Subject: : A look at the Y2K problem -- STOP CASSINI #110
Date: April 6th, 1999
Time Frame: There are 79 days left before the flyby of Venus, June 24th, 1999.
Hi!
This morning we were sent a "primo collection" of Y2K-related sources which we feel should be of urgent interest to all our readers. Cassini's upcoming flyby of Venus will continue to remain the main focus of this newsletter, but more and more issues will be devoted to other topics, such as this one.
Russell D. Hoffman, Founder and Editor, STOP CASSINI newsletter
Today's Subjects:
Well, is it a scam? The people may well decide that it is real and go wild, without any significant cause for alarm. Or, all the alarm that might be caused may yet fail to indicate the true danger. It is perhaps best that the world realize that thinking about disasters BEFORE they happen is a whole lot better than cleaning up after them. It is true for Cassini, it is true for the nuclear missiles, it is true for the nuclear plants. All are disasters in the waiting and all require education and foresight on the part of the public to prevent what the industry calls an accident, and what statistics indicate is much more reasonably called an inevitability.
I hope America will wake up to "efficiency" as the #1 cry of the will of the people. Local farms -- should not become malls. Hydroelectric dams are far better for the environment than nuclear, coal or oil, or even gas. Geothermal power stations are better still. Nonrewables are for people with no faith in the only thing we can all be sure of -- humanity. From humans comes our strength, our weaknesses, our past and our future. We are not guided by inner lights or outside forces, we are alone and we are the rulers of our destiny. If that is taken to mean I do not believe in God, some God, my God, any God, that is not true. But I do not believe we should ever act as though we expect Him to do more right now, or ever, than watch us, with sad eyes. And jot down notes on society's strange and self-destructive behaviors.
Okay, world, so you don't want to believe me about Cassini?
Well, fine. Whether Cassini reenters Earth's atmosphere on August 17th or 18th, 1999, or whatever the exact date NASA currently says, or if Cassini GOES DEAD TOMORROW and becomes a poisoned pill everyone will soon forget about (except Whoever rolls the cosmic dice), or if (the more likely, of course) all goes well and Cassini teaches us that sure enough, there's no life on Saturn -- well, what can I say?
I am amazed at how strongly the United States Government will fight for this issue. There are other documented uses of Pu thermal generators besides in outer space, and the United States military clearly uses them on Earth just as they do in the Heavens. DU is probably used throughout the military for armoring everything from C-Rations to the proverbial "$500 hammer".
And there appears to be absolutely nothing a free-thinking U.S. Citizen can do, either to get to the truth, or to work within a movement to try to enlighten people, or even to remain unencumbered by "apologists, cover-up artists, sycophants and other government toadies". Thus, NASA can start out claiming that the flyby will occur at just 312 miles above the Earth -- that was one of their first values. Then NASA raised it to 496 miles. Such exact numbers! Actually, right up until the very last bias correction, NASA can more or less freely adjust the height. NASA of course knows this. My long-time readers of course know this. Any physics teacher of course knows this. Yet NASA acts as though raising the height is the proper response to public concerns, but NASA knew full well all along that in the final stage it would be raised to above "1000 kilometers" (about 700 miles) because at that point, it no longer blatantly violates the provisions of the U.N. Treaties, which appear to have been written not to protect the human population from this terrible use of plutonium, but to permit it! Indeed, they appear to be written by traitors to the human race -- or at least, by lawyers for the space agencies which needed public permission (or ignorance) after earlier public outcry, which amounts to the same thing. (More on this in an upcoming issue.)
As NASA raises the flyby height, at each stage, they appear to the media to be responding to the cries of the "concerned citizens" and indeed, the act of doing so does indeed work to lessen any reasonable person's fears, thus the political maneuver works as designed, to deflate the strength of the opposition's cries. But it lessens the real danger, over time, not the slightest. Only a policy change can do that.
