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Mexico, Canada partnership underway with no authorization from Congress.

Despite having no authorization from Congress, the Bush administration has launched extensive working-group activity to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada.

The membership of the working groups has not been published, nor has their work product been disclosed, despite two years of massive effort within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

The groups, working under the North American Free Trade Agreement office in the Department of Commerce, are to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005.

The trilateral agreement, signed as a joint declaration not submitted to Congress for review, led to the creation of the SPP office within the Department of Commerce.

The SPP report to the heads of state of the U.S., Mexico and Canada, -- released June 27, 2005, -- lists some 20 different working groups spanning a wide variety of issues ranging from e-commerce, to aviation policy, to borders and immigration, involving the activity of multiple U.S. government agencies.

The working groups have produced a number of memorandums of understanding and trilateral declarations of agreement.
The Canadian government and the Mexican government each have SPP offices comparable to the U.S. office.

Geri Word, who heads the SPP office within the NAFTA office of the U.S. Department of Commerce says that the membership of the working groups, as well as their work products, have not been published anywhere, including on the Internet.

Why the secrecy?

"We did not want to get the contact people of the working groups distracted by calls from the public," said Word.

She suggested that the work products of the working groups was described on the SPP website, so publishing the actual documents did not seem required.

It appears that there is no specific congressional legislation authorizing the SPP working groups. The closest to enabling legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., on April 20, 2005. Listed as S. 853, the bill was titled "North American Cooperative Security Act: A bill to direct the Secretary of State to establish a program to bolster the mutual security and safety of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and for other purposes." The bill never emerged from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In the House of Representatives, the same bill was introduced by Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla., on May 26, 2005. Again, the bill languished in the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment.

Again, there appears to be no congressional committees taking charge for specific oversight of SPP activity.

Many SPP working groups appear to be working toward achieving specific objectives as defined by a May 2005 Council on Foreign Relations task force report, which presented a blueprint for expanding the SPP agreement into a North American Union that would merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico into a new governmental form.

Referring to the SPP joint declaration, the report, entitled "Building a North American Community," stated:

    The Task Force is pleased to provide specific advice on how the partnership can be pursued and realized.

To that end, the Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that "our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary." Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.

The CFR task force report called for establishment of a common security border perimeter around North America by 2010, along with free movement of people, commerce and capital within North America, facilitated by the development of a North American Border Pass that would replace a U.S. passport for travel between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Also envisioned by the CFR task force report were a North American court, a North American inter-parliamentary group, a North American executive commission, a North American military defense command, a North American customs office and a North American development bank.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., is demanding the Bush administration fully disclose the activities of an office implementing a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada. Tancredo wants to know the membership of the SPP groups along with their various trilateral memoranda of understanding and other agreements reached with counterparts in Mexico and Canada.

Tancredo's decision has been endorsed by Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project.

"It's time for the Bush administration to come clean," Gilchrist said. "If President Bush's agenda is to establish a new North American union government to supersede the sovereignty of the United States, then the president has an obligation to tell this to the American people directly. The American public has a right to know."

Source: World Net Daily
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50719

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Notice something wrong? Are our clocks ticking backward? The known laws of physics say there's no reason why the past, present and future must occur in that order. Backward works, too.

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

The answer would seem to be yes, if only because time always moves forward, drawing not just “we few” but everyone and everything “onward to new era.”

But what if time is like the palindrome above? What if the so-called arrow of time flies both ways, forward and back? What then? What now? What next?

People have debated the nature of time since, well, people invented it. Time is, in many ways, a fabrication of our minds, a superficial construct that helps us explain the universe, plot our course through existence and show up when we're supposed to.

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once,” Albert Einstein once said.

And so it goes, one thing happens, then another – a phenomenon called cause-and-effect. “It's a notion so deeply ingrained that it's hard to think about things any other way,” said Daniel Sheehan, a professor of physics at the University of San Diego.

