WHAT'S NEW Friday, November 05, 2004

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 5 Nov 04  Washington, DC 

1. THE VOTE IS IN: IT'S NOW TIME TO UNITE BEHIND THE WINNER.  
The winner of the Excalibur Prize, was the Black Hole Weapon or
BHW, nominated by George Wallerstein.  Too dangerous to use on
Earth, it's designed for use against any alien planet suspected
of harboring weapons of mass destruction.  If we're wrong, who's
to complain?  George will now receive WN without charge for an
entire year.
     The Excalibur Prize http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn101504.cfm
was inspired by bold "outside-the-box" pioneers at the Pentagon,
NASA and CIA, who gave us the Excalibur X-ray laser, the
Podkletnov gravity shield, and remote-viewing.  Other brilliant
ideas in past years included the neutrino bomb, which had an
acoustic device to let victims know they'd been zapped by
trillions of neutrinos.  
     Our panel of experts faced an ethical crisis when former WN
intern Paul Gresser, who is not exactly svelte, nominated the
Atkins bomb.  When detonated, the A-bomb coats the target area
with bacon grease, reducing everyone to skin-and-bones with high
blood pressure.  The countermeasure is carbs, applied with a
device called a carburetor.  Would picking Paul's idea be viewed
as conflict-of-interest?  One panelist, General Persiflage,
scoffed: "At the Pentagon we always award contracts to friends;
you gonna do favors for your enemies?"  Another idea was nano
voodoo dolls; trillions of them on a single chip.  Jim Dukarm
explained, "It amplifies Murphy's law based on quantum theory or
something.  In tests it dropped a tree on a troublemaker with at
least partial effectiveness." 
     
2. IRAN: THE NUCLEAR CHALLENGE THAT THE CAMPAIGN MOSTLY IGNORED.
The world is too divided to agree on sanctions, the U.S. is too
bogged down in Iraq to threaten punitive action, and Iran sees an
opportunity to wring concessions from a divided world.  Diplomats
from Iran and the European Union are meeting in Paris today, but
there seems to be little prospect of agreement.   Iran, floating
on an ocean of oil, insists it will never abandon its  sovereign
right to produce peaceful nuclear power.  Iran's Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said today that, "Our nuclear weapon is
our devoted youth and our believing nation."  The election showed
we're also a "believing nation."  It's our young  fundamentalist
believers against their young fundamentalist believers.  

3. DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS: FDA VOWS TO CRACK DOWN ON MISLABELING.  
Don't count on it.  Passage of the 1994 Dietary Supplement and
Health Education Act largely freed the industry from government
oversight.  A couple of celebrity deaths has turned up the heat
on the FDA http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn040904.cfm , but this is
a powerful industry, and it will change when the law changes.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.  
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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