In point of fact, it's THE SYSTEM which the fully aware and awake citizenry wishes to protect itself from, not just from any one single flyby. Raising the height does answer some fears for one particular flyby, there is no doubt. Just as all the little individual containment systems do each and of themselves, add some degree of "safety" along the way as well. But none of these little "appeasements" mean diddly to the real problem, which is the military use of RTGs and RHUs and so forth, which must be stopped. The madness of the military nuclear agenda is an assault by all major militaries against all peace-loving people. It is a war of all combatants against everyone -- even themselves. The various governments originally, 50 years ago, set up such a strong system to protect the "secrets of the bomb" from each other, that those institutions for keeping secrets, and those ways and means of doing so -- such as infiltrating the opposition movement, and such as raising the flyby height in stages -- all those things, are relics of a dead era. A "Cold War" that was the hottest ticket in town for 50 years of global terror -- and the results of which will be "hot" (aka radioactive) isotopes spreading into the environment for millions of years to come. The poisonous assault by the military and their friends, the subsidized and secretive nuclear establishment, has got to end. If Y2K doesn't awaken the world to the twin threats of secrecy and nukes, I don't know if anything will.
I am not a particularly religious person -- or perhaps I am -- but in either case I have no reason, to the extent that I am religious, to believe that this is the end of the human race, this Y2K thing. Or even Cassini. I think if He is coming it will be much further down the road. That is what I believe. We, the human race, will have to figure everything out all by ourselves. There is no other choice. We must tackle each issue honestly, in its order of importance. The first issue is to educate the world. That is what my software company does. We distribute a lot of educational animated software, most of it for free. That is also what this newsletter does -- it tries to educate, and despite the recent claims of certain people who once claimed that I should be cloned for my efforts here, I have not lied, and every word has been the truth as I believed it at the time I wrote it, and when necessary I have corrected what was said in error, and will continue to do so. But it is time to start to refocus. I will hope that an underground movement will form against the space nuclear policies, and I will hope that cooperation among those opposed will grow. But I think the only way to stop the mad policies of the U.S., Russia, and who knows who else, is to educate the world about the general concepts of statistics. So that is what I have been doing since the launch, and we are about to release a new product in that arena, and that is what we will be continuing to focus on when I am at work, which for those wondering, has averaged at least 50 hours a week throughout the Cassini battle. Cassini has never been more than a part-time thing, because that is the nature of activism. It cannot step in front of trying to make a living for anyone. New products have continued to flow from my software company all along, and a 700+ screen educational tutorial about statistics will be forthcoming shortly. Perhaps by educating people about statistical analysis in general, they will be able to see the silliness of NASA's approach to the truth -- the way NASA averages accident scenarios together, and minimizes everything, and presents single-number averages, where graphics indicating statistical distributions are far more appropriate -- but far more alarming.
Effective today, we are permanently broadening the focus of this soon-to-be-renamed newsletter to whatever the next big potential or recent disaster there is that strikes the founder and editor's fancy, which we feel is more in need of our attention specifically. Because we will still have a lot to say about Cassini, we will not automatically drop any subscriber intentionally nor will we cease from sending these, unsolicited, to government employees and leaders whose email addresses we have obtained through what we consider legitimate means and who should become enlightened about these issues, for the sake of the people they purport to serve.
Although we have not said all there is to say on Cassini, time is getting short and perhaps we are getting close. We know what the game is, our readers know what the game is, there is not much left to say. It is utterly clear now, having so recently realized the extent of the damage and infiltration within the so-called movement, that nothing can be done to save a blind and stupid world, unwilling and/or unable to investigate the truth about anything, from Cassini or its followers. I cannot stop it. My readers cannot stop it. The movement will certainly not stop it, preferring brinksmanship with a fictitious and nameless enemy, rather than attacking the source of the problem, which is, of course, the nuclear issue as it relates to space. The issues are crystal-clear now, and I do not believe there are any more significant secrets left to uncover. If things change, I'll do a newsletter about it.
