PLEASE READ THIS-MAJOR BREAK THRU FROM BILL MEHESS

[altrez]

Bill,

I look froward to your open tests. Is there anything else that you can share with us at this point? Will you post the plans in this thread in a few weeks?



-Altrez

[giantkiller]

http://www.damninteresting.com/project-babylon-gerald-bulls-downfall/
Here's a lesson.
The equation is this:

As much as the device is wanted so is the designer.

And since this has now been advertised the trolls have notified the moguls which will send grunts.

Another prairie dog festival. Pop goes the weasil.

Cold, huh?

So, Bill? You gonna jump out in public and wave the answer around like everybody needs you?
All you had to do was send it around quietly for stealth reproduction. Or have you done this already? Possibly on the day of your son's publication?

I read an interesting article about Oppenheimer and Tesla. You see we needed a quick fix to Japan. Oppenheimer and Tesla were called into a meeting. Oppenheimer was given Sandia labs site to produce a weapon. Tesla already had his. Oppenheimer won the contract because of the effect of the show. Cheaper too. Alot of people on stage. Everything to distract the public. Horrify them in a multi level aspect. Nothing mystical from nowhere. Nope, a bomb. Something the whole human race could understand. Put Tesla's design behind the curtain. This would allow the powers that be to have a level of stuff that could blackbirded. Always create a publicity stunt to hide the truth. Then you never have to waste an event. It has been said 'Rewrite and history and you control the masses.'

And in case anyone forgot...

What should they know of the present who only the present know?
        - Blair Worden

Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.
        - Gustave Flaubert

"History ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It's written not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living. It is part of our cultural bloodstream, the secret of who we are. And it tells us to let go of the past, even as we honour it; to lament what ought to be lamented; and to celebrate what should be celebrated."
        - Simon Schama, "A History of Britain"

In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.
        - Simon Schama, " History of Britain"

In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
        - Simon Schama

"History, Macauley says, is a debatable land. It lies on the margin of two disputed territories; those of poetry and those of philosophy; that of reason and that of the imagination."
        - Simon Schama, introducing Thomas Macauley, "Historians of Genius"

"If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."
        - Andrew Fletcher (1653-1716), Scottish patriot

"We do not live in the past, but the past in us."
        - Ulrich Phillips, "The Slave Economy of the Old South"

A generation which ignores history has no past: and no future.
        - Lazarus Long, from the works of Robert Heinlein

To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.
        - Cicero

There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again - now.
        - Eugene O'Neill

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect is already in the cause.
        - Henri Louis Bergson

Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the the air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He has entered into the strange world of history.
        - Loren Eiseley

Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it.
        - Simon Jenkins, "The London Times"

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
        - GK Chesterton

A person with no sense of the past is a person who is a stranger both to his or her own roots and to the human condition more generally. For human beings are not creatures of nature; we are inheritors of the history that has made us what we are. Not to know our history is not to know ourselves, and that is the condition not of human beings, but of animals. And even from a practical point of view, to be ignorant of the past is to make us impotent and unprepared before the present. How can someone without a sense of medieval history have the slightest inkling of the meaning of the current impasse the West finds itself in in its dealings with Islam? The Crusades were not, as is often implied by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, a unique moment of anti-Islamic aggression. They were actually but one blip in the astonishing growth of Islamic empires in Europe and elsewhere, from the time of Mohammed onwards, right up to 1683 when the Turks were turned back from the gates of Vienna and 1686 when they were expelled from Budapest. But who now remembers any of this, or ponders its consequences? It is not, needless to say, taught in National Curriculum history, which prefers to dwell on the Aztecs, about whom we have only the vaguest knowledge in comparison, and (endlessly) on the rise of Fascism (not communism) in Europe, studied by pupils who know nothing of the history of Italy and Germany before the 20th century.
Is it any wonder that, with no sense of our past or identity â€" as, in other moods, politicians increasingly complain â€" we are a culture obsessed with celebrity, football, and reality television? Most of our population know nothing else, and they have no yardstick from either history or culture with which to judge.
        - Anthony O'Hear, "The Telegraph"

