The Bilderberg Group

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The Bilderberg Group is a group of influential people, mostly politicians and business people, whose existence and activities are private, and due to its secretive nature is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. The group meets annually at five-star resorts throughout the world, normally in Europe, although sometimes in America or Canada. It has an office in Leiden, South Holland.

Although the group has no official name, the "Bilderberg Group" title comes from what is generally recognized to be the location of its first official meeting in 1954: the Bilderberg Hotel in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

The group has been depicted as an international cabal of the influental and the affluent: politicians, financiers, and media and business moguls; the elite of the elite. Some believe that they have dictated national policies, rigged (or outright stolen) national elections, caused wars, recessions, and ordered murders and ousters of world leaders such as American president John F. Kennedy and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The original intention of the Bilderberg group was to further the understanding between Western Europe and North America through informal meetings between powerful individuals. Each year, a "steering committee" devises a selected invitation list with a maximum of 100 names; invitations are only extended to residents of Europe and North America. The location of their annual meeting is not secret, and the agenda and list of participants are openly available to the public, but the topics of the meetings are kept secret: they are not published, and attendees pledge not to divulge what was discussed. The official stance of the Bilderberg Group is that their secrecy prevents these individuals' discussions from being manipulated by the media. However, social class-related exclusivity is considered by many to be the primary motive. Security is managed by military intelligence.

Perspectives on the nature of the group

The stated reason for the group's secrecy is that it enables people to speak freely without the need to carefully consider how every word might be interpreted by the mass media. However, as many of the attendees have gained their power through the democratic process, it is debatable if it is morally desirable for them to exercise their power off the record. This secrecy has led conspiracy researchers to claim that the meetings have a sinister purpose; that they are merely a front for the Round table groups, or even a semi-public front for the Illuminati or assorted other secret societies.

The Bilderberg Group has been described as:

• A "discussion group" of politicians, media moguls, academics and business leaders

• An exclusive international lobby of the power elite of Europe and North America, capable of influencing international policy

• A capitalist secret society operating entirely through self-interest.

Attendees of Bilderberg include central bankers, defense experts, mass media press barons, government ministers, prime ministers, royalty, international financiers and political leaders from Europe and America.Some of the Western world's leading financiers and foreign policy strategists attend Bilderberg. Donald Rumsfeld is an active Bilderberger - so is Peter Sutherland from Ireland, a former European Union commissioner and chairman of Goldman Sachs and of BP. Rumsfeld and Sutherland served together in 2000 on the board of the Swedish/Swiss energy company ABB. Former US Deputy Defense Secretary and current World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz is also a member, as is Roger Boothe, Jr. The group's current chairman is Étienne Davignon, the Belgian politician and businessman.

Is Your Jar Full?

When things in your life seem almost to much to handle, when 24 hours in a
day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar......and the beer.

A Professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front
of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and
empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then
asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

So the Professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the
jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas
between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was
full. They agreed it was.

The Professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of
course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar
was full. The students responded with an unanimous "Yes."

The Professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and
poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty
space between the sand. The students laughed.

"Now," said the Professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to
recognize that this jar represents your life.

The golf balls are the important things - your family, your children, your
health, your friends, your favorite passions - things that if everything
else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house,
your car. The sand is everything else - the small stuff."

"If you put the sand into the jar first", he continued, "there is no room
for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all
your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the
things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are
critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get
medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There
will always be time to clean the house, and fix the disposal. Take care of
the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities.
The rest is just sand."

When he had finished, there was a profound silence. Then one of the
students raised her hand and with a puzzled expression, inquired what the
beer represented.

The Professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no
matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of
beers."

Gordian Knot

The Gordian Knot is a legend associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke ("cutting the Gordian knot").

The legend

At one time the Phrygians were without a legitimate king. An oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Phrygia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. The next man was a poor peasant, Ahmidas son of Gordias, who drove his parents into town on his father's ox-cart. He was declared king by the priests. This had been predicted in a second way by a sign of the gods - before Ahmidas' birth, an eagle had once landed on that ox-cart. In gratitude, he dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios (whom the Greeks identified with Zeus) and either tied it to a post or tied its shaft with an intricate knot of cornel (Cornus mas) bark. It was further prophesied by an oracle that the one to untie the knot would become the king of Asia (today's Asia Minor).

The ox-cart, often depicted as a chariot, was an emblem of power and constant military readiness. It still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium in the fourth century BC when Alexander arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire.

