An interesting article from abroad with some poor word uses

Usually the old gnome either lets the item
stand on its own or comments after the end.
This time I felt the need to insert some
prologue.

1) I had not thought that being white and
being Muslim were mutually exclusive.

2) Perhaps the central idea of this article
from "The Scotsman" will help explain
to some Americans why "racial profiling"
is not a valid or desirable tool in looking
for terrorists.

That said, here is the lead and the link:



Al-Qaeda's white army of terror

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

By Richard Elias

HUNDREDS of British non-Muslims have been
recruited by al-Qaeda to wage war against the
West, senior security sources warned last night.

As many as 1,500 white Britons are believed to
have converted to Islam for the purpose of funding,
planning and carrying out surprise terror attacks
inside the UK, according to one MI5 source.

Lord Carlile, the Government's independent reviewer
of anti-terrorism legislation, said many of the converts
had been targeted by radical Muslims while
serving prison terms.

Security experts say the growing secret army of
white terrorists poses a particularly serious threat
as they are far less likely to be detected than
members of the Asian community.

Since the 7/7 and 21/7 London bombings, police
and intelligence services have had considerable
success in identifying, disrupting and stopping
extremist plots. As a result, groups such as al-Qaeda,
Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
have been forced to change tack. Converting
white non-Muslims has been one response.

The trend is well established in the United States.
American-born Adam Gadahn is one of the FBI's
top 10 most-wanted terrorists after converting to
Islam and rising through al-Qaeda's ranks to
become a prominent spokesman.

One British security source last night told Scotland
on Sunday: "There could be anything up to 1,500
converts to the fundamentalist cause across Britain.
They pose a real potential danger to our domestic
security because, obviously, these people blend in
and do not raise any flags.

"The exact figure of those who have converted to
Islam and turned to terror is not precisely known.
Not everyone who converts becomes radicalised
and it may be that just two-fifths go down that path,
but it remains a significant and dangerous problem."

Carlile said he was not aware of specific numbers,
but confirmed to Scotland on Sunday that Whitehall
was aware of the new threat and was actively tackling
it. He said: "These people are an issue and are
potentially very dangerous. There have been cases
of non-Muslims converting before, and of these,
Richard Reid, the so-called Shoebomber, is the most
obvious example. Read more at The Scotsman

---------------------------------------------
Comments by the Desert Gnome:

I'm not known for being overly "politically correct"
(hell, I'm not known at all!) but something about the
headline and the wording of this article seemed
discordant.

Upon reflection, I think it might be that Scotland
probably is racially more homogeneous than
southern Nevada and maybe the writer equates
Scottish nationality with being white.

In the U.S. most of us are of mixed race or are
non-white anyway so we probably would have
been inclined toward expressing the idea more
directly in terms of nationality as opposed to race.

As he was writing of Brits converting to Islam
he asserted the idea that perhaps "only" forty
percent of converts became "radicalized" and
therefore potentially a threat to security, and
that amounted to a total of 1500 people joining
the other side.

I looked at several sites for statistical information
on Muslims in the USA and the best estimates are
between 7 and 10 million Americans are of the
Muslim faith. We know of two American Muslims
(both converts from other backgrounds) who
were, or are, involved in al-Quaida. Of course
there have been other unsubstantiated
reports floating about.

The next is from Scotland.com:

The population of Scotland is on the
increase according to latest records and is now
5,094,800. The reasons are slightly more births,
slightly fewer deaths and more people coming to
Scotland than leaving.The main reason for the
increase in population is the net gain in migration.
More people come into Scotland from other countries,
mostly the rest of the UK as compared to the
number of people leaving Scotland. According to
latest reports this gain is 19000 with almost 45000
leaving Scotland and over 55000 coming in.
----------------
Gnome here, I have just spent a ridiculous
amount of time reading statistics concerning
the population of Scotland (or as the Scots
would have it: the population for Scotland).

I have come up with both official estimates
and non-official estimates of number of
people broken down into every demographic
division of which one could conceive.

Oops, not quite... The missing breakdown
was? You guessed it: race, ethnicity,
derivation... call it what you will: the Scots
apparently either don't have it or don't
acknowledge its existence.

I'm guessing that they're almost (as 99.995%)
totally native Scottish people whose ancestors
were native Scottish people descended from
native Scottish people.

Their national net in-migration of 19,000 people
per year is about a quarter of the in-migration
to the Las Vegas Valley or Phoenix area.

There was also no breakdown by religion,
whether professed, suspected or reported,
in the official demographic breakdowns nor
elsewhere.

Given the lack of data it is difficult to estimate
the Muslim population of Scotland although
we do know that there were two Muslim
doctors there a few months ago...