The Crusaders have been regarded â€" and not only by Muslims â€" as an advance force of western imperialism. This is an odd judgment, given that they were responding to expansionist Islam. Still, the intensity of their faith, and the brutality of some of their actions, have sat ill with liberal anti-colonialist attitudes. There are many more eager to offer understanding to Islamic jihadists today than to the crusaders, who had more in common with these jihadists than either had or have with western liberals. History, however, is not a matter of passing judgment, and real historians don't put past ages in the dock. Their business is to show what happened and, if possible, why it happened, to open our eyes and so enlarge our understanding. Jonathan Phillips does this admirably. The past may be another country where they do things differently, as L P Hartley suggested; but it is a country open for exploration, and the voyage Phillips takes us on is fascinating.
        - Allan Massie, reviewing "The Second Crusade", "The Telegraph"

When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him ‘warts and all’, he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy.
        - Mark Steyn,"The Spectator"

The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.
        - Sir John Keegan

The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the purpose of historians to say, 'No! It's very complicated.'
The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.
        - David Cannadine

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.
        - from a review of the work of Edward Gibbon

"Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure antiquarians, see history against the background â€" the controlling background â€" of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time, to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible."
        - Hugh Trevor Roper, valedictory address to Oxford University (1980)

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that Once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at crow.
        - G.M. Trevelyan

Time's glory is to calm contending kings, to unmask falsehood, and to bring truth to light.

- Oedipus Rex
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.
- Will Durant, "The History of Civilization"
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
        - Will Durant, "The Lessons of History"

Civilization is the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

        - Adam Ferguson, "A History of Civil Society", 1767.

History is a record of exploded ideas.
        - Admiral Fisher

History is an argument without end.
        - Pieter Geyl

One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes.
        - David Frum

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

- George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Science, 1918
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
       - George Santayana

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

        - Aldous Huxley

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

- George Bernard Shaw
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
        - Mark Twain
History is tangled, messy, contradictory. But is where we are.
        - Eamon Duffy, "Faith of our Fathers"

We need open minds and open hearts when we wrestle with the past and ask questions of it, and the answers it will provide are in nobody's pocket... We should let nobody tell us that they know all that it contains, or try to prescribe or constrain in advance what it has to tell us.
        - Eamon Duffy, "Faith of our Fathers"

If history offers no obvious solutions, however, it does at least provide the comfort of knowing that failure is nothing new.
        - Eamon Duffy, from "Scandals in the Church"

Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.
        - Eamon Duffy

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.
        - Kurt Vonnegut

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.
        - Ernest Renan

History is a lie agreed upon.
        - Napoleon Bonaparte

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
        - Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790)

History is the torch that is meant to illuminate the past, to guard us against the repetition of our mistakes of other days. We cannot join in the rewriting of history to make it conform to our comfort and convenience.
        - Claude G. Bowers, "The U.S. and the Spanish Civil War"

History is what we read, write and think about the past.
        - Sir Michael Howard

I make no apologies for any inconsistencies or contradictions in my essays. Those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have probably stopped thinking all together.

The true use of history, whether civil or military, is not to make man clever for the next time, it is to make him wise forever.

- Sir Michael Howard, "The Causes Of War"
People often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or economics or perhaps in political science, who have led their governments into disastrous decisions and miscalculations because they have no awareness whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe, of the foreign societies with which they have to deal.
        - Sir Michael Howard, "The Lessons of History"
"History is philosophy teaching by examples."
        - Lord Bolingbroke, 18th century political philosopher

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom â€" not a guide by which to live.
        - Robert Kennedy

History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
        - Andrew Marr

"The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case must ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged."
        - Abraham Lincoln, looking forwards after re-election in 1864

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
        - George Will, "The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts"