But Sheehan does, as do other physicists who are meeting this week at USD to discuss and debate the concept of “reverse causation,” a fantastical notion that suggests effects can precede causes, and the future can influence the past, assuming the past and future actually “exist” in the first place.

(The symposium is part of the 87th annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

“I don't think we've reached any kind of consensus coherent enough to be called a state of thinking,” said York Dobyns, a physicist at Princeton University who is attending the meeting. “There's a tremendous amount of disagreement about reverse causation between people who think the whole subject is just too speculative to deal with and people who have actually grappled with it, either theoretically or experimentally.”

This much, however, can be said: While reverse causation (also called backward or retro-causation) may sound like science fiction, it is firmly grounded in classical laws of physics. These laws say time is symmetrical, that it moves – or should be able to move – in all directions with equal ease.

Case in point: electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. (The others are gravity and strong and weak nuclear force.)

In the 19th century, Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell developed equations explaining how electricity and magnetism work in tandem. It was Maxwell, in fact, who determined that electromagnetic energy, such as light and radio, traveled in waves through empty space at the speed of light.

But Maxwell's equations say nothing about the direction of time. It's irrelevant. The equations work equally well whether electromagnetic waves arrive after or before they are transmitted. In effect, writes Paul Davies, a physicist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology and author of “About Time,” the waves “are indifferent to the distinction between past and future.”

Feeling dizzy yet?

Most physicists accept the idea of time symmetry (at least in the context of things like Maxwell's equations). The same cannot be said of reverse causation, which goes farther by suggesting the future can influence the past.

“The tendency is to ignore it, to say it's just a fact of nature that time moves one way,” said Michael Ibison, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin.

If reverse causation is real, it most likely occurs at the largely theoretical and unseen level of quantum mechanics, a place where subatomic particles with names like mesons and quarks interact in ways contrary to both classical physics and common sense.

To wit: Mesons exist simultaneously as both particles and waves until they are observed. But until they are observed, they don't exist.

“Anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first word about it,” said the late, great Danish physicist Niels Bohr who, incidentally, invented much of the theory.

“People know how to calculate with quantum mechanics, but that's not to say they know what it means,” agreed Sheehan. “Quantum mechanics is like poetry. The poem is right there, for everyone to see, but it has many different interpretations.”

Sheehan offers a couple of scenarios to ponder:

First, imagine a large boulder at the top of a hill. The boulder begins rolling downhill. Now freeze the action with the boulder midway along its descent. Call this the boulder's present. At this point in time, Sheehan says the boulder is being influenced both by its past (when it was atop the hill) and by its future (when it will come to rest at the bottom of the hill). The boulder's current position midway down the hill cannot happen without the effect of both the past and the future.

“The present is always a negotiation between the past and the future,” said Sheehan.

Or think about this: You're invited to a Saturday wedding. On Friday, you go to the barber for a haircut. As you sit in the chair, the future is influencing the present. The wedding hasn't happened. It may not happen at all. And yet its possibility changes what will be the past.

The best evidence for reverse causation – perhaps the only evidence, said Sheehan – comes from parapsychology, which investigates phenomena not explained by the known laws of science, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis (the alleged ability to move matter with the mind).

Numbers in limbo

In 1992, a paranormal investigator named Helmut Schmidt set up a radioactive decay counter to generate sequences of random numbers, both positive and negative. The numbers were recorded, but not seen by any person. Several months later, these numbers were shown to a group of students who had been asked to use their “mind power” to skew the sequences in favor of positive numbers. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent cheating.

According to fundamental physical laws, there should have been an equal number of positive and negative numbers. But Schmidt reported that the students saw more positive numbers; the probability of that happening was less than 1 in a 1,000.

Did the students actually influence the outcome of radioactive decay rates recorded months before? Henry Stapp, a theoretical physicist at UC Berkeley, thought so.

Stapp was one of the independent monitors of Schmidt's experiments. Two years later, he published a possible explanation for what had happened. In essence, he suggested that human consciousness had interacted with the numbers, effectively altering the past (when the numbers were recorded).

