's leaning towards me, he says: "Ok, do you understand THIS?" and a fist big as a football appeared right in front of my inadequate face. I'm not sure what happened next, but we ended up a short time later crowding on a bus with a silent driver back into the jungle that we were trying so desperately to avoid. NO food, no water, no money, no talk. We are a bunch of sorry-ass hippies on the road...

We are going to jail, that's a fact. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were going to the lock-up for standing up the China-man at the border crossing.
We then knew we were about to be fed; what, that was a whole different question.
The trip lasted for about three hours, no-one spoke a word, not us or the driver; one thing we knew for certain: we were still on the road towards an unknown destination. We eventually reached a town called New Nieckery which was located, of course, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by absolute nothingness, just a muddy road and pure Amazon jungle. At one point I felt as if the entire cacophony was just a choir of laughter as we were the joke of the whole region--people, monkeys and birds. In any case, everything was, to us, still a great adventure. Then we stopped. "We are here", the driver said, "now Go !". What?...who, us? --we asked, incredulously. He calmly responded, "Yes, you !, Go !!."
We are not going to jail. Not only that, but as he closed the door after we descended, he threw a paper bag our way that had some paperwork with our names on it, plus two twenty dollar bills. We were absolutely ecstatic, barely managed to say thank you as we retrieved into the fast approaching darkness.

We've been on the road for 4 days now, little sleep, almost nothing to eat except for some rice and bread, but we have managed to go through 4 countries. Our destination was unchanged, Amsterdam or bust.

Two, sometimes three hippies on the road hitchhiking through the Great Amazon jungle for days on end was more than we had ever expected, managing to fool "balseros", befriended cops and eluded jail, while on our trip was all together an exhilarating experience. This is what we were living for, the ones that couldn't, wouldn't and the stories we were going to tell our grand-children. At those moments--I can recollect fully--I was wearing my heart on my sleeve and my soul as the suit. Now we were about to cross to another unknown land, British Guyana. I knew we were going to eat some great chocolates and I was really looking forward. At last the people there spoke a language that we kinda could somewhat understand. I felt as if we were the only white people on the entire planet, the culture shock has been amazing, except for the French Guyana, which was heavily populated with whites as well as mulattoes, but now, whoa!, this was definitely a black people's nation. "I want some chocolate," that was all Raphael was hearing me say. Incredibly he wanted to go...to the movies !!. So we ended up in the movies( outdoors) eating lots of chocolate.
It was an illuminating time, a very exciting experience. This was our first "English" encounter, but for the most part it turned out to be a demonstration of our abilities to combine sign language--our own invented kind--, and all the languages that we managed to express ourselves with at the time, and that was in itself a glorious thing. Or so we thought.

I hadn't spoken to my parents since the trip started. I thought of them fondly, but somehow I knew it was going to be a long time before I would see any of them again. So we carried on, without maps or compasses, meeting new people, sharing everything. I didn't know it then, but these were going to be the best years of my life, and as Rapha later confessed, they were his too.
Here we are, thousands of miles from home, with a passport near its expiration.
How in the world are we gonna get to Europe? On a ship? A plane? This was not going to be a cruel joke or a tease. No way. We are going to make it, how, well, that was going to be another story.



Ronnie was working happily in Caracas, Venezuela, when we abruptly came into his life. Since he was Rapha's brother, I figured they would sort it out between themselves. Rapha was a master manipulator, a brilliant mathematician that left little to chance. We were destined to be three on our way to Europe, and he was gonna make sure it happened just like that. Don't ask me how, or what he was going to do to make it happen, but he figured three were better than two and that was that. I had no special argument one way or another, so I let the chips fall where they may.

For now that was just the plan, since we were nowhere near Caracas, yet.
There is more jungle to traverse, more rivers, more fares. We pulled silver plated wire from our backpacks and we continue doing what we did to get this far, making bits of money here and there by making these strange artifacts that Rapha designed to take the place of earrings, sometimes necklaces, other times bracelets. I said, "People aren't gonna buy THAT, c'mon!" As usual I was proven wrong. Again. We really amassed a fortune in Brazil with those ugly things; people were making lines to buy them.