History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
        - Isidor F Stone

History is what the evidence compels us to believe.
        - Michael Oakshot

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.
        - RG Collingwood

What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present.
        - Adam Garfinkle

History is past politics, and politics is present history.
        - Edward Freeman

History is the projection of ideology into the past.
        - Unknown

Historians are not just dispassionate chroniclers. By their selection, ordering, highlighting, attribution and analysis of facts they fashion a particular version of the past. And they also play a part in the disputes of the present, by legitimising or undermining the rationales, heroes and myths which influence current debates. Historical figures are forever being conscripted for fresh cultural battles.
        - The Times, "Truth, trust and rewriting history" 4/4/02

Western elites â€" the beneficiaries of 60 years of peace and prosperity achieved by the sacrifices to defeat fascism and Communism â€" are unhappy in their late middle age, and show little gratitude for, or any idea about, what gave them such latitude. If they cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all.
        - Victor Davis Hanson, "Remembering World War Two", "National Review"

"The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights confront each other."
        - Henry Kissinger

"History is a conversation with the dead."
        - Keith Hopkins

"Every piece of history is a piece of human nature."
        - Joss Whedon

Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.
        - Bettany Hughes, reviewing "Vote For Caesar" by Peter Jones

History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
        - AN Wilson, "The Victorians"

The past is dead, and nothing that we can choose to believe about it can harm or benefit those who were
alive in it. On the other hand, it has the power to harm us.
        - ATQ Stewart, "The Shape of Irish History"

If we are to understand anything of the human mind we must approach the people of the past with humility rather than an overconfident superiority.
        - ATQ Stewart, "The Shape of Irish History"

History is a dead thing brought to new life. It is fragments of a past, dead and gone, resurrected by historians. It is in this sense like Frankenstein's monster. It threatens our versions of ourselves.
        - Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"

Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.
        - Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"

What any of us know of our births, we learn from others. It is a beginning we ourselves cannot recall, so we commit the story to memory. We claim it and incorporate it into our story of ourselves. We thus begin the story of our lives with an intimate event that we can only know second hand. And so the confusion of history and memory begins.
        - Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even â€" if we dare, and we should dare â€" a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.
        - Stephen Fry, "History Matters"

History is not made, or lived, in hindsight.
        - Eoghan Harris

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.
        - Bruce Catton

One might say that history is not about the past. If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn't walk about saying, "Isn't this fascinating living in the past! Aren't we picturesque in our funny clothes!" They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have. History is â€" or should be â€" a lesson in appreciation. History helps us keep a sense of proportion. Is life not infinitely more interesting and enjoyable when one can stand in a great historic place or walk historic ground, and know something of what happened there and in whose footsteps you walk? Why would anyone wish to be provincial in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest books ever written. History is a larger way of looking at life.
        - David McCullough, from the 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
        - David McCullough

By and large "history", when taken to a mass audience by a television documentary or a newspaper, is usually only a kind of fraud, in which viewers and readers are induced to take an interest by the promise that people in the past were "just like us", comforted all the while by an unspoken assumption of their own innate superiority. Most contemporary values and nearly everything trading under the banner of modern liberalism, it seems fair to say, are built on the notion of the past's inferiority to our own arrangements. Queerly enough, being honest about modern life involves acknowledging that television sets and share-option schemes are not an instant guarantee of spiritual worth. Patronising your ancestors is simply a form of moral cheating. Whatever we may feel about Dickens's Mr Gradgrind, he was a product of the environment which created him. Our first duty, consequently, is to examine him on his terms, not ours.
        - DJ Taylor reviews Matthew Sweet's "Inventing The Victorians" for The Times

More and more, we are projecting our own values on to those who lived in the past as though there can be no other way to live, or to think, than the way we live and think now... All ages have their prejudices. We're no different. We are different in one respect, though. Ours is the only one ever to think that it has nothing at all to learn from the past. One result of this is that it has become all but impossible for us to make a drama set in the past in which a credible character doesn't think exactly like us. The writer CS Lewis called this kind of attitude 'chronological snobbery', meaning the belief that the latest thing is always the best. We're all chronological snobs now.
        - David Quinn, "The Irish Independent"

