*
*
*
One friday i was sent to work in an electronics warehouse. My job was to heave and haul the merchandise. Just as i was to depart for the job, a very young kid of about 19 came into the labor agency. He looked as if he had just gotten off the bus from Oklahoma City, which in fact, he had. He had not eaten for two days. Tattered clothes, unshaven — a real mess. He quickly signed up and the manager sent him out to the same job with me. In the 90-100 degree September heat, the warehouse foreman thought it was great fun to watch us drive forklifts which neither of us had ever done. (On a forklift, the –rear– wheels do the turning, and that is a very different driving skill.) Trying to navigate the sharp turns between corners of stacked cartons, we mostly rammed the forks into TV’s, stereos, and the like. i was definitely getting irritated as the day wore on. But most of all i was getting irritated with my “work” partner.
-1-
* *
Suddenly the program was ending with the announcer saying: “and this is Mike Nardo signing off for KBIG radio!!” I was stunned. I recognized the voice immediately — it was unmistakable. Mike and I were church choir friends for many years in high school. I had not seen or heard of him for ten years. At last! A friend in Los Angeles. I promptly sent him a letter at the station and asked him to call me. He did, and said to me, “Pal, i get a lot of strange mail from the public, and i don’t remember you. Can you refresh my memory?” I just mentioned our church back in Ohio, and “old home week” was off and running. We made plans to meet soon. It was to be a meeting i would never forget.
About a year before moving to California, I had been having dreams. Dreams of either reading (very) old texts and manuscripts or being read to. During the deaming state there seemed to be a part of me that was perfectly wide-awake standing apart from me and the dreaming and saying “Oh! Of course! That is absolutely correct. How obvious! I have always felt that was true, and this is terrific — here is a very intelligent and wise person saying and reading the same thing.” These dreams we on for about a year. I was curious but not frightened over them. I had asked my sister and brother-in-law what they thought. With absolutely clarity and directness they replied: “Don’t be alarmed. You are being taught wisdom by the Guides.” The unfortunate part was that although I awoke with a great sense of spiritual refreshment, I could not remember the specifics of what i had been “taught”. Don’t worry, my sister and brother-in-law counseled, when you need to remember, you will. “When the Student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Only by recalling their advice was I able to sit “calmly” through Mike’s story and the entire adventure to follow.
Telling Barney my story, he assured me that I was not loony, and that the events i had experienced and the information gained were true! He told me that the U.S.Government is completely aware of “space people” (regardless of what announcements are made from “Project Blue Book”). The Air Force keeps planes in the air at all times over certain sections of the Pacific Ocean. There is to be a new continent arise, and it will be called “Pan”, of which Japan is already a mountaineous part. These planes are kept in a ready status at all times to be able to land first and claim this new land for the United States. When this new continent appears, all of the spiritually advanced persons who have been gathering in California for many years will be the vanguard of the new colonists and settlers. A new age of spirituality will be ushered in and world peace will be achieved.
*THE END*
*
As of March, 2012, the world population stood at 7 Billion.
Los Angeles Times, Thursday 19 August 1993, Page A5 by Melissa Healy”Servings At World Table Get Smaller” “Cropland and fisheries are less productive, experts warn. But each year the planet has 91 million more mouths to feed.”