Now he wanted to do it again. Sure. Why not?. So we re-started.
There was no place to go from there, it really WAS nowhere. There were no roads even, we had to take a plane. But to where?. Trinidad and Tobago seemed like a pretty good destination. Maybe we could pass as tourists...
A few days later we landed at Port of Spain, the capital of T&T. We quickly slipped into the city and found a cozy place to rest our tired bones. Since we were staying at this hippie's hotel, we started hurrying up our productions of those ugly items with the purpose of a Grand Sale. It worked. Soon we were at the main plaza selling the stuff to "other' tourists. Then we could be on our way to Venezuela and onto our final destination, Amsterdam.

We lived in Caracas without much fanfare, partying a lot, since Ronnie would know all the hot places and staying here and there with some friends and other acquaintances. It was really a sweet time; each of us found a girlfriend, so we really had it going. One day we decided it was time to check out that place in the mountains called Merida, where the magic mushrooms come from. Oh , boy! We certainly weren't dissatisfied. We were told if one takes them right after a full moon, the potency quadruples. Of course, we followed those instructions to a "T".

We found out that there were charter flights to Europe from the Caribbean town of Bridgetown in Barbados. Since we couldn't afford round-trip tickets, we were prepared to go with a one-way. What could they do, send us back?. No one had a real idea how close they came to that.

Soon it was time to make the final assault on the senses. All the unprepared preparations were in place, passports were forged or checked, t-shirts and jeans were packed and we even shaved, although our hair was a spaghetti-like mess. We were ready for the Big Time.

No one in Luxembourg took a look at us without staring outright, the poor airport officials didn't know what to make of us. We were nothing but a bunch of no-money hippies in t-shirts with one-way tickets, while the whole nation was covered in 3 feet of snow.

Unbelievably, they gave us 40 minutes to exit the country. They did those things back in the days. These were still innocent times, and anyone who have traveled in those times knows exactly what I mean by this.

Free. We are finally in Europe, and we are free...who could have guessed it?

Rene Volpi

(continued at top of the page)

I'm still writing on my blog "Tales from The Amazon and Beyond" which includes some real life passages from NYC as well. These are some short stories reader-friendly that I hope is to your liking.
Subscribe to it, if you so choose at http:stillmind-thoughts.blogspot.com
or at short-stories.posterous.com, and leave a comment right on the page. I thank you immensely.
René

Tales from The Amazon: I have no Message....

The "Pope" endlessly repeats -as I pressure him to elaborate on a deep philosophical premise- : "I have no message for nobody." Yet, ironically, all the people that had the opportunity (and the privilege) to hear him talk, feel otherwise and flock instinctively to his unique brand of discourse. But that isn't easy because he organizes no gatherings, gives no "speeches" -ramblings maybe-, pushes no method, peddles no mantras, has no organization, no office, no secretary, no telephone number, no fax and no fixed address. How could he, our Pope is homeless. But he has became a fixture in Greenwich Vlllage and as he grows more popular everyday, he has managed to become, very unwillingly some kind of local hero, a legend in his own right. Pope is everywhere and nowhere. He stays with the streets, and they have become the vehicle by which he delivers his message. But he insist that he has no message, so the man has become a human oxymoron, a beautiful contradiction and a sight to behold. There was a day when he just disappeared. He stayed away for two and a half weeks. I tried to locate him by checking with hospitals, the local jail, the police precincts. Nothing. I even check the morgue with my heart pounding in my throat, and an awful sickening feeling in my stomach. Nothing, no trace of him anywhere. The streets were lonely without him. Even Washington Park was depleted of the beautiful aura it always had. Everything had suddenly changed. Many people were wondering what could be done. He had touched so many souls that even the ones that didn't know him like I did, were truly worried, restless, anxious. There was no Internet or cell phones in those days, so I gathered a couple of friends and we hanged fliers and posters with the ubiquitous "Have you seen this man?. When he finally returned, he had the nerve to ask, through a smart-ass smirk on his face "Why are you treating me like a criminal with all those FBI-like wanted posters, where have you guys been all this time?. We could only chuckle away with him as I felt a great benevolent feeling of relief and inner-calmness once again. I came soon afterward to the conclusion, the magnificent realization that I really, really love this so strange a man.

via stillmind-thoughts.blogspot.com