In 333 BC, wintering at Gordion, Alexander attempted to untie the knot. When he could find no end to the knot, to unbind it, he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, producing the required ends (the so-called "Alexandrian solution", taken by the Hellenic Army IV Army Corps as their motto). Plutarch disputes this, relating that according to Aristobulus, Alexander pulled the knot out of its pole pin rather than cutting it. Either way, Alexander did go on to conquer Asia, fulfilling the prophecy.

The knot may in fact have been a religious knot-cipher guarded by Gordion's priests and priestesses. Robert Graves suggested that it may have symbolized the ineffable name of Dionysus that, enknotted like a cipher, would have been passed on through generations of priests and revealed only to the kings of Phrygia.

Unlike fable, true myth has few completely arbitrary elements. This myth taken as a whole seems designed to confer legitimacy upon a dynastic change in this central Anatolian kingdom: thus Alexander's "brutal cutting of the knot... ended an ancient dispensation." The ox-cart seems to suggest a longer voyage, rather than a local journey, perhaps linking Gordias/Midas with an attested origin-myth in Macedon, of which Alexander is most likely to have been aware. To judge from the myth, apparently the new dynasty was not immemorially ancient, but had widely remembered origins in a local, but non-priestly "outsider" class, represented by the peasant Gordias in his oxcart. Other Greek myths legitimize dynasties by right of conquest (compare Cadmus), but the legitimizing oracle in this myth suggests that the previous dynasty had been a race of priest-kings allied to the oracle deity.

Juliet's Branding

When Juliet's death sentence was commuted in "Stranger in a Strange Land", Ben orders the Others to mark Juliet instead. This is then revealed to be a strange symbol branded onto her lower back. The symbol looks like an upside-down cross (with the top line longer than the others), with two (or four) lines facing away from the center on the horizontal line. The mark is raised, reddened, and inflamed.
What exactly is the significance of this branding? Well, scarification can be used for various reasons , such as :

• to mark slaves and criminals
• to make the body complete
  
• as a rite of passage in adolescence
  
• denote the emotional state of the wearer of the scars
• her maturity and willingness to bear children

I believe the last point is the reason for Juliet's branding. Until it was outlawed in the late 1970’s by their native governments, the people of the Benue-Valley area of Nigeria practiced a process of female scarification called hleeta . Applied in stages beginning at age five or six, the applied patterns of raised dots symbolize within their societies the ripening and maturing of girls into womanhood and their emergence into society as marriageable women, and most significantly they publicize the realization of her reproductive nature. As we all know pregnancy on the island is a death sentence in itself. Is it possible that this is the meaning of this symbol?

Time on the island, all relative, relatively speaking!

Special Relativity proposed that distance and time are not absolute. The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock. Published in 1915, General Relativity proposed that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space. The key idea of General Relativity, called the Equivalence Principle, is that gravity pulling in one direction is completely equivalent to an acceleration in the opposite direction. (A car accelerating forwards feels just like sideways gravity pushing you back against your seat. An elevator accelerating upwards feels just like gravity pushing you into the floor. If gravity is equivalent to acceleration, and if motion affects measurements of time and space (as shown in Special Relativity), then it follows that gravity does so as well. In particular, the gravity of any mass, such as our sun, and in this case the island, has the effect of warping the space and time around it. For example, the angles of a triangle no longer add up to 180 degrees and clocks tick more slowly the closer they are to a gravitational mass like the sun/island. This video explains it all perfectly!!!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2VMO7pcWhg as does this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyM1ffXb-sQ

Scenario 1

• Imagine you are standing on a boat, and your friend, lets say he’s called Daniel is on an island.
• Your watches are synchronised.
• You fire a rocket at the island.
• The rocket lands on the island in 2:45:03

Scenario 2

• Imagine you are standing on a boat, and your friend, lets say he’s called Daniel, is on an island.
• Your watches are synchronised.
• You fire a rocket at the island.
• You radio Daniel and tell him the rocket has landed. The time is 2:45:03
• Daniel tells you it hasn’t.
• The rocket lands on the island in 3:16:22
• There is a time difference of 31 minutes, or exactly 1879 seconds.(Thank you Lucidity)

How can this be possible?

• The Electromagnetism of the island is creating a vortex in a swirling motion.
• This in turn bends time, causing it to slow.
• It also scatters the light differently.
• You can escape the island by using heading 325; this is a safe path through the vortex.

1. Boat

2. Vortex

3. Heading 325

4. Island