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Federal investigators end silence on Flight 800 crash
Feb 12th
Colorado 9/11 Truth Video and Action Meetings are held the 3rd Friday of each month in Denver.
When: Friday, February 21, 2014, 7:00 – 9:30 PM
Where: Hooked on Colfax Coffee-Books-Community, 3213 E. Colfax Ave., Denver (303-398-2665) (1/2 mile west of Colorado Blvd., between Adams and Steele, on north side of Colfax) (Map)
TWA FLIGHT 800 is a thought-provoking, 90-minute documentary about TWA Flight 800 to Paris, which exploded on July 17, 1996, just 12 minutes after takeoff from JFK International Airport, killing all 230 people on board. The film features six former members of the official crash investigation who break their silence to refute the officially proposed cause of the jetliner’s demise and reveal how the investigation was systematically undermined.
TWA FLIGHT 800 was written, directed, and produced by Emmy Award-winning journalist Kristina Borjesson. Coproducer Tom Stalcup, who holds a Ph.D. in physics and led the film’s investigation, spent 16 years delving deeper into the original investigation in order to seek truth and closure for the family members of the victims of this tragedy. In addition to the compelling testimonies of many of the eyewitnesses to the downing of the jetliner, the documentary features interviews with key members of the original TWA 800 Investigation team. These whistle-blowers include:
• Hank Hughes, Senior Accident Investigator, National Transportation Safety Board, who laid out the matrix for the reconstruction of the entire aircraft and was chairman of the Airplane Interior Documentation Group that reconstructed TWA 800’s interior.
• Bob Young, Senior Accident Investigator, TWA, who oversaw TWA team members of virtually all the investigative groups associated with the crash and was himself a member of the Eyewitness Group.
• Jim Speer, Accident Investigator for Airline Pilots Association, who sifted through much of the physical evidence in the hangar and found first explosives residue “who sifted through much of the physical evidence and was the first to find evidence of explosives on the right wing.”
• Rocky Miller, Accident Investigator for Flight Attendants Union, who worked in the hangar with Hank Hughes and also worked on Splatter Group.
• Dr. Charles Wetli, Chief Medical Examiner, TWA 800, who was in charge of crash victim autopsies and identification.
• Col. Dennis Shanahan, M.D., Senior Medical Forensics Medical Consultant, TWA 800 Investigation, who correlated injuries to plane damage.
After seeing the evidence presented in this revealing documentary, the parallels can be readily drawn between the cover-up operations of 9/11, political assassinations, and other State Crimes Against Democracy, which have all been shrouded in denials and controversy. Viewing this enlightening film helps us to see through the veil and further understand the mechanisms that the government uses to create and sustain its “official” narratives.
Similar to what it published about 9/11, Popular Mechanics published a propaganda article entitled, “3 Reasons to Doubt the TWA Flight 800 Conspiracy Theory” in order to distort the evidence and discredit the eyewitnesses. The Popular Mechanics article sounds somewhat “scientific” and “conclusive,” but it fails to mention the following evidence:
• Explosive residues were found on pieces of the wreckage.
• Key pieces of the aircraft were removed from the hangar and subsequently disappeared.
• FBI agents had been observed altering some of the evidence in the hangar.
• The nose-wheel gear door was blown INWARD, shredding the tires and wrecking the cockpit.
• The debris field was altered by the FBI by their “locating” (re-locating) key parts of the plane miles away from where they were actually found.
• Multiple eyewitnesses saw a bright object (like a flare or fireworks) streaking up from the surface of the ocean into the sky leaving a white smoke trail, and then a bright white explosion(s) (ordinance), followed by a bright orange fireball explosion (fuel explosion).
• The FBI refused to release its hundreds of reports of interviews with eyewitnesses who told them what they saw.
• The FBI prevented the witnesses from testifying at the NTSB public hearing in 1997.
The events related to TWA Flight 800 are another example of how key evidence can be suppressed and kept from the public. This film is another wake-up call. Indeed, every American needs to see this film.
Please join us for this very informative and thought-provoking documentary.
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February Events and Workshops
Feb 12th
Peers Building Justice
Love, Me … a free teen event.
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th Street, Boulder
Join us for a teen event featuring an art workshop, food, photo booth, and other fun activities. With a focus on self-love and healthy relationships, BMoCA Studio Project and Peers Building Justice will be hosting this fun and free event!