For another British input check out this
post: England's Population Changes Will
Make Whites A Minority Group

...

England's population has been overwhelmingly
Caucasian throughout its history. The shift began
shortly after World War II, when the government
encouraged men from the former colonies to fill
factory posts left empty by the casualties of war.

Although Wales and Scotland remain largely
homogeneous, (emphasis by Gnome) a 2001 census
found that England's white, native-born population
had dropped to 87 percent.

Simpson predicts that the white population of England
will plateau at around 75-80 percent in a couple of
decades, depending on the vagaries of future immigration
and the social dynamics of the individual groups...

As is obvious from this link, headline writing in
the UK needs more study...

Given that, we do learn from the English that
Scotland is still lily-white and so the Scotland.com
writer might be forgiven for writing such seemingly
insensitive (or even racist) copy.

Still, his figures (estimates, guesses) give one
a thought to consider: if hundreds of British white
young people are becoming radicalized to the
point of being willing to become suicidal mass
murderers on behalf of a perceived Muslim
cause, what the hell is going on in British society
which could create so much alienation among so
many of your young people?

Artifacts may point to de Soto's trail

From Foster's Daily Democrat

By RUSS BYNUM
Associated Press Writer
Article Date: Sunday, January 13, 2008

JACKSONVILLE, Ga. — A rusty, diamond-shaped iron blade, its sharp
point jutting from the dirt where it was discovered, could be a
centuries-old clue that sheds new light on the obscure path taken
by the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto.

For archaeologist Dennis Blanton it has erased most doubts that
the patch of ground in southeast Georgia was visited more than
460 years ago by some group of Spanish explorers —
if not by de Soto himself.

"It's pretty much case-closed," says Blanton, standing in a clearing
among planted pines where his archaeologists have dug about 18
inches into the dirt in an area the size of a small house. "If you had
to deduce the most plausible source, it would be de Soto."

But it also presents a mystery: The site is 90 miles from where experts
believe de Soto traveled. It highlights the challenge of deducing the
route taken by de Soto, an explorer who left few traces of his journey.

Hernando de Soto became the first European to explore the interior
of present-day Georgia in 1540, when he and 600 men arrived nearly
two centuries before the British founded the colony of Georgia in 1733.

Historians and archaeologists have long debated his exact path, which
took him through much of the South. Few Spanish artifacts along his
trail have been found. Blanton says, cautiously, his findings in rural
Telfair County may provide some physical proof of de Soto's presence.

Blanton of the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta has been
digging on-and-off for 18 months on private land used for growing pine
trees in rural Telfair County, about 120 miles west of Savannah.

Along with shards of Indian pottery, Blanton's team has uncovered two
scraps of iron and five ornate, pea-sized glass beads. Blanton says he's
convinced the beads and iron were brought by Spanish explorers to
trade with Indians.

However, the site where Blanton's team found its artifacts near the
Ocmulgee River lies about 90 miles southeast of where most experts
believe de Soto crossed the river near Macon. The few known written
accounts by de Soto's companions are short on landmarks other than
rivers and long-vanished Indian villages.

Archaeologist Charles Hudson spent a decade dogging de Soto's trail.
The route he and two colleagues first published in 1984 remains the
map of de Soto's course most accepted by experts. But Hudson says
it's a pursuit fraught with uncertainty.

"They weren't modern men and weren't self consciously trying to leave
an account of where they went," said Hudson, a retired University of
Georgia archaeologist. "It's kind of maddening, because everything
is enclosed in a fog of doubt."

In the summer of 2006, Blanton began digging in hopes of finding a
remote Spanish mission established in the 1600s. Instead he found
beads that experts agree were fashioned a century earlier by Italian
glassmakers. Italy was known to trade the beads with the Spanish,
who brought them across the ocean.

Historians agree de Soto and his men entered present-day Georgia
near its southwest corner and worked their way northeast into
South Carolina on the first leg of a winding trek that took de Soto
4,000 miles from northern Florida to Arkansas, where he died of
fever in 1542.

In 1984, Hudson and fellow researchers Marvin T. Smith and
Chester DePratter published a route for de Soto's Georgia travels
that had him crossing the Ocmulgee River near Macon.

Hudson and his colleagues mapped de Soto's route using written
accounts of three men traveling with the explorer and matching them
with geographic features and archaeological evidence of Indian
settlements they believed the explorer encountered. Hudson said
what made his proposed route stand up to scrutiny was that the
Indian sites formed a chain across the state.

"If you just pinpoint a single location on the basis of artifacts, the
evidence is not very strong — and these are all portable artifacts,"
Hudson said. "I'm a little dubious that de Soto was down that far."

