David Abbot: Whew! I must be getting tired...When I initially read your first sentence, I thought you said that you were in China during the Boxer Rebellion. That was in 1900 which would make you about, at least 113 years old and probably 20 or so years more than that. Good thing I reread your sentence. You had met someone that was in China during the Boxer Rebellion...so he must have been much older than you. Anyway, that was quite an interesting story about that suitcase full of US dollars! That reminds me of an interesting movie I once saw...don't remember the name of it now.

By the way, I was in China a couple of times ...once in about 1981 and again in 1982 in Hong Kong and Kowloon and the New Territories and took a hydrofoil over to Macau then took a bus up to Dr. Sun Yat Sen's historic home then on to some little city..don't remember the name now. That was relatively pollution free...that I could tell. In that part of China, north of Macau, there was hardly a motor vehicle besides the bus I was in...mostly everyone rode bicycles...and they looked like very well built (heavy) bicycles...not the 3 or 10 or 15 speeds with skinny tires.

I was on vacation during those times and had bought a round-the-world unlimited-stop each year I was living and working in Saudi Arabia.(all my routes had to be in the same direction around the world..ie: I couldn't back track...and I had about a month each time to do it..thank Allah for Ramadan..no, I'm not Muslim). Aramco paid us for two one-way 1st class tickets to and from Saudi Arabia back to the states for repatriation each year. Most people used that money to buy round the world trip specials and still had some money left over....they cost something like $2000 (which we had to pay in Saudi Riyals).

Many years later...about 2005...I went to Shanghai for a couple of weeks, and while it was nice to see yet another strange place, I was on a working trip. But, I had some time off during the evenings and the week end to scout around over at The Bund and the Pearl Tower. I did a lot of walking from the Bund to the Nanpu bridge to the Pearl Tower and then to the YuYuan Garden. At that time the Pearl tower was the tallest structure on that side of the river...now it is swamped by lots of much taller buildings.

I had to commute from the hotel, in a newer section, to a University every day in a taxi and I had never seen, or smelled, so much pollution...it was terrible! There was less air pollution over near The Bund and the River. Most of the air pollution was during the commute hours. I saw all kinds of yucky things rapidly floating down the river, however.

I experienced the same kind of horrible air pollution, mostly during rush hour, in Guadalajara, Mexico when I had to spend time down there for work for weeks at a time.

I noticed that the Move to Amend website is secure:
https://movetoamend.org/petition
https://movetoamend.org/submit-petitions

And that means that your form data is encrypted before it is sent. Still, that leaves the question...how secure is the servers at Move to Amend? Can anyone hack into their servers and steal the information? https is a good sign though and might help to indicate that Move to Amend does try to protect data.

But, you know, I've seen some petition web sites that like to brag about who signed up and they display people's names of those who signed.

David Abbot & DAnneMarc: Got it! :-) Of course not all things turn out for the best. Nazi Germany got their just rewards only because there were more powerful enemies, like the US, that brought them to justice. I don't know if there are any more powerful countries than the US right now, although China is in the works for the next leading world power. And the US has already been a very large recipient of what once belonged to China thanks to Japan and Operation Golden Lily....ie: many tonnes of gold that was confiscated from China by the Japanese...which we got when we won the war against Japan..discovered many of the tunnels hiding the gold in the Philippines. Marcos got some of the rest...but who has it now?

Did we even offer to give it back to their rightful owners? China? In fact the US used much of that gold to fund the cold war with Russia...gave some of it back to Japan (the original thieves)...so Nixon could win re-election. I do hope the Chinese aren't too sore over than one. But, I guess, in a way, one could say that the US has given all their jobs to China!

But wait! There's more! The US has largely used China to fund their illegal wars. It all has to do with economics that I don't entirely understand. So, I won't even try. Maybe the Chinese are getting a little pi$$ed and once they take over the world they might throw the US a scrap from time to time as long as we beg. Maybe not! Maybe they'll "do unto others as others have done unto them" ..like conquer us and turn our females into "Comfort Women" and then break open our vaults and steal all the gold right back...maybe whack of some heads with a sword just for sh!ts and g!ggles. Frightening thought!

Here is another petition from CREDO that you can sign to forbid the government from bombing Syria:

http://act.credoaction.com/sign/dont_bomb_syria/

Don't be a coward. Sign the petition!

It's all about Iran and oil. Weaken its allies and it will be easier to conquer. Along with Asian oil and gas, we'll control Middle East Oil. And, destroy our planet even quicker.

Yes of course the powers that be want the names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers of everyone who dislikes the idea of living in a deranged oligarchy, so if things go their way they can round up the dissenters and treat them the way that Stalin, Hitler, or Mao would have treated them.

But in their ongoing effort to find out just how much they can get away with, the oligarchs are given pause by just how many people are willing to go on record as favoring a sane government.

Picture yourself living in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Mao Tse Tung China, just to name a few, and someone says to you "call or email your representatives and urge them to do this or that". What chances do you think you will have in influencing them to your cause? Nada! Zilch! Nine! Nix! La! not a chance...a waste of time...and likely to get you sent to some gulag somewhere (if they don't shoot you on the spot). Oh, but you say: "But those countries weren't democracies and we are!" Yeah, right! Keep on believing that nonsense...we really don't have a democracy in the US...not a real one...the game is fixed. Only the "believers" still cling to that nonsense.