The idea, which Stapp and others have since expanded upon and promoted, is that human consciousness is an unexplained, nonlinear force of nature. Like subatomic particles in quantum mechanics, the numbers in Schmidt's experiment existed in a sort of limbo in which they were positive, negative and neither until the students saw them. At that point, human consciousness and intent (instructions to think positive) induced the numbers to assume a specific condition or quantum state.

The physics of consciousness is controversial, to say the least. And Stapp is first to say much more study and experimentation is necessary, especially by respected scientists in well-regarded scientific journals.

“You'd think people would want to either refute or confirm some of these reports,” said Stapp, “but the only people willing to test them are people who already tend to believe them. Most mainstream labs shy away for fear of sullying their reputations, as if they would be dirtying their hands by even imagining some of this is possible.”

Mind games

For Stapp, who now works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, it's not inconceivable that quantum mechanics plays some role in alleged paranormal phenomena like extrasensory perception (ESP) and remote viewing, which is the projection of one's consciousness to distant locations.

These abilities may be a consequence of nonlocality, a well-established quantum concept that says entities far-flung in distance or time are still entangled and interact via a faster-than-light, quantum mechanical connection.

Einstein called this phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.” He couldn't explain it, didn't like it and regarded it as quantum trickery.

In recent decades, nonlocality has been repeatedly observed, tested and measured in experiments. In one seminal experiment in 1982, physicist Alan Aspect at the University of Paris noted that by changing the polarity of one speeding photon (a particle of light) he could induce another photon from the same source speeding in the opposite direction to change its polarity. The interaction happened faster than light, with sufficient distance between the photons that they shouldn't have “known” what was happening to the other. And yet, inexplicably, there was some sort of link.

In contrast, paranormal phenomena like ESP and remote viewing are not as well-substantiated. Supporting evidence tends to be anecdotal. Purposeful deception and fraud are common.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Army and the CIA spent millions investigating the potential of remote viewing, but that effort apparently went for naught and funding ceased. In 1979, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program began investigating interaction between human consciousness and the physical world. Over the years, PEAR has produced a wealth of data indicating human intent by itself, without any physical connection, can alter the behavior or results of unthinking machines. The PEAR experiments, many similar to Schmidt's 1992 random number generator test, produced only small effects, but they were observable, measurable and repeatable.

PEAR's operations, however, are now in the process of closing down, with researchers moving on to other institutions.

Dobyns, an analytical coordinator for PEAR, said he still thinks “parapsychology and related areas are useful places to look for evidence (of reverse causation).”

But he is not optimistic that many mainstream physicists will ever take up the cause. “They say it's impossible because there's no evidence and there's no evidence because it's impossible.”

But physicists like Sheehan say what we do understand about the universe fundamentally depends upon the idea that time is fluid and dynamic. “To say that it's impossible for the future to influence the past is to deny half of the predictions of the laws of physics,” he said.

Nobody's predicting a speedy or conclusive resolution to the question of reverse causation. Sheehan says it's the journey that counts, how we get from Point A to B to C – or, perhaps, from C to B to A.

Source: Union-Tribune
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20060622-9999-lz1c22cause.html

Dragon boat festivals are once again underway all across Canada, and while tens of thousands of people will attend the events, very few are familiar with the ancient history of the tradition.

The festivals, or rituals, started approximately 2500 years ago in southern China along the banks of the Yangtze River and were originally carried out to please the Asian water dragon deity. The rituals often included human sacrifices and violent battles between crew members of competing boats who hurled stones and struck opponents with bamboo sticks. It was considered to be unlucky if there wasn't at least one drowning during the course of the event.