We must not look at the past with the enormous condescension of posterity.
        - EP Thompson

"Pearl Harbor" is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.
        - A.O. Scott, film critic for "The New York Times"

Early 21st-century man prefers, like Chairman Mao, to let the past serve the present. If he stopped making jejune moral judgments about his ancestors and tried to understand what made them tick instead, he might make less of a mess of his own times.
        - Robert Salisbury, "The Spectator"

The 20th century is already slipping into the "obscurity of mis-memory", writes Tony Judt in the introduction to this superb collection of essays. Global capitalism has dissolved most of the old national and ideological hatreds, leaving those under 40 puzzled as to what all the fuss was about. History has become either a source of nostalgic reminiscence ("heritage") or a chronicle of victimhood. Politicians raid it for "lessons"; fashion designers for styles. Gone is the sense of carrying forward some great project, be it of national glory or social liberation.
        - Edward Skidelsky, reviewing "Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century", "The Telegraph"

One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is now lost for ever.
        - Michael Bywater, "Lost Worlds"

Knowing what not to learn from the past is more important than knowing what to learn.The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot wheel and said "What a dust do I raise"

- Michael Handel, "War, Strategy & Intelligence"
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
- Francis Bacon
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
- Herb Brody
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind.
- Samuel Coleridge
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
- L. P. Hartley
The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.
        - Israel Zangwill
Perhaps the most tantalising sort of history is the kind that is just out of reach â€" the stories of peoples whose deeds and style of living helped to form our own world, but of whom we know almost nothing, because they left no written records.
        - Jane Shilling, "The Times"

All my life I’ve been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I’ve ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.
        - AA Gill, "The Times"

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.
        - Frank Herbert

I had nothing but sympathy for the reporter who, after listening in court to David Irving's insistence that the elevator to the ovens simply couldn't have carried as many bodies as the defence expert had claimed, confessed: 'On the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten minutes for each batch of 25. I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up.'
        - DD Guttenplan, "The Holocaust On Trial"

Journalism is merely history's first draft.
        - Geoffrey C. Ward

History, it used to be said, is written in four drafts. The first is the account of a big event in the next day's newspapers. The second is the hot-on-the-heels analysis of that event in the weekly columns. The third becomes possible when fresh detail emerges from the memoirs and diaries of key players. Eventually, decades later, the fourth and final draft of history is etched in stone after all the earlier versions have been graded and revised by learned academics with access to the archives.
In reality, this courtly ritual was never the whole story. But it barely constitutes a sub plot today. Television has transformed the rules that govern how history is made and recorded.
The judgment of posterity is no longer left to historians, or indeed the future. Today, it's the prestigious television documentary series that settles the score and sets the record straight, often while the ink is still wet on the peace treaty and the blood still visible on the combatants' hands. History is no longer written by the victors alone; even the losers can get a look in as long as they win the sympathy of the prime-time viewer.
        - Liam Fay, "The Times"

For many of us, history class is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. Evocatively conveyed, history can be a superior form of infotainment: a thrill-ride through the follies, triumphs and misfortunes of our ancestors. All too often, however, the subject is reduced, by uninspiring teachers, to tedious dates, facts and figures â€" the navigational co-ordinates of a forgotten world.
        - Liam Fay, "The Times"