Smith, an anthropologist at Valdosta State University, said the most
likely scenario would be that the Spanish artifacts found in Telfair
County got there by way of Indians trading among themselves.

"It would be so easy for the Indians to move that stuff around
among themselves," Smith said. "It was so shiny and new and
something they'd never seen before."

Blanton argues that archaeologists typically find Spanish iron and
beads in Indian graves, indicating that Indians prized such rare
and alien trinkets. The Telfair County artifacts, however, appear
to have been found on the floor of a home.

Blanton argues Indians would have treasured glass beads and
iron too much to leave them discarded on the ground, but
Spaniards wouldn't have valued them as much.

Regardless of de Soto's involvement, experts agree the Telfair
County site offers a rare window to a distant history when Indian
cultures thousands of years old first collided with Europeans
intent on conquering the new world.

"Everything changed instantly," Blanton said, "as soon as those
Spaniards emerged from the woods and came up the riverbank."

See Original Article
-----------------------------------

Comment by The Gnome:

Neither the Spanish nor the Natives had a clue that the mere
presence of the Spanish among the Americans was a death
sentence for the Americans and their civilization.

It was not simply the rapaciousness of the Europeans (of which
there was no shortage) but of even greater consequence for
the Americans were the micro-organisms, brought by the
Europeans, which were being inhaled by the Americans who
came in close contact with the explorers.

These invisible and unimagined passengers upon and within
the Spaniards would spread fatal pestilence throughout the
communities of the people contacted by the Spanish and
would be spread, by the contactees, to other Americans
living in the area.

According to Hudson's reconstruction, De Soto expedition
built boats and crossed the Mississippi a little south of
present-day Memphis and found the riverbanks basically
lined with Native towns and the area home to thousands
of warriors.

When the French, including La Salle, passed the same area
one hundred years later they found no people living in the
area: the river was without a village for two hundred miles.

The Spanish had intended to enslave the Americans and
steal their lands and gold, instead they introduced the
diseases which depopulated the American continents of
the pre-Columbian inhabitants except for a small remnant.

Rules of attraction take strange twist

Richard Woods, Claire Newell | January 14, 2008

IMAGINE what they thought, imagine the turmoil they endured.

They are the twins who, it emerged on Friday, were separated at birth and given up for adoption only to meet by chance years later - and marry.

The man and woman, unaware they were siblings, had grown up in different families. Yet when fate brought them together again, they experienced an uncanny bond and a sexual attraction.

As Lord Alton, who revealed the case, said: "They were never told they were twins.

"They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction."

Did they sense something? It certainly must have seemed odd: both had been born on the same day in the same year.

According to Lord Alton, who was told about the case by a judge, the couple married and later discovered they were twins.

The marriage was annulled at a special hearing in the High Court last year with the judge ruling it had never been valid. Under Britain's 1986 Marriage Act, it is illegal to marry your sibling, parent, grandparent, grandchild and various other blood relatives.

And now, the rest of the story...

"Comet/Asteroid Impact Hazards"

We are living in a relatively risky time for potential collisions between our fair blue planet and comets and asteroids that
cross our orbit, according to astronomers Napier and Clube, authors of Cosmic Winter (1990).

Spectacular environmental and ecological catastrophes resulting from infall of near-Earth objects (NEOs) have occurred repeatedly in the past and will occur again...

Read the rest of the story: Here

Zombie Attack at Hierakonpolis

A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America
by Renée Friedman

Weighing the evidence for and dating of Solanum virus outbreaks in early Egypt

This nondescript tomb (center) may be the location
where the first historical evidence of a zombie attack
was discovered. (Courtesy of the Hierakonpolis Expedition)

Hierakonpolis is a site famous for its many "firsts," so many, in fact, it is not easy to keep track of them all. So we are grateful(?) to Max Brooks for bringing to our attention that the site can also claim the title to the earliest recorded zombie attack in history. In his magisterial tome, The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), he informs us that in 1892, a British dig at Hierakonpolis unearthed a nondescript tomb containing a partially decomposed body, whose brain had been infected with the virus (Solanum) that turns people into zombies. In addition, thousands of scratch marks adorned every surface of the tomb, as if the corpse had tried to claw its way out! [Editor's note: click here for an interview with Max Brooks and a timeline of archaeologically documented zombie outbreaks.]

Read Article: Link

US at bottom of global privacy rankings!

Big Brother lives. And he may live a lot closer to home than you might think or want.

Human rights organization Privacy International compiled list of the best and worst countries in 2007 for citizen privacy versus government surveillance. The United States sits squarely at the bottom of that list with Privacy International classifying the country as one of the world's most "endemic surveillance societies."