Effective today and for the next 9 months or so, this newsletter will be increasingly devoted to a subject few would dare claim I know nothing about. As a computer programmer with two decades' of Assembler language and other experience, with personally-written PC software distributed globally via the Internet, and having sold educational software programs to many departments of the U. S. government, and having distributed millions and millions of software programs to schools and universities, and to corporations and individuals all around the world, I feel obliged to take time out to comment on Y2K.
First of all, on a personal note, I have been aware of and have been testing Y2K scenarios on my own software for the entire time I have been a programmer. I do not believe a single piece of code I have written for anyone will be affected by Y2K. For a more detailed description, please see:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/faqs/y2kquest.htm
I have long taken the stand that the Y2K issue is overblown. I believed that most programmers behaved much as I did, and that there was little to worry about in terms of major problems. However, I no longer hold that viewpoint. I have spoken to too many programmers who inform me they believe their own code, written perhaps decades ago but believed to be still running somewhere, will fail. There are so many dangers inherent in the embedded systems, there are so many conflicts of authority, and there is so much guesswork going on, and programming is such a transient profession, with few programmers staying in one place for long, that I am no longer unconcerned about the Y2K problem. The concern may not be overblown at all. But will I have water, food, guns and ammo, enough for 6 months or a year? No. Food and water for several weeks? Absolutely, and so should everyone else, even in the best of times.
Will I be hiding under my bed when Cassini does its flyby? I doubt it. I will probably be working on Y2K issues at that point, or writing my next educational software product. 1000 kilometers -- hey, what's the worry? It's only plutonium. It's only a few million that might die -- hey, there are billions of us worker ants. We can expend a few million for even flimsy and false science goals. Why not? We waste Albanians in Kosovo, letting Milosevic run rampant under a limited air engagement, which never works without a coordinated ground attack. We waste a whole generation of children in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of youths, having blown up even their sewage system infrastructure as a "military target". We wasted tens of thousands of U. S. citizen-soldiers in nuclear weapons testing, giving them cancer from weapons testing. Then we hide all this activity behind lie after lie after lie. We create phoney movements to further hide the truth and help silence the scientific debate on the issues -- where will it all end? I don't know, but the attached email is the best grouping of Y2K-related web sites and short commentary I have seen.
Please educate yourselves about the growing Y2K threat. It is real, if only because people can make it real by going berserk over anything, real or imagined. This is however, such an unknown that to call it imagined is unreal, yet to call it real is unimaginable.
Oh and don't forget -- NASA is way, way behind on Y2K testing, just like every other government agency. Cassini (and humanity) could survive the flyby just fine, only to have the risk have been useless if Cassini fails at any time, for any reason, including but hardly limited to Y2K.
-rdh
X-Sender: mrobinowitz@green.igc.org@pop2.igc.org
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 1999 21:27:27 -0700
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: "Mark Robinowitz -
www.igc.org/icc370/y2k.htm
"
Subject: nuclear power station for sale
Reply-To: mrobinowitz@igc.org
Sender: owner-Y2K-nukes@envirolink.org
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.2.07 -- ListProc(tm) by CREN
from the April / May 1999 issue of Home Power magazine (www.homepower.com)
"FOR SALE! Nuclear Power Plant, Good Condition, Runs Fair, Minor leaks, Never been moth-balled. Includes government subsidies and bailouts making this a sure bet investment. No waste worries! -- Contracts in place to send all waste to your neighbors in another state. Oblivious local population means hassle-free operation and ease of cover-up in the event of an accident. Rube-Goldberg couldn't have designed a better facility. It's just too good to pass up (or be true). Must sell before Jan. 1, 2000. A deal at $1 or best offer. Call Now! 1-800-APR-FOOL"
From: DRovics@aol.com
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 12:29:21 EST
Subject: y2k song
hi folks,
thought i'd send this along to a few folks who i thought might like it. it ain't the greatest poetry, but hey, it's timely... feel free to distribute it or delete it or whatever...
