Benjamin Franklin's Earthquake Machine

What to make of the report of Horace Walpole, in a letter to the Rev. William Mason, dated Feb. 27, 1777:

The natural philosophers in power believe that Dr. Franklin has invented a machine of the size of a toothpick case, and materials that would reduce St. Paul's to a handful of ashes.

The rumor is sarcastically delivered, in reference to one John the Painter's plan to burn down the Bank of England, "for stone and gold are wonderfully combustible." But, Franklin, who did devise a simple but invaluable means to conduit lightning, was often reputed to have mastered powers and technologies long before their time had come. (See Marguerite Gérard's etching To the Genius of Franklin) He was also said to have designed a means of wielding sunlight into, essentially, a death beam with which to repel the British navy.

These rumors roughly describe technologies that were in fact designed by Nikola Tesla over one hundred years later. The designs, particularly Tesla's "death ray," were said to have been seized by the U.S. government upon his death and developed in black budget weapons programs.

As for their destructive potential, consider Tesla's self-report of testing his alarm clock sized mechanical oscillator (only a little bigger than Franklin's reputed toothpick case sized device) upon a steel construction site in 1898, as told in Margaret Cheney's Tesla: Man Out of Time...

...he put the little oscillator in his coat pocket. Finding a half-built steel building in the Wall Street district, 10 stories high with nothing up but the steelwork, he clamped the oscillator to one of the beams.

"In a few minutes I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally the structure began to creak and weave, and the steelworkers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Before anything serious happened, I took off the oscillator, put it in my pocket, and went away. But if I had kept on 10 minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And with the same oscillator I could drop Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour."

Then, some 103 years later, there were those two 110 story completed structures, nearby in Lower Manhattan, that were, in professor Judy Wood's terminology, "dustified" into a blizzard of ashes by what, we cannot say with certainty. However, some eyewitness (or better, "bone-witness") accounts of rumblings immediately before the felling of the towers might suggest that something like the reputed Franklin device, or Tesla's "earthquake machine," was deployed...

Pg. 5 of Bradley Mann:

Shortly before the first tower came down I
remember feeling the ground shaking. I heard
a terrible noise and then debris started
flying everywhere.

Pg. 7 of Louis Cook:

Okay. I start going across this
pedestrian bridge. I'm the only one on this
bridge. I'm walking across it, and then I just
remember feeling a rumble and hearing this
rumbling sound that was really intense. It
actually shook my bones.

Pg. 11 of Paul Curran:

...all of a sudden the ground
just started shaking. It felt like a train was
running under my feet.
...The next thing we know, we look up and
the tower is collapsing, it's coming down.

Pg. 10 of Karin Deshore:

...a sound came from somewhere that I never
heard before...It was the worst sound of a
rolling sound, not a thunder. I can't explain it,
what it was. All I know is -- and a force
started to come hit me in my back. I
can't explain it...

By Jove!

Fifteen years after Jupiter was struck by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, to the very week, the King of the Planets has been struck again.

The timing is curious in several ways. July, named after Julius Caesar, is the month originally associated (at least until Augustus came along) with Jupiter, the chief of the Roman deities. Moreover, the association of Jovis pater with the head of Rome extends to the present day, with the Pope serving as the highest Father of the catholic church. So, the strange coincidence of Pope Benedict XVI suffering a fall and injuring his right hand at the same time that the great planet was about to be struck, or indeed as it was being struck (it wasn't noticed until two days later) comes at a time when one of the harshest foes of popery, Tony Alamo (who perhaps betrays his envy thereof with the self-ascribed title, "World Pastor"), stands trial on child molestation charges.

As WXXX notes, followers of the latter are likely to take these signs in the heavens and on Earth as true portents of God's favor for their pastor. Until the verdict comes.

Foreign Entanglement

Hooray to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford for engaging in a foreign entanglement of the delightful sort.

But this post concerns the less desirable foreign entanglements of the body politic, such as are addressed in George Washington's statement: "'Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign World." Presently there are three entanglements fitting the criteria of such alliance: the relationships between the United States and the countries of Great Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Here, we gather some reporting on the latter entanglement. In Exposed: British 'BAE' Hand Behind Terror, by Jeffrey Steinberg of Lyndon LaRouche's foundation, we read that BEA was allegedly slushing money around in the same pool that was utilized by 9/11 hijackers Alhazmi and Almidar, with facilitation by two of Prince Bandar bin Sultan's men. The background for this article is in the cited June 24 New York Times.

A couple of anecdotes have surfaced recently that attest to the intimacy of the U.S. entanglement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. First, it is reported that CIA director George Tenet had a Mel Gibson moment at Bandar's pool in 2004.

This is trivial but interesting; if Tenet's relationship with Bandar was similarly cozy as of early 2001, while Ahazmi and Almidar were receiving support, albeit via intermediaries, from Bandar, questions are raised about the refusal of the CIA to open leads (concerning the presence of Alhazmi and Almidar in the U.S.) to John O'Neill's FBI investigation of al Qaeda. See Lawrence Wright's chapter "The Big Wedding," and particularly his account of the June 11, 2001 meeting with the CIA in The Looming Tower, beginning at pg. 333. This account belies Tenet's claim, in a 2007 interview with 60 Minutes, that Alhazmi and Almidar simply fells through the cracks of bureaucracy.

And in other news, former FBI director Louis Freeh is now Prince Bandar's legal spokesman, as seen in the Frontline special, Black Money. As noted in the comment from "Louisville," Freeh proved to be another obstructor to John O'Neill's investigation of Saudi relationships with al Qaeda in the years and months preceding 9/11 (when O'Neill was killed at the WTC, as the new head of security)...

"The first time I ever heard of FBI director Freeh was when I watched Frontline's "The Man Who Knew". In that program he seemed to be the one who was instrumental in getting rid of FBI agent John O'Neill. John O'Neill was the counter-terrorism expert who had been tracking Al Qaeda for six years. Is it possible that Louis Freeh was on the Saudi payroll even before 9/11, and forced O'Neill out because he was getting too close to Bin Laden and some of his Saudi friends? Is it possible that Freeh was interfering with the investigation to protect his friend Bandar?..."

And there is a history between the two. Freeh's relationship with Bandar during the Khobar Towers bombing investigation in the late '90s, suggest that he was Bandar's dupe.

The Cheshire Cat

At the G-8 (minus one) in L'Aquila Italy...