Ray's X-Blog

Liberty Net Jamfest I've been trying to listen to the May 22 - 23 recording of the Liberty Net with the emphasis on the word trying . I used to hear the transmissions between the ultra-right-wing ham radio operators live on my portable shortwave radio but reception usually sucks. So now I download the latest meet-up from the archives at http://3950.net . Last Saturday jammers were out in force, illegally blocking the Lib Netters. Loud rock music and stupid comments from "Buck Rogers in the Holland Tunnel." I don't agree with most of what the Lib Netters espouse; I'm just trying to track conspiracy theories. Discussion during the last Liberty Net dealt with the theory that North Korea blew up the BP oil rig, the Deepwater Horizon, causing the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Why? Because South Korea built the rig. One Lib Netter said he gave that theory a 30 or 40 percent chance of being true, unlike Rush Limbaugh's "Environmental wackos ...

Sea Hunt: Target USO ** Ahoy! Spoilers! ** "It was shiny and circular like a flying saucer." And underwater, not in the sky. I'm watching a rerun of an old TV show called "Sea Hunt" about the adventures of a ex-Navy frogman, Mike Nelson, portrayed by Lloyd Bridges. Usually the flippered hero is out chasing crooks and assorted other bad guys but this time around he's investigating reports of a sea monster off the coast of Mexico. He responds to an urgent message from a friend living in the area of the sighting. The episode is entitled "Decoy," from the first season of "Sea Hunt" (First broadcast: Sept. 20, 1958). You can watch the episode at this link . Whatever this unidentified submerged object is, when it approaches the shore, whales go nuts, jumping out of the water. It also emits a strange sound that is picked up by underwater microphones. One fisherman claimed it had eyes that burned and long flowing hair. When the object is det...

XR #73 It's up, the latest PDF version of my hardcopy zine, the Ray X X-Rayer . Go to www.xrayer.com , scroll down to the PDF zine section and click on XR #73b. Snail mail readers have received a pamphlet version, a double-sided sheet, but I didn't want to confuse my online readers with the details of printing that out. So what's online is just three pages, 1-3, no special lay out. And with the problems I had putting together the hardcopy pamphlet, I should've stayed with a straight lay out instead of getting compleX. Of course, each X-Rayer reformats a few posts from this blog into an easy-to-read zine.

Conspiracy Theorist Rush Limbaugh Environmental "wackos" might have blown up the BP oil rig that is gushing disaster into the Gulf of Mexico, according to Rush Limbaugh. Sure. And if someone attacks this blog and shuts it down, I'll blame it on neo-Nazi Zionist Amish radicals. (We all know how dangerously tech-savvy Amish radicals are.) I used to tune in Rush's right-wing conservative circus / radio show to verify that he remained a bloviating bag of bullshit. But thanks to the Internet Rush's stupid comments can be found without the pain of listening to an entire program. One of the few times I tuned in Rush he was saying that the Democrats might have screwed up the economy so that Obama could be elected. I did some Googling and learned that informative comment was spewed way back on December 22nd, 2008. When I heard it I thought how appropriate it was to spread such negative BS during the holiday season. His "Democrats did in the economy" theory...

Gulf Oil Spill: The Nuclear Option (Composite image by Ray X). Russian science journalist Vladimir Gubarev has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: nuke it. In a Pravda article he explains how the Soviet Union used nuclear bombs to seal off wells: "The USSR had a sad experience in containing oil-well flowing in Central Asia. Two breakdowns occurred almost simultaneously... The two giant flames were extinguished with the help of nuclear explosions. They drilled two wells to approach the emergency wells under the ground and lowered nuclear devices into the wells. The troubled wells were blocked as a result of the explosions." The Russian science journalist explains that he was present during the successful explosions. Gubarev then writes that the Soviet scientists wanted to promote their oil-spill-stopping technology to other countries but the US declined due to concerns about radioactivity. The atomic bombs used by the USSR were still powerful but relatively low yield . The f...

XR #72 Available for download at http://www.xrayer.com . Scroll down to the PDF archives. Now to wait and see how well the hardcopy version, the digest-sized edition I sent without an envelope, made it through the snail mail system.

Review: Stanton T. Friedman Is Real What's with the organ music? Opening scene, "Stanton T. Friedman Is Real." The doc's subject is standing at a podium, speaking at the 2001 MUFON conference. In the background a musical selection is played, added post-production, the kind of tonal atmosphere one would hear at an old time tent revival decades ago in rural USA. I suspected why Paul Kimball, the documentarian, picked that particular piece. I'm not surprised when later on an interviewee refers to Stan as an "evangelist." But despite that editorial musical commentary, STFIR is a balanced documentary, showing different POVs regarding Stan's work and the ufological field in general. I was an "informed viewer" going in, i.e., I was familiar with the subject matter. But the doc still held my interest; I learned all sorts of new stuff. Also, it's doubtful I'll ever make to Roswell during one of its goofy Crash Festivals, but STFIR shows...