Y2K
Seems like everybody's talking, you can hear 'em mumble
Thinking of tomorrow, getting ready for a tumble
Some are running to the hills in their camouflage jackets
Stocking up on guns and dried vegetable packets
Folks are hoping an alarm clock will wake the dead
Looking nervous in the mirror for a mark on their forehead
Some folks are getting all excited, saying isn't this great
You know the revolution has a time and date
(chorus)
Y2K, Y2K
What's gonna happen on that day?
Lots of folks got lots to say
Talking 'bout Y2K
The bankers are shaking and they're acting kinda funny
Hoping no one'll be making a run on their money
Someone's burning a cross in the darkening gloom
Giving a speech about living room
Some folks are selling everything they own
While they're chatting up Jesus on the telephone
Other folks are talking about how to prepare
For a world to lose or a world to share
(chorus)
They say the power grids'll fail, the missiles'll launch
The food'll be scarce, you'll be losing that paunch
We'll wake up one day and the streets'll be still
With a million empty tanks to fill
Your house'll be dark, no heat will run
Unless it's powered by wood or sun
And if yours is, will you run and hide
Or welcome your guests as they come inside?
(chorus)
e-mail: DRovics@aol.com
http://www.davidrovics.com
(617) 747-4460
P.O. Box 995
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
from www.y2kculture.com
By Solveig Singleton
Millennium parties
with loud music, lights and joy;
then, how dark, how cold!
Stupid programmer,
think ahead next time, when the
power comes back on.
Windows 98 is
compliant with minor bugs,
store food and water!
Hire more programmers
for Y2k Bug now -- oops,
too late, lights are out!
Y2k is just
a scam for consultants--hey,
riots, Martial law!
-------------------------
constructive things to do about Y2K
the Year 2000 global computer crash
www.utne.com/y2k -- Utne Reader's Y2K Citizen's Action Guide
www.co-intelligence.org -- Awakening: the upside of Y2K
www.cassandraproject.org -- individual & community preparedness, public health concerns, links to Y2K citizen action groups
www.redcross.org/disaster/safety/y2k.html store food, water, cash (but only for a week of disruptions)
www.fema.gov/nwz99/99001.htm -- feds want everyone to prepare www.ciao.gov -- Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office (feds have a sense of humor -- CIAO "goodbye") www.ncs.gov -- U.S. National Communications System learn about power grid & military emergency communications
www.tmn.com/y2k -- scenarios, psychology (very progressive & visionary)
www.kiyoinc.com/current.html -- Cory Hamasaki's Y2K weather reports (technical expertise, sarcastic, not for the faint-hearted)
Y2K and environmentalism www.y2ktimebomb.com/Tip/Lord/lord9836.htm
www.yardeni.com -- strategic analysis from Wall Street See "Year 2000 Energy Crisis" (oil company problems) www.csis.org/html/y2kw6.html (middle east oil & Y2K)
www.carlaemery.com/Y2K.htm -- cities need to store extra food
www.euy2k.com -- learn about electric utility problems (the duration of power failures is probably the single most important factor in the severity of Y2K, apart from terrorist attacks, martial law and accidental nuclear war)
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roleigh_martin utilities, banks, and more
www.nirs.org -- nuclear information and resource service petitions to nuclear regulatory commission -- very important!!!
www.dieoff.org -- "brain food" about the end of the petroleum age
www.igc.org/icc370/y2k.htm -- "Y2KO" environmental impacts, practical suggestions for mitigating "01-01-00" and envisioning a sustainable society during the recovery on the other side of the century roll-over
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"There can't be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full" -- Henry Kissinger
"What's going to happen when whole countries drop off the radar screen with no infrastructure remaining?" -- Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah), Chair of the Senate Y2k Committee, addressing the first White House Y2K Council Summit, December 3, 1998
"The Titanic sank in an ocean that was 99% free of icebergs." -- Y2K embedded systems expert Mark Frautschi www.tmn.com/y2k
"Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much" -- FDR, Fireside Chat at the beginning of WWII
END OF FOWARDED EMAIL
A humorous and timely poem by Mike Waller, a scientist in Britain.