(three charts, declining world outputs, Grain down 8%, Meat down 1%, and Fish down 7%, charts up to 1990)
WASHINGTON — The World’s 5.47 billion people are sharing a dinner table that is slowly shrinking, according to agronomists and enviromental researchers. And as 91 million more crowd in each year, the world’s farms, ranches, and fisheries are putting less and less on their plates. Degradation of the world’s cropland and grazing fields and depletion of its fisheries — as well as an ominous decline in the effectiveness of fertilizers — are beginning to slow and in some cases reverse the growth of food suplies that has steadily reduced world hunger since the 1950s. That is the warning issued by the Washington-based research organization, The Worldwatch Institute, and echoed by United Nations experts. The trends raise a fundamental question, said Edouard Saouma, director general of the U.N.’s Food And Agriculture Organization: “Are we going to have enough goodland to feed the extra 2.6 billion people who will be on this planet by the year 2025?” According to Worldwatch Institute’s latest publication, “Vital Signs: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future,” world grain output per person, which climbed 40% between 1950 and 1984, has fallen 8% over the last eight years. After a rise of 78% over 40 years, world meat production per person has declined nearly 1% in the past two years. And the catch of fish, which more than quadrupled from 1950 to 1990, has dropped by 7% in three years. “The needs of the 91 million being added each year can be satisfied only by reducing consumption of those already here,” Worldwatch Institute Director Lester R. Brown wrote in the forward of “Vital Signs.” Trends in U.S. food production, in some cases, have worsened the world’s situation. While the United States has long been a leading exporter of such foodstuffs as wheat, exports of the grain have stopped growing, even as the Third World clamors for more. The reasons for the worldwide decline in production follow a clear pattern: All appear to be the result of reckless exploitation of land and ocean resources. Oceangoing fishing fleets had netted such high yields that dinner-table staples like cod, mackerel and tuna cannot sustain their populations. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization now lists virtually every major commercial species of fish as depleted, fully exploited, or over-exploited. Last Month, the United Nations called an international conference to discuss how and whether the fish populations could be nursed back to health. It broke up without reaching any conclusions — with countries operating open-ocean fishing fleets and those that fish mainly in territorial waters at loggerheads. The apparent downturn in meat production comes from a different sort of enviromental breakdown. The grasslands that nourish cattle and sheep are being pushed to capacity on every continent, including North America, experts have concluded. Because much of it has been overgrazed, the soil has eroded and been robbed of nutrients which stunts the growth of grasses and eventually turns the grazing range into desert. The loss of cultivable land to soil degradation also appears to have contributed to a depression in the growth of grain harvests worldwide. The amount of land used to produce grain had been increasing slowly from 1950 until 1981, when it came to an abrupt halt. And the growth of irrigated land worldwide has fallen since 1978 due to a spreading scarcity of fresh water. Meanwhile, farmers have discovered that crop yields for grains are falling as overworked soil becomes depleted of nutrients. “Vital Trends” noted that farmers used ever-larger quantities of fertilizers to raise the productivity of grain fields by 3% yearly from 1950 to 1984. But as farmers in the United States and Western Europe have learned that more no longer brings higher yields, their use of it has leveled off.
#####
Addendum 2
Boston Globe, 4 December 1993 by Colin Nickerson
“Once Fertile Atlantic Coast Off Canada Growing Barren”
ST.JOHN’S, Newfoundland — Decades before Christopher Columbus set eyes upon the New World, Basque fishermen were hauling cod from the immensely fertile waters of the Grand Banks. In 1497, explorer John Cabot was dazzled by fishing grounds so abundant that flapping mases of cod, haddock, halibut, plaice, and yellowfish could be scooped from the sea simply by casting a basket overboard. Even in 1979, when Doug Howlett of the fishing hamlet of Petty Harbour followed genertions of forebears down to the sea after cod, the bounty of the banks still seemed endless. “You weren’t ever going to get rich, but if you worked hard and long you’d made a good living most years,” said Howlett, now 31 and unemloyed by government edict. No more. In what is looming as one of the worst enviromental disasters of the century, the vast fishing grounds off Atlantic Canada — once the richest on Earth — have been transformed into something approaching an underwater desert. The ressons are not fully understood. Overfishing by high-tech, deep-sea draggers and trawlers deserves the major portion of the blame. But subtle changes in the water enviroment of the Grand Banks also have contributed to what Ross Reid, former minister of fisheries, described as an “unprecedented ecological crisis.” In 1966, scientific surveys found that northern cod alone numbered more than 3.3 billion in the Grand Banks; by 1992, the numbers stood at barely 340 million and falling fast. Faced with dangerously diminishing stocks of groundfish, the government has shut down much of its Atlantic fishing grounds, imposing an indefinite moratorium on commercial harvests. “The cod are gone,” Howlett said. “And cod is 90 percent of what we make our living from.” The moratorium is expected to last well in the next century. Newfoundlanders, Nova Scotians, and other Atlantic Canadians have weathered tough times before. But nothing like this. “When prices are down, you can always live off the fish,” said Reg Best, 41, a director of Petty Harbour’s inshore fishmerman’s cooperative. “When the fish are gone, you have to figure we are done for, too. This isn’t just an economic setback; the survival of hundreds of communities and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people are at stake.” Many fear that a unique way of life followed for hundreds of years by Newfoundlanders, Nova Scotians and other inhabitants of tiny fishing hamlets — called outposts — across Atlantic Canada may vanish with the fish. “The fishery is decimated, the cod and other