The book begins by pointing out that history can offer simplicity and support to just about anybody who is willing to twist and distort its lessons. If you believe that Man is acting out God's purpose, or progressing towards liberal democracy, or moving towards the inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat, you will always be able to find examples from the experience of the past to confirm such a prejudice. Equally, if you think that history has largely been responsible for most of the world's recent woes - and anyone living in Ireland, Bosnia, Kashmir or the Holy Land could be forgiven for suspecting as much - you might yearn for Man to unlearn the past. This has in fact been tried on occasion: the Emperor Qin of China destroyed all history books and the scholars who wrote them, vowing to start history over again - the same nirvana that was later offered by Robespierre's new calendar, Pol Pot's Year Zero and Chairman Mao's cultural revolution. Yet none of these attempts worked, and Clio wreaked her own revenge on the reputation of all four dictators. Trotsky has now been digitally restored to the photographs from which Stalin had him airbrushed in the 1920s. Whether we like the idea of history and its capacity for inflaming conflict or not, we are nonetheless stuck with it.
- Andrew Roberts, reviewing Margaret McMillan's "The Uses and Abuses of History", "Standpoint"

The Somme (BBC1) was more fashionable push-me-pull-you, contrarian TV history. Except that the belief that the battle was not so much a desperate disaster as a postponed and expensive triumph is really more revisionist and much closer to the official view in 1919.  The Great War was the defining tragedy of Britain, France, Germany and Russia, and a new beginning for much of the rest of Europe. But, at the time, most of those who had been through it saw it as a great victory; The current received wisdom of the conflict sounds like having the history of the past 50 years recorded solely by Harold Pinter. We are reaching the end of living contact with the Great War and it’s not a question of “lest we forget” so much as “what we choose to remember”.
        - AA Gill, reviewing a documentary in "The Times"

In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials for future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine... supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving, dissesions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites which shake the public. These vices are the causes... religion, morals, laws, perogatives... are the pretexts... Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear... whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body... it walks abroad, it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcase, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers.
        - Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France"

Continue to instruct the world; and â€" whilst we carry on a poor unequal conflict with the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons than other passions and prejudices of our own â€" convey wisdom to future generations.
        - Edmund Burke, in a letter to historian William Robertson

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.
       - Herbert Butterfield, "The Whig Interpretation of History" (1931)

It is AD 5000, and Professor Ostrich, hard at work in his study-pod on Mars, has just made a stunning discovery. Up to that time, it had been assumed that Ian Fleming's books about the hero James Bond, published some 3,000 years earlier, had been fiction. But idly perusing some of the archive material that had been saved from 'Planet' Earth, he found that the old Japanese for 'foreigner' had been 'gaijin'. This rang a bell, and on downloading You Only Live Twice from his ear-piece into his brain, he found this was the very word Bond had used for it too. Curious, he looked up Mount Fuji, also referred to in that book. It existed! Becoming more and more excited, he found that 'Dunhill', 'Martini', 'White's', 'Boodles' - obviously silly names, made up for the occasion - and even 'St James' Street' could all be attested from those long-lost times. Incredible! Surely this must mean that the Bond stories, far from being works of fiction, were history! And Bond, therefore, a real person! An analogous process of reasoning has led a number of businessmen and academics, Professor Barry Strauss of Cornell University among them, to believe that the story Homer tells in his Iliad c 700 BC offers an accurate account of a real war fought between Greeks and Trojans over a woman in Mycenaean times, around 1200 BC... He solemnly adduces political reasons for Paris' abduction of Helen (Homer gives none), dissects the military tactics of the Greeks and Trojans (no such thing), discusses the economics and domestic politics of Troy (non-existent) and compares it with the Hanseatic League of the late Middle Ages (sounds of helpless laughter). Probingly, he wonders whether Achilles was a war criminal. 'A new history', Strauss calls it, and it certainly is that. No history ever paid so little attention to evidence or argument or any of the usual historiographical constraints. No history has ever been so replete with 'would haves' and 'mights'. Was the Trojan king Priam able to look his soldiers in the eye when the Greeks landed? Or would he have been too ashamed of 'his family's policy'?
        - Peter Jones, reviewing "The Trojan War" by Barry Strauss, "The Telegraph"

"Was there a war fought for love?"
        - BBC Horizon asks the essential question of the Trojan War