The Asian water dragon is not alone in its class. In Canada alone there are many stories and eyewitness accounts of aquatic beasts comparable to the Chinese water dragon. These aquatic beastie boys and girls have been given names; Ogopogo, Champ, Manipogo, Kempenfelt Kelly, The Cadboro Bay Sea Serpent, The Thetis Lake Monster, The Lake Erie Monster, The Wendigo, The New Brunswick Lake Utopia Monster — the list goes on.

The number of eye witness accounts of these underwater monstrosities coming to the surface is staggering, yet even with the help of giant nets, submarines, underwater cameras, sonar, and crews of observers no solid evidence has been ever been obtained to prove that these monsters exist.

The most famous of Canadian aquatic beasts is undoubtedly Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan, located in the south central interior of British Columbia. According to numerous sightings each year, Ogopogo is 20 to 50 feet long with a horse shaped head and snake-like body and favours an area of the lake south of Kelowna near Peachland. The indigenous people of BC knew of the monster which they called N'ha-a-itk, or Lake Demon, long before European settlers came to Canada. They placed the monster's lair at a cave under Squally Point near Rattlesnake Island. According to Ogopogo expert Arlne Gaal, the First Nations' custom of offering a small animal to appease the lake demon when travelling near the lair was adopted by fearful European settlers who also patrolled the shoreline, in case the monster attacked.

Lake Champlain, a lake mostly within the borders of the United States but stretching north into Quebec, is home to another oceanic oddity: Champ. There have been over 240 sightings of Champ, the first of which, by Sheriff Nathan H. Mooney in 1883, reported a gigantic water serpent over 25 feet in length which rose five feet out of the water. Other eyewitnesses present at this event were close enough to clearly see round white spots inside the creature's mouth.

Another beast from Quebec goes by the name of Memphre. Lake Memphremagog, home to Memphre, stretches 33 miles from Newport, Vermont to Magog, Quebec. There has been an average of eight sightings per year of this particular prehistoric pond dweller, the fist of which dates back to 1816. One of the most compelling recent sightings was reported in July 1996 when four people in two boats saw a 20 foot long creature with several humps swim approximately 50 yards between their boats and the shore. A similar sighting of the beast took place three hours before and was seen by three persons standing on shore. To date there have been more than 215 reported and documented sightings

Manipogo, of Lake Manitoba, has a history dating back to 1908. There have been numerous sightings of the creature which is rumoured to be snake-like in appearance with a long tubular body and a head comparable to a sheep's. In the 1950's the Manitoba Government launched an official expedition to search for the serpent to no avail. A photograph taken by two fishermen in 1962 showed what they said was an image of Manipogo, but was not clear enough to be considered verifiable proof.

Thetis Lake is a very popular swimming destination for Vancouver Islanders during the summertime, and is also the reputed home of the Thetis Lake Monster, a fact widely unknown among swimmers. This freakishly scary fiend of a fish is quite different from most lake monsters in that it has a humanoid body similar to that of the beast from the film The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In 1972, two teenagers on the shore of the lake said they witnessed a scaly, humanoid form suddenly rise from the water. The two teens turned and took off, but the creature caught up and cut one the boy's hands with a barbed fin on its skull.

There are many theories that attempt to explain these unsolved modern mysteries. Many believe that the monsters are relics from another time; prehistoric beasts who survived the ages. Some say the creatures are spiritual guardians who protect their sacred aquatic turf. Others believe that they are an undiscovered species of long necked seal. There has been much speculation that the monsters are actually plesiosaurs; aquatic dinosaurs from the Triassic period (over 200 million years ago). Still, most people are sceptical and believe that the beasts are nothing more than floating logs, strange reflections off of waves, or flat out hoaxes.

One notable similarity among these elusive entities can be found in the places they are rumoured to dwell. Almost all of the river and lake systems that the monsters call their home are, or have been at some point, connected to the sea. They also all harbour, or have harboured migratory fish, and are deep, cold bodies of water.

So, if your summer plans this year include outdoor water sports, you might want to think twice before jumping in — you never know what might be waiting for you just below the surface.

Source: Epoch Times
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-6-22/43063.html