Hey, Kids – Wanna Drive Yourself Insane? So this time around I decided to format the hardcopy version of my zine as a digest. For those of you unfamiliar with zining, a digest-formatted zine is when you take 8 1/2 X 11 paper, turn it sideways, fold it down the middle, and staple it along the crease. It looks neat but there’s a downside. How to you get the pages in the proper sequence? Four sheets folded convert into an 8 page edition. Not only do the pages have to be out of sequence to be in the proper sequence, you have to make sure each double-side sheet has the correct pages on each side. For eXample, this means sheet A has to have pages 8 and 1 on one side, then pages 2 and 7 on the flip side. I wanted to do all the formatting on my computer instead of printing out the pages in sequence, then taping or gluing them down as I did in the past. I think I’ve figured it all out, no mess lying around my desk, paper trimmings, but what an eXcruciating HEADACHE I got! Now I have to m...

Papernet: MY ZINE Should you ever tell a zinester what to do? Fuhgeddaboudit. Especially if that zinester is Fred Argoff, creator of the paper zine Brooklyn! In B! #68 -- which just arrived via snail mail -- Fred has an essay entitled YOUR FRIENDLY LOCAL NEANDERTHAL which addresses the issue of paper versus photons. He explains that a couple of people have told him that his zine should go digital instead of being exclusively hardcopy. One person stated that Fred was wasting his time with B! because it wasn't being produced as an e-zine. Fred's response is summed up in two words: MY ZINE. As in, this is my zine, not yours. As he explains: "You want to read your zines off a computer screen? Go right ahead. But for long as there is a zine called Brooklyn! it shall be produced on paper." His zine. His call. I agree with him. If you don't like what he's doing, then start an ezine about Brooklyn. Me, I'm both paper and photons. I blog first, then col...

No Accidents: It's All A Conspiracy Interesting tidbits from the latest gathering of the Liberty Net that started on Saturday night, May 1, around 10 PM and carried into Sunday morning. (For those of you unaware of this net, it is a weekly on air meeting of ham radio operators in the US who share extreme right-wing views.) A main topic: the tremendous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It was emphasized that the offshore rig explosion occurred on Earth Day. Of course, that can't be a coincidence, say a few of the LibNet gang. The Mega-Conspiracy must have planned the explosion and the resulting spill for that particular date. It's all a plot by President Obama, claimed a LibNetter, to push liberal green energy sources over traditional ones. How else can you turn the public against new offshore drilling? Also the contrived spill forces this country to use oil under the control of China. Obama, of course, is really a communist, he serves his red masters, at least not when...

Facebook Crosspost SNAFU Facebook is still not crossposting from this blog. So I'll just paste links over there for those you like to use FB as a central info service. But there are other options. http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=337187 Just click on above link, sign up, and FeedBlitz will deliver my posts to your email account. I've used it for some time now and no problems. http://www.google.com/reader No problems with Google Reader so far. You can follow your favorite sites all in one place. I also use Bloglines but have been having trouble with it. Sometimes it gets wonky. Check out the box on the right side of my blog, Subscribe To Ray's X-Blog . Other services besides Google are available. There is also Google Friend Connect. I'm not familiar with it, never took the time to use it, but it allows you become a follower of a blog. So keep up the great work, Facebook. It's not like users are completely stuck with your service.

Notable Points: TJ And The Star Fleet At ufodigest.com contributor TJ Morris has posted another intriguing article with concepts spanning from the metaverse to the xenoverse. Such a sweeping span would boggle the average reader but TJ puts her cosmic concepts into personal terms, showing how they relate to her earthly existence. She admits her experiences sound like science fiction but insists they are true. Entitled "TJ Morris Shares The Andromeda Galaxy Star Fleet," I gleaned these fascinating details from her essay: > In a previous existence TJ lived in the Andromeda galaxy. > Here on Gaia (planet Earth in the Milky Way galaxy) she searched out other intelligences beyond this world through meditation and prayer. > She's now in contact with the Andromeda Star Fleet hovering over our world, a global fleet of 27 different species. > She and the intelligences of the Star Fleet will work with quantum scientists to explain exobiology and existentialism to the ...

Time Suck I wasted about an hour yesterday trying to get the crosspost app at Facebook to automatically include posts from this blog. The feature worked OK until recently; it just stopped without warning. I'm not a Facebook fan but some people check out all their stuff there and so I used crossposting to make it more convenient for them to follow my thoughts. Someone (Hat Tip: Doug ) told me that the app would work again if you reset it. But with all the digital knowledge crammed into my head, I couldn't remember how to access the crosspost feature. Of course, Facebook's Help was useless. I managed to find the answer via Google and even that took some time. When I did access the proper Facebook page, the link box I needed was missing. Taking a chance, I clicked on Page 2 and the link finally appeared on that page. Convenient, easy to access Facebook. I've heard complaints that changing the privacy settings involves even more hoops to jump through. Now to see if t...