THEORIES OF HISTORY

If the history of mankind were to begin over, without any change in the world's surface, it would broadly repeat itself.
        - Edmond Demolins

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
        - Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs and Steel"

Any study of mankind is incomplete which ignores the predominant influence exerted on all human development, be it physical, political or social, by man's geographic environment, and it is therefore necessary to know something of the land in which he lived.
        - Joseph Raftery, "Prehistoric Ireland"

People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.
        - Karl Marx

Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth.
        - Harold Urey

At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves against the East; the words of an hallucinated enthusiast such as Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.
        - Gustave Le Bon

In Italy under the Borgias, they had 30 years of warfare,terror,murder & bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, DaVinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The Cuckoo Clock.
        - Orson Welles as Harry Lime in "The Third Man"

"A great man represents a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists of his being there."
        - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Counterfactual experiments in history should always include two limitations: the 'minimal rewrite rule' (only small and plausible changes should be made to the actual sequence of events) and 'second order counterfactuals' (after a certain time, the previous pattern may reassert itself).
        - Geoffrey Parker, in "What If?"

France would pay huge reparations, enough to keep it underarmed and angry for another generation. Anti-Semitism, ever the bane of defeated European nations, would become a problem for it and not Germany.
        - Robert Cowley, "Germany Wins The Marne" from "What If?"

QUOTATIONS FROM HISTORICAL WORKS & REVIEWS

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period (A.D. 98-180) of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.
        - Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", 1776.

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
       - Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?
        - Volney, "Ruins"

She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
        - Thomas Macauley, on Ranke's "History of the Popes"

The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.
        - Thomas Macauley, from "The History of England"

"For Leonidas and for the 300 Spartan warriors who had accompanied him, Thermopylae was more than a strategic strongpoint, it was the place where they intended to show the world what it meant to be a Spartan. As a whole the Greeks made a great deal of noise about the nobility of dying for your country. But for the Spartans, it was far more than just a platitude. In battle they were ordered to see out a beautiful death... embracing death like a lover. The beautiful death was a sacrifice in the true sense of the word. Turning something mortal into something sacred."
        - Bettany Hughes, "The Spartans"

Augustus gradually increased his powers, taking over those of the senate, the executives and the laws. The aristocracy received wealth and position in proportion to their willingness to accept slavery. The state had been transformed, and the old Roman character gone for ever. Equality among citizens was completely abandoned. All now waited on the imperial command.
        - Tactitus, on the transition from Republic to Empire

In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.
        - Salman Rushdie, interviewed in "Reason" magazine

Michael Burleigh is not the first of them to trace the antecedents of 20th century totalitarianism to the well-documented aspiration of Jacobinism to enclose all French people within its intellectual compass by a ruthless stamping out of dissent in the name of progress, liberty and equality. Jacobinism triumphant was an unedifying spectacle, and Burleigh attributes its bloody excesses to the fanaticism of politics as religion. It is true that in their messianic zeal for the regeneration of the French nation the Jacobins sought to remould the minds and manners of the French people in ways that foreshadowed Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The enduring legacy of the 18th century and the French revolution was the demise of the assumption that had so long prevailed in Europe that successful government required the ethical foundation that only religion could provide. The most potent offspring of the revolution was nationalism. Just as religion did, nationalism offered, in Burleigh’s words, 'to fulfil a human need for intense belonging'. The instrument of that fulfilment was no longer to be the church, but the nation-state.
        - Robin Stewart, reviewing "Earthly Powers" in "The Spectator"

The Dutch must be understood as they really are, the Middle Persons in Trade, the Factors and Brokers of Europe... they buy to sell again, take in to send out again, and the greatest Part of their vast Commerce consists in being supply'd from All Parts of the World, that they may supply All th World Again.
        - Daniel Defoe, commenting on the success of the 17th century Dutch Republic

The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun.
        - RR Palmer, describing the events of 1793

The history of Napoleon now becomes, for 12 momentous years, the history of mankind.
        - John Holland Rose, on the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars in 1803

By the summer of 1807, Napoleon ran a one-man European Union with more efficiency and less argument than achieved by Brussels 186 years later. France, Benelux, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany were ruled by directives from Napoleon's quill.
        - Richard Gordon

What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.
        - Andrew Roberts, "The Telegraph"

Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
        - David McCullough

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.
        - George Bernard Shaw

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
        - A.J.P. Taylor

Rather an end in horror, than horror without end.