groundfish have mostly disappeared and the stocks remaining are not in good shape,” said Scott Campbell, the Newfoundland-based director of Northern Cod Science for the federal Department of Fisheries. “In both human and enviromental terms, it is a catastrophe. Even with a total ban on fishing, the stocks are unlikely to revive any time soon — if they revive at all.” The disappearance of the fish remains something of a mystery; the underlying reasons are debated fiercely by fishermen, enviromentalists, and fisheries scientists. Some blame the scores of foreign factory ships that still hover just beyond the edge of Canada’s maritime limit, plundering unprotected stocks of cod, plaice, haddock, halibut, yellowtail and other dwindling species from the “nose” and “tail” of the Grand Banks. But a far greater burden of blame seems to rest on misguided government fisheries policies, which encouraged the buildup of the nation’s own fleet of offshore trawlers and draggers. A domestic fleet that in the past 15 years has cut through the Grand Banks with all the reckless rapacity of bulldozers clear-cutting a tropical rain forest. Additionally, fisheries scientists believe that complex changes in the marine enviroment — a steady drop in average water temperatures, shifts in water currents, changes in salinity — may have either killed off or driven away substantial numbers of groundfish, or inhibited the fishes’ ability to spawn. Fish stocks have plunged so precipitously that last year the Canadian government banned all commercial fishing in a vast swath of the North Atlantic from the eastern coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador to the 200-mile limit. Desperate, Canada recently shut down five more fishing grounds off southern Newfoundland and parts of Nova Scotia. Next month, the government is expected to ban the commercial harvest of all groundfist and most flatfish in nearby all its Atlantic waters. Inshore fisherman like Howlett and Best welcome the closure of the fisheries as the only hope of reviving the stocks. But they do not credit the Canadian government with either courage or foresight in taking the drastic step. “Inshore fisherman have been warning about the decline in stocks since at least the early 1980’s,” said Jack Noseworthy, 59, whose family has fished Trinity Bay for at least five generations. “No one listened. The government imposed its moratorium too late, acting only because the fish were gone.” Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 small fishing communit8ies across Atlantic Canada — including 700 in Newfoundland alone — face extinction, with nothing to sustain the fishermen, fish plant workers and the thousands of businesses that depend either directly or indirectly on the catching of cod and other dwindling species. “A lot of people are going to be in dire straits, and the social safety net is not going to catch everyone,” said Fred Morley, senior policy analyst for the Halifax-based Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. “Huge numbers of people are going to be cast permanently outside the labor force.” Indeed, the collapse of the Atlantic fishery is certain to cause enormous economic and social upheaval in Newfoundland, where the catching and processing of groundfish, mainly cod, represents about 50 percent of the economy. Nova Scotia also will be terribly hard-hit, although that province — together with New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec’s Gaspe — have fairly healthy alternative fisheries, including lobster, crab, shrimp, and shellfish. Special government payments to out-of-work fishermen — averaging around $226 a week — are scheduled to stop next May 15, and no one is counting on an extension. As recently as 1982, when inshore fishermen were seeking to convince the government that irreparable harm was being done to the fishing stocks, a federal report asserted that “the Newfoundland fishery has a lot of problems, but a lack of fish is not one of them.” Said fisherman Noseworthy: “Aye, and they should carve that on the headstone of the last Newfoundland fisherman.”
#####
Addendum 3
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Thursday 28 December 1995 from the AP Newswire
“World Population Records Largest Jump”
Associated Press WASHINGTON — The World’s populaton grew this year by 100 million people, to 5.75 billion, the largest increase ever, a population research group said Wednesday. “Ninety percent of the growth is in poor countries “already terribly torn by civil strife and social unrest and where all too many people live in brutal poverty,” Werner Fornos of the Population Institute said. Fornos, giving the insitute’s “1995 World Population Overview,” told reporters that effective birth control policies and practices could stabilize world population by 2015 at about 8 billion. But unless family planning is promoted actively, he said, there could be an increase to as many as 14 billion people. “Some 3 billion young people will be entering their reproducdtive years in this coming generation,” Fornos said. “How well these young people are able to implement the awesome responsibility of parenting … will make the difference between our setting course for an enviromental Armageddon in the 21st century or a better quality of life.” The Population Institute receives no U.S. government money. Its funding comes from the United Nations, foundations, and individuals. To illustrate the difference between population growth in wealthy and poor countries, Fornos compared condidtions in Iowa in the United States and the South Asian country’ of Bangladesh, which have about the same area. At present growth rates, Iowa will will need a century to double its population of less than 3 million. But Fornos estimated that Bangladesh will double its 128 million people in less than 30 years. Around the globe, he said, the people of 80 countries are repoducing at a rate to double their populatons within those same 30 years or less. Of those, 43 are in Africa. The report was not all gloomy. Fornos found about 30 “good news countries” where the number of children being born to the average woman has been declining. “For instance, Mexico and Brazil in our hemisphere,” he said. “We’ve seen declines in Thailand, Indonesia. We’ve seen dramatic changes in Kenya and Zimbabwe.” The biggest decline has been in China, with more than 1.2 billion people the world’s most populous conntry. Fornos said that in 1965 the average Chinese woman could expect to give birth to 6.5 live children in her lifetime. The Figure now is to 1.4, he said.