Subject: So you still think you're in charge
O May No Some Pow'r the Giftie
gie us............
I think old Rabbie got it wrong,
Our world would not last very long
If we could see with steely eye
The self that's seen by passers-by.
The human brain's perhaps the best
But in one way it fails the test.
In planning all our clever acts
We need a mind which faces facts.
Yet one such fact we deeply fear:
There ain't much point in being here.
As billions of us come and go,
From whence and whither we don't know,
Our egos need stout walls and roof
To shield them from this dreadful truth.
So, whilst outwardly there's no sign,
Inside ourselves we build a shrine.
There, raised upon a noble plinth,
Which stands within a labyrinth,
There dwells the sacred sense of self
So crucial to our mental health.
These gods, who hold us all in thrall,
Demand delusions shared by all,
Which serve to fool the human race
That everyone's a special case.
So when your mind to ego turns
Forget about old Rabbie Burns.
As of yourself you take a view
Wear spectacles of rosy hue.
Mike Waller
(Mike Waller is not associated with the STOP CASSINI campaign. We just like his poetry.)
SIGN THE PETITION!
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/petition/cass1999.htm
CANCEL CASSINI by JUNE 24th, 1999!!!!
To Cancel Cassini start by asking NASA for the 1995 Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission and all subsequent related documents (on paper, please!). Tell them you need it IMMEDIATELY (members of the world press should do this too). All citizens of the world are ENTITLED to these documents because of the global threat Cassini poses. Here's where to get information:
Tell them Russell Hoffman, founder and editor of the STOP CASSINI newsletter, sent you. I bet they love to hear that!
NASA states that they do not have the resources anymore to answer most emails they receive. Liars! They have $13 billion dollars to play with. They can answer the public's questions. At least, ask them one specific question: How many letters did they get opposing Cassini today? (And tell them you oppose it too!) If each reader asks them that...
Here's NASA's email address:
Daniel Goldin is the head of NASA. Here's his email address: daniel.goldin@hq.nasa.gov
Here's the NASA URL to find additional addresses to submit written questions to:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS-002-HQ.html
(Note that it looks like possibly a temporary URL assignment, but you can always start at http://www.nasa.gov.)
They imply at the web site that written comments are more likely to get answered -- quicker than emailed comments! Someone should welcome them to the 1990's before it's too late.
Long time readers know lots of questions to ask them! Ask them why they don't link to our web site. Ask them why they haven't got rid of Daniel Goldin, the glassy-eyed fool. Ask them why they haven't sent you YOUR copy of the 1995 EIS for the Cassini mission! Ask them anything, but demand an answer! YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW WHAT NASA IS DOING TO YOUR HEALTH.
Be sure to "cc" the president and VP and your senators and congresspeople, too.
president@whitehouse.gov vice-president@whitehouse.gov
Always include your full name and postal address in all correspondence to any Government official of any country.
Please send any news directly to the editor at the email address given below.
Please post these newsletters EVERYWHERE! You can -- and should -- send them to news media too! Please tell your friends and neighbors and Internet buddies to subscribe! These words can have power, but only if they are passed on to many others!
Thanks for reading,
Sincerely,
Russell D. Hoffman
rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
Founder & Editor
STOP CASSINI Newsletter -- over 100 issues of mirth, merriment, and mind-numbingly depressing facts about NASA and other horrors
Webmaster
STOP CASSINI Web Site
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cassini.htm
I don't know how it is in your country, but in our country, at least we have this:
Amendment One... "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble..."
Written in U.S.A.
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