He could not condemn principles he might need to invoke and apply later.

The wolf cannot help having been created by God as he is, but we shoot him all the same if we have to.

The great player in diplomacy, as in chess, asks the question,"Does this improve me?", not look at the possible fringe benefits

If you can't have what you like, you must like what you have.

- AJP Taylor, "The Struggle For Mastery In Europe 1848-1918"

[jhilldlt]

I understand the confusion let me clearify this. I have the patent pending in place so that I will be able to form a company to hopefully develop the full potential of the device. A company and a patent pending allows me a vehicle to go into the market place and make available this innovation.
It is absolutly imperative to my marketing strategy that the device be reproduced though by anyone who wishes to, I will at the demo provide ALL information to this end.
I would simply like a mechinism in place to put the halt to any commercialization. PLEASE BUILD AWAY!.
Also I realize the limitation of the patent pending. It is only good in the US.  So I am sure it will be jumped on in the other 90% of the world. Even if I had a international patent (which would take years to get) we all know that the Chinese would knock it off anyway.

Bill,

Applying for a patent would bring the following results:
If you do so only in the US then the rest of the world will be  either for people to build it for personal purposes or for  making a commercial product, being this said, it will also cause another effect; because there is a previous priority date for a previous art in the US with your filed application, therefore it will not be granted to any other entity that likes to apply for a patent in any other place in the world.
If you apply for the PCT (there is not such an International patent application that would protect your invention at once) and your application is  published, then you will have to apply for a patent in every country that you decide with the advantage to carry the priority date of your PCT application for your new patent applications in the countries that you decide.Once your PCT application has been published, you will have 12 months to apply for a patent country by country,  otherwise your invention will become of public use.
Finally, the nature itself of patent applications (where keeping a trade secret within will automatically void it) is highly educational, in other words, a patent should be written in such a way that anyone with a normal understanding, by reading a patent, should be able to know what is the invention about.
good luck,
Jesús Hill

[FatBird]

@ BillMeHess,

There are things going on I can't tell you about so please be patient with me.
At the demo as I have stated I will openly answer all questions and show exactly how the device works. No NDA they are really not enforceable anyway.

Also please no folishness about MIBs!

I do not in anyway consider myself important hopefully the work is!  Lets all work together for our fellow man.
Bill

====================================================================================

In Post 23, Bill dogmatically states that talk about MIBs is only FOOLISHNESS!!!

Hmmmmmmmmmm.  I suspect that the inventors of those 6,000 SEIZED patents now firmly believe in MIBs.  LOL

I keep seeing inventors making the SAME MISTAKES over & over & over & over again.  GREED for money overrides their desire to help humanity!!!!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act_of_1951

[billmehess]

Hi Bill,
if you want to claim the overunity prize you must first publish the blueprints and
send a demo device that can output 1 Watts.

I hope your device is not a selfmade battery from any metals
that are consumed ?

Regards, Stefan.

Hi Stefan

I looked at the OU prize requirements I understand them but they seem restrictive. You will see that my device will work as claimed. With no input and a measurable output that should in itself by recognized as obvious overunity. Also you want 3 months of testing to take place.
As a startup the OU prize money would be very useful but your request have a surprisingly large amount of restriction. If this works it's obvious OU and the prize should be granted.
But hey that just me voicing my humble opinion.
This is not a selfmade battery as it contains no electrolytes or anything that can be consumed.
Totally solid state no liquids.
Bill