I think we are so close to that right now. I certainly don't think it is going to matter a whit that you sign petitions or call or email your representatives. All they will do (rather, all their computers will do ) is to send you an automated email response or recorded message thanking you for being a patriotic American and then use obfuscating language to make you think you've done something important.

What THEY will get is your real name and address and telephone number...which they always *require. Now just what they will do with that information right now is not yet known. But what they could do with it is anyone' guess. One thing for certain, they want to hound you later with requests for political donations. Once they get your real name and email or address or your phone number they'll hound you forever.

The Nazis used IBM punched tabulating cards to facilitate rounding up the Jews for their extermination...now our Neo-Nazi/Fascists have super-spy-computers that collect many Terabytes of data on us every second.

Of course, just typing our ideas and beliefs on these blogs do the same thing..pretty much...and it wouldn't take much for the government to use their legal crowbars to get the blog site to reveal our names and email addresses. And, as many hackers already know, you don't even have to do that to get that information...albeit...illegally...but what is legality anyway? Especially when the legal eagles are all corrupt.

But, hey, if you sign those petitions (by all means go ahead) it just means that you still believe that the system will, somehow, work. And it keeps you out of the streets waiting for that automated email response. It also means that it buys the criminals more time to more deeply screw us all to the point of no return. We will all be so powerless that we will never be able to fight back.

There is no justification for war and more killing, especially when every diplomatic option has not been tried. Are we stupid enough to fall for the WMD scam yet again? Most of the people are not for this military action. Will our reps really represent us?

Recent history begs the question: while the drama of a Congressional committee has our attention, what are we being distracted from? More Shades of Orwell - Big Brother, on-going wars, & propganda media; Big Corporate slipping through a trade deal that will further gut the middle class and ship more jobs to Nicaragua, pushing for worldwide slave labor: more domestic devastation like Detroit, perhaps a micocosm of bigger things; voting rights nonsense in the government of the people and by the people: fracking, pipelines and more oil wars, instead of developing better options, with more records of warming temps, fires, floods, melting glaciers and CO2 wrecking the life-support of this planet?

the United Arab League is the same group who have made sure our gas prices continue to rise and why should we send our young men over there to die when they have been using their profits to back the talaban, the same organization that hate us and had a hand in taking down the twin towers in New York and attack the Pentagon??????????

Palindromedary ~ Thanks for that link. I will have to make time to graze on it. However, for now, I'm more worried about the possiblility of WWIII.

Quote Palindromedary:DAnneMarc: I've heard of the "whore of Babylon" but not that Babylon was the whore itself. I knew that ancient Babylon was in Iraq and somewhere very close to Baghdad. I don't know do you think males can be classified as "whores"? Was Saddam Hussein the "Whore of Babylon"?

Of course a man, or anything else can be a whore. Basically, a whore sells her body for profit. If a country sells it's national resources for profit is it not also a whore? Have you ever looked at an oil pump in motion? It drives air into a hole in the ground in order to extract the national resource from the land. Is that not a sexual innuendo? Remember, "The Beast ascended out of the bottomless pit." What a better way of describing an oil well than a bottomless pit--especially when the supply of oil is considered endless? Remember, "The whore had in her hand a cup full of the filthyness of her fornifications with the Kings of the earth. The Kings who waxed rich due to the fortifications with the whore." The cup is full of oil. What else?

I'm sorry if the prophecy is hard to swallow; but, in my humble opinion it fits the description perfectly. Coincidence? Maybe! But a damn good coincidence at that.

Now on to stopping WWIII--if we can...

Thanks for all the great links....Flopot and Notadoormat! Very good information! Pipeline through Syria to Europe sounds like a repeat of the pipeline through Afghanistan. Also, the Baghdad to Berlin pipeline prior to WWI that ticked off the Brits against Germany. In the case of the Afghanistan pipeline, the US wanted it...and in the case of the Syrian pipeline they don't. At least Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US doesn't want it because it would assist Iran in distributing their gas. And anything that helps Iran is a problem for those countries.

And deep pocket Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia is the CIA's darling so he is always assisting in any way he can...fund the manufacture of chemical weapons in Saudi Arabia and give them to Al Qaida rebels in Syria using, perhaps, the British company, Britam Defences perhaps, to facilitate it all. Those hacked Britam Defences emails referring to a very lucrative deal (or however it was put) and CW weapons to be sent to Homs, Syria may have been referring to funding by Bandar.

And those reports of young rebels who actually carried those unusual looking shells (as they described to their mothers and the mothers later reported it) and storing them in a tunnel was interesting evidence that it was the rebels who carried out the chemical attack...maybe it wasn't an actual attack..maybe just an accident. Remember Bhopal, India accident? Maybe India should have attacked the US..and specifically Union Carbide plants in the US!

Flopot ~ Thank you! You are quite a source of sobering information. Between you and Palindromedary I feel like I'm at a banquet of news. That video you've linked to should be scene by everyone. Thank you both!