"April 19, 2009"
http://www.spaceweather.com/
"Daily Sun: 19 Apr 09 The sun is blank--no sunspot. Sunspot number: 0"
"Far side of the Sun: This holographic image reveals no sunspots on the far
side of the sun."

The face of the Sun is without blemish:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images20...qm4vs41r 68u7

Please visit:
http://blog.nj.com/southjersey_impac...SolarCycle.jpg

The right panel shows the face of the Sun as it looked on a good day during
the late Modern Warm Period. Sunspots are the apparent size of craters on
the moon. The left panel shows a Sun as it appears today. Please write to Al
Gore so that Al knows that the Sun is not living up to his religious
expectations. Al Gore is a divinity school dropout. George Carlin had a
better grasp of the true nature of God's creation, than does Al Gore.

Please visit:
http://www.co-intelligence.org/newsl...es/sun-etc.jpg
which shows the relative sizes of the Sun and planets. Compared to the Sun,
Jupiter is the size of a pea, earth is the size of a grain of sand.

http://www.russiatoday.com/Politics/...weapons.ht ml

Obama dreams of a world without nuclear weapons
17 April, 2009, 19:36

Removing the deadliest weapons that mankind has ever created appears to be
the latest ambitious project of US President Barack Obama. Can the dream
become reality?

In the final days of World War II, in August 1945, US President Harry S.
Truman made the fateful decision to drop atomic bombs on the industrial
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, respectively.
By the year’s grim end, the cities resembled “graveyards without tombstones
standing,” as one witness described the devastating aftermath. In all,
320,000 people were reported dead, and thousands of people suffered from
radioactive burns and contamination that left them with a life of pain and
most often an early death.

After Japan’s formal surrender six days after the second bombing, the US
forced its World War II enemy to sign a peace treaty with the rather odd
addendum that the nation would be forbidden from acquiring atomic weapons in
the future.

Today, the United States, as the only nation to implement these horrific
weapons against an enemy, is pushing for a world without nuclear weapons. Is
this a realistic goal, or did mankind wait too long to take the initiative?
Is the nuclear genie out of the bottle never to be returned? Finally, does
America, especially so soon after the violent Bush years, possess the moral
authority to underwrite such an ambitious plan?

No more nukes?
Obama said he has no illusions about the great challenge that he faces, and
told a crowd in front of the Prague Castle earlier this month that the world
must work towards nothing less than “change.”

“I’m not naïve,” said Obama. “This goal will not be reached quickly –
perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now
we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change.”

The speech seemed to be well-timed. Just hours before Obama gave his own
version of the ‘I have a dream’ speech North Korea launched a missile that
it claimed took a satellite into outer space. Western observers, however,
fear the launch had nothing to do with charting the final frontier, but
rather proved the ability of the communist nation to catapult a nuclear
missile some 3,200 km (2,000 miles).

It is exactly this sort of nuclear threat that the United States hopes to
remove. Vulnerable, paranoid nations like North Korea, or Pakistan, and
increasingly Iran view nuclear weapons as a mark of great national pride,
not to mention the great equalizer. As a rule, at least to date,
nuclear-armed nations don’t suffer much in the form of invasions and
occupations, a bit like the strange-yet-true logic that countries that have
McDonald’s don’t go to war with each other.

It is not difficult to imagine the myriad problems involved in disarming a
power-hungry world of its nuclear weapons. Actually, getting rid of the
weapons might just be the easy part. Finding the trust between friends and
enemies alike to initiate such a program would be next to impossible.

After all, even in the fantastic event that nuclear weapons did get shelved
around the world, the technology to produce these weapons would still be
available. And it is not only nation states that have access to this
technology. Today, there exists the fear, largely germinated by the events
of 9/11, that rogue states or outright terrorists will get their hands on
the technology, or the fissile material needed for the technology to work,
thus possibly taking the world hostage with the most destructive weapons
imaginable.

Finally, ridding the world of nuclear weapons would certainly open up
another can of worms. After all, many countries around the world, after many
years of arming themselves to the teeth with everything from tanks to
fighter jets, might be tempted to risk a jolly little war if nuclear weapons
were no longer in the equation. But as deadly and frightful as nuclear
weapons may be, conventional warfare offers just as many opportunities for
unleashing unprecedented destruction on the planet.

It seems that the trick to modern warfare is how to destroy the enemy
without destroying the entire planet, which just might mean that we have no
choice but to declare all wars extinct.


Good intentions or sly strategy?
It is no small irony that Obama’s no-more-nukes speech was delivered in
Prague, the Czech Republic – the very place where the United States hopes to
install components of its missile shield, which Moscow views as a direct
threat to its national security.

First, Obama, in his caramel-coated delivery, poured it on thick about the
Czech Republic’s present status within NATO and Europe.

“Few would have imagined that the Czech Republic would become a free nation,
a member of NATO, a leader of a united Europe.”

Then the American president dragged up dusty memories that many people,
judging by the faces in the crowd, were probably too young to even remember,
but they cheered them wildly nevertheless.

“We are here today because 20 years ago the people of this city took to the
streets to claim a promise of a new day, and the fundamental human rights
that had been denied them…”

And then Barack Obama seized the opportunity to speak in the native tongue
of the audience, which never fails to draw applause, uttering the phrase
‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czech.

“Sametova Revoluce.”
Admittedly, the speech was inspiring, and listening to Barack Obama’s
powerful articulation after eight long years of George W. Bush’s
incomprehensible gibberish only accentuates the American president’s rare
gift.

But who can help but wonder, after the slash and burn chaos of the Bush
years, where even allies had no idea where they stood, if we are not
witnessing one of those good cop, bad cop comic routines performed
wonderfully by Bush and Obama? After all, who could forget how Donald
Rumsfeld, Bush’s old Pentagon warhorse, soothed Eastern Europe’s jaded ego
by calling the region ‘New Europe,’ as opposed to the ‘Old Europe’ of the
western half of the continent?

And once the Bush administration divided the European continent, it was
child’s play to conquer the eastern half by installing secret CIA prisons,
recruiting enthusiastic troops into Iraq and Afghanistan, and finally,
convincing Poland and the Czech Republic about the need for a missile
defense system on their territories.

Suddenly, amazingly, and even stupidly, the rise of a single black man to
the highest office in the Land of Liberty whitewashes all of the unsavory
actions – from the photographic horrors of Abu Ghraib to the abuse of civil
liberties in the Homeland – of the Bush administration. How eager we are to
forget. How eager we are to forgive. How eager we are ready to write off the
blundering Bush years as an isolated anomaly that could never be repeated in
the United States, a country that fanatically believes it is free because it
has the chance to democratically mull over its mistakes every time they are
committed. Rarely, however, as the war in Iraq proves, not to mention the
very election of George W. Bush, which had nothing in common with democracy,
do the American people enjoy enough powers to sway the will of their leaders
at the most crucial moments. Debating issues after the fact is not
democracy – it is merely an exercise in futility, with less sense than
American Idol.

More to the point, it’s important to remember that Barack Obama never said
he would shelve the missile defense plan for Eastern Europe.

And as more than one Russian general has commented, it can only seem
strange, at least from Moscow’s viewpoint that the Obama administration is
hoping for a heavy reduction of Russian nukes, at the very same time that
the US military is trying to lay the groundwork for an extensive missile
defense system.

So if Barack Obama is really serious about a world without nuclear missiles,
he should come to Moscow in July with the news that America has completely
scrapped its plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe.

Then, and only then, can Obama’s dream of a world without nuclear weapons
start to become a reality.

Robert Bridge, RT