#####
Addendum 4
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sunday 31 December 1995, Page 7J by Albert Johns
“Growing World Population Sparks Cause For Concern For The Future”
Even as your morning Review-Journal is arriving at your doorstep today, 1996 has become a reality for people in the Far East. Hour by hour as planet Earth spins eastward on its axis, people in each succeding time zone are heralding the dawn of a new year. Somehow, i wonder why all of the excitement, though i must admit that in my earliest teen years, it was exciting to be allowed to stay awake until the new year arrived on the West Coast. Listening to a radio, i enjoyed the big band sounds and the roar of the crowds as midnight struck in different sections of our nation. Soon after, a sleepy teen-ager would reach the Land of Nod, dreaming of whadt the arrival of another year would mean. A few years later, of course, i would join the crowds, cheering and singing in the newest year.
More people than ever will greet the arrival of 1996. The best estimates say there will be 5,746,734,550 human beings on hand as midnight, 1995, becomes history. The annual growth is estimated at about 90 million people each year. This will mean that the Earth will number 6 billion somewhere near July 1, 1989. Looking backward, the Earth is believed to have reached its first billion human inhabitants around the year 1830. About 100 years later, 1930, the two billionth person arrived. Tripling that numberin a mere 68 years will give thoughtful pause for reflection. The 1990 census for the United States was 248,708,873, which was probably the most accurate census ever taken here. Estimates for the Unites States in 1995 were 260 million, which is fairly accurate with the clocks in the Census Bureau recording second by second the births and deaths as they have been statistically calculated. This brings us to the population of Clark County (Las Vegas, Nevada), estimated at some 1.1 million. The population of Nevada in 1870, just six years after Nevada was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, was cited as 42,491. The state population then rose to 62,266 in 1880, but in the next two decades, the state lost population. In 1890 it was recorded as 47,355 and in 1900 as 42,335. It gained population by the 1910 census to 81,875, but again showed a loss in 1920 to 77,407. Since then is has been on the growth side. What do all of these statistics really mean? Worldwide it emphasizes that an estimated 1.3 billion people are living in abject poverty. Except for a few million of them, 1.1 billion live on $1 or less per day. India is the nation with the most impoverished, 350 million, yet it is expected to surpass China as the most populous nation in the world by the year 2020. Increasing numbers of people will have a negative influence upon people throughout the world. Demographers have noted the world’s quality of life will constantly diminish beyond the 3 billion figure. What impact will all of this have upon the Las Vegas Valley? We can expect more crime and more scams. They abound already, despite optimism that some kinds of crime were slightly lower than a year ago. More people and more cars will mean longer time needed to get getween points A and B throughout the valley. While negotiations are in process to abate immediate problems of water shortage, unlimited growth will further increase poor air quality and place strains upon adequate water sanitation. We live in exciting times but the evidence illustrates that it is possible we have seen nothing yet. Happy New Year anyway!!
#####
Addendum 5
Alura and Mike’s first Christmas Card
“…And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the North, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
…Also out of the midst, thereof came the likeness of four creatures and this was their appearrance; they had the likeness of a man.” — Ezekiel, 1:4, 5
“May the Divine love that has found common ground between this extra-terrestial woman and me, find its way into the hearts of all men everywhere, and remain forever more.”
Alura and Michael — Our First Christmas
#####
bobtvshows 
It’s going to be end of mine day, except before finish I am reading this enormous article to increase my knowledge.