RSVP to the Facebook Event
Thurs., Feb 13
7:00PM – 9:00PM
One Billion Rising
Worldwide Event: Rise, Release and Dance for Justice
Avalon Ballroom, 6185 Arapahoe, Boulder
We hope to see you rise, release, and dance for justice today. Just as important, we ask you to challenge yourself to a plan of action of how you will support, speak out, and stand up to ending violence.
Fri., Feb 14
3:00PM – 5:00PM
Sharing the Love
Chocolate Lovers’ Fling Raises $27,855
At the Chocolate Lovers’ Fling on February 8, we held a Paddle Raiser with the audience, with a goal of raising $35,000 to honor SPAN’s 35th Anniversary in 2014.
We came so close, with $27,855 in donations that night! We are asking our supporters to show us some love between now and the end of the month, raising the remaining $7,145 by February 28.
To sweeten the deal, if you make a donation of at least $50, we’ll send you a Chocolove bar as part of our thank you; donations of $500 or more will receive a delicious box of gourmet toffee! Donate Now.
Survivor Drop-In Group
Aging Adults Experiencing Violence Later in Life
3rd Wednesday Each Month
11:00AM – 12:00PM
Josephine Commons
455 N. Burlington Ave., Lafayette
2nd & 4th Tuesday Each Month
11:00AM – 12:00PM
Boulder Senior Center
909 Arapahoe; Boulder
Contact Becky for details 303.673.9000 or by email.
CU study: We’re not so different than the Ancients
Feb 12th
rules of development, says CU-Boulder researcher
Recently derived equations that describe development patterns in modern urban areas appear to work equally well to describe ancient cities settled thousands of years ago, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“This study suggests that there is a level at which every human society is actually very similar,” said Scott Ortman, assistant professor of anthropology at CU-Boulder and lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE. “This awareness helps break down the barriers between the past and present and allows us to view contemporary cities as lying on a continuum of all human settlements in time and place.”
Over the last several years, Ortman’s colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), including Professor Luis Bettencourt, a co-author of the study, have developed mathematical models that describe how modern cities change as their populations grow. For example, scientists know that as a population increases, its settlement area becomes denser, while infrastructure needs per capita decrease and economic production per capita rises.
Ortman noticed that the variables used in these equations, such as cost of moving around, the size of the settled area, the population, and the benefits of people interacting, did not depend on any particular modern technology.
“I realized that if these models are adequate for explaining what’s going on in contemporary cities, they should apply to any settlements in any society,” he said. “So if these models are on the right track, they should apply to ancient societies too.”
To test his idea, Ortman used data that had been collected in the 1960s about 1,500 settlements in central Mexico that spanned from 1,150 years B.C. through the Aztec period, which ended about 500 years ago. The data included the number of dwellings the archaeologists were able to identify, the total settled area and the density of pottery fragments scattered on the surface. Taken together, these artifacts give an indication of the total population numbers and settlement density of the ancient sites.
“We started analyzing the data in the ways we were thinking about with modern cities, and it showed that the models worked,” Ortman said.
The discovery that ancient and modern settlements may develop in similar and predictable ways has implications both for archaeologists and people studying today’s urban areas. For example, it’s common for archaeologists to assume that population density is constant, no matter how large the settlement area, when estimating the population of ancient cities. The new equations could offer a way for archaeologists to get a more accurate head count, by incorporating the idea that population density tends to grow as total area increases.
In the future, the equations may also guide archaeologists in getting an idea of what they’re likely to find within a given settlement based on its size, such as the miles of roads and pathways. The equations could also guide expectations about the number of different activities that took place in a settlement and the division of labor.
“There should be a relationship between the population of settlements and the productivity of labor,” Ortman said. “So, for example, we would expect larger social networks to be able to produce more public monuments per capita than smaller settlements.”
The findings of the new study may also be useful to studies of modern societies. Because ancient settlements were typically less complex than today’s cities, they offer a simple “model system” for testing the equations devised to explain modern cities.
“The archaeological record actually provides surprisingly clear tests of these models, and in some cases it’s actually much harder to collect comparable data from contemporary cities,” Ortman said.
Other co-authors of the study include Andrew Cabaniss of Santa Fe Institute and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Jennie Sturm of the University of New Mexico.
The study is available at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087902.
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