Other low ranking countries include: China, Russia, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and England. Greece was the highest ranking country when it came to citizen privacy protection. Privacy International said that Greece had "adequate safeguards against abuse." No country reached the highest ranking of "significant protections and safeguards" or "consistently upholds human rights safeguards." Read the rest of the article and comments: here

Zimbabwe dollar - in free fall - stronger against USD

Z$1 triillion for house in Zim Dec 11 2007 08:25 PM





Just skim the article for the sense of it, then
space down to the italicized lines and let it
soak in for a minute...

Harare - A trillion dollar house, billion dollar bed and a million dollar beer. That and a severe cash squeeze are the latest sign of runaway inflation that has vexed consumers in President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

A newspaper advertisement shows a four-bedroom house with a pool and tennis court in Harare's leafy Glen Lorne suburb selling for just under Z$1 trillion, a whopping $33m at the official bank rate but only $667 000 on a widely used black market.

An identical property cost half the price a month ago.

Prices of household furniture, groceries and food and rentals have more than doubled in the past month as businesses seek to eke out a profit and remain afloat, but at a cost to consumers ravaged by the world's fastest rising prices.

Shops which were emptied of basic goods after Mugabe announced a blanket price freeze to tame inflation in June, have started restocking but prices have skyrocketed.

"Prices are increasing but my salary is not and that is a very big problem because it's now difficult to settle my bills," Humphrey Chitovhoro, a trainee with a Harare accounting firm said, a line now recounted many times by Zimbabweans.

Salaries are failing to keep pace with galloping inflation - the world's highest at nearly 8 000% - which has inflamed tensions in a country with rising unemployment and enduring foreign currency, fuel and food shortages.

Mugabe's government has so far failed to rein in an economic slide, which critics say has been badly hit by the veteran leader's policies, including the seizure of white-owned farms to resettle blacks that has knocked agriculture output.

Cash crunch

On Tuesday Zimbabweans jammed banking halls, desperately seeking cash, in short supply, the latest sign of the southern African country's economic free-fall.

Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono said last month the launch of a new currency was imminent. This has not happened, instead cash shortages have worsened, with banks running out of notes.

Gono accuses foreign currency black market dealers of stashing more than half the total money in circulation and says the bank will not intervene in the cash crisis.

"I came here at five (03:00 GMT) and just got Z$5m. What can I do with that money," an angry mother of two who identified herself only as Auxilia said as she left a bank where a long queue stretched for a couple of blocks.

The amount is equivalent to three days of bus fare.

Most Zimbabweans use cash for their transactions since most basic goods like cooking oil, sugar and maize meal are purchased on the black market.

In a small vote of confidence for Gono, the Zimbabwe dollar has strengthened against the US dollar on the black market, rising to Z$1.5m per dollar on Tuesday from a low of Z$2.4m.

But businesses are feeling the cash squeeze as sales have dropped, while workers spend more time in bank queues.

"We need to have more money in circulation but we cannot expect the central bank to continue pumping in more money if that which is in circulation can not be accounted for. We are caught up in a vicious cycle," Joseph Malaba, a local industrialist told the official Herald newspaper.

----------------------------------------------------

A little comment from the Ol' Gnome:

If I'm analyzing this article correctly,

we have a country (Zimbabwe) which

has a currency losing value at the rate

of 8000% or more... But, its miserable

currency has gained value against the

United States Dollar. Does that give

us increasing confidence in the old

greenback?

read the article and the comments

Top 10 Star Mysteries

White Dwarf Star

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

When a star the mass of our Sun uses up its nuclear fuel, it expels
most of its outer layers to leave just a very hot core called a white
dwarf. Scientists had speculated that at the bottom of a white
dwarf's 31 mile (50 kilometer)-thick crust was crystallized carbon
and oxygen, similar to a diamond. And in 2004, they found that a
white dwarf near the constellation Centaurus, BPM 37093, was
made of crystallized carbon weighing 5 million trillion trillion
pounds. In diamond-speak, that s 10 billion trillion trillion carats!
Robert Bigelow, any interest?

Read the rest of the star mysteries: www.space.com

Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?

The universal human myth may be the first example of disaster reporting.
by Scott Carney 11.15.2007


The Fenambosy chevrons at the tip of Madagascar. Image courtesy of Dallas Abbott



The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly.
A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature
looks as if it might be swimming through a sea
of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer
basalt cliff?

For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist
at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no
confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph,
scratched into a rock by a Native American
shaman. “You can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,”
he says.

In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph com-
memorates a comet that streaked across the sky
just a few years before Europeans came to this
area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor
blip compared to what he is really after. Masse
believes that he has uncovered evidence that a
gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean
several thousand years ago and nearly wiped
out all life on the planet. What’s more, he thinks
that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in
plain sight